UnArcana Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Damn.” Damien shook his head. That made sense, and yet… Even decapitating Riordan’s government wouldn’t impede the defense of the system, and the Republic seemed more direct in their covert operations than that.

  “System: show me a map of Nouveaux Versailles. Mark the most recent Al-Assad class four or higher incidents.”

  A map of Ardennes’s capital city flashed into existence on his window. Persephone stopped grooming his hand, the cat seeming to have an eerie sense of when to behave.

  “That’s the bomb attempt,” Romanov said, tapping one of the red markers. “That’s a class six incident by the Al-Assad standard. Why class four?”

  Al-Assad was a standard created by an Arabic police reformer in the twenty-first century. Class six incidents were confirmed terrorist attacks. Class four was anything involving suspected terrorists or military-grade firearms or munitions.

  “Distractions, Denis,” Damien replied, studying the map. “They’re concentrated around the Governor’s House and the northwest quadrant. I’m guessing system and city police are moving to reinforce around the House?”

  “I don’t have that information, my lord, but almost certainly,” Romanov told him. “I can find out.”

  “It’s only a question of degree, not of what action they’re taking,” the Hand said grimly. “System, show me ASDF command stations in Nouveaux Versailles.”

  Three green icons appeared on the map. None of them, Damien noted, were the old Command Center that he’d wrecked during his first visit to the planet. One of them was in the far southeast corner, well separated from the Governor’s House.

  “System, identify the ASDF facility at grid 26-K,” he ordered aloud.

  “Ardennes System Defense Force Ground Command Alpha,” the computer replied calmly. “Primary coordination center for orbital defense and search-and-rescue.”

  Damien studied the map for five more seconds. Then he was on his feet, magic gently carrying Persephone to the floor.

  “My shuttle, Denis. Now.”

  “My lord?”

  “They’re going for the command center, and the fastest way we can get reinforcements there is to drop them from orbit.”

  There was some method to Damien’s madness. His orders set Marines throughout the RMN detachment into motion, but while the warships were on alert and prepared to fight, that didn’t include their assault shuttles.

  They were on alert for a space battle, not a ground team feinting to draw the locals out of position for a decapitating strike on the local command facilities. There was one shuttle in the fleet, however, that was always kept fully fueled, with exosuit armor charged and on standby for a Marine detachment: Damien’s.

  Duke of Magnificence’s crew had learned that having a Hand aboard meant that said Hand might need to go somewhere at the drop of a dime, and it was better to send him there in an armed spacecraft with heavily-equipped bodyguards.

  Damien could no longer fly the shuttle himself, so he still needed to find a pilot when he left the ship. It was still faster to find a pilot than to fuel a shuttle capable of an orbit-to-surface-to-orbit flight and charge up a platoon’s worth of exosuit combat armor.

  Of course, there were other rapid-response forces, which meant that Damien’s shuttle wasn’t the only one dropping from space towards Nouveaux Versailles like a homesick meteor.

  And that the commander of his bodyguard could still try and argue him out of this.

  “There is an entire company of Marines dropping from orbit, my lord,” Romanov pointed out calmly. “Multiple battalions locking and loading as we speak, ready to drop within ten minutes. Each of those companies has at least three Combat Mages.”

  “And which authority is cutting through air traffic control like a hot knife?” Damien asked brightly. He probably hadn’t needed his First Hand status for that, not with a potential attack on the ASDF command in the air.

  On the other hand, they had no proof of that attack yet. They were going on Damien’s instinct and analysis.

  If he was right, it was a good thing no one argued with a Hand. If he was wrong, well, it was good thing no one was really going to hold it against a Hand.

  “Damien, it’s Julia,” his ex-bodyguard’s voice sounded in his earpiece.

  “Ground Command Alpha is supposed to be Top Secret. Most accesses are double-blind; people go in via underground tunnels from other locations.”

  He knew from experience she wasn’t arguing with him about his analysis, so he waited to hear her point.

