UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  The system might be about to fall to the Republic, but that still wasn’t enough to justify firing a cruiser’s antimatter engines that close to an inhabited planet.

  Roslyn was probably one of the few people in the star system with the time and sensors to know what was going on. She had a timer running on one side of her screen, showing the countdown to the estimated range of the missiles carried by the Republic gunships.

  Her current focus was on the Republic warships, hitting them with every active sensor the destroyer commanded. There was no subtlety to what she was doing, but there wasn’t much to be subtle about.

  Stand was running. Their job was to warn the Protectorate about what had happened, and she was going to learn as much about their new enemy as she could.

  “They must have come in on a direct line behind Admiral Palmeiro’s fleet,” Katz said over the link from secondary control. “That way, we thought their jump flare was backscatter to Palmeiro’s.” The XO shook her head on the screen.

  There was only one other person in secondary control with her. Stand’s bridge was her simulacrum chamber. If something happened to that room, the destroyer wasn’t leaving. All Katz would be able to do at that point is fight—and probably surrender.

  “That’s impossible,” Herbert replied. “They’d have needed live data on Palmeiro’s fleet and a complete itinerary. That would need them to have…I don’t know, someone aboard his ships who could tell them in real time what he was doing.”

  Which was impossible. And yet…

  “And yet they did it,” Roslyn whispered and a sudden horrifying thought hit her. “Sirs…could they have triggered the fault? With…say, nuclear bombs?”

  “It’s theoretically possible,” Katz said after several seconds of silence. “Why?”

  “I’d forgot, with everything that happened, but I picked up some odd rad pulses just before the quake.”

  “Sweet God,” Herbert said in shock. “All of this was planned. They wrecked a city to take out the RTA and weaken the fleet.”

  “I’m not even sure weakening the fleet was required,” Roslyn admitted. “I’m forwarding you both everything I have on their task group.”

  She tapped a command, looking over the data herself.

  “The central ship is the size of our battleships,” she told them. “At least fifty million tons, possibly sixty. She’s got two main hulls on either side of what I’m guessing is her recovery-and-launch deck, and they’re big enough that’s she’s probably got rotational gravity decks inside her armor.”

  Roslyn shook her head.

  “She’s almost certainly primarily a carrier, but I wouldn’t want to tangle with her with less than a battleship of our own. Her escorts are almost as bad. Two are half again the size of our cruisers, fifteen million tons.”

  “Big enough for internal centrifuge decks, like the carrier,” Katz noted. “The other two don’t look smaller.”

  “No. Forty million tons apiece, maybe bigger again,” Roslyn told them. “Like the smaller ships, I’d say they’re direct combatants. Battleships.”

  Assuming the ships were a ton-for-ton match for the Martian Navy, at least outside of amplifier range, Admiral Castello’s fleet was outmassed and outgunned—and undermanned and outmaneuvered.

  Roslyn was grimly certain she was going to have to watch her boyfriend die.

  Only half of the destroyers had their engines online by the time the gunships opened fire. Only two of the cruisers had managed it, and Dance of Honorable Battle was still struggling up from low orbit.

  “Ten thousand gravities,” Herbert noted. “Didn’t notice that before; that’s quite the upgrade. Last data we have on their Excalibur missiles was eighty-five hundred, but they’d pushed the flight time out to match our Phoenix VIII in range.”

  “Assuming this is their max range, they’d have a range of about eight million from rest,” Roslyn replied. “I doubt that assumption is valid.”

  “No.” Herbert shook his head. “How many are targeted on us?”

  “None,” Roslyn admitted. “It looks like they’re sending everything at the cruisers.”

  Silence filled Stand’s bridge.

  “Any chance they’ll survive?” the Mage-Commander asked.

  “I have no idea, sir,” Roslyn said. “That’s two hundred and fifty missiles per cruiser. They could handle that in three or four salvos, but just one…”

  A second salvo blasted clear of the gunships as she spoke. How many missiles did those little ships carry? They were only about fifty thousand tons apiece, smaller than any Legatan gunships they had in the warbook.

