UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “In all honesty, my lord, I can’t help but wonder if we would be wiser to evacuate Ardennes,” Admiral Vasilev said quietly. “Without reinforcements from the Protectorate, we cannot hold.”

  “His Majesty has promised reinforcements,” Damien replied. “Not as grand or as overwhelming as we might hope, but even a single battleship has turned the tide of entire wars in the past.”

  The Royal Martian Navy had only had twelve battleships until very recently. Four had been commissioned since Damien had become a Hand less than three years before, the largest amount of new construction deployed in decades.

  There were another twenty now under construction, but those wouldn’t see commissioning for years. Even Project Mjolnir and its secret warships would commission first, and those were the ships Damien actually expected to turn the tide of this war.

  Damien would back the RMN’s battleships and their fifty million tons of armor and weapons against any individual ship he’d seen the Republic deploy. Until he had five of them at his back, however, he didn’t know how the next battle would go.

  “Thanks to Mage-Lieutenant Chambers and the rest of Stand in Righteousness’s crew,” he continued, “we now know as much as we’re likely to about the capabilities of our enemy. The Republic has better missiles, lasers, ships and gunships than we thought Legatus had.

  “Much of that was likely built in Legatus, in the reservations they blocked from Mages.” He shook his head. They should have found that more suspicious in hindsight, but even knowing that Legatus was waging a shadow war against the Protectorate hadn’t caused them to think the UnArcana Stars were building a fleet.

  “They’re better than we thought they had,” Cruyssen agreed. “But they’re still not as good as ours, in a lot of ways. Most of those trace back to our having a more reliable and expandable supply of antimatter than they do. Our ships and missiles accelerate faster, are more maneuverable and have greater endurance. We have amplifiers and magical gravity. They don’t.”

  “We’re going over the data from both battles that we have sensor records on,” Jakab said. “Their armor is better and their electronic warfare systems are better. Their lasers are the same as ours, but their targeting software is superior. They’ve made up a lot of the defensive shortfall they face from not having an amplifier.

  “Ton for ton, they lose out because of using fusion engines and having to provide rotational pseudo-gravity,” the Mage-Commodore concluded. “Otherwise, they’re using superior software and systems to make up much of the difference.”

  “What about command-and-control loops for their missiles?” Vasilev asked. “What happens if they’re including an FTL component?”

  The room was very quiet. Even Damien could see the consequences of that.

  “Their firing patterns don’t suggest they are,” Jakab replied. “I don’t know what limits they have on production of their FTL coms. The fact that they had one aboard Duke of Magnificence suggests that they have enough to equip their spies with them.”

  “On the other hand, one com per planet would provide them a lot of information,” Amiri pointed out. “And, well, bluntly, Mage-Commodore, everyone knows you command Damien’s personal transport. If I was going to put an agent anywhere…”

  “Agreed,” Jakab admitted. “That’s my hope, at least.”

  “The ASDF will do everything within our power to defend our system and support the Navy,” Vasilev assured them. “Any data and technological assistance the RMN can provide us is, of course, more than welcome, but this is our star system. The Militias exists to defend our home ground.”

  “And we will defend Ardennes with you,” Damien promised. “I will find a way to get more ships, people. The battleships I’ve been promised should suffice to stand off any rapid strike the Republic can mount, but…we’ll need more for their real push.”

  The return to Duke of Magnificence was almost painful. They’d converged as much of the two fleets as they could above the planet, leaving only a trio of destroyers to guard the logistics base. The missile-production lines they’d jury-rigged together in orbit of the gas giant Lyons were critical…but they weren’t essential.

  It would hurt both the Protectorate and the defense of Ardennes if the logistics base and its production were lost, but they’d survive. They’d have to. Losing Ardennes, however, was unacceptable.

  So, destroyers and cruisers hung above the planet and Damien’s shuttle weaved through them. Ardennes did have repair slips for their ships, and Duke of Magnificence was currently occupying one of them. Drones and workers swarmed over the big ship, replacing armor plating and sealing breaches.

