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and had already produced at least fifty papers of various degrees of importance.
    The Hand had a university degree, a minor and three years of focused postgraduate training under the Mage-King himself. It took him less than an hour to skim the papers sufficiently to work out which fourteen actually contained useful information.
    So far as the Expedition could tell, the facility had been calmly closed up between two hundred and fifty and three hundred years before, during the Eugenicist War between Earth and occupied Mars. There were no bodies or even—strangely—images of the occupants, so they had no idea what the aliens had looked like.
    The absence of any seating arrangements recognizable to humans suggested that the creatures had been at least different from humans, but analysis of the interior of the facility also suggested that they’d breathed the same air, seen on roughly the same wavelengths of light, and needed spaces only slightly larger than humans.
    And, in three years of study, that was basically every piece of conclusive data Kael and his people had . There were a lot of guesses and qualifiers in the documents Damien had but nothing solid. The aliens had removed a lot of tech and destroyed much of what they hadn’t removed in place.
    Until Kurosawa had broken into the sealed lower levels, there’d also been no evidence of magical use in the facility. Legatus had put up a good chunk of the funding for the Andala Expedition in the hopes of finding the UnArcana World’s holy grail: an FTL drive that didn’t require Mages.
    It seemed they were going to be disappointed.
    Another flicker of nothing passed through the ship and Damien checked his computer to confirm what he already knew: they’d arrived in the Andala System.
     
    #
     
    Lightspeed delay in communication was a fact of life. Since they were in no hurry—no one had left the facility since the murder, according to the report Damien had received—and multi-second gaps in conversation weren’t conducive to mutual understanding, he waited until they were in orbit before reaching out to Dr. Kael.
    The man who appeared on his wall when the channel finally connected couldn’t have been a more stereotypical professor if he tried . He was a portly, balding older man with his remaining hair gone shockingly white and a distracted, grumpy look on his face.
    “You must be the MIS team,” Johannes Kael began immediately, cutting Damien off before the Hand could say a word. “You look too young, though. Whatever,” he said, cutting off his own question.
    “Get down here at once,” he ordered. “You’ll coordinate with my security chief, Volk. You will not interrupt my people’s work or distract me until you have an explanation for Kurosawa’s death. We are very busy here and I will not tolerate interference!”
    Damien was silent for a moment in pure shock. Even if he had “merely” been a Martian Investigation Service Inspector, Kael’s peremptory orders would have been unacceptable.
    “Did they send the rune person with you?” he continued abruptly. “How nice of the Navy to send a ship—make sure they know they won’t be permitted on the planet. I shudder to think of the chaos those uniformed thugs would cause!”
    “Dr. Kael,” Damien finally snapped. “Shut. Up.”
    The academic administrator stumbled to a halt, tripping over his own tongue—then started to inhale, clearly about to launch onto a tirade.
    In response, Damien leaned forward, making sure both the gold medallion at his throat—the one that marked him as a Mage, with symbols carved into it denoting his training as a Jump Mage, Combat Mage, and Rune Scribe—and the chain and amulet of his rank were fully visible in the camera.
    “I am Hand Damien Montgomery,” he told Kael softly. “Your conditions are unacceptable, Doctor. This investigation is under the jurisdiction of Mars and will be carried out as I choose. Do you understand me?”
    “We didn’t call for a