Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Both of her superiors looked at the massive holographic display at the heart of Righteous Shield of Valor’s flag deck.

  “She’s not wrong, sir,” Kulkarni said slowly. “They could still adjust their course for a zero-velocity rendezvous with the existing fleet, but I think Mage-Lieutenant Chambers is correct. In about ten hours, we’re going to be looking down the launchers of about five thousand gunships.”

  Alexander studied the display and then nodded herself.

  “Worst-case scenario, I look paranoid,” she said aloud. “The fleet is to go to one-quarter watches for the next eight hours. Every ship is to stand down to status three for at least six hours and make sure their alpha watches get some rest.

  “We’ll prepare for heavy fire in ten hours.” She smiled. “And that ‘get some rest’ applies to you lot, too. Send the orders, call your replacements and sack out.

  “That is also an order.”

  29

  Nine hours later, Roslyn was back on the bridge with the rest of Mage-Admiral Alexander’s core staff, watching as the scenario they’d predicted unfolded in front of them.

  Space battle lent itself to that. Even the Republic gunships were limited to eight or so gravities at best, which meant courses were built up over hours or days. The gunships from the cardinal station closest to them had launched just over an hour before, accelerating at that full eight gravities for the entire time.

  Now all of the various gunship forces had converged at the same point and the same velocity, a masterpiece of maneuvering that would have been far more impressive if it wasn’t assembling almost thirty thousand missile launchers to come at Roslyn and her companions.

  She wouldn’t have turned down a few thousand gunships of her own. The Aegis-class destroyers would, in theory, make up some of that difference when they became available. The new destroyer class was primarily a defensive ship, trading half of the Lancer class’s offensive armament for over three times as many anti-missile turrets.

  The new cruiser and battleship designs being considered were planning to squeeze in more RFLAM turrets anywhere they could fit. The current round of construction was Honorific- and Peace- class ships, though. Those were the warships they’d fight this war with unless it lasted far longer than anyone hoped.

  Right now, however, the entirety of Second Fleet mustered forty-nine hundred launchers and six thousand anti-missile turrets.

  That was less than one missile launcher per gunship coming their way, and the gunships had over twice as many RFLAM turrets as the Martian ships.

  Worst of all, the Excalibur V missiles in the Republic’s magazines outranged the Martian fleet’s missiles by a lot—almost two million kilometers at this closing geometry.

  “They’re never going to enter our range,” Kulkarni said quietly. “They chose their velocity carefully. They’ll launch their missiles and flip. Their zero-vee point will be almost four hundred thousand kilometers out of our range.”

  “So, we get to face ninety thousand missiles and just, what, smile and take it?” Roslyn asked. That was…terrifying.

  “We need to deplete their gunship numbers,” Alexander replied. “Amplifiers and missiles in defensive mode should get us through this attack, but they’ve got the ships to do this again even if we wipe this force out.

  “We can’t let them get away untouched.”

  “Then we have to pursue,” the ops officer said quietly. “If we bring the fleet forward at fifteen gravities, they’ll get into range faster, but they won’t be able to evade our range.”

  “They’ve only got three missiles, Kulkarni,” the Admiral said grimly. “So long as we stay out of range of the defensive platforms, I will chase them to the end of the stars. Pass the orders.”

  The timers on the main display shifted as Second Fleet’s engines came to life. When Second Fleet had been staying basically in place, engaging only in defensive maneuvers, the RIN gunship strike would have reached their weapons range in just over thirty minutes.

  Now that timer was starting at seventeen minutes and counting down. A second timer had joined it—this one counting down from over an hour. When that one ran out, Second Fleet would finally range on the gunships.

  As Roslyn was studying the big holodisplay, more icons and circles drew themselves in. Weapons range for Second Fleet and the gunships were joined by a bright crimson threat sphere drawn around the cardinal station and the fleet gathered around it.

