Ironic in a way, since doubling the numbers had been the confederacy’s tactics in their invasion of the Kingdom.

  Once that was done, she’d pull them back and keep them on a border world, all twelve fleets together massed on the enemy’s border would ensure they’d have to recall those ships to counter any future moves on her part. She had no plans to press them further, but there was no way for them to know or trust that even if they did.

  She turned the corner that led to her rooms and was shocked to see two guards on the ground with an armed man standing over them. Her magic coalesced around her even as the man fired, and she cried out as the laser burned into her side, her mind dizzied with the pain, but she didn’t lose her focus as the shield caught the rest of the laser bolt.

  She waved her hand angrily, and the man screamed as his body slammed into the wall and stuck there. She was extremely good at force magic, and she’d put a five G gravity field on the man’s body. That was a about a thousand pounds of force holding him against the wall, and the man had dropped his weapon.

  She scowled as she called for a healer, even as she forced her pained mind through the mental gymnastics for a mind spell. She dove into his mind.

  The man before her was the traitor in her temple, and he had been working for Francine specifically. She was almost disappointed, that he didn’t belong to another of her powerful rivals, but the rest of them seemed to be playing by the rules for now. She pushed thoughts of vengeance out of her mind, that wasn’t her, even though she really wanted to take them all down. She had to wait until they’d crossed the line, because perhaps they wouldn’t.

  Security rushed into the hallway with a healer trailing behind, who immediately started to work on her wound.

  She waved, “Hang him. He was Francine’s plant, and he decided to try and kill me in vengeance for her death or die trying. She… had him thoroughly seduced and wrapped around her finger, during her visit for my rise to prelate.”

  The head guard bowed, “At once, prelate.”

  She released the man who fell to the floor with a groan, and two of the guards grabbed his arms in a hold, while a third picked up his rifle.

  She continued, “He worked in the kitchens, and managed to smuggle the military grade laser rifle into the temple with some food, in four parts. See what we can do to prevent that from happening again.”

  The guard bowed again, “I’ll look into it personally and advise the head of security.”

  She left them to it, and then let out a deep breath as she entered her quarters. She was a bit shaken, but it was hardly her first assassination attempt, and it wouldn’t be the last. She went straight for the bedroom, to change her robes and clean up the blood.

  She sighed, and already missed him. She wondered how Dacen was doing.

  Chapter Ten

  Dacen ghosted down the corridor of the sin resort owned by Liandra Combs and therefore the Lincoln mercenary group. He’d been there most of the day. Travelling under illusion and in stealth was not one of his strong points, but Daniella had worked with him, and he’d had plenty of time to get the spells right before he teleported to the planet.

  They were a little unnatural for his mind to easily hold, and he’d been concentrating on doing so for hours.

  He’d teleported almost immediately after the three fleets dropped out at the FTL line. Before Daniella even hailed the Blackwood and Carmichael mercenaries to discuss her needs and haggle over a price.

  The only one with him was Riesa, and she’d been silently watching his back the whole time, and also hidden via a wizard device the princess had created for her. The rest of the team was attending the queen as protection and advisors for dealing with hiring the mercenaries.

  He’d been extremely busy over the last three hours laying preparations, and several of his prepared spells on a magical timer were about to go off. He’d be destroying the resort, but he didn’t want to harm innocents here on vacation. Which had required some extra planning, thought, and quite a bit of effort on his part. Worth it though, to save the innocents.

  Destroying the resort would be the easy part.

  He felt a surge of anger and contempt, as he finally tracked down Liandra in one of the BDSM sex clubs.

  She was quite an attractive woman, but he’d never met an uglier one. She also disgusted him, as he watched her whip a sexy black haired and quite young woman who was naked and tied up, hanging by her wrists from a pole jutting out of the ceiling. He wasn’t all that sure Liandra’s current conquest was even eighteen, but she could be. Maybe.

  He didn’t judge people’s kinks. To each their own, but it was clear to him the victim’s reluctance was not feigned, and she wasn’t enjoying the punishment in the least. That made it quite different in his eyes, and worthy of his judgement. Liandra was a petty entitled bitch who liked to make others suffer in her arrogance, it was as simple and disturbing as that.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to watch long as his spell timers all ran out simultaneously.

  Three of the spells went off in the security room. One simply depressed the fire alarm, which would have the customers running for the exits. The second released a fireball explosion, which would immolate the four guards in the room and prevent them from cancelling the alert. The third simply reshaped the concrete in the structure to completely remove the doorway and any access to the control room.

  At the same time, several explosions went off in the main power room. He left the backups alone, they weren’t strong enough to power the force fields emitters or weapon emplacements, but they’d keep some of the lights on, as well as the alarm running.

  Lastly, he cast a new spell directly at the same time, which had the concrete of the floor breaking through the rug. The concrete flowed up Liandra’s body trapping her in cement save her head.

  He wasn’t a petty man, if it’d been up to him, he’d have just taken the bitch out. But he was under orders on this. The queen wanted Liandra to know who had come for her, and that the Lincoln Mercenary company was doomed and at war with the Kingdom.

