Raven's Peace Read online

  “As for the gold,” Henry forced a smile. “I’m not surprised you don’t know, Commander. It means I made ace, shooting down at least three hostile combat spacecraft from a starfighter.”

  Thompson looked suitably awed for a moment, then confused.

  “I didn’t think the Kenmiri had starfighters,” he noted. “Bunch of the rocket-jocks I knew kept complaining about it: nobody made ace in the war ’cause there was nothing to shoot down.”

  Henry chuckled.

  “I would be very surprised if I am not significantly older than any rocket-jock you know now, Commander,” he pointed out. “I didn’t make ace against the Kenmiri. I made it before the war in anti-piracy patrols.”

  He shook his head. Enough people had died in peacetime anti-piracy actions that he couldn’t call them “better days.” Gold ace wings had been more common then.

  Most of the pilots who’d earned them during the war had earned them the same way Henry had. Just because humanity was locked in a desperate struggle for their lives didn’t mean the pirates had packed up and gone home.

  “Damn.” Thompson shook his head. “They say you were there from the beginning to the end, ser, but it’s easy to forget what that means!”

  “‘They,’ Commander?” Henry asked. It appeared that introducing himself had been redundant.

  “Rumor mill and reputation, ser,” Thompson replied. “Not much for them to do these days but chatter about heroes.”

  “I’m no hero, Commander,” the Asian-American Colonel said firmly. “We have a job. We do the job. If we do it right, a lot fewer people die. You get me?”

  “I get you, ser,” Thompson confirmed. “I’ve led extraction drops on Kenmiri worlds, ser. The people you pull out of work camps, they think you’re a hero…but all you remember is the ones you didn’t save.”

  “Exactly.” Henry shook his head. “You being transferred to Skyrim, Commander?”

  “Just got the bump to O-4,” the younger man told him. “I’m transferring to Raven, taking over her onboard ground detachment.”

  “I’ve heard good things about the Corvid-class ships,” the Colonel replied. “I’m sure she’s lucky to have you.”

  “Everyone’s paranoid about peace cuts,” Thompson said quietly. “I’m just glad to have a billet. Government seems to think the war is over, but I hadn’t seen anything saying the Kenmiri agree just yet!”

  Henry chuckled, but he didn’t argue. The Kenmiri hadn’t officially surrendered or given up or…well, anything. But the reports from the Vesheron—the rebels from the many species the Kenmiri had conquered—were that the insects were pulling back. They weren’t just pulling occupation garrisons from annexed worlds but evacuating entire colonies.

  Millions—probably billions—of red insectoids were on the move as the Kenmiri tried to find a path into a future that no longer included their breeding and ruling caste.

  He’d seen the wrong end of their fleets and their ground troops too many times to cry crocodile tears for them, but he could still feel sorry for them.

  And if he hadn’t had that skill, he wasn’t sure Dr. Schult would have let him go!

  Chapter Three

  Large chunks of Base Skyrim predated artificial gravity, which meant that the core facilities were built around massive habitation rings. They no longer rotated, but it was easier to refit an old station with gravity generators than to build a new station.

  The largest of the rings was the central station. A trio of UPSF SF-122 Dragoon starfighters orbited above it, a cautious reminder that the station’s weapons had proven far harder to update. Two battlecruisers were docked to the station at opposite sides.

  One at least looked familiar to Henry: one of the Jaguar-class battlecruisers that had carried the weight of the war against the Kenmiri. She carried a three-hundred-and-sixty-meter-long gravity driver as the main weapon, matching the length of the core hull. Thirty meters wide and tall with eighty-meter-long wings, each carrying four missile launchers.

  He knew the Jaguar class like the back of his hand. The ship on the far side of the station from the Jaguar—this one was Leopard, he picked out as the shuttle swooped over it—was both similar and very different.

  His implant told him that this one was only three hundred meters long—which dredged the rest of the details from his memories and databases. Her core hull was forty-five meters wide and tall, and her wings stretched a hundred meters out from her hull. A Corvid-class battlecruiser, she was in every sense a superior ship to the old Jaguar class.

