Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Carry on, Inspector, is it?” Damien instructed softly. “I think I need to hear this.”

  “Sorry about that James,” the Governor told his bodyguard. “It’ll be fine.”

  The rumpled and embarrassed-looking bodyguard bowed his way out of the office, re-closing the door behind him.

  “Hand Damien Montgomery, meet Inspector Javier Accord,” the McLaughlin introduced them dryly. “He was investigating the attempt on my granddaughter’s life and our suspicions that one of our Captains had gone rogue – suspicions you are telling me are confirmed.”

  “I’m presuming Captain Wayne planted the device?” Damien asked. “I have solid evidence that he is your rogue.”

  “Yes,” Accord said slowly, clearly processing data. “But the ‘who’ may be less important than the ‘how’, my lord. Wayne didn’t do it directly, obviously. I checked every Patrol ship and every ship registered to a Patrol officer in the first day.”

  “Then how did you find him?” McLaughlin asked.

  “I was working from one end, and I had a financial analyst on my team working from the other,” Accord told them. “The analyst found it first, but he didn’t see the consequences. You see, via about seventy different shell corporations, Wayne has almost one hundred percent ownership of Teatime Replenishment.”

  McLaughlin inhaled sharply, while Damien looked at the Inspector patiently, hoping for an answer that would justify his time.

  “Teatime Replenishment is contracted to run over half of the Patrol’s missile and fuel colliers, lord Hand,” Accord explained after a moment. “The shuttle that I believe placed the explosives for the assassination attempt was destroyed in an accident six days later with all hands, but TR ships were intimately involved in supplying the Patrol for the latest operation.”

  “My God,” Damien murmured as the implications sunk in. There were a lot of things you could do to a missile if you had unlimited access to it before it was delivered. If Wayne’s people had supplied the missiles on all of the Patrol’s ships…

  “Your Excellency,” he said formally to the Governor, “we have a third party in play here – one Wayne clearly works for. They’re trying to drag you into a war – don’t let them. Let me help you.”

  “Grace was headed to Antonius to rescue everyone she could,” McLaughlin admitted. “But then she was going on a counter-force operation against the MSF. If no one intercepts her… I ordered her to start that very war, Damien,” he whispered. “My god, what have we done?”

  “What someone spent a lot of time and blood to make you think was the right thing,” Damien said grimly. “When did she leave, Miles?” he demanded, only half-aware he was using the Governor’s first name for the first time.

  “Sixteen hours ago,” the Governor told him. “They’re still fourteen hours away, but…”

  “Governor McLaughlin, you and Accord need to deal with this Teatime Replenishment,” Damien ordered. “You have my authority to intern all of their personnel and vessels until we have time to separate the guilty from the innocent.

  “I will need a message from you to Grace,” he continued. “Things have gone far enough that she may not be willing to listen to me.”

  “You’ll have it,” the Governor promised. “Though I suspect she’d listen to you anyway.”

  Damien shook his head, grimacing.

  “We’re nearing eighty thousand dead, Miles,” he said quietly. “No more risks. Not one more dead innocent.”

  “I’ll see all of my research forwarded to your ship,” Accord told him. “You may need it.”

  “Do that. Then get yourself on a shuttle,” Damien ordered. “We’re leaving as soon as you’re aboard.”

  Chapter 30

  “Jump to Antonius system in five minutes. All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. This is not a drill. Jump to Antonius system in five minutes.”

  The Robin Hood had only left the Sherwood system three times since her commissioning, but Grace’s crew moved around and through the frigate’s bridge with practiced ease. Months upon months of drilling served its purpose, and none of her crew seemed lost at all.

  The trip to Sherwood-Antonius Jump Seven had been heart-wrenching. Each time the Patrol had jumped, her heart had leapt into her throat, hoping against hope that this time they’d find a surviving freighter. The hope that more than one lucky freighter had survived the massacre..

