There’d been enough of the weapons thrown around. The decoys had proven worth their weight in gold or anything else you named. The rigged-up containers were all gone now, but they’d served their purpose—and the Republic hopefully overestimated how much damage they’d actually done.
“Well, they’ve stopped shooting them at us, and they’ve fired off at least twenty salvos apiece between the first go-around and this one, so…I hope not?” Meadows replied. “I mean, they’ve probably got missiles aboard the carriers for the gunships, but they seem content to run for now.”
“We’ll keep chasing them,” Grace ordered. “Let any of the damaged ships still with us drop back to the rear of the formation, but we need to keep the pressure up. Don’t want them stopping to think. Or, well, count heads.”
Meadows shook his head.
“We’ve already hammered them harder than we hoped,” he pointed out. “Do we need to keep this up?”
“A dozen occupied systems say yes, Gunther Meadows,” Grace told him. “We can’t just beat them. As Montgomery said, we have to smash them. And that, Commodore, is why we’ll stick to the plan.”
“And if they do decide to launch those gunships at us?” he asked.
“At this point, I think we can take four hundred gunships,” she said. “But there are still five battleships and two carriers over there, and that fleet can take on anything else in the Protectorate.
“So, we keep chasing them.”
“Yes, sir,” Meadows replied, turning back to his console. “Hounds are on duty. Woof-woof.”
51
“And…now.”
The presence of Cherbourg between the original fleet position and the Republic force had ended up being more of an advantage for Damien than for his enemies. He’d held the entire RMN task group back, trusting in the decoys and the System Militias to spook the RIN into running.
They’d succeeded. The price was going to haunt his dreams for a long time, but they’d succeeded. Now, however, the Republic fleet was about to make their slingshot, coming around Cherbourg at a higher velocity and staying well ahead of the pursuing Militias.
And they’d be able to see the battleships and cruisers he hoped they believed they’d destroyed. It wouldn’t matter if they did, to be fair, but if they saw Medici’s fleet coming, they might realize what he was about to do.
He didn't need to have worried.
The Militia ships had pulled off exactly the jump they needed to, and the Navy wasn’t going to be shown up. Hours of acceleration at fifteen gravities had got them far enough clear of Ardennes that they weren’t jumping from one gravity well to another. They were jumping from relatively flat space into a gravity well—with perfect data on the target.
Three battleships, two cruisers and seventeen destroyers disappeared from the void of the Ardennes System and appeared two million kilometers from Cherbourg—and barely one point five million kilometers from the Republic battle group.
Lasers and missile launchers spoke as soon as the Martian fleet emerged. Phoenix VIIIs screamed across space, and the battleship’s twenty- and twenty-five-gigawatt beams spoke in anger. The destroyers and cruisers couldn’t match the overwhelming power of the heavy battle lasers, but they didn’t need to.
Not at this range.
Precious seconds passed as the Mages who’d jumped the ships stumbled away from their simulacrums. This wasn’t an evolution they practiced nearly enough, Damien reflected in the back of his head, and those seconds were paid for in the only currency accepted by war.
All three battleships lurched under heavy beam fire and several destroyers disintegrated—but then the Mage-Captains slammed their rune-marked hands down on their ship’s simulacrums and fire lit up the sky.
This was the environment for which the amplifier matrix had been designed. At this distance, missiles and even battle lasers paled into insignificance as the Mage-Captains of the Royal Martian Navy unleashed their magic.
The only missiles in space were their own, and they’d have ignored missiles even if they were there. Their targets were the enemy. Arcs of plasma and lightning flashed across space, and fireballs erupted inside enemy ships.
The carriers died first, the battleships’ lasers focusing on them even as the Mages tore into their consorts. The Republic had built big, powerful ships, ships that could withstand even the amplified power of a Mage…for a few seconds.
