Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  He checked the screens.

  “We have a few minutes to play with here,” he concluded, “so let’s use them to take care of our people.”

  “What happens when those minutes are up?” Kellers asked.

  “We fight. So, be ready for it.”

  “Against these assholes? I’m always ready.”

  Switching channels, David cut to the simulacrum chamber.

  “Maria, report,” he ordered, his voice gentler now.

  “Anders is dead,” she told him, her voice wooden. “Xi Wu is badly injured; I had Kelzin rush her to the medbay. I think she’ll live, but Costa smashed her across the head with a stun baton hard enough that the discharge wasn’t even necessary.”

  “Costa?”

  “Costa,” she confirmed. “He’s with the Legacy. He helped sneak an entire company of boarding troops aboard in Turquoise’s containers, then shot Iovis when he had a freak-out of conscience and tried to warn me.”

  “Damn.” The curse escaped David before he could stop it. “Acconcio too?”

  “Acconcio was an idiot and in it for money.” Soprano’s voice was toneless. “Costa’s more complicated, I think. He’s unconscious and in Mage-cuffs in Skavar’s brig. He’ll have some answers for us—or for the Navy, as the case may be. He knows where Turquoise’s base actually is.”

  “Understood,” he said calmly. He paused, looking at the approaching warships. “Can you jump?”

  “I’m hitting the come-down from a dose of Exalt,” she told him. “I’m fucked for at least twelve hours. Costa’s jump runes are wrecked, even if I was willing to trust him near the simulacrum. Wu’s wounded and Anders is dead.

  “We’re not jumping anywhere,” she concluded. “So, I hope you have a plan to fight these bastards.”

  “You know the plan,” he said quietly. “Survive. We’ll make it work, Soprano.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” she promised. “But…it won’t be much. I’m about one wrong twist away from covering the chamber in vomit.”

  “Stay with me, Maria,” David urged. “But remember: I need you alive.”

  “I get that,” she said. “Keep the bastards from blowing us all up?”

  “Wilco, Ship’s Mage.”

  Even David’s worst-case imaginings had fallen short of the reality of what Azure Legacy and Silent Ocean had brought to the party to take him down.

  The farthest of the four groups of approaching ships was Silent Atlantic and her two sister corvettes, a small squadron that Red Falcon could handle with her backup fusion missiles if needed. Their probably-intentional mis-jump had put them well outside the coming combat arena.

  Closer, inside not merely antimatter missile range but fusion missile range, were the three groups that had jumped in after Costa had crippled their sensors. Two groups consisted of a single destroyer and four corvettes, and the third was two destroyers and two corvettes.

  There were four destroyers and nine corvettes, a total of just under five million tons of pirate ships, inside their weapons range of Red Falcon.

  But no one was firing yet.

  “What are they doing?” Campbell asked. David hadn’t realized his XO had joined them and he looked up in surprise.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said shortly. Her eyes were haunted and he knew she was lying, but she also appeared physically unhurt. “Shouldn’t those bastards be shooting at us by now?”

  “Five light-seconds,” David replied. “We could tag any one group with the lasers, but the other two would rip us to pieces. We haven’t moved or fired off active sensors. They may still think we’re crippled.”

  “So, what do we do?” LaMonte asked. “I’ve got them dialed in as best as I can, but…the lasers aren’t lined up on any of them. I can hit anyone you want with missiles, but we’ll have to turn the ship to hit anyone with the beams.”

  “And ten missiles won’t be enough to threaten anyone out there,” David concluded. “Are the launchers loaded with the antimatter rounds?”

  “No,” the young woman replied. “The automatic reloader can change its cycle, but removing the loaded missile has to be done manually by the on-mount crew. Or we could fire them to clear the launchers…”

  “That would be too obvious,” David said quietly as a plan began to take shape in his brain. “The launcher crews are all in place?”

  “They’re undermanned, but they’re there,” LaMonte confirmed.

