The Service of Mars Page 3

  “Now we just need to dodge around a carrier and keep drifting on,” Kelly said brightly. “How long do you think before the gunships start sweeping the routes to Kenku and Greyhawk?”

  “They’ll probably start decelerating once they hit the jump-flare zone and then settle their new courses once they’re at zero,” Shvets guessed. “Give them another two hours. We won’t have long where we’re at a range we can maneuver safely at, not if they keep up the search.”

  “They’ll keep up the search,” Kelly predicted. “They know they can see us leave as clearly as they can see us arrive.” She shook her head. “Unless they give up and call it bad data, they’re going to keep hunting us until we actually leave.

  “We’ll keep the reactor offline until we’re clear of the carrier,” she decided. “Hopefully, we can get at least five million klicks of clearance from all of their ships and get our velocity up.”

  She grimaced.

  “If I have to travel four light-minutes at less than five hundred KPS, I will, but I can think of better ways to spend three days!”

  5

  The two dreadnoughts were the first ships into the Nueva Bolivia System, the hammer-headed pyramids materializing in a flash of magic and blue Cherenkov radiation.

  Roslyn had an observer seat on the flag bridge aboard Durendal, a recognition of the fact that a Flag Lieutenant didn’t have much to do during an actual battle except maybe fetch coffee. Her job at this point was to watch and learn.

  It was at this point that it was hardest to forget that serving on an Admiral’s staff was generally considered a requirement for an officer making flag rank themselves. She was far too junior for that to be a major thought just yet, but she’d been handpicked as Alexander’s Flag Lieutenant on Damien Montgomery’s suggestion.

  There was a lot of trust riding on her. Today was a day where she couldn’t do much to earn it, but it was also the kind of day where she couldn’t forget it.

  “Scanning confirms no unexpected concentrations of activity,” Kulkarni reported. “Enemy battle group remains in position above Sucre. Numbers are consistent with the MISS sweeps: eleven capital ships.”

  “Confirm the breakdown ASAP, Kulkarni,” Alexander ordered. “Any sign of movement from the gunships yet?”

  They were barely a light-minute away from the planet, the presence of the two unescorted dreadnoughts a blatant taunt to the defenders. They weren’t in range of even the Protectorate’s new heavy-bombardment missiles, but the RIN had to know they were there.

  “We’re picking up new power signatures in orbit,” a noncom reported. “A defensive constellation just came online. We’re reading twenty-four fortresses that weren’t in the intelligence report!”

  “Interesting,” the Admiral observed. “They’re learning and starting to play games with our scouting flights. That must have taken some doing, though. What kind of forts are we looking at?”

  “Twenty megatons apiece; they look like modified versions of their standard twenty-MT cylinder without engines and with more weapons,” Kulkarni said as the data came in. “Enough mobility to avoid unpowered missiles, I presume, but still limited to the powered range of their Excaliburs.”

  “Good for us, unfortunate for them,” Alexander said. “We can ignore the fortresses for the moment. What is the rest of the fleet doing?”

  “Lot of gunship activity; they’re doing the best they can to keep their numbers obfuscated, but it looks like we might have overestimated them,” the operations officer continued. “Chambers?”

  “Sir?” Roslyn asked.

  “Keep your eye on those gunships,” Kulkarni ordered. “You know their signatures as well as anyone, so work with Chief Jian and get me an accurate number.”

  “Yes, sir,” she confirmed.

  Pulling the data over to her screen and setting up a link with Chief Jian took her less than a second. She was still listening to Alexander as she dug into the data, though.

  “They know we outrange them now,” the Admiral noted. “Their only chance to survive this is to bring their mobile units out to meet us.”

  “They might want to test how many of the new missiles we’ve got,” Kulkarni observed.

  Roslyn was tagging squadrons as they wove through each other. The RIN pilots were decent; at least some of these crews had to have been involved in the early offensives where the Republic had pushed the Protectorate back across the board, after all, but there was only so much they could do against the sensors of the dreadnoughts.

