The Service of Mars

by Glynn Stewart

“Well, at least we got their attention after all,” Kelly replied. “I was starting to think we were being ignored. Xi?”

  “We’re already gone,” the Ship’s Mage said flatly. Even as Kelly turned her attention to the display showing her the incoming battle group, the world twisted around her.

  “Jump complete,” Xi said, her voice far more exhausted than it had been a moment before. “Passing off to Mel.”

  “Shvets?”

  “Emergence on target; we are twenty-seven million kilometers from Hyacinth, and I am vectoring in at maximum power.”

  “That was a full carrier group, Captain,” Milhouse reported. “Courageous-class carrier, two Combination-class battleships and four Benjamin-class cruisers.”

  “Always nice to be respected and sent the best,” Kelly agreed. The Republic had sent over two hundred million tons of warships after her little two-hundred-thousand-ton stealth ship.

  “I think they’re just paranoid,” her tactical officer told her. “Because this is our El Dorado, Captain. I can confirm we are looking at an accelerator ring in orbit of Hyacinth. Accompanying shipyards, fortresses and a goddamn multiple-carrier group fleet.”

  “Then I think we need to get out of here,” Kelly said in a sharp exhale of breath. “We can pray for the poor bastard whose distraction bought us the time for this, but we’ve got to take advantage of it and go.

  “Mage Droit, are you ready to jump?”

  Many of the ships nearest to them were starting to adjust course toward them. They weren’t an immediate threat, but Kelly had no intention of pushing the limits of her time. A Martian squadron wouldn’t risk any microjump under five light-minutes, but the RIN might have different protocols.

  “We’re ready down here,” her third Mage confirmed.

  “Milhouse, get me a count on those hulls,” Kelly ordered. “You have sixty seconds. Droit—the count is sixty seconds.”

  “Understood,” both of her subordinates replied.

  “That’s a lot of damn ships,” Milhouse said after a few seconds. “I’ve definitely picked out six carriers and eighteen battleships, but the gunships are making it hard to be certain I’ve got them— Status change!

  “What the fuck?!”

  Even on Rhapsody’s casual bridge, that was a useless report, and Kelly was about to turn it back on her tactical officer when she looked at the screen herself.

  46

  “These supplies suck,” Roslyn said grimly as she laid out the limited tools available to her. The shuttle was running on autopilot, but that could only buy them a few minutes for this process.

  “They’re what we’ve got,” Alexander said, though she sounded nervous to Roslyn. “They’ve got a local anesthesia spray, right?”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to be enough,” the young woman replied. “I think I’ve got the dosage worked out for a general.”

  “A general anesthetic isn’t an option,” the Mage-Admiral said. “We need me able to act as soon as this damn thing is out of me.”

  “I’m about to cut a twenty-centimeter-square layer of skin off your back,” Roslyn pointed out. “I really don’t think a local anesthetic is going to—”

  “The one the Marines use is rated for similar insanity,” Alexander cut her off, lying face-down on the cot with her shirt off again. “It will work. It will have to work.”

  Roslyn swallowed and looked at her tray of sterilized tools. The trauma bay on an assault shuttle was designed to be used by a medic instead of a doctor, but it was still intended for someone with a lot more medical knowledge than she had.

  It also wasn’t intended to be used for surgery outside of emergencies. Dedicated hospital shuttles would come down in any major landing. The trauma bay and the medic were intended to keep troops alive long enough to get them either to a hospital shuttle or back to a mothership.

  But she had what she needed. She needed to find the stomach to cut open a friend and mentor. She had the scalpels for it.

  With a long, slow exhalation, she picked up the local anaesthetic spray and checked over its instructions. Calibrating it was simple enough, and she slowly ran the spray over the Rune of Nullification and the skin around it.

  “Well, given how fresh and painful that thing is, that helps all on its own,” Alexander told her. “Do what you have to do, Roslyn.”

  Roslyn very carefully tried not to pay attention to the Admiral’s putting a rag between her teeth, focusing on the task to hand.