  David caught Campbell’s wince out of the corner of his eye. She’d been pulling asphyxiated bodies out of people’s quarters and knew bone-deep why they were undermanned. They were going to need to find some good counselors in Amber.

  “Have them disarm and remove the fusion missiles,” he ordered. “If they think we’re dead, they may get close enough for us to pull off a Sunday punch.”

  “Thirteen warships,” Campbell reminded him. “Red Falcon isn’t a warship, David. She’s got guns and armor, but…”

  “So, it’s a Hail Mary; I know,” he told her. “But we sure as hell can’t fight them head on, so we need to tilt the odds in our favor.

  “Get the antimatter missiles up, make sure the RFLAMs are fully online and have no more tricks loaded into them, and charge the laser capacitors,” he concluded. “Let them close.”

  “How close?” Campbell asked. “You’re right, it’s the only plan we’ve got, but…”

  “Kelly—the moment they twitch wrong, light them up with everything we’ve got,” David told the engineer now acting as his tactical officer. “Otherwise…let them close to a light-second. How long will that take?”

  “Ten minutes, give or take,” Campbell replied.

  David checked the time. Two hours, fifteen minutes since jump. Ten more minutes…if they survived this, they’d have friends pretty quickly.

  “You and Kelly have the call, Jenna,” he told his XO. “Line us up on the pair of destroyers and light them up with all of the lasers. Dump five AM birds apiece into the other two and keep shooting at whatever’s left standing. Surprise might just get a clean sweep on the destroyers and we can fight the corvettes.”

  And either way, the biggest hope they had was that the Navy would get there early.

  For the first time since losing internal communications and sensors, David was finally certain that time was on his side. A Navy squadron had been shadowing Red Falcon since they left Svarog. They would have arrived fifteen light-minutes from the last jump point thirty minutes after Falcon left, and scanned the beacon they’d left behind for the jump calculation.

  They’d arrive at this jump point half an hour after Falcon should have left. The plan had been that they’d jump back to the squadron if ambushed, but Costa had wrecked that plan handily. Now, they just had to stay alive long enough for the Navy to arrive and rescue them.

  Of course, David had no objection to rescuing himself, and if the pirates continued to figure his ship was either in their own hands or torn by internal conflict, he had a chance at that.

  “Did Costa send any communications out?” he asked.

  “Nothing from our systems,” LaMonte told him. “They may have had a transmitter aboard the container they boarded from, but they haven’t transmitted since we regained external sensors, if so.”

  “Can we add a bit of spin to the ship?” he asked Campbell. “Make it look accidental, but rotate us closer to the line of the destroyers?”

  “We should be able to,” his XO confirmed. “Nice and slow, with the maneuvering thrusters at low power.”

  “Exactly. Give Kelly a clean shot straight at them with the least possible warning.”

  The engineer nodded, busily entering code and studying her screens.

  Carefully, wincing at his hastily bandaged wounds, David rose from his chair and crossed to LaMonte’s console, looking over the tactical displays she had up.

  “You got this, Kelly?” he asked quietly. “The only people actually qualified for this are dead or on the wea
pon mounts, but…”

  “I’ve got this,” she said levelly. “It’s just code in the end. I know code.” She smiled grimly. “And it’s not the first time I’ve written code I knew would kill people, either. I’m fine.” She looked up from her screen at him and her smile flattened.

  “You, skipper, have holes in you,” she continued. “Go sit your commanding ass down before you fall over.”

  David chuckled. It was just as forced as LaMonte’s joke, but it was there.

  “I’ll do that,” he promised. “Any change on our bogeys?”

  “They’ve got evasive patterns running, just in case we’re awake,” she replied. “They’re not stupid, just fat and happy. Of course, they could be running better evasive patterns.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “As opposed to the standard type three, type six, and type nine evasion programs taught in the last year of flight school,” LaMonte said sweetly. “Which are perfectly effective…if you cycle them up and don’t let the person you’re sneaking up on watch your movements for ten minutes.”

  “You can hit them?”

  “Eighty-twenty,” she told him cautiously. “I mock them, but those are standard evasive patterns for a reason.”

