UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  The defensive force was maintaining a ballistic course toward the incoming Republic carrier group. Their velocity was low, allowing them to sort out their formation easily.

  The four cruisers were forming the second line of the formation, making up a perfect square wall in space. The destroyers were more scattered, establishing a defensive line from ten thousand to fifty thousand kilometers in front of the cruisers.

  “You’re the only Tac Officer who’s seen one of these things in action. What should we be looking for?”

  Roslyn swallowed as she considered her memories of the disaster at Nia Kriti.

  “They’re primarily missile platforms,” she said first. “Six launchers apiece, the same missiles as their capital ships. That formation is going to send twelve hundred missiles at us in a salvo.” She shivered. “I don’t know how many missiles they carry, but they launched multiple times in Nia Kriti, so it’s not just one per launcher.

  “I’d guess they’ll adjust their course as they close to skim the edge of our missile range. They’ll empty their magazines at us and break back for their carrier. They’re far from defenseless, but why tangle with more of our fire than they need to?”

  “That makes sense,” Kulkarni agreed. “Barring orders to the contrary from the flag, Mage-Lieutenant, I want to keep our missiles for counter-fire. We’re not going to kill very many gunships today, and we’re a lot better off if we still have a fleet tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For the first time, Roslyn Chambers watched an enemy charge toward her and her ship…and was doing nothing.

  That wasn’t entirely true, of course. She was laying in firing patterns, double-checking her data on the Republic’s new missiles, making sure that her counter-missile and RFLAM programming accounted for their current acceleration…but the entire defensive fleet was simply waiting. There were small maneuvers inside their formation, just enough to prevent long-range unpowered missile fire, but otherwise, the Martian and Ardennian force just waited.

  Four hours was a long time. Martian doctrine called for crew to be cycled over that kind of wait…but Stand in Righteousness didn’t have enough crew to do that. Roslyn made sure the petty officers supporting her on the bridge took a break, at least enough for a coffee and sandwich.

  Rank had its privileges, however, and today that privilege was staying on the bridge for the entire wait and having the one overworked bridge steward bring her coffee and a hot sub.

  “Orders from the flag,” Armbruster reported after just over two hours. “All destroyers are to use half of their missiles for defensive fire. The remainder, plus the cruisers’ fire, are to focus on attempting to destroy gunships.”

  Roslyn herself would have preferred Kulkarni’s plan, just focusing on surviving the incoming fire. She, however, was literally the single most junior officer in the entire fleet, Medal of Valor be damned. Her only response to orders she wasn’t sure about was to smile and obey.

  And perhaps ask for an explanation from her Captain, but in this case, she figured it was simply a matter of prioritization. The Mage-Commodore didn’t want to see the Republic have this fight go entirely their way.

  Montgomery might have given different orders, but Montgomery was on the surface and the fleet wasn’t getting information from that mess.

  He was probably alive—Roslyn was reasonably sure Hands were basically unkillable—but he had his own problems to deal with.

  31

  “Yeah…those definitely aren’t locals.”

  Romanov’s thoughtful, almost bored observation was the only comment among the haphazardly assembled “command squad” watching the street.

  Said street was now empty of locals, everyone either evacuated or sheltering in place now. It was not, however, empty of vehicles. Somebody clever on the other side had been hot-wiring the emergency remote system on every vehicle they passed, and now a solid wall of civilian trucks and sedans was rolling along the street toward the half-wrecked bank.

  “Oh, I’m sure the cars are local,” Damien replied. “Are we secure below?”

  “Yeah, my squads are on the way back up.” The Marine shook his head. “No prisoners. Where does the Republic find these guys?”

  “Pretty sure at least some of it is suicide implants that they didn’t tell them about in advance,” the Hand admitted. “If we’re secure below, can we reseal the command center?”

  “No,” Romanov told him. “They blew a damn big hole. We could probably seal it if we dropped what’s left of this building on it, but reports are that we still have people upstairs. They’re being moved up now and there’s a helicopter inbound for rescue, but…”

  “But that won’t work for anyone if our friends out there decide to shoot it down.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do we have a number?” Damien asked, turning back to the street. The slow-moving wall of vehicles was doing its job. It wasn’t much of a barrier to the weapons available to the twenty exosuited Marines he had with him—but it was a pretty decent one against their sensors and vision.

  “Somewhere between seventy and a hundred,” Romanov said. “How the hell did they get that much armor on planet?”

  “At a guess?” Damien shook his head. “They brought it in when they brought in the gear that was being sold to the resistance here. Once the rebels were working with us, we followed that chain all the way back, but we didn’t think to check if anything else was brought in at the same time.”

  The previous Governor of Ardennes had been…problematic. The Protectorate probably would have taken longer to step in, except that he’d decided to suppress a revolt with an orbital strike—one delivered by a mutinying Royal Martian Navy squadron.

  Things had gone sideways from there, and now an ex-rebel—Riordan—was the Governor, the ASDF had needed to be rebuilt, and the RMN was short a cruiser squadron. A Hand had died along the way, Damien’s mentor, and Damien himself had become a Hand in the chaos of the revolution.

