Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (30 page)

The chaos slowed, a scattering of applause turning into cheers and waving fists. Every eye in the room was on Damien - was on the Hand of Mars.

Somehow, in kicking the Wing into gear, it appeared that he’d accidentally taken command.

#

Montoya had waited patiently while Vaughn informed Admiral Martine of her new orders. The Admiral, despite nominally being senior to ‘Commodore’ Cor, took the orders in stride. Any two of Cor’s cruisers, after all, out-massed Martine’s entire fleet.

“I’m assuming you didn’t call me in here to have me listen to you talk to our naval commanders, such as they are,” Montoya observed dryly after the call ended. “I take it that someone definitely did get to the RTA?”

“Most likely Montgomery,” Vaughn conceded, agreeing aloud with what his chief General had said days before. “Alexander wouldn’t have listened to anyone less - at least, not enough to send a fucking battleship.”

“So, what happens now? We watch and pray that Cor wins the day?”

“Cor is going to get her ass blown out of the sky,” Vaughn said bluntly. “I know it and she knows it. She probably knows it with more certainty - I’m guessing because I can’t see Alexander sending a fleet that couldn’t take out what he
knew
was here.”

“Shit.”

“So, my question for
you
, General, is where does that leave us?”

“In trouble,” Montoya said dryly. “We have enough missile launchers and other defenses that any assault on Nouveaux Versailles will be messy as hell. There are definitely ways they can
get
troops here - if nothing else, they can fly down the Fault a hell of a lot more easily than we can get missiles or interceptors over it.

“Planetary assaults are an ugly, ugly business though,” he continued. “Faced with that, they may be willing to negotiate.
If
we can rely on our troops.”

“Your Scorpions?”

“Utterly reliable,” Montoya replied. “They’re already in control of Versailles’ defenses. But we’re pretty spread out, any defense of this city will fall primarily on the Army.”

“If we’re attacked, they will do their duty,” Vaughn snapped. “Or they’ll regret it.

“But you said you were working on an insurance policy, Montoya. Is it ready to be activated?”

“It is,” the Scorpion’s commander confirmed. “But… it’s a last-ditch option, Governor. It should suffice to get you and me off the planet, but it won’t save your government.”

“Then we’ll hold off for now,” Vaughn told him, wondering at his friend’s vagueness. The only option they’d really discussed was a fast ship, after all.

“I’ll be ready if everything else fails, my friend. We
will
get out of this,” Montoya promised.

#

“Here they come,” announced Commander Kayin Breisacher, the
Righteous Guardian of Liberty’s
Tactical Officer. “Six
Hammer
class cruisers, fifteen
Lancer
class destroyers - looks like the entire ASDF is coming out to play too.”

Adamant nodded, reviewing the tactical data herself. Cor’s squadron mustered six identical ships, and the
Hammer
class were older ships but still serviceable. According to the Fleet List, all six ships had been fully updated with the latest electronics and missiles, too, so she had no range advantage.

The
Lancers
were a different matter. Tau Ceti built them for export, and the Charter limited what could be sold to another system’s defense forces. Their missiles would be at least a generation behind the Navy vessels, with almost eight light seconds’ less range given the current geometry.

Unfortunately, the people who’d designed the
Lancers
had expected that weakness. Despite being barely a tenth of the size of the
Hammer
class, each of the
Lancers
actually carried seventy percent of the
Hammer
‘s missile defense lasers.

Those fifteen ships almost tripled Cor’s missile defenses, and as long as she held her formation together they’d be a tough nut to crack.

“What about the logistics depot?” she asked aloud. “Shouldn’t there be ships out there?”

“Negative, ma’am,” Breisacher replied. “Looks like everybody was in Ardennes orbit.”

Adamant nodded slowly. That made sense, she supposed - the planet was in civil turmoil, the Navy was expected to help. It did ignore the fact that Cor’s squadron was supposedly here to defend the logistics depot orbiting the gas giant - a logistics depot that contained enough modern missiles to allow a smart and brave pirate to carve out a new empire.

“Any verbal response from Cor?” she asked.

“Negative, ma’am,” her com officer replied. “But…” he gestured to the screen showing the slow advance of the twenty-one warships.

“Oh, her message is perfectly clear, Lieutenant,” the Mage-Commodore replied with a small smile. “I was wondering if she’d bothered to try to make excuses. For that matter, her acceleration is damned low.”

