Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Assuming nothing else changed, they’d be in range for missiles for the last hour or so of their journey, but at a distance where they could be reasonably sure they could defend themselves.

  “What are they doing?” Kulkarni asked aloud. “The carrier is just staying at Cova on its own?”

  “Look at this, sir,” Roslyn told her superior as she highlighted several smaller signatures. “They’re dropping shuttles to the surface and it looks like they’re evacuating the orbital bombardment platforms. With the gunships gone, that carrier probably has capacity to hold most of a corps of troops.”

  “If they’re writing off the gunships in favor of evacuating troops and crew, that would make sense,” the Captain said slowly. “That will probably let them evac everyone on Cova. The smaller carriers can’t board as many people, though.”

  “No, but that’ll double the number of people they can get off Novo Lar,” Roslyn pointed out. “They’ll leave a corps on the surface, probably with orders to surrender, but get two corps and the orbital platform crews out. Save over twice as many people.”

  “So, they’ll concentrate their gunships and capital ships and bring them out to meet us,” Kulkarni agreed. “They’ll have to, or we’ll range on the carriers and transports before they get out.”

  “And we’ll have to watch our acceleration as we come near them,” Roslyn said. “Or we’ll end up cutting through them at far too high a relative speed.”

  With the firepower balance sitting on the Martian side, a shorter engagement was definitely to the Republic’s advantage, especially if they could cut into laser range without slipping into the range of the amplified Mages aboard the Protectorate ships.

  “I’d rather let them evac than take the losses pushing through them will entail,” Kulkarni agreed. “Get together with Coleborn and make sure we have courses set up for optimal engagement time based on their most likely sortie times.”

  Before Roslyn could respond, an alert chimed on Kulkarni’s console, and she picked up her headset to listen to a message.

  The young tactical officer was well aware of how inexperienced she was, but she could see the Mage-Captain’s face getting stonier and stonier by the second. Kulkarni didn’t say anything, but she put her headset down roughly as the call ended and gestured Roslyn over to her.

  “Don’t worry about those courses,” she ordered, her voice gravelly with frustration. “The Mage-Admiral has the same assessment of the Republic approach as we do, but she doesn’t think they have enough firepower to threaten the fleet.

  “Our orders are to target the transports and carriers. We’re to punch through their fleet at whatever velocity is necessary to guarantee a close-enough intercept that they’ll be forced to surrender.”

  Roslyn shivered.

  “Surrendering doesn’t seem to be in the Republic’s lexicon,” she pointed out.

  “Each of those ships is going to have over twenty thousand people aboard, most of them not spacers,” Kulkarni replied. “Even if they’re all technically combatants, the ship crews won’t regard them that way. If we have to blow them away, a lot of their people are going to die for nothing.”

  She shook her head.

  “They’ll surrender, I’m pretty sure…but the Mage-Admiral is wrong if she thinks those gunships can’t hurt us. If we punch through a screen of seven hundred of the little ‘mosquitos,’ we are going to bleed for the privilege.”

  Kulkarni sighed.

  “It’s a question of priorities,” she admitted. “And Alexander wants an intact Republic starship. With one of those, we can answer a lot of damned questions about why this damn war is even being fought.

  “It’s worth the risk. I’m just not sure the Mage-Admiral realizes how harsh that risk is.”

  Even if she didn’t, there wasn’t much Roslyn could do about it. The most junior tactical officer in the fleet definitely wasn’t going to be calling up the Admiral to tell her she was making a mistake, after all!

  7

  Space combat was not measured in seconds or minutes. Even brutal short-range engagements like the ambush in Ardennes that had destroyed the Republic fleet there still lasted five minutes or more, and they were rare.

  The weapons available to the Royal Martian Navy and the Republic Interstellar Navy had accelerations over a thousand times as fast as their motherships. Weapon ranges were measured in millions of kilometers. Missiles outranged lasers, and lasers usually outranged amplified magic, but both sides’ missiles had a range of forty light-seconds if their ships weren’t moving.

  It would take hours for Stand in Righteousness and the rest of the ships to get into range of each other, and hours more for them to actually pass through the range envelopes normally.

  The course that the RMN task force was taking wasn’t going to be quite so normal.

  “Their assault landers are going back for a second wave,” Roslyn reported. “It looks like the orbitals are emptied and they’ve moved one of the corps off the planet.”

  She checked the data.

  “I’d guess that the big army transports are full but they’re waiting for the carriers to get loaded up,” she concluded.

  The army transports were built on the same fifteen-megaton hull as the rest of the older ships of the RIN. Each could carry twenty to twenty-five thousand people, two divisions of ground troops.

  The two transports in orbit had probably been cycling back and forth between Santiago and a Republic base of some kind for weeks to bring in more troops. With three army corps, over a hundred thousand troops, on the surface of Novo Lar, there was no way the Republic could evacuate everyone.

  “What’s the ETA on the gunships from Cova?” Kulkarni asked.

  “Still just over two hours. If the next wave with the landers is comparable to the last, they’ll arrive about thirty minutes after the transports start moving.”

  “And the Cova evacuation?”

