UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “I’m going to guess a jump-ship that carries gunships,” Damien replied with a forced chuckle. He stepped back into the flag deck as they were speaking, moving into the flag officer’s seat and checking over the hologram.

  “I know we’ve seen ships used to carry gunships before,” he continued. “The whole mess at Antonius—and some of the crap I got involved in before I was a Hand. It’s a logical step forward, given their limitation on Mages. They’ve got a small number of big ships, but to make up the difference in hulls and flexibility, they give them a few squadrons of, say, Crucifix-type gunships.”

  “Speaking of which, the orbital patrol is staying right where they are,” Jakab pointed out. “Whatever’s coming down the pipeline, they’re not getting involved.”

  “Thank God for small mercies,” Damien said. “Bring Glory out to join Duke in formation. They’re not going to try to hit the freighters, but we don’t want to risk even one misguided missile going that way.”

  “How do you want to play this, my lord?”

  “This is their star system, Mage-Captain. Find them, hail them…but they have to fire first. You are authorized to do whatever is necessary to defend your ships and the convoy, but we cannot initiate the engagement.”

  “That could end very, very badly, my lord,” Jakab said.

  “I know,” Damien admitted grimly. “But our presence here is a provocation, so we will minimize that as best as we can. We’ll play with kid gloves—but not enough to risk our ships; am I clear?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Kole?”

  “Yes, my lord?” Jakab asked carefully. Damien rarely used his first name, but it was a useful tool for making the officer stop and take careful stock of what the Hand was saying.

  “Am I wrong?” Damien asked. “I’m looking at the political situation here, but you’re the military officer. Is this the wrong call?”

  The Mage-Captain sighed.

  “No, Damien, you’re right,” he conceded. “It just…goes against the grain to know I have to let them get the first swing in.”

  “Find them, Mage-Captain. The better we know the threat, the better we can adjust to it. Plus, just knowing we’re watching might be enough to make everyone stop and think.”

  “You know that’s unlikely, right?”

  Damien grimaced.

  “Yes, Mage-Captain, I know. We do what we must.”

  “I don’t have any unusual heat signatures,” Duke’s tactical officer, Commander Kristopher Cisternino, reported. “There’s nothing out there running engines of any kind except the usual collection of in-system clippers.”

  Damien was looking those over as the tactical officer spoke. Korma was classed as a MidWorld, which meant they had quite a bit of in-system traffic. A dozen ships of similar size to the freighters in the convoy but lacking jump matrices were the crown jewels, each hauling four or five million tons of cargo between various platforms and outposts. Another hundred or so smaller ships were scattered around, personal yachts and small transports and suchlike.

  None of those civilian ships were heading toward Kormar. What traffic was moving around the system was, rather intelligently, avoiding the warships. They might have done the same even before the Protectorate ships had counted as vessels of a foreign power.

  Now, well…Damien had seen enough of the news and fearmongering being distributed in the Republic. Even knowing the Protectorate had no intention of invading the Republic, he’d still have given the cruisers a wide berth in the locals’ place.

  “I doubt the Governor went to that much effort to warn us for nothing,” he murmured. “So, what are we missing?”

  “Not much,” Jakab replied. “They’ve turned their engines off, and while we can pick up a ship by its operating heat signature, we need to be much closer. They’re trying to be sneaky.”

  “I figured that much out.” Damien studied the hologram. “But they’re almost certainly coming from Baghdad, correct?”

  “Agreed,” the Captain said. “Depending on how far out they are, we might be able to identify them with a focused sensor pulse. There’s no way we can do that without them knowing what we’re doing, though. They’d know they were detected—and they’d know we had a reason to be looking for them.”

  “We don’t have a choice.” Damien shook his head. “The cloudscoop and the naval position there are the most likely source of an enemy force, regardless. They might be suspicious, but it’s not an unreasonable course of action.

  “Pulse them, Mage-Captain. Stand by to bring both ships to battle stations.”

