Raven's Peace Page 25

  “Ser?”

  “We still have to let them fire the first shot,” Henry told the broad-shouldered black officer. “We need to look reasonable and rational, even after the situation has gone to pot.”

  “If I may ask, ser, why?” the tactical officer demanded. “There’s a dreadnought headed for us. Without adjusting their course, they’ll pass within a hundred thousand kilometers of us. The money is better than even that that dreadnought has already killed a ship today.

  “Why are we playing nice when they’ve already killed people?”

  The tactical officer was following his orders even as he asked. There was time for the question, unless the dreadnought started launching missiles. Henry could have shut the officer down…but tactical officers became XOs became Captains. Someday down the line, Okafor Ihejirika might have to face the same decision.

  “We’re playing to two audiences here, Commander Ihejirika, and neither of them is on that dreadnought,” Henry told him. “One is back home. Every scrap of this day is going to be examined under a microscope, and how we react, what we do, will define how the UPSF’s proposals on dealing with this new galaxy are treated.

  “The second audience is the Restan. They’re panicking and they’re afraid. We need them to start letting the diplomats go, but right now, they’re being too paranoid. Someone they trust has to make them do it…which, since the Londu ran and everyone else started shooting at each other, means us.

  “Which means we cannot risk that trust, Commander Ihejirika. We will take these bastards’ best hit to make us look reasonable and respectable. And then you are going to blow them into next fucking week. Understood?”

  “Yes, ser. Thank you, ser.”

  The range was at six hundred thousand kilometers. It was a question of nerve now. Did Kal Rojan understand space battle well enough—or trust his captain well enough—to know that closing to a hundred thousand kilometers without changing his course gave him the best first shot?

  And if he did understand that, would the terrorist turned assassin turned right-hand man of the Kozun’s ruler have the nerve to hold that long?

  “Bazzoli,” Henry called his navigation officer’s attention gently. “We’re going to hold course until they fire, and then this is what we’re going to do…”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The silence was eerie. Henry was used to subspace coms flying all around during combat, the Vesheron communicating with each other and occasionally flinging insults back and forth with the Kenmiri.

  Kenmiri Warriors were not known for being reticent and humble, after all.

  With the subspace coms gone, everything was limited by lightspeed and radio waves again, and the other ship wasn’t bothering to respond to Raven’s transmissions.

  “I can’t even get a handshake protocol,” Moon admitted. “I think they’re Kozun, but they’ve shut their radio transmitters down completely.”

  “They don’t want to talk to us and they aren’t aborting their intercept course,” Henry concluded. “Range, Commander Ihejirika?”

  “Three hundred thousand kilometers…now.”

  Henry caught himself holding his breath and released it. That was a bad idea when under twenty gravities, even if the drugs and the tank and the virtual reality made it possible to ignore his body to a point.

  They were now in weapons range. Raven would take just over nine seconds to flip and bring the grav-driver to bear.

  “Gravity shield?” Henry asked.

  “Online,” Song replied instantly. “Our capacitors are charged and we’re pumping extra power into the shield to shore it up.”

  There was only so much the shield could do with extra power, but Henry figured his engineer knew what she was doing.

  “Range is two hundred fifty thousand kilometers,” Ihejirika noted.

  “Should I commence evasive maneuvers, ser?” Bazzoli asked.

  “Go ahead,” Henry allowed. “Keep us on course to Gathering Sta—”

  “Enemy firing!”

  “Return fire!” Henry barked. It was an unnecessary order. They’d already gone over the plan, and the timing was far too critical to wait for the Captain to give the order.

  Six heavy plasma guns had targeted his ship and opened fire. Each of the blasts of superheated gas hammered into his shield with enough force to vaporize his ship, only to find themselves torn apart by tidal forces.

  Another eight heavy lasers fired along with them and suffered the same fate. The grav-shield wasn’t invincible, but the odds were in Raven’s favor in any given salvo of energy-weapons fire.

