The staff vanished, as it tended to when I stopped using it, and a popup told me the planet below was volcanically stable again, and a great deal cooler. Maybe in time something would grow there again.
I jumped to the next system over, and found no fuzz. I jumped back to where the rift had been near fungus space, and then to a nearby system I’d not checked before, and found some. I waited for a few minutes, and then felt the magic rush across the system, leaving no fuzz behind.
Lastly, I jumped to the system with the fungus station we’d been on, arriving out of their sensor range above the plane of the system. It also was completely clear now. There were ant ships at the now closed jump point, and their hulls were clear. When I used my magic sight to look at the ants themselves, they still had fuzz on their bodies. So no revolution happening here any time soon.
I jumped back to near the frontier with the Ralnor, and found a Trixone colony. The plants inside the station still had small amounts of fuzz on them, but the planet was a different matter. Plants under cover still had fuzz, but any plant or rock out in the open was now fuzz free.
Jane popped up on my console.
“What did you just do, Bud?”
“Why do you think I did anything?”
“You’re over a Trixone colony for one thing, and for another, every Trixone fleet visible on our network has stopped moving. So what did you do?”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Just tell me!”
“I was over the third Trixone planet the Imperium destroyed, when it occurred to me visiting every system likely to have fuzz would take forever. So I borrowed some energy from the planet, and sent out a wave to burn off fuzz in every system in the galaxy. It’ll take maybe another ten or fifteen minutes to complete through the jump points, and maybe a few weeks to do the whole galaxy completely.”
“What? To do the whole galaxy? Seriously?”
“Sure. It’s fast magic. Certainly everywhere near Imperium spaces has already been done, because of the rifts linking them.”
“So you’ve broken the fungus hold completely?”
“Not completely. Beings within stations and ships, or in buildings on planets were not affected. So they have a local hold on some individuals. If the Trixone fleets stopped moving, maybe enough leader Trixone stopped being influenced and began to question why they were on an invasion rampage.”
“Each planet has a governor. But each planet is mainly independent. They supply ships, crew, troops, and colonists to the fleets, and the admirals in charge of fleets follow the orders of the governors collectively who made their fleets. So if what you say is true, and we understand things correctly, maybe the admirals didn’t have enough fuzz on them, and with the fuzz on the ship hulls gone, can now think for themselves properly again.”
“Here’s hoping.”
“Okay, that’s interesting.”
“What is?”
“Several of the recently discovered invasion corridors now have Trixone fleets heading back the way they came. But in several others, the fleets have resumed their courses.”
“So free will is reestablished?”
“So it seems.”
“Good. I could do with a lie down.”
“You can have one. Rejoin your squadron. Job well done. Again.”
“Thanks.”
She vanished. Leanne grinned at me. I smiled back tiredly, and jumped us back to Haven, and Leanne took us through the rift to Gold Coast. There she jumped us on board Long Water.
I stepped out of the tree on my beach, ignored what was going on in the water, and trudged the short way to my house. Inside, I flopped down on the bed, shifted my uniform back to a belt, and went to sleep.
Serena woke me up for dinner.
Fifty Four
We were still eating when Jane appeared on one of the big screens in the entertainment area.
“You’re going to want to see this,” she said, and vanished, being replaced by a drone’s eye view of a battle in progress.
It got our attention.
Eighteen Chaos class dreadnaughts under Admiral Bentley’s command were above, and just inside missile range of, a normal sixty ship Trixone fleet, with a planet visible in the middle distance. The drone was obviously under Jane’s command, as it zoomed in on the plants, and gave us a very good look at their formation.
“That’s new,” said Woof.
He wasn’t wrong. Their fleet was still moving from being surprised by our fleet. Each ship had fifty fighters keeping pace with it, and the range between ships was already greater than we’d seen before.
“Convoy spacing,” said Jill, idly.
“Where are their main guns aimed?” asked Norden.
“At each other?” suggested Davis. “That can’t be right.”
“No,” I said. “That is right. They’re expecting our ships to attack individually, and they’ve adapted to that tactic again. No matter where you go in at them, another ship will nail you a couple of seconds later, while fifty cruiser guns pivot and fire at you before them. Any attack is going to be dangerous. Fortunately, our ships don’t need to.”
“But we haven’t been attacking them like that lately,” said Gitte. “Why would they change?”
“Rogue,” said Serena, grinning. “I bet Rogue has been hitting a fleet like that, and they’ve only just adapted to it.”
“The Rogue class does have a lot more firepower and shielding than a Chaos class does,” pointed out Mel. “Probably survive even these tactics if flown well.”
“Maybe we’ll find out if they survive, and finally show up on the navmap,” said Fina.
Our fleet were taking missile fire, but the mosquitoes were handling them without any trouble. Then suddenly, one of the plant ships simply vanished. Then another. And another.
“Nice to see another mage doing some real work,” laughed Haynes.