  “We need a drone sweep to confirm,” she murmured to Jian. “But I make it thirty-four hundred and change.”

  “Sweep is being set up,” Jian confirmed. “I think it’s closer to thirty-five, but I see your tags too. They’re doing their best.”

  “Tactical?” Roslyn linked to Durendal’s bridge, intentionally contacting the assistant tactical officer—a young man who shared her own rank. “Do we have a timing on a probe sweep?”

  “Salvos launching in sixty seconds,” the other junior officer replied. “We’re feeding everything we’ve got to the flag deck.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she confirmed. “Those little buggers are being clever, though.”

  “Time, Kulkarni?” Alexander asked.

  “Ninety seconds,” the operations officer replied. “Locals are maneuvering but aren’t coming out to meet us.”

  “Shame,” the Admiral said. “I didn’t really expect them to take the bait. If nothing else, they probably figure two dreadnoughts can take their entire fleet.”

  Sensor probes flashed away from the two massive warships: dozens of missiles refitted to carry sensors instead of warheads. They’d have more answers once those drones entered Sucre orbit.

  “Well, we’ll see how they react when we move in,” Alexander finally said. “That carrier might still have her gunships aboard, after all. That would bring the numbers closer to MISS’s estimate.”

  “Or they moved gunships somewhere else in the system?” Kulkarni asked.

  “Defending the cloudscoops would make sense,” she agreed. “If I thought that it would bring them out to play, I’d go for the fuel stations. As it is, though…they know what I know, which is that this battle will be decided here.

  “And if cleverness doesn’t work, well, there’s a reason I brought a really big hammer.”

  Kulkarni’s ninety seconds ran out—and the rest of Second Fleet flared into existence around the two dreadnoughts. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers dropped out of nothingness into a perfectly arranged formation.

  It was a flashy parade-ground trick, synchronizing jumps like that…but it had a point, too, that Roslyn at least picked up.

  Not only do we have more ships than you, we’re just plain better than you.

  She wondered if the Republic ships in Sucre orbit interpreted it in the same way.

  The warships hung in space silently for several moments as the command networks synchronized. Roslyn kept a careful eye on those networks as they linked up, with each additional sensor platform giving them one more angle to try and identify the individual gunships.

  “Carrier is launching her gunships,” Jian said softly. “Two hundred fifty additional units. I make it thirty-seven hundred exactly, all told.”

  “I have the same,” Roslyn confirmed. “Anyone want to guess where they hid fifteen million tons of gunships?”

  The balance of power between the two forces wasn’t close enough to make those parasite warships a game-changer, but any surprise in a battle, however small, was generally bad in her experiences.

  “First guess is the cloudscoops,” Jian replied.

  Roslyn nodded and turned back to Kulkarni. The tall black operations officer was neck-deep in the network link-up, and she waited a few seconds for the immediate chaos to resolve.

  “We’re looking at thirty-seven hundred gunships,” she told the older woman. “That’s with the two-fifty from the carrier. Intel said four thousand. The difference could be a resolutio
n error from the distance that the scout ships came through, or they could have moved them out to the gas giants to protect the cloudscoops.”

  Roslyn paused.

  “We could send someone to check on the scoops,” she suggested. “The risk to the ship we send would be high, though, higher than the risk to the fleet from an unexpected thirty gunship squadrons.”

  “Understood,” Kulkarni acknowledged. “Keep an eye out for them and see what you can resolve on those battle stations.”

  “Do we have a command network, Mage-Captain?” Alexander asked, leaning past her ops officer. “This shouldn’t have taken this long.”

  “The Cataphracts appear to have left the yards with a calibration issue, sir,” Kulkarni said crisply. “I failed to notice it in the previous exercises, but it did cause a small delay in syncing them to the overall network.”