  Twenty missiles followed the beams and plasma bolts, and Henry had his suspicions about those missiles.

  What he was certain his opponent had not realized was that Raven’s heavy lasers were multidirectional. They were roughly fifteen percent more powerful than the Kenmiri beams and could just as easily be fired behind the battlecruiser as forward.

  And the energy screen was a power hog. Just like Raven, the dreadnought couldn’t maintain the screen and fire all of its heavy energy weapons without dipping into capacitor banks. Knowing that Raven had to flip to fire her main weapons, the Kozun Captain had tried to steal a second salvo without draining their ship’s capacitors.

  The lasers smashed into the dreadnought before the screen came up. Armor could only do so much against the brute force of the energy transfer, and armor and hull splintered under the hit.

  Then the thirty-six missiles, three full salvos, that Ihejirika had prepositioned under Raven’s wings came to life. They didn’t have the thousand kilometers per second of the launchers, but the Kozun ship was already closing at over fifteen hundred KPS.

  And they weren’t targeted on the dreadnought, anyway. They weren’t penetrators or conversion warheads. They were straight nukes, five-hundred-megaton fusion warheads that intercepted the hostile missiles and self-destructed.

  “Second salvo on the shields, we have a blowthrough.”

  Raven lurched as she spun, her crew already in acceleration tanks against the thrust that had just vanished. Plasma seared along the lower hull, creating a mirror gouge to match the missile wound on the top of the ship.

  “Firing.”

  “Their screen is up,” Lieutenant Rao snapped, the assistant tactical officer focusing on the enemy vessel. “Two of their turrets are gone and they’ve stopped firing half their lasers. Not sure if that’s damage or lack of power.”

  “We were expecting the screen,” Ihejirika said calmly as Raven’s shields ate a third salvo of plasma bolts.

  Henry’s attention was with his tactical officer—focused on the single projectile flashing across space toward the dreadnought. A conversion round could overload the energy screen, opening the path for the lasers currently wasting their energy against it.

  Raven hadn’t fired a conversion round.

  Just before it would have hit the screen, the heavy grav-driver round skipped, an icosaspatial kick that moved it out of realspace for a critical fraction of a second.

  It returned to regular space inside the dreadnought, bypassing screen and armor alike to deliver a two-hundred-kilogram projectile traveling at seven percent of the speed of light.

  A projectile including another five-hundred-megaton fusion bomb.

  “Direct hit, direct internal hit,” Rao barked. “Target is losing power and drifting off course.”

  “Your orders, Captain?” Ihejirika asked calmly.

  Henry studied the dreadnought in silence. Her engines had stopped. Her weapons had stopped. Part of him wanted to finish the job…but he was still playing to those same two audiences.

  “Commander O’Flannagain,” he said flatly, linking to his starfighters with a thought. “Break off and match velocity with the hostile. Remove her turrets, if you please. Once that’s done…leave her.”

  “Understood, Captain,” O’Flannagain responded. “Adjusting vectors for disabling strike.”

  The virtual bridge was silent, and Henry
smiled.

  “Well done, people,” he said aloud. “Let’s get back on course for Gathering Station. This asshole wasn’t the mission, after all.”

  Damage reports were showing up on his screen and he was glad no one could see into the tank to see his wince.

  Raven had got off lucky on both of the hits she’d taken, but she was now basically unarmored over almost forty percent of her hull…and three lower decks were venting to space.

  It was minor damage, easily fixed from onboard resources. The tanks had even protected his people from the loss of atmosphere…but seventeen of his people were now stuck in their acceleration tanks until someone could retrieve them.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Drones will have the decks sealed in another twenty minutes,” Song reported. “We’ve cleared paths to six of the acceleration tanks in the damaged zones, but we can’t retrieve them until we stop accelerating.”