  “That means the security posts are at those tunnels, not in the main facility,” Amiri concluded flatly. “If they’ve located the site and are preparing to come in through the roof, we are in serious trouble.”

  “Rapid-response force is three minutes out,” he replied. “I’m with them.”

  “Of course you are.” He could hear her rolling her eyes. “I see the same pattern you do. I’m moving APA troops as we speak, but they’re all outside the cities. “

  Like any sensible military force, the Ardennes Planetary Army based itself well outside any urban area. It helped avoid a lot of potential problems—including, though no one talked about it much, collateral damage from kinetic strikes if someone attacked the planet.

  It was a problem when you were suddenly expecting a serious threat in one of your cities, though.

  “I don’t care who they are,” Damien told her. “They’re about to learn what it means for a Hand to go to war.”

  The call was silent for a few seconds.

  “Yeah, that’s about what we need,” she admitted. “Can I ask that you leave my command center intact when you’re done, though?”

  They were still over a minute out when the first explosion rocked the secondary commercial district that housed Ground Command Alpha. Evacuation orders had been issued, but there were no officers to enforce them.

  Most people were smart enough to get the hell out when the police starting issuing even voluntary evacuation. The explosions weren’t targeted at any of the civilian buildings, anyway.

  They still blew out the bottom four floors of a bank office tower that Damien hoped had been fully evacuated. It took him less than two seconds to confirm that the explosion was directly above the command center.

  “Get us on the ground,” he ordered.

  “Working on—”

  “Threat detected. Threat detected.” The mechanical voice of the shuttle’s systems echoed through the cockpit, and Damien recognized the icons on the sensors before the pilot spoke again.

  “SAMs incoming. Diving hard.”

  “No. Fly straight,” the Hand ordered. “I’ll put us down.”

  The pilot looked at him with fear and confusion in his eyes but obeyed. Even as the high-speed missiles blasted toward them, he stabilized the shuttle.

  Damien closed his eyes—and then the shuttle was somewhere else. They were less than a meter above the ground now, blazing a trail directly toward the gap torn open in the tower.

  The sensors flagged the man-portable surface-to-air-missile launchers firing at the incoming rapid-response force, and even as the pilot fired every forward thruster he had to slow their hurtling progress, he also tapped a series of commands with a half-free hand.

  The assault shuttle had several different weapons systems available, but the pilot went for the simplest: twin thirty-millimeter railguns fired in atmosphere mode. The weapons were designed for deep space, but in atmosphere, they fired a fifty-gram aerodynamic “arrow” at five hundred kilometers per second.

  Each round hit with the force of a hundred kilograms of modern explosives. The pilot walked a dozen shots across the already-wrecked lobby, and the threat icons from the man-portable SAMs disappeared.

  Half a second later, the shuttle itself hammered into the ground with brutal force. Any of the saboteurs still up would have been burned to ashes by the flaming rockets.

  “Go!” Damien ordered. “Sweep the site, secure the entrance. Legatus doesn’t
go for single-point-of-failure plans.

  “There will be a second string to this mess.”

  There was still a first string, as it turned out. The Marines aboard Damien’s shuttle were a platoon seconded to the Protectorate Secret Service as his bodyguards. While that meant they hadn’t seen action in the last eighteen months, it also meant that they’d been training with the elite troops and Combat Mages who guarded the Mage-King of Mars.

  They swarmed out of his shuttle expecting to be fired on, and the Republic ground team met that expectation. Most of the Republic troops were carrying regular small arms, however, and Damien’s Marines were all in full exosuit armor.

  Bullets ricocheted off the heavy body armor, and the two heavy penetrator rifles punched through. One of the Marines went down—and so did the two women with the anti-armor gear.

  The Marines moved out with practiced efficiency, fire teams providing covering fire as other teams moved forward. The infiltrated attack squad were utterly outclassed—and the bodyguards had them outnumbered.

