A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Read online

  “That destination is deep in former Republic space,” Daalman continued. “We are on a standard patrol and show-the-flag run to the Sorprendidas System, where we will relieve the Honor-class destroyer Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice as the system’s primary RMN presence.

  “The tour is expected to last three months. Because we have a Link and Unrelenting Pursuit does not, we make a far better tripwire than she does.” Daalman beamed beatifically at her crew. “We will be responsible for assisting the local sublight security forces in providing search-and-rescue and general security in the system, with a limited patrol radius of the standard jump zones around the area.

  “Our patrols will be kept to a minimum because our main purpose in Sorprendidas is to be seen,” she noted. “I will hammer this point into you a dozen times before we arrive; and I expect you to hammer it into your subordinates: we will be the single largest symbol of the Protectorate in the system.

  “We must be on our best behavior and in our most generous mood. Our job is to remind the people of the benefits and value of Her Majesty’s protection. Any and all opportunities to help or otherwise make a good impression are to be seized immediately.”

  “We’re not going to make them love us,” Franklin said grimly. “The Repubs—”

  “The Republic no longer exists,” Daalman said sharply. “These people are citizens of the Protectorate of the Mage-Queen of Mars. They have elected Senators and Members of Parliament here in Sol. They are not our enemies and I will not tolerate my senior officers, especially, regarding them as such.

  “Or using derogatory nicknames born out of a war that ended over two years ago,” the Captain concluded. “Am I understood, everyone?”

  Nods and quiet murmurs answered her.

  “I hate to do the parade-ground bullshit,” Daalman told them, “but I did not hear you. I said, is that understood?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Roslyn joined the other Lieutenant Commanders in chorusing, hiding a grin as she did it.

  “The people of the former UnArcana Worlds have a thousand reasons to distrust a destroyer of the Royal Martian Navy,” Daalman told them. “I trust Unrelenting Pursuit’s crew to have ground down some of those fears—and we will continue to grind down those fears, until for every reason they have to distrust us, they have a dozen positive memories of what the RMN has done for them.”

  As if to cap off the speech—and quite possibly in response to a concealed signal—the door to the mess slid open and Steward Washington emerged with an assistant and several trays of steaming pasta.

  “Dinner is served,” the Steward told them all. “I ask that you refrain from more work discussion until you have at least tasted my cannelloni, please?”

  “What do we know about Sorprendidas?” Frost asked as the desserts were brought in and the already-stuffed officers looked at the cheesecake with trepidation.

  “Fringe World, settled sixty-two years ago,” Kristofferson replied, the XO clearly having been expecting the question. “Original founding group was a Spanish Catholic diaspora effort. They’re not technically a theocracy, but the planetary Cardinal has always been elected Governor.”

  “Does anyone even run against them?” Abiodun asked. “I’ve seen that kind of mess before.”

  “Surprisingly, yes,” Kristofferson said. “Like most colonies, Sorprendidas hasn’t stayed as monocultural as it was planned. It’s young enough that the population are still mostly Spanish and Spanish-descended Catholics, but that still leaves a few million people who are neither Spanish-speaking nor Catholic.

  “Despite the Cardinal-Governors being both religious and secular figures—and generally very anti-Mage—the actual culture of the place is extremely welcoming and accepting, according to the reports we have,” the XO continued. “As an UnArcana World, they followed Legatus into the Secession and became a member of the Republic of Faith and Reason.”

  “And managed to avoid every single actual conflict of the war,” Mage-Captain Daalman told them. “Records show that there was an MISS scout ship that swept the system while we were looking for the Hyacinth Accelerator Ring, but that was the only time anyone from the Protectorate was there.

  “We’ve posted a destroyer in the system since the end of the war, with the support of the current Cardinal-Governor. No problems, no trouble.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a show-the-flag task, people. We’re not expecting trouble.”

  Roslyn felt a chill run down her spine, which she concealed by taking a bite of the excellent cheesecake. From the nature of her secret mission, there was more going on at Sorprendidas than anyone thought.

  Martian Interstellar Security Service agents didn’t generally just vanish, after all.

  “We’re looking at twenty-five million people on two continents,” Kristofferson told them. “There are three more continents that are habitable but less pleasant than the two they’ve settled, and some of the usual asteroid extraction infrastructure.

  “They’ve got an asteroid belt for raw materials and a gas giant for fuel and a generally warm and pleasant inhabitable planet.” He shrugged. “Give them another fifty years and they’ll have levered themselves into MidWorld status without much external help.”

  The Fringe Worlds were generally self-sufficient for food and had a couple of local industries but needed to trade for most technological systems. MidWorlds were complete industrialized economies, with moderate sources of wealth and usually their own defensive security fleets.

  The Core Worlds were the first dozen colonies. No one had yet decided on criteria for a MidWorld to become a Core World.

  “Do they have any local defenses?” Roslyn asked. She hadn’t had time to look that up since being briefed by the Prince-Regent and Mage-Queen.

  “The Republic set up a prefabricated gunship base in orbit with thirty gunships,” the XO replied. “Like most of the in-system defenses set up by the Republic, Sorprendidas kept them. Enough to cause us trouble, I suppose.”

