Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  If every Academy was empty, then there were three thousand teenagers missing. If no one knew where they were and Damien wasn’t turning up mass graves, he wasn’t sure just what their fate had been.

  Pushing aside that thought, he stepped past the Legatans and joined Kelzin. The scanner displays didn’t look much different than they had at any point in the last sixteen hours, which wasn’t right.

  “Mike, can you show me where we thought the station would be?” he asked. It was easier to have the other man manipulate the scanners than try to change it by magic or voice command on a ship that wasn’t really designed for either.

  “Here.” A chunk of space highlighted in orange. “And there’s nothing there. I don’t think I’m missing anything; I don’t think it’s hidden behind magic. There’s just nothing there.”

  “That’s impossible,” De Santis said from the doorway. “Or at least damned unlikely. The courses New Orleans Delight took lined up with something in a stable, unpowered orbit. If it was in the same orbit for two years that we know of…why would it change?”

  “Maybe they were done?” Damien asked. “Finished whatever scheme they were running?”

  “Maybe they thought they were compromised,” Niska suggested. “If we trace back along the orbital path, would we be able to find any trace of debris? Or maybe a rocket burn?”

  “You think they would have destroyed the station?” Damien demanded.

  “Or moved it,” the old LMID agent told him. “It doesn’t take much to move a station, after all. What takes a great deal is moving it quickly.”

  “They couldn’t have destroyed a space station without it attracting everyone’s attention,” De Santis noted. “Space traffic control can be easily convinced to ignore a platform with the right authority, but no one would have ignored an explosion of any kind.”

  “So, we need to trace back and find out where they moved the platform,” Niska suggested. He met Damien’s gaze. “You’d know better than I would, Montgomery. Can this shuttle do that?”

  “No,” Damien admitted. “We’ll make contact with LaMonte, bring in her ship. There’s no way we can do this with the shuttle.”

  “If it helps, they probably would have tried to drop it into one of the gas giants if they wanted to wreck it,” De Santis suggested. “We’re far enough out that they could have adjusted the vector to fling it toward Santa Maria relatively easily—and if they wanted to do that with any kind of efficiency, there was only one two-week window in the last six months.”

  “And we know they got a shipment six months ago,” Damien conceded. “Let’s reconvene with real scanners and a real ship, people,” he decided aloud. “Whatever we’re close to finding, the Republic wanted to bury it pretty hard.

  “So, let’s close the gap, people. There’s a space station out here somewhere, and I want its databanks. Let’s make it happen.”

  Rhapsody swam up on them out of the dark without warning.

  Well, without warning for De Santis and Jezek, anyway. Damien had known the stealth ship was coming for a while. LaMonte had brought her ship near to where they expected to find the space station, so when they started taking the shuttle back along the orbital path, it was easier for her to find them.

  Nueva Bolivia was active enough that even this far out, they were running a lot of the stealth systems. Directed venting and radar baffling were enough to keep the ship concealed for now…and enough that the shuttle’s limited sensor suite didn’t even see her coming until she was on top of them.

  “Initiating docking protocols,” Kelzin said aloud.

  “With wha— The fuck!” De Santis looked up at the ship diving toward them “Where did that come from?”

  “Around,” Damien said gently. “She’s not being as sneaky as she could be, but this shuttle’s sensors suck. Meet Rhapsody in Purple, Mr. De Santis. She’s your ride out of here.”

  The agent snorted, looking up at the stealth ship.

  “So I see. I’ve never seen anything like her.”

  “So far as I know, she’s a first in the galaxy,” the Hand replied. She wasn’t unique, but he wasn’t going to tell the RID agent that the Protectorate had six of the stealth ships. De Santis didn’t need to know that.

  “And if anyone can find where they buried that space station, it’s Captain LaMonte and her crew.”

  The shuttle bay swept over them like a consuming maw, sending a chill down Damien’s spine. They slowly dropped to the deck and he exhaled. Home.

