UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Mage-Commander Herbert sent the rest of the Jump Mages on shore leave, which means that you and the XO are the only Mages aboard this destroyer, and regs forbid us to have less than two Mages aboard.”

  “Which means you and I are stuck, Ensign,” a familiarly accented voice said calmly.

  Roslyn turned to see Mage-Commander Philip Herbert enter the bridge. Stand in Righteousness’s executive officer was an Earth native with an English accent recognizable even to someone who’d never visited the homeworld. He was portly and balding, with a fringe of shockingly white hair around his head.

  If the Ensign saw tears in the XO’s eyes, she’d never admit it to anyone.

  “Unfortunately, Commander Katz, the same goes for you,” he continued. “You and I are the only senior officers left aboard. Both Mage-Captain Martell and Commander Farrier are on the surface, and I can’t help but feel our chief engineer, especially, is going to find her hands very full.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “So, we’ll keep the lights on up here and make sure that if there’s anything we can do, it is done. But none of the three of us get to go down there and help with our own hands.”

  Returning to her quarters at the end of her shift, Roslyn found her fellow Ensign, roommate and lover packing. Kor was tossing uniforms into a duffle as quickly as he could, though he stopped when she came in to give her a tight embrace.

  “You’re going down to New Athens,” she said. It wasn’t really a question. She would be going down to New Athens if she could.

  “Not exactly,” he admitted, not letting her go. “Dance of Honorable Battle is dropping into a low orbit and being used as a shuttle tender. They want everyone who knows which way a shuttle engine is supposed to point aboard her to help turn the birds around as fast as we can.”

  Dance of Honorable Battle was probably the oldest warship in the system, but she was still a cruiser. Kor would be safer there than in the disaster zone that had been a city.

  “They won’t let me go anywhere,” she told her lover. “Stand needs two Mages aboard, even if we don’t have enough crew to fight her.”

  “Regs are regs for a reason, usually,” he replied. “I can go, so…”

  “So you have to,” Roslyn agreed. She wasn’t sure when she’d picked that up. It was something the Academy tried to hammer into their students—but she was inclined to blame Montgomery for her own sense of duty.

  “Yeah. You get it, right?”

  She kissed him.

  “I get it. Need help packing?”

  “I’m out of time,” he admitted, glancing at his wrist-comp. “This will have to do.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt!”

  Kor laughed and kissed her back fiercely. When they came up for air, he zipped up his duffle and winked at her.

  “Totally worth it!”

  By the time Roslyn was back on duty, barely eight hours later, the role of the crews remaining aboard the ships was clear. Roslyn manned the sensor station, providing air traffic control for a specific volume of the space above New Athens.

  Between civilians, police, rescue services and the Navy, there were over two thousand spacecraft and aircraft swarming the air above the city. Hospitals in New Athens couldn’t handle the need, so many of those craft were transporting the injured who could be moved to other cities or into orbit.

  Dance of Honorable Battle was serving as a shuttle tender, but she was hardly the only warship turning out her decks for a purpose other than her designed combat role. Two more of Admiral Castello’s cruisers hung in geostationary orbit above Dance, with most of the squadron’s medical personnel aboard as they acted as impromptu hospital ships.

  New Athens was a city of four million people. Most of them were alive and uninjured, but the injured were enough to require every scrap of help they could get.

  Marines and Navy MPs were on the ground in their thousands, helping the police evacuate the damaged sections and helping get food and medical supplies where they were needed.

  It was something entirely outside of Roslyn’s experience, and she was frankly stunned at the speed with which the whole reaction had come together. Her classes had spoken again and again about the need for contingency planning and that the Navy needed to be ready for any scenario. It seemed Mage-Admiral Castello had taken that message to heart.

  They might not have planned for this crisis, but there’d been a plan in place to provide major humanitarian assistance to the surface.

  “Damn.”

