Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Corporal Williams knocked at that moment, opening the door to allow one of Government House’s staff to enter with a steaming tray of food and – bless the Marine’s heart – two cups of coffee.

  Julia snagged one off the tray as it passed her, then waited as Damien took a somewhat paltry stab at the food. Bodyguarding a Hand sometimes seemed to involve making sure the somewhat excessively dedicated man she worked for ate as much as stopping assassins.

  “So, where do we go from here, boss?”

  “I’ll need to set up a meeting with Jakab, you and Christoffsen back aboard the Duke,” Montgomery answered after chugging half the cup of coffee. “Go over everything, see what your opinions are.”

  “Last time I checked, you were the Hand,” she pointed out. “So where do we go from here?”

  She recognized the signs of Damien dancing around a decision he’d already made.

  “The only place that makes sense, Julia,” he admitted. “From here, we go to Sherwood and present Wong’s complaint. What happens after that… depends on the McLaughlin.”

  Chapter 8

  Mage-Captain Jakab’s steward made fantastic coffee. This was more important than usual, as Damien wasn’t entirely sure how much sleep he’d got after falling asleep on that desk, but it hadn’t been nearly enough.

  Most of the time, he could follow presentations like the one the Duke’s tactical officer had just put on, but today he’d got lost sometime between ‘antimatter drive emissions spectrum’ and ‘phased laser wavelength’.

  Despite that, he was reasonably sure Commander Rhine had gone on for long enough that he probably should have come to a conclusion, and from the expressions of the other people in the conference room aboard the Duke he hadn’t yet.

  “Commander Rhine,” he interrupted. The dark-haired officer stopped short, looking confused. “The Mage-Captain and I can follow you. Special Agent Amiri can probably follow you. Professor Christoffsen has no background in spacecraft and the poor man’s eyes just glazed over. Can you summarize, please?”

  From the grateful expression his aide shot him, Damien hadn’t been too far off the mark there.

  “Apologies, Professor, my lord,” Rhine recovered quickly. If he hadn’t been at least somewhat quick on his feet, the man wouldn’t have been tactical officer on a battlecruiser. “It’s rare to have to delve this deeply to try and identify a ship, I’m afraid I may have been a little enthusiastic.”

  “That’s fine, Commander. Summarize, please?” Damien repeated.

  “Of course.” With several taps on his wrist computer, Rhine brought up the main holo-tank in the middle of the conference table. A zoomed in view of the data provided by the Flotilla appeared.

  “In short, the weapons used are consistent with a Sherwood frigate,” he noted. “All energy signatures detected are also within parameters for a Hunter-class frigate given the level of interference. The only item keeping me from being certain this was a Hunter is the level of electronic warfare in play – not only did it render a confirmation on the energy signatures impossible, but it is also a higher power ECM suite than our data says the ships possess.”

  “So Sherwood has upgraded their ships since our last update?” Damien asked.

  “That is the most likely scenario, yes,” Rhine agreed. “While I cannot be certain, I would say it is about seventy to seventy-five percent likely that this was a Hunter out of Sherwood. No one else has built an equivalent ship to date.”

  That was what Damien had concluded as well, though he couldn’t have put a percentage on his opinion.

  “Mage-Captain Jakab,” he turned to the Duke’s commander. “As of our last update, what was the strength of the Sherwood Interstellar Patrol?”

  “Sherwood created the Interstellar Patrol after the Blue Jay incident,” Jakab said. “I believe you were involved in that, my lord?”

  “Yes,” the Hand confirmed. “Two pirate attacks on the same ship. It didn’t end well for the pirates, but it made Sherwood look unprotected.”

  “And the Patrol was the result,” Jakab agreed. “They purchased three Sol-built destroyers six months after that, while laying the yards and creating the design for the Hunter. The first set of six ships was commissioned a year ago after eighteen months construction.”

  “The yards are still present, though?” Damien asked.

  “Yes,” the Captain confirmed. “A second set of frigates was laid down once the first was complete – they should still be six months from completion.”

  Damien took over control of the holo-tank from his wrist computer and brought up a star map.