Her own task force was driving in at five gravities, an acceleration easily absorbed by the rune matrix that provided the ships with artificial gravity. Cor’s force was only coming out to meet them at a single gravity. All of her ships
should
have gravity runes, but they were playing it safe anyway.

“Re-send the recording, Lieutenant Fiero,” she ordered her com officer. “Let’s take away any chance for the Commodore to pretend she didn’t know what we’re here for.” She turned to Breisacher. “Commander - please have the squadron prepare to clear for action in…”

She checked her math. Her missiles had over twenty-five hundred times her own current acceleration - and no need to decelerate to a rendezvous with their targets. She’d be in weapons range of Cor’s formation over ninety minutes before she’d hit turnover.

“We’ll clear for action in three hours,” she told the Tactical Officer. “Charles, pass the word to the task force to go to General Quarters at the same time.”

That would be roughly twenty minutes before they reached missile range. If Cor was going to do anything clever, she’d have to do it before then.

#

Cor glared at the sallow-faced image of Admiral Delia Martine on her screen. She’d engaged a privacy bubble around her command chair on the
Unchained Glory
‘s bridge to avoid blatantly dressing down another flag officer in front of her crew. The odds were that her long-term relationship with Martine was irrelevant, but it rarely hurt to observe the niceties.

“What do you
mean
, your ships can’t make more than two gravities?” she demanded. The current acceleration of her task force felt like they were limping along - and they were! Most of the pirates in the galaxy would regard a Navy vessel traveling at one gee as blood in the water. “Your ships come from Tau Ceti with a full gravity rune matrix, don’t they?”

“They had full rune matrices upon arrival,
oui
,” Martine said precisely. “However,
Mage
-Commodore, there are only six Mages in the entire Ardennes Self Defense Force. Providing full and proper maintenance for the gravity matrices is not their top priority,
nes pas
?

“We made certain the runes worked enough to provide daily gravity, but I do not believe that the matrices would be able to safely provide more than a single gravity of inertial compensation.”

The prissy little woman seemed completely unbothered by her announcement, as if the fact that her ships could
maybe
achieve twenty percent of their rated acceleration wasn’t an issue. Cor carefully did
not
tell the stupid mundane playing at being an officer what she thought of the woman’s little fleet.

“We will have to adjust our tactics,” she said finally, through gritted teeth. “Given the reduced range of your weapons, we’ll need to use your ships primarily as missile defense in any case.”

And that would keep them out in
front
of Cor’s ships, where they were unlikely to accidentally shoot her cruisers. If one of Martine’s tin cans ate a missile from her ships, she wasn’t going to be heart-broken, either.

She dropped the privacy shield and returned her attention to her bridge crew. They were, at least,
competent
.

“We will maintain one gravity of acceleration,” she said calmly. “The ASDF units cannot safely maintain a higher speed.”

If their rune matrices were in such bad shape, she wasn’t sure about the rest of their equipment either. With fifteen fully functional
Lancers
, this wasn’t a completely lost cause, but if Martine’s ships were as incapable as it appeared…

“Ma’am, the
Righteous Guardian
has repeated their earlier transmission,” her com officer informed her. “Shall we reply?”

“No,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing worth saying at this point - either we surrender or we fight. Surrender will only buy any of us,” she gestured around the bridge, “a noose or a firing squad. I am uninclined to accept His Majesty’s idea of mercy.”

She glanced around at them. None of her crew looked
happy
, but they all seemed to be on board. Hamilton returned her gaze calmly, and then softly said what they’d all been thinking.

“Ma’am, we can’t win this fight. Especially not if the ASDF ships aren’t worth the scrap they’re built of.”

Cor sighed and glanced at the screen showing the fifteen destroyers formed up in front of her squadron. Their missile defense could make all the difference - if it worked. If it didn’t, they were all going to die.

Dying was not something Cor intended to try just yet.

“You’re right,” she finally confessed. “Set up a squadron-level, maximum acceleration, course to the nearest location we can jump from, and keep it updated. We’ll use the ASDF’s missile defenses to get as far as they can, and then make a run for it.

“We’ve got a better chance to blast our way past that battleship than to fight it.”

#

Space battles were slow, almost stately, affairs. Hiding the massive heat signature of a million or fifty million ton warship’s matter-antimatter engines was nearly impossible, even for magic. Once two ships or fleets had decided to accept the engagement, everything after that was simple linear arithmetic.

