Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  All four mining ships remained, now turning their lasers in the direction of the incoming Doctor Akintola, but none of the smaller armed transports had survived his pass.

  “How long till we come around for another pass?” Denis asked the pilot.

  “At least forty minutes,” the woman replied with a shake of her head. “We’re down to a quarter of our magazines, too—and the Navy should be in missile range by then.”

  Denis nodded, turning his gaze back to the scope where Akintola swooped down on the terrorists.

  “Down to you now, my lord,” he murmured.

  #

  The only reason Damien could see for the Front sending six missiles flying at Doctor Akintola was that they’d recognized her. In and of herself, after all, the Civil Fleet jump-yacht was unarmed, mostly unarmored, and in general no more of a threat than the Councilor’s yacht they’d destroyed with half as many missiles.

  If they had recognized the yacht, though, they’d done an insufficient amount of research. In their place, knowing he was coming, Damien would have thrown everything at Akintola. The yacht was terrifyingly vulnerable, and he could only do so much without a proper amplifier.

  Unfortunately, Akintola’s jump matrix was designed to be difficult to access to prevent foolish rich people from damaging their own ships. Even if he had been able to get at it, Damien was under strict orders not to convert jump matrices to amplifier matrices.

  It gave people ideas.

  With an amplifier, he could have wiped all six missiles from space as soon as they’d been launched.

  Without, he had to wait until the range dropped and lash out at a “mere” sixty thousand kilometers, destroying the missiles one at a time as they lunged toward him at over a thousand kilometers a second, accelerating the whole way. Destroying a missile took several seconds each—there were enough missiles and they were moving fast enough, the last one actually had him worried before it detonated a hundred kilometers short of the yacht.

  “Cutting it closer than I’d like,” he said aloud. “I’m glad they misestimated us.”

  Before the Inspector sharing the bridge with him could reply, he took the controls again, adding a series of barrel rolls and spiraling turns to their course toward the mining ships. He had no idea what range would allow their refitted cutting lasers to damage his ship—and he suspected they didn’t either.

  The attack was a completely different level of both scale and competence than the targeted assassinations Kay had engaged in before. Those, led by Legatan Augment troops, had been small-scale, highly competent operations.

  This… The scale was still small, at least by the standards of space combat. A single destroyer would have been a greater threat than the Belt Liberation Front’s entire flotilla—but a destroyer would have been spotted long before it reached Council Station.

  The scale was clever. It had allowed the attack to take place at all and yet… The Front themselves weren’t quite a bumbling coterie of buffoons, the long-range bombardment of the Station’s defenses proved that, but they certainly weren’t trained soldiers.

  Lasers flashed through space, interrupting Damien’s thoughts. He suspected there was something to the different levels of resources of the two operations, a key he was missing…but right now, he needed to stay alive.

  Lasers were among the few weapons magic was basically useless against. Without air, he couldn’t generate his usual defensive shield around the ship. Without mass or warning, he couldn’t deflect, destroy or stop the beams.

  All he could do was try and make sure they missed by putting Doctor Akintola all over the sky. Damien wasn’t an incredible pilot, but he was a perfectly competent one, and the jump-yacht was a stunningly maneuverable ship.

  Even leaving the main program of “decelerate toward Council Station” in place and maneuvering around it with the manual joystick controls, she responded to his commands like an eager warhorse. The general “accelerate halfway then decelerate halfway” flight didn’t require these kinds of controls or precision.

  They were included in a ship like Akintola to allow for flying for fun.

  Damien was now using them to fly for their lives.

  With one eye on the distance counter to the four mining ships, he put the yacht through a series of twists, keeping them just that one half-second ahead of the flashing lasers.

  “They’re coming towards us,” Samara told him nervously. “Romanov’s people have taken care of the transports, but the mining ships are heading right at us.”

  “I noticed.” He danced the entire ship upward, dodging “over” another quartet of deadly beams as the range counter ticked over the hundred-thousand-kilometer line. “I think they’ve decided we’re the biggest problem, for some reason.”

  “I wonder why,” the Inspector said dryly. “Why aren’t they firing railguns at us? Those ships have them; they were using them before!”

  “They remember us—and they remember what I did to their railguns last time,” Damien pointed out.

  Ninety thousand kilometers.

  Avoiding enemy fire now was a matter of luck, and Damien only had so much. A laser slammed into the yacht, tearing through the boat bay in an explosion of vaporized metal and liberated air.

  “Please tell me none of the Marines were in there,” he said urgently. “Because we sure as hell aren’t picking anyone up.”

  “The Marines aboard are in position to repel boarders throughout the ship in exosuits,” she told him. “Two were in the boat bay, but they’ve reported in as safe, according to Corporal Massey.”

  “Thank God.”

  Eighty thousand kilometers.

  Damien was barely breathing now as he twitched the controls as randomly as he could, adding layer after layer of twisting to his vector—every additional angle and line of momentum he could add made the Front’s targeting computers’ job harder.

  Sixty thousand kilometers.

  Doctor Akintola slammed backward as if she’d run into a brick wall, a laser hitting the yacht dead center as Damien dodged left when he should have dodged right. An engine exploded, failsafes spewing antimatter and debris out into space as the yacht careened completely out of control.