  “Teething problems, I suppose,” the Admiral said. “There were a few people who should have spotted that, Kulkarni. Including me. No need to throw yourself on your sword…if we have the network.”

  A final set of lights for the two squadrons of brand-new Cataphract-class destroyers turned green on the screens around them.

  “We have the network,” Kulkarni confirmed. “We had them in the missile defense net already; that was our primary focus.”

  “Good call,” Alexander agreed.

  The new Cataphracts were based on the realization that the Honor- and Lancer-class destroyers were built on designs a century old and intended to fight pirates. The ships had been upgraded and revised since, but they weren’t designed to be escorts for larger units.

  The Cataphracts were. They carried lighter offensive armaments despite their larger size, trading in missiles and heavy lasers for over twice as many defensive Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile turrets.

  The Admiral glanced around the flag deck, her gaze meeting Roslyn’s for a silent second, then focused on the main display.

  “Second Fleet will advance,” she ordered. “Course is for a zero-velocity halt at twelve point nine five million kilometers.”

  Even if Roslyn hadn’t had the numbers memorized, the range spheres of the various ships were laid out on the displays around her. The Republic fleet had a range of twelve point seven five million kilometers from rest.

  Second Fleet’s new Phoenix IXs had a range of thirteen million kilometers. They weren’t entirely effective at their full range, but they would be far more effective than enemy missiles without any fuel left.

  Like the Republic in half a dozen battles before the new missiles had arrived, Mage-Admiral Alexander had the range advantage—and unless the enemy came out to meet Second Fleet, they were going to get hammered to pieces.

  Second Fleet’s course was scheduled to take over three hours, and the flag deck crew wasn’t going anywhere in that time frame. The entire fleet was at battle stations, every move, every twitch on the part of the Republican defenders being examined in minute detail.

  “They’re not coming out to meet us,” Roslyn concluded as Second Fleet made turnover. Now the massive antimatter engines of ninety-two warships were pointed toward the planet, bleeding velocity at fifteen gravities as they continued to hurtle toward the enemy.

  Second Fleet had traveled two and a half million kilometers in an hour and forty minutes. They had magical gravity runes throughout their ships, an ability their enemy didn’t share, which allowed them to consistently out-accelerate their opponents.

  Fifteen gravities could go a long way in a few hours, but it still took time to cross interplanetary distances. They could have jumped in closer, but the closer they came to a gravity well, the riskier the jump became. Civilian jump Mages—and the trapped brains inside Republic warships—couldn’t do it safely.

  The Navy could but it was still risky. Everything in Alexander’s tactics today was built around minimizing risk. The RIN was going to have surprises. They’d had weeks to prepare for this fight, weeks where Second Fleet had sat at Legatus waiting for new missiles.

  “They’re forming up facing us and maintaining defensive maneuvering, but you’re right,” Kulkarni agreed. “Admiral? Are you seeing this?”

  “I am,” Alexander confirmed. “It’s a defensive formation with the gunships around the fortifications and the capital ships. They’re hoping that our long-range fire is ineffective enough that they can weather it—at least more readily than we can afford to spend the new missiles.”

  Roslyn brought up another screen and concealed a grim swallow.

  The battleships and the newest cruisers and destroyers carried twenty-five missiles per launcher. The dreadnoughts had forty…but that didn’t matter when the rest of the fleet, twenty-six cruisers and forty destroyers, only had fifteen missiles per launcher.

  The Protectorate’s navy had always been intended to fight pirates, and it shaped their design paradigms. They were built for pursuit and short, high-intensity battles. Only a small portion of their fleet was really designed to fight a true peer opponent.

  A lot of people had already died for that mistake. Roslyn hoped they weren’t going to add to that number today.

  “They might be right,” Kulkarni warned. “With those gunships, they’ve got more launchers, more defensive lasers, more…everything than we do.”

  “The gunships only have three missiles apiece,” Alexander replied. “They want to make me burn missiles at long range…and I have the same plan for them. The first test will be the Samurais.”

