This had been planned as his last term—but no one had expected it to involve a war.
“You did,” Grace agreed. “A staff, three competent subordinate staff officers, and an entire administrative structure.” She gestured at the mess around her. “This is what’s left for me.”
“You need more staff,” the McLaughlin told his granddaughter. “Paperwork shouldn’t be trapping you in an office; you have a job to do.”
“This is part of the job. I figure you know that as well as anyone,” she replied.
“That’s fair. But it’s not the most important part of the job, and you know that,” he countered. “We’ve received a message from Ardennes. You need to listen to it.”
“Ardennes?” Grace asked. “What’s at Ardennes?”
“Possibly our only hope of not losing this war?” the Governor shrugged. “And, just as important, Montgomery.”
“Oh.”
Grace listened to the entire message, but by the time the recording was over, she was already pulling up the readiness reports on her ships.
“We will deploy,” her grandfather said fiercely. “Montgomery has the authority to order us to. He has chosen not to…and it doesn’t matter. He is a son of Sherwood and we owe him.”
“We owe him,” Grace agreed. Jurisdiction conflicts over Antonius—plus some carefully calculated intervention by Legatan spies—had nearly brought Sherwood into war with Míngliàng. Damien’s intervention and refusal to let either system jump to war had probably saved tens of thousands of lives, if not more.
They owed him. And Grace wasn’t going to pretend she was over him, either. They’d had less than a week together after the Battle of Antonius and she knew he’d dated others, as had she, but…she wasn’t over him.
Even if that felt irrelevant and minor compared to the scope of the disaster the galaxy was facing.
“We have twenty frigates in commission, but four are at Antonius right now,” she told the McLaughlin. “We don’t have a lot of corvettes left, given the way I’ve been raiding them for frigate crews, but we’ve still got a solid dozen defensive ships that can’t go anywhere.”
She knew that her grandfather understood the value of those defensive ships too. The dozen of them left massed roughly half as much as one of her frigates.
“So, you have sixteen frigates in the system, plus the corvettes, correct?” he said.
“Exactly.” Grace continued running numbers. “If we concentrate Mages from all sixteen onto say…twelve, leaving only the Captains on the remaining ships, we’ll have five Mages per ship. Our people aren’t Navy Mages, but with five Mages per ship, we can make it to Ardennes in just over two days.”
“Do you have twelve ships fueled and ready to go?”
“No,” Grace admitted. “It’ll take twelve hours for us to have two full squadrons ready to deploy.”
“It’ll take you almost that long just to move your Mages around,” the McLaughlin pointed out. “Who will you leave in command here?”
Grace noted that he hadn’t even suggested she not command the deployment herself.
“McTaggart,” she said instantly. Commodore Ishbel McTaggart had been promoted past other officers who had been senior, primarily for keeping her head in the middle of the disaster when one of their Captains had turned out to be a traitor.
“I’ll take Commodore Arrington with me,” she continued. “That’ll give me two flagships and twelve frigates total. The intel we’ve seen on these bastards is terrifying, I’ll admit that…but I’ll match eighty-odd million tons of our frigates against the same mass in the Republic’s ships. We, after all, have magical gravity.”
“That is your area of expertise now,” her grandfather confirmed. “Do whatever it takes. Any resources you need, any assistance we can provide, let me know immediately. I want the Patrol underway in twelve hours, Admiral McLaughlin. Mars has called, and Sherwood will answer.”
37
“I’m not even certain you’re in Amber, Captain Rice, but if you are…I need your assistance.”
Damien Montgomery’s recorded voice echoed in the hotel room as Captain David Rice listened to the message. The burly merchant captain turned spy had been asleep when the message arrived, but he wasn’t going to let a message from the First Hand go ignored.
He wouldn’t have ignored a message from Montgomery, regardless of the young man’s rank. Damien Montgomery had been his Ship’s Mage for only a handful of months, but they’d saved each other’s lives a lot in that short time.
“Ardennes looks to be the pivot point where the next six months to a year of this war will turn,” Montgomery continued. “If we hold here, we have a chance. If we don’t… I can’t say what happens next, but I doubt it will be pretty.
“So long as we have this beachhead, this position from which to counterattack, they will focus here. If we lose Ardennes, we may just lose the war. I want to think that couldn’t be that bad, that the Republic is reasonable. They were us until a few short months ago. And yet…I cannot help but fear what the victorious Republic would do.
“I need you to recruit every mercenary you can, Captain Rice. You have the word of the First Hand. Their fees will be met. Their service rewarded. If you have allies who can put pressure on the Defense Cooperative to send ships as well, I beg of you…do what you can.
“I face an enemy stronger than our worst fears. I need every ship, every weapon I can gather. You are far from my only hope, old friend, but I need your help regardless.”
David exhaled a long breath as the message ended, and pulled up a map with the ease of long practice. Twelve light-years from Amber to Ardennes. A ship with one Mage would take four days to cross the distance. That time dropped if the Mage was Navy-trained, and dropped further if there were more Mages.
A lot of the mercenaries and ships in Amber, though, only had one Mage. Jump Mages were expensive, and mercenary companies ran on surprisingly thin margins.