  “That’s Raven,” Commander Thompson told him. “Hell of a ship, right?”

  “I have my biases,” Henry admitted with a smile. “I commanded a Jaguar for six years, Commander. They’re damn fine ships. But I have to admit, you can’t argue with the upgrades for the Corvids.”

  “I’m mostly partial to the expanded ground detachment myself,” Thompson admitted. “A short battalion instead of a double company. Double the size.”

  “And a full Commander’s slot instead of a Lieutenant Commander’s?” Henry asked. “So, a command that lets you stay in space?”

  The younger man chuckled.

  “Only three carriers in the fleet,” he agreed genially. “Unless you have strings to pull, you’re not getting one of those slots as a GroundDiv officer. Doesn’t take much promotion to get yourself kicked to a desk as a ground-pounder, ser.”

  “A desk” was an exaggeration for the senior ranks in the Space Force’s ground contingents…but not much of one. In seventeen years of war, Henry wasn’t sure there’d been fifteen ground deployments larger than a battalion. There definitely hadn’t been twenty.

  “So, the Corvids having larger detachments is good for GroundDiv careers, huh?” Henry asked. “I wonder if that was the reason.”

  He heard Thompson swallow hard as the shuttle swung into its final docking bay.

  “I don’t believe so, ser, but I wouldn’t know,” he admitted.

  “Neither would I,” Henry agreed. “Though I can tell you there were a few times during the war when I wished my Panther had another company or two of GroundDiv troopers. Ground-pounders or not, you always managed to make yourself useful.”

  “We do try, ser.”

  The shuttle settled down into the artificial gravity field with an almost unfelt impact. The pilot was good.

  “And it seems we have finally reached Base Skyrim,” Henry said aloud, rising and stretching. “It’s been a pleasure, Commander Thompson. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

  “I’ll buy you a beer if we have the chance, Colonel,” Thompson replied. “Less rank in the mess, after all.”

  “That there is,” Henry agreed. The shuttle hatch slid open and he gave the GroundDiv officer a salute. “Good luck, Commander. I suspect Raven is lucky to get you.”

  Henry Wong didn’t know Skyrim Central as well as he’d known Panther, but his ship had been based there for most of the six years he’d commanded her. It only took him a moment to reorient himself and look up his destination.

  It had been all of those six years since he’d needed Visiting Officers Administration, after all! The area was located close by, thankfully, near most of the shuttle bays that people would arrive on the station through.

  Declining an offer of assistance from the NCO of the deck for the landing bay, he shouldered his duffle bag and set off. The steel oak leaf of his rank would get him a human donkey if he needed, but he was perfectly capable of hauling the duffle himself.

  It might have been over ten years since he’d been on Earth and almost twenty since he’d visited the United States, but he’d still been raised a self-sufficient Montana boy. His father might have looked like he’d escaped a Hong Kong action movie about rogue cops, but he’d been born in Montana too.

  And the old man would have laughed his ass off at his son needing someone to haul the duffle bag for him.

  Visiting Officers Administration had a small reception area in front of two large desks. The cha
irs looked reasonably comfortable, and both of the Chief Petty Officers holding down the desks themselves were attentive and awake.

  The black Chief in the desk on the right was free and gestured for Henry to come over.

  “Chief Petty Officer Andrew Adebayo,” he said in a sharp accent distinctive to the main colony in Keid, known as 40 Eridani until people actually lived there. “Scan in, please, Colonel.”

  Adebayo flipped a reader field across the haptic interface of his desk, and Henry placed his hand on it. The field ran over his hand for a second, a mild tingling sensation as it scanned his handprint and linked to his network, then vanished in a green halo around his hand.

  “Colonel Henry Wong, correct?” Adebayo asked. “I have your appointment listed in the system as being in just over an hour on Deck One. You should be able to grab a transit pod and make it there in plenty of time.”

