Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  It was an arrow. The other invoices came away easily, revealing a circular set of arrows permanently drawn into the board and pointing at a single invoice that had been covered by the other, mundane ones.

  Underneath the invoice, someone had written two words: I’m sorry.

  “I’ve got an invoice for two hundred and seven seats on an intersystem passenger liner,” Damien said slowly. “An invoice the accountant here wanted to be sure someone found.”

  “A passenger liner?” Niska asked. “Going where?”

  “Nueva Bolivia,” Damien read off the paper, his anger muted now as he saw a possibility that wasn’t a pit full of dead kids.

  “That’s not much,” the Augment pointed out. “But if you’ve got the ship details and dates, I can get their final destination out of the traffic control at Bolivia.”

  He paused.

  “You’re right, Montgomery,” he conceded. “Something is very wrong here and these kids are in trouble. I don’t know if we can help, but if there’s even one damn clue here, we have to follow it.”

  The advantage of them not being in the same room, Damien reflected, was that he hadn’t broken any of the Augment’s bones before the other man had apologized.

  “We have a problem,” O’Malley announced as Damien pulled the invoice from the wall.

  “I dropped some auditory scanners outside as we were heading into the hangar, and they just started going off. Aircraft inbound.”

  “Any idea what type?” Damien asked.

  “High-powered helicopters,” the Augment replied. “Fast, maneuverable. Running it against my database, but I’m guessing Phantom VI gunships.”

  “I’ve met the V,” he noted. The stealth attack helicopters had ended up in the hands of the rebellion on Ardennes. He’d ended up coopting them, along with the rebels, against Ardennes’ treasonous prior governor. “The VI lacks the stealth, has bigger missiles?”

  “Exactly,” Niska replied. “But if we can hear them, they’re ninety seconds out at most.”

  “Sixty-five and counting,” O’Malley told them. “I think we need to execute on that exit plan!”

  “Meet me in the main yard,” Damien ordered.

  He was still less than happy with Niska, but he needed his cyborg allies. Getting the hell out of this creepily abandoned school while they were all alive sounded like a brilliant plan.

  He and Romanov were outside first. Damien couldn’t pick out the sound of the approaching attack helicopters. From the way the Marine was scanning the air, he could at least hear something.

  “Thirty seconds and counting,” O’Malley told him as she and Niska left the hangar at a run. “That’s until they can do a thermal sweep. If they want visual confirmation of us, longer.”

  “They won’t.” Niska’s voice was grim. “Their orders will be to kill anyone here.”

  They reached Damien and the two Augments looked uncomfortable.

  “What do we do now?” Niska asked.

  “Take my arms.” Damien stretched out his gloved hands. Being touched on his forearms wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it only took a few seconds for all three of his companions to be holding his arms.

  Now even he could pick out the gunships, but he ignored them. From the courtyard of the Academy he had an amazing view out over the foothills and plains. He could even pick out Arndale in the distance.

  For the moment, however, he selected what looked like a set of farm fields halfway to the city and focused his energy.

  “Swallow now,” he ordered. “This will suck for you.”

  He didn’t wait to see if they obeyed. As five armed helicopters swept over the mountains, Damien stepped into warmer temperatures and calmer airspace.

  Warned or not, augmented stomach or not, Niska promptly stumbled away from him to throw up. O’Malley didn’t look much better, scanning the air for a few seconds as she processed that they were somewhere else.

  Then the redheaded Augment hit a button and smiled.

  “Scanners self-destructed,” she told the others. “They’ll know there was a Mage there, but we should be good.”

  “This end of the teleport is less detectable, but they’ll find it eventually,” Damien warned them. “Let’s move. We need to get Captain Maata looking for an excuse to go to Nueva Bolivia.”

  16

  The full weight of Roslyn’s new position didn’t really sink in until the first full flag-officer meeting. In a room full of Admirals and Commodores, she was the only person below the rank of Captain.

