The Service of Mars Read online

  “Our freighter was not a covert ops ship or anything remotely unusual,” Shvets reminded everyone. They tapped a command, highlighting the habitable world. “They visited Greyhawk, sold their cargo of agricultural and industrial machines and parts, and purchased a cargo of refined titanium and local fish.

  “From Greyhawk, the ship did not get a solid view of Kenku, the gas giant,” they continued. “There was no unusual industrial activity at Greyhawk or at Paladin, the planet much of the system’s heavy industry is anchored around.”

  The third planet in the system, a frozen, uninhabitable rock similar to Sol’s Mars, flashed on the screen.

  “Nothing in this suggests that there’s a secret Republic military base and antimatter supply station here,” Milhouse noted. “Except that any base like that would be at the gas giant, and they encouraged the ship not to go there.”

  “A lot of systems have assorted expensive crap at their gas giants,” Kelly said. “Especially the UnArcana Worlds. The rest of the Protectorate uses antimatter for a lot of things, and we don’t have quite so immense a demand for hydrogen and helium.

  “The cloudscoops at the gas giants are the only things fueling the power stations of an UnArcana World. Keeping them from prying eyes is pretty common.”

  “But it still leaves a gap in our intelligence that must be filled,” Xi Wu replied. “Do we have a plan?”

  “We do,” Kelly confirmed. “Apologies, Jalil, we’re keeping your people as passengers for now.”

  The immense shaven-headed cyborg woman grinned.

  “Just how we like it,” she noted. “Quiet, easy cruises where you lot do all of the work.”

  “It’s a standard scoot ’n snoop,” Kelly continued, glancing around her crew. “Mage Foster will jump us in and Xi Wu will take over stealthing us immediately. We’ll sweep around Kenku to make damn sure of the presence or absence of our target, and then we’ll do a long drift over to Greyhawk and Paladin to do detailed scans of the orbital industry.

  “If everything goes perfectly, we’ll be in-system for about thirty-six hours and have full information on every planet, every ship, and every space station in the Gygax System.”

  “And what if things don’t go perfectly?” Milhouse asked.

  “Then we’ll be spending a lot less time in Gygax but might be leaving with a lot more useful information,” Kelly told him. “We are the sneakiest starship in existence, people, and there are only a handful of ships like Rhapsody. The Republic might have figured out we exist, but they still can’t track us, and they can’t fight what they can’t see.

  “If Gygax is the Republic’s fallback position, we will know very shortly.”

  “And if they’re not?” her husband asked, the ship’s senior pilot having been quiet so far.

  “Then there are two more ships doing the same thing we are in other star systems,” Kelly replied. “We rendezvous back at Legatus with them and we collate data. We know the Republic leadership went somewhere.

  “We’ll find them, Mike. We are the invisible eyes to see what they think they’ve hidden, and they have nothing to stop us.”

  3

  “Jump complete,” Liara Foster reported. The video link from the bridge to the simulacrum chamber showed her wavering slightly as she stepped back from the simulacrum itself. The standardized spell that teleported a starship a light-year at a time was immensely draining—and Kelly was told that short-jumping was in some ways more so.

  She had to trust her Mages on that. Like every child of the Protectorate, Kelly LaMonte had been tested for the Mage Gift at eleven years of age, and like the overwhelming majority of them, she lacked even the tiniest fragment of the power her wife wielded.

  Xi Wu stepped up to replace Foster, laying her hands on the semiliquid silver model of Rhapsody in Purple suspended at the exact center of the jump ship. Kelly knew the other woman had silver runes inlaid into her palms that linked her into the rune matrices woven through the ship, allowing her to project her magic around the vessel.

  “Stealth spell up,” Xi Wu reported after a moment. “Liara, go fall over,” she ordered her subordinate. “We’ll need you soon enough.”

  There were four Mages on Kelly’s ship, three of them answering to Xi Wu. Two were RMN Mages seconded to MISS. Two, including Xi Wu, were full-time MISS agents.

