Raven's Peace Page 10

  “Report,” Henry demanded as the alerts on his screens faded.

  “It breached the shield but missed the hull,” Song reported after several seconds of silence. “I repeat, we have blowthrough, but we do not have impact.”

  “And she’s not getting a second chance,” Ihejirika said. “Her casing chamber just shattered. She can’t charge a second shot.”

  Henry glanced across his screens and displays, taking in the situation. In a few seconds, the lasers would start…but the bandits had already lost. They had to know that.

  “Moon, send a surrender demand,” he ordered. “Their surprise failed and their gunships are gone. Let’s see if we can end this without any more bloodshed.”

  “Do we hold fire?” Ihejirika asked.

  For a moment, Henry was tempted…but much as he wanted to dismiss the escorts, the truth was that each of them carried four beams powerful enough to wreck Raven if they made it through the shield.

  He couldn’t take the risk.

  “No,” he told his tactical officer. “If a ship stops shooting, we stop shooting at it…but so long as they’re firing, keep pounding them.”

  “Range in ten seconds.” There was a pause. “Do we wait for them to fire first?”

  “Unless they’ve stopped shooting missiles and I didn’t notice it, no,” Henry said dryly.

  “Firing!”

  Raven shivered again as the main gun fired. This time, the lasers joined in. They’d be more effective at closer ranges, but no one was going to enjoy being tapped at a quarter-million klicks.

  “Laser strikes across the shield and they’re continuing to pound us with missiles,” Iyotake noted. “Recommend ceasing antimissile engagement to preserve power for the main beams.”

  “Agreed,” Henry replied. “Pull them in, XO.”

  At this range, the missiles had the same problem as the starfighter missiles had had earlier. They didn’t have time to build up velocity, but they also didn’t have nearly as far to go—and shipboard missiles were launching with a base velocity of a thousand kilometers a second.

  “Direct hit,” Ihejirika reported. “Conversion round amidships, hit multiple times with both lasers…target has lost engine power and ceased fire. Switching to target two.”

  Henry checked the screens and nodded. His crew might not be as smooth a machine as he’d like, but they knew what they were doing. Raven’s lasers walked their way across their new target as the three remaining escorts threw everything they had at her.

  “Good news?” Iyotake said quietly. “They’ve run out of whatever the hell those missiles they had earlier were. All we’re seeing now is conversion warheads.”

  Those could be bad enough, but Henry could safely ignore them as their second target managed to dance out of the way of the plasma beam from their second main-gun round. The grav-driver took a lot longer to cycle than the Kenmiri lasers…and the escorts weren’t running their guns from capacitors.

  Raven’s were running dry. If they had to charge between each shot, their cycle would go from seven seconds to seventy…and as Henry watched, the capacitor indicators clicked to zero.

  “Got him!” Ihejirika exclaimed. “Target two’s engines are down and she is spinning. She might have guns, but they aren’t pointed at us anymore! Switching to target—”

  “Receiving radio transmission on Vesheron protocols,” Moon cut in. “They’re surrendering. They’re ceasing fire and surrendering.”

  “Tactical—confirm that!” Henry snapped.

  “Enemy fire has ceased,” Ihejirika confirmed a moment later. “I’m still seeing capacitor charge across all three ships, though.”

  “Moon, order them to discharge their capacitors and cut their engines,” Henry said. “Inform Commander Thompson that his people get to practice boarding ops.”

  He shook his head.

  “I have a sinking feeling about why these guys were here. I want to know who sent them…and I want to know who sold them those resonance warheads!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Well, they’re not Kenmiri,” Thompson’s projected image said on Raven’s bridge. “I’m not familiar with the particular race in play, but they’re one of the Ashall.”

  “Do you have a picture?” Todorovich asked. The Ambassador had arrived on the bridge just as the GroundDiv commander reported in. What was visible of her hair was still glistening with moisture from the gel of the acceleration tank, but she’d wrapped it in a simple black headwrap to keep it out of the way and returned to work.

