Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I have the missiles, focus on the beams,” the Captain heard Rhine whisper, and his own screens noted Rhine taking control of the two salvos of missiles Carver had already put into space.

  “Add more spin to the course, Lieutenant Rain,” Kole ordered, wondering where his Navigator was. “Let’s keep them from landing too many hits.

  “Lieutenant Carver, Commander Rhine – let’s not let these bastards get away, shall we?”

  Even as he finished speaking, the sweeping cuts of dispersion pattern Lambda-Nine caught up with Bandit Two’s half-crippled attempts to dodge. At least two twelve-gigawatt beams lanced down the hole opened by the earlier salvo – deep into the heavily armored heart of the ship where the simulacrum chamber and antimatter storage were concealed.

  The stark white light of a matter-antimatter reaction flared into a tiny new sun marking Bandit Two’s grave.

  “Missiles on autonomous terminal mode,” Rhine announced. “Say what prayers you’ve got, I’m targeting our inbounds.”

  A twenty second communication loop didn’t allow much fine control on the final approach, but a Phoenix VIII was a smart missile. Kole had ordered the missiles launched hoping to defend the Tidal Wave, but his reflex served them well as eighty missiles swarmed in on Bandit One.

  No destroyer built had the defenses to withstand that, and with Carver’s lasers boxing in any attempt by Bandit One to dodge, she never stood a chance. Twenty-two one-gigaton weapons penetrated every defense the Tidal Wave’s murderers threw up – and an even brighter stark-white sun marked Bandit One’s annihilation.

  “Their missiles, Rhine?” Kole asked. The inbound weapons were Phoenix VII’s – a lot more advanced than any pirate should have, but still slower weapons than the Duke’s and launched later.

  “Hold on a second,” the Commander replied, then tapped a final command on his screen. Duke of Magnificence shivered as a hundred one-gigawatt defensive turrets slewed about, selected their targets, and fired.

  Two seconds later, the second lasing crystal on each turret cycled into play. The beams fired again, focusing on even fewer missiles.

  Rhine didn’t need a third volley.

  #

  Damien was woken up by the General Quarters alert. He had his bedroom wallscreen showing him the tactical display before he was even dressed – just in time to watch the Tidal Wave be vaporized.

  He could read the icons himself, if not as well as some of the experienced officers aboard. The pair of destroyers were completely out-classed by the Duke of Magnificence, and he knew better than to jog the elbows of the ship’s crew in a fight.

  He carefully dressed, watching the battle unfold on the screen. Once the missile salvo had been destroyed, he tapped the command to link to the bridge. An image of Kole Jakab appeared on his screen, the pale-skinned officer standing at the command console next to the silver simulacrum of the Duke.

  “Mage-Captain,” he said calmly. “Our status?”

  “We are undamaged,” Jakab replied. “I can’t say the same for the freighter who was hoping for our protection.”

  “I saw the jump sequence, Captain,” Damien told him quietly. “Those ships already knew where she was. Unless you’d jumped to her the moment you saw her, there was nothing you could do to save that ship, Kole.”

  “I know,” Jakab ground out. “I still don’t like it.”

  “Move us in and search for survivors, Mage-Captain,” the Hand ordered. “We can hold position at this jump until we’re damned sure no one escaped. Even the pirates. Who were they?”

  “Still analyzing,” the Captain replied. “Not Sherwood, I can tell you that much – the Patrol doesn’t have destroyers anymore.”

  “Too many players in this game,” Damien muttered. Míngliàng and Sherwood – and now unaffiliated pirates? Pirates with destroyers? It was possible – while the companies that built them were careful about who they were sold to, the regional militias were often less careful when they decommissioned them.

  And for that matter, no one was entirely sure how the Blue Star Syndicate had acquired the Navy cruiser they’d tried to kill Damien with before he was a Hand. Similar shadowy channels could have shuffled a few destroyers into the hands of pirates.

  “Agreed, my lord,” his ship’s Captain said grimly. “This is getting messier all the time. The Tidal Water asked us for protection – they were worried about pirates at the jump, which means this has already been happening.”

