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

  “Bombardment, I think,” Westcott said slowly. “That’s the standard impactor icon, but I’m not sure what the other four are.”

  “Did we miss a memo?” Roslyn asked aloud, and one of the other Chiefs coughed. “Chief Trevis?”

  Chief Janez Trevis was the juniormost of her three Chiefs, but he held the vague title of Weaponeer. He’d come up through the ranks as a missile operator and was responsible for coordinating with Logistics to make sure they had all of the weapons they needed.

  “You might have missed it, yes,” the tanned man told her. “We received the new Talon Tens during our layover. They’re modular weapons, with multiple warhead options.”

  He gestured at the screen.

  “So, we can adjust the number of projectiles from five to ten and switch the warheads on each projectile.”

  Roslyn studied the TOS display and nodded slowly. Now she knew what she was looking for, she saw the section of the report that told her that Song of the Huntress actually carried both the new Talon Ten and the older—but still new, introduced in the war—Talon Nine.

  The Talon Nine was a nine-warhead MIRVed precision kinetic impactor, capable of taking out anything from an armored bunker to a city depending on dispersal and velocity.

  The Talon Ten options were…complicated.

  “Okay,” Roslyn conceded. “I’m guessing these new icons as cluster, penetrator, airburst, explosive and…”

  The last icon looked like a crossed-out network transmission symbol.

  “Electromagnetic pulse, sir,” Trevis confirmed. “We retained the standard impactor, but we gained two options for small and mid-size antimatter warheads for area destruction, as well as three specialty munitions.

  “We now have an anti-vehicle munition that turns a single impactor into forty-four smart anti-vehicle missiles, an anti-bunker munition that is significantly denser and capable of penetrating up to four kilometers of stone, and an electromagnetic pulse warhead to disable enemy electronics.”

  “I’m reasonably sure any enemy we’d run into would have hardened electronics,” Westcott pointed out. “What’s the point of an EMP warhead?”

  “Depends on the enemy, I suppose,” Trevis replied. “We used to deal with a lot of terrorists, after all. Knocking out all electronics for a few hundred square kilometers might be necessary there.

  “Plus, well, keep overloading it and even our electronics can shut down.”

  “We can turn them back on if they do,” Roslyn countered. “But that can provide a few moments of critical vulnerability.”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s useful to have options, at least. Though god knows I have no desire to ever fire a planetary impactor!”

  There was a chorus of agreement. Even in the war, the RMN had done everything in their power to avoid having to use their ground-attack munitions. Even the most basic mode of the new Talon Tens could easily destroy a city—and if Roslyn was reading the data correctly, Huntress now had the ability to deliver ten one-hundred-megaton warheads with near-perfect precision from a single missile.

  That wasn’t killing cities. That was killing continents.

  7

  “Jump complete,” Roslyn reported, wavering slightly as the exhaustion washed over her. “Welcome to the Sorprendidas System, everyone.”

  “Take your seat, Lieutenant Commander,” Daalman ordered gently. Roslyn was still on watch, though the expectations were always low for a post-jump watch.

  Chief Westcott was already at her station, pulling the default information the Captain would want now that they’d arrived at their destination. Roslyn dropped heavily into her seat next to the NCO and tapped a command to mirror the Chief’s screen.

  “What are we seeing, Tactical?” Daalman asked.

  “Chief?” Roslyn said, clearly passing the question to Westcott to make sure the NCO got credit. She could read the analysis Westcott was doing off the screen in front of her, but that would be rude as far as she was concerned.

  “Geography is as expected,” Westcott reported crisply. “Two balls of burnt rock, a habitable planet named Sorprendidas, two balls of frozen rock, an asteroid belt and two outer gas giants.

  “Scans show Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice is in Sorprendidas orbit,” she continued. “Flagging space installations throughout the system, but nothing materially off from the reports we received prior to our arrival.

  “Thank you, Chief Westcott,” Daalman said. “Chief Zaman? Fire up the Link and inform Command that we have arrived.”

  Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice was a pre-war design that lacked anything resembling faster-than-light communication. Before the war with the Republic, the only form of interstellar communication available to humanity had been the Runic Transceiver Arrays, large and complex magical installations that only transmitted the voice of a Mage.

  But the Republic had developed the long-sought holy grail of quantum-entanglement communicators under the unassuming name of “the Link.” Now replicated by the engineers of the Protectorate—some of them the same engineers who’d designed it for the Republic—it was being installed in all new RMN ships.

  Refitting older ships took time, and old destroyers were at the bottom of the priority list. Roslyn figured a ship like Unrelenting Pursuit was likely to be scrapped before she received an FTL communicator.

  “Once we’ve called home, let’s get messages fired off to Cardinal-Governor Guerra and Mage-Captain Mac Gille Fhaolain,” Daalman continued, the Gaelic name coming far more smoothly off her tongue than Roslyn figured she could manage.

  “The locals know we’re coming, but there’s only one Link on the whole planet and it’s Republic-built,” the Captain noted. “Regular radio, please.”

  The RMN might be comfortable enough with the Links they’d built and the Republic might be dead…but they were not going to connect their FTL communication network with the one the Republic had built.

  There were interfaces used to integrate the old Republic network with the new civilian network, but small as the risk was, the RMN had chosen not to take it.

  “Command confirms our arrival,” Zaman noted. His boss, Lieutenant Commander Frost, was off-duty, leaving the noncom as the senior coms person on deck. “Sending standard greetings to Cardinal Guerra and Mage-Captain Mac Gille Fhaolain.”

  “And now we wait,” Daalman murmured. “Lieutenant Ambrogi?”

  The shaven-headed officer at the navigation console turned their head to face the Captain.

  “Sir?”

  “Do you have a course for Sorprendidas?”

  “Yes, sir,” the junior navigator confirmed. “ETA three hours, eleven minutes.”

  “All right. Make it so, Lieutenant,” Daalman ordered. “Let’s go meet the locals.”

  With Daalman holding down the watch and a clear lack of threats in the Sorprendidas System, Roslyn was able to retreat to her office after an hour or so. It was helpful, in her admittedly biased opinion, that all of her superiors were also Jump Mages and understood exactly how wiped she was after jumping.

  Even with the exhaustion from jumping, a Mage could still only actually sleep for eight to ten hours a day, so they ended up doing work in a manner best described with the ancient aphorism of “puttering.”

  Amidst the paperwork she was going through for her own department, she pulled together the information she had on the missing MISS agents. Four had gone into Sorprendidas in the last nine months. Two men, one woman, one genderqueer.

  The genderqueer agent, she at least knew what had happened to. Against a background of three other agents ceasing to report, the car accident was suspicious as hell. Isi Yuan had been hit by a drunk driver and died before they’d even reached the hospital.

  They’d been following up on the research done by Pallavi Rose. Rose had been on Sorprendidas since before the war, a long-term surveillance asset. She’d been the one to identify Dr. Finley when information on the Rune Wright had gone out to every agent to track his movements.<
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  Rose had flagged Finley as having repeatedly visited the planet and had even identified several businesses he’d been working with. Only part of that list had managed to make it back to Mars before Rose had stopped reporting.

  Yuan’s investigation had been intended, at least partially, to find out what had happened to Rose.

  Timur Spiker had left Tau Ceti barely twenty-four hours after the MISS office there had learned of Yuan’s death. By the time he’d arrived, at least, the Link on Sorprendidas had been interfaced with the civilian Link network in the Protectorate so he could send some reports.

  Not many though, Roslyn saw. There was only so much access a covert agent could get to an expensive and still heavily-controlled communication device.

  Spiker had sent in three reports in four weeks and then gone silent. A fourth agent had already been dispatched to support him, though Angus Killough had arrived to find himself alone. The initial report Roslyn had from him sounded shaky.

