Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  She heard him swallow.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he responded levelly. “I presume we don’t want Captain Wayne to know about this.”

  “No,” she confirmed. “If all is aboveboard, it won’t matter. If it isn’t…”

  “I understand, Commodore.”

  #

  Grace eventually joined Commander Arrington on the bridge for her his portion of the watch. She was too agitated to rest or do paperwork, though she hoped she was concealing that from her crew. Days like today were when she felt her relative youth and lack of experience hardest.

  Michael Wayne’s utter unperturbedness had been much of what had attracted her to the man when they’d been, theoretically, equals. A decade-and-a-half in civilian shipping had given the Alan-a-dale’s captain an astonishing ability to take everything in stride.

  In a little over five hours, he’d managed to rendezvous with both the tanker and ammunition collier she’d sent out, fully restock his vessel for deployment, and join the squadron she was assembling in high orbit.

  With seven heavily-armed ships, she was starting to feel more confident in her ability to handle whatever the galaxy decided to throw at her – confident enough that she was considering sending a ship to go looking for the missing Navy courier. FN-2187’s continued absence was making her nervous.

  “Still no sign of Montgomery’s courier?” she asked aloud.

  “Negative, ma’am,” Lieutenant Anderson told her. “I just finished remote interrogating the Teabiscuit’s inventory system, Commodore,” the pale, skinny, far too young officer continued.

  Arrington looked confused, but she motioned him to wait.

  “And, Lieutenant?” she asked.

  “Everything looks correct,” Anderson admitted. “Their inventory system shows that they shifted over sixty missiles without warheads. That’s exactly what we’d expect from one live fire test.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” she told him. Paranoid as she was feeling, it was good to have at least some confirmation that Wayne wasn’t outright lying to her. Probably.

  “Ma’am! Jump flare!” Lieutenant Amber, the other officer on duty, announced. “On the line for Antonius, looking for an IFF beacon now.”

  The redheaded young woman was normally rosy-cheeked enough to attract teasing from her coworkers, but was suddenly as pale as Anderson was.

  “Ma’am… it’s the Royal Learner, one of our Antonius freighters – but her beacon is carrying a Navy Code Omega!”

  #

  “We can’t access the data package the Royal Learner received from FN-2187,” Grace told her grandfather. “We know it was a Code Omega, but we’re relying on the Learner’s sensor logs for what we’ve learned of the courier’s fate.”

  “You’re procrastinating, Grace,” her Governor said calmly. “What is it you don’t want to tell me?”

  She swallowed, trying to organize the chaotic mess of thoughts and emotions ripping through in the twenty minutes since the Royal Learner had dumped their sensor logs to the Robin Hood.

  “Approximately twenty-eight hours ago, less than thirty minutes after FN-2187 arrived and issued the hold shipping order, eight destroyers emerged from jump within attack distance of the Greenwood Outpost,” she said mechanically. “They destroyed FN-2187 and a number of freighters within moments of emergence. Royal Learner had been on her way out of the system and was turning back on Commander Renzetti’s orders.

  “His final order was for them to reverse course and come here as fast as they could, delivering his Code Omega,” she continued. “From Royal Learner’s sensors, Mage-Commander Renzetti attempted to use his ship’s missile defenses to cover the colony. He failed.

  “The Learner’s data is sufficient for us to confirm no less than four one gigaton antimatter strikes on the surface colony.”

  Greenwood had been built onto the surface of the largest asteroid in Antonius, using the asteroid’s gravity to anchor the big refineries needed for their purposes while keeping them a safe distance from the primary residential sectors. Like most such colonies with major industrial presences, the ‘company town’ had expanded dramatically, and Greenwood had been home to some forty thousand people.

  A surface colony, even one of domes and tunnels, was always a bit easier to expand than a space station. That was why Sherwood had used the asteroid as the base for their operations – and now that ease had killed tens of thousands of people.

