Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “One of our own is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of civilians as part, the Hand believes, of a campaign to drive us and Míngliàng into open conflict. His motivation is irrelevant to me,” Grace snarled, and the anger and betrayal in her crew’s faces echoed her own.

  “Hand Montgomery intends to arrest Captain Wayne for his crimes aboard the Duke of Magnificence,” she warned them. “The intent is to avoid having Sherwood or Míngliàng take the blame with whatever supporters he has back home. The Protectorate took over responsibility for Antonius’ security. A Protectorate crew was killed along with thousands of civilians under their protection. The Protectorate will judge Michael Wayne.”

  Her bridge was silent for a long moment as her crew digested that.

  “What about the Alan-a-dale?” Arrington asked finally, and Grace smiled grimly. She could have kissed the man for that opening.

  “That is why you needed to know what I know,” she replied. “I don’t know how or why, but clearly, the Alan-a-dale’s crew has followed Captain Wayne into treason and murder. His arrest may well provoke them to… precipitous action. Action we cannot afford – if for no other reason than that we hope to find evidence of Wayne’s crimes aboard his ship.”

  She turned to her bodyguard, meeting the big boarding team leader’s gaze levelly.

  “Sergeant Gibbons, I’ll need you to coordinate with the other ships,” she told him. “People you trust – NCOs, officers, whoever you need to speak to, but only those you can trust to keep the faith. When Wayne is arrested, you will need to board and seize the Alan-a-dale.”

  The big redheaded man considered for a long moment, and a big grin spread across his face.

  “It’ll need to be a surprise,” he noted aloud. “I can make it happen, Commodore – but who’ll watch your back on the Duke?”

  “I’m a Mage, Sergeant,” Grace pointed out. “I can watch my own back – and I suspect I’ll be surrounded by Marines. I need you to stop Wayne’s crew from firing on anyone else!”

  She held her bodyguard’s gaze for a long moment, until he nodded. His grin was no less wide, but there was a measure of seriousness in it now. She’d take what she could get.

  “MacClare, Arrington,” she turned to her XO and tactical officer. “I’ve been warned that a large portion of our missiles may have passed through the hands of people working for Wayne. We have to assume that our missiles have been compromised.”

  Both men were intimately familiar with the devastating power of the Phoenix VII missiles their ship carried, and looked physically ill at the thought of those one-gigaton warheads or twelve thousand gravity antimatter rockets being compromised.

  “I want you to reach out to every ship by whatever back-channels you can find,” she ordered. “Senior NCOs, junior tactical officers, missile techs if that’s who we can trust. I want to make damned sure that every single failsafe on the launchers and the magazines is live and fully functional.”

  She paused and took a deep breath as she looked around her bridge.

  “If worst comes to worst, people,” she told them calmly, “we need to be prepared to defend the Duke of Magnificence against missile fire from our own ships.”

  Chapter 34

  Damien watched the shuttles slowly drift their way towards the Duke of Magnificence’s landing bay. It had been a punishing flight for the officers he’d required make the seven-hour trip from their own ships. That had been more of his reason to demand they come to the Duke than he was likely to admit to anyone – after seven hours at three gravities, just about anyone was going to rethink their decisions.

  The Alan-a-dale’s shuttle was one of the last to arrive, with only two MSF birds behind it, and he waited patiently for it. As each Captain arrived, he shook their hand and sent them on to the conference room Mage-Captain Jakab had set up for the meeting.

  Commodore McLaughlin arrived moments before Admiral Phan. Exiting her shuttle and seeing McLaughlin in front of her, Admiral Phan immediately sped up, half-running to make sure that the two militia commanders arrived at the same time.

  “Stay here,” he ordered when they reached him. “You both need to witness this.”

  An entire platoon of Marines in exosuit battle armor waited in the corridors around the landing bay. Damien didn’t expect Captain Wayne to show up with a boarding squad of his own, but the Alan-a-dale’s Captain was a Mage. If he decided to resist, things could get messy. Amiri had tried to keep Damien away – and finally insisted that the Hand strap on the concealed body armor he rarely wore under his suit before she’d let him be remotely near the shuttle when it landed.

