UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “We know where you are,” Roslyn shouted down the container. “Surrender now and—”

  Chey slammed into Roslyn bodily, detaching both of them from the deck as her spell collapsed. They both went flying as gunfire echoed toward them.

  “Yeah, not happening,” the Chief snarled. She turned in the air with the grace of an experienced spacer, opening fire with the stungun. The SmartDarts it was loaded with were supposed to calibrate their shock to avoid lethal overload of any human.

  They still had to hit, however, and the expensive smart munitions smashed into the chassis of the missiles down the container.

  Roslyn leapt forward herself. She didn’t have the Chief’s experience or grace…but she had magic.

  A shield of solidified air led the way, sweeping bullets out of the air as their “ghost” fired down the hallway. Magic slammed her into the side of a missile as she reached her still-floating orb.

  Their intruder was tucked into a neatly assembled cubby between the missiles. There were a hammock, a computer, a small locker of personal effects—and a disturbingly large machine gun now pointed directly at Roslyn Chambers.

  She shattered the gun with a flash of power. The spy pulled another gun, a heavy pistol of some kind.

  Roslyn didn’t wait to find out what it was. Electricity arced down her hands and across the space between them, flinging the spy against a wall and leaving him convulsing.

  She landed next to him and pinned his gun hand to the wall with her foot and magical gravity.

  “This would have been so much easier of a conversation before you started shooting,” she pointed out grimly, a bar of overstrength magical gravity pinning the man’s other hand to the missile. “But I think this will still work.”

  Chief Chey brought herself to a halt next to the cubby, producing a pair of manacles from somewhere inside the many pockets of an RMN utility uniform.

  “I’m sure the Hand is going to love having a chat with you,” the Chief informed their prisoner…and then the man’s entire body spasmed. His eyes disintegrated in explosions of blood, and Roslyn had a horrified moment to realize a series of tiny explosives throughout the man’s body had just gone off.

  “We need to get out of here!” she barked. She was already working magic, wrapping bands of force around them both and flinging them toward the entrance. “You have the codes, Chief. Eject the container.”

  They hit the cargo hold fast, Roslyn barely having enough control to keep them from breaking bones. She left ejecting the container to Chey as she opened a channel to the bridge.

  “Get us away from the container we’re ejecting,” she ordered, without even checking who she was speaking to. “There was a spy aboard and it may be rigged to blow!”

  There wasn’t much antimatter inside a missile in transit. Most of that would be loaded from the ship’s own storage tanks while arming the weapon. There were, however, enough other explosives and volatiles in even an unarmed missile…

  She hoped she’d been fast enough.

  For just over a minute, nothing happened, and Roslyn began to think she might have just cut short her career by giving orders to the Captain.

  At the same time, her wrist-comp showed her every ship in orbit accelerating away from the container as it drifted away from Ardennes. She might be wrong…but it didn’t look like anyone else was going to take that chance.

  Then something sparked. The container started to disintegrate and it looked, from Roslyn’s low-resolution view, like several of the missiles were about to activate…

  They didn’t get a chance. As soon as the container started to disintegrate, four destroyers opened fire with every laser in their arsenal. Volatile or not, the contents of the container were much less dangerous reduced to vapor than being fired through rocket nozzles.

  She still held her breath, waiting to see what happened next. The debris cloud “sparked” visibly in her holographic screen as antimatter reacted with the rest of the vapor, spreading the cloud wider. More laser beams cut through space as the Navy ships carefully contained the cloud to avoid further damage.

  “Well, Mage-Lieutenant,” Mage-Captain Kulkarni said calmly from the bridge, “it seems you have once again stumbled into the middle of it, haven’t you? And saved the day, at that.”

  “No, sir,” Roslyn said firmly, looking over at Chief Chey. “This was all Chief Petty Officer Chanda Chey, sir. She recognized the alert, locked down Cargo Four and called for my assistance.”

  “What are you doing?” her subordinate hissed.

