UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

Linked into the simulacrum and, through it, to the amplifier matrix woven through the ship, it was almost like Roslyn Chambers became the million-ton white starship. She could see with Stand’s sensors, feel the RFLAM turrets gently rotating in their standard patterns.

  Holding the calculations in her head, she summoned her power and fed it into the simulacrum, feeling the runes absorb her power and double it. Triple it. The energy she commanded expanded a thousandfold, and she exhaled a long sigh as the power flowed through her.

  Then she stepped and Stand in Righteousness jumped. The empty void around them and the freighter drifting half a light-minute away vanished in a flash of blue light, and when the light faded, they were…somewhere else.

  A wave of exhaustion swept over Roslyn and she released the simulacrum. Amplifier or not, the jump spell was one of the most demanding tasks a Mage could take on.

  “Navigation?” Captain Martell asked. She offered Roslyn a hand, helping the young Mage out of the command seat.

  “We are bang on target,” another officer reported. “We are in the Nia Kriti System, exactly nine million kilometers from the Fleet Base in orbit of Samos.”

  “Good.” Martell took her seat back and smiled at Roslyn. “Lieutenant Sanders, send our bona fides into the base and request a docking port. We’ll need to refuel and restock, and the crew needs some time off. Lieutenant Diamond, get me a zero-zero course to the station.”

  The officers got to work and Martell held her gaze on Roslyn.

  “Well done, Mage-Ensign Chambers. Now go rest. I’m not going to make you stay on duty after jumping!”

  With a tired salute and a glow of accomplishment, Roslyn obeyed.

  9

  By the time Roslyn woke up from six hours of sleep, feeling mostly recharged, Stand in Righteousness was slowing down into orbit of Samos. The Nia Kriti Fleet Base itself hung in geostationary orbit above Samos’s equatorial capital city. The core of the Fleet base was a massive space station assembled from prefabricated components, a set of gantries, tubes and rotating rings roughly five kilometers long.

  Six cruisers were nestled into the docking cradles at the top of that station, but there was easily space for twice that many more. Gantries sprawled out from the base, each with the umbilicals and fueling systems for half a dozen destroyers.

  The Nia Kriti Fleet Base was home to six cruisers and fifteen destroyers, three and a half squadrons of the Royal Martian Navy. It had been provided with the infrastructure, however, to fuel and maintain over three times that many.

  Roslyn looked over the data feeding to the ship’s scanners from the comfort of her quarters. Kor was still on duty, and she wasn’t scheduled to go back on duty for another four hours, which left her with some studying to do…and a junior tactical officer’s access to the sensor feeds.

  She’d thought there’d been a lot of work going on at the Fleet Base when they came through last time, and it had only increased since then. Many of the extra docking cradles and refueling gantries had been functionally in mothballs when Stand had first arrived, but there had seemed to be work in progress.

  Now it was obvious. Docking ports that probably hadn’t even been inspected in ten years were swarming with workers, and new prefabricated station components were hanging in orbit nearby.

  The Fleet Base was expanding, and rapidly. Someone was expecting to need to reinforce the Fringe, and soon.

  Roslyn wasn’t a full-fledged officer yet. She’d still ended up helping the Hand Damien Montgomery via a few juvenile delinquent–esque tactics before she’d ever joined the Navy. She kept up with the news, and it wasn’t like the Secession had been easily missed.

  There was only one possible enemy the Protectorate could be preparing for war against, but her own sparse but continuing correspondence with the First Hand told her the Protectorate’s leaders didn’t want a war. They weren’t planning on starting one.

  Which meant that if the Royal Martian Navy was preparing for war, either someone in the Navy was going against the intent of the Mage-King—or those same leaders were expecting the Republic to start one.

  Roslyn’s next shift saw her under Commander Katz’s command again, part of a skeleton crew as most of the ship’s crew were sent off on shore leave. From her brief conversation with Kor before reporting for duty, the other Ensign was remaining aboard as well.

