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  Raven’s Peace

  Peacekeepers of Sol Book 1

  Glynn Stewart

  Raven’s Peace © 2019 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2019 Jeff Brown Graphics

  ISBN-13: 978-1-989674-02-4 (epub)

  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.

  Contents

  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

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  About the Author

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter One

  The battlecruiser shook around him and Henry Wong recognized the dream. It was a familiar nightmare now, which helped rob it of the strength it had had months before.

  “We have a grav-shield blowthrough,” a seemingly faceless noncom reported across the warship’s bridge. “That dreadnought hit us dead-on.”

  “We’re going to get shot to pieces!” That figure had a face. Commander Kveta Vela wasn’t that pale and sunken-eyed in reality, though. The dream warped Henry’s old navigator into a figure of nightmare.

  It fit there.

  “The shield will hold,” Henry heard himself bark. With a moment of practiced effort, he separated himself from the dream-him.

  He’d learned he couldn’t stop the dream, but months of therapy allowed him to disconnect from it.

  The man in the center of the bridge of the battlecruiser Panther was less warped than the officers and crew around him. Tall and narrow-shouldered, Colonel Henry Wong was a beanpole of a man with short-cropped black hair, dark skin and his father’s dark Chinese eyes.

  The dream didn’t distort him much as his old ship dove through the maelstrom. The figure of dream-Henry was focusing on the set of massive screens giving the bridge a view of the world around the United Planets Space Force battlecruiser.

  Henry himself didn’t need to look. The arrangement of forces in the Set-Sixteen System was burned into his brain, even asleep. His perception was still pinned to his dream self’s, though, and he was dragged to it.

  Set-Sixteen was a Kenmiri provincial capital, deep on the far side of the Empire from the United Planets. The Kenmiri hadn’t been expecting an attack and their defense fleet was weaker than it should have been. That fleet was still five full dreadnought battle groups and the UPSF’s Vesheron allies were getting hammered.

  Panther’s grav-shields and weapons could turn the tide of that fight—but that wasn’t their mission, and the birdlike starship plunged through the Kenmiri lines.

  “There,” Henry’s avatar said sharply. “That ship. Broos, confirm.”

  Commander Broos Van Agteren wasn’t a normal part of Panther’s crew. He was from United Planets Intelligence, their handler for Operation Golden Lancelot.

  In person, he was a squat and dark-haired man with a ready smile and a brilliant glint to his eyes. In the dream, he was a distorted goblin, every aspect of his features twisted and torn to make him into the monster of Henry’s own subconscious.

  “Confirmed,” Van Agteren told him. “That’s the evacuation ship for the Kenmorad. The queen and her consorts will be aboard.”

  The ship was the size of one of the dreadnoughts pounding the Vesheron ships behind Panther but lacked their devastating main guns. The evacuation ship had one purpose and one purpose only: to evacuate the Kenmorad population of Set-Sixteen if they felt the planet was threatened.

  A Kenmorad breeding sect could repopulate an entire planet of Kenmiri drones in a few years. They could create more breeding sects, more drones…more Kenmiri.

  The Kenmiri couldn’t reproduce without the Kenmorad.

  “Ser, that’s the last one. We can’t kill her!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Emil Tyson had been Panther’s executive officer, Henry’s right-hand man and lubricant who kept a battlecruiser working in the face of the enemy. The redheaded Irishman hadn’t raised any complaints on the day. They hadn’t known.

  “Stand by all missiles and prep the main gun,” Henry’s avatar ordered, as if Tyson hadn’t spoken. “Vela, get us in hard and fast.”

  Panther lunged across the void in a quarter of the time she had in real life. Suddenly, it was the moment of truth, the evacuation ship’s escorts making a suicide charge at the battlecruiser as Panther dove toward her prey.

  “She’s the last one, ser,” Tyson repeated, the avatar of Henry’s subconscious. The one that knew what he’d done, even if he hadn’t then. “If we kill that ship, we commit genocide. We end a species.”

  Henry hadn’t known the full scope of Golden Lancelot. He wasn’t sure if anyone aboard Panther had—he knew that Van Agteren hadn’t known when they fired. He suspected the Intel officer had guessed…but hadn’t realized that the breeding sect they were firing on was the last one left.

  “Ignore the escorts,” dream-Henry barked. “Target the evac ship with everything. Fire!”

  It had taken dozens of missiles and multiple hits from the main gun to take out the evacuation ship. In his dreams, however, there was only the single gravity-driver round that had finished her off. It flashed across space and detonated, turning itself into a shotgun blast of superheated plasma.

  The Kenmorad evacuation ship vanished inside that blast, and Henry released a chunk of unconscious hope. Even separated from the dream as he’d been taught, he still hoped that it would end differently.

