Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3) Read online

  She once again reached the center stage, joining the speaker on the stage and looking up at the crowd around her.

  “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe is prepared to act as your intermediary in this matter,” blue-whorls-on-silver told her. “We have a condition and a price.”

  “I will hear them, on behalf of the United Planets Alliance,” Sylvia replied.

  “Our condition is that you and your vessel remain with the Convoy until we have heard from the Kozun,” the Drifter speaking for the Council said. “We have no desire to spend time chasing down an appropriate contact point for you. While we understand the negotiation is between La-Tar and Kozun, we are acting as an intermediary for the United Planets Alliance.

  “Is that clear and acceptable?”

  “It is both,” Sylvia said calmly. She’d be more out of touch than she liked, but Shaka had enough skip drones on board to provide reasonably solid communications with La-Tar and the Peacekeeper Initiative base in the Zion System.

  “And your price?” she asked.

  “We will require the technology of the gravity shield,” the Ancient told her.

  Sylvia laughed. She would have faked it even if she hadn’t thought the Drifters were joking, so letting the emotion out was safe in this case.

  “Even if I was permitted to trade that technology, which we both know I am not,” she said, “we also both know that this task is not of nearly sufficient value to call for a prize of that magnitude. I am prepared to pay in refined metals, not in strategic systems.”

  She couldn’t see the Drifter’s face behind their mask, but she could see enough of their body language to guess they were amused.

  “That is as expected,” they conceded. “We will carry out this task for seven tons of refined palladium.”

  Sylvia smiled thinly.

  “You are still aiming rather high, do you not think?” she asked. “Three tons.”

  “Six.”

  “Five.”

  “Done.”

  She nodded firmly and offered her hand. This was something the Drifters shared with Americans, the firm handshake as a close to the deal. Blue-whorls-on-silver shook her hand firmly.

  “We presume your destroyer has the materials?” they asked.

  “She does,” Sylvia confirmed. “And for the deals my companion is closing with your Quartermasters. I will return to Shaka and we will await confirmation of the success of your mission.”

  “We will send over food and other supplies to make certain you are not strained by the delay,” the Ancient assured her. “This will take some days at least.”

  She nodded her understanding. Shaka would be fine for the twenty or so days she understood a round-trip journey to Kozun would take, but the gesture was meaningful as well.

  If the Drifters fed them, they were guests—and that meant something in almost every culture she’d encountered.

  Chapter Four

  “Just what is that and what is it doing on my flight deck?”

  Colonel Henry Wong was more amused than the sharpness of his tone indicated, but the captain of the battlecruiser Raven was also truly unsure what he was looking at. The…thing was sitting in the middle of the small flight deck that handled his eight starfighters, and it could not have looked less like it belonged.

  “That’s a starfighter, boss,” Commander Samira O’Flannagain, his Commander, Air Group, told him. The gawky woman with the Ophiuchi accent adjusted her red braid as she turned to look at her captain. “A brand-spanking-new one, straight from an assembly line on Luna all the way here.”

  Henry inspected the craft as he approached, shaking his head. The dark-haired Chinese-American Colonel was shorter than his CAG, though they both wore the same black turtleneck uniform. His uniform had a white collar, marking him as the captain of a United Planet Space Force starship, but both of them had the raven-with-quill-pen shoulder patch of Raven’s crew.

  “Starfighters are spherical, Commander,” he said drily. “I’ve flown enough of them to know that.”

  The craft in the flight deck was saucer-shaped. The SF-122 Falcon starfighters the deck had held before had been flattened spheres, but this was barely taller than the pilots would be.

  Stepping up to the fighter, he assessed that it was the same three-meter diameter as the older fighter and would fit in the same hangers and launch tubes. The straighter sides meant it didn’t lose as much volume as he’d have thought, but something had to have been given up…

  “I’m guessing less fuel capacity,” he said aloud. “Which makes this the fabled SF-One-Thirty Lancer?”

  “Fabled is the right damn word, ser,” O’Flannagain confirmed. “I first heard about a GMS starfighter almost ten years ago. Stopped expecting to see one on my flight deck five years ago, but…well, we got the new simulators a year ago and I made sure my people were all qualified.”

  Henry vaguely recalled a conversation around that point. He’d almost certainly even received a notification that the fighters were aboard, but Raven was just exiting a six-week intensive repair. There were a lot of messages in his inbox.

  “Fill me in,” he ordered the CAG as he circled the starfighter. “I’m sure I have a technical briefing buried in my inbox somewhere.”

