“If you can get us to Minerva Station, Captain LaMonte, I can get us aboard. After that…”
“After that, the Republic will learn the truth of their worst fear,” Damien said levelly. “Get me to Minerva Station, people, and the Republic will learn what it means for a Hand to go to war.”
“You’re not actually planning on going in alone, I assume?” Romanov asked later, the Marine looking…twitchy.
Damien actually laughed. After the last few weeks, it was almost as much of a surprise to him as it was to his bodyguard.
“With as many Marines, commandos, Augments and former LMID fighters as we have aboard? I don’t think any of you would let me,” he noted. “Even if I was dumb enough to try.”
He shook his head.
“No. We don’t know nearly enough about this Minerva Station for me to try anything that stupid. All we really know is where it is.”
“Yeah.” Romanov looked at the image still on the wall of the conference room. “In the middle of a fortified side facility hidden from the Republic, surrounded by more purely automated defenses than I’ve seen just about anywhere.
“If the Mages’ stealth spells fail, we’re going to be staring down a lot of missiles and lasers with only a computer deciding if we live or die.”
According to Niska, there were four major complexes attached to the Centurion Accelerator Ring, big shipyards that would be visible from well into deep space. The Daedalus Complex, however, was concealed in the shadow of Centurion’s largest moon.
Like the station they’d left behind in Nueva Bolivia, Minerva Station was a Legatan prefab. Unlike Prometheus Station, it was made of five of the ring stations and it did have a central zero-gravity section the rings rotated around.
That section was connected to a number of shipyard slips, designed to take anything up to the Republic’s new fifty-million-ton carriers. There, those ships would have their “jump drives” installed.
Now Damien and his people knew that process involved installing a concealed jump matrix, a simulacrum…and a collection of Mage brains hooked up to life support and control systems.
All of this was surrounded by defensive platforms, clusters of the triple-shot missile launchers built for the gunships, mounted around twenty-gigawatt lasers.
Niska didn’t know how many platforms, beyond “a lot.”
Rhapsody had to sneak past those platforms, board Minerva Station, and find proof. Something they could throw at the feet of the Republic’s government—and more importantly, the Republic’s people.
Damien had to believe that the citizens of the Republic wouldn’t stand for the horror their government had committed in their name. If they didn’t, the proof they were after would bring the Republic of Faith and Reason to its knees.
If the people of the Republic didn’t care, at least they’d destroy the production facility for the horrific engines and free the Mage prisoners.
“One way or another, this horror show ends, Denis,” Damien said quietly, studying the stations on the screen. “We’ll free the Mages. Wreck the Daedalus production facilities. End this.”
“And if the Republic tries to start again?”
Damien shook his head, swallowing down the spike of rage that answered his bodyguard’s question.
“Then we burn them to fucking ash.”
43
“Jump…now.”
Liara Foster’s soft voice carried across the silence of Rhapsody in Purple’s simulacrum chamber bridge. The void of deep space vanished in a moment of nothingness, and then the Legatus System appeared around them.
“Taking over the simulacrum,” Xi Wu announced calmly. She and Liara swapped positions in the carefully practiced dance of military Mages. “Casting our veil of shadow.”
Rhapsody’s dozens of technological stealth systems were already online. None of them would cover the jump, any more than the stealth spell would. Anyone watching would have seen them arrive.
Of course, they were hoping that there weren’t very many people watching out beyond Triarii, the next gas giant out from Centurion. The two gas giants were close to each other right now, which made the smaller planet a useful hiding spot.
“Drives online; we are heading in for a slingshot around Triarii,” LaMonte said. “I’m definitely seeing some sensor platforms and what looks like a gunship squadron guarding the extraction facilities.”
“Did they see us?” Damien asked.
“Oh, almost certainly,” the spy captain said cheerfully. “But we’ll run the stealth spell for six hours as we get the hell out of dodge and they won’t find us.”
He nodded and studied the screens. Wait…
“Those gunships are sticking pretty close to the planet,” he noted. “They almost look like they’re hiding. From what?”
“We don’t have a clear shot of the rest of the system,” LaMonte admitted. “Not without deploying drones, and we can’t hide those nearly as well.”
Rhapsody’s stealth requirement defined everything from her power source to her hull shape. Her drones were harder to see just because of their size, but they simply couldn’t have every aspect of the bigger ship’s stealthy design.
And they couldn’t carry a Mage.
“How long until we can see?” he asked.
“Maybe three hours,” LaMonte replied. “At that point, we’ll be coming around Triarii on a course for Centurion.
“Once we’re clear of Triarii, we’ll bring the drives online at full power under our stealth spell for several hours. We’ll be pushing pretty hard, but we should be able to keep our presence concealed and still make it to Centurion in roughly twenty-two hours.”
“So, we’ll have about nineteen hours’ warning of what’s going on in this system,” Damien concluded. “I can work with that.”
“I can’t see there being anything going on that can change our plan,” she said.
“Alexander might be here,” he replied softly. “That was the plan, anyway. We’ve been out of touch for a while, but she was considering a long-range strike on Legatus. Potentially even an attempt to besiege the system.”
