Starship's Mage 2 Hand of Mars (31 page)

Devi Ishtar winced and glanced down at the screens.

“The
Guardian
is huge,” she said quietly. “Everything on her is over-engineered - her thrust nozzles can withstand temperatures and pressures ours cannot. The
Honorific
class… was designed with similar criteria. They can’t sustain this acceleration forever, but…”

“They can sustain it long enough,” Cor said grimly. She needed roughly seventy minutes to make empty space with a low enough gravity to safely jump. Even with the seven minute flight time of Adamant’s missiles, they would now be under fire for almost twenty-five minutes.

“Can we go any faster?” the Mage-Commodore demanded.

“We could,” Ishtar said slowly, “but our engines are not over-engineered. We could gain perhaps another two,
maybe
three, gravities, but we could easily lose several ships to engine failure - potentially including
this
one - and still be under fire for at least ten minutes.”

“I see,” the Mage-Commodore said grimly, looking at the screen. The destroyers she’d abandoned were doing the only smart thing left to them - they were running. They’d pulled another two gravities out of their back pockets to do it too, she noted.

It wasn’t going to save them. Two of Adamant’s cruisers were still on vector to intercept them and reach Ardennes. Those two ships alone outmassed Martine’s entire command by three to two, and Cor couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for the prissy bitch’s now inevitable fate.

“Pull us ahead of the rest of the squadron,” she ordered calmly. “Interface all missiles defenses through our primary computer net.

“Adamant
knows
which ship is the flagship,” she continued as Ishtar started to object. “She’ll focus fire on us, which will allow us to use the entire squadron’s missile defenses against her attacks.”

Cor turned her gaze grimly back to the screens, watching the three warships come thundering along on their intercept vector. With a battleship on the other side, she was going to need every edge she could get!

#

The minutes ticked by and the range slowly shrank. For all of the unimaginable acceleration of the missiles the Protectorate fielded for the Martian Navy, the ships themselves were still mostly limited by the tolerance of their crews and the ability of the magic to protect them.

Adamant had very quickly realized that she’d overestimated just how much acceleration the rune matrix would absorb. Every member of her crew was being pressed into their acceleration couches at four times their Earth-normal weight and it was wearing them down, fast.

After an hour of this, her crew wouldn’t be worth much, and it would take several
more
hours for her to reach Ardennes’ orbit. But Cor would
not
escape.

“All systems are armed,” Breisacher told her quietly. “We are co-ordinating salvos across all three ships.” He paused. “Ma’am, what is our target?”

The new Mage-Commodore studied her opponent’s formation. She saw Breisacher’s point - by pulling the
Unchained Glory
ahead of the rest of her squadron, Cor had given her a choice between making her salvo more vulnerable or working her way through the squadron ship by ship - and potentially letting Cor get away.

“We cut the head off the snake, Kayin,” Adamant said quietly. “Everything we’ve got on the
Unchained Glory
. Once Cor’s gone, the rest may surrender. And if they don’t…” she shrugged. “I’m less concerned about hunting down a few rogue captains than an entire rogue squadron. Cor dies.”

“Yes ma’am. I’ll set up the fire plan.”

Adamant left him to it and focused on the screens surrounding her. At this point, there was nothing she could do. Everything was set, and the only real question was whether Cor’s people’s
will
would hold up under fire.

How prepared were they to die for a traitor?

#

The geometry of pursuit allowed Cor to fire first. The traitor Mage-Commodore caught herself holding her breath as her squadron ceased acceleration to rotate in space. The Martian Navy had long ago optimized their warships for pursuit. It made Cor’s position more tenuous than she liked - she had to rotate to fire, and when Adamant’s salvos began arriving, she’d have to be facing them to use most of her defenses.

It would slow down her escape, but the alternative was fiery death.

Rotated and facing their enemies, the mighty ten million ton warships shivered from the recoil of their missiles, and then rotated again to blast forward once more.

Her tactical display lit up with first dozens, then
hundreds
of tiny lights. Three hundred and sixty missiles blasted into space, took a moment to orient themselves with their sisters, and then blasted back along her squadron’s path at twelve and a half thousand gravities.

Thirty seconds passed in silence, her entire bridge frozen around her as they watched the suicidal little spacecraft charge backwards.

Then their pursuers launched.
They
had no need to rotate, and the three warships threw four hundred and sixty missiles back at Cor. Each cruiser threw twenty more missiles than her own warships, and the battleship carried
three hundred
launchers.

Then her own ships rotated again to fire their second salvo, exactly sixty-five seconds after the first. Thirty seconds after that, the pursuers launched again.

Both forces were using the same missiles. The same launchers. Every system on all nine ships was perfectly matched.

Cor glared at Adamant’s task force on the screens. The weapons systems were exactly the same, but Adamant had more of them. At General Quarters, both were locked out of each other’s systems, there was no way to abuse the similarities.

It was down to luck and formation. In less than six minutes, she’d find out if Adamant had fallen for her bait - and if her trick was enough to save her ship.

#

Cor’s missiles came in first. They hit the outer defense zone of the three loyalist warships at a fifth of the speed of light, and lasers began lighting them up. Hundreds of invisible beams were marked on the screens with their patterns of energy, and missiles began to detonate.

Antimatter explosions formed their own kind of electronic jamming, and each explosion made it harder to track the missiles remaining.

