Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  Damien took the time to force himself to breathe, working magic around himself to reduce the pressure for a few moments, and then focused on the camera once again as he exhaled a heavy breath.

  “All Navy Captains, this is Montgomery,” he told the recorder.

  “By now, you have been notified of the incipient attack on Council Station by fringe elements. We have reason to believe these elements have been enabled and armed by outside forces and represent a clear and immediate danger to the safety of the Protectorate and, clearly, of Council Station itself.”

  The phrasing was formal, stilted…and critically important. By declaring the Belt Liberation Front a danger to the Protectorate, Damien made it a Protectorate problem. A Royal problem.

  A Hand’s problem—and most importantly, not the Council’s jurisdiction.

  “By now, you have also received orders from Lictor-Constable Lucas telling you to break off, informing us that the Council is not lifting the neutrality zone and therefore Navy warships are not permitted within one light-minute of Council Station.”

  Damien smiled.

  “I am overriding her orders in the Name and the Voice of the Mage-King of Mars,” he told them. “In the interests of the security of the Protectorate, I am voiding the neutrality zone around Council Station and ordering all available warships to move to protect the Station.

  “The Station will come under enemy fire at fourteen hundred thirty-six hours,” he said flatly. “At some point after that, a second enemy assault of ships and boarding troops will commence. You will proceed to the Station and engage those ships, using any means necessary up to and including counter-boarding operations by your Marines.

  “The Council may be stubborn and proud, but they remain under His Majesty’s Protectorate and we will protect them,” Damien told the Navy officers. “God speed you, Captains. I have faith in you.”

  The message went out and Damien leaned back, letting the full force of Doctor Akintola’s acceleration crush him down again.

  “That’s everything,” he half-whispered. “Ten hours. Ten hours…and all I can do is hope that the bastards had better aim than I’m inclined to give them credit for.”

  #

  Chapter 34

  Damien forced himself to sleep. Even under five gravities of subjective acceleration, he could manage it, at least with the drugs he currently had.

  He was very careful to be sure that no one else saw him take the medication, though. Romanov knew he had the pills—Damien’s desire to keep his weakness hidden fell second to the necessity of his bodyguard knowing he was using sleeping pills.

  They knocked him out for seven hours, almost exactly, leaving him awake and watching over an hour before the expected impact.

  Navy ships were visible for light-minutes in every direction, their antimatter engines brilliant stars that stood out against the night sky as a dozen destroyers burned toward Council Station from as many different directions. Unlike Akintola, they weren’t even decelerating. Damien would arrive at the Station at a speed where he could engage enemy ships and dock with the station to protect it himself.

  The destroyers would pass by at velocities that were frankly dangerous inside the asteroid belt. The Belt might not look like fiction made it, but there was enough debris and dust to make speeds of over a percent of lightspeed unwise.

  Those Captains didn’t care. Duty said they would be at Council Station in time to intervene, and if that meant shooting down an inconvenient asteroid or even taking a meteor strike to the million-ton warships’ mighty forward armor, then that was what they would do.

  He mentally saluted them. The Royal Martian Navy was a peacetime fleet, with all of the problems that entailed, but its crews and officers understood what the Navy existed for.

  There was enough civilian shipping scattered around the system that they couldn’t be sure they’d picked out the BLF ships. There were at least three clusters of ships of the right size on vectors that could be turned to attack Council Station. Half a dozen ships on similar vectors that were much larger than the vessels they knew the BLF to have, including a Dealer-type sublight freighter that resembled his old ship Blue Jay enough to bring back a twinge of memories.

  “Ninety minutes to impact,” Samara told him softly. “No one has even picked up a hint of the projectiles.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Damien reminded her. “They’re not fast enough or active enough to be picked up with anything except active sensors, and that at only about a million kilometers.”

  He sighed.

  “We’ll see them coming,” he admitted. “Council Station will see them a good quarter-hour before they hit, but the Station’s defenses have nothing that can stop a hundred-ton hypervelocity projectile.”

  “Does anything have a defense that can stop that?” Samara asked.

  He shrugged.

  “A modern missile defense laser is designed to detonate the fuel supply on a missile,” he admitted, “but it would still vaporize enough of a pure iron projectile to force a miss. Mostly, the defense against something like this is to be able to dodge, which the platforms at Council Station simply can’t do. They weren’t designed for it.”

  “Seems shortsighted.”

  “It was,” Damien agreed. “But reading between the lines, the first Mage-King intentionally crippled Council Station’s defenses. I think he figured the only person likely to be trying to break through them was him.”

  Samara shook her head.

  “The more I hear about the Mage-King’s grandfather, the more I realize he was a paranoid bastard.”

  “He was,” Damien confirmed. “But he also ended a hundred-year-long war, stopped a continuing eugenics project that had lasted just as long, and pulled the Mages out of a forced breeding program. He had a lot of credit to spend.”

  “So, what now?” she asked.

  “We wait ninety minutes and see what’s left,” he said grimly. “Then we go make sure whatever’s still intact stays intact.”