  “Time?” David asked, glancing over at Campbell.

  “Five minutes to one light-second,” she told him. “Ten until the Navy will arrive in the zone.” She paused. “I have no idea how long it will take them to intervene.”

  He nodded.

  Commodore Andrews’s force would emerge fifteen light-minutes away from everything going on. Hopefully, they’d have Mages standing by for emergency jumps.

  Because if they didn’t, the Royal Martian Navy might well only arrive in time to watch Red Falcon die.

  44

  “They’re adjusting course,” Campbell reported. “Nothing major, just enough to keep them at least half a million klicks from us as they start to slow down.”

  “Damn,” David murmured. “Are they trying to contact us at all?”

  “No… Wait, I’m getting an encrypted transmission,” his XO told him. “Nothing coherent. I’m guessing they’re trying to ping Costa, though.”

  “And if he doesn’t respond, they’re going to start shooting,” he said grimly. “Range?”

  “Seven hundred thousand kilometers. They’ll close for another three minutes, but they’re vectoring away from us and they won’t approach closer than five hundred thousand.”

  “And they’re going to expect a response.”

  It wasn’t a question. They were out of time. If the pirates didn’t hear back from Costa…

  “LaMonte.”

  “Sir?”

  “When our spin brings us to the closest point, line us up and take the shot.”

  David waited. He realized he was holding his breath, but there was no time to change anything now. The rotation Campbell had built into their “immobile” course was taking place over a twenty-six-second cycle.

  Those seconds counted down…and then LaMonte pushed a single flashing button on her screen.

  The engineer had linked her own console into the tactical systems, and that button did several things.

  First, it brought the main engines online, turning the big armed freighter the last few degrees of arc to line her forward battery of ten heavy lasers up on the approaching pair of destroyers.

  Second, the battle lasers fired. Ten five-gigawatt high-energy lasers flashed into space, five on each of the two destroyers.

  Third, the missiles fired. Ten antimatter-drive missiles blazed into space at ten thousand gravities, splitting into two groups of five to charge at the other two destroyers.

  Last, to David’s surprise, every one of Red Falcon’s twenty-five RFLAM turrets rotated and opened fire as well. They fired shorter, less-intense bursts than the main guns, unable to penetrate warship armor…and then David realized LaMonte had targeted them on the corvettes.

  The corvettes didn’t have warship armor.

  The two destroyers now directly ahead of Falcon never stood a chance. They never saw the lightspeed weapons approaching. One moment, they were charging at the freighter, attempting to contact their agent aboard.

  The next, twenty-five gigawatts of coherent energy slammed into each of them. LaMonte had dialed in their cursory evasive maneuvers perfectly and hit with every beam.

  The effect was similar to jumping into a pit of spikes…only even more energetic. Both ships came apart as the hammerblows struck home, shattering hull and systems alike.

  The corvettes were luckier. Only five of the six close enough to be hit were targeted, and the beams that hit them were lighter, less effective—except that the “RF” in RFLAM stood for “Rapid-Fire”.

  All five targeted corvettes survived the first salvo, but the lasers kept cycling, working their way along the hulls of the pocket warships. One of the ships managed to break contact, dodging behind the destroyer it was escorting.

  Four disintegrated—but the surviving ships were launching missiles of their own, and the RFLAMs went back to their real job of protecting Falcon.

  “Group Bravo is a hard kill,” LaMonte chanted. “Charlie is down to just the destroyer, missiles inbound. Delta is still mostly intact, missiles inbound. Alpha is out of range.”

  “Bring us to bear on Delta,” David ordered Campbell. “Keep those missiles away from us and press them, hard. They’ve got more missiles—but we have better lasers. Take them out!”

  Return fire was flickering out from the pirates’ lasers now, but Campbell wasn’t using academy-standard evasive patterns. She twisted the big ship through a series of pirouettes that would have done the smaller corvettes proud, and lined LaMonte’s lasers up again.