  Killough had been more careful with his reports than Spiker, sending them in once a month after his arrival report. They’d gone through an encrypted drop box in the civilian network, buried in the corporate reports of several different Tau Ceti-based corporations that probably didn’t even know they were being used for MISS coms.

  His last report had been five weeks earlier. More MISS assets were supposed to be deployed, per the notes she had from the Prince-Regent. None were expected to be in the system for another few weeks, at least, but they would make covert contact with her once they did.

  Roslyn sighed and shook her head.

  “They’re all dead,” she muttered grimly. “Someone is killing our people.”

  She probably shouldn’t be talking to herself about this, but she was tired. Sighing, she shook her head and pulled up another document. This one gave her a list of virtual classified sites running on Sorprendidas and specific messages that would be posted as emergency alerts.

  It would take some finagling to get archives from those sites, but even from half a light-minute out, Roslyn could access the planetary datanet. She told her computer to pull those classifieds and grabbed herself a coffee as they downloaded.

  She wasn’t entirely surprised that there were no calls for help concealed in the ads she pulled. Whatever was going on on this planet, somebody had made very sure that all of the MISS agents who’d gone in to investigate it were dead.

  That meant Roslyn needed to talk to people—because she was feeling far from suicidal, and that meant she was investigating with Marines.

  8

  “You asked to see me, Lieutenant Commander?” Daalman asked as Roslyn entered the Captain’s office.

  Daalman had made more of an imprint on her office in the months they’d been aboard than Roslyn had. Song of the Huntress’s commissioning seal of a bow with a music note hanging above it was emblazoned on the wall behind her desk. Simple plastic bookshelves marked one wall, filled with an assorted array of nonfiction, reports and novels.

  Pride of place on the wall that had avoided bookshelves was a massive picture of a family of five in front of a gorgeous estate house in the countryside somewhere. It took Roslyn a moment to recognize Mage-Captain Laura Daalman in the brilliantly smiling mother in the oil painting.

  “Yes, sir,” Roslyn admitted. She hesitated, standing by the chair in front of Daalman’s standard-issue metal-and-plastic desk.

  “Sit down, Chambers,” the Captain ordered. “Is this where I get to find out what the Prince-Regent put in your ear while you were having dinner with him?”

  Roslyn took the seat, trying not to wince at the accuracy of her commander’s guess.

  “How did you…” She trailed off helplessly, feeling very young.

  “I figured the odds were sixty-forty that the Prince-Regent had wanted you for more than a social dinner,” Daalman noted. “And then you ask for a private meeting, which throws the odds to at least seventy-thirty.

  “I’m guessing you have secret orders under the Mountain’s seal that you’re authorized to brief me on as you need assistance,” she continued. “I won’t pretend I like that, but I can work with it—and it makes sense to me that the Prince-Regent would lean on a young protégée like you.

  “Tell me, did he introduce you to the Queen?”

  Roslyn blinked. Now she was completely out of her depth.

  “Yes?” she admitted.

  “I figured,” Daalman said. “Kiera Alexander desperately needs a core cadre of officers and officials within spitting distance of her own age. Hell, Chambers, I’m almost as young to be a Mage-Captain as you are to be a Lieutenant Commander, and I’m over twice Her Majesty’s age.

  “I’ve never met Montgomery, but from talking to people who have, I suspect he is very aware of the Mage-Queen’s lack of friends and allies of her own age group. I approve, strongly, of him helping her make those connections.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Roslyn admitted. “She’s…impressive. Clever, compassionate…but I had one dinner with her, sir.”

  Daalman gestured at the painting of her with her husband and three children.

  “And at one point, I’d had one dinner with Roger,” she pointed out. “Friendships have to start somewhere. Now, however.”

  She leaned on her desk and studied Roslyn.

  “I have impressed with my acuity and intuition, but you had a reason for scheduling this meeting, and it wasn’t for me to horrify you with what being the Prince-Regent’s protégée entails.

