Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (18 page)

“Ardennes?” he shrugged. “The most qualified people served in Vaughn’s military and government. Even those Riordan might trust, his
people
wouldn’t. The rest were in the Freedom Wing, unacceptable to much of the government and, frankly, to the Protectorate.

“He could grab a Navy officer, but unless they were one of the captains from the Battle of Ardennes, Cor’s shadow will hang over them.

“But all of Ardennes knows you,” he concluded. “They remember you, in the heart of the battle, liberating the Bastille, standing at
my
side when we proclaimed Vaughn’s defeat. You’d be welcomed, loved, even adored.”

“There was a time it wouldn’t have mattered,” she said quietly. “I joined Stealey for revenge. I wouldn’t have expected it to end here.”

“She left a mark on the lives of all who met her,” Montgomery agreed. “She showed us…that we could be better. That we could make
the galaxy
better. She’d say to go where you’d do the most good.”

“And that’s Ardennes,” Julia admitted with a sigh. “My lord Montgomery, will you accept my resignation?”

“Can you stay until this mess is over?” he asked. “I’m walking into a snake pit; I’d rather do it with my strong right arm at my side.”

“I can stay,” she promised. “But I’ll need to let Riordan know. He can plan the damn wedding for when I get back—I just need to make
damned
sure he knows I’m not wearing a dress!”

Damien woke to a loud klaxon he’d never heard in his quarters before. He had finally managed to get to sleep, trying to get some rest before arriving in Sol, where he was going to get very busy very quickly, but now bolted upright in his small quarters near his office.

Since he mostly lived in the office, the room was barely large enough to hold a bed, a side table and a closet, and echoed
painfully
with the emergency klaxon.

“Battle stations,” a voice announced as the klaxon cut off. “All hands report to battle stations. This is not a drill. All hands report to battle stations.”

Damien grabbed his wrist PC from the side table and pinged the bridge.

“This is Montgomery. What’s going on?” he asked.

“My lord, we’re at Tau Ceti–Sol Jump Ten and we have an unidentified ship maneuvering aggressively,” Jakab told him. “We don’t have a clean enough scan to say if she’s our mystery ship from Andala, but anyone
inside
missile range and maneuvering at me makes me twitchy.”

“I agree,” Damien replied. The Mage-Captain didn’t need his approval to take the ship to battle stations—or even to defend himself if attacked. Opening fire
preemptively
, though, would be better done with the Hand’s authorization.

“Our bogey’s at ten million kilometers. That’s
inside
our missile range, but if she’s only got the half-dozen launchers she fired at TK-421, there’s no way she can hurt us,” Jakab pointed out.

“And how many missiles would
you
have launched to take out an armed courier?” Damien asked.

“
Maybe
ten,” the Mage-Captain said with a snort. “I take your point, my lord.”

“Do whatever you feel is necessary, Kole,” the Hand ordered. “I’ll be on the flag deck in three minutes.”

#

It was the first time the Hand had ever had to make it to the flag deck in a rush, and he took over thirty seconds longer than he had told Jakab. It hadn’t made
too
much difference—the strange ship was accelerating at roughly twelve gravities and had already been moving at a fair velocity toward
Duke
, but they’d still carved less than a light-second off the range.

“What’s our status, Torres?” he asked as he settled into the command chair. The Lieutenant Commander might have been on the flag deck when everything went down, but he wasn’t certain. It was entirely possible she’d made it there well ahead of him.

“Range is just under nine point eight million kilometers,” she replied. “Flight time for
our
missiles is six and a half minutes. No idea what they might have; CIC still hasn’t confirmed an ID.”

“Thank you.” He brought up the tactical plot in the main holo-tank, an empty-looking display with only two icons on it. A few more taps zoomed in on the strange ship, allowing him to study what data they had.

As he did so, he
saw
the refresh of new data come through and the amorphous blob from the previous scans resolve itself into a familiar odd-looking bullet shape.

“Jakab, that’s it,” he snapped into the communicator.

