Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (24 page)

The jump-yacht
Doctor Akintola
was only a little larger than the armed courier Damien had visited Andala VI aboard. Unlike TK-421, however,
Akintola
—named for one of the Eugenicists anyone chose to remember, one who had betrayed her fellows to help the Mage-King overthrow their control of Mars—was completely unarmed.

And had literally gold-plated faucets.

Doctor Akintola
was a luxury ship, with every interior fitting completed to the highest standard. Intended to be flown by a small crew or by a Mage VIP like Damien themselves, even the crew sections were finished in plush carpet with woven silver gravity runes, leather seats, and hardwood paneling from Earth itself.

Even the simulacrum chamber at the heart of the spherical ship was a step above almost any vessel Damien had been on before. Instead of expecting the Ship’s Mage to stand next to the simulacrum, a reclining leather chair had been mounted on rails, allowing the Mage to sit and adjust their seat to allow them to hold the magical icon comfortably.

Screens on flexible mounts surrounded the chair, easily responding to gesture commands to align themselves around the Hand as he relaxed into the seat.

“We may need to get Jakab one of these,” he observed. “This is disturbingly nice.”

“They tested the concept on Navy ships,” Amiri told him. Since Damien was fully qualified to pilot the ship himself and there was no permanently assigned crew—there were six of the yachts in Mars orbit but only four rotating crews and three Jump Mages—he’d forgone crew to allow Romanov to pack two entire platoons of Marines alongside Amiri’s Secret Service agents into the richly appointed ship.

“And?” he asked.

“It’s too distracting and too comfortable if you’re trying to command the ship as well,” she said. “A Navy Captain has access to a lot of the same displays, but
not
when they’re using the simulacrum. The amplifier demands too much attention; layering on the data access led to overload and dramatically increased decision-making time and reduced quality.”

“That’s a shame,” Damien replied, luxuriating in the cushioned leather. A few gestures across the panels linked him into Mars Orbital Control.

“MOC, this is
Doctor Akintola
,” he informed them. “We are executing our previously assigned flight plan and leaving orbit at five gravities in sixty seconds.”

That flight plan took them in the rough direction of Jupiter, though it wouldn’t have mattered if he was going in the opposite direction. All he needed was to be far enough away from Mars to jump without risk.

“Understood,
Akintola
,” an older female voice replied. “Be advised that one of our charted debris fields is closing on your flight path. Not close enough to require diversion per our scanners, but watch your proximity alerts. There is a chance of small debris having separated from the cloud.”

“Understood, MOC,” he replied as he swung his fingers across the haptic interface. He could have brought up the data faster working through the command pad on his wrist computer, but he couldn’t resist the shiny toy.

One of the screens lit up with the debris cloud they mentioned, wreckage from one of the battles of the Eugenicist War. Many such clouds, lacking in anything worth scooping up and only minimally hazardous to navigation, had simply been tagged and left. Cleaning up the
dangerous
wreckage of the Eugenicist War had taken fifty years. Cleaning up the harmless debris was an ongoing “as we have time” project for the Navy and several salvage companies.

Given that estimates ranged from twelve to twenty
thousand
ships destroyed over the hundred-year course of the war—smaller than today’s vessels but still interplanetary warships—they’d be at it for at least another hundred years.

Damien adjusted his course a fraction of a degree, still inside his flight plan but giving himself a few dozen more kilometers from the cloud that had probably been a UN Martian Expeditionary Force squadron or something similar once, and triggered
Doctor Akintola
’s engines.

At five gravities, the distance to Mars rapidly increased, the world shrinking behind them. First slowly, then more rapidly as their velocity built.

The debris cloud grew closer, and an itch started on the back of Damien’s neck that had him checking the ship’s systems and shaking his head.

“Our VIP transports seriously have no defenses whatsoever?” he asked aloud.

