Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Milhouse swallowed.

  Rhapsody in Purple was a stealth ship, designed for scouting and inserting commando teams. She had two missile launchers and a single laser.

  She had a ten-gigawatt laser to the one-gigawatt weapons her enemy possessed, a full military-grade weapon to go with the Phoenix VIIIs in her magazines.

  “If they don’t know they’re under threat, I might get all three with the laser,” he admitted. “But anything I shoot missiles at is going to see us coming a long way away.”

  Kelly nodded, the math running in her head as she considered the situation.

  If they got within five million kilometers, the laser could take down one ship at a time…but that beam had to cycle. If they got within two million kilometers, her wife could use Rhapsody’s full military amplifier to shred the gunships.

  They couldn’t get that close.

  “How fast can we cycle that laser, Conrad?” she finally asked.

  Rhapsody in Purple lunged through space as her engineers dug into the guts of her singular battle laser. The scout ship had two RFLAM turrets as well, but Kelly had no illusions that those would suffice in the face of multiple salvos from hostile Republic gunships.

  Her two assets in the fight she was about to start were speed and surprise. Her intervention would remove any question of whether Starlight was a spy ship or not. Hopefully, the Republic didn’t know much about the Rhapsodies, but a ship appearing from stealth and blowing away a gunship flight wasn’t going to leave many doubters behind. If nothing else, stealthing a ship was still supposed to be impossible over the long term, even with magic.

  “Those gunships are going to be in range of Starlight when we fire,” Milhouse warned as the distance ticked down. “If they open fire with their RFLAMs at maximum range, they could destroy Captain Maata’s ship.”

  “If they were going to try and destroy Starlight, the squadron from Manchester orbit would have done it,” Kelly replied. “Or they’d have launched missiles.”

  She wasn’t sure what defenses the defected Legatan ship had, but she had no more faith in their ability to stand up to full salvos from three gunships than she did in Rhapsody in Purple’s.

  There was no way for her to tell Starlight she was there. From what she understood of Damien Montgomery’s plan, none of the ex-LMID crew even knew she was following them. She was supposed to be the ace in the hole if they were betrayed.

  Or just plain caught.

  “We’ll fire as soon as we cross the five-million-kilometer mark,” she told Milhouse. “Drop stealth, sequence three shots as fast as Engineering can give them to you.”

  “They’re saying a two-second cycle time,” Milhouse replied. “Four shots. No more. Quite possibly only three.”

  It would have to do. For all the hours that had passed since Starlight had broken orbit and the hour-plus that would pass between their intercept and the two ships being able to jump, the survival of both ships was going to come down to four seconds and Milhouse’s aim.

  “The gunships don’t think they’re under threat,” her tactical officer said in response to her unspoken worry. “Straight and true. Easy targets.”

  Kelly nodded silently.

  Thirty minutes to contact.

  19

  “I know you want to keep your secrets, Montgomery, but we will be inside the range of those gunships within a few minutes,” Niska said quietly.

  Damien hadn’t missed the Augment entering the bridge, but his focus had been on the incoming enemy ships.

  While Starlight was accelerating hard toward deep space and the safety of a magical teleport and had built up quite a velocity, the gunships had already been heading in that direction. They’d adjusted their course, moved slightly in Starlight’s direction, and were now accelerating in the same direction as the freighter.

  The math was clear: even if Starlight were to somehow find even more acceleration, there was no way the jump-ship could avoid interception. The gunships would not merely get her in range of their lasers. They would get close enough to lock on to her hull.

  Even without Damien aboard, that would end poorly for them. Starlight’s weapons were easily capable of destroying the gunships at close range.

  Her weapons were only missiles, however, which meant the gunships would be able to return fire with precision before they were disabled. They’d take one or two of the gunships with them, but then the survivor would destroy Pod Bravo and board the ship.

  Between the Augments and Marines, that wouldn’t end well either…but there were still three more gunships following behind them, well within their missile range.

