“I’m not going to like where this is going, am I?”
“None of them have broken off,” she confirmed. “All seven ships just adjusted their vectors to target Council Station… and if they’re carrying railguns at all, there is nothing to stop them bombarding the Station.”
“Where’s Montgomery?”
“Akintola has docked. Forest Unyielding in Storms is the closest destroyer. She’s in range, but…”
Denis nodded.
A Navy missile had a seven-minute flight time—and while it had an abort function, it wasn’t the most reliable thing. Forest Unyielding could fire on the closing ships, but by the time her missiles arrived, they could have opened fire on Council Station.
If they were terrorists.
If they weren’t, there was a roughly forty percent chance Forest Unyielding wouldn’t be able to stop her missiles from blowing an innocent civilian ship to pieces.
“Is Montgomery available?”
“I think he’s already in with the Council.”
“Fuck.”
Denis stared at the screen. It wasn’t his call…but if Forest Unyielding in Storms’s Captain didn’t make the call, Montgomery would have to. And Montgomery wouldn’t have an active comm in the Council Chamber.
“Get me Lictor-Constable Lucas,” he ordered.
#
Ratu led Damien through the almost-familiar corridors of Council Station to the grand Council Chamber itself, with its massive transparent wall and its rows and rows of desks.
There were Councilors missing from those desks, and Damien found himself wondering, rather uncharitably he knew, if they simply hadn’t bothered to get out of bed for something so minor as a major emergency.
Some, however, were almost certainly dead. That thought calmed his ire as he once again strode to the middle of the chamber, looking out past the Councilors at the strip-mined surface of Ceres, now obscured by the rapidly condensing debris field the attack had added. He’d heard no news from the surface, but he doubted the settlements had gone unharmed from the high velocity impacts.
“The Constable has briefed us on the situation,” Councilor Granger told him. “It appears this Council is in your debt, Lord Montgomery.”
“My investigations led me to the attack,” Damien replied. “Duty would not permit inaction.”
“So brave,” McClintlock snapped. “So high-handed. Centuries of tradition flouted—and without need, I see. And without authority, I must add, Mr. Montgomery.”
“My orders were approved by His Majesty,” Damien replied with a sigh. Clearly, the Council was aware of his resignation. “Would you have preferred, Councilor, that His Majesty’s Navy did nothing but sit by while you were killed?”
“I would prefer that the warships be turning away now the situation is resolved,” McClintlock demanded. “Or do you intend to now threaten us with the might of the Martian Navy if we refuse to blithely bow to your demands?”
“Peace, Raul,” Paul Newton snapped. “Now is the time for us to recognize that we stand together, not divide ourselves again. I, for one, would rather be alive, which makes me quite grateful to Voice Montgomery.”
Damien suspected that the irony of Councilor Newton giving him the title he currently qualified for, despite his earlier refusal to give Damien any title at all, didn’t escape anyone.
“A day ago, this Council was prepared to demand Voice Montgomery’s resignation as Hand,” Catherine Montague pointed out. “Now we owe him our lives. The situation seems to have…changed.”
“His prior actions remain,” McClintlock replied. “The high-handed arrogance with which he has handled this mess hardly changes my position!”
“I am standing right here,” Damien pointed out mildly.
“And if I had my way, you would be in chains!” the Councilor snapped. “Your hands are coated in blood, Montgomery. How many ships and men will die to prove your wild stories this time?”
“Enough!”
Councilor Farai Ayodele’s magic slammed McClintlock back into his chair with crushing force, power flaring across the Council Chamber as the Earth Councilor finally ran out of patience and did what Damien couldn’t quite justify doing.
“Sit down and be silent, McClintlock,” the old black man continued as he stalked onto the center floor. “You have gone past rational discussion or reason, and I will not sit here and listen to your poisonous drivel.
“I call for a vote to formally give the Thanks of the Council to Voice Montgomery and to withdraw our request for his resignation as Hand,” Ayodele continued, his hand still extended towards the Legatan Councilor and glittering with power as he broke at least three sacred rules of the Chamber at once.
The doors to the Chamber slammed open before anyone could respond, and Damien looked up to see the now-familiar shaven-headed and white-uniformed form of Lictor-Constable Cande Lucas charge through with his wrist computer in her hands.
“My Lord Montgomery!” she snapped. “There’s a second wave!”
#
Chapter 37
Years of practice let Damien read the display the computers threw up in moments. Two more forces, totalling as many ships as had been included in the original attack. If they’d all come together, they might have already won…or have all died when Damien and his people had counterattacked.
Romanov’s shuttles were too far away. They could fire railgun rounds and might score a few hits, but the major reason the Martian Navy didn’t bother with kinetic weapons was that they were only useful at ranges that were knife-fighting in space.
“We don’t know these ships are hostile,” Newton said, the Alpha Centauri Councilor staring at the icons flashing orange in the display as Lucas hooked Damien’s wrist computer, with its tactical display programming, into the Council Chamber’s main projector.