  “I am not carrying all of this, Chief,” Roslyn said cheerfully. “If you want to be a hero, you get to bear that burden.”

  Chey sighed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, get both of you up to the bridge,” Kulkarni ordered. “For your sins, you get to talk to every MP in the fleet.

  “You caught one of these buggers. We need to make sure we catch them all.”

  27

  “I wish we at least had some way to detect their communicators,” Jakab complained. “We can’t be sure that the agent who was trying to sneak aboard Stand had an FTL com or not.”

  “Have we traced how he made it aboard that cargo container?” Damien asked. He and Jakab were sitting at a small table in Damien’s observation deck office. Commodore Cruyssen was present by hologram.

  “I have military police tearing the logistics base apart,” Cruyssen replied. “But…” He shrugged. “We’ve confirmed that container was sitting out there for a while. It was delivered in a resupply shipment from Tau Ceti over a year ago.

  “We can be reasonably sure our spy wasn’t living in that container for a year, so he was infiltrated recently. If he was targeting Stand specifically, he would have had to sneak aboard within the last twenty-four hours.”

  “But if he just wanted to make sure he was aboard one of our ships, he could have inserted himself into that container anytime in the last few weeks,” Damien concluded grimly. “Can we check the rest of our logistics infrastructure for moles? At least in theory, there shouldn’t be much in terms of heat signatures in our missile containers.”

  “We’re sweeping as we speak,” the Commodore in charge of the base confirmed. “This one is on me, my lord. Either my people missed him going aboard or some of them helped him get aboard.”

  “I don’t care whose fault it is. I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If someone intentionally caused this, then I care,” Damien said dryly. “Otherwise, I have no intention of assigning blame for blame’s sake; am I clear?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “In better news, the Transceiver Mages have forwarded a message from Tau Ceti,” Damien told the two Commodores. “An old friend is on his way: Mage-Admiral James Medici has taken command of Task Group Peacemaker and is headed here.

  “At this point, we’re all being insanely paranoid about what we’re transmitting, even via the RTAs,” he continued. “I’m not entirely sure what Medici is bringing with him—but Peacemaker is the RMN’s newest battleship. If we’re lucky, we’re getting Peacemaker and Pax Marcianus.”

  Those were the two Peace-class battleships, laid down in orbit of Terra the day the body of Hand Alaura Stealey was brought back from Ardennes for burial. Until Project Mjolnir completed, they were the most powerful warships in existence.

  “Even if we’re not that lucky, Peacemaker herself will turn the balance of power here,” he continued. “Their ETA is three days. Once Medici is here, he’ll take command of the combined force, second in authority only to me.”

  “I only know Admiral Medici by reputation,” Jakab admitted. “But his reputation is good.”

  “He saved my life once,” Damien replied. “I can’t say I know him well, but that’s definitely a solid introduction to a man.”

  “So, if the Republic waits for three days, we win,” Cruyssen suggested.

  “Maybe,” Damien allowed. “Three days and they can’t take this system with one carrier group.
In their place, I’m not sure I ever would have planned to. If they bring two and Medici has a pair of Peace-class ships? We can hold them.

  “If they bring three?”

  “We’ll bloody well give them a fight they won’t forget,” Jakab promised. “But I won’t pretend I’d turn down a miracle.”

  “So far, evidence suggests we should ask young Lieutenant Chambers about that,” Cruyssen said. “Where did you find that young woman, Lord Montgomery?”

  Damien chuckled.

  “In a juvenile detention center, looking down the barrel of an absolutely ruined life,” he told Cruyssen. Jakab already knew the story. “I accidentally dragged her into Protectorate politics and got her in trouble, so I exercised the privileges of my rank to give her a boost.”

  He shook his head.

  “Given what she’s pulled off lately, I think that might be one of the best calls I ever made.”

  Intelligence was continuing to trickle in. The limitation of the RTAs to basically voice communication meant mass information only traveled quickly when it could go by ship. Protectorate couriers were jumping around like madmen, updating every command on what information was flowing back.

