The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

  “Between Xi, and her team, we can do that,” Kelly agreed. “But our timeframe would be short. Very short. Remember that they’re just as capable of microjumping as we are.”

  “But we have four Mages,” Kelzin suggested slowly, her husband’s perpetual grin turning thoughtful. “Turn that around, my love. We’re just as capable of microjumping as they are.”

  The silence was more thoughtful than grim now, and Kelly returned her husband’s grin.

  “Normally, we’d jump in and have one of them hiding us,” she noted. “But if we’re not planning on hiding, then we have the option to make at least one jump around the system.”

  “That will drain whoever does it just as much as a full-scale jump,” Xi Wu warned. “And if we jump in close to a gravity well, there’s risk to both the Mage and the ship.”

  “I wasn’t thinking jumping in any closer than the first jump, actually,” Kelzin said. “Civilian ships jump in at, what, three light-minutes from a gas giant like this?”

  “Give or take. We can do ninety light-seconds. Maybe eighty,” Xi suggested. “What are you thinking, love?”

  “We jump in at five to ten light-minutes, a long-distance scoot ’n snoop,” Kelly’s husband told them all. “We act like we’re being sneaky; we get their attention and we wait for the hunting swarm to jump out to track us down.

  “If we run the heat sinks but not the stealth spell, that should keep them guessing enough to get their ready force out to our position—and then as soon as they arrive, we jump to the other side of the gas giant, ninety light-seconds out.

  “Burn for Hyacinth at high speed while we have the bastards looking for us in the outer system. Get our scans in, then jump the hell out and head for home. They’re no better at tracking jumps than we are.

  It was possible to track jumps. The people, the Trackers, who could do so were immensely rare, however, and the Protectorate only had a handful in their employ. One had been supposed to join the MISS contingent running scouting missions in the Republic but hadn’t arrived yet.

  Kelly didn’t have a Tracker, and she was reasonably sure the Republic didn’t either.

  “This does sound like the kind of stunt an aggressive assault shuttle pilot would plan, yes,” Charmchi noted, the big cyborg grinning from ear to ear. “I like it. Skipper?”

  “I like it as well,” Kelly admitted. “We’re never going to successfully sneak in past a fleet. They might not have one, in which case the whole game is unnecessary, but…if they don’t have one, this isn’t the place we’re looking for, anyway.”

  She met her husband’s gaze and smiled.

  “I like it,” she repeated. “But remember that if we’re right and this is the accelerator ring, they’re going to pull every stop out to catch us. There will be more ships that they can microjump after us.”

  “Yes, but can they microjump ninety light-seconds starting in a gas giant’s gravity well?” Mike asked. “Xi? Could you?”

  The Mage snorted.

  “Probably,” she allowed. “It would suck and all I’d want to do afterward is sleep for a week. Though I guess that’s why we have three Mages aboard.”

  “Whether the Prometheus Interface can achieve that is an open question,” Kelly admitted. “I guess we’ll find out—but we’ll have one of our Mages standing by to get us out of Chrysanthemum if they do.

  “Let’s be honest, people: if there’s that much of a Republic presence in a system that’s supposedly loyal to the Mountain, we already have our answer!”

  44

  The first shockwave jolted Roslyn awake. She hadn’t expected to actually fall asleep when she’d lain down on the uncomfortable cot, but she’d managed it regardless.

  Now the entire shuttle shook around her as she rolled off the hard surface and rose against the heavy pull of the gas giant’s gravity.

  “Admiral?” she asked aloud.

  “We’re trapped on a thirty-meter-long shuttle inside a gas giant surrounded by an enemy fleet,” Alexander replied calmly. “I think you can call me Jane, Roslyn.”

  “What’s going on…Jane?”

  “Not sure,” the older woman admitted. “I was meditating.”

  Alexander had put the fatigue jacket back on and was still moving slowly, with a level of pain and despair that tugged at Roslyn’s heart. It hurt to see her mentor and commanding officer this close to the edge.

