The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  Which meant that only the dreadnoughts and Salamanders could launch them internally. The rest of the fleet could carry the weapons and deploy them, but it would be a slower and more painstaking process—one Admiral Alexander had decided not to engage in.

  “Second salvo is ready. Standing by for your order,” Kulkarni reported.

  “Proceed,” Alexander ordered. “Launch the third wave when ready.”

  A second wave of two hundred–plus icons appeared on the screen, hurtling toward the planet at several thousand gravities.

  By the time the third wave hit, every isolated launch facility around Isla de Bolivar would have been the target of at least a dozen kinetic submunitions. That should, per the plan, neutralize them all.

  There would still be a fourth wave in the launchers, held back to see what happened.

  “Bunnag and the rest of the Guard Generals are requesting an update,” Roslyn noted as her console beeped. “What do we tell them?”

  “Everything is proceeding according to plan; minimum thirty minutes before they get their clearance,” Alexander said quickly. “As they well know. They can find half an hour of patience.”

  “I’ll let them know everything is on plan,” the Flag Lieutenant agreed diplomatically, earning herself a flashed grin from her Admiral.

  The third salvo of Talon Nines leapt into space and the bombardment squadron waited. Drones hovered in Sucre orbit, updating the data on the targets as the weapons flashed inward.

  “We have missile fire from the surface targeting the deployment platforms,” Kulkarni noted. “This was accounted for in the firing pattern. We’ll see how well they do.”

  Hundreds of missiles were rising from the surface on initial fusion-drive boosters. Reaching minimum safe altitude, they switched over to antimatter rockets and blazed out toward the incoming munitions.

  The designers of the Talon Nine hadn’t had access to Republican surface-to-orbit munitions, but they had possessed the Protectorate equivalent. They’d designed the weapon to account for the most likely return-fire approach—and the first wave of deployment platforms broke apart ten seconds before the defensive fire reached them.

  The icons on the screens now were projections, probabilities. The terminal approach for the weapons was purely ballistic, a mostly directed thirty-thousand-kilometer fall.

  The defensive weapons detonated a few moments later as their controllers saw what had happened and did the best they could to clear away the incoming fire.

  “We lost twelve deployment platforms,” Kulkarni reported. “Looks like the detonations of the local missiles may have taken out some of the final impactors as well. We won’t be able to confirm until we have impact.”

  She paused.

  “Additional missiles are being launched at the second and third waves. They’ll attempt to account for the separation times. We will lose more munitions.”

  “Keep an eye on the losses and update the fourth-wave targeting,” Alexander ordered. “We’ll see the results of this, and I’ll make a call before we even go that far.”

  Roslyn had everything they needed for that call loaded into her console already. They didn’t know exactly where Governor South Isle was hiding, but they knew where he’d been transmitting from the last time he and the Admiral had spoken. They would hit that station with a tightbeam transmission once the bombardment waves were done.

  Maybe South Isle would even listen.

  “First-wave impact in ten seconds,” Kulkarni noted. Her voice was very, very soft, almost ill. The Talon Nines were calibrated for thirty kilotons per impactor, and each wave was dropping over seven hundred of them.

  Over the course of the next ten minutes, Second Fleet would be dropping sixty megatons of weapons on Sucre. Compared to the level of firepower thrown around in even a small space battle, that was nothing—but planets didn’t have hypertensile ceramics and energy-dispersion systems.

  Impact markers began to appear on the screen, and Roslyn swallowed down a sick taste in her mouth. The use of a stylized mushroom cloud had been part of the RMN’s iconography for a long time, but she’d never seen it before outside of simulations and exercises.

  Hundreds of the icons appeared on the screen, all of them clustering into groups. From her own part in the analysis, Roslyn knew they were hitting one hundred and sixty-five targets.

  Those targets were fortified, with at least some of the hypertensile ceramics that allowed warships to withstand gigaton-range antimatter warheads. A single thirty-kiloton kinetic impactor wasn’t going to do the job on its own.

  By the time the third wave had hit, each of those sites had been subjected to at least ten such impacts. The drones were scanning the impact sites, sending back visual imagery that Roslyn forced herself to piece through.

  It was quickly clear that none of the targets still had functioning launchers. The surface components of those weapons systems were probably the most vulnerable portion of the installations. Most of the installations were completely wrecked, their relatively light armor having failed under repeated impacts.

  A handful of the installations were no longer in their original locations, the very ground and rock they were built into having given way under the bombardment—but the fortified bunkers still at least partially intact despite everything.

  It took five minutes for the analysis teams, including Roslyn, to confirm what they needed to know.

  “All targets appear disabled, Mage-Admiral,” Kulkarni confirmed. “We are ready for the bravo wave strike.”

  That was the assault-shuttle wave, where they would hit facilities relying on human shields with even more precise weapons to clear the way for the landing.

  “One last arrow to fire first,” Alexander replied. “Chambers? Are we ready to transmit?”

  “We are, Admiral. Ready to record on your order.”

  Alexander nodded, squaring her shoulders and facing the camera.

  “Let’s get the dog-and-pony part of this show on the road,” she ordered.