  And now, for the second time in five years, he was looking at a street fight in the planet’s capital.

  “So, we’re outnumbered either two or three to one, and they’ve had a clever idea for mobile armor,” Romanov concluded. “What happened to our air support, again?”

  “We’re in the middle of a civilian commercial district and we wanted to avoid collateral damage,” Damien replied. “Plus, I sent them all to help evacuate the blast zone of the nuke these people set off.”

  “Right.”

  There was a long silence, and the remote-controlled vehicles continued their approach up the street. They were well into the range of the heavy penetrator rifles usually carried by exosuits, which meant the Republic infiltrators were hoping for surprise by controlling the start of the engagement.

  “So, what’s our plan now?” Romanov asked.

  Damien smiled thinly.

  “Me.”

  Before his bodyguard could even protest, Damien calmly walked out from behind the shuttle and faced the oncoming wall of vehicles. He was wearing a T-shirt and a light armor vest, which left the platinum hand of his office highly visible on his chest.

  Elbow-length black leather gloves covered his crippled hands, hopefully concealing that he could barely move anything past his forearm.

  “My lord?” Romanov’s voice echoed in his earpiece. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “You’ll know when it’s time to open fire,” Damien told him. “It’ll be hard to miss.”

  The Marine snorted over the radio, but he clearly understood.

  Damien studied the oncoming vehicles and then used a touch of magic to project his voice.

  “My name is Damien Montgomery,” he told them, probably unnecessarily. “I speak for the Mage-King of Mars.”

  Nothing happened for several seconds, and then the entire cavalcade of remote-controlled vehicles came to a jumbled halt forty meters from him.

  “I am prepared, for the moment, to assume that you were not directly involved
in the war crimes the Republic has committed today,” he told them. With the magic carrying his words, he spoke normally, calmly.

  “If you lay down your arms and surrender now, you will be treated as honorable prisoners of war. As spies and saboteurs in our territory, you know that is not our obligation.” He smiled coldly.

  “This offers expires the moment you move forward,” he continued. “I am the First Hand of the Mage-King of Mars. Do not underestimate my will or my power. If you do not surrender, I will destroy you.”

  Once, he would not have hesitated to believe his own words. He had worked outright miracles with five Runes of Power carved into his skin. With only three, however, it was easy to doubt himself.

  They might underestimate his power, after all. On the other hand, so did he.

  There was a moment where he thought it might have worked. The wall of vehicles was immobile for several seconds…and then started forward again.

  Damien Montgomery had not picked up the moniker of “the Sword of Mars” for allowing second chances. They were already too close.

  He focused his gaze on the ground beneath the advancing wall of vehicles and told about a thousandth of a gram of regular matter to “change polarity.” The description was easy. The spell, less so.

  It was still easier than producing antimatter without magic. The tiny amount of antimatter he created wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things…but when it annihilated against regular matter, it triggered the equivalent explosion of several tons of high explosives.

  The advancing wall of civilian vehicles disintegrated, debris scything out in every direction. Damien had a shield in place already, though, channeling and deflecting the explosion and debris back toward the advancing Republic infiltrators.

  One moment, they had a defensive screen of stolen vehicles.

  The next, Damien had turned those vehicles into a massive claymore aimed right at them.

  The wave of debris smashed over the approaching troops, but even as he unleashed the spell, Damien knew it wasn’t actually going to be enough against exosuits. Even before the debris cloud had begun to settle, the approaching Republic soldiers were opening fire.

  Heavy tungsten penetrator slugs, designed to punch through exosuit armor with only a little bit of luck, cut through the smoke and chaos. Damien was almost impressed—despite the heat and the debris and the clouds, several of the shots would have actually hit him.

  Instead, they crashed into a barrier of solidified air that crossed the entire street, an intentional leftover of the shield he’d used to shape the claymore. The clouds dispersed and more gunfire emerged as Damien walked forward to the edge of the shield.

  There was no undamaged portion of the street. The area behind him had been savaged first by the explosion that had broken into the command center and then by the crashing shuttle.

  “You had a chance,” he told them, his voice gentle as he gathered power again. “You should have listened.”

  More gunfire smashed into his shield, and he shook his head sadly. The shield swept forward at a thought, clearing the street of debris and hammering the soldiers to the ground.

  Romanov knew him. The Marines knew they couldn’t punch through his shield from this side either and had been waiting until he’d dropped it—and Damien had done so in a way that bought them time.

  As the Republic forces struggled to regain their feet and formations, the Marines charged out of the wrecked building. They were still outnumbered at least two to one, possibly more. Romanov was the only Combat Mage, but at this point, all of them were support.

  A gunshot rang out as one of the Republic troopers regained his footing. It slammed into the personal shield he’d kept up—and then Damien snapped his arm out in an old gesture he apparently hadn’t unlearned. A thin line of white fire flashed across the street-turned-battlefield and cut the soldier in half.

  Fire began to flicker across the battlefield as Damien stepped forward. The First Hand of Mars was all but immune to their weapons, and each time someone fired, the shooter dropped.

  Fewer than a dozen of the remaining Republic troopers died, to either Damien’s power or the Marines falling in behind him, before it finally sank in how screwed they were.