  “Here, eat.” Alexander shoved a ration bar over to Roslyn. “We’re going to need your magic to get through this, I’m afraid.”

  A second shockwave rippled through the shuttle, lurching the sturdy spacecraft to the side. Both women traded glances and set off for the cockpit.

  Alexander was slower, and Roslyn had the systems up by the time the Admiral joined her.

  “Nukes,” she told the older woman. “Ground-bombardment weapons like the ones we used on that gunship. They’re firing them randomly into the gas giant with timed detonations.”

  Two more explosions rocked the shuttle, and a warning light popped up on one of the screens. Roslyn checked it and sighed.

  “And it’s going to work,” she admitted. “They’re still detonating them too high up to really cause us damage, but they’ll work on that. The shockwaves are traveling hundreds of kilometers in this mess. They don’t need to be perfect. They just need to get close.”

  This time, four warheads went off simultaneously. The zone was expanding, and Roslyn shivered, almost in time with the shockwave that rippled through her ship.

  “We have to move. I thought I’d taken us far enough away, but I wasn’t sure what they’d do.”

  The shuttle’s engines were more visible from orbit than the shuttle herself, but the shockwaves themselves would eventually make the shuttle’s presence clear if the RIN ships were paying attention.

  “Are you refreshed enough to protect us?” Alexander asked.

  “I think so,” Roslyn admitted. “For a while. But they can keep this up for longer than I can protect the shuttle.”

  She suited actions to her words, reaching out with her power to forge a small bubble of even thicker atmosphere around the ship to absorb the shock before it reached her. As the waves of several more nukes washed over them, she grunted at the effort—but the shield stayed up.

  “I’m taking us deeper now that I can shield us,” she told Alexander. “I’m going to cut the curve and bring us back up to three and a half atmospheres farther away.”

  “Good plan,” Alexander agreed. She shook her head. “What I’d give for Second Fleet right now.”

  “Second Fleet might be outgunned by what they’ve got here,” Roslyn warned. “They have something close to three-quarters of the strength they started the war with concealed in this system. Not all of it’s jump-capable, but still…seven or eight carrier groups.”

  “And they’re installing Interfaces here,” Alexander said grimly.

  “They’ve got a propaganda answer to the accusations around the Interface, too,” Roslyn continued. “They told me that the brains were non-Mage volunteers. Called them martyrs.”

  “Makes sense,” the old Mage agreed. “We know damn well the brains were Mages, but if they can sell their fighting force on that lie…they can fight. And given that their fighting force will want to believe they aren’t fighting for monsters, well.”

  “It’s an easy sell,” Roslyn confirmed. “What do we do, Admiral? All I can think of is to squirm around their depth charges and try to survive as long as possible.”

  She was deep enough and far enough away now that the shockwaves weren’t a critical threat anymore. Her shield was even more critical now, though. The shuttle was showing pressure of around two atmospheres, but that was only because her magic was keeping it that way.

  The true pressure around them was closer to five atmospheres now. Armored as the shuttle was, it was designed to withstand impacts, not constant pressure. Roslyn suspected that if she dropped the shield now, the shuttle would crumple like it was made of p
aper.

  They were moving faster than the depth-charge pattern was expanding, but more ships were joining the bombardment now. Most likely, the only nuclear missiles in the fleet had been aboard shuttles like the one they’d stolen, and it had taken some hours to fabricate fusion warheads for weapons the starships could deploy.

  Nobody was going to fire antimatter warheads at a planet they were planning on using later.

  Now the RIN clearly had that fabrication going at a steady rate, as what had been one bomb became ten, twenty—a hundred warheads at once over an ever-expanding area.

  “We’re not going to survive on that plan, Roslyn,” Jane Alexander half-whispered. “You can’t fight a fleet with your magic, especially not if you use yourself up just keeping us alive. They’re not going to give up until they have reason to believe we’re dead.

  “We were valuable as prisoners, but as escapees, we’re too dangerous to let live.”

  The flash of the warning signs on the shuttle screens was the only interruption to their silence.

  “What do we do?” Roslyn finally asked.

