Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Airlocks are active and powered,” Corporal Coral reported. “Standard security, the breach package is already through.”

  “Move in and start securing the modules,” Romanov ordered. “Command shuttle is coming in behind you; raise a flag if you hit any resistance.”

  “Wilco, opening the locks and moving in.”

  Exosuits began to vanish into the base as Damien’s shuttle swept toward the ground itself, rockets flaring to slow it to a somewhat reasonable impact.

  “Gravity is…” Romanov snorted. “Point zero three gees. The rock has plenty of iron. Engage your mag-boots and be careful. I want High Watch watching for bad guys, not chasing your lost metal asses. Move!”

  Damien took the time to put on a vac suit, leaving him the last out, with even Romanov in front of him. For the quick run to the airlock he didn’t need the suit, he could hold enough air in with magic, but…if he went flying the same way Romanov was warning his men, he couldn’t keep himself safe for long enough.

  Four exosuited Marines were waiting for him at the base of the shuttle ramp, falling into neat formation as he jogged carefully after the rest of the company. Where they were using mag-boots, Damien was using a spell that kept himself in a small area of artificial gravity.

  The clear landing pad area was surprisingly dust-free, any loose debris or grit clearly having been blasted free. Their three shuttles wouldn’t have managed that on the way down. It would take a lot of launches for an asteroid crater to be this clean.

  “Mass launch from here,” he murmured to Romanov. “Recently.”

  “I concur,” he replied. “How long ago would it have had to be for us to miss it?”

  Damien considered. They’d been watching since they left Mars, but if the Front had been careful, Akintola’s sensors might still have missed them leaving.

  “Twelve hours,” he concluded. “Probably more, but twelve hours ago was the latest they could have snuck out on us unnoticed.”

  “Do you think they saw us coming?”

  “The timing’s suspicious, but…”

  There was another possibility, one Damien let trail to silence. How much information did the BLF have, he wondered? How much access did they—or this Kay—have?

  Would they know that the Mage-King was supposed to be on Council Station in less than two days?

  #

  The interior of the asteroid facility looked the same as a dozen other stations or off-world bases Damien had been in. Prefabricated components looked the same no matter where you put them or who used them.

  There was some decoration here and there, glorified graffiti really, but enough to make it clear that this part of the base had been occupied. There were rooms with beds that had clearly been slept in, armories that had clearly been used recently. The smell of gun oil and sweat seemed to permeate the entire place when he popped his faceplate.

  They clearly hadn’t been properly maintaining the air filtration systems, which surprised Damien. These were Belt miners, men who’d been born and raised in artificial environments. Checking on the safety of their air supply should have been second nature.

  “No one lived here,” Romanov said. “No one ever saw this place as anything except a temporary stopover. Graffiti but no art. Unmaintained life support. Beds but no personal effects.

  “Looks like a second-rate barracks,” he admitted.

  “It wasn’t home, so nobody cared,” Damien realized aloud. “They’d built it to be more but never had the resources or the will to make it more until—”

  “Until they came into ships and guns, apparently through our ‘Kay’,” Romanov agreed grimly. “But I’m not sure there’s anybody here, my lord. I think they all shipped out.”

  “And left the power running?”

  “Keeps the air clean if you end up coming back, and doesn’t use that much fuel if you step it down,” the Marine replied. “Depending on how much fuel they left, could run for a day, a week, or even a month while waiting for them.

  “Does wear your air filters down, though,” he noted thoughtfully.

  “I’d expect better from miners,” Damien replied.

  “Yeah, but the kind of guys who get wrapped up in this sort of nihilistic bullshit are not…the smartest or best of their culture,” Romanov pointed out. “The usual pattern would say we’re dealing with a few charismatic narcissists and a lot of, well, idiots.”

  “My sympathies for their intellectual shortfalls are limited. Let’s see if we can find some kind of computer center,” Damien ordered. “That’s our best chance for anything resembling answers.”

  #

  “Sirs, you have to take a look at this,” Corporal Massey pinged Damien and Romanov over the company network. “I’m not one hundred percent sure what I’m looking at, but it is definitely some kind of computing setup and it isn’t asteroid miner standard prefab. Which separates it from everything else on this rock.”

  “This way,” Romanov told Damien, gesturing back down the corridor they’d been traveling through. “I have Massey’s location on my screen.”

  “Lead the way.”

  While the base itself was huge, less than a fifth of it had been occupied and had an active air supply. It took them only a few minutes to reach the chamber that Massey had found, one of the largest rooms they’d seen so far.

  Despite what Massey had said, it clearly was a prefabbed module, but not a complete room or setup like most of the pods that had been linked together. The walls and roof were prefabricated, the design normally used for a garage with a floor of native rock.

  A pit had been blasted into the rock under it, crudely carved into a series of concentric circles that dropped towards a circular floor four meters across. A large but cheap holo-display had been set up in the middle of that floor, and an assortment of even cheaper consoles had been arranged on the concentric circles.

  “Looks like some kind of command center,” Damien observed. He studied them, counting, and a thought struck him.