  The curse word was mild enough, and Commander Herbert’s soft English accent somehow softened it more. There shouldn’t have been any swearing on the bridge of a Martian destroyer, however, and Roslyn turned to look at the XO.

  “The Captain didn’t make it,” Herbert announced very steadily. “They just confirmed the identity of the body—she’d been staying downtown but was visiting somewhere in the outer suburbs. They only just got to sweeping that area for survivors.”

  Stand in Righteousness’s bridge was very quiet in response. Even Roslyn was in shock. She’d known Mage-Captain Martell had been on the surface, but she hadn’t truly expected to learn that the older woman had died.

  It brought the loss and devastation on the surface home with painful certainty. The current best guess was that over forty thousand people had died in the earthquake. New Athens had technically been on a fault, but none of the studies had suggested a quake of this magnitude was remotely likely.

  “Still, people, Salut would have been rather frustrated at us if we sat around and wept for her,” Commander Herbert said after several seconds of silence. “Let’s keep on our toes. We’re the eyes in the sky for thousands of pilots trying to rescue people. We can’t let them down.”

  Six hours of air traffic control was enough to fry anyone’s brain. With over half of Stand in Righteousness’s crew elsewhere, there was no one to take over from Roslyn.

  So, she kept going. The only real sound on the bridge was people talking into headsets, guiding the tiny percentage of the shuttlecraft currently having computer troubles. Her zone was currently clear and she took a moment to lean back in her seat and rub her eyes.

  She was feeding sensor data to most of the other consoles on the bridge, allowing the destroyer to act as an ATC for about a hundred small craft. The rest of the ships were doing the same, and their attention was definitely focused on the planet below.

  Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s ships would be in orbit in under an hour, doubling the number of military spacecraft and ships available. That would hopefully spread the workload out a bit further.

  Roslyn checked over her long-range scanners to double-check the incoming ships’ locations. “Best practices” said that she should be checking them anyway, and she wanted to make sure she built good habits.

  She was very aware just how larval her current stage of officerhood was, and she was determined to be a good officer by building good habits.

  Running the scanners left her scratching her head. Something wasn’t right. She could see Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s squadrons exactly where they were supposed to be, but there was another group of icons beyond them.

  She queried the squadron tactical network, to see if anyone else had noticed them.

  The result gave Roslyn a minor flush of embarrassment. They’d been flagged over an hour earlier by the sensor crew aboard Mage-Admiral Castello’s flagship, Thunderous Roar of Justice. Flagged, IDed and tagged as helpful.

  Habit opened the full file, however, and a strange chill ran down her spine.

  Thunderous Roar’s sensor crew had picked up the contacts, yes. They’d done enough analysis to confirm they were too small and too numerous to be jump-ships…and that was it. The contacts had then been flagged as friendlies.

  Roslyn could see the logic. They had to be sublight ships; they were running fusion drives, so they were almost certainly civilian…but she came back to the whole “best practices.” Doctrine and regs said that a contact shouldn’t be
flagged as friendly without a solid ID.

  As Kor had said when she’d complained about being stuck aboard Stand, regs were regs for a reason.

  Stand in Righteousness could spare a radar emitter for a few minutes to salve her itchy nerves, she judged. With one eye still on her ATC duties, she retasked one of the emitters on the opposite side of the ship from the planet and targeted it at the incoming contacts.

  They were still a good distance out, and it took most of a minute for the data to come back. She’d used a relatively weak pulse, but it was enough to get her some data from all of the ships.

  They were identical. All of them. That didn’t make any sense, not for civilians. If the cluster was civilian ships coming in to lend a hand—entirely likely and clearly what Thunderous Roar’s crew had assumed—there’d be almost as many different designs as there were ships.

  Not hundreds of identical ships. Even as she was staring at that, however, she realized that she had managed to build some of the habits she was working—she’d automatically fed the data into the warbook and it happily popped back a response.

  One that made no sense.