  Rank had its privileges, and if said rank was that you were still in training, those privileges included continuing your training.

  Having full access to the scanners only confirmed what she’d seen from her quarters: Nia Kriti was in full refurbish-and-expand mode. There were no more warships on the radar than there had been the last time they’d been there, though. Just an expansion of the logistics base.

  “Sir,” she said carefully as Katz approached her console—the Commander made a habit of walking around the bridge at least once an hour. “Does it seem odd to you that we’re expanding Nia Kriti this much? I don’t see any other ships or, well, wars on the horizon.”

  Katz chuckled, but there was a sad tone to it.

  “Really, Mage-Ensign?” she asked. “You see no wars on the horizon? Peace forever, huh?”

  Roslyn flushed.

  “I know we don’t want a war with the Republic,” she said. “I know they may be less peaceful-minded, but still…this seems like a lot of work.”

  “It is,” Katz confirmed. “I don’t know where the decision came from, Ensign, and that would be way over your head even if I did. But you’re right. We don’t want a war. That said, the presence of the Republic increases our threat levels out here on the Fringe, so the call was made to increase our force levels.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Roslyn said, looking back at her scanners. “Where are those ships, then?”

  From the Commander’s repeated chuckle, she wondered if she was asking more than she should be.

  “From the updates we got when we arrived, Mage-Admiral Palmeiro will be arriving in the next few days. He’ll take over from Mage-Admiral Castello as the commander of the Fleet Base, and he’s bringing another squadron apiece of cruisers and destroyers.”

  Katz shook her head.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to be on the wall when Palmeiro takes command, though,” she admitted quietly. “Castello is senior to him, but she’s been stuck in Nia Kriti for a decade and he’s been explicitly placed in command above her.”

  That sounded like a level of politics above Roslyn’s pay grade, but…like everything else, politics were something an Ensign had to learn.

  “May I ask why, sir?” she asked.

  “She pissed off a Hand,” Katz said bluntly. “Our Mage-Admirals are among the most powerful people in the Protectorate. Castello isn’t the first Admiral to forget who she answers to. She won’t be the last, either.”

  Roslyn shivered.

  “I can’t imagine arguing with a Hand,” she admitted. “Have you met one?”

  “No,” Katz replied. “You have, right? You got into the Academy on a letter of recommendation from one, didn’t you?”

  “I got dragged into some kind of op that Hand Montgomery was running on Tau Ceti,” Roslyn confirmed. “Went downhill pretty badly at the time but managed to get me into the Academy despite a stint in juvenile detention for being an idiot.”

  Helping Montgomery had got her gassed and briefly kidnapped. Worth it in the end…but she could not imagine getting on the wrong side of that terrifyingly-intense man.

  “Huh.” Katz regarded her levelly, then smiled. “For your reference, Ensign, that you were ever in juvie isn’t in your Navy file. I suggest not mentioning that to your superiors in the future.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Roslyn was surprised. She’d assumed that had been in her file.

  “The Navy thinks you have great potential, Ensign Chambers. Hand Montgomery’s recommendation may have caused people to look at you more closely, but you’ve shown that potential yourself.”

  Katz shook her head.<
br />
  “But for today, you shouldn’t need to worry too much. We’ll stick around Nia Kriti until the Mage-Admiral arrives, then we’ll head out on another patrol. Keep your eyes open, Ensign. We’ve got work to do.”

  Roslyn was back on duty the next day when the reinforcements arrived. Her screens flashed with warning icons as jump flares lit up the space nearby.

  “Jump flares,” she reported briskly to Commander Katz, exactly per the book. “Sensors are resolving twelve individual icons.” She paused, studying her screens.

  “Sir, I have some odd backscatter. Can you take a look?”

  They were expecting twelve ships, six cruisers and six destroyers. There was an odd flare behind them, though, like there was more Cherenkov radiation than there should be.

  “Do we have IDs on our jumpers yet?” Katz asked as she mirrored Roslyn’s screen.

