The Peacekeeper Initiative (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 2) Read online

  The explosion probably hadn’t been the only string to the attackers’ bow, but that attack was definitely blunted.

  As Shuttle One was obliterating the attack, Shuttles Two and Three touched down in front of Henry. He shook his head as he identified the two spacecraft in front of him and watched the GroundDiv companies deploy in rapid order.

  “What?” Todorovich asked.

  “Take a wild guess, Ambassador, which shuttle Commander Thompson is on,” he asked.

  She looked at the gray-armored troops spreading out to form a perimeter around the shuttles.

  “He just rappelled into the middle of an assault, didn’t he?” she replied.

  “Bingo.” Henry waved the closest of his GroundDiv Lieutenant Commanders over to him. “Lieutenant Commander Rocca, report,” he ordered.

  Adriana Rocca commanded Raven’s second company of GroundDiv troops, the second-most senior Ground Division officer aboard Henry’s battlecruiser.

  “Company Two and Company Three are on the ground,” she reported crisply. “Scans suggest several concentrations of life signs near the Center walls, but there’s a high likelihood that any individual concentration is civilian.”

  “No preemptive strikes,” Henry agreed. It was an order, but it was only confirming what the officer was already telling him.

  “Your officers are Kem-fluent, yes?” he asked. He knew the two Lieutenant Commanders would be—there were non-Kem-speaking officers in the UPSF, but few of Rocca’s rank or above and even fewer in the Peacekeeper Initiative.

  “Ninety-two percent of the battalion’s troopers can at least ask for directions,” the officer replied brightly. “All the officers are fluent.”

  “Good.” Henry switched to the Kenmiri language and waved a local officer over. “Name and rank?” he asked.

  “Captain Install,” the Ashall officer replied.

  That was one thing Henry had noted. There’d been three species in the Council and he’d seen at least two more around, but every race he’d seen on Tano had been Ashall. Humanoids, some more distinctive than others.

  It was a broad grouping. By any standard you cared to apply, humans were Ashall, after all.

  “Captain Install, this is Lieutenant Commander Rocca, second-in-command of my ground forces,” Henry told the local. “Can you link her in with General Kansa and whoever is in command here?

  “We have three UPA troopers on the scene, but Commander Thompson is, ah, neutralizing the attack over there.” He waved in the direction of the breach and the still-hovering shuttle.

  “General Kansa.” The officer paused, clearly parsing his Kem slowly. “Left coms with. For you. To coordinate.”

  From Captain Install’s halting Kem, communication might not be as smooth as Henry was hoping, but the local was holding out a box of earpieces that looked like they’d fit humans.

  “I’ll leave you with General Kansa and Captain Install,” he told Rocca. “I need to return to Raven.”

  “Take Shuttle Two,” Rocca urged. “Best pilot you’re going to find outside a starfighter, ser.”

  “We haven’t seen anti-air yet,” Henry replied. “And, Lieutenant Commander?”

  “Ser?”

  “Make sure you’ve got at least a fire team with the ambassador at all times. She’ll remain down here to negotiate once the situation is resolved.”

  He’d like to haul her back aboard Raven with him and lock her in an acceleration tank. His ship’s acceleration tanks were probably the safest place in the entire star system right now.

  Unfortunately, there was no way in hell he was winning that argument, and he wasn’t going to try.

  “Are you good, Commander?” he asked Rocca.

  “I’m linked with Thompson and Kansa,” she replied. “North wall is secure. Company One is moving to sweep the outer perimeter while Shuttle One provides overhead. I don’t know who’s out there, ser, but GroundDiv has the scene.

  “These people will be fine.”

  “Play nice, Commander,” he muttered. “Good luck.”

  With a final nod to Todorovich, he set off for Shuttle Two.

  He’d be a thousand times more comfortable on the bridge of a battlecruiser than in the middle of a ground battle.

