She pulsed electricity into him. Not a lot—she wasn’t sure she could still conjure a lot of lightning—but enough to hurt.
“I will electrocute your nerves and implants to death one piece at a time until you unlock this shuttle,” Roslyn told him, her voice determined and cold. She wasn’t sure she could do it, but she was certain she would do it.
There was no other way off Styx Station.
“You’re insane,” he told her. “Fine.”
“Go.”
Roslyn pushed him ahead of her, clinging to the last of her strength to keep the gravity spell up as they made their way to the cockpit.
“This station is in the middle of a fleet in the middle of a Republic system,” the pilot told her. “The shuttle doesn’t even have interstellar charts, let alone a jump system. You’re fucked.”
“My problem, not yours,” Roslyn pointed a glowing finger at him. “Unlock it.”
He typed in a code on the console. The screens she could see used the same operating systems as the Protectorate version, which gave her a chance.
“Thank you very much,” she told him sweetly—and then grabbed him by the shoulder. All of the accessways inside the shuttle were open, and she could hear exosuited boots approaching the bay.
For now, though, she threw the pilot backward. The shuttle was big—but not that big. The pilot flew down its full length and out the end in the seconds it took Roslyn to take the pilot’s seat and take control of the systems.
She closed the door behind the departing pilot and brought every one of the shuttle’s systems online. She spared the extra second to make sure she didn’t vaporize the pilot, and then brought the thrusters online.
The safety interlocks wouldn’t let her bring up the main engines inside a shuttle bay, but the craft had specific thrusters for just that purpose.
“The bay door is closed,” Alexander observed behind her, the Admiral’s voice having lost most of its dreamy undertones. “Do you have a plan, Chambers?”
“Yup,” Roslyn agreed. They were accelerating toward the door, slowly but surely, as she flipped a set of commands. “I just armed six nukes. Their scanners can see that. Either I get out into space or a good chunk of Styx Station gets blown to itty-bitty pieces.
It was a gamble—but it was all she had left. She’d had to let the gravity spell go now, strapping herself into the pilot’s seat. As she blazed toward the bay doors, she felt Alexander release the tether, the Admiral pulling herself into the other seat.
“This, I think I can do now,” Alexander noted, her words still slow but firm and certain now. “I have weapons control. I confirm six one-hundred-megaton warheads armed.”
“You have weapons,” Roslyn confirmed. “Four. Three. Two…there we go!”
The bay doors slid open with the speed of perfectly maintained systems. Roslyn’s speed was rising quickly, but she was still at velocities better measured in kilometers per hour than kilometers per second.
“Clear, clear!” Alexander confirmed. “Gunship incoming…well, that works.”
Roslyn didn’t even need to ask. The red icons marking that she’d armed all six of the assault shuttle’s nuclear missiles flashed green and then blank as the weapons blasted clear of the spacecraft.
The missiles weren’t supposed to be ship-killers. They were designed to clear landing sites or threaten merchants, with ranges, warheads and accelerations that were anemic compared to real warship missiles.
The gunship was barely a hundred kilometers away. They didn’t have time to realize something was going on before all six missiles hammered into the thirty-thousand-ton spacecraft.
The explosion helped cover Roslyn’s escape. She dove the shuttle next to the nuclear fireballs as the main fusion thrusters woke up.
“Where now?” Alexander asked. “Threat display is getting very full.”
“I’m not sure,” Roslyn admitted. “I figured you’d have your magic back by now and we could swap off.”
“I don’t,” the Admiral said grimly. “I don’t know why, I need time…but I don’t have my magic, Chambers. I don’t have any magic. We need…cover.”
There were over fifty capital ships maneuvering to try and get a shot at their tiny shuttle. Styx was the largest fortress, but it wasn’t alone in Hyacinth orbit—and the gunships were starting to deploy toward them in their dozens.
Hyacinth.
The gas giant.
“This might suck,” Roslyn admitted. “But it’s the only chance I see.”