Nonetheless, Adamant remained on the bridge of the
Righteous Guardian of Liberty.
Her experience was that her crew needed to see her - needed to know she was watching for tricks and traps to keep them safe.

Of course, ‘her experience’ was exactly two space battles, with vastly inferior opponents flying cobbled together pirate ships.

She could count the number of battles the Royal Martian Navy had fought in the last three years on her fingers. Given the restrictions in the Charter and the lack of availability of warships to anyone except star system governments, to her knowledge the RMN had
never
fought as even a battle as she was about to face.

“How long to missile range?” she asked softly.

“A little less than an hour,” Breisacher replied. “About thirty minutes after that for the ASDF if Cor hasn’t upgraded their weapons.”

“Any change in their vectors?”

“Negative, ma’am,” the Tactical Officer replied. They’d repeated the exchange every twenty or thirty minutes for over two hours now, but the little ritual and confirmation seemed to re-assure everything around them.

“Wait,” Breisacher suddenly stated sharply, looking down at his screens. “I have an aspect change!”

“What are they
doing?
” Adamant asked, looking to the screens and seeing the icons shift.

“The Seventh Cruisers have broken off - they pulled a ninety degree course change perpendicular to the ecliptic and went to ten gravities acceleration!”

“What about the destroyers?”

“Still on course,” her Tactical Officer reported. “… I think Cor just cut and ran.”

“Agreed,” the Mage-Commodore replied, scanning the screen and display as she judged distances and vectors in her head. “But the timing… can the ASDF evade us at this point?”

“Negative, ma’am,” Breisacher replied. “Unless they managed to come up with ten times the accel they’ve shown so far and break in the opposite direction from Cor, anyway. At their current accel, they can only add maybe ten minutes to the time to range.”

“Understood,” Adamant acknowledged, and came to a decision.

“Signal to the Task Force,” she ordered, glancing at her communications officer. “Mage-Captains Isabel and Jakab are to maintain their current course. They will intercept the ASDF destroyers and neutralize them. Accept surrenders if offered, but they
will
be in Ardennes orbit in eight hours to support Hand Montgomery.

“Mage-Captains Dionysios and Duane are to form on
Righteous Guardian
. They have five minutes to secure the ships for subjective acceleration, then we will fire one time-delayed salvo at the ASDF and break off to pursue Mage-Commodore Cor.”

Adamant glanced at her Executive Officer, who nodded and started to give the orders for the
Righteous Guardian of Liberty
to prepare for the orders she was giving.

“We will pursue at fifteen gravities,” she finished, ignoring the several sharp breaths taken around her. “Send, and have them acknowledge receipt,” she ordered the officer, then turned back to Breisacher.

“Prep that time-delay salvo, Kayin,” she told him. “We’ll feed the timing and telemetry data to the
Master of Wisdom
and the
Esquire of Glorious Conflict
.” For the first time in her life, she realized that the Protectorate Navy’s taste in ship names added an unnecessary delay in combat. Something to point out to the higher-ups after this was done.

“Strap in people,” she ordered the rest of her bridge crew. “The rune matrix
should
be able to compensate up to twelve gravities, but that’ll still let three gees through, and none of us are used to that.”

Settling herself in her chair in the middle of the bridge, next to the simulacrum that controlled the battleship’s magic, Mage-Commodore Adamant followed her own advice as her crew sprang into motion around her.

“What about Ardennes, ma’am?” Kayin asked quietly. “Isabel and Jakab don’t have the Marines to launch any significant ground attack.”

“I know,” she admitted, equally quietly. “But
my
job is to make sure that the woman who blew away a city doesn’t escape to the Fringe with an entire squadron of Protectorate Cruisers.

“Hand Montgomery will need to deal with Governor Vaughn on his own for a little while longer.”

#

For a few precious minutes, Adrianna Cor was certain she was going to get away. All Navy ships had the same gravity runes to reduce acceleration, and the battleship actually had less total delta-v stored aboard than her cruisers.

Their speed would bring them to a safe zone to jump well before Adamant’s task force could bring them to bay.

Then the immense mass of the battleship shifted. Three of the five Martian ships flared to life with new energy, their heat signatures expanding exponentially as the warships turned to pursue her.

The
Unchained Glory’s
computer churned the numbers - and then informed her that the Martian warships would be in range in forty minutes. The massive increase in their acceleration needed to allow them to catch her ships meant they’d be in range
sooner
.

“How the
hell
can they
do
that?” she demanded aloud, glaring at the Captain of her flagship.