  “Understood.”

  The sensor scan was shown on Damien’s hologram as a white bubble, arcing out in the direction of the gas giant Baghdad. Every second it traveled was two seconds before he’d see any response, but after the first twenty seconds, they at least knew they weren’t in laser range of the Republic force.

  “Got them!” Cisternino snapped, then swallowed audibly. “I make it twenty light-seconds, one hundred individual contacts…make that one-fifty.”

  “Damn,” Damien murmured. “Do we have any details?”

  “Negative, all I can tell you is that they’re out there and they’re not very big,” the tactical officer admitted. “Maybe twenty meters across, thirty to fifty meters long. None of the rotational pods of a Crucifix.”

  “Specifically designed for this,” Jakab concluded. “How long have they been planning this?”

  “At least since the Antonius Incident,” Damien pointed out. “Record for transmission.”

  He faced the camera and smiled grimly.

  “Republic gunships, this is Hand Damien Montgomery aboard the Protectorate battlecruiser Duke of Magnificence. We are on a humanitarian mission to deliver food and technical assistance to Kormar. We are not, I repeat, not on a hostile mission and mean no harm to anyone.

  “I have authorized these ships to defend themselves, but there’s no need to start a fight here today,” Damien said softly. “We’re here to help Kormar. You’re here to protect Kormar. Those don’t contradict each other.

  “Please. Let me help these people. Then we’ll leave. That’s all I ask.”

  The message left and he shook his head.

  “Think it will help?” Jakab asked.

  “Maybe. Legatus had a number of intelligent, reasonable officers and crews,” Damien reminded himself. “I can only hope that the Republic had similar recruiting standards.”

  “Well, that’s an answer, I suppose.”

  The gunships had flipped in space, launching missiles and accelerating away from the Martian cruisers.

  “No communications, I presume?” Damien continued, trying and failing to get a feel for the numbers showing on his hologram. “Someone want to fill the glorified civilian in?”

  “No coms,” Jakab confirmed. “One hundred and fifty gunships, six launchers apiece. Nine hundred missiles, accelerating at ten thousand gravities. That’s an upgrade on the last numbers we had for Legatan antimatter birds, but I can’t even guess their flight time.”

  “Enough to reach us seems reasonable.” Damien was running numbers on the part of the scenario he did fully understand. “Their new course is going to keep them outside of our laser and amplifier range. They’re playing it cautious.”

  “Agreed,” Jakab replied. “Your orders, my lord?”

  It was arguable whether the Republic had just declared war on the Protectorate—Damien’s convoy was in their space, after all—but they had declared war on this flotilla.

  “I already gave them,” Damien said quietly. “Defend the convoy, Mage-Captain Jakab. This part is your job.”

  There were three Runes carved into Damien’s skin that made him a far more powerful Mage than Jakab, but the simulacrum chamber that co-existed with Duke’s bridge was linked to an even more powerful version of his Runes of Power.

  From the simulacrum chamber, Damien had once worked magic few other Mages could—but even Jakab could use the amplifier t
o terrifyingly and incredible effect. And Jakab was more experienced at using a warship amplifier than Damien was.

  So, Damien would leave the fighting to the professionals. Even as his burned hands twinged in pain at the memories of the times he hadn’t.

  He had, after all, had five Runes of Power at one point.

  5

  The two cruisers had already positioned themselves between the incoming Republic vessels and the convoy. Now they accelerated outward, toward the missiles.

  The runes providing the Protectorate ships with gravity also worked to counteract acceleration, up to about ten to fifteen gravities.

  Those ten gravities were a tiny thing against the ten thousand gravities the incoming missiles were pulling, but it bought them more space and time to protect the freighters.

  Damien watched in silence as his ships launched. Both of his ships were Honorific-class battlecruisers: big, tough ships, among the most modern the Royal Martian Navy possessed. They overwhelmingly outmassed the gunship flotilla thrown at them, but most of their advantages would be seen in the exact type of drawn-out engagement the gunships were avoiding.