  “How many of those satellites were there?” he asked.

  “Final count was forty-five,” Romanov reported.

  “How many consoles do you see, Agent?”

  The Marine’s helmeted head turned to survey the pit in the middle of the room.

  “Son of a bitch. Forty-five.”

  “Boot them up,” Damien ordered. “Let’s see what they were showing.”

  “These models have almost no internal memory,” Corporal Massey pointed out. “They run entirely off the user’s wrist computer.”

  “But with our overrides, we can bring up the last thing on the screen,” Damien replied. “Move.”

  He was settling in at the closest console himself, linking in his wrist computer with its standard set of police overrides—no longer the complicated and powerful overrides his Hand had contained, but capable enough for this.

  The screen lit up with its last image. Rows of numbers tracked across half the screen, with multiple separate images occupying separate sections, all marked with green lines for projected orbits…and a single red line marked with a set of crosshairs.

  “Targeting systems,” he said quietly. “Boot the holo-display. I suspect I know what we’re going to see.”

  The main display made it even clearer. Each of the individual consoles had targeted one weapon, but the big display had been used to derive the primary line of attack. Highlighted on one side of the tank was their current location with its forty-five orbiting satellites.

  Highlighted on the other side was Council Station.

  Damien tapped his wrist PC.

  “Samara, have we established just what those orbitals are?” he asked calmly.

  “We just finished the data run,” she replied, her voice grim. “They’re railguns, my lord. Single-shot, capacitor-fed railguns. Firing them threw them completely off course, I can’t be certain what the target was—”

  “We found the targeting systems,” Damien told her, studying the numbers. “If I’
m reading these projections right, the projectiles will hit Council Station’s defenses in fourteen hours, sixteen minutes, and some change.”

  His staff were silent.

  “We need to get moving,” he concluded. “Samara, forward everything you can put together to the Mountain. Alexander has to delay his trip.”

  “What about the Navy?” Romanov asked.

  “If I remember correctly, the closest ships are at least sixteen hours from Council Station,” Damien told him grimly. “We’re just over fourteen if we go fifteen gees the whole way, but it’ll take us half an hour just to get the Marines back aboard.

  “We can’t beat the projectiles there,” he concluded. “I need to get aboard Akintola and on the coms. If we move fast enough and people listen, we might be able to stop this from turning into an abject disaster.”

  “Understood,” Samara replied. “Packaging for transmission now.”

  Damien turned to Romanov.

  “Get your people moving,” he said grimly.

  “Already on it,” the Marine replied. “Only one question, boss.”

  “What?”

  “It wouldn’t take these guys twenty-six hours to get to Council Station, would it?”

  “It could, easily even,” Damien said slowly. “Depends on how hard they were willing to push those ships. However…these railguns could only impart a thousand kilometers a second of velocity. The rounds have a thirty-hour flight time, and these guys could have left anytime from right afterward to about thirteen hours ago.”

  “So, odds are they went straight to Council Station?” Romanov said. “That makes things simpler, even if they’re going to beat us there.”

  “They had the time to go around a bit to avoid notice, but yes. Anyone who left here after the railguns fired had to have basically gone straight there. That should limit their surprises at this point.”

  His bodyguard snorted.

  “Because the bastards need more surprises.”

  #

  Chapter 33

  Back aboard Akintola, Damien grimaced under five gravities of subjective acceleration as he checked their course ahead, making sure that they were arcing around the inevitable rocks that would orbit into their path.

  Even at a thousand kilometers a second, the massive slugs the Front had fired at Council Station were invisible to anyone’s sensors. They had minimal heat signatures. No power source. Just a hundred tons of iron slag traveling through space with enough velocity to create the equivalent of a ten-megaton nuclear bomb.

  About the only good news was that the data dump they’d taken from the BLF’s holo-display suggested that none of the projectiles were aimed at Council Station itself. In an unusual sign of good sense, none of the Station’s weapons were mounted on the main hull.

  Instead, fifteen smaller defensive stations surrounded Council Station, armed with an array of weapons that had probably been obsolete before the current Mage-King was born. The Belt Liberation Front’s attack had three projectiles targeted on each of them—a massive amount of overkill, in Damien’s opinion.

  He brought up the communications system and mostly managed to wipe the grimace of five gravities of acceleration off his face as he recorded a message for the people ahead of him.

  “Lictor-Constable Cande Lucas,” he greeted the woman he’d argued with once before—the woman in charge of Council Station’s defenses and the one he had to convince of the danger. “This is Damien Montgomery.”

  There was no point telling her he was no longer a Hand. It wasn’t relevant, and it might undermine his urgency.

  “My investigations have discovered an immediate and dire threat to Council Station. At this moment, forty-five one-hundred-ton projectiles are on their way to you at approximately one thousand kilometers per second. They will impact at fourteen hundred hours, thirty-six minutes and some seconds today.”

  He paused, glancing at the data he had on Council Station’s defense and shaking his head.