  “Gentlemen, the nearest Navy base to here is the Corinthian system,” he noted. “Unfortunately for our needs, the base there is small. Mage-Commodore Teller has six destroyers and no cruisers – an insufficient force to change the balance of power in this region.

  “The nearest Runic Transceiver Array is in Amber,” he continued. “Both Míngliàng and Sherwood have Arrays under construction, but neither is less than a year from completion.”

  Magic could teleport a starship a full light year, but instantaneous communication between systems had to cross vast distances using one spell. The solution was the Runic Transceiver Array, a massive construction of runes and magic that could project a Mage’s voice – and only a Mage’s voice, despite hundreds of thousands of man-hours of experiments – to another RTA in another system. Complex and huge, the arrays took years to construct and were hugely expensive.

  There were only six in the MidWorlds to date, four of which had been funded by the Protectorate for security reasons.

  “Since we will need to call in forces via the RTAs regardless, I see no reason to detach Mage-Commander Renzetti and the Twenty One Eighty Seven just yet,” Damien told his staff, nodding to the courier’s commander. “What is our ETA to the Sherwood system?”

  “We are twelve light years from Sherwood. Since, unlike Commander Renzetti, I only have four Mages aboard including myself, that’s a full day’s travel,” Jakab told him. Meeting the Captain’s somewhat surprised gaze, Damien gestured towards Christoffsen with his chin. He, Amiri, and the officers all knew the limitations of Jump Mages and the number aboard the Duke. The ex-Governor did not.

  “Coordinate with Míngliàng Orbital Control,” Damien ordered. “Make sure both ships are fully replenished on all consumables. The sooner we’re on our way, the better.”

  “Sir, this ship cannot engage the entire Sherwood Patrol on its own,” Jakab pointed out. “I hope you have a plan.”

  “My plan, Captain, is to order the Patrol to stand down and provide all of their sensor data for our review,” Damien said quietly. “Even if the McLaughlin has decided to stoop to piracy and murder, it’s a long way from picking a fight with Míngliàng to picking a fight with Mars.”

  #

  “So, you agree with us now?” Governor Wong Lee demanded. He and his husband had come aboard the Duke of Magnificence to discuss Damien’s conclusions. They’d come without the military officers this time.

  “I never disbelieved you,” Damien pointed out, pouring the two men coffee. “Understand that there are still limits to what I am willing to do, but I will be moving to Sherwood to inform them of your complaints.”

  “I hope you plan to do more than that,” Wong Ken growled. “We are losing people, my lord Hand.”

  “I will be ordering the Patrol to stand down while I investigate further,” Damien replied. “If they do not comply, the situation becomes rather more straightforward.”

  “It seems straightforward enough to me,” the Governor’s husband snapped.

  “I cannot disagree. But I still hope that my intervention can end this crisis without further conflict. Despite evidence to the contrary, I do not enjoy bringing the Navy down on our member systems,” the Hand observed. “I have a number of options short of that. Professor?”

  Christoffsen leaned forward.

  “In the best case, Sherwood will capitulate upon arrival,
” the political advisor told them. “More likely, we will find ourselves in an extended stalemate, where Sherwood is not in a position to argue with the Hand, but is not prepared to concede.

  “Our first task is to end the violence,” he continued. “Once that is complete, it will be necessary for us to bring you and the McLaughlin together to try to sort out just why this all started.”

  “They want us out of Antonius,” Governor Wong said flatly. “Complaints of claim-jumping by Sherwood crews have increased three-fold over the last two years. I will not concede our claim to that system, my lord Hand. The deal we negotiated with Sherwood was more than equitable.”

  “That is a discussion for once the violence is over, Wong Lee,” Damien told him. “For now, I promise that the violence will end.”

  “If there’s anything Míngliàng can do to assist, let us know,” the Governor replied. “All of my resources are at your disposal.”

  “For now, as soon as we’ve refueled, we’ll be on our way. I have many questions for Governor McLaughlin. We shall see how I like his answers.”

  Chapter 9

  “Jump complete.”