  Four salvos blasted into space in just over a minute, and then the warships’ launchers were silent. Even with each battlecruiser carrying eighty missile launchers, that probably wasn’t enough to take out the retreating gunships…but Damien suspected that wasn’t Jakab’s plan.

  The missiles’ vectors quickly proved him right. They weren’t charging after the gunships—Jakab was clearly assessing their risk as lower than their already-launched missiles. Damien wasn’t sure he agreed with that, but it was the Mage-Captain’s decision to make.

  The earlier Legatan gunships he had data on had carried multiple missiles for each launcher, capable of at least some sustained engagement, and Damien didn’t think these new ships were that much smaller.

  They were, however, falling back away from the convoy.

  “First missile intercept in ninety seconds,” one of the handful of techs on the flag deck announced. “Last in one hundred forty seconds. RFLAM range in one hundred fifty seconds.”

  Damien nodded his understanding.

  Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets were the key component to his ships’ defenses. Each of his cruisers mounted a hundred of them. All of the freighters in the convoy had at least two or three, though hopefully, the Republican ships weren’t targeting the convoy.

  “Still no communication from the Republic ships?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just missiles.”

  The Hand shook his head. He hadn’t expected to avoid a fight, not once the Republic force had sent gunships out at him, but he had expected them to at least talk to him.

  The tactical affair of dealing with the incoming fire was Jakab’s job. The Mage-Captain was focusing his attention on defending his ships. Damien could order an attack on the fleeing gunships and Jakab would obey, but that…was contrary to his actual objectives there.

  Which, of course, was why Jakab wasn’t firing on the gunships. It was a rather large gesture of goodwill, and one that could easily cost the RMN force badly.

  Damien hoped the bastards saw it that way.

  “First missile intercept. Seventy-two percent success rate,” the tech reported. Damien took a moment to study the man, a dark-skinned Chief Petty Officer with McQueen, Akash embroidered on his uniform.

  “Thank you, Chief McQueen,” he murmured.

  “Second intercept…less effective,” McQueen continued.

  “That’s normal, right?” Damien asked. He’d been in more than a few space battles by now, but usually, he’d been sitting on Jakab’s bridge. This was the first time he’d been completely separated on the flag deck, and he was realizing he didn’t like it.

  It was a lot harder to judge how the battle was going by the Captain’s demeanor when you couldn’t see the Captain, after all.

  “Yeah, we’ve got an ugly radiation hash out there from the antimatter warheads,” McQueen confirmed. “The Republic birds are big, ugly weapons, too. Two-gigaton warheads to our one.”

  The third intercept was slightly more effective than the second, Damien thought, but it was hard to tell. Like McQueen had pointed out, the antimatter warheads were making a mess of the space in front of the Martian flotilla. Each weapon that detonated made it harder to track the rest.

  There were still far too many missiles out there for Damien’s peace of mind. Apparently, the cruiser Captains agreed, as both ships began spewing missiles again. They were using multi-million-dollar weapons systems as glorified flak, detonating the warheads in the middle of the incoming salvo even as the RFLAM turrets came to life behind them.

  Then the missiles reached the distance at which the amplifiers allowed the Mage-Captains to unleash their own power. Arcing “lightning” flickered across the incoming fire, detonating dozens of missiles at once.

  And still they kept coming. The sheer range of space-to-space weapons meant that Damien and his people watched the missiles come in for almost ten minutes, and while everything they threw at the incoming fire worked, there were just too many missiles.

  Two missiles exploded around Duke of Magnificence, barely avoiding direct hits but still sending shockwaves and radiation pulses hammering into the big cruiser’s armor. A few icons on Damien’s screens flashed yellow, but Duke continued unharmed.

  Glory in Honest Purpose wasn’t so lucky. At least three missiles scored direct hits, multi-gigaton explosions going off in contact with her hull. The battlecruiser lurched in space, spewing atmosphere and vaporized metal—but she was still there.

