Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Ten ships unleashed seven hundred lasers, cutting and slashing through space. Seconds later, the Patrol added their own seven hundred and fifty – followed by the three cruisers with another hundred apiece.

  The first salvo flew into the teeth of over seventeen hundred laser turrets. Even traveling at well over ten percent of lightspeed, the missiles still had to withstand that fire for over thirty seconds.

  The last missiles died ten seconds and half a million kilometers from the Duke – only four hundred thousand kilometers from the destroyers strung out in front – and leaving the defenders with less than ten seconds to retarget their weapons on the second salvo.

  Montgomery was improving, Kole realized. He’d blasted over a hundred and fifty missiles away with even fewer opportunities to drop his strange ball lightning mines.

  That still left eleven hundred missiles hitting the laser defense perimeter, with an added delay to get the weapons on target, and some of the lasers in their secondary cool-down cycles. ECM arrays sang deadly songs, luring missiles onto fixed courses that made them easy prey, and the lasers reaped a vicious harvest.

  They couldn’t stop them all. Six snuck through – six of over twelve hundred. Blinded by jamming and in terminal acquisition mode, they picked up the destroyers in front of them and lunged for the kill.

  Fire lit up the void, and two of the Míngliàng Security Flotilla’s ships died. A third stumbled in space, venting atmosphere and debris as she slowed, over half her engines gone.

  “Order the Manticore to fall back,” Kole snapped. “Get her behind the cruisers, fast!”

  “We got the bastard!” Rhine crowed over him, pointing at the screen.

  Without checking the historical footage, Kole couldn’t tell how many missiles had struck the Wil Scarlet, but the ex-Patrol frigate was now an expanding ball of fire. Other missiles, having lost their primary target, slammed into gunships and destroyers.

  Everything the Mage-Captain saw was thirty seconds old, when his own first salvo had savaged the enemy – and savaged was the right word. The Wil Scarlet was the biggest victim, but three of the destroyers and five of the gunships followed her. The strangers had a lot of firepower, but no experience working as a team – even the Patrol and Flotilla ships worked better together, at least with their own comrades.

  “Third salvo inbound,” Carver reported. “Eleven hundred and four birds hitting the perimeter… now.”

  The time lag meant Kole saw the results of his own strikes at the same time as the incoming missiles hit his own ships. Even if they wiped the entire enemy fleet from the universe, he’d still be facing the six salvos currently in space, though after this one there were only three hundred and fifty missiles.

  The Hand seemed to have reached the same conclusion. The strange and devastating electrical mines followed the missiles in this time, detonating more missiles as the lasers began to take their own harvest.

  Short three ships, Kole realized it wasn’t going to be enough. A chill settled into his heart as he saw the last full salvo from the enemy charge forward like a juggernaut come to claim his people’s lives.

  Eighty missiles broke through everything they threw at them. Some had lost their original targets and went for the easiest prey – the destroyers in the front line. Four more Míngliàng ships vanished in balls of antimatter fire.

  Fifty charged forward, and the Patrol met them head on. More missiles died to point blank laser fire – but missiles struck home as well. The Loxley would never get her defenses fully online, missiles ripping through the gap in her lasers and ripping the brand new ship to shreds.

  The Friar Tuck and Lionheart joined her in death, and the Maid Marian fell out of formation venting debris and atmosphere – and still a dozen missiles blasted directly for the Duke of Magnificence.

  An arcing web of pure power appeared from nowhere, the Hand unleashing everything he had at a terrifyingly short range – and the Duke’s viewscreens blanked as multiple gigaton range explosions triggered right in front of them…

  Then the entire ship ran like a bell, its multi-megaton mass lurching as a gigaton hammer slammed into her hull. The lights flickered, the screens dimmed – and came back up.

  “Damage report!” Kole ordered. “How bad were we hit?”

  “One missile, Bravo broadside,” Carver snapped. “We lost most of the Bravo launchers, but we’re still intact.”

  “We hit them – tell me we hit them,” the Mage-Captain demanded.

  “On screen,” Rhine replied, and Kole turned his gaze back to the tactical plot.

  Over a dozen more gunships were gone, along with three more destroyers. Over half the enemy starships were gone and almost a quarter of the sublight gunships. With all of the full-strength salvos gone, Kole breathed a sigh of relief – now he knew how this was going to end.

  “Sir, one of the destroyers has jumped!” Carver announced.

  “So it begins,” Kole said grimly. He’d seen this in the records of engagement with pirates – once it was a lost fight, if they could jump, they would.

  “Son of a…” a new explosion lit up the screen – at least twenty seconds before their missiles would have arrived.

  “Sir… unless I’m misreading this, another destroyer just tried to jump – and blew the hell up,” Rhine reported.

  Kole blinked. That was unexpected.

  “We’re being hailed!” Rain reported. “Throwing it up on the screen.”

  A panicked looking man in a pseudo-military uniform with far too much gold braid appeared.

  “We surrender!” he snapped. “We’ll disable our missiles – we just don’t want to…”

  The transmission cut off, and as Kole looked to the screen to see why, all he saw was explosions.

  “What the fuck?”