The new formation didn’t save the Trixone. It just slowed down their destruction. Each ship was deliberately targeted by a mage using my wide mouth to ship sized rift method, probably rotating around the mage group as they did one at a time each, and with noticeable time gaps between the destruction of each ship.
The timing was so slow, the last quarter of the formation broke completely, and with the fighters not caught up in the destruction of the mother ships forming up on them, they headed away from the Chaos fleet. Our fleet broke up into three sections, and jumped to new positions, where they resumed targeting, and firing, before moving again as soon as the remaining targets moved beyond the rift range of the mages, which appeared to be quite short by even Gitte and Haynes’ standards.
What would have taken me a matter of minutes, took the trainee rift mages nearly an hour. The result was the same though. A fleet taken out, without risk to ours. Ours vanished again, this time not reappearing. What did appear was a support cruiser, which sent out a huge number of salvage droids.
The screen went blank for a moment, and Jane reappeared on it.
“Sleep on your ships tonight. Your pilots will as well. The Imperator doesn’t think you’ll be needed, but everything is in flux, and Bud is probably to blame for it. So you’re all on standby in case something goes pear shaped on us.”
She vanished, leaving everyone looking at me.
“I cleaned up some loose fuzz today. Nothing else.”
“And yet,” said Metunga, “you slept when you got here.”
“I think you’re understating what you did,” said Loren.
“Spill it!” ordered Jill.
“You’ll hear about it if the Imperator decides to announce it. Otherwise, I’ve said all I’m going to say. In fact, I’m going back to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“If not before,” muttered Woof, loud enough for everyone to hear.
I ignored him, locked the door to my house with some magic, and walked down to the beach. No-one followed me, and I stepped through the tree back to the ship, trudged down to my suite beginning to fee
l really drained, and collapsed on my other bed.
This time I forgot to shift to a belt.
Fifty Five
“Bud?” said a voice.
I wasn’t sure who it was, or even if I’d just imagined it.
“BUD!”
This time I woke up fully.
“What?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, sailor,” snapped Jane, who was looking at me from the wall.
“What, sir?”
“Get up. Something’s happening I think you’ll want to see.”
“What?”
I hadn’t moved.
“The comnavsat freighter I sent after Rogue is forming an arrowhead of systems with them. My avatar on the freighter probably thinks Rogue is not far away, and did the arrow to warn us, since communications at this distance are not immediate. Get up. We might need a rift.”
I still hadn’t moved, and truth to tell, I was still exhausted.
“Can’t the Imperator do one?”
“He’s busy. By the time he can shake himself loose, it might be too late.”
“Okay, I’m up.”
I wasn’t.
“MOVE IT, LIEUTENANT!”
I bounced out of bed as if the bed had coughed me out. I shifted to a belt, shucked my underwear, and had a fast shower. At the same time, I increased the amount of energy I was taking from the dark sun. Shift into flight suit to dry, and then with clean underwear and a shift into uniform, I started running for the bridge.
I found Serena already there.
“I need a rift,” said Jane, from her hollo on the console.
The navmap popped up, highlighting a system not far from where the arrow head had started forming.
I concentrated, and opened one big enough for our ships to go through to the indicated system, well above its plane. Immediately, both AI avatars stiffened, and looked at each other, and then Jane, who was looking at me.
“Get your captains on their bridges,” Jane said.
I nodded to Tamsin, but it was Serena who spoke next.
“We need to go there, now.”
“What did you see?” I asked her.
“A new problem. Get everyone up.”
It wasn’t late enough for everyone to be asleep. Jill usually wouldn’t be. But catching up with sleep was always a good idea when you had a day off. Standard military doctrine.
“ALL HANDS TO BATTLESTATIONS,” rang through the ship in Tamsin’s voice. “This is not a drill,” she followed it with.
Eagle bounded onto the bridge at the same time my captains started popping up on the console.
“Take us through,” I said to Leanne and Tamsin.
The latter I knew had passed the command before I even finished saying it.
The squadron formed up into line astern formation and followed me through the rift. The navmap changed to show a dozen local systems, and Eagle took a quick look, and bounded out again. Less than a minute later, his head popped up on the console along with his squadron leaders.
“What am I looking at?” I asked Jane.
She was now a larger hollo, wearing civilian insignia on her shoulders, and a very non-standard flight suit, showing a generous amount of cleavage. A moment later, her normal hollo popped back up as well.
“I’m the freighter avatar,” said the Jane showing cleavage. “I’m very close to where the Rogue crew expected to find Arthur and his people, and there is very definitely something going on here. There are a lot of Trixone fleets around, all heading towards where the arrow I’m building is pointing. If I have my timing right, Rogue has been here with Arthur for at least a day, maybe two or three, and the Trixone seem really pissed about whatever they’ve been doing.”
“I’ve alerted Jon,” said two star Jane, “but he’s still in a meeting he can’t get out of without a damn good reason.”
The navmap zoomed in a bit, to a system closer to where the arrow point was now forming. Serena looked at me over her shoulder.
