The Mage-Commodore’s blood ran cold. A jump flare that large had to be at least an entire squadron of cruisers. There was no reason for that kind of force to come to Ardennes - unless they had some idea of just what had actually been going on.
She gave her waffles a sad look.
“Inform Captain Ishtar I’m on my way to the bridge,” she ordered. “Let me know immediately if anything changes.”
#
Mage-Commodore Cor strode onto the bridge of her flagship with a storm cloud on her heels. Her quarters were only slightly further away than the Captain’s, and there had been no time for anything to change before she made it from her uneaten breakfast to the central Simulacrum Chamber of the warship.
“We have a problem,” Mage-Captain Devi Ishtar told her bluntly, and gestured at the section of the screens surrounding them zoomed in on the emerging ships.
Cor may not have understood the imagery and scans used for aerial and ground combat, but she knew the iconography the Unchained Glory used to identify starships perfectly. It still took her a minute to identify just what was at the center of the five-ship formation now dropping towards Ardennes.
“That is a battleship,” she said aloud, her voice surprisingly calm.
“Righteous Guardian of Liberty,” Ishtar confirmed. “Accompanied by four Honorific class cruisers. Last reports have all five ships in the Tau Ceti system.”
“Have they communicated yet?” Cor asked. It was theoretically possible that they were here to refuel at the logistics base.
“Not yet… wait,” Ishtar stopped as the communications officer held up his hand. “We’ve got something?”
“Incoming from Righteous Guardian,” the officer confirmed. “I can forward it to your office?”
The battleship was still a full light minute away, ten hours travel to make a zero velocity intercept in orbit. Any message was a recording that could be played and replayed before responding.
Cor swallowed and glanced around the room. Everyone on the bridge had been there when they’d blown Karlsberg to hell. Everyone was in on the half-a-dozen dirty little deals she’d cut with Vaughn, and they’d all collected their own cuts of the ‘special compensation packages’.
There was nothing she could hide from them.
“No,” she answered slowly. “Put it on the screens.”
The bridge of a warship was also its Simulacrum Chamber, centered on the small silver model that, magically at least, was the ship. All of its walls were covered with screens, with the bridge crew working on platforms suspended in the middle of the pyramid-shaped room.
A window opened on the screens ahead of them all, resolving into a familiar woman in the navy blue uniform of the Royal Martian Navy, and the same golden circle on her collar as Cor.
“Mage-Commodore Adrianna Cor, this is Mage-Commodore Jane Adamant aboard the Righteous Guardian of Liberty,” the woman introduced herself. She would have known Cor would recognize her, but she was speaking for the record. Cor knew the tone.
“It is my duty to inform you that charges of the most grievous nature have been laid against you,” she continued. “You stand accused of mass murder and grand treason. My orders from His Majesty are to take you into custody.
“You will stand down your ships. All of your vessels must power down their weapons and evacuate their Simulacrum Chambers.
“You have one hour to comply, or I will use whatever force is necessary to bring you in.”
The transmission ended, and Cor stared at the screen, now showing the stylized rocket-and-red-planet logo of the Royal Martian Navy. The bridge was silent around her, and she realized everyone was looking at her.
“Ma’am,” Captain Ishtar asked, her voice soft and slow. “What do we do?”
She swallowed and spoke as calmly as she was able.
“First, I think I need to talk to Governor Vaughn.”
#
“What do you mean, there’s a battleship in my system?” Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn demanded of the crew in the main command center. “Where did it come from?”
“IFF identifies it as the Righteous Guardian of Liberty, sir,” Captain Duval reported. “Last Royal Navy listing we received reported it as being in Tau Ceti, preparing for a refit.”
The newly promoted Captain swallowed hard as his Governor rounded on him.
“The cruisers are also from Tau Ceti,” he said quietly. “All of them should be part of Mage-Admiral Segal’s Tau Ceti Station.”
“Why the hell are they here?”
“There was a transmission to Mage-Commodore Cor,” Duval reported. “It was under a Navy encryption; we can crack it but it will take us some time.”
“Fuck that,” Vaughn snapped. “Get Cor on the private line in my office - now. And someone get Montoya - ASAP.”
“He’s in the Center,” Duval confirmed quickly. “I’ll have him join you in your office.” The officer paused. “Mage-Commodore Cor has just opened a channel. She’s requesting to speak with you in private.”
“Connect it to my office,” the Mage-Governor of Ardennes snapped. He left Duval, currently the shift commander, standing awkwardly at the edge of the command center’s central pit.
Slamming his door behind him, Vaughn crossed the underground conference room he’d commandeered and hit the ‘accept’ key on his personal computer. The main wallscreen lit up with the image of Cor’s personal office, a plate of waffles at the Commodore’s elbow and a fork descending from her mouth as she swallowed.
“Governor Vaughn,” she greeted him.