  “They all just self-destructed,” Rhine said slowly. “Someone blew remote charges in every one of their ships.”

  Shaking himself to clear his thoughts, and sparing a single glance for Montgomery, still locked to the Simulacrum, Kole looked at the incoming missile salvos.

  “Pull all ships back and spread us apart to clear our lines of fire,” he ordered. “We’ve lost enough good people today, and these birds are running stupid now. Let’s take them down.”

  Chapter 41

  Search and rescue took almost two whole days. They swept for survivors from the pirate fleet, but given the fate of the Alan-a-dale’s crew, Damien was hardly surprised when they didn’t find anyone. Just a lot of debris, vaporized wreckage, and bodies.

  Whoever Wayne’s sponsors had been, their secrets had died with their minions.

  Far too many of the people who’d followed Damien to this unremarkable corner of the void had died with them. Six destroyers gone and two damaged had left the Míngliàng Security flotilla with over a thousand dead, and the Patrol’s three lost and one damaged Frigate had left them with similar casualties.

  Thirty five of Mage-Captain Jakab’s people had also died when the missile had shattered the cruiser’s entire Bravo broadside. Morgues throughout the little fleet were full to overflowing, and many of the medical bays were packed with wounded from the damaged vessels.

  But at this point, everyone who was going to be coming home – alive or dead – was loaded aboard the remaining ships. Damien watched the ships – once enemies, now fire-forged brothers gathering around the wounded – from the window of his office.

  “All ships report ready for jump, Lord Montgomery,” Jakab informed him over the intercom. “We’ll be in Antonius in an hour.”

  “Make it happen, Mage-Captain,” Damien told him. “This place is far too cold and lonely for my tastes now.”

  He felt as much as saw the big battlecruiser jump, rendering the carefully ordered lights he’d watched from his window were now scattered and disorganized.

  Shaking his head, he returned to his computer. He didn’t expect reviewing the data from the battle to give him any great leaps of insight, but there was always the cha
nce there was something he’d missed.

  #

  When they finally made the second jump back to Antonius, the system was far busier than when they’d left. Both Governors appeared to have arrived, and they’d brought friends – the fastest transports they could scrounge up from the looks of it.

  Damien waited patiently while the crew sorted through everything, watching as the two fleets gently went their separate ways, each falling into neat formation around the collection of freighters their government had brought.

  Despite the split, their formations showed some of the change. Neither Phan’s nor McLaughlin’s formation was set up to cover a potential attack from the other. All the ships were looking to attacks from the outside, making certain that the civilians would be safe.

  Bristling sheepdogs, still not entirely sure of each other – but both far more concerned about the wolves outside the pasture.

  Given the price of getting them there, it was good to see. Damien still had concerns about what was going to happen in this sector – not to mention concerns about how it had got this bad – but he could at least be sure the navies involved had some respect for each other.

  “My lord,” Lieutenant Rain appeared on the intercom screen. “It appears Governors Wong and McLaughlin are aboard the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ. They have requested to meet with you and have requested that Admiral Phan and Commodore McLaughlin be included as well as Doctor Christoffsen.”

  “The ice miner has gravity?”

  “And apparently conference facilities, sir,” the shaven-headed communications officer confirmed. “My understand is that the gravity runes are only in limited areas, but the ship is designed to function as a base for system-wide operations.”

  Damien considered. If the two Governors were issuing joint requests, then they’d already closed much of the distance he needed them to work through. It was time for concessions – especially when they were easy concessions.

  “Inform the Governors I will meet them aboard the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ,” he told the Lieutenant. “I need to see these ice miner conference facilities myself.”

  #

  The Tiāntǐ tíqǔ was a massive metal crescent, with the ends of the crescent wrapped around a chunk of the ice asteroid it was rapidly turning into fuel, water, and oxygen. The conference rooms were placed at the very top of the crescent, with a set of windows looking out over the harsh but beautiful landscape of the ice.

  Everyone was waiting for Damien by the time he entered the room and stopped, in awe of the view.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Governor McLaughlin said. “Puts all of mankind’s achievements in perspective – eighty light years from Earth, we stand in a ship that will take that landscape out there and turn it into fuel. Mind-boggling.”

  “Agreed,” Damien murmured. He stepped up to the long conference table in the middle of the room, gesturing for Amiri to take a seat. The owners of the Tiāntǐ tíqǔ – the Celestial Miner, so far as he could tell – had spared no expense for this space. He wondered what it was actually normally used for.

  “You wanted to meet with me,” he noted, glancing around the table. Christoffsen sat at one end of the table, looking disturbingly pleased with himself. Each Governor had an aide – his husband, in Wong Ken’s case – and their military commander sitting with them. It was a small crowd for a room that could clearly handle many more.

  “We wanted to apologize,” Wong Ken said simply. “The situation should never have degraded to the point it did. Without your intervention, we might well be at war.”

  “You lost a lot of people from my intervention,” Damien replied softly.

  “While I would rather my people lived,” Phan interrupted, “I think they would all have rather died with honor, facing our true enemy, than fighting those who should have been our friends. You gave them that – and stopped more of our people dying in a pointless war.”