  Twenty-nine ships against whatever the Republic could gather. Thirty-one if he got the “couple of battleships” the Mage-King had promised.

  There was a key there, something niggling at the back of his mind that would change the equation. Part of him was certain he was staring directly at it, but it wasn’t coming to him.

  He was too tired, too stressed, to produce a miracle today.

  He recognized Stand in Righteousness as his shuttle passed the destroyer, and smiled. That, at least, seemed to have been something he’d done right. He’d met with Roslyn Chambers at the request of her counselor, Kole Jakab’s cousin.

  She’d served him well on Tau Ceti, dealing with a conspiracy inside the Protectorate. His authority had then seen her ushered into the Academy immediately, bypassing exams and everything else to drop her into the class she would have been in if she hadn’t failed the ethics part of the entrance exam.

  And, well, been two weeks out of juvenile detention when she took the exam. That wouldn’t have weighed against her that much, though someone without that background might have had a marginal fail on ethics bumped to a pass.

  The reports he’d read on Nia Kriti suggested she was the only reason anyone had escaped—and she’d been the only Mage left aboard her ship when they’d arrived in Ardennes. Watching a mentor and superior officer overdose couldn’t have been easy, either.

  She’d well earned her battlefield commission.

  Damien was more comfortable with her handling that role than he was with the fact that everyone expected him to save the day.

  25

  Roslyn sighed as she looked at the Petty Officer standing in front of her. PO Madelina Wendell had been transferred to Stand in Righteousness from another destroyer’s tactical department, and Roslyn was now quite certain she understood why.

  Wendell’s record was clear: she was an amazing team lead, capable of garnering fervent loyalty from her crew and achieving noticeable increases in efficiency for the weapon mount she was in charge of.

  What clearly hadn’t made it into her record was that the tall woman with the short-cropped red hair had a massive attitude problem, which was hardly helped by being expected to report to an officer ten years her junior.

  “Well?” Roslyn asked.

  “Well what?” Wendell demanded.

  “That would be ‘well what, sir,’ Petty Officer,” Roslyn said calmly, carefully not glancing over at Chey next to her for support. This was her first in-department disciplinary hearing, and she knew damn well that leaning on the Chief too much would hurt her.

  Even if she had no idea what to do with an exemplary NCO who’d pissed off three other Petty Officers and started a fight in the mess that had, thankfully, managed to avoid any serious injuries.

  Wendell was silent.

  “PO Wendell, the purpose of this hearing is to decide whether you face administrative punishment at this level or get bounced to the Captain for a full Mast,” Roslyn said. “Explaining what you were thinking when you took a swing at PO Arbor is potentially your best bet of avoiding actual assault charges. So. What the hell were you thinking?”

  This time, Roslyn let the silence stretch out.

  “You really want to know?” Wendell finally demanded. Roslyn met her gaze for several seconds, then the PO grudgingly added, “Sir.”

  “My alterna
tive is to bounce you to Mage-Captain Kulkarni for a full Mast, so, yes, PO, I really would like to know.”

  “They were a bunch of idiots who think you walk on clouds,” the PO said bluntly. “Told them the truth, that no nineteen-year-old kid is worth even a butter bar. They told me I hadn’t been with you in Hoisin and got personal. I took offense.”

  Roslyn had wondered if it was something like that when she’d seen that the three other POs had all been in her department when they’d escaped the Republic at Hoisin.

  From Wendell’s expression, she had been poking at the Petty Officers before the fight—and was poking Roslyn now.

  The young Mage-Lieutenant grinned. What Wendell didn’t realize was that Roslyn Chambers had spent time in street gangs and prison. She knew how to play this kind of dominance game.

  “And you want to see how I react to the fact you got in a fight attacking my honor, is that it?” she asked sweetly. “I wanted to know why you got in a fight. Now I know. And it was, as I expected, a dumb reason.”