“We need to go there now. But come in high, there’s a fleet here we’ve never seen before.”
“I’m seeing them appearing in several systems now,” said freighter Jane, which I thought was a lot safer calling her, even in my head. “The Trixone are starting to react to their presence. There’s going to be a huge battle very soon in one system.”
“Get us there,” I ordered Leanne.
We started jumping.
“Where are the unknowns coming from?” I asked freighter Jane.
“Looks like the general direction of the Long Bar.”
I took a moment to bring up a map of this end of the core, and found Long Bar was a join of sorts where several of the galactic arms came close to the core. The one further out was a precursor arm to where the human spine was located, but there was a still a long jump across interstellar space to reach that sub-arm.
“They’re coming from the first arm, you think?”
“Possibly.”
We stopped jumping, and the navmap and HUD snapped to the local system. Then adjusted again, as presumably Tamsin changed it according to a Serena thought.
There was a small convoy of four civilian ships trying to flee from a faster fleet of sixteen ships in a four by four wall formation. They were just about in range.
“Can we communicate with the civilian ships?” I asked.
“Should be able to,” said freighter Jane. “Rogue obtained several updates to the translator, and I picked them along the way. I sent them as soon as we made contact.”
I nodded to Leanne. A channel opened, and we looked onto an alien bridge.
There was a large rat in the center chair, and to one side, was a frog. It was green.
“Definitely not Kermit,” pinged in from Jill. I had no idea what a Kermit was, and didn’t get a popup telling me. “And is that a llama at the back there?”
“Yes,” pinged Jane.
“Who are you?” asked the rat.
“An Imperium navy squadron looking for one of our lost ships.”
“Imperium? You looking for Rogue?”
He seemed exited, and the frog was grinning.
“You’ve seen the ship?”
“Been on it. Arthur introduced us. We’re the ones who got their distress message out. Sadly, I expect they are all dead by now. You’re about two days too late.”
“Can you save us?” asked the frog. “The Rawtenuga have been chasing us almost ever since we left Arthur. We’re about to die.”
I reached out to the local sun, and put a rift ahead of the civilian ships, coming out enough away from us so they wouldn’t run into us before they could stop. They moved in space just before the wall of ships opened fire, resulting in only one salvo being fired, and what was, being wasted. The wall split up, with each ship heading in a different direction, one of them almost directly up towards us.
“Thanks,” said the rat. “We didn’t know you could do that for other ships, only your own.”
“Do the, Rawtenuga, did you call them, know we can move our ships around?”
“They will by now.”
“So they’re looking for you?” asked Serena.
“Yes. How long can you keep us safe?”
“Indefinitely,” I said. “Can you tell us where Rogue was last time you saw them?”
“Got them!” exclaimed freighter Jane. The navmap moved again.
“Contact made,” said both Janes, together.
The normal Jane vanished from the console.
“Hell’s donkeys!” exclaimed freighter Jane. “I’ve located Rogue, Camelot, Avalon, and Cavall.” A popup told me they were Arthur’s modified Scimitar class ships. “Rogue is inside a Rawtenuga ship which is bigger than our titan class ships.”
“What do you mean inside?” asked Eagle.
“They’re inside a Rawtenuga transport?” asked the rat at the same time. “That’s insane!”
“We’ll get back to you,” I said, and nodded to Leanne, who ended the channel. “Jane? D
o we need to go there?”
“No. The Imperator just ripped the end off the transport, and Rogue is out. She’s banged up really badly, and doesn’t have any shields. Arthur’s ships are down to almost no shields, and are engaged with a lot of destroyer sized ships, I’ve been told are troop transports heading to land on the planet. Wait.”
Things started disappearing from the navmap, and appearing in the next system over.
Fifty Six
Two star Jane appeared on the console again.
“Orders from the Imperator. He’s dealt with the war going on in the system where Rogue is. All the remaining combatants, and the debris of this battle, were moved a system over, and the jump points are now closed. Navy Mage One and Eagle Wing are to remain where they are for the moment. The rest of the fleet is reorganizing, in case they’re needed. You’re to remain vigilant for threats, as the network expands to show us what is really going on at your end of space. I expect the Imperator and I to go to Rogue as soon as Jon can issue orders, and get back to BigMother.”
“What about the alien ships in this system?”
“Unfortunately, Arthur seems to have declared war on this Rawtenuga species, which by the way, are some form of smallish dinosaurs. You may return fire if fired upon, but do not initiate hostilities until further orders are given.”
“What about civilian assets in the local systems?” asked Eagle. “And what do we tell the ones we just saved?”
“Bud?”
“Sir?”
“Open a communication rift from where you are to where Rogue is, so the coms lag from there is removed.”
I concentrated for a moment.
“Done.”
A third Jane popped up, this one looking a little older. The bridge behind her was wrecked, and it looked like one third of it was missing completely.
Lieutenant Spacemage (Imperium Spacemage Book 3) Page 22
