“I’ll be telling the Imperator you said all that.”
“Fine. I’ll expect his call. But consider this. It is a considerable asset to have a mage master owe you a favour. I don’t want to see my name in the news ever again. I am prepared to pay that back in the future should you need the services of a mage.”
She thought about it.
“I honestly can’t think of any reason why I would need a mage, but if I manage to piss off another one, maybe I’ll need a more powerful one to call on.”
“Exactly. But choose when you call wisely. Do we have an arrangement?”
“We do.”
She vanished.
Now I was ready for bed.
I found Serena waiting for me.
She was wearing three fig leaves, and a huge grin.
Thirty Eight
We did get asked for help.
I ignored training in the morning, and headed straight to my ready room, where I opened a channel to the Trixone station, and asked for Red Flower. It turned out it was looking for me. A dozen systems had been screaming for help, even from us, and even more so when one of them went silent. It sent me their locations, and I matched them up to known locations of Rawtenuga fleets.
By the time I’d finished checking on each location, training was ending.
The planet which went silent had a fleet heading away from it already, so it was likely too late to help them. The one in the most danger had a titan approaching it.
“Get the captains in their chairs, please Tamsin.”
“Confirmed.”
One by one they popped up on the console, and by then, we were already jumping.
“What’s up?” asked Jill.
“We’re going to have a long day. There are eleven planets screaming for help, and we’re going to try to help all of them. Gitte and Haynes, you’ll be doing the firing rifts. I’m going to make about half of each fleet vanish, but then we take what’s left the normal way, so we leave debris behind. I’ll salvage hulls and large stuff after if there are any, but I want sites left in space showing there was a battle. Work out which group you each do, and hit them at the same time when I tell you.”
“Where are the vanished going?” asked Gitte.
“Where do you think?”
There was a silence and several frowns. They were wrong, but it didn’t matter. The action matched my mood from the other day, and the fact we were going to leave only rubble left of the rest made what they thought was happening the easier death.
Tamsin was watching me, and I gave her the nod.
“All pilots to their ships. This is not a drill.”
We emerged from the last jump well above the Rawtenuga fleet. The titan was in the middle of two groups of sixteen battleships, before and after it. As I looked at them now, it was like the first time I really saw the formation for what it was. Four across, four deep, putting a lot of firepower pointing forward, while at the same time leaving no approach vector uncovered by multiple battleship guns, which could shift aim in less than a second because of the gimbal they were mounted on.
I also noticed something else. If you turned the ships on their side, the front of the ship looked like two dinosaur jaws about to close on their lunch. I shook my head, and reined in my imagination.
I prepared the magic I needed in my mind, connected to the local sun, and moved all the crews to a viable continent on the dead planet. I suddenly remembered I’d put some on my penal planet, and so I moved the remaining ones of them as well.
Power flooded through me, as moving something that far away, even through rifts, lit up every sun between here and my home system sun in my mind. It wasn’t many because of the active rifts, but I hadn’t asked for energy from them. It was like I’d moved up another level, where now I didn’t need to connect to a sun, they connected as soon as the magic needed them. Or maybe I’d just done it enough times, any magic I did now had it as a base intent to seek enough energy to perform the magic from the local sun.
And suddenly Thorn’s abilities finally made total sense to me. He hadn't needed to form the magic and connect to suns to do it. It was all implicit in what he wanted done, and hadn’t needed explicit thought. And now I’d moved to that level as well.
I concentrated again. The titan transport vanished, appearing in the dead system. The rear sixteen battleships also vanished and appeared nearby the titan. It seemed a pity to destroy the remaining sixteen, but this was a trading lane, and there were traders due through here in the near future. And I was very sure Jane would be checking on each battle at some point. We needed to leave something behind.
“Two wall formations please.”
The thirteen capital ships jumped, rearranging the formation into two smaller walls, and then the fighters jumped out to fill the walls in. It was classic overkill, but that’s what the whole idea was. Shoot from a distance where they didn’t know we were there, and leave small debris behind. The ships seemed to be blissfully unaware they were about to die, still on course for the planet, but only by momentum.
That was an interesting part of the moving dinosaur magic I hadn't considered either. The drives on the ships had all shut down, leaving them just ballistic. When I moved them, they remained exactly where I put them, while the ones not moved kept going at the same speed. Somewhere in the magic intent was shutting the ships down, without me consciously specifying it.
“Fire.”
Less than a minute later, all sixteen ships were little more than rubble. A lot of torpedoes missed, and I moved them to near the debris fields back home, again shut down without me thinking it, where Hubaisha could recycle them.
“Home jump.”
The fighters vanished, and I looked over at Tamsin.
“Half hour break for everyone, then we do it again. If anyone wants breakfast, they should be quick.”
She sent the news on to her fellow AIs for passing on to their squadron leaders. I rose, and stalked into my ready room. I’d barely sat when Serena poked her head in the door.
“You okay?”
“Do I look not okay?”
“You’re doing a lot of killing. I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’ve got it all under control. Trust me.”
“I do.”
She pulled her head back out, and the door shut. And then promptly opened as a butler droid came in. It was carrying a tray, and when the lid came off, I saw my own breakfast.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” said Hubaisha, through the droid.
“You decided to do that formally now?”
“Cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, so why not? And I took your other advice as well. Aisha it is, from now on.”
“Congratulations. How is our side project coming?”
“Which one? The reverse engineering has begun, as has Jane’s ferry.”
“The side one to the reverse engineering.”
“In progress. You know I’ll need a crystal for Jane’s ferry soon?”
“And for the other thirty seven operational ships I sent you, not including the hulks. We’ll need to upgrade them to Imperium specs as much as possible, and that will need a crystal for each, and somewhere to put it.”
“On that too. I’ll let you know. Doing Jane’s will show me where it can go. The Imperium dreadnaught crystals might fit. But since they were not actually designed for the ships in the first place, if you can change the size, we may be able to incorporate bigger ones.”