  Wendell looked more curious than intimidated now.

  “But no one was hurt, so I see no reason to escalate this. You are restricted to quarters when off duty for three weeks and are fined ten days’ pay.”

  Roslyn might have been phrasing it as mercy, but that was the maximum punishment she could levy in a departmental disciplinary hearing.

  “If this occurs again, you will go before the Mast,” she warned Wendell. “Keep doing your job as well as Mage-Commander Trill says you do, and I’ll forget this after your restriction is up.

  “Understood?”

  Wendell cocked her head, looking curiously at the Mage-Lieutenant, then nodded.

  “Understood. Sir.”

  There was less hesitation before the title this time, at least.

  “Just what the hell am I supposed to do with someone like that?” Roslyn asked Chey bluntly when they were alone a few minutes later. “Is this normal for a PO?”

  Chey laughed.

  “It’s normal for that type of PO, yeah,” she confirmed. “The type that should be a Chief and would be a Chief if they didn’t have a chip on their shoulder about something. Often about not being a Chief.”

  Roslyn sighed and shook her head.

  “Wonderful.”

  “That said, I think you handled that well,” the Chief continued. “I’d have hammered her and sent her on up to the Captain, kept our tier of administrative punishment for the people in the fight who got swung at.”

  “I watched the video, Chief,” Roslyn pointed out. “There was plenty of swinging to go around. Now I know what the fight is about, the next few hearings will go faster.”

  Chey snorted.

  “What, they get off easy for defending your honor?”

  “No,” Roslyn said flatly. She didn’t even need the Chief to tell her that was a bad idea. “They didn’t start the fight, but they definitely didn’t try to deescalate, either. Don’t care why. I will not have my Petty Officers brawling like dockyard drunks.

  “They’ll get less than Wendell did, but they’re getting restrictions and fines, too. Should make my point, I think.”

  “That it should,” the Chief agreed. “You might get through this okay, Lieutenant.”

  “People don’t change,” Roslyn observed. “Environment doesn’t matter; they group, they clique and they cause trouble. Sometimes, you got to hit someone with a hammer.”

  “I’d have said it differently, but yeah.” Chey shook her head. “Ready for the next one?”

  No wasn’t really an available answer, Roslyn reflected. This was part of the job.

  “Yeah, let’s get PO Virden in here and keep working our way down the list.”

  With the hearings done, Roslyn dismissed Chey and returned to her office to face the never-ending stack of paperwork that came with her new job. Normally, she’d be the assistant tactical officer and learn the paperwork while keeping her boss from being overwhelmed by it.

  Without a senior or junior, she was struggling to make the distinction between paperwork she could delegate to an NCO like Chey and paperwork she needed to handle herself. She was pretty sure she was erring on the wrong side, and her sleep was suffering for it.

  She had an hour before she had to be on the bridge for her watch, however, so she dove back into the current stack. This one was the transfer records for the personnel they’d brought over from the other destroyers. Her tactical teams were still understrength, but there were now two hundred men and women under her authority.

  There was a reason the tactical officer was usually one of the three Commanders aboard a starship, along with the executive officer and the chief engineer. Right now, though, Stand in Righteousness had one nineteen-year-old Mage-Lieutenant.

  One of the new messages in her queue was a short note from the First Hand, congratulating her on her promotion…and thanking her for what she’d managed to do.

  Everyone seemed to think that she’d done something incredible. So far as Roslyn could tell, she’d survived. She’d always been reasonably good at that. Sometimes with a bit more acting out than even she would prefer in hindsight, but she’d always survived.

  “Mage-Lieutenant, this is Chey,” the Chief’s voice interrupted her paperwork.

  “Yes, Chief, what is it?” Roslyn asked.

  “Need you in Cargo Four. We may have a problem.”

  When you are a brand-new Lieutenant and your senior Chief Petty Officer says they need you, you get there.