  “IFFs are resolving out of the jump-flare static right now,” the Ensign responded. “Running them against the warbook as the system cleans them up.”

  There were no real surprises in the IFF codes for the twelve ships.

  “IDs confirmed: Ninth Cruiser Squadron and Eleventh Destroyer Squadron. Flagship is Honor of Liberty, beacons confirm Mage-Admiral Palmeiro in command.” She looked up at Katz. “There’s also a message sent to the main fleet base. We got the fringes of it, but I can probably decipher it.”

  “Leave it be, Ensign,” Katz ordered. “It’s almost certainly just a hello, but one doesn’t eavesdrop on Admirals’ coms.” She chuckled. “Not without suspecting something more serious is going on, anyway.”

  The Commander was silent for several more seconds.

  “You’re right, Ensign. That backscatter is odd, but I’m not seeing a source for it. Looks like background radiation, really.”

  Which was a polite way of saying it’s a sensor ghost. The downside of running systems as sensitive as those aboard a modern Martian destroyer was that they saw a lot of things that weren’t relevant.

  Background Cherenkov radiation was odd, but…not unheard of. Katz would know better than Roslyn, in any case.

  “Yes, sir. Thanks for taking a look.”

  “When your junior sees something they don’t understand, your job is to double-check it,” the tactical officer told her. “For two reasons: one, it’s my job to educate you and it’ll be your job to educate your juniors in future; and two, sometimes your junior sees something of concern you might just dismiss.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By which I mean, keep an eye on that, Ensign Chambers,” Katz ordered. “I would have dismissed it if you hadn’t flagged it, but it’s strange enough to deserve more attention.”

  Admiral Palmeiro’s fleet was clearly in no hurry to make Samos orbit. Five gravities of acceleration was beyond even the emergency standard for most civilian ships, but every Royal Martian Navy ship had enough Mages aboard to keep the gravity runes refreshed.

  Without those runes, they had no gravity and nothing to counteract acceleration. With those runes, RMN ships could push ten gravities easily. Fifteen in emergencies.

  Five gravities saved fuel, however, and if Admiral Palmeiro wasn’t expecting to need to be anywhere soon, well, it made sense.

  Roslyn had to wonder, though, if his upcoming meeting with a senior officer he’d been placed in command of had anything to do with the slow pace.

  That was going to be an awkward introduction, from what Commander Katz had said.

  The background radiation from the jump seemed to have finally dispersed as well. Her focus was remaining on the ship’s sensors, however. It was as good an excuse as any to dig into the systems and learn as much as she could about them.

  Stand in Righteousness had some esoteric toys buried in her systems. Her primary long-range sensor systems were infrared-based, scanning for heat sources across empty space. She also had extraordinarily sensitive radiation receivers, capable of picking up Cherenkov radiation from a jump flare at a light day or more.

  For that matter, she could pick up the miniscule radiation leakage from the two fusion plants in the mountain above New Athens, the Samosian capital. Given how carefully shielded and directed a fusion plant was, that was impressive.

  Of course, on double-checking, she realized that one of the fusion plants was leaking above the regulated maximum. It was adding the equivalent of an extra couple dozen bananas a year or so to the rad dosage in the city, but there were radiation rules for a reason.

  Roslyn flagged it for Katz to consider—it was hardly important enough for even the Ensign to be spending time on. The report would bounce its way through an automated notification system down to the plant, where a tech would probably go tighten three valves and fix the problem.

  She was about to move on to the next system when something else flashed on the radiation scanner in the mountains. It was a tiny pulse of rads, too intense to be natural but too small to be anything else.

  It had to be a ghost. The scan data made no sense—and then a second strange pulse occurred, several kilometers away from the first. It was like there was a more intensive source that was being muffled, which made no sense.

  A third pulse triggered and Roslyn stared at her three datapoints, wondering what she was missing.

  Then a new alert wiped the strange data from her mind.

