Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I’ve got a second transmission,” Samara told him. “You need to hear this.”

  A moment later, a new voice echoed in the bridge. Unlike the first message, this was a person instead of a computer. The voice was gravelly, like a man who’d smoked too many cigarettes or caught a couple of whiffs of vacuum.

  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the voice declared. “I speak for the Stone and the Void, the People and the Rock that you have denied for so long.

  “Callisto now belongs to the people of the Belt. Any of you Martian thugs that come near her or us will meet fire and stone. I, the Alpha and the Omega, have spoken!”

  “It doesn’t repeat,” Samara concluded.

  “I’m not familiar with the threat list for Sol,” Damien told her. “Do you have any idea who this idiot is?”

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “The Stone and the Void…I’ve heard that before.”

  “Anyone who might pull something like this?

  “It’s come up in the context of the Belt Liberation Front, but they’re…” Samara sighed. “They’re a bunch of fringe crazies we didn’t think even took themselves seriously. The last intelligence I saw certainly didn’t give them enough resources to pull off a space hijacking.”

  “It might not be them and it might not be a full-on hijacking yet,” Damien replied. “That distress beacon is still going, so I’m guessing they don’t have enough control to shut it down. There’s a window of vulnerability for them, and I’d say we’re arriving right smack in the middle of it.

  “We’re getting close enough that Akintola’s sensors should be able to resolve something,” he continued. The yacht might not have warship scanners, but they were better than most luxury yachts of her breed would carry. “See what you can pull up.”

  It didn’t occur to him until after he’d asked that he had no idea if the MIS officer had a clue how the sensor systems of a spaceship worked. From the speed with which the data started feeding to his displays, however, she clearly did.

  “Callisto is a giant slug of a ship,” she said frankly. “Thirty million tons, centrifugal gravity ring for habitation, pure ion thrust. Can’t pull more than a tenth of a gravity, but she’s the anchor point for Amethyst Star Mining’s operations. They’ve got a dozen mining ships; each of them swings back by Callisto at least once a week to deliver their raw ore.

  “I’m not reading any of ASM’s ships here,” she continued, “but I’ve got at least twenty ships circling her with no IDs—and a debris field that might have been another ship.

  “Twenty ships?” Damien asked. “How large are we talking?”

  “Pocket change and toys,” she replied. “A dozen shuttles, six intra-system personnel transports, and two mining ships. I’m assuming they’ve strapped guns of some kind to them, but they won’t have the mass or power supply for anything significant.”

  “But it’s not like Callisto has any defenses at all,” he confirmed grimly. And without weapons or a proper amplifier, his own ability to engage was limited to about fifty thousand kilometers. They weren’t going to enjoy him getting that close, but they might well be able to shoot at Doctor Akintola before that.

  “Let everyone know to brace for impact,” he told her. “I can take them, but this ride might get rough.”

  “This ship is unarmed!” Samara objected. “What are you going to do?”

  “I am a Hand, Inspector Samara,” Damien reminded her. “And like you, they might just underestimate what that means in a situation like this.”

  #

  They were still over a million kilometers away when Callisto noticed that the cavalry was on its way.

  “Incoming transmission from the refinery ship,” Samara told Damien. “The distress beacon is still going; this is a directional transmission straight to us.”

  “Show me.”

  One of his screens lit up with a recording of an overweight gray-haired woman. She wore a bulletproof vest and had a gun strapped to her side, both of which looked like she’d worn them before and they were old friends.

  “Civil Fleet ship, this is Captain Kayla Gambon of Callisto,” she said in a gruff drawl. “We have been attacked and boarded by pirates. One Amethyst Star Mining ship has been destroyed with all hands, and I’ve lost over a dozen of my own crew trying to hold them back.

  “They are in control of the engines and the refinery spaces,” she continued. “I retain the bridge, communications, and life support, but they are pressing my boys hard at life support.

  “Any assistance you can provide would be more than welcome.”

  The message ended.

  “She realizes this ship is unarmed, right?” Samara said, repeating her earlier words with a tone of disbelief.

  “She probably only saw the Civil Fleet ID,” Damien pointed out. “Most Civil Fleet ships aren’t armed, but they do usually have a security detachment.”

  “What can we do?”

  “First, we need to drive off those ships,” he concluded, checking his velocity. Burning at fifteen gravities, which even after the gravity runes absorbed ten was an unpleasant experience for everyone aboard, they’d still be moving at just over five hundred kilometers a second when they passed the big refinery ship.

  “Second, we need to retake Callisto. Romanov.” He linked the Marine in. “Are your people ready to go?”

  “Shuttle is locked and loaded. What do you need us to do?”

  “The shuttle is rated for twenty gravities if you’re all in your ’suits, right?”

  He could almost hear Romanov’s wince.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Going to kick you out of the door at fifteen minutes and six hundred thousand kilometers away from Callisto,” Damien ordered. “Burn twenty gees the whole way in; I’ll drive the ships off and return for pickup.”

  “If my math is right, you’ll be an hour from zero velocity,” Romanov pointed out.

