Sword of Mars Read online

  “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Maata asked.

  “Not really,” Niska replied, with a warning glance at Damien. Maata knew a lot, but she didn’t know everything. “I know where to look, and that should tell me more.”

  He shook his head.

  “Whatever it is, the Republic killed Bryan Ricket to cover it up,” he pointed out. “We’re not key loyalists and founding fathers of the nation. They’re not even going to blink at putting any or all of us down, hard.”

  “Let them try,” Maata said grimly. “I never expected to see Prodigal Son activated, James, no more than you did. But if the Republic killed Ricket, they’re not my goddamned Republic anymore.

  “So, fuck ’em. I have nuclear missiles if they want to argue the point.”

  Damien swallowed. Rapiers didn’t normally have warheads, but from what Maata had just said…he might want to have his people check the ones Starlight carried.

  Just in case.

  10

  Two days was barely enough time for anyone to begin to sort out the consequences of the Republic occupation of Santiago or the Protectorate liberation of the system.

  Stand in Righteousness and the other cripples had been towed into Cova’s orbit while other ships had moved to Novo Lar to force the surrender of the remaining troops. From what Roslyn was hearing, most of the remaining troops felt that they were the lucky ones.

  Some had tried to hold out, however, and the Santiago Defense Force didn’t have much of an army left. The Protectorate didn’t have an army, which meant that the holdouts were being dug out by the Marine contingents of Mage-Admiral Alexander’s fleet.

  Roslyn was getting updates through the tactical network. They were at least more positive than the updates she was getting from Stand’s engineering department.

  Of the forty destroyers that had arrived in the system, fifteen were just gone. The design of the Lancer class was almost a century old, and Roslyn was now grimly aware that it had been built as an anti-piracy ship.

  Against a real opponent, even updated Lancer destroyers were obsolete, and they’d paid the price for the age of their design. The Protectorate had updated their cruiser and battleship designs over the years, but the Lancers had just seen their weapons and systems upgraded around the same core schematic.

  Of the twenty-five remaining destroyers, thirteen were damaged to one degree or another and now hung in Cova orbit. Four damaged cruisers orbited with them.

  Four more lightly damaged cruisers were still with the battleships, as were the remaining twelve functioning destroyers. Six more of the massive ten-to-twelve-megaton ships had died in the fight.

  Mage-Admiral Alexander’s fleet was victorious, but the price had been brutal.

  The terrifying part was that the Protectorate search-and-rescue efforts had pulled more of their people out of the wreckage than the Republic’s. The best estimates Roslyn was seeing was that there had been eighty thousand people on just the ships that they’d seen fail to jump.

  S&R had picked up less than two thousand.

  Another thirty thousand had died aboard ships and gunships destroyed in the fighting, but Roslyn could understand those. Could live with those, even if she felt guilty about them…but eighty thousand people had died in an instant because they would rather die trying to run than surrender.

  “It’s about the drives,” Coleborn said over her shoulder.

  Roslyn looked up at the navigator in surprise and he shrugged.

  “The drives?” she asked.

  “We haven’t recovered an intact Republic jump drive yet,” he reminded her. “Their ships self-destruct or, well, suicide-jump”—he gestured at the screen—“to avoid capture.”

  “I doubt their crews are that determined to keep that secret,” Roslyn replied. “That’s insane.”

  “You’re assuming the crews even know about the security protocols,” the navigator replied. “What happened in Ardennes?”

  Roslyn shivered, suddenly feeling very, very young.

  “They blew up after the rest of the fleet jumped out,” she said. “Remote-detonated via their FTL com?”

  “Or just one fanatic captain,” Coleborn agreed. He gripped her shoulder reassuringly. “Sooner or later, that’s going to bite the RIN in the ass. Right now, however, the Captain wants to talk to you.”

  Roslyn looked up at the bigger man.

  “You know about what?”

  He shrugged.

  “Yeah. So do you, I bet.”

