UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “They were ours, once,” Roslyn pointed out quietly. “Doesn’t that mean they knew exactly what they were walking into?”

  Roslyn joined Katz and the rest of Stand in Righteousness’s shattered officer corps in standing at attention as the shuttle came to a gentle halt. Cooling vents blasted air over the spacecraft, bringing the temperature down to where the safety barriers could retract and the boarding ramp extend.

  There were, to Roslyn’s understanding, about forty people on the shuttle. Only four stepped down immediately, all officers with the gold medallions of Mages. A Mage-Captain with skin almost as dark as her uniform led the way, and three Mage-Lieutenants followed her.

  “Commander Katz,” the leading woman greeted the acting captain. “I am Mage-Captain Indrajit Kulkarni. I have orders for you.”

  She passed a datapad over to Katz, who thumbed it and glanced down the screen.

  “As expected, Mage-Captain,” Katz said loudly. “I stand relieved.”

  “I relieve you, Acting Captain,” Kulkarni told her. She stood at parade rest, surveying the handful of officers standing in front of her.

  “All of you have been through hell,” she said calmly. “We’re reinforcing Stand’s crew, but we won’t be back up to establishment.” She gestured behind her. “These are all the Mages we’re getting, people. Five Mages where we should have six. We’re going to have less than two dozen officers where we should have thirty, barely three hundred crew where we should have six hundred.

  “But you have given this ship a reputation to uphold. The Commodore is still reviewing the files and he’s asked me to go over everything as well, but I guarantee you that there are going to be a stack of decorations coming down the pipeline. You have risen to the call of duty and gone far above and beyond anything we could ask of you.”

  She shook her head.

  “In happier times, we’d be taking this ship back to Tau Ceti or Sol and sending you all on well-earned leaves. These aren’t happier times. We’re going to take Stand in Righteousness back into the line of duty almost immediately.”

  Roslyn shivered. She hadn’t expected anything else, but it was still painful to hear.

  “Before all that, however, there are two tasks that I have been charged with, very specifically, by the word of the Mage-King himself,” Kulkarni stated calmly. “Mage-Ensign Roslyn Chambers. Commander Onyeka Katz. Step forward.”

  Roslyn swallowed hard and obeyed. Kulkarni was the first person to call her Ensign in a bit, which wasn’t promising.

  “Commander Katz. Rarely do we call upon non-Mages to command warships of His Majesty’s Navy, but it seems that every time it is necessary, we are reminded that the lack of a medallion does not indicate a lack of talent or ability. I am tasked to present you with His Majesty’s personal thanks for your service.”

  That was…a big deal. The Mage-King’s thanks ranked above a good number of decorations for service and went on an officer’s permanent record. That meant that Katz was almost certainly up for promotion to Captain as soon as they could spare her from running Stand in Righteousness.

  “Your service was exemplary, above and beyond what we would ask, but it was still within the scope of your duties and actions,” Kulkarni noted, exchanging a firm handshake with the other black woman.

  “What is not within the scope of the expected duties and actions, however, is for an Ensign on a glorified internship to step up to the duties of an officer of His Majesty’s Navy. We know perfectly well that the young officers-in-training we send out on Ensign cruises are not officers—they are students.

  “We tailor our expectations to that. We do not expect them to step up as tactical officers or Jump Mages—let alone for them to single-handedly bring a Royal Martian Navy destroyer home after all of the ship’s other Mages were lost.”

  The Mage-Captain had produced a large velvet box and Roslyn was lost. She was on the edge of panic and she wasn’t sure what the hell was going on.

  “Please kneel, Mage-Ensign,” Kulkarni ordered.

  Roslyn knelt, only to stare in shock as Kulkarni opened the box to reveal a deceptively simple medal.

  A length of blue ribbon held a stylized rocket ship cast in gold. No gems or text or decoration. Just one simple symbol—that represented the Mage-King’s Medal of Valor.