“Well, a distraction would certainly make this easier,” LaMonte replied. “But I didn’t think we had the ships to take Legatus.”
“We don’t,” Damien admitted. “But she might have had the ships to make sure no one left Centurion or Legatus. A stalemate, not a victory. A siege.”
“We’ll see in a few hours,” LaMonte said. “In the meantime, I suggest you go get some rest. Even if this goes wrong, we can deal with the enemy here at Triarii without you.”
“And at that point, the whole plan is screwed anyway.”
Unable to sleep and unwilling to break into his stash of sleeping drugs, Damien ended up “resting” by playing with Persephone. The black cat was always happy to see him, alternating between purring on his lap and chasing a tiny ball of magical light across the room.
His wrist-comp eventually chimed and he answered it instantly.
“I hate to wake you up, Damien,” LaMonte apologized.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he admitted. “Persephone isn’t enthused with the interruption, but since everyone on this ship spoils her, I think she’ll be fine.”
His ex chuckled.
“Fair enough. We need you on the bridge. We’ve got scanners on the rest of the system, and it looks like you were right.”
“Alexander is here?” he asked.
“With friends,” LaMonte confirmed. “We’re still resolving Legatus, but it looks like the orbital defenses there have had the shit kicked out of them. Centurion’s defenses look intact, but there is a huge fleet flying Martian IFFs…including ships I’ve never seen before.”
“How big?” Damien asked, his attention entirely focused.
“Sorry?”
“How big? I may know what they are, but I didn’t expect them to be ready yet.”
“We’re not sure,” she admitted. “But there are three ships out there at least
half again the size of anything else in Alexander’s fleet.”
“Damn. They did it.”
“Damien?” LaMonte asked.
“Three of them, right?” he checked.
“Yes.”
“Those are dreadnoughts,” he told LaMonte. “One was done. The yards promised me they could strip parts from some of the incomplete ships to finish two more in time to actually join the fight, but I didn’t expect them to succeed.”
“Dreadnoughts.” Her response wasn’t really a question. More an exclamation.
“And if we have those and Alexander has her fleet gathered, this siege might be changing into a real fight sooner than I expected,” he told her. “Which means I need to talk to her. We may need a distraction to get out—but we absolutely need to get in before Alexander introduces the Daedalus facility to antimatter warheads!”
He shook his head.
“I’ll be up on the bridge shortly, but I’ll need to record a message for Alexander in private. Can we get it to her without being detected?”
“We’ll drop a relay buoy that will fire an encrypted pulse after we’re clear,” LaMonte promised. “Hell, I’ll drop three to make sure the message gets through. Can I make a suggestion, Damien?”
“Of course.”
“Send her everything,” Rhapsody’s captain suggested. “Everything we’ve learned, every scrap of data we have. My ship was designed for this kind of mission and my crew are the best, but I can’t guarantee we’ll get in, let alone escape alive.
“We can’t afford—humanity can’t afford—for all we’ve learned to be lost.”
Voice commands and touch screens with overlarge icons were Damien’s life these days. His hands were recovering, but he was still barely able to hold a cup or a glass. He certainly wasn’t up to drinking without magic—or using a computer that wasn’t specifically set up for him.
LaMonte’s crew had copied the setup from Duke of Magnificence, his usual cruiser flagship slash transport, which made things a lot easier. He got everything set up and faced the camera.
“Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander, this is First Hand Damien Montgomery,” he greeted her. “There will be a large data dump attached to this message. It needs to be transferred to a courier and relayed to Mars and the rest of the Protectorate ASAP.”
He paused and considered.
“For now, you will want to keep its contents classified. I fear the potential consequences if our crews here in Legatus learn what we have learned.
“That said, I am aboard a stealth vessel heading to a concealed facility around Centurion. I need you to delay your final attack until I have completed my mission. If we fail…” He shook his head.
“If I fail,” he echoed, “you now have everything we have learned, extrapolated and guessed. It will fall to you to decide what happens after that, Jane. Desmond has to know what we’ve learned, and my own feeling is that everyone in both Protectorate and Republic needs to know what has been done.”
Damien swallowed, considering how best to summarize what they’d learned.
“You have everything,” he repeated. “But the core discovery is this: the Republic does not have a technological jump drive. What they have done instead is murder Mages and extract their brains.
“Those brains and souls are trapped in an apparatus that makes them able to jump. They have concealed this from their crews and their main population, but this is why they could not permit peace.
“They started with children, Jane,” he admitted quietly. “They kidnapped the populations of their Mage Academies and murdered their own children. Every ship you see, every starship that flies Republic colors, represents half a dozen murdered Mages.
“We believe this process is taking place at Minerva Station in the Daedalus Complex. There is evidence in the files attached of every part of this horror up to the use of the brains of their victims.”
Anger stabbed Damien again and he exhaled carefully. He would do no one any good by setting his quarters on fire.
“We may need a distraction to escape, but I will be in touch as needed,” he told Jane. “I can’t give you orders, but we both know we share a goal. I need to find the proof at Minerva. Their crimes may break the Republic…and I don’t even care anymore.”