  Chapter Three

  “Whoever these people were, they were pretty confident they’d knocked out the Tano air support,” Commander Alex Thompson noted over the com network. “Across three attacks, they had a grand total of four antiaircraft weapons, ser, and they were rockets. Not Kenmiri AA.”

  “Three attacks, Commander?” Henry asked. “I saw one as I lifted out, but I haven’t even made it to Raven yet.”

  Shuttle Two was in the middle of her deceleration burn, the thrust pressing Henry firmly back into his seat.

  “We were busy,” Thompson said. “First wave, the one you saw with the breaching charges, was the largest. Three hundred troops—but only a single AA rocket and no energy weapons among them.

  “The locals make a solid bullet-slinger, potentially better than ours, but it’s still just a bullet-slinger. The other two groups were nasty. Maybe three hundred between them, but they were the real push. All of them had real antiballistic body armor, and at least a quarter of each force had energy weapons.”

  “Any idea on the source for the beamers?” Henry asked.

  “We just finished repelling the last wave,” his subordinate pointed out. “The Center is secure. We’re still counting the damage.”

  “How bad?”

  “Need to confirm a couple of troopers where personal telemetry is gone,” the Commander said grimly. “Assuming they’re alive with damaged gear, forty-six wounded. No dead. Locals weren’t as lucky. They had good gear, but today was the first time many of the Center guards had seen the elephant.”

  That fit with what Kansa had told Henry. The only experienced troops the local government had were ex-enforcers for the Kenmiri. Janissary slave troops, the type the Kenmiri Warrior Caste had used for third-tier security and wasteful frontal assaults.

  The Tano didn’t trust them yet, which meant they’d been kept out of the capital city. The Kenmiri had used this city as an administrative center, and the Tano had taken over those facilities.

  The fact that the city—Arsena was the name, he thought—was an admin center also meant that it didn’t have the massive sky-poisoning factories of most of Tano’s other population centers. Arsena had been kept “clean,” but even there, the air burned the lungs for a non-local to breathe.

  Most of Tano’s cities required breath masks even for locals. The Kenmiri’s factory worlds had been operated with nothing remotely resembling environmental rules. So long as the air was breathable with moderate filtration, the worlds’ owners were happy.

  And if the air and soil ceased to be able to support food crops, well, that was a feature. Not a bug.

  “Hold the Center, Commander,” Henry told Thompson. “Have a team go through the enemy. See if you can ID any of the gear or any species we’re not expecting. Tano has seven major Ashall species making up the population, but if you see anyone else, I need to know.”

  “Like Kozun?” Thompson asked.

  “Yes,” he agreed flatly. “The locals think the First Voice’s people are behind this. I need confirmation, or the Initiative can’t do anything.”

  Not that the Initiative could do much even with confirmation. They had a surprisingly broad mandate outside the UPA’s borders, but Henry Wong was only too aware of how limited the resources they’d assigned to salvaging the empire they’d destroyed were.

  It was better than nothing. But it wasn’t going to be enough to save the five thousand stars the Kenmiri had cut loose from themselves, let alone the wannabe warlords like the First Voice of the Kozun.

  “We’re landing on Raven now,” he told Thompson. “Keep me and Iyotake informed. I’m expecting a second string to this bow.”

  The Vesheron would never have kicked off a local revolt without space support, and it was unlikely that there was outside support that hadn’t been one of the rebel factions.

  Hell, Henry Wong had worked with the First Voice in the past. It was only a question of time, and only the lack of the old subspace communicators had forced the attackers to rely on prearranged timing.

  “Skip signature,” a voice said in Henry’s internal network as he strode briskly through the corridors of his ship. Raven was three hundred meters long, which made the trip from the hangar to the bridge a job at the best of times.

  He wasn’t going to jog through his ship. Or run, for that matter. Anything above a brisk walk might imply to the crew that the captain wasn’t fully in control of the situation.

  “What are we looking at, Commander?” he asked. The conversation was silent. He knew from experience that he didn’t exhibit the visible concentration many people showed when they were talking through their internal network.

