The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Thirteen thousand missiles were still blazing toward Second Fleet, and the lightspeed delays meant there was no time to change the programming of the missiles with the velocity to intercept.

  “Adjust our salvos to target two apiece on the second and third gunship salvos,” Alexander ordered, her voice firm and far calmer than Roslyn felt.

  “Orders on their way,” Kulkarni confirmed. “Intercepting the incoming fire with salvo eight, but…”

  “Kill ratio will be even lower due to eight not being up to speed, I know,” the Admiral agreed. “Better wasted missiles than dead ships, Mage-Captain.”

  It was all dissolving into numbers and iconography for Roslyn. That wouldn’t last, but her lack of involvement in everything was making it hard to keep track of the battle. Her memory was all too happy to remind her of what would happen when those little dots of light on her screen converged.

  She’d been aboard one ship battered into uselessness in this war already. She was trying not to show it, but she could feel the fear coiling in her stomach as more explosions flashed across the screens, multiple salvos of the Protectorate’s missiles sacrificing themselves to buy a chance for their motherships.

  “Kill ratio was below one for that,” Jian said grimly. “Eight thousand–plus still incoming. It’s down to the turrets and the Mages now.”

  At the heart of every Royal Martian Navy warship was its simulacrum, a semiliquid silver model of the vessel that in some senses was the ship. Holding the simulacrum, the ship’s Mage-Captain could unleash their magical powers at a level far beyond almost any unaided Mage.

  Few battles would enter the range where the amplifiers could reach, but missiles had to cross it to threaten the ships themselves. As the laser turrets flashed to life, so did the magic of the warship’s defenders.

  Lightning and fire blazed in the void around Durendal and the other Martian ships, magic creating impossible realities even as the ship’s technology lashed out alongside it.

  “I should be in the simulacrum chamber,” Roslyn heard Alexander mutter. “I underestimated them.”

  Roslyn shivered. She was only partially aware of just what Alexander’s status as Crown Princess of Mars meant in terms of her magical power, but she suspected it would make the power wielded by the Mage-Captains look like toys.

  “Multiple hits across the cruiser screen,” Kulkarni reported grimly. “Glorious Voice of Honor and Shining Beacon of Hope report significant damage to engines and weapons. Most other units remain above ninety percent capability.”

  “Pull the damaged units to the back of the fleet and inform their Captains they are authorized to emergency-jump at their discretion,” Alexander ordered. “The rest of the fleet holds the line. That will be the worst of it today, I think.”

  The intercepts of the second salvo were less effective than Roslyn had hoped, not even reaching the one point eight ratio of the first interception—but they still obliterated twenty thousand of the Republican missiles.

  Four thousand missiles wasn’t enough to penetrate Second Fleet’s defenses. Without the gunships, the enemy only had two thousand launchers left as the first offensive salvos hammered through the gunship screen.

  “We may need to actively target the gunships,” Kulkarni said after a moment. “We lost over half our salvo to the gunship screen, even penetrating at high speed.”

  “I don’t want to waste missiles on them,” Alexander admitted, “but you’re right. Retarget the next three salvos. How many does that leave targeted on their battleships?”

  “Five, sir,” Kulkarni replied. “And then we have ten salvos left in the magazines on the battleships and Salamanders and another twenty-five on the dreadnoughts.”

  “It does appear that they have full loads of their new missiles,” the Admiral noted. “We’re going to need to investigate that once we’re in control of the system, Mage-Captain. Intelligence may want to claim there isn’t a second accelerator ring, but if they had enough antimatter to build a hundred thousand new missiles, Intelligence can kiss my royal ass.”

  She glared at the screen.

  “Hammer those gunships for me, people,” she ordered. “I’m not worried about fighting them at laser range, but they’re out there to protect their motherships from our missiles. Let’s make sure they fail.”

  8

  The soft alarm woke Kelly up. It wasn’t one of the urgent ones that meant she needed to leap to her feet, so she took a moment to appreciate how fortunate she was. No military ship could have tolerated the Captain curling up and falling asleep with her head on the First Pilot’s naked chest.

  “Pretty sure that one’s for you,” Mike Kelzin murmured, her husband gently stroking her hair. “Xi’s still on duty for another two hours.”

  “And what are you planning on doing, Mr. First Pilot?” Kelly asked, slowly lifting her head and grinning at him.

  “I am not on duty for another four hours, unless we encounter a crisis,” he told her, his hand still gently holding her. “I am planning on napping and then giving our senior Ship’s Mage a well-deserved massage while she passes out.”

  Kelly snorted.

  “I don’t know if we’re likely to run into any crises that need the shuttles,” she admitted. “Like Charmchi, you’re mostly a passenger for this particular collection of stunts.”

  “If you need us, you’ll need us in top form,” he said. “We’ll be ready. I’ve got a set of simulations I’m going to tweak when I do go on duty. I’ve got a few scenarios around us trying to board a Republic warship.”

  “That would be a suicide op I’m not ordering,” Kelly replied as she regretfully detached herself from her husband and began to poke at drawers for clothing.

