Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (19 page)

“Anything we took out doesn’t matter at this point,” the Hand said quietly. “Not enough damage to take out the amplifier, and all six lasers are still firing.”

“Might help the missiles,” Torres replied. “Gods know
we
could use help
against
theirs.”

The double-stacked salvos had now entered the outer perimeter of
Duke
’s defense zone and the remaining RFLAM turrets were engaging. The gouge through the cruiser’s armor and weapons told in the paucity of her defenses. Instead of the hundred laser turrets that had handily downed forty-five missiles, less than seventy now faced
ninety
.

On the screen showing the bridge, Damien watched Mage-Captain Jakab go from sitting in his command chair, primarily focused on the technical aspects of commanding his ship, to on his feet with his hands on the simulacrum.

It would be harder to pay attention to the bridge around him while linked into his ship like that, but it would allow him to use his magic directly in defense of the starship—a boost the battered cruiser desperately needed.

“Whoever’s running their amplifier is good,” Torres said quietly. “That’s the first redirected salvo gone. We got some of the turrets, but the Mage is making up the gap.”

Damien’s focus was on
Duke
herself, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the arms of his chair. He’d used
Duke
’s simulacrum to turn the tide of a fight before, but Jakab was
far
more experienced at it than he was. He just had more raw power than the Mage-Captain did.

Missiles died by their dozens, but there were still dozens left—and a second salvo behind them. Damien found himself holding his breath as the trail of explosions reached toward
Duke of Magnificence
.

He could
feel
the magic flow through the runes around him as Jakab reached out to defend his ship. Tiny sparks were visible in the screens that suspended the flag deck in a simulation of the space around them. Each of those sparks, Damien knew, was a swathe of white-hot plasma hundreds of meters across.

Not all of those sparks lit the bright explosions of missile warheads—but many did, and the icons cascading toward
Duke
in the holo-tank suddenly dissipated, the survivors of the first salvo wiped away by the trained skill of
Duke
’s commander.

The second doubled-up salvo followed right on the first’s heels. Slower now, launched from closer in or stepped down to arrive with the closer missiles, they were still traveling at over ten percent of lightspeed, giving the lasers under fifty seconds to intercept them all.

Duke
’s crew gave it their all, and explosions lit up the surrounding stars with flashes of antimatter fire. Power flared through the amplifier matrix, and more sparks flared into existence, taking missiles with them.

Damien had lived through enough space battles at this point that he could
feel
the moment it became clear it wasn’t enough. The flag deck crew tensed, bracing for impact—and he rose from his chair, mentally transferring the tracks from the holographic tank in the middle of the room to the surrounding screens.

Without an amplifier, he could only do so much—but a long time before, he’d been taught a spell for just this circumstance, and now he had
much
more experience and power to throw behind it. He focused, studying the screens for a moment more—and then unleashed his power.

He couldn’t wait to see if he’d had any effect. These screens weren’t designed to enable what he was doing in the same way as the chamber that cocooned the simulacrum. He couldn’t zoom, couldn’t focus—all he could do was throw energy into the path of missiles and hope it was enough.

Again and again he lent his strength to the defenses. Seconds passed like hours…and then it was over, and his staff were staring at him in awe and shock.

“
How
?” Torres whispered from behind him. “Without an amplifier…you can’t…”

“I am a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” he told them. “I can.”

Damien wavered slightly. He
could
do it, but without an amplifier, acting at those ranges would drain even him. He carefully grabbed the arm of his chair, turning back to study the tank. The Keeper ship was handling the missile salvos so far, but the salvos were creeping closer. They might finish this before they reached amplifier range.

Then his Sight
flared
as a massive charge of magic flashed into existence, an immense explosion of plasma and energy tearing a new hole in reality…
barely
clear of
Duke
’s hull.

The big cruiser lurched from the shockwave but was undamaged as Damien checked the range. The Keeper ship was still ten light-seconds away—and no one except a Hand could use an amplifier past seven!

#

Damien was already moving by the time the ship stopped vibrating from the near miss, running past his shocked flag deck crew and out the door into the hallway. Two hallways and a ladder to the bridge, and he was already pushing past the fatigue to channel magic to speed his way.

A new gravity source, completely detached from the battlecruiser’s artificial gravity magic, appeared next to the ladder. He leapt forward, letting the pull yank him through the air and into the alcove of the ladder with a bone-shivering catch of a landing.

Dropping down the ladder, he
felt
the gathering strength of the attack, recognizing it this time as he never had before, and reached out with his own magic. The power wavered through the air around him, time seeming to slow as he
saw
the other Mage’s amplified strength start to take shape
inside
Duke of Magnificence
.