  “All stations report closed up and fully manned,” Commander Arrington told her. Her executive officer stood next to the simulacrum as he would be making the final jump. The Patrol had based its designs on the Protectorate Navy, combining bridge and simulacrum chamber into a single central command nexus.

  Unlike the Navy, of course, her ships lacked amplifiers for their Mages’ powers. Only their lasers and missiles would protect them from the enemies that might still await them in Antonius.

  “Squadron status report?” Grace ordered over the command network.

  “Alan-a-dale at full readiness,” Michael Wayne responded instantly. Despite her occasional twinges of discomfort with the man, he remained her most efficient and effective captain.

  “Friar Tuck standing by.”

  “Maid Marian ready to jump.”

  “Little John closed up and ready to go.”

  “Lionheart is champing at the bit, ma’am.”

  “Nottingham clear to jump.”

  A pause, a few extra moments as the last two ships inevitably scrabbled. With no time to work together and the inevitable minor failures of ships launched without trials, her last two ships were a strain on everyone’s patience – especially their crews!

  “Newstead Abbey here. We’re down four battle lasers to a software glitch, but we are otherwise online.”

  Grace sighed, but nodded. That was better than she’d been afraid of, though she still had one ship…

  “This is Captain MacDougal on the Loxley,” her last captain chimed in. “Ma’am, our weapons are online, but our entire primary sensor array just fired up a blue screen of death and shut all the way down. My engineering crew is neck deep in wires and software, but they’re warning me we’re easily twelve to twenty-four hours before the array is back up.”

  MacDougal admitted all of this in a perfectly level tone that Grace hoped had been the same one she had used when her ship had thrown up that level of critical error.

  “Understood, Loxley,” Grace accepted aloud. “Link into the squadron net, we’ll dump sensor data from the rest of the ships to you. You’ll have some delay, but better that than nothing.”

  “That should work, ma’am,” MacDougal replied after a moment’s thought. “Targeting system is fully online, we just have no sensor data to feed them.”

  “You have two minutes,” she told him. “Then we jump.”

  “Yes, Commodore.”

  Cutting the channel, she turned to her own crew. “Make the link happen,” she ordered calmly. It was probably redundant, as the techs in her own sensor and communications departments had their heads together before she finished speaking.

  The result impressed her. It took a little over ninety seconds for the techs across eight ships to get a link set up to feed all of their data to the ninth. Depending on the distances, the data could easily be delayed quite a bit – but that was why she had all of the ships linked instead of one.

  “Commander Arrington,” she said aloud as she leaned back in her chair, looking at the timer. “Jump on the clock, if you please.”

  #

  Grace had reviewed the literature. Supervised test firings. Reduced some of Sherwood’s outer system ice asteroids to vapor. She knew, intellectually, what the impact of an antimatter warhead looked like.

  It was an entirely different experience to look at the overlapped craters of a multi-missile, multi-gigaton, strike and know that forty thousand people had been there when those missiles hit. Greenwood Outpost was simply gone. The big smelter sites had taken a pair of missiles each, and the main resident
ial hub had been hit with six.

  A dozen antimatter missiles had turned thirty years of investment, tens of thousands of homes and dozens of small and medium businesses, into a handful of craters that showed no sign of the settlement they’d destroyed.

  “Any chance of survivors?” she asked.

  “No, Commodore,” Arrington admitted. “The entire Outpost was vaporized. Even if someone had been in transit between the town and the smelters, the transit tunnels were torn open at both ends. Even if they’d survived the shockwave and the radiation, the vehicles used only had a twenty-four hour emergency oxygen supply.”

  She nodded silently, surveying the destruction. Greenwood Outpost had been built on a large asteroid, a fifteen hundred kilometer diameter chunk of low value rock. The rock had enough gravity to help hold the settlement together, but not enough to make leaving or arriving noticeably more difficult.

  All the images of the Outpost that she’d seen, though, had had another layer. Ships. The debris field slowly settling into a rough ring around the planetoid told the fate of Navy courier FN-2187 and the freighters that had been here when Greenwood’s murderers arrived.