  “That’s going to be soon enough,” Henry replied. They were now inside missile range of the Restan battleship and the defenses of Gathering Station itself. “We’re either going to be docking with Gathering Station or picking up a shuttle in the next ten minutes. After that, we should be sticking to standard acceleration.”

  “Oh, thank god,” the engineer replied. “The ship is going to be a mess, ser.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “It was necessary.”

  “I saw the same screens you did, ser,” Song said. “What’s the plan for the battleship in our way right now?”

  “Waiting for them to talk to me, Colonel Song,” Henry replied. A blinking icon appeared on his screen. “And Moon is informing me they’ve finally sorted out the radio protocols.”

  “Good luck, Captain Wong.”

  He snorted and dropped the channel.

  “Link me up, Commander Moon,” he ordered. He knew he’d be sending an avatar. There wasn’t much need for the Restan to see him floating in viscous clear gel, after all. It did terrible things to his hair.

  “Captain Wong, this is Squadron-Voice Ta Callah,” his old comrade-in-arms greeted him, her Kem harsh. “If you do not break off your course, we will open fire.”

  “I will break off my course when you release my Ambassador,” Henry replied. At this point, Raven was moving slowly enough that there was almost twenty minutes left in his flight time. He was two light-seconds from the station, well out of anything except missile range.

  “My orders are clear. No one leaves the station until I am certain of the security and safety of my star system,” Ta Callah snapped.

  “So, you admit to holding the ambassadors hostage?” Henry asked. It took four seconds for him to see the response to his question, and Ta Callah may as well have physically recoiled, for all the success she had in concealing her emotions.

  “Nothing of the sort,” she replied. “But people barely stopped shooting twenty minutes ago, Captain. As you should know.”

  “I did not pick that fight, Ta Callah,” Henry told her. “I did not start any of this. But if you do not start letting the ambassadors go, we will see an all-new fight here, my friend. I have no desire to destroy Restan ships or kill Restan officers. You are my allies; many of you are my friends.

  “But if you hold my Ambassador hostage, you become my enemy. My orders, Squadron-Voice, are to do whatever is necessary to retrieve my diplomatic party. The situation out here is as stable as it is going to get. You can either let Ambassador Todorovich’s shuttle leave—and I would suggest letting all of the ambassadors’ shuttles leave—or you can fight me.”

  Seconds ticked by.

  “I have my orders as well,” Ta Callah said. She was trying to speak calmly, and the extra focus of speaking in a non-native tongue probably helped, but her eyes screamed her fear.

  “You are the commanding officer of Gathering Station’s defenses,” he said gently. “That battleship answers to you. The station’s fixed weapons report to you. Ost is seven light-minutes away. There is no time to ask permission, Squadron-Voice. You have to decide, right here, right now.

  “Are you going to hold the diplomats who came here trusting your people’s honor hostage? Or are you going to accept that the Kenmiri have struck one last blow and the Gathering is dead where it lies?

  “I am leaving with my Ambassador, Squadron-Voice Ta Callah. I would far rather do so without having killed a friend.”

  Four seconds of transmission lag…and then the channel went dead.

  “They cut the channel on their end, ser,” Moon reported. “I think Ta Callah just hung up on you.”

  “Let her think,” Henry ordered. “We’re open to her calls right up until she starts shooting.”

  “And then, ser?” Ihejirika asked.

  “Then we kill her battleship and hope she sees sense after that,” he said grimly. “My patience with the Vesheron is running out.”

  A minute. Two. Five. Six…

  “We are entering weapons range of the Restan battleship, ser,” Ihejirika reported. “Any change to your orders?”

  “No,” Henry said. “Moon? Stand by to trans—”

  “Incoming message from Ta Callah, ser!” she interrupted.

  She put it through to his network without asking.

  “Captain Wong, please adjust your course to pass a minimum of fifty thousand kilometers from Gathering Station,” Ta Callah instructed. “We are lifting the lockdown on the shuttles and transmitting holding orbits to all escort units while we arrange rendezvous for the ambassadors.