Since doing nothing would inevitably result in death for him and everyone aboard, Damien grabbed every erg of power he could access, reached into the middle of the gathering power with it and
pushed
.

Somehow, it worked. The impending crush of energy was suddenly elsewhere, even a relatively tiny amount of force enough to fling it completely off target, though
Duke
lurched again as he reached the bridge, buffeted by more shockwaves.

Jakab looked up from the simulacrum, his face grim, as Damien charged in.

“That’s where you are,” he snapped. “Torres didn’t know!”

“No one else can use the amplifier at this range,” the Hand told him, but it was unnecessary. The Mage-Captain was already stepping back from the simulacrum, gesturing him toward it.

“They’ve missed us twice,” he told Damien, his voice sharp with strain. “They likely won’t miss us a third time.”

“Steiner,” Damien told the navigator, a pasty-faced man in his mid-twenties. “See if you can make them. Rhine—tell me you’ve got
something
up your sleeve.”

“Give me sixty seconds and he’ll have the shock of the day,” the tactical officer promised.

“Let’s see.”

Parts of his suit were already smoking from the heat of the runes, but Damien’s gloves were intact as he tore them off and laid his palms on the simulacrum. The small semi-solid silver model was covered in runes except for two points that were perfectly matched to the silver patterns inlaid in every Jump and Navy Mage’s hands.

Linked into the ship at last, Damien let the magic flow through them, restoring and building up on his own reserves as he absorbed the information it fed him. In that moment, the bridge was ever so far away. He
was
the ship, seeing with her sensors and feeling her wounds.

A third blast of fire was taking shape as his power linked with the ship, but Steiner had pulled an appropriate twisting maneuver that had yanked them out of its way, and Damien took a moment to absorb everything.

Everything he saw of the enemy ship was still ten seconds out of date, but anything
he
did would take effect in real time. It was part of the advantage of an amplifier over the heavy battle lasers still filling the space between the two ships—the lasers had to travel the ten light-seconds back at lightspeed as well, and his magic did not.

He’d never been linked into an amplifier when someone
else
was using one before. The Royal Navy’s doctrine basically treated them as super-fast lasers, to be defeated with the speed of light and maneuvering—and for anyone who
wasn’t
a Rune Wright, Damien agreed that had to be the case.

He
felt the fourth attack taking form. It wasn’t going to be a direct hit, erupting partway into the wound opened by the battle laser earlier. Damien reached out and pushed again, sending the carefully constructed spell careening off into space, where it fired off a thousand kilometers from the cruiser’s hull.

His opponent had to be confused. No ordinary Mage could do what Damien was doing…but on the other hand, his opponents had been disturbingly well informed so far…and he recognized the “taste” of the magic being thrown at him.

Even a Rune Wright couldn’t identify an individual Mage by their magic, but Damien had learned long ago that magic that had gone through an amplifier felt different from regular magic—and magic that had gone through a
Rune of Power
felt different again.

The magic that had now tried to hammer
Duke of Magnificence
to dust had gone through
both
, which confirmed Damien’s worst fears.

As the Hand on the other ship paused, probably trying to work out just what was happening, Damien lashed out with his own magic. Studying his enemy’s maneuvers, he channeled power through his Runes and the amplifier and conjured
six
immense, kilometer-wide balls of arcing plasma from nothingness.

Everything he saw was still ten seconds old, so there was no way he could guarantee a hit with his first strike—but he came close. Two of his spheres appeared close enough to the Keeper ship to appear to flank it, and electricity
arced
from his plasma balls, transferring unimaginable levels of heat and energy to the enemy ship.

She
survived
but stopped accelerating for a precious few seconds. Damien was still gathering his strength from the strike and cursed mentally as he saw the other ship’s engines and systems switch back on, reset from the massively powerful EMP the plasma arcs had triggered on their hull.

Then he saw Rhine’s “shock of the day.” Six salvos of missiles had already been too far out and going too fast when the Keeper ship jumped forward to be directed onto her—so instead Rhine had let them
pass
her, slow down, match speeds—and then come screaming back at the enemy ship in a single massive salvo of over
four hundred
missiles.

Their sensors took longer to recover than their engines, and it might not have mattered, anyway. The only way they could have lived was to have killed
Duke
before Rhine released the missiles to local control or jumped away.

Shaken by the plasma strikes, they did neither. Over a third of a
teraton
of antimatter explosives went off in a single heavens-shattering instant.

There was very little left of the enemy when the explosion faded.

Denis Romanov tried very hard
not
to look at the ship his shuttle was leaving behind.