  “We have no choice but to conclude the colony is a total loss,” she concluded, her voice still wooden as she tried not to cry. She’d had friends on Greenwood. People she would now never see again.

  “We cannot confirm the identity of the attackers as the Learner only had civilian grade scanners,” she said quietly, “but I am forced to conclude that it was almost certainly Míngliàng forces.”

  Her grandfather was silent for a long time. Somehow, seconds had seemed to age the already old Governor years, and he stared half-blankly at the camera for almost a full minute before coughing to clear his throat and meeting her gaze.

  “What do we do?” he asked. Sad and desperate as he sounded, Grace knew he wasn’t a grandfather asking his granddaughter how to deal with a tragedy – but a planetary Governor asking his senior military commander how to respond to an atrocity of previously-unimaginable scope.

  “What we must,” she replied, and if her voice was flat with rage, it was no longer mechanical. “I have nine jump-capable warships of the Patrol,” she told him. “I intend to take them all to Antonius. There, we will engage in search and rescue operations to make certain that all of our surviving people are safe.

  “If any of the attackers remain in Antonius,” she continued, “we will engage and destroy them. Since the MSF isn’t supposed to be in Antonius, any of their vessels will qualify as legitimate targets.”

  Calmly, levelly, she met her Governor’s eyes.

  “I then intend to take those nine ships on a counter-force operation into Míngliàng,” she said flatly. “I will give the MSF one opportunity to evacuate their ships, and then I will destroy every jump-capable warship they possess.”

  “You heard Montgomery’s as well as I did,” her Governor pointed out. “The Patrol is not permitted to leave Sherwood. The Martian Navy was responsible for the protection of Antonius.”

  “Montgomery underestimated our enemy,” she replied. “I will leave justice to the Hand – but I must – we must – act to protect our people.”

  It wasn’t Montgomery’s fault. Despite everything, that was surprisingly clear to her. It wasn’t his fault – but she could also no longer trust him to fix everything. No longer trust the Protectorate to fix everything.

  Her grandfather looked positively ancient. Every bit of the energy and iron will that sustained him against his age seemed to have fled him, and she knew, knew in her very bones, that this would be the straw that finally took him out of office.

  “You,” he coughed, clearing his throat before he continued. “Your proposed operation is authorized,” he said thickly. “Do what you must.”

  Chapter 29

  “You asked to see me, my lord?” Professor Christoffsen asked as he entered Damien’s office.

  “I did,” Damien confirmed. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

  “Certainly.”

  Damien poured a second cup for the ex-Governor and slid it across to him. He waited patiently for the other man to take his first appreciative sip and smiled. He liked good coffee, and watching other people enjoy the blends he picked was a small, but real, pleasure.

  Such pleasures were rare right now. Jumping the Duke of Magnificence had been surprisingly relaxing. It drained him less than it drained the other Jump Mages, but it was still an exhausting experience – but a familiar one, one he could control.

  “Most people with your authority have someone else pour coffee, you know,” Christoffsen noted as he leaned back and studied Damien. “I find it interesting that you do it yourself.”

  “Why would I
not?” he asked. “If nothing else, Professor, it’s one less person I need to get a security clearance for.”

  “Touché, my lord,” Christoffsen laughed. “What did you need from me?”

  “Perspective,” Damien admitted. “You know why you were asked to help me, right? I know His Majesty called in a pretty significant favor to get you on my staff.”

  “Not as big as you might think,” the older man told him. “Early retirement was boring me out of my skull. But… Desmond said that the runes you could use as a Rune Wright made you the most powerful Mage he’d ever trained, but you were also one of the youngest to ever carry a Hand. He wanted you to have someone with more gray in their hair to back you up. And someone with more experience in the down and dirty of politics.”

  “I am not the largest fan of politics,” Damien agreed. “The final resolution on Ardennes worked out for everyone, but all I needed to do was keep things together until the interim Governor arrived. Now…” he shrugged.