  “They don’t have landers,” Roslyn pointed out. “They’re moving forty thousand people with shuttles that aren’t designed for mass personnel transport.” She checked the numbers. “Assuming the Republic troops on Cova are equivalent to a standard Legatan Army Corps, they’re over seventy-five percent complete pulling them up.

  “I wouldn’t want to be aboard that carrier with an extra forty-odd thousand people crammed in,” she continued. “But they should be ready to go in under half an hour.”

  No one had suggested splitting the fleet to chase down the carrier. They had the edge in firepower, but the RIN had handled the Protectorate roughly in the first weeks of the war. The RMN would let one carrier go to make sure they took fewer losses when they chased down the transports and carriers in orbit.

  Or, at least, that was Roslyn’s assumption. She couldn’t read Alexander’s mind.

  “Keep one eye on her,” Kulkarni instructed. “It may look like she’s running, but that carrier still has more missile launchers than almost anything else in the damn star system. If she wants to run, we’ll let her…but I don’t want any surprises, either.”

  Roslyn chuckled and locked the ship into a subroutine of her scanners. It would warn her when the ship moved. There were other officers tracking the ships as well, officers whose warnings would get to Mage-Admiral Alexander faster, but it was always possible she’d be the first one to send the alert.

  Every officer watching increased the odds that they’d know about any surprises in time to deal with them.

  “Bogey at Cova has brought her engines online and is accelerating. Vector is at seventy-five degrees to the ecliptic and heading away from us at five gravities.”

  Roslyn finished her report and double-checked that acceleration figure. Unlike the Martian fleets that used magical gravity to help compensate for their acceleration, the Republic ships didn’t have that option.

  Their cylindrical hulls contained internal rotating sections to provide pseudogravity. The RMN hadn’t had an opportunity to examine an intact Republic ship yet, but presuma
bly they adjusted position for acceleration.

  But they had no ability to counter acceleration. At five gravities, the crew and the newly added passengers aboard that carrier were being crushed.

  “Any orders from the Flag?” Kulkarni asked.

  “No, sir,” Armbruster confirmed. “We’re letting them go.”

  “All right. Time to weapons range, Chambers?”

  Roslyn didn’t even need to look. She had a timer for that sitting on her primary screen, and she’d kept one eye on it all along.

  “Assuming we don’t start decelerating and the Republic doesn’t come out to meet us, we’ll be in range in seventy-eight minutes,” she told him.

  Unlike the Republic fleet, they were accelerating at ten gravities without crushing their crews. They could push to fifteen, but that had its risks. Right now, their course was angled just past Novo Lar, giving them mobility to try and intercept the transports when they made their run for it.

  “Transports will move in forty minutes,” she continued. “The Cova force is pushing their systems. They’re holding off on their deceleration and it looks like they’re going for a slingshot of Novo Lar.”

  “Really?” Kulkarni asked. “Are you sure?”

  Roslyn passed the diagram she’d put together on her screen over to her CO’s screens.

  “They’re still going to be moving damn fast when they hit Novo Lar’s orbit,” she pointed out. “They’ve shaved ten minutes off their arrival time, getting there before we can range on them now.

  “But if they don’t do something, they’re just going to fly right past the planet, and I don’t think that’s what they’re planning. Assuming they can push their acceleration to six or seven gravities, they can get their velocity down low enough to let Novo Lar’s gravity catch them.

  “They’ll slingshot and come back out at us at over a hundred KPS,” Roslyn estimated. “Real confirmation will be when the ships already in orbit move. If they move out at five gravities toward us around when the transports take off, they’ll match up with the gunships and cruisers after the slingshot.”

  The Captain studied her diagram and smiled.

  “I imagine you’re not the only one that picked that up, Lieutenant, but I’m forwarding this to the Flag,” she told Roslyn. “Knowing what’s coming will help.”

  Roslyn was already programming the assumption into her systems. The slingshot would change when they came into range. Knowing that the Republic ships would be bringing an extra hundred kilometers a second to the fight added another fifty thousand kilometers to her missile range.

  Every little bit counted when she wanted to make sure everyone came home.

  “Oh, you clever buggers.”

  Kulkarni’s words echoed in Stand in Righteousness’s bridge as the transports turned to run.

  Even with the acceleration advantage of the Martian fleet, they still couldn’t lose velocity that quickly. Alexander’s orders to keep a minimum velocity meant they were coming in fast relative to the planet—and the transports weren’t running along the same vector.

  They were almost running toward the Martian fleet.

  “Eighty degrees from the ecliptic, angled toward us,” Roslyn confirmed. “We’ll be in missile range, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to bring them to boarding range. Not with a fleet coming down our throats.”

  Like the carrier from Cova, the transports and carriers were pushing the limits of what could be considered remotely safe for their passengers. The two carriers had enough defenses to keep the transports safe from long-range missile fire, and their new vector meant they weren’t going to see much else.

  “New course from the Flag,” Armbruster reported. “Passing it to Coleborn, but the fleet is adjusting course to intercept.”

  Roslyn looked at the sensor screens and shivered. They could do it, she supposed. Even through the gravity runes she felt Stand’s engines go to full power. At fifteen gravities, they could at least get into a range where they could try to disable the ships, force them to a halt before they could escape.

