Raven's Peace Page 21

  “We keep assuming that,” Raven’s Captain noted. “Has anyone asked the Kenmiri what they think of no longer being a factor?”

  “They have abandoned almost seven thousand stars to their fates. The remnants of their empire have a lifetime measured in decades at most, but even those remnants have retreated entirely from twelve sectors.

  “The Kenmiri remnant will cause problems in the future, but we must establish the fate of those abandoned stars now.”

  “That is what the Gathering is about, is it not?” Henry asked. “That’s what those diplomats and ambassadors are discussing.”

  “My Scion has committed vast resources to this war,” Kahlmor replied softly. “He will demand his price now, and I must know whether the UPA will fight us.”

  And there it was. The flat question of whether the United Planets Alliance would fight the Londu for the other Vesheron. Henry knew that answer. He didn’t like it, but he knew it—and he knew it wasn’t his place to give it.

  “That is a question for ambassadors, I think,” he said, slowly and carefully to make sure his intent transferred across languages. Fluent as everyone sent to the Gathering was in Kem, it was still a barrier that everyone was negotiating in a second language.

  “And the answer will depend on what price the Scion desires,” he admitted.

  “The sector you call Isis,” Kahlmor said. “All of it.”

  Henry stared in silence for several seconds, even his control of his emotions and expressions broken by that shock.

  “That is five hundred star systems,” he replied. “At least sixty inhabited worlds. There are over a dozen ambassadors here at the Gathering from those systems. You lack the ships and the soldiers to secure five hundred stars.”

  “Not all at once, no,” Kahlmor agreed. “Some of those worlds have already agreed to join us voluntarily. Others will kneel if the rest of the Vesheron will not support their stand. And if Terra stands aside, the rest of the Vesheron will not fight us without you.”

  Henry knew the UPA was prepared to surrender the hundred star systems they’d expected the Scion to chase. To…well, to betray their allies in those systems, if he was going to be honest with himself.

  But to freely yield five hundred star systems and somewhere in the region of eighty billion sapient beings to an expansionist empire…

  “I cannot answer that question, Lord of Ten Thousand Miles,” he told the Londu.

  “You hesitate, Colonel Wong,” Kahlmor suggested. “We both know that the Isis Sector will fall to the Blades of the Scion. The Vesheron here, the non-Vesheron scraps in Isis, they lack the ships and the will to stand against us.

  “And if we do not secure the sector, those five hundred stars and sixty worlds will descend into chaos and anarchy. If those worlds yield without a fight, they will only benefit from our rule,” the soldier continued. “You have already seen this on your journey here. Without the Kenmiri to stand against, the Vesheron will shatter. This Gathering will fail. The strong must maintain order or the weak will suffer.

  “The diplomats can phrase it how they wish, but you and I? We are soldiers. We understand that there must be ships and warriors to guard the innocent from the evil. Scattered and disunified, a few honorable Vesheron squadrons cannot turn back the night. Only governments and fleets can replace the Kenmiri Empire in providing peace.

  “Here, the Restan will do it. In Apophis, Trintar. Ra? You, I presume. But Isis has no home for the Vesheron, no government already risen from the ashes to command their loyalty and shape their power to the betterment of all people.”

  Henry shook himself.

  “You would replace one foreign ruler and enslaver with another,” he pointed out. “There is providing security for a region, and there is conquering it…and your Scion clearly plans the latter.”

  “It is the price we must demand,” Kahlmor said softly. “And I must know, Colonel Wong, if I should expect that you and I will meet across the field of battle. Here? Now? This is not a question of price. We both know that the UPA’s support would turn the tide of what my Scion wants.

  “Your aid would bring a dozen worlds to bend the knee without bloodshed. Save tens of thousands of lives. My Scion’s orders are clear: your Ambassador may name her price. But we must know your answer.”

  “If it were up to me, we would defy you,” Henry finally said. “Were it my will, you would face our fleets at every star. At every front, our carriers and battlecruisers would hammer you back. We would teach you that tyrants always fail and empires always fall.”