  “Milhouse, what are we seeing?” Kelly asked her tactical officer.

  “Still pulling data in from the arrays,” Milhouse replied. “No one should know we’re here yet, not for another couple of minutes.”

  “Shvets, put some distance between us and the jump flare under Xi’s shield,” Kelly ordered.

  “On it,” they replied, the stealth ship vibrating as her engines came to life. Antimatter engines would obliterate the ability of the technological solutions to hide the ship, but the spell woven around her could conceal them.

  For a while, anyway. Kelly knew her wife well enough to pick out the signs of strain on Xi Wu’s face as the Mage adjusted her spell.

  “I’ve got something at Kenku,” Milhouse reported. “Multiple energy signatures. Trying to get visual resolution, but we are a long way out, skipper.”

  Four light-minutes was enough to keep them safe from initial observation, but it also limited how much data they could grab. Foster had dropped Rhapsody in Purple almost exactly halfway between Greyhawk and Kenku, which meant they had a view of both.

  “What about Greyhawk and Paladin?” Kelly demanded.

  “Greyhawk is more active than our old reports, but nothing major,” Milhouse reported. “Hard to say for sure, but I’d guess that they’ve installed some new orbital forts. Paladin…is significantly busier, but that could just be civilian industry.

  “Kenku, I’m looking at something new. There were cloudscoops there but not on this scale.”

  “Shvets, set a course that will sling us around Kenku and get us close enough to Paladin to pick out details as well,” Kelly ordered. “Sounds like we’ve found something interesting at least. Let’s go see what it is.”

  The main display shifted as the new course was laid in. What information they did have on each cluster of signatures appeared by each of the three planets as Milhouse worked through the data.

  It wasn’t much. Their old intel said there were four cloudscoop gas-extraction and refining facilities in orbit of Kenku—but even their years-old most recent scan data of the system hadn’t seen them.

  Right now, it looked like there were either ten times as many extraction platforms as there had been or someone had moved in a good-sized fleet. Since they could only see one side of the gas giant, they could be missing as much as fifty percent of the orbitals, too.

  She started an analysis in her computers. The captain’s seat on any ship had a number of screens attached to it, usually called the “repeater screens” as they could be set up to mirror any station on the bridge. Kelly, who had been an engineer and a computer programmer before she’d been a covert ops commander, was more active in using them than most.

  It was possible there was an accelerator ring there, her program concluded. They couldn’t be certain until they were much closer, too. The odds weren’t great, but they’d need to close within two light-minutes to entirely eliminate the chance.

  “Shit!” Milhouse suddenly swore. “Jump flare, danger close, danger close!”

  “Shvets, kill the engines,” Kelly snapped. “Milhouse, what am I looking at?”

  She checked the time. That was fast. They’d been in the Gygax System for just under twenty minutes and no one had been within four light-minutes of them. That meant the RIN had detected them, picked a destination, and deployed a starship inside twenty minutes.

  “Dear gods, either someone is really paranoid, or they’ve worked out that we exist,” the tactical officer replied as he transferred data to the main displays. “That’s a Bravado-class carrier, Captain. Forty megatons, a hundred and fifty gunships.”

  And the gunships, Kelly was grimly
certain, were far more relevant than the rest of the carrier’s weapons. The carrier had emerged just over three million kilometers from Rhapsody in Purple’s jump flare, and the parasite warships were already spilling from her bays.

  “She’s between us and Kenku, but we’re looking at barely ten light-seconds of distance,” Milhouse said grimly. “Captain, what do we do?”

  “Xi?” Kelly asked softly. “Engines are down; can you hide us at this range?”

  “Yes. It gets harder as the range drops, though,” the Mage confirmed. “I can also kill her if she gets much closer.”

  Kelly nodded grimly. Rhapsody in Purple was sized more like a civilian ship than a warship, but she had the bones of a military vessel. Most critically, she had an unrestricted amplifier instead of a simple jump matrix.