  “They might have been going off the attacks on Míngliàng shipping,” the Hand pointed out. “Trust me, Captain, unless someone specifically warns them that the attacks are focused, merchant shippers are just going to put the whole lot in the ‘pirate attacks threaten me’ category.”

  “Fair,” Jakab shook his head, muttering a curse Damien didn’t quite catch. “My lord, we’re supposed to stop things like this. What the hell is going on in this sector?”

  “Um, sir, my lord,” Commander Rhine stepped into the view of the camera. “I’m going to have to run some more detailed analysis to confirm, but the computers just churned through the first analysis. They were faking their emission spectrum – some electronic warfare, some specific heat projectors. Would have worked on most militia sensors, but ours saw through it.”

  “And?” Damien demanded. Rhine was going into more detail than he needed again, but he was assuming there was a point.

  “Sir, under the fake spectrum… like I said, I need to run confirmation, but the system gives me a seventy percent probability the pirates we just killed were Míngliàng Security Flotilla destroyers.”

  Chapter 10

  Seventeen.

  That was how many people had survived in the one rotating rib of the Tidal Wave that had blasted free when the freighter was vaporized. They’d confirmed that there had been one hundred and fourteen people aboard the ship.

  Damien already knew he wasn’t particularly good at focusing on the survivors. It turned out that Mage-Captain Kole Jakab wasn’t any better, which at least had the benefit of forcing the Hand to look past his own frustration to attempt to curb his subordinates.

  He’d basically dragged the Captain down to the landing bay when the shuttle returned with the survivors. He found the fact he could realize the Captain needed to see their success more easily than he could find solutions to his own concerns ironically amusing.

  They’d sent out five search and rescue shuttles, but only one was returning. The other four continued to sweep the debris of the two destroyers, looking for any clues to confirm or deny Rhine’s analysis. There wasn’t much chance of retrieving anything useful from Bandit One – twenty-plus gigaton explosions didn’t leave much for analysis. Bandit Two had been destroyed by its own fuel cells going up, so there was a chance something useful had been blasted free.

  Corporal Williams was the first off the shuttle, opening the door and waving the waiting medical team forward. The blond Marine stepped aside as the medics charged forward, then spotted Damien and Jakab.

  Approaching them, she saluted crisply.

  “My lord, sirs. All the survivors are stable,” she reported. “Five had major vacuum exposure and three were injured by shrapnel; they need immediate medical attention.” Behind her, the first stretchers began to leave the shuttle, the worst cases already secured by the Marines in preparation for transport to the Duke’s shipboard hospital.

  “The others have various minor injuries, mostly frostbite and minor vacuum exposure,” she continued. “They’ll all need medical attention, but they can walk themselves to the doctors.”

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Damien murmured, watching as the eight stretchers hurtled their way deeper into the ship. Few hospitals anywhere in the galaxy could rival the facilities aboard a Royal Martian Navy cruiser – having made it aboard the Duke, those men and women’s survival was now guaranteed.

  “Wait, Damien?”

  The voice was familiar, but it took Damien a moment to even locate the speaker. A gaunt, dark-skin
ned man of his own age had paused halfway out of the shuttle. His golden medallion marked him as a Jump Mage, though his rough flannel pajamas didn’t exactly carry rank insignia to say if he was a senior or junior Ship’s Mage.

  His name was Charles MacLeod, a scion of Sherwood’s second oldest and second most powerful Mage family. He and Damien had gone to school together – they’d been romantic rivals for a time before Grace McLaughlin had made it clear that she was only interested in Damien. MacLeod had taken that with relative poise, though he and Damien had never been close.

  “Charles?” he asked. “You were on the Tidal Wave?”

  Shakily, his old classmate stepped down from the shuttle and nodded. “Ship’s Mage and Executive Officer. God… Did Riley make it? The Captain?”

  “The only survivors were in Rib Two,” Jakab said. “I’m sorry, Mage?”

  “Macleod. Charles Macleod. Why are you here, Damien?”