  The shuttle was silent, Kahlmor clearly as taken aback by Henry’s words as Henry had been by his.

  “But it is not up to me,” Colonel Henry Wong of the United Planets Space Force said, his voice suddenly tired and small. “And all the will in the universe will not conjure warships or fuel from nothing.

  “Is that the answer you seek, Lord of Ten Thousand Miles Kahlmor? The United Planets will not oppose you. Saunt and Todorovich can establish what our price looks like, but we will not fight you.”

  He shook his head.

  “We cannot fight you.”

  “And that is why we have to act,” Kahlmor said, his voice gentle. “Because you are not alone in your limits, and my Scion will not stand by and watch chaos consume the Kenmiri Empire. We can act to control the Isis Sector and protect the people there. We seek citizens and brothers, not slaves.”

  “You say that now,” Henry replied. “But my people have known tyrants and empires in the past. They always fail. It’s only a question of how many people they kill on their way down.”

  The shuttles separated, Kahlmor’s whisking the Londu back to Rigid Candor like he hadn’t just broken Henry’s illusions with a hammer. Henry’s own shuttle made its own way back to Raven while he sat in the cargo bay and studied a holographic map of the stars.

  UPA Intelligence’s best guess was that the Great Scion of the Londu commanded eighty battleships and two hundred or so escorts. They had a surprisingly solid idea of the industrial capacity and population of the hundred stars the Londu already claimed and their fourteen inhabited worlds.

  Without imposing conscription or any drastic demands, UPA Intelligence estimated the Londu could field somewhere in the region of fifty to a hundred million ground soldiers. It would strain their economy for them to do so, but the Scion was a near-absolute monarch.

  If he wanted to invade and conquer the Isis Sector, he could bankrupt his nation trying. He might even pull it off…but he could also end up making the situation in the Isis Sector worse and feeding the whole disaster back into Londu space.

  But there was nothing Henry could do. Without writing new temporary funding agreements that dramatically expanded upon what had been provided for the last decade of the war, the UPA couldn’t afford to field a fleet that could match the Londu’s.

  Their best option was to support them at the Gathering, hoping to reduce bloodshed and score major concessions in terms of future trade with the soon-to-be-dramatically-larger Londu Imperium.

  “We’ll be back aboard in a few minutes, ser,” the pilot informed him. “Anything you need us to do?”

  “Lock down the recordings from the cargo bay,” he ordered. “They’re to be double-encrypted and transferred to Raven’s systems under my personal seal. Once they’re transferred, wipe them from the shuttle’s memory.”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, ser. As you order.”

  The whole meeting was a ticking bomb, and he was going to lob it to Ambassador Todorovich before he even told his superiors.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Back on Raven’s bridge, Henry began to feel slightly more in control of the situation.

  “Do we have a course out?” he asked Bazzoli. “Or are we following the same path we came in on?”

  “There is a second set of beacons to guide us out,” his navigator replied. “It’s a much straighter route.”

  “Rigid Candor is getting underway now
,” Ihejirika reported. “A nice gentle point four KPS squared.”

  “That’s practically an invitation,” Henry said with an only partially forced chuckle. “Let’s take the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles up on it. Position us ten thousand klicks behind her, watching her back.”

  “On it, ser.”

  He settled back in his seat and studied the Londu battleship. Eighty of those versus twenty-four UPA battlecruisers…he wasn’t entirely convinced it was an unwinnable fight. Being able to beat the massed Londu fleet in open combat, though, didn’t enable the UPA to magically get that fleet to the Isis Sector or force that fleet engagement.

  It wasn’t his call. It had never been his call, but Henry still felt dirty for having been the one to admit to the Londu that the UPA wouldn’t stop their conquest of sixty new worlds.

  Mostly to distract himself, he started to go over their course out of the asteroid cluster. From inside the swarm of radioactive rocks, they couldn’t see much outside of it. Few of the rocks were big enough or close enough together to really stop Raven bringing up the grav-shield and taking the shortest route out. On the other hand, these particular radioactive rocks were probably rather valuable to the Restan, and shattering asteroids your hosts wanted to mine was rude.

