“Got it!” LaMonte snapped. “Dumped a bunch of viruses into the system to keep them confused, but they’ve still locked me out. I got a full map, though, unredacted.”
“Send it to everyone,” Damien ordered. It appeared on his heads-up-display before he even finished giving the order.
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Damien,” LaMonte told him with a chuckle. “Looks like everyone is close to their intended target except Force Four.”
Force Four, under Captain Maata, had been one of the teams hunting prisoners.
“They’re close to the support system control,” Damien noted. “Captain Maata, do you see what I see?”
“We’re a long way from the prisons and pretty darn close to life support. I’m going to go play with the lights.”
“Good luck, Captain.”
“Same to you.”
Damien turned to his people.
“All right, we’ve flagged the computer center. Kelly—how long until they start wiping data?”
“They can try whenever they want, but you know those viruses I mentioned?” she replied.
“Yes?”
“They aren’t wiping shit until they clean those out of the computers, and that should take them at least twenty minutes.”
“Okay.” Damien grimaced. “We have twenty minutes to secure and physically isolate the computer center. Let’s move.”
“Contact!”
The shout over the radio was redundant. Damien could hear the gunfire coming from up ahead. Worse, he recognized the distinctive SNAP-CRACK of the discarding-sabot tungsten penetrators used against exosuit battle armor. Whoever was in charge of Minerva Station’s defenses had held back until they could properly equip their people.
His HUD was rapidly updating with new information as he ushered Kelly to cover. The access to the computer center was behind an intentionally designed choke point. Three corridors converged and a single accessway led to the hardware cores.
Additional defenses had been physically built into the station. They couldn’t have truly expected that this place would come under attack, but the Republic had prepared for it anyway. At least two dozen troops, seemingly half Augments, were holding the line in exosuit combat armor.
They clearly hadn’t been expecting to face Protectorate Bionic Commandos. In general, Legatan Augments were still the better cyborg by any standard—but they hadn’t expected any cyborgs.
By the time Damien had ducked his way around half of Captain Charmchi’s troops to be able to see the fight, the defenders had lost over a third of their number—but several of the BCR troops were down and they didn’t look like they were getting back up.
“Drop to the ground and shield your sensors on my mark,” he ordered calmly.
“What?” Charmchi replied.
“Just do it,” he barked. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”
They obeyed. The seven armored Commandos in front of him hit the ground like a small earthquake.
The defenders didn’t even have time to respond before Damien struck. He wasn’t able to point particularly well, but the one advantage his injuries had provided was that he’d become much less dependent on gestures to conjure his magic.
Lightning risked the very computers they were there to retrieve, so he reached for one of the simplest spells a Mage learned for self-defense. Except where a Mage in training was taught to heat a small ball of air to create the classic fireball, he heated every scrap of matter in the corridor the Legatans were guarding.
The defenders weren’t even cooked alive. They simply turned to ash in a moment of extreme heat. It took almost as much power to contain the heat in his target area as it did to spike it.
Exhaling slowly, he released his power and slowly lowered the temperature ahead of his people.
“Go,” he ordered softly.
“Fuck me,” someone murmured on the local channel.
Damien ignored it, walking slowly ahead as the Commandos swarmed forward around him.
“There’s a sealed door he—”
He obliterated the door before the Commando finished her report, shattering three tons of iron to rusty sand in a moment.
“Carry on.”
“Why do we need an army, again?” LaMonte murmured. She’d apparently caught up with him.
“Because I only have one set of eyes and can only be in one place,” he replied. “Get into those computers, Kelly. I need proof of what they were doing here and everything you can get on the station itself—in that order.”
“On it.”
She was past him and drawing her working computer again as they spoke.
Everyone was stepping very judiciously as they moved down the corridors. Damien had cooled the temperature to one safe for people in vac-suits, but it was still easily fifty degrees Celsius in the corridor.
A corridor that was covered in a layer of ash that had been over twenty people.
Damien took the time to check in on the rest of the teams as LaMonte started to hook in. Force Four had run headlong into heavy fire, at least a full platoon of exosuited troops and Augments dug in around the life support section.
Force Three and Force Two were running into resistance, but not nearly as tough as they’d expected. There were hundreds of Mages in the prison sections—possibly thousands across all of the rings of Minerva Station.
Just their presence there left Damien cold and furious. Occupying planets was one thing, but rounding up people and shipping them there to murder them? That brought back old memories for any Mage.
He’d stood on the slopes of Olympus Mons and looked at the fields of unmarked graves where the tens of thousands of children who had failed Project Olympus’s tests had been buried—along with the older teenagers who had been forced to bear multiple children and then been executed when they became too troublesome.
The Mages wouldn’t have struggled, not without knowing what was coming. Once the knowledge of what the Republic was doing made it back to the occupied worlds and the rest of the Protectorate, none of them would go easily.
The great families of any Protectorate world were not to be underestimated. Once they knew what was coming…Damien shivered.