“We don’t,” Damien agreed, mentally judging the distance to Forest Unyielding in Storms. It would take almost the full seven-minute flight time for Forest Unyielding’s missiles to intercept the oncoming ships.
“However, they aren’t responding to hails and are on an attack approach,” he pointed out. “If they’re armed, Councilor, it’s already too late to stop them firing on Council Station. If the Navy Councilor McClintlock wished to send away intervenes now, they can likely prevent the Station’s destruction with all of us aboard.”
“Can you stop them, Voice Montgomery?” Councilor Montague asked.
“I can defend this station,” he confirmed, “but I can’t drive them off. If they attack from multiple angles, I can only defend us from one.”
“Then order the Navy to defend us!” Ayodele demanded.
“My lord Councilor,” Damien murmured, “if Forest Unyielding launches missiles, they will destroy whatever they fire at. If we guess wrong…”
The Councilor for Earth nodded, his eyes suddenly dark.
“Can we stop their missiles if we are wrong?” he asked after a moment. “Like you, Lord Montgomery, I was trained to use magic for missile defense.”
That hadn’t occurred to Damien, and he glanced at the time again. They had enough, maybe…
He tapped commands on his wrist computer.
“Forest Unyielding in Storms, this is Montgomery, respond,” he snapped.
Seconds ticked by.
“This is Mage-Commander Anna Santiago,” a Spanish-accented voice finally responded. “Captain of Forest Unyielding.” She paused. “My lord…have we confirmed hostility on the part of the approaching ships?”
She sounded very young to be commanding a destroyer, likely no older than Damien himself, and he felt a twinge of guilt for having wanted to leave the decision of whether or not to potentially kill over a thousand innocents to her.
“We have not,” he admitted. “If they are armed the same as the previous ships, they will be able to engage in three minutes. You must launch now if we are to save the Council.”
He heard her swallow.
“My failsafes are not rel
iable.”
“We will not use them,” Damien told her. “If their approach is innocent, I and the other Mages aboard Council Station will disable your missiles.”
He gave her a few seconds to process that.
“Target the approaching ships and launch your missiles, Captain,” he ordered. “We are running out of time.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The channel cut, but bright green icons lit up on the display as the destroyer began to fire. Three salvos of missiles blazed into space, half a dozen for each of the probably terrorist ships closing on Council Station.
“Who else here is trained in missile defense?” Ayodele demanded, looking over the rest of the Council. Six of the Councilors stood immediately. Four more followed a moment later. Another stood, smiling, and shook her head.
“Trained, no,” Andrea Tsimote, the Councilor for Míngliàng, told Ayodele. “I was never a soldier. But if you show me the way, I’ll do my damnedest.”
Guilted by Tsimote’s effort, more Mages stood, studying each other’s magic as they prepared to defend the Station themselves.
To Damien, the entire Chamber sang with power as the Gifts of over three dozen Mages lit to life. It was a sacred rule of the Council that magic was not to be used in the Chamber, that in this space, Mage and mundane were to be equal.
But today, as the Compact their ancestors had agreed demanded, the Mages stepped forward to defend them both.
#
It was almost a relief when the oncoming ships did open fire. Damien had been reasonably sure both that they were BLF ships after they’d refused to turn back and that, with the support of the Mage Councilors, he could protect them from the missiles if they weren’t…but he still preferred to have ordered missiles fired at actually hostile ships.
Of course, that meant that Council Station was once again under fire and he was called on once more to conjure magic in the Council’s defense.
The missiles came first, each of the transports and mining ships having half a dozen cheap fusion weapons mounted on external racks. Sixty missiles flashed into space from a quarter-million kilometers away, building velocity as they closed…and then dying as they ran into the will and power of forty Mages determined, no matter what, that they were not going to die today.
Damien took out a third of them himself, but the Council easily handled their fair share. Fuel tanks and warheads detonated in the short-lived fireballs of burning hydrogen instead of the nuclear blasts of hydrogen bombs.
The railgun rounds weren’t so easily handled. The counter-missile spell was a simple-enough spell, if draining. Any Mage could do it, though many weaker ones couldn’t do it repeatedly.
Conjuring a shield of force of a scale sufficient to help defend a station over a kilometer across without even air to use as a base was an entirely different question.
Even Damien could only cover one side of the station, and he chose to block the side the mining ships were coming from. They had bigger weapons mounted on them and had the lasers as well. He swept a wall of pure telekinetic force into the oncoming fire, throwing the railgun slugs back at the ships that fired them.
They’d seen his trick before, however, and maneuvered to avoid the return of their own weapons—but he’d targeted carefully. He couldn’t reliably hit the ships with their own weapons…but he could block their lasers.
Even as he filled the space “above” Council Station with spinning debris and vaporizing railgun slugs, protecting the station from everything the BLF’s refitted mining ships could do, however, the refitted transports were hammering the other side of the station with their own weapons.
Some of the Councilors were strong enough to protect sections of the Station, but only a handful—not enough to shield the entire ring. The runed carpet underneath Damien’s feet trembled as round after round impacted on the hull of Council Station, each hammering home with the force of multiple tons of TNT.