  “Mage-Commander Herbert already saw to your promotion, so I don’t have collar tabs to give you,” the new Captain told her. “Your promotion has been confirmed, countersigned by Commodore Cruyssen and the Mage-King himself.

  “I am also, under His Majesty’s direct orders, tasked to hang this trinket around your neck, to remind everyone that we do not expect an Ensign to rise to the occasion as extraordinarily as you have—and that we recognize the value of one who does.”

  The medal felt surprisingly light around her neck.

  “We expect great things from you, Mage-Lieutenant Chambers,” Kulkarni whispered. “But I also understand how unprepared you are. We’ll get through this the only way we can: as a team. As a crew.”

  21

  Six random jumps away from the Santiago System, Damien’s little fleet had to stop. With the full crew of Mages, they could jump six times in sequence. They just had to let all six Mages rest for a quarter of a day after that.

  It made for a decent way of getting clear of the enemy. If they jumped along the normal route to Ardennes, they had a not-insignificant chance of being followed. Making six entirely random jumps meant that even if the Republic somehow had a technological equivalent to the rare human Trackers who could follow a jump, they wouldn’t find the fleet before it moved on.

  The downside was that they were less than two light-years from Santiago. That shouldn’t have been a problem—even a single light-year was an almost incomprehensible distance for the human mind—but with everything going on, Damien wasn’t taking that as a given.

  “Commander Ferber,” he said calmly into the video call. “What’s Duke’s status?”

  Commander Tamatha Ferber was a heavyset woman with a shaved scalp. She was also the operations officer aboard Duke of Magnificence and the most senior non-Mage aboard the ship. With the rapid-fire jumps, the Captain, the XO and the tactical officer were all asleep, recovering from the spells.

  “We’re running regular operations,” Ferber told him. “Sensor sweeps are clear. Bravo shift is on duty.” She shook her head. “Not much going on, my lord. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, after all.”

  “We are,” Damien agreed, looking at the chart on his flag deck hologram. “And yet the Republic keeps surprising us.”

  “My lord?”

  He sighed.

  “Take the task group to Alert Bravo,” he ordered. “Man all weapons, load all launchers, pre-charge all capacitors.”

  “Sir…there’s no way they can find us out here,” Ferber protested. “All of the Mages in the task group are asleep and most of our crew have joined them. The trip through Santiago pushed us to our fullest.”

  “I know,” Damien agreed. “And you’re going to take the task group to Alert Bravo anyway. I would rather have our people tired and angry at me than vulnerable and dead. Am I clear, Commander?”

  He didn’t raise his voice. He knew perfectly well that he was a small man and raising his voice was hardly intimidating. For most people, though, he’d found that simply talking over them in calm, level tones was more than enough to achieve his purposes.

  Ferber bowed her head.

  “Yes, my lord. Of course, my lord.”

  “You don’t need to agree with me, Commander, and I hope I’m being paranoid,” Damien told her. “But let’s humor my paranoia. We have to be prepared for anything.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The icons of the cruisers and destroyers on Damien’s tactical plot slowly added amber carets to their green cores. The amber marked them as Alert Bravo, a couple of steps short of full battle stations. Two-thirds of the crew was awake and on-duty, with minimum crews on all of the weapon m
ounts.

  The ASDF ships might not use the same terminology, but they had an equivalent status and knew the RMN term. It took longer to get all six ships up to ready than Damien would have preferred, but the empty darkness remained calm and silent.

  For now.

  “Are you going to sit on the flag deck and watch the scanners until we leave?” Romanov asked, the bodyguard leaning against an empty console.

  “That’s basically it, yes,” Damien agreed. “I can’t count on the Republic not having any more surprises for us. We didn’t think they had jump ships, and we’ve been proven thoroughly wrong.”

  “I wish we knew more about those,” his bodyguard admitted. “That’s a wrinkle I don’t think any of us were expecting.”