  Exosuited soldiers began to throw down weapons, rising with their gauntlets up to show they were unarmed. Some continued to fight, but Damien was watching. At this point, he started disabling weapons and locking soldiers inside their own personal shields.

  It was over in a few minutes, the last of the Republic soldiers stepping out of their suits and surrendering.

  “What do we do now, my lord?” Romanov asked.

  “They’re POWs,” Damien replied calmly. “We are the Protectorate of Mars, Mage-Captain Romanov. We won’t be the ones to mistreat prisoners.”

  “No, my lord,” the Marine agreed. There might have been relief in his tone, but Damien wasn’t sure.

  “We’re being jammed,” Romanov continued after a moment. “We’ve got limited local coms, but we can’t reach anyone in orbit.”

  “Then let’s get these people rounded up and coordinate with Julia’s people,” Damien ordered. “There’s nothing I can do for the space battle from here, but if they think they can take this planet from me…”

  Romanov turned away from him and surveyed the destroyed road.

  “They’re going to need a bigger army,” the Marine observed.

  32

  “It’s confirmed, people,” Mage-Commodore Jakab’s image said grimly on the hologram on Stand of Righteousness’s bridge. “We believe that the situation in Nouveaux Versailles is fundamentally under control, but the infiltrators have activated several high-power jammers.

  “Until those are shut down, we have no communication with Hand Montgomery or the local government.” He shook his head. “Hand Montgomery was on the surface to attempt to secure the local command center, which is now cut off from us. Fortunately, Duke of Magnificence is more than capable of acting as a command nexus for the combined fleet without assistance from the surface.”

  Roslyn was only paying half-attention to the Commodore’s communication with the ships’ captains. Her focus was primarily on her console as she dug through the recordings of the ill-fated clash between the gunship strike and Mage-Admiral Palmeiro’s squadron.

  She also had the information on the fight between Hand Montgomery’s recon force and the Republic battle group that had come after them.

  The one thing she’d managed to confirm was that the missiles used in each case were identical. That wasn’t particularly good news: the missiles the RIN had sent against Hand Montgomery were less maneuverable than the RMN’s, but they were a lot smarter.

  There were a lot of clever electronic warfare tricks available to her as Stand’s tactical officer. She could jam missiles, attempt automated hacking sequences, try and decoy them off…but she had recordings of a cruiser trying those stunts on the Republic’s new missiles.

  And failing.

  An alert flashed up on her screen and she double-checked it.

  “Gunships are adjusting vector as expected,” she reported. “If we don’t change our course, they’ll reach zero velocity relative to us at about twelve point three million kilometers.”

  She shook her head. “They’ll have enough time to dump all of their missiles at us, and we’ll get a few good salvos in ourselves, but it’s a hit-and-run.”

  “Given their range advantage, why would they let us shoot at them at all?” Kulkarni asked. From her tone, she wasn’t expecting an answer, but…

  “They’d still be well outside range of the Phoenix VII, which is all that the ASDF is supposed to have,” Roslyn pointed out. “I’d guess their intelligence isn’t up to informing them that we set up production lines for the VIIIs and opened up our stockpiles to the locals.

  “Given that three of our cruisers and half of our destroyers are ASDF ships, they’re probably counting on most of our weapons not having the range.”


  The Mage-Captain nodded slowly.

  “That would make sense. And they don’t lose out much if they’re wrong, either. Worst-case scenario is they lose all of the gunships, which would take a miracle on our side.”

  “And if they’re sending them out like this, they’ve got gunships to spare,” Roslyn guessed.

  “It won’t matter too much,” Kulkarni concluded. “But that’s a good thought, Lieutenant Chambers. Keep that brain of yours turning, and if you see anything else…”

  “Only thing I can think of, sir, is to make sure the rest of the fleet doesn’t try and use any complex electronic warfare,” Roslyn told her boss. “I’m relatively sure everyone should draw the same conclusions as me, though.”

  “How so?” the Captain asked.

  “Looking at our data from Nia Kriti and Mage-Commodore Jakab’s data from their ambush near Santiago, the Republic’s missiles are much smarter than ours—and basically have our full electronic warfare suite programmed into their databases. None of our clever tricks are going to work.

  “We can jam their scanners, but anything more subtle than that is going to fail.”

  Kulkarni sighed.

  “I’ll drop that note into the tactical network,” she said calmly. “You’re right that we all have the data, but habits are habits. We’re not used to fighting an equal enemy.”

  Roslyn nodded, her eyes on the oncoming gunship strike.

  The Royal Martian Navy had no experience in fighting an equal foe…and she was starting to suspect they might be fighting a superior one.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Maker make us truly thankful.”

  Kulkarni’s words seemed oddly formal to Roslyn. She didn’t recognize the words—probably a prayer, she guessed, but her own family were Mages by Blood. There wasn’t much religion left in the scions of Project Olympus.

  The prayer was, in any case, a strange response to the fact that the Republic gunships had finally opened fire. Twelve hundred missiles leaped into space, suicidally eager electronic brains seeking out the Protectorate fleet facing them.