  Everything in the trauma bay was automatically sterilized, but the scalpels were also stored in a miniature autoclave that flash-sterilized them before use. The metal was warm under her hand as she picked it up and swallowed.

  “Can I use magic to steady my hands?” she asked slowly.

  “No,” Alexander said in a muffled voice. “Don’t know how the Rune will react. Magic that close to it is dangerous.”

  “Thought so,” Roslyn admitted. “I’m about to—”

  “Don’t tell me,” her mentor snapped. “Just do it.”

  Roslyn cut. The anesthetic hopefully helped, as Alexander didn’t immediately start screaming, but it wasn’t a fast process. Sharp as the blades were, they lost that sharpness quickly enough. She got through one long, twenty-centimeter cut, and then she had to swap scalpels.

  They’d anticipated that, though. The scalpels were self-sharpening when heated—the autoclave served two purposes—but Roslyn had collected all of them in the shuttle. She swapped to a new scalpel and began the second cut.

  Alexander was definitely biting down on her rag now. Roslyn couldn’t notice, didn’t let herself notice as she finish the second cut. The third. The fourth.

  Now the most terrifying part. A fifth scalpel slid into the flesh and began to lift up the skin as Roslyn made sure she was removing enough flesh to lift out the Rune of Nullification.

  It went slowly, with her spraying plastiskin as she lifted up sections of skin and tried to hold down her nausea, but it went surprisingly smoothly. When it was done, an entire section of Alexander’s back glistened with the pale pink medical membrane, a contrast to the faded brown skin of one of the Martian royal family.

  “Admiral?” Roslyn asked. There was no response, and she dumped the Rune of Nullification into the bag she’d had to hand for it, and moved to check Alexander’s breathing and pulse.

  “Admiral?” she demanded. She checked the vitals. Alexander was breathing. Her pulse was steady. Her eyes were closed…she’d passed out from the pain, without ever screaming loud enough for Roslyn to even realize how bad it was getting.

  “I need to move the shuttle,” she told the unconscious Alexander. “I can’t… I…”

  She trailed off.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she admitted. “So, I’m going to let you rest and go move the shuttle.”

  Nuclear bombs at least made one level of priority very clear.

  Roslyn didn’t even know if they’d succeeded. All she knew for certain was that Jane Alexander was unconscious and the Republic Interstellar Navy was starting to close in on her. If they hadn’t initially been using the shockwaves from the bombs as sensor tools, they definitely were now.

  A hundred-thousand-kilometer gas giant had a lot of surface area, but the RIN had a lot of ships and a lot of bombs. Gunships were doing most of the work now, it looked, with cruisers and battleships backing them up.

  Her view out of Hyacinth was better than the RIN’s view into the gas giant, but that wasn’t by much. She had a rough idea of where the enemy ships were, and she knew exactly where the nukes were going off.

  And she was running out of places to hide. The shuttle was only actually in danger from warheads that went off within ten kilometers or so—but she estimated the RIN could use the vibrations to detect the shuttle at five hundred kilometers at least.

  The pattern of the explosions told her they were estimating four hundred. The bombs were going off in a perfectly sequenced mesh of detonations spaced eight hundred kilometers a
part. Their timing was tight enough that there was no way she could dodge through after the bombs went off.

  She was staying ahead of it so far, but the net was closing. Best case, she figured she could keep them safe for another thirty minutes.

  “Roslyn?” a tired voice said from behind her. “I’m sorry; I didn’t expect that.”

  She turned to see Alexander leaning against the cockpit door, struggling against the gravity. Her fatigue jacket was back on, but she hadn’t fully done it up. She was fighting with exhaustion and pain and looked utterly shattered…but…there was something there.

  “Jane? Are you all right?”

  That spark spread into a smile as the Crown Princess of Mars held up her hand and conjured a tiny, dancing sprite of light on her palm.

  “More than all right, my young friend, my savior,” Jane Alexander told her. “You did it. I need to sit for a minute or two and drink another of those godawful ration drinks, but…the Nullification is broken, and my Runes of Power are answering my commands.”