“They’re intended to either hang out inside defensive perimeters, like we’re doing,” Amiri pointed out, “or have escorts. If you’re feeling paranoid, I’m sure we can borrow a battleship or two. The Martian Squadron wouldn’t even
miss
them.”

Damien chuckled. The Martian Squadron was the only full squadron of battleships in the Protectorate, with
six
of the immense fifty-million-ton warships permanently positioned in orbit. With two more orbiting Earth, fully two-thirds of the massive ships were in Sol.

“I don’t think the itch between my shoulder blades justifies borrowing battleships,” he said dryly. “I wouldn’t mind a defense turret or three, though.”

“You’re an all-powerful Hand,” she replied. “Who needs lasers when we have you?”

He laughed again, relaxing slightly. They were in orbit of
Mars
. Who could possibly threaten them here?

Ten seconds later, he remembered why it was unwise to
even
think things like that as the threat detectors—which the defenseless VIP transport
did
apparently have—started screaming.

“What the hell is that?” Amiri demanded.

“Targeting sensors,” Damien said grimly as a gesture summoned a manual control joystick into his hand. Settling his grip, he focused and then took direct control of the spherical little ship, spinning it into a spiraling evasive course as he pushed up the acceleration with his other hand.

“They have active lock,” he announced, trying to discern anything
else
from the screens around him. “I can’t tell you what they
are
, but they’ve got our number. Trying to evade.”

Without the gravity runes, his careening, twisting antics would probably have crippled everyone aboard, but they only bought him a tiny reduction in the signal strength of the radar hitting his hull.

Finally, however, the pathetic sensors on the runabout picked up the threat. Still over ten thousand kilometers distant, a dozen antimatter drive missiles flared out of the debris cloud they’d been hidden in. Their sensors had locked onto him, and there was
no
way he could evade the military-grade computers driving their maneuvers.

“I don’t suppose anyone believes those are left over from the War?” he asked.

“Phoenix VIIIs,” Amiri said quietly. “Following you around, I’ve become
far
too familiar with them.”

“Great,” he muttered. All he had was seconds, and not many of them. He could
try
to stop them. Even without an amplifier, he could probably handle twelve missiles still only twenty seconds or so into their burn.

On the other hand, he wasn’t planning on staying here
anyway
, and while the jump matrix was harder to make a high-interference jump with than an amplifier, he
was
a Rune Wright.

“Flash a warning to the Martian Squadron,” he ordered. “Then stand by to jump.”

Updating his calculations to jump over an hour early took time. Not much time, but every second was precious and he was mustering power to try to defend the ship anyway when the numbers popped up on his screen.

Inhaling sharply, he committed the numbers to his mind, grabbed the simulacrum, and
stepped
.

#

The numbers were wrong. He knew it the moment he committed to the jump—he’d run his calculations assuming he had an
amplifier
, not a jump matrix. The jump matrix was basically the same, but it was prevented from doing anything except amplifying the jump spell by limiter matrices.

They also slightly but measurably changed the results for the jump spell. Across a light-year, the impact became irrelevant as the interference smoothed out. Across less than a light-hour, the impact was several light-seconds.

He’d jumped from close enough in that it was a strain, which the jump matrix made worse. With the calculation error, he also
arrived
too close in.

His entire body
rippled
, the magic tearing through him in waves as both his power and reality itself objected to the change. For an eternal moment, the ship
hung
in a way he’d never felt before, trapped in a reality that insisted they were in two completely different places.

Damien pushed past the pain, channeling more power through the matrix as he bent the universe to his will and
felt
the missiles enter the space where his ship was, their sensors confused by a ghost they could
see
but not
touch.

Then, in a sudden rush, it was over.

Doctor Akintola
erupted into reality once more a million kilometers from Jupiter, alarms screaming throughout the ship as its computers tried to deal with the fact that, for a few seconds that the computer would have been able to process, the ship had had
no
physical presence.

Damien all but fell out of his chair, pain wracking his body as he began to vomit, again and again across the leather seat until his stomach was empty and he was curled into a fetal position on the floor.

