The fortress closest to Second Fleet only had five hundred gunships left, and only two-thirds of them survived long enough to launch their missiles. As the rest of the salvos of Samurais and the new Phoenix IXs swarmed in afterward, they didn’t manage to launch twice—and the fortress didn’t survive her gunships by long.
A single salvo of a “mere” two thousand–plus missiles flung themselves at Second Fleet, only to die to the RFLAM fire.
They weren’t even applying missiles to their own defense, Roslyn realized. As soon as the first fortress was gone, Samurais and Phoenix IXs were being flung at the other fortresses. Short ballistic periods of a few seconds were more than enough to make certain every fortress that wasn’t protected by the planet itself was badly outranged.
Fortresses couldn’t dodge.
Even the gunships were scrambling. There were still over six thousand of the small ships aboard the defenses of Centurion, but their deployments rapidly showed that Roslyn’s guess had been right: they could be easily refitted to run on fusion drives, and the Republic was reserving their antimatter for their missiles.
Second Fleet ignored them all. The fortresses were reduced one by one, overwhelmed by missiles from just beyond their range. Then, once the bases were gone, the missiles focused on the gunship formations.
None of them tried to surrender. To the last, they were desperately trying to coordinate the one massed salvo that would have been a real threat to Second Fleet.
They failed.
“The good news, everyone, is that Centurion is now functionally defenseless,” Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander announced to her flag officers a few minutes later. “We took minor damage across the fleet from the gunship salvos, but they weren’t expecting the range advantage to be flipped on them.
“But remember that the Republic was prepared to risk the Accelerator Ring to lure us in here. They’ll expect our range advantage when the trap closes,” she concluded. “If nothing else, we’re out of Samurai bombardment missiles. They’re too big for us to carry many of them.”
“We still have the range advantage with the IXs,” Medici pointed out. “They’ll be expecting it, but there’s only so much they can do about it.”
“Agreed. We’ll turn over in fifteen minutes,” Alexander continued. “In just over three hours, we’ll rendezvous with the Daedalus Complex. Unfortunately, General Tone and the majority of her Marines are at Decurion. We don’t even have our complete regular shipboard detachments.”
She smiled grimly, and Roslyn felt a moment of pity for anyone who thought that shortage was going to help them.
“That still leaves us with roughly three thousand Marines, all of them with combat exosuits,” she noted. “That should be more than sufficient to finish the task of securing the Daedalus Complex.
“Without that complex, the Republic does not have FTL warships. We now control it…and we are not letting it go.”
“What about the Accelerator Ring?” Medici asked. “We could take it out now, easily.”
The Ring was far from defenseless, but even a million RFLAM turrets would have paled against the immense scale of humanity’s only true megastructure. It had, according to their intel, twelve thousand such turrets.
That was less than one for every kilometer of its circumference. Less than one for every ten kilometers of its circumference—and given the inherent vulnerabilities of a giant particle accelerator, it would only take one missile to take it out.
“No,” Alexander said slowly. “Right now, unless the Republic’s trap is far more powerful than I expect, we are going to end up in control of at least Centurion, if not the entire Legatus System.
“I see no reason to destroy one of humanity’s greatest technological and engineering achievements in that case.”
“And if you’re wrong, sir?” Mage-Admiral Marangoz asked. “We won’t have another opportunity like this.”
“We will have plenty of opportunity to destroy the Centurion Accelerator Ring before the Republic can bring us to battle, Admiral.” Alexander shook her head. “That was the bait for this trap, and I am still stunned that they were prepared to take the risk.”
“It can’t be the only one,” Roslyn said aloud before her mortification caught up with her. Her job in these meetings was to shut up and take notes, not interject.
“I’m so—”
“No, you’re right,” Marangoz cut off her apology. “Out of the mouths of Flag Lieutenants, people—we’ve been bloody blind. We’ve assumed all along that Centurion was the only accelerator ring they had, but they wouldn’t have taken this kind of risk if they didn’t have a backup ready or close to ready.”
“Then taking Legatus won’t end this war,” Alexander said. “But it’s a damn good start, regardless. We’ll destroy the accelerator ring if we have to, but we’ll preserve it if we can.
“For now, let’s go fetch ourselves a Hand. As usual for my brother’s chosen representatives, the good Lord Montgomery seems to have dug himself into a very deep hole he needs the Navy to collect him from.”
49
“All right, everyone, we have a winner,” Kulkarni said in a forced bright tone. “The pool is closed; whoever bet ‘two hours after turnover’ for the Republic closing the trap wins.”
“I don’t think I bet on that,” Roslyn replied. “There was a pool?”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to let the kids gamble; I’ll have to check with the Admiral,” the ops officer replied.
Roslyn managed a moment of mock huffiness, but then her gaze was inexorably drawn back to the main holodisplay. They were still an hour from reaching the target complex, which meant they were easily seven or eight hours from being able to escape—and that was if they abandoned everyone they’d come this deep to collect.
Escape was suddenly looking like the best option. The Republic had clearly been preparing for this moment for a while.