  “Sit and drink, then,” Roslyn instructed. She had a stockpile of the rations in the cockpit now and passed a drink over to the Admiral as her superior carefully took the copilot’s seat.

  Roslyn returned her focus to the deadly dance on her display.

  “We don’t have much longer before they use the shockwaves to detect us,” she told Alexander. “Ten minutes, maybe twenty.”

  “I need those ten minutes, so let’s take them,” Alexander replied, closing her eyes as she drained the ration drink and grabbed a second one. “Fuck those bastards for that Rune,” she said conversationally.

  Roslyn smiled, her boss’s returning strength their only real hope of surviving this mess. Her attention slipped away from the screen for a moment, and she blinked. Her view wasn’t great but it wasn’t that bad.

  “A bunch of ships just disappeared,” she told Alexander urgently, running the data back in time on a second screen. “Looks like seven ships just jumped somewhere. From high orbit of a gas giant?”

  She shook her head.

  “They’ve lost ships pulling stunts like that,” Roslyn observed. “What are they playing at?”

  “What did they see is probably a more important question,” Alexander said. “Can we tell?”

  “We’re a thousand kilometers deep inside a gas giant,” the Mage-Lieutenant pointed out. “We can barely see what’s in orbit, let alone what’s in the rest of the star system.”

  The two women exchanged a long look, then Alexander took a deep breath and looked down at her hands.

  “Take us up,” Alexander ordered. “Can this cockpit do a three-sixty-by-three-sixty view?”

  It took Roslyn a moment to confirm that the shuttle couldn’t. What it could do, though, was provide a fully functional surround view to a helmet and headset, which they set up as quickly as they could.

  For Alexander to use her magic effectively, she had to be able to see outside the ship.

  “Don’t we need an amplifier to do this?” Roslyn asked as she lowered the helmet onto Alexander’s head.

  “The amplifier provides power and distance,” Alexander replied. “You would need an amplifier to use magic for this at all. I need it mostly for range…and everything we care about is in Hyacinth orbit. The range is damned short by space-combat standards.”

  “You can do this?” Roslyn asked. She knew she was repeating herself, but they were about to commit suicide if Alexander was misjudging.

  “I can. Now bring us up out of the gas giant, Roslyn. We have an escape to pull off and a war to end.”

  Roslyn focused on her controls, pointing the shuttle upward and bringing the engines on at full power. In a blink of an eye, they went from hiding in the bluish gasses of Hyacinth’s atmosphere to rising from the depths like a homesick meteor.

  “I have sensor data from outside the giant,” she confirmed as they continued to rise. “Ships are definitely moving; they’ve picked up something… I have a jump flare! Jump flare at ninety light-seconds; RIN is maneuvering to intercept.”

  “I think that might be our ride, Roslyn,” Alexander said brightly. “ID her!”

  Seconds ticked away as they blazed skyward. The RIN would locate them quickly enough. They had no time, but…

  “She’s not hiding. It’s one of our spy ships,” Roslyn snapped as the image resolved. “She’s heading toward Hyacinth at fifteen gravities. They found the bastards!”

  “And now they’ve found us and get to be our ride,” the Admiral told her. “Hail them and let them know who we are. I am going to clear us a path—and see what I can do about this accelerator ring.”

  They burst clear of the gas giant’s atmosphere in a final explosion of loose hydrogen, and half a dozen gunships swerved to try to engage them.

  Half a dozen gunships died in a blink of an eye, vanishing in balls of ice-white fire unlike anything Roslyn had ever seen. The pair of cruisers behind them blew up in fireballs she at least recognized as Alexander tore apart their antimatter-containment systems.

  An expanding sphere of dying ships surrounded Roslyn’s assault shuttle as they blazed into the stars, and she brought up the shuttle’s com systems.

  “Protectorate ship, this is Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers and Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander,” she said quickly, desperately. “We have commandeered a Republic assault shuttle and are en route to your position at our maximum acceleration. Please make rendezvous for extraction; we cannot escape this system on our own.

