UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “And if we’re spotted?” Milhouse asked.

  “We jump,” she said instantly. “No games here, people. Hand Montgomery’s data says there’s a carrier group in the system—we’re guessing the ships that came after him were from here, but validating that is part of our job.”

  “And what happens if they ambush us?” her tactical officer said.

  “Unless Xi Wu jumps us before they can fire, we die,” Kelly admitted. “Their gunships aren’t FTL-capable, which means anything ambushing us is a cruiser or bigger.” She shook her head. “A cruiser outmasses us about a hundred to one. If the Republic catches us with a warship, we’re dead.

  “So, let’s not let that happen, shall we, people? We’re here to find out what the RIN is planning.”

  If she was lucky, it would be obvious. If she was good—and she was—she could probably extract a lot of their plans from their radio communications, even from this far away.

  And if the Republic was far better at communications security than anyone else she’d ever encountered, there was always the option of ambushing a ship in the outer system and discovering how her commandos stacked up against Republic shipboard security.

  The acceleration burn was hard on Rhapsody’s crew. It took a lot of power to actually inflict a force on the crew of a ship with magical gravity runes, but it was doable. At twenty-five gravities, the runes were doing their best, but they weren’t designed for this.

  Eight gravities made it through, slamming Kelly and her crew back into their seats for a full fifteen minutes. Once they entered Milhouse’s orange zone, the pressure released as the acceleration cut back to a “mere” five gravities.

  They continued to accelerate at that rate for another fifteen minutes, and then cut acceleration entirely.

  “Well?” Kelly asked.

  “We appear to have gone unnoticed,” Milhouse said after several seconds. “I’m not picking up anyone accelerating hell-for-leather in our direction, anyway.”

  “That’s good,” she allowed. “What are we picking up?”

  “Not much yet,” he told her. “We have some of the most sensitive passive sensors in the galaxy. They were not calibrated for a twenty-five-gravity burn, so it’ll take me some time to get them aligned again.”

  “Then get on that,” Kelly ordered. “Xi?”

  “Stealth spell is in place,” her wife replied. “We are invisible, Captain.”

  “That’s a good feeling,” Kelly said. “Thank you. Stealth systems?”

  “Fully online,” Milhouse said in a distracted tone. “Heat sinks are melting at standard rates. Vong estimates twenty-two hours till we will need to vent.”

  Duong Vong was the chief engineer, a Navy officer who’d been involved in the development of the stealth systems aboard the Rhapsodies. MISS had happily poached him when the ships had been commissioned.

  If he left Engineering while they were underway, Kelly LaMonte didn’t know about it. Vong was…dedicated, to put it mildly.

  “All right. We’re the invisible eye in the sky, Officer Milhouse. How long until we aren’t blind?”

  “We’re not blind,” he objected. “We just need…some optical nerve surgery. Things are blurry.” He gestured expansively at the main display. “I can tell you where all of the planets are!”

  “I could tell you that with a window, Milhouse,” she replied. “Anything more for me?”

  “There’s ships in orbit and there’s ships at the cloudscoop around Roberta,” he told her. “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll tell you how many. Give me an hour, and I’ll tell you the maiden names of their commanders’ mothers.”

  “I don’t need to break into their bank accounts, Milhouse,” Kelly pointed out. “I need to know what they’re planning.”

  Milhouse had been many things in his life. Currently, he was technically a convicted felon putting in community service to commute his sentence. He’d been convicted of hacking into bank accounts and funneling money to his own projects.

  Since he’d been good at it—and had been a Navy officer before he’d fallen into his white-collar criminal career—MISS has offered him an alternative to ten years in jail.

  “Well, for that, you’ll need to give me at least that hour,” he said with a chuckle. “And hope that at least one of them used their mother’s maiden name as an encryption key!”

  “Well, that’s about what we were expecting,” Kelly concluded as they looked over the ships in orbit of Novo Lar.

  “Yeah. One carrier, one battleship, three cruisers and a couple of transports built on the same hull as the cruisers,” Milhouse counted up. “That battleship has had a rough month, too. Someone kicked them in the nuts a few times with antimatter boots.”

  Novo Lar’s local space was swarming with gunships, too, but that was also expected. The electronic intelligence Kelly was looking over suggested that the Republic had just dropped two army corps’ worth of regular troops.

  Not Space Assault troopers. Not cyborgs. Just a hundred thousand regular soldiers with tanks and guns. A true army, designed to take and hold a planet in the face of heavy resistance.

  The Protectorate didn’t even have an equivalent force. Marines and PSOC combined barely totaled a hundred thousand troops. There were more uniformed Navy personnel than there were trained ground soldiers in the service of the Mage-King.

  “What’s funny is that Damien’s report made it very clear that the Republic was keeping a close eye on the cloudscoop when they came through,” Kelly murmured. “Do we have a clean scan of that area yet?”

  Her tactical officer looked at her in near-confusion for several seconds, then sighed.

  “You mean Montgomery,” he clarified. “Damien Montgomery. The goddamn First Hand of the Mage-King of Mars. Could you not refer to him like an old high school friend? It makes my neck twitch.”

