Sword of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Putting together the appropriate setting for the transmission took time. Unlike Duke of Magnificence, Alexander’s flagship didn’t have Damien’s normal working space.

  The thought of having Damien actually go to his ship didn’t occur to anyone until it was too late.

  Despite everything, as Second Fleet set its course to meet the Republic fleet, Damien had a properly set-up office. The wall behind him was the flag of Mars: a stylized mountain in front of a red planet on a black background.

  He sat behind a standard RMN-issue desk, facing a camera. The suit and black gloves he wore were almost aggressively the look he’d adopted as his uniform over the last few years.

  The platinum hand of his office hung visibly on his chest, and the gold medallion at his throat caught the light. He laid his hands on the desk, wincing as he slowly straightened them, and faced the camera.

  “How long?” he asked quietly.

  “Just over forty minutes to weapons range,” Romanov told him. “Enough time to let the message sink in.”

  “I’ve put together a supporting package that should convince people quickly,” Niska said. “I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to hit the buttons of loyal Republicans.”

  He shook his head.

  “I can’t believe it’s come to this.”

  “Blame George Solace,” Damien suggested. “Whatever has come to pass, the Lord Protector has had his fingers in it since the beginning.”

  “I know. I just can’t believe I fell for this.” The old cyborg shook his head. “I can’t believe Ricket fell for this.”

  “You were told what you wanted to hear. Now we need to convince a few hundred thousand of your fellow citizens of something they don’t want to hear.”

  “If anyone can, it’s you.” Niska stepped backward, making sure he was out of the line of the camera. “My package will go with the transmission. It’s your show now.”

  Damien nodded and inhaled.

  It was show time.

  “Start recording,” he ordered.

  “My name is Damien Montgomery,” he told the camera. “You know who I am. I am the First Hand of Mars. I am the man who brought food to Kormar when they were starving. I am the man who saved Ardennes from a dictator.

  “I am also the man who gathered the fleet that stopped you at Ardennes. I am the man who cleaned up after LMID’s massacres in the Antonius System. I am one of the people who have fought the shadow war against your Republic since before it was born.”

  Damien smiled thinly.

  “I am the Hand who laid the charges of treason against Legatus and triggered your secession.”

  He paused, letting that sink in.

  “You know me,” he said again. “I am your enemy, but you know my word can be trusted. I speak for Mars and you know that I will not lie to you…so I beg you to trust me now when I tell you that you have been lied to.

  “You have been made accomplices in an atrocity beyond your worst nightmares, servants to a horror that you would not have supported. You have been betrayed by the men who led you into first secession and then war.

  “There is no technological jump drive at the heart of your ships,” he told them. “Your ships are carried through the stars by something your leaders call the Promethean Interface. It is a technological wonder, yes, but not a jump drive.

  “It is a tool of torture and control, designed to force a Mage to jump…except that they realized they didn’t need the whole Mage. Or even a Mage trained to jump.

  “At the heart of your supposed technological wonders are the tortured brains of murdered Mages, forced by this interface to provide the interstellar travel you would not accept from the Guild.

  “Thousands of Mages have been taken prisoner by your fleets and delivered here, to Legatus, to be sacrificed on that altar…but I beg you to think. To question.

  “Your ships were built before the war, before you could murder prisoners of war to fuel these devices. Where did the Mages whose brains power your ships come from?”

  He paused again.

  “They came from the UnArcana Worlds,” he said quietly. “From the only place in the UnArcana Worlds where there were Mages: the schools for the Mages by Right. Your leaders kidnapped and murdered children, by the hundreds—the thousands—to fuel the war machines you ride. The proof of all I have said is attached to this message, organized by one of your own.”

  Damien winced as his hands clenched into fists.

  “There can be no mercy for the people who authorized or executed this plan,” he said harshly. “Only justice. Your Republic is built on lies and death. We were never your enemy until you brought this war to us—but if we had learned what lies hid behind the Lord Protector’s smile, we would have been.”

  His speech was supposed to be urging them to surrender, but his anger was taking over, and he rose to his feet as he faced the camera.

  “I am the Sword of Mars,” he snarled. “I am charged to bring justice to the weak, freedom to the oppressed.

  “I will bring justice to Lord Protector George Solace and anyone else I find who supported this horror. The horror that lurks in the heart of your ships.

  “You are in my way. Leave, surrender or die.”

  Anger swirled through Damien as he glared at the camera.

  “I am past caring which.”

  The office was silent after Damien had finished speaking and collapsed back into the chair. He looked over at Niska, meeting the ex-LMID spy’s gaze.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Recording attached to the package and sent,” Niska told him. “It’s up to them to decide what they want to do now.”

  Damien had been expecting the Legatan to object to the tone he’d ended up taking, and arched an eyebrow at him.

  “It’s more powerful, my friend, for you to say what you truly feel than for you to soften the blow,” Niska told him. He offered Damien his hand to help him rise. “We’ve been through this together. We’ll finish it together. Our next step is Legatus itself, regardless of what the fleet does.”

  Damien raised his arm, letting the cyborg grab his upper arm. Even knowing Niska was augmented, he was still surprised by how easily the other lifted him to his feet.