  He let the spells fall with relief, his mind tired of holding the illusions long ago. He cast one more spell, which freed her victim, who immediately ran for the exit.

  “I warned you, Liandra. What would happen if you chased me. The Kingdom is declaring war on the Lincoln mercenaries, and you will be its first victim. Your mercenary band will fall today.”

  She looked at him in disbelief, no doubt shocked that he was still alive after the coup, and he couldn’t quite help himself as he waved his hand in her direction.

  Liandra’s scream was awful, but it only lasted a second before she fell to the ground, her body twitching in death as her glassy eyes stared up in horror. It was a cruel spell, igniting every nerve ending in her body at once, and she’d died from the shock of it. Heart attack, most likely.

  Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. He both wished she’d have lasted longer and was heartily glad she hadn’t at the same time. He wasn’t one to flinch from duty, but he wasn’t one to torture others either.

  Of course, it was all being recorded as an object lesson, so no mercenary company dared challenge them again.

  He walked out as well, casually dropping an exploding plasma ball behind him, which destroyed the room totally and had the walls, floor, and ceiling on fire. He didn’t even bother to gesture at the six cyborgs coming at him, some already firing. They just fell dead to the floor, as he released his body magic.

  This wasn’t a foreign government, just a mercenary band, and no one in its ranks could challenge him. Not if he was paying attention anyway, and he was very alert in that moment. He did have limits, but the enemy was too disorganized to capitalize on them.

  He walked back toward the entrance, occasionally firing off plasma spells that started fires hot enough to burn just about anything, and make the concrete explode and the rebar melt. His own shield and Riesa’s filtering out the smoke and chemicals in the air, not to mention the incredible heat. To him it was like breathing fresh air in a cool forest glade, even as the resort burned around him.

  By the time they arrived near the entrance, the entire building was cleared out, which he verified with a ping of magic. After that, he sent a huge plume of plasma down the other hallways leading to the gambling section and others.

  As he walked out he noted he had put a lot of beautiful women out of work, all the exotic dancers, hostesses, sex workers, and servers. But he was sure the other three would snap them all up, as they fought over the remains of the Lincoln empire.

  But he was just getting started.

  A teleport field surrounded them, and they appeared in front of a Lincoln ground command center. He needed that building intact, at least for now, so focused on using body magic and electrical attacks on the cyborg guards as he entered the building and headed for the control room.

  The enemy was hitting his shields with plenty of laser and plasma pellet fire, but not in an organized fashion. He had his awareness deep in his magic, any that thought to coordinate their fire to overwhelm his shields, never got a shot off at all.

  He paused at the heavy battle steel doors blocking access to the control room, one last impediment. He could destroy them, quite easily just like on the station, but if he did then he’d likely destroy the room beyond it. He needed that room to complete his mission.

  Instead, he cast a spell that sent his magic and mind into the door’s security electronics. It was something he wasn’t very good at, but Riesa had his back and he had the time to make it work. It was maybe thirty seconds later, that ten more cyborgs were dead at Riesa’s hand, and the blast doors slammed up into the ceiling.

  He took in the room with a glance, and fifteen mercenaries in uniform just fell dead to the floor.

  Riesa followed him in, and he closed the blast doors with his mind still in the system, as he found and moved over to the fleet’s tactical console. It wasn’t so different from the Kingdom’s tactical network, and it didn’t take him long to start identifying coordinates. They had four fleets in orbit, almost eighty ships.

  Their three fleets were only fifty-four ships, but their fleets wouldn’t be engaging the mercenaries. He planned to handle it himself, as ordered. Which was why he needed access to the fleet tactical network, or more exactly, the exact coordinates of each and every Lincoln ship in orbit.

  He started to run some exacting calculations on four of the ships, and a wistful pain filled his heart. Daisy could’ve done it in seconds, after all.

  The coordinates and a countdown timer came up for the engineering section of all four command battleships of the fleets.

  He took a deep breath, and he focused on the first one. The ships were moving on a predictable course and his timing needed to be perfect. His aim was right above the cooling and containment systems for the plasma reactors.

  At nine seconds he built an exploding plasma ball above his hands, and he set it to explode in ten seconds. At three seconds to go, he started the teleport spell, then released the spell at the exact moment. If he did it right, the plasma ball would appear at those coordinates, and absolutely destroy and melt the reactor’s critical support.

  He did the second through fourth in exactly the same way, and just under a minute had passed since he’d started. Each ship taking ten second each, with a few seconds pause between each. Then he waited and watched the fleet status. The reactors would take a minute or two to overload with the cooling systems destroyed.

  One by one they all exploded as he saw their status turn red on the screen, as well as several ships around them turn yellow, no doubt damaged in the huge runaway explosions.

  Most of the fleets were still operation, but between the resort, the command center he stood in, and taking out four battleships, he’d cut the head off the snake. All of the Lincoln mercenaries with true authority over the mercenary group were now dead.

  He opened a comms channel on another console.