The Republic didn’t know what they were unleashing. To spare their neighbors and friends, the Mages they’d captured already would have kept their resistance to the reasonable. Faced with mass murder?
The Mages would burn their worlds to the ground before they would yield. The UnArcana Worlds had struggled with the fact that Mages had been held to separate laws and judged by separate courts under the Compact.
But this…this was why the Compact existed.
“Damien, we have a problem,” LaMonte snapped. “Running both of your searches, and I just found something really, really ugly.”
“Tell me.”
“The prison bays are set up to be dumped into space from a completely separate control center,” she told him. “They’re trying to lure our people into a trap—exosuits or not, if they expel the prison bays into vacuum, our people will go with the Mages.”
And the very people Damien was there to rescue would die.
He crossed the room to LaMonte, looking over her shoulder.
“Who can activate it and where are the controls?”
“Looks like just Dr. Finley and from here.” She highlighted a space. “It’s a general control center for those prison bays.”
“I’ll stop him,” Damien told her.
“Damien, the prison bays are runically sealed,” she warned. “You might be able to get in—but I’m not sure even you can get out.”
“Then you’re all going to have to come get me, aren’t you?”
He fixed the coordinates in his mind, adjusting for the continuing rotation of the station, and then gave his companions a firm smile.
“I am the Sword of Mars,” he told them gently. “This is my job.”
He stepped.
45
Roslyn and Kulkarni were holding down
the fort on the flag deck, neck-deep in the logistics headaches of replacing every missile in over seventy warships, when Mage-Admiral Alexander calmly walked into the mostly abandoned space.
“Sir!” Roslyn exclaimed, scrambling to her feet. The last she’d heard from the Admiral was that she’d been going to sleep, barely an hour earlier. As the Flag Lieutenant, that meant that Roslyn should be heading to rest herself, but the logistics situation was a mess.
“Sit down, Chambers,” Alexander ordered. “I didn’t get to sleep before I was interrupted by an old friend of ours.”
“Sir?” Roslyn asked.
“Apparently, Damien Montgomery is in-system. He’s polite enough not to give me orders, but he probably should have,” the Admiral said. “Bring up the map of Centurion space.”
Roslyn obeyed and Alexander walked up to the hologram and poked one of the moons.
“This one is Trajan, right?” she asked. “What does our intel say about it?”
“Largest moon of Centurion,” Kulkarni replied instantly. “Flagged for potential long-term colonization during the initial expeditions. That project fell by the wayside, as most major artificial habitation projects do.”
Why live in a dome when you could live somewhere with a sky, after all?
“Is it inhabited, then?” Alexander asked.
“We don’t believe so.” Kulkarni said. “No colonies, no stations. Might be some mining operations, but it’s mostly ignored.”
“If there was a major shipyard complex hidden underneath it, would we be able to see it?”
Alexander’s question silenced both of her subordinates.
“No,” Roslyn finally said, glancing at Kulkarni for confirmation. “They’d have to have placed it very carefully, and I’m not sure why…”
“Because apparently they’re hiding it from most of their own people,” Alexander said. “Not just us. That complex is where the Republic’s ships are fitted with ‘FTL drives.’”
There was something in the way Alexander said FTL drives that sent a chill down Roslyn’s spine. Just what had the Admiral learned from Montgomery?
“Is that where Montgomery is going?” Roslyn asked.
“Yes. And we’re to hold off our assault until he calls us,” Alexander told them. “I can’t share all of the intelligence he sent me, not yet, but I can tell you that he’s looking to rescue thousands of prisoners from that complex.”
“Has he found another ship?” Kulkarni said. “He left us aboard Rhapsody in Purple. That ship would be hard-pressed to carry even a thousand people from Trajan to us. They’d be packed like sardines, but I think the air would last that long.”
“He hasn’t, which means he hasn’t thought that far ahead,” the Admiral said grimly. “Given what he’s told me, I’m not surprised.
“So, what I need from you two is a detailed attack plan that will take out the cardinal forts on this side of Centurion and any of the inner forts that threaten us…and gets Second Fleet to the Daedalus Complex in the shortest time possible.”
“Sir, we’re fifteen point four million kilometers from the cardinal forts. Those forts are six hundred thousand kilometers further out from Trajan—that’s a sixteen-million-kilometer trip.”
“At maximum acceleration for a zero-velocity-zero-distance rendezvous, six hours,” Alexander agreed.
“What about the RIN?” Roslyn asked. “As soon as we commit to an attack, they’re going to jump in behind us and try to pin us against Centurion.”
“We’re going to let them,” the Mage-Admiral told her. “I can’t tell anyone, even you two, what Damien found yet. What I can tell you is that the Republic can bloody well come.
“We’re going to kill them all.”
Alexander left the flag deck and Roslyn shared a long look with Kulkarni.
“We need to get Medici’s cruisers back ASAP,” the younger woman said calmly. “Six Honorific-class cruisers could change all of this, even if they’re only carrying Phoenix VIIIs.”