  The two women walked past him, studiously avoiding each other’s gaze as they fell into place behind him. He was vaguely aware of Amiri inserting herself between the two officers, gently encouraging them to move up beside him.

  Finally, the Alan-a-dale’s shuttle swept into the space opened by the bay staff rolling the Commodore’s and Admiral’s shuttles off to join the Duke’s own small fleet of parasite craft. If the pilot noticed that the shuttle behind him was suddenly pulling back into a holding pattern, there was no sign of it in his handling as he neatly dropped the twelve-meter-long spaceship onto the marked location.

  Mist sprayed over the spaceship, cooling the shuttle’s hull and the bay around it by converting to steam and being sucked away by ready hoses. The steam fogged around the shuttle for a moment, and then faded, allowing humans to exit the craft safely.

  Captain Michael Wayne exited the ship on his own, and Damien got his first solid look at the man who’d tried to kill him. Wayne was an average-looking man with long sandy-blond hair tied back in a ponytail. He looked unbothered by seven hours under three Earth gravities, his uniform still in perfect array, and carried a somewhat imposing presence despite his middling height.

  A small voice in the back of Damien’s mind noted that he could understand what Grace had seen in the man. That voice came along with a twinge of jealousy that made what he had to do next dangerously sweet, and he suppressed it as hard as he could. The professional could not become personal.

  He waited for Wayne to be well away from the shuttle and then gestured to Amiri as he stepped forward.

  “Captain Michael Wayne?” he asked loudly.

  “My lord Montgomery,” Wayne responded crisply, saluting. “It is a pleasure to be invited…”

  Exosuited Marines started to file in. All of them were carrying combat stunguns: rapid-fire weapons loaded with SmartDarts that tailored their electric shocks to the target’s weight and a quick assessment of their health.

  “Captain Wayne,” Damien repeated calmly, projecting his voice to be sure the man heard him, “you are under arrest for high treason against the Protectorate and mass murder via weapons of mass destruction.”

  Wayne froze in surprise, his gaze immediately going to his Commodore where she stood behind Damien.

  “Grace, what the hell is going on here?” he demanded. “You know I didn’t do any such thing!”

  “I’ve seen the evidence, Michael,” Grace snapped as she stepped up next to Damien.

  “Evidence provided by them!” Wayne snapped, gesturing in a wide sweep that included both Damien and Admiral Phan behind him. “Míngliàng is trying to set us up! We should never have listened to Montgomery in the first place, he’s working with them!”

  “I watched the footage from the Dreams of Liberty, Michael,” she said quietly, advancing on Wayne. “I watched Captain Arrow try to stop you – and I watched you blow thirty thousand civilians to hell. Surrender. Cooperate – help us find the bastards behind this whole mess and we might be able to give you clemency.”

  Something changed in Wayne’s expression. Suddenly, the smile, the passion as he proclaimed his innocence vanished into a flat mask that showed no emotion at all.

  “Sorry, Grace,” Wayne murmured. She was only a few feet from the Captain now, and Damien realized he should never have let her get so close. On some level, neither her n
or Grace hadn’t truly believed that Wayne was a threat. Not to her.

  “The Hand can’t let this stand,” he continued, and Damien saw the magic flare around the other man – channeling down and into his wrist. “And I won’t be taken alive!”

  “Grace, down!” Damien bellowed, his own magic flashing out as he realized that, somewhere along the way, Captain Wayne had acquired a Battle Mage’s projector rune.

  Carved at the base of the palm, the small rune didn’t amplify a Mage’s power. It ‘just’ increased their range – allowing a Mage standing at the center of the landing bay to send fire slashing across the armored Marines.

  The Marines fell like toppled pins, several cut in half despite their armor, before Damien slammed a shield of power into place blocking the attack.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” Wayne snapped, and Damien saw he’d produced a gun he now held to Grace’s head. “No clever ideas or we all find out what color the Commodore’s brains are. I’d hate that, I really would, but I’m not going power-to-power with a Hand, either.”