  The carrier had chosen her distance carefully. If her target was a Protectorate warship, anything within two million kilometers was suicide. That was the reach of a Mage with an amplifier, a distance inside which no mundane structure could stand against the power of the scions of Project Olympus.

  But it would take Xi almost as much energy to take out each individual gunship as it would take to destroy the carrier. Now there were over a hundred of the parasite warships in space, even destroying the carrier wouldn’t be a victory.

  “Killing the carrier looks great on everyone’s record, but it’s contrary to our actual mission,” Kelly pointed out. “We need to know what’s going on at Kenku and Paladin—that there even is a carrier in Gygax says something is happening here.”

  Their intel was that the Republic had only built sixteen of the big ships, after all, and the Protectorate had captured or destroyed seven. With just nine of them left, what the hell was one of them doing at the far end of the Republic?

  “Shvets, see what we can manage for movement while cold,” Kelly ordered. “Doesn’t need to be much. I just want to go around their search net if at all possible.”

  Their current velocity was only a few hundred kilometers per second. It was going to take them a long time to get past the Republic search net if they couldn’t accelerate.

  “Xi, how close do they need to get to see through our cloak of invisibility?” she asked her wife.

  “I’d say knife range, but we’re already in knife range,” Xi Wu said grimly.

  “And if we open fire with the laser, we die,” Milhouse replied.

  Rhapsody had two missile launchers and a single ten-gigawatt battle laser. Her laser outclassed anything the gunships carried, but there were also a lot more gunship lasers out there.

  And the carrier’s weapons individually outclassed hers—and they were also in effective laser range of the carrier.

  “We’re not getting out of knife range quickly,” Kelly told them. “Our best chance is that they figure they had a sensor glitch and go home after a few hours.”

  “And if they don’t?” Shvets asked, their voice calm, almost distant.

  “We cycle through Xi’s people slowly and surely as we drift toward Kenku at a couple hundred kilometers a second,” she said, yanking on her braid. “We can hide from them unless one of those gunships literally stumbles over us.”

  They could even, in theory at least, micro-jump the four light-minutes to Kenku. They wouldn’t be able to conceal their arrival at that point, though, and given that accurate a starting point, she was grimly certain the Republic could find her and catch her.

  4

  Even a hundred and fifty gunships paled in comparison to the sheer scale of deep space. Four light-minutes from anything of value or interest, they had to be guessing where Rhapsody in Purple could have gone and how close they needed to get to catch her.

  “I’d say their estimate is that they can spot us at around sixty thousand kilometers,” Milhouse said as the net took its final shape. “The longest distance between any two gunships is a hundred and twenty thousand klicks.”

  Each set of gunships made a square eighty-five thousand kilometers on a side, forming a literal net in space accelerating toward the location of Rhapsody’s jump flare—and, not coincidentally, Rhapsody herself.

  It made for a net over a million kilometers across, with six gunships held back to defend the carrier. Just in case.

  “I liked it better when my enemies didn’t know our ship existed and weren’t competently paranoid,” Kelly admitted. “Shvets?”

  “They’re only accelerating at five gravities,” the navigator told her. “It’s going to be a long few hours while they sweep.”

  “Can we get around them?” she asked.

  “No,” they admitted. “If we could conceal our full acceleration for those hours, yes. As it stands…no.”

  “So, our best chance is to slot ourselves right through the middle of one of those squares and hope they’ve overestimated their scanners,” Kelly concluded. She glanced at her wife’s image on the link from the simulacrum chamber.

  “Xi, you know this magic better than anyone,” she admitted to her wife. “Can we hide from them at sixty thousand klicks?”

  “Yes,” the Mage said flatly. “We’ll want to bring up every tool we’ve got, though. Heat sinks, baffles, everything. Once we’re within a hundred thousand klicks, it’s down to luck as much as anything else. We should be able to get to fifty so long as the spell doesn’t blip, but every bit of energy we’re radiating is a chance for a blip that wouldn’t matter at longer range.”