“Commodore Cor,” he replied. “Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”
“I was planning on asking you the same thing,” she said sharply. “You’ve noticed our new friends.”
“Yes. I’m told they’ve communicated with you.”
“They have,” she confirmed. “Their commander is a Mage-Commodore Adamant - an old ‘friend’ of mine who has to be giggling in her shoes.
“I’ve been charged with mass murder and treason. They know, Michael. If they know enough to lay those charges on me, they know enough to hang you next to me.
“I know none of Stealey’s people made it out of this system, Vaughn,” she told him. “So tell me, how the hell do they know?”
Vaughn cursed as he remembered Montoya’s fit of paranoia.
“It’s… possible,” he admitted, “that someone got access to the transceiver array. We had nothing confirmed,” he pointed out, “but it’s possible.”
“I’d say it’s probable, Michael,” she snapped. “And now it’s come home to roost. That battleship is going to settle into orbit and its Marines are going to arrest us both. They’ll haul us back to Mars, give us a perfectly fair trial, and shoot us.”
“Everything I have done was for Ardennes,” Vaughn said stiffly. Much of what he’d done could be argued as criminal, but he was the Governor. It had been necessary.
“Martian courts won’t care, Michael,” Cor said softly, almost gently.
“I feel like we’re missing something,” he said after a moment. “A Hand falls, another rises…”
“What?” the Commodore looked at him like he was crazy.
“There’s no Hand on Ardennes, Adrianna,” he told her. “A Mage-Commodore with a warrant can arrest you, but she doesn’t have the authority to arrest me. They need a Hand for that, and Stealey’s dead.”
The door behind him opened and closed and he glanced back to see Montoya enter the room. He gestured the General to a chair and turned back to Cor.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said with a shake of his head. “This Adamant needs to make orbit before she can do anything. What is your plan, Mage-Commodore?”
Cor paused for a long moment, her eyes falling to the half-eaten stack of waffles on her table. With a convulsive motion, she threw the entire plate into the garbage and looked back up to meet his gaze evenly.
“I intend to fight,” she said flatly. “Adamant has us out-massed
, but I have her outnumbered, and I have years more experience in squadron command than she has.
“What I need from you is the ASDF,” she continued. “I want you to put Admiral Martine under my command. With those destroyers, we stand a chance!”
Vaughn considered. Admiral Delia Martine commanded the fifteen Tau Ceti-built destroyers of the Ardennes System Defense Force. They were modern, capable ships, if a generation behind the Navy by Protectorate law. They’d been expensive as hell, but now they looked to be worth every penny.
“Done,” he promised. “I will advise Admiral Martine immediately.” He paused. “Don’t fail me, Adrianna,” he told her. “We can still get out of this.”
The Mage-Commodore smiled thinly. “You mean I can still get us out of this,” she told him. “We’ll see what happens.”
#
“They’re here!”
The bellow that echoed across the main landing pad in the Freedom Wing’s hidden airbase drew everyone’s attention. They had a small ‘sensor’ station set up on one side of the cavern, though its data actually came from a hack into the planetary defense network.
The operator, who had been keeping an eye on the orbital scanners and watching for the Navy to arrive, was standing and pointing at the screen. A few keystrokes activated a hidden projector and threw the sensor return up on the smooth stone wall, highlighting the five signatures of the newly arrived Navy task force.
Damien whistled as he interpreted the data signatures. He’d suspected that Alexander would send Adamant and the Righteous Guardian, but it was still amazing to see that half-kilometer pyramid slicing through space.
The shorter and narrower spikes of the cruisers next to her were a welcome sight as well. His King had pulled out all of the stops - five ships might seem a bare handful against the twenty-one already in orbit, but there were only twelve battleships in the entirety of human space.
He watched, bemused, as everyone dropped what they were doing and started scrambling for preparation. A moment later, Brute - the pilot already half-into his flight-suit - stopped next to him in confusion.
“Shouldn’t we be getting ready?”
“They’re still ten hours out,” Damien reminded him quietly. Glancing around, he realized that if he didn’t put a hold on things, the Wing was going to fire off the operation with Cor still in orbit. That wasn’t going to help anyone.
“Everybody calm down,” he bellowed, loud enough for everyone to hear him, then hopped up on a box so they could all see him.
“That’s Mage-Captain Adamant and the battleship Righteous Guardian of Liberty,” he announced so everyone could hear him. “I promised you justice - I promised you Mars would come - and we sent our best. That is fifty million tons of long-overdue justice.
“But,” he continued, “she’s still a full light minute - eighteen million kilometers - away. It’ll take the Guardian a little over ten hours to close that distance, and she won’t maneuver faster than that unless something goes damn wrong down here.
“So, breathe,” the Hand ordered. “Adamant will deal with Cor. It will fall to us to deal with Vaughn, but we won’t do anyone any favors by rushing. Check and double check everything. We move into Nouveaux Versailles in six hours.
