“Granted,” he snapped. “We need all the help we can get.”
Fifteen seconds later, the Flotilla almost vanished on his screen, buried behind the icons of their own salvos of hundreds of missiles. The thought crossed his mind that if the Flotilla was going to betray them, now would be the perfect time.
Of course, every single Flotilla captain was currently aboard the Duke. That probably contributed to their willingness to help.
Even as he saw the Flotilla’s salvo launched, the Duke herself vibrated under his feet as Rhine launched their own missiles. Their Phoenix VIII’s were faster and smarter, with an extra thirty seconds of endurance that wouldn’t play in this fight.
His tactical officer spent the multi-million dollar weapons like candy. It took almost two minutes for the missiles to clear the range of the Patrol’s defenses, and a disturbing number of them had survived.
“What are the numbers, Commander?” he asked softly.
“The Patrol nailed over a thousand of them,” Rhine replied instantly. “I make it… nine hundred and twenty-six still inbound.”
Kole grunted, eyeing the icons of the Míngliàng salvo. Even with the Duke burning towards the Flotilla at its top speed, those missiles would only intercept the Patrol’s missiles a few thousand kilometers away from his ship. Even that wouldn’t have happened if the rogue missiles had been properly launched – the extra few kilometers per second from the launchers added up over a two million kilometer flight.
“One minute to missile impact,” Carver reported aloud. “Thirty seconds to first intercept. Fifty seconds to second. Fifty-five seconds to Flotilla missile intercept.”
He paused. “Incoming missiles are in laser range, we are engaging.”
Waving one of the junior Mages to the simulacrum, Kole leaned forward in his chair and took direct control of his battlecruiser’s ECM. With hundreds of missiles in space around him, the last thing he wanted was for any of them to have a clue where his ship really was. Terminal mode was hard to fool, but the key was to keep the missiles getting into a range where they could get hard radar locks on your hull.
Lasers flared in space again, the Duke’s computer helpfully drawing the invisible lines of energy on the screens surrounding him as the missiles closed. More missiles died. The Duke’s defensive lasers were less effective than the Patrol’s had been – now they were firing against the missiles’ best defenses – but they were more effective than they should have been.
“They’re on internal programming,” he noted aloud. “No assistance from even the Alan-a-dale, just given a target and let loose.”
He smiled grimly. The Navy knew the programs for a Phoenix VII inside and out. The Patrol could – must – have added a few tricks, but the processor in the missile was only so good.
Feeding that information into the Duke’s projectors and transmitters, the cruiser’s Captain began to sing an electronic siren’s call, urging the missiles to go here.
The only important thing about that point in space was that the Duke of Magnificence wasn’t there. Any missile that missed his ship was a sitting duck.
“Missile intercepts in five seconds,” Carver announced. “Darkening screens.”
All the rune-laced video screens that filled the bridge dimmed – and then flashed brightly as the missile swarms ran into each other. The Duke’s eighty missiles blew simultaneously, their one gigaton warheads trying to take as many of the incoming missiles with them as possible.
The screens stayed flash-blinded for a moment, then cleared. There were gaping holes in the missile swarm now, but hundreds of missiles still remained. Amplified magic and rapid-firing lasers cut through the swarm again and again, and ECM lured dozens of missiles off-course, but there were still too many incoming.
Kole swallowed as they kept coming, fear sinking into him. He’d been spared the worst of the Battle of Ardennes as he’d been sent to aid Hand Montgomery in securing the planet, but he remembered watching the missile swarms there. A single mistake could cost hundreds of lives… and he was out of right things to do but wait.
The screens dimmed and flashed again as their second missile salvo intercepted the rogue weapons. They brightened only for a second… and then went black as the Míngliàng Flotilla’s counter-salvo arrived.
The MSF had more ships than the Patrol, but most of theirs were Lancer-class destroyers, and they’d only fired one salvo versus the four effectively contained in the attack on the Duke. A ‘mere’ four hundred missiles flashed past the Duke of Magnificence, merging with the big cruiser’s own third salvo and detonating barely five hundred kilometers from her hull.