  Damien met Grace’s eyes. She’d been caught in Wayne’s blast of fire and her side was a mess of half-cauterized wounds. Wayne didn’t even need to shoot her – unless Damien missed his guess, if she didn’t get medical attention fast she was going to die anyway.

  “Stand down,” he ordered. “Everybody back.”

  As the Marines pulled their wounded back, Damien slowly walked forward.

  “I’ll back Grace’s offer,” he said quietly. “You’re right that I shouldn’t. My mission – my oath – demand that you pay for your crimes, but if you help me bring the assholes who set you in motion down, I’ll let you live.”

  “A lifetime in a Martian prison?” he laughed. “I’ve pulled enough people out of those holes that I’ll never go in one. Here’s my offer: I get back on my shuttle, we fly back to my ship, and my ship and I disappear into the fucking ether. I promise I’ll get Grace medical attention and drop her somewhere she can get home from.”

  “That’s not happening,” Grace ground out, her eyes flickering to the gun. “You hear me Damien? You do not let this fuc–” she gasped as Wayne ground his free hand against her burn.

  “Sorry, love, but this isn’t your conversation,” he said genteelly. “Instant I let you go; Montgomery here turns me to dust. Only way out of here is with you.”

  Grace struggled to stay upright against her injuries and Wayne’s crushing grip, but she met Damien’s eyes. She mouthed two words, hoarsely enough and with enough pain that if he’d known her even a little bit less he wouldn’t have known what she’d said.

  Trust me. Take him!

  “So, my lord Hand,” Wayne continued, genteelly, “what are you going to do?”

  Damien looked the rogue Captain evenly in the eyes.

  “My duty.”

  Wayne must have seen something in his gaze because he shivered backwards for a moment – just a fraction of a second.

  A fraction of a second the gun wasn’t pointed directly at Grace.

  A fraction of a second in which one of the most powerful Mages alive struck.

  Fire burned through Damien’s Runes of Power as he twisted pure force into unstoppable lines of power. The first blade struck across Wayne’s wrist, the second his neck. The Sherwood Captain literally came apart as blades of Damien’s will sliced through his flesh.

  Somehow, Wayne still fired. With his wrist removed from his arm and the gun starting to fall, he could only have triggered it with magic – but it was still pointed directly at Grace’s head from centimeters away.

  The shot echoed in the cavernous landing bay and Damien stared in horror. Wayne fell away from Grace, collapsing into pieces, and the Commodore wavered, staggering forwards.

  Damien was there to catch her as she fell, trying desperately not to touch her burns and staring at her miraculously undamaged skull.

  “I told you to trust me,” she slurred, and then passed out. Injured – badly – but alive.

  #

  Mage-Captain Kole Jakab was focused on watching the two fleets of warships now slowly pacing his vessel across the Antonius system, trying not to be too obvious about looking over Commander Rhine’s shoulder as the tactical officer used passive sensors to gain hard weapons locks on every ship around them.

  The Hand’s job was to try to negotiate the two forces down. Kole’s job was to keep them alive if one of those forces decided to open fire.

  It took him a moment to see practically every alarm go off in the shuttle bay, and he snapped the feed from the bay’s cameras to his console just in time to watch the Hand cut Michael Wayne into pieces.

  “Men down,” he snapped, opening a channel to the infirmary. “Medical to Shuttle Bay Two now.”

  “On our way.”

  On the screens, he watched as the Alan-a-dale’s shuttle started to lift off the deck. The Bay Landing Officer acted before he could even think to open a channel.

  Even an unarmed shuttle could cause a vast amount of damage with its engines – especially to the squishy humans beyond the marked blast zones of the shuttle bay. The designers of the Honorific-class battlecruisers had been fully aware of that danger – and had provided a counter-measure.

  A concealed panel on the innermost wall of the bay slid aside. A targeting array measured angles – and the coilgun fired.

  The shuttle was barely a meter off the deck when the first twenty kilogram projectile slammed into it at over a hundred kilometers a second. With only the artificial gravity field from the runes beneath it to hold it in place, the shuttle lurched from the impact.

