UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Want? Sure. Need? No. I need you on Missile One, making sure the gunnery crews know everything is still running smoothly. I need you on a closed channel with me if you think I’m screwing up—but I also need you to follow orders and keep the department ticking until we get things back under control.”

  The Chief grinned.

  “That, Mage-Lieutenant Chambers, is my job description,” she pointed out. “We’ll make this work, I think.”

  “We have to,” Roslyn admitted. “If we don’t make it to an RTA, Chief, the Protectorate may not know we’re at war until it’s far too late.”

  Chey’s grin faded.

  “Hoisin, then?”

  “Exactly,” Roslyn agreed. “We’re the harbinger, Chief. But if we don’t carry our message, the Protectorate might fall. And we both swore an oath about that, didn’t we?”

  15

  Stand in Righteousness jumped into the Hoisin System and Mage-Commander Herbert sagged against the simulacrum. Roslyn watched in concern as he straightened and extracted a pair of small blue pills from a package and swallowed them.

  “If we have to jump, it’s on you,” Herbert told Roslyn. “But these will let me stay awake.” He shook his head. “After Nia Kriti, I think we’re allowed some paranoia.”

  They’d waited long enough after the last jump to make sure that Roslyn was able to get them out. She wasn’t sure that was a necessary step—Hoisin had both a Navy refueling base and an RTA. Without some kind of trick like they’d launched at Nia Kriti, it should be safe from the Republic.

  “Transmitting IFF to local control and requesting orbit clearance,” Lieutenant Armbruster reported. The broad-shouldered blond officer glanced back at Roslyn and Herbert. “I’m seeing proper protocols on the radio waves.”

  “Chambers?” Herbert asked.

  “Usual traffic,” she said as she went over the scanners. “I’ve got in-system clippers. The main orbital is running traffic control, as Lieutenant Armbruster says. No jump ships on the scanners.”

  Roslyn checked their position versus the orbits.

  “The Navy refueling station is on the other side of the star,” she continued. “We’ll have to relay our report to them via the satellite network.”

  “The priority is getting to the RTA on New Bangkok,” Herbert replied. “Armbruster, get our report onto the satellite network and make sure that the locals know we need RTA access immediately, emergency priority.”

  “Should we relay our report through the Transceiver Mages?” Armbruster asked.

  Herbert hadn’t quite mastered the impassive face a Captain needed. Roslyn recognized his moment of hesitation, possibly aggravated by the amphetamines keeping him awake, before he spoke.

  “No,” he finally ordered. “And encrypt the report sent into the satellite network under Orange Cream protocols.”

  “Yes, sir.” Armbruster looked confused but he didn’t argue.

  “Orange Cream” was the highest level of encryption protocol Stand’s crew had access to. They didn’t even carry the decryption protocols for it; those were only available to flag officers and base commanders.

  The station commander there in Hoisin would be able to decrypt their report. Their subordinates, however, wouldn’t be—and if, by some currently unknown disaster, the Republic now held the Hoisin Navy Station, they definitely wouldn’t be able to.

  Roslyn continued to go through her scan data. Something wasn’t adding up.

  “Commander,” she said slowly. “Do you know how many ships were assigned here?”

  The pills were not doing enough to keep Herbert fully functional. It took him at least ten seconds to even process her question.

  “No,” he admitted. “Should be in our records, though. Might be out of date, but we should keep the number constant.”

  Roslyn nodded, hiding her concern for the Acting Captain’s health as she dug into the records. She wasn’t as experienced with the broad Navy files as she probably should have been, but she managed to find the listing for the Hoisin Navy Station eventually.

  Four destroyers. Not a world-shattering number by any stretch of the imagination, but enough hulls that there should have been a ship in orbit of New Bangkok.

  Wait.

  There was an addendum, a convenient link to the Navy’s files on the Hoisin System Security Flotilla. She looked at that listing for thirty seconds, processing the details listed for the sixteen ships the Hoisin System had purchased to protect themselves.

