Raven's Peace Page 23

  “I’m going to go meet O’Flannagain on the deck,” he told his bridge crew. “Iyotake has the con.”

  Once on the deck, automated movement systems closed around the spherical starfighter. They whisked it into its bay as the craft’s internal systems moved the “coffin” to the exterior and opened the accessway.

  Commander Samira O’Flannagain emerged from the goop of her acceleration tank clad in a head-to-toe bodysuit and helmet. The helmet came off as soon as she was outside the tank, taken by a waiting FighterDiv support tech.

  Henry was waiting as the helmet was removed and gave the woman a crisp salute.

  “Ser!” she greeted him, returning the salute.

  “Commander,” he replied. “Well done. I saw the vector data on those missiles.”

  “Neither is in great shape, ser,” she reminded him. “I figured we needed both if we were going to track anything useful from them.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “Two half-wrecked missiles are worth a hell of a lot more than one. The missile Gaunt brought home? Decently clean vector, for all that Ihejirika’s people put a laser through its engines.

  “But you forget that I can fly that ball of metal behind you,” Henry continued. “I’d have gone after the missile Gaunt did, because that one was possible. The one you pulled in? That was impossible, Commander.”

  “Nothing is impossible, ser. Not to a pilot with something to prove.” She smiled. “You know that, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I do,” he confirmed. “You shouldn’t have done it, Commander, and it’s enough of a bad look on the CAG that I can’t officially condone or commend what you did. Understood?”

  “Yes, ser,” she said crisply, the smile fading.

  Henry had, however, stopped at the officers’ mess on the way down. The bottle of brandy was the most expensive the ship had in stock, probably the single best liquor on the entire warship, and even his mess account had cringed at its acquisition.

  He pulled it out from behind his back and offered it to her.

  “Raven’s Captain cannot commend you for taking the risk or condone the CAG showing off like that,” he repeated as she stared at the bottle. “But that missile may make sorting this whole mess out a hell of a lot easier. So, consider this a gift from Colonel Wong. Am I understood, Commander?”

  “Ser, yes, ser!” she said crisply.

  She paused after taking the bottle. She studied it for a few seconds, then chuckled and passed it to the same tech who’d taken her helmet.

  “Get that in my locker, PO,” she told the woman. “There’ll be another time for it, I think.” The tech obeyed and the two officers had a moment in private.

  “I get the full lecture, ser,” she conceded. “CAG shouldn’t have done it, but I was the only pilot there who could. I owe it to my people not to take risks like that…but I owed it to Raven to make sure that missile came home.”

  The full lecture, indeed. It seemed that Commander O’Flannagain might be at a vastly reduced risk of being beached when this tour was over. If it took an ex-pilot as her Captain to show her how to be a better officer, well…

  It wouldn’t be the first time Henry Wong had hand-reared an officer worth the time.

  “I’m going to see what Song makes of your prizes,” he told her. “Go get cleaned up, Commander.” He paused, considering the situation back at Gathering Station.

  “We’re holding the ship at readiness two, but I want your pilots at one,” he told her. “This system is a time bomb in a tinderbox, and I’m not sure it’s a question of if it’s going to blow up…or when.”

  “Understood, ser. Raven’s starfighters will be ready for your orders!”

  The missiles had been aboard for less than ten minutes by the time Henry located the workshop Song and her people were working in, but they’d already been dismantled and spread across the entire space.

  It was easy to pick out the missile that had hit Raven. For one thing, there wasn’t as much of it left, and what was left was in far smaller pieces.

  “Anything useful yet?” he asked. “I know it’s only been a few minutes, so I’m not expecting miracles.”

  Song removed her head from inside the chassis of one of the missiles.

  “I saw what O’Flannagain pulled to get this one,” she said, rapping the casing with her fist. Around her, a dozen senior chiefs continued tearing into components of the three-meter-long weapons.

  “It was dumb, but we all figured it would be worth it,” he told her.

  “Yeah, well, it’s the reason I have anything for you,” Song replied. “First thing I looked for was serial numbers. The one that hit us? Fuck-all. The other two both have about sixty percent of an intact serial number.

  “I don’t have a full number for you, but two partials should be enough for LogDiv to flag which ship they’re from,” the engineer continued. “That’s a phone-home job.”

  “But it’s the most likely way to find out where these missiles came from,” Henry agreed. “Any sign of tampering?”

  “One of them had an active black-box protection system we had to disable,” Song told him. “So, that actually says they didn’t tamper. With these particular missiles, at least.”

  “How could they fire them, then?” he asked.

  “Engine protocols are pretty universal,” the engineer said. “Hand me any missile built on the Kenmiri design and I can make the engine fire. The penetrator warhead is initialized by the launcher tube and triggered by detecting a shear field.”

  “Guidance computers would be the only part they’d actually have to crack?” he asked.

  “Exactly. And those are protected by the same black-box protection system as the penetrator system. When we bought Kenmiri missiles from other Vesheron, we just yanked the entire guidance computer system and installed a new one. With the protection system, they couldn’t do that.”