“That’s…awful,” his pilot murmured, and he finally caved to the desire.

Duke of Magnificence
looked like someone had taken a battle-ax built to the same scale as the four-hundred-meter-tall cruiser and bashed in one of the corners of the four-sided pyramid. The gouge started on one face and cut most of the way across the second, and that black splotch marked where over two hundred men and women had died.

“You should see the other guy,” he finally told the pilot, and the young woman snorted softly.

“That’s exactly what we’re out here to do,” she noted. “Did you bring your forensics evidence baggies?”

“We’re hoping to find something a bit larger than that,” Denis replied. “Do we have a sector yet?”

“Search pattern’s downloading now,” she replied. “CIC’s best guess puts the simulacrum chamber or any bridge remnants here.” She highlighted a section of the screen in front of them.

“Are we actually expecting trouble?” she asked, gesturing to Denis’s exosuit armor and rifle.

“If I was expecting trouble, I’d be carrying a bigger gun,” he replied. The rifle was almost too small to be used by an exosuited soldier. “We Marines are just the largest contingent of EVA-trained personnel aboard,
and
we’re less useful than the EVA-trained techs for repairing
Duke
, so we got cleanup.”

“Lucky you,” she said. “And
I
get to haul you guys through a debris zone. It’s like Academy worst-case exercises all over again.”

“Let’s just see if we find something
worth
landing on,” Denis noted. “The Hand would
love
a living prisoner, however beat-up.”

The pilot nodded, carefully guiding the spacecraft deeper into the cloud, mostly vapor but with a few chunks of physical debris, that had been an attacking ship.

“Sir,” the pilot said after a moment. “Is it true…

“What?” he asked carefully.

“That there was another Hand aboard
this
ship?”

Denis sighed.

“From what Montgomery said, it seems highly likely,” he said quietly. “That’s why we sent Marines.”

Hopefully, the bastard was dead. Though Denis had made it quietly clear to
every
officer going in searching the debris that if they found a
living
Hand, no one would ask questions if they died before reaching
Duke
.

His people couldn’t fight a Hand, but shooting a wounded one in the head?

Given his choices, Denis Romanov wouldn’t even hesitate.

#

“I think that’s the best you’re going to get,” the pilot finally told Denis, highlighting the chunk of metal in the screens. “It isn’t much, but hell, even
Duke
’s sensors couldn’t resolve just how many missiles we hit this bitch with.”

That
was a chunk of hull less than ten meters on a side, almost certainly from near the center of the ship, though clearly not the simulacrum chamber itself. It was melted and battered—but it was also the
only
significant piece left of the Keeper ship.

“Hold us at fifty meters; we’ll jump the rest of the way,” he told her. “Thanks.”

“Part of the service,” she replied with an airy wave.

Leaving the cockpit, Denis rejoined his old squad. He was getting comfortable with the rest of the company he’d been given, but the squad that was all that remained of his old platoon were still his strong right hand.

“All right, we have a fragment,” he told them. “Not enough space for everybody. Chan—your fire team’s with me.”

He didn’t hear any immediate response as he placed and sealed his exosuit helmet, locking himself in against the vacuum of space.

“We’re good to go,” Chan reported once everyone was linked in. “Please let us lead the way, sir.”

“I’m not the Hand,” Denis pointed out calmly. “It took me longer than it should to convince him he shouldn’t make this sweep himself. I know my place in this kind of op.”

#

The airlock door shut behind them and the five Marines were blasted out into space along with the air. Training and experience allowed Denis to readily control his course with the exosuit’s jets, directing himself toward the designated chunk of debris.

In obedience to Corporal Chan’s request, he hung back enough to allow the other Marines to land first, electromagnets in the boots locking them to plain metal floors. There were gravity runes on the floors of the ship section and they even appeared to still have power, but Denis wasn’t taking any chances.

“Sweep for any survivors,” he ordered. It was possibly someone who’d been in a proper ship-suit or had been close to an emergency locker had survived the destruction of the ship. Finding anyone like that was the main point of the trip, but he had little hope.

“Once we’re sure we’ve found anyone on board, let’s grab samples of anything you can find,” he continued. “Hull metal. Furniture. Fabric. Bodies. Let’s see what we can find.”

The fire team obediently moved forward, spreading out through the dark and frozen remnants of a starship.

“Sir, you might take a look at this,” Chan reported after a moment. Denis joined him in a few long strides to find him studying a door. “Look’s like the Captain’s briefing room, but check out the seal.”

The commissioning seal on the door was in the same style as the ones the Royal Martian Navy had a bad habit of putting everywhere aboard their own ships, but where the RMN one had
Royal Martian Navy
across the top and the ship name across the bottom, this one simply had the name
Keeper of Oaths
.