  It was over in moments. Another Marine was wounded, but Damien’s people now controlled the surface above Ground Command Alpha.

  “Looks like at least a forward team has gone down,” Romanov reported. “None of these people are Augments. I’d say local recruits.”

  “And the Augments are in the base,” Damien agreed. “Send two squads down after them, hold the third up here. I don’t think this is—”

  It was funny. He’d seen, heard, or set off at least a dozen nuclear-equivalent explosions, but he’d never seen or heard an actual nuke before. Nonetheless, he knew instantly what had happened when the ground shook and a cloud of fire rose into the sky. The mushroom shape of the cloud was just confirmation.

  “Julia!” he barked into his link with the Minister for Defense. “Where was it?”

  “The RTA,” she told him flatly. “I don’t know enough to know if it’s repairable; we may have intercepted it before they got it into the array…”

  “In which case the shell should have protected it, but the array will still be temporarily offline,” Damien told her. “My Marines are yours. Where do you need them?”

  “I’m redirecting APA units towards the RTA but…” She choked off, then: “Fuck. Damien, the RTA is in a goddamn exurb of the city. I don’t know how big the bomb was, but there are half a million people within twenty kilometers of that rock.”

  “We’ll redirect all of the Marines in the air to search-and-rescue support,” Damien told her. “We’ll save them, Julia.”

  “We have to,” she replied.

  “My lord,” Romanov interrupted. “I thought the Minister said the APA was outside of town.”

  “They are. Why?”

  “Because our scanners are picking up exosuits. Lots of exosuits. They’re coming our way.”

  And Damien had just ordered his reinforcements redirected.

  “Damien?” Julia asked.

  “That’s my problem, Minister Amiri,” he told her formally. “The Marines in the air are yours. Ground Command Alpha will be intact when this is over. You have my word.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll do my job, Julia. You do yours.”

  He cut the channel and turned back to the Marines with him.

  “Agent Romanov, ladies, gentlemen,” he said brightly. “Our reinforcements are going to go save people from that nuke, and it seems the Republic thinks that means we can be overrun.

  “I don’t think they know I’m here, and that’s a mistake they’re not going to survive making. Dig in and get ready. It seems like the war is coming to us.”

  The Marines saluted and got to work as Damien took a moment to assess the situation. He needed to see what he was affecting, which meant that he needed good sight lines.

  “My lord, it’s Commodore Jakab,” another voice echoed in his headset, and Damien inhaled sharply as he realized there was only one reason Jakab would be contacting him right now.

  “They’re here, aren’t they?” he asked.

  “Full carrier group just jumped into the system,” Jakab confirmed. “Your orders?”

  “I’m down here. You’re up there. Defend the planet, Mage-Commodore. I’ll make sure they don’t blow it up behind you.”

  30

  “Battle stations! All hands to battle stations.”

  It took Roslyn a few seconds to separate the clarion call of Stand’s general quarters alarm in reality from the identical klaxon in her nightmare. She finally jerked awake, escaping one nightmare for another.

  “Battle stations! All hands to battle stations,” the automated voice screamed through the ship, and she rolled out of bed, the feel of the cold floor knocking the last of the sleep from her system.

  A gesture and a wisp of power pulled her combat vac-suit from the closet and she pulled it on as quickly as she could.

  The klaxon muted after the first minute, by which point she was already out of her quarters and heading for the bridge. The destroyer’s corridors were controlled chaos, spacers heading for their stations at the carefully controlled run they trained for.

  She wasn’t even the last officer on the bridge, with a full minute left before the “acceptable” mark for a drill.

  Except this was no drill. Five ugly red icons glittered on the display as she dropped into her seat and brought her systems online.

  “What have we got, Tactical?” Kulkarni asked once she was up and running.

  “We’re in the fleet tactical network,” she told the Captain. “We’re making it a full heavy battle group, two twenty-megaton cruisers, two forty megaton-battleships and a fifty-megaton carrier.” More icons speckled her display as she watched.

