Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  It only took a couple of moments to link the Admiral to the man commanding the two Armed Auxiliary Fast Heavy Freighters providing security for the supply ships.

  The AAFHFs weren’t warships, but the pair under Commodore Warren Iceni’s command were brand-new, built after a decommissioned AAFHF had served with distinction in covert operations.

  Anyone who decided to tangle with the supply fleet was going to get an ugly surprise.

  “Admiral Alexander!” Iceni greeted her. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting to see all of Second Fleet suddenly arrive out here. What happened?”

  “A significant Republican battle group escaped the siege,” Alexander said bluntly. “Here was where they could have done the most damage, and given the degree of RID penetration we seem to suffer on a regular basis, I had to be sure the convoy was safe.

  “I see TK-626 here. Where is Admiral Hovo Tarpinian?”

  That wasn’t a name Roslyn recognized. At all. Who was Tarpinian?

  “Tarpinian jumped less than ten minutes ago to see if he could cut off the runaway convoy,” Iceni told her. “His ships are—”

  “Still classified, Commodore,” Alexander cut him off. She shook her head. “Damn. I need to know where the Republic went.”

  “At the least, sir, I’ll move the supply fleet to rendezvous sequence, mmm, Kappa,” Iceni replied. “We should be safe, but I’ll have courier ships on standby in case we aren’t.”

  “Thank you, Commodore.”

  The channel cut and Alexander was silent in thought for a moment.

  “Mage-Captain Kulkarni, can the fleet jump again?” she asked.

  “All of our ships have four Mages, sir,” Kulkarni replied. “We haven’t made any jumps before today, so even with the medical casualties from the microjump, every ship has at least one Mage ready for action.”

  “Then take us back to Centurion,” Alexander ordered. “Let’s intercept that convoy if we can.”

  She shook her head.

  “We’re probably too late, but it will at least let us rendezvous with Admiral Tarpinian.”

  Kulkarni’s gaze was questioning, but she set to work. That left it to Roslyn to ask the question she knew the operations officer wanted to.

  “Who is Admiral Tarpinian, sir?” she asked quietly.

  “An old friend of my family,” Alexander told her. “None of you would know him; he’s been retired for twenty years. We dragged the old warhorse away from a Mediterranean beach house because we needed someone we could trust beyond all reason.

  “As for why he’s here, well.” The Admiral smiled. “Project Plowshare was the covert, semi-official attempt to expand the Martian Navy for this war.

  “But we had a black project before that. Depending on who you talked to, it was Project Weyland or Project Mjolnir…and I was told its first fruits would be mine very shortly.

  “And it seems that Admiral Tarpinian has been as reliable as ever.”

  41

  “What the hell are those?” Kulkarni demanded.

  The tanker convoy was gone, but a cloud of radiation and debris suggested that the tankers hadn’t escaped. Admiral Tarpinian had clearly cut them off and destroyed them and their escorts before they could escape.

  Instead of the convoy, twelve ships orbited Centurion at a distance. Only three of the twelve ships were recognizable, and all of them were huge to Roslyn’s eyes.

  “Officers, those would be the reinforcements I’ve repeatedly promised,” Alexander told the operations officer. “Twelve ships under Admiral Hovo Tarpinian, including some of the largest warships we’ve ever built.

  “Okay, so these are Peace-class battleships,” Roslyn noted, highlighting the three sixty-megaton ships. “These are cruisers and look like ours, but I’m reading them as fifteen megatons.”

  The Honorific-class ships were the newest cruisers in the RMN’s inventory that Roslyn knew of—and were twelve-million-ton ships.

  “And then…I have no idea what these three are,” the Flag Lieutenant admitted, highlighting the heavy warships at the heart of the new battle group. Each was a full kilometer long. The core hull was a pyramidical spike, four hundred meters across at the base and a hundred meters across at the top, topped by a half-kilometer wide, two-hundred-meter-thick, cylindrical hammerhead.

