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  And would make Admiral Kosigan’s Intelligence wonks happy, a good thing on its own.

  “Iyotake, meet me in my office,” he ordered as he left the shuttle bay. He’d been gone for less than four hours this time, so no one was officially greeting him aboard. “Get a secured subspace link to the Ambassador as well.

  “I need to brief you both on what I just agreed to—risks and benefits alike.”

  The channel was silent for several seconds.

  “I’ll make sure of it, sure,” Iyotake replied. “Just…just what did you do?”

  “I committed us to a gunnery and maneuvering contest against Rigid Candor,” Henry explained. “We’re betting wine against liqueur, quantities sufficient for the entire crew of each ship.”

  “Do we have that much wine?” his XO asked.

  “I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure I put up half of our mess stock,” the Captain answered calmly. “So, let’s make sure we don’t lose. Set up that call, XO. I’ll see you in five.”

  He was in his office by that point and poured a pair of coffees. He’d just finished adding the XO’s preferred mix to the other man’s cup when Iyotake arrived.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Please.” Iyotake took the cup. “I know you know how much of a headache you just dropped on me. How much alcohol is in this?”

  “None right now. How much would you like?”

  “He doesn’t get any,” Ambassador Todorovich’s voice cut in, and both men looked up as her holographic image settled in in the corner of the room. “He’s going to need his head clear for dealing with this.

  “A bet, Captain? Why does this sound like a terrible idea?”

  “Because it is one,” Henry confirmed. “It’s also a brilliant idea. Which it ends up being depends on whether we win, lose or draw. Putting all context aside, the contest itself lets us assess our skills against the Londu’s best.

  “That has value, both in motivating the crew and in helping the UPSF assess where we stand against one of the other major powers of the Vesheron.”

  “Context, Captain Wong, is often everything,” Todorovich pointed out. “I’m not seeing the context for this as particularly good.”

  “It isn’t,” he agreed. “But it also is. We all know the main reason everyone brought the biggest and baddest warships they could spare here is because the escorts are a dick-measuring contest.” He shook his head. “There’s a hundred ambassadors on that station that either came on unarmed ships or hitched a ride on somebody else’s warship. They know damn well they’re getting automatically dumped to the bottom of the list.

  “Everyone is looking to the ambassadors who showed up with the biggest guns. Right now, ignoring the Restan, who have the advantage of being the hosts, that’s the Londu, who showed up with a battle group; the Drifters, because everyone is terrified of guardians; and us…because everyone knows that Raven could take the massed firepower of every other ship here and have a decent chance of not even noticing.

  “So, if we and the Londu throw down in a formal contest intended to judge not who has the better ship but the better crew, that changes the balance. Whichever one of us wins that contest has more weight to throw behind their words.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “Am I wrong, Ambassador?”

  “No,” she confirmed. “Do you know how much influence we’ll lose if you lose?”

  “Enough to put us solidly behind the Drifters in the diplomatic weight game,” he guessed. “But given that all we really need is to walk out of here without committing warships…”

  “I’d rather have the weight to smother some of the likely conflicts before it’s over,” Todorovich told him. “My hopes for any kind of long-term balancing organization out of this meeting are shrinking by the minute.”

  “I don’t plan on losing,” Henry said. “I’m not expecting to win, either, if I’m being honest, but I figure we can at least bring Kahlmor to a draw with even honors.”

  “That’ll help us more than it hurts, I suppose,” she conceded. “But I can tell you now, Henry, it’s going to be hard enough to get anything done here as it is. Losing influence because of some military game…”

  “I think Kahlmor is playing on more than one level, too,” Henry pointed out. “He suggested going into the asteroid belt. Once we have a location, I’m going to take a closer look at it. The nature of the exercise will require a relatively dense chunk of the belt…probably chock full of radioactives.”

  “He just had you aboard his ship,” Todorovich reminded him. “If he wanted to have a private conversation, he could have done it then.”