  Another hour or so and Liara Foster could risk the jump. Starlight wasn’t a Protectorate ship, though, and her jump matrix was ever so slightly odd in a dozen ways. Enough that the Navy Jump Mage wasn’t sure she could push it.

  Their only hope was to get through the gunships in front of them and deal with the long-range missile fire from their pursuers. That hope depended on a ship that Damien hadn’t told his ally was with them.

  Damien himself wasn’t sure Kelly was with them. There was an encrypted transmitter hidden in his quarters that was letting the stealth ship know where they were jumping to, but there was no return transmission.

  “Would you be reassured, Niska, if I had somehow concealed an entire fleet with magic?” he asked. “If all I had to do was whisk away my cloak of spells and the Protectorate would save us?”

  The Augment snorted.

  “I believe you can hide a starship, Montgomery,” he said. “Perhaps even several…if you were in the middle of them. Is there another ship out there? A ghost, perhaps, that’s been following us since Amber?”

  Damien shook his head.

  “Somehow, I’m not surprised you noticed.”

  “I noticed the transmissions first, I have to admit,” the old spy said. “So far as I can tell, Maata didn’t and her people haven’t seen the ship at all. I’m impressed.”

  “You should be,” the Hand replied. “Our ghost’s a good ship and the Captain is a good friend. I just hope they are close enough.”

  “Enemy laser range in thirty seconds,” Maata announced. “Two hours after that before they can board us.”

  Which was probably two hours before an ordinary Mage could jump them. Foster could get them out if the Republic was confident of that, but they couldn’t take the risk.

  Damien exhaled.

  “It’s down to either our ghost or the Republic’s overconfidence,” he admitted. “Bets, Major Niska?”

  The Augment looked at the screen.

  “These are the crews the Republic assigned to security duty, so overconfidence is possible,” he admitted. “I’d still rather bet on your—”

  The first of the gunships in their way disappeared in a brilliant flash of light, the laser invisible before it struck.

  Two seconds later, the second gunship—still continuing on its fixed course—shared the first ship’s fate.

  Whoever was piloting the third gunship, though, earned a mental salute from Damien. They had four seconds’ warning, lightspeed beams entirely invisible until they arrived, and the gunship still managed to avoid Rhapsody of Purple’s beam.

  “Captain Maata?” Damien said loudly.

  “Launching.”

  Six new icons appeared on the screen as the Rapier launchers in Pod Bravo spoke for the first time. Damien didn’t expect them to be effective—the Rapier IVs had a little less than a third of the acceleration of Phoenix VIIIs—but they’d make the gunship commander think.

  Especially as Rhapsody in Purple appeared on their screens and opened fire with her own launchers. Two Phoenix VIIIs screamed toward the gunship at over twelve thousand gravities.

  They could probably deal with either salvo, but they couldn’t deal with both—and they had to focus on the Phoenixes. For all that Rhapsody in Purple was further away, she was moving much faster relative to the gunship.

  “I don’t suppose Starlight
has lasers?” Damien asked quietly.

  “RFLAMs only,” Niska told him. “Missiles are it.”

  It wasn’t like the gunships blocking their way had anything heavier, but they had real armor. Starlight didn’t. If she got into range of the gunships, she’d be destroyed.

  More Rapiers flashed out of the launchers and the First Hand held his breath. The gunship had launched her own weapons, six Excalibur V antimatter-drive missiles, at Rhapsody. The stealth ship had her own RFLAMs, but that would push her defenses.

  Then two of the missiles disappeared and he heard a whoop from Maata’s gunner.

  “Returning the favor as best we can, sir,” the man declared. “Bugger was already in range of us after all.”

  Damien smiled. Starlight couldn’t take down six missiles heading away from her, but she could take down some—and while Rhapsody in Purple would be pushed to stop six missiles with her two RFLAM turrets and her amplifier, she could almost certainly handle four.