  “Right now, I’m honestly presuming they have a small number of Mages who were either kidnapped or like money more than ethics,” Damien replied. “That’s enough for them to support a relatively small number of the massive warships we’re seeing.”

  The Marine stepped up beside him, tapping a command to bring up a map of the border area next to Damien’s view of the space around them. The UnArcana Stars were marked in red now. The Santiago System had a red marker around it, declaring it as lost.

  Other stars were marked with yellow, a line of systems from Nia Kriti down the border. Stars where either RTAs had gone silent or shipping had suddenly stopped.

  “If they took all of these systems,” Romanov said slowly. “That’s not a few ships, my lord. Even assuming they’re staging a small number of carrier groups through multiple systems, that’s still multiple groups.”

  Damien sighed.

  “And the carrier group at Santiago was still there, covering the landings,” he concluded. “It’s entirely possible each star system was hit by a separate group, which means we’re looking at…eight to ten battle groups. Plus the one at Korma, and presumably at least one at Legatus, too.”

  Romanov was silent, the Marine staring at the map.

  “So…sixty ships. Maybe more.”

  “At our best case, one Mage per ship,” Damien concluded. “Strategically and tactically slow, but their command-and-control loop is tighter and more flexible than ours. We know nothing about this FTL com of theirs except that it exists, but I’m guessing a shipboard installation.”

  “And if they’re using some kind of technological jump drive, we don’t know what its rules and limitations are,” Romanov said. “I’m starting to feel underequipped for my job, Damien. Keeping you alive is starting to look like it’s going to require dragging you away from the front in chains.”

  Damien snorted.

  “We both know that isn’t happening,” he replied. “You just need to watch my back. The Navy will keep whatever ship I’m on safe; we just need to be wary for assassins.”

  “You think we have traitors aboard?” Romanov asked.

  The universe decided to answer the Marine’s question for them. In the middle of the last word, three jump flares appeared on the screen, and Damien swallowed a curse.

  “I’d say that yes, we do,” he said grimly. “And that their FTL com can apparently be concealed on our ships.

  “Commander Ferber—take the fleet to battle stations! We have incoming!”

  Jakab struggled onto the bridge a couple of minutes later, the Mage-Commodore looking utterly drained.

  “Report,” he ordered. Even as he was giving orders to his bridge crew, he looked at the channel to Damien.

  “As usual, paranoia turns out to be accurate,” he said dryly. “What’s your guess, my lord?”

  “Spy with an FTL communicator, probably aboard Duke herself,” Damien said grimly. “Because what we needed was a fucking witch hunt.”

  Jakab grunted and Commander Ferber reported.

  “We’ve got three Republic warships at fifty light-seconds. They’re accelerating our way at five gravities. No gunships on the screens, but it looks like a forty-megaton battleship and two cruisers, fifteen and twenty megatons apiece.”

  “I’d make jokes about the Lord Protector compensating for something, but I’m feeling rather notably outgunned,” Jakab replied. “Do we know anything about these big bastards’ armament?”

  “No,” Ferber told him. “I guess we get to find out.”

  “Lucky us,” Damien murmured. “How long until they’re in weapon range, Commander?”

  “If we do nothing and they continue to accelerate: thirty-four minutes and some change for our Phoenix VIIIs,” the Operations Officer replied. “We can’t jump for at least four hours.”

  “You have ten gees on them,” Damien pointed out. “We can avoid engagement, can’t we?”

  He wasn’t sure that was the right plan, but he wanted all of the options.

  “They jumped in with a thousand KPS of base velocity towards us,” Jakab replied. “If we run, we buy about ten minutes—and we don’t know what their range is.”

  Seventy-five million tons of Republic ships versus less than twenty-five million tons of Protectorate warships. Even Damien could do that math.

  “Anyone feeling comfortable with the bet that our ships are three times as good as theirs?” Damien asked. Both the Mage-Commodore and the Operations Officer looked at him in horror.