  “And you’ll be the ones making an assault crash—I mean, boarding,” the Hand replied. “I’m not worried about my ability to see off twenty pirates with refitted ships, Mage-Captain. I am worried about losing more of Callisto’s people. Understand?”

  “Understood. We drop at t-minus fifteen from contact—twelve minutes and counting.”

  “Good luck, Denis,” Damien told him.

  #

  “Well, that’s nice and obvious,” Damien said aloud as the assault shuttle kicked free and lit up its own engines at a third again Akintola’s acceleration.

  “I’m not entirely unfamiliar with starship sensors,” Samara replied, “and I must point out that the bigger ship burning antimatter engines for fifteen gravities is a bit warmer and more obvious than the shuttle.”

  “Oh, I know,” he admitted. “I’m waiting to see what they do.”

  “So far, not much of anything,” she told him. “Starting to feel ignored.”

  “Can you get a decent scan of them with those systems?” he asked. “Identify weapons?”

  “The mining ships will have lasers, but they’re not really designed to hit a maneuvering target,” Samara said almost absently as her fingers danced over the console. “If they’ve gimballed them up to aim better, we’re not going to pick it up from here.”

  “But if they’ve added bigger systems, you should be able to,” he pointed out. “And those are what I’m worried about.”

  If the pirates had any real weapons, he’d have seen them by now. Even cheap missiles had ranges measured in millions of kilometers. A decent military laser could have lit Akintola up at over a million.

  There were still a lot of things they might have that could start messing the yacht up before he could return the favor.

  “I’m not sure I’ll pick up anything before they fire,” Samara admitted after a few more minutes. “There’s no major additions to any of the ships that I can see, but we’re still pretty far away and they’re not exactly standard designs.

  “Is this ship armored to even take a hit?”


  “We can take a hit,” Damien told her. “Maybe two. Depending on what they’re shooting at us with.”

  “That is not reassuring.”

  “I’m not planning on getting hit,” he replied, studying his screens and sensor output carefully as they flashed over the half-million-kilometer mark…then throwing the ship into a jinking spiral in time for the sensors to register an energy spike where they had been.

  “That was one of the mining ships’ lasers,” Samara said instantly. “They’ve upgraded the power source and presumably the targeting. It’s not a military weapon, but nothing civilian is going to like being hit with it.”

  “And Akintola is basically civilian,” Damien agreed, studying the sensor screens himself and noticing a very distinct pattern he’d only ever seen in training. “Isn’t this entertaining.” He tapped a command to open up a shipwide intercom channel.

  “Everyone, this is your pilot speaking,” he said calmly. “I apologize for the acceleration, but I’m afraid things are about to get even rougher. If you’re not strapped in, I suggest you fix that.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  Samara had finished running the scans and recognized what he’d seen—just as Damien threw Doctor Akintola into an even wider spiral, yanking the dextrous little yacht out of the way of the stream of mass-driver rounds launched from the smaller ships.

  “Cheap, effective, and dangerous against big freighters and other ships that don’t dodge well,” Damien said. “That’s about what I was expecting.”

  He twisted the yacht again, distorting her course to make sure the next batch of projectiles missed. The rounds were “only” moving at about one percent of lightspeed, so he could see them coming thousands of kilometers away.

  The lasers on the two mining ships were the real threat, but the same twisting course that made it impossible for the mass drivers’ metal bullets to hit made it harder for the lasers to connect to.

  For now.

  The range was dropping rapidly, and every few thousands of kilometers Akintola grew closer to Callisto’s attackers took a few more fractions of a second off the time elapsed between when they saw the yacht and when their beams would reach her.

  Eventually, the lapse wouldn’t be enough for him to move the yacht away from their beams, even if they kept failing to guess his dodges.

  “What happens if they hit the shuttle?”

  “Two things,” Damien told Samara, jinking around another burst of high-velocity metal shards. “Firstly, Romanov’s pilot is both better at this than I am and behind us, so has more time to dodge. Second, well, the assault shuttle is probably better armored than we are.”

  “You need to work on your reassurances, my lord.”

  The ship shuddered as his luck ran out and one of the lasers connected. Damien yanked the controls, twisting the ship out of the way after barely a fraction of a second of contact, but the ship happily informed him that the beam had cut almost entirely through the hull at the impact point.

  Leaving the ship’s programming to spiral it forward randomly, he stripped off his gloves and lay his hands on the simulacrum. The runes on his palms slotted neatly into place on the semi-liquid silver model, and he exhaled as he linked into the ship.

  His options were limited. They were still over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away, and even he couldn’t do much at that distance. Unless he found some way to keep the yacht intact, however, they weren’t going to make it to the distance where he could reach the pirates.

  He’d misjudged, and winced as a second laser beam slammed into Akintola. The mining ships had three lasers apiece, and they’d clearly upgraded both their targeting and slew abilities. The beams were still low-power cutting lasers even with their upgrades, or Akintola would be debris.

  Another salvo of mass-driver rounds bracketed them. The pirates were expanding their field of fire, sacrificing the likelihood of a single salvo kill for a better chance of hitting the yacht at all.