  11

  “Sir, I think I need you to take a look at this,” Roslyn said loudly as she stared at the impossible data. “The warbook is giving me a seventy percent probability that I’m looking at a flight group of Legatan gunships.”

  Herbert nearly teleported to her station.

  “That’s impossible,” he noted slowly. “Show me.”

  She gestured to the screen and he looked it over. His florid face paled as he did.

  “Two hundred and fifty identical ships,” he whispered. “Dear gods, where did they come from?”

  “I have to be misreading something,” Roslyn told him. “I’ve fed something—”

  “No, Ensign. You are reading it entirely correctly,” he stated flatly. “Stay here.”

  She stared after Mage-Commander Philip Herbert as he calmly and steadily walked over to the Captain’s seat and flipped up a covering panel to hit a button.

  A flashing alert blared up and a recorded voice started speaking over the PA system.

  “Battle stations. Battle stations. All hands to battle stations.”

  Herbert calmly took his seat and tapped a command.

  “All ships, all ships. Bandits inbound, I repeat, Bandits inbound. Republic warships are in-system and making an assault approach on Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s fleet.

  “I repeat, Bandits inbound. Republic warships are in-system and making an assault approach on Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s fleet.”

  Stand in Righteousness’s acting captain rotated his chair, studying his skeleton bridge crew.

  “Get us underway,” he ordered. “Commander Katz will be on the bridge in a few minutes. Ensign Chambers, you’re on tactical until she gets here. Lieutenant Pepper, vector us away from the gunships.”

  Confusion was reigning across the system, and Roslyn felt panic try to seize her throat. There were three squadrons of warships in orbit, and none of them were prepared for battle. All of them were under-crewed, their small craft and much of their staff helping in the disaster relief.

  “Commander Herbert, what the hell is going on?”

  Roslyn recognized Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s voice from the all-ships broadcast.

  “What kind of joke is this?” the Mage-Admiral continued. “There’s no Republic ships in this system. The only craft on our radar are local sublight ships!”

  “They’re not local, sir. They’re gunships,” Herbert said flatly. “I don’t know how, I don’t know why. But check your scans, sir. Look at the damn data before—”

  “Missile launch,” Roslyn cut him off, her report half-instinctual as her screen lit up with threat icons. “We can’t resolve individual targets at this range.” She swallowed. “Estimate forty seconds to impact.”

  She could barely make out the gunships now behind a swarm of at least a thousand missiles. Forty seconds wasn’t enough time to maneuver, to bring ships to readiness. All that Admiral Palmeiro’s people had to protect them was the automated defense sequence on the RFLAMs.

  “I see,” Palmeiro said quietly. He was clearly looking at much the same data as Roslyn and Herbert, and he faced the camera levelly. “By the time this message arrives, I will be dead.

  “You will take your ship and whatever Mages you have aboard and you will leave the Nia Kriti System immediately. You will proceed to the Hoisin System and inform the rest of the Navy of events here.”

  And it finally sank in for Roslyn. The RTA had been destroyed in the earthquake. There was no way for anyone to tell the Protectorate what was happening there. An entire Protectorate fleet was about to be obliterated and the Mage-King wouldn’t even know.

  Unless they ran.

  “These orders are non-discretionary, Mage-Commander. You will get underway immediately. Godspeed and good lu—”

  Roslyn didn’t even need to check her screens to know why the message had cut off. Mage-Admiral Palmeiro had run out of time.

  The gunships were impossible. They were sublight ships, and even if the Republic had managed to refit them with jump matrices, where had they found two hundred and fifty Mages to jump them?

  Even as she was questioning that the answer appeared as five massive ships lit off fusion engines in the outer system.

  “Carriers,” she half-whispered. “They’ve built themselves a fleet of carriers.”

  Stand in Righteousness was the only ship already at battle stations, and Roslyn was grimly aware of how understrength they were. Panic coiled through her and it took every scrap of self-control she’d learned in jail and the Academy alike to keep her breathing under control.

