She checked her math. Her missiles had over twenty-five hundred times her own current acceleration – and no need to decelerate to a rendezvous with their targets. She’d be in weapons range of Cor’s formation over ninety minutes before she’d hit turnover.
“We’ll clear for action in three hours,” she told the Tactical Officer. “Charles, pass the word to the task force to go to General Quarters at the same time.”
That would be roughly twenty minutes before they reached missile range. If Cor was going to do anything clever, she’d have to do it before then.
#
Cor glared at the sallow-faced image of Admiral Delia Martine on her screen. She’d engaged a privacy bubble around her command chair on the Unchained Glory’s bridge to avoid blatantly dressing down another flag officer in front of her crew. The odds were that her long-term relationship with Martine was irrelevant, but it rarely hurt to observe the niceties.
“What do you mean, your ships can’t make more than two gravities?” she demanded. The current acceleration of her task force felt like they were limping along – and they were! Most of the pirates in the galaxy would regard a Navy vessel traveling at one gee as blood in the water. “Your ships come from Tau Ceti with a full gravity rune matrix, don’t they?”
“They had full rune matrices upon arrival, oui,” Martine said precisely. “However, Mage-Commodore, there are only six Mages in the entire Ardennes Self Defense Force. Providing full and proper maintenance for the gravity matrices is not their top priority, nes pas?
“We made certain the runes worked enough to provide daily gravity, but I do not believe that the matrices would be able to safely provide more than a single gravity of inertial compensation.”
The prissy little woman seemed completely unbothered by her announcement, as if the fact that her ships could maybe achieve twenty percent of their rated acceleration wasn’t an issue. Cor carefully did not tell the stupid mundane playing at being an officer what she thought of the woman’s little fleet.
“We will have to adjust our tactics,” she said finally, through gritted teeth. “Given the reduced range of your weapons, we’ll need to use your ships primarily as missile defense in any case.”
And that would keep them out in front of Cor’s ships, where they were unlikely to accidentally shoot her cruisers. If one of Martine’s tin cans ate a missile from her ships, she wasn’t going to be heart-broken, either.
She dropped the privacy shield and returned her attention to her bridge crew. They were, at least, competent.
“We will maintain one gravity of acceleration,” she said calmly. “The ASDF units cannot safely maintain a higher speed.”
If their rune matrices were in such bad shape, she wasn’t sure about the rest of their equipment either. With fifteen fully functional Lancers, this wasn’t a completely lost cause, but if Martine’s ships were as incapable as it appeared…
“Ma’am, the Righteous Guardian has repeated their earlier transmission,” her com officer informed her. “Shall we reply?”
“No,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing worth saying at this point – either we surrender or we fight. Surrender will only buy any of us,” she gestured around the bridge, “a noose or a firing squad. I am uninclined to accept His Majesty’s idea of mercy.”
She glanced around at them. None of her crew looked happy, but they all seemed to be on board. Hamilton returned her gaze calmly, and then softly said what they’d all been thinking.
“Ma’am, we can’t win this fight. Especially not if the ASDF ships aren’t worth the scrap they’re built of.”
Cor sighed and glanced at the screen showing the fifteen destroyers formed up in front of her squadron. Their missile defense could make all the difference – if it worked. If it didn’t, they were all going to die.
Dying was not something Cor intended to try just yet.
“You’re right,” she finally confessed. “Set up a squadron-level, maximum acceleration, course to the nearest location we can jump from, and keep it updated. We’ll use the ASDF’s missile defenses to get as far as they can, and then make a run for it.
“We’ve got a better chance to blast our way past that battleship than to fight it.”
#
Space battles were slow, almost stately, affairs. Hiding the massive heat signature of a million or fifty million ton warship’s matter-antimatter engines was nearly impossible, even for magic. Once two ships or fleets had decided to accept the engagement, everything after that was simple linear arithmetic.
Nonetheless, Adamant remained on the bridge of the Righteous Guardian of Liberty. Her experience was that her crew needed to see her – needed to know she was watching for tricks and traps to keep them safe.
Of course, ‘her experience’ was exactly two space battles, with vastly inferior opponents flying cobbled together pirate ships.
She could count the number of battles the Royal Martian Navy had fought in the last three years on her fingers. Given the restrictions in the Charter and the lack of availability of warships to anyone except star system governments, to her knowledge the RMN had never fought as even a battle as she was about to face.
“How long to missile range?” she asked softly.
“A little less than an hour,” Breisacher replied. “About thirty minutes after that for the ASDF if Cor hasn’t upgraded their weapons.”
“Any change in their vectors?”
“Negative, ma’am,” the Tactical Officer replied. They’d repeated the exchange every twenty or thirty minutes for over two hours now, but the little ritual and confirmation seemed to re-assure everything around them.
“Wait,” Breisacher suddenly stated sharply, looking down at his screens. “I have an aspect change!”
“What are they doing?” Adamant asked, looking to the screens and seeing the icons shift.
“The Seventh Cruisers have broken off – they pulled a ninety degree course change perpendicular to the ecliptic and went to ten gravities acceleration!”
“What about the destroyers?”