  The mass-driver rounds had to come to him.

  Damien smiled.

  A missile would be too fast, too maneuverable for him to do anything.

  A laser was begun and over before he could influence it.

  Mass-driver rounds, however…

  His power flickered out as the next salvo came in. There was so much energy in them, a thousand kilometers a second on projectiles that massed everything from fifty grams to fifty kilos.

  Another Mage might have been able to deflect them, knocking them aside from the course that would hit Doctor Akintola—but Damien Montgomery was a Rune Wright with full command of his powers.

  He turned every single projectile back on its course, flinging them back at their originating ships at twice the speed they’d been fired at him.

  They had time to see what he’d done and evade, but none of them had expected it. Mass-driver rounds slammed home on the pirate ships. The mining ships and refitted transports had the mass to take the hits; the weapons were only truly deadly in massive quantities.

  The fundamentally civilian shuttles the pirates had stolen had neither armor nor mass. The heavy metal slugs smashed home at over four thousand kilometers a second, ripping gaping holes through the small craft and smashing their wreckage into the asteroids behind Callisto.

  The transports and mining ships were damaged but functioning…but stopped firing the mass drivers anyway.

  “I think you scared them,” Samara pointed out. “Wait…you really scared them. They’re scattering.”

  “Damn,” Damien cursed, studying the screens. The pirates had been watching his velocity, too. All eight remaining ships were scattering on courses where even their lower acceleration could prevent Akintola from catching up to them. He could probably catch one…but not the rest.

  “That’s both better and worse than I hoped,” he admitted. “I suppose I’m left hoping that Romanov catches us some prisoners.”

  #

  Chapter 13

  “Everybody hang on,” Denis Romanov ordered his team as the assault shuttle careened toward Callisto, still decelerating toward from the big refinery ship at twenty gravities.

  Royal Martian Marine Corps assault shuttles didn’t go in for such niceties as magical gravity. They had straps, acceleration couches, and an assumption that their passengers were in armor. The only concession to making sure that Mars’s finest survived the assault crash was a one-shot runic artifact at the front of the ship.

  It was activated by impact and was excruciatingly uncomfortable…but completely neutralized the inertial energy of the shuttle. Once. Then the thing had to be replaced, and it was expensive.

  But for moments like this, when his shuttle was still traveling at well over four hundred kilometers a second upon reaching their destination, it was an absolute and literal lifesaver.

  “Impact in ten seconds,” the pilot snapped over the intercom. “If you haven’t done this before, open your mouths and clench your guts. This is gonna suck!”

  Impact.

  And then, for a period of time that Denis knew was literally fractions of a second but felt like eternity, the entire shuttle was wrong.

  There was no other way to describe it. In that infinitesimal instant of time, magic swept through every molecule, every particle of his body, and robbed them of their kinetic energy, converting it into a blast of heat that passed out the rear of the ship like a superheated ghost.

  The moment passed, and the Marine turned Secret Service Agent shook himself inside his armor, trying to get the last of the sensation out of his body.

  “All right, people, that’s never fun, but we have a job to do,” he snapped. “Secret Service Agents, back up the Marines; they know this drill better than you do.

  “Intel from inside the ship is that engineering is in enemy hands but life support is still holding. Corporal Coral, take your fire team and six of the Service Agents, head to life support. The rest of you are with me.”

  “Do we have a map?” Coral asked.
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  “Should be in the download,” Denis replied. “So far as I know, she’s a standard MacMurray-class refinery ship. Interior might be off from the schematics but shouldn’t be by much.”

  “We’ll find them either way,” the Marine Corporal promised. “Can probably just follow the sound of the guns.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” the detail commander replied. “We’re headed for Engineering, which means that sound is going to be us pretty damn quickly.”

  “Oohrah, sir.”

  Half of his detail split off after the Corporal, suit jets flaring in zero gravity, and Denis turned a smile he knew couldn’t be seen behind the faceless mask of his exosuit helmet on the remainder.

  “All right, people,” he told them. “If these were pirates, I’d be expecting them to surrender. But if these are terrorists…they may try and take us all with them by blowing the fusion plants. Let’s go discourage that plan, shall we?”

  #

  Overlaying the ship schematic on his helmet view and highlighting the fastest route to Engineering demonstrated to Denis Romanov that he didn’t give his pilot enough credit. Callisto was an immense vessel, four kilometers around and five kilometers long, that looked more like a mobile factory or city than a spaceship.

  Traveling at over four hundred kilometers a second, his pilot had delivered them less than two hundred meters away from the main power planet, a monstrous complex of fusion generators that could handily power multiple cities.

  He flipped the route to Corporal Massey, who led his fire team out on point. The Secret Service Agents under Denis’s command were decent in a fight and not even particularly bad in zero gravity, but this kind of action was exactly what his Marines trained for.

  If Denis had known that Montgomery would have been ordering him to board ships, he could easily have packed another assault shuttle and thirty Marines aboard Doctor Akintola. It wasn’t a possibility he’d considered in the extremely abbreviated planning for the trip.