“Wide sensor sweeps,” Kole ordered as the last ships appeared around him. “All ships, full active sensors. If there’s anyone out there, they know we’re here – let’s make sure we know they’re here.”
Passive receptors across all twenty-one ships were already sucking in petabytes of data that the computers churned through analysis of. Here in deep space, light years away from anything, even a dormant ship should stick out like a sore thumb.
“We’ve got something,” Carver announced. “Multiple heat signatures, distance thirty light seconds, sixty degrees by one-seventy-five. Pulling data from the rest of the fleet to triangulate.”
That put the unknowns above and behind the Duke of Magnificence on her current vector and orientation – and, like most Protectorate ships, almost her entire arsenal pointed forwards.
“Orders to the fleet,” Kole snapped. “Re-orient all ships along that vector, prepare to engage the enemy!” He turned his gaze to his tactical department. “Get me an ID, people,” he ordered.
“I’ve got nineteen signatures,” Carver reported. “Multiple mass ranges – all of them just lit up their engines. Six are headed away from us, thirteen are headed right at us.”
“The six are reading at over ten million tons apiece,” Rhine added, reviewing his staff’s data. “Acceleration is slow, I’m only showing three gravities. They’re freighters –-big container ships, no question about it.”
“The lead unit headed for us is a frigate,” the junior officer continued as his boss finished. “The rest are destroyers.” He paused. “I can’t say for sure on the rest, but the lead matches the profile of the Wil Scarlet.”
“She was destroyed,” Kole objected.
“According to Michael Wayne,” Montgomery said quietly from the observer seat. “I hadn’t considered that – she’s the ship that attacked Phan when she was rescuing her freighters. She’s a surprise, but the numbers are in our favor, I believe?”
“No change to the plan,” Kole agreed as he watched his fleet slowly reorient around him. “Only question is: do we fire first, sir?”
“Give me a wide-channel transmission,” the Hand ordered. “We’ll give them one chance. And Captain?”
“Yes?”
“If they fire before I’m done talking, you are authorized to blow them to hell.”
#
A tiny light flicked on, informing Damien that his observer console was recording for transmission.
“Unidentified vessels,” he said harshly, “this is Damien Montgomery, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars. This area has been identified as a pirate rendezvous point. You will cease acceleration and prepare to be boarded for inspection, as per Article Twenty-Seven of the Protectorate Charter.
“Failure to heave to will be regarded as conspiracy with the individuals responsible for the destruction of Greenwood and the Míngliàng Antonius Central Processing Facility – and the deaths of seventy thousand Protectorate civilians.”
Subtle it wasn’t, but Damien wasn’t actually expecting these people to surrender. If nothing else, the Duke’s CIC team was attempting to match the energy signatures of the destroyers to those responsible for the attack on Greenwood – and the attack on the Wil Scarlet. That ship appeared to have been captured intact, which left the Hand wondering about its crew. Had Captain Vlahovic followed Wayne into treason? Or had the Wil Scarlet been given an entirely new crew – and Vlahovic’s people murdered?
Damien didn’t know. He probably never would, now.
“That’s strange,” Carver said quietly. Damien’s observer console was closer to the junior tactical officer’s station than the Captain’s chair war. He wasn’t sure anyone else had heard the youth speak.
“What’s strange?” Damien asked, his voice equally soft.
“I’m not sure,” the youth replied. “Commander Rhine, Lord Montgomery, if you want to take a look.”
Carver flipped an image to Damien’s console and zoomed in on the six freighters, currently accelerating away from the Protectorate ships. They were all identical, the Hand noted. That removed the possibility of them being prizes taken in the campaign – those six ships were here for a reason.
“It’s like they’re ejecting something,” Carver told them. “See? The engine of the furthest ship keeps being eclipsed, and I’m picking up faint heat signatures. Too big to be cargo, not sure what they could be.”
A chill ran through Damien. His old ship had repeatedly used ‘ejecting cargo’ as cover for tricks that had helped keep the Blue Jay alive – but had killed a lot of those pursuing her.
“Any idea of the size?” he asked.
“Hard to say… thirty, forty minutes across?”
That rang a bell too. “Do we have radar data on them?” he asked. “Might not have shown up as they’re cold and small, but we might have it anyway.”
“No response to your message, sir,” Jakab noted. “What do we do?”
“Got them!” Rhine interrupted. “Strange things… look like half an egg, but they’re familiar…”
Damien looked at the profile they’d pulled out. Forty meters long, twenty meters across. Each ship had been dropping them in pairs, and they looked very familiar.
“Son of a bitch,” he swore. “Captain – they’re deploying gunships.”
“What? That’s… impossible.”
“Legatus hired the freighter I served on to deliver gunships between systems,” Damien told him urgently. “That three megaton ship carried eight gunships, and the crews could access their ships from the main hull. We didn’t spend a lot of effort optimizing them… but those ships are four times the size of my old ship. They could be carrying over two hundred gunships between them.”
“My god,” Carver breathed. “If they’re anything like the Legatan ships, that’s easily another two thousand launchers.”