It took a few minutes for him to recover enough to sit up and realize that nobody
else
on the yacht’s bridge was doing much better. At least one of the Secret Service agents at the door was completely unconscious, and the other was barely working up the energy to crawl over to check on him. Amiri managed to lever herself back to her feet at much the same time as he uncurled.

“What was that?” she asked slowly, massaging her temples and eyeing the several pools of vomit scattered around the room.

“Jumping from too close and arriving too close,” he told her. “Nobody on the ship is going to be in good shape.” He touched his own temples and groaned as pain spasmed through his skull. “On the other hand, no one appears to be shooting at us here.”

“Great.” His bodyguard winced. “What do we do?”

“There are cleaning robots, but I don’t think they can handle this,” Damien admitted. “Help me up,” he ordered. “We need to find some cleaning supplies.”

“You can’t just magic it away?” she asked hopefully.

“If you’re willing to let all that sit for an hour or so while I rest, sure.”

“Right. Cleaning supplies.”

Several hours later, with everything cleaned up and following a careful arcing course through Jupiter’s moons and rings,
Doctor Akintola
finally approached the massive collection of smelters, girders, and half-constructed ships that made up the Royal Martian Jovian Naval Yards facility.

Two destroyers were already headed toward them as Damien hit a command on the screens surrounding him, opening a channel.

“Jovian Yards, this is Hand Montgomery,” he told them. “Transmitting authentication codes.” Another command triggered that sequence. “I’m here to inspect the Weyland hulls.”

And to interrogate the Yardmaster and her associated computers, but there was no point explaining that. His involvement in Project Weyland gave him a reason to be out there that no one in the know about the quiet armaments program would question—and he was quite sure that the Keepers were entwined deeply enough into the Martian government that
they
knew.

“Authentication confirmed, my lord Hand,” a transmission responded after a moment. “I am Mage-Commander Honshu of
Sterling Voice of Judgment
. We will escort you in… You look like you’ve had better days.”

“You have no idea, Mage-Commander Honshu,” Damien replied. “I make our ETA to the main station eleven minutes.”

“We have the same. Enjoy the view, my lord. Not many people will see it before the girls are done.”

Cutting the channel, Damien quickly double-checked his course and then focused his cameras on the only set of hulls present in the yards. He heard Amiri suck in a breath of shock and smiled to himself.

The Jovian Yards had the facilities to build or repair roughly a hundred million tons of warships—two battleships or a hundred destroyers—simultaneously. Or it
had
had, at least.

The yard slips had been completely dismantled, the girders and mobile repair pods spread across an even-larger volume of space anchored on four huge chunks of rock pulled from the Trojans. Material was being cut from those rocks as Damien watched, a stream of autonomous miners and piloted control craft shaping and moving thousands of tons of raw material toward the smelters—and then from the smelters to the seven immense hulls starting to take shape in orbit above Jupiter, shielded from view by the gas giant and its moons.

One was nearly complete, an immense half-kilometer spike in space that flared out to a quarter-kilometer-wide hammerhead at its tip. The base hull was only the beginning, Damien knew, with weapons and armor still remaining to be installed on the hull itself, not even considering the crew quarters, power supplies, engines, and rune matrices necessary to make her a warship.

“What
are
those?” Amiri asked as he kept the camera focused on the furthest along ship.

“
Mjolnir,
” he tapped the nearly complete ship. “
Masamune
.
Excalibur. Fragarach, Durendal. Zulfiqar. Kladenets.
Project Weyland, Amiri. Our answer to the carriers we fear Legatus is building.

“Mars’s first dreadnoughts.”

#

Yardmaster Misaki Tsukuda was a tiny woman from Japan on Earth. She was one of the few adults Damien had met who shared his own lack of height, though her reputation suggested she’d adapted to her height in a more…stereotypical manner.