“Then our dear Governor Vaughn will learn the punishment for his many, many crimes.”
The chaos slowed, a scattering of applause turning into cheers and waving fists. Every eye in the room was on Damien - was on the Hand of Mars.
Somehow, in kicking the Wing into gear, it appeared that he’d accidentally taken command.
#
Montoya had waited patiently while Vaughn informed Admiral Martine of her new orders. The Admiral, despite nominally being senior to ‘Commodore’ Cor, took the orders in stride. Any two of Cor’s cruisers, after all, out-massed Martine’s entire fleet.
“I’m assuming you didn’t call me in here to have me listen to you talk to our naval commanders, such as they are,” Montoya observed dryly after the call ended. “I take it that someone definitely did get to the RTA?”
“Most likely Montgomery,” Vaughn conceded, agreeing aloud with what his chief General had said days before. “Alexander wouldn’t have listened to anyone less - at least, not enough to send a fucking battleship.”
“So, what happens now? We watch and pray that Cor wins the day?”
“Cor is going to get her ass blown out of the sky,” Vaughn said bluntly. “I know it and she knows it. She probably knows it with more certainty - I’m guessing because I can’t see Alexander sending a fleet that couldn’t take out what he knew was here.”
“Shit.”
“So, my question for you, General, is where does that leave us?”
“In trouble,” Montoya said dryly. “We have enough missile launchers and other defenses that any assault on Nouveaux Versailles will be messy as hell. There are definitely ways they can get troops here - if nothing else, they can fly down the Fault a hell of a lot more easily than we can get missiles or interceptors over it.
“Planetary assaults are an ugly, ugly business though,” he continued. “Faced with that, they may be willing to negotiate. If we can rely on our troops.”
“Your Scorpions?”
“Utterly reliable,” Montoya replied. “They’re already in control of Versailles’ defenses. But we’re pretty spread out, any defense of this city will fall primarily on the Army.”
“If we’re attacked, they will do their duty,” Vaughn snapped. “Or they’ll regret it.
“But you said you were working on an insurance policy, Montoya. Is it ready to be activated?”
“It is,” the Scorpion’s commander confirmed. “But… it’s a last-ditch option, Governor. It should suffice to get you and me off the planet, but it won’t save your government.”
“Then we’ll hold off for now,” Vaughn told him, wondering at his friend’s vagueness. The only option they’d really discussed was a fast ship, after all.
“I’ll be ready if everything else fails, my friend. We will get out of this,” Montoya promised.
#
Chapter 39
“Here they come,” announced Commander Kayin Breisacher, the Righteous Guardian of Liberty’s Tactical Officer. “Six Hammer class cruisers, fifteen Lancer class destroyers - looks like the entire ASDF is coming out to play too.”
Adamant nodded, reviewing the tactical data herself. Cor’s squadron mustered six identical ships, and the Hammer class were older ships but still serviceable. According to the Fleet List, all six ships had been fully updated with the latest electronics and missiles, too, so she had no range advantage.
The Lancers were a different matter. Tau Ceti built them for export, and the Charter limited what could be sold to another system’s defense forces. Their missiles would be at least a generation behind the Navy vessels, with almost eight light seconds’ less range given the current geometry.
Unfortunately, the people who’d designed the Lancers had expected that weakness. Despite being barely a tenth of the size of the Hammer class, each of the Lancers actually carried seventy percent of the Hammer‘s missile defense lasers.
Those fifteen ships almost tripled Cor’s missile defenses, and as long as she held her formation together they’d be a tough nut to crack.
“What about the logistics depot?” she asked aloud. “Shouldn’t there be ships out there?”
“Negative, ma’am,” Breisacher replied. “Looks like everybody was in Ardennes orbit.”
Adamant nodded slowly. That made sense, she supposed - the planet was in civil turmoil, the Navy was expected to help. It did ignore the fact that Cor’s squadron was supposedly here to defend the logistics depot orbiting the gas giant - a logistics depot that contained enough modern missiles to allow a smart and brave pirate to carve out a new empire.
“Any verbal response from Cor?” she asked.
“Negative, ma’am,” her com officer replied. “But…” he gestured to the screen showing the slow adva
nce of the twenty-one warships.
“Oh, her message is perfectly clear, Lieutenant,” the Mage-Commodore replied with a small smile. “I was wondering if she’d bothered to try to make excuses. For that matter, her acceleration is damned low.”
Her own task force was driving in at five gravities, an acceleration easily absorbed by the rune matrix that provided the ships with artificial gravity. Cor’s force was only coming out to meet them at a single gravity. All of her ships should have gravity runes, but they were playing it safe anyway.
“Re-send the recording, Lieutenant Fiero,” she ordered her com officer. “Let’s take away any chance for the Commodore to pretend she didn’t know what we’re here for.” She turned to Breisacher. “Commander - please have the squadron prepare to clear for action in…”
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?”
Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars Page 27