But Damien had twenty Mages and amplifiers. Both carriers vanished, obliterated by magic. The last cruisers disappeared, almost an afterthought. A battleship died. Then another. A third turned in space, flinging its forty-million-ton mass in front of the remaining two ships at a dozen gravities.
It bought a few seconds—a few seconds where every weapon and Mage in the RMN task force focused on one ship.
But when the shattered debris of that warship cleared, the surviving two battleships were also gone. The fading radiation of two jump flares lit up the wreckage around them.
Then new explosions and rads lit up their screens. A trail of fire traced itself back around Cherbourg, back to where the Republic ships had first emerged.
“What the hell?” Damien demanded.
“Suicide charges,” Jakab said after a moment. “Probably nuclear, hidden in the drive systems and remote-detonated by one of the battleship commanders before they fled.”
“Or by remote control from Legatus itself,” Damien said in a sick voice. They’d seen that at the Antonius Incident; Legatan Agents had used suicide devices on the ships of their patsies—or implanted in their patsies’ heads—to make sure there was no evidence. “They have an interstellar com, after all.”
“And the Navy commanders wouldn’t even need to know they were aboard,” Jakab agreed. “As soon as some officer in a bunker fifty light-years away sees the battle is lost and their ships are clear…he pushes a button.”
“We need to search for survivors regardless,” Damien ordered. “They may have wrecked the jump drive, but they probably didn’t kill all of their crews. Regardless of this damn war, we’re all human. We owe them that much mercy.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll make sure the order is passed on.”
“Let’s make sure we get our own people as well,” the Hand added, almost certainly unnecessarily. “Our friends paid an ugly price to set this up. Let’s make sure as many people get to go home as possible.”
52
Rameses was now definitively lacking in “new ship” smell to David’s nose. Even twelve hours after the battle, the smell of burning smoke was distributed throughout the ship—or at least the parts of the cruiser that still had atmosphere.
His and Keiko’s quarters were not in those parts of the ship, and she was looking at a damage control map with a somewhat lost expression on her face.
“Keiko?” he asked.
“David.” She turned and leaned against him. She was taller than he was, but he was more than solidly built enough to hold her up. “What do we do now?”
“Rameses is heading back to Ardennes orbit,” David told her. “You and I get a shuttle down to the surface and grab a hotel for a few days, at least, while Admiral Casanova and his people establish whether or not they’ll be able to fly her home or will have to repair her here.”
“Can we repair her here?”
“Yeah. Ardennes can’t build cruisers, but they can definitely fix them. I checked,” he confirmed. “And the Protectorate will pay for the fixes, too.”
“And death benefits for the mercenaries.”
David looked up to see Admiral Casanova joining them.
“Admiral?”
“I’ll admit, Captain Rice, that I wasn’t sure how reliable the ships we collected along the way would be,” Casanova said. “But now…” He shook his head. “I’ll take anyone who thinks they didn’t earn their pay and their pardons out into a dark alley and change their minds.”
David winced. The Amber Defense Cooperative ships had been damaged, quite badly in Rameses’ case, b
ut they’d all survived.
Of the hundred and forty-seven mercenary ships he’d brought to Ardennes with him, sixty-two had been completely destroyed. Another thirty-five were cripples, probably not economical for their for-profit owners to repair.
“How many of them were pirates?” he asked.
“Not as many as you’re afraid of,” Keiko told him. “I wasn’t going to hire anyone with that bad of a record. A few crews with issues in their pasts and definitely more than a few in need of pardons, but no active pirates.”
He arched an eyebrow at her.
“Okay, very few active pirates, and only ones I knew wanted out,” she admitted. She shook her head with a sigh. “They’re all dead, if that makes you feel better.”
“Not really,” David admitted. “We just gutted Amber’s mercenary economy. Was it worth it?”
“Yes,” Casanova said flatly. “Montgomery and the Protectorate will see the ships replaced. The dead…no one can bring back the dead, but they died doing the right thing. Even Amberites value that, Captain Rice.”