  #

  The targeting data they’d found at the hidden launch site was, to Damien’s mild surprise, almost completely accurate.

  At the exact moment his projections said that Council Station’s radar would detect the incoming projectiles, glaring red icons began to flash up on the feed he was receiving from them.

  The projectiles were actually closer to Doctor Akintola than they were to Council Station, though outside the reach of both the yacht’s low-powered proximity radar and Damien’s magical power. They continued at the same steady pace they’d maintained the whole trip, while Akintola was slowing down, decelerating to allow them to have a useful interaction when they arrived.

  Even Damien couldn’t reduce the velocity of a full-size starship by enough to have made a high-speed approach worthwhile. Physics left him slowing down as he watched the massive iron slugs ahead of him close with the station he was try to save.

  “Right on schedule,” Samara reported. “Vectors are aligned with the data we had. Forty-five projectiles in total, no attrition.”

  “What was going to take out those things by accident?” he asked bitterly. Still over an hour away from Council Station himself, all they could do was watch.

  “Not much,” she agreed. “We’ve confirmed all fifteen defense platforms are evacuated. We still have multiple potential groups of ships,” she continued, “but I think our problem is these guys.”

  The approaching BLF spaceships weren’t what Damien wanted to look at right now, but her attempted distraction was welcome regardless. She’d highlighted a group of ten ships, six intra-system transports and four mining ships, that were on a vector that could easily adjust to arrive at Council Station thirty minutes after the bombardment.

  “The other three potentials are either too few ships or, well, a big freighter that’s on a scheduled flight,” Samara concluded, highlighting the others. There was a trio of mining ships in one group and four intra-system transports flying in convoy in the other.
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  The last of her eliminated options was the Dealer-type freighter Damien had noted before.

  “The Dealer was making a scheduled delivery to Council Station,” she told him. “She’s been warned off and has adjusted her vector to clear the Station, but her Captain advises that if she doesn’t make her delivery, Council Station only has a week or so of oxygen and food.”

  “We’ll worry about that if we’re still here tomorrow,” Damien pointed out.

  “That’s what Constable Lucas told her,” Samara said. “If those ships are the BLF, my lord—”

  “The destroyers will be in range for long-range missile fire before they reach the station,” he agreed. “But we don’t know, Inspector, and I’m not willing to blow apart ships without knowing. None of those ships are responding to hails”—he gestured at the three groups of ships—“and Belt ships are notorious for ignoring authority and having ‘broken’ radios. The two have something to do with each other,” he finished dryly.

  Further discussion was cut off as he turned back to the screen and inhaled. The distraction had bought him a few minutes’ not staring at the inbound bombardment, but time was running out. His image was only a few seconds delayed now, and a sudden sick silence fell over Akintola’s bridge as the time ran out.

  Council Station’s defense platforms were spread across a full light-second, extending the range of their lasers and old missiles across a massive area of space. As the projectiles closed, the lasers opened fire under automated control.

  Jets of vaporized metal flared in space, attempts to slow or deflect the massive projectiles…but they were too massive and too fast. The adjustments inflicted were too little, too late, and the closest defense platform lit up with bright sparks as two massive projectiles slammed into it.

  The others followed, a growing sphere of destruction around the station as the Belt Liberation Front’s hammer came down, shattering platform after platform.

  They managed to deflect some of the projectiles, though not enough to save any of the defenses. Each defense platform took at least one hit, but half a dozen slugs went tumbling off into space. Two slammed into the surface of Ceres, thankfully far enough away from the remaining settlements to avoid immediate consequences.

  And one, Damien realized a heart-wrenching second before it happened, was deflected into Council Station. It was a glancing hit, the projectile hitting at an angle and being smashed aside by the Station’s rapid rotation, but the flare of fires and explosive outgassing was visible even from Akintola’s hundreds of thousands of kilometers’ distance.

  His warning had saved hundreds of lives on the defense stations, but that single hit had probably cost just as many lives as had been spared. The ships around the station were buzzing like hornets, some rushing for the assumed safety of the docking ports, others turning to land on Ceres, while still others simply fled.

  The ships that fled were the first to come under fire.

  #

  Chapter 35

  Samara had assessed correctly. The ten-ship flotilla was clearly BLF ships, the four mining ships opening fire with lasers on the fleeing civilian transports, while the smaller transport vessels launched missiles that had been strapped to their hulls.

  Those missiles, Damien noted, were cheap pieces of crap, fusion-drive weapons with accelerations of only a thousand gravities…but they were also far better weapons than the Front had shown in the attack on Callisto.

  The railguns that also opened fire were what he’d been expecting, fifty-gram slugs accelerated to the same thousand kilometers a second of the more massive projectiles that had just devastated Council Station.

  The space around Ceres turned to chaos. There were over forty ships either docked with the Station or in close proximity. None were large, only two were even jump ships according to their beacons, and none were sure of whether they wanted to run or hide under Council Station’s skirts.

  The ones that had already tried to run died.

  A jump-yacht, presumably belonging to one of the Councilors, took a trio of fusion-drive missiles and disappeared in a flash of failing reactor containment.