  “Solace is the key,” he agreed. “But we do have to deal with that fleet first.”

  “You should get to the flag bridge,” Niska told him. “And shut all the computers in here down before you leave me. There’s trust and there’s being irresponsible.”

  “Romanov?”

  “My lord?”

  “Stay with Niska,” Damien ordered. “Set the systems to passive and put the tactical display up. He deserves to see how this ends.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Romanov smiled. “So long as you take the team outside with you to the flag deck.”

  “Of course.” Even here, even now, Damien couldn’t be sure there were no hidden RID agents. The Republic had done a damn good job of infiltrating the Protectorate—but then, their enemy had known the war was coming long before they had.

  52

  There was a stunned silence on the flag deck as Damien entered, three suited Secret Service Agents in tow. Every gaze turned to him as he crossed the room, an uncomfortable situation at the best of times.

  “Admiral Alexander,” he greeted the Princess of Mars with a bow.

  “I ordered your message played for our people as well,” Alexander told him without preamble. “They needed to know what happened, too, and it seemed like the most efficient way.”

  “Ah.” Damien concealed a sigh. It made sense, but it explained why everyone was watching him.

  “My flag deck crew knew the key parts, but you did lay it out rather…succinctly.” Alexander nodded toward the consoles nearest her. “I know you’ve met Lieutenant Chambers. This is Mage-Captain Kulkarni, my operations officer.

  “Kulkarni is watching to see what impact your speech had,” she continued. “Captain?”

  “We’re still at over forty
seconds of lightspeed delay on transmission and sensors,” Kulkarni pointed out. “They got your message two minutes ago. What we’re seeing is roughly a minute and twenty seconds after that.”

  “So, what we’re seeing is nothing, I presume?” Damien asked. “It’s not like they’re going to change their minds dramatically in a few seconds, after all.”

  “But a few minutes is possible?” Alexander replied.

  “Possible, yes.” He shrugged. “If not, well, when are you getting to the simulacrum?”

  She snorted.

  “Weapons range in thirty minutes,” she told him. “I’ll be on the bridge and taking over the amplifier in twenty-five.”

  “Sir?” Kulkarni said in surprise.

  “I am the sister of the Mage-King of Mars,” Alexander said calmly. “I am my brother’s equal, his match, in every way. That’s something we go to great lengths to conceal, but today…today it is time for our enemies to realize what it means to face the rulers of Mars in battle.”

  Damien was probably the only other person in the room who realized what that meant. Romanov would have had an idea—he’d seen Damien stretch to the full limits of his power before—but the number of people who’d seen a Rune Wright with five Runes of Power go all-out was very small.

  “It’s still going to be a hell of a fight,” Damien murmured to the Admiral. “Every trick in the book.”

  “It’s been a long time since I could fully unleash,” she admitted. “I should still be able to shield the fleet, if nothing else.”

  The geometry of the battle was…brutally simple. They were too deep in Centurion’s gravity well to jump away, and they weren’t prepared to surrender the Accelerator Ring or the Daedalus Complex.

  In Alexander’s place, Damien would probably have destroyed both. He was not in command of Second Fleet, though. He might be using his face and reputation to sell the truth of what they’d discovered to the Republic, but Alexander commanded the military operation.

  His role was purely political.

  “Wait…I have an aspect change,” Kulkarni barked. “Multiple aspect changes, throughout the RIN fleet.”

  Damien checked the time. Receipt plus about seven minutes. Enough time for a determined engineer to removed the sealed casing around their “jump drives” and find the truth.

  He knew starship crews. You never trusted your ship to anyone else. You verified the problem yourself—and the engineering crews of those warships had to have suspected something.

  Given the extra pressure of his call, he suspected that at least half of the jump drives in the Republic fleet had been torn open.

  “Holy shi—” The curse was cut off, but everyone else had seen what the exclaiming sensor tech had seen.

  One of the forty-megaton battleships had just blown up. The gunships closest to her were reeling, even as other battleships and cruisers fell out of the line. Suddenly, at least a quarter of the Republic fleet wasn’t accelerating toward the Protectorate force…and some were outright running, flipping in space to accelerate away.

  A second ship, one of the cruisers, exploded.

  “What the hell is going on?” Alexander demanded. “I’m not seeing weapons fire.”

  “What you’re seeing are the ships whose engineers weren’t good enough to disable the failsafes,” Damien said quietly. “At a guess, fusion warheads inside the jump drives to make sure no one examined them.

  “Not even their own crew.”

  “My god.”

  More ships were dropping out of formation now. The self-destruct sequences seemed to be changing minds that Damien’s message hadn’t.

  “I’m picking up the edges of a lot of chatter,” a com tech reported. “It’s encrypted, but we’ve got the codes for some of it… Oh.”

  The tech sounded ill.

  “Pictures of the interface?” Damien asked. “I’ve seen them.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the tech half-gasped.

  For the first time, a carrier stopped accelerating. One of the big fifty-megaton ships turned back.

  The Republic formation was a mess. Ships were attempting to retreat. Others were holding their vector as they tried to work out what was going on, Captains buying themselves time to make a decision.