  “We’re on an encrypted subspace call with two of us in the same room and you in a white-noise field,” he replied. “Even so, what do you think the odds are that no one in this system is listening in?”

  The silence he got was his answer.

  “I don’t know if that’s the game Kahlmor is playing. Even just aiming to beat us in the contest could be played multiple ways, depending on Saunt’s plans,” he noted. “Either way, I think we had to take the bet. We need the Londu to respect us, and subtle as the challenge was, I think we’d have lost some critical points with them if I’d dodged it.”

  “Probably,” Todorovich conceded. “And you’ve done it, anyway. I’ll talk to the Under-Speaker and get things rolling.”

  “Then I need to go warn the crew,” Iyotake said. “They’d be rather upset to discover they lost their wine stock because they weren’t fast enough or sharp enough, so I figure it’ll be a handy motivational tool.”

  He smiled wickedly.

  “They don’t need to know we’re only aiming for a draw, after all!”

  After the XO withdrew, Henry turned his attention back to Todorovich. With only the two of them on the call now, her hologram was showing more of her fatigue than it had before.

  “You all right, Sylvia?” he asked. “I hope this contest isn’t adding that much to your workload.”

  “God, no, not really,” she admitted. “Ten hours, Henry. I just sat through ten hours of the official Gathering, and my hopes of getting anything actually done here are disintegrating.

  “Everybody is getting to speak. Opening remarks of twenty to seventy minutes apiece. We’re up to a hundred and seventy-five ambassadors, with nineteen more expected in the next three days.”

  That was a week of ten-hour days, even with the shorter speeches.

  “Better you than me, Sylvia,” he concluded. “I might have shot someone already today.”

  She shook her head and sighed.

  “We’ll get through it, and it’s not like no business gets discussed around the opening remarks,” she said. “I mean, we got something resolved today!”

  Her tone was a warning, but he picked up the trap anyway. He figured she needed him to spring it.

  “It didn’t sound like the day was that productive,” he noted. “What did you get resolved?”

  “That we won’t call the Kenmiri provinces that anymore,” Todorovich said bitterly. “That took an hour of debate. In Kem. Since the Kenmiri no longer rule them, we can no longer call them provinces.

  “Of course, since those five hundred star divisions have been in play for between sixty and three hundred years, we’re still going to use them. We’re just going to call them sectors instead of provinces now.”

  She snorted.

  “So, now Resta is in the Geb Sector instead of the Geb Province. This was very important, you see, for people to get sorted out.”

  “I see,” he acknowledged, while making a note to have the not-quite-useless change included in the morning briefing for his Kem speakers and the translator programmers. “It’s not meaningless, I suppose.”

  “No, but it wasn’t worth an hour’s debate with the core diplomats of two hundred Vesheron and El-Vesheron factions present,” she told him. “Though, let’s be fair, getting something through a hundred and seventy-five diplomats in an hour is a miracle. Eto piz’
dets.

  “I met Kal Rojan, at least,” she continued. “Man has dead eyes, even for a Kozun. I’m pretty sure he was seriously planning on killing the four-eyed mu’dak nattering on about the Kem etymology of the word province.”

  Henry had never heard Sylvia Todorovich degrade into Russian profanity. It was probably a good sign that she was relaxed enough to do that around him, but still…

  “Is it that bad, Sylvia?”

  “Probably worse,” she told him. “I’m blowing off steam because I can, Henry, but unless we start semi-officially dismissing half of the ambassadors as meaningless or breaking out into committees, this Gathering is going nowhere quickly.”

  “How would you run it?” he asked.

  She snorted.

  “Honestly? Short opening remarks, then split into committees,” she admitted. “I’d maybe put some restriction over who was a big-enough deal to get opening remarks in the first place, but the Restan aren’t too far off what I’d do yet.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” she concluded. “Thanks for letting me rant, Henry.”

  “I’m here to support your mission any way I can,” he told her.