  Her instructions from Admiral Alexander to “keep her mouth shut” made more sense than ever. She sat slightly off to the left of the tall Admiral, her wrist-comp projecting a continuous stream of the transcription of the meeting.

  The repeated “Admiral such and such said” on the transcript warned her of something that was going to be a problem. Technically, Mage-Admiral Alexander, the commander of the fleet, and Mage-Admiral Medici, the commander of only half of the cruisers, held the same rank.

  Authority went by seniority and, in Mage-Admiral Alexander’s case, the fact that she’d been appointed directly by the Mage-King and that said Mage-King was her brother.

  There was no question as to who was in command of the fleet. The argument her transcription software was dutifully recording between Mage-Admiral Medici, the man who’d commanded the desperate defense of Ardennes for First Hand Montgomery, and Mage-Admiral Soner Marangoz, the man in command of Alexander’s battleships, told her that no one was quite so sure what the pecking order was below that.

  “Enough!” Alexander bellowed. “Marangoz, your battleships are going to carry the brunt of the fighting, but that does not magically give you more experience than the man who held Ardennes against the Republic! Listen to Medici, damn it.”

  The dark-skinned Admiral turned a shade darker, but he bowed his head in acknowledgement.

  “Good. Continue, Medici.”

  “We need to work on our counter-gunship tactics,” the Mage-Admiral told them all. “As we’ve seen again and again, they provide a mind-boggling augmentation to the first few salvos of missiles from the Republic. Even with overwhelming force, like Admiral Alexander possessed in Santiago, they allowed the Republic to inflict heavy losses and damage.”

  “And the success of the battle line tells me that the gunships can’t deal with battleships,” Marangoz replied. “I’m not afraid of mosquitos, Admiral!”

  “That exact phrasing, Admiral Marangoz, was used by Lieutenant Commander Nikodem,” Alexander pointed out. “And trusting it resulted in us losing far too many cruisers and destroyers in Santiago.

  “Our battleships survived because the gunships didn’t target them. They knew they could hurt us just as badly and more efficiently by hammering our escorts.”

  They’d been reinforced up to twenty-six cruisers now, but Roslyn knew their destroyer numbers hadn’t recovered. They only had thirty of the lighter ships, meaning the destroyers were actually outnumbered by heavier ships.

  “My understanding is that there were some covert armament programs that will bear fruit in the near future, but we are otherwise looking at over a year before we have any additional cruisers or battleships,” Alexander said grimly. “Destroyers would be sooner, but my brother and the core Admiralty has agreed with the assessment that we cannot deploy the existing Lancer design.

  “We have no choice but to put Lancers into the fray for now, but new construction on destroyers has been paused until the design process for the Aegis-class ships is complete.”

  Alexander looked around the room and Roslyn felt a chill run down her spine. She knew what the Admiral had decided…and nobody else in the room did. That was a strange feeling.

  “Right now, the Battle of Ardennes has badly depleted the Republic’s available fleet forces,” the Mage-Admiral noted. “Our own losses, while horrific, were mostly felt in the Militia volunteers. The Royal Martian Navy remains fundamentally intact, and the sacrifice and triumph of the M
ilitia has evened the odds.

  “All evidence, however, suggests that the Republic will out-build us for at least the next year. Worse, if they are prepared to engage in hit-and-run tactics and expend large numbers of sacrificial gunships, they can make us bleed for every system we hold and every system we retake.”

  “But we have to advance,” Marangoz stated. “We cannot leave Protectorate systems in the hands of the Republic.”

  “The only thing I cannot do, Admiral Marangoz, is throw this fleet away for nothing,” Mage-Admiral Alexander said coldly. “I can and I will leave the occupied systems in the hands of the enemy. We know from the occupation of Santiago that the Republic is not carrying out vast purges or massacres.

  “Yes, people are dying,” she admitted levelly. “But we do them no service by dying and failing them.”

  “And what about Santiago’s Mages?” Medici asked quietly. “They were being rounded up in internment camps, and we know several hundred are missing. We can only assume they were transported out of the system.”