  “You’re not going to get private quarters,” he admitted. “We’ve got a lot more people crammed onto the ship than she’s supposed to carry. We were doing okay, but then the Republic blew up Starlight.”

  “Give me a shoebox heading away from the Republic, and we’ll fit ourselves in,” Jezek told him, taking his husband’s hand. “Any course that lets us keep what’s left of our souls.”

  Damien grimaced.

  “You know, I really did hope your Republic was going to be a positive thing,” he admitted. “At the least, I figured it would end the damn shadow war. Looks like I was wrong on all counts.”

  “Yes,” Niska agreed bluntly. “Now. Let’s go see what Captain LaMonte has discovered, shall we? If there are answers to what kind of cancer my country had birthed hidden here, I need to know them.”

  The Augment stalked out of the shuttle, and Damien looked at the other Legatans.

  “Remember, Lord Montgomery, that this is harder for us than you in many ways,” O’Malley said quietly. “You fought LMID and fought the Republic. Finding out that there is evil at the heart of the nation Legatus birthed can’t be unexpected for you.

  “We fought to create that nation. And its leaders may have betrayed everything we trusted them to build. We’ll find the truth with you and we’ll trumpet it to the heavens for you, but don’t expect us to find this easy.”

  Damien sighed and nodded his understanding. As she said, this was bad enough for him.

  “As Niska said, let’s go find out what this system is hiding.”

  34

  “Colonel Chiang reports that Decurion’s orbital defenses are now under our control,” Kulkarni told everyone.

  Decurion was the uninhabitable world closest to Centurion, used to supply much of the raw metals and minerals fueling the shipyards attached to the accelerator ring.

  No remotely habitable planet would have been subjected to what had been done to Decurion; that was for sure. The images of the planet on Roslyn’s display showed literal chunks carved out of it that were visible from orbit, thousands of square kilometers of rock blasted into space with nukes.

  Those massive gouges marked the source of the raw materials for the immense accelerator ring, but the continued smaller-scale mining operations were fueling the Republic war machine. There was no way they could leave Decurion operating.

  Of course, Decurion was heavily defended. Unlike Legatus or Centurion, however, those defenses were older. No gunships or RIN warships, just massive batteries of missile launchers on artificial asteroids in orbit.

  Those launchers had been updated…but they were mostly automated and linked to a single command center. One that Colonel Chiang Wen’s Second Battalion, Bionic Combat Regiment, now controlled.

  “I assume Admiral Medici has already started to move in, but confirm his orders,” Alexander said with a chuckle. Medici’s cruiser detachment would have received the report from Colonel Chiang two minutes earlier.

  “Yes, sir,” Kulkarni confirmed. “And General Tone?”

  “Her Marines are to move in as soon as Medici confirms the orbital space is clear,” the Admiral replied. “Taking the defenses intact means we don’t have to worry as much about our rear, but I want Medici to make sure we can get the transports through.”

  General Alexis Tone had fifteen thousand Marines, the only complete division of the Royal Martian Marine Corps that Roslyn was aware of. They had exactly one specially-designed combat transport. The rest of the Marines were
being delivered on regular civilian freighters carrying specialized transport containers.

  The RMMC had trained for assaulting a planet from orbit, but they’d never expected to actually do it. Interstellar assault ships were expensive, so they’d only ever built the prototype.

  Like the rest of the Martian military, they were making do.

  “Any reaction from Centurion or Legatus?” Alexander asked.

  “Nothing from Legatus yet,” Roslyn confirmed. “It’ll be over an hour before we see the moment they would have known Chiang arrived. It’s not like there’s much at Legatus they can send at Decurion, either.”

  Their initial attack had wrecked Legatus’s orbital defenses. The RIN starships in orbit were chained to the Republic’s capital now—Second Fleet could obliterate the carrier group in an open engagement, and—worse from the Republic’s perspective—the remaining fortresses couldn’t defend the planet against the Protectorate fleet.