Nearly five hundred gigatons of explosive force filled space, and even from that distance the Duke trembled as the energy waves passed over her – but the Flotilla had spaced their missiles perfectly, and Rhine had had plenty of time to set his own missiles to fill the gaps.
A solid wall of fire shielded the Duke from the attack and the remaining missiles flew straight into it. The missiles’ deaths added to the explosions, building into a crescendo of fire that washed over the Duke, shaking the warship hard enough that her crew felt it… and leaving her unharmed.
“Rhine?” Kole demanded.
“We’re clear,” the tactical officer said softly, his voice almost awed. “I have no missiles on the scanners. We are clear,” he repeated.
Mage-Captain Kole Jakab looked at the screen, at the two fleets he’d half-expected to try to kill him, and breathed a long, hard, sigh of relief. They’d saved his ships as much as Rhine’s skill had. Something very strange had happened with the Patrol, but without their lasers, there would have been too many missiles left for even the Flotilla’s intervention to save the Duke of Magnificence.
“Get me Hand Montgomery,” he ordered Rain. “Where we go from here… is a political decision.”
Chapter 35
Damien traded reassuring nods with Amiri as he reached the conference room they’d stashed the ship captains and Admiral Phan in. She’d taken his orders to make sure the captains all made it safely – and without wandering off anywhere! – better than he’d expected.
“They’re getting agitated in there,” she warned him. “Nobody knows anything, and they’re running a lot more scared than I’d expect from a bunch of warship captains.”
“They’re militia, not Navy,” he reminded her. “But that’s why I’m here. Watch my back.”
His bodyguard nodded silently and fell in behind him as he opened the door and walked into the room. Anything he’d intended to say was instantly drowned out by shouted questions, and he simply let the tumult rage over him for a moment while he considered his audience.
With one Patrol captain dead and the Commodore also serving as captain of her flagship, there were only seven Patrol captains to seventeen Flotilla captains and an Admiral. That didn’t seem to be slowing his homeworld’s officers down, though, as they made up for their lack of numbers with volume.
He made a small gesture and teleported about a hundred cubic centimeters of air outside the Duke’s hull, switching it with the vacuum there. The bang of air rushing into the newly-created vacuum echoed louder than a gunshot, cutting the tumult like a sword.
“Enough,” Damien said softly once he had everyone’s attention. He walked forward, into the center of the circular, amphitheater-esque conference room. “If you have any questions once I’m done, I will take time to answer them, but for now you are all going to sit down, shut up, and listen to me.”
One of the Míngliàng captains started to shout something – Damien didn’t bother to let him finish the first word before slamming the man down into his seat with invisible bands of force. The captain, likely a Mage himself, looked stunned – and was silent.
“Sit,” Damien invited, gesturing to the chairs around the room. “For any of you with a terminal lack of situational awareness, I am Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars.”
He focused on the Sherwood contingent first.
“I will start by laying the inevitable rumors and speculation born of the last couple of hours to rest. Commodore Grace McLaughlin is alive. She is badly injured, and undergoing care in the Duke of Magnificence’s infirmary.
“She was injured by Captain Michael Wayne of the Patrol frigate Alan-a-dale. Captain Wayne is dead,” Damien said flatly. “He attacked Royal Martian Marines and killed three of them in his attempt to escape arrest and I neutralized the threat he represented.”
The tumult exploded again, too many shouted questions, demands, and accusations for Damien to even begin to follow. He raised his hand to create another vacuum – but the room was suddenly silent, everyone staring at him.
“In the aftermath of Captain Wayne’s death,” Damien told them quietly, “someone aboard the Alan-a-dale activated a program concealed in the Patrol’s missiles that attempted to remote-fire them. While the Patrol frigates’ failsafes protected them from damage, they allowed that program to launch over two thousand missiles at this ship.”