  Kulkarni was waiting as Roslyn entered her office, Stand in Righteousness’s Captain looking exhausted. She gestured Roslyn to a seat and slid a coffee across the desk.

  “To play the old ‘good news, bad news’ game, I have bad news, weird news, terrifying news and good news,” the Captain told her. “Drink your coffee; you’re going to need it.”

  Roslyn took a seat and a swallow of coffee—far too large a swallow, given that the Captain had added a significant amount of whisky to the hot drink.

  She coughed, and Kulkarni managed to smile through her fatigue.

  “The bad news, I think everybody has guessed,” she told Roslyn. “Stand is irreparable. Her amplifier matrix isn’t stable enough to jump, and even if Santiago had the yards to fix her, she just isn’t worth it.

  “She’s going to be scrapped in place for parts to repair ships that do have matrices we can fix,” Kulkarni said sadly. “We are all now out of a job, though you can imagine that isn’t going to last long for any of us.”

  Roslyn gripped the cup of coffee hard. It was warm enough that it was uncomfortable to do so, so she took another swallow of the whisky-laced drink. She’d been battlefield-commissioned aboard Stand in Righteousness. She’d literally never served on another warship.

  Stand had been her ensign cruise, a glorified internship in the middle of her academy training. Somehow, everything had gone to hell around her, but she wasn’t quite sure what would happen to the youngest Lieutenant in the Navy without her ship.

  “The weird news might seem unrelated, but you’ll understand when I’m done,” Kulkarni continued. She was clearly aware of Roslyn’s concern as she gave the younger woman a reassuring smile.

  “Through sources I don’t have nearly the clearance to know about, we came into a mother lode of intelligence on Republic espionage operations inside the Protectorate. I don’t know the details, but I can tell you that the Republic is going to have a very bad few days as the news starts trickling home.

  “Given what we know of the Republic’s communications, we held off on executing on the intel until everything was in place. That was this morning, which brings me to the terrifying news.”

  Kulkarni grimaced and shook her head a Roslyn’s confused look.

  “I’m sure you wondered why Mage-Admiral Alexander was so dismissive of the gunships,” she asked.

  Roslyn nodded slowly.

  “It was because her operations officer sold her on a detailed analysis that said they weren’t a threat,” the destroyer Captain told her. “I’ve seen that analysis now. It’s really well done. Without knowing the truth, we would have chalked it up to a couple of misestimates and an overeager officer.”

  “The truth, sir?” Roslyn asked. Surely, what Kulkarni was suggesting couldn’t be the case…

  “Lieutenant Commander Louna Nikodem was an operative of the Republican Intelligence Directorate,” Kulkarni said flatly. “That’s how they knew which ship was Alexander’s flagship. Nikodem might have had a plan to escape the destruction of Righteous Shield…but then again, she might not have.

  “Especially since she committed suicide to avoid capture when the MPs came for her.”

  Roslyn swallowed hard.

  “That’s…bad, sir.”

  “It is,” Kulkarni agreed. “The good news is that she’s no longer a threat—and the good news for me is that Mage-Admiral Alexander’s staff suddenly has an unexpected opening. That’s also good news for you, Lieutenant. And me, tha
nkfully.”

  “You’re moving over as her ops officer, sir?”

  “Exactly,” Kulkarni confirmed. “And you’ll be on the shuttle with me.”

  “Sir?” Roslyn said again. She was starting to feel lost.

  “The Admiral wants the most experienced people fighting the Republic at her side, and I think she feels that you, in particular, need a staff posting as you catch up with your peers.”

  A staff posting wasn’t exactly what Roslyn wanted, but…it was still a posting.

  “I can live with that, sir.”

  Kulkarni laughed.

  “‘Live with that,’ she says,” the Captain echoed. “Mage-Admiral Alexander didn’t have a full staff when she arrived in Ardennes. She filled most of the holes, but she never had a Flag Lieutenant.

  “That’s your job now, Roslyn Chambers. It’s a staff posting to let you get your feet under you, sure, but serving as a Flag Lieutenant is generally considered as a necessary checkmark to flag rank.