  Henry blinked.

  “That might be a mistake,” he admitted. “I’m supposed to be checking into Visitors’ Quarters and notifying Command of my location as I stand by for assignment.”

  “Let me check,” the noncom replied. His hands flickered across the desk, but the system projected whatever he was looking for directly into his eyes. Henry couldn’t see anything.

  “Yes, I see that,” he finally said. “That request was filed at eleven hundred GMT this morning. You were flagged as assigned and the request for housing was canceled at fourteen hundred GMT.”

  “I was an on interplanetary shuttle in deep space at fourteen hundred hours, Chief,” Henry pointed out. “Assigned where?”

  “That information hasn’t been released to the general system yet,” Adebayo told him. “It usually isn’t until the officer has been informed by their superiors or received a physical writ, in the case of a proper command.”

  Henry couldn’t help himself. He fingered the rocket insignia that declared him a member of Space Division—the portion of the Space Force that actually contained starships.

  He’d held two of the archaic paper writs declaring him captain of a UPSF starship in his life, but he hadn’t realized that no one was advised of the assignment until the captain held that writ.

  “You don’t know anything, Chief?” he asked. “That’s fair, but it leaves me swinging in the dark.”

  “I know you have an appointment at eighteen hundred hours on Deck One,” Adebayo said with a brilliantly white grin. “Office one-six-six-eight.” He paused. “That’s the visitor office in the Admirals’ box, ser. Security on the Deck One Command Center, then more security for the Admiralty Annex. Might take you more time to get in than you think.”

  There were seven Admirals in Base Skyrim, but Henry felt a sinking sensation in his chest as he realized that, with his luck, it could only be one of them.

  “I need somewhere to change and store my duffle,” he told Adebayo. He’d traveled to Base Skyrim in a duty uniform—dark blue slacks and a turtleneck with his insignia.

  He was not meeting an Admiral in that!

  One dress uniform, one transit pod, and two extremely thorough security checks later, Henry had entered the Admiralty Annex on Deck One. Part of him wanted to go right to Office 1668 without checking who the room was assigned to.

  The rest of him was too much a tactician to go into battle without knowing the ground. Stepping over to the wall just inside the door, a gesture into the haptic interface field brought up the directory.

  Confidentiality and habit might keep the identity of the occupant of the visitor’s office in the Annex quiet outside this space, but efficiency required the directory there, inside all of the security, to be complete.

  Henry was unsurprised by the name: Vice Admiral Sonia Hamilton. She wasn’t officially assigned to Base Skyrim—officially, she commanded the United Planets Fifth Fleet—but her command was notorious for being sliced up into single-ship detachments scattered across known space.

  It was Fifth Fleet’s battlecruisers that had carried out the long-distance strikes of Operation Golden Lancelot, including Panther under Henry’s command.

  Hamilton was also the woman who’d ordered him declared a psychological casualty. She’d probably saved his life…but she’d done so after he’d had what he now recognized as a PTSD attack and sworn at her.

  Staring at the name, he pulled out a flimsy. Unrolling the thin display, he gave it instructions via his network and checked his current status in the system.

  As Chief Adebayo had noted, his new assignment hadn’t been released yet. What was in the system, however, was that while he’d been transferred off Panther, he had never been reassigned from Fifth Fleet.

  An Admiral’s orders always had priority. In this case, though, not only was Vice Admiral Sonia Hamilton an Admiral, she was also his direct superior officer.

  There was no way to avoid what he suspected was going to be an awkward conversation at best. Concealing a sigh, Henry rolled up the flimsy and returned it to the pocket inside his jacket. Another gesture flipped the directory to a mirror, and he double-checked the uniform.

  Class Two Undress Uniform was basically the same dark blue slacks and turtleneck as a duty uniform—though lacking the safety features that would turn a duty uniform into an emergency vac-suit—with a black jacket overtop carrying his full medals and decorations.