  “I don’t know what they are either,” Kulkarni agreed. “But they’re a hundred million freaking tons.”

  “Before there was Project Plowshare, there was Project Weyland,” Mage Admiral Alexander said quietly. “Inside Project Weyland was Project Mjolnir, the program to design and build an entirely new type of warship.

  “Your three mystery ships are Mjolnir, Masamune and Durendal,” she continued. “They are Mjolnir-class dreadnoughts of the Royal Martian Navy, our closest-kept secret for the last four years.

  “Mjolnir has been ready for a while, but we didn’t want to commit a single dreadnought to action alone. So, we rushed two of her sisters to completion—which gave us the chance to finish the only fully covert set of Peace-class ships and to construct the testbed vessels for the Salamander-class cruisers.

  “They’re the only reinforcements we’re getting for another year, but they’re the doorknocker I plan on kicking in Centurion’s teeth with,” Alexander concluded. “And it seems like Admiral Tarpinian has made an appropriate opening impression.

  “Mage-Captain Kulkarni, please get the Fleet and Task Force Mjolnir on a rendezvous course that will keep us out of range of the cardinal fortresses. We’ll need to coordinate with Admiral Tarpinian and complete a plan as the rest of Second Fleet rearms.”

  Alexander smiled broadly.

  “Because the other thing Admiral Tarpinian brought with him should be the first production runs of the Phoenix IX. Enough for at least one full load for every ship we have.”

  Assuming the IX outranged the Republic’s long-range missiles, then the tide of the battle had just turned, and Roslyn joined the rest of the flag deck in a drawn-out noise that was somewhere between a chuckle and a growl.

  They’d held Legatus under siege for weeks. Now, with Phoenix IXs and the dreadnoughts, well…

  It might be time to finally end the damn war.

  “How the hell did they manage that?”

  Roslyn and Kulkarni were locked in the operations officer’s office, going over the specifications for their latest arrivals.

  The exact toy earning the older woman’s surprised comment was an entirely new weapon system aboard the Salamander-class cruisers and the Mjolnir-class dreadnoughts: a heavy bombardment missile with thirty thousand gravities of acceleration.

  “It’s six times the size of the Phoenix IX with a warhead only twenty percent larger,” Roslyn pointed out. “Most of that extra mass goes to engines and fuel. They managed it by giving her twice the power-to-weight ratio.”

  “The IX already involves an entirely new generation of thrust modulators and engine tech.” Kulkarni shook her head. “The VIII only had a five-hundred-gravity increase over the VII. A full twenty-percent increase in acceleration for only a thirty-second decrease in flight time?”

  “That’s what we had with the VII, wasn’t it?” Roslyn asked. “And for all that, I’m not entirely sure it’s enough.”

  Numbers and vector diagrams splashed across Kulkarni’s office wall.

  “We have less of a range advantage now than the Republic had yesterday,” she pointed out. “The IX accelerates faster but it only has half a million kilometers more range than the VIII. The Samurai has eight hundred thousand, but we only have nine ships with Samurai launchers and they’re damned expensive.”

  If the newly reinforced Second Fleet fired off a full volley of the new heavy missiles, it would cost as much as a new destroyer. There were definitely times it would be worth it, but Roslyn could see the Samurai remaining a special-circumstances weapon.

  “How long until we’re fully reloaded?” Roslyn asked her boss.

  “Longer than I’d like. Shockingly, our s
hips aren’t really designed to remove missiles from our magazines except by firing them,” Kulkarni replied. “The Admiral gave me a few more hours to build a plan, but I think the easiest way is to actually cycle ships back through the supply fleet by squadron.

  “Plus, I’m nervous about the fact that those starships ran away,” she noted.

  Roslyn nodded. Nervous understated her own feelings. Two full carrier groups had decided to pull out of Legatus, leaving Centurion to Second Fleet’s gentle care.

  The only thing that was stopping them from launching an attack against the accelerator ring right now was that they’d take fewer losses if they attacked with the new missiles.