  “Minimum distance of three hundred thousand kilometers will be required from all ships, but your vector will make that extremely difficult.”

  Henry exhaled in relief, then activated his own coms.

  “Thank you, Squadron-Voice,” he told her. “You made the right decision, you know.”

  A new green line appeared on his screen, Raven’s new adjusted course…a course set at point three KPS2 as Bazzoli finally got to cut acceleration.

  “I know,” Ta Callah acknowledged. “I request that Raven remain in the orbit we are sending you to provide backup to my people until further Restan units are in position to secure the station.” She held up a green-skinned hand.

  “It is only a request, Captain Wong, but it would be appreciated.”

  “I am more than willing to honor a request from a friend,” Henry replied. “We’ll need the time to finish our repairs before we can skip, anyway.”

  She exhaled.

  “Home then, for you?”

  “Without subspace coms, the Vesheron are done,” Henry told her, putting into words what everyone in the system had to have realized. “When we cannot even talk to you without a four-week turnaround, any alliance becomes difficult at best.”

  “Trade is possible and I’m sure the diplomats will return in time,” Ta Callah countered. “But…you put it well before. The Kenmiri in their defeat have destroyed us in turn. We never knew they held that weapon, and they have ended our alliance with it.”

  “Without the Vesheron, it falls to each power to maintain order around it,” he said. “I trust your people to be just. I can’t say the same for others.”

  “Nor can I. But that is the future we face,” the Restan told him. “I thank you, Captain Wong. Others might have been less patient.”

  “Enough blood was shed today,” Henry replied. “I will not shed one drop more than needed.”

  Raven slid into her assigned orbit, exactly three hundred thousand kilometers from Gathering Station, and Henry finally got out of his acceleration tank. His hair and uniform still slick from the gel, he met Todorovich in the shuttle bay.

  “Somehow, seeing you like that makes me feel a lot better,” Leitz said dryly as the diplomats left the shuttle.

  “Felix, get our people settled back aboard the ship,” Todorovich ordered. “Some of the juniors are stressed the fuck out. Get them settled.”

  Diplomats and analysts didn’t usually see a lot of training on being crammed into a shuttle with a bunch of soldiers whi
le a space battle raged outside. In Henry’s opinion, they probably should.

  The Ambassador gestured for him to join her away from the slow trickle of soldiers and diplomats leaving the shuttle.

  “Do we even know whose dreadnought you wrecked?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Henry admitted. “We probably will before we leave, but it’s almost certainly the Kozun. The people we’re going to have to deal with most, going forward.”

  “Because what we need when our government wants to stay the hell out of everything is an enemy,” Todorovich said with a shake of her head. “How quickly can we get home, Henry?”

  “I promised Ta Callah we’d stay here until her reinforcements arrived,” he said. “That’ll be about six hours. If we plan to stick around for ten, that will cover making sure all of the ambassadors get out safely and discharge any pretense of moral obligation here.”

  “And then four weeks?” she asked.

  “Exactly. Same series of skips as it took us to get here to get back to Procyon…and then we need to sort out what exactly we’re telling the UPA.”

  “The Vesheron as we knew it is dead,” Todorovich replied. “There’s not much else to say.”

  “They’re going to want a recommendation from us, Sylvia,” Henry pointed out. “They’re going to look to you and me, as the leaders and the ones who dealt with this mess, to at least suggest what the UPA and UPSF should do next.”

  Every action he’d taken since the first mine went off had been keeping that moral authority in mind. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, but he knew he needed to make sure that he got to speak.

  “Do next?” The Ambassador shook her head. “We know what they want to do next, Henry. They’re going to pull the UPA’s head back into their shell and try and forget any of this ever happened while we quietly expand our own dominion.”

  “We helped bring things to this point,” Henry replied. “I know what our government wants to do, Sylvia. But I can’t help but feel that it’s wrong. That we have an obligation out here to do something.”