Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) by Glynn Stewart Page A

shield prevented injury, but she had him pinned. He couldn’t move.
    She wasn’t moving, standing in the uniform she’d dishonored and looking coldly up at him as she gestured above their heads.
    “The secret will be kept,” she promised him. “Not that you’ll know. Sorry, Romanov.”
    White had looked back up at the stars when he opened fire. Both of them had ignored their rifles for the entire fight—at this range, magic was far more dangerous than any battle rifle. Her magic was enough to pin Romanov in place, and she was slowly crushing down his shields—but not strong enough to do that and shield herself.
    Heavy bullets slammed into her torso, ripping apart the other Mage in a spray of bullets. Her eyes still to the heavens above them, Karina White fell.
    The pressure released and Romanov rose to his feet. Considering White’s words, he looked up—and swallowed hard.
    There was a new star. A big star, one screaming across the sky toward them at an impossible speed.
    A ship. One that wasn’t supposed to be there.
     
    #
     
    Damien had picked up his pace back toward the base camp as soon as he realized he was being jammed. The sounds of fire and lightning magic led him to break into an all-out run, but the domes were huge .
    He finally made it to a point where he could see what was going on, to find Karina White collapsed on the ground, very obviously dead, and Denis Romanov staring at the sky in horror.
    Following the Marine’s gaze, Damien spotted the same rapidly approaching light.
    “Please tell me that’s TK-421,” he shouted toward Romanov as he approached over the curve of the alien ruin.
    “TK is in orbit,” Romanov replied. “They’re approaching orbit and decelerating hard; that’s why they’re so visible.”
    The Marines, Damien reflected, had a lot more reason to train in identifying what ships were doing from the ground than he did.
    “I can’t raise TK-421 to confirm what they see, either,” Romanov continued. “I’m pretty sure the men who went out with White are dead and she’s set a jammer up somewhere.”
    “Can you localize it?” Damien asked.
    Romanov pulled up his computer, studying it. “I don’t have enough data,” he admitted after a moment.
    “Link to my PC; we should be close enough at this point.”
    Another moment passed, and the Marine shook his head, gesturing toward the nearby forest.
    “It’s that way,” he said, his gesture encompassing an arc of several hundred meters of forest, “somewhere between five and six hundred meters. Not really helpful.”
    “You’d be surprised,” Damien told him dryly. “Does your combat gear suggest there’s anything alive over there?”
    “What?”
    “Your helmet has thermal and motion sensors,” Damien reminded the Marine. “Is anything except the trees in that area you just described?”
    Romanov turned his head, scanning the forest. “No, but…what are you going to do?”
    Normally, Damien tried to keep his open use of magic inside what one of the Marine Combat Mages could achieve. Even when he wasn’t doing that , he tried to stay inside what the other Hands, with only one Rune of Power to his five , could do.
    Something about today’s events, though, left him very, very nervous.
    All five of his Runes flared with a gentle warmth as he channeled magic, drawing energy from the alien earth beneath him and from the web of the universe. With a broad gesture, he unleashed it, conjuring a vast wave of flame that swept over the arc Romanov’s scanner had indicated.
    Trees popped , the local cellulose equivalent no more resistant to that heat than Earth’s trees would have been. Blue-green bushes and leaves vanished in an inferno that filled the area the jammer had to be in…and then vanished when Damien loosed his will once more.
    The jamming stopped.
    “TK-421,” he snapped into his radio. “Pokorni, what the hell is going on up there?”
    “Oh, thank goddess you’re alive,” the armed courier’s