  “They have FTL coms,” Roslyn reminded her boss. “We don’t. The moment we’re stuck in against the defenses, they’re going to jump in behind us.”

  “That’s my reading as well,” Kulkarni agreed. “But…what worries me, Chambers, is that they had the force to go toe-to-toe with Second Fleet. They would probably have lost in the end, but it wouldn’t have been a sure thing.”

  “They went for reinforcements, you think?” Roslyn asked.

  “I think they went to meet reinforcements that were already on their way,” Kulkarni replied. “There are at least half a dozen more carrier groups’ worth of ships floating around, guarding the Republic’s systems. Even without pulling back their offensive forces, they could assemble a fleet that could kick us out of Legatus with an overwhelming advantage.”

  “Mjolnir will help with that.” Roslyn was hoping aloud more than she was stating an opinion.

  “To a point. To a point,” Kulkarni repeated with a sigh. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to field a force that can really beat us head to head without pulling back most of their fleet.”

  That was, after all, basically what the Protectorate had done to assemble Second Fleet.

  “That was the minimum mission objective for this plan,” she continued. “By attacking Legatus, we’d force them to pull ships back from the front. Buy ourselves time.

  “I’m worried we’ve concentrated enough force to make ourselves overconfident,” Kulkarni admitted.

  “And not enough force to actually get ourselves out if they come at us with everything,” Roslyn finished the thought for her old boss with a shiver. “They’re good; we have to give them that. The question is whether they have the fuel to push a major attack in on us.”

  “My only hope is that they’ll be short on gunships,” her superior replied. “They’ll have the missiles, but if we can cripple their gunship forces’ fuel supply…”

  Roslyn shook her head.

  “They were flying fusion engines in Nia Kriti,” she reminded Kulkarni. “That was to fool us into thinking they weren’t a threat, but I doubt those were specially built ships. What do you want to bet that they can change the gunships’ engines over to run as fusion drives? They’ll lose in operating range and acceleration, but they won’t need antimatter for them.”

  “I forgot that,” the older woman admitted. “Damn. I won’t take that bet, Lieutenant Chambers—because the only thing I have to bet with is the entirety of Second Fleet.”

  42

  The team gathering aboard Rhapsody in Purple was a quiet group. The ship itself was crowded to the nth degree, but there were only so many people aboard that Damien trusted completely.

  And regardless of anything else, Damien had no intention of surrendering command of the mission. That meant that the planning meeting was with the people he trusted, which meant that only Niska and Maata were present from the Legatans aboard the ship.

  He also trusted O’Malley, but that was why she was one of the people guarding the door to the room.

  The MISS contingent was represented by Captain LaMonte and her wife, Xi Wu. Damien and Agent Romanov represented the Protectorate government.

  The six people in the room represented a surprisingly wide cross-section of humanity from both the Protectorate and the Republic. They also represented the only people outside of whatever horror show the Republic was running who understood the true failing of the Republic.

  “I’ve put the pieces together,” Niska told them all. “It was the name that was the final puzzle piece, and it all adds up now.”

  “Can you lay it out for the rest of us?” Damien asked. “I’m guessing you’d heard of Project Prometheus?”

  The old cyborg bowed his head.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Only in passing, never directly. I heard about it so rarely that I can only assume that it was and remains the most classified of projects in what is now the Republic of Faith and Reason. For obvious reasons.”

  “Hell, I’d never heard of it, and I dealt with a lot of strange shit for LMID,” Maata noted.

  “It was tied to Project Hephaestus, and that’s our biggest lead here,” Niska told them all. “Hephaestus was the overarching project for the covert creation of what became the Republic Interstellar Navy. Greek names for the components: Athena was the new sensors, Ares was the warship hulls, Apollo was the missile upgrades…et cetera, et cetera.”

  “So, Prometheus fit right in,” Damien said.

  “Except I knew the full org chart for Hephaestus, and Prometheus wasn’t on it,” the old Augment admitted. “It was a secret project, one operating under the cover of another…and I think I know which one.”