  “Still resolving,” Commander Okafor Ihejirika, his tactical officer, replied. “Looks like a minimum of four signatures, no more than eight. Nothing large enough to ping as a dreadnought, so we’re looking at escorts or home-builds.”

  The UPA had been unusual among the Vesheron in that they’d been outside the Kenmiri Empire. They’d been El-Vesheron, outsider rebels, and had brought fleets of their own ships. Most of the Vesheron had been internal rebels of the Empire and had fought with stolen Kenmiri designs.

  The Kenmiri only used three ship types: escorts, small laser and missile platforms that they’d built in near-infinite numbers to maintain order across ten thousand stars; gunships, slightly upsized escorts built around a single heavy plasma cannon; and dreadnought, much larger ships built around multiple heavy plasma cannon.

  Raven’s defenses meant she could easily handle four escorts. Eight escorts—or four gunships, for that matter—would be a bit more concerning.

  If they were looking at something someone had built in the fourteen months since the Kenmiri Empire had fallen, though, all bets were off.

  “Inform me if you resolve them before I reach the bridge,” Henry ordered. “Are we ready?”

  “All weapons and sensors are green,” Ihejirika confirmed calmly. “We are definitely looking at escort- or gunship-sized vessels, no more than six,” he continued. “They are now accelerating towards the planet at one kilometer per second squared. Range is ten light-seconds.”

  In theory, Henry could use his internal network and its ability to generate virtual reality around him to run Raven from anywhere aboard the ship. It degraded efficiency—and most importantly right now, he couldn’t do it while he was walking.

  “Moon,” he said aloud, connecting his network to his communications officer. “Do you have a link with the Tano defense forces? They’ve got to have something up here we can work alongside.”

  “There are definitely ships up here,” Lieutenant Commander Lauren Moon confirmed. “I’m having problems making a connection with whoever’s in charge. I’m not sure they know who’s in charge.”

  She paused.

  “I think there was some confusion before this even started,” she told him, “and while they’re not admitting it, I think the most likely person to be in charge was assassinated.”

  “Of course,” Henry accepted with a sigh. “All right. Hack their coms if you must, Commander. I want to be able to talk to everyone in orbit. Confirm with Ihejirika and Iyotake. I want to know how many local supports we can grab.”

  Most of the factories on Tano’s surface had been building starship parts for assembly in orbit. Much of it could have been done in orbit, Henry was sure, but that wasn’t the Kenmiri way.

  Given time, it would probably become the Tano way—with UPA help, if they wanted it—but what mattered right now was that while those yards had been intended for freighters, they could have easily been converted to build escorts. The locals should have warships.

  They were the lucky ones, after all. Only one factory world in three had the ability to build skip drives. Tano had clearly found some way to feed their people, too. If they hadn’t, well, fourteen months was long enough to run through the food supply of a world that couldn’t grow its own.

  That was a familiar train of thought, one practice and therapy allowed Henry to pull himself away from as he finally entered the bridge of his battlecruiser.

  “Captain on deck!” the GroundDiv guard standing by the door announced.

  “As you were,” Henry ordered. His rank was Colonel, but so long as he was aboard his ship, his title was Captain. That rank had never been included in the UPSF’s rank structure, reserved for the commander of a vessel regardless of their rank.

  His crew had known better than to turn their attention to him with potential hostiles in the battlespace. Their focus was on their consoles and the virtual augmentations their networks would be layering around them.

  The consoles had the key data, more than enough to fight the ship if the wireless network that linked the internal networks to the ship’s went down. But since they could add VR displays, Henry knew his people would be doing just that.

  Iyotake rose from the dais in the center of the bridge. Massive screens faced inward from both levels of the bridge, mirroring the displays on their other sides. The bridge had two levels, the “balcony” and the “pit,” but both were divided from the central command “bubble” by the two-sided screens.

  It separated the captain in a way Henry didn’t like, but it put all of the information in the captain’s line of sight and accessible to anyone who needed it. Confidential or secure information would be handled in private VR displays, but the battle- and time-tested screens carried every necessary function.