  “That’s it, then,” Van Agteren said, the goblin-like appearance of the dream version of the man growing more grotesque by the moment. “The Kenmorad are no more. The Kenmiri will die. We are victorious!”

  Henry didn’t need to look. He already knew that both the version of him in the dream and the version of him watching the dream had hands covered in blood.

  Henry started awake as the dream ended. He always did. Time and familiarity had eased much of the horror of the dream, along with copious amounts of therapy, but…well. He poked at the metal band wrapped around his left arm.

  MedSuite detected nightmares. At this stage in your treatment, MedSuite recommends meditation.

  He sighed. The band was linked into his internal network and talking to the implants in his head and elsewhere. He had enough authority over the device now to override it and tell it to give him drugs. If he did that, though, it would probably add days to his medical leave.

  Rolling out of bed, Colonel Henry Wong settled himself onto the floor of his bedroom. The apartment wasn’t much, but it at least gave him privacy. It was better than the orbital hospital he’d spent the first six weeks of his twelve-week medical leave inside.

  “One more appointment,” he said aloud. The walls were bare. This wasn’t his apartment—it belonged to the United Planets Spa
ce Force Medical Division. The entire building on Sandoval did.

  The ground floor of the building was shops and restaurants, like most of the not-quite-downtown area of New Detroit, Sandoval’s capital city. Above that was a floor of UPSF security, then two floors of medical clinics, then fifteen floors of apartments.

  If his appointment went well, he’d finally be out of there today. Command only knew where he’d go from there—psychological casualties were notorious for being unpredictable in how long it took to return to duty, so Panther had a new Captain now.

  He focused on the meditation, letting his anger, grief, horror…all of his emotions flow through him. He might have given the order for the final critical shot, but no one had told him what Operation Golden Lancelot entailed.

  Henry was honest enough to admit that after seventeen years of war, he’d have signed off on Golden Lancelot. He was also honest enough to admit that he understood why the full scale of Lancelot’s objectives had been kept under wraps.

  It had worked, after all. Henry had gone into psych treatment in a Space Force still on a war footing. He’d be coming out of it into a Space Force on a peacetime footing.

  Seventeen years of war.

  Henry Wong had started the conflict with a fiancé and a starfighter. He’d ended it a divorcé with a battlecruiser.

  He barely remembered the all-too-excited younger pilot who’d greeted the news of first contact with joy.

  But the world turned and people adapted. He’d adapted to a decades-long, seemingly unwinnable war.

  He was pretty sure he could handle peace.

  Chapter Two

  “Well, Colonel?” Dr. Schult asked. The psychiatrist had spent over an hour grilling Henry on everything from his nightmares to his datanet use over the last few weeks. She was a dark-haired woman wearing the same dark blue UPSF uniform as he was, though hers came with a black headscarf as well.

  “Well what, Doctor?” he asked after a moment. After twelve weeks of at least daily sessions with Dr. Schult and her colleagues, he still found them brutal. He’d thought he was an introspective man, but the intensive psych rehab that followed being casualtied out of active duty was something else.

  “Your mental state has been stable for a solid eight days now,” she told him. “You’re not quite to where I’d want you to be, to be completely frank, but you may well be as close to fighting fit as I can get you.

  “So, I’m looking at one critical question, Colonel Wong. Do you feel that you are ready to return to active service?”

  Henry breathed a long sigh as he considered the question. He didn’t even know what active service was going to entail for him. There weren’t that many spacegoing commands that needed a full Colonel—the UPSF’s trio of carriers had Commodores in command, their thirty-two destroyers only needed Lieutenant Colonels, and all twenty-three battlecruisers already had captains.

  “I…” He paused. “I don’t know, Dr. Schult,” he admitted. “I know I’m probably reaching the end of how long I can be under supervision in a MedDiv apartment without going nuts, no matter how much freedom I have inside that.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to be put back in the command seat of a warship, but I also don’t think the UPSF has one for me. I know… I know I need to do something, Doctor, and the only thing I know how to be is a combat spacer.”

  Everything dropped into place and he smiled broadly at the doctor as he leaned back in his chair.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready,” he repeated. “But I know I’m ready to try.”

  “Good answer,” Schult said with an answering smile. “And good enough for me, Colonel Wong.” She waved a hand through the haptic interface field above her desk, looked at something in the screen only she could see, and then pressed her thumb down.

  “You’re released from MedDiv supervision and returned to active duty as of twelve hundred hours GMT today, Colonel,” she told him. “That’s about one thirty New Detroit time. It takes at least an hour for everything to process through, so I like to give it extra time.