“They haven’t launched them all yet,” Damien noted. “Mage-Captain – you have to destroy those freighters.”
“What! If there’s any prisoners, any survivors…”
“Then they’re aboard those ships,” Damien said grimly. There was no choice. No third option. If those freighters deployed that many gunships, the fleet he’d pulled together would die. “We don’t have a choice, Captain. I am ordering you to target those freighters with long-range laser fire.
“Take them out, Kole. There’s no time.”
“Commander Rhine, charge the main battle lasers,” Jakab said slowly, holding Damien’s gaze as if begging him to change his mind. Damien simply nodded.
Jakab swallowed hard, then returned Damien’s nod.
“Target the gunship carriers and take them out before they finish deploying,” the Mage-Captain said in a rush. “Dispersion Pattern Lambda-Four. Fire on all targets.”
#
The Duke of Magnificence carried hundreds of thousands of tons of layered composite armor, including upper layers of both ablative and reflective armor designed to defeat heavy battle lasers equivalent to her own twelve-gigawatt main battery.
Even the militia ships around her were armored enough and maneuverable enough that a shot at over nine million kilometers would be a waste of energy. If the beam somehow managed to connect, the beam dispersion at thirty light seconds would be enough for their armor to shrug aside the heaviest of lasers.
Whoever had converted the freighters to gunship carriers hadn’t added armor. They were maneuvering, but at barely a third of the speed of a true warship with gravity runes to protect its crew – and limited in their options by the need to deploy the gunships they were carrying inside their keels.
They never even saw death coming.
Three twelve-gigawatt beams of coherent light targeted each ship. Targeted as carefully as they could be, and then unleashed in the wide, sweeping, cuts of a Lambda – long-range – targeting program. Each ship was hit by at least one beam, most by two.
When the light made it back to the Duke of Magnificence it showed the utter destruction of all six ships. Fuel s
tores, engines, munitions… it was impossible to sure, but all six ships vanished inside the first few seconds of sustained laser fire.
Then the parasite ships they’d deployed lit up their engines, rotating to join the traditional warships and charge at their motherships’ killers.
#
“Cease laser fire,” Kole ordered his people, trying not to guess how many people had still been aboard the freighters when they’d gone up. All six appeared to have been acting as gunship carriers, so there probably hadn’t been prisoners aboard. Probably. “All vessels are to target the warships and prepare to fire.”
He turned to Montgomery.
“My lord, should we summon them to surrender again?”
Before the Hand could reply, a muffled curse from the tactical section rapidly devolved into prayer.
“Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy will be done…”
Kole stared at the screen, understanding instantly why Carver had starting asking the divine for protection.
The carriers might be gone, but seventy-six gunships had apparently launched before he took out the motherships. They had brought up their engines and were charging at his fleet – and firing as they came.
Their fire was clearly the signal the main force had been waiting on, and the frigate and destroyers opened fire as well.
In a matter of moments, space was filled with missiles – almost thirteen hundred weapons his computers identified as Phoenix VII missiles.
“All vessels,” Kole said calmly. “Focus your fire on the Wil Scarlet, and fire when ready.”
Chapter 40
“Step our missiles down to match the Phoenix VIIs’ acceleration,” the Mage-Captain continued.
It took Damien a moment to understand the reasoning – the Duke’s missiles were bigger and faster than the ones the militias were using. While they were superior weapons, they weren’t superior enough to make up for arriving on their own, as opposed to arriving with the other eight hundred-plus missiles.
A few moments after Jakab’s orders, nine hundred and twenty missiles were in space at twelve thousand gravities. Gentle nudging from the warships’ computers adjusted the accelerations, tiny blips that brought all of them into line as a single giant salvo.
The strangers’ missiles had a thirty second advantage on the Protectorate salvo, and one of Rhine’s people had thrown up an ‘Estimated Impact’ timer on the surrounding screens. Six minutes and counting, with the missiles still effectively nine million kilometers away and accelerating.
“They’re maneuvering to throw off any more long-range laser shots,” Rhine noted. “I think we spooked them.”
“I’ll take small benefits,” Jakab replied. “As for big ones… best guess on the capacity of those carriers?”
“These are Orion-class Legatan gunships, I think,” the tactical officer replied. “An older model, the last Legatus built before switching to home-built fusion missiles with enough endurance to match the Phoenix’s range. The LSDF has completely phased them out – and only built three hundred of them.”
“And?”
“And if someone managed to pick them all up when they scrapped them, they could have fit all three hundred on those six ships,” Rhine said quietly. “They have no gravity, less than two days endurance, and are a cheap-as-dirt method of putting twelve launchers into space to defend a planet. No one has ever tried to move them around as an offensive weapon that I know of though.”
Damien shrugged as the Captain looked at him. “We were transporting them to set up defenses in another system,” he explained. “We could, theoretically, have launched them like that, but it would have been an… interesting procedure.”