  “We don’t know that,” Alexander replied. “But the best way to liberate the occupied systems remains the same: we must neutralize the capacity of the Republic to both build new warships and to resupply the ones they have.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?” Marangoz asked.

  “By taking this fleet to the heart of the enemy and separating the Centurion Accelerator Ring, the only major antimatter production facility the Republic has, from the shipyards at Legatus,” Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander said firmly.

  “We cannot challenge the fixed defenses of either Legatus or Centurion and the mobile forces in the system,” she said. “But we can engage those mobile forces or the fixed defenses. We can create a situation where we can destroy any force that sorties while we prevent them moving ships or supplies out of the system.

  “We can’t break the defenses of the Republic’s core logistics facilities—but we can damn well make sure that the Republic can’t get into them either!”

  The meeting exploded into chaos, and Roslyn realized why Alexander had insisted everyone attend in person. It was never a good idea to let anyone else watch a bunch of flag officers attempt to argue with their superiors like uncomfortable toddlers.

  The Mage-Admiral waited for a minute to see if anyone was saying anything useful, then slapped her hand down on the desk.

  The sound was clearly augmented by Alexander’s magic, echoing through the room in a way even a gunshot wouldn’t have.

  “Captain Kulkarni,” she said sharply. “Explain. Lieutenant Chambers, a map of the Legatus System, if you please.”

  Roslyn had known that this part of the meeting was coming and had the map already loaded on her wrist-comp. A single command flicked it to the holo-projector built into the table, and a three-dimensional image of the Legatus System appeared.

  Kulkarni rose and gestured to the map.

  “Lieutenant, can we dim everything except Legatus and Centurion, please?”

  Roslyn had that queued up as well. The other planets of the system dimmed to translucence. None of them were completely unoccupied—only Sol was more heavily developed than Legatus, though Tau Ceti came close and had more people.

  Tau Ceti’s multiple habitable planets helped there.

  “The dimensions of the Legatus System are key to the Mage-Admiral’s plan,” Kulkarni told the assembled flag officers. “Legatus itself orbits the star at an average of eight point two light-minutes every four hundred days. It’s an eccentric orbit, with an aphelion of just over nine light-minutes.

  “Centurion, on the other hand, orbits relatively evenly at forty-five light-minutes every four thousand five hundred days and change. We are currently roughly one month away from the absolute furthest the two planets will ever be apart, an alignment that occurs approximately once every hundred and forty years.”

  Roslyn highlighted the gap between the two planets without being asked.

  “Fifty-four light-minutes, people. It’s far enough that we’d jump it most of the time rather than taking the week or so it might take to fly in normal space.

  “The Republic doesn’t have that luxury, with most of their defenses being sublight units. Thanks to efforts by one of our scout ships, we also have a solid idea of what kind of mobile forces and defenses are positioned in Legatus.”

  Kulkarni gestured to the planet and Roslyn zoomed in, highlighting each group of icons as her former Captain laid them out.

  “Legatus’s permanent fixed defenses have been vastly upgraded since the Secession. What was once shielded by forty gunships and some concealed defenses is now shielded by an estimated two thousand gunships and twenty major orbital platforms. Scans from our scout ship suggest those platforms are based around the Republic’s default twenty-megaton hull, but we have to assume that the lack of FTL or even significant in-system mobility means they have increased firepower over the RIN’s twenty-megaton cruisers.

  “Certainly, twenty of them represent a force that our entire fleet would be hard pressed to overcome,” Captain Kulkarni noted.

  She raised a hand as the flag officers started to object. “We could overcome,” she agreed. “But it would stretch our fleet to the limit, and there are currently two full carrier groups in orbit around Legatus.”

  That silenced the officers for a moment as Roslyn added the icons.

  “That’s two fifty-megaton carriers, four forty-megaton and two thirty-megaton battleships, and eighteen cruisers. The cruisers are about half-and-half fifteen- and twenty-megaton ships.

