UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  For the first time in its existence, the Royal Martian Navy faced an enemy with superior range. Not necessarily, Damien knew, superior weapons. Just longer-ranged ones.

  They were assuming that the Republic weapons could reach them, of course. The missiles accelerated noticeably slower than the Protectorate’s equivalent weapon, but everyone aboard Duke was assuming they had the extra sixty seconds of endurance that would make up the difference.

  Once the Martian ships flipped, however, the math changed. Not so much for the missile flight time—the fifteen gravities the cruisers and destroyers could accelerate at was a pale shadow of the ten thousand gravities the missiles were pulling—but for when the RMN’s missiles would be in range.

  With the incoming missiles still ninety seconds out, Damien’s force returned fire. The two hundred and thirty-six launchers on his fleet were badly outnumbered by the enemy’s weapons, but they’d known that from the moment the enemy opened fire.

  “They had three salvos in space before we returned fire,” Jakab reported. “They have less confidence in their weapons than I would—against our force, that’s easily a full salvo wasted.”

  “Well, I intend to prove their lack of confidence quite justified,” Damien replied. “I’m linked in to your sensors and preparing my calculations. How do you want to play this, Commodore?”

  The battlecruiser vibrated under their feet as a second salvo launched into space.

  “Hard and fast. Hit them with everything we’ve got, lasers and Mages alike.” The Commodore grimaced. “We have about fifty seconds to take them out and that window is opening…well, now.”

  The Mage at the amplifier stopped talking, Jakab locking his hands on to the simulacrum of his ship with a grim focus. Damien knew how worn-down the other Mage was from jumping less than two hours before.

  This was probably safe. But only probably.

  His own range without the amplifier was more limited, and he kept a careful eye on the scanners as the lasers opened fire as well.

  Three fully-trained Navy Mages were unleashing the full power of their amplifiers, blasting missiles out of space by the dozen. Lasers flared as well, hundreds of beams calmly drawn onto Damien’s holographic display as neat white lines.

  The missiles continued to crash forward through the defenses, and the Hand took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and brought up his power.

  Without an amplifier, few Mages could do more than take down a handful of missiles in their last second or so of flight…but Damien Montgomery was a Rune Wright, a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars with three Runes of Power despite everything that had gone wrong.

  He was running off the ship’s sensors with a series of screens which inevitably made him less accurate than the Mages using the amplifiers. Unlike them, however, he didn’t need to be accurate.

  Balls of electrically charged plasma materialized in deep space, each arcing off “lightning” toward the missiles nearby. He couldn’t produce as many or as powerful of the ball-lightning strikes as he could normally, but he could still scatter them through the densest remaining parts of the salvo.

  Explosions lit up space and the sensors dissolved into static as big, ugly antimatter warheads went off in their dozens—their hundreds.

  “We’re clear,” Ferber reported. “None of them made it through.”

  “Are they continuing to target us exclusively?” Jakab asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Interesting,” the Mage-Commodore murmured. “All right. Drop our acceleration for a half-second, pull us behind everyone else. If they want to ignore the rest of the task group, let’s make them shoot past our friends to hit us.”

  “At least one more of their salvos is going to hit us before our fire hits them,” Ferber said. “We’re dropping behind the rest of the ships, but we’re still going to take a lot of missiles.”

  “Buy us what time you can.” Jakab met Damien’s gaze. “Are you having the same suspicion I am, my lord?”

  “If our mole is aboard Duke of Magnificence, they’re trying to get off of her right now,” Damien said. “Is that the one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fight your ships, Commodore. I’ll deal with our spy.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Damien kept most of his attention on the hologram, watching the next missile salvo plunge into the outer portion of Jakab’s defenses.

  “Romanov.” He called the Marine over. “Keep this off the radio channels, but I want you to take a team of our Secret Service agents and lock down the escape pods. Pull in any Marines from Duke that you trust, but we’re ninety percent sure we’ve got a mole onboard.