He looked at the camera levelly.
“The Mages taken prisoner on the occupied worlds are believed to be held prisoner aboard Minerva Station, awaiting…processing,” he said quietly. “I will save them. I will destroy the bastards responsible for this.
“Then—and only then—will you turn this entire hellhole to ashes.”
44
Rhapsody in Purple was invisible. Not just hiding behind a low radar profile and heat sinks, but entirely invisible. Xi Wu’s hands glowed to Damien’s Sight, magic pulsing out from the Mage as she concealed all evidence of the starship’s existence.
Their engines were burning at full power, decelerating the stealth ship to a rendezvous with Minerva Station, and the weapons platforms around them saw nothing.
Damien had more power than Xi Wu and could have managed the same concealment if he could use the amplifier. Captain LaMonte’s wife didn’t have that power. She had no Runes of Power. No Rune Wright gift.
She was simply an above-average Mage who had studied this particular spell, this specific trick, very, very well.
Every scrap of heat and light was being spread across half the star system, a spell that mixed the teleport and stealth spells to create an utterly impenetrable invisibility.
Damien was watching her carefully. In Xi Wu’s hands, it made for an amazing cloak of invisibility. In his hands, once he could use an amplifier matrix again, the same spell could easily render a starship invulnerable.
For a few moments, anyway, depending on what weapon attacked them.
“Contact in one hundred ninety-five seconds,” LaMonte said from the Captain’s seat. “We would match velocities exactly in one hundred ninety-seven seconds without the impact. It’s going to be one hell of a bump, people.”
“This is so freaking weird,” O’Malley breathed softly. “This is insane. We won’t even know if the stealth failed; we’ll just be dead.”
“We’ll see the platforms maneuvering to fire before they shoot,” Damien replied. “We’d know.”
He looked past O’Malley to Niska.
“If we’re ninety seconds out, it’s time for us to go,” he told the two Augments. “Let’s load up.
“I’ll be right behind you,” LaMonte promised. “The rest of this is on autopilot. Human involvement in this kind of high-speed docking is a bad idea.”
“I’ll hand off once we’re in contact,” Xi Wu assured them. “Will you need us aboard the station?”
“Romanov and I will have it,” Damien told her. “Keep your Mages aboard. Making sure Rhapsody goes unseen is damn important. We’ve got the station.”
“Good luck, my lord.”
He traded a nod with the Ship’s Mage.
“Thanks. We’re probably going to need it.”
Impact.
A momentary crushing sensation hammered Damien even through his magic, and he wavered against it. That was one hell of a hit. Rhapsody was designed for this, but that was going to leave a dent in Minerva Station.
“Go! Go! Go!” Captain Jalil Charmchi’s voice echoed through the boarding tube Damien was waiting in.
The Bionic Commandos led the way, punching through the station’s hull moments after the cutting lasers finished their work.
Damien and Romanov were with the Commandos, but Charmchi’s command was only one of four forces boarding the space station. This was what Rhapsody was designed for, after all.
Each tube was delivering a force of twenty boarders. Damien and Romanov followed twenty Commandos aboard. A second tube held Romanov’s Marines, and the last two were a mix of Maata’s people and the Bionics and Augments.
Damien didn’t know what was waiting for them, but his team was going for where Legatus
design said the computer core would be. They needed data. Proof of the Republic’s crimes.
And that was why LaMonte was with him. The other teams were looking for prisoners to rescue, but Damien and LaMonte were going for the heart of Minerva Station.
“No contact, repeat, no contact,” Charmchi reported. “Alpha Team, sweep left, Bravo, sweep right. Charlie, you’re with me. Delta, watch the package.”
Damien snorted. It was far from the first time he’d been called “the package” in his life. It probably wouldn’t be the last.
Five Commandos fell in around his three-person party.
“Let’s go,” he told them. “Believe me, people, I’m safer unarmored than you are in those walking tanks. Let’s move.”
Like the Augments, the Bionics had specially designed exosuit armor. Damien and LaMonte were once again the only people not wearing the immense armor in this team.
“Let me get into the computers here,” LaMonte said. “That’ll give our friends time to check out the immediate area while I work out where the hell we’re going.”
She didn’t wait for him to approve it or not, and Damien smirked behind his vac-suit helmet as one of the Bionics ripped a wall panel off for her.
Some things never changed.
A few seconds of plugging in wires and LaMonte was in. Damien didn’t even bother trying to watch over her shoulder—he knew his skill set, and cyberwarfare wasn’t in it.
“Force Three has contact,” Niska reported. “Regular security troopers. No Augments or exosuits. We’re continuing moving toward the cargo bays.”
Minerva Station was built around multiple versions of the standard Legatan ring station. They’d picked the middle ring as the most likely to hold the prison and command centers, but the stations had a relatively fixed layout. The computer center might be somewhere odd, but there were only so many big cargo bays.
Those bays were the most likely location of the imprisoned Mages.
Sword of Mars Page 26