  “The assistance of both your fleets was necessary,” the Hand told them. “Your commanders did you credit, Governors – not least in knowing when it was time to make decisions of their own instead of follow their original orders.”

  He did, after all, know what orders Grace had gone to Antonius with.

  “Doctor Christoffsen here,” McLaughlin gestured to the ex-Governor, “helped us see at least part of the underlying issue. We were granted shared ownership of Antonius, but we didn’t function with anything of the sort. Instead, we ran two separate administrations for a single system. Friction was inevitable – and our enemies abused that.”

  “We will sort out the details over the next few days,” Wong told Damien. “We both brought enough staff for this negotiation to continue. We would invite you to remain with us while we negotiate – it would be our preference and our privilege to have the Hand who saved us as the Protectorate witness on the final document.”

  It seemed Christoffsen had been doing some day-saving of his own since Damien had left him behind. He couldn’t have had more than six hours with the Governors. The Hand met his political aide’s gaze and inclined his head. He was impressed – and also somewhat terrified. The ex-Governor was, in his own field, even scarier than Damien had thought.

  “It would be my privilege,” he told them. “I may need to send the Duke of Magnificence to Tau Ceti in any case, but the reinforcements I called for should be here in a few days. We will need to sweep the region to make sure no more of these mystery ships remain.”

  “Do we have any idea who they were?” Wong asked.

  “Suspicions only, Governor,” Damien replied. “The number of candidates who could build that fleet is small, but the gunships, for example, were all sold as scrap years ago. The destroyers could easily have come from similar sources and been modified in any one of four dozen yards. The missiles would have been harder to find, but…” he shrugged. “I suspect they fell out the back of a freighter delivering them to an honest system government. Without intact weapons to study that lead takes us nowhere as well.”

  “Can you share your suspicions, my lord Hand?” Phan asked.

  Damien shook his head.

  “This is not a case where I can lay accusations or even cast suspicion without evidence, Admiral,” he said quietly. “Either a criminal organization of a scale I do not believe still exists is in play, or my accusation must inevitably fall on a system government. And the Charter limits what I may say about such governments without proof.”

  #

  “It’s Legatus, isn’t it?”

  Damien turned in the hallway back to his shuttle. Grace McLaughlin drove the powered chair the doctors were insisting on up to him, nodding to Amiri.

  “I can’t say,” he told her gently.

  “Please,” she replied. “A moment, Julia?” she asked the bodyguard.

  Amiri shook her head, then checked a door next to them and held it open for them.

  “Meeting room,” she told them. “Gravity runes even. I can guarantee you ten minutes without question, though I’m not sure that’s enough even if she wasn’t in a cast.”

  Damien flushed as his bodyguard gave him a wicked grin and closed the door behind him, whistling jauntily.

  “You look like you need to talk to someone,” Grace told him.

  Sighing, the Hand took one of the seats in the small meeting room and looked back at her.

  “I have no proof,” he told her. “But…”

  “But?”

  “I know Ardennes was a Legatan operation,” he admitted. “Panterra… the terrorists had a lot of gear from a lot of places, but all of their modern stuff? Legatan. Those gunships? Yeah, they scrapped them – but even the LSDF should have told us if one buyer picked up three hundred sublight warships.”

  He shrugged. “Legatus could have built the destroyers easily – hell, they could have custom-built them to match the MSF’s specs. But… I can’t accuse a Core World system government of sponsoring terrorism. Not without a lot of proof, and evidence of some kind of motive.”

  “Could they b
e pushing to get the Compact lifted from their worlds?” she asked. “I didn’t think Legatus liked the Protectorate.”

  “They don’t,” Damien agreed. “But we’re the only game in town – we’d happily let Legatus declare independence and write their own rules, to be honest. But if we did, the Mage Guild would pull out of the system entirely. They’d be completely cut off from interstellar shipping, and no one has found any way except magic to travel faster than light.”

  “I do not want your job,” she said prayerfully. “Mine is enough of a headache.”

  “I’m still impressed,” he told her. “Your grandfather didn’t just pick you for the role for family ties. You’re doing a good job.”

  “But it keeps me tied to Sherwood,” Grace said. “And… it’s not like you’ll be coming back, is it?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “Mars is my home now. There’s reasons I can’t even talk about for that, but it’s true nonetheless.”

  “Couldn’t get you to stay, huh?” she asked, but her tone told him she already knew the answer. “Not even for me?”

  “I decided… a long time ago that the galaxy had to be more important than just me,” Damien said very quietly. “If I can help – if I can serve – I have to.”

  “If you hadn’t been here, we’d have gone to war,” Grace replied. “So yeah, you can help. You can serve.”

  “Another Hand would have come.”

  “We wouldn’t have trusted another Hand as far,” she told him. “Only you, Damien. That would be why your boss sent you. I know you have to go. I don’t have to like it.”

  “You could come with me,” he offered. He knew the answer as well as she had when she asked him to stay.

  “Took a job, swore an oath,” she answered with a sad smile. “Hate this cast, too,” she admitted. “I’d be asking for a ride back to your ship without it.”

  He laughed, and for the first time in years, reached out to touch her arm. She covered his fingers with hers and pulled him down.