  “Verify location,” Mage-Captain Kole Jakab ordered. He trusted every one of the Mages on his ship completely, but the extra time to verify was a small cost.

  Mage-Lieutenant Jessica Philips bowed her head to him slightly from where she grasped the simulacrum. He smiled and shook his head at the youngest Mage on his ship.

  “Go get some rest, Jessica,” he ordered.

  “Clean jump,” Lieutenant Patrick Carver announced. “We are dead on the center of Míngliàng-Sherwood Jump Nine.”

  Philips had waited for the confirmation before releasing the simulacrum, but once assured she’d done her job she saluted Kole and swiftly left the bridge – hopefully headed for a nap, but the black-haired woman was very young.

  Kole smiled to himself. She was even younger than the Hand the ship was ferrying around, and that was a warning not to underestimate her if nothing else was. Other Navy Captains had occasionally mocked him for becoming a taxi driver after the Duke had been assigned as Montgomery’s personal transport. The Duke’s Captain ignored them.

  They hadn’t been the one approaching a planet, praying for Montgomery to succeed so they wouldn’t have to nuke one city in the probably vain hope of saving five more. Mage-Captain Kole Jakab had. He’d understood why the order had been given – and why Montgomery had made it non-discretionary.

  If Montgomery had failed, he would have followed those orders, and then resigned his commission. Instead, Damien Montgomery had stopped a madman and saved fifty million lives and Kole Jakab’s conscience.

  Kole could live with being a glorified taxi driver.

  “Sir, we have a contact on the sensors,” Carver told him. “No jump flare, they’ve been here all along.”

  “How did we miss them on our initial scan?” Kole asked.

  “They showed up as soon as we did a radar sweep,” his junior officer replied. “They’re running cold so we didn’t pick them up on passives. Wait… they must have seen us, they’ve lit up their transponder.”

  Kole leaned forward, studying the screens around him. “What do we have?” he said softly, studying the icon.

  “Santiago-class freighter – pretty standard rotator-type, four ribs, six megatons cargo capacity,” Carver reeled off. ‘Rotator-type’ freighters had a central keel cargo pods were attached to and curved ‘ribs’ that rotated around that core to provide pseudo-gravity.”

  “Transponder downloaded complete,” Carver concluded a moment later. “Sherwood-registry, sir – the Tidal Wave.”

  Sherwood registry on its own wasn’t suspicious. Combined with lying low until pinged though, the Tidal Wave was making Kole’s back itch.

  “Sir, we’re receiving a low-band transmission from them,” another junior officer – twenty-four hours into the trip, Jakab had his C-shift on duty – reporter. “They’re…”

  “They’re what, Lieutenant Rain?”

  “They’re requesting to move into our weapons envelope for protection,” the shaven-headed junior coms officer reported. “They advise that they believe they detected a pirate vessel in the area on arrival.”

  “Did we pick up anything?” the Captain asked, glancing at Carver.

  “Emissions trails, nothing that really stood out,” the redheaded young man replied. He glanced over his data. “Wait… there’s a relatively recent antimatter trail in here,” he announced. “That seems… odd.”

  “Yes,” Kole agreed slowly. He looked over at Rain. “Lieutenant Rain, inform the Tidal Wave they can close to five light seconds. Ask Mage-Commander Renzetti’s people to close to one hundred kilometers.”

  “Sir?” Carver looked at him questioningly. It looked like Rain wasn’t sure of his intentions either, but she was busy sending the requested orders.

  “I don’t trust the Tidal Wave,” the Mage-Captain admitted. Training junior officers was, after all, why the Captain was on duty with C-shift. “I want them close enough we can protect them, but far enough out that they can’t hurt us by surprise. FN-2187, on the other hand, is our only truly vulnerable asset in the area so I want them well inside our defensive zone to prevent anyone getting ideas.”

  His junior officers nodded their understanding. He also noted that they were being careful to watch their consoles as well as pay attention to him pontificating. That little bit of multi-tasking was one of the best skills a junior officer could learn.

  It was one he’d mastered a long time ago, and he’d been watching the main screens while he was pontificating. He saw the two jump flares before Carver announced them.