  “Sir,” she said slowly. “There should be two destroyers and four non-jump-capable guardships in orbit of New Bangkok, even ignoring the Navy flotilla. I don’t see them or the ten corvettes that should be backing them up.”

  The stats said the guardships were Legatan-built, four-megaton ships with rotating habitats hidden “under” their hulls. The destroyers were Tau Cetan–built, proper export ships with rune matrices for jumping and artificial gravity.

  The system was missing eighteen million tons of capital ships.

  Seconds ticked by as Roslyn waited for Herbert to respond. Too many seconds; she turned to look at the Acting Captain and realized he was frozen, staring blankly forward into space.

  “Sir?” she snapped. “Sir?”

  Armbruster caught the tone in her voice and all but ran to the command chair, feeling for a pulse at the Mage-Commander’s neck and then swearing.

  “Chambers, get a medic!” he barked. Feverishly, he began unstrapping the belts holding the Acting Captain into the chair and lowering him to the floor. While the coms officer began CPR, Roslyn hit the ship’s intercom system.

  “Medic to the bridge, medic to the bridge! We have an emergency!”

  Herbert’s face was turning gray, even as Armbruster hammered on his chest. Roslyn grabbed the automatic defibrillator the coms officer hadn’t had time to pick up on his way to the Captain.

  “Damn it, sir, breathe.” Armbruster nodded to her as she dropped the defibrillator next to him, but he was focusing on his CPR.

  The clear tasks complete, Roslyn froze. Their Captain was dying, potentially dead—but the ship was in critical danger. She’d let one odd scan result slip her mind in a crisis, and thousands had died for her mistake.

  It wasn’t going to happen again.

  A ragged breath escaped Herbert’s chest, and Armbruster sighed in relief as he took the chance to grab the automated defibrillator and start slapping its patches on. He continued to administer care, compressing the officer’s chest again as the Mage-Commander didn’t keep breathing.

  Roslyn swallowed and rose. The coms officer was doing everything that could be done for Mage-Commander Herbert. She needed to make sure the rest of the ship survived the trap they’d walked into.

  Commander Katz would be asleep, the acting XO taking every scrap of rest she could get when she was off-duty. There was no time for that, and Roslyn started tapping commands on the Captain’s repeater screens.

  Herbert had been logged in with his codes, and the computer wasn’t smart enough to realize the Acting Captain was on the floor, dying. Roslyn used his overrides to trigger an emergency alert in Commander Katz’s quarters.

  “Commander Katz to the bridge,” she snapped into the microphone. “Mage-Commander Herbert is down, Commander Katz to the bridge.”

  Then she swallowed down her fear and stepped into the Captain’s chair. Herbert had been running navigation himself, and she had control of the ship’s engines. They were accelerating toward New Bangkok at fifteen gravities, a rush to get to the RTA.

  An RTA she had to now assume was either destroyed or in enemy hands.

  A medic rushed onto the bridge and started helping with the Mage-Commander as Roslyn set to work. She wasn’t entirely familiar with the controls for flying a destroyer from a Captain’s repeater screens, but she was qualified to fly one.

  The Navy insisted that if the only officer left aboard a ship was a Jump Mage, that would be enough to get everyone else home. Jump Mages were trained to fl
y everything from shuttles to battleships.

  Stand in Righteousness reacted to her commands with alacrity, the million-ton white pyramid flipping in space to accelerate toward the outer system.

  Sensors told her the worst of it. She was well inside of the unsafe jump zone. Roslyn could jump the ship, but it was risky—mostly due to her inexperience.

  They’d been accelerating in-system for over an hour. It would take them just as long to slow to zero relative to the planet, and they’d be within missile range of the planet orbitals once they had.

  “Stay right there,” Katz barked as she charged onto the bridge. “I assume command, but you’re the Jump Mage, Chambers.”

  Roslyn swallowed. The bridge wasn’t designed for that. The Navy assumed that the person in command was the Mage—but with Mage-Commander Herbert on the floor with a medic kneeling over him, the only available Mage was Roslyn Chambers.