The shuttle flipped in space, dodging several laser beams as Roslyn danced her through a half-forgotten evasive pattern toward her target.
Then several large angry men sat down on her chest as she pushed the assault shuttle to its maximum acceleration toward Hyacinth.
“How deep do we need to get to be undetectable?” she asked, her tone surprisingly calm to her own ears.
“Three atmospheres,” Alexander said after a second. “Not sure how deep that translates to. Can this ship take it?”
“The alternative is to test if she can take antimatter warheads,” Roslyn replied. “I know the answer to that question.”
With an entire fleet trying to pursue them, she drove their stolen assault shuttle into the upper tiers of Hyacinth’s atmosphere.
Somewhere in the depths of the planet was at least a momentary safety.
42
Roslyn knew she was a competent but not spectacular pilot. Dodging and weaving her way through the incoming fire and into the storms of a gas giant’s upper atmosphere was far beyond anything she’d ever practiced—and flying was an occasional training exercise for her, not a regular task.
Somehow, she did it. Alexander worked the shuttle’s weapons as they plunged, expending the rest of their missiles, the non-nuclear ones intended for ground targets, as decoys and counterstrikes.
The silence when the threat detectors stopped going off was a shock.
“We’re clear of targeting radar and incoming fire for the moment,” the Admiral told her. “How deep are we?”
“Two point eight atmospheres,” Roslyn said. “I’m taking us deeper and pulling…seventeen degrees west of north.”
It was a random angle, and that was exactly what they needed. It wouldn’t take long for the Republic warships to find some way to blindly bombard the layer they thought the shuttle was in.
They were at three atmospheres when the shuttle’s systems warned them they were exceeding maximum recommended pressure. Roslyn shared a long, silent look with Alexander…and then went deeper.
“Listen,” the Admiral said a moment later. The shuttle hull was creaking around them.
“Leveling out,” Roslyn confirmed. “We are at three point four atmospheres. Not sure of our actual depth, to be honest. Deep.”
“Okay.” Alexander exhaled. “We can go deeper if we use magic to reinforce the hull.”
“I’m out,” Roslyn said. “I need to rest. Eat. Something…everything. Can you?”
“No.” The single word hung in the shuttle cockpit like the sword of Damocles. “My magic is gone, Lieutenant. I don’t know what they did, but most of the drugs have worn off and I have nothing.”
Roslyn didn’t know how to respond to that. If the Republic could take the magic from someone as powerful as Jane Alexander, they were in serious trouble. Her entire plan, such as it had been, had relied on the Mage-Admiral being able to get them out from there.
“I need to eat,” she decided aloud, rising and leaving the cockpit, grimacing against the gas giant’s gravity.
They’d stolen a full-size Space Assault Regiment assault shuttle. While its primary purpose was to deliver a platoon of soldiers to a planet or starship, it was designed for a lot of potential emergencies. The seats in the walls, designed to strap in assault troopers during a high-speed drop, could fold down to act as cots, turning the spacecraft into an impromptu barracks.
It had bathrooms, a tactical command center…and a section of storage tha
t could be rotated out into the main area to open up a large kitchen. From the design, Roslyn figured the only way all of those features were expected to be used at once was if the shuttle was on a planet.
But she was able to get into the kitchen area and access the food storage. There were supplies aboard for actual meals, but most of the food was exactly what she’d expected: military ration bars and drinks. Electrolyte-laden high-calorie ingestibles to maintain a unit in a high-threat environment.
She grabbed two sets of a drink and a ration bar and reentered the main hold. Alexander had left the cockpit as well, but she hadn’t made it as far as Roslyn had. The Admiral was showing every year of her almost-complete century, her face ashen-pale as she sat on one of the drop seats and looked up at Roslyn.
“Here,” Roslyn said, passing one of the drinks and ration bars to the Admiral. She tore open her own drink and drained half of it in a single long swallow.
“I think the fuckers did more to me than I was afraid of,” Alexander admitted. “Painkillers are starting to wear off. Too stiff to move much.”