  Legatus was quite handily contained, so long as Second Fleet was in position to jump over and take out any attempt to run.

  Centurion remained a concern. They were a lot shorter on gunships than they had been, but the mobile forces there were the only force in the system that could actually challenge Second Fleet. The fixed defenses were sufficiently spread out that it was possible that Second Fleet could evade the mobile forces and attack the accelerator.

  “The Centurion forces are continuing to hover around the closest cardinal station,” Kulkarni reported. “They’re going to hang out between us and the accelerator ring forever, from the looks of it.”

  “Whoever is in command over there realizes that we only need one missile to end the damn war,” Alexander said. “I’d prefer they sent ships out to attack us. The more we can grind them down, the closer we get to actually being able to engage one world or the other.”

  “With Decurion under our control…there isn’t much else in the system we can take away from them,” the operations officer admitted.

  “Nothing obvious, anyway,” the Admiral confirmed. “That’s why I have you and Chambers, Mage-Captain. Find me the non-obvious weaknesses.

  “Besieging this system cuts off the reinforcements for their entire Navy, but it isn’t going to end this war. All we’ve forced is a stalemate…unless we can find a way to actually take Centurion or Legatus.”

  As the Flag Lieutenant, Roslyn had her own office. It wasn’t much of an office, but it at least recognized that her job wasn’t quite just being Alexander’s secretary.

  While the battle for Decurion wrapped up, over two light-minutes away, she was studying a strategic map of the system on one screen.

  Another was showing the latest updates from Decurion. There had been some gunships amongst the defenses, and several platforms had enough crew aboard to wrest control of their launchers away from the command center.

  Six cruisers had made short work of all of that, and uninhabitable worlds didn’t have many places to hide when the Marines came dropping from orbit. A planet of ten million souls was falling in front of Roslyn’s eyes, and all she could think was that it wasn’t enough.

  Mars didn’t have the troops to assault Legatus. The Marine Corps was recruiting, but they didn’t have the gear or ships to equip and move the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary to take a world of five billion people.

  They’d have to make Legatus surrender, and she wasn’t sure how they could do that without engaging in atrocities that she didn’t even need to ask to know weren’t on the table.

  If they could separate the starships guarding Legatus from the planet and its defenses, they could take the orbitals of the Republic capital. That was check…but Roslyn wasn’t convinced it was checkmate.

  Not against a society that had forged itself for decades on opposing Mars—and not against the dictator who’d used that fear to make himself ruler of eleven worlds.

  Taking control of Legatus was a fool’s game, Roslyn concluded. They’d lose ships and people taking the orbitals, and then the Lord Protector would call their bluff. Somehow, she didn’t see Alexander finding the ruthlessness to order cities nuked from orbit.

  Perhaps that was weakness. Roslyn was somehow sure that Solace would call it weakness…but she couldn’t.

  If Legatus wasn’t the key, then it had to be Centurion. She refocused her map, then looked up at a chime at her door.

  “Come in.”

  She was somehow unsurprised when Kulkarni stepped in.

  “Poking at the impossible task our Princess assigned us?” the older woman asked, pulling up a chair with a flicker of magic.

  “Yeah.” Roslyn shook her head. “Legatus is a trap,” she concluded. “Even if we somehow took the orbitals, we couldn’t do anything. Not without a million or so Marines we don’t have.”

  The operations officer was silent.

  “I’ll admit, I was thinking that Legatus was the most vulnerable point,” she admitted. “We could smash through the defenses and starships left. It would hurt, we’d lose good people, but we’d be in control of the orbitals. Checkmate, right?”

  “Checkmate means the king can’t escape,” Roslyn noted. “Solace won’t surrender just because we control the orbitals. We don’t have the troops to dig him out, and we won’t blow up cities.”

  Kulkarni was silent as she studied the strategic map, then nodded.

  “You’re right,” she conceded. “I hadn’t even got that far. I was thinking maybe drop Marines to grab him in person, but he’d be ready for that.”