  And she was definitely not qualified to command a warship.

  “He’s gone,” the medic reported grimly several minutes later.

  “What was it?” Katz, now Acting Captain Roslyn supposed, demanded. “Allergic reaction? I thought those pills weren’t supposed to do that.”

  “They don’t,” the medic said flatly. “Overdose. I’d say that was at least the fifth set of pills he’d taken in the last twenty-four hours. He shouldn’t have been given that many, but…” The young woman shrugged. “He was the Captain.”

  “Damn.”

  Katz’s tone was almost broken to Roslyn’s ear, leaving the young officer wondering if there’d been more between the two Commanders than she’d known about—or if the new Acting Captain was staring down the barrel of her responsibilities.

  “We need to get out of this system,” Roslyn said firmly. “Your orders, Captain Katz?”

  A long silence hung over the bridge.

  “You seem to be doing just fine, Lieutenant,” Katz finally replied. “What’s our ETA to safe jump?”

  “Four hours, roughly,” Roslyn confirmed. “A full hour to decelerate to zero, then three to get back to where we started.”

  “Keep us on it,” the new Captain ordered. “I’ll manage tactical and keep an eye on…things.”

  “Sir?” Roslyn asked, then glanced at the repeater screens on her current seat. “Oh.”

  A squadron of ten gunships had lit up their engines in New Bangkok orbit, accelerating out toward Stand in Righteousness.

  Lightspeed delays caught up a few moments later, showing them the other squadrons deployed around the system. Four squadrons, forty of the little ships in total, were now accelerating toward the Martian destroyer.

  “Lieutenant?” Katz said calmly. “You have navigation. Can we get away from them all?”

  Roslyn was already running vectors. It took her longer than a fully-trained navigator, but she could do it.

  “Yes, sir,” she reported. “Vector up seventy-five degrees to the ecliptic and stay at maximum acceleration. We have almost double their engine power. They can’t catch us.”

  “Do it,” Katz ordered. She looked back at Roslyn from the tactical station and shook her head though.

  “My math says at least one of those groups could have caught us on our original course. What are they playing at?”

  “A trap?” Roslyn suggested.

  Katz grimaced.

  “Almost certainly. Are you okay to jump us, Lieutenant?”

  Roslyn hesitated.

  “I could, sir, but it would be hard on me. It’s not going to get easier for at least an hour, though. Your orders?”

  “We have time,” the Commander noted, but she was studying the distances. “I’m firing up an omnidirectional sensor sweep. Let’s see what they think we haven’t noticed.”

  Stand in Righteousness’s radar emitters came to full power, pulsing coherent radiation across the star system. They could see the gunships’ engines clearly on infrared, but a ship without engines was harder to pick up at a distance.

  Radar wouldn’t necessarily work better, but it gave them a bit more of an edge. It would create another signature, however faint, and Stand’s computers were smart. If the sensors had two signatures in the same place from different scans that weren’t enough to flag the detection thresholds on their own, it would still flag the location.

  “And…bingo,” Katz said grimly. “New contact right where we need to fly to get clear of the gunships. Too far away and cold for a hard signature, but I’m guessing that’s not a gunship.”

  “No, sir,” Roslyn confirmed. “It appears the Hoisin System has fallen to the enemy.”

  Silence was the only answer to her words, but Katz nodded slowly.

  “Our ships and the local System Militia both appear to have been destroyed. The RTA is lost…I can’t tell if it’s intact from here, so it’s possible the Navy has been warned.”

  “They had a plan for Nia Kriti,” Roslyn said. “I doubt they didn’t have one for Hoisin, not if they were here at all.”

  “Agreed.” Katz sighed. “We apparently don’t have time, Lieutenant. Jump this ship—then we need to decide where the hell we’re going next.”

  Roslyn took a deep breath and laid her hands on the simulacrum. This would take even more out of her than an ordinary jump, but…it was that or run into the teeth of a Republic warship that almost certainly outgunned them.

  She jumped.