“Lord Montgomery, we were not warned to expect you,” she greeted him as he entered the boarding gallery of the Yard Facility’s Station Alpha. “I was told I would have full control and be advised in advance of all inspections!”

“No,” he replied calmly, “you weren’t. I
know
you weren’t, Yardmaster, because I helped write your quarantine protocols. His Majesty has full control of all visitors to this facility now, and you were told there would be unannounced inspections by either Alexander or his designated representatives.

“Do I need to explain what this means?” he asked, tapping the fist-shaped golden icon hanging on his chest. “I am here on His Majesty’s behalf for an update on Project Weyland. We have other questions as well,” he noted quietly, glancing around the mostly empty boarding gallery, “but everything we have to discuss requires more private surroundings.”

“Everyone in the Jovian Yards has been fully cleared, my lord,” she said stiffly. Her willingness to defend her people did her credit in Damien’s mind. “We did a lot of transferring and rearranging when we took the Yards over for Project Weyland, I trust everyone out here now.”

“Good,” Damien allowed. “Nonetheless, Yardmaster, we need to speak in private. Can you arrange a tour of the Weyland hulls?”

She sighed.

“We have a lot going on, my lord. I know the timeline is long enough that one day may not
seem
like much, but if we can avoid interrupting the work?”

Damien smiled.

“Miss Tsukuda, I understand you perfectly,” he told her. “I want to
see
them, but I certainly don’t need to be close enough to get in the way.”

She relaxed—slightly—and nodded.

“We should be able to use my private shuttle,” she told him. “It is secure, I promise you. But,” she continued as Amiri stepped forward, “your staff is of course welcome to sweep it.”

#

The Yardmaster’s private shuttle had artificial gravity runes in its main observation compartment and an outer hull that had been partially transmuted to be transparent. Other than those two relatively functional luxuries, it was a surprisingly spartan spacecraft with no more amenities than any other commuter shuttle.

The transparent wall, however, allowed them to study
Mjolnir
from a distance as the pilot carefully skirted the actual work zones. An overlay allowed Tsukuda to control the zoom, and she focused in on the shape of the dreadnought.

“The
Mjolnir
-class ships are still a work in progress as the design continues,” she noted to Damien. “
Mjolnir
herself was commissioned as a test-bed two years back, where the other six were initiated after the Sherwood-Míngliàng incident. While we’ve been working on
Mjolnir
for longer, we’ve learned enough that the other six are only about twelve months behind her.

“
Mjolnir
is about another two years from completion,” Tsukuda
warned him. “The squadron will be done about a year after that, having taken three years to build. The
second-
wave ships, once we’ve worked through the whole process and run up seven vessels, we expect to only take two years to build from scratch.”

“How big is she?” he asked.

“Eighty million tons, seven hundred meters from the base of the pyramid to the front of the hammerhead,” she reeled off. “She’s got higher-density beams than our current generation of warships, faster launch cycles, and more efficient power generators. She may only be sixty percent bigger than our battleships, but she has almost three times their firepower and survivability.

“They chose the name
dreadnought
for the class with intent, my lord. Once they’re complete, nothing in space will be able to fight them. Their only real vulnerability is an amplifier at close range.”

Damien winced.

“That brings me neatly to my other point in visiting,” he said. He’d been briefed in on Weyland after the Sherwood-Míngliàng incident, asked for his input on how the ships could best stand up against the kind of mass gunship attack he’d faced there.

Bringing up his wrist computer, he opened the files he’d prepared and brought up a three-dimensional image of
Keeper of Oaths
, based on the schematics they’d pulled from the Olympus Archive.

“We’re looking for the origin of this ship,” he told her. “I have reason to believe it may have been built here, potentially commissioned by a Hand. They would have been
very
exact on a lot of specifications and brought in their own people to do the amplifier matrix.”

Tsukuda was very still, staring at the hologram as it gently spun in the air.

“My lord,” she said carefully, “you know I am bound by my office, my oaths, and my contracts not to reveal His Majesty’s secrets. For Weyland, for example, only two Hands are cleared to know anything about the project. Even with a Hand asking, there are questions I cannot answer.”

