The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Captain LaMonte, welcome aboard Gentle Rains of Summer,” Michaels told her. “I’d like to introduce you to my Ship’s Mage, Evelyn Nguyen, and my executive officer, Bran Wiltshire.”

  Evelyn Nguyen had the ambiguously brown features of a Martian native and bowed slightly to Kelly, but everyone was expecting the main focus of attention to be Wiltshire.

  Wiltshire was a sandy-haired older man who’d been working his way up in administration on basically every civilian ship Kelly had ever served on. He’d been on Blue Jay under Captain Rice with her and then on Red Falcon with the same Captain. When Red Falcon had been lost, Wiltshire had returned to civilian life with a glowing series of recommendations and referrals from his now either wealthy or MISS former superiors.

  They seemed to have done him good.

  “Kelly,” he greeted her with a broad grin. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “The galaxy is way too damn small,” Kelly replied, pulling the man into a quick embrace. Letting him go, she stepped back to nod to Captain Michaels.

  “Wiltshire knows me and my spouses, but this is my wife, Ship’s Mage Xi Wu, and my husband, First Pilot Mike Kelzin.”

  “Greetings to you all,” Michaels told them. “While I don’t believe Bran broke any confidences, he did suggest that if you were asking for help, it might be more important than you were letting on.”

  “It might be, yes,” Kelly said carefully.

  “Come, let’s talk in private over a good meal,” the freighter’s captain said firmly. “That always seems the best plan for me!”

  The meal was good. Kelly had no argument with the quality of the handmade pasta Michaels’s staff produced for the six of them. It was delicious and it occupied the first twenty minutes of the dinner without interruption.

  Once the plates were cleared away, the steward brought coffees, and the freighter Captain leaned forward over his, studying Kelly.

  “Between one thing and another, I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that your ship is loitering near a Protectorate-loyal UnArcana World. What do you need, Captain LaMonte?”

  “Cover,” Kelly said bluntly. “We have reasons to feel that a more-detailed scouting run on the loyal UnArcana worlds is needed. My ship is capable of that run, but we can’t jump into a system undetected.”

  “You want us to haul you in with our cargo?” Michaels asked. “That might take some doing.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” she admitted. “If you can provide us a full copy of your jump calculations and we jump at the same time, my crew can make certain we emerge in your shadow. No one will ever be the wiser about our presence.”

  “That seems easy enough,” he told her. “I assume that you didn’t want to risk anyone on my ship telling the Alignment government about this?”

  “Exactly. The less you can reveal, the less trouble you can possibly get in,” she told him. “Dinner with a stranger this far out? Easy to justify, especially since it turns out we aren’t strangers. Transmitting your jump calculations? Harder.”

  “If the Captain is on board, I can provide the calculations before you leave,” Nguyen said in a soft near-whisper. “It is easy enough.”

  “We can pay for this,” Kelly told them. “It’s the least I can offer for the help we’re asking for.”

  “I won’t turn down the money,” Michaels admitted, “but we’ll do it. I don’t jump to Alignment often, and I like the folks I deal with there, but I know where my loyalties lie in this damned war.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “It’s appreciated. Hopefully, all of this is unnecessary, and I will learn only that Alignment is doing everything they say they are and are truly loyal members of the Protectorate.”

  “But you wouldn’t be going through this rigmarole if you thought that was going to be the case,” Wiltshire said grimly, the XO looking thoughtful.

  “No,” Kelly conceded. “I don’t think Alignment is entirely out of the fold just yet, but I think they’re hedging their bets.”

  She’d check them anyway. Her suspicions still rested mostly on Chrysanthemum—and that system was enough farther out that she wasn’t expecting to find a ship to hide behind there.

  37

  “Jump complete. Gentle Rains of Summer is exactly on target and so are we,” Shvets reported. “Well done, Liara.”

  The junior Ship’s Mage bowed her head on the video feed, looking utterly drained. Xi Wu was already stepping up beside her, gently guiding the other woman out of the way as she took over.