  “The seismic stations in New Athens are going nuts,” Katz snapped. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  Roslyn was about to mention the strange rad sources, but then she looked at the feed coming in from New Athens and lost everything she was thinking of.

  They were receiving visual data from a number of sources, with a computer algorithm identifying the most important image to focus on on a moment-to-moment basis.

  At that moment, it was focusing on the downtown core of New Athens, a collection of skyscrapers over thirty stories high that held the key government and corporate offices for a world of two hundred million souls.

  Roslyn was only vaguely aware of the building codes involved in building hundred-plus-meter towers, but she was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to be swaying like trees in a stiff wind.

  Stand’s bridge was silent, every member of the skeleton crew’s gaze riveted on the screen as the inevitable happened. The Spire, New Athens’ tallest and most prestigious building…broke. The bottom hundred meters of the tower continued to sway as the top two hundred meters sheared off and fell.

  Other towers were already falling, and the debris from the Spire hammered into its neighbors.

  “My god,” Katz murmured. “It’s midday there. Those buildings are…”

  Packed. Full. There were a hundred words Roslyn could have finished her superior’s comment with, but they all meant the same thing. The horror they were watching wasn’t just the loss of buildings but the deaths of thousands.

  “Sir! The RTA!”

  It was the petty officer running the communications console who’d seen it first, but the computer algorithm picked it up as well. The feeds from the surface refocused, bringing an image of Samos’s Runic Transceiver Array to the front.

  From above, the RTA was a large black stone dome. The satellite feeding them the image didn’t have enough resolution to show the runes visible from the outside, and most of the runes were inside the obsidian hemisphere, in any case.

  It took a few seconds for Roslyn to see what the NCO and the computer had picked up, but at the point that the dome split in two, no one could miss it. A fault line had apparently run directly underneath the RTA but been quiet enough that no one had even considered it.

  The RTA was built into a plateau just west of the city of New Athens, and as Roslyn watched in horror, half of the plateau slipped, falling away from the other half and taking a third of the construct that gave Nia Kriti interstellar communications with it—as it fell on New Athens’s suburbs.

  10

  “All ships in orbit will deploy their shuttles to assist in the rescue efforts immediately,” Admiral Palmeiro sa
id grimly on the hologram. The same message playing on Stand in Righteousness’s bridge hologram tank was playing on every screen and receiver in the fleet.

  “The Ninth and Eleventh will deploy their small craft as soon as we arrive.”

  The screens on Roslyn’s console told her that the incoming ships were no longer lazily traveling in-system at five gravities. Every ship in Palmeiro’s force was now accelerating at fifteen gravities, an emergency maximum rarely deployed outside of battles.

  Or, Roslyn supposed, massive crises.

  “All leaves and furloughs are canceled,” Palmeiro continued. “Personnel who are not currently aboard their ships are to report to the nearest police station to coordinate with local search and rescue. We will be collating lists of missing Navy personnel as rapidly as possible.

  “I have already informed the government of Samos that the Navy stands by to assist in any way possible. We will shortly be asking for volunteers from all ships to assist in rescue efforts on the ground, but we’ll start with the people already down there.”

  The graying Admiral shook his head.

  “New Athens’s situation is dire. We will do everything in our power to prevent it getting worse. The Navy protects, people.”

  The recording ended and Roslyn shivered.

  No one was sure how bad it was yet. Half of the downtown core was in ruins, and the falling plateau with its interstellar transmitter had covered thousands of homes in debris.

  They knew it was bad, but from what Roslyn was hearing from the surface, the locals were expecting to discover that it was much, much worse.

  “Sir, permission to volunteer for the surface parties,” Roslyn said to Katz. “A Mage can be of major…”

  The tactical officer was already shaking her head sadly.

  “Ensign, there are only two Mages aboard Stand in Righteousness right now,” she pointed out gently. “Mage-Captain Martell is on the surface…hell, she was in downtown New Athens, so we don’t even know if she’s still alive.