Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “I know who you are, Captain Mere Maata,” he said calmly. “You are a deserter and a traitor to the Republic. If you do not immediately stand down and surrender on receipt of this message, I will destroy your ship.”

  One of the cruisers, presumably Ancestor, was already leaving orbit at five gravities. Two dozen gunships were falling in around her, their accelerations more variable as they matched the cruiser’s velocity.

  “Anybody know this Captain Thatch?” Damien asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” Maata said flatly. “He’s my bloody ex-husband. He divorced me when he found out I was an Augment who moonlighted as a spy.”

  Being an Augment was probably something that should have been discussed before the wedding, Damien figured, but it wasn’t his place to judge other people’s relationships.

  If he was very lucky, Grace would be content with the unclassified version of this particular adventure, after all, and would forgive him for once again risking himself in the line of fire.

  Maybe.

  “I’m guessing that doesn’t cover quite everything, since most people aren’t quite so willing to blow their ex-spouses to pieces,” he noted.

  “Willing has nothing to do with it,” she said. “If he thinks he has to, he will. End of story. Man has an iron rod jammed up his ass.” Maata glanced over at him. “It’s not a quality without value, as I’m sure you can attest to yourself.”

  Damien was pretty sure she meant him.

  “So, can we outrun our lovelorn friend over there?” he finally asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Starlight’s captain responded. “We’ve already flipped and are burning for the outer system, but…”

  The main screen had the unfortunate answer to Damien’s question. They’d already built up a velocity heading toward Sucre, and it would be hours yet before Liara Foster could jump them. They could match the cruiser for acceleration, but the gunships could probably outmaneuver them, and the RIN ship had the velocity advantage.

  “We run. They pursue,” Damien agreed. “And it’s all down to when Captain Thatch decides to shoot.”

  The range was long—almost thirty light-seconds—but they were definitely inside Ancestor’s missile range.

  The first missile launched a couple of minutes later, but no one on Starlight’s bridge took the weapon overly seriously.

  “I have it dialed in with our turrets,” Maata told Niska and Damien, “but I’m pretty sure that’s a warning shot.”

  With almost nine million kilometers of range, the missile charged after them for several minutes before desultorily detonating its antimatter warhead a hundred thousand kilometers clear of the freighter.

  The next message played immediately on the screen.

  “Starlight, that is your only warning shot,” Thatch said grimly. “You know I can hit you. You know I can blow you to hell.” He paused. “My math says you’re eighty minutes from space clear enough to jump.

  “You have thirty to surrender or I will vaporize your ship. My orders leave me no choice.”

  He paused, his face softening from the harsh lines of the mask of duty.

  “Please, Mere. Stand the hell down,” he said quietly. “Don’t make me do this.”

  The recording ended.

  “Do you want to reply?” Damien asked.

  “What’s the point?” Maata replied. “We aren’t going to haul over and surrender, and he is going to blow us up if we don’t. So, options, people?”

  “Liara is at least four hours from being ready to jump,” he told them. “I can’t jump us, for obvious reasons.”

  He could barely hold a damn glass. He was a long way from being able to inlay new silver runes into his scarred palms.

  “What about your stealth ship?” Niska asked.

  “She’s here,” Damien agreed. The plan had called for Rhapsody in Purple to come in much farther out than Starlight and hide in the asteroid belt. “Even if she managed to sneak into point-blank range again, however, her laser and missiles aren’t going to do much to a cruiser.

  “And she’d be ripped to shreds by the gunships even if she could.”

  “So, we’re fucked,” Maata said harshly. “Great. Always wanted to get vaporized by the man I thought was the love of my life. Seems to fit with my judgment.”

  “No,” Damien corrected, studying the screen. He tapped a command on his wrist-comp and a new green icon appeared on the screen. Unlike Starlight’s crew, he did know roughly where Rhapsody in Purple was—or at least where she’d been thirty minutes earlier, when he received the last encrypted update pulse.

  “Starlight is fucked,” he continued. “We are only in trouble if we remain aboard the ship.” He looked at Maata. “How many shuttles do you have?”

  “Enough for everybody but not all of the gear,” she admitted. “And I have no way to hide them.”

  “So long as we keep them really close together, I can take care of that,” he said firmly. “Your ex just gave us a deadline. Let’s see how much crap we can fit around ourselves on your shuttles, Captain Maata.”

  “And Starlight?” she demanded.

  “She’s a damn fine ship, Captain, but I don’t think she’d want you to die with her,” Damien told her. “But I think her computers are enough to keep her running until Thatch vaporizes her.”

  Maata looked torn between fury and tears, but she slowly nodded.

  “Then we’d better get started.”

  26

  Maata had understated how little space the shuttles would have left after cramming the crew aboard. These weren’t designed to be personnel transports, after all. The shuttlecrafts’ primary purpose was to haul the standard ten-thousand-cubic-meter cargo containers around.

  They could also carry people, but by the time all of Starlight’s passengers were crammed aboard, there wasn’t enough space for such niceties as food, let alone exosuit power armor.

  Niska and Maata had tried anyway, which had left the interior of the spacecraft quite cramped.