  The recording started and Roslyn watched Alexander’s face transform into a cold mask.

  “Governor Hans South Isle,” she said flatly. “This message is being transmitted to a site we believe is receiving for you. If it isn’t, I strongly suggest that whoever is receiving this message relay it to the Governor immediately.

  “There is a term, Governor, from second-millennium European warfare that I suggest you become familiar with. That term is practicable breach. When a town was besieged, they were expected to hold out until mining or bombardment had opened a breach in the walls through which the besieger could launch an assault. They were then expected to surrender—or the wealth and even lives of the townspeople were forfeit,” she explained.

  “We have demonstrated our ability to reduce your defenses from beyond any range at which you can engage my ships. We have destroyed the defenses around Isla de Bolivar, creating that exact type of breach.

  “I am sadly aware that breach already came with significant cost of life,” Alexander said. “But I am now faced with the final defenses of Isla de Bolivar, the ones that Republican military doctrine has positioned next to or even inside civilian cities. I will not risk my invasion force, Governor. I will bombard those defensive positions before I initiate my landings.”

  She did not, Roslyn noted, point out that the plan was to do so with assault shuttles, risking—indeed, almost guaranteeing—Protectorate losses to minimize civilian deaths. If South Isle thought they were going to continue the long-range bombardment, his estimate of the collateral damage would be much higher.

  Alexander made a show of checking the time on her wrist-comp.

  “It is fourteen hundred and seven hours Olympus Mons Standard Time as I record this,” she told the Governor. “If Sucre has not surrendered by fourteen hundred and twenty hours OMST, the invasion will proceed.

  “While I accept responsibility for the death and bloodshed that will follow, you will share in my guilt, Governor, if
you refuse to yield. By the time you receive this message, you will have ten minutes.

  “I suggest you use them wisely.”

  Alexander made a cut gesture and Roslyn stopped the recording.

  “Send it,” the Mage-Admiral ordered.

  Roslyn obeyed silently, her gaze on the rotating globe of Sucre in the middle of the flag deck. Everyone in the bridge was studying the planet, considering it carefully. How many of the forty million people on Isla de Bolivar were going to die before the day was out?

  How many of Sucre’s two billion citizens would die before the fight there was over?

  “The assault shuttles aren’t scheduled to go in until fourteen forty,” Kulkarni pointed out softly.

  “I know,” Alexander agreed. “And if he surrenders at any point prior to the shuttles’ launching their missiles, no one else has to die. But the bastard needed a deadline…so he got one. One that didn’t tell his people when our attack would start.”

  Roslyn nodded, even though the conversation wasn’t addressed at her. She could do the napkin math on how many people they’d already killed today: each of the hundred and sixty-five installations they’d bombarded had between a hundred and five hundred staff.

  She didn’t know the average or how many people had escaped, but Second Fleet had probably killed at least fifty thousand soldiers and technicians. They hadn’t chosen to support a regime that had embraced murder as expediency, but they were trying to protect their homes.

  Roslyn could hold the Prometheus Project against a lot of people in the Republic, but she found that she couldn’t hold it against the people trying to do their jobs. It didn’t change her job, and she was grimly focused on making sure she was watching the communications channels, but she could still feel guilt over it.

  Fourteen hundred hours and twenty minutes Olympus Mons Standard Time passed without any communication from the surface. One of the stranger legacies of the first Mage-King of Mars was that Mars now rotated in twenty-four hours instead of twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes.

  Why exactly Desmond Michael Alexander the First had made that change when he’d used his power to complete the terraforming was lost to history. Roslyn suspected it had, as much as anything else, stemmed from a desire for nice, round numbers.

  Or potentially just a desire for control. Desmond the First had been born in the caves of Project Olympus, after all, with only a number. Like the rest of the subjects of the Project that had restored magic, his purpose had been to grow to puberty, be tested for magical gifts to see if he was stronger than the generation before him, and then father the next generation.

  Like many of the last generation of Project Olympus’s subjects, he’d proven stronger than the Eugenicist scientists who’d ruled Mars at the time had predicted. He’d seized control of the Olympus Mons Amplifier, disabled the Eugenicist fleet that had been about to invade Earth, and ended the century-long Eugenicist Wars by smashing the entire structure of their caste-driven Martian state.

  A number, DMA-651, had become a name: Desmond Michael Alexander. A slave had become a king. A partially transformed desert world had become a temperate and controlled paradise…with a twenty-four-hour day.

  “Shuttles are ready for the second-wave strikes,” Kulkarni reported. “Both Guards and Marines are fully fueled and armed. They can deploy on your order, Mage-Admiral.”

  Roslyn knew the schedule said they wouldn’t launch the shuttles for twenty more minutes, but if they were ready and the deadline had already passed…

  “Hold them till the schedule,” Alexander said softly. “Let that arrogant ivory-tower ass sweat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Roslyn checked her communications channels again.

  “Admiral,” she said quietly. “We sent a tightbeam transmission. Should we…send a wider message? One that the rest of the planet will hear?”