  “This is Celestial Knight Dacen Black. Men and Women of Lincoln, you are hereby ordered to surrender unconditionally. Your leadership has been decimated. They made the mistake of declaring war on the Kingdom, and we’re here to finish that war. Any action except abandoning your ships for the planet will be taken as an offensive action, and I will destroy any ships that arms their weapons.”

  It wasn’t quite an empty bluff, the remaining ships listed on the screen, all seventy-two of them, had scrolling coordinates on the screen next to their names. Coordinates that would allow him to do the same. They also wouldn’t be finished with the war, not until Megan Wilde and her mercenary group was dealt with as well, but as far as Lincoln went the war would very much be over.

  Of course, if they all armed weapons and fired at his position, he’d have to do it the hard way, and teleport up there and take them down one at a time.

  “I repeat, you are ordered to abandon your ships and return to the surface. Leave them in their current orbits. Any attempts at sabotage will result in all your deaths.”

  Riesa asked, “Do you expect them to actually listen?”

  He snorted violently in amusement, “No chance at all, they never just surrender. But offering surrender is the knightly thing to do, and it looks better on my mission reports and in the Kingdom’s history books. No one will ever doubt I had no choice but to kill them all. Shit, almost a quarter of them just brought weapons online, and are no doubt locking onto this building.”

  He moved closer to her as he cast the teleport spell, and they disappeared in a bright explosion of light. Just moments before kinetic impactors took out the building and most of four blocks in every direction.

  It was more than a little awkward as they landed on the machinery right below them, but he managed to recover his balance, and of course Riesa was so graceful it looked like she did it every damned day. There’d been no time to figure out new coordinates for a better place to land on the enemy ship, plus there was zero chance anyone would’ve been hovering up in the air for them to merge with.

  Lastly, coming out on top of the plasma reactor would confuse the internal sensors enough so they wouldn’t correctly read the energy pulse at their arrival.

  The six engineers and two wizards in the room died almost immediately, as he struck out with the body magic spell and Riesa nailed the two to his back with a pinpoint kinetic strike. The wizards were relatively average in magic and didn’t measure up, but more than that they’d been taken totally by surprise, so hadn’t had the time to even grab a shielding spell device.

  Riesa asked, “What’s the plan?”

  He asked in a faux shocked voice, “I have a plan?”

  Riesa giggled.

  He chuckled, the adrenaline raced through him, and he felt hyper aware. There were actually a few ways to do it, but if they kept going from engineering to engineering eventually the enemy would flood engineering with too many soldiers for even him to take out before they overwhelmed him with attacks. He was also taking his time at the moment because he’d used a lot of magic already, and he wanted to let it regenerate inside of him. So far there’d been no alert.

  “Let’s get down and into the auxiliary bridge.”

  They climbed down the machinery rather than wasting magic on it, and then searched around the edges of the main room for auxiliary control. The ship was a little different and without Daisy to guide him he had to do everything the hard way. Of course, he’d long ago learned those ways, Daisy had only been working with him a relatively short time, given the seven years before that he’d been in the field alone with military support.

  Riesa asked, “Won’t it be locked down?”

  He nodded, “While the main bridge is still online, yes. The command functions will be, anyway. But I will be able to see what’s going on, and determine coordinates using the enemy’s fleet tactical network.”

  They found auxiliary control and moved in. He took a few minutes to go over the specifications and layouts of the various ship types in the Lincoln fleet. Most ships were very similar, destroyer to destroyer, but there were small differences in design and layout from model to model. The time spent was a risk, but it also let him fully recover his magic before kicking off the next assault. The information could also be useful if certain situations developed.

  He’d never actually been tasked to take out four fleets before, with backup of one other individual. He knew he’d never survive the attempt and get away with it if it’d been a Confederacy fleet or Communion fleet, but while the Lincoln mercenaries were well trained and disciplined, they lacked the crucial element of a wizard strong enough to challenge him, much less him and Riesa.

  The only way they could kill him would be to hit with an overwhelming amount of plasma from normal weapons, or to destroy the ship he was on. It was a little crazy still, but he thought they could pull it off if they were careful enough.

  The second time he built the targeting program with magic that he’d made using their own network against them for pinpoint accuracy, he saved it to a portable data device and put it in his pocket. He doubted their luck would continue too much longer, as soon as he started teleporting from this ship, the ship would know he was aboard it and move to stop him.

  He suspected other ships might even fire on theirs, in the hopes of taking him out at the cost of one of their ships and crews. So he lined up another six teleports, targeting the remaining battleships save the one they were on, and the first few frigates that time. Chances were that he wouldn’t get to all six, but he’d try, then it’d be time to move again.

  “Here we go. Try to keep them out, if the fire gets too intense fall back and we’ll get out of here and start the cycle over again.”

  She nodded and moved toward the door. Her wizard spell weapon and shield device in her left hand and a multifunction laser and plasma pellet pistol weapon in her right.

  As before, he created a compact plasma ball with magic, and set it to explode in ten seconds, then teleported it off the ship. Then another, and another. By then thirty seconds had passed and cyborg soldiers were very fast, so he started to hear weapons fire as Riesa tried to keep them pinned down.