  But the entire reason Greenwood had existed was to service and maintain the much smaller, sublight mining ships that actually did the hard work of extracting valuable ore from the systems many, many, asteroid belts.

  “Do we have any of the mining ships on the sensors?” she asked. Eight of her ships were still pulsing full power active scanners. There should be dozens, at least, of the motley collection of working ships visible.

  “Nothing,” Arrington said slowly, looking for one of the junior officer shoulders. “I’ve got nothing within about three light minutes, ma’am. Further than that…” he shrugged. “The computers will need a bit to grind through the background heat sources and identify active engines. We won’t pick up anyone not actively burning their drives at that range though.”

  “How far away would we see them if they’d shut everything down and gone as silent as possible to hide from Greenwood’s murderers?” Grace asked. Despite her mission, a large part of her brain refused to refer to the attackers as ‘Míngliàng’. She still had too many doubts for that.

  “About three light minutes, ma’am,” Arrington told her with a small smile. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was as much as anyone could likely muster while hovering above the scene of a massacre.

  “Lieutenant Amber,” Grace called her com officer over. “I’m going to need a wide-band, omnidirectional transmission. Most likely, our miners are running and hiding. Those ships have no sensors to speak of, so they don’t know we’re here.”

  “Record on your command console and I can send it out immediately,” the young officer responded crisply. “I’ll get it ready.”

  Grace nodded and then brought up the recorder on her console. The camera showed her in her command chair and clearly displayed her uniform and its single crystal oak leaf rank tab.

  “Antonius system miners, this is Commodore Grace McLaughlin,” she introduced herself for any of them that hadn’t been paying attention to news from the home system. “The Sherwood Interstellar Patrol is in-system on a rescue mission for any survivors of the attack on Greenwood. We should have the capacity to take everyone home where it’s safe.”

  Antonius clearly wasn’t safe anymore. Even if the Friar Tuck had still been guarding Greenwood, the results wouldn’t have changed. The Wil Scarlet’s fate meant Grace already knew what would likely happen to any of her frigates that faced off with a third again their mass in destroyers. Only the Protectorate fleet that was supposed to be on its way could guard against that kind of attack.

  Until it arrived, she needed to bring her people home. And if she had enough of them to bring home, she could justify postponing the counter-force strike on Míngliàng. She knew the operation was necessary, but she couldn’t avoid a nagging feeling that she was missing something, and it would be an irretrievable mistake.

  #

  Grace’s ships were back in clear space they could jump from when they finally received a response – delayed over thirty minutes. In almost three days, even a sublight mining ship could go a long way if they had reason to.

  “Commodore McLaughlin,” a grizzled looking woman with short-cropped hair and a much-used lightweight space-suit said out of the bridge screens, “you have no idea how glad I am to see someone show up – anyone show up.”

  The ship behind the woman was apparently big enough to have a separate bridge, a rarity for many of the ships that clawed their living from Antonius’ rocks. The bridge she was transmitting from was tiny, though, a cube maybe four meters across, with three working consoles crammed into it.

  “I’m Captain Liddell of the Thor’s Digger,” Liddell continued. “We’re a processor ship, which means we’re the closest ones with a transmitter big enough to reach you. Everyone is headed for the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ. They were doing fuel cracking on an ice rock, which means they have oxygen supplies. Most of the mining ships only have food and air for a few weeks at best.”

  Grace glanced at Arrington, confused. She wasn’t sure which ship the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ was, but she sounded Míngliàng. If all of the miners were going there…

  “With both colonies gone,” Liddell noted, “no one was sure when we’d get help. I don’t think anyone’s more than an hour’s flight away from the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ, and we’re a long way from you now. If you want to evac people, you’re probably best meeting us there.”

  The older woman shook her head. “Thank Freya you made it,” she whispered.

  “Thor’s Digger out.”