  16

  Six hours later, an exhausted Roslyn joined the tiny handful of remaining officers aboard Stand in Righteousness in the conference room attached to the Captain’s quarters, right next to the bridge.

  There were only four of them left now. Commander Katz, once the tactical officer and now the Acting Captain. Armbruster, once the most junior officer of the communications department, barely senior to Roslyn, who hadn’t even been commissioned yet then.

  Lieutenant Scrivenor, on the other hand, was an older officer, a hard-edged woman promoted from the ranks. She’d been the second-in-command in Engineering and had been left behind when everyone else moved over to Dance of Honorable Battle.

  And then there was Roslyn herself, the youngest person in the room and the only Mage. Her commission as a Lieutenant had been the emergency act of a now-dead man. Without her, the ship wasn’t going anywhere—and she still didn’t feel like she belonged in this meeting.

  “Thanks to Lieutenant Chambers, we escaped the trap that was set for us at Hoisin without further losses,” Katz concluded. “They knew we were coming and where we were coming from. There’s no way that trap was set up that perfectly by accident.”

  “That’s impossible,” Armbruster replied. “Even if they had Mages willing to run the RTAs for them, which I guess they must, given they have jump ships, they wrecked the one in Nia Kriti.”

  “You’re assuming they’re working under the same rules we are,” Scrivenor said in a hoarse half-cough. “Legatus has always put more research into what the rest of the Protectorate thought were dead-end lines of study. They’ve been searching for a technological answer to interstellar coms and travel for generations.”

  “And if they have it…then that would explain a lot,” Katz said grimly. “If they don’t need Mages, that would explain where their fleet came from—and if they have some other form of interstellar coms, then why would they care about wrecking RTAs? It’ll hold us back even if we retake Nia Kriti, but it won’t bother them at all.”

  “So they’d know where we were coming from and could even make a decent guess as to when,” Roslyn whispered. “That means…we can’t trust anywhere to have held. If they’ve launched a coordinated assault across the border…”

  “Then we might have already lost this war,” Armbruster said. “What do we do?”

  Katz tapped a command, bringing up a map of the region.

  “We have to try and report in. These two systems”—she gestured at a pair of stars marked with the icons of Navy refueling stations—“have neither RTAs nor sufficient defenses to have stood off major assaul
ts. They don’t have significant local militias, and neither was home to more than three of our destroyers.

  “That leaves us Santiago or Ardennes,” she stated, highlighting the two stars. “Ardennes is pretty far from the border, but…”

  “Santiago may have an RTA but they don’t have a Navy presence,” Roslyn pointed out as she checked the files on her wrist-comp. “Local militia is understrength…a single Republic warship could have taken the system in an afternoon.”

  “And the Republican Navy seems to have agents on the ground to make sure no one calls for help,” Armbruster noted. “Santiago doesn’t look like a good option, Captain.”

  Katz visibly shivered at the title, studying the map.

  “Eighteen light-years to Ardennes. Can you do it, Mage-Lieutenant?” she asked Roslyn.

  “Stars,” Roslyn breathed, looking at the course. “Five days. Maybe four and a half, but…it’s just me.”

  “We know, Lieutenant,” Katz told her. “It’s more important that we get there than that we get there yesterday. I’m afraid the Republic has planned this for far too long, and so far…” She shook her head. “So far, I can’t help but feel they pulled it off without a warning getting back to Mars.”

  17

  “It’s good to see you, Damien,” Julia Amiri told him. Ardennes’s new First Lady and Minister for Defense was a tall woman with broad shoulders and short-cropped black hair. She’d also once been his bodyguard, serving as a member of the Protectorate Secret Service until Mikael Riordan had stolen her away.

  “And you,” he replied. “I see the political life suits you.”

  Amiri chuckled, gesturing him to a seat at the large stone table in the new Governor’s House. The room and the table were designed for meetings of the Governor’s cabinet or possibly grand affairs with major political figures or visitors from other worlds.

  It rattled with just him, Amiri, her husband and Romanov.