  A quartet of interplanetary shuttles, on their way in from the Jupiter Yards, tried to turn and run. Railgun slugs ripped them apart.

  Two orbital runabouts, carrying tourists down to Ceres, caught a laser apiece and came apart above the old mining colony, scattering fiery ash across the dome.

  Even the ones that tried to hide were dying, the space around Council Station beginning to fill with railgun slugs and debris. A collision claimed the only jump-courier around the station, an in-system fast hauler loaded with fresh delicacies from Earth slamming into the fragile jump-ship with enough force to split both vessels in half.

  It was a disaster in the making, and Akintola was diving right into the middle of it.

  “I think they spotted us,” Damien noted as he picked out six missiles rising up out of the chaotic mess, the weapons on a clear course for his jump-yacht. “If they had more missiles, I’d even feel threatened.”

  The bravado was a frail shield against the dying ships he could only watch.

  He tapped a channel.

  “Romanov, how do your pilots feel about dogfighting?”

  “A lot better than they feel about watching civilians die,” the Marine replied gruffly.

  “Go,” Damien told him. “I think the missiles they’ve thrown at us are their last bolt; they’re down to lasers and railguns…and your shuttles have better weapons than that.”

  “What about Akintola?”

  “I’m taking her right at those mining ships,” Damien replied grimly. “Those lasers are the biggest threat now they’re out of missiles, but I need to get inside fifty thousand klicks to hit them.”

  “Good luck,” Romanov told him. “We’re launching.”

  “Happy hunting, Marines.”

  #

  Denis strapped himself into the second copilot’s seat as the shuttles blasted free. He was in Montgomery’s usual ride, since it seemed the ex-Hand would be using Akintola for anywhere he needed to go today.

  The yacht was still decelerating as the shuttles dropped away, falling behind them as they shot toward Council Station and its attackers. Most of his Marines were still aboard the yacht—the assault shuttle’s weapons functioned best with additional gunners, but that still only brought him up to six a ship instead of the usual twenty.

  “All right, everybody,” he said calmly over the channel to all five ships. “You know how this goes: bad guys to the left of us, civvies to the right, only leaves one place for the Marines.”

  “Right down the middle, sir.”

  “Oohrah, people. Hit them hard.”

  Akintola continued to decelerate. Montgomery might be taking the yacht toward the heaviest concentration of enemy fire he could find, but he also needed to be able to dock with Council Station afterwards.

  Hand or no Hand, the political ramifications of this mess were still apparently Montgomery’s problem. So far as Denis was concerned, better the Mage than him!

  The assault shuttles aligned themselves on the armed transports and lit off their engines, accelerating into battle. Their weapons weren’t much longer-ranged than the ex-Hand’s un-amplified magic. They were mostly designed for ground bombardment, but the designers had made sure they could all be used in space.

  “Akintola-Lead,” the shuttle’s actual copilot announced over the channel, “Fox Three, Three, Three.”

  Three short-ranged missiles blasted free of the shuttle. They were slow things, only a few dozen times faster than the shuttle itself and carrying fifty-kilo chemical warheads. They were designed to disable tanks, bunkers or anti-aircraft turrets, and the assault shuttle only carried six of them.

  Against a military spaceship, their anemic ECM, EW and defensive maneuvers would have doomed them. Against the retrofitted in-system haulers the Belt Liberation Front had brought to the party, the only real issue was their lack of killing power ve
rsus a two-hundred-meter spaceship.

  Five assault shuttles fired a total of fifteen missiles to announce their arrival into the fight. The hauler Denis had flagged could have survived one hit. Might have survived three, or even six.

  It came apart in a cascade of explosions as over a dozen missiles hammered home.

  “Akintola-Lead,” the copilot repeated. “Fox Three, Three, Three.”

  The assault shuttle trembled as the missiles rippled free again, a moment before the gunner, calling the shots for the entire shuttle force, announced, “Guns, Guns, Guns.”

  A second armed transport came apart under the missile fire, and then the paired thirty-millimeter railguns mounted on each shuttle began to fire. Like the air-breathing fighters the assault shuttle had inherited its design ancestry from, the ships only carried enough ammunition for about forty seconds of sustained fire.

  That allowed for a lot of two-second bursts, and Denis flagged two more of the in-system transports as his shuttles flashed into the middle of the fight. The transports had bigger guns, firing hundred- to two-hundred-gram slugs at a thousand kilometers a second. A single hit would shred any of his shuttles.

  His guns were better, firing smaller slugs at three times the velocity. The bursts of slugs ripped through both of the flagged transports, ripping the slow, lumbering terrorist ships to pieces.

  The Marine shuttles’ ECM only bought them so much invulnerability, however, and the two remaining transports filled the space around them with flying debris. Two of Denis’s shuttles came apart, men and women he’d known for years dying in sterile flashes of light.

  His remaining three ships contorted in space as they flashed through the swarm of vessels around Council Station, continuing to fire bursts at the remaining Front attackers as they had clear lines of fire.

  Then his ships were clear, rapidly proceeding out of range as they finally began to decelerate.