“Still on course,” her Tactical Officer reported. “… I think Cor just cut and ran.”
“Agreed,” the Mage-Commodore replied, scanning the screen and display as she judged distances and vectors in her head. “But the timing… can the ASDF evade us at this point?”
“Negative, ma’am,” Breisacher replied. “Unless they managed to come up with ten times the accel they’ve shown so far and break in the opposite direction from Cor, anyway. At their current accel, they can only add maybe ten minutes to the time to range.”
“Understood,” Adamant acknowledged, and came to a decision.
“Signal to the Task Force,” she ordered, glancing at her communications officer. “Mage-Captains Isabel and Jakab are to maintain their current course. They will intercept the ASDF destroyers and neutralize them. Accept surrenders if offered, but they will be in Ardennes orbit in eight hours to support Hand Montgomery.
“Mage-Captains Dionysios and Duane are to form on Righteous Guardian. They have five minutes to secure the ships for subjective acceleration, then we will fire one time-delayed salvo at the ASDF and break off to pursue Mage-Commodore Cor.”
Adamant glanced at her Executive Officer, who nodded and started to give the orders for the Righteous Guardian of Liberty to prepare for the orders she was giving.
“We will pursue at fifteen gravities,” she finished, ignoring the several sharp breaths taken around her. “Send, and have them acknowledge receipt,” she ordered the officer, then turned back to Breisacher.
“Prep that time-delay salvo, Kayin,” she told him. “We’ll feed the timing and telemetry data to the Master of Wisdom and the Esquire of Glorious Conflict.” For the first time in her life, she realized that the Protectorate Navy’s taste in ship names added an unnecessary delay in combat. Something to point out to the higher-ups after this was done.
“Strap in people,” she ordered the rest of her bridge crew. “The
rune matrix should be able to compensate up to twelve gravities, but that’ll still let three gees through, and none of us are used to that.”
Settling herself in her chair in the middle of the bridge, next to the simulacrum that controlled the battleship’s magic, Mage-Commodore Adamant followed her own advice as her crew sprang into motion around her.
“What about Ardennes, ma’am?” Kayin asked quietly. “Isabel and Jakab don’t have the Marines to launch any significant ground attack.”
“I know,” she admitted, equally quietly. “But my job is to make sure that the woman who blew away a city doesn’t escape to the Fringe with an entire squadron of Protectorate Cruisers.
“Hand Montgomery will need to deal with Governor Vaughn on his own for a little while longer.”
#
For a few precious minutes, Adrianna Cor was certain she was going to get away. All Navy ships had the same gravity runes to reduce acceleration, and the battleship actually had less total delta-v stored aboard than her cruisers.
Their speed would bring them to a safe zone to jump well before Adamant’s task force could bring them to bay.
Then the immense mass of the battleship shifted. Three of the five Martian ships flared to life with new energy, their heat signatures expanding exponentially as the warships turned to pursue her.
The Unchained Glory’s computer churned the numbers – and then informed her that the Martian warships would be in range in forty minutes. The massive increase in their acceleration needed to allow them to catch her ships meant they’d be in range sooner.
“How the hell can they do that?” she demanded aloud, glaring at the Captain of her flagship.
Devi Ishtar winced and glanced down at the screens.
“The Guardian is huge,” she said quietly. “Everything on her is over-engineered – her thrust nozzles can withstand temperatures and pressures ours cannot. The Honorific class… was designed with similar criteria. They can’t sustain this acceleration forever, but…”
“They can sustain it long enough,” Cor said grimly. She needed roughly seventy minutes to make empty space with a low enough gravity to safely jump. Even with the seven minute flight time of Adamant’s missiles, they would now be under fire for almost twenty-five minutes.
“Can we go any faster?” the Mage-Commodore demanded.
“We could,” Ishtar said slowly, “but our engines are not over-engineered. We could gain perhaps another two, maybe three, gravities, but we could easily lose several ships to engine failure – potentially including this one – and still be under fire for at least ten minutes.”
“I see,” the Mage-Commodore said grimly, looking at the screen. The destroyers she’d abandoned were doing the only smart thing left to them – they were running. They’d pulled another two gravities out of their back pockets to do it too, she noted.
It wasn’t going to save them. Two of Adamant’s cruisers were still on vector to intercept them and reach Ardennes. Those two ships alone outmassed Martine’s entire command by three to two, and Cor couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for the prissy bitch’s now inevitable fate.
“Pull us ahead of the rest of the squadron,” she ordered calmly. “Interface all missiles defenses through our primary computer net.
“Adamant knows which ship is the flagship,” she continued as Ishtar started to object. “She’ll focus fire on us, which will allow us to use the entire squadron’s missile defenses against her attacks.”
Cor turned her gaze grimly back to the screens, watching the three warships come thundering along on their intercept vector. With a battleship on the other side, she was going to need every edge she could get!
#
The minutes ticked by and the range slowly shrank. For all of the unimaginable acceleration of the missiles the Protectorate fielded for the Martian Navy, the ships themselves were still mostly limited by the tolerance of their crews and the ability of the magic to protect them.
