Damien did the mental equivalent of sitting on his hands. Mage-Captain Jakab knew better how to fight his ship than the Hand did.
“Steiner,” Jakab snapped at his navigator. “Evasive maneuvers, if you please, and take us toward the bastard. Fifteen gravities.”
Both ships were moving now, though everything they saw of the enemy was delayed more than thirty seconds. Fields of jamming swept out from the ships and the missiles, causing the tactical plot to surround every icon with a shaded probability zone where it could be.
Duke came under threat first, the missiles sweeping into the engagement zone of her Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets at over fifteen percent of lightspeed.
This was the environment an Honorific-class battlecruiser was built for, and a hundred RFLAM turrets flared to life. Their beams were invisible to the naked eye and the cameras that covered the flag decks walls with the view of the outside world.
The tactical plot drew them in automatically as tiny lines of white light. Every half-second, each RFLAM fired a tenth-second pulse at a missile. Lines flashed and appeared on the tactical plot with eye-searing speed, many of those flashes ending in explosions visible to the naked eye.
None of the missiles made it closer than a million kilometers, the gigaton explosions of their deaths three seconds or more old by the time the light reached Duke of Magnificence.
Their own missiles did better. The enemy ship had a full defensive suite, easily comparable to Duke’s in quantity though not quality. The weaker lasers, equivalent to those the Navy mounted on destroyers, couldn’t engage nearly as far out as Duke’s defenses.
Watching the sensor data, Damien found himself holding his breath as the missiles carved their fiery path through the Keeper ship’s defenses. Antimatter explosions marked the trail as missile after missile died—but over a quarter of the missiles closed to within a single light-second of the strange ship.
Then something flashed across the hologram, the computer unable to interpret the sensor data into anything useful, and third of the missiles disappeared. A few seconds later, more energy flared, and this time Damien recognized it before the computer could.
“Amplifier,” he said aloud. “Watch their closing rate, Captain Jakab. They have an amplifier.”
“That’s…a problem,” Duke’s Captain said slowly as the last of his missiles vanished. He was silent for a moment.
“My lord Hand, we’ve never tested our counter-amplifier combat doctrine,” he admitted. “Closest we came was Ardennes, and that was over before anyone was in amplifier range.”
Damien nodded and leaned back in his chair.
“No one else knows any better either,” he told his ship’s commander. “Fight your ship, Mage-Captain.”
#
The first missiles salvos had each been launched on their own, with no follow-up, to test the defenses of the other ship.
Duke of Magnificence was capable of emptying her magazines before her first missiles reached their maximum range. Testing the enemy’s defenses before launching follow-on salvos wasn’t always necessary, but in a situation with an unknown enemy, it could be valuable.
If the situation hadn’t already suggested to Damien they’d be facing an enemy who’d read the same playbook, the matching test salvos would have been a strong indicator.
Now, with a solid idea of what they faced, Duke’s missile launchers spun to life again. Eighty missiles blasted into space, followed thirty seconds later by another eighty as the launchers reloaded at their fastest rate.
Icons began to speckle the display around the enemy ship as well as the light from their answering launches reached Duke. Two launches flared into space…and then Damien blinked in surprise as, suddenly, there were two Keeper vessels on the screen, the second emerging from a bright jump flare almost six million kilometers closer than the other.
“Picard Maneuver,” he heard Jakab bark. “Steiner—laser evasive, now! Rhine, Carver—redirect what missiles you can; get our lasers on target!”
The Captain had barely finished giving his orders when the twelve-million-ton battlecruiser lurched like a drunken Marine, a laser beam slamming into the ship with brutal power, vaporizing a massive gash across the hull. Red lights started flashing all across one of the displays on Damien’s chair as the ship took critical damage once more.
“My gods, that was a twenty-gigawatt beam,” Torres exclaimed. “Those are battleship weapons—she only hit with one, but…”
Damien could read the damage display and understood Torres’s unfinished sentence. That one hit had done more damage than the multiple near misses that had sent the cruiser into Tau Ceti’s yards for a month. The schematic of the ship on his screens had a huge swathe of red and yellow marking sections the computer guessed destroyed or damaged.
“Kole?” he said quietly.
“They got us good, Montgomery,” the Mage-Captain said in a strained voice. “We’re evading, they won’t land another hit like that until we’re in basically amplifier range, but those lasers…I don’t know if the old girl can take another solid hit. We’re down a quarter or of our launchers and the same of both our defensive and offensive lasers. They’re stacking their earlier salvos with new salvos, doubling up the numbers.”
Now that the light from the “original” ship had caught up, Damien could see what Jakab had meant by “Picard Maneuver.” The enemy ship had made a twenty-light-second jump, dropping them eleven light-seconds away from Duke, allowing them to attack with lasers by surprise and stack new missile launches on top of old.
Damien was a trained Jump Mage, augmented with Runes of Power and more intimately familiar with the works of the amplifier and the jump spell than most Mages alive…and he wasn’t sure he could have pulled off that jump.
The computer drew the invisible beams of the multi-gigawatt lasers in the tank for the humans, but both ships were now evading. While hits could be deadly at this range, the likelihood of hitting when your knowledge of the target’s location was ten seconds out of date was low.