  He could pull it up on his internal network, but that hardware was never quite the same as learning things the old-fashioned way.

  “Stripped out the engines almost entirely,” the woman told him, touching the fighter with a fond expression. “Six light jets at the cardinal points; that’s it. Only capable of about five gees under reaction thrust and not for long.

  “Main engine and the gravity shield operate out of the same projectors,” she continued. “My understanding is that in a bigger ship, they’d use different gravity projectors, but this is a starfighter.” She shrugged. “Gravitational maneuvering system basically leaves the ship in free fall down an artificial gravity well.

  “She’s rated for three kilometers per second squared, fully compensated. With reduced fuel and no need for an acceleration tank, they managed to sneak a cabin with a kitchenette and a bed into her.”

  “Seriously?” Henry asked. “I guess that makes sense.”

  He shook his head. The UPSF’s Fighter Division had fought the war with starfighters that could get to 1.5 KPS2, half again the maximum thrust of their starships but still barely edging out Kenmiri capital ships.

  Their Vesheron allies had better engine technology, stolen from the Kenmiri, and had regularly outmaneuvered Terran starfighters. Of course, Terran starfighters had gravity shields and the Vesheron ones didn’t.

  The GMS was the long-promised alternative use of gravitic projection, the technology the UPA had mastered and neither the Kenmiri nor Vesheron had. And with that acceleration…

  “You’ll be able to outfly anything else in space,” he told her. “I’m impressed.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to take one of them out for a spin yet, but they also have one more feature I’ve fallen in love with,” O’Flannagain told him. “It’s almost as important as the coffeemaker!”

  She gestured for him to join her as she hooked a mobile stepladder over to her.

  “Climb up, boss,” she instructed.

  Bemused, Henry obeyed and found himself on top of the flat disk of the spacecraft. O’Flannagain joined him, walking over to the most obvious feature of the disk: a man-sized groove running from one edge to the other.

  “What does this look like to you, ser?”

  “Missile mount,” Henry said instantly, but his eyes narrowed as he studied the size. “That is not the size of a fighter missile.”

  “No, it’s not,” his CAG confirmed. “That’s a full-sized missile, ser. We’ll be able to draw our birds from Raven’s main magazines. And vice versa—we’ve stocked the flight-deck magazines with full-size missiles, though there’s no cross-loading systems.”

  “We’ll fix that with the next generation of ships, I presume,” Henry murmured. He’d be
en involved in the discussions around several of the SF-122’s predecessors, and the fact that they couldn’t spare the mass for full-size missiles had been a perennial nightmare.

  “How?”

  “Amount of mass falling into the gravity well the GMS creates is irrelevant,” O’Flannagain told him. “So long as the birds fit in the bubble, we’re good to go.”

  Henry nodded and then the dark-skinned Chinese-American smiled at his CAG.

  “So, given all of that, is the fighter wing ready for deployment?”

  O’Flannagain drew herself up straight and sharply saluted.

  “Ser, yes, ser!” she barked. “I could use live flight time on the Lancers for my people, but we had the swap-over well planned. If Raven is ready to go, ser, we’re ready to go.”

  “We’ll find the time for those exercises, probably en route,” Henry told her. “I have a meeting with Admiral Hamilton this afternoon, and I was hoping to tell her everything was green and ready to deploy.”

  “Getting twitchy away from the action, ser?” his CAG asked. “Or away from the ambassador?”

  He waved a warning finger at his subordinate.

  “Are you ever going to stop trying to matchmake, Commander?” he said.

  “In the general situation or the specific, ser?” O’Flannagain replied, then laughed. “Though, to be fair, the answer is the same for both: no, not really.”

  “Why didn’t I cashier you, again?” Henry asked, but he was chuckling as he did.

  “Because I keep hauling the entire ship out of the fire, ser,” she said. “And I’ve got your back. Down to hell and up to the other one, wherever you lead us. Enjoy your meeting, boss. The fighter wing is ready to go.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Tatanka Iyotake was waiting just outside the flight deck, the broad-shouldered Lakota officer looking as tired as Henry felt.

  “XO,” Henry greeted him. “Report.”

  “You told me to meet you here,” Iyotake replied. “What do you need?”

  “A report on the ship’s status,” Henry said. “While I head to the airlock. Walk with me, Iyotake?”

  “Of course, ser.” The executive officer fell into pace beside Henry. “All of our damage is repaired. All weapons systems, defenses, power plants and heat radiators are online. Sensors are still in testing, but I expect them to clear those tests with flying colors by the end of the day.