  “Don’t waste Her Highness’s trust,” Kulkarni concluded. “I’ll be there to back you up, and I’m pretty sure Alexander knows where you’re at, but this isn’t an easy posting she’s giving you. Like Montgomery before her, Alexander seems to think you’re worth some extra effort.”

  Roslyn was very quiet as she met her Captain’s gaze.

  “That should have gone under the terrifying news, Mage-Captain,” she admitted.

  “That would only have been if I didn’t agree with them, Lieutenant Chambers.”

  11

  The shuttle flight away from Stand in Righteousness was grim. The destroyer was already being dismantled behind them, exosuited workers swarming over the hull with cutters and transport sleds.

  Stand’s sacrifice would get two of the other destroyers online, but it was still morbid to watch your home get chopped up behind you.

  “She did her job, Chambers,” Kulkarni said from behind her. For all that the older woman was trying to be reassuring, Kulkarni was also watching the ship being dismantled.

  Stand in Righteousness had been Roslyn’s ship, but she’d been Kulkarni’s command. Roslyn mourned her home, but she couldn’t help wondering just how responsible Kulkarni felt for the loss of the destroyer.

  “We did our job, too,” the Captain continued. “And look over there.”

  Roslyn noted that Kulkarni didn’t look away from the wrecked destroyer as Roslyn did.

  She was pointing, however, at Righteous Shield of Valor, and the sight of the battleship forced Roslyn to pay more attention to what she was getting into.

  The Guardian-class battleship was fifty times Stand in Righteousness’s mass. They were both white pyramids floating in space, but that was where the similarities ended. Stand had been exactly one hundred meters high on a square base a hundred meters across.

  Righteous Shield was half a kilometer high on a four-hundred-meter base. For every weapon system the destroyer possessed, the battleship mustered ten. Her missiles were comparable, but she had three hundred launchers to the destroyer’s twenty-four. Her battle lasers were almost ten times as powerful, and she had four times as many of them.

  By any standard, the battleship dwarfed their previous ship. Pax Marcianus and Peacemaker, still in orbit of Novo Lar, outmassed her by twenty percent, but short of those two ships, nothing in space challenged a Guardian-class battleship.

  There were scars on Righteous Shield’s hull now. Sensors and turrets had been replaced, but no one had repainted where the fires of matter-antimatter reaction had seared the battleship’s hull.

  She’d withstood that fire, though, where no lesser ship could have.

  “That’s our new home,” Kulkarni told her. “Unless Alexander moves somewhere. We’re part of Her Highness the Mage-Admiral’s staff now. We go where she goes, sleep when she sleeps, follow where she leads.”

  “I feel underqualified still,” Roslyn admitted.

  Her now-former Captain laughed.

  “That’s because you are, Chambers,” she said. “But that hasn’t stopped you yet!”

  Their shuttle wasn’t the only one in the battleship’s landing bay. Two others had appeared in front of them, and streams of people were already making their way off to meet officers and head deeper into the massive ship.

  Powered safety shields were moving out of the way, presumably by remote from the control center. They clearly had been protecting those other passengers and the waiting welcoming parties from the energy of the shuttle’s arrival.

  Roslyn tried not to look as lost as she felt, falling in behind Mage-Captain Kulkarni and hoping that the older woman knew where they were going.

  A few seconds after leaving the shuttle, however, she realized where Kulkarni was headed. There were only two red exosuits in the cavernous bay—and only one organization in the Protectorate wore unmarked red exosuits.

  The two suits of armor held Royal Guards, veteran Marine Combat Mages with at least ten years’ service assigned to the protection of the Mage-King of Mars and his family.

  A second circle of four young-looking women in plain black fatigues carrying overpowered penetrator carbines surrounded the Royal Guardsmen. They were Protectorate Secret Service.

  All six of those intimidating-looking guards were gathered around a tall woman with gunmetal-gray hair and pale blue eyes. Roslyn Chambers had never met any member of the Royal Family, but she didn’t think anyone born and raised in the Protectorate would have failed to recognize Her Royal Highness Mage-Admiral Jane Michelle Alexander.

