Raven's Peace Page 22
“That’s it, ser,” Ihejirika said, his voice small. “I’ve confirmed fourteen launchers. All were destroyed by nuclear scuttling charges after firing.”
“Colonel Song,” Henry called his engineer, his own voice surprisingly calm. “That was a kinetic warhead, not a nuke. There must be something you can retrieve from the wreckage. I want a team to retrieve it now.
“Commander O’Flannagain? I want your birds in the air now,” he continued as he flipped channels. “The missiles that made it through the shield are gone, but there’s four wrecked missiles out there. It doesn’t look like whoever fired them managed to access their guidance controls, so I’m hoping the safeguards are inoperable as well.
“I need you to catch me a dead missile, Commander,” he told her. “I need answers, and those missiles are the best source we’re going to have.”
No one was supposed to have icosaspatial grav-shield penetrator warheads except the UPSF. What he’d seen suggested that someone had retrieved the launchers and missiles from one of their destroyed ships…which wasn’t supposed to be possible.
And suggested all sorts of ugly scenarios down the line.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Ser?” Moon asked softly as the Restan destroyers began to slow down to assist Rigid Candor. “Candor’s coms are back online and Kahlmor is ordering the Restan to stand off.”
“I would too, in his place,” Henry admitted. “But I’m not dropping the gravity shield. We can’t tow him, so…”
“They are arguing the same thing and insisting they had nothing to do with this,” Moon confirmed. “They say they’re approaching with weapons offline.”
“Ihejirika?” Henry turned to tactical.
“Sensors confirm,” he said. “Should we send that to Candor?”
“Do it,” Raven’s Captain ordered. “Sanitize the data to as low a resolution as you can confirm the lack of weapons cha—”
“Candor is firing!”
It was a warning shot, Henry realized inside a second. For that second, he thought he was about to see the entire Vesheron disintegrate into open warfare right then.
The blast of plasma missed the two Restan ships by at least ten thousand kilometers, but they both adjusted their vectors away from the Londu battleship immediately.
“Get me a channel to Kahlmor,” Henry said. “And get that sanitized data packet for me.”
“On it,” his officers replied in chorus.
A moment later, a new icon popped up in the corner of his vision, and he mentally clicked on it to link into the channel.
“Lord of Ten Thousand Miles, we can confirm the Restan are approaching with weapons cold,” he said without preamble. “Beyond that, what is your status?”
The only visual on the channel was an avatar, a computer-generated image of the tall Londu officer as he chose to appear. He guessed that Rigid Candor’s bridge was visibly damaged. The Blades of the Scion would refuse to show weakness to anyone.
“Our status is less than optimal,” Kahlmor said slowly. “I have contacted Lord of Hundred Thousand Miles Intahlrahn via subspace, and she is on her way to retrieve us with the rest of the battle group.
“Let the rest of these so-called warriors think my engines are offline,” he continued. “If my weakness allows Saunt to draw our enemies out of the shadows, they will be sorely disappointed.”
Henry had a summary of Rigid Candor’s status as best as CIC could assess it running on his network. Only half her turrets were online, and the energy-screen projector was simply gone. His analysts figured she could get about a quarter of her engines back online, but they were raising questions around her inertial dampeners.
And her artificial gravity, which might also explain the avatar in the call. Candor was less damaged than her ballistic course toward Gathering Station implied, but far more damaged than Kahlmor was pretending to Henry.
“I will confirm with my Ambassador, but I should be able to maintain position on you until your battle group arrives,” he told Kahlmor. “I need to remain to retrieve my fighters anyway.”
“Your vessel is also damaged,” the Lord of Ten Thousand noted, his tone surprised. He probably hadn’t had time to look at anything outside his own hull since the first bomb went off. “What happened?”
There was no point in dissembling, not when Kahlmor’s ship had been right there. Sooner or later, he’d look at the sensor data and see what had happened.
“Whoever triggered this was in possession of several UPSF weapons,” Henry admitted. “My people are attempting to trace those. It may give us more clues than the collection of Kenmiri missiles and mines used for the rest of the attack.”
Kahlmor grunted.
“Any of us could have acquired Kenmiri missiles,” he agreed. “The mines…those are different.”
“We have encountered them before,” Henry said. “We just usually knew where they were. Mines are pretty useless in space, after all.”
“If you learn anything, the Blades of the Scion will be in your debt,” Kahlmor promised. “For now, Colonel Wong, I must attend to my ship.”
The channel cut and Henry leaned back in his chair.
“Did O’Flannagain catch anything?” he asked.
“It looks like one of the missiles might be intact enough to be worth retrieving,” Ihejirika reported. “She is vectoring in on it now.”
Of course the CAG was trying to do the damn fool stunt he’d ordered herself. Henry realized he needed to remember how rocket-jocks thought more often.
“Understood,” was all he said, though. “And our status? Colonel Song?”
“We got lucky,” his engineer told him bluntly. “Even a slightly steeper impact angle and that round would have punched right through the armor and ricocheted down the length of the ship’s interior.”
That was a mental image Henry probably could have lived without.