  It was only a matter of time, and Damien closed his eyes as laser fire lit up the screen.

  “Two battleships just fired on the withdrawing carrier,” Kulkarni reported. “Three other battleships just opened fire on them. My god…”

  The last vestiges of a formation disintegrated. Whatever flag officer had ordered the carrier destroyed had made a critical mistake. Up to that moment, the confusion would have resolved itself before the battle was joined.

  Regardless of the bombshell Damien had dropped on them, less than a tenth of the RIN fleet had actually gone so far as to run. There was, after all, a Martian battle fleet in their star system. They would fight.

  The self-destructing ships had tested that resolve, but the order to kill their fellow officers and crew broke it.

  Ships scattered in every direction and laser fire cut through the void. Explosions marked the display, and from this distance, Damien couldn’t see if they were self-destructing or being fired on.

  “I have jump flares,” Chambers said quietly. “They’re not all making it…I don’t know if that’s voluntary on the ships’ part.”

  “It’s not,” Damien replied. “We’ve seen it enough: their fleet commanders can force other ships to jump. The poor bastards at the heart of the Promethean Interfaces have no ability to refuse the order, no matter who’s sending it.”

  Or how dangerous it was.

  “Looks like there’s a solid core resolving around three of the carriers, but the rest of the fleet is running,” Kulkarni finally reported. “A lot of the runners have converged around the retreating carrier, one of their big ones.”

  She shook her head.

  “That group isn’t shooting back, but they are defending themselves.”

  “And the rest?” Damien asked.

  “Running in every direction. It looks like whoever’s left has disabled any failsafe bombs or remote-jump functions,” the operations officer concluded. “Between wrecked ships and fleeing ships, they’re down over half their numbers.”

  “That solid core is running, sir,” Chambers noted softly. “I make it forty-one capital ships around three carriers.”

  “Are they heading for Legatus?” Damien asked.

  “No. They’re vectoring sideways to reduce our engagement time now, but they’re moving in formation.” The young woman shook her head. “Those are the only ships out there actually keeping formation; the other grouping is just a cluster.”

  The numbers weren’t clear, but it looked like at least twenty ships were dead. Battleships, carriers, cruisers, the full gamut of the Republic’s order of battle.

  Forty-one remained in an intact formation, retreating in an organized fashion.

  Twelve had clustered around the rogue carrier, running with no clear destination beyond away from the intact formation.

  The other twenty-five ships were…lost. There was no other description for it. Some were running solo, desperate to escape everyone. Six were on their original vector, their drives shut down—quite likely with fighting throughout their hulls.

  “Orders to the Marines,” Alexander said softly. “They’re to prepare for boarding actions. Search-and-rescue teams are to stand by to deploy as well.

  “Navigation departments are to adjust our course: I want to be damn certain we can retrieve any survivors of that mess.”

  “What about the intact formations?” Kulkarni asked.

  The Admiral swallowed something and looked to Damien.

  “I think that’s a political question, First Hand?”

  “They’re both running,” he pointed out. “We’re guessing this group are loyalists and this group are mutineers, but we don’t know.

  “We don’t want to shoot down potential allies, whate
ver horror show is running on their ships right now. Let them go.”

  If they were potential allies, he suspected that they wouldn’t have jump drives for much longer. In their place, he’d run to somewhere safe and then destroy the Promethean Interface.

  There wasn’t much they could do for the poor people inside the Interfaces other than give them mercy.

  “I think this battle is over,” he noted quietly. “May I make a suggestion, Admiral?”

  “Of course.”

  “We need to secure Legatus’s orbitals,” he told her. “Send Mjolnir’s group under Admiral Tarpinian and myself. We’ll bring my Legatan contacts with us, see if we can convince the planet to surrender, but we need to secure Legatus.”

  “We don’t have the forces to take the planet,” Alexander pointed out.

  “So, we secure the orbitals and the Siege of Legatus becomes of the planet rather than the system,” he agreed. “The battle is over. Let’s make sure we grab every lever we can to try and end the war.”

  53

  Legatus didn’t look any different from orbit than it had five years earlier, when Damien had visited aboard the merchant freighter Blue Jay.

  The orbital space around the planet certainly looked different, though. Dozens of what the younger Damien had thought were storage or industrial stations had turned out to be secondary nodes in the defensive network.

  They were gone now. So were the new-build fortresses installed after the Secession.

  It hadn’t even been a fair fight.

  “The Republic Legislature is still refusing to surrender,” Mage-Commodore Kole Jakab told Damien. “They’ve evacuated the main Assembly Hall, too. It’s like they expect us to bomb them from orbit.”

  “Should we?” Damien asked.

  “I never wanted to,” Jakab said calmly. “Certainly, I don’t want to bombard civilian targets from orbit. We could still do a number on legitimate military targets, though. Clear the way for the Marines.”

  For the first time in weeks, Damien stood in his observation deck office aboard Duke of Magnificence and surveyed a world beneath him. The computer screens overlaid on the window marked the military bases of the Legatan and Republic Armies. All of them were legitimate military targets…but they also represented somewhere around two million people wearing those uniforms.