  Damien could barely tell. He was wearing a helmet that completely covered his head, filling his entire view with a virtual reality projection of the space outside the shuttle. He could see the other six shuttles drifting nearby, ejected from Starlight as carefully and sneakily as possible.

  “The others aren’t close enough, Captain,” he murmured.

  “If we get them any closer, this goes from unsafe to insane,” she pointed out.

  “Slave their controls, match velocities with minimum thrust while we have Starlight to hide behind,” he ordered. “I can shield a bubble maybe five hundred meters across, so everyone needs to be inside that.”

  He heard her swallow.

  “We’ll do what we can,” she promised.

  As he watched, the shuttles slowly condensed. “Safe distance” between two ships running fusion engines was generally set at around the ten-kilometer line unless you were docking the ships.

  They’d already had less than a kilometer’s space between each shuttle, but Maata did as he asked. The shuttles got closer, each of them slotting into a spot two hundred meters away from the shuttle Damien was riding and surrendering control of their engines.

  “And now.”

  His voice was soft, but he could feel power ripple through him. The three Runes of Power that remained to him warmed with the energy as he projected an illusion around his new charges. Light hit one side of the illusion…and emerged on the other side, unchanged.

  There was no sign that six shuttles were inside that bubble.

  “You’re clear, Captain Maata,” he announced. “Let’s try and keep this nice and gentle for the moment. I’m not sure how much engine heat I can hide, but one gravity should be safe.”

  “All right. Everyone hold on.”

  He was pressed back into his seat by the acceleration. Ignoring that, he checked the rest of his charges. Each was matching the vector and acceleration exactly, six ships moving in a staggered formation with Damien’s shuttle at the hear
t.

  It was the closest he was going to get to flying again anytime soon. Even as the Hand of the Mage-King, he’d flown himself as much as possible. It had been a refuge, a safe zone where he was fully in control.

  Now, as First Hand, he was no longer physically able to fly. The controls of a ship would have to be heavily modified to allow him to use them, and the cost in reaction time and flexibility could easily be dangerous.

  So, Damien lost another refuge and let others fly him. Right now, however, the VR helmet allowed him to pretend he was the shuttle he was hiding.

  Six ships and sixty people fled under the cover of his magic, and he really had no way to tell if Ancestor was fooled. In theory, his spell was impenetrable to their scanners, but the Republic had surprised them before.

  “Breathe, my lord,” Denis Romanov said quietly in his ear. “Everything is good, but we need you to hold that spell. So, breathe.”

  Damien chuckled and felt some of his stress leave his shoulders.

  “Which of us is in charge again?” he asked.

  “You,” Romanov agreed cheerfully. “Right up until I need to keep you safe. Isn’t that how being a bodyguard works?”

  The first few minutes were the scariest. For about ten minutes, they were still close enough to Starlight that they could be in trouble if Thatch opened fire.

  Thankfully, they were almost a full light-second away from the freighter when the deadline ran out. Edward Thatch might not have wanted to shoot down his ex-wife, but he certainly didn’t hesitate once his time limit was hit.

  An Andreas-class cruiser carried one hundred missile launchers. Damien probably would only have fired a third of them at most, but he supposed they had an update on the fate of the gunships that had tangled with Starlight in Arsenault.

  Thatch launched a full salvo. A hundred missiles blazed into space, closing the distance at ten thousand gravities.

  Starlight was running on autopilot, but Maata had turned on the automated defense protocols. RFLAM turrets came to life under computer control as the missiles charged in. Lasers swept space, catching some missiles.

  Three. Maybe four. Possibly even five—it was impossible to tell, given the scale of the swarm.

  Even five would have been a miracle for the computers, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. Over ninety one-gigaton antimatter warheads detonated as one, and Starlight ceased to exist.

  “Stealth spell is holding,” he murmured. “We’re a hole in space and they don’t see us.”

  “And the bastard didn’t leave enough behind for it to be worth investigating,” Maata said. “God damn it. I always knew duty came first for him, even more than for me, but still!”

  “You don’t expect to see your ex vaporize a ship you’re presumably standing on,” Niska agreed. “On the other hand, I find it interesting that he vaporized Starlight quite so thoroughly.”

  “What?” Maata demanded.

  “Like you said, there isn’t enough left for it to be worth investigating, and he’s already slowing down to return to orbit,” the spy told her. “By utterly vaporizing Starlight and turning back, he’s making our sneaking away significantly easier.”

  “You think he saw us get out?” she snapped.

  “I doubt it,” Damien interjected. “But he might have seen something that was enough to make him suspicious…and not enough that he had to do anything about it.”

  “So, you’re saying he overkilled on killing me in case I had escaped, so I could keep escaping?” Maata asked. She didn’t sound convinced.

  To be fair, neither was Damien.

  “I’m saying it’s possible,” he conceded. “You know the man better than any of us, apparently. All I can say is that it looks like we’re clear. Give Ancestor an hour or so to move further away, and I’ll ping LaMonte for a rendezvous point.

  “I hate to lose a good ship, Captain Maata, but Starlight served us well. She got us clear.”

  Damien wasn’t really one to anthropomorphize ships, but if ships did have souls…well, Starlight had to be happy her crew were safe.