  “I appreciate it,” she replied. “But, Colonel Wong?”

  “Yes, Em Ambassador?” he answered, matching the formality of her tone.

  “Kick Kahlmor’s ass in this contest of yours. It would make my life a lot easier.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Henry’s senior officers looked at the holographic image hanging in the middle of the room in a shared uncomfortable silence.

  “Let’s run down the numbers, shall we?” Ihejirika said, his voice surprisingly calm as the tactical officer looked around the room at his compatriots. “Rigid Candor is roughly four hundred and eighty meters long and two hundred wide, massing approximately four megatons when fully fueled and armed.”

  The width was somewhat deceptive as it was from the widest point, and the ship was a rough, flattened teardrop shape. It was much like Raven in that sense, though the battlecruiser’s wings were narrower than the battleship’s flared-out engineering section.

  “She has an acceleration capacity of up to one point one KPS squared but can easily maintain a full KPS squared with full inertial dampening,” Ihejirika continued, his voice edging toward dry from its base of calm. “Her primary armament is six heavy plasma turrets of a version notably superior to that of the Kenmiri, backed by missile launchers, heavy lasers and twenty-five starfighters.

  “She is one of the most advanced ships of the Londu Blades of the Scion. And we’re supposed to beat her in a competition. What are we competing on? Taking a hit?”

  “With her armor and energy screens, she’s not much worse at that than we are,” Henry replied. “For the first few hits, at least. It’s probably relevant that while Rigid Candor is one of their more advanced ships, she’s only middling in size for a battleship.”

  He smiled coldly.

  “I have every confidence that this ship could destroy Rigid Candor in a straight fight,” he continued. “The question is whether we can perform better than her in a contest. A contest, I remind everyone, that is supposed to be structured to even out our various advantages.”

  The conference room was silent again.

  “How exactly are they going to even out the fact that Candor has twice our acceleration?” Bazzoli finally asked, the navigator staring blankly into space at a set of data only she could see. “There aren’t that many clusters dense enough to even that out in the galaxy, let alone in the system.”

  “My understanding is that the Restan will be placing a series of navigation beacons through the cluster we’ll be exercising in,” Henry told her. “We will need to approach each beacon at a specific vector, ping it with a tightbeam from within one thousand kilometers and proceed to the next beacon.

  “Without hitting any of the beacons.”

  She grunted.

  “Tight quarters and specific maneuvers make up some of the difference,” she conceded. “But they’re still going to have the advantage unless we send the crew to the tanks.”

  “So we send the crew to the tanks,” Iyotake suggested. “We can match her gee for gee if we seal ourselves in the tanks and juice up.”

  Henry grimaced.

  “I hesitate to ask the crew to take acceleration drugs for a contest,” he replied. “Plus, we’ll lose a small but critical edge on the gunnery part of the contest if the crew is in acceleration tanks or coming down off the drugs.

  “Bazzoli, can you do it without the crew in the tanks?” he asked the navigator.

  “You’re asking the impossible, ser,” she complained.

  “I know. If it was merely very difficult, I wouldn’t be asking,” Henry told her.

  “They have twice our acceleration,” she repeated. “That’s twice our velocity change. Twice our maneuverability. Easily twice our speed averaged over any open stretch. We’re a bit more agile, we can change our thrust vector about thirty percent faster than they can, but that’s it.”

  Henry studied the battleship in the hologram again.

  “I suppose we could ask them to limit their acceleration to keep it a fair contest between crews instead of between the ships’ engines,” he murmured.

  Bazzoli sighed.

  “I’ll do what I can, ser, and I know I can fly rings around any Londu helmswoman,” she told him. “But the odds are against us.”

  “We’ll deal with what comes,” Henry said. “So long as everyone is okay with having to drink beer on the way back home, anyway.”

  “I’m less worried about the gunnery portion,” Ihejirika told them. “That’s a straight accuracy test for the main weapons. From what the Restan sent me, there’s a time limit but not a time score. Which makes sense, given that they have six main guns and we have one.”