  “Yeah, hold on,” the GroundDiv officer confirmed. A moment later, the feed from the captured escort warship split in two. Thompson’s image slid to the left and a new picture appeared on the right.

  “This is Attallis, the Captain of this particular ship and the one who ordered the surrender,” he noted.

  Henry studied the image. Assuming they were at the same scale, the alien was tall: at least two meters, probably more. She—clearly visible breasts were generally a solid sign of sex across Ashall species—was gaunt by human standards, her limbs looking like her bones were thin and fragile.

  Her skin was a pale shade of purple and she had what looked like an armor plate instead of hair, but her facial features were human enough. Ashall, a Seeded Race. She looked like a human in a costume.

  “She’s Drex,” Todorovich noted. “They’re from Osiris-Six, in the inner Provinces.”

  “Where the Kenmiri are still in control,” Henry concluded. “Commander, are they all Drex?”

  “I’d say ninety percent,” Thompson replied. “The rest are mostly other Ashall. We’ve secured all three nearby ships. There was no resistance. Attallis apparently made her surrender order stick.”

  “So, she’s in command of this little fleet?” the Captain asked, looking away from the image of his GroundDiv commander to study the tactical plot. He snorted as he spotted O’Flannagain’s starfighters.

  The eight of them were now in a formation around the crippled gunship they’d nuked earlier. Tow cables—super-strong and super-light kilometer-long streams of monofilament—connected the Dragoons to their victim, and they were carefully burning toward Raven.

  Bringing the wrecked ship with them.

  “She wasn’t in command before,” Thompson told him, unaware of what Henry was seeing. “The three Captains left are apparently equals. The three dead Captains were the senior ones—the original commanders for this batch of merry thieves.”

  “She’ll know as much as anyone,” Henry said. “We’ll need to keep people aboard the ships until we sort out what we’re doing with them. Keep the officers and non-coms isolated. The last thing I want is for your people to get stabbed in the back.”

  “We’ll work through the doctrine,” the GroundDiv Commander replied. Most board-and-captures carried out by the UPSF had been of Kenmiri ships, which required quite different handling.

  Not least because they’d usually been crippled before GroundDiv could get anywhere near them. Kenmiri Warriors did not surrender outside of truly extraordinary circumstances.

  “And, Commander?” Henry interrupted Thompson before he dropped the channel.

  “Ser?”

  “Send Attallis back to Raven.” Henry glanced over at Todorovich. “I want to have a conversation with her and see if we can sort out some bloody answers.”

  Henry wasn’t particularly surprised when Todorovich followed him into his office after ending the call with the GroundDiv Commander.

  “How are you holding up, Ambassador?” he asked her after the door slid closed. “I know I wasn’t expecting to go into combat on this mission.”

  “I’m fine,” she said shortly. “My chief of staff thinks throwing us into the tanks was some kind of sick joke since you never went past standard acceleration. Fair warning.”

  “If I order it, my crew is in the tanks in under thirty seconds,” Henry pointed out. He had a lot of concerns with how slowly Raven’s crew had reported to their stations, but he s
till suspected the base competence of his people was quite high.

  It was getting them to work together that was giving him a headache.

  “I can’t rely on civilians to move as quickly.”

  “I know that,” Todorovich agreed. “Felix is…wet and grumpy. He’ll probably get over it.”

  “I hope so.” Henry shook his head as he threw the tactical plot onto his office hologram. “We now find ourselves with two intact Vesheron escorts, a damaged Vesheron escort, a crippled gunship…and two hulks that Thompson’s people are doing search-and-rescue on, not boarding ops.”

  “Not exactly an easy trip to the Gathering,” the Ambassador noted. “What do we do with them?”

  “Engaging them and forcing their surrender was a military situation,” Henry replied. “What we do with them is a political situation. Which means it’s in your court.”

  She grimaced.

  “Dragging them to the Gathering wouldn’t help us,” she noted. “At the same time, I don’t really want to leave a bandit force in play here. It seems…unneighbourly.”