  “If I can come up with a plan to make it not a suicide op, then we have a better chance if the situation arises where you need to order it,” Mike told her. “Because I can think of the kind of mess where it might be necessary, much as it would suck for a few of us.”

  Kelly put on her bra and studied her husband. He seemed surprisingly calm at the admission that he’d expect her to order him on a suicide mission if she thought it was necessary.

  “You’re a strange man, Michael Kelzin,” she told him.

  “I know,” he conceded. “That’s why you married me. You married Xi because she’s smart and gorgeous and powerful. You married me because I’m patient and ever-tolerant…and strange.”

  She snorted and threw the shirt she was holding at him.

  “Yes,” she conceded as she pulled another shirt out and put it on. “We’ll go with that.”

  Milhouse had the watch when she arrived on the bridge, the tactical officer looking more fatigued than usual. Kelly crossed the bridge to the Captain’s seat and leaned over his shoulder.

  “You going to make it to your quarters before you pass out, Milhouse?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Just been a long shift.” He shook his head. “We’re about half a million klicks higher up from the ecliptic than projected. We had to dodge another gunship.”

  The RIN carrier had returned to Kenku by microjump, but her gunships had taken the long way home. Other gunships were swanning around the system now, along with what looked like civilian in-system clippers commandeered for the mission.

  “I’d be happier at this level of paranoid competence if it wasn’t being targeted on me,” Kelly replied. “Two days of this bullshit.”

  The only good news was that most of the time, they were far enough away to be firing their engines, at least at low power. It had only gained them a few hours on their journey to Kenku, but that was because it had gained them more separation from their hunters.

  “The cruisers are spreading out as well now,” Milhouse warned her. “We’re getting close to the best look we’re going to get, and I will gladly leave that part of this mess to you.”

  She snorted.

  “Don’t get too comfy, Milhouse,” she told him. “If the shit even starts looking at a fan, I’m waking ever
yone up and calling them to stations.”

  “Then I’ll go get what sleep I can, skipper,” the RMN loaner told her. “Luck.”

  The other occupied stations in the bridge were swapping over at the same time, Kelly’s mix of RMN loaners and MISS hands taking their usual stations. Only five of the fifteen non-officer stations were filled right now, which would be more than enough for what Kelly needed today.

  She pulled up everything Rhapsody’s sensors had learned about their target while she was sleeping. Kenku had definitely acquired some new infrastructure since the last time anyone had been looking, but they were confident there was no accelerator ring here now.

  Rhapsody would have to get closer for Kelly to be certain of what was there, and that was the decision she couldn’t offload onto anyone else. There was definitely a carrier. At least four cruisers, and it looked like several hundred local gunships at Kenku.

  Even four cruisers and a carrier were a lot of jump ships for the depleted RIN to have at a nowhere system, which meant there was something in Gygax worth protecting. If it had just been the energy signatures and the gunships, she’d have guessed that Kenku had been turned into a major refueling stop for the Republic Interstellar Navy.

  “A fuel depot doesn’t need cruisers,” she murmured aloud. “Unless it’s all timing and you just happened to be here while I’m poking around.”

  More data flowed across her screen. The natural debris field around the gas giant was interfering with their visuals, but there were definitely bigger ships than the cruisers at Kenku as well.

  “So, carrier group,” she muttered. “Carrier, two battleships, four cruisers. Now…are you always here or are you just lucky?”

  If they were always there, there was something worth the RIN committing one of what Kelly’s briefing said was only eight remaining carrier groups to protect. If they were just refueling, then it was just a refueling station.

  It wasn’t an accelerator ring. She was certain of that. It wasn’t even a large-scale shipyard…except…

  She zoomed in on what she could see and sighed.

  “You could be a refit yard, couldn’t you?” she cursed. “I need signals intelligence and these buggers aren’t transmitting outward.”

  They also needed to see what was at Paladin. It was entirely possible that half of whatever problem she was dealing with was there, at the planet Gygax mined for resources and anchored their heavy industry on.

  “Csizmadia, link in with my screen three,” she ordered, gesturing for Borbola Csizmadia, one of her RMN loaners on the tactical team, to join her in her thoughts.

  “We need to swing to Paladin and try to pick up signals intelligence between there and Kenku,” she told the noncom. “I still want eyes on Kenku, and I don’t think there’s much point concealing that we’re here. They’ve guessed.”

  She gestured at the hundreds of sublight ships searching the system for them.

  “How many of those navy sensor probes do we have and how sneaky are they?” Kelly asked.

  “Eighteen and not enough to hide where they’re coming from,” Csizmadia replied. “We can kick them out the launchers without sparking an energy signature, but the moment they bring their drives online, everyone is going to know they exist. Once they’ve flown any distance, they’re going to know where the drones launched from.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rhapsody’s Captain muttered. “But that just means we need to be clever. We can never conceal that we’re here, after all, but that doesn’t mean they can find us.”

  “And…now.”

  It took a few seconds for the command to cross the light-seconds to the package Rhapsody had left behind, but once it reached its destination, any question the Republic had over whether or not someone was sneaking around their star system vanished.

  A one-gigaton antimatter warhead detonating tended to do that.

