The Service of Mars Read online

  “Of course, Your Highness,” Bunnag said with a small bow. He paused for a moment, then rose to his feet and spread his hands.

  “The Protectorate Guard is a brand-new organization still finding our feet,” he began without hesitation. “We were created by Royal Order barely a month ago, an order that called on each of the planetary governments to provide one corps of soldiers, defined as four divisions of twenty thousand, to a central force to support the Royal Martian Navy in this war.

  “The limited strength of the RMMC required this,” he explained. “The planetary armies average around four hundred thousand soldiers apiece, serving primarily as security and disaster relief on a planetary scale.

  “The intent is that the corps are provided as intact units with their own organization hierarchies unchanged and then grouped at a higher level into five-corps battle groups and five-battle-group army groups,” he said. “Earth and Mars both provided extra corps of troops at Her Majesty’s request to fill out the numbers for a target strength of five army groups and ten million solders.”

  Roslyn knew about the Guard and the plan for bringing them up, but she had to admit that the numbers sounded impressive. A hundred and twenty-five corps, one per planet plus extras from Sol, would make for a vast expansion over the single eighty-thousand-Marine corps of the RMMC.

  The other side, though, was that Sucre alone had a population of just over two billion.

  “Currently, we have a single corps with Second Fleet,” Bunnag told the officers. “Additional forces are being concentrated at Legatus. Two corps of the First Battle Group, First Army Group, have already been deployed to the surface of Legatus to assist the Marines in garrisoning the planet.

  “If everything has gone to schedule, the entirety of the First and Second Battle Groups of the First Army Group should already be in Legatus and deployable to reinforce us. The Third Battle Group may have been successfully assembled as well, which would give us approximately thirteen corps or roughly one million soldiers to launch the invasion with.”

  “I believe we have no choice but to wait until the Third Battle Group can be brought up to reinforce our landing troops,” Alexander said. “I hesitate to attempt to conquer a world of two billion souls with six hundred thousand troopers, even with proper support.”

  “And we have that support,” Bunnag promised. “Each corps includes exosuit combat units, tanks, artillery and aircraft. They are fully functional planetside combat forces. But I would also suggest waiting until we can deploy the Third Battle Group as well.”

  He paused, then sighed.

  “If I thought we’d have the Fourth and Fifth Battle Groups of the First Army Group in less than another month, I would suggest waiting until we could deploy a full Army Group of the Guard,” he admitted.

  “We can’t wait that long,” Alexander told him. “I’m hoping, I have to admit, that opening a breach in the defenses and landing a real invasion force will bring about Sucre’s surrender without further fighting after that.”

  “I do have to ask, Admiral,” Marangoz said slowly. “I reviewed your conversation with Governor South Isle, and he made one very relevant point. Nueva Bolivia and Sucre are already out of the war. We can leave lighter units here to secure the planet and make certain that Sucre doesn’t contribute to the Republic war effort.

  “Why do we need to invade?”

  Roslyn had been thinking the same question. Unlike the Admiral, though, she had been going to ask it in private. Rank had its privileges, after all. Flag Lieutenants were allowed to ask stupid questions of their Admirals, but they were expected to do it where no one else could hear them.

  “For two reasons, Mage-Admiral,” Alexander replied. She held up one finger. “Firstly, Sucre has a Link. If we draw down our forces significantly here, they are entirely capable of informing the Republic that we have done so.

  “A relief force could be dispatched and the system retaken. Unless we are prepared to destroy all of Nueva Bolivia’s infrastructure—an act that would impose an immense level of hardship on the people of this system for decades to come—that would render the entire battle to take the system almost meaningless.

  “Secondly”—she held up another finger—“Sucre itself is a threat. As a society, we keep most of our heavy industry in space, but never underestimate the industrial capacity of a planet. We regard a planet like Sucre as lightly industrialized, but that light industry, combined with two billion determined sets of hands, is entirely capable of building new weapons, new defenses—even, given enough time, new warships to try and retake their system.