  After seventeen years of war and twenty-seven years of active service, Henry Wong had enough of those that his uniform jacket could probably be used as a bludgeoning weapon.

  Its perfect alignment, an unconscious arrangement borne of practice, wasn’t going to give him an excuse to delay. With a deep breath he concealed from the Commander holding down the Annex’s front desk, he turned.

  Giving the young man at that desk a firm nod, he set off for Office 1668.

  Chapter Four

  Arriving at Admiral Hamilton’s office several minutes early despite everything, Henry parked himself on the wall across from the door and prepared to wait.

  He was rudely disabused of that notion when the door slid open and Hamilton’s familiar bark echoed out.

  “Get your ass in here, Henry,” she ordered. “They gave me an adorable security camera and I don’t have anything else scheduled for the next hour.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Removing himself from the wall before he even managed to get comfortable, he entered the office. Coming to attention, he saluted the white-haired woman sitting behind the desk.

  “When, in the twenty years you have known me and been under my command, have you known me to want that mickey mouse shit, Colonel?” Hamilton asked. “Sit. Down.”

  “Yes, ser,” he responded, echoing his earlier words as he obeyed.

  Then–Colonel Sonia Hamilton had been the captain of the support carrier Rygel when the war had started. Henry had spent two years under her command as one of her Fighter-Div pilots, the aptly-nicknamed rocket-jocks, but had lost track of her when he’d transferred to SpaceDiv.

  They’d met again when she was the battle group commander when he’d served as executive officer on a destroyer, and she’d been his first battle group commander when he commanded his own destroyer.

  She’d received Fifth Fleet around the same time he’d received Panther. Age had whitened the Admiral’s hair, and she’d gone from wearing it in a long braid to shaving it into a tight white cap. It certainly hadn’t softened her.

  “Let’s get one thing out of the way, since I know you’re going to have a stick up your ass about it,” Hamilton said calmly. “You told me, and I quote, that you ‘didn’t have a fucking clue where your ship was and didn’t give a flying fuck.’”

  Henry winced.

  “That was followed by a stream of gibberish that I believe may have included the phrases ‘tin-pot dictator’ and ‘ironclad bitch,’” she continued. “Do I have that roughly correct, Colonel?”

  “I don’t remember the details that well,” he admitted. “But roughly correct, yes.”

  “I got the report from the medics I sent to you
r office, but would you like to tell me what was on your desk when we had that memorable conversation?” Hamilton asked him, her voice suddenly soft and gentle.

  That he was never going to forget.

  “My insignia, a bottle of rum, and a loaded nine-millimeter pistol,” Henry said flatly.

  “You are aware, I assume, that being a psych casualty is recorded on your record merely as being wounded?” she asked. “While we all believe ourselves to be modern souls, people are people and make dumb choices. It is never officially revealed that you were stood down for psychiatric reasons.

  “So far as I’m concerned, Colonel, you bled on me,” she told him. “I no more hold it against you than if you’d lost an arm and physically leaked on me. You were injured and that was how you showed it. We got you the help you needed. End of story, yes?”

  “If you insist, ser,” Henry conceded.

  “I do insist,” Hamilton said as she pulled a pair of glasses and a bottle of rum from under the table. “Not least because I’m quoting what Admiral Sasaki told me when I returned to duty after the Battle of Procyon.”

  “Ser?”

  “I was psych-casualtied after Procyon, yes,” she confirmed. “And I told Admiral Sasaki to go stick their iron pipe up their ass.”

  Henry had met Admiral Jun Sasaki once. The legendary admiral had died with their flagship in the fifth year of the war, in the daring offensive that had led to humanity’s first contact with the Vesheron. Sasaki had been a notoriously strict taskmaster with, as Hamilton was suggesting, a reputation for having an iron stick up their ass.

  “I did not know that,” he admitted.

  “And that’s how much people will know about your own incident,” Hamilton told him. “PTSD is a sneaky evil bitch, but we can treat it. You’re going to be okay.”