  The computer was assessing them as basically the core hull of a Crucifix-class gunship without the living pods. Their crews almost certainly lived aboard the carrier instead of their gunships, and they probably had less fuel aboard, too.

  “And the battleships and cruisers are coming in fast,” Herbert concluded. “Watch for any missiles coming our way.”

  “Yes, sir.” Roslyn paused. She felt very young and very small right now. “Couldn’t we…jump away now?”

  Their presence wouldn’t change what was about to happen. She hated herself for it, but she didn’t want to watch it.

  “We could,” the Mage-Commander said, very gently. “And I understand why you want to, Ensign. We just don’t have a choice. Someone needs to see what happens. We need to know how this ends.”

  Roslyn nodded and turned back to her console. She understood. She didn’t want to understand, but she did.

  The first salvo fell on the fleet like the hammer of an enraged god. The cruisers might not have had engines yet, but they’d brought most of their defenses online and the destroyers were trying to cover them.

  The inability of most of the cruisers to dodge was their doom. Even wrecked missiles left trails of vapor and half-annihilated antimatter, and even as the defenders shattered the vast majority of the incoming fire, that debris collided with its targets at over fifteen percent of the speed of light.

  Mage-Admiral Castello presumably died with her flagship. Dance of Honorable Battle survived, the oldest of the squadron’s cruisers shielded from the worst of the debris by the atmosphere. The cruiser Rise of Dancing Manticores took a beating but continued to maneuver.

  “Rise of Dancing Manticores has taken over the tactical network,” Roslyn reported, then swallowed. “They’re sending us a full feed.”

  Manticores’ Captain clearly understood what Stand in Righteousness was doing. She was sending them every piece of data she could.

  It wasn’t for very long. The second salvo crashed home on a mere two cruisers, and it didn’t matter that most of the destroyers were maneuvering now.

  Roslyn closed her eyes as the download from Rise of Dancing Manticores cut off—and both cruisers vanished from her screens.

  The gunships didn’t seem to have any more missiles now, but the speed at which they were closing with the remaining destroyers suggested they still had weapons to play with. This time, however, the Martian ships actually had a chance to engage.

  Missiles flashed out from the eight surviving destroyers and the battered remnants of two squadrons formed up to try and push through the gunships to make space flat enough to jump from.

  Eight destroyers, unfortunately, didn’t fire enough missiles to get through even half-effective defenses on two hundred and fifty platforms, and the gunships swept into battle-laser range.

  The destroyers carried over a hundred and sixty lasers and filled deep space with coherent light. The gunships carried over seven hundred individually weaker weapons.

  It was over as soon as light could travel between the two fleets. For the first time since they’d arrived, the Republic paid for their victory, but the destroyers had focused their fire to guarantee kills. Two dozen gunships disappeared, but the remnants of the defenders of the Nia Kriti Fleet Base went with them.

  “I’m…” Roslyn paused, swallowing down a sick taste in her mouth as she looked helpl
essly over at Mage-Commander Herbert. “I’m picking up what the warbook is calling Legatus Self-Defense Force Space Assault transports, battalion-sized.”

  “Why would the Republic build something new when the LSDF had a tried-and-tested design?” Herbert asked rhetorically. “The base will surrender. That’s policy. The Protectorate doesn’t want a scorched-earth war, so we won’t blow a space station with fifteen thousand people aboard.”

  Roslyn winced at the thought. It hadn’t even occurred to her—even if she had just watched over forty thousand men and women wearing the same uniform she did die.

  “We’re done here, Ensign,” the Mage-Commander continued. “I’m guessing the Republic is starting to pay attention to us now?”

  “One of the cruisers is changing their vector,” she confirmed. “They won’t get to us anytime soon, but if we don’t jump, they’ll cut us off eventually.”