  The gunship shot down the first pair of missiles from Rhapsody. And the second. The stealth ship wasn’t firing her laser, Damien noted grimly, but the missiles were still coming.

  They weren’t necessary. The gunship had split her fire too badly, and two Rapiers made it through. Most of the civilian missiles didn’t have warheads, relying on kinetic energy to finish their opponents.

  Captain Maata’s turned out to carry two-hundred-megaton fusion bombs.

  The intercept squadron was gone, but that was only half of Starlight’s problems, and Damien’s gaze turned to the icons of the three ships that had been pursuing them since Manchester orbit.

  “What are they doing?” Maata asked slowly, her attention clearly focused in the same spot. “I assumed they would launch as soon as they saw us, but they haven’t even increased their acceleration. Wait…have they cut it?”

  Damien’s borrowed seat didn’t have a console or a repeater screen, but he had linked his wrist-comp in earlier, and now he dug into it to get a proper update on what was going on.

  “They cut their acceleration just after we shot down the intercept squadron’s missiles,” he confirmed for her.

  “But they want to catch us. Why cut their acceleration?”

  “Because they’ll resume it again in about forty seconds,” Damien said grimly as he brought up the numbers on the launchers built into the Republic’s new Accelerator-class gunships.

  “And then they’ll activate the drives of the missiles they’ve been launching into space and send them all after us at once,” he continued. “We’re not even near their extreme range, so that will be over fifty missiles arriving in a few minutes.”

  “Can your stealth ship cover us from that?” Maata asked.

  “No,” Liara Foster interrupted. The Mage was clearly already doing the calculations. “We won’t be in range of their amplifier or their RFLAMs at that point. By delaying, they took away our mutual support.”

  “We can’t stop fifty missiles,” Captain Maata told them. “This is a freighter with some concealed guns, not a warship.”

  “Not even a warship this size could stop fifty modern missiles,” Damien replied. Magic wrapped around him as he unbelted himself from his seat and crossed the bridge to the simulacrum.

  The acceleration would have crushed the mundane members of the crew. Even the Augments could only survive eight gees of thrust, not easily walk around in it.

  Magic, however, allowed many things. He knew he was getting uncomfortable looks from the crew. Foster had received a couple herself when she’d entered the bridge, but everyone had been too glad to see her to care.

  “Liara, we need to go,” he said quietly as he reached her. “You’re the only person aboard who can save us now.”

  “We’re still too close in,” the stocky woman replied, her hands fixed to the simulacrum. “If I jump now, I’ll kill us all. Maybe if I was in a warship…”

  “Liara, I have studied this for years,” he reminded her. “It’s not about the amplifier or the jump matrix or the ship at all. Whether or not we can jump from here is entirely about the Mage and their training. If you could jump from here in a warship, you can jump from here in a Legatan q-ship.”

  She swallowed.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she admitted. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”

  “You are a fully trained goddamned Mage of the Royal Martian Navy,” Damien snapped. “You trained to jump from bloody orbit in an emergency. I won’t pretend it won’t hurt…but—”

  He gestured at the screen as the Republic missiles lit up.

  “I can’t jump us,” he reminded her, holding up his gloved hands. “Romanov can’t jump us—he doesn’t have the runes and never learned how. It’s you or we all die.”

  “Make it happen, Mage Foster.”

  She took a deep breath and focused on the liquid silver icon at her fingertips. Liara closed her eyes, and Damien felt the power flicker through the ship.

  And then they were somewhere else, a thankfully long way away from any Republican missiles.

  20

  Roslyn’s head hurt.

  The young Mage-Lieutenant rubbed her temples and blinked several times, hoping that the array of data she had on her screen would come back into focus.

  It didn’t cooperate and she linked her wrist-comp to the wallscreen in her office. Transferring the data blew it up to roughly forty times the size, and even her tired eyes could read that.