  “Now I’m about to arrest and probably execute a senior captain from one star system for crimes committed against another,” Damien concluded. “We have come to the very edge of a bloody civil war because of Wayne and whoever his sponsors are. The tensions around Antonius are dangerous, and even proving Wayne was at the heart of so much of it will not ease that tension.

  “I have to do something to keep things from getting worse, but I’m not seeing the solution.”

  “That’s because you don’t have enough information,” Christoffsen noted. “You literally can’t, you’re not intimately involved in this mess the way the people at the heart of it are. All we can do as an outside force is end the bloodshed and get people talking.”

  “Lock Wong and McLaughlin in a room for a week and see what they come up with?”

  “Effectively, yes,” his aide replied. “I found that often my job as Governor was just to get the right people actually talking to each other instead of feuding from different boardrooms. It’s a lot harder to assume the worst of your opponents when they’re looking you in the eye and telling you what their exact problem is!”

  “But hardly impossible,” Damien said dryly. “I’ve seen that often enough.”

  “No, it’s not – but if the Governors are honest, honorable men, actually getting them to talk to each other will help,” Christoffsen said. “Half of the problem is that the two systems are sharing jurisdiction over Antonius… but nobody ever sorted out what that meant, so they basically had two separate colonies competing with each other.”

  Damien sighed and took a sip of his own coffee. It made sense, but if it was really that simple, why hadn’t it happened already?

  “Governors don’t leave their systems,” the ex-Governor sitting across from his answered his unspoken question. “They don’t. There isn’t really a reasoning for that beyond tradition and the fact the Mage-King never leaves Mars.”

  “There are reasons for that,” Damien replied. He didn’t say anything more – the existence of the Solar Simulacrum and the Olympus Mons Amplifier, tools that made the Mage-King almost omnipotent within the Sol system, was so classified he wasn’t sure he was supposed to know.

  “And there really isn’t for Governors,” Christoffsen said. “So if a Hand tells them to get off their asses and meet, they will. And that might just give us the beginning of an answer to this mess.”

  “Thanks,” Damien told him quietly. “We’ll see, I guess, but I needed a plan for once we’ve stopped the continuing meltdown that this whole sector has turned into.”

  “Once we’ve stopped?” his aide asked. “We’re pretty much at ‘Arrest Wayne and deliver his head on a platter’ to achieve peace from what I can tell.”

  “With the way everything has gone since we got here, Professor, what makes you think it’s going to be that easy?”

  #

  Damien made the final jump into Sherwood himself. While the training and experience of the Duke of Magnificence’s four Jump Mages exceeded his now, jumping deep into a gravity well was more a question of sheer power than anything else. Mage-Captain Jakab and his people were strong Mages – the Navy only recruited above the average – but they didn’t have the Runes of Power a Rune Wright could carve into their own flesh.

  The twelve-million-ton battlecruiser erupted into high orbit, less than forty thousand kilometers away from the Defender Yards, with active sensors singing across every wavelength with enough power to temporarily blind most civilian or militia receptors.

  The Hand quickly stepped aside to let Mage-Captain Jakab reclaim the simulacrum at the heart of the bridge. At this range, it was the Duke’s most powerful weapon, and better in the hands of the experienced and less drained Mage-Captain rather than Damien.

  “What the hell?”

  Commander Rhine’s curse echoed through the silently efficient bridge, and Damien faced the tactical officer instantly.

  “Sir, my lord,” he said slowly, “the Patrol is gone.”

  Rhine’s team processed all of the data before it hit the main displays, so he’d seen it before anyone else had. As the main screen populated, even Damien saw it. The icons and data codes materializing on the screens that walled, floored, and roofed the bridge were almost all for civilian ships. There were a handful of small craft and in-system corvettes, but the frigates of the Patrol were missing from the scopes.

  “Look at Defender Yards, too,” Rhine told Damien and Jakab, highlighting the shipyard structure orbiting beneath them. “Only two of the slips have hulls in them – they must have rapid-mobilized the other two without even doing flight trials.”