  “Stealth spell active,” Xi Wu reported. “We are invisible.”

  “Shvets, get us out from Gentle Rains,” Kelly ordered. “Captain Michaels has earned his money today; let’s not put him at any more risk.

  “Our destination is Mesa, the innermost gas giant.”

  Alignment had five rocky worlds, one comfortably habitable, and three gas giants. The usual arrangement of the rocky worlds on the interior and the gas giants on the outside was in play, with Mesa, Parallel and Angular all orbiting well away from Plateau, the habitable world.

  “Angular has been in the data from the freighters,” she explained as the spy ship’s engines woke up. “Mesa and Parallel haven’t, but Mesa is closest to Plateau and to us. We’ll investigate Parallel before we leave the system, but I’m hoping we can do a fast sweep of them both and call it a day.”

  “Course is in, engines are active,” Shvets replied. “We’re on our way. ETA eighteen hours, assuming nothing comes up that calls for us to cut the engines.”

  Rhapsody in Purple had the same magical gravity as every RMN warship. The faster they accelerated, the harder it was for them to hide their presence, but the cloaking spell was sufficient to cover about ten gravities from their antimatter engines at any significant distance.

  Kelly nodded and glanced over at the icon for Gentle Rains of Summer. Like most big civilian ships, Gentle Rains resembled nothing so much as an eggbeater. Six ribs extended from the front of the ship, sweeping back to connect to the engine module and rotating to provide gravity when the ship wasn’t under thrust.

  Their course was heading directly toward Plateau and taking them well away from Rhapsody in Purple, and she mentally saluted them.

  “Fly safe, Captain Michaels, Wiltshire,” she murmured. “Don’t let me have got you in trouble. This is going to be a messy enough day as it is.”

  “Captain to the bridge, Captain to the bridge.”

  The carefully pitched alert cut through Kelly’s quarters and she jerked awake, only avoiding banging her head against the wall because her husband got a hand in the way in time.

  “Careful, love,” he told her. “Go,” he urged, kissing her forehead. “Conrad wouldn’t wake you if it wasn’t critical.”

  They were taking careful shifts right now, keeping an eye on things while letting everyone get some rest. Kelly was sleeping in her shipsuit to be ready, but she still took a moment to make sure she looked presentable before rushing to the bridge.

  Milhouse and Shvets had the watch, and they were waiting for her as she came into the command center.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “Had to cut the engines to three gravities,” Shvets told her. “Adds two hours to our ETA at this point, but…” They waved at the screen. “Did Alignment have gunships before the Secession?”

  The familiar bullet-like shape of a RIN gunship danced across her screen, fusion engines lit as the ship followed a standard patrol route.

  “They did,” Kelly confirmed, her voice hard, “but they were Crucifix-class ships, not Accelerator-class. I don’t see rotational gravity pods on that ship, do you?”

  The Crucifix-class gunships had four living pods on extended arms. Designed for long-duration patrols, they could rotate to provide pseudogravity to anyone in the pods. Under acceleration, the pods would swing behind the ship to have the thrust provide gravity in the same direction—usually called “squid mode.”

  The gunship on
their screens was accelerating and there was no sign of squid mode anywhere.

  “We picked her up first because she was accelerating, but we’ve IDed several more as we’ve kept moving,” Milhouse told her. New red icons glistened on her display. “Once we had one, the other five were easy to find. They’re running a standard security pattern around Mesa. Keeping their engines low-ish to avoid detection from Plateau, but I’d say they’ve got a base at the gas giant.”

  “We need more than supposition,” Kelly said with a sigh. “We’re talking about treason by an entire star system government, people. Even the Accelerators might have been delivered before the actual war.

  “That means I need sensors on either an RIN starship or a major base that the Alignment government hasn’t told the Protectorate about. We need smoking guns, unfortunately.”