  More projectiles followed, ripping gaping holes through the spacecraft and flinging the remains into space. Kole wasn’t sure what the pilot had been intending, but he doubted it had been friendly – and it was now a moot point.

  “Status report,” he demanded. “Any actions from either fleet?”

  Seconds ticked by. They were still just over seven light seconds distant from each fleet – outside the range of the Duke of Magnificence’s amplifier, if only barely, and a fifteen second round-trip even for light.

  “I can’t tell if the pilot transmitted,” Rhine admitted after a moment. “Neither fleet seems to be responding to the destruction of the shuttle – it’s quite possible they didn’t even detect it.”

  “Sir, the shuttles still outside want to know what is going on,” the current com officer reported. “What do I tell them?”

  “The truth,” Kole ordered after a moment. “Tell them Captain Wayne attacked Hand Montgomery and Commodore McLaughlin. They are ordered to land immediately. Warn them that anyone disobeying orders will be regarded as an accomplice to Captain Wayne and shot down.”

  Lieutenant Rain swallowed hard, but leaned forward into her microphone and started passing on his commands. The two orbiting shuttles had started to move away from the Duke, but rapidly obeyed and dropped back into their holding pattern. After a few seconds, the first in the previously established queue carefully started inching its way through the debris of the Alan-a-dale’s shuttle towards the landing bay.

  “That’s strange,” Lieutenant Carver said aloud, and Kole turned his attention back to his tactical section.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Commander Rhine, can you double check this, sir?” Carver asked. Kole would have preferred an instant answer, but he still nodded approval at the young man. Sometimes, accuracy trumped speed.

  “Captain, every ship in the Patrol just emergency jettisoned their ready magazines,” Rhine said slowly. “Something triggered the launcher failsafes. Wait – what’s that?”

  “Assault shuttles,” Carver replied immediately. “Every Patrol ship except the Alan-a-dale just launched assault shuttles – at the Alan-a-dale.”

  “I guess we know what Montgomery talked to the Commodore about,” Kole observed. “What about the…”

  “Holy shit!”

  Kole saw it before Rhine had finished swearing. The Patrol used an ol
der version of a Navy launcher, with a ready magazine of four Phoenix VII missiles loaded with antimatter warheads. All nine ships had dumped the entirety of their ready magazines into space – a necessary failsafe ability in a system that contained enough explosive force to vaporize the entire ship.

  Over two thousand missiles had drifted away from the Patrol frigates – and now every one of them had lit up their drives.

  “What’s the target?” he asked calmly – but he already knew the answer.

  “They’re coming straight at us, sir.”

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Kole ordered instantly. “Missile defense status?”

  “All systems online,” Commander Rhine reported. “But we can’t withstand two thousand missiles.”

  “We might not have to,” Carver interrupted. “Take a look at that.”

  The Patrol’s missiles might be out to destroy the Duke of Magnificence, but the Patrol didn’t seem to be. The Alan-a-dale seemed frozen in space, some kind of override locking out her systems while an entire squadron of assault shuttles slammed into her hull, but the other eight frigates had rotated to train their weapons on their errant munitions.

  Sherwood had designed their Hunter-class frigates uncompromisingly for a missile engagement, trading having far fewer and much less powerful lasers than the Duke to achieve a missile armament three quarters of the battlecruiser’s despite being half its size. Their defensive lasers were lighter and smaller than the Martian warship’s – but each of the Hunters carried just as many of them.

  Over seven hundred and fifty lasers slashed into space. Two of the ships were definitely less than fully operational, Kole noted absently – six of the frigates were firing all of their one hundred lasers, but the last two were down nearly fifty between them.

  Even firing from behind the missiles, the Patrol couldn’t take them all out. Hundreds of missiles blew apart, vaporized by their motherships, but hundreds more continued on.

  “Sir,” Rain addressed him, “we’re being hailed by the Flotilla ships – they’re requesting permission to fire missiles in counter mode to help cover us.”