  “They’re using the mole’s FTL transmitter as a targeting beacon. It isn’t helping them much, yet, but we need to find the mole and we need to find the transmitter.”

  “My job is to protect you, my lord.”

  “And right now, you can protect me best by making sure we catch that spy,” Damien ordered. “And that they haven’t sabotaged Duke of Magnificence!”

  22

  Damien’s focus was on the incoming missiles. He trusted Jakab and the other ship Captains to do their jobs and put their own missiles where they’d do the most good. He trusted Romanov and Duke’s Marines to handle any attempt by the spy to escape.

  His own contribution was making sure they all survived. For the first time since he’d melted the runes in his hands, he felt powerful again. It was all too easy to compare his skills to the Mage-King’s or even what he’d been two years ago.

  Today, however, he unleashed the miracles of a Rune Wright trapped in a corner, and he knew that few others could match what he was doing. Ball lightning danced across the incoming fire like an angry will-o’-the-wisp, and he could see that his power was turning the tide.

  Enough missiles were making it through the outer layers to the final terminal maneuvers where he could reach them to make his contribution necessary. His power spoke to the universe—and hundreds of missiles died.

  He had enough attention to spare to watch the first of Jakab’s salvos go in. The Republic hadn’t skimped on defenses for their new ships either, but even from the number of launchers, it was clear the rotational gravity habitats inside their hulls cost them mass and volume alike.

  On a ton-for-ton basis, even the Ardennes ships, Tau Ceti–built “export” ships, had more missile launchers and defensive lasers. The Ardennian ships wouldn’t normally carry the Phoenix VIIIs he’d ordered loaded aboard them before they moved out, but the Republican missiles were still longer-ranged.

  Of course, the smallest Republic ship out there had three million tons of mass on Duke of Magnificence and over five million tons on Andes. The tonnage made up plenty of the difference.

  But the Republican battle group didn’t have Mages. Over a thousand missiles had reached the Royal Martian Navy force, and none had struck home. Less than two hundred and fifty missiles replied…but some of them made it through.

  The battleship at the heart of the Republic formation lurched in space. Damien wasn’t sure how many missiles had struck it—at least two, probably more—but there were a thousand tools in the arsenal of a twenty-fifth century-Navy to withstand an antimatter warhead.

  She was hurt, but she was still in the fight. First blood, however, had gone to Damien’s people. His confidence in their ability to at least survive this battle was rising.

  Then he heard the distinct cracking noise of the penetrator carbines carried by his own Secret Service detail. The weapons were designed to punch through exosuit battle armor but still be human-portable. They were expensive, overpowered…and probably shouldn’t have been fired aboard ship.

  But both Damien and Romanov trusted their people’s judgment enough that they’d left the team with the penetrator carbines—and no one else on the ship had the guns.

  If a penetrator carbine was being fired, it was one of Damien’s people shooting.

  Damien had enough time to realize that with Romanov
off hunting spies, he was alone on the flag deck. The Marine had clearly left at least one guard outside the room, but there was no one in there with him.

  They hadn’t considered the possibility that if there was a Republic agent aboard, well, the First Hand of the Mage-King was probably a fantastic opportunity target.

  There was a security lockdown for the flag deck. Damien even knew where it was, but it was under a plastic shield to avoid accidental triggering. There was no way he could remove it with his half-frozen fingers.

  He had to take a moment to recalibrate his power. There was a vast gap between the amount of energy needed to remove a plastic cover and the amount needed to generate balls of plasma seventy thousand kilometers away—and even Damien would be in trouble if he tried to use the latter inside the ship.

  By the time he’d adjusted his mental throttle and torn off the cover on the button, it was too late. The much-flimsier normal doors were ripped apart and a vague figure dove into the room. Only the blur of motion allowed Damien to pick out the stealth-suited spy from the background—and they moved fast.

  Too fast. Somehow, the Republic hadn’t merely infiltrated a spy onto Damien’s own ship. They’d infiltrated an Augment, a cybernetically-modified and heavily-trained Mage-killer.