She slowly followed Roslyn’s example and drained her drink pouch. Even that motion caused her to wince.
“I need you to help me,” she told Roslyn. “I need the jacket off; I need to see my arms.”
Alexander sounded terrified. Roslyn would have helped anyway, but the tone of her boss’s voice accelerated matters. She took a single bite of her ration bar and set to carefully removing the outer layer of the clothes the Admiral was wearing.
There was a black tank top underneath—the fatigues were identical to the ones Roslyn was wearing and a far cry from a proper shipsuit—but removing the jacket bared the Admiral’s arms and the glittering silver runes that marked her forearms and biceps.
“Those aren’t anything I’m familiar with,” Roslyn murmured.
“Montgomery has them too,” Alexander told her. “Proof, I guess, that the recurring rumor you slept with him to get his help is bullshit. As if I needed any proof of that.”
Roslyn couldn’t help herself. She laughed aloud at the thought.
“I’m not sure Montgomery would see me as anything other than a kid now, let alone when I was seventeen,” she told Alexander. “He’s not my type, anyway. Too skinny. Too intense.”
“That he is,” Alexander agreed, studying her arms. “So, if the Runes of Power are still there, they did something else.”
Runes of Power. That wasn’t a phrase Roslyn had heard outside of bad thrillers and extremely sketchy rumors. Apparently, they were real.
Now that she looked more closely, she could see the divisions between the individual runes. There were two on each of Alexander’s arms, one wrapped around her forearm and one around her bicep.
“What do you need, boss?” she asked, taking another bite of her ration bar. She was ravenously hungry, she realized, and she kept eating while she waited for the Admiral’s response.
“To not hurt,” Alexander snapped, then stopped. “A lot of this is…stiffness,” she murmured. “Probably from being sedated to fuck for weeks on end. But…”
“Sir?”
“Help me turn this into a cot,” Alexander ordered. “They couldn’t have…but… Fuck.”
Roslyn had a better idea. She folded down the seat next to where Alexander was sitting, extending it to create a narrow but serviceable bed.
The Admiral tried to rise, only to spasm halfway up. Roslyn took her arm, helped Alexander over to the bed and watched as she lay down, face first.
“They did something to my lower back,” Alexander told her. “Help me take this shirt off.”
Roslyn obeyed, helping lift the tank top off and then moving Alexander to settle her more comfortably. As the Admiral lay back down on the bed, what had been done became blatantly, obviously, visible.
The Rune Wright’s upper shoulder blades were marked with a similar rune to her arms, the organic silver whorls of a fifth Rune of Power. The rune wasn’t in Martian Runic, its lines and connectors not even resembling the seventy-six characters and fourteen connectors of the language that defined magic. It was more refined, more natural—more true to magic even in Roslyn’s eyes.
The new rune, the one hacked into Alexander’s lower back with something close to a stencil rather than the proper tools, was in Martian Runic. Roslyn was no Rune Scribe, and deciphering runes was hard for her, but she could make out key components of a matrix she hadn’t even known could be made.
“It’s a new rune,” Roslyn told Alexander softly. “A modified form of the ward on the cells. The fuck?”
“Can you take a picture and show me?” the Crown Princess of Mars asked, her tone determined.
It took Roslyn a few moments to find a portable computer. Her wrist-comp was somewhere on Styx Station, but like their Marine cousins, space assault troopers didn’t land with their personal wrist-comps.
She took a picture of the rune and passed the tablet to Alexander.
“Fuck.” There was a depth of despair in the single word that Roslyn had never heard Jane Alexander use.
“Sir? Admiral Alexander?”
“That rune is almost as classified as my Runes of Power,” Alexander told her. “We wouldn’t carve it on the surface of the skin, though. We make sure it can’t be undone by inlaying it inside muscle, usually the left thigh.”
Roslyn had never even heard of anything like that in the Protectorate.
“What the hell is it?” she demanded.