Medici’s ships—and the six destroyers who’d gone with them—were the last ships that had been sent back to the logistics fleet for rearming. Every other ship was now fully armed with the new Phoenix IXs.
“We’ll get a courier moving,” Kulkarni agreed. “But to get to Trajan? What are you thinking?”
“Minimum-time course doesn’t leave us a lot of options,” Roslyn admitted. “We were thinking about trying to keep our new range advantage hidden, but I don’t think that’s an option. Bull in a china shop, sir?”
The Mage-Captain laughed.
“That’s a good description. Lock in the course as soon as Montgomery contacts us, blow the cardinal forts away with the Samurais and then hit everything they throw at us with Phoenix IXs. No subtlety, just hammer our way through.”
“We have the firepower and the range, but if the First Hand is inside a Republic shipyard, we don’t have time for anything more complicated,” Roslyn agreed. “We send that courier right now, muster the entire fleet and then kick the door in when Montgomery calls.”
“TK-5331 is next up on the docket; I’ll get them moving,” Kulkarni said. “I want you to see if our tactical group can get a drone into position to look under Trajan’s skirts. If they were concealing this yard from their own people, it’s almost certainly defended, and I want to know what we’re sending people into.”
“On it,” Roslyn promised.
The flagship was currently part of the one-third of the fleet on full stand-down, but Roslyn didn’t need to go through the tactical team, anyway. After the last fight, she’d been linked into the tactical network directly.
She’d been a tactical officer until relatively recently, so it only took her a few seconds to put together the retasking request. There weren’t any drones in position to subtly take a peek at the complex, but she could send one of their closer-in drones much closer in.
A tight orbit of Centurion, underneath most of the facilities, risked running into the systems defending the accelerator ring itself. It was the only option she saw for getting a look at the mysterious hidden shipyard.
One probe would probably get shot down. She retasked six and passed the orders for the active ships to launch new ones to replace them.
The drones left their positions, diving toward the gas giant at maximum acceleration.
“The hell?” someone snapped on the com channel attached to the network. “Who ordered those drones to suicide?!”
“This is Admiral Alexander’s staff,” Roslyn interjected. “We have intelligence on a facility we may have missed. Those drones are going to tell us if that intel is correct.”
“All those drones are going to get is shot down!” the voice objected. A quick check showed that Roslyn was arguing with the Lieutenant Commander acting as tactical officer aboard Mjolnir.
As they were arguing, one of the drones was shot down. Antimissile defenses weren’t perfect at shooting down recon drones, but they could certainly handle the task.
“That’s why I sent six, Lieutenant Commander,” Roslyn said calmly. “Because we need to know what Trajan is hiding, and if that requires us to lay a trail of wrecked drones thick enough to walk on, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
There was silence on the channel, and then the stranger laughed.
“If it’s the Admiral’s orders, it’s the Admiral’s order,” he concluded. “But those drones aren’t cheap. It better be wo…”
Four of the drones had died. Two made it far enough to get a look at the underside of Trajan.
The fifth died even as the survivor twisted toward the Daedalus Complex to get better data. The sixth lasted long enough to get them a solid image of the entire miniature shipyard and its defenses.
“Never mind, Lieutenant,” Mjolnir’s officer concluded. “Do you want assistance setting up the next pattern? We’re going to need a better number on those defensive platforms, if nothing else.”
Medici’s ships returned thirty minutes later. Their
ammunition status updated on Roslyn’s displays almost immediately.
Only half of the Mage-Admiral’s cruisers and destroyers were armed with Phoenix IXs, with the other half still carrying the older missiles. It would hopefully be enough, combined with the heavy Samurai missiles and the full rearmament of the rest of the fleet.
With the entire fleet reassembled, Second Fleet was an utterly overwhelming wall of steel in space. Eighty-six warships, massing over a billion tons and carrying the most advanced technology available to the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars.
There was a reason that the bull-in-a-china-shop approach was going to work to get them to the mysterious shipyard complex. Roslyn’s second sweep of drones gave her the details she needed to help Kulkarni plan the attack.
There were a hundred and ten weapons platforms guarding the shipyard, primarily laser platforms that would utterly devastate anyone who came around the moon without expecting them.
Unfortunately for the defenders, Second Fleet now had enough data to target missiles on those platforms from the other side of Trajan. They probably had the sensor relays to return fire, but the platforms had only a few hundred missile launchers.
There was nothing in Centurion orbit now that could stop Second Fleet. The RIN presumably had a significant force in place to try and pin them in place, but doing so was going to risk the accelerator ring.
Right now, the only thing stopping Second Fleet from destroying the structure underpinning the entire logistics structure of the Republic’s military was that Damien Montgomery had told them to wait.
So, they were waiting. Still waiting. There was no way that Roslyn could tell whether Rhapsody in Purple had penetrated the Daedalus Complex. They were waiting for the First Hand’s call.
But he’d told the Admiral he was attacking the complex hours before. Roslyn would have expected him to call. How long, she wondered, would Admiral Alexander wait to hear from Montgomery?
How long until they had to conclude that something had gone wrong?
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