  “They are targeted on your defense platforms. My data informs me those platforms are only capable of basic maneuvering. You have no way to save them. You need to evacuate those platforms now or you are going to lose hundreds of people.

  “I believe that there is a follow-up wave of at least a dozen ships and several hundred fanatics preparing for a boarding action,” he continued. “I suspect the primary target is the Mage-King himself, and I have requested that he abort or delay his meeting with the Council.

  “The Council, however, are almost certainly targets in their own right,” he said grimly. “I am attaching all of the information I have, Constable. I can’t be certain of the arrival time of the second wave of the attack, but we have exact timing on the thirty-second window those projectiles will arrive in.”

  He sighed.

  “I am on my way at the maximum acceleration this ship is capable of,” he told her. “Unfortunately, I expect to arrive approximately forty minutes after the incoming projectiles.

  “I wish there was more I could give you, Constable. Good luck.”

  Hitting TRANSMIT, Damien turned to Samara.

  “Any response from His Majesty?” he asked.

  “A Your-Eyes-Only message just came in for you while you were recording for Lucas,” she told him. “Transferring it to your screen.”

  “Thank you,” he told her. “I’m sorry I keep drafting you as impromptu bridge crew; I appreciate it.”

  “It’s the only place on the ship with the data and the analytics package,” Samara replied with a grin. “I’ll happily pass on your messages so long as I have access to all of these toys!”

  He returned her smile, then started the video transmitted from Mars over ten minutes before.

  He wasn’t entirely surprised to see the King’s face appear in the screen, Alexander looking old and grave.

  “We’ve received your transmission, Damien,” he said. “I’ve ordered all nearby vessels to immediately make for Council Station. We’re going to violate the shit out of the neutrality agreement I have with them, but I don’t care.

  “I am transferring from the unarmed yacht I was taking to observe that agreement to the battleship Storm of Unrelenting Fury. Given the situation, my escort will not be turning back at the one-light-minute mark and I will be arriving in the company of two battleships and six cruisers.”

  The Mage-King paused.

  “My security is insisting that whichever ship I am on delays, but even if I send part of my escort ahead, Damien, they’ll be twelve hours behind you,” he said softly. “The nearest patrol destroyers will make a high-speed pass and engage any ships in the vicinity…roughly two hours after you arrive.

  “After all that has happened and all that I have asked of you before, I hate to say it, but you are the Council’s only hope. Much as they frustrate me, the Protectorate needs them.

  “Save them for me, Damien Montgomery. I will make certain they understand their debts.”

  #

  Extended time under heavy acceleration had a strange, uniquely amorphous quality to it, in Damien’s experience. Like being five times his normal weight meant that time could be five times faster or five times slower, but not normal.

  The human brain didn’t handle this type of experience well, which meant he had to check a clock to see how long it had been when he received the response from Council Station. Just over an hour, which, given that the message would have taken six minutes either way, could be a bad sign.

  A familiar shaven-headed woman in the white uniform of a Council Lictor appeared on his screen.

  “Lord Montgomery, we received your message,” she informed him. “I apologize for the delay; certain…elements required that we fully validate your data before accepting your conclusions.

  “I have given the order to evacuate our defensive platforms and we welcome your assistance. However”—something in her eyes told him she did not like what she had to say—“I must inform you that the Council is not prepared to relax the neutrality
zone around Council Station.

  “While you and your vessel will be permitted to approach, I have been advised that any decision to allow Martian warships into the neutrality zone would require a majority vote of Council, and we have been unable to assemble quorum.”

  Damien stared at the recording in horror. Were they idiots? Or, worse, despite apparently hating his guts, did they think that he could save them all on his own?

  “I am also passing this message on to the Navy vessels that have begun accelerating towards us,” she continued, her voice flat but her eyes pleading. “I remind you, Lord Montgomery, that as you once told me, I serve the Council—but we both serve the same masters in the end.

  “I ask that you contact the Navy ships as well to…clarify my orders,” she finished, and Damien laughed aloud as he realized what she wanted him to do.

  “This station’s security is my responsibility,” she concluded. “I ask you—no, I beg you—to provide any and all assistance you can.”

  The message ended, and Damien kept chuckling for a moment.

  “My lord?” Samara asked, looking at him like he was insane. Then she paused, shook her head, and tried again without the title. “Damien, what’s so funny?”

  “The Lictor-Constable is an intelligent woman determined to do her duty, trapped under superiors who are actively playing power games with their own lives at risk,” Damien told her. “What she means, my dear Inspector, when she asks me to ‘clarify her orders’ is that she wants me to tell the Navy warships to completely ignore her.”

  He sobered, looking at the frozen image sadly.

  “Of course, I no longer have that authority,” he said quietly. “But then…the Navy Captains don’t know that any more than she did, do they?”

  “They would not,” Samara replied. “Normally, as an officer sworn to uphold the law, I would frown on abusing that lack of knowledge, Mr. Montgomery…but given the circumstances, how can I help?”

  #

  Seconds might count, but every message had minutes’ worth of lightspeed delay.