  And into the range of Damien’s amplified magic.

  He let the damage take over making his ship’s movements unpredictable and grabbed the simulacrum, reaching out across space to see, to feel the four enemy ships desperately trying to kill him and his people.

  Even a Rune Wright had limits at this range, only so much force he could inflict, only so much power he could unleash. Normally, he would fight in space with conjured balls of plasma, but without an amplifier, he didn’t have the power to do so at this range.

  Two hundred grams of matter at the front of the lead mining ship shifted. A simple transmutation spell, the bread and butter of the working Mage that fueled the Protectorate’s unending appetite for antimatter, “flipped the polarity” of a fist-sized chunk of the ship’s hull.

  Most Mages could only change matter to antimatter at a touch. Damien had learned to do it at range a long time before, though never at this distance.

  The ensuing explosion gutted the mining ship, sending debris smashing into her fellows.

  Debris that Damien followed with balls of ghostly witch fire, a sticky plasma that smashed into the holes created by the debris and began eating the hull around them. The two ships jerked away, an instinctive reaction on the part of their pilots trying to save them from the plasma that tore its way through their ships—until it found their fuel cells.

  The last ship was intact and he gave her crew a second to see the fate of their friends. Five seconds. Ten.

  Then he opened the radio.

  “BLF vessel, this is Damien Montgomery,” he told them softly. “I speak for Mars…and I offer you mercy. Surrender and submit to interrogation and you will be spared.”

  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” a familiar voice, gravelly with vacuum damage, responded. “I spea
k for the Stone and the Void, the People and the Rock that you have denied for so long.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Damien replied. “Yield or die. Mars can be merciful.”

  “I have seen Mars’s mercy,” the voice spat. “You will see my fire before we are done.”

  Before Damien could reply, the ship exploded, the fusion core overloading in a crudely rigged self-destruct.

  “Inshallah,” Samara whispered.

  Damien exhaled a long sigh, nodding his agreement.

  “I do wonder,” he said to her, “if the rest of his crew knew he was going to do that.…”

  #

  Chapter 36

  “What is your status, Constable?” Damien asked Constable Lucas a few minutes later.

  “I’ve got people pulling search and rescue through the Station,” she replied. “I’ve ordered all ships to dock until the Navy can get here and clear up the debris field. I don’t have much in terms of spacecraft and less in terms of available hands, but if you’re in need of assistance, I’ll scrape some people together.”

  “The explosion helped slow us down,” he told her. “We’ve got one hell of a spin going on, but I’m starting to get that under control, and I’ll be able to make a safe docking approach in about ten minutes.

  “Doctor Akintola won’t be going anywhere under her own power after that,” he admitted, “but I and my Marines and Secret Service detail will be available to assist you shortly.”

  The shaven-headed woman nodded thankfully with a sigh.

  “I appreciate that,” she told him. “My bosses are probably going to raise several kinds of havoc, my lord, so let me say this before I get any orders to the contrary: thank you. Your warning and intervention saved hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.”

  “My job, Lictor-Constable,” Damien reminded her. Even with just the Warrant, it was still his job. “I’ll be aboard in about ten minutes; my Marine shuttles will be a bit longer. Let me know how we can best assist.”

  “It’s changing moment by moment,” Lucas replied. “I’ll update you when you arrive. I can guarantee you, though, that you are going to have to meet the Council.”

  “I figured,” Damien agreed. “Thank you, Constable.”

  He closed the channel and glanced over at Samara. The explosion had shaken up the yacht and its passengers pretty badly, and she’d acquired a sharp cut across her cheek. She’d torn off a chunk of her headscarf and was using it as an impromptu bandage as she went through the medkit for gauze and tape.

  “Are you all right, Munira?” he asked her.

  “I think this might qualify as the most exciting single day of my career,” she pointed out, “but I’m fine. Yourself?”

  “I’m not sure this even makes the top three yet,” Damien replied. “I just wish we’d got more answers.”

  “This ‘Kay’ sure had a lot of friends. Legatans on Mars, nihilistic fanatics in the Belt…” Samara shook her head. “And he also seemed perfectly willing to leave them all to die.”

  “Which tells me that he’s neither Legatan nor BLF but a third party,” he agreed. “He certainly was a Keeper, but I can’t help feeling there’s more than that.”

  “The Front was our last link, though,” she pointed out. “I’m guessing he fled the system?”

  “We’ll have to see if we can identify and trace which ship he was on,” Damien said, “but yeah. This trail is cold as ice now. I’m not objecting to what it led us to—cheap as their gear was, these guys were about to rip the Council of the Protectorate a new one, and that wasn’t something we would recover from.”

  He sighed.

  “Of course, this links, through Kay, back to Legatus,” he admitted. “His Majesty has no choice now but to launch that Inquest.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a necessary thing. I’m not sure anything that involves accusing an entire system government of treason qualifies as a good thing,” Damien told her. “That it’s looking more and more true doesn’t help.”

  A final adjustment to the controls finally arrested the last of Akintola’s spin.