  Damien did the math. That meant they’d pulled together nine frigates – over fifty million tons of warships – and taken them… somewhere. What had Grace done?

  “Where’s FN Twenty One Eighty Seven?” he asked. “Commander Renzetti should have told us about this.”

  “We’re scanning for her,” Rhine reported. “The corvettes are all standing down, I’m reading drive shut-downs and they’re all requesting instructions.”

  The icons for the sublight ships left behind to secure the system flashed with new icons as the Patrol ships in the system desperately tried to avoid having to fight the Navy cruiser.

  “Sirs…” Lieutenant Rain said slowly. “One of the freighters – her beacon is flashing a Navy Code Omega. I’m downloading the data packet now… but I it’s definitely Twenty One Eighty Seven’s.”

  “If the Patrol killed Renzetti, every ship here would be flashing his Code Omega,” Jakab said aloud, glancing back at Damien. “Twenty One Eighty Seven died somewhere else.”

  “Antonius,” Damien realized. “They were destroyed at Antonius – and something happened to Greenwood.” He turned to Rain. “Get me Governor McLaughlin,” he ordered. “Now.”

  #

  Damien stepped into the break-out conference room attached to Jakab’s office to have at least some privacy for the meeting, and by the time he reached the room the McLaughlin was already on the screen. He’d expected the Governor to look angry, defiant… anything but utterly exhausted.

  “I presume you can guess where the Patrol has gone,” the McLaughlin said slowly. “Have you even bothered to find out why?”

  “Jakab’s people are still decrypting Mage-Commander’s Renzetti’s Omega data package,” Damien admitted, “but I assume that Greenwood has been attacked and destroyed, along with courier FN Twenty One Eighty Seven and any civilian ships they could catch. I’ll even go so far as to presume that the attackers appeared to be Míngliàng Security Flotilla destroyers.”

  McLaughlin looked taken aback. “How did you…?”

  “Fifty-five hours ago, the Sherwood Patrol frigate Alan-a-dale – and yes, Governor, the identification is confirmed – attacked and destroyed the Míngliàng Central Processing Facility in Antonius, killing nearly thirty thousand civilians and destroying the Royal Martian Navy warship Dreams of Liberty,” Damien told him flatly.

  “For the entirety of that fif
ty-five-hour period, I know exactly where every single ship of the MSF was,” he continued. “I also, however, have confirmed that there are at least eight destroyers out there modified to appear to be MSF ships even to RMN scanners. Given that these ships exist, and Captain Wayne’s actions already show our true enemy to have no compunction about civilian casualties, this is exactly what I was afraid of.”

  “But… you reviewed all of our ships’ sensor logs yourself,” Governor McLaughlin objected. “There is no way the Alan-a-dale was involved in the attacks!”

  “We reviewed the MSF’s logs,” Damien said gently. “Every case where we could identify the ship, it was Captain Wayne’s vessel. He betrayed you and the Protectorate, Governor. Someone is trying to start a war between you and Míngliàng – and so far as I can tell, the MSF is completely innocent. Your Patrol… is not.”

  If the Governor had looked exhausted before, now he looked on the verge of a heart attack. Damien wasn’t sure if he should be continuing the conversation – or calling a doctor to the Governor’s office.

  Before either of them could say more, though, there was a commotion on the Governor’s end. Someone bodily collided with a door loudly enough that Damien could hear it, followed by shouting.

  “I need to speak with the Governor. It is critical.”

  The door behind McLaughlin crashed open, a suited bodyguard flying through it to crash on the floor. In the opening, looking somewhat sheepish, stood a gaunt older man in a plain black suit in a defensive pose.

  “I apologize, sir,” he said crisply, straightening and entering McLaughlin’s office as if invited, “but I needed to speak with you – I know who tried to murder Commodore McLaughlin and the Hand, and the potential consequences are terrifying.”

  Then, and only then, did the man realize who was on the screen. He looked at Damien on the wall and swallowed hard.