  The big bombardment missiles had an extra half-million kilometers of range—but most importantly, they came in at thirty percent of lightspeed instead of twenty.

  That extra velocity had shredded the defenses at Legatus, and Roslyn hoped it would do the same here—because there were a lot of gunships out there and the projections on her screens were mind-numbing.

  On their own, the defensive fleet only had a quarter of Second Fleet’s missile launchers. With the gunships and the fortresses, they were up to almost five times as many.

  And Alexander was leaning back in her chair, studying the same numbers as if they were mildly interesting. Roslyn knew what the plan was for dealing with the gunships’ twenty-odd thousand missile launchers, but it was far easier to accept that in a quiet briefing room than on a flag deck as they calmly flew into the teeth of the enemy defenses.

  “All Samurai-equipped vessels will target the fortresses,” Alexander ordered. “Kulkarni, I want a targeting order. We hit each one with a full salvo of every Samurai we’ve got, then move on.

  “We might not kill a fortress with two hundred-odd missiles, but they’ll know they’ve been touched, and that buys us some leeway.” The Mage-Admiral smiled. “I’m hoping to rattle their cages. Let’s see how we do.”

  6

  “Range is thirteen million three hundred fifty thousand,” Chief Jian reported calmly. “Samurai range in under one minute.”

  “We’ve designated the fortresses One through Twenty-Four,” Kulkarni told Alexander. “Currently, Twenty-One through Twenty-Four are on the other side of Sucre. I’m guessing they’re holding them back as a reserve—but we only have fifteen Samurais per launcher anyway, so we wouldn’t get to them even if we could.

  “We have thirty-seven minutes between Samurai range and Phoenix IX range,” she continued. “We can fire all fifteen missiles well before then, but…”

  “Say what you’re thinking, Kulkarni,” Alexander ordered.

  “The Samurais are proving harder to mass-produce than the Phoenixes, and we don’t have many ships who can fire them. Should we be holding off on some of them?” the operations officer asked.

  “Any of them we don’t fire at this range run the risk of being destroyed aboard their ships later,” Alexander noted. “I’d rather spend gold than blood, Mage-Captain. We will expend the full magazines of the Samurais.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kulkarni confirmed. “Orders are locked in. We’ll see how well they’ve upgraded their defenses in the last few weeks.”

&nb
sp; “Agreed.”

  Roslyn kept her focus on the drones sweeping the star system. She was at least certain that the missing gunships weren’t in position to intervene in the immediate battle, but she wanted to know where they were. It might be paranoid—but it might not be.

  She was also watching the gunships in Sucre orbit, which meant she caught the blip when a different energy signature flashed across her screen.

  “Jian, did you see that?” she asked.

  “See what?” the chief asked.

  “For a second there, I got a spike of a different energy signature from one of the gunships,” Roslyn told him. “Let me rewind the data.”

  The systems were designed to do that for just this reason. While every other screen on the flag deck kept showing the current situation, Roslyn’s pulled back several seconds in time and focused in on the spike.

  “That’s an antimatter annihilation signature,” she said softly. “It looks like one of the gunships zigged when they should have zagged, and another had to dodge fast—and fired antimatter engines to do it.”

  “I thought they were all using fusion engines?” Jian asked.

  “So did I,” Roslyn confirmed. “Because that’s what all the energy signatures we’ve seen so far have been—but our analysis of the gunships we captured in Legatus said that they could have either fusion or antimatter engines.

  “It’s apparently an easy-enough refit, one the carriers can do on the fly, but…” She shook her head. “They can only have one type of engine.”

  She considered the data for a moment, then tapped a command.

  “Tactical, I need at least three drones for a suicide sweep,” she told Durendal’s ATO. “There’s something fishy about these gunships.”

  “Swapping control of drones X3-75D through 75G to you,” the other Lieutenant said instantly. “They’re close in and running low on fuel, anyway; I’ve got replacements inbound already.”