Adamant had very quickly realized that she’d overestimated just how much acceleration the rune matrix would absorb. Every member of her crew was being pressed into their acceleration couches at four times their Earth-normal weight and it was wearing them down, fast.
After an hour of this, her crew wouldn’t be worth much, and it would take several more hours for her to reach Ardennes’ orbit. But Cor would not escape.
“All systems are armed,” Breisacher told her quietly. “We are co-ordinating salvos across all three ships.” He paused. “Ma’am, what is our target?”
The new Mage-Commodore studied her opponent’s formation. She saw Breisacher’s point – by pulling the Unchained Glory ahead of the rest of her squadron, Cor had given her a choice between making her salvo more vulnerable or working her way through the squadron ship by ship – and potentially letting Cor get away.
“We cut the head off the snake, Kayin,” Adamant said quietly. “Everything we’ve got on the Unchained Glory. Once Cor’s gone, the rest may surrender. And if they don’t…” she shrugged. “I’m less concerned about hunting down a few rogue captains than an entire rogue squadron. Cor dies.”
“Yes ma’am. I’ll set up the fire plan.”
Adamant left him to it and focused on the screens surrounding her. At this point, there was nothing she could do. Everything was set, and the only real question was whether Cor’s people’s will would hold up under fire.
How prepared were they to die for a traitor?
#
The geometry of pursuit allowed Cor to fire first. The traitor Mage-Commodore caught herself holding her breath as her squadron ceased acceleration to rotate in space. The Martian Navy had long ago optimized their warships for pursuit. It made Cor’s position more tenuous than she liked – she had to rotate to fire, and when Adamant’s salvos began arriving, she’d have to be facing them to use most of her defenses.
It would slow down her escape, but the alternative was fiery death.
Rotated and facing their enemies, the mighty ten million ton warships shivered from the recoil of their missiles, and then rotated again to blast forward once more.
Her tactical display lit up with first dozens, then hundreds of tiny lights. Three hundred and sixty missiles blasted into space, took a moment to orient themselves with their sisters, and then blasted back along her squadron’s path at twelve and a half thousand gravities.
Thirty seconds passed in silence, her entire bridge frozen around her as they watched the suicidal little spacecraft charge backwards.
Then their pursuers launched. They had no need to rotate, and the three warships threw four hundred and sixty missiles back at Cor. Each cruiser threw twenty more missiles than her own warships, and the battleship carried three hundred launchers.
Then her own ships rotated again to fire their second salvo, exactly sixty-five seconds after the first. Thirty seconds after that, the pursuers launched again.
Both forces were using the same missiles. The same launchers. Every system on all nine ships was perfectly matched.
Cor glared at Adamant’s task force on the screens. The weapons systems were exactly the same, but Adamant had more of them. At General Quarters, both were locked out of each other’s systems, there was no way to abuse the similarities.
It was down to luck and formation. In less than six minutes, she’d find out if Adamant had fallen for her bait – and if her trick was enough to save her ship.
#
Cor’s missiles came in first. They hit the outer defense zone of the three loyalist warships at a fifth of the speed of light, and lasers began lighting them up. Hundreds of invisible beams were marked on the screens with their patterns of energy, and missiles began to detonate.
Antimatter explosions formed their own kind of electronic jamming, and each explosion made it harder to track the missiles remaining.
Adamant was still the Captain of the Righteous Guardian, and as the missiles hit the outer perimeter she had already forced herself up against the force of the ba
ttleship’s acceleration and laid the runes tattooed onto her palms on the floating silver simulacrum of her warship.
With an almost unfelt exhalation, she became the ship. Every rune carved into the fifty million ton hull told her their story in an inrush of data, and the screens around her became her eyes as she looked deep into space.
Mage-Commodore Jane Adamant saw the missiles coming and called her magic to her. Fire and lightning danced in her mind – and then danced in the empty void around her. She met the missiles with her will and training, and they died in their dozens.
The Mage-Captains of the two escorting cruisers lashed out with their magic as well. The space around the three warships was overwhelmed with antimatter explosions, invisible laser beams, and the plasma and lightning of human magic.
The first missile swarm was annihilated well short of the task force, and Adamant spared a moment to judge the success of their strike on Cor’s fleet. A similar cataclysm of artifice and magic surrounded the Seventh Cruisers, making it difficult to make out much, but it seemed they’d successfully weathered the storm.
The second missile salvo burst into the cloud of radioactive debris in front of the Righteous Guardian, and Adamant turned her power back to the threat. More missiles disintegrated under the defensive laser turrets, and even more were shattered beneath the amplified power of the three starship captains.
Dionysios missed one. A missile slipped under the Mage-Captain’s guard, diving towards the battlecruiser at twenty percent of the speed of light.
Adamant saw it and lashed out with her magic, summing a wall of force a kilometer across between the missile and the Master of Wisdom. The missile slammed into her magic with an explosion and impact that made her physically cringe backwards before regaining control of herself.
Another few moments of peace. They were gaining rapidly on Cor’s ships now, the cruisers unable to accelerate away as their design forced them to face the incoming fire. Adamant’s second salvo burned in hot on the heels of her first, and the debris cloud of five hundred missiles was worse than that of four hundred.
Hand of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 2) Page 28