  “We have weapons to spend,” Alexander said quietly. “They don’t. As soon as they open fire, the fleet will engage with extreme-range missiles.”

  “They’ll be ballistic by the time they reach the gunships,” Kulkarni objected. “We’ll be throwing away missiles.”

  “We have them to spend,” the Mage-Admiral repeated. “More importantly, there are five thousand targets out there. Relatively lightly armored targets, at that. We only need to get a warhead within a few hundred meters of a gunship to take it down.

  “Proximity kills are the name of the game, Mage-Captain. We can’t guarantee hits through their defenses, so let’s swarm them with weapons they can’t even see.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kulkarni started to run numbers and feed them to the rest of the fleet. Roslyn mirrored the operations officer’s screen, virtually watching over Kulkarni’s shoulder as the attack patterns took shape.

  She didn’t have any more confidence in a swarm of ballistic missiles than Kulkarni did, but they could easily send twenty salvos of missiles at the gunships while closing and have half of their magazines left.

  And if the Republic thought they could run Second Fleet out of ammunition, they’d have some ugly surprises waiting for them. Dozens of freighters packed full of munitions were hidden in the deep dark a light-year from Legatus, waiting for a courier to summon them forward to rearm the Martian fleet.

  A siege would take a long time. They were going to run through their magazines a lot, and Alexander had made sure they had the supplies to do it.

  Right now, however, they needed to prove that the Republic couldn’t break the siege with their current resources.

  “We need better damned missiles,” Alexander muttered, her voice quiet enough that only Roslyn could hear her. “They’ve been promising us an improved Phoenix since the penny dropped, but I needed a million of them two weeks ago.”

  Roslyn could only nod. Second Fleet’s need to stay in position to prevent traffic leaving Centurion meant that the enemy would always get to choose the velocity of the engagement. That meant they had the chance to set up fights where the Protectorate fleet wouldn’t range on them without taking risks.

  Even if the Navy’s suppliers had finally come up with a schematic for a Phoenix IX, they definitely hadn’t produced enough of them to fill Second Fleet’s supply train.

  “Enemy range in sixty seconds; standing by for defensive fire,” Kulkarni reported. “We’ll launch ten salvos to counter theirs, then twenty ballistic salvos.” She paused. “We’re only going to get two fully powered salvos when we reach range. We’re going to have to flip immediately after launching the second and go to full power away from the enemy.

  “They will be able to bring warships out after us,” the operations officer warned, “but we’ll avoid missile range of the station.”

  “We’ll deal with that then,” the Admiral said grimly. “For now…” She studied the holodisplay and grimaced.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

  At some point, Roslyn was going to have to research that silly prayer.

  Five thousand gunships launched thirty thousand missiles in a salvo. They only carried three missiles per launcher, leaving their impact on a battle immense but short-term. Once all three salvos were launched, the Republican ships flipped in space and began accelerating toward the cardinal fortress.

  They were accelerating at five gravities, though. Second Fleet was accelerating at fifteen, and the velocity was with Mage-A
dmiral Alexander’s force.

  Moments after the light showing the launch of the first missiles reached the fleet, Roslyn felt Righteous Shield of Valor shiver underneath her as the big warship’s missile launchers spoke. Again and again the battleship fired, until ten full salvos of missiles were in space.

  The RMN’s answer to having ninety thousand missiles coming toward them was to put fifty thousand missiles in their path. The orgy of mutual destruction started disturbingly quickly, with massive explosions of antimatter lighting up the stars. The Republic’s heavier warheads only added to the usual gunsmoke effect of the radiation and debris of the explosions, making it harder and harder for the gunships to guide their own weapons.

  The Protectorate forces were the target of the incoming fire, which meant that the missile swarm left the radiation fields of the cataclysmic intercept behind as they continued toward the Martian ships.

  RIN missiles were smart enough for this environment, better designed for true war than the RMN weapons were. The Republic, Roslyn was grimly aware, had been expecting to fight a war with the Protectorate for longer than it had existed and had studied every RMN action to date.