  Damien threw up a shield of solidified air in front of himself, barely in time to turn aside the first shots from the penetrator carbine the Augment carried. Recognizing the weapon sent a chill down his spine—it wasn’t a Republic weapon and it wasn’t integrated with the suit. The Augment had taken it from one of Damien’s bodyguards.

  The Augment kept moving. He knew that Damien needed to localize him to hit him with magic and that the shield couldn’t be made spherical without cutting off Damien’s air supply.

  Damien threw lighting at the cyborg anyway, diving out of his own seat as the Augment managed to get around the initial shield.

  A thought slammed the button for the security doors down and the doors crashed shut. Damien was now trapped in the room with his assassin.

  This time, he “threw” the solidified layer of air that made up his shield. Barely visible walls slammed down around the Augment, sealing the cyborg inside exactly the kind of defense—and trap—that Damien had used to stop the tungsten penetrators a moment earlier.

  The Augment bounced off the invisible wall, then fired into it experimentally. The stealth suit flickered as Damien rose to his feet, studying his enemy, and he clearly saw the cyborg give him a mocking salute.

  Then pain wracked his body as the Augment slammed something into the bubble Damien had trapped him in. He’d never encountered anything like it—it was the opposite of one of the runic artifacts his gifts allowed him to build. It yanked energy out of the spell he was trying to maintain. He could keep the spell up, but only at the cost of agony.

  The spell collapsed as Damien hit the floor panting in pain.

  “Huh. That’s even more effective against a Hand than a regular Mage,” the cyborg said in an oddly-level, nearly-mechanical voice. None of the Augments he’d met before had spoken like that—and there was no way the cyborg had infiltrated his ship sounding like that.

  No. The Augment was still expecting to get out of this alive. Damien was peripherally aware of the spy raising the penetrator carbine again…

  Then, without Damien contributing to the defense of Duke of Magnificence, three missiles made it through her defenses. Hammerblows rocked the massive ship and the Augment stumbled.

  A bullet whizzed past Damien’s head, and he was still distracted by the aftermath of the pain. He couldn’t attack or defend himself—but there was one spell he’d learned by heart over the years he’d been a Jump Mage.

  He teleported, leaving the Augment trapped inside the heavy security doors of Duke’s flag deck.

  Damien reappeared on the observation deck he used as an office, one of the few places on the ship he knew the location of relative to the flag deck. The pain from whatever the Augment had used to disrupt his spell was still running through his system, and he collapsed to his knees, vomiting across the floor.

  “My lord!” Jeff Schenck exclaimed, the steward bustling into the room. “Are you okay? How did you get back here?”

  “Battle still going on,” Damien gasped out. “Get me a link.” He coughed. “To the bridge.”

  Schenck might have been a steward and assigned to take care of the Hand, but he was also a Royal Martian Navy Petty Officer. Damien would have been shocked to learn that the man didn’t have bodyguard training—and even more shocked if he wasn’t able to bring up a communication channel.

  “My lord, what is going on?” Jakab demanded. “We’re taking hits, Damien. I need you.”

  “Commodore, lock down the flag deck with the maximum-security codes you have,” Damien ordered. “Our spy killed one of my bodyguards and came after me. Augment, with some tricks I haven’t seen before.” He grimaced and forced his body to work well enough to open up the oversized icons on his personal console.

  “I trapped him on the flag deck and teleported to my office. I’ll have a feed set up so I can help defend the ship in a moment—but make damn sure that agent doesn’t escape. I want to have a long conversation with him when this is over.”

  Jakab didn’t even hesitate.

  “Dropping secondary security seals. We didn’t even have camera feeds in there, my lord. We didn’t know what was going on at all. I’m instructing the ship to lower the oxygen content in the air,” he told Damien. “We’ll take him alive. Even Augments need to breathe.”

  “Eventually,” the Hand replied, the sensor feed he needed unfolding on the screens in front of him. He grunted as he channeled power again, dropping ball lightning into the middle of a salvo that was already far too close.