  “That’s one word for it,” Henry agreed. “The dangerous part to all of this, Ambassador, is that they were carrying some kind of specialty weapon designed to take down a gravity shield. It wasn’t good enough, but it was definitely moving in the right kind of direction to be a serious threat.

  “Our ‘allies’ are working on ways to undermine our best advantage over them,” he concluded. “I’m not surprised, but it certainly wasn’t my best-case scenario.”

  “Or mine,” she agreed. “I think I need to talk to this Attallis before I make a decision, Captain Wong. If you’ll permit?”

  “I command this ship, Ambassador Todorovich, but this is your mission,” Henry conceded. “Right now, I’m planning a conversation with the woman, not an interrogation. It’s a different situation, I suppose, if this was a targeted assassination attempt as opposed to general banditry.”

  “For me, that might be worse,” Todorovich noted dryly. She pulled an image of Attallis up on the hologram and studied the alien.

  “She’s attractive to human eyes, even with the head-plate,” she said. “That’s always the oddity of the Ashall, isn’t it?”

  “According to my old XO, they may look like us and are reliably mammalian…but that doesn’t mean everything’s compatible downstairs,” Henry pointed out. “My own experience doesn’t stretch that far. Captain Attallis here isn’t my type.”

  “What is your type?” Todorovich asked, then laughed. “Sorry, that’s inappropriate. Do you have a plan for dealing with her?”

  “Right now, I need to look her in the eyes and ask her what the hell her boss was thinking, picking a fight with a UPSF battlecruiser,” he replied, her humor bringing a smile to his face. “Once I know the answer to that, I think everything else is going to fall into place.”

  The sharp-edged woman standing across from him nodded.

  “We can’t wait here for long, but I think we need to deal with this situation before we move on, Captain. The sooner we get answers from this Attallis, the better.”

  “Well, that’s her shuttle.” He tapped an icon on the display marking one of his spacecraft leaving the captured escort. “Give us ten minutes to get her aboard and into an interview room.”

  “Will the rest be secure?” Todorovich asked, looking at the other ships.

  “Only two of them can fly under their own power right now,” Henry pointed out. “One might be repairable here if they cannibalize the wrecks. Two are hulks, basically collections of debris. The gunship O’Flannagain is towing back toward us would probably be salvageable at a shipyard, but I wouldn’t count on it being fixed here.”

  He studied the icons for a long few seconds, letting the memories of being aboard wrecked ships dominate his thoughts for a few seconds as they spiked into his brain. Let it flow through and be done…

  “Captain?” Todorovich asked.

  “Sorry. As I said, only two of them could be a threat, which is why those two have most of our GroundDiv troopers aboard. Hopefully, the people we’re pulling out of the wrecks are feeling grateful for the rescue!”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time if they weren’t,” the Ambassador pointed out. “I presume your people are being careful?”

  “That’s the plan,” he confirmed. “Thompson seems a competent sort, and while his battalion is assembled from scratch like the rest of the crew, he got complete companies to do the assembling with.”

  “Anything I should know for the interview?” Todorovich asked.

  “Let’s try not to talk over each other?” Henry said with a chuckle. “This conversation won’t be easy, but it’s not an interrogation.”

  His smile thinned.

  “If it comes down to an actual interrogation, I have people for that.”

  Two GroundDiv troopers, in mottled gray medium combat armor, escorted Attallis into the room where Henry and Todorovich were waiting.

  The room would probably have been recognizable to anyone who’d served on any starship or wet-navy ship of the last half-millennium. A metal box with a single door, a visible camera—and at least five invisible ones—and some plain lights.

  The metal table bolted to the floor was standard too. There was nothing in the room the prisoner could pick up and use as a weapon. Even if there were, Attallis’s hands were cuffed behind her back.

  “Release the cuffs and wait outside,” Henry ordered. “She doesn’t leave unrestrained, but we’ll be safe enough in here.”