  Herbert nodded and laid his hands on the simulacrum.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  12

  “That’s it, my lord,” Romanov reported. “The last shuttles have off-loaded their cargo and are heading back to the convoy.”

  Damien nodded silently, his hands resting on his lap as he studied the image displayed on his office’s immense window. Persephone head-butted his leg for attention and he sighed, then reached down to pat the cat’s head.

  “As soon as the shuttles are aboard, we are getting out of here,” he said quietly. “Make sure Mage-Captain Jakab and the freighter captains are advised.”

  “That’s been the plan for two days, my lord,” his bodyguard pointed out. “Everyone knows.”

  Damien chuckled bitterly, looking at the icons of fifty Republican gunships orbiting on the opposite side of the planet from his fleet.

  “Has Wang moved at all?” he asked.

  “Not from what anyone is telling me. His ships are still sitting at Baghdad. He’ll get the update that we’re nearly done soon enough.”

  “And I’m sure we’ll hear from him then,” Damien agreed. Persephone shoved her head more firmly into his hand, which unfortunately did not work with his injury. Pain went spiking all up his arm and shoulder, and he pulled himself back up to sitting with a hiss.

  “My lord?”

  “Just…my hands.” The kitten mewed pitifully and butted his leg in what he thought might have been an apology. Damien sighed and gestured gently with the hand that wasn’t currently hurting. Magic flared through him and the kitten was on his lap.

  She looked surprised for a moment, then curled up and started purring.

  “Mage-Captain Jakab doesn’t need me to remind him of the plan, you’re right,” Damien conceded. “I want to know the instant any of the Republican ships so much as twitch.”

  Romanov didn’t even get a chance to respond before a chime announced an incoming message from the bridge. Damien gestured his bodyguard to a seat and tried to tap the Accept command.

  Even with his system adapted for his current needs, though, he didn’t manage it without overstretching his scarred forearms. His whimper of pain was met with soft paws poking at his arm and a purring head shoved gently into his stomach.

  “Persephone says, ‘Use the voice command,’ my lord,” his bodyguard said in a perfectly professional tone.

  Damien chuckled and shook his head at both his subordinate and his cat.

  “System, accept incoming call,” he ordered aloud.

  Mage-Captain Jakab appeared in front of him, the video feed appearing next to the tactical plot on the screens laid onto the observation deck window.

  “My lord, we have an incoming transmission from Admiral Wang,” he reported. “I’d guess that his people advised him we were nearly done.”

  “Of course they did,” Damien acknowledged. “Send it to my screen, Mage-Captain. Make sure you’re in the loop. No point in my summarizing his posturing for you, after all.”

  His window dissolved into the image of the heavyset Republican Admiral. Wang was glaring at the camera and there was a new, determined set to his jaw.

  “My people inform me that by the time you receive this message, you will have completed your off-loading. Your only excuse for being in this system is done, Montgomery. If you have not left the system by midnight tonight, Olympus Mons Time, I will engage and destroy your ship.

  “This is no longer discretionary. You will leave or you will be destroyed.”

  He shook his head.

  “There is nothing more to say, Montgomery.”

  The message cut and Jakab’s image reappeared.

  “That was…brusque,” the Mage-Captain noted.

  “That was what I was expecting,” Damien replied. “Though that was shorter than I was expecting.” He shook his head lightly, studying the screen showing him the positions of the ships in the system.

  “What I find fascinating, though, was his descriptor of his plan,” the Hand continued. “‘This is no longer discretionary.’ Which sounds, to me, like it’s no longer at his discretion.”

  “Even the Governor said she can’t override him,” Romanov said. “So, who in this system is giving him orders?”

  “No one,” Damien agreed. “And that’s the interesting part, isn’t it? We’ve had evidence before that Legatus has some kind of interstellar communications. Our friend Wang should have been more careful with his words.

  “For now, however, that’s merely a curiosity. What is truly concerning is the overall hostility of Admiral Wang’s force, not to mention its firepower. We’ll head to rendezvous with Glory in Honest Purpose, but from there, we’ll leave the convoy with Glory and make our own way.”