  “You know the Hand?” the Mage-Captain asked, and MacLeod froze. His gaze met Damien’s, then slowly traveled down, to the gold medallion at his throat, and then to the golden fist icon of his office hanging on his chest.

  “Hand?” he whispered. “Grace said something, but I didn’t realize… damn.”

  “What happened, Charles?” Damien asked. “We had no reason to expect piracy near Sherwood – I understand that to be the whole point of the Patrol.”

  “I don’t know much, just what Grace told me when she asked me to come home,” MacLeod admitted. “Said they were over-stretched, needed Mages willing to put on the uniform and help protect people. Came through Míngliàng, which has its own problems… is this entire sector coming apart?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out,” Damien told him softly. “When you’re feeling up to it, my people will want to interview you.”

  “My god, your people?” MacLeod looked around the landing deck. Even with four SAR shuttles out, there were still rows of spacecraft lined up in neat rows. The closest row was assault shuttles, menacing looking craft with visible weaponry.

  “I’m on a goddamn Navy cruiser, and it’s Damien fucking Montgomery’s personal transport?”

  “Yes,” Jakab said shortly. “Now, Mage Macleod, we really do need to get you and the other survivors to our doctors. The Hand will interview you later.”

  #

  Twenty-four hours of searching had sadly found exactly what they’d expected to find of two ships destroyed by antimatter explosions: nothing.

  Damien had insisted they make certain, and the shuttles had carried out alternating sweeps across a large portion of the surrounding space, in case something had been blasted clear before the antimatter missiles and fuel tanks had gone up.

  A full day after the short battle found his senior subordinates once more gathered in the meeting room next to the Duke’s bridge, and Commander Rhine once more preparing to present his findings.

  “Well, Commander Rhine?” Damien asked. The tactical officer looked more nervous this time than when he’d presented the data from Admiral Phan. That was, Damien reflected, probably at least partially his fault.

  “My staff and I have completed our analysis of all of our sensor data on the two destroyers,” Rhine said slowly. “Without going into too much detail, a number of measures had been taken to conceal the emissions signature and other identifying factors. The measures would have been sufficient against civilian sensors and the sensors available to most regional militias.” He tapped a command, and holograms of two identical vessels appeared above the table. Sections of the ships were fuzzy where the Duke hadn’t seen them as clearly, but most of the ships were clear.

  “These measures were not sufficient against the sensor and computer capability of a Navy battlecruiser,” Rhine concluded, his voice very satisfied. “While we didn’t get complete emission signatures, I am reasonably confident we got accurate signatures.”

  “You said before that they were Míngliàng ships,” Damien pointed out. “Have we managed to confirm or deny that yet?”

  “We do not have a detailed emissions profile list for the Míngliàng Security Flotilla,” the tactical officer admitted. “The regional militias prefer to keep that kind of data to themselves, and we didn’t request it before we left. Without those profiles, I cannot confirm with one hundred percent certainty that the ships were MSF vessels.”

  “I’m hearing a ‘but’,” Jakab interjected. “What can you confirm, Commander?”

  “Both ships were constructed by Tau Ceti Nova Industries,” Rhine told them. “TCNI builds their vessels in eight ship batches, and each batch is slightly but noticeably different from those before and after. They also provide the RMN a lot more information on those batches than I suspect the militias buying the ships realize.”

  A third ship appeared on the hologram. Sections of it were highlighted in blue – with matching sections highlighted on both of the ships they’d destroyed.

  “I can state with a ninety-two percent confidence that both ships were part of TCNI Batch Twenty-Four-Fifty-D. According to the records I have here, the entirety of that batch was purchased by the Míngliàng Security Flotilla.”

  “So Governor Wong is fucking with us,” Damien said calmly. He was angrier than he could let his people see. He’d trusted Wong – the man hadn’t felt like he was lying to the people who were his only apparent hope for saving his people. “Was the data the MSF provided faked?”

  “The thought crossed Lieutenant Carver’s mind as well,” Rhine replied. “We triple-checked – the data Admiral Phan provided was unaltered. My confidence that that vessel belonged to Sherwood is unchanged.”