  “So, Centurion is the key,” Roslyn replied, studying the map. “And the key to Centurion is the cardinal forts.”

  “We’ve smashed a bunch of their gunships, but they’re all still heavily armed battle stations with hundreds of parasite warships,” Kulkarni pointed out. “Sensor networks, antimissile defenses, the works. They’d pick up a stealth ship before we could pull the trick we pulled at Decurion. Hell, they’d pick up a ballistic rock before it could hit them. They planned for that.”

  “And no approach to the planet doesn’t pass within laser range of two of them,” Roslyn concluded. “We could take any one of those forts. Maybe two of them—but while we were doing so, the entire mobile fleet would arrive and kick the crap out of us.”

  Her superior nodded and sighed.

  “I don’t see an answer to Centurion, Lieutenant,” she admitted. “Except for more ships, and we’re not getting those anytime soon.”

  “The Admiral keeps talking about reinforcements we’ll get before the rest,” Roslyn said. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  “You caught that too, huh?” Kulkarni shook her head. “I asked. I got told the answer was classified and I didn’t need to know yet.”

  “So, what, we just besiege Legatus until the answer falls into our lap?” Roslyn asked.

  “I wish I saw something else, Chambers,” the Mage-Captain admitted. “But right now…that’s all I see. I’ll keep poking at it, though. There’s got to be an answer somewhere.”

  Roslyn snorted.

  “I see an answer,” she admitted. “It’s ‘Give me twenty more battleships.’”

  Kulkarni laughed.

  “I’ll check behind my couch, Lieutenant, I’m sure they must have just slipped out of sight!”

  35

  Four days.

  That was how long Rhapsody in Purple sneaked through the outer void of the Nueva Bolivia System, creeping ever closer to Santa Maria.

  The largest gas giant in the system was the farthest out. Edging close to brown-dwarf territory, it was highly energetic and its orbital spaces were generally not considered safe to colonize. Most of the inevitable industrial work that needed to be done at a gas giant took place at the closer-in and calmer Cochabamba.

  That meant that Santa Maria made a useful place for the people they were chasing to dump an entire space station. Unfortunately, it also turned out that the system security force was carrying out an exercise with their monitors far beyond thei
r normal operating ranges.

  None of the dozen sub-million-ton sublight warships would have been a threat to any real starship on their own. Together, though, they could probably stop a cruiser—and any of them could have taken down Rhapsody without breaking a sweat.

  “It is just coincidence they’re out here, right?” Damien asked. “I’m starting to get twitchy.”

  “They run these exercises three times a year,” Jezek told him. “Nueva Bolivia Security had two squadrons like this, and they want them ready to deploy anywhere in the star system.

  “I didn’t check when this one was scheduled for, but I don’t think they’re looking for us.”

  “Well, they’re behind us now and they didn’t see shit,” LaMonte replied.

  “And I’ve got something,” Xi Wu reported. “Check out seventeen by sixty-five.”

  That part of the screen on the simulacrum chamber bridge flickered at the Mage’s command and zoomed in.

  “We’re not getting much of a heat signature, but…” The screen zoomed in further and an odd dot resolved into a slowly spinning circle.

  “That’s a centripetal-gravity ring station,” Damien said. “Legatan-style. Do we have dimensions?”

  “One kilometer. It isn’t powered, but it’s still spinning. Full rotation about every ninety seconds. Half a gravity or so, I’d guess.”

  “No power,” LaMonte said quietly. “Fusion plant offline. Evacuated and abandoned. Damn, that’s creepy.”

  “Do you think you can get anything out of her computers?” Damien asked.

  “Can’t tell you until we’re aboard,” the covert ops captain replied. “I’m coming with you this time, Damien. You need me.”

  “Agreed.” He glanced over at their Republican partners, then back at LaMonte. He wasn’t going to trust Niska to break into the station’s computers, let alone any of their other Republican allies.