  It wasn’t really the Flag Lieutenant’s job to make suggestions, but she was handling coms for Alexander today. She was going to sit there and watch an invasion go forward with everyone else, too. If there was a way around it…she wanted to suggest it.

  The Mage-Admiral exhaled a long sigh.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “Resend the transmission we sent to South Isle. Omnidirectional. If South Isle is going to damn his people, he can do it with their knowledge.”

  Roslyn had already set up the transmission and sent it with a single button-press.

  “Transmission sent,” she reported. “And we wait?”

  “We wait,” Alexander confirmed. “Get me the status reports on the heavy landers, Chambers. I want them ready to move the moment the shuttles have cleared the path. Once we get moving, it all goes by the plan and by the book.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Roslyn linked into the Guard channels, firing off the information requests. The standard “one-platoon” assault shuttles used by the RMMC and similar forces would have had enough trouble trying to land a million-soldier invasion on their own, let alone the tanks, ground transports and aircraft the Guard was taking down with them.

  The answer was retrofitted heavy-lift shuttles, spacecraft designed to haul multiple ten-thousand-ton cargo containers up from a planetary surface. Instead of the standard containers, these were carrying specially designed modules loaded with those troops, tanks and aircraft.

  The landing would still need over a hundred of them making four flights apiece. The assault shuttles would mostly be relegated to an escort role, keeping any missiles or aerospace craft the locals had left from reaching the slower landers.

  “Landers report ready,” Roslyn told the Admiral after a few moments. “First-wave equipment is loaded, and personnel are coming aboard now. They expect full readiness at fourteen forty.”

  That meant a quarter-million soldiers were cramming themselves into those modules, preparing to drop through hostile space to the first planetary invasion the Protectorate had ever launched.

  That was a lot of moving pieces, but everything seemed to be coming together according to plan. Ahead of plan, in fact. If everything was ready ten to twenty minutes early, Roslyn suspected that most of the Guard elements had probably started moving thirty minutes early.

  The Guard officers knew that this was as new to their people as anyone else, after all.

  Communications channels from the planet were still silent. They were ten minutes past the deadline Alexander had given South Isle and no one was saying anything.

  Durendal’s flag bridge was as silent as the radio waves between Second Fleet and Sucre now. The fleet’s role in this fight was over. The plan was moving, and the only possible task left to Admiral Alexander was to give the order to stop if the defenders surrendered.

  “Chambers, it’s Lieutenant Burns from Tactical,” a soft voice said in her headset. “Can you check quadrant minus thirty-six by minus forty-eight? I’m seeing something weird, but…it’s weird enough I don’t want to officially bounce it up the chain.”

  Darrel Burns was the assistant tactical officer Roslyn usually spoke to first when dealing with the Tactical department. He’d done her enough favors that she didn’t mind doing him one in turn, and she pulled up the data.

  “…That’s a nuke, Darrel,” she half-whispered. “A small one, probably buried, but what the?”

  “That wasn’t us,” Burns replied. “If you see what I see, I’m bouncing it up the chain. Tell the Admiral.”

  “Of course.”

  Roslyn turned from the intercom channel and tapped a command that flashed her screen image to Kulkarni’s screen.

  “Captain Kulkarni, Admiral Alexander, somebody just nuked something on the surface,” she reported. “Energy readings are unclear, but it looks like at least a hundred-kiloton subsurface detonation.”

  “What the fuck?” Alexander asked bluntly. “Where the hell is this?”

  “Central region of one of the larger continents,” Kulkarni reported. “Two hundred forty kilometers from the capital city, in fact.” />
  An alert flashed on Roslyn’s channel and she looked up at the Admiral.

  “Sir, incoming transmission,” she reported. “Same transmitter as last time.”

  “Put them on,” Alexander ordered. “Let’s see if the Governor is willing to surrender.”

  South Isle looked far more tired than he had the first time, his hair no longer utterly perfect and visible bags now showing under his eyes.

  “Admiral Alexander, I am aware we missed your deadline, but my people tell me you have not yet launched your next bombardment. I hope that means we still have a chance to come to a resolution to this.”

  “There is always a chance, Governor,” Alexander replied, “but yours is running thin every second we speak.”

  “I am prepared to offer the conditional surrender of Sucre and the Nueva Bolivia System,” South Isle said instantly. “Is that enough to stay your hand for long enough for us to talk terms, at least?”

  “That won’t take very long, I suspect,” the Admiral told him. “What just blew up next to your capital city, Governor?”

  There was a long silence, one hardly justified by the two second com delay.

  “That, Mage-Admiral Alexander, would have been the Republic Intelligence Directorate’s primary operations facility on Sucre,” South Isle said slowly.

  “You nuked the RID?” Alexander asked. Roslyn couldn’t help but agree with the Admiral’s incredulous tone—South Isle had pushed it this late and had then blown up the RID base?

  “Technically, they nuked themselves,” the Governor replied. “That bomb was originally installed in the basement of the fallback bunker I am speaking to you from. It was relocated some weeks ago by what turns out to have been a rather…imaginative agent of mine.

  “They were supposed to dispose of the bomb.”

  “Instead, they infiltrated it into the RID base?” Alexander asked.