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Hand!” Kael barked.
    “But a Hand is what you got. I speak for Mars, Doctor, and my assistance is not under discussion,” Damien told him calmly. “I am both your investigator and your rune expert. My shuttle will be departing TK-421 shortly, I expect to arrive within the hour, and I will be meeting with you as soon as I land.
    “I will be accompanied by my shuttle’s four-man crew, three Secret Service Agents, three Martian Investigation Service Inspectors and a squad of Royal Martian Marines. Please make sure you have quarters ready for them,” Damien instructed. He paused, eyeing the now-silent academic.
    “Will there be any problems, Dr. Kael?” he asked, his voice softer now. “Believe me when I say I have no intention of interrupting your people’s work more than I must, but Doctor Kurosawa’s discovery is of critical importance to the Protectorate—which makes his murder my concern as well.”
    Doctor Johannes Kael visibly swallowed and slowly nodded.
    “I had not considered it in that light,” he admitted. “I am concerned about both our research and my people’s morale, Lord Montgomery,” he continued, “but I will try not to impede your investigation.”
    “Thank you, Dr. Kael,” Damien told him. “We will speak once I have landed.”
    He cut the channel with a sigh. He’d give Kael the credit of his words, but somehow he doubted the man was going to manage to not be a problem.
     
    #
     
    The shuttle dropped away from TK-421 with all the grace of a brick dropped from a plane. The Royal Martian Marine Corps did not build their assault shuttles to be pretty or graceful. They built them to land in the face of hostile fire, take hits, and deliver their payload of Marines alive.
    Damien’s detachment was smaller than the platoon the shuttle was designed to deliver, which thankfully meant there were safety harnesses for everyone. Among other things, the RMMC didn’t bother with gravity runes in their shuttles, so multi-gravity combat maneuvers were painful affairs.
    In the absence of incoming fire, the MIS Inspectors had clearly thought the harnesses wouldn’t be required. Luckily for them, Mage-Lieutenant Romanov had insisted—and the Navy pilot of the assault shuttle promptly dropped them toward the planet at four gees.
    “Are we actually in this much of a hurry, my lord?” Inspector Mara Dragic, the senior member of the MIS team Damien had “borrowed” on his way out of Tau Ceti, asked. The dark-haired, hook-nosed police officer looked vaguely ill under the force of the acceleration.
    “No,” Damien allowed. “But the people responsible for our safety, Inspector Dragic, take it very seriously. They may take unnecessary precautions—but the day those precautions turn out to be necessary, you will be very glad they were taken.”
    She looked confused for a moment.
    “When would this become necessary?” she finally asked.
    “It was on Ardennes,” Damien said shortly. “A squad of Marines and a Navy flight crew, much like these men and women, died to get me to the ground alive then. So, you are right, Inspector, that I do not expect this to be necessary today. But I didn’t expect it to be necessary then, either.”
    The whole mess on Ardennes was public knowledge, though given the size of the Protectorate, Damien doubted few of the Mage-King’s citizens knew more than the headline blurb of “A Hand falls, another rises, Governor removed for treason.”
    He was okay with that.
    “Landing in ten minutes,” the shuttle pilot reported. “We have a storm incoming, and despite my best efforts, we aren’t going to miss it. It’s going to get bumpy.”
    Dragic looked even more horrified for a moment.
    “This isn’t bumpy?”
     
    #
     
    The planet Andala IV wasn’t habitable by humanity but that didn’t mean it lacked life. A strange forest of blue-green trees with spindly branches and strange cylindrical leaves shifted and trembled in the hammering rain and vicious wind as the