  “Would the conclusion that these two governments are already waging a shadow war against each other seem justified?” Professor Christoffsen asked mildly. “We already know that Míngliàng’s interstellar forces are not capable of destroying the SIP. Commerce warfare on the MSF’s part would seem a logical response if they didn’t trust us to resolve the situation.”

  “That seems to be the case, yes,” the Hand agreed. “Certainly there is no question that Governor Wong’s people have engaged in a level of duplicity I do not find acceptable. Commander Renzetti!”

  That worthy was attending by a holo-projection at one end of the table, but the young Mage-Commander – only three years older than Damien himself! – came to attention and saluted crisply.

  “Yes, my lord?”

  “I need you to transit to Amber and pay whatever fees they require for use of their RTA for classified transmissions,” Damien ordered. The Amber system’s government was intentionally a joke, a series of cooperatives set up by a libertarian colony program to provide the minimum services the Protectorate required. Nothing in that system, including access to the RTA that Mars had built to keep an eye on said system, was free.

  “I need you to contact Tau Ceti Nova Industries and find out when they’re expecting to make delivery of Míngliàng’s warship order.”

  The room was silent for a long moment.

  “Son of a bitch,” Amiri snarled. “You think he’s using us to buy time?”

  “I know he’s using us to buy time,” Damien corrected mildly. “What I’m wondering is whether he’s allowing for the possibility of success on our part and acquiring warships as a backup plan, or if he is only using me to buy time to prepare for an outright attack on either Sherwood or Antonius.”

  Apparently neither his military nor political advisors were quite that paranoid. There was more reason than one that he was the Hand.

  #

  A Navy warship didn’t have much in stock for civilian clothing, so someone had set Macleod up with an officer’s undress uniform without insignia. Certainly, the tall and gaunt Mage couldn’t have borrowed Damien’s clothes – they shared a build, but Macleod had easily ten inches on the Hand.

  Amiri showed the Sherwood Mage into Damien’s observation deck office. She hesitated for a moment, watching the steward laying the food on the table, and Damien arched an eyebrow at h
er.

  “There are three places at the table for a reason, Julia,” he pointed out dryly. “There are twelve hundred Marines on this ship, two of them standing outside that door. Bodyguarding me here is a little redundant.”

  For once, she didn’t argue with him, taking a seat at the round table the stewards had set up earlier in the day.

  “Please, Charles, have a seat,” Damien told his old classmate. “The Duke’s kitchen staff put on quite a spread when I let them.”

  “And quite a fit the first time you told them to, what was it? ‘Throw some food from the buffet on a plate and send it up, just make sure it’s a balanced meal’?” Julia noted.

  Damien winced, but Macleod’s hesitant smile was what he was aiming for. It had to be a shock to find that one of your classmates from five years ago was now a Hand of the Mage-King.

  “That is about right,” he admitted. “I’m no gourmand, so they may as well send me the same food as the crew. My coffee, on the other hand…”

  “Gets forgotten and left to go cold far too often for something that costs what you spend on it,” Amiri pointed out.

  “Charles, this is Protectorate Secret Service Special Agent Julia Amiri – my bodyguard and general busybody,” Damien introduced them as Amiri finally took her seat.

  “Is there anyone around you without a mouthful of titles?” Macleod asked, eyeing the plate in front of him carefully. Damien wasn’t sure, but he thought that they’d served up a poached pacific salmon. It had probably come from the actual Pacific Ocean on Earth.

  “Christoffsen?” Damien glanced at Amiri in question.

  “You mean His Excellency Doctor Robert Christoffsen, Ph. D, Ph. D, Ph. D, Governor-Emeritus?” his bodyguard replied sweetly.

  “Right,” the Hand said slowly. Glancing over at Macleod, who was looking somewhat stunned, he shrugged. “The Professor is here because the Mage-King knows that I have limited real-world political experience and called in a favor. He is my political advisor in the same way Mage-Captain Jakab is my military advisor. And despite Julia’s official role, she acts more as my trouble-shooter than my bodyguard.”