  “So long as they’re following the pattern it looks like they’re following, we should be able to cut through Mesa’s space at about thirty light-seconds without detection,” Shvets told her. “That will require shutting down the reactor and running heat sinks at full. Barring similar tech and magic to ours, though, they won’t hide anything from us at that range.”

  “We do what we have to do,” Kelly replied. “I’ll take turning the ship into a sauna over missing something. If there’s a Republic base in this system, we need to know.”

  “Any chance it’s the accelerator ring?” Milhouse asked. “We’re still pretty far out.”

  “We might be missing the accelerator ring itself from this distance,” Kelly agreed. “But if you were defending the most critical piece of infrastructure left to your nation, would you do it with six gunships in a standard patrol pattern?”

  “Shutting down the reactor,” Kelly murmured, as much to herself as anyone else, as she tapped through the screens on her command chair. Rhapsody in Purple’s Engineering section was small and self-contained. She could have a chief engineer, but the four-person team running the section was small enough that Kelly ran Engineering herself.

  “We’re cold,” Milhouse announced. “Heat sinks filling. Containment active.”

  “Current velocity seven thousand one hundred and fifty kilometers per second,” Shvets announced. “We will make our pass at nine million kilometers in eleven minutes from…mark.”

  Mesa was growing on the screens as their sensors focused on the gas giant and its orbitals. From almost a full light-minute away, even Rhapsody’s scanners could only pick out so much. Ships with active engines, major space stations, that kind of thing.

  “Last official reports say that Mesa has a civilian extraction complex anchored on an inner moon,” Milhouse said aloud. “Unless I miss my guess, that’s this here.”

  The tactical officer highlighted a “moon” that was little more than a midsized captured asteroid. It was probably smaller than Phobos or Deimos back on Mars, even.

  But it had a permanent stable orbit, which made it a good place to anchor a space station on. Milhouse’s highlight picked out the mix of deep-space and surface infrastructure that made up the facility—relatively easily identified, given the five-thousand-kilometer-long cloudscoop tubes that dipped into Mesa’s atmosphere to pull up hydrogen and other gases in immense quantities.

  “And if that is the only station that’s supposed to be here, I’ll give everyone one guess on what contact bravo is,” Milhouse continued, highlighting a different section of space. “Bravo appears to be entirely artificial, no anchoring. She’s lower down, which makes her cloudscoops harder to pick out, but…I think I’ve got her.”

  The cloudscoops were the most obvious part of any fuel-extraction operation. It was hard to conceal a thousand-kilometer-plus magnetically charged pipe, after all. The ‘scoops on “contact bravo” were a fifth of the length of the official refinery’s version and had been clearly designed to be stealthier as well.

  But there were also twenty-three of them to the official station’s eight.

  “Got a confirm on that, Milhouse?” Kelly said softly.

  “Major refueling depot, sir,” he replied. “I’m estimating a hundred million tons of fuel storage and what looks like at least twenty million tons of warehousing. Probably munitions and provisions, at a guess.”

  Kelly whistled silently.

  “I imagine the RMN doesn’t have a major logistics depot they forgot to mention to the MISS,” she murmured. “But do we have anything else?”

  “Hold one; I have new contacts,” Milhouse snapped. Vague orange icons blipped onto the screen around the depot…and then the entire complex flashed bright crimson.

  “I have a Republic cruiser in a defensive position,” the tactical officer barked. “Beacon is shut down, but nobody else flies a twenty-megaton cylinder with rotational gravity. Installations here, here and here appear to be missile and gunship bases, ten megatons apiece.

  “Lighter platforms than the Republic has used elsewhere, they’re probably local builds, but I’m seeing at least twenty more gunships as we’re getting closer. Plus, the cruiser.”

  Kelly nodded slowly, focusing her own screens on the Republic warship.

  There was no mistaking it. A Benjamin-class heavy cruiser was built around a single cylindrical hull, five hundred meters long by one hundred and seventy-five meters across. That twenty-megaton hull was also used as the basis for the Republic’s bigger battleships and carriers, but this was its most basic form.