“Let’s run the numbers, people,” Alexander said calmly. “What am I looking at? Ten carrier groups?”
“Looks like,” Kulkarni confirmed. “Roslyn, do we have a split?”
“Yes, sir,” she confirmed. “Tactical makes it six fifty-megaton Courageous-class ships and four forty-megaton Bravado-class ships. Twenty-one hundred gunships aboard.”
“Twenty battleships; evenly split between their thirty- and forty-megaton models,” Kulkarni continued, the operations officer running through the data herself.
“And seventy cruisers,” Roslyn finished. “Forty twenty-megaton ships, thirty fifteen-megaton. This has to be their entire damn fleet!”
“Quite possibly,” Alexander agreed. “They’ve probably still got a couple of carrier groups floating around, but you’ll note…” The Admiral flagged one of the carriers. “This group is slightly off from the rest. They jumped from Legatus while we were distracted.
“They’ve concentrated everything they have. That’s over two billion tons of warships.” Kulkarni said in a soft voice. “They’ve got us outmassed, outnumbered and outgunned.”
She snorted.
“I guess we should have expected that. Except for Mjolnir and her escorts, we’ve all been here for quite a while. They know exactly what they were facing.”
“And now they have us pinned against the planet. I wonder what their plan is,” Alexander said calmly.
“For now, we will continue as planned. If they want to enter the gravity well and give us a chance to run on our terms, I’ll take it.
“If not, well, we’ll find a way out. But we’re going to do it with those rescued prisoners aboard and leaving their shipbuilding and antimatter production facilities in ashes behind us,” she concluded.
“The good news is that they’re not coming in after us,” Kulkarni pointed out. “The bad news is that they have the metaphorical high ground. I don’t know if they can microjump, but if they can, we’re screwed.”
“They can do anything a Mage can do,” Alexander said with a sigh. “Because that’s what they’re
using.”
“Sir?” Roslyn looked over at her boss. There was something in the Admiral’s tone… “They’ve made a big deal about their technological solution to FTL. You know something?”
“That’s what Montgomery found,” Alexander told them. “It doesn’t leave this room yet, all right?”
Roslyn glanced around the flag deck. There were easily thirty people in there, and yet…she was pretty sure no one was going to tell tales outside of school about anything Alexander told them to keep quiet.
“Their ‘technological solution’ was to murder Mages, extract their brains and hook them up to an interface that can force them to cast the jump spell into a specially designed amplifier,” Alexander told them, her voice tired. “Every starship in the Republic Navy represents at least three or four murdered Mages…most of them teenage Mages by Right from the UnArcana Worlds.”
Roslyn’s gaze snapped over to the fleet waiting for them to try and run. There were a hundred ships out there. All told, she’d probably seen at least twice that in Republic starships over the last year.
Those ships represented hundreds of dead Mages, murdered so that their powers could be stolen to fuel the Republic’s rise to power.
“My god,” she whispered.
“I was fourteen years old the first time I stood at the black tombs and truly understood,” Alexander said, her tone still drained. “We buried a Hand that day, but it was the mountainside above the black tombs that really hit home. We always thought that Project Olympus would be the worst crime committed against us.
“We were wrong. At least Olympus only killed us when we were no longer useful.” The Admiral’s face twisted into a snarl. “The Republic had found ways to make us useful even after they murder us.”
“This has to stop,” Kulkarni said. “We have to stop them.”
“Montgomery already has,” Alexander pointed out. “There are almost certainly other places where they carry out this horror, but the vast majority of their ship construction and FTL drive installation was here—at the Daedalus Complex.”
That complex was already growing on their sensor screens. They were only a few minutes from swinging around Trajan now, and Roslyn hoped that the Hand had been correct when he said he’d taken control of the complex’s defenses.
A hundred twenty-gigawatt lasers would make a mess of even Second Fleet.
The flag deck was silent as the terminator line approached, then Alexander sighed.
“Orders to the Fleet,” she said crisply. “All ships are to launch their assault shuttles as soon as we have clear line of sight. I trust the Marines to divvy up their own targets, but they will make contact with Montgomery’s people in that task.”
“And us, sir?” Kulkarni asked.
“We’ll be making contact with Montgomery directly,” she replied. “He’s done his job. Now I need him aboard Righteous Shield while we do ours.”
Alexander smiled coldly.
“If the Republic thinks they can deal with this fleet, they have underestimated me…and they have underestimated the Sword of Mars.”
50
Niska intercepted Damien outside the shuttle intended to take him to Righteous Shield of Valor. Despite everything they’d found, Damien was prepared to give the old cyborg some credit.
It was pretty clear that a large portion of LMID hadn’t known what they’d been fighting for. The ideal James Niska had fought for had been for an equal world, one without special rights for Mages. The kind of horror included in Project Prometheus was far beyond whatever lines the covert ops soldier had drawn.
“We need to talk,” Niska said.
“We are talking,” Damien pointed out.