  “We’ll catch them,” she said slowly. “We might have to destroy them, but we’ll get close enough that we can definitely do that.”

  “I know ground troops count as combatants, but that still feels wrong,” Armbruster said quietly.

  “Hopefully, they’re smart enough to surrender,” Kulkarni replied—but Roslyn could tell that the Captain’s screen was focused on the battleships and their escorts.

  They were just starting to move, exactly on schedule to rendezvous with the slingshot maneuver of the cruisers and gunships from Cova.

  “But their friends waited to see what we did in response to that maneuver, and now they’re coming out to greet us,” the Captain concluded. “Looks like the slingshot will bring them together just inside missile range.”

  Two battleships. Ten cruisers. Seven hundred gunships.

  It probably wasn’t enough to destroy their fleet, but Roslyn would much rather they were focusing on controlling that range, not chasing a completely different target.

  “Range in twenty-two minutes,” Roslyn reported. “Then we see what happens.”

  Firing orders came down from the flag shortly afterward, and Roslyn loaded them into her systems. She had a pattern already programmed in and ready to go, but the orders from the Flag told her who she was shooting at.

  A quarter of the destroyers were going to be using their missiles in a defensive mode, using their antimatter warheads to shoot down the incoming fire from the Republic ships. The rest, including Stand, were to join the heavier ships in targeting the cruisers.

  The logic, so far as Roslyn could see it, was that the gunships were going to empty their magazines in the first two minutes, and it would take over seven minutes for the Protectorate fire to arrive.

  It would take almost a minute longer for the first Republic salvos to travel the distance. Their missiles had lower accelerations but longer flight times, which meant they’d launch before the Protectorate, but Roslyn’s missiles would arrive long before the Republic missiles did.

  The gunships would get all of their missiles into space long before the RMN’s fire reached them, and that, Roslyn concluded, was their big value in an engagement like this. The first three salvos out of the Republic fleet were going to be hell.

  The gunships would still serve a role in the battle to come, and Roslyn wasn’t sure she’d have ignored them. The seven hundred gunships actually carried more antimissile defenses in aggregate than the ten cruisers did, and they were individually easier to kill.

  The cruisers were still active threats after the opening salvos, though, with over a hundred missile launchers apiece. They were much bigger than the Protectorate’s cruisers and carried more launchers to go with that mass.

  The key was the battleships, Roslyn supposed. The Republic had two of them, both damaged forty-megaton ships. The Protectorate had five, three fifty-megaton ships and two sixty-megaton ships.

  The Republic wasn’t going to win this battle, but it wasn’t being fought the way Roslyn Chambers would have chosen to fight it.

  Hopefully, Mage-Admiral Alexander’s far greater experience meant she saw something Roslyn didn’t.

  8

  As red icons began to spill out onto Roslyn’s display, all she could really think to herself was that it was better than Ardennes.

  At the final Battle of Ardennes, the Republic had thrown five full carrier groups at the system’s defenders. There had been tens of thousands of missiles flying each way that day, and a lot of people—Protectorate and Republican alike—had died.

  With the gunships in place, the Republic task force launched almost four thousand missiles. The Protectorate task force could launch more, and could keep launching them long after the gunships ran out of weapons.

  Those first three salvos were going to hurt. The fact that all three would be launched before the Protectorate ships were in their own range was going to hurt even more.

&nbs
p; “No new orders from the Flag,” Armbruster reported.

  “Engage as per prior orders then, Lieutenant Chambers,” Kulkarni said calmly.

  The young Mage-Lieutenant hit the waiting command on her screen. Stand in Righteousness shivered as Republic ships entered her range. At fourteen million kilometers, it would take seven and a half minutes for her missiles to reach their targets—minutes in which Stand would fire eight more salvos.

  The same pattern repeated around her, but Roslyn’s attention was fixed on the enemy. How they handled their gunships was going to decide the real cost of this battle. She was confident that they’d win—Alexander had brought over five hundred million tons of warships against three hundred—but the more holes they tore in the Republic command-and-control loop, the better they’d do.

  Those holes were usually torn by destroying ships. One thing the Protectorate had learned so far was that Republic ships were incredibly hard to kill. They had better antimissile defenses than their Protectorate cousins, and the armor on their outer hulls was better still.

  “Enemy first-salvo arrival in two minutes,” she noted aloud. “Initial salvo intercept by our defensive missiles in…twenty seconds.”

  She had no control over those missiles, and the explosions were going to wreak havoc on her own control loops, but she’d take that over having four thousand missiles coming her way unchallenged.

  “Intercept.”

  Roslyn’s calm word didn’t really do justice to the energy release taking shape on her screen. Two hundred and forty missiles, each carrying a one-gigaton antimatter warhead, had charged into the middle of the Republic missile salvo and detonated.

  Antimatter warheads were far from the most stable things in existence. Cascading explosions took out hundreds of missiles.

  Unfortunately, thousands more remained and there were only two more salvos in place to intercept the incoming fire. Salvos after that were being targeted on the next wave of missiles.