“David?”
He looked up as his lover reentered the hotel room. Keiko Alabaster owned the hotel they were staying in. He was a starship captain, which meant his assets and resources easily qualified him as wealthy even before counting the fact that he now owned four ships.
Keiko Alabaster was an Amber shipping magnate. She owned ten ships and leased or hired at least four times that many. She also owned at least one of the planet’s orbitals—even now, he wasn’t sure which one—and swathes of planetside businesses and real estate.
He hadn’t known most of that when he’d fallen into her bed, and hadn’t really cared once he had learned. That, he was sure, was a good chunk of why the statuesque woman kept him.
“You had your message; I had mine,” he told her. “I’m guessing yours was also from Montgomery?”
The pale redheaded woman dropped onto the bed next to him, wrapped in a dark blue terrycloth robe as she leaned against his bare shoulder.
“That’s supposed to be confidential,” she said lightly. “But…yes.”
“And what is the ADC going to do?” David asked.
“That’s definitely confidential,” she said. “On the other hand, how long does it take MISS to find out our decisions?”
Keiko was still far from reconciled to David’s second life as a covert agent of the Martian Interstellar Security Service, but she was accepting enough about it to joke.
“Honestly?” David chuckled. “I have no idea; they keep me out of that loop unless absolutely necessary. Conflicts of interest and all that.”
“That’s probably wise.” She kissed his shoulder, then sighed. “Montgomery knows us,” she told him. “Well enough that he put a dollar figure on things. A big one. They’re sending the jump fleet, such as it is.”
David nodded thoughtfully. The Amber Defense Cooperative was exactly what it sounded like—a semi-private military force that provided system security for Amber. Along with the Judicial and Medical Cooperatives, it was part of the triad of “insurance” organizations th
at made up the closest thing Amber had to a government.
And since their purpose was entirely to provide security for Amber, funded by service fees and the purchase of membership shares, they had kept the vast majority of their forces limited to sublight ships. On the other hand…
“Rameses alone will be a significant contribution,” he pointed out. He had no idea how the ADC had convinced Tau Ceti’s Nova Industries to sell them one of the Dragon-class heavy cruisers—they weren’t supposed to be available for export at all—but he suspected that Keiko had had something to do with it.
“Rameses, Osiris, Isis and Horus,” she confirmed, reeling off the names. One cruiser, three destroyers. One of the destroyers was ancient, an ex-Navy ship, but the rest of the ships were brand-new. The new destroyers had actually been built in Amber herself, a test of their shipyards.
“What did Montgomery want from you?” Keiko asked. “Since I’ve spilled all of my secrets.”
Again went unspoken.
“Well, in respect of that, I have a question that I suspect you know the answer to better than I,” David told her. “How much to hire every mercenary in Amber?”
“More than you have,” she replied after a few seconds’ thought. “You might be able to come up with the deposit, but the bosses would know the limits of your resources.” She snorted. “They probably wouldn’t trust that I’d be able to come up with the liquid assets to pay them, not on that scale.”
“This isn’t your problem,” David said slowly.
“Like hell it isn’t,” she snapped. “I may not work for Mars like you do, love, but I live in the damn Protectorate. I can find the people we need to talk to, but like I said…a lot of them are going to want money up front, and they’re not going to trust that even I could liquidate assets in time to pay them.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he told her. “You know these people better than I do. Think the First Hand’s word is good for them?”
Keiko was silent for several seconds.
“He pledged his word. The word of the First Hand of the Mage-King.”
“He did,” David confirmed. “I have the recording, specifically what he said. ‘Their fees met, their service rewarded.’”
“That’s a blank check, David. He realizes that, right?”
“Damien Montgomery is many things,” he told her. “I doubt he is as naïve as he once was, but even if he was, he was never stupid. He knows what he just wrote…and I know he meant it. He needs a fleet, Keiko, not a cruiser and three destroyers.”
“If he’s prepared to write Amber’s mercenaries that kind of blank check…” His lover smiled and kissed his shoulder again. “I think we need to get dressed, David. We have work to do…but I think we can deliver the First Hand his fleet.”
38
Kelly LaMonte let herself sigh openly in relief as Rhapsody in Purple emerged into the Ardennes System. Despite running from an entire Republican battle fleet, she hadn’t let herself or her crew feel safe until they made it here.
That relief didn’t last long.
“We’re receiving an automated transmission,” Milhouse told her. “It’s on a loop, making sure everyone gets it.”
“Play it,” Kelly ordered, and the familiar voice of Damien Montgomery echoed across her bridge.
She’d known him well enough once to be able to tell how tired he was.
“All civilian shipping, the Ardennes System has become a war zone,” the recording announced. “Warships of the Republican Interstellar Navy have been present in the system and may have left behind automated munitions or mines. We also cannot guarantee that RIN parasite vessels are not present in the system.
“We are organizing convoys for in-system shipping, and your safest approach is to rendezvous with one of those convoys. An attachment to this recording will provide you with the locations of the current protected convoys.”
The recording paused, then resumed after a moment’s thought.