The logo was a stylized mailed fist holding a scroll, etched in what was potentially real gold.

“Any atmosphere on the other side?”

“Not a drop,” Chan told him.

No air meant no survivors—or at least, none that would complain when they kicked the door down. Stepping back to cover the door with his rifle, he gestured for Chan to open it.

One powered boot later, Denis followed the NCO into what
had
been a small briefing room. Now, the entire far wall was gone and it appeared the central table had been on fire until all of the oxygen left.

“Looks the same as ours,” he concluded aloud, checking under the table. “Yep, computer setup is in the same place—slagged by the heat.”

Chan had been checking the podium at the other end, looking for papers or data storage.

“Nothing here, either,” he reported. “Damn, I was hoping, but it looks like this one’s a bust.”

“Let’s check everywhere else,” Denis ordered. “It’s not
that
big a hunk of debris.

#

“The commissioning seal was the only thing of real interest we found,” Romanov admitted later to a small meeting of Damien’s advisors. The gold seal, cut with a hand laser from the door it had been mounted on, sat in the middle of the table.

The Marine looked disappointed to Damien, as if he’d hoped to bring back some kind of definitive evidence or gaudy loot to make the delay to study
Keeper of Oaths
’ wreckage worth it. Just the name of the ship was telling, though, as it at least confirmed
who
the ship had belonged to.

“I’m surprised there was even
that
much left,” Jakab told them. “We hit that ship with almost
four
hundred
missiles.”

“From what we saw, she was built to the same standard as Navy ships,” the Marine replied. “Internal armoring, buffer sections, the works. Didn’t leave anything useful, though.”

“What about material samples?” Damien asked. Those had let them identify where the shuttles had come from, so he had hope for information from the wreckage of the enemy
ship
.

“My people and Jakab’s MP forensics team have been going over what we got,” Amiri told him. “It’s…well, it’s not much use. Even the one significant chunk had taken enough heat and radiation that we couldn’t localize the hull metal.

“What
did
turn out to be of use was the commissioning seal itself.” She gestured toward the golden symbol. “It was roughly central to the debris piece, so it got minimal radiation, and gold is significantly
easier
to trace than steel or titanium.”

“Did you find the source?” Damien demanded.

“It’s from Mars,” she said flatly. “The John Carter mining complex, barely two hundred kilometers from Olympus Mons. While we can’t be
certain
about the hull metal, our higher certainties—only about sixty or seventy percent likely, to be clear—place the source in either the asteroid belt or the Jovian Trojans.”

“She was built in Sol,” Damien concluded. “I’m not surprised.” He sighed. “While I’m sure the rumor mill is having a field day and we
won’t
feed it, I can confirm this for everyone here: there
was
a Hand on
Keeper of Oaths
.

“I can’t say which one, and given how scattered and only semi-linked we all are, it may be weeks or more before we know who,” he continued. “But we—
I
—killed a Hand today.”

The room was silent.

“That’s unprecedented,” Christoffsen finally said. “Hands have died in the line of duty—Conrad Michaels most recently—but a Hand has
never
been killed by another Hand.”

Conrad Michaels had taken the dubious privilege of being the most recent Hand to die in service to Mars from Alaura Stealey a month before, when his investigation into an arms smuggling ring had gone sour.

Two
other
Hands were now completing his investigation, with a Navy cruiser squadron backing them up. A Hand falls, another rises.

“I know,” Damien told the Professor. “But…one way or another, a Hand was going to kill another Hand today. I suspect His Majesty will forgive me for not simply dying to avoid a political crisis.”

He let that hang for another moment of silence, then turned to Jakab.

“Mage-Captain, can
Duke
get us home?” he asked.

“We’re only two jumps out, and the matrix appears materially intact to our inspection,” he reported. “We’re down an engine, so we can’t go over our ten gee flank if we
wanted
to, but we should be able to get back to Mars safely.”

“It looks like I’m taking you from one repair yard to another,” the Hand said softly. “I apologize. I’ll… The dead—”

“—will be listed in the Navy rolls with honor,” Jakab cut him off. “They died protecting a Hand. We’ll get as many of them home as we can, and we’ll hold a general memorial once we’re back at Mars.”

“I…will make certain I can attend,” Damien told him. “I owe them that. And a thousand times more.”

“Find the bastards who sent that ship after us, my lord,”
Duke of Magnificence
’s commander replied. “When
they
have faced justice, our ghosts will rest easy.”

“You have my word,” the Hand promised. “Your dead
will
have justice.”