  Mage-Commodore Jane Adamant had arrived yesterday with the battleship Righteous Guardian of Liberty and another half-dozen cruisers and destroyers. The Commodore had received an incredibly cold shoulder from the locals in Ardennes, but her presence finally brought Mage-Admiral Alexander’s fleet up to her target numbers for Operation Bluebell.

  Roslyn shook her head as she moved Adamant’s task force over to one side of the screen. She’d looked up the officer’s history and she could see why the Ardennes Self-Defense Force didn’t like her—Mage-Commodore Adamant had earned her star by smashing the previous ASDF to pieces at Damien Montgomery’s order.

  The ASDF ships had obeyed a treacherous governor and been under the guns of a mutinous RMN cruiser squadron. They’d had no choice but to fight—and Mage-Commodore Adamant had had no choice but to wreck their ships.

  The older woman hadn’t seemed bothered by the cold shoulder, either. She’d clearly known what to expect.

  Her ships brought them up to six battleships, thirty-two cruisers and thirty-six destroyers. Unless Roslyn missed her mark, their newly designated Second Fleet was the single largest formation the Royal Martian Navy had ever assembled. They had over half of the RMN’s surviving cruisers, if nothing else.

  The Protectorate had been functionally stripped of ships, she knew. Anywhere with a strong-enough Militia to protect themselves had been left to their own devices. Tasks and missions that would once have seen cruisers or multiple destroyers now saw single destroyers—nothing the RMN had heavier than a destroyer was anywhere except the front and Sol.

  Coordinating the logistics and meetings for those seventy-four ship captains and the twelve flag officers among them was falling on Roslyn Chamber’s young shoulders. Icons glittered next to the ships on her wall screen—a glorified checklist.

  She was almost certain she’d invited every captain and flag officer to the final briefing aboard Righteous Shield of Valor, but missing one would have been unacceptable.

  Lost in the review, she missed the admittance chime on her door the first two times it went off. She had barely registered the third when Mage-Captain Kulkarni gave up and entered her office.

  “You have a doorbell for a reason, Lieutenant,” the fleet operations officer told her. “You also, I should note, have assigned working hours for a reason.”

  “The Flag Lieutenant sleeps when the Admiral does,” Roslyn replied. “Have you seen Alexander sleep?”

  “Yes,” Kulkarni said calmly. She studied the screen. “Sit down, Roslyn. Can you even read this
?”

  “Not really,” the young woman admitted as she obeyed. “I just need to make sure I didn’t screw anything up.”

  “And did you ask me to double-check it?” the ops officer asked. “Did you ask one of the Chiefs to check? Or any of the other officers in the Admiral’s staff?”

  “No, sir,” Roslyn admitted.

  “And in what galaxy, exactly, do you think that we expect the most junior officer on the staff to handle an entire fleet briefing on her own?” Kulkarni asked. “Or, hell, anything? You literally can’t see straight, Roslyn.”

  She tapped a command on her own wrist-comp and the screen shut down.

  “You are two hours past the end of your shift, and Chief Sinclair told me you started four hours early,” Kulkarni told Roslyn. “I’ve just transferred your working files to my wrist-comp. I will double-check everything and make sure everyone knows where they need to be and when.

  “You, Mage-Lieutenant, are going to bed—your bed, in case that’s currently a question—and you are going to sleep for the next twelve hours so that you are conscious and useful during this briefing.

  “Am I clear?”

  “I haven’t enough time to breathe, let alone find someone else to sleep with,” Roslyn responded, only half-aware of how stupid she sounded.

  “Because you’re not supposed to be doing this alone without any experience to fall back on,” her senior officer told her. “Your quarters, Mage-Lieutenant. Now.”

  Chief Olivia Sinclair was waiting for Roslyn when she finally woke up. She’d already realized she’d overslept the start of her next shift by an hour and was in a panicked rush toward her office when she almost physically collided with the taller woman.

  “Slow down, Lieutenant,” Sinclair told her. “There are no time bombs or live snakes waiting in your office. I checked.”