There was more, but there was a reason that piece of intel was at the top of the transcript. It had taken Roslyn far too long to decode even that one line, but that one line could change every—
The door sliding open interrupted her thoughts and she looked up. She was expecting the Secret Service detail the Admiral had promised…and she should have known better.
There was only one person in the door, a tall man completely unknown to her holding a gun.
Training and years of practiced paranoia got Roslyn’s personal shield up in time to stop the bullets.
The attacker kept moving, dodging sideways as Hersch turned, drew and fired in a single smooth motion. Unfortunately, Roslyn wasn’t a good enough Mage to establish a one-way shield, and the MP’s bullets slammed into the same defense that had saved them both.
The stranger slammed some device on the door control panel, which promptly flashed red and slammed the door shut. He studied her and Hersch for a few silent seconds, then grinned and charged.
He was too fast. Roslyn’s shields were designed to stop small objects moving at a high velocity, not a human charging through them. The solidified air disintegrated under the impact, and the attacker collided with Hersch.
The two struggled for a moment and Roslyn tried to intervene. Bands of force slammed down across both men…and then a gun went off.
Several more gunshots followed and she saw Hersch jerk as the bullets struck home.
She tightened the bands of force. She was almost certainly making Hersch’s injuries worse, but she had to keep the attacker pinned down.
She failed. The stranger moved with impossible speed and strength, slipping out of half of her bars of force and breaking several of them as he lunged back to his feet.
Most of the bullets had apparently been Hersch’s. The MP was lying on the ground, dying if not already dead, but there were four clear bullet wounds in his attacker.
“Get back,” Roslyn snapped, drawing her shield tightly to herself. She couldn’t stop him charging, but she could keep bullets or blades from hitting her.
But this time, the attacker didn’t aim at her. He aimed at the computer console—the console her tight defense around herself didn’t cover. Bullets hammered into the system and he tossed another strange device after them.
She felt the magnetic pulse trigger. The computer was Navy equipment, hardened by default—but the bullets would have undermined most of that. The short-range EMP had almost certainly wiped the data.
Roslyn forced herself to focus and flung fire at the stranger. He sidestepped it and grinned at her again as he approached. He’d discarded the gun in favor of a blade of some kind…a narrow-pointed dagger she was quite certain an Augment could punch through her shields.
And there was no way her attacker wasn’t an Augment. It seemed that their intelligence motherlode had missed an assassin or two in the data dump!
She glared at him and drew a deep breath. Roslyn Chambers was not going to die whimpering on her knees, begging for mercy. As the Augment lunged toward her, she flung her shield out. She wasn’t trying to block his attack, just deflect it. The dagger plunged into the barrier—but that just gave her enough of a hold to throw it aside.
The cyborg’s inhuman grip betrayed him and he was thrown aside with the dagger. That gave Roslyn a moment to reach for the Mage training the Navy had given her. Lightning flashed from her fingers, hammering into the Augment’s back.
At a low level, the spell could disable a human without killing them…but Roslyn didn’t know how much disabling an Augment could take, and she knew she wasn’t going to get a second chance.
Cyborg or not, she roasted the man alive.
24
Magical healing was a surgeon’s speciality, requiring years of education and libraries’ worth of medical knowledge. To fix the human body with magic required you to understand the human body.
Magical combat first aid was a far more brute-force practice and one prone to causing almost as much damage as it fixed. Mages were trained to use regular first aid first and to call on their magic as a last resort to stop an injured person from dying.
By the time Roslyn reached Hersch, that was her starting point. Magic provided compression for her as she tried, desperately, to save the MP’s life. He’d already lost a lot of blood and she wasn’t sure that compression was going to work.
There had to be help on the way, but if she didn’t stop the bleeding quickly, it wasn’t going to matter.
The one thing that magic was really good at for medical treatment was also reserved for last-ditch options: cauterization. There was almost certainly internal damage, but there was nothing Roslyn could do about that.
She could, however, stop the bleeding.
Neat sparks of fire appeared inside the MP’s wounds, searing the still-bleeding holes shut. It wouldn’t hold—his injuries were too severe for that—but it would buy him time.
As she dared to hope, he stopped breathing.
Cursing, she placed her hands onto his chest and started pushing. Magic wove around Hersch’s face as she began compressions, adding the air-transfer component of magically assisted CPR.
Ten seconds. Thirty. Between the cauterizing and the necessary strength of CPR, she knew she was causing as much damage as she might be fixing…but he was going to live, dammit.
Roslyn barely even recognized the sound of a vibroblade hitting the security door behind her. Her focus was so complete, whoever it was had been sawing through the door for ten seconds before she registered them.
Then the door fell from its frame. Roslyn kept her focus on Hersch as she heard footsteps…but she wove a defensive shield around them as she did.
“Fuck,” a woman swore behind her. “Call it in, Hammond. We need medical now.”
Roslyn kept compressing. Someone knelt beside her, studying the wounds over her shoulder as Hersch drew several ragged breaths beyond those the young Mage was forcing into him.
“Medtech should be under three minutes,” a calm voice said in her ear. “Keep compressing.”