  The route they’d been given took them off the shortest course back toward Gathering Station by enough to dodge around a denser zone of the cluster that was hard to scan into even from this close.

  It would keep them safe, which was important for Rigid Candor, but they were still passing close to the cluster, and something about it was making him nervous.

  “Commander Ihejirika, can you give that cluster a focused radar pulse?” he ordered, tossing the location he was studying over to the tactical console. “And get me a radiation breakdown. Ten thousand kilometers should be plenty of distance, but let’s be sure.”

  It would take a star to be dangerous at ten thousand klicks, not an asteroid of heavy metals, but the jamming effect was making him nervous—

  “Threat alert!” Ihejirika barked. “Fuck. Those are anti-radiation targeting systems! I have multiple missile signatures inbound from the cluster!”

  “Get the shield up,” Henry snapped. “Lasers out. Spin up all the reactors—but drain those capacitors. Battle stations!”

  They were farther away than whoever had laid the trap had been hoping, he noted absently. Even at the missiles’ ten KPS2, fifty thousand kilometers was over ninety seconds’ flight time.

  It should only take ninety seconds to get the grav-shield up, but unprepared response times on Raven still weren’t where he thought they should be.

  Defensive lasers under bridge control were their first line of defenses, and those were online in forty seconds. With the active radar quiet now, the missiles had to use their own sensors to aim, which helped target them.

  There were still at least thirty of them targeting his ship, and he didn’t have a grav-shield yet.

  “Rigid Candor is maneuvering to light up the cluster, but they’re out of position to shoot at the missiles coming at us,” Iyotake noted. “They are charging their main guns, targeting the cluster. They’ll fire about as the missiles reach us.”

  “They won’t reach us,” Ihejirika said grimly as the first half-dozen red icons vanished from the display. “It’s the fighter missile problem. Short range means low terminal velocity, and we weren’t moving fast enough to make up the difference.”

  More missiles died. As the weapons flashed toward Raven, they started disappearing faster and faster…and then the shield came up.

  “Grav-shield online,” Lieutenant Henriksson reported, the engineering relay officer relaxing as she spoke.

  “Six missiles converted,” Ihejirika reported. “No shield failure. We’re clear, ser.”

  “From that round,” Henry replied. “What did the radar sweep get us, Okafor?”

  They’d been so focused on the missiles that had lit up in response to their radar, they’d missed the rest of the trap. Fortunately, they weren’t alone in this mess, and Rigid Candor had also picked up the reflections from their radar pulse.

  Unfortunately, Rigid Candor’s main heavy plasma cannon paid for their lighter profiles and greater flexibility with longer initial warmup times. A Kenmiri dreadnought might have been able to fire before the mines realized the ARAD missiles had fired, woke up their own sensors, located their targets and detonated.

  The Londu battleship fired before most of them detonated. Dozens of laser mines were vaporized, but at least ten triggered. Nuclear warheads flared in the dark of the void, feeding X-ray lasers that stabbed deep into Rigid Candor’s hull.

  “Report, is Candor still with us?” Henry asked as new scarlet details flashed across the icon of the other capital ship.

  “Her energy screen took the worst of it, but it’s offline now,” Ihejirika reported. “She’s bleeding atmosphere and fuel, and at least half her turrets went offline with the energy screen. Energy signatures suggest she just emergency-scrammed multiple reactors.”

  “Please tell me that was everything,” Raven’s Captain snapped.

  “It looks like Rigid Candor swept the cluster clean, but…I wouldn’t have set this up with only one round of weapons,” his tactical officer replied.

  “Right. Keep the shield up, keep us at battle stations,” Henry ordered. “Bazzoli, swing us out in front of Rigid Candor. Ihejirika, once we’re out in front of them, start hitting every cluster between us and empty space with the hardest radar pulses we have. I want to be able to tell the damn Restan which asteroids out here are the best places to start mining, am I clear?”