  Henry’s XO gestured him to the chair with its own set of secondary screens.

  “What have we got, XO?” Henry asked as he dropped into the seat, its systems automatically switching from Iyotake’s preferred display to his.

  The XO’s usual battle station was in CIC, but there was a spot for him in the bubble alongside the two observer seats.

  The broad-shouldered Native American man shrugged expressively at his boss.

  “You’ve been getting the same updates from Ihejirika I have,” he noted. “Four to six escorts or gunships, ten light-seconds and closing at one KPS squared.”

  “Cautious bastards, aren’t they?” Henry observed drily.

  If they were Kenmiri escorts, the unknown ships were capable of 1.2 KPS2. Their compensation wouldn’t be perfect, but they’d still only be looking at five subjective pseudogravities to pull that off.

  Raven, on the other hand, could only get up to 0.5 KPS2 before experiencing subjective thrust. Just to match the acceleration his potential enemies were showing would require his entire crew to report to the acceleration tanks to survive the twenty pseudogravities that would leak through.

  “Commander Ihejirika?” Henry said more loudly, using the network to send his voice to the tactical officer to make certain he was heard. “Do we have more data?”

  “Yes, ser,” the Nigerian officer replied. Earth natives like him and his captain were relatively rare in the UPSF, for all that Earth still made up forty percent of mankind.

  “We’re looking at five ships; all appear to be unmodified Kenmiri escorts,” the tactical officer laid out as the data updated on the screen. “I’m guessing they’re late. Our updates from the surface suggest that the Tano are getting the upper hand on everything, but these guys are still almost an hour from zero-zero in orbit.”

  “We’ll see if they withdraw,” Henry replied. “If they’re Vesheron or ex-Vesheron, they know they can’t fight Raven with five escorts.”

  “It depends on their orders, ser,” Iyotake noted. “Speaking of?”

  “Moon, what have we got for the locals?” Henry asked, nodding his understanding to his XO.

  “Not much,” his com officer said grimly. “I’ve got links to six orbital forts, but they’re standard Kenmiri defensive installations. If our unknowns are remotely competent, they can handle them easily enough. They’ll get hurt, but they can take them.”

  “That’s it?” Henry demanded. “These people should be able to build escorts, even assuming there was no one local with an ex-Kenmiri one in their hands.”

  “I’ve got codes for three squadrons of sublight fighters, looks like twenty-four ships,” Moon told him. “I can link you in.”

  Henry swallowed a sigh and nodded grimly.

  “Ihejirika.” He turned back to his tactical officer. “What have you got on the local fighter craft?”

  “Roughly equivalent to our Dragoons, but no gravity shields,” his subordinate reported. “Potentially better compensators, but…they’re TIEs, ser.”

  Henry wasn’t sure who had decided to drop that particular nickname on Vesheron starfighters. It had been a running joke in the prewar fighter corps, an organization he was probably the only person on his bridge old enough to understand, comparing the terrible unshielded pirate fighters that were the UPSF’s bread and butter to the cheap and expendable bad-guy fighters of the old movies.

  He’d found the joke a lot funnier when he was twenty, applying it to pirates and scum, than when he was past fifty and seeing it applied to allies. The comparison fit, though. His fighters had gravity shields and could take a lot of hostile fire before they went down.

  The local fighters couldn’t take a hit at all.

  “All right,” he finally decided. “Let’s get O’Flannagain and her people into space and get us moving out. If the local fighters decide to come with, we’ll slot them into the Commander’s networks.”

  He’d barely finished giving the order before his console informed him that Commander Samira O’Flannagain and her pilots had launched. Raven carried eight SF-122 Dragoon starfighters, mobile missile platforms capable of augmenting his alpha strike or carrying out independent long-range strikes.

  They couldn’t fight a battle on their own, but that wasn’t their job.

  “O’Flannagain, danger close formation,” Henry ordered. “For now, at least. You might get some new chicks as we move out.”