  “I repeat, this is Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander and Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers. We were taken captive by the Republic and have escaped. We are en route to your position. Please rendezvous for extraction.”

  She turned her attention back to the close-range sensors in time to watch Alexander’s magic tear a battleship into its two component hulls and fling those wrecked pieces into Hyacinth’s upper atmosphere.

  Roslyn was still flying evasively, desperately trying to avoid as much of the incoming fire as possible, but she wasn’t sure that was even necessary. A spray of twenty-gigawatt beams from a trio of closing battleships resulted in four direct hits. Any one of those four should have obliterated the shuttle. Instead, they dissipated harmlessly—and three battleships blew apart as magic tore through their antimatter-containment systems.

  “I have the fleet but they’re damned determined,” Alexander said aloud, her voice distracted and a little strained. “The ring is yours, Roslyn. Can you break it?”

  Roslyn wasn’t a Rune Wright and didn’t have five Runes of Power inlaid into her flesh. Very little of her training had ever focused on dealing with things on a starship scale without using an amplifier—she’d learned one spell to use as an antimissile defense, but even that was supposed to have a civilian simulacrum to work from for targeting.

  Instead, she pointed the shuttle directly at the accelerator ring. The Hyacinth Accelerator Ring was more fragile than its Centurion predecessor, lacking heavy armor, defensive installations or any of the other things that made the Centurion Ring a world in the sky.

  It handled a massive amount of power and it wasn’t thirty thousand kilometers ahead of her. It was barely three thousand kilometers ahead of her, and the shuttle’s screens were enough for her to locate it in her mind.

  She summoned her power, that deceptively simple spell that could detonate an antimatter missile’s fuel tanks, and slammed every scrap of her magic into that station. She didn’t know where to find an antimatter tank, so she slammed a single blade of force through the entire station.

  Against a missile, the spell used a spark and a five-meter force blade. With the simulacrum and the three-sixty-by-three-sixty view from a simulacrum chamber, she could be accurate enough to do that.

  Against the Hyacinth Accelerator Ring, she dropped the spark and panic-summoned a force blade a kilometer long. In the end, she didn’t detonate a fuel tank.

  She carved a gash halfway through the ring. The sheer amount of force inherent i
n a ring over a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter did the rest. The wrecked ring snapped away from her with awe-inspiring force, crashing into a carrier attempting to evade Alexander’s wrath and triggering a massive explosion that wrecked carrier and station segment alike.

  Roslyn suspected Chrysanthemum could rebuild the ring. Eventually. But not today—or this week or next week.

  Not before Second Fleet could get there—and all around her, the reserve fleet of the Republic, their secret second arrow that should have turned the tide of the war, collided with the power of the Crown Princess of Mars.

  And died.

  “Lieutenant Chambers, this is Captain LaMonte aboard Rhapsody in Purple,” the radio messaged greeted her. “We are inbound on your position and preparing for rendezvous.”

  There was an awed, hushed tone to LaMonte’s words.

  “If you can maneuver to match our velocity at a midpoint and the Mage-Admiral can keep us safe while we make our approach, we will pick you up in approximately six hours.” The message paused. “Please…make sure the Crown Princess doesn’t accidentally mistake us for a hostile.”

  “No risk of that,” Alexander murmured. “Everyone else is running for the hills.”

  And they were doing so from the opposite side of the gas giant, too. Not even a gunship remained in line of sight of their tiny shuttle as they accelerated toward the stealth ship.

  “Are we safe?” Roslyn asked.

  “That depends on whether they find their gumption in the next six hours or so,” the Admiral admitted. “If they come out after us once we’re well on our way, I can only hurt them from within a hundred thousand klicks or so.

  “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I can stop their missiles…and I think I made an impression.”

  The assault shuttle’s computers had no concept of softening the blow. They were happy to show Roslyn how many ships had died around them as they fled the gas giant.

  There had been seven carriers and over sixty starships gathered around Hyacinth. One carrier group had left earlier to try and capture Rhapsody. They had wisely chosen not to return.