  “Would you rather I called him my ex?” Kelly said sweetly. “Answer the question, Milhouse.”

  “No, we’ve got nothing on the cloudscoop, and that’s weird, too,” Milhouse said with an exaggerated shiver at her description of the First Hand. “I should have a clean shot at it by now, but it isn’t there.”

  “You think they blew it up?”

  “No.” He shook his head, all humor gone now as he focused on his screens. “I think they moved it. And I think they moved it to make exactly what we’re doing harder.”

  “Which means they have something to hide.” Kelly shook her head as well. “But if we can see every ship that we know is here, then what are they hiding?”

  “More ships?”

  She snorted.

  “I can’t think of anything else they would move a cloudscoop around to help protect,” she confirmed. “And if there’s more ships here, we need to know. Clever ideas, Officer Milhouse?”

  “They expected something like the course we took,” he pointed out. “They moved the cloudscoop to be invisible from the outer system. We’re not going to see anything on this course.”

  Kelly didn’t like where that was leading, but she could see his point.

  “We need to go deeper,” she concluded aloud.

  “How are you feeling about playing matador, boss?” Milhouse asked. “Because the only way we’re getting the answer to your questions is to dive right past a Republic battle group.”

  She curled a lock of pink hair around her finger and smiled coldly.

  “Then it’s a good thing I have the best crew in the MISS, isn’t it?”

  Even magic could only do so much when Kelly pointed her ship directly at the enemy and brought the engines online at full power. Antimatter met matter and created pure-white flares of annihilation that flung the covert ops ship deeper into the star system.

  Xi Wu maintained the stealth spell around the ship, channeling the heat from the engines away from the Republic ships. With the engines online, it could only do so much. That kind of concealment worked a lot better with other ships to hide against.

  Kelly LaMonte had once
seen Damien Montgomery conceal a freighter running at full power, but they’d been in the middle of a swarm of other ships fleeing an attack on the station they were leaving. Out here, with nothing behind them, all Xi Wu could buy them was time.

  “And…there we go,” Milhouse confirmed. “We can stop running the stealth spell now, Ship’s Mage. They see us.”

  Kelly checked. Almost half an hour of full-power acceleration. That was more than she’d expected.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Well, twenty gunships just rotated in space to point right at us and brought their engines online,” her tactical officer replied. “They’re coming our way.”

  “I figured. Time until we can see past Roberta?”

  “Forty-five minutes,” Hilton reported. “Do we have a plan for what we do after that?”

  “We locate the cloudscoop. Find whatever ships they’re hiding. Jump the hell out.”

  “They’ll know we were here,” Milhouse pointed out. “They’ll guess what we are, what we’ve done.”

  “Yep,” Kelly agreed. “And that’s the price we’re going to have to pay to know what’s going on.”

  “What if we’re guessing wrong? We could blow our cover to find nothing.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” she pointed out. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We may look like a regular courier, but the Republic isn’t going to care. If they find us swanning around their systems these days, they’re just going to blow us to hell.

  “So, blowing our cover is irrelevant. Finding out what they’re planning is everything.”

  “And you’re the skipper, skipper,” Milhouse allowed. He checked his data. “Good news is that the gunships won’t range on us before we can see the other side of Roberta.”

  “And how long afterwards?” Kelly asked.

  “Oh, about a minute,” he told her. “These new missiles of theirs are among the longest-ranged things in existence. They’ll take eight minutes to reach us, but…”

  “But once we pass Roberta’s orbit, we have eight minutes to learn as much as we can,” she concluded. “Then we need to get the hell out of this star system.”

  “Or be blown to a million pieces,” Milhouse confirmed cheerfully. “Which seems like it would make delivering our intelligence somewhat difficult.”

  “Why are all my crew smartasses?” Kelly asked aloud.

  “Sir…have you met the people you married?”

  Kelly and her crew had just spent three weeks ghosting through the outer edge of various Republic star systems, scanning for new shipyards, logistics stations and warships. It was almost exhilarating to do something more blatant and active.

  Of course, the exhilaration wore off around half an hour before anything actually happened. They were accelerating at fifteen gravities. The gunships, lacking in magical gravity but clearly well equipped with acceleration couches and suchlike, were accelerating at ten.

  They’d started far enough apart that even those incredible accelerations weren’t enough to bring them into missile range in a timely fashion. Even once they were in range of each other, it would be so only for missiles that traveled at a thousand times their acceleration for seven or eight minutes.

  Space combat was weird. It also wasn’t Kelly’s job and she had no intention of actually fighting anyone today.

  “We are crossing Roberta’s orbital line now,” Hilton reported.

  “Still a couple of minutes until we get a clear view of the inner hemisphere,” Milhouse reported. “I’d guess they’re running enough engine power to stay on the inside of the planet, but that cloudscoop can’t go fast enough to evade us. Not without tearing some fragile bits that would render it nonfunctional, anyway.”

  Seconds ticked away.

  “And there we are,” the tactical officer concluded. “I’ve got new resolution on my original signatures from Roberta orbit and it looks like I’ve localized the…”

  “Milhouse?” Kelly demanded a few seconds later, pulling up the scans on her own screens.

