That seemed to silence any arguments.
“I’m going to need to borrow one of your Mages, Captain LaMonte. Niska has a ship but no one to jump her and, well”—he lifted his still-injured hands—“I’m not jumping anytime soon.”
“You can’t possibly be planning on going alone!” Charmchi demanded.
Damien heard Romanov swallow his chuckle. The Marine turned Secret Service agent knew him too damn well.
“No, I’m not,” he told the cyborg. “I’m taking my Secret Service detail and I’d like to borrow a fire team of your commandos.”
“Done,” she said instantly, turning her gaze on Romanov. “Think you can take care of them, Mage-Captain?”
“Like they were my own flesh and blood, Captain,” the Marine replied brightly.
“Good boy.”
“As for the rest of you…I want Rhapsody following us as covertly as possible,” Damien told them. “I’m prepared to work with Niska to find out what the hell is going on inside the Republic, but I don’t trust him. Having a stealthed ship of Mages, Marines and commandos on call will make me feel much better.”
“Us, too,” LaMonte told him. “I don’t want to have to go back to Mars and tell His Majesty we lost you.”
“I’m sure Desmond would understand,” Damien said with a chuckle. “At this point, he knows my bad habits.”
Leaving his people to scatter and get things organized, Damien retreated to his quarters, where he was greeted by the querulous displeasure of a small ball of black fur. Persephone, his cat and the physical therapist for his hands, had very clear opinions of how long the First Hand should be away from her.
“Sorry, kitten,” he said, letting her leap up into his lap as he took a seat. “I don’t think I can sneak you onto a ship I’m sharing with a bunch of Legatan cyborgs.”
If Persephone understood what he was saying, she didn’t show it. She simply curled up on his lap and purred as he started, very carefully, petting her.
Petting the cat was good therapy for his hands, and her presence was good therapy for his soul. He wasn’t going to be able to bring her with him, though.
He was thinking about talking to LaMonte when she knocked on his door.
“Come in.”
His ex crossed from the door, gave Persephone a few pets and then dropped into a couch facing Damien.
“I suppose telling you that going with Niska yourself is a bad idea would be a waste of time?” she asked.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “It’s Romanov’s job to tell me that. He and I went over it. Other than that, I don’t think anyone really gets a say.”
LaMonte snorted.
“What about Grace?”
Damien sighed.
Admiral Grace McLaughlin was the commanding officer of his home system’s Militia, the Sherwood Interstellar Patrol. She was also his girlfriend, which was looking to be one of the worst long-distance relationship hells he’d ever heard of.
“I’ll send her a message before we leave,” he told LaMonte. “She understands duty, at least.”
LaMonte shook her head.
“I guess that’s all you can do. You do owe her that, at least.”
Damien chuckled. When he’d first been recruited into the service of Mars, he’d broken up with LaMonte because he’d had no idea when he’d even be able to leave Mars, let alone have a relationship.
Now he knew exactly how mobile he was—and how tied to duty. He’d try…but he honestly expected Grace to run out of patience before they managed to sort out how to make it work.
“I do,” he conceded. “But I also owe the people of the Protectorate my duty. My service.”
“Even after wrecking your hands?”
“Always,” Damien told her. “If fate gave me this power, then I must use it. I don’t have it in me to stand by, and so I do what I can. And ‘what I can’ is a lot more than most people.”
“So, you’re going to sail into hostile territory with a potential double agent in pursuit of a mystery that the Republic killed some of their core people over?” LaMonte demanded.
“Yep.” He grinned at her. “If it will make you feel better, I’m not bringing Persephone. Can I get you to look after her?”
Rhapsody’s Captain shook her head at him.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Promise me you won’t get yourself killed?”
“I can’t guarantee that,” he reminded her. “But I can promise I’m not going to do anything intentionally stupid. And if the Republic does bring me down, they’ll know they’ve been in a fight.”
She sighed.
“Is it worth it?”
“I don’t know. But there are too many questions about what’s going on in the Republic and what happened to their Mages. If there’s a mass grave somewhere, we need to know…and so do the people of the Republic.”
“Fair enough.” LaMonte shook her head. “Liara will be going with you. Everyone should be ready to transfer over to Heinlein and whatever ship Niska is using within an hour or two.”
5
They met Niska on the main docking ring. The white-haired cyborg was accompanied by a redheaded younger woman who looked positively petite and delicate. The way she moved, however, told Damien that she was also an Augment.
Damien had kept his “team” down to twelve people. Himself, Romanov and Liara Foster, plus five Marines turned Secret Service agents and four cyborg commandos.
Liara Foster was a heavyset woman with short-cropped black hair. She was actually older than Damien—or her own Captain—but she fell comfortably in line with the Secret Service detail and the BCR commandos.
“Montgomery,” Niska greeted him. “Bit more than you and a Jump Mage, I see.”
“I think Agent Romanov here would tase me into unconsciousness and handcuff me to a pillar if I tried to go anywhere alone,” Damien told the other man. “Especially into the hands of a former enemy.
“And you wanted numbers and firepower. You got them.”