  “There we go,” he said aloud. “Next stop, docking. Last stop, too.” He shook his head, studying the yacht’s automated damage report. “This ship isn’t flying anywhere on her own again.”

  #

  With the immediate crisis over, Denis Romanov’s three remaining shuttles were taking a somewhat more sedate pace back toward Council Station than he’d originally been planning—a mere five bone-crushing gravities instead of the utterly devastating, strapped into acceleration couches and missing his exosuit’s impact absorption systems, fifteen gravities that they’d made their initial approach at.

  “Always nice to know that the Navy wasn’t needed,” his pilot snarked, eyeing the destroyers still making their high-speed approach. “Do we want to tell them they can slow down?”

  “No,” Denis replied, studying the simplistic two-dimensional plot the shuttle’s screen displayed of the area around Council Station. “The ships that are far enough out that they can actually stop here are already changing their courses,” he noted. “Their Marines and search-and-rescue teams are going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for cleanup.

  “The closer ones…” He ran the numbers. “Starting in about ten minutes, at least one Navy warship is going to be in missile range of Council Station at all times, counting the ones who are going to actually stop here.

  “It looks like the Front have shot their bolt, but I’m not calling this done until those two battleships over there have settled in on top of Council Station,” Denis concluded, pointing at the Mage-King’s flotilla still almost twenty-four hours away.

  “Besides,” the Marine turned Secret Service bodyguard said with a cold smile, “after all of the bullshit the Council has pulled on Lord Montgomery, I think a little bit of twisting the knife on who saved them is entirely justified.”

  #

  Normally, a ship with as much computer support as Doctor Akintola was perfectly capable of making the final docking adjustments herself. Indeed, given the precision needed for those kind of maneuvers, it was generally preferable for ships to dock under automatic control.

  With the maneuverable little ship missing one of her two main engines and having multiple giant holes in her hull, Damien wasn’t particularly willing to trust the yacht’s computers to be able to compensate for the damage.

  He babied Akintola in the entire way, shedding velocity carefully with the one main engine while compensating for the unavoidable rotation with the maneuvering thrusters, then slowly edging the yacht’s docking port up to the airlock and making the connection with an audible impact.

  Damien sighed aloud.

  “And there’s the reason we normally let the computers do this,” he admitted. “Come on, Inspector. Let’s go see if we can help clean up.”

  His Secret Service detail fell in around them as they crossed through Akintola, and the Marines were waiting at the airlock, several teams already having made their way through.

  “Place yourselves at Lictor-Constable Lucas’s disposal,” he told the armored Marines. “The Station has taken a hammering and we want to make certain any survivors are found while we still have time. We probably have more exosuits than the entire Lictor contingent, which means you’re the best people for SAR into the damaged areas.

  “The Councilors may not be my favorite people,” he admitted with a smile, “but their staff and the Secretariat remain under our protection regardless. Get them out, people.”

  “Oohrah!”

  “What about us?” the lead Secret Service Agent asked.

  “You’re with me,” he said quietly. “I may have just saved their lives, but I don’t necessarily expect the Council to be greeting me with parades and flowers.”

  #

  Damien’s worries weren’t calmed by his actual greeting party—a group of eight white-uniformed Lictors, each carrying a black battle carbine wit
h an under-barrel stungun.

  None wore the gold medallion of a Mage, but an armed welcome was never a good sign. Especially not when he knew that Council Station was dealing with a major catastrophe in several sectors, but they’d instead decided to use eight men and women for a show of force.

  “Constable Lucas asked for my Marines to provide assistance,” he told them, keeping his voice as calm as he could.

  “Of course,” the leader, a woman with skin so black her white uniform seemed to glow, told him crisply. “Lictor Lehrer, please guide the Marines towards the damaged areas and link them into our emergency repair channels.”

  One of the white-uniformed guards bowed slightly to Damien’s armed escorts and gestured for them to follow him. Damien made a small gesture he hoped the Lictors didn’t catch, confirming that the Marines should go with Lehrer.

  His people weren’t feeling any more comfortable than he was.

  “I am Lictor-Sergeant Ratu,” the black woman told him, her tone still crisp and formal. “I am to escort you to the Council. Alone.”

  She eyed Samara and the six Secret Service Agents accompanying Damien, and he gave her a warm smile.

  “I need to speak with the Council, yes,” he agreed, “but my escort comes with me. This isn’t negotiable, Sergeant Ratu.”

  Ratu started to respond, then stopped, clearly listening to a voice in her earpiece.

  “Of course, my lord,” she allowed slowly. “The Constable says your guards are allowed. If you’ll come with me, please?”

  “Lead on, Sergeant.”

  Whatever the day still had to bring, it wasn’t going to be boring.

  #

  “Mage-Captain…I think we have a serious problem,” Denis’s pilot interrupted the Marine with his eyes half-closed, stealing a moment to doze and try and regain energy for the task ahead.

  “What kind of problem?” he asked, blinking his eyes open as he tried to study the tactical plot.

  “The Inspector flagged two other groups, four transports in one and three mining ships in the other, as potential risks,” she explained. “They were ordered off before the Front began their attack, and then everyone ignored them because we knew who the Front ships were.”