  This was the exact threat her armor had been designed for, after all.

  “Glory reports heavy damage,” Jakab told Damien a few seconds later. “Most of their missiles and defense turrets are offline. Engines are still mostly functional and they still have the amplifier.” The Mage-Captain grimaced.

  “She can run, my lord, but she can’t fight.”

  Damien waited roughly five minutes to be sure he had all of the information on the status of his ships. None of it was good. Duke was combat-capable. Glory wasn’t. The only good news was that less than a dozen missiles had missed the cruisers and gone for the freighters. None had come close enough to be a threat before they were destroyed.

  “What’s the status of our shuttles?” he asked Romanov.

  The Special Agent wasn’t in charge of the Marines aboard the convoy, but Damien would freely admit he used the man as an interface with Colonel Petrik Dean Popov. Popov was a solid, reliable soldier, but he and Romanov spoke what felt like a completely different language to Damien.

  “The locals are causing trouble, as the Governor warned us,” his bodyguard said. “The off-loading seems to be progressing on schedule, but the shuttles that have completed off-loading are being held up.”

  “Wonderful.” Damien unconsciously tried to open a channel to Jakab from the repeater screens on the arms of his seat. For half a second, his fingers let him—then the scar tissue locked up and cramps tore through the muscles.

  The Hand swallowed an undignified curse as he remembered himself.

  “System, open a link with Mage-Captain Jakab and Colonel Popov,” he ordered the computer aloud as he gently shook his aching hand. The screens lit up with the two officers’ images before Romanov could inquire about Damien’s health, which was a benefit.

  “My lord,” Jakab greeted him. Popov gave him a wordless half-salute.

  “Jakab, what’s the status of the gunships?” Damien asked.

  “Outside our weapons range now, falling back towards the cloudscoop. I’m guessing there’s somebody else out there,” the Captain warned.

  “So am I,” Damien agreed. “Colonel Popov, how much trouble are the locals giving us?”

  “So far, they’re keeping it to claiming they can’t sort out flight clearances due to other traffic,” the Marine replied. “Of course, unless said traffic is invisible…”

  “That’s what I figured
. I want every shuttle headed back for orbit in fifteen minutes,” Damien ordered. “If they can possibly dump their cargo and leave sorting it out to the locals, they’re to do that. I want to get as much of this damn food on the surface as possible.

  “Assuming they can make the fifteen minutes, how long until the entire shuttle fleet is back aboard their transports?”

  “Three hours, give or take about twenty minutes,” Popov answered instantly. “It would take about half an hour for them to refuel and pick up cargo—”

  “They’re not picking up cargo,” Damien told them. “We’re recalling everybody, right now. Colonel…”

  The Hand shook his head and grimaced. Only part of it was from pain.

  “Your Marines are to do whatever is necessary to get those shuttles back to their transports,” he ordered. “I am specifically including firing on local aircraft and ground troops; am I clear?”

  Popov nodded grimly.

  “Yes, sir.” He paused. “I hope it won’t come to that, but…thank you, sir.”

  “I won’t lose anyone else if I can avoid it,” Damien told the two officers. “Jakab, I want eyes on those gunships from now until Judgment Day. There’s a mothership out there and I don’t want to play. Find her.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Mage-Captain hesitated. “What do we do when we find her?”

  “Unless we can negotiate some kind of ceasefire, we are leaving this system as soon as the shuttles are aboard,” Damien said flatly. “The food we already delivered will buy them another month, with careful rationing.

  “If the Republic won’t let us deliver food, then the Republic will have to save its own people.”

  6

  To Damien’s relief, the shuttles managed to get clear without bloodshed. They even managed to get all of their cargo landed safely for the locals.

  Five million tons of food wasn’t much when weighed against eighty million appetites, but it would buy the people of Kormar time. Time to solve their bacteria problem and grow new crops. Time to get help from the Republic that seemed so damned determined to make sure that no one else helped.