“It’s the Rune of Nullification, Lieutenant,” her boss said. “It’s what we do to Mages who break the highest laws. It’s how we take someone’s magic.”
43
There was nothing in the particular patch of empty void that Rhapsody in Purple was drifting in to mark it as special or dangerous. There were no ships there other than them, no enemies hurling missiles and lasers, nothing.
It was just a patch of empty space that happened to be one light-year away from the Chrysanthemum System, and Kelly LaMonte stared at the galactic map silently as she considered her options.
“Xi, send all your people to bed,” she finally ordered. “We won’t jump until all of you are rested up and ready to go.”
“That’s—”
“The best way to make sure we can jump the hell back out if things go wrong,” Kelly cut off her wife. “This ship already carries enough information to potentially turn the tide of this war. We need to see what’s in Chrysanthemum. If our enemy is waiting there, the Protectorate needs to know.
“We also need to make damn sure we survive. We won’t be playing risky games for detailed data in Chrysanthemum.”
“We also won’t be able to hide our arrival,” Shvets warned her. “Not unless someone has a civilian freighter in their back pocket they haven’t mentioned.”
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Kelzin replied, flashing a grin across the conference table. “I think I’d notice that. Freighters are a tight fit in my pockets.”
The senior officers were gathered in the meeting room next to Rhapsody’s bridge. A hologram of the map of the space around them hung above the table, the map a stark explanation of their position.
They were technically in Protectorate space now, but Chrysanthemum was a Fringe world at the far end of nowhere. The fastest route to most of the Protectorate was through the Republic, which had helped keep the supposedly loyal UnArcana World even more isolated through the war.
“Even if we moved to the regular jump lines into Chrysanthemum, the odds are that we wouldn’t see anyone,” Kelly reminded her people. “The system has seen an average of one freighter a month for the last three years. That’s given us quite a bit of data to work with, but it also points out our target.”
She tapped a command, replacing the hologram of human space with an image of the Chrysanthemum System itself.
“Peony and Dandelion are both a bit too large to host an accelerator ring,” she noted, highlighting the innermost and outermost of the system’s three gas giants.
“Both are also currently nearly aligned with Chrysanthemum itself, which means we actually have decent scan data on them.
“Hyacinth is our joker,” she continued, highlighting the last gas giant. “As planets go, she’s basically the same size as Centurion. If they took the schematics for the Centurion Ring, they could duplicate them on Hyacinth without much work.”
She shrugged.
“Of course, there are seven gas giants we can say that about in official Republic space, so that’s not a selling point all on its own, but with everything else we’ve run into…well, I want to take a real close look at Chrysanthemum-Six, AKA Hyacinth.”
Her officers were nodding as they looked at the map.
“The good news is that she’s basically on the opposite side of the star system from Chrysanthemum right now, which gives us a nice clear run to the planet without the locals seeing us,” Milhouse said.
“Except if she’s hosting the accelerator ring, there’s going to be a damn fleet guarding her,” Kelzin replied. “The easiest way to tell if we’ve found our target is to count how many battleships start coming our way!”
“Mike hits the nail on the head,” Kelly agreed, yanking on her braid gently as she looked at the map. “The geometry says we can jump in relatively close to Hyacinth and get a decent scan shortly after arrival.
“But we saw in Republic space that the RIN is getting better at reacting to the possibility of scout ships. We covered our tracks in Alignment. We can’t do the same here, and if Hyacinth is what we think it is, we’re going to be looking at a hunting swarm to make what we ran into in Gygax look like kids out playing.”
There was a grim silence in the room. The carrier that had come out after them at Gygax had been operating to a clearly developed doctrine, and the Republic still had a communication advantage over the Protectorate.
A doctrine deployed in one place was readily available to every other place as well.
“So, does anyone have any clever ideas?” Shvets asked. “The only one that comes to mind for me is to jump in, hurtle toward the planet at maximum acceleration, get everything we can and jump out.”
The Service of Mars Page 24