  “Are you sure, ser?” the guard asked, glancing over the Captain and the Ambassador—both unarmed. “Should one of us stay in here?”

  Henry considered it for a moment, but a look at Attallis made up his mind for him. The woman’s body language was utterly crushed. She could be faking it, but even if she was, what was she going to do? Injuring or killing him or the Ambassador would just guarantee her death the moment the door opened.

  “We’ll be fine, PO,” he told the GroundDiv noncom. “Thank you.”

  Attallis let herself be guided to the chair and uncuffed. She rubbed her wrists as the guards withdrew, looking around with the careful eyes of a caged animal that didn’t understand what was being said around her.

  Henry took a moment to mentally recalibrate. It was easier to speak a different language if you were thinking in that language, and with the internal network, it was easier to force that switchover than it would have been without it.

  Opening his eyes, he was thinking in Kem and addressed Attallis in the same language.

  “My soldiers tell me your name is Attallis,” he said. “You were in command?”

  He could see the moment she registered that he was speaking a language she understood. She still looked defeated but not quite as terrified.

  “I was in command of my ship, Dancing Sister,” she answered. “I did not command the fleet. That was First Warlord Deearan. They commanded the fleet and chose our targets.”

  “And you were Vesheron once?” Henry asked.

  “We are Vesheron still!” she snapped proudly.

  “We called on all Vesheron channels,” he pointed out. “We tried to communicate. You ignored us.”

  Attallis was silent.

  “We are also Vesheron. Why did you attack us?” Henry demanded.

  She was silent for several more seconds, then bowed her head.

  “Because First Warlord Deearan commanded it,” she admitted. “As they commanded other attacks. We are Vesheron still…but we are not what we were. We have attacked others. Transports. At first, Deearan claimed they were Kenmiri.

  “After a while, they stopped pretending.”

  “But you knew we could not be Kenmiri,” Henry pointed out. “Why did you attack us?”

  “Because the First Warlord commanded it,” she repeated. “And because the last three Captains to defy their orders are dead, spaced without trial. Deearan said we could never go home. No one would ever help us go home.


  “We had to make our way here.”

  Henry concealed a grimace. This “First Warlord” wasn’t wrong there. The Drex had been conquered and enslaved by the Kenmiri a long time ago. Not only had Attalis never seen her homeworld free, but if she was this far out it was quite possibly she’d never see it at all.

  Worse, the Osiris Province was one of the four the insectoids hadn’t given up, which meant that Attallis’s homeworld was still under Kenmiri control.

  And with Kenmiri expansion halted, the El-Vesheron like the Terrans and the Londu weren’t going to wage war deep into the Empire to liberate the still-occupied worlds. It would be years—decades, probably—before any of the Vesheron managed to build fleets able to wage those campaigns alone.

  The alliance hadn’t officially broken down yet, but the Drex among the Vesheron couldn’t bring together enough factions to liberate Osiris-Six.

  “So, you turned to piracy.” Todorovich inserted herself into the conversation in Henry’s silence. “Theft. Murder. The traditions of our people say your crimes warrant death, Captain Attallis. Why should we spare any of you?”

  Henry reminded himself never to get on the Ambassador’s bad side. The sharp and cold tone of her voice carried through the alien language perfectly. She wasn’t wrong, either. UPSF military law called for him to turn pirates over to local authorities if they were present, but in situations like this?

  He was entirely within his authority to execute every survivor of Warlord Deearan’s crews. It wasn’t an option he’d be comfortable taking, but…he wasn’t sure it was worse than leaving two active pirate ships behind him.

  “I am not a pirate!” Attallis snapped. A flush of darker purple crossed her face and she was suddenly straighter in her chair. “I am Vesheron, a warrior of the Drex, an escaped slave who carved the path I must to survive. I followed the commands of my Warlord. I am not a pirate.”

  “Your actions define you, Captain Attallis, not your words,” Todorovich replied. “If we left you behind us, you would continue as you have. Innocents would die.”