  The Protectorate had specialized its lighter ships for piracy pursuit and then unconsciously scaled many of the same concepts up when they built bigger ships. Neither side, though, had dedicated counter-missiles, something that Roslyn forced herself to think about intellectually as the waves of missiles crashed toward her.

  Using full-size missiles with regular warheads meant they could get proximity kills and create the radioactive gunsmoke effect, but the weapons weren’t really designed for this purpose. A dedicated weapon with a smaller warhead, less flight time and potentially even less acceleration but more maneuverability…she could see the value.

  Right now, they had what they had. Their missiles suicided against the Republic’s and the entire first gunship salvo vanished before it reached the inner defensive perimeter.

  The second was almost obliterated. Only a few thousand missiles reached the defensive perimeters, and twice as many RFLAM turrets came to life to engage them.

  A handful of missiles made it through, vanishing as the battleship Thunderer’s Mage-Captain reached out with her amplifier to defend her ship.

  “Drop the escorts back,” Mage-Admiral Alexander said quietly. “Let’s get the battleships in front. If we’re going to take a hit, let’s take it where we can.”

  The formation adjustment took mere seconds, the battleships continuing to accelerate at fifteen gravities while the rest of the fleet dropped to thirteen for a moment.

  A lot more of the third salvo was going to make it through. The last of their defensive salvos was gone and there was no time to launch any more. Over ten thousand missiles hit the laser and amplifier perimeter at over an eighth of lightspeed.

  At the tactical console, Roslyn would have focused on the missiles heading directly toward her own ship. On the flag deck of the entire fleet, she had no easy basis to filter down the conflict and found herself almost losing track in the chaos.

  Thousands of missiles died. Second Fleet had over seventy amplifiers and almost six thousand RFLAM turrets, and their Mages and gunners alike had been trained to a razor edge over the last few months.

  Hundreds of missiles made it through, flinging themselves at the battleships in the front line. Last-ditch sweeps by the individual ships’ lasers claimed dozens, but missiles began to strike home.

  A two-gigaton warhead didn’t need to make contact, but it needed to get close. Those last few seconds allowed for desperate maneuvers and magical illusions that could fool even the computers aboard RIN missiles.

  Hammerblows hit Righteous Shield, and Roslyn inhaled sharply, half-expecting a bright flash of light and nothing.

  When the impacts faded, they were still there.

  “Report,” Alexander said flatly.

  “Every battleship took at least two hits,” Kulkarni said swiftly. “Shield took four, but none were direct. Pax Marcianus took two direct hits, but…”

  “But?” the Admiral demanded.

  Roslyn was pulling up the status on the Peace-class battleship and swallowed a silent curse.

  “Her armor held, sir,” Kulkarni reported. “She’s down three launchers. That’s…it.”

  “Apparently, we did something right with these battleships,” Alexander said brightly. “The gunships are done?”

  “They’ve shot their bolt and are running for home. We’re in pursuit.” Kulkarni shook her head. “We’re still almost forty minutes to our weapons range.”

  “Engage with ballistic phase as previously indicated,” the Admiral ordered.

  “We’re going to waste a lot of missiles,” Kulkarni warned.

  “We have them to spend, and they’re more easily replaced than those gunships. Use them.”

  The problem with every plan was that the lighter warships only carried fifteen missiles for each of their launchers. This time, however, the RMN had a solution. Several munitions ships had jumped into Point Alpha with Second Fleet, and they’d left behind hundreds of containers of missiles.

  Dozens of those containers had been towed to the current fight by the cruisers. As the first wave of ballistic salvos began to spew forward, those containers were released from their tows and destroyers swept in to scoop them up.

  Five ballistic salvos emptied the escorts’ magazines and then the Fleet paused, waiting for five minutes as the destroyers and cruisers rearmed.