  It took him three tries to adjust for his new location within Duke of Magnificence, and a missile made it through while was doing so. The ship lurched again, but then Damien had the rhythm.

  “He’ll have an oxygen reservoir in his lungs,” the Hand continued. “Not to mention resistance to stunguns and almost certainly a complete willingness to wreck the ship to escape.”

  “Marines are on their way. Combat Mages, too,” Jakab replied. “Brief them on those ‘tricks’ you mentioned.” Both men’s focus turned to the incoming missiles for a few seconds.

  “I don’t know what these bastards are using for a jump drive, but I’m hoping they’re able to run,” the Commodore admitted. “With your help, we can stand off most of their missile fire, and we’re landing hits, but…not enough. That battleship can keep taking missile hits all week, it seems. I want the man who designed her armor…”

  “I’d rather not discover what they’re mounting for lasers,” Damien agreed. “What can we do?”

  “I’m not sure I can even keep us out of range. We’re still hours from us being able to jump, so…it’s down to them. If they want to press this to the knife, we’re gonna have a knife fight.”

  Damien grimaced, scattering more ball lightning across space as he did.

  “I don’t know if I can keep this up that long,” he admitted. “I don’t know what that Augment had, but he’s left my magic more than a little fried.”

  “Fill in the Combat Mages,” Jakab repeated. “This part of the battle is my job…and for all that I’d rather they ran, I’m willing to take that knife fight to see what happens.

  “Brutal as it is, I’m quite sure that those three ships represent a lot more of the Republic Interstellar Navy than my three do of the RMN.”

  “We want him alive, Marines,” Damien ordered grimly. “He probably won’t cooperate, but the crew is running the oxygen content in the room down, and there’s a setup for pumping in a knockout gas.”

  “Augments are usually protected against that,” the Marine Mage-Lieutenant warned. “We’ll do what we can, my lord.”

  “He has some kind of anti-magic weapon,” the Hand continued. “It short-circuited my magic, threw my own power back against
me. My guess is he can only use it on one Mage at a time and, well, if he’s using it instead of a gun, your Marines have an advantage.”

  “That they do,” the Marine confirmed. “We have this, my Lord Hand. If he can be taken alive, we will.”

  Damien nodded.

  “Carry on, Lieutenant.”

  The Marine cut the channel and Damien turned his attention back to protecting his flagship. He could feel his energy reserves flagging, hammered surprisingly hard by whatever trick the Augment had pulled.

  None of the ships in his little fleet were untouched now, but all six of them were still in the fight. The range was continuing to drop, and the Republic ships were starting to take long-range testing shots with their lasers.

  Interestingly, all three ships were using the same class of laser. Both the Navy and ASDF destroyers were using a three-gigawatt battle laser, but the two cruisers used different levels of power.

  The Republican ships were uniformly equipped with a twenty-gigawatt weapon, far more powerful than anything except what an RMN battleship carried.

  “There’s some interesting patterns to their design,” he said to Jakab. “It’s all standardized parts.”

  “I agree. Two hulls, larger ships built with multiple hulls connected together. One missile launcher, one battle laser, one defensive turret.” The Mage-Commodore shook his head. “I have to wonder how long they’ve been mass-producing components, hoping they managed to pull off an FTL drive.”

  “And yet…they still can’t have many of them,” Damien pointed out. “Even Legatus only has so much industry and money. They can’t throw away…There they go.”

  Jakab’s guess that the enemy would act to preserve their ships in preference to a knife fight they might win was right. At six million kilometers, still well out of laser range, the Republic battle group disappeared.

  “Jump flare,” Mage-Commodore Jakab observed. “Like when they arrived. Identical to what I’d expect from a Mage-jumped ship.” He shook his head. “Timing suggests that they have at least three Mages aboard each ship, though, and I’ll be damned if I believe the Republic could find that many Mages willing to fight for them.”