  This time, all ten lasers flashed at a single target. Two thirds of them missed—but the three that did hit left the destroyer spinning and leaking atmosphere, unable to evade as the antimatter missiles slammed home.

  “Delta-one is gone,” the engineer-turned-gunner announced. “Charlie-one took a hit and is leaking atmo, but her lasers and missiles are still in the fight.”

  “How long till Alpha sees the fight?” David asked. Silent Atlantic and her consorts were group Alpha, the first group of ships on the scene. He was reasonably certain they were hostile as well, but they were also a long way away.

  “Ten minutes at least, maybe more,” Campbell told him.

  “Second missile salvo is all on Charlie-one, focusing lasers on the Delta corvettes!” LaMonte was making her announcements at least half to herself, chanting aloud as her hands flew over her console.

  “We’re hit!” the XO snapped. “Delta-two landed a laser strike on the rad dome. We’re leaking water; systems are intact.”

  And Delta-two wasn’t going to be doing that again. Delta-three was undamaged and managed to twist out of LaMonte’s pattern of coherent energy. Delta-two, already hammered by the RFLAM salvo, didn’t. Small and unarmored as she was, two five-gigawatt lasers were more than enough to vaporize the pocket warship.

  “Missiles incoming,” Campbell reported. “RFLAMs engaging.”

  There were a lot of missiles in space. The destroyers were old ships, likely the missing ships from Grand Interstellar Foundry’s local mercenary fleet, but they’d been updated to carry a lot of fusion missile launchers.

  The four ships that had lived long enough to launch had sent a salvo of eighty missiles at Red Falcon. The RFLAM turrets flared to life, lasers cutting through space. The weapons weren’t a lot of use against warships, but they were designed for this job.

  “Delta-three is gone,” LaMonte announced grimly. “Rotate us to bear on Charlie-one!”

  Red Falcon lurched. The previous hits hadn’t been felt on the bridge, with the magical gravity in play, but that one had.

  “That’s not happening,” Kellers said grimly over the engineering link. “The bugger just tagged us with his main lasers. Engines are down and I don’t know when they’ll be back up—if I guess wrong, we
blow the fuck up!”

  “Kelly?”

  “I’ve got twenty missiles in the air at the bastard, but he knows the game as well as we—holy shit!”

  A brilliant flash lit up the screen and an immense white spike appeared in space between Red Falcon and the remaining destroyer. It took a few seconds for the multi-megaton Martian cruiser’s sensor to sweep the battlespace for hostiles—and less than a second for its massive ten-gigawatt lasers to shred the remaining destroyer.

  “Jump flare,” Campbell said weakly. “Multiple jump flares. Two cruisers, two destroyers, in escort formation around where we were fifteen minutes ago. Close enough.”

  “Close enough indeed,” David replied. “Hail them!”

  The speed the link opened with suggested the Navy had already hailed Red Falcon, and the image of a tiny red-haired man with the slanted eyes and dark skin of a Martian native bowed slightly in his screen.

  “Captain Rice, the necessity of secrecy denied us the pleasure of meeting in person,” the man told him. “I am Commodore Victor Andrews. Captains Laurentian and Vilbur happened to arrive just after you left, and it seemed a shame to turn down their services.

  “I hope Glorious Shield of Justice didn’t cause too much trouble emerging as close to you as we did,” he said, his tone halfway between apologetic and amused. “Our location data for everyone was fifteen minutes out of date. I…” Andrews sighed.

  “I half-expected to be avenging you, Captain Rice. I can’t say how pleased I am that that is not the case!”

  45

  Tired and injured as he was, there was no way that David wasn’t going to meet the Navy teams when they came aboard his ship. The space between Glorious Shield of Justice and Red Falcon swarmed with Navy small craft carrying engineers, doctors, security teams—everything a ship that had just been boarded and shot up needed.

  The first shuttle came into a landing in Kelzin’s Bay Bravo with the practiced skill of an experienced pilot. The spacecraft touched down on one side of the bay, leaving a clear space for the chain of shuttles following it in.