Adamant was still the Captain of the
Righteous Guardian
, and as the missiles hit the outer perimeter she had already forced herself up against the force of the battleship’s acceleration and laid the runes tattooed onto her palms on the floating silver simulacrum of her warship.

With an almost unfelt exhalation, she
became
the ship. Every rune carved into the fifty million ton hull told her their story in an inrush of data, and the screens around her became her eyes as she looked deep into space.

Mage-Commodore Jane Adamant saw the missiles coming and called her magic to her. Fire and lightning danced in her mind - and then danced in the empty void around her. She met the missiles with her will and training, and they died in their dozens.

The Mage-Captains of the two escorting cruisers lashed out with their magic as well. The space around the three warships was overwhelmed with antimatter explosions, invisible laser beams, and the plasma and lightning of human magic.

The first missile swarm was annihilated well short of the task force, and Adamant spared a moment to judge the success of their strike on Cor’s fleet. A similar cataclysm of artifice and magic surrounded the Seventh Cruisers, making it difficult to make out much, but it seemed they’d successfully weathered the storm.

The second missile salvo burst into the cloud of radioactive debris in front of the
Righteous Guardian
, and Adamant turned her power back to the threat. More missiles disintegrated under the defensive laser turrets, and even more were shattered beneath the amplified power of the three starship captains.

Dionysios missed one. A missile slipped under the Mage-Captain’s guard, diving towards the battlecruiser at twenty percent of the speed of light.

Adamant saw it and lashed out with her magic, summing a wall of force a kilometer across between the missile and the
Master of Wisdom
. The missile slammed into her magic with an explosion and impact that made her physically cringe backwards before regaining control of herself.

Another few moments of peace. They were gaining rapidly on Cor’s ships now, the cruisers unable to accelerate away as their design forced them to face the incoming fire. Adamant’s second salvo burned in hot on the heels of her first, and the debris cloud of five hundred missiles was worse than that of four hundred.

Adamant couldn’t help but feel a stir of pride as she watched them fight for their lives - in the end, her enemies remained
Martian
warships, trained in the same school as her. They fought hard, but it wasn’t enough.

A dozen missiles broke through the center of the formation, diving for the
Unchained Glory
with deadly speed - and then reality
shifted
. With a huge jerk of power, whoever was at
Glory’s
amplifier
yanked
one of the other cruisers into the missiles’ path.

The ten million ton ship slammed into the missiles from the side, crushing their containment fields and detonating their warheads. Moments later, the cruiser’s own antimatter storage lit up - and a new, if momentary, star lit up of the Ardennes system.

#

The sound of a safety being clicked off echoed resoundingly in the sudden dead silence of the
Unchained Glory’s
bridge.

It was enough to yank Cor away from the simulacrum she’d just seized from Mage-Captain Ishtar and draw her attention to Lieutenant Trevor Hamilton, who had drawn his sidearm and pointed it at her.

“Put that down,” she snapped. “What are you
doing
?”

“What am
I
doing?” the young officer - the
boy
- demanded. “You killed the Captain!”

Cor glanced away from the automatic pistol at Ishtar and swallowed. She’d flung the Mage-Captain away from the simulacrum with magic in her rush to reach it and save them all. Now, the pale-skinned Ishtar lay slumped in a corner of the pyramid-shaped central chamber, her neck at a clearly impossible angle. She would never be getting back up.

“I saved us!” she snapped at Hamilton. “I did what I had to!”

“You’ve killed us,” the young man told her flatly, gesturing to the screens with the pistol. “We could have held - could have stopped those last few missiles. But now you’ve shown your true colors - and no-one’s going to die for a coward.”

Mage-Commodore Adrianna Cor followed the line of her Tactical Officer’s gesture and saw that the remaining other four ships of her squadron had decided they’d had enough. Each had taken off on a different vector, perpendicular to the
Unchained Glory’s
course. None of them were firing on the remaining missile salvos, and
thousands
of weapons blasted their way towards the
Glory
.

“Cowards!” she snapped. “Traitors!”

“I think… I think we all know who the coward and the traitor here is,” Hamilton said quietly. “We’re all going to die anyway, Commodore, but I think the poor innocent youth I was when I met you deserves this satisfaction.”

She turned back to him, staring down the barrel of the gun she
knew
the boy would never fire.

“We can still…” she began.

He fired.

#

Adamant watched as the Seventh Cruiser Squadron’s neat formation came apart. Four ships blasted away to opposite corners, and the thousands of remaining missiles swarmed the
Unchained Glory
.

The missiles bearing in on the
Righteous Guardian
began to detonate on their own. First in tens, then in hundreds as the cruisers detonated all of their missiles as a token of surrender. Sweeping laser turrets cut down the remaining missiles, presumably launched by the
Unchained Glory
herself.

“Ma’am, we’re getting surrender transmission from the remaining ships,” Breisacher reported. Further reports were cut off when the first of
their
salvos struck home.

Whoever was running the
Unchained Glory’s
defenses had done better than anyone could have reasonably hoped. With a single cruiser’s laser turrets - not even the amplifier, as not a single spell fired in the cruiser’s defense - they shot down nearly a hundred missiles.

Which had left over
three
hundred in the third salvo.

The screens surrounding Mage-Commodore Adamant blanked to block out the flash as a half-
teraton
explosion lit up the sky, overwhelming every sensor, every camera.