Watching the deadly dance of starship and laser beams, it took Damien a moment to realize there were no more incoming missiles. Duke continued to belch out over fifty missiles every thirty seconds, but after the stranger had launched two final salvos, timed to coincide with her previous weapons, they’d stopped firing missiles.
“Rhine got him!” Torres snapped, drawing Damien’s attention back to the laser fire. One of Duke’s twelve-gigawatt lasers had connected with the enemy ship. The battlecruiser’s beams were lighter, but with five times as many in play, Jakab’s people had a far better chance to hit.
Icons updated on the screen, notes attached to the enemy ship in the massive holographic tank, assessing the damage and pointing out the gas venting.
“Anything we took out doesn’t matter at this point,” the Hand said quietly. “Not enough damage to take out the amplifier, and all six lasers are still firing.”
“Might help the missiles,” Torres replied. “Gods know we could use help against theirs.”
The double-stacked salvos had now entered the outer perimeter of Duke’s defense zone and the remaining RFLAM turrets were engaging. The gouge through the cruiser’s armor and weapons told in the paucity of her defenses. Instead of the hundred laser turrets that had handily downed forty-five missiles, less than seventy now faced ninety.
On the screen showing the bridge, Damien watched Mage-Captain Jakab go from sitting in his command chair, primarily focused on the technical aspects of commanding his ship, to on his feet with his hands on the simulacrum.
It would be harder to pay attention to the bridge around him while linked into his ship like that, but it would allow him to use his magic directly in defense of the starship—a boost the battered cruiser desperately needed.
“Whoever’s running their amplifier is good,” Torres said quietly. “That’s the first redirected salvo gone. We got some of the turrets, but the Mage is making up the gap.”
; Damien’s focus was on Duke herself, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the arms of his chair. He’d used Duke’s simulacrum to turn the tide of a fight before, but Jakab was far more experienced at it than he was. He just had more raw power than the Mage-Captain did.
Missiles died by their dozens, but there were still dozens left—and a second salvo behind them. Damien found himself holding his breath as the trail of explosions reached toward Duke of Magnificence.
He could feel the magic flow through the runes around him as Jakab reached out to defend his ship. Tiny sparks were visible in the screens that suspended the flag deck in a simulation of the space around them. Each of those sparks, Damien knew, was a swathe of white-hot plasma hundreds of meters across.
Not all of those sparks lit the bright explosions of missile warheads—but many did, and the icons cascading toward Duke in the holo-tank suddenly dissipated, the survivors of the first salvo wiped away by the trained skill of Duke’s commander.
The second doubled-up salvo followed right on the first’s heels. Slower now, launched from closer in or stepped down to arrive with the closer missiles, they were still traveling at over ten percent of lightspeed, giving the lasers under fifty seconds to intercept them all.
Duke’s crew gave it their all, and explosions lit up the surrounding stars with flashes of antimatter fire. Power flared through the amplifier matrix, and more sparks flared into existence, taking missiles with them.
Damien had lived through enough space battles at this point that he could feel the moment it became clear it wasn’t enough. The flag deck crew tensed, bracing for impact—and he rose from his chair, mentally transferring the tracks from the holographic tank in the middle of the room to the surrounding screens.
Without an amplifier, he could only do so much—but a long time before, he’d been taught a spell for just this circumstance, and now he had much more experience and power to throw behind it. He focused, studying the screens for a moment more—and then unleashed his power.
He couldn’t wait to see if he’d had any effect. These screens weren’t designed to enable what he was doing in the same way as the chamber that cocooned the simulacrum. He couldn’t zoom, couldn’t focus—all he could do was throw energy into the path of missiles and hope it was enough.
Again and again he lent his strength to the defenses. Seconds passed like hours…and then it was over, and his staff were staring at him in awe and shock.
“How?” Torres whispered from behind him. “Without an amplifier…you can’t…”
“I am a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” he told them. “I can.”
Damien wavered slightly. He could do it, but without an amplifier, acting at those ranges would drain even him. He carefully grabbed the arm of his chair, turning back to study the tank. The Keeper ship was handling the missile salvos so far, but the salvos were creeping closer. They might finish this before they reached amplifier range.
Then his Sight flared as a massive charge of magic flashed into existence, an immense explosion of plasma and energy tearing a new hole in reality…barely clear of Duke’s hull.
The big cruiser lurched from the shockwave but was undamaged as Damien checked the range. The Keeper ship was still ten light-seconds away—and no one except a Hand could use an amplifier past seven!
#
Damien was already moving by the time the ship stopped vibrating from the near miss, running past his shocked flag deck crew and out the door into the hallway. Two hallways and a ladder to the bridge, and he was already pushing past the fatigue to channel magic to speed his way.
A new gravity source, completely detached from the battlecruiser’s artificial gravity magic, appeared next to the ladder. He leapt forward, letting the pull yank him through the air and into the alcove of the ladder with a bone-shivering catch of a landing.
Dropping down the ladder, he felt the gathering strength of the attack, recognizing it this time as he never had before, and reached out with his own magic. The power wavered through the air around him, time seeming to slow as he saw the other Mage’s amplified strength start to take shape inside Duke of Magnificence.