  “The war will likely be resolved before that could happen, but it is a threat I cannot justifiably leave behind us.” She shook her head. “Not least because my projections tell me it’s going to be at least four weeks before we have enough missiles to launch our next offensive, anyway. If I’m going to be waiting here for a month, we may as well bring up the Guard and finish the damn job.”

  She glanced around the room.

  “Any other questions?” she asked. Silence answered her.

  “It will take a minimum of a week for the couriers to return to Legatus and for the transports of the Second and Third Battle Groups to report here,” she told them all. “I want you all to sit down with your Captains and get a solid assessment of your ships’ damage.

  “Munitions colliers should be here shortly to restock our magazines, but we only have a half-load of the new missiles. I want to know what we can repair in place and which ships need to be sent back to Ardennes or even farther.”

  “None of the battleships have taken anything that can’t be buffed out,” Marangoz told her. “If we can source a few extra armor plates and energy-dispersion nets from the logistics train, the battle line will be back to full function by the time the Guard arrives.”

  “Glorious Voice of Honor and Shining Beacon of Hope aren’t going to be repairable here,” Mage-Admiral Medici reported. The cruiser commander looked grim. “I don’t think even Ardennes’s yards are going to cut it. Glorious Voice is fixable, but she’ll need Core World yards. Shining Beacon…”

  He shook his head.

  “She can jump, but I suspect we’re going to need to scrap her,” he admitted. “Two more of my ships, Dancing Smoke Dragon and Count of Righteousness, have taken relatively minor damage that’s still beyond our ability to fix without a yard.

  “We’re still assessing the rest of the screen, but those four will need to be sent back. Smoke Dragon and Count can likely be quickly turned around by Ardennes, at least.”

  “Get me a final list by end of day,” Alexander ordered, then glanced at the other officers. “The same goes for the destroyers,” she noted. “If we’re moving in four weeks, I want every ship at a hundred percent by then—and I won’t lose people because we still have ships that shouldn’t have been in the line; am I clear?”

  11

  If warfare is long stretches of boredom interrupted by moments of terror, that description fit scouting missions better than any other part of it.

  “I think the game might be up, skipper,” Milhouse said quietly. “They’ve cut their intervals by a third and they are sweeping the route to Paladin. We’re running out of time.”

  “I know,” Kelly allowed. That was why everyone was on deck as Rhapsody in Purple sneaked toward the mining planet. “And, frankly, I’m sick of this star system. Xi, how are we doing?”

  “Liara is maintaining the stealth spell,” her wife replied. “I’m standing by to teleport us the hell out of here. How close are you going to cut this?”

  “If the game is blown, then let’s do it in style, shall we?” Kelly asked with a smile. “We are headed directly for Paladin already. If we cut the reactor and go full heat sink, how close do you think we can get?”

  “With the gunship patrols, sensor stations and the rest?” Xi Wu shook her head. “They’ll pick us up at a light-second at the closest. And that’s assuming we can get that close, because they can spo
t us at twice that if we lose the heat sinks.”

  “Then we go in as far as we can and see all that we can,” Kelly replied. “No drones; we can’t risk them localizing the launch vectors.

  “Shvets, set the course.”

  “On it,” the androgynous navigator replied languidly, reaching out and pressing a single button on the screen. “Engine shutdown in twelve minutes. We will be moving at just over seven thousand KPS at approximately four light-seconds from Paladin—we’re already cutting it close, boss.”

  “If they see us, Xi will get us out of here,” Kelly said. “Won’t you?”

  “Of course,” the Ship’s Mage said, her tone sounding less certain than her words. “Do we even think there’s anything here worth this risk? Wouldn’t we already know?”

  “We know there’s industrial platforms here,” Kelly replied. “We need to get closer to have a clue what they’re making.” She checked over her own screens. “Main reactor goes down with the engines,” she concluded. “Then we’re dark for twenty minutes and then you get us the hell out of here, love.”