  “Then we go completely dark at one ten,” Kelly decided. “Milhouse, set it up. How long will it take us to get through that?”

  Shvets exhaled and rubbed their eyes.

  “Longer than any of us are going to like, skipper,” they admitted. “I’m setting up the course now, but even with their accel, we’re looking at a relative velocity of maybe five hundred KPS. Ten minutes, maybe.”

  “We can go full heat-sink for twenty-five,” Kelly replied. “We’ll be drowning in our own sweat by minute twenty, but we can retain functionally all of our heat radiation for twenty-five minutes.”

  They’d then need to radiate it, but she could pick the direction she did that, and there was always some angle to vent heat where no one would see it.

  “Stand by for going dark,” she concluded. “We’ve got an hour to prep for this. We’ll get through it, people. And these sons of bitches are never going to know what snuck past them!”

  With a final nerve-wracking shiver, Rhapsody in Purple’s antimatter reactor went into cold shutdown. Kelly checked over the metrics on her repeaters and patted the arm of her chair.

  “It’s all right, girl,” she murmured to her ship. “We’ll have you back awake in no time.”

  Batteries and capacitors fueled the stealth ship now, keeping the lights and life support on as she drifted forward toward the dragnet coming her way.

  “Angle is perfect,” Shvets announced. “We will be roughly one hundred kilometers off center. Range is one hundred ten thousand and closing at five hundred and ten kilometers per second.”

  “All systems cold,” Kelly said aloud, confirming for the rest of the bridge crew what she’d just checked for herself. She hated shutting down the antimatter reactor. It was a catch-22 in a lot of ways—the antimatter reactor provided the power that contained its own horrendously dangerous fuel.

  There were specific batteries and systems to continue powering that containment, but if they failed…well. If the containment on Rhapsody’s antimatter fuel tanks failed, no one aboard the stealth ship was ever going to know.

  “From this close, Milhouse, confirm something for me,” Kelly murmured. “Are the gunships running antimatter or fusion engines?”

  “Fusion, sir,” the tactical officer replied after a few seconds. “I guess we don’t merit the good stuff.”

  “Not today, at least,” she agreed. “And not on their current standards, which I hope are getting really sticky around the use of antimatter.”

  Seconds ticked by around them. The kilometers between them and the gunships vanished, a
nd Kelly resisted the urge to close her eyes.

  Even if this went wrong, the Republican warships would almost certainly attempt to take them intact. The crew of an MISS scout ship wasn’t worth much to the RIN, but the ship itself would be worth its weight in antimatter. There weren’t many areas where Protectorate tech drastically exceeded Republic tech, but the stealth systems aboard the Rhapsodies were definitely one of them.

  “They’ve definitely been paying attention,” Kelly said aloud as they began their closest approach. “Someone put together the various pieces and realized we had stealth ships scouting their systems. Paranoid bastards.”

  “If this is their standard reaction, that might be useful for Second Fleet to play with,” Milhouse noted. “I can see all kinds of uses for drawing a carrier out away from the main forces.”

  “Me too,” Kelly agreed. It was getting hot on the bridge and she pulled on her braid absently. “Though I’m guessing the Republic has allowed for that. They can call in reinforcements instantly, after all.”

  She’d been told that the Rhapsodies would be getting some of the first Protectorate-manufactured Links once they were available, but the Protectorate hadn’t finished reverse-engineering the entanglement technology yet.

  Not enough to trust that the Republic couldn’t eavesdrop, anyway.

  For now, the Republic continued to have a tighter command-and-control loop than the Protectorate. Kelly had hoped the war would be over after the Republic fleet had disintegrated at Legatus, but the grim competence of the gunships sweeping around her told her the truth.

  Montgomery had broken the morale of the RIN that day, but the Republic had clearly found some answer to the horror of the Promethean Interface. If nothing else, she supposed, they’d probably been able to find enough people who just didn’t care what they did to Mages to keep the RIN operating.

  “We’re through,” Shvets reported. “Range is now sixty-five thousand kilometers and rising. We are through.”