  “Commander Katz has gone to the secondary bridge,” Herbert told her. “She’s taking up the XO’s seat. You’re acting tactical officer, Ensign. What have you got for me?”

  Roslyn swallowed hard. She wasn’t ready for this…but she was the one on the spot.

  “Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s force is gone,” she told him, her voice only breaking a little. “The gunship swarm is still heading our way and continuing to accelerate. They’ll pass Samos traveling just over one percent of lightspeed. Presumably, they still have missiles and most of our ships won’t be mobile yet.”

  “And they’re undermanned and unready,” her new Captain said quietly. As he spoke, the destroyer’s engines finally flared to life beneath them. “Our orders are non-discretionary, people, and Palmeiro had the authority to issue them.

  “We run.”

  Only silence answered him. Even Roslyn couldn’t muster up anything to say. It was wrong. It had to be the wrong call…but the incoming gunships were only ten minutes at most from missile range, and the fleet wasn’t going to be ready.

  “Chambers, make certain you have operational RFLAM turrets and missile launchers,” Herbert ordered. “If you need people to man the mounts, let me know ASAP. The only thing with higher priority than our missile defenses is our engines. If we don’t make it out of here, no one is going to know what happened until it’s too late.”

  “It’s war,” Roslyn breathed. “They’ve declared war.”

  “They’ve started one, that’s for sure,” the Mage-Commander agreed. “Somehow, I doubt they’ve been so polite as to tell anyone.” He shook his head. “Once we have guns, focus on the sensors. Get me everything you can on those gunships and the warships, Ensign. Every scrap of data we have will be worth this ship’s weight in gold.”

  Roslyn nodded and got to work. Her list of tasks was short, but none of it was simple. None of her weapon mounts or turrets had their full crews, but even she knew the full crews weren’t actually necessary.

  How many people her guns actually needed, though… There was an easy way to answer that question. She’d only physically met Chief Petty Officer Chenda Chey, the senior noncom for Stand in Righteousness’s tactical team, once, but she knew the woman’s duty station was Missile One.

  “Chief Chey, are yo
u there?” she asked, pulling on a headset and opening a channel to the weapon mount.

  “I’m here. You’re left in charge, Ensign?” Chey asked bluntly.

  “Herbert’s in command and Katz is running secondary control,” Roslyn reeled off. “Chief, we’re undermanned and our missile defenses are the most important thing we need running. What’s the minimum we can run the RFLAMs and launchers with?”

  “Strip the battle lasers and we’ve got sixty-one of our people aboard,” Chey told her. “We need at least three people per missile launcher and one per RFLAM.”

  Twenty-four missile launchers and thirty-six RFLAM turrets. A hundred and eight people—and they had sixty trained weapons crew.

  “Can you sort out who we’ve got and get them in motion?” Roslyn asked.

  The Chief chuckled.

  “That’s supposed to be an order, sir,” she pointed out. “I’ll make it happen. If you can get me another forty-odd hands, though…”

  “I’ll talk to the Commander,” the Ensign promised, flushing at the Chief’s correction. “Everyone we get, I’ll send to you.”

  “I’ll get them where they need to go, Ensign. See you on the other side.”

  Roslyn cut the channel, swallowed down the acid taste of fear in her mouth again, and turned to talk to Mage-Commander Herbert.

  At full crew, Stand in Righteousness had just under six hundred spacers and Marines. As she fled Samos orbit, she had just over two hundred souls aboard.

  By the time they had minimum crew everywhere they needed it, there were only three people left on the bridge itself. One Chief was flying the ship, Mage-Commander Herbert was trying to coordinate everything, and one underqualified Ensign was running the tactical console.

  Kor was aboard Dance of Honorable Battle, and the swarm of engineers aboard the old cruiser had made her the first ship actively online. Her orbit was so low, however, that it would take her the entire time before the gunships reached the planet just to safely get out of the planet’s gravity well.