  Damien certainly was.

  “What happens now that we don’t have Niska’s accesses to get us on-planet?” Romanov asked.

  “We’ll have to take a look at what we’ve got in terms of fake shuttle beacons aboard Rhapsody,” Damien said. “We can get her pretty close in, but her usual courier guise isn’t going to cut it here. She has to stay invisible—but we should be able to insert a couple of shuttles into the regular traffic without drawing too much attention.”

  “Get me on the ground and I still have resources,” Niska promised. “If we’re burned, there’s only so much I can do from orbit. I have some electronic accesses they might not have IDed, but at this point…well, at this point, we’re better to go for an entirely different kind of authority and access.”

  Damien was pretty sure he followed, and he chuckled.

  “We’re at ‘beg friends for help,’ aren’t we?”

  After six hours of not being able to move, Damien wasn’t sure he ever would be able to stretch his arms again. The strain of sustaining the stealth spell was starting to get to him as well. He’d been lowering the intensity of it as they got farther and farther away from the RIN, but his skin was now itching from the gentle heat of his Runes of Power.

  “I’ve got something on the scanners,” Maata reported. “We’re at the rendezvous point and…”

  The main thing that separated Damien from other Mages was that, as a Rune Wright, he could feel magic. He felt the amplified stealth spell being run by Rhapsody in Purple’s mages sweep over his own shield and finally dropped the illusion with a sigh.

  “We are inside Captain LaMonte’s protective envelope,” he told the Captain. “You should be able to see her now.”

  “We’ve got her on the screens,” Maata confirmed. “We’ve got six shuttles to dock; this could take a while.”

  “I know.” Damien sighed. “The good news to all of this is that I at least get to see my cat.”

  “You have a cat, Montgomery?” Niska asked.

  “My physiotherapist suggested it where the Princess of Mars could hear,” he replied. “Never let a sixteen-year-old know there’s an excuse to get a kitten; trust me. Persephone is the finest princess-approved rescue cat in the Protectorate, but she was rather foisted on me originally!”

  The Augment laughed.

  “That’s…not the image I would expect of the terrifying First Hand of Mars,” he pointed out.

  “Major, when was the last time you argued with a friend’s teenage daughter?” Damien asked. “Believe me, it’s not a game you can win. Especially not when kittens are involved.”

  “I haven’t had a home anywhere for long enough for anyone to pressure me to get a cat,” the Augment spy replied. “The thought has been tempting, though. I like cats.”

  “I didn’t understand why anyone would,” Damien said. “Until the first time a furball jumped up on my lap and informed me that it was physical therapy time.” He grinned. “By which, of course, she meant time to pet her.”

  The first shuttle was docking as they spoke. Damien hadn’t taken the VR helmet off and wasn’t planning to, either.

  He was feeling crowded enough without being able to see how cramped the actual confines of the shuttle were.

  Damien was honestly surprised to find himself wrapped in LaMonte’s tight embrace moments after he exited the shuttle. Even he could tell it was platonic, but her fear was real.

  “You need to stop doing this shit,” she whispered in his ear.

  “We were never in danger,” he reassured her. He returned the hug and stepped back, surveying the crowded shuttle bay. “We were the last shuttle. Everything is aboard?”

  “I don’t have a damn clue where we’re putting everyone or the crap, but everything’s aboard,” she confirmed. “If we weren’t intended to carry more troops than we currently are, we’d be in serious trouble. As it is, everyone is going to be doubling up
in staterooms and I think my armory is about to start resembling a trash heap.”

  “Better than losing the gear that the Augments need,” Damien said grimly. “Do we even have extra gear for the BCR troops?”

  “No.” LaMonte shook her head as she guided him and Romanov out of the shuttle. She glanced at the Marine. “We’ve got a few exosuits for your Marines, but most of our battle suits are designed to interface with BCR implants—and my commandos apparently use a different data interface standard than the Augments.”

  “Of course they do.” Damien shook his head. Humanity had taken two centuries to standardize power connections. Data interface ports were still…idiosyncratic. Add different software protocols to go with the different hardware, and he wasn’t surprised the Augments couldn’t use BCR armor.

  “You realize it’s going to take Niska less than five minutes to realize I have an entire platoon of cyborgs aboard, right?” she asked. “I don’t know how much the Republic knows about the Bionic Combat Regiment.”

  “I would honestly assume that the Republic is fully aware of anything we were doing prior to the Secession,” Damien admitted.

  They reached a door and LaMonte opened it, leading the way into a spartan stateroom. The room appeared to be unoccupied…until Persephone leapt from the couch to Damien’s shoulder.

  “You’re the only one of our passengers getting a private room,” LaMonte told him. “And you only get it because half of Rhapsody’s senior officers sleep in the same bed. We were keeping Persephone in our quarters, but I figured she’d want to see you.”

  Damien carefully supported the kitten—cat now, he supposed, at over a year old. His hands hurt a bit, but he was getting better.

  “True.” He shook his head. “I don’t like bringing Niska and Maata aboard a Rhapsody,” he conceded to LaMonte’s earlier point. “But I prefer it to getting everyone killed.”