“We see it too,” the Mage-Captain confirmed. “Sir…it’s your call. She likely has comparable
weapons
to us, but she’s only half our size. We’ve got her outgunned. Do we engage or wait to see what she does?”

There was, Damien reflected, a chance that the other ship was here by coincidence and it wasn’t hostile. There was even a possibility that it
wasn’t
the ship from Andala…except that no ship like it existed in the records of the Royal Martian Navy, and the vessel was very clearly maneuvering to engage
Duke of Magnificence
.

“No, Captain,” he said quietly. “That ship is guilty of, if nothing else, the attempted murder of a Hand and a thousand innocents. If they choose to surrender, we’ll talk, but I am
not
okay with that ship in weapons range of me. Engage at your discretion, Kole. Take the fucker down.”

“My lord,” the Mage-Captain acknowledged gruffly. He turned on the screen to focus on the rest of his bridge crew.

“All right folks, you heard the Hand,” he snapped. “Carver—run the turrets, full defense; assume we’re facing Phoenix VIIIs. These bastards seem to have the
rest
of our gear.

“Commander Rhine,” he addressed his tactical officer. “Full salvo, all launchers. Fire when ready!”

Damien’s current link to the bridge was a small screen on his chair, limiting his ability to see anyone’s reaction to the orders from Jakab, but he saw the results of
Rhine’s
actions on the main holographic tank with the tactical display.

A fountain of new icons emerged from
Duke
, dozens of missiles flashing across space at twelve and a half thousand gravities. Even at those tremendous accelerations, it would take them over six minutes to cross the void between the two ships.

Twenty seconds after
Duke
launched, a second flurry of icons emerged from the
other
ship.

“That’s not right,” he murmured.

“They launched before we did,” Torres confirmed aloud. “They must have realized we’d have identified them from the active scans.”

“Damn. What am I seeing, Torres?” Damien asked. Even as he spoke, though, he was fiddling with his controls, zooming in on the missiles and reviewing the data they had.

“Twelve point five kilo-gees,” she said crisply. “Forty-five missiles. We’re losing them to sensor jamming already—if they’re not Phoenix Eights, they’re close enough in capability to make no difference.”

Damien did the mental equivalent of sitting on his hands. Mage-Captain Jakab knew better how to fight his ship than the Hand did.

“Steiner,” Jakab snapped at his navigator. “Evasive maneuvers, if you please, and take us toward the bastard. Fifteen gravities.”

Both ships were moving now, though everything they saw of the enemy was delayed more than thirty seconds. Fields of jamming swept out from the ships and the missiles, causing the tactical plot to surround every icon with a shaded probability zone where it
could
be.

Duke
came under threat first, the missiles sweeping into the engagement zone of her Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets at over fifteen percent of lightspeed.

This was the environment an
Honorific
-class battlecruiser was
built
for, and a hundred RFLAM turrets flared to life. Their beams were invisible to the naked eye and the cameras that covered the flag decks walls with the view of the outside world.

The tactical plot drew them in automatically as tiny lines of white light. Every half-second, each RFLAM fired a tenth-second pulse at a missile. Lines flashed and appeared on the tactical plot with eye-searing speed, many of those flashes ending in explosions visible to the naked eye.

None of the missiles made it closer than a million kilometers, the gigaton explosions of their deaths three seconds or more old by the time the light reached
Duke of Magnificence
.

Their own missiles did better. The enemy ship had a full defensive suite, easily comparable to
Duke
’s in quantity though not quality. The weaker lasers, equivalent to those the Navy mounted on destroyers, couldn’t engage nearly as far out as
Duke
’s defenses.

Watching the sensor data, Damien found himself holding his breath as the missiles carved their fiery path through the Keeper ship’s defenses. Antimatter explosions marked the trail as missile after missile died—but over a quarter of the missiles closed to within a single light-second of the strange ship.

Then
something
flashed across the hologram, the computer unable to interpret the sensor data into anything useful, and third of the missiles disappeared. A few seconds later, more energy flared, and this time Damien recognized it before the computer could.

“Amplifier,” he said aloud. “Watch their closing rate, Captain Jakab. They have an amplifier.”