“Unfortunately, the Royal Martian Navy cannot guarantee your safety in the Ardennes System outside of those convoys. If you cannot safely reach a secured zone, I recommend that you withdraw from this system and promise that any penalties for late delivery will be covered by the Protectorate.
“If you remain, please attempt to rendezvous with a convoy as quickly as possible and we will do all within our power to keep you safe. Regardless, good luck.”
The recording stopped for several seconds, then resumed. Milhouse cut it off.
“They’ve already been attacked,” he told her. “It can’t have been the fleet we saw at Santiago, or the system wouldn’t still be in our hands.”
“No, they probably tried to rush them with a single carrier group,” Kelly guessed. “And it looks like the RMN got here first.”
She haloed the two massive signatures hanging in orbit above the planet.
“Those are battleships. Ours. I’m picking up ten cruisers backing them up, too—and there’s destroyers bloody everywhere. I don’t know where he found them, but Damien dug up reinforcements.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Xi Wu asked. Kelly looked up as her wife crossed the bridge, replacing Liara Foster at the Mage station. Foster promptly abandoned the bridge with the zombie walk of a post-jump Mage.
“In theory,” Kelly allowed. “I make it over two hundred million tons of heavy warships. That’s a hell of a fleet.”
“I’m hearing a but here, my love,” Xi admitted.
“Yeah.” The covert ops commander studied the chart. “Except there are four carrier groups in Santiago. We confirmed four hundred million tons of heavy warships, and we only got a clear look at two of the task groups.
“Assuming the RIN extracted any significant portion of the strike force they hit Ardennes with, we’re probably looking at the best part of a billion tons of warships heading this way. That’s a good chunk of the tonnage of the entire Royal Martian Navy.
“We need to abandon Ardennes…but if Damien has battleships, that argument is going to be a lot harder to win.”
Rhapsody in Purple wasn’t pretending to be a civilian ship this time. They were diving toward Ardennes at fifteen gravities, and Kelly was sending her MISS codes on ahead.
“Any response?” she asked Milhouse after they’d been in-system for half an hour.
“Nothing yet… Wait, I’ve got a pair of destroyers detaching from the orbitals,” he told her. “Incoming message.”
“Put it on.”
“Captain LaMonte, this is Commodore Cruyssen,” a uniformed officer told her from her screen. “We have received your codes and are sending two of my ships out to bring you in safely. Please transmit your sensor records from Santiago to Peacemaker.
“We are arranging a briefing once you arrive. You’ll be speaking to Admiral Medici and Hand Montgomery at least; we’ll see if we can pull anyone else in.”
“We’re glad you made it back safely, Captain. The more data we have on the enemy, the better able we are to defend Ardennes.”
The message ended and she shook her head.
“I don’t get the impression anyone is going to like our data,” she said aloud. “I don’t think we can defend Ardennes.”
“Don’t we have to try, sir?” Milhouse asked.
“I don’t know.” Kelly sighed. “If the Republic is coming with overwhelming force, can we justify losing the ships needed to even try? I don’t think we can.”
“We need a victory,” her tactical officer said quietly. “But if all that trying to hold will get us is another defeat…”
“This war isn’t going to turn on one battle,” she agreed. “It’ll turn on whether or not the Protectorate still has a navy over the next few months. We can afford to lose another system better than we can afford to lose the fleet I’m seeing on my screens.”
Or than they could afford to lose Montgomery. The death of a Hand was bad enough. Kelly had no idea how the Protectorate would take the loss of Damien Montgomery now.
>
She snorted, and Milhouse looked at her questioningly.
“I just realized that the thing in this system we can afford to lose least is probably Damien Montgomery, but I know him well enough to know that is not an argument I can make to him!”
Duke of Magnificence wasn’t the first cruiser Kelly LaMonte had ever set foot on, but it was still an unusual experience for her. There was no formal boarding party as she came aboard. She was met by a small squad of Marines who escorted her to a conference room where several officers waited for her.
There were two men and a woman linked in by video screen. She recognized Commodore Cruyssen from her earlier conversation and Mage-Admiral Medici from when the RMN officer had rescued the crew of Blue Jay back when the people hunting Damien had almost finished them off.
She didn’t know the tall woman in a business suit, but Kelly guessed she was a civilian member of the Ardennian government linking in from the surface.
There was another Commodore in the room with her, along with a Marine officer—she didn’t recognize either, but she was focusing on the other occupants of the room to distract herself from the one person in the room she most definitely did recognize.
Damien Montgomery looked like he’d aged a decade in half that time. He was more formally dressed than she’d usually seen him when he was Blue Jay’s Ship’s Mage, a black blazer over a tight-fitted white turtleneck.
He still had the gold medallion that designated him a Mage, but that symbol was almost secondary compared to the platinum-cast fist that hung on his chest. Kelly’s ex-boyfriend looked…happy to see her but utterly exhausted.
She’d heard about everything, and her eyes were inevitably drawn to his hands. He wore thin black leather gloves, long enough to disappear under the sleeves of his jacket. The gloves hid any visible scars, but his hands were immobile.
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