  Cargo Four was mostly empty. A pair of standard ten-thousand-cubic-meter containers were currently docked with its airlocks, and Roslyn had to think about why Cargo Four was registering as “her problem.”

  Right. One container was general replenishables for the ship, but the other was missiles. A full reload for magazines that had been fired off before they’d returned to Ardennes.

  Chief Petty Officer Chenda Chey stood by the door, with an addition to her uniform that Roslyn had never seen the Chief wear before: a standard Military Police shoulder holster with a stungun in it.

  “Chief? What’s going on?” Roslyn asked.

  “We had a security breach on the missile container,” Chey reported. “My readouts say nothing has been removed, but the cameras say nothing even came into Cargo Four around when the container’s door alert went off.”

  “And we don’t have any MPs,” the Mage-Lieutenant said grimly. Which wasn’t entirely true, but given there were only ten Military Police on the ship, it may as well have been.

  “Backup would be great, and rumor says you Navy Mages are combat-trained,” Chey told her.

  Roslyn chuckled and touched the gold medallion at her throat. Like any Mage, hers was inscribed with symbols dictating her qualifications. Like any Navy Mage, however, all hers had were the three letters RMN. If she’d had a standard medallion, however, it would have included the Sword of a trained Enforcer Mage.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Shall we go take a look, Chief?”

  26

  “I sealed the cargo hold as soon as the alert went off on the container,” Chey told Roslyn as they reached the small personnel access to Cargo Four. “Cameras weren’t showing anything on the ship, but it’s a straight mechanical connection on the container. Easy to short-circuit if you know it’s there, but it’s only standard on missile shipping containers.”

  “So, our ghost shut down every alert they knew about and botched the one that wouldn’t be there on another container,” Roslyn agreed. She conjured energy in front of them, a shimmering shield of solidified and heated air protecting them from incoming fire.

  “Open it,” she ordered.

  Chey hit a command on her wrist-comp. The doors slid open into the dimly lit cargo hold.

  There was no movement visible.

  “Lights?” the Chief asked.

  “Go on,” Roslyn agreed, stepping into the hold. She could see the two cargo connector locks. Both were closed, but she didn’t disbelieve Chey’s discov
ery.

  Light panels in the roof went from minimum lighting to full power, a stark white brightness that cut stark lines of shadow in the floor.

  “If you’re in here, you may as well surrender now,” Roslyn said loudly. “We know you’re here and the exits are secured.”

  As she spoke, the entrance they came through locked down behind them. No one was getting out of there until Chey decided they were.

  A moment of chill paranoia ran down Roslyn’s spine, but then the Chief was right beside her with the stungun drawn.

  “I don’t think anyone wants to be that cooperative,” she said cheerfully. “What do you think, Lieutenant?”

  Roslyn grimaced.

  “This is so far outside my experience, I have no clue,” she admitted. “Let’s check the missile container. We have the exits locked down, so even if they’re hiding in the other one, they can’t go anywhere.”

  The cargo airlock connected to the missile container slid open easily, revealing the massive expanse of one of humanity’s standard shipping containers. Ten meters wide, ten meters tall and a hundred meters long, the ten-thousand-cubic-meter containers were ubiquitous across both the Protectorate and the Republic.

  Most of them weren’t full of neatly stacked missiles, stacked two wide and five high on each side of a narrow-looking gap leading down the center of the container.

  “No gravity in the container,” Chey warned.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Roslyn replied, conjuring more magic to hold their feet to the deck as they moved forward. Whispering nonsense words under her breath—a child’s focusing trick but still a useful one—she conjured a ball of light and tossed it down the central path.

  It drifted down the container, seemingly only a light…and then halfway down the hundred-meter-long void, it started to drift to the side. It moved faster and faster as it approached the heat source—almost certainly a human in there—until it stopped and hovered in place next to someone’s hiding spot.