  “Hence, straight-line fire at point-blank range,” Henry concluded.

  “Exactly. It’s a great way to use a weapon you can’t control. But ser? They couldn’t know the warhead would engage.”

  “Another damn test?” he asked.

  “It looks like,” she confirmed. “Someone is playing with our stolen systems and gear they’ve built themselves to fuck with our grav-shielded units.”

  “It’s nice to be feared, I suppose. I think I preferred being invincible.”

  “Sorry ser, but it looks like somebody is determined to pierce our magic armor,” the engineer replied. “I can’t tell you who from this. I can confirm what I’m sure you already guessed: the missiles and mines are Kenmiri design, if not necessarily Kenmiri construction. We have the same damn birds in our magazines, and while we don’t carry mines, I could fabricate them in three days.”

  “And so could any other engineering department aboard the escorts gathered here, I presume?” Henry asked.

  “Exactly. The rest of the weapons are going to be useless for tracking anything. We’ll dig into these guys and see if there’s anything else, but LogDiv should at least be able to identify which ship those two missiles were issued to.”

  “I’m impressed, Colonel Song,” Henry told her. “Raven’s crew has done me proud, I have to say.”

  She snorted.

  “Say that again once this mess is over. I’m not in charge of it, but even I can see how this can blow up in our face.”

  “So long as my ship can get us back to Gathering Station in the same four hours we got here in, I’m happy, Colonel Song. I’ll go talk to LogDiv.

  “Let’s see if the folks back home have an answer for us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Any bureaucracy is inherently specialized. There are things it does well and things it does poorly and slowly. Military bureaucracy is even more so. Getting missiles from point A to point B to make sure the ships on the sharp end had weapons? The UPSF had that down to a science.

  Finding someone able to track down where a specific missile had ended up? That apparent
ly took longer. Between Henry, Lauren Moon and half a dozen Chief Petty Officers, it still took them over two hours to finally track down someone who thought they could answer his question.

  “This is Colonel Borghild Holst,” the slim woman who finally ended up on the other side of the subspace channel introduced herself. “My team tells me that you’re trying to track a specific pair of missiles, Captain Wong.”

  “I am, Colonel Holst,” he confirmed. “They’re ours. And someone fired them at me.”

  “That’s not supposed to happen,” she told him. “And you retrieved them intact?”

  “That’s also not supposed to happen,” Henry agreed. “They were gravity-shield penetrator missiles, Colonel. My understanding is that we have multiple layers of safeguards to make sure those don’t end up in unexpected hands.”

  “All safeguards can fail,” the logistics officer said softly. “What do you have?”

  “Partial serial numbers from the chassis of two missiles that we shot down before they impacted the gravity shield,” he told her. “Scan data from their performance as well; we managed to break them down as being either Gen Two or Gen Three warheads.”

  “That suggests they’ve been in somebody else’s hands for a long time,” Holst said distantly. “I see the numbers here. Running the analysis now.” She shook her head. “Even restricting it to Gen Two and Three gives me a thousand possibles for each missile, Captain Wong. Let me try something—”

  For a moment, the connection disintegrated into static. Holst’s voice was unintelligible, and static rippled through the image.

  “Colonel?”

  “I’m here,” Holst replied. “Are you? That was strange. I’ve never seen distortion on a subspace channel before.”

  “Neither have I,” he admitted. “That’s a LogDiv problem, isn’t it?”

  “Not my departme—” She disintegrated into static.

  “Colonel Holst?

  “That is very strange,” the LogDiv officer said. “But I’ve got your source, Colonel Wong. Most likely, your missiles came from Adelaide. She was an escort destroyer backing up Lynx in the Ra-Nineteen System eight years ago. Lynx was the only ship to make it back out of a five-ship strike group. If one or more of the destroyers had a self-destruct failure, well…four destroyers could have given a salvage party the launchers they used against you.”

  “Eight years?” Henry considered. “I thought Ra-Nineteen was blockaded.”

  “I can’t speak to that,” Holst responded. “I’m a logistics officer, Captain. The only time I’ve been in Kenmiri space was running the supply division on a LogDiv munitions collier. I don’t—”

  The entire transmission dissolved into static. Voice. Image. Everything suddenly cascaded into a distorted mess that got worse by the second. Henry winced back from the noise, reaching for the cutoff switch.

  Then the distortion stopped…and someone else appeared.

  Something else.

  Henry Wong had fought the Kenmiri for seventeen years. He could identify a Kenmiri Artisan on sight. The holographic creature now standing above his desk looked like an ant scaled to roughly six feet tall.

  The creature’s multipart torso was covered with a heavy carapace, bright red to mark its caste. Unlike an Earth ant, the Kenmiri only had four limbs with a clearly visible skeleton under the darker skin there.

  “You are all fools,” the Artisan said in flat Kem. “If you have stolen this frequency, you understand this tongue. You do not understand what you have done. You have thought this was yours to use, freely, without question or debate.

  “It was not. This was the great artifice of the Empire, the subspace network we built to connect our worlds and those we saved. And you petty children thought you could steal it without consequence. Without consequence.