  “What kind of mission have they saddled you with?”

  Roslyn sighed.

  “I’m to brief you as you need to know, sir,” she admitted. “That suggests against fully reading you in. But…I’ve been tasked to follow up on an investigation MISS was handling. Their agents have gone missing, so I need to catch up on what I can.

  “That means I’ll need some time on the planet, away from the ship. But given that multiple MISS operatives are missing, presumed dead…I was hoping to borrow some Marines.”

  “This is the ass end of fucking nowhere,” Daalman said bluntly. “Which I’m guessing is a great place to hide something. I’ll write the orders authorizing you to borrow a shuttle and travel to the surface as you need, but I have a requirement for lending you Marines, Lieutenant Commander. One I’m not going to budge on, no matter what your orders are.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If you’re taking Marines with you into this kind of mess, you brief them,” the Mage-Captain told her. “You can leave me with as little as I need to know, but the Marines at your back need to know everything. They can’t judge the risks otherwise—and you can trust Martian Marines to keep their mouths shut, too.”

  “My orders say need to know, sir,” Roslyn noted. “I think that covers briefing my immediate escort.”

  “Good.” Daalman waved her hand over her desk, activating a touchscreen interface linked to her wrist-comp. “I’ll touch base with Major Dickens and see which of his squads he’ll want to assign. He doesn’t need to know as much as I do, but he needs to know something.”

  The Mage-Captain smiled coolly.

  “Like I said, Chambers, I don’t like my officers having secret orders,” she reminded the junior woman. “But I understand the need and I understand the officer in question being you. You didn’t pick up multiple ranks of the Medal of Valor by being useless.”

  “Sir,” Roslyn acknowledged.

  “The Major will advise you of your team within a few hours,” Daalman told her. “You’ll have a shuttle and probably ten Marines. Try to bring them all back intact, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Roslyn was busy pulling together the information she had from the MISS agents to identify a starting point when the admittance buzzer for her office went off. She concealed the data with a wave of her hand, then studied the door in silence for a moment.

  She hadn’t heard anything from Captain Chiyembekezo Dickens—courtesy promoted to
Major aboard a starship to avoid confusion with the ship’s Captain. She wasn’t entirely sure how the Marines would handle an assignment like this, though—she had limited experience with the Royal Martian Marine Corps.

  “Enter,” she ordered.

  The door slid open to reveal what she realized she’d been expecting: A Marine Sergeant in shipboard blues. The woman snapped to perfect attention as the door opened, giving Roslyn the preemptive salute both her rank and her Medal of Valor required.

  “Mage-Lieutenant Commander Chambers, sir?” she asked in greeting.

  “Come in, Sergeant,” Roslyn replied. “And you are?”

  “Staff Sergeant Borislava Mooren,” the dark-haired Slavic woman introduced herself. “I lead First Squad of First Platoon for Major Dickens, and my squad has been assigned to you for a special project.”

  “Come in, Sergeant,” Roslyn ordered. “I’m assuming the Major didn’t give you much to work from?”

  “No, sir,” Mooren confirmed. “We’re assigned to your protection and discretion until ordered otherwise, with the understanding that everything you tell us and everything we do are completely classified.”

  “That’s about all I’ve got, yeah,” Roslyn said with a chuckle. “This is locked down at some of the highest levels of bullshit, Sergeant. I have no idea how dangerous it’s going to get, but I can tell you that multiple very capable people are already dead.

  “Once I brief you and your squad, you can never breathe a word of any of this unless I or the Prince-Regent authorizes it. Do you understand?”

  Mooren managed to somehow get straighter as she stood in front of Roslyn’s desk. She was at least five years older than Roslyn, the Lieutenant Commander judged, and she seemed somewhat taken aback by Roslyn’s certainty.

  “We are Marines, sir,” Mooren told her. “We do the job. Sometimes, that means we never talk about the job again. Whatever you need, whatever we’re ordered.”