Since doing nothing would inevitably result in death for him and everyone aboard, Damien grabbed every erg of power he could access, reached into the middle of the gathering power with it and pushed.
Somehow, it worked. The impending crush of energy was suddenly elsewhere, even a relatively tiny amount of force enough to fling it completely off target, though Duke lurched again as he reached the bridge, buffeted by more shockwaves.
Jakab looked up from the simulacrum, his face grim, as Damien charged in.
“That’s where you are,” he snapped. “Torres didn’t know!”
“No one else can use the amplifier at this range,” the Hand told him, but it was unnecessary. The Mage-Captain was already stepping back from the simulacrum, gesturing him toward it.
“They’ve missed us twice,” he told Damien, his voice sharp with strain. “They likely won’t miss us a third time.”
“Steiner,” Damien told the navigator, a pasty-faced man in his mid-twenties. “See if you can make them. Rhine—tell me you’ve got something up your sleeve.”
“Give me sixty seconds and he’ll have the shock of the day,” the tactical officer promised.
“Let’s see.”
Parts of his suit were already smoking from the heat of the runes, but Damien’s gloves were intact as he tore them off and laid his palms on the simulacrum. The small semi-solid silver model was covered in runes except for two points that were perfectly matched to the silver patterns inlaid in every Jump and Navy Mage’s hands.
Linked into the ship at last, Damien let the magic flow through them, restoring and building up on his own reserves as he absorbed the information it fed him. In that moment, the bridge was ever so far away. He was the ship, seeing with her sensors and feeling her wounds.
A third blast of fire was taking shape as his power linked with the ship, but Steiner had pulled an appropriate twisting maneuver that had yanked them out of its way, and Damien took a moment to absorb everything.
Everything he saw of the enemy ship was still ten seconds out of date, but anything he did would take effect in real time. It was part of the advantage of an amplifier over the heavy battle lasers still filling the space between the two ships—the lasers had to travel the ten light-seconds back at lightspeed as well, and his magic did not.
He’d never been linked into an amplifier when someone else was using one before. The Royal Navy’s doctrine basically treated them as super-fast lasers, to be defeated with the speed of light and maneuvering—and for anyone who wasn’t a Rune Wright, Damien agreed that had to be the case.
He felt the fourth attack taking form. It wasn’t going to be a direct hit, erupting partway into the wound opened by the battle laser earlier. Damien reached out and pushed again, sending the carefully constructed spell careening off into space, where it fired off a thousand kilometers from the cruiser’s hull.
His opponent had to be confused. No ordinary Mage could do what Damien was doing…but on the other hand, his opponents had been disturbingly well informed so far…and he recognized the “taste” of the magic being thrown at him.
Even a Rune Wright couldn’t identify an individual Mage by their magic, but Damien had learned long ago that magic that had gone through an amplifier felt different from regular magic—and magic that had gone through a Rune of Power felt different again.
The magic that had now tried to hammer Duke of Magnificence to dust had gone through both, which confirmed Damien’s worst fears.
As the Hand on the other ship paused, probably trying to work out just what was happening, Damien lashed out with his own magic. Studying his enemy’s maneuvers, he channeled power through his Runes and the amplifier and conjured six immense, kilometer-wide balls of arcing plasma from nothingness.
Everything he saw was still ten seconds old, so there was no way he could guarantee a hit
with his first strike—but he came close. Two of his spheres appeared close enough to the Keeper ship to appear to flank it, and electricity arced from his plasma balls, transferring unimaginable levels of heat and energy to the enemy ship.
She survived but stopped accelerating for a precious few seconds. Damien was still gathering his strength from the strike and cursed mentally as he saw the other ship’s engines and systems switch back on, reset from the massively powerful EMP the plasma arcs had triggered on their hull.
Then he saw Rhine’s “shock of the day.” Six salvos of missiles had already been too far out and going too fast when the Keeper ship jumped forward to be directed onto her—so instead Rhine had let them pass her, slow down, match speeds—and then come screaming back at the enemy ship in a single massive salvo of over four hundred missiles.
Their sensors took longer to recover than their engines, and it might not have mattered, anyway. The only way they could have lived was to have killed Duke before Rhine released the missiles to local control or jumped away.
Shaken by the plasma strikes, they did neither. Over a third of a teraton of antimatter explosives went off in a single heavens-shattering instant.
There was very little left of the enemy when the explosion faded.
Chapter 29
Denis Romanov tried very hard not to look at the ship his shuttle was leaving behind.
“That’s…awful,” his pilot murmured, and he finally caved to the desire.
Duke of Magnificence looked like someone had taken a battle-ax built to the same scale as the four-hundred-meter-tall cruiser and bashed in one of the corners of the four-sided pyramid. The gouge started on one face and cut most of the way across the second, and that black splotch marked where over two hundred men and women had died.
“You should see the other guy,” he finally told the pilot, and the young woman snorted softly.
“That’s exactly what we’re out here to do,” she noted. “Did you bring your forensics evidence baggies?”
Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Page 19