The last remnants of the tumult died away, and everyone in the room was focused on him.
“Thanks to the quick and brave responses of the crews of all of your ships,” he continued, “we are clearly still alive. Look around you, ladies and gentlemen. Had the ships from only one of your fleets acted, we would all be dead. But when faced with a common threat, your crews stood together and helped save you all.
“I suggest you take inspiration from their actions,” Damien told them. “I have ordered all of our ships to converge on the Alan-a-dale. Loyal Patrol troops have boarded the vessel, but my understanding is that fighting continues.”
He wondered silently if any of the men and women around him had any idea of just what that meant. The Patrol troopers had boarded the Alan-a-dale a full hour ago now. A second wave of assault shuttles – carrying troops their officers trusted now that Wayne’s ship was in clear mutiny – had crossed over twenty minutes ago.
Memories of the Mistletoe Solstice and the Blue Jay and the aftermath of boarding actions on both ships sent a shiver down his spine. He’d only ever seen the aftermath of the kind of carnage the Patrol’s boarding teams were fighting through – and it would still be over an hour before his Marines could reinforce them.
“Since the immediate threat is resolved,” he finally said, “I can now actually explain why I called you all aboard the Duke – though the fate of Captain Wayne and his ship should tell you all most of the story…”
Chapter 36
The assault shuttles blasted clear of the Duke of Magnificence’s shuttle bays at an acceleration that slammed Julia into the supports holding her down. The exosuit battle armor she wore helped compensate against acceleration, but even the Royal Martian Navy didn’t bother with gravity runes on shuttlecraft.
Her screen informed her that the Marine next to her was Corporal Williams, the young Marine who she suspected Mage-Lieutenant Nguyen had assigned to bodyguard the Hand’s bodyguard – probably without a hint of intentional irony.
“What’s our ETA?” she asked on a channel that included Nguyen, Williams, and the pilot.
“Five minutes,” the pilot replied. “And no, we’re not dropping under ten gees at any point, so I really suggest all of you tin cans stayed strapped down until the assault shuttle is at rest and the seatbelt light off.”
With a grin, Julia linked her exosuit’s internal screen to the shuttle sensors and studied the area around them. The Patrol warships other than the Alan-a-dale now formed a loose sphere around the rogue warship, with at least one of them between the frigate and the Duke of Magnificence at all times. If Wayne’s crew managed to regain control of their weapons, the Patrol appeared determined that they would not be able to harm anyone except their fellow Patrollers.
The Duke herself was slowly decelerating to a relative stop behind them, well outside the sphere of warships guarding the Alan-a-dale. Behind her, the Míngliàng Security Flotilla was making their own approach to join the cluster of no-longer-hostile ships.
The shuttles carrying the Patrol captains back to their ships were flying significantly less aggressively than the Marine assault shuttles, but the last word from the Alan-a-dale was that a number of pockets of resistance remained – and that the Patrol had taken literally hundreds of casualties boarding the ship.
Damien had ordered the Patrollers to pull back. They’d successfully taken the bridge, engineering, and the main computer core. The remaining traitors couldn’t destroy the ship, they could only kill people trying to get at them.
There was no point losing Patrollers when the Royal Martian Marine Corps was available – and this kind of mess was the Marines' specialty.
#
“Welcome aboard the Alan-a-dale,” a Patrol officer clad in an armored space-suit greeted them as they boarded. The complete lack of atmosphere aboard the frigate meant she was using a short-range radio. “I’m Commander Ishbel McTaggart off the Maid Marian. For my sin of being Sergeant Gibbons’ high school girlfriend, I ended up being the senior officer he trusted and in charge of this clusterfuck.”
The space-suit helmet shook slightly. “I am glad to see you,” she concluded. “What do you need from me and my people?”
“Nguyen?” Julia asked.
“We’re just the first wave,” the Mage-Lieutenant said calmly. “Major Elise Reid is back on the other shuttles. We need target locations, Commander.”