  “We run as best as we can and we…” Alexander bit her lip. Roslyn could see tears of anger in her superior’s eyes. “I want to fight these bastards,” she ground out. “I want to demonstrate to them the full power of Mars, to demonstrate why their ilk has always feared the Mountain.

  “But so long as this thing is in me, I have no power. They have stolen my Gift, and for that, I would burn them all to ashes.”

  “What if it wasn’t in you?” Roslyn said. Alexander’s gaze snapped on to her like a hunting hawk and she quailed under the Admiral’s eyes. “If we removed it, what would that do?”

  “That’s why we bury it deep when we nullify criminals,” Alexander admitted slowly. “In theory, if the Rune of Nullification is removed, my power would return. But…you’re not a Rune Wright, Roslyn. If you broke it, without knowing exactly where to cut it, you could trigger a release of my own power that would rip this shuttle apart like a teacup in a storm.”

  “So, we need to remove it in one piece,” the younger woman replied, feeling ill as she contemplated what she was suggesting. “I need to get us to somewhere away from their bombing, somewhere that gives us an hour or two of time.”

  “There could be no mistake or slip, Roslyn,” the Admiral said quietly. “You’d need to remove the entire rune from my back in one piece. You’re talking about flaying me.”

  “We have painkillers, plastiskin, surgical tools—this is an assault shuttle, Jane,” Roslyn countered. “It should have a full trauma bay somewhere. If we can get away from the bombs, we should be able to do it.”

  “That’s madness,” Alexander whispered. “And yet…it’s no crazier than inlaying a Rune of Power on your own arm with magic.”

  Roslyn blinked, looking down at Alexander’s forearms.

  “Who the hell did that?” she asked, feeding slightly more power to her engines.

  “Who do you think?” the older woman asked. “Damien Montgomery. This plan of yours is his kind of crazy. It always worked for him, I suppose.”

  Roslyn heard Jane Alexander swallow.

  “Get us to safety, Roslyn,” she ordered. “I’ll go find the trauma bay. We won’t have a lot of time.”

  45

  “Jump complete,” Liara Foster announced.

  “Stealth systems engaged, engines online,” Milhouse reported in turn as Rhapsody in Purple’s scanners began to sweep the Chrysanthemum System.

  “We are on a course for Hyacinth under maximum nonmagical stealth,” Shvets confirmed. “Current range, nine point two light-minutes. ETA if we don’t do anything…uh, a day-ish?”

  “And somehow, I don’t think we’re going to be taking that long,” Kelly murmured. The initial sensor sweep of Hyacinth, even from this range, was showing massive energy signatures. “What the hell is going on over there, Milhouse?”

  The bridge was silent for at least ten seconds as the tactical officer went through the data.

  “What we’re seeing is the aftermath of at least five or six hundred fusion warheads,” he concluded. “Looks like fifty warheads a minute in an expanding pattern.” Milhouse fell silent for a moment, then shook his head.

  “They’re being fired into the gas giant, sir,” he said. “Like…depth charges. What the hell could be inside a gas giant that’s making them that angry, sir?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not going to complain about the distraction,” Kelly replied. “Keep an eye open for their response. Even if they’re busy nuking the gas giant, I expect them to find a carrier to send out after us. I’m seeing a lot of ships over there.”

  “We wouldn’t if their drives were cold,” Milhouse said. “I’m not getting anything resembling exact numbers, but I’d say we’re looking at dozens of ships and hundreds of gunships. We’re too far out for me to resolve anything without active engines like, say, an accelerator ring, but…”

  “If there’s a goddamn fleet in orbit of Hyacinth, that’s a bloody good sign,” Kelly agreed. She looked over at the video link to the simulacrum chamber.

  “Xi, are you ready?” she asked her wife.

  Xi Wu was the least experienced of her Mages in many ways, with Liara Foster and Melanie Droit both being secondees from the Royal Martian Navy. She’d been run through an accelerated version of the same training as her subordinates, however, and was also a more powerful Mage than either of her subordinates.