  “And?” LaMonte asked bluntly. “You’re dancing around the point, Niska. What do you know?”

  James Niska buried his face in his hands for several long seconds.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It should have been obvious to us all. Prometheus was buried in Project Daedalus. Everything about Daedalus was classified beyond the highest levels; it’s the only organization that would have had the authority and the power to carry out something like Prometheus.” He shook his head. “And even then, only with the cooperation of the people in charge of everything.”

  “Daedalus?” Damien asked.

  “The jump drives, Damien,” Niska told him. “In legends, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. We didn’t steal fire from the gods; we stole it from our brothers.

  “The Republic doesn’t have a technological jump drive. They have an apparatus that uses the brains and magic of murdered Mages to jump their ships.”

  The silence in the meeting room was now sharp enough to cut with.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Damien finally asked, swallowing down his rage. Niska wasn’t his enemy. The Legatan might have helped this come to pass—but he was also the only reason they knew any of this.

  “We should have known,” Niska snarled. “Two hundred years of research and not even a hint of an answer, and then suddenly we have one? We should have suspected. I should have suspected, should have looked deeper.”

  “And now thousands of children are dead,” Damien told him. It was harsh but true. “You can’t change that, so what are you going to do to try and fix it?”

  “It’s worse than you think,” the old cyborg replied. “It was only rumor on the Republic worlds I visited, so I ignored it, but now it makes sense.”

  “What makes sense?” Damien demanded.

  “The civilian Mages on the occupied worlds were being rounded up and shipped somewhere,” Maata said quietly. “That’s the rumor you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  The chill in Damien’s spine turned to ice.

  “They’re going to murder prisoners to fuel their fleet?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Niska whispered. “My god, what did I make possible? What did I help create?”

  “We’ll stop them, Niska,” Damien promised.

  “That won’t be enough,” the old cyborg said flatly. “I asked you to help me restore my nation’s honor, but this had to have been going on all along. These programs would have started while I was working for LMID, possibly before.

  “My nation, my leaders…they never had any honor,” Niska spat. “I can’t make this right. I can’t find honor in
what my people, what my planet has done. All I can do is help destroy it.”

  The room was silent again.

  “We need to know where the actual facility is, then,” LaMonte said. “We can get Rhapsody in. If we’re careful on cycling Xi’s Mages, we can get anywhere. But getting out is a different story.”

  “We can’t get it wrong,” Damien concluded. “We need to hit the right facility the first time, free the prisoners, find proof of what’s fueling the Republic fleet.”

  “They’ve got to know,” Romanov snapped. “They can’t have warships that they don’t understand.”

  “With how black they kept the jump drives, they can,” Niska pointed out. “I don’t think most of the RIN’s engineers, let alone the rest of the Navy, know what’s inside their jump drives. They’re black boxes, maintained at heavily secured facilities.”

  “Facilities that would have to have Mages,” Damien growled. “This couldn’t have been done without Mage help. Every type of humanity has their monsters, so let’s not pretend Magekind is innocent in this horror.”

  “So, we want one of those repair facilities?” Romanov asked.

  “No,” Niska replied. “We want the origin point. The production facility, where they’ll have shipped frozen children and prisoners of war alike. And I know where it is.”

  “Where?” LaMonte demanded.

  “Centurion,” the Augment replied. “All of the hulls pass through a specific secondary yard to get fitted with their jump drive. All of this is done under a shroud of secrecy and apparently lies, but at the heart of it is the space station Minerva, hidden under Centurion’s moon Trajan.

  “It’s supposed to be a specialized zero-gee production facility where the jump drives are constructed,” Niska explained. “Now I suspect Minerva is the heart of this horror. It’s where we’ll find your prisoners and your proof, Lord Montgomery.

  “I have some access still, I think. Back doors Ricket installed that no one would know about.” The old spy smirked. “I’m not sure Ricket even knew I had them.