  “Where to, my lord?” Jakab asked.

  “The convoy is supposed to return to Tau Ceti,” Damien replied. “There’s an RTA there and I could report it, but only at the cost of several days’ travel time. We spent enough time here. What’s the closest array?”

  “Ardennes,” Jakab replied. “I’m sure we’ll be welcome there. Governor Riordan and Minister Amiri will be pleased to see you.”

  Damien chuckled. Julia had been his bodyguard before Romanov, but her whirlwind romance with the now-Governor of Ardennes had eventually taken her to different duties. She was her husband’s Minister of Defense, responsible for rebuilding the Ardennes System Defense Force.

  Of course, the reason the ASDF had needed rebuilding was that an RMN force operating under Damien Montgomery’s orders had blown the entire fleet to pieces while removing the previous Governor.

  There’d been reasons—good ones; the Protectorate couldn’t stand by and allow massacres by governments, after all—but it was an open question how welcome Damien would actually be in Ardennes.

  “And others won’t be,” he concluded. “Nonetheless, it’s the closest RTA. We can be there in two days. Tau Ceti is six.”

  “We’ll get you there, my lord,” Jakab promised. “This whole situation makes my skin crawl.”

  “You too, huh?” Damien murmured. “Yeah. Something doesn’t sit right. There’s no way Wang would have been this aggressive without backing from the Lord Protector.”

  “That could mean war,” his ship’s Captain noted.

  “We’ve been expecting it since they responded to our charges of treason with secession,” the Hand said. “More time would be better, but this has been coming since the beginning.

  “The Lord Protector needs something to justify the existence of his Republic. Fighting the Protectorate is the only idea on the field that I’m aware of.”

  The last of the shuttles was tucking themselves into their motherships’ docking bays when a new communication request came in on the encrypted com channel the Governor had used before. This time, Damien’s people connected Governor Motta to him instantly.

  Once again, she was in the quiet office that was probably her working space. Motta looked tired, leaning on her desk with both hands as she gazed levelly at the camera.

  “Lord Montgomery,” she greeted him. “On your way, I p
resume?”

  “Within the next ten minutes or so,” he confirmed. “Admiral Wang has made it clear that our limited welcome has expired.”

  “Admiral Wang is under very different pressures than I am,” she said. “We ran the numbers, Montgomery. Almost two tons of food per person per standard year. You’ve bought us over a year of breathing room… I… There are no words, Lord Montgomery. Your scientists didn’t manage to do much, but they gave us some key places to start—and you made sure my people will survive until we can get it fixed.”

  “I intended to do more, but I can’t leave Dr. Aputsiaq’s team behind in what is potentially hostile territory,” Damien admitted.

  “It’s not potential,” she said quietly. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t imagine it’s a surprise: the Republic Assembly has given the Lord Protector the authority to go to war against the Protectorate. I don’t know when he’ll pull the trigger, but…it’s coming.”

  “We could hope,” he replied, his tone equally soft. “We don’t want a war with the Republic.”

  “I figured that when you showed up with enough food to save my planet from famine.” She shook her head. “I have no authority to oppose the Republic, Lord Montgomery. Opinion polls show a sixty percent majority of my people are pleased to be part of it, though it’s a much smaller component that’s really happy about secession.”

  “It’s done, anyway,” Damien said. “We have to live with it. I don’t want a war, Governor, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that means the Protectorate won’t fight one.”

  “I know. I’m going to keep my eyes and ears open,” Motta told him. “I know which side I’m on, regardless of what I may think of some of the Republic’s plans, but you’ve handed us a miracle. If I can convince some folks to consider peace who might not have otherwise, well, I’ll talk their damn ears off.”

  “I appreciate it,” he replied. “You have a job to do, Governor Motta: take care of your people. That’s what they elected you for, and that’s all I need you to do, too.”