  “Again, we could defeat that mobile force, but they aren’t dramatically inferior to our fleet.”

  “What about the construction yards?” Medici asked.

  “Legatus had significant yards,” Kulkarni agreed. “None of the ships currently in those yards, however, appear close to completion—though all of them are finished hulls. I would hesitate to assume, but my guess would be that what we’re looking at are a new collection of their standard hulls delivered to receive systems and armaments—and probably delivered just before our scoutship came through.”

  “If they’re not building those hulls in Legatus’s yards, where are they building them?” Marangoz asked. The Admiral was leaning forward intently now. “You’re implying they’re only doing final fitting-out at Legatus?”

  “The fact that we don’t see any under-construction hulls in Legatan orbit appears to imply that, sir,” Kulkarni noted. “We’d known they hadn’t done any major military construction at Legatus prior to the Secession, so that makes sense. The yards in Legatan orbit definitely have the capacity to build ships of this scale, but they seem to only be using them for weapons and systems.

  “The hulls themselves appear to be being built at Centurion.”

  Kulkarni gestured to Roslyn, and the Flag Lieutenant moved the zoom.

  They weren’t as zoomed-in at Centurion as they had been at Legatus, but the planet still looked bigger.

  “We knew they’d built the Centurion Accelerator Ring out here, and we’d known they were paranoid about letting Mages near it,” the operations officer told the assembled Admirals. “Now we know that there was a lot more going on out there than we thought.”

  The Ring itself was surprisingly flimsy-looking to Roslyn, which she supposed made sense. The vast majority of it was simply a particle accelerator and maintenance access for the same. Only small portions of the Accelerator Ring were even pressurized.

  A single missile could end the Republic’s military logistics. Getting close enough to launch that missile, though…

  “Here and here”—Kulkarni gestured and Roslyn highlighted—“we see construction yards to put anywhere in the Protectorate to shame. However, they appear to lack much of the equipment necessary to fit out warships with weapons and other systems.

  “Here”—Roslyn highlighted the third yard for Kulkarni—“we see their original fitting-out yard. It’s smaller than the other two, which is why most of that
work is now being done at Legatus.

  “Centurion is the source of the antimatter for their missiles and gunships and the hulls for their warships. The complex here is a single point of failure, though…” Kulkarni sighed and shook her head.

  “Don’t let the scale fool you. We are looking at multiple stations and industrial nodes spread around a gas giant with eighty percent of the volume and mass of Sol’s Jupiter. Each of those nodes is guarded by half as many fortresses as Legatus itself, but the main defense is this.”

  At Kulkarni’s words, Roslyn lit up eight stations orbiting the gas giant in red. They were much farther out than any other platform but carefully positioned so that no missile attack on the Ring would pass by fewer than two of the stations.

  “We’re not sure what the Republic calls these guys, but they are the key to the defense of Centurion. Each of them appears to be two of their fifty-megaton carriers attached together. Where their fifty-megaton carriers have one flight deck, these fortresses have four. Each of them plays home base to at least a thousand gunships.”

  Eight one-hundred-megaton fortresses mothering eight thousand gunships. Roslyn concealed a shiver at the thought—that was a lot of firepower.

  “Any attempt to fire directly on the ring would pass through the RFLAM defenses of multiple fortresses, and I suspect we’ll find that they have traded a significant portion of their mobile sisters’ weapons and engines for more defensive lasers.”

  “So that, Admirals and Commodores, is our challenge and our opportunity,” Mage-Admiral Alexander said calmly. “Their final fitting-out facility and their source of crews is Legatus itself, but their hulls and their fuel come from Centurion.

  “We could take either Legatus or Centurion in the absence of mobile forces, but the presence of RIN carrier groups means we can’t take either.

  “What we can do is make certain that neither of them can send support to the other,” she concluded. “If personnel, hulls, system components and antimatter cannot flow between these two worlds, the Republic’s military logistics infrastructure is functionally disabled.