  What it also did, however, was create a zone of radioactive hash where no one could resolve what was going on. Inside that hash, six of Rhapsody in Purple’s precious handful of drones brought their engines online and blazed away on varying courses.

  By the time even Kelly—who knew their courses—could pick them out, there was no way to backtrack them to a central point that would suggest where the stealth ship had been. They were maneuvering as hard as they could under concealment as well, burning on a direct course for a selected point five million kilometers “up” from Paladin relative to the ecliptic.

  “Yeah, that got everyone’s attention,” Csizmadia reported. “Gunships are swarming toward the blast, and we’ve got cruisers vectoring toward a couple of likely locations for us.”

  “Anywhere near us?”

  “No, they’re basing their projections off the jump flare and us trying to sneak up on Kenku. I don’t think they’ve noticed the drones yet.”

  “That won’t last,” Kelly murmured to herself. The drones weren’t hard to detect. They were hard to localize, with ECM and jammers that made them a handful to target with weapons at long range, but they were easy to detect.

  The drones were never going to get to Kenku. Kelly’s projection put far too many gunships far too close to their courses for that to be the case. What they were doing was giving her multiple points of view that her computers could interlace—and getting closer than she could risk Rhapsody.

  “I give the drones forty-five minutes,” she said more loudly. “Figure the closest will get to about two light-seconds from that base.”

  “Optimist,” her wife said from the simulacrum chamber. “Thirty minutes and five light-seconds is the best you’re going to get. They don’t have Mages to conceal them, after all.”

  “Five light-seconds would be close enough, but three would let me read the name off that carrier,” Kelly replied. “We’re scouts. The more data, the better.”

  Several of the gunships were adjusting their courses to improve their intercepts. They definitely knew the drones were there. They could probably even guess the purpose of the antimatter bomb.

  “Double-check the transmitter programming,” she told Csizmadia. “The last thing I want to do is go to all this effort and get picked up because one of the drones fires off a tightbeam radio where someone can pick it up.”

  The drones were already proving their worth. If nothing else, they were pulling away every ship that might intercept her when she headed to Paladin. Beyond that…

  “Do you see that ship?” she asked the sensor tech.

  “I think so,” Csizmadia confirmed. “I didn’t think they built anything that big. She’s got to be, what, a quarter-kilometer wide?”

  The RIN used two standard hulls to build everything: a one-hundred-and-fifty-meter-wide cylinder and a one hundred and seventy-five meter cylinder, both half a kilometer long.

  “I’d guess two hundred meters across and, mmm, five fifty meters long,” Kelly replied as she studied the big ship hanging in low orbit. “She’s not a warship, Chief. She’s a transport—practically a mobile dry dock. She’s designed to move those standard cylinders of theirs around.”

  “I’m surprised we don’t have a data file on her, then,” the noncom replied. “Wouldn’t they have been using a bunch of them?”

  “All of the shipyards and fleet construction we’ve seen were in Legatus,” Kelly pointed out. “They didn’t need a big jump ship for that. Now, though, they’ve probably had to spread at least some of the work out.”

  She studied the base and its structures as they resolved into more detail. “That’s two refit yards, but I’m not seeing any big production facilities,” she noted. “They might be installing something made at Paladin.”

  “Or they’re installing something that doesn’t have a big physical structure and mostly requires people to follow directions with an inlaying tool.”

  Kelly looked up as Shvets spoke, the navigator apparently having entered the bridge while she was focusing on the data. The operative was wearing darker makeup than usual, shaded in dark green aro
und their eyes as they glared at the screen.

  “Are you suggesting what I think you are?” she asked.

  Shvets didn’t answer initially. They crossed to their console and plugged in a series of commands, bringing up the image of a familiar-looking space station and dropping it on the screen next to the platform in Kenku orbit.

  “Minerva Station,” Kelly said. Rhapsody had been the ship that had inserted Damien Montgomery and his strike force aboard the secret Republic facility dealing in Mage brains and the Promethean Interface.

  “Minerva was a standard prefab construction,” she said after a moment as she assessed the similarities between the two stations. “The similarities might be a coincidence, but it would also have made sense for the Republic to have a fallback station without an insane Mage.”

  “So long as they have Mages to activate the matrix, my understanding is that the jump matrix can be installed by any idiot with a glorified soldering iron,” Shvets said, resting their hands on their hips and glaring at the station.

  “And the Interface itself isn’t big,” Kelly conceded. She’d seen the images. She’d never be able to forget the images. “This could be a Promethean Interface installation facility, but they’re definitely not building ships here.”

  “Hence the big transport ship,” Csizmadia said. “It might not be their main facility, even now, but a secondary station somewhere they don’t think we’re going to look…”

  “Fuckers,” Kelly said, but there was no real heat in the word. “All right, people, we’ll keep watching the drone data and we’ll make our sweep of Paladin, but I think this mission just justified itself.”

  “No accelerator ring, though,” Xi Wu pointed out from the simulacrum chamber. She’d clearly been listening to the entire conversation. “That leaves some questions still out there.”

  “We sent four ships into the far reaches of the Republic,” Kelly replied. “The odds were good that one of us would find something, but they were never great that any single ship would find it.