  None of it was good.

  The timelines that Damien was looking at were fuzzy at best, but they suggested that while he’d been playing games with an RIN carrier group in Korma, other carrier groups had been hitting at least five systems.

  Nia Kriti wasn’t the only system where the RTA had been taken out by preemptive sabotage, either. Santiago was odd in that the RTA was intact. Damien wasn’t sure how that had worked, but he doubted it had been overly pleasant for the Mages in the structure.

  The Martian Interstellar Security Service was run off their feet, chasing spies and operatives. Some of the people MISS had flagged and arrested had been in place for decades. How could you secure your infrastructure against an enemy who’d been laying the groundwork for thirty years?

  Damien could already see the chilling effect of those discoveries on communications. His last data package from Mars had been hand-delivered by a nervous-looking courier captain, a civilian Mage who probably didn’t even want to know what he was delivering.

  Less and less information was being transmitted or even sent by RTA. The Protectorate was not ready for war.

  They’d thought they had been. They’d expected the Republic to move…but eighteen months of peace had lulled them into a false sense of security.

  Persephone head-butted his leg, and he sighed and patted his lap.

  “Come on up, kitten,” he told her. He was honestly surprised by how well the cat could account for his limitations. He couldn’t really pick her up, but she was perfectly capable of getting into his lap.

  The report he had up on his screen told him that specialty MISS ships were being deployed into Republic space, trying to learn as much as possible about the enemy. He suspected at least some of those ships had already been there, but what they’d been able to learn had clearly been far too limited.

  His minimum estimate was that the Republic had eight to ten carrier groups. He’d guess they were holding at least a third of their ships back to defend their territory, and attacking the Protectorate with at least five carriers and twenty cruisers and battleships.

  It was possible, in his worst-case calculations, that their offensive force was ten carrier groups—one per system that had already fallen to the Republic. In that case, he’d expect that they had five more in defensive positions in key systems.

  And if the Republic had fifteen carrier groups, the only option available to the Protectorate was a desperate holding action until Project Mjolnir finished.

  “I need more data,” he said aloud as he carefully scratched behind Persephone’s ears. “I don’t know enough about my enemies…or my own people.”

  He sighed. What was the Art of War quote? If you knew yourself and your enemy, you would win every battle, but if you didn’t know either, you’d always lose? Something along those lines.

  Two days. He needed the Republic to give him two more days.

  He wasn’t really expecting to get them.

  28

  “So, how many times have we checked these calculations?” Kelly LaMonte, commanding officer of the Martian Interstellar Security Service’s covert operations ship KEX-26, Rhapsody in Purple, asked her wife sweetly.

  Right now, Rhapsody drifted in deep space one light-year from the Santiago System. They’d reached their home port in Tau Ceti after a long and incredibly boring sweep of the UnArcana MidWorlds, and been turned around immediately.

  Normally, they got at least a few days, but Kelly had agreed with her superiors’ urgency.

  “I’ve checked them three times myself,” Jump Mage Xi Wu, Rhapsody’s senior Ship’s Mage and Kelly LaMonte’s wife, replied. “And then I had Joe, Liara and Mel check them all as well. We’re coming in on the other side of the gas giant. No one is going to see us.”

  There was a strong tone of “teach your grandmother to suck eggs” in Kelly’s wife’s words. Rhapsody in Purple was just over two years old and her crew had been together since the beginning. They’d made a lot of covert insertions over those years.

  “This is the first time we’ve jumped into a war zone,” Kelly pointed out gently. “Normally, the worst we’re going to get is shouted at, unless someone works out that we’re not what we appear. This time, the RIN will just start shooting.”

  Rhapsody looked like a standard Protectorate courier ship. On a command from her Captain, however, a number of panels that artificially augmented her radar signature back up to where it should be would fold away, leaving her with her base hull. A hull covered in radiation-drinking paint that any twenty-first-century aircraft designer would kill for.