“Data packet on its way,” McTaggart confirmed, tapping a command on the computer built into the suit’s wrist. “They still hold the CIC and primary life support. Both of those sections have built-in fortifications to hold against boarding actions – we took the bridge and engineering in the first assault.” She shook her head again.
“They’re fighting to the death,” she said quietly. “We’ve been trying to get them to surrender since we boarded, but… nobody is giving up.”
“They know the rules Montgomery works under,” Julia replied. “We’ll give clemency to a few who cooperate, but they’re all guilty of mass murder. The Charter doesn’t allow the death penalty for much… but they’ve committed crimes where it requires it.”
“I know.” Julia heard as much as saw McTaggart’s wince. “These were my brothers in arms, Agent,” McTaggart admitted. “Some of them I thought were my friends. Where did we go so wrong?”
“That’s something we’re going to have to investigate,” Julia admitted. “I suspect, however, that the Patrol didn’t go very wrong – Wayne set out to at least create the option for himself from the beginning.”
“Ma’am, I suggest that we move this conversation to the bridge,” Mage-Lieutenant Nguyen interrupted. “I may be able to do something with the simulacrum to ease Major Reid’s assault, and some of my people are already drooling to get into the Alan-a-dale’s computers.”
“Of course,” Commander McTaggart agreed. “Keep your eyes open – we think we have all the traitors penned up, but if there’re any left they may well try to ambush us.”
Nguyen, clad in a two-meter-tall suit of armor, tapped the battle rifle to his chest.
“I almost hope so, ma’am.”
#
They reached the bridge without further incident, Nguyen’s troops sweeping ahead to keep the precious handful of computer techs safe.
Julia smiled in relief at the sight of Sergeant Gibbons. She’d quite liked McLaughlin’s bodyguard, and she suspected that the Commodore would have been very upset if the man had got himself killed.
He had, it was clear, got himself shot. He was clad in the same armored space-suit as everyone else, but a medic had set up a pressure tent over his torso and was working on cleaning out and bandaging his injuries.
“I think your boss is going to be cranky with you,” she told him.
“Is she okay?” he demanded. “Heard she was injured…”
“Wayne burnt her pretty badly,” Julia admitted. “But she’s fine. Our doctors are working on her as we speak, but the prognosis was
positive.”
Gibbons nodded and seemed to relax. The medic working on him swooped in and scooped out something that Julia couldn’t see – and she heard the Sergeant’s gasp of pain. Someone had done a number on him.
“Major Reid’s shuttles have breached the hull at their target points,” Nguyen reported.
Further discussion was cut off by a high-powered, broadband, radio signal that overrode every channel.
“Crewmen of the Alan-a-dale, this is Major Elise Reid of the Royal Martian Marine Corps,” a calm voice said over the signal. “You are no longer facing your fellows of the Patrol, and you have few tools at your disposal that can threaten my Marines. Resistance will change nothing. If you surrender, you’ll at least have an opportunity to try to come up with something worth your lives.”
Julia winced. Reminding the remaining holdouts that whether they surrendered or not they were almost certainly dead wasn’t going to encourage surrenders – but then, perhaps that was the point. Now that Reid was here with exosuited Marines, they weren’t likely to take any losses blasting out the survivors – and Marines hated pirates.
Shaking her head, she glanced around the Alan-a-dale’s bridge. Mage-Lieutenant Nguyen was checking on the simulacrum to see if there was anything he could do with it. To Julia’s knowledge, Combat Mages lacked the interface runes necessary to use it fully, but there might well be something the Lieutenant knew that she didn’t.
The bridge had clearly been seized before the frigate’s atmosphere had been dumped. The crew had fought back, but none of them had been in space-suits. The Patrol boarding team troopers who’d stormed the room were well-trained, too. Most of the crew had gone down to center of mass shots.
Nguyen’s Marines were starting to shuffle bodies to one side. They’d eventually be moved down to the morgue, though it was unlikely there would be a full crew on the Alan-a-dale again for a long time.
Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Page 26
