Nemesis of Mars

NEMESIS OF MARS STARSHIP’S MAGE BOOK 13 GLYNN STEWART CONTENTS Visit Me Online Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 The Next Book in the Starship’s Mage Series Other Books by Glynn Stewart Preview: Raven’s Peace by Glynn Stewart Chapter 1 Raven’s Peace by Glynn Stewart About the Author Nemesis of Mars © 2023 Glynn Stewart Illustration by Jeff Brown This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a registered trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc. VISIT ME ONLINE For Glynn Stewart news, announcements, and more, visit GlynnStewart.com 1 “Attention!” Four hundred pairs of boots snapped together as their occupants responded to the Chief Petty Officer’s bellowed command. None of the nineteen-year-old cadets looked old enough to be almost a third of the way through their military training, but Mage-Commander Roslyn Chambers wasn’t sure she had any right to judge. Eight years before, while barely older than her students were now, the slim redheaded officer had been battlefield-commissioned and thrust into the war against the Republic of Faith and Reason. Now, she’d been an instructor at the Tau Ceti Naval Academy for almost three years, and she was still surprised by how young all of the new-fledged cadets looked to her. “Cadets,” the redheaded Tau Cetan-born Mage greeted the class. “You may be seated.” The Tau Ceti Naval Academy of the Royal Martian Navy was impressive. The lecture hall was sized for the four hundred students occupying it, providing each of them with a fixed workstation that normally interfaced with the ubiquitous wrist-comps of the citizens of the Protectorate of Mars. Today, those wrist-comps were disabled and they would only have the workstations. Today was the final exam for their second-year tactics course, and Roslyn was probably more nervous about it than her students were. She’d taught a dozen courses now, and every time she worried that the exam results would prove that she was just too young to be teaching this course. It hadn’t happened yet, but Roslyn was well aware that she had been the youngest person ever promoted to Mage-Commander in the RMN. “You all know what today is,” she told her students. “And it turns out that I have permission to give you all a special surprise.” None of the cadets were unintelligent. Only a third were Mages—though even that was a vastly higher proportion than the usual one-in-a-hundred-thousand ratio of humanity’s hundred-odd inhabited worlds—but they were all smart, thoughtful, capable teenagers. And they knew that “a special surprise” when it came to the final exam was probably a bad sign. Roslyn gestured and Chief Patience Kovalyow activated the program the two of them had put together that morning. The lights dimmed and holographic projectors came online, filling the air above Roslyn’s head with a standard Navy tactical display. “What you are about to see, cadets, took place just over two years ago in the Mackenzie System,” she told them. “For those of you who weren’t paying attention to the news when you were sixteen, the Mackenzie System was the capital of the little empire the First Legion had put together of the unprotected colonies.” Roslyn’s last command had been tasked with locating the systems of the First Legion, a task that they’d succeeded at—by cutting a deal that had seen her ship make a reckless deep strike into a Legion system to rescue thousands of enslaved workers. She’d saved a hundred thousand people and opened up the First Legion to the Royal Martian Navy. She’d lost her ship and a number of friends along the way, and she’d been informed that she was taking a shore posting where she would be in easy reach of therapists. Over the following six months, Mage-Admiral James Medici’s Seventh Fleet had calmly and carefully hammered their way through the First Legion’s systems until they reached Mackenzie. On the tactical display above her head, green icons flashed into existence. The icons were swiftly replaced with three-dimensional images of the ships themselves as the display zoomed in on them. “At oh seven thirty Olympus Mons Time on January Fifth, twenty-four-sixty-five, Admiral Medici and his Seventh Fleet entered the Mackenzie System, expecting to find the last major formation of the First Legion’s space forces,” she told her cadets. “At this point, Seventh Fleet had seen some minor combat losses”—including Roslyn’s own Voice of the Forgotten over six months earlier—“but had been materially reinforced. As of the Battle of Mackenzie, Admiral Medici had the dreadnought Masamune, five battleships, twelve cruisers and forty-five destroyers.” The sixty-two smaller warships all shared a rough pyramid shape. The newer ships had a “skirt” of a partial reverse pyramid, giving them some defenses against attack from behind, but the older ships had been uncompromisingly built for the attack. Masamune herself had that pyramid shape for her base, but she also had a cylindrical hammerhead forward containing her long-range bombardment missile launchers and a suite of heavy lasers. The fleet took a few minutes to shake themselves out into formation—but the footage was accelerated sixty-to-one, turning that into a handful of seconds. “For the defenders, Admiral Ridwan Muhammad had kept his heaviest ships in Mackenzie all along—a strategic decision outside the scope of this course and presentation,” Roslyn noted. “That gave him three battleships: one