“As it is, we basically don’t have armor on the top of the ship’s core hull anymore,” Song continued. “I’ve got drones out looking, but you’re not going to find much of a weapon that impacted at over a thousand kilometers a second, ser. That kinetic energy became heat, and even if most of that heat got dispersed into our armor, the original projectile is in pieces at best.”
“I know,” Henry conceded. “Priority is the ship, but we need to know where they got those missiles.”
“We’ll see what we and the fighters get, and I’ll go over everything when we have the parts,” Song promised. “I can tell you one thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Henry asked.
“Ihejirika, your data shows that they all were off course after they emerged from their penetration skip, right?”
The tactical officer was silent for a few seconds.
“Yes,” he finally confirmed. “That’s why most of them missed…they were pointed directly at us, but once they’d skipped the shield, they were off course.”
“If they’d had the guidance systems online, the software was designed to compensate for that,” Song told them. “That’s means they were Gen Two or Gen Three missiles. I’d say Gen One, but Gen One was never deployed forward.
“It took three generations of design and analysis before we finally sorted out compensating for the gravity shear’s icosadimensional effect,” the engineer continued. “Gen Four missiles were the first that would emerge from their skip in a straight line from where they entered. Everything before that adjusted their impact angle to account for the divergence and was programmed for final adjustments in the terminal approach.”
“We started seeing Gen Four missiles eight years ago,” Henry said slowly. “I don’t think they were fully deployed through the Force until five years ago, though. We weren’t using penetrators, after all.”
His own magazines held sixth-generation grav-shield penetrators. In theory, the weapons would be almost as useful against energy screens and even heavy armor as they were against grav-shields, but the UPSF didn’t want to give anyone ideas
.
The one major advantage his missiles had over the ones he’d been shot with was that his weren’t kinetic weapons. Gen Six penetrators were the first to carry a condensed two-hundred-megaton fusion warhead.
“So, if we’re looking at Gen Three weapons, we could easily be seeing missiles stripped from any ship lost in the middle ten years of the war,” Song told him. “You know was well as I do that the grav-shield never made us invulnerable.”
“They also had the launchers, which means that a ship’s self-destruct protocols failed,” the Captain replied. “Fourteen launchers, too. That means at least two destroyers were taken somewhat intact by somebody.”
His guess was Drifters. He wasn’t going to go so far as to claim the Drifters were behind the attack, but he could definitely see them deciding that UPSF ship parts were worth enough to others to not even let the UPSF bid on them.
“What’s the ETA on the Lord of Hundred Thousand Miles and her battle group?” he asked.
“Two hours, twenty minutes,” Ihejirika replied. “Your orders?”
“We stand here like a friendly guard dog until Intahlrahn gets here, then we get back to Gathering Station,” Henry said. “Keep me in the loop. I’m going to call the Ambassador.”
“Are you all right, Henry?” Todorovich demanded the moment he had the subspace connection live. “Is your crew all right?”
“A few minor injuries, no severe casualties,” he told her. “I’ve had skips that were worse in terms of crew injury. Raven took a heavy hit, but it didn’t penetrate our armor.” He shrugged. “Warships are built to take a beating, Sylvia. We’re fine.”
“That’s good.” The sharp-faced woman shook her head. “The rest of this has the potential to turn into a goddamned clusterfuck, so I’m glad your ship is okay.”
“How bad?” Henry asked.
“The Restan are assigning everyone’s escorts new orbits, and the ambassadors are promptly freaking out,” she replied. “The ships are not only being set up at least a light-second from the station, they’re being set up at least a light-second from each other. That makes perfect sense to me, but a lot of people think they’re basically being accused of setting up the attack.”
“My suspect list only has three groups of people on it,” Henry said dryly. “The other however-many-hundred ambassadors present are in no danger from me.”
“Let me guess: the Restan, the Drifters, the Kozun?” Todorovich asked. “I’d honestly swap the Restan out for the Londu. Kahlmor seems straightforward enough, but Intahlrahn is a twisty one.”
“God.” He shook his head as he remembered the conversation with Kahlmor. “I don’t know about straightforward. The whole contest was apparently a setup to get me somewhere where Kahlmor could talk to me face to face and be entirely certain that no one was listening in.”
“So, of course you’re going to brief me over subspace,” the Ambassador said with a chuckle. “Because we don’t care about Londu paranoia.”
“They want the Isis Sector, Sylvia,” Henry said quietly. “All of it. Kahlmor wanted me to say, one way or another, whether we’d fight them.”
The call was silent.
“What did you tell him?” she finally asked.
“He told me that you could name your price for our support at the Gathering for that,” he said. “So, I told him the truth: we can’t fight them. Most of our soldiers would prefer to, but we cannot wage a war against the Londu.”
Todorovich nodded.
“Probably better. You lie better than most Force officers, I suspect, but the truth serves our purposes. If they want an entire sector…I have a shopping list.”
“They won’t be able to hold it,” Henry warned.