  “Your faith is touching. You know this is going to hurt, right?”

  “Damien jumped a ship I was on from orbit once,” Kelly said. “I know it’s going to hurt.”

  “Wonderful. Does everyone else?”

  “We have thirty-one minutes to let them know,” the Captain said with a chuckle. “Mike, get the medbay ready, will you?

  “On it,” her pilot husband—also one of the two certified medics on the ship—replied.

  Kelly leaned back in her chair and watched the counters run down as she charged her little ship into the teeth of a small fleet eager to vaporize her.

  “We’re here for answers, everyone,” she reminded them. “We’ve got one ugly one. It’s time to see what else Gygax is hiding from us!”

  Rhapsody in Purple was silent and overheated as she plunged toward her final destination in the Gygax System. Kelly wiped sweat from her brow as the ship’s sensors drank up everything they could of Paladin and its orbitals.

  “Heat sinks are at eighty percent capacity,” Milhouse warned her. “We don’t have much longer.”

  “Xi, are you ready?” Kelly asked.

  “We are,” the Mage confirmed. “On your command?”

  “And not a moment sooner, love,” Kelly ordered. “I’ve got an itch between my shoulders that says there is something here we’ve missed.”

  “There’s nothing here of the size to be building gunships,” her tactical officer said. “A couple of yards for megaton-range in-system clippers, but nothing I’d call military construction. If there’s anything here, we’re more likely to learn about it going over the signals intelligence than pushing a hundred thousand kilometers closer.”

  “And those gunships make getting closer more dangerous, I know,” Kelly agreed. “Humor me.”

  The silence that answered her told her that her officers—her friends—thought she was nuts. But they waited anyway, watching the heat-sink capacity disappear and the temperature aboard the stealth ship creep up.

  “It’s thirty-two degrees in here and the sinks are at ninety percent capacity,” Milhouse said quietly as the range continued to close. “Boss, what are we looking—”

  “That,” Kelly said sharply, pointing at a particular icon. “Milhouse, on my mark, pulse full active sensors at that target. Liara, keep us hidden until we get the bounce back.

  “Xi, as soon as we have the data from the radar sweep, get us out of here.”

  “They’ll know where we are,” Milhouse replied.

  “And that’s why we have to act now. Do it.”

  She could see the timer on the heat sinks. Sixty seconds at most before they had to vent—but the factory she’d picked out for a tiny blip of unusual radiation on was only a light-second and a half away. A radar sweep would take three to four seconds…they could evade fire for three to four seconds.

  Kelly hoped.

  “Sensors active on capacitors,” Milhouse replied. “Receivers online.”

  “Hold everything else dark,” Kelly ordered. “Shvets, emergency gas thrusters. Keep us dancing!”

  There were thirty gunships within five light-seconds of her ship and a dozen mid-sized forts orbiting Paladin. Any of those armed platforms could obliterate Rhapsody with a single lucky hit—but they weren’t going to have time to try.

  “Sensor sweep data coming back,” Milhouse snapped. “Give me a second…give me a second…go!”

  “Xi! Jump us!”

  Half a dozen laser beams scored across the sensor panels on Rhapsody in Purple’s bridge, the closest of them missing the scout ship by a hundred meters at most.

  Then Kelly’s stomach tried to climb out through her spine and six years of period cramps arrived at once—and the Gygax System vanished, replaced by the distant lights of empty space.

  “We’re clear,” Xi reported, fatigue straining her voice. “One light-year away from Gygax.”

  “And good riddance to that star system,” Shvets concluded, the navigator speaking for them all.

  “Agreed. I’m bringing the reactor back up; set the heat sinks to vent at maximum,” Kelly ordered. “Xi, get Pamela up to jump the ship again ASAP. Let’s put an extra light-year between us and these bastards, please.”

  “On it,” her wife replied.

  Kelly leaned back in her chair and pulled the results of the sensor sweep onto her screens. Radar and lidar were powerful scanners, detailed enough to pull a lot of information. Combined with the radiation signature she’d seen in the passive scans…she was entirely certain and smiled coldly.