“That’s…a problem,”
Duke
’s Captain said slowly as the last of his missiles vanished. He was silent for a moment.

“My lord Hand, we’ve never tested our counter-amplifier combat doctrine,” he admitted. “Closest we came was Ardennes, and that was over before anyone was in amplifier range.”

Damien nodded and leaned back in his chair.

“No one else knows any better either,” he told his ship’s commander. “Fight your ship, Mage-Captain.”

#

The first missiles salvos had each been launched on their own, with no follow-up, to test the defenses of the other ship.

Duke of Magnificence
was capable of emptying her magazines before her first missiles reached their maximum range. Testing the enemy’s defenses before launching follow-on salvos wasn’t always necessary, but in a situation with an unknown enemy, it could be valuable.

If the situation hadn’t already suggested to Damien they’d be facing an enemy who’d read the same playbook, the matching test salvos would have been a strong indicator.

Now, with a solid idea of what they faced,
Duke
’s missile launchers spun to life again. Eighty missiles blasted into space, followed thirty seconds later by another eighty as the launchers reloaded at their fastest rate.

Icons began to speckle the display around the enemy ship as well as the light from their answering launches reached
Duke
. Two launches flared into space…and then Damien blinked in surprise as, suddenly, there were
two
Keeper vessels on the screen, the second emerging from a bright jump flare almost six million kilometers closer than the other.

“Picard Maneuver,” he heard Jakab bark. “Steiner—
laser
evasive, now! Rhine, Carver—redirect what missiles you can; get our lasers on target!”

The Captain had barely finished giving his orders when the twelve-million-ton battlecruiser
lurched
like a drunken Marine, a laser beam slamming into the ship with brutal power, vaporizing a massive gash across the hull. Red lights started flashing all across one of the displays on Damien’s chair as the ship took critical damage once more.

“My
gods
, that was a twenty-gigawatt beam,” Torres exclaimed. “Those are
battleship
weapons—she only hit with one, but…”

Damien could read the damage display and understood Torres’s unfinished sentence. That one hit had done more damage than the multiple near misses that had sent the cruiser into Tau Ceti’s yards for a month. The schematic of the ship on his screens had a huge swathe of red and yellow marking sections the computer guessed destroyed or damaged.

“Kole?” he said quietly.

“They got us good, Montgomery,” the Mage-Captain said in a strained voice. “We’re evading, they won’t land another hit like that until we’re in basically amplifier range, but those lasers…I don’t know if the old girl can
take
another solid hit. We’re down a quarter or of our launchers and the same of both our defensive and offensive lasers. They’re stacking their earlier salvos with new salvos, doubling up the numbers.”

Now that the light from the “original” ship had caught up, Damien could see what Jakab had meant by “Picard Maneuver.” The enemy ship had made a twenty-light-second jump, dropping them eleven light-seconds away from
Duke
, allowing them to attack with lasers by surprise and stack new missile launches on top of old.

Damien was a trained Jump Mage, augmented with Runes of Power and more intimately familiar with the works of the amplifier and the jump spell than most Mages alive…and he wasn’t sure he could have pulled off that jump.

The computer drew the invisible beams of the multi-gigawatt lasers in the tank for the humans, but both ships were now evading. While hits could be deadly at this range, the likelihood of hitting when your knowledge of the target’s location was ten seconds out of date was low.

Watching the deadly dance of starship and laser beams, it took Damien a moment to realize there were no more incoming missiles.
Duke
continued to belch out over fifty missiles every thirty seconds, but after the stranger had launched two final salvos, timed to coincide with her previous weapons, they’d stopped firing missiles.

“Rhine got him!” Torres snapped, drawing Damien’s attention back to the laser fire. One of
Duke
’s twelve-gigawatt lasers had connected with the enemy ship. The battlecruiser’s beams were lighter, but with five times as many in play, Jakab’s people had a far better chance to hit.

Icons updated on the screen, notes attached to the enemy ship in the massive holographic tank, assessing the damage and pointing out the gas venting.