  “I’ll make some notes and prep some exercises,” Roslyn replied. “We should be able to handle thirty gunships—even if mostly by running away until they run out of missiles.”

  Several of her colleagues chuckled. There was no one there who hadn’t served in the war, and they all remembered the strengths and weaknesses of the Republic Interstellar Navy’s sublight parasite warships. They carried a lot of launchers for their mass—and very few missiles for those launchers.

  “That wouldn’t be fun for them,” Franklin said. “Squish-squish.”

  Song of the Huntress, like the rest of the RMN, used magic for gravity. RIN warships had needed to either spin or accelerate to achieve similar sensations of “down”—and the gunships were too small for any kind of spin. Roslyn had seen the inside of several after the war, and they were designed for short-term operations with acceleration tanks and suits to allow them to withstand high thrust.

  “We don’t plan on fighting the locals,” Daalman headed the engineer off drily. “Those gunships are more likely to be backing us up than fighting us.”

  “I’ll prep some exercises for that, too, then,” Roslyn said cheerfully. “I don’t think many of us have practice thinking about how to use ex-RIN gunships.”

  “Agreed. We should work on that,” Huntress’s Captain said. “We may have scrapped every carrier they built, but there are still a lot of gunships running around.”

  The gunships, after all, hadn’t been built using people’s brains as their main engine.

  5

  When Samuels finally reported aboard, Roslyn found herself in the same position as Kristofferson had been on her own return. She was standing behind the safety barrier as the shuttle slowed to a halt—and felt the vibration as the megaton-and-a-half-plus starship’s main engines came to life.

  Mage-Captain Daalman had already made it clear they wouldn’t be hanging around once the Mage-Lieutenant was aboard. There were a few others reporting in late for a few reasons, but the
ir sixth Jump Mage was the only person they were going to hold up the entire destroyer for.

  Kirtida Samuels saluted crisply as soon as she spotted Roslyn. The Lieutenant was a dark-skinned woman with naturally copper-red hair that contrasted sharply with the rest of her features. Like most Mages by Blood, born from the descendants of the brutal eugenics program that had created the modern Mage, her genetics were…complicated.

  “Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Roslyn greeted her subordinate. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel fine,” Samuels said. “I’ve felt fine for at least a day, but apparently they’re really careful around soft-tissue injury.” She shrugged. “I’m not allowed to work out for a minimum of a week—other than the specific exercises they gave me—and I have to follow up weekly with the ship’s doctor for two months.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Roslyn said. “Check in with medbay as soon as you get a chance and schedule those. If at all possible, I’d prefer we not have to shift your watch schedule—but we’ll do what it takes to make sure you get the care you need.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m fine,” the younger woman said with a chuckle. “But I’ll follow orders, sir. Yours and the doctors’.”

  “Good Lieutenant,” Roslyn said, gesturing for Samuels to follow her. “There’s a briefing packet prepped for you on our mission. Jordan is fully up to speed—she’s on watch with Captain Daalman right now—so she can fill you in if you have questions.”

  “Of course, sir,” Samuels accepted. “The Chiefs will fill me in on the rest, I’m sure.”

  “They do that,” the tactical officer agreed. “Now, you should also have got an update on the new TOS? We get to guinea-pig for the entire RMN.”

  “Lucky us,” Samuels noted. “Any problems, sir?”

  “Nothing major, but watch your controls for the first few days. Nothing is quite what you expect it to be.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Tactical chiefs and officers’ meeting after the jump,” Roslyn concluded. “That’ll give you a couple of hours to get squared away. We’ll learn what you need to catch up on quickly.”

  “I’m just glad to be out of the hospital, sir,” Samuels admitted. “And doing anything.”

  “Oh, you are going to regret that,” Roslyn said with a wicked grin.

  The bridge of any Martian warship was also the simulacrum chamber. Civilian ships often split the two, leaving the Mage jumping the ship with a private sanctum at the center of the starship—but a civilian ship’s simulacrum could only augment the jump spell.

  A warship’s unrestricted amplifier could augment any spell the Mages aboard cast, giving it a deadly weapon at shorter ranges. Combined with the general tendency of the ship’s commander to be a Mage and the need to save cubage and mass alike on the armored warships, the two were combined.

  That left the bridge as a spherical space at Song of the Huntress’s exact center, roughly six meters across in each dimension. Every wall of the sphere was covered in high-fidelity screens that showed everything around the ship in perfect detail.

  Positioned through the spherical bridge were the stations for the bridge crew, each a small platform with computer consoles a small step away from another platform. At the very center of the bridge was the simulacrum itself, a ninety-centimeter-long model of the hundred-and-twenty-meter-long starship.

  Even at that, the magic of the amplifier matrix had been changed since the last ships Roslyn had served aboard. Those had all been exactly a one-hundredth-scale model, resulting in five-meter-long simulacra aboard cruisers and even larger on battleships.

  Roslyn watched in silence as a dozen metrics on her screens slowly reduced. A warship could jump from close to a planet, but it was uncomfortable and rather dangerous. Normally, they would get a full light-minute clear of the planet—which was an easier task on a warship with magical gravity and ten gravities of acceleration than on a civilian ship.