David snorted.
“I never doubted that, Admiral, even if I’m only an occasional resident still. Was this…all worth it, in your opinion?”
“We held Ardennes. We stopped the Republic and shattered an entire battle fleet.” Casanova shook his head. “Their losses will hurt them worse than ours hurt the Protectorate. The logistics base will let the RMN launch offensives to retake the lost systems.
“I don’t plan on staying,” he admitted. “We were an emergency band-aid, a stopgap to hold the line until the Navy could act. Once we’re sure Rameses can safely jump, we’re going home.”
The white-uniformed Admiral smiled.
“But we’re going home with the knowledge of a job well done.”
Despite everything, Stand in Righteousness had come through the Battle of Ardennes with only minor damage. They’d been hit with the aura of a battle laser in the final clash, and an entire face of the pyramid was missing sensors and no longer white, but that was repairable.
Roslyn still concealed a sigh of relief as they slotted the destroyer back into orbit of the planet. A lot of ships hadn’t survived the last few days, and as theirs was one of the undamaged ships, search-and-rescue had fallen heavily on them.
“We have a final count, sir,” Chief Chanda Chey told her as she stepped into the tactical officer’s office.
“Chief?” Roslyn asked carefully.
“Of rescues,” the noncom clarified. “We—or our shuttles—pulled three hundred and forty-six escape pods and about a thousand loose vac-suits out of the wreckage. All up, four thousand eight hundred and fifty-two people.”
“Damn.” That brought the first smile to the young officer’s face in a while. Five thousand people were going to live because Stand in Righteousness had been there to save them. Someone else might have saved them if they hadn’t been, but still…five thousand lives.
“I can feel better about that than a lot of our job,” she admitted. “I saw the estimate on Republican losses, too.”
The RIN fleet’s twenty-eight ships and thousand gunships were estimated to have had the better part of a million people aboard. Two ships had got away and the Protectorate had pulled almost a hundred thousand RIN crew from the wreckage, but that still put the death toll at around half a million.
“Largest fleet battle in human history,” Chey agreed. “Hell of a baptism by fire for a brand-new Lieutenant, if I may say so, sir.”
Roslyn shook her head.
“We’re still here,” she pointed out. “I’d like to think that means I did okay.”
“‘Okay,’” Chey echoed. “Brought Stand home, almost on your own. Stayed in command of a department that thought you were too young. Saw the scout ship before anyone else.”
She snorted.
“Yeah, I’d say that was passable, sir. Potentially adequate.”
Roslyn gave the Chief a gently reproving look, then caught the older woman’s broad grin.
“Of course, remember that I’m judging on the standards of holders of the Medal of Valor.” Chey stepped back slightly from the desk and gave Roslyn a crisp, Academy-perfect salute.
“I’m honored to be under your command, Lieutenant Chambers,” she concluded. “I look forward to seeing what trouble we get into in the future.”
Roslyn laughed.
“Be careful what you wish for, Chief,” she warned Chey. “I didn’t get rammed into the Academy by a Hand for avoiding trouble, after all.”
Grace McLaughlin’s flagship was the last one to leave the battlespace. Robin Hood had taken a few solid hits, but her sensors and boat bays were intact. They’d kept up the search and rescue sweep for three entire days.
“Sir, that’s the fourth sweep that hasn’t found anything,” Meadows said quietly as she continued to look over the scans. “Pretty much everyone out here was using the same standard emergency vac-suit. Forty-eight hours. Life pods had more, but they also have beacons and, well, power sources.”
“So, we’ve found everyone we’re going to find,” she murmured.
“Almost certainly,” her aide agreed. “It’s possible there’s still someone in a chunk of debris with atmosphere that we’ve missed, but we’re down into fractional percentages.” He sighed. “Sooner or later, we have to stop looking.”
Thirty shuttles and a pair of destroyers from the ASDF continued to sweep around them as well, but everything was being coordinated from Robin Hood.