  “And our main gun would gut Rigid Candor where her main guns would tickle us,” Henry replied. “You can outshoot them?”

  “I can bull’s-eye a mosquito buzzing around your ranch on Earth from Mars orbit,” Ihejirika boasted. “I think we can manage a few dead-center hits to even up the contest.”

  Henry had to swallow a wince at the mental image from the boast.

  “Let’s not bull’s-eye mosquitos with cee-fractional weapons, shall we?” he suggested. “Perfect shots on the target drones, though, those I’ll take. Some will be immobile; some will be moving and evading.”

  “We can handle that,” the tactical officer promised. “Plasma guns aren’t precision weapons. A good crew can achieve incredible things with them…but I know my crew can do better with the grav-driver.”

  “Good,” Iyotake replied. “Because I don’t know about the rest of the crew, but I hate beer and I don’t want to have to give these bastards our wine!”

  The other officers dispersed to try to motivate and corral their teams for the mission ahead of them, leaving Henry and Iyotake sitting in the room, staring at the hologram of the Londu battleship.

  “I don’t think there’s a question that we could take her in a straight fight,” Henry said quietly. He drew a line in space with his hand. Two of the six heavy plasma turrets were on the tip of the teardrop, both opening up arcs of fire and protecting the ship from potential blowback from the powerful weapons.

  A single grav-driver strike with a kinetic armor-penetrating round would shatter the spine of the battleship and send a third of her heavy firepower spinning off into space. Missiles with conversion warheads would keep the lasers engaged while they used further AP rounds from the grav-driver to disable the energy screens.

  Once the energy screens were done, conversion rounds from the grav-driver would finish the job. It wouldn’t be quick or clean, but Rigid Candor was a battleship. It was designed to survive.

  The tactics would be familiar to Lord of Ten Thousand Miles Kahlmor, too. They were the same ones he would have seen Jaguar-class battlecruisers use against Kenmiri dreadnoughts.

  The UPSF had a lot of practice at
killing other people’s capital ships.

  “Killing the people we want to work with is generally frowned upon,” Iyotake replied. “So, we play a game and see who wins. I think one of the most interesting parts of this is going to be how the Restan set up the contest.”

  “Oh?”

  “They have a pretty good idea of the limits and advantages of each of our ships,” the XO noted. “Energy screens are at their worst at stopping physical objects, where the grav-shield is at its best against them. We can fly through a meteor shower or debris cluster without blinking.

  “Kahlmor can’t. On the other hand, as Commander Bazzoli pointed out, he’s far better off at a straight sprint than we are. It’s a similar story with the gunnery contest. They have more lightspeed or near-lightspeed weapons than we do. Depending on how they set up that time limit Ihejirika mentioned, they could leave us in a position where we can’t use the grav-driver on every target.”

  “That wouldn’t be that much of a disadvantage,” Henry argued. “Ihejirika and his people are good with the lasers.”

  In simulations, at least…

  “The lasers are new, though,” his XO replied. “The Restan don’t know how good we are with them, but they know we’re going to be deadly with the grav-driver.

  “As the hosts, they’re setting the terms of engagement, which means they can very easily tilt the entire contest toward one of us.” Iyotake studied the battleship’s hologram and tugged on his braid.

  “I think that whether they do so—and who they tilt it toward if they do—is going to be fascinating.”

  “I won’t be feeling quite so fascinated if we actually lose this, XO,” Henry noted. “Winning opens doors for our Ambassador. Losing may close them. I’d rather not have Todorovich more pissed at me than she already is.”

  “Now, that, ser, I understand completely!”

  Chapter Thirty

  The two ships accelerated away from the Gathering in close company. Closer, really, than Henry was comfortable with. He appreciated Kahlmor keeping his ship’s acceleration down to Raven’s standard 0.3 KPS2 for the trip, but it made his neck itch to have another capital ship within thirty thousand kilometers.