  And it was a ship that had no business in a Protectorate system.

  “Any sign from Plateau that the planet has been occupied since our last reports?” she asked quietly.

  “Nothing,” Milhouse replied. “Everyone there seems to be acting like business is as usual.”

  “Bastards.” There was no real heat in Kelly’s epithet, just faded exhaustion. The minds behind the Republic had known the Protectorate would use kid gloves with any UnArcana World that didn’t secede—that several of those worlds had stayed was a huge moral victory for Mars, after all.

  And they’d used that against the Protectorate.

  “Maintain course,” she ordered. “Xi, get one of your people ready,” she continued. “I don’t care if these bastards know they’re caught. We jump as soon as we’re clear and safe. There’s no accelerator ring here, which means even money is on Chrysanthemum and New Madagascar—and we, my friends, are heading to Chrysanthemum.”

  If she was very lucky, this little trip might mean the end of the war.

  38

  When someone knocked on Roslyn’s door at noon, two days after her visit to Alexander’s apartment, she was expecting it to be McLain again. She intentionally fumbled a book she was fiddling with, collapsing the structure of books she’d been building.

  If she’d guessed the location of the camera correctly, it would look like she was still building a house of cards to her captors. If she hadn’t, well, McLain might be coming to ask her just why she was using the books they’d given her to build a rough map of Styx Station.

  The knock repeated a few seconds later, and she realized it didn’t sound like the sharp and confident rap of the Protector’s Guard officer.

  “Come in,” she instructed.

  The door swung open, allowing two of her usual female guards to step in. They did a quick survey of the room, then stepped farther inside and out of the way. Behind them followed a man she was unfamiliar with. He wore a civilian suit in dark burgundy but had the same golden crook on his lapel as the Protector’s Guard.

  He was a golden-haired young man with expressive blue eyes, at most a few years older than Roslyn’s own early twenties. He saw her and bowed deeply.

  “Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers,” he greeted her in an unfamiliar slow accent. “I am Alecto Gil.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me, Mr. Gil?” Roslyn asked.

  He smiled.

  “Not really,” he admitted. “I am one of several junior aides to the Lord Protector, though I have the distinction of hailing from this star system. Our esteemed
leader has asked that I give you a tour of the reasonably unclassified portions of Styx Station and answer any questions you have about the Republic and, well”—he gestured to the books scattered across the floor—“the reading material he provided.”

  “That sounds more interesting than staring at walls,” Roslyn told him. It would also give her a chance to add to her mental map of the station. She had a good memory and was focusing on remembering her way around. Enough silly tours trying to win her over might give her an opportunity.

  She wasn’t sure what that opportunity would even look like, but she knew she had to find it.

  “She can’t leave the room without Mage-cuffs,” one of the guards noted, producing the silver manacles from inside her uniform. “Those were the Lord Protector’s direct orders.”

  “Of course,” Gil agreed. “I think we can dispense with the actual chains, though. You will be with us every step of the way if the Mage-Lieutenant decides to try something silly.”

  The guard did a good job of looming at Roslyn as she clasped the Mage-cuffs around her wrists and ankles. Roslyn wasn’t going to tell them that they only needed one set—wrists or ankles would have been enough to block her power—even if she thought they’d believe her.

  Once the cuffs were attached, the guard stepped back. She accepted her carbine back from her compatriot and checked the stungun attachment before leveling it on Roslyn.

  “We need you alive,” the guard noted. “But SmartDarts are pretty reliable on that count. You read me?”

  “I read you,” Roslyn agreed.

  “Please, ladies, please,” Gil interjected. “We have no need for threats and displays today. Lieutenant Chambers is a guest, even if not entirely by her choice.

  “Come, let me show you our station.”

  Roslyn wasn’t sure if Gil was as brightly naïve as he seemed or if he was just an idiot. Both were options, she supposed, though the most likely scenario was that it was a façade.