  Today, for this mess of a microjump, Xi wasn’t leaving it to her subordinates.

  “I have the simulacrum and I am prepared to jump us,” Xi Wu confirmed. “Watching all the scanners. I make it at least eight minutes before we’re likely to see anything.”

  “They might have Link-equipped sensor satellites to cut that number down,” Kelly warned. “We found a few of those in Legatus after the fact—and while we haven’t seen them since, if this was their fallback position, well. They’ll be here if they’re anywhere.”

  “Keeping our eyes open,” Xi agreed.

  “Numbers are getting cleaner as we resolve more data, sir,” Milhouse reported, his voice strained. “It’s not good. I’m reading at least fifty active capital ships. Whatever’s going on inside the gas giant has them stirred the hell up, but…that’s almost as many ships as the RIN is supposed to have left.”

  “And we’ve accounted for most of what they’re supposed to have left,” Kelly agreed. “These ships couldn’t have been ready before the end of the Siege of Legatus, but…what a goddamn mess.”

  “Your orders, sir?” Milhouse asked formally.

  “We proceed as per the plan,” Kelly told them all. “We stand by to microjump closer in once we’ve drawn at least some of their ships out of position. We have enough to bring Second Fleet here, but I want to make sure the Fleet knows exactly what they’re walking into.”

  There’d been enough traps and misestimations in this war already. Kelly LaMonte was not going to contribute to another one.

  “Light from our jump flare should have reached Hyacinth ten seconds ago,” Shvets reported. “Any guesses on how long until we have a carrier in our faces?”

  “About a minute and a half,” Kelly replied. “I’d say two to three minutes, except they’ve clearly already mobilized their fleet after whatever the hell is pissing them off.”

  “Should we be planning to try and extract whoever they’re trying to bomb out?” Mike Kelzin asked. “Anyone who pisses the RIN off that badly…I kind of want to make sure they get away.”

  “They’re on the wrong side of a fleet, Mike,” Kelly pointed out. “I agree. I want to get in there and extract whoever has an entire battle fleet bombing a gas giant, but so long as that fleet is there…” She shrugged. “In an absolute best-case scenario, we can only conceal Rhapsody at about fifty thousand kilometers. We can’t do any better for the shuttles—they don’t have any stealth systems and would be entirely relying on a Mage.”

  “The planet is a hundred th
ousand kilometers across,” Shvets noted. “If we came in on the opposite side from the fleet…”

  “Do you want to bet our lives and the potential end of this war on there not being anything in position to pick us up as we did that?” Kelly asked. “There’s almost certainly an accelerator ring around that planet, people. A half-million-kilometer space station. It will have sensors along its length, which means we can’t sneak up on any side of the gas giant.”

  She watched the timer counting up from the moment the Republic ships would have seen their jump flare, and sighed.

  “If it was just us, I’d take the risk,” she admitted. “But right now, this ship is carrying enough to end the damn war. We’re taking one more chance, people. One more dive into hell to make certain we’ve found the enemy. But we can’t do more than that. We have a plan to do that as safely as possible.

  “We cannot risk that knowledge being lost. I wish I knew who they were chasing, and I wish we could save them, but we can’t. This war has to end.”

  The count was at ninety seconds and rising. The RIN hadn’t responded as quickly as Kelly had expected, and she yanked on her braid in frustration. She didn’t want to jump until they’d moved out of position, but…

  “We’re probably not going to get a major disruption out of them today,” Milhouse noted as the count continued to rise. “Should we just jump in? We know there’s going to be a fleet there, no matter what we do.”

  “I still want them focused out here,” Kelly told them. “We give them five minutes, at least.”

  “We’re ready,” Xi Wu said. “Whenever they come.”

  “They seem distracted, at least,” Milhouse agreed. “Two minutes. We’re into a regular response time.”

  “I’m not complaining, but I do wish that they’d—”

  “Jump flare!” Milhouse snapped. “Multiple jump flares; I’m reading at least five ships at two hundred thousand kilometers!”