  “Jump flare,” he told her quietly. “I have five jump flares just inside Leonardo’s orbit. Best guess is we’re looking at carrier group number two for the system.”

  “Which is a carrier group more than we’ve ever seen in any single…”

  This time, it was Kelly who trailed off, her attention still focused on Roberta as the computers continued their calm, rational, unflappable analysis of the data. There were a hundred gunships flying close air support around the cloudscoop, and she could see the reason why as well.

  A “portable” ‘scoop had been brought in from out-system and set up. It wasn’t a permanent structure and would only stand up to the pressures of its task for a few months. That was all it needed to do, however, and for those months, it more than doubled Santiago’s capability to refuel the Republic’s fleet.

  Thirteen warships hung under the gunship screen. All of them were huge. Six were the size of RMN battleships, and the remaining seven were almost twice as big as any cruiser she’d ever seen.

  She swallowed.

  “Can you validate individual IDs, Officer Milhouse?” she asked, her voice coming out far calmer than she’d expected.

  “On it.” He paused. “Incoming fire, skipper. From both our friends who left Novo Lar and the gunships in Leonardo orbit. Flight time is shorter for the Leonardo missiles.”

  “How long?”

  “Six minutes, some change.”

  “Xi, you heard that?” Kelly asked her wife.

  “Yes.”

  “Get us out of here in five,” she ordered. “We can post-process data later, so long as we’re alive.”

  “Wilco.”

  More seconds ticked by as Rhapsody in Purple’s scanners drank in every piece of data. None of the big ships were maneuvering, but they had files on the Republic’s warships now. Those files sucked, but they at least allowed Milhouse to break it down by type.

  “Looks like two carrier groups with some reinforcements,” he finally concluded. “Two carriers, big ones, four battleships, seven cruisers. All of them are as large as we’ve seen the type yet.”

  Seven twenty-million-ton cruisers. Four forty-million-ton battleships. Two fifty-million-ton carriers.

  And that was ignoring the other two carrier groups in the system.

  “Confirmed, our jump flares are also a carrier group,” Milhouse told her. “Can’t ID specific units, but the carrier is at least smaller than the pair at Leonardo.” He coughed. “Those missiles are still closing. Three minutes out.”

  “Can we get more by hanging around?” Kelly asked.

  “Not really. We have enough to chew on for days while we go home.”

  “Xi, get us out of here,” she ordered.

  As the strange sensation of the jump swept over her, she turned her gaze to Milhouse.

  “Start chewing, Tactical,” she told him. “We’re not going home. We’re going to Ardennes.”

  “Why Ardennes?” he asked

  “Because Hand Montgomery is at Ardennes with a fleet—and Ardennes is the last logistics base remotely close to Legatus. The only reason they’re gathering this large a force is to pin the First Hand against a world he is sworn to defend, and smash as large a portion of the remaining RMN as they can in a single battle.”

  Kelly LaMonte shivered.

  She was going to have to convince Damien Montgomery to run.

  Age might have mellowed her ex-boyfriend…but she doubted it had mellowed him that much.

  29

  It was clear that, from Persephone’s perspective, the immense magical might of a Rune Wright had one major benefit: her human could create a ball of light for her to chase around the office floor.

  Damien had one eye on the data flowing across his screens and the view beyond them, but most of his attention was on the kitten. Medici was still at least eighteen hours out, but he trusted Jakab to run the fleet until the Mage-Admiral arrived.

  Politics and symbolism req
uired him to be there, but there was only so much for him to actually do. If the Republic came, he would challenge them and he would contribute to the battle, but until then…he found himself feeling rather useless.

  Persephone had a very different opinion, at least, which helped. Watching her chase the ball around the floor, he slowly and carefully flexed his hands, running through the series of exercises he was supposed to do every time he remembered.

  Between magic and voice recognition on his computers, he could do everything he needed to. But he still couldn’t hold his own cup of coffee without using magic.

  The black mug with Duke of Magnificence’s commissioning seal on his desk mocked him. He glared at it for several seconds before sighing and willing it over to him.

  Drinking from the hovering cup, he reflected that there was at least one small positive: he’d finally mostly broken himself of the need to gesture to use his magic. That was technically only a habit, not a true requirement of magic use, but few Mages ever managed to break free of it.

  A disgruntled meow from the floor informed him that he’d let the cat-toy spell lapse. Before he could resume it, however, several kilograms of large kitten landed in his lap. Persephone meowed at him again, headbutted his chest, and then wrapped herself around the hand he’d left resting on the chair arm and started aggressively grooming the glove.

  While purring.

  “And that, my furry little friend, is what you think of my moping,” he said aloud with a chuckle. “And here I thought we adopted you as therapy for my hands.”

  “My lord?”

  Damien looked up as Denis Romanov entered the room.

  “Agent?” The tone suggested a problem. On the other hand, there was always a problem.

  “Local security forces just intercepted an attempt to bomb the Governor’s Palace,” his bodyguard told him. “The assassins’ backup were Augments. Situation is under control, but over a dozen police were killed.”