  “Understood, ser.”

  The battlecruiser dashed forward as Henry studied the situation. There was at least one more cluster that their route had been intended to take them around. It wasn’t as dense as the first, which limited how much weaponry could be concealed in it.

  It was still suspicious to him. He was going to have some long conversations with the Resta. Speaking of which…

  “Where are the Restan destroyers?” he demanded.

  “They just brought their engines online,” Ihejirika reported. “They were headed back to Gathering Station. They appear to have flipped and are heading back to us at maximum acceleration. I’d like to think they’re coming to help.”

  “They probably are,” Henry conceded. “Are we seeing anything in that last cluster on our path? Bazzoli, can we detour around it?”

  “We could,” the navigator confirmed. “We wouldn’t get a lot of distance, but we could probably put at least a hundred thousand kilometers between it and us. Rigid Candor, on the other hand, is currently ballistic.

  “They’re going to cut within fifteen thousand kilometers, and there’s nothing we can do until they get their engines back online.”

  Henry swallowed a curse.

  “All right,” he said calmly. “Hold the shield and take us right at that cluster with full evasive maneuvering. If sensors aren’t picking up anything, let’s give whatever is hiding there something to see.”

  If there was one more jaw to this trap, he was going to let it close on his ship. The odds that whatever it was could punch through his grav-shield were low. He could be wrong on that assessment—and he’d pay for it if he was—but he had to act.

  “And now is when we find out how many of those grav-shield disruptors the Drifters sold,” Iyotake’s voice murmured over his internal network. “And if they’ve improved the design.”

  “You think this was the Drifters?” Henry asked. Their conversation was functionally silent, a network-to-network connection linked through the ship’s systems.

  “My guess? Kenmiri-built weapons someone bought from the Drifters,” his XO replied. “The Drifters don’t pick sides; I doubt we’re somehow on their hit list.”

  “Someone with a Drifter Convoy made a deal with First Warlord Deearan,” Henry reminded Iyotake as they closed with the second cluster.

  “Someone aboard a Drift
er Convoy made a deal,” the younger man replied. “Didn’t have to be one of them. A lot of people rent space on those convoys, everything from passage to entire covert research facilities.”

  “Hell, we did the latter,” Henry admitted. “Let us tear apart Kenmiri weapons without risking our own ships or worlds—and they rented us people with the expertise to help us do it without risking theirs, either.”

  The UPSF had paid the Drifters a vast quantity of platinum, gold, uranium and plutonium over the years of the war. They’d bought everything from fuel to missiles to medical care for injured crewmen.

  Henry had always known the Drifters would take anyone’s money, but that hadn’t really been a problem when everyone they would work with was fighting the same enemy.

  “There is something in that cluster,” Ihejirika reported. “I’m not sure… Missile launch. Multiple missile launches. Ser—they had military-grade launchers in there. UPSF launchers!”

  Everyone might be using the same missiles, but only a few of the Vesheron were able to build fully functional missile launchers. Kenmiri launchers, and their homebuilt equivalents, added a thousand kilometers per second to the initial velocity of the missile.

  There was enough variety in the energy signatures and final velocity for Henry to completely trust Ihejirika’s assessment. And if they were UPSF missile launchers…

  “Double those evasi—”

  They were only twenty thousand kilometers away. The missiles’ acceleration was basically irrelevant—and the sparkle of warning lights on his screen told him his worst-case scenario was true.

  Ten missiles made it through the defenses to the gravity shield…and vanished. Fractions of a second later, their icosaspatial skip ended and they reappeared.

  Inside Raven’s defenses.

  Bazzoli had already been evading. For all that they’d been accelerating at ten KPS2 the whole way, the missiles had essentially been fired dumb.

  Seven missed. Two, despite all odds, were shot down in the final fractions of a second before impact.

  The last missile hit at an angle, failing to penetrate into the inner hull but dragging a long gouge along the top of the battlecruiser before finally stopping near the engines.