  The guards let Kulkarni and Roslyn through without hesitation, the protective cordon opening to let them in and then closing behind them as the two women came to a halt and crisply saluted.

  “Mage-Captain Indrajit Kulkarni and Mage-Lieutenant Roslyn Chambers reporting, sir,” Kulkarni introduced them. “We’ve been assigned to your staff.”

  “I know, Mage-Captain,” Alexander said lightly. “I apologize for the security.” Her head gesture took in the Royal Guards and Secret Service agents around her.

  “Lieutenant Commander Nikodem had served with me for five years,” she continued. “Her betrayal was unexpected, to put it mildly. You were chosen to replace her, Mage-Captain, because you’ve had plenty of opportunity to screw us just as badly as Louna did.”

  “I’d hoped my qualifications were also helpful,” Kulkarni replied. “It’s comforting to be regarded as trustworthy, though.”

  Alexander chuckled.

  “Right now, Captain Kulkarni, ‘trustworthy’ is the highest qualification someone can have,” she noted. “Come, let’s get out of the landing bay.”

  They reached a set of offices close to where Roslyn thought the flag bridge was. Alexander stopped outside one of the doors and gestured to the blank spot where a nameplate should be.

  “I believe they’ve finished cleaning out Louna’s crap,” she told Kulkarni. “If you want to go in and get set up, Lieutenant Chambers and I need to have a long chat.”

  Roslyn swallowed as she was suddenly and unexpectedly separated from Kulkarni. Showing her concern was bad form, however, so she simply smiled and nodded.

  “With me, Lieutenant,” Alexander told her.

  Roslyn fell in behind the Admiral and followed her to her office.

  Alexander’s office showed every sign of having been her main working space for a long time. Roslyn wasn’t sure when the Admiral had taken over Righteous Shield as her flagship, but she’d clearly had time to make the office her space.

  There was no sign of the normal standard-issue furniture in the room. The furniture that had replaced it didn’t look particularly expensive, but it had definitely been selected to a specific taste. Everything, from the painting of Olympus Mons on the wall to the cabinets to the desk, matched.

  “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” Alexander ordered. A tray with a carafe of coffee and two cups floated over to the desk without the Admiral doing anything.

  “Take anything in your coffee?”

 
; “No, sir,” Roslyn replied.

  “Okay.” Alexander added a cube to hers. “I take one sugar, nothing else. Remember that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Roslyn wondered if getting coffee was going to be the major part of her job.

  The Admiral shook her head at the young woman.

  “I haven’t had a Flag Lieutenant in a while,” she admitted. “I have a secretary, Chief Olivia Sinclair, and a steward, Chief Andres. Between them, they keep my life in pretty solid order.

  “That said, we’ve never actually run a fleet at war before, and we’re finding the limits of what I can get NCOs to do without getting pushback from other officers,” Alexander noted. “Which is bullshit, but I can only do so much.”

  “So…you found the most junior officer you possibly could?” Roslyn asked.

  The Princess of Mars laughed.

  “Exactly!” The humor faded. “Now drink your coffee.”

  Somewhat intimidated, Roslyn obeyed.

  “Your job, at least initially, is going to be as my gofer,” Alexander told her. “That means that, yes, you need to know my coffee order. My food allergies and preferences. My birthday—and the birthdays of my staff to make sure I don’t forget as I get old.

  “You’ll also need to know the entire org structure of my staff, the fleet under my command, and the command structure of Righteous Shield of Valor,” the Admiral continued. “You’ll need to know who to go to for answers when I ask questions and who to go to for supplies when I’m putting on a party or a dinner.

  “Olivia and Andres will know a lot of those answers initially, but you can only rely on our NCOs so far,” Alexander noted. “A small and aggravating number of those officers have a stick up their asses and won’t answer questions from the NCOs. They don’t have that excuse when you speak in my name, so you’ll have to get used to politely browbeating officers senior to you.”