Her loyalty and discretion did her credit, though her refusal was
frustrating
.

“I can assure you,” he said quietly, “that this is not one of
His Majesty’s
secrets. No Hand has the authority to bar another Hand from a project. Only Alexander can do that.”

“So
you
say,” she told him. “But I was bound not to unveil anything about that ship without the permission of His Majesty or…”

“Or Hand Octavian?” Damien asked quietly.

Her lips whitened as she pursed them for a long moment, then nodded.

“I’ve already said more than I should have, my lord,” she confessed. “I can say no more without permission.”

Fortunately, Desmond the Third, at least, had foreseen this possibility and had provided Damien with one more arrow, one not normally provided to
anyone
, not even the Hands.

He tapped a command on his wrist computer, rapidly bringing up a different file.
Keeper of Oaths
flickered and disappeared, replaced by the image of the Mage-King of Mars.

“This recording represents a Royal Order, a High Warrant for Grand Treason,” Alexander’s voice intoned solemnly. “Damien Montgomery, my Hand and Voice, has been charged with investigating treason among my Hands and Court. He speaks with my Voice…even to the Hands of Mars.

“By my Order, deny him nothing.”

Tsukuda stared at the space where the hologram had hovered for a long moment.

“
Chikushō
,” she swore. “I’ve…never seen anything like that.”

“Only seven High Warrants have ever been issued,” Damien said quietly. Four had been for Hands. Two for Core World Governors. One for a member of the Council of the Protectorate. Only two men
ever
had been given that authority permanently, as First Hand of the Mage-King, charged to pass judgment on his Hands and Voices as well as the rest of the realm. “The situation is dire, Yardmaster. We fear Hand Lawrence Octavian has delved into treason and shadows, and the very fate of the Protectorate may rest on finding out just what he was doing.”

“I’ll need access to files I don’t have here,” the small woman finally told him. “We need to return to the station.”

#

Back on Station Alpha, Tsukuda led Damien to her office. Reaching the door, she glanced back at where Julia Amiri and another Agent trailed them.

“We need to speak in private, ladies,” she said calmly but firmly. “I’m no threat to a Hand.”

Amiri looked ready to object, but Damien cut her off with a swift gesture.

“I’ll be fine, Julia,” he told her. While he could think of half a dozen ways that the Yardmaster
could
threaten him—poison topped the list, for example—she didn’t
seem
to be plotting his demise. “You’ll be just outside, and I
do
have both a panic button and healthy lungs.”

His bodyguard looked rebellious but nodded her agreement. Until this mess was resolved and she went to join Riordan on Ardennes, she had to keep him alive.

After that, Damien already had a plan, though he’d run it past Amiri before he did anything permanent.

“Thank you, Julia,” he said quietly as he followed Tsukuda into the office, allowing the door to slide closed behind them.

The office was gorgeous. At some point in Tsukuda’s twelve-year tenure out there, she’d had enough Japanese red pine shipped from Earth to completely panel over the steel walls of the station. One wall was covered in a screen, currently pretending to be a window out onto
Mjolnir
’s construction, and the other three each held two calligraphied scrolls.

The desk also looked to have been imported from Japan, though Damien recognized the telltale black markings of built-in electronics that would link to the Yardmaster’s wrist computer. The desk
looked
old-fashioned but was clearly very modern.

Tsukuda went straight to one of several standing cabinets, all in the same wood as the paneling and the desk, and pulled out an unmarked white ceramic bottle and a single matching cup. Wordlessly, she filled the cup with a clear liquid and slugged the entire drink.

Damien took a seat in a comfortable chair facing her desk and waited. The woman was upset by more than just the fact that he’d demanded access to her files, and he wouldn’t begrudge it if she needed liquid courage.

She poured another cup, swallowed half of it, and studied one of the calligraphied scrolls carefully.