“I need time,” the cyborg replied. “I know what’s waiting for you out there. I need to come with you.”
Damien sighed.
“I trust you, James,” he said gently. “But there is no way in hell I can bring you aboard the flagship of Second Fleet as we face the massed fleets of the Republic. We can’t afford a single false step, a single error…or a single betrayal.”
Niska gestured around them.
“Do you think we would have made it this far if I was going to betray you, Damien?” he replied. “Please. We’ve come this far together. Hear me out. I’ll stay on the shuttle when we get to Alexander’s flagship, but you and I need to talk about what happens next.”
Damien sighed, then gestured for the cyborg to come with him.
“You stay on the shuttle,” he told the older man. “Romanov, you make sure of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was probably telling that Damien’s bodyguard wasn’t even blinking at Niska’s request. If Romanov, whose job was to be paranoid on Damien’s behalf, figured this was fine, they were probably okay.
Aboard the shuttle, he led the old cyborg into the space usually set aside for a Marine unit commander. It had full coms and tactical networking capacity, and Damien eyed them with a moment of paranoia.
Then Denis Romanov closed the door behind them and Damien swallowed. His bodyguard had just left him alone with a professional mage-killer, a cyborg trained from his teen years to take down Mages like Damien.
If Romanov left them alone, then the bodyguard was trusting beyond all reason…and Damien realized that James Niska had earned that trust.
“That is a reminder that I owe you more than this,” Damien said quietly, gesturing at the closed door. “Talk.”
The shuttle’s engines flared around them, but Damien calmly conjured gravity around him as he held Niska’s gaze.
“You need to give the RIN a chance,” Niska said quietly.
“They outgun us two to one,” Damien pointed out. “I’m not sure you’re talking to the right people.”
“Damien, I have seen the records of you in action—and the records of other Hands,” Niska told him. “I know the Mage-King is something more than a regular Mage. I know his sister is the same—and I’d bet the survival of Second Fleet that you are too.
“I don’t know what that level of raw magical power means to a fleet battle, but I doubt it’s going to end well for my people,” Niska told him. “So, yes, I think I’m talking to the right person.”
“Fine. Keep talking,” Damien instructed.
“They don’t know any better than I did what’s been done,” Niska said. “A few of the engineers and captains may have guessed, and I’d presume most of the flag officers have been briefed, but the crews? The gunners? They don’t know. They’ve been lied to from the beginning.
“Just like I was.”
Niska inhaled, looking at the display behind them.
“We have the proof to show them. Let me show it to them,” he asked.
“It’s the RIN that shipped Mages back here in job lots,” Damien noted. “It’s that Navy that has broken world after world, that provided covering fire for the invasions, that carried out those kidnappings.
“Why the hell should I give them a chance?”
“Some of them are rotten, yes,” Niska conceded. “But most aren’t. Gods, Damien, if there was one group I’d have called rotten to the core, it would have been LMID and RID, and De Santis saved your life!”
“I can’t give you access to fleet coms in the hours before a battle, James,” Damien said. “It can’t happen. It won’t happen.”
“Damien, please,” the old cyborg said. “We’ve come this far together, and we both know that the honor of the nation I swore to serve is garbage and lies.
“But the honor of her people is not. The RIN has been led into atrocity and horror, but they don’t know that. Let me tell them,” he begged. “Give me this chance, to test the honor of the nation I swore to serve.
“Give me the chance to redeem the soul of the people I swore to protect.”
Protect.
That was one hell of a word to conjure with to the sworn servants of the Mage-King. The Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars was a nation, yes, ninety-plus star systems swearing fealty t
o the throne at Olympus Mons.
But it was also something else. A concept. A duty. The Mage-King’s Protectorate, it was called among those who knew Desmond Alexander…the duty of the Mage-King to guard and protect all humanity.
Even those who didn’t owe him allegiance.
Even those who had betrayed him.
And if not, perhaps, those who had committed grand atrocities, perhaps those who had been led astray by others.
“The soul of the Republic is broken,” Damien said quietly. “George Solace smeared it with shit and blood before it was ever born. Anything else must build from that truth.”
“I know.”
Niska faced him levelly, but the man’s eyes were something else. Something old and dark, that even electronic pupils couldn’t conceal.
“You don’t owe them anything,” he admitted. “But I do…and you owe me. You never would have made it this far on your own.”
That was true enough, and Damien sighed.
“What purpose is his protectorate if we don’t protect people?” he asked. A deadly question, he supposed.
“I can’t let you talk to them,” Damien admitted. “But I can. Despite the Republic’s propaganda, I suspect your people know me well enough to believe what I have to say. Especially since we can send them proof.”
“I can give you codes and backdoors to make sure they can’t shut you down,” Niska promised. “They won’t let you do more than talk to them, but they can make sure that every screen and speaker carries your message—and that your proof gets through.”
“We will do what we can,” Damien conceded. “What comes after that…that I leave to the honor of your people, James Niska.”
“For the sake of all of our souls, I hope that honor is more intact than I fear.”
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