  “When your rebellion was meaningless, we ignored your intrusion onto our network. Now our Mothers are dead. You have brought fire and death to our sacred crèches and destroyed our ancestors and our future.

  “This intrusion will no longer be tolerated. Your lies, deception and violence will no longer be tolerated.

  “We have abandoned the outer provinces. We no longer care what occurs there. But if you enter the stars where we remain, we will burn your ships to ashes. We will unleash arsenals like you have never seen and we will bring your stolen worlds and stolen stars down around you.

  “And we will no longer permit your violation of our network. Scrabble in the dark like the primitives you are and understand what you threw aside.”

  The image vanished and a new icon appeared. It was an icon Henry hadn’t even thought was programmed into the subspace communicators.

  No Signal.

  He was on his feet and heading for the bridge before the system finished powering down.

  “Commander Moon,” he snapped as he entered the bridge. “Status report. What the hell happened to our subspace coms?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “They’re just…gone. It’s not just like we’re not receiving a return signal from home. It’s… It’s like the transmission medium is gone. We’re trying to send signals, but there’s nothing to send them on.”

  “That’s impossible,” Henry replied, but a chill ran down his spine as he considered what the Kenmiri had said. Subspace communicators used an odd layer of space, one that defied most theories and acted like the hyperspace of fiction. Insufficiently stable for a vessel, it allowed instantaneous communication across the galaxy. “Unless…”

  “I think that Kenmiri was telling the truth, ser,” Moon said quietly. “We always knew that subspace was weird, but we assumed it was a natural phenomenon. I… I think it’s possible it was artificial all along.”

  “And they just shut it down,” he concluded. “How bad, Commander?”

  “We don’t have an alternative interstellar communication system, ser,” she reminded him. “I mean…the USSF and the Imperatorskiy Flot both used automated skip drones, but that was a security measure since subspace coms were new and no one was sure how secure they were. The last time anyone used a courier or a drone was the Unity War.”

  “And that was a hundred years ago,” Henry said. “I know there are couriers out there for high-speed physical deliveries, but that’s not going to be enough. If we don’t have subspace coms anymore…”

  “The UPA itself is in danger,” Moon finished for him. “Ser…what do we do?”

  “We complete the mission,” Henry told her. He stepped away from the communications console, moving around the screens to reach the center of the bridge, where Iyotake was currently in command.

  He traded nods with his dark-haired XO, and Iyotake abandoned the Captain’s seat for him.

  The entire bridge was paying attention to him now, and Henry swallowed a grimace as he forced himself to calmly activate the all-hands channel.

  “All hands, all hands, this is Captain Wong speaking,” he announced. “Rumor travels faster than the speed of light, so I imagine many of you are already aware of the latest complication in matters.

  “As of ten minutes ago, the subspace communication network is down. It appears to have been either disabled or jammed by the Kenmiri. We are not certain which, but what is important is that we, here in Resta, have no ability to communicate with the UPA.”

  He paused for a second to let that sink in. He could feel the concern of the bridge crew around him, and he knew he needed to head off real panic before it took hold.

  “This does not change our mission,” he told his crew. “It adds both complexity and urgency to our actions, but our mission remains the same: support Ambassador Todorovich’s presence at the Gathering and bring her and her people home safely.

  “We are four weeks from home. That has not changed. The ships that ply the trade lines back home haven’t disappeared. The UPA will maintain communication and shipping links at home without us. They cannot shape the safe future of the former Kenmiri provinces from ther.

  “Ambassador Todorovich,
with our help, can. She needs us here. That is our mission. And I have full confidence in the crew and officers of UPSV Raven to rise to these new challenges and overcome them.

  “We have enemies here who just tried to kill us. The Ambassador is secure but arguably in danger. Our focus must be on the here and now. We must have faith in our comrades back home, that they will meet this challenge as we will meet ours.

  “Now. Return to your duties. We will be setting out for Gathering Station in the next few minutes. Do so with the certainty that a communication failure does not mean that home is having any more problems than they were having fifteen minutes ago.

  “Do so with the certainty that your Captain knows you are the best damn crew in the Space Force!”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Henry’s speech seemed to have settled his bridge crew, at least, but that seemed to be the only thing settled down in the entire star system.

  “The Londu battle group just went to emergency deceleration,” Ihejirika reported. Somehow, despite no one having officially called battle stations, all of Henry’s senior officers were at their posts on the bridge.

  “They don’t have acceleration tanks,” Bazzoli said. “That…means they’re taking a good eight gees straight up.”

  “And Rigid Candor just brought her engines back up. Point three KPS2,” the tactical officer added. “Assuming they’re going to match velocities…yeah.”

  “Tactical?” Henry demanded.

  “They’re leaving, ser,” Ihejirika reported. “I’m guessing Saunt’s already aboard the cruiser Intahlrahn is flying her flag from. Their vector is heading directly out-system toward Londu space.”

  “It’s more than a coms failure,” Henry realized aloud. “A lot of these ambassadors don’t actually have the authority to act on their own. Todorovich had it out of tradition as much as anything else, but she has it.