“We still have ships that need repair before we’re going anywhere,” Grace pointed out.
“Yes. And, frankly, those ships might be better served by having their Admiral on hand to negotiate repairs and parts,” he replied. “I don’t know what more we can do out here.”
“We can save the damn people I led to their deaths,” she said bitterly.
“I think we did that,” Meadows said. “You led, they followed. Everyone knew the plan, Grace. There was a reason Montgomery put you in command, and it was because he trusted you to judge how hard to press. We did it right. We won, smashed the bastards to hell. You helped save the Protectorate, which does—last time I checked—include our homeworld.”
She snorted.
“You’re not my therapist, Commodore Meadows,” she told him.
“No, but you should probably talk to her, too,” he replied. “Right now, I’m one of your senior subordinates telling you that even if the search-and-rescue effort continues, you don’t need to be here. In fact, you shouldn’t be here.”
Grace was silent as she glanced around her flag deck.
“I’ll admit to being a bit worried about…other motivations for returning to Ardennes,” she admitted.
“Gods, McLaughlin—and you accused Montgomery of Sherwood Scot stubbornness?” Meadows demanded with a laugh. “You did your job. You’ve kept doing your job. No one is going to begrudge you and the Hand grabbing a hotel room together in an orbital around Ardennes. If either of you would let sleeping together get in the way of your duty, I haven’t seen any sign of it!”
Grace flushed but nodded.
“We can leave our shuttles with the ASDF ships for a bit longer, I think,” she decided. “A little bit more help can’t hurt, even for these final no-chance sweeps. But once we’ve sorted that out, I suppose we can set our course back to Ardennes.”
“Oh, thank Gods,” Meadows said. “I’m trying to help coordinate the repairs, but a thirty-plus-minute turnaround time on coms is giving me a headache.”
That managed to get a chuckle out of Grace.
“I see you have ulterior motives of your own, Commodore.”
53
After three days of sharing a bed at night, if barely seeing each other during the day, Damien was almost used to the degree to which Grace held on to him at night. She hadn’t clung as hard when they were younger, but he understood that it was different now.
And it wasn’t just the fact that they were only going to have days until t
hey were separated again, he reflected, while he gently stroked her hair as she gasped her way awake from another nightmare. Duty tended to drag people into many places where life was not so kind.
“Shh, shh, I’m here,” he murmured. His hands couldn’t bend, but he could at least touch her and help calm her down.
“That was at least…not a new one,” she said slowly, exhaling into his shoulder. “Remember getting blasted out of my office and having to keep air around us in vacuum with our magic?”
Damien winced.
“Yeah. That one features in my own nightmares,” he admitted. “We made it through it, though. And we made it through this battle.”
“Still get to watch my ships blow up when I close my eyes,” Grace told him. “Gods. We won. Should it feel this bad?”
“In my experience?” He sighed, then kissed the top of her head. “Yup. Never won a victory that didn’t cost more than I was prepared to pay.”
“Like your hands,” she said quietly.
“I’ll get them back,” Damien said. “It sucks for now, but they’re healing.”
Realizing that they were awake, Persephone arrived on the bed with a sudden thump and a loud purr.
“And that is what your cat thinks of our moping,” Grace told him.
“It’s not moping,” he replied as he petted the cat. “PTSD is a known career hazard. I’m guessing you have a counselor aboard your ship?”
“Yeah. Only managed one appointment so far. Time, after all.”
“Make it, my love,” Damien told her softly. “It’s worth it. You don’t have anything as precious as your sanity.”
“I can think of a few things you probably value as much,” she said with a lascivious wink. He chuckled and gently poked her.
“Value, yes, but not that much,” he told her, earning himself a throaty chuckle as she slipped herself along him.
Things were progressing quite positively, to Persephone’s disgruntlement, when his wrist-comp chimed.
UnArcana Stars Page 30