Each of those tremors represented shattered hull plating, broken systems and lost lives…but there was only so much Damien could do. More railgun slugs hammered home into his own shield, and he grimaced. He could do a lot more than almost any other Mage…but there were limits to anyone’s power, and he was starting to run perilously close to his.
If only the Mage-King weren’t twenty-plus hours away.
The entire Station lurched under his feet as another salvo of railgun slugs hammered home, throwing off his own concentration. He swept power through space, trying to clean up what he’d missed.
Only half a dozen slugs made it through. This time. He twisted his defense back into place, sweeping more slugs back into lasers.…
And then Forest Unyielding’s missiles finally began arriving. Captain Santiago had targeted the mining ships first, and her initial salvo came crashing down on the crudely refitted terrorist ships like the wrath of God.
Without point defenses or Mages or amplifiers or even armor, all four ships vanished in balls of antimatter fire. A single sweep of power sent the remaining railgun slugs spinning off into space, no threat to Council Station.
Damien twisted his shield around, interposing it in front of the next salvo from the transports. Two more swarms of metal hammered into the defenses the Mages had raised, but then the rest of Forest Unyielding’s missiles struck home, shattering ship after ship as Santiago’s fire wiped the remaining terrorists from space.
Leaning on the table he’d so recently given testimony behind, Damien exhaled sharply, letting the shield go as he steadied himself. He could feel the beginnings of a headache as he looked up at the display his wrist computer was still projecting.
Council Station was still there.
That was obvious from the fact that he was still alive, he supposed, but the Station could have been in much worse shape. Chunks of it were flashing red, with oxygen leaking out and almost certainly people Damien had failed to save dead or dying, but the ring itself was intact.
Radiation from the antimatter warheads was hashing the sensor feed the Station was providing him, but the Front’s attack ships finally seemed to have been cleared away. Forest Unyielding in Storms was past, already growing more distant as she finally ceased accelerating.
He was still breathing heavily, but he wasn’t the only one. The Mages had managed to keep Council Station intact, but it had drained a lot of them as they had stepped up to summon magic many of them had never been trained to use.
“My lord…” Montague’s voice was soft as she stepped up next to him, studying the projection. “I’m not…very familiar with the iconography of this display, and there seems to be quite some distortion…but I thought that bulk freighter had been ordered off?”
Damien exhaled again, blinking away his fatigue as he focused on where the Tara Councilor was gesturing.
The Dealer-type freighter that everyone had assumed couldn’t possibly be part of the attack had turned around at some point while they’d been distracted by the Front—and was now accelerating on a collision course for Council Station!
#
Chapter 38
“Texas Poker is one of our regular supply ships,” Constable Lucas told Damien, staring at the icon on the projected display and reading its details. “I know Captain Marion—hell, her daughter is dating my son!”
“I suspect Captain Marion is dead,” Damien replied. He checked the numbers on Texas Poker. The ship was currently accelerating at over fifty gravities—anyone who was still aboard her was dead. The ship itself wouldn’t survive that for long…but it would hold together long enough.
“At some point while we were all being distracted by the Belt Liberation Front and their clever assault, someone else boarded Texas Poker and took control of her, then launched her on an automated suicide course.”
That someone might have been a BLF team. It might have been the mysterious Kay. Hell, for all Damien knew, it was the Legatans or a completely unrelated set of attackers!
Certainly, there were enough enemies on the fiel
d to leave several possibilities open—and for him to be unsurprised if some new, unknown party were taking advantage of the confusion.
“Can the Navy intercept?” Newton asked, the Alpha Centauri Councilor one of the Mages who’d pushed themselves well beyond their limits already. There were new bags under his eyes, and he was dabbing at a nosebleed with a kleenex.
“Both Forest Unyielding in Storms and Rising Dawn of Freedom are in range,” Damien told the Councilor as he ran the numbers, “but would have four- and six-minute flight times respectively.
“Texas Poker is two minutes from impact,” he concluded. “The Navy can fire on her, but they won’t hit her in time.”
He ran one last set of numbers and then stepped away from the projection, looking out the window behind the Councilors for the glittering star he knew had to be there.
The tiny point of light that was going to kill them all.
“We have to do something!”
“She is fully loaded and masses just over five million tons,” Damien said. “Her velocity will exceed point zero one cee shortly before impact. It is an impact, Councilors, that would destroy a world.
“I cannot stop her. Even if I weren’t already drained, I would never have the power to so much as deflect her alone.”
The room was silent. Ayodele stepped up beside Damien, the gaunt Councilor for Earth a head or more taller than the slim, almost tiny ex-Hand.
Damien felt utterly frail in the face of the oncoming hammer, a titanic blow no skill or artifice of his could turn aside. He barely noticed the old man laying a pitch-black hand on his shoulder until the Councilor spoke.
“You’re not alone, Lord Montgomery,” Ayodele said loudly. “We lack your Runes or your Gift, but we are not weak, and I for one will not die on my knees.”
Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5) Page 26