Nothing in terms of weaponry was illegal in Amber, but the contents of the heavy black cases rolling behind Damien’s people would have drawn comment even there. Heinlein Station’s administrators, if no one else, disapproved of weapons with enough power to breach the station’s hull.
There were three sets of exosuit battle armor in the cases, along with the full-size heavy penetrator rifles those suits carried to kill their counterparts. The other two Secret Service Agents would settle for “merely” the stripped-down and ridiculously expensive carbine that fired similar anti-armor rounds.
The BCR commandos’ standard long arm was somewhere between the two weapons in scale, but like the penetrator rifles and carbines, it could fire discarding-sabot tungsten penetrator rounds.
There was more than enough firepower in the cases to wreck a significant chunk of Heinlein Station or fight a small war. Damien might only have brought ten people, but they could fight most armies for him.
And the armies they couldn’t fight, he could.
Niska was eyeing the cases and Damien wondered if he could guess their contents. He probably recognized the “coffins” containing the exosuits, if nothing else.
“No half-measures, I take it?” he said slowly.
“No artificial shortages,” Damien told the cyborg. “We have ammunition, penetrator rifles, armor. In all honesty, we should probably get this gear off of Heinlein Station. Even an Amberite station’s security would complain.”
Niska snorted and gestured for them to follow him.
“All right. Let’s get everyone aboard Starlight.”
Starlight was a fast packet, a small cargo ship designed to move a hundred thousand tons of cargo. Damien had never spent any time aboard a fast packet, and he studied the design as they boarded her.
The standard merchant ship of the Protectorate looked like an eggbeater, with three to six “ribs” that rotated around the core to provide gravity. Everything along those ribs could realign to account for thrust while the ship was
under power.
Starlight’s designers had declined to deal with that level of finicky arrangement and set up the entire living and working areas to realign. She looked more like an upside-down flower than anything else, with three pods hanging from the central core. Those pods were currently extended outward, rotating to provide pseudogravity.
Under thrust, they’d fall into line with the main hull, using the thrust for gravity instead of rotating.
It was a clever design and one that kept the living and working areas clear of the cargo spars. The eggbeater design meant that the ribs had to be stopped to load or unload cargo, but Starlight could keep her crew aboard while cargo was loaded in front of the pods.
She was also barely ten percent of the size of the only merchant ship Damien had served on. Blue Jay had been almost a kilometer long and carried three million tons of cargo.
Starlight’s core hull was a hundred and ten meters long. The pods were roughly fifty meters long, and the cargo would be mounted on the first fifty meters of the hull.
“Never seen a fast packet before?” Niska asked as Damien studied the ship through the window.
“Not closely,” he admitted. “It’s not a common design.”
“It’s a Legatan speciality,” Niska told him. “Should probably have been more widely adopted, but, well…” He shrugged. “Legatus doesn’t build many jump ships, so it never caught on.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” Damien said. “I’m looking forward to seeing how she flies.”
“And I’m sure Captain Mere Maata is looking forward to showing you,” the cyborg replied.
Mere Maata was a dark-skinned woman with a long, thick braid and complex tattoos woven across her face. Damien didn’t even pretend to understand the meaning of the tattoos, but he nodded firmly to her as they came aboard. Handshakes would wait until they were out of the zero-gravity loading area.
“She looks like a fine ship, Captain,” he told her. “I look forward to seeing how she does. You have our destination?”
“Arsenault. An old stop for Starlight; no one is really going to question us.” Maata shook her head. “We’ve picked up a cargo of our usual mix of small and valuable. Our old contacts will be glad to see us, and no one is going to look too hard at our supercargo.”
Damien chuckled.
“It’s always good to know where we stand,” he told her. He glanced over at Niska with a questioning look.
“Maata is retired LMID. She got trapped in Legatus when her Mage jumped ship to a Guild evacuation vessel. I got her out, and now, well, we’re going back in.”
“I wouldn’t go back into the Republic for anyone else, you know,” she told Niska, slamming a heavy hand on the cyborg’s shoulder, a carefully practiced gesture in zero-g. “You know what I think of this stunt, and they haven’t done anything to make me happier since the secession.”
“I know,” Niska said quietly. “Obviously, we’ll be keeping the identities of your team quiet,” he continued to Damien. “Maata knows everything, but her crew is mostly out of the loop.”
Which explained, Damien realized, why the boarding area was empty of anyone except Maata herself.
“They know we’re carrying passengers they’re not supposed to talk about,” the Captain noted. “And they trust me. I got them out of the Republic.” She shook her head. “Nobody blames Davey, but it wasn’t like we were going anywhere different than he was!”
Davey, presumably, was the Mage who’d jumped ship to get out of the Republic.
“We go in, we find out what we need to, we get out,” Damien promised. “Might need to visit another system or two in the Republic, though. Will that be a problem?”
“Starlight has run on spec cargos and desperation for a damn long time, Montgomery,” she told him. “The crew will go where I tell them to. I’d rather not hang around in the Republic, but I’m guessing you can make it worth my while.”
Damien chuckled. The budget of a Hand was basically defined as “explain what you spent to the accountants after they stop crying.” As First Hand, he got to make someone else do that explaining.
