“Eagle Tickle intends to remove that capability by the simplest means available: Second Fleet will be leaving Legatus in thirty-six hours to move on the Nueva Bolivia System. Our scouting runs have left us quite confident in our ability to engage the forces there, and I expect to be able to secure the system inside of two days of active combat.”
Roslyn switched the holograms and screens over to the Nueva Bolivia System. The system had eight planets: one habitable world, Sucre, and two gas giants. The rest of the planets and the asteroid belt were only really important as supplies of raw materials.
“Our current estimate is that the defensive fleet around Sucre consists of roughly four thousand gunships and the reassembled remains of two RIN carrier groups,” Alexander told them all. “A Courageous-class carrier, three battleships and seven cruisers. That’s backed by the existing fortifications put in place around Sucre to defend their orbital industry.”
Sucre was one of the more human-friendly worlds ever discovered, with vast world-circling oceans, gorgeous archipelagos, and calm weather. The colonists had always wanted to keep it that way and had put almost all of their industry in orbit.
That industry was a vulnerability now that they were at war, but the RMN wasn’t looking to wreck the planet. Just take control of it.
“We also need to make sure that Legatus itself remains in our hands,” Alexander continued. “So, I will be detaching a Task Force Twenty-Two under Mage-Admiral Hovo Tarpinian.”
That worthy, the man who’d brought the three dreadnoughts to the Battle of Legatus, bowed slightly as he was indicated.
“Mjolnir will remain here in Legatus, accompanied by two battleships and a cruiser squadron,” Alexander said. “The rest of Second Fleet will proceed to Nueva Bolivia and commence operations against Sucre itself.
“Details of the plan are on your briefing chips, which should now be unlocked, but Mage-Captain Kulkarni will run us all through the high levels,” the Admiral said, indicating Roslyn’s boss, Alexander’s operations officer.
Indrajit Kulkarni stepped up beside her Admiral. She and Alexander were both tall, but where the Crown Princess of Mars was gray-haired with the ambiguously brown coloring of a Martian native and a descendant of Project Olympus, Kulkarni’s skin and hair were black as night as she captured the audience’s attention.
The Mage-Captain gestured for Roslyn to switch to the next part of the briefing and smiled levelly at the gathered officers.
“While the force we are bringing to Nueva Bolivia should be overwhelming,” she noted, “the reality is that we cannot count on the RIN to roll over politely for us. They like their surprises—and our scouting operations have yet to locate enough of the force they brought against us at Centurion to make me happy.
“Therefore, we will…”
2
“All right, people, I believe this is the last stop on the Unofficial Sneaky Tour of the Republic of Faith and Reason,” Kelly LaMonte told her people brightly. The covert ops ship commander was a petite woman with currently dark-turquoise hair, clad in an unmarked shipsuit.
Her role required her to assume a level of professionalism that negated having the brightly colored hair she’d enjoyed as a junior engineer earlier in her life. Now she ran an entire starship—and if Rhapsody in Purple was small, she was all the more valuable for what she carried.
“What are we looking at, everyone?” she asked.
Rhapsody was bigger than a Royal Martian Navy courier ship, and that was about all Kelly could say for her command’s size. Built with every technological stealth trick the Protectorate could muster and a small but potent arsenal, the stealth ship was an expensive toy…and one utterly dependent on magic to truly carry out her work.
“We are currently eight light-months away from the Gygax System,” Conrad Milhouse reported. Kelly’s tactical officer was a still-gangly man in his late twenties. Like the gunners for Rhapsody’s limited weapons systems and the stealth ship’s powerful sensor array, Milhouse had been seconded from the Royal Martian Navy.
“Gygax is a Fringe World, one of the seven that followed Legatus into the Secession,” he continued. “Positioned as it is on the far side of the region of space occupied by the UnArcana Worlds, it didn’t see a lot of traffic even before the Secession.”
Rhapsody had a briefing room, but Kelly preferred to run meetings like this on her bridge. There were enough extra seats to allow everyone who needed to be in the meeting to be there, and the bridge was the most secure place on the ship.
Built as a civilian ship bridge, it was separate from the simulacrum chamber the ship would be jumped from and arranged in a rough semicircle facing a large viewscreen. A civilian ship wouldn’t have had the other half of the circle on the other side of the viewscreen, where Milhouse’s military hands ran the ship’s sensors and weapons.
There were always spots on the bridge for the captain, the navigator and the tactical officer. Today, they were joined by the First Pilot, Kelly’s husband Mike Kelzin; the senior Ship’s Mage, Kelly’s wife Xi Wu; and the commander of their boarding party of Protectorate Bionic Commandos, Captain Jalil Charmchi.
Rhapsody in Purple was very much a family affair for Kelly LaMonte, even as she reported up to the general structure of the Martian Interstellar Security Service. She didn’t really regard herself or her people as spies, though that was the MISS’s role.
They were the Protectorate’s sneaky eyes, jumping into systems where they weren’t welcome and seeing just what was going on there.
“All of our intel on Gygax is badly out of date,” the navigator reminded everyone. Nika Shvets was a new addition to the crew, an androgynous MISS agent with shoulder-length blond hair, watery blue eyes accentuated with dark makeup, and the knowledge of how to kill someone with a spoon.
At least four different ways, from what Kelly understood of the operative who was now her navigator. There were parts of Shvets’s file she wasn’t officially cleared for, and she doubted they were going to explain those blanks to her.
“The last sensor scans we have were from a civilian tramp freighter two weeks after the Secession,” Shvets continued, their voice soft. “The freighter crew didn’t know about the Republic yet—in fact, it’s entirely possible that no one in Gygax knew. It is questionable whether any Links were distributed to the system.”
“They had enough of the transceivers to hide them on Protectorate warships to enable their spies to report in,” Kelly reminded her people. “Someone in Gygax would have known—and if we fuck this up, someone in Gygax will be able to tell the rest of the Republic we were here.”
“It’s hard to avoid them knowing we were here, love,” Xi Wu pointed out. The dark-skinned Chinese woman smiled at her wife. “Once we’re in the system, we can hide from everything they can throw at us so long as my Mages and I can trade off every few hours, but the jump flare is unavoidable.”
“They have their own ships coming and going,” Milhouse countered. “Not many, one presumes, but they do exist. And if our target is actually here, there might be even more traffic.”
“Shvets, can you show everyone those scans?” Kelly asked. “Let’s take a look at what the geography is.”