  “We got the bastards,” she said aloud.

  “Would you care to illuminate the rest of us, skipper?” Milhouse asked.

  “Five hundred and eleven keV, Guns,” Kelly told him. “Sound like a familiar number?”

  “Positron annihilation radiation,” the tactical officer said instantly. “That’s…loose antimatter, basically?”

  “Inevitable and allowed-for consequence of moving antimatter in bulk quantities,” she said. “Also of using antimatter as a power source—but I’ll note that the Republic doesn’t do that. Their antimatter stocks are reserved for engines…and missiles.”

  “None of the ships we saw were using antimatter engines,” Shvets observed. “Their capital ships never have, but the gunships usually do.”

  “But can be modified to run on fusion drives,” Kelly noted. “But…no, this wasn’t someone using an antimatter engine. Too small, too contained. Might have been a reactor, but neither the Republic nor the UnArcana Worlds ever liked using AM for power.

  “Plus, I know the pattern.” She shrugged. “I worked in merchant shipping, people. We didn’t haul antimatter often, but I know what the radiation pattern of an antimatter-containment release valve looks like. So…take a look at the factory it was attached to.”

  The bridge was silent as Kelly put the data on the main screens. Form follows function, and there were distinctive lines to certain types of zero-G manufacturing. Someone had made a passing attempt to conceal them in this case, but now everyone was looking for them.

  “Where there’s one missile production station, there’s ten,” Kelly noted calmly. “While I doubt Gygax is either their sole source of missiles or their sole source of Promethean Interfaces, there’s definitely a lot going on here.”

  “More than enough for Second Fleet to send someone to pay a visit,” Shvets said in satisfaction. “Guess it was worth the week, wasn’t it?”

  “I’d have rather found the Republic government’s hideaway,” Kelly conceded, “but I’ll take a drive-installation facility and a major munitions production site.”

  Now they just needed to get back to Legatus and check in with the rest of the Rhapsodies. With this round of scouting done, they’d gone to every single system of the Republic in the last three months.

  Someone had to have found the Lord Protector by now.

  12

&nb
sp; It was one thing to list out the numbers involved in a Protectorate Guard Army Group. Five battle groups represented twenty-five corps from as many star systems. Second Fleet was only expecting forces from the two battle groups in Legatus, hopefully eight corps. Six hundred and forty thousand human beings.

  Numbers were just numbers, though, even as officers like Roslyn Chambers tried to keep the reality of it all in mind.

  It was something else to watch the seemingly unending cascade of jump flares as the Third through Tenth Corps of the Protectorate Guard arrived in Nueva Bolivia. The Guard didn’t have their own ships yet, which meant they were being transported on a mismatched collection of de-mothballed Royal Martian Marine Corps transports and ships belonging to their home worlds.

  Eight corps represented thirty-two divisions and a total of just over a hundred starships. Roslyn sat next to Kulkarni on the flag deck as the ships continued to appear, assembling the information incoming from the Guard transports’ beacons and reports as they made contact with the fleet.

  “It looks like we got everyone we were promised,” she told her boss. “I make it one hundred and six ships.” She shook her head. “That’s more than we have warships in Second Fleet.”

  Second Fleet only barely outmassed the transports, too. The dreadnoughts might mass a hundred megatons apiece, but the transports averaged eight. The best part of a million soldiers had just entered the star system aboard nearly a billion tons of transports.

  “We’ve got an update on the Third Battle Group as well,” Kulkarni said after a moment. “They left Ardennes one day ahead of schedule. They should have already reached Legatus and should be here in three days.”

  “Gives us a timeline, I suppose,” Roslyn replied. She didn’t know how comfortable the transports the Guard were using were, but she guessed that only the handful of ex-RMMC ships were livable long-term.

  “We’ve already found our target zone,” Kulkarni told her. “Did you see the mapping on that?”