“Then I should make sure my shopping list is short-term, should I?” she asked. “I don’t know if the Gathering is going to work out for anyone at this point. Right now, there are sixty warships out there whose captains—and the ambassadors they report to—are arguing with their hosts over where they should be orbiting.
“No one is shooting yet, but from what I’m overhearing, there’s a lot of charged weapons systems out there…and not all the Vesheron like each other. Think you can get back here without igniting any new sparks of chaos?”
“I didn’t think my contest was going to turn this into a tinderbox,” he admitted.
“Oh, don’t give yourself so much credit,” Todorovich replied with a smile. “This was a jug of gasoline before that. Now people are just realizing what the jug they were hauling around was full of.
“Ambassador Saunt, Under-Speaker Sho Lavah and I are playing elder diplomat. I think we’ll have everyone calmed down in a day or two and ready to get back to the table…assuming nothing else goes wrong.”
“Well, I have one more spark that we’ll want to keep quiet as long as we can,” Henry admitted. “We didn’t have a shield blowthrough, Sylvia. They hit us with penetrator missiles. Fourteen of them.”
Todorovich’s response was silence and a gesture for him to continue.
“From what my engineers are telling me so far, they were definitely ours. Our missiles fired from our launchers. No ship, just launchers and an isolated power source. Best guess is early generation missiles stripped from a couple of the destroyers we’ve lost.
“Downside to that is that if a mythical someone got their hands on two destroyers, well…we can assume that seven launchers were lost to whatever damage took the destroyers out without triggering their self-destruct, but they should still have had thirty penetrator warheads in their magazines.
“Each.”
“The nukes and the conversion warheads would be irrelevant,” Todorovich said softly. “The computer cores should have slagged even if everything else failed, correct?”
“They didn’t seem to have access to the proper codes for the missiles,” he agreed. “They managed to bring them live and fire them with active penetrator systems, but the guidance systems were offline. I’d guess the ships were wrecked, but the overall self-destructs and the magazine security measures failed.”
“But someone out there probably has at least another dozen penetrator warheads…and as many as forty-five of them?” she asked.
“My hope would be that they only got the magazines from one ship,” Henry said. “But yeah. And I give you two guesses who I think at least found them, even if I figure they sold them rather than using them.”
“You know,” Todorovich said after a pause, “there was a time when having an available bunch of nomadic merchants with a grand total of one principle was useful.”
“It’s the same problem we’re going to have with the rest of the Vesheron, Sylvia,” Henry reminded her. “So long as we were all fighting the Kenmiri, it was fine.”
He brought up a hologram of the ships’ locations around Gathering Station above his desk.
“We’ve been moving you around to date on our standard shuttles,” he noted. “I have two heavy-duty insertion ships. Weaponry is modular; if we replace it with fuel tanks, one of them can reach Gathering Station in three hours, well before Raven can get back.
“The shuttles have gravity shields,” he told her. “I’m going to send it with a pair of fighters for escort. You’ll need to convince the Restan to let O’Flannagain’s birds dock.”
“It’s not going to happen, Henry,” she told him. “And trying is going to burn some of the goodwill I’ve been building by trying to keep things calm.
“Send the shuttle,” she agreed. “I’m not going to complain about having a near-invulnerable getaway vehicle on hand, but a pair of loose starfighters in the middle of this is just asking for trouble.”
“Sylvia, we’re four hours away,” he pointed out. “We should be underway in two, but that’s still six hours until Raven is back at the station. If things go to shit before we’re there…”
“I’ll deal. Even if everyone is arguing over moving orbits, they’re still outside easy weapons range of Gathering Station. If this falls apart, the amb
assadors will be the prize everyone is fighting over, not the target they’re shooting at.”
“I’m not sure I’d be so blasé,” he admitted.
“You’re the one with a warship. You should be the calm one,” she replied. “Send the shuttle, Henry. I’ll get the Restan to fuel it up, and I’ll have my people settle into our equivalent of your readiness one.
“If things fall apart, we’ll be on that shuttle in five minutes. We’ll be fine.”
“All right,” he conceded. She was assuming an external threat, but he had to live with what she was willing to do. This was, after all, her mission.
Right up until “things fell apart,” anyway.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Henry watched the icons of the returning fighters on his screen with a concealed sense of awe. The missiles hadn’t been moving that fast in the grand scheme of things, having been accelerating for only a handful of seconds when they were disabled, but when they’d lost acceleration, they’d done so violently.
That meant that Raven didn’t have a guarantee on exactly what moment the engines cut out—and even fractions of a second mattered at ten KPS2—and the impact itself had added an unknown random vector.
Ihejirika had localized probability zones for three of the four missiles he’d shot down, but even those were simply identifying the haystack the needle was in.
O’Flannagain and her people had found two of the needles. The CAG herself had matched vectors with the more violently spinning one and caught it with tow cables.
“There’s a reason we don’t catch missiles, ser,” Ihejirika noted. “That was damn impressive flying on our people’s part.”
“It was,” Henry confirmed. “I’m not the pilot I once was, but I can still manage a fusion rocket better than some.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have done that.”
He watched the icons from the bridge for a moment more, then shook his head again.