She’d been about to stop, but she followed instructions…and Hersch stopped breathing again.
A noise started a few seconds later, causing Roslyn to start. Then she realized it was a metronome beat—exactly the rate she needed to be keeping up—and she adjusted her compressions to match.
She was weakening and a hand squeezed her shoulder.
“Keep up the air; I’ll take over compressions,” the stranger ordered.
Roslyn obeyed, also using magic to sustain the compressions for the seconds of the changeover. A narrow-set woman slid past her with an experienced motion and took over.
There was no concern in her movements for the fact that Hersch was covered in blood and that she was wearing an expensive suit.
It seemed the first to arrive had been Alexander’s Secret Service team.
Roslyn would never, not even with access to the timestamps of everyone else’s actions and arrival, be certain how long passed between Sergeant Hersch being shot and the medical techs’ arrival.
All she knew was that she was being suddenly gently ushered away as an oxygen mask replaced her magical efforts and two white-uniformed young men took over from the Secret Service Agent.
“We’ve got him, sir,” the lead medtech told her as they gently slid a stretcher underneath Hersch. “Everything says he’s still with us. It’s up to us now.”
Roslyn stepped away and almost fell over Menendez’s desk. One of the Secret Service agents had already produced a white sheet from somewhere and covered the crisped corpse that had been a Legatan agent.
“You need to head to medbay yourself, sir,” the woman who’d been helping her deal with Hersch told her. “You’re showing every sign of shock. You need to get checked out.”
“Not yet,” Roslyn told her in a distracted voice. She was going over the desk, trying to link to its systems with her wrist-comp.
She was unsurprised when she go
t nothing. The Augment had done a brilliant job of wrecking the hardware and Roslyn had been looking at the data on Menendez’s local console.
“Agent…?”
“Aryana Escarcega, Mage-Lieutenant,” the woman replied. “And I’m going to have to argue with you on the medbay. I was sent to guard you, and that includes taking care of you in my book, sir.”
“Not. Yet.” Roslyn bit off the words as she studied the wreck of the intelligence officer’s desk. She plugged a command sequence into her wrist-comp.
“Communications, Lieutenant Peti Vida speaking,” an officious voice responded.
“Lieutenant, I need to know what happened when we got the intelligence dump from the Ardennes RTA before we left the system,” Roslyn said crisply. “I know Captain Menendez had a copy, but were there any others? Was a copy kept in the coms buffer?”
“Intelligence communications are confident—”
“This is Mage-Admiral Alexander’s Flag Lieutenant,” Roslyn said sharply. “Captain Menendez is in sick bay after a murder attempt made to keep that intelligence from getting to the Mage-Admiral.
“Answer my damn question, Lieutenant, or explain to the Admiral why you didn’t.”
Roslyn was well aware that the Lieutenant should have held her ground and insisted Roslyn get authorization from the Admiral directly. She’d have got that authorization, though, and Roslyn was out of patience.
There was a pause as the officer went through the same thought process, then sighed.
“Menendez insisted that all intelligence communications went through her for distribution,” Vida told her. “No copies were distributed to anyone else or kept.”
“And why the fuck did we let her do that?” Roslyn snapped.
“Because she was MISS and we were told she had that authority,” the coms officer replied. “From the sounds of it, we should have pushed back harder, I take it?”
“Menendez is down and her console is destroyed. I don’t suppose she would have been keeping the data elsewhere?”
“It’s got to be backed up, no matter how controlling she was being,” Vida replied. “I can pull the file metadata and give it to IT to track down, if that would help, Mage-Lieutenant?”
Roslyn swallowed.
“Check with Mage-Captain Kulkarni for authorization before we go that far,” she suggested gently, “but yes, Lieutenant Vida, that would help greatly.”
The channel closed and she could feel herself wavering.
“Sir.” Escarcega was there, inserting a well-muscled arm under Roslyn’s shoulder to keep her upright. Roslyn noticed, somewhat distractedly, that the woman had very thick black hair that had been carefully tied into short braids over her head.
“Not yet,” she told the Agent. “I need to talk to the Admiral.”
She tried to stand and fell over onto Escarcega.
“I’ll let her know and she’ll meet us at sick bay,” the Secret Service Agent said firmly. “Because that’s where you’re going, sir. Now.”
Escarcega was as good as her word, at least, and Mage-Admiral Alexander was in the sick bay when Roslyn arrived.
“What in the black tombs is so important you can’t see a damned medic before telling me, Chambers?” Alexander demanded, gesturing for a medic to start checking over the Flag Lieutenant.
Roslyn shivered at the medic’s cold, gloved hands. Escarcega was probably right, a part of her mind noted in a calmly rational tone. She was crashing from an adrenaline overload and in shock, and the fact that she’d killed a man with her magic was probably going to catch up to her pretty quickly.
She’d killed in battle before, with missiles, lasers and amplified magic, but it was something else to kill in person. To see the man’s flesh crisp under her magic as he screamed.
“Chambers?” the Admiral repeated, and Roslyn tried to shake herself.