  “We are sufficiently clear for a safe jump,” Mage-Lieutenant Commander Lehr reported.

  “Thank you, Lehr,” Mage-Captain Daalman replied.

  The Captain was seated in front of the simulacrum and surrounded by a smaller set of screens. All of those screens were folded away now, giving the Mage a near-perfect view of the rune-encrusted screens that surrounded them all.

  “Record for the log, please,” Daalman continued calmly. “We are jumping…now.”

  She laid her hands—with the same silver runes inlaid on the palms as Roslyn and the rest of the Jump Mages had—on the simulacrum.

  Years of practice on the Captain’s part made the whole affair far smoother than Roslyn dared hope her jumps would ever become. One moment, Daalman was placing her hands on the simulacrum; the next, a surge of disorientation washed over Roslyn and all of her screens were reporting different data.

  “First jump complete,” Daalman said loudly, her voice tired. Jumping took a lot out of a Mage. “Lehr, you’re up next in ninety minutes. Let’s keep this show moving.”

  Even with six Mages aboard, it was going to be a long trip.

  6

  The tutorial for the command portion of the new tactical operating system ended, leaving Roslyn and her subordinates looking at the wallscreen in her office with mixed levels of distaste.

  “I don’t think I ever realized how much credit we needed to give the first crews to test out this kind of software,” Chief Westcott finally said. “I’m used to us receiving really complete and detailed tutorials that emphasize what we need to know.”

  “This is not that,” Lieutenant Samuels agreed, the dark redhead looking at the now-frozen display with a shake of her head. “This is…”

  “The basic tutorial on functionality prepared by the techs who wrote the software,” Roslyn finished for her. “They know what we need for the actual programs and work with active-duty officers to get to this stage, but the final tutorials and instructions have to be prepared by people using the system in the real world.”

  She tapped a command, wiping away the tutorial video and replacing it with the practice version of the tactical operating system, the same main screen she’d gone over with Westcott when they began their plan for this.

  “The six of us need to write and record those tutorials,” Roslyn continued, gesturing at the two junior officers and three Chief Petty Officers in the room with her. “And unfortunately for the Chiefs, all three of us officers are on the Jump Mage rotation, which means we’re going to be shattered even when we’re awake for the rest of the trip.”

  If they’d been expecting serious trouble, Roslyn would have argued to keep at least one of the ship’s six Mages on a longer cycle than the others. Currently, everyone would jump the ship on an eight-hour cycle. That meant that they’d been asleep at least half the time and at less than their best the rest of the time.

  “I hate to undermine the myth that the Chiefs don’t actually need officers, but that’s going to be a pain,” Westcott conceded. “We’ll make it happen. We’re the RMN.”

  “The protectors of Her Majesty’s Protectorate,” Roslyn agreed. “I know we’re going to drop a lot of this on you three, but we all will be here, I promise. The XO and the skipper are aware of what’s going on too, so Kristofferson is available for backup when needed.”

  “What about the skipper?” Samuels asked.

  “My plan is to test our final tutorials on her,” Roslyn replied. “Captain Daalman is familiar with more iterations of the TOS than any of us except Chief Westcott. She’ll make a good first audience for the tutorials we put together—and so long as one of us is available to run the command interface, it doesn’t threaten the ship if she’s a bit rusty.”

  No one was expecting trouble on this trip, but it was always wise to prepare for some trouble. Even ignoring Roslyn’s secret orders, she knew the ship needed to be ready for action at any moment.

  “So, let’s go through this practice setup, shall we?” she asked. “Section by section.”

  She st
udied the iconography for a moment, then shrugged and tapped a command. One group of icons, currently colored amber, zoomed in and took up the entire wallscreen, more data appearing as the icons expanded.

  “Someone want to read off what this is telling us?” Roslyn suggested. “Jordan?”

  Mage-Lieutenant Jordan coughed and studied the screen.

  “We’re looking at the offensive laser suite,” the pale blonde officer with the watery blue eyes noted. “Batteries Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta.” She gestured at each section as she indicated them. “Each section has four ten-gigawatt battle lasers, and the color-coding is warning us that the capacitors are only at one-third charge.

  “Oh.” She paused with a questioning tone as she looked at the notations. “That’s handy. It’s showing the current capacitor charge rate and how many shots until we’re dry with current levels and charge rates.”

  Jordan chuckled.

  “That is, if anyone didn’t know it already, one.”

  Roslyn joined in the general amusement at that. At battle stations, with the fusion reactors at full, the lasers would be charging fast enough to offset the Book’s set rate of fire for the weapons. With the capacitors charged, they could double that rate of fire for a very small number of shots.

  “All right, everyone comfortable with the laser screens?” she asked.

  “I need to play for a bit in the practice software, but I think most of the detail pages haven’t changed much,” Samuels noted. She held primary responsibility for the lasers and the teams who handled them.

  “Good. So, next is…”

  Roslyn swapped to another screen and looked at it for several long seconds.

  “Okay, what am I looking at?” she finally asked. “I don’t recognize half of this iconography, and I’m reasonably sure I know all of our weapons.”