  “Gunships launching. Computer makes it two hundred fifty, repeat, two-five-zero hostile gunships.”

  “Any orders from the flag?” Kulkarni asked Armbruster.

  “Mage-Commodore Jakab is assuming full tactical command of the combined Navy and Militia fleet,” the coms officer reported. “We are to move into formation Delta-Six along predesignated vector Oscar-Nine at fifty KPS, then hold velocity and vector for further orders.”

  “Helm? Make it happen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Their new helmsman was already on it.

  “That puts us out in front, sir,” he reported. “Are we sure we even know which end of the ship the missiles come out of?”

  “I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?” Kulkarni asked.

  The young man was one of the most recent acquisitions from one of the other destroyers. It took Roslyn a moment to even remember his name—Lieutenant Adrian Coleborn. Suddenly, she had a sinking suspicion as to why his old ship had been able to spare his services.

  “This is a scratch crew, built on a core of runaways with a kid at tactical,” Coleborn replied, gesturing toward Roslyn. “Does she even know how to fire the weapons? All she’s done so far is run away!”

  “Lieutenant, may I remind you that the officer you are slandering is the only person on this ship with the Mage-King’s Medal of Valor—and she got it for a damn good reason,” Kulkarni snapped. “I suggest you apologize to Mage-Lieutenant Chambers before I have you up on charges for undermining the chain of command in the face of the enemy!”

  Seconds ticked by in frozen silence.

  “My apologies, Mage-Lieutenant,” he ground out. “I am…merely concerned at your lack of combat experience.”

  “And how many battles have you even been near, Lieutenant Coleborn?” Kulkarni asked. “Zero, according to your record. That’s two less than Mage-Lieutenant Chambers.”

  “My concern is clearly unfounded,” Coleborn said, though his tone made it clear he didn’t truly believe that.

  “Good. Because there’s over ten million tons of gunships heading our way, and I’d rather we didn’t do their work for them!”

  “They’re holding five squadrons back to guard the carrier group,” Roslyn reported. “I don’t know against what; it’s not like we’re go
ing to abandon the planet to try and surprise a force that outguns us on every possible metric.”

  “They know we have to have reinforcements incoming,” Kulkarni replied. “They might not know the details, but they know there’s a chance a fleet is going to show up behind them.”

  The young tactical officer looked over her data and shook her head.

  “Twelve hours until we’re due to see Admiral Medici,” she said, in answer to the Captain’s unspoken question. “Gunship strike is four hours from range. They’re faster than the carrier group. Their second wave will be later.”

  “Any chance we’ll be facing their capital ships before Medici arrives?” Kulkarni asked.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Roslyn told her as she ran the numbers. “They’ll probably be in missile range before he gets here, so it’ll depend on how hard they’re going to push it.”

  Her new Captain grunted, looking at the numbers herself.

  “If they wait to see how the gunship strike performs, they might just hand us this,” she noted. “It depends on what their limitations on jumping are.”

  Roslyn was lost for a moment, so she looked at the same data the Mage-Captain was studying.

  “If they can jump out that close to the planet, they can push in, wipe out our defending fleet, and withdraw before Medici can trap them against the planet,” Kulkarni explained. “If they know Medici is coming, then that has to be their plan.”

  “They seem to know more about what we’re doing than we do,” Roslyn said. It took her a moment to realize she’d been actively whining, and she swallowed down that tone with a flash of embarrassment.

  “They do,” the Captain agreed, in a far more adult tone of voice. “If we could take one of their ships…”

  “We did just drop every Marine in the fleet to the surface,” the younger woman pointed out. Her focus was on the incoming fleet, but she hadn’t missed the nuke going off next to the RTA. “I don’t think boarding ops are an option today.”

  “No. Today, regardless of what happens afterwards, our first priority is to survive that gunship strike.”