  Then the fire resumed, more and more missiles flashing into space in a cascade that Roslyn knew was going to be almost useless.

  “It’s a mind game, Mage-Lieutenant,” Alexander told her, the Admiral’s voice quiet enough that no one else could hear them. “We won’t score many hits with these, but we’ll score some. And we’ll remind the Republic that while Legatus may be the most industrialized Core World, we have twelve Core Worlds to their one.

  “They can’t out-produce us. We can afford to spend missiles like this for limited kills.”

  Roslyn considered the number of missiles aboard Second Fleet and their logistics train.

  “Not…really, sir,” she pointed out. “We’ll have shot off fifteen percent of our total munitions load by the time we pull back from the cardinal station. We can’t keep doing that.”

  “Agreed,” Alexander conceded. “I know that. You know that. The Republic? They don’t know that.”

  The gunships were out of missiles, and there was no way they would bring the fleet to laser range without a miracle. If the warships came out, Second Fleet would pull back, but Roslyn didn’t expect the Republic to risk warships to save the parasite fighters.

  Republican doctrine ranked the jump ships far above any number of gunships. They’d stand by and watch Second Fleet shatter their fleeing brethren.

  It was really only a question of how many gunships would die before Second Fleet had to let them go.

  30

  The absence of ten people, multiple exosuits and several dozen crates of supplies left Starlight’s former shuttle feeling almost spacious to Damien as their pilot inserted them into the regular traffic.

  “Bringing the beacon online now,” Kelzin reported, looking back over his shoulder at Damien. Rhapsody’s First Pilot had insisted that no one else was flying the Hand into this stunt.

  “We’re flagging as a personnel courier for one of the companies that does high-speed transits from the outer system to Sucre,” he continued. “According to MISS’s files, the company intentionally rotates their own beacons to cover the fact that they’re smuggling on the side.”

  “What are they smuggling between planets in the same system?” Niska asked.

  “Depends on who’s paying, I imagine,” O’Malley said grimly before Kelzin could respond. “But most likely people.”

  “People?” Damien said.

  “Most of the metal extraction in the system is either on Camibol or based there, since that rock is closest to the belt,�
� the Augment explained. “Camibol is a frozen hellscape with a hyperactive tectonic system. Your options on the planet are freeze on the surface or burn in the mines.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s not a popular place to work, so Camibol uses a lot of long-term indentures to keep people there. They’re not quite slaves, but they can’t leave until their ten- or twenty-year terms are up.”

  “That’s illegal,” Niska said coldly. “…Isn’t it?”

  “In Legatus,” O’Malley replied sadly. “Republic law was carefully written to allow the loophole, so Nueva Bolivia can continue their century-old practice of transforming debt and prison sentences into indentured-service terms.”

  “So, people run,” Damien concluded with a glance over at Romanov. His bodyguard and the two Augments were the only people accompanying him to the surface. Mike Kelzin was flying them down, but would stay with the shuttle as their emergency backup. There wasn’t much he’d be able to do on a relatively advanced MidWorld like Sucre, but a shuttle with concealed weapons was nothing to sneer at.

  “They run and pay people to smuggle them to Sucre, where they try and grab a ship to anywhere else,” O’Malley confirmed. She grimaced. “I was too young to understand what was happening to my family when my dad got sent out to pay off his debts.

  “Wasn’t much more understanding when he suddenly came home and we all shuffled onto a ship for Legatus.” The Augment shook her head. “A lot of star systems have their dark sides that they try not to think about. Nueva Bolivia’s is just darker and uglier than most.”

  “And helps fuel the industry that’s supporting the Republic war machine,” Damien agreed. “What a mess. Is that cover at least going to get us onto the planet?”

  “I don’t know much about that background,” Kelzin admitted. “Our files do note that they smuggle people and gemstones, but nothing about the reasons for the people. The debt-slavery thing is probably in our files somewhere, but I was focusing on Sucre and getting us there.”