The medic’s iron grip stopped that.
“Lieutenant, you need to rest,” the young man—the very attractive young man, a distant part of Roslyn’s brain noted—told her firmly.
“Admiral,” she forced out. “Intel came through Menendez. She kept it under her thumb, no other copies. Don’t think she was hostile, just…controlling.
“Her console was wrecked but I saw the dispatch.”
“And someone tried damn hard to make sure no one did,” Alexander agreed. “Tell me, Chambers—then get some damned rest.”
“They moved the battle group from Legatus to Centurion. Brought a new group in so Legatus looked right, but moved their battleships to Centurion. Wanted to…wanted to…”
Roslyn knew enough about the Operation Bluebell plan that she was sure she could see how this made them vulnerable. But it wasn’t coming.
“They wanted us to think nothing had changed and let us move in around Centurion before hitting us with a massive gunship strike,” Alexander finished for her. “Damn, they knew our ops plan in detail…but they didn’t count on us getting the intel.”
The Mage-Admiral gripped her shoulder firmly.
“Go with Dr. Rostami, Lieutenant,” she ordered.
Apparently, the attractive young man wasn’t a medic. He was a doctor. She should probably have recognized the insignia.
“Yes, si…”
25
Damien’s reaction to Nueva Bolivia, he supposed, was a sign that he was getting far too calm about his life. He ran through a mental checklist as the scanners updated.
Eight planets. One habitable, in the liquid-water zone. Two gas giants, useful sources for hydrogen and helium for the fusion plants that powered an UnArcana World. Two massive ice balls too far out to be useful for anything. Three rocky uninhabitable worlds and an asteroid belt, providing multiple easily accessible sources of minerals.
Then he realized that he’d reduced an entire star system, one of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe, to a list of resources, and shook his head at himself. Nueva Bolivia the star was a golden furnace, brighter and more intense than Sol, that created a wide liquid water band.
Sucre was still the only world in that liquid-water zone, and it was right in the middle of it, creating a world with as many contrasts and different climates as Earth itself. Sucre had jungles and ice plateaus and immense world-straddling oceans.
Even for a habitable world, it was surprisingly Earth-like. And like most Protectorate and now Republic worlds, it was going to stay that way. Most of the heavy industry was kept in orbit, massive space stations that took in raw materials and spat out the refined goods that fueled an interstellar economy.
Nueva Bolivia had always built gunships. He doubted that their production of the sublight warships had decreased under the new management, though his expectation of shipyard complexes were unmet.
That was odd in itself. Nueva Bolivia was one of the most industrialized UnArcana Worlds. With the Republic of Faith and Reason at war, he’d have expected to see military shipyards sprouting up like mushrooms.
Instead…nothing. The military reservations scattered here and there across the system were gunship yards and component factories, not shipyards.
“Okay, so I see gunships and missiles, and I think that’s a production facility for your ridiculous heavy lasers,” he said aloud on Starlight’s bridge. “Why the hell aren’t they building warships here?”
Captain Maata and her crew were silent for several long seconds.
“I never thought about it,” she admitted eventually. “I guess the Republic is still keeping their FTL drives secret enough that they’re only building them in Legatus.”
“But not even hulls being built here,” Damien challenged her. “Just components. Doesn’t that seem weird?”
“If Legatus can build enough hulls to match their jump drive production, why not?” she asked. “Build the components here and elsewhere, ship everything to the Legatus System for assembly.”
“That’s one hell of a strategic vulnerability,” he countered. “Why would the Republic embrace that?”
“So, all of the hulls are made there?” He shook his head.
“Which is why Centurion is now the most fortified planet in existence,” Niska replied. “But yes, it’s a vulnerability. One your Navy is probably going to try and take advantage of—and one the RIN is expecting an attack on.”
He shook his head grimly.
“That’s not a battle we can influence, Montgomery. Our task is here.” He gestured at the system’s fourth planet. “The records to tell us where that liner ended up will be on Sucre, in the system traffic-control archives if nowhere else.”
“You can get us in?” Damien asked.
“Yes.”
“Good, because there’s a carrier in orbit, Niska, and she’s not alone,” Maata told them both. “Looks like a Bravado-class with a pair of Andreas-class escorts.” She snorted at Damien’s confusion. “Forty-megaton carrier, fifteen-megaton cruisers. It’s not a full carrier group and it’s the smaller ships, but it’s more than enough to handle us.”
Damien snorted.
“As we saw before, a handful of gunships is enough to handle us,” he pointed out. “Let’s play nice little merchant ship this time, shall we?”
“I’ve already applied for an orbital slot,” Maata confirmed. “We’re about nine hours out. We’ll know in plenty of time if there’s going to be a probl…”
“Captain?”
Maata was staring at her screen as a response came in, then tapped a command to toss it up on her screen.
“Merchant freighter Starlight, this is Captain Edward Thatch of the Republic Starship Ancestor,” a tall dark-haired man greeted them. “Your orbital slot is denied. You will surrender immediately and stand by for my vessel to match courses with yours. Any resistance will be met with overwhelming force.
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