  She could also retract her heat radiators and store heat in several massive heat sinks buried underneath her antimatter power plant, where a normal courier would have put their fusion core and its fuel bunkers.

  Rhapsody in Purple and her sisters were as invisible as technology could make them—and unlike their civilian cousins, the Rhapsodies had full, unrestricted amplifiers. The final piece of Kelly’s cloak of invisibility was her wife’s Gift.

  “I know,” Xi Wu confirmed. “And I am well aware, my love, that both my wife and our husband are aboard this ship. I don’t plan on getting shot at today. Can’t say the same for Mike.”

  Mike Kelzin was the senior of Rhapsody’s three shuttle pilots and the husband of both women. His job was to make sure the elite platoon of black ops cyborgs tucked away in the barracks aboard Rhapsody made it to their targets intact.

  It had been a surprise to Kelly to discover that Legatus and the Republic didn’t have a monopoly on badass fanatical cyborgs. The Protectorate’s Special Operations Command fell under the authority of MISS, not any of the military branches, and the Bionic Combat Regiment was part of PSOC.

  “Unless something goes very wrong, we won’t be sending Mike in today,” Kelly replied. “You’re sure on these calcs?”

  “Sure enough to take myself and my two most precious people in the galaxy into hostile territory with them,” Xi Wu said with a chuckle. “I don’t think I can be more certain—and worse-case scenario, Mel is making the jump with Liara and I standing by to jump us right back out if needed.”

  Kelly chuckled.

  “All right. Inform Mage Melanie Droit that she may jump the ship at her discretion.”

  A moment later, reality twitched—and Kelly LaMonte’s ship was in enemy-held territory.

  The Santiago System had three gas giants, and Rhapsody’s crew had picked the farthest-out of them to emerge behind. None of the three had significant infrastructure beyond the one facility the Navy had protected, but Columbo had nothing. There were no ships, no stations and—most importantly—no sensors out there.

  “We’re clear,” Conrad Milhouse declared after reviewing the sensors for several minutes. The tactical officer was a chubby blond man—and one of the few pe
ople Kelly had ever met who could keep up with her in programming.

  Which was good, given that Rhapsody in Purple had a grand total of two missile launchers and a laser. Her sensors and electronic-warfare emitters, however, could put battleships to shame. She’d been designed for a very specific purpose.

  “All right,” Kelly said brightly as she tugged gently on a long lock of currently neon-pink hair. “Can you give me a safe zone for accelerating?”

  Milhouse nodded, a few gestures across his console dropping a green cone behind Columbo on the main display. A larger amber cone surrounded it.

  “Green, I’m ninety-nine percent certain no one will be able to see us. Orange, we’ve got a good chance of going undetected if we keep our burn low.” He shook his head. “Outside those zones, our odds get very messy, very fast. Assuming they have ships at the cloudscoop and in orbit around Novo Lar, these areas are definite no-gos without full stealth.”

  Large sections of the system shaded into red. “Of course, that assumes they’re watching,” he concluded.

  “I don’t plan on hanging the survival of a hundred and twenty-six people on our enemies being completely incompetent,” Kelly said calmly. “Check in with Engineering; make sure we have everything set up for stealth at my command.”

  As Milhouse set to work, she programmed in a course and flipped it to her navigator’s console.

  “Hilton?” she asked. “Any issues with this?”

  Jennifer Hilton was already reading through it.

  “Nothing, boss. It won’t be a fast trip, though,” she warned. “Biggest concern will be running out of heat-sink capacity before we reach Leonardo.”

  Leonardo was the next gas giant in, currently roughly four light-minutes away. The course Kelly had plugged in would take them just over thirty-six hours to reach it.

  “Worst-case scenario, we rely on the Mages’ stealth spell for a bit while we vent heat,” Kelly responded. “It’s not perfect, but it will let us reset the heat sinks.”