Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars by Glynn Stewart Page A

personnel files for the Ardennes Special Security Service and, after a short moment of hesitation, typed in “Colonel Elijah Brockson.”
    The database churned for a moment, then flipped up an ‘Access Denied, Record Restricted’ message.
    That was strange. Apparently, even Brockson’s very existence was classified?
    Damien typed in the access code the locals had provided him. Supposedly, he’d been provided full access to their systems, but the same message flashed up. Now it had an extra line - “Gubernatorial Seal.”
    Most likely, if he hadn’t been typing in the exact name, the record would never have shown up in his search. Since he was looking directly for the man, however, he’d bounced up against a hard seal - one Vaughn had either implemented himself or had been done under his direct orders.
    Glancing at both doors of the compartment and swallowing hard, Damien reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out the Hand. The golden icon was light, no more than forty or fifty grams, but it seemed to hold the weight of worlds.
    He turned it over in his hands. The Hand was a closed fist cast in gold, and he didn’t see any way to connect it to the computer at all.
    “It needs to touch your palm. Warmest part of the body and the easiest spot for the gene scan,” Mitchell told him from the door. The Sergeant was eyeing the amulet with awed eyes. Somehow, despite the fact that Damien knew the Sergeant had seen Alaura’s Hand dozens of times, the icon was still awe-inspiring to the Marine.
    It was terrifying to Damien.
    Following Mitchell’s advice, he stripped off the skintight glove from his right hand. He stretched his fingers for a moment afterwards, watching the silver inlaid on his palm and forearms ripple gently. Finally, he placed the Hand in his palm and watched.
    For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, as the tiny golden symbol warmed from his hand, it shivered slightly and he felt a momentary prickle - and a connector port slid out of the thumb.
    Damien wasn’t sure if he’d been expecting something more dramatic - or just nothing, the Hand not actually being his.
    He took a deep breath and slipped the connector into the computer. It beeped, and ‘OVERRIDDEN’ flashed up on his screen across the ‘Access Denied’ message.
    Even unlocked, Brockson had a very bland record - though interesting in its blandness. Up until five years ago, he had a normal-looking progression through the ranks, up to Captain at age thirty.
    Then the first ‘Special Assignment - SOD’ entry popped up. Three months, no details, followed by a promotion. Several more ‘Special Assignments’ followed, until a year ago, accompanying his promotion to Colonel, was the note “Assignment - Commander, Special Operations Directorate.”
    That was the last note in the file until very recently, when Brockson had been assigned as ‘Logistics Coordinator, Nouveaux Normandy Province’.
    It looked like a lot of information had never made it into the files, but the latest position looked odd. Damien pulled it up. With the Hand overriding all security measures in the government system, the database happily informed him that while the posting was backdated to a week ago, it had been entered last night.
    A few keystrokes brought up another database, this one the government records tracking official and civilian travel. Brockson had arrived in Nouveaux Normandy ten hours before Alaura had, accompanied by several cases of cargo under a Special Operations Directorate seal instructing that they were to be handled with care and not opened or exposed to heat.
    Another, more local database, told Damien that Brockson had only just signed in at the Nouveaux Normandy Logistics Center this morning. He’d been in town for a full day before checking in at his supposed assignment - an assignment that hadn’t existed until after the attack on Alaura.
    None of Damien’s briefing files had mentioned anything about a Special