  “Both colonies gone,” Grace repeated. “Arrington,” she snapped, “are we picking up anything from the Míngliàng station?”

  “The star is between us and them,” her XO pointed out. “We wouldn’t see anything either way, except maybe reflections.”

  “Check for them,” she ordered. “If something has happened to the Central Processing Facility as well as Greenwood, we’re going to have damn big problems.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Arrington agreed, gesturing for part of the tactical team to get on it. “And what about Tiāntǐ tíqǔ?”

  “Get me the Captains on a group channel,” Grace told Lieutenant Amber. “We’re going to have to check it out,” she answered her exec. “If both colonies are gone, we might not have the lift to shift everybody, but I need to know before we do anything. Find out what we’ve got on the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ in our system.”

  “I have the Captains for you, ma’am,” Amber interjected. Grace gave the young woman a nod of thanks and flipped her command console over to the channel the Lieutenant had set up.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” she said calmly. “Captain Liddell’s message was in the clear so I presume you all saw it. We now have reason to be concerned for the safety of the Míngliàng Central Processing facility as well as our own people.”

  “Given that the MSF just murdered forty thousand civilians, I don’t exactly see why we should care,” Captain Wayne replied. “This could be a trap,” he pointed out. “Captain Liddell could be under duress, luring us into an area controlled by Míngliàng to set us up for an ambush. We know nothing about this ship she mentions.”

  “That’s not true,” Arrington interjected as he entered the conversation. As Grace’s XO, he ended up effectively commanding the Robin Hood half the time, so she included him in all-Captain conferences like this. “The Tiāntǐ tíqǔ is actually one of the few Míngliàng ships we do have a record of – she’s an ice miner, a big beast of a sublight ship at a million tons. Greenwood bought oxygen and fuel from her because it was cheaper than importing it or even making it ourselves. If there’s a ship in the system everyone would know, and that could provide enough oxygen to keep everyone alive, it would be the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ.”

  “Fair,” Wayne allowed. “But she’s still a Míngliàng ship – and Míngliàng ships just blew Greenwood to hell.”

  “I have no intention of going
in blind or oblivious, Captain Wayne,” Grace pointed out coolly.

  “Our scanners confirm roughly what Liddell has said,” Arrington told them. “The ships we can detect are all actively burning for a single location which agrees with our last reported location of the ice miner. We can jump in about five light seconds away.” Grace saw her XO shrug out of the corner of her eye. “Ma’am, I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “And neither do I,” she said firmly, before Wayne or the other Captains could chime in. “Ladies, gentlemen, prepare for a short-range jump. I presume we can all handle a sixteen light minute jump without straining ourselves?”

  If anyone was concerned, no one was going to admit it. Grace smiled grimly at her Captains.

  “Then we jump in two minutes. I’ll see you all at Tiāntǐ tíqǔ.”

  Chapter 31

  Power flared through Grace as she stepped through space, her magic running throughout the six million ton mass of the Robin Hood and telling it that no, it wasn’t there, a million kilometers away from Greenwood, it was here – fifteen hundred thousand kilometers away from the ice ball the Míngliàng ship was breaking down into fuel and oxygen.

  The frigate shuddered and obeyed. An imperceptible instant later, all nine ships erupted into existence at their new location. The carefully arrayed formation they’d left Greenwood in came apart in the process, and Grace mentally sighed at the state of her fleet. Only the Alan-a-dale­ – of course! – was still in formation, one hundred and fifty kilometers off the Robin Hood’s starboard bow.

  The other seven ships were scattered across a sphere almost fifty thousand kilometers wide. Apparently, she needed to arrange more training in short-range formation jumping. Useless in most systems, but valuable in Antonius’ notorious mess of a gravity well – and Antonius was one of the main operations zones.

  For now at least.

  “Get me a count on those ships,” she ordered, studying the screen in front of her. The big ice miner, still attached to the ice asteroid she was rapidly consuming, sat at the heart of a growing cloud of orbiting spaceships.