The big cruiser shivered around them as a second salvo launched into space, a minute after the last. The enemy vessels seemed to have the same older launcher as the Flotilla and Patrol – if nothing else, the Wil Scarlet had been a Patrol ship. Their second salvo had launched thirty seconds ago.
Two timers and distances appeared on the screen, counting down the time and range.
“MSF destroyers have assumed the new formation,” Rhine reported. “Everyone is now aligned, enemy first salvo is at roughly eight million kilometers and four and a half minutes to impact.”
“My lord,” Jakab said quietly to Damien. “I’ve seen you in action, but never with an amplifier.” He paused. “How much further than I can you reach?”
The Hand glanced at the screen, the now three salvos of over a thousand missiles reaching out. With only one amplifier in the fleet, the laser turrets every ship carried would bear the biggest burden of missile defense, but even an extra light second of use of the amplifier could make a huge difference.
“We’ve experimented,” he admitted. He’d killed Mikhail Azure, when that crime lord had tried to capture his ship, by being able to use the amplifier well beyond the range Azure had expected. “Far enough that the lightspeed lag is a real issue. Effective…” he shrugged. “Ten to twelve light seconds.”
Jakab blinked, then gestured towards the simulacrum.
“That’s a million kilometers more than anyone else on this ship, my lord. If you would be so kind as to see what you can do to keep us alive, I’d appreciate it,” he said dryly.
The Hand nodded and quickly stepped up to the raised dais, stripping off his elbow-length black leather gloves as he did. Hands tried to keep the exact strength of their augmented magical abilities under wraps – and since his own were even more augmented, he had strict instructions only to use his full power when truly necessary.
If he wasn’t sure that his extra power would be enough, then it was probably necessary.
#
The silver polymer inlay on Damien’s palms slotted perfectly into the two blank spaces left for them on the semi-liquid silver model of the Duke of Magnificence. The simulacrum shivered under his fingers – and the entire ship shivered around him as a third salvo of missiles blasted into space.
Linked into the amplifier, Damien became the ship. The screens that surrounded him in every direction became his eyes, his senses, even as his magic reached out into the space around the mighty vessel. A few sparks, generated in an empty part of the void, tested his ‘muscles’ as he prepared for the incoming fire.
Seconds ticked by, and the pirates launched a fourth salvo – but this one was only from the destroyers and frigate. The gunships held their fire, the tiny ships likely out of missiles.
A fourth salvo followed from the Protectorate fleet, more and more missiles launching into space every minute from each side.
Damien couldn’t truly see the timers anymore, but he was aware of the distance and speed of the missiles in a way that no computer display could ever enable. The first salvo was four million kilometers away, moving at over thirty thousand kilometers a second and everything he saw was over ten seconds delayed. By the time the light reached the sensors he was ‘seeing’ through, the missiles had moved another light second and more.
Precision was impossible. Attacking a starship at this range was far easier than stopping missiles, though at least his magic was not limited by the speed of light. If he judged where the missiles were correctly, he only need to know where they were… now.
Power flashed through space. At closer ranges, plasma balls and beams of pure energy could be effective, but they required either precision or massive scale to have a chance of stopping missiles at this range.
Instead, Damien conjured ball lightning. For all of his power, electric charges strong enough to lash out across hundreds of kilometers were a drain, and he could only produce one ‘ball’ at a time.
Each point source of electricity was placed closer and closer to the Duke and its guardian militia ships, tens of thousands of kilometers apart as the missiles traveled at a blistering pace.
He’d dropped six of the lightning balls into space by the time the light from the first reached the Duke, allowing him to refine his targeting. He’d been close – close enough
that he heard a couple of choked off gasps around him in the bridge as the first blast took out a dozen missiles.
The results of his second and third blasts showed that he’d misestimated the missiles’ speed. When the light of the sixth charge reached them, it had only taken out two missiles – but the seventh was better, sixteen missiles detonating as electricity arced into them across the vacuum and overloaded systems.
“When they hit six light seconds, leave them for the lasers,” Jakab murmured in his ear. “We’ll need you to hit each wave in sequence.”
Damien was only loosely connected to his body at this point, but he managed to nod. The Mage-Captain, thankfully, seemed aware that the Hand had never actually played the missile defense role in reality.
After dropping the eighth electromagnetic charge, fifty seconds after the first missiles had entered his range, he turned his attention to the second salvo. Some of those missiles were running into the remnants of the charges, but he started dropping new charges again. This time, he had even less time to work.
And every missile he stopped was one that couldn’t hit the ships around him – the ships that, among others, contained him, his staff and friends, and Commodore Grace McLaughlin.
#
Mage-Captain Jakab had never seen anything like what the Hand was doing with his ship’s amplifier. An area effect weapon in space? The ball lightning seemed to be restricted to a thousand or so kilometers, but even that should have been impossible – from both a physics and a thaumaturgics perspective.
The first wave reached the outer limits of the fleet’s laser range less eighty missiles from when it started. The Míngliàng Flotilla destroyers had edged towards the enemy, extending the defensive range of the fleet by a hundred thousand kilometers, and opened fire first.
Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Page 29