  “Standard protocol is for you to report in to the nearest Force Base. There’ll be a car waiting for you at one thirty. By the time you make it to Base Skyrim, they’ll have visitor quarters ready for you—that’s included in the order I just submitted.”

  She rose and offered a hand to Wong.

  “You’ve been as cooperative a patient as I could ever hope for, Colonel, and I know this was a terrible situation all around,” she told him. “My own opinion of the situation that led you here is complicated, but I doubt your own is simple.”

  “No, Doctor,” he confirmed as he shook her hand. “It’s not. But we deal with the past and move on. Nothing else we can do, is there?”

  “No. So, get your ass back to work, Colonel,” Schult told him. “Between you, me and the wall, I had an official request to confirm whether you’d be returning to duty in the next week. I suspect there may be something waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Schult,” Henry replied. “For everything.”

  Something waiting for him? That wasn’t intimidating at all…but it was definitely the game he’d put on the uniform to play.

  The car couldn’t deliver him directly to Base Skyrim, if for no other reason than that Base Skyrim wasn’t on Sandoval. The massive Force Base had been the anchor for UPSF actions against the Kenmiri Empire, and it orbited Procyon’s fourth planet: Rose.

  Procyon’s government was the one of the UPA’s eight member star systems most likely to support UPSF expansion and funding. Part of that was because Base Skyrim was now the largest Space Force base, so Procyon benefited disproportionately from spending by the United Planets Alliance’s military.

  The other was that Procyon was the closest of those eight star systems to the Kenmiri Empire. The Red Wing Campaign—so named for the near-complete annihilation of the UPSF’s starfighter corps over a six-month period—had ended in Procyon.

  Memories of that battle flashed through Henry’s head as the space elevator delivered him to a transfer orbital. He and Peter had been the only survivors of the Red Wing Campaign from their carrier. By the time Rygel had gone into the Battle of Procyon, there’d been only four veteran pilots aboard.

  The newbies had all died in orbit above this planet. So had half of the surviving vets. Henry and his fiancé had lived blessed lives, but they’d been there to watch the first Kenmiri invasion fleet hit the massed strength of the UPSF and fail.

  In some ways, the starfighter corps had never recovered from that campaign. Henry and Peter had both transferred to starship track after that, and they hadn’t been the only ones. It was the starfighters that had saved the UPA at the beginning, but it was the battlecruisers that had carried the war after that.

  From the orbital, he boarded a UPSF official shuttle, exchanging salutes with the pilot and security as he took his seat.

  Senior officers were first on, first off, and there was no one on the small interplanetary craft more senior than a UPSF Colonel. The ship was too small for artificial gravity, too. The generators for that were bulky and fragile things—and since the shuttle would spend its entire trip accelerating and decelerating, thrust would provide what “gravity” was needed—while inertial compensators kept that thrust from crushing the passengers.

  “Ser, may I ask a question?”

  Henry looked up at the young man sitting across from him. For a second, he thought the younger officer had to be a relatively new recruit. Then his implant highlighted the insignia on the other man’s uniform: the paired steel bars of a full Commander, combined with the crossed rifles of the UPSF’s Ground Division.

  The UPSF was a combined military. A GroundDiv Commander could be in charge of as many as six hundred men, a full strike battalion. The man had to be at least in his thirties, even if modern medicine kept his age from showing at all.

  From the grand precipice of fifty, Henry thought the man still looked like a kid.

  “The flight lasts f
our hours, Commander,” Henry pointed out. “Colonel Henry Wong. You?”

  “Commander Alex Thompson,” the Commander replied. He was a solidly built blond and blue-eyed man. He could have stepped out of a recruiting poster.

  “Your question, Commander?”

  “Your wings,” Thompson said, gesturing at the icon pinned to Henry’s uniform. “I’ve never seen that particular version before. Red and gold?”

  Henry nodded slowly. He still wore the wings that marked him as qualified to fly a starfighter—these days, he’d probably be better off conning a battlecruiser, but he’d kept up the qualification—but his were done in gold with a red center. Most officers would have a chrome insignia with either a black or gold center, depending on whether they were qualified on shuttles or combat starfighters.

  The red center wouldn’t have shown up on the other man’s implant because it was technically a violation of the uniform code—if one that no one had begrudged its wearers in the last fifteen years.

  “You know what red wings mean,” he told the younger man. “You’re here in Procyon, after all.”

  “You flew in the Red Wing Campaign?” Thompson asked. “I…didn’t think there was anyone left!”

  “Not flying starfighters,” Henry said with a moment of sadness. “Last I checked, there were eleven of us left.”

  Four battlecruiser captains. One carrier captain—Henry’s ex-husband, Commodore Peter Barrie. One Admiral. Five retired or medically discharged. He’d checked the previous day. He hadn’t had much to do except research, after all.