  “That’s what I thought.” Damien looked grimly down at his hands. Once, he could have teleported at least Duke away. Combining his Runes of Power with the amplifier, it wasn’t even impossible that he could have moved the entire fleet.

  It would have hurt, but he could have done it. Now, however, he couldn’t even link with the amplifier to augment his range and power. He was the most powerful Mage in the fleet, but without the ability to link with the amplifier, Mage-Commodore Jakab could do more in the space battle.

  “It would be over two hours to amplifier range, even if we go right for them at maximum power,” Jakab murmured, as if he was following Damien’s thoughts. “We’d wipe them out if we got any of the Navy ships to within reach of the amplifiers, but I don’t know if we’d survive an hour of missiles to get there.”

  Damien sighed.

  “I can help stop their missiles,” he told the two Naval officers, “but without interface runes, that’s all I can do. The command is yours, Mage-Commodore. If I come up with any clever ideas, I’ll let you know, but right now I’m afraid the best thing I can do is get out of your way.”

  Jakab snorted.

  “You’d be surprised, my lord,” he admitted. “Keep your eyes and ears open.”

  The Commodore gestured Ferber back to her station.

  “In the absence of brilliant ideas, however, let’s start by keeping the range open. Get me a tactical network, Ferber. We have a battle to fight.”

  All six Protectorate ships flipped in space and brought their engines fully online.

  As Damien watched, one of the key weaknesses of the Protectorate warships’ design struck him. The Royal Martian Navy had never really expected to face an equivalent or superior enemy, and the Militias had copied the RMN’s designs.

  While the cruisers and destroyers had some of their RFLAM turrets around the base of the pyramid, able to fire forward or backwards, they carried no offensive weapons and few defensive weapons on the base of the pyramid. Missiles could handle the course change easily enough, but lasers fired in a direct line.

  So long as they were running, they were limited even in their ability to protect themselves. Once the missiles started flying, they were going to have to turn—and at that point, they wouldn’t be able to run anymore.

  With the magical gravity runes throughout their ships, they were pushing fifteen gravities to the Republic ships’ five. The Republic’s starting velocity was more than enough to get them into missile range, though, and Damien found himself simply…waiting.

  “They’ve got us pretty badly outgunned,” Romanov murmured. “Not seeing any clever options, either.”

  “I have a couple,” Damien admitted. “Entirely defensive, though.”

  Unless the i
ncoming ships had a lot more missile launchers than he expected, he actually had a decent chance of making up the difference in their missile defense.

  “I’m okay with living through this,” his bodyguard replied.

  “Me too.”

  The Hand looked over the holographic map of the system and was once again struck by the fact that he very much needed a staff if he was going to run a war from this ship—and unless he died today, he was going to be running a war from aboard Duke of Magnificence.

  “I’ll never get used to the waiting,” he admitted. “Been a long damn time since the first time someone fired missiles at a ship I was aboard, but I still hate the wait.”

  “War is ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent absolute terror,” Romanov told him. “That’s what my first drill sergeant told us, back when even we larval officers and Mages were going through the same boot camp as everyone else.

  “Working with you seems to up it to about ninety-seven / three, but the same rule applies.”

  Damien chuckled.

  “I spent a year and a half in rehab. That can’t have been that bad!”

  “Nah, that was fine. The couple of months before that more than ma—”

  “Vampire!” Commander Ferber’s exclamation echoed across the link. “Range is thirteen point one million kilometers and the Republic has launched. Estimate four hundred and fifty, repeat, four five zero, missiles incoming.”

  The Operations Officer coughed.

  “They’re all targeting Duke of Magnificence.”

  “Yeah,” Damien said calmly. “We’ve got a mole on board. Mage-Commodore?”

  “I can work with this. I can’t work with being outside of my weapon range, my lord.”

  “If we can’t outrun them, then let’s take it to them,” the Hand suggested.

  “With your permission, my lord?” Jakab asked.

  Damien laughed. “Shove your fleet down their throats, Mage-Commodore. The call is yours.”