“I think we can manage that, Captain Maata,” he told her.
“Then, what are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s get this old boat moving.”
6
The battleship Righteous Shield of Valor was the central vessel of the first element to arrive in the Santiago System. Stand in Righteousness and seven other destroyers accompanied Mage-Admiral Alexander’s flagship into the occupied system.
Roslyn’s ship and the other destroyers were there only to augment the battleship’s missile defenses if some evil luck had put a Republic force in position to engage them on arrival. Combined, the destroyers had less than a fifth of Righteous Shield of Valor’s mass, weapons or defenses, but every antimissile turret could count.
They arrived in the quiet of deep space, however, and no sudden surprises emerged from the darkness to jump the Martian fleet.
The second battleship arrived moments later, roughly a million kilometers away. Pax Marcianus brought half of Alexander’s cruisers. A few seconds later, Peacemaker arrived with the other half of the cruisers.
Foremost Shield of Honor and Liberation of the Oppressed appeared together, the last two battleships bringing the rest of the destroyers along with them.
Five battleships. A third of the Protectorate’s strength of the ships, accompanied by twenty cruisers and forty destroyers.
The only reason it wasn’t the largest single fleet Roslyn had ever seen was because she’d seen it in Ardennes, where dozens of Militia ships still stood guard over the world they had bled to hold against the Republic.
“RIN hasn’t noticed us yet,” Roslyn reported aloud. “It looks like they’ve picked up some friends since the last time we were here, but not much.”
She could still see the two damaged battleships, plus their two carrier and six cruiser guardians. Every ship they’d seen before was still sitting in orbit of Novo Lar.
The newcomers were in orbit around Cova. A single fifty-megaton heavy carrier and four cruiser escorts.
“It’s not a full carrier group,” she noted. “It looks like a carrier they broke free from another position and attached a few cruisers to. All big ships.” She studied it. “I wonder if they’re not building any more of the fifteen-megaton hulls.”
Every ship they’d seen so far had been built on cores of either fifteen-megaton or twenty-megaton hulls. All of the cruisers they were seeing now were twenty-megaton ships, though, and the heavy carrier was built on two of the cylinders that made up the core hulls of those cruisers.
“It would make sense if they could manage it,” Kulkarni agreed. “Their key limitation has to be their FTL drive. If they can build bigger ships, they get more firepower for the same number of hulls. Do the extras change anything?”
“That gets them up to seven hundred or so gunships,” Roslyn replied. “But all told? No. Not when we have five battleships.” She shook her head. “I’m going to keep an eye on the gunships.”
“Good plan,” Kulkarni told her. “I’m more concerned about the ‘mosquitos’ than the Admiral is.”
“We have another minute or so before they see us,” Roslyn noted. “Five minutes after that before we know what they’re doing in response.”
“What do you expect?” Stand’s Captain asked quietly.
As they spoke, the four clusters of warships were converging. Spreading out the force had reduced the risk of arriving in a cluster of Republic resistance, but they needed to concentrate before they engaged the enemy.
“Two possibilities,” Roslyn replied as she watched the fleet converge. “First, they take one look at a quarter-billion tons of RMN battleships and get the hell out of here.”
She tapped another icon on her screen as she spoke.
“That’s unlikely, though, since they’ve still got troops on the ground and they only have enough transportation for maybe forty thousand troops, a s
ingle corps. Last intel said they had three corps on the surface. They won’t abandon them, so…option two.”
Roslyn ran the numbers on the gunships’ acceleration and nodded.
“Option two is that they converge all of their gunships, probably here”—she highlighted a spot on the screen—“and throw them right at us. Seven hundred gunships can dodge or eat a lot of missile fire and throw over twelve thousand missiles at us. Battleships or not, that’ll hurt.”
“It would,” Kulkarni agreed. “There’s a third option, though.”
“Sir?” Roslyn asked. She was still new enough for her role and junior enough for her rank to be willing to be educated. She was, so far as she knew, the youngest Lieutenant and youngest tactical officer in the fleet.
“Your option two makes sense, but they know they’re outgunned,” the Mage-Captain told her. “In their place, I’d hold the gunships back to stiffen the missile defense and firepower of my main fleet. They don’t have enough to really hurt us if they send them in alone, but they’ll dramatically augment the defenses and the first few salvos of the main fleet.”
Roslyn was calculating again as Kulkarni spoke, and highlighted a second point.
“If they bring their forces together, they’ll rendezvous here,” she noted. “We’ll be in missile range by the time they meet up, but they’ll be close enough for a level of mutual support already.”
“How long until we start seeing clues?”
“Two minutes—and that’s assuming they react faster than I’d expect anybody to.”
It was just over five minutes after they had to have seen the arrival of the Martian fleet before the Republic ships reacted at all—and their reaction wasn’t any of the ones Kulkarni or Roslyn had predicted.
The carriers and stations in Novo Lar orbit started spewing out gunships, but none of the ships in orbit of the inhabited planet moved.
The carriers and stations at Cova did the same. After another minute, over three hundred gunships and two cruisers set out on a course that would bring them to Novo Lar well before the Protectorate ships arrived.
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