  They’d appeared practically on top of the Tidal Wave.

  #

  Kole Jakab was a thirty-year veteran of the Royal Martian Navy who’d worked his way up to command a capital ship in a peacetime Navy. There hadn’t been many actions in his career, outside the Battle of Ardennes itself, but he knew an attack jump when he saw one.

  “Take us to General Quarters,” he ordered. “Pursuit vector on those ships now. Prep missiles for long-range defensive fire – cover the Tidal Wave.”

  C-shift or not, his officers leapt into action with admirable speed. Everything they saw was ten seconds old, light suffering its ancient delay reaching them.

  Nonetheless, he felt his ship lurch as she went from drifting in preparation for a jump to her full ten gravity acceleration. Missiles blasted out from her forward tubes, covering the distance at over twelve thousand gravities.

  “Laser capacitors charging,” Carver reported. “Sixty seconds to full charge.”

  Kole laid his hands on the silver simulacrum of his ship, linking into the amplifier matrix and reaching out with his senses. Nothing, not even a Mage’s sense of spells being worked, traveled faster than light. Seconds ticked by.

  “What am I looking at, Carver?” he demanded.

  “I’m reading a pair of destroyers,” the Lieutenant told him in a surprised voice. “One million kilometers clear of the Tidal Wave, but closing at eight gravities. I’m not reading any missiles, but…”

  “They don’t need them at this range.”

  “I have laser fire!” Carver snapped. “Looks like a warning shot, no impact.”

  “And now they see us,” Kole murmured, watching the timer. The warning shot had been fired thirty seconds after emergence. Without the Duke of Magnificence bringing her engines up, the attackers probably hadn’t seen her – but they’d been fully active thirty seconds after seeing the jump flares.

  “Shit!”

  In theory, the Duke’s Captain should have reprimanded whichever of the officers had sworn. In truth, his own reaction was barely muffled as the two destroyers both opened up with a dozen three-gigawatt lasers.

  The Tidal Wave came apart in a blast of vaporized metal.

  “How many,” Kole coughed, swallowed, and then tried again. “How many crew are aboard a Santiago?”

  “One
hundred ten minimum,” Carver said softly.

  “Time to missile impact?”

  “Three minutes, twelve seconds.”

  “Tell me I have lasers,” he snapped.

  “First phase capacitors charged in ten,” the junior tactical officer replied crisply. “We’ll only have ten beams, thirty seconds more to having the rest of the beams online.”

  Duke’s sensors were still resolving the data on the destroyers, but the power of their beams said everything. The weapons that had killed Tidal Wave were three-gigawatt beams. The Duke of Magnificence’s heavy battle lasers were twelve-gigawatt beams.

  “Five beams per target,” Kole ordered. “Dispersion pattern Kappa-Five. Fire when ready.”

  “Firing!” Carver announced.

  “We have incoming!” Rain snapped from her console. The shaven-headed com officer had taken over sensors when Carver had needed his tactical console to engage an enemy. “First beam set have missed, missile ETA is three minutes, forty seconds. Forty birds.”

  “Too late you bastards,” Kole murmured. Carver had kept up his gunnery practice – he nailed the K-5 attack pattern perfectly – and Kole had guessed right. One of the destroyers was untouched, but the other took a twelve-gigawatt ultraviolet laser directly to the tip of the hundred meter pyramid.

  The ensuing explosion of energy ripped the destroyer open, but warships were built tough. Despite the damage, he watched in surprise as the half-crippled destroyer rotated and kept firing. More lasers flashed out, several landing glancing blows on the Duke of Magnificence.

  The cruiser shuddered, brushing aside the impacts on her armor for now.

  “Secondary capacitors spun up,” his junior tactical officer announced. “Switching to dispersion Lambda-Nine, going to sweep on all beams.”

  As Kole held onto the simulacrum, he noted Commander Rhine charging onto the bridge. His often stuffy tactical officer half-ran across the room to his station… and promptly dropped into the junior’s seat, leaving Carver in charge of the battle the junior had already started.