  “Raven is ready for action in all aspects, ser.”

  “Good.” They walked in silence for a moment. “O’Flannagain confirms the fighter wing as well,” Henry told his right-hand man. “That’s the news I wanted to give Admiral Hamilton. Nobody liked having half of the Initiative’s battlecruiser strength laid up like this.”

  The Peacekeeper Initiative was only grudgingly operated by the United Planets Space Force, a sop to the consciences of the officers and spacers who’d committed genocide and collapsed a tyrannical interstellar order.

  The Kenmiri Empire had much to answer for, but not least among its crimes was how the Empire’s worlds had been set up to fail without the Kenmiri. Their retreat to their inner worlds had left a chaotic disaster behind them, one that Henry and many other officers felt responsible for.

  Henry himself had killed the last living Kenmorad, a realization that still haunted his dreams despite the best efforts of his therapists. The state of the worlds the Kenmiri had abandoned felt like it was his personal responsibility.

  But the UPA wanted to reap the dividends of peace and focus on their own worlds. The Peacekeeper Initiative was busy in the stars of the Ra Sector, but Raven was one of only two battlecruisers in Admiral Sonia Hamilton’s command.

  “She’s ready to get back into action and so are the crew, ser,” Iyotake assured him. “Any idea what the mission will be?”

  “La-Tar, for certain,” Henry replied. “The Hierarchy has been quieter than we like. Until and unless Todorovich’s mission is successful, we have to assume they’re planning for a new invasion.”

  “Do you think that mission will succeed?” his XO asked.

  “If it was anyone else, I’d say not a chance in hell,” Henry admitted with a chuckle. “But it’s Todorovich. I give her better than even odds of actually sorting out a peace agreement.”

  The ambassador’s absence bothered him in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d got used to having the civilian around to bounce ideas and plans off of, in a way he couldn’t truly do even with Iyotake…and yet that still didn’t feel like it was all of it.

  He shrugged mentally. It would sort itself out in his head eventually. He’d learned that over the years. He hadn’t made it past fifty as a wartime officer by dwelling in his own head.

  “I want you to double-check with Song and Kuroda,” he told his XO. That was Commander Anna Song, his chief engineer, and Lieutenant Commander Kouseke Kuroda, his logistics officer. “Make sure we have everything we need aboard in terms of supplies, parts, et cetera, et cetera.

  “I want to be able to move within twenty-four hours if the Admiral has orders for us.”

  “I’m ninety percent certain we’re already there, but I’ll confirm with everyone,” Iyotake promised. “Anything else, ser?”

  Henry chuckled.

  “Nothing that comes to mind, though I’m sure you’re already on three other things I haven’t mentioned,” he said. Iyotake was a good XO. That meant he was on a list that Henry didn’t really want him to be on: the list of officers that were almost certainly going to get promoted off Raven in the next six months.

  Henry had signed a lot of recommendations for early promotion since Raven had returned to Zion with a broken wing and a far-too-long casualty list. It was going to leave some serious holes in his crew—but neither his people nor the UPSF were served well by holding his officers back.

  They reached the airlock leading into the main station of Zion’s Fleet Base Fallout and Iyotake stopped, snapping a sharp salute.

  “I’ll get to work, then, ser,” the younger man promised. “Raven will be ready to deploy on our orders; you have my word.”

  “That’s just doing your job, Lieutenant Colonel,” Henry pointed out. “It shouldn’t need your word.”

  “Yes, ser, of course, ser,” Iyotake said crisply—but he was returning Henry’s grin. “Keep me updated on what the Admiral has to say, as appropriate.”

  “I’ll fill you in when I get back,” the captain promised. “Into the belly of the beast I go.”

  He respected Sonia Hamilton and he’d worked with her for years—she’d commanded the carrier a much-younger Henry had flown starfighters off of when the Kenmiri had first entered UPA space—but even he wasn’t going to pretend meeting with the woman was going to be easy.

  Chapter Five

  The Zion System was the far end of the United Planets Alliance in many ways. It was the closest territory to the former Kenmiri Empire that they officially claimed—and where humanity’s first encounter with the insectoid conquerors had been when they’d invaded the small religious colony out there.

  Base Fallout had all of the repair yards and supply depots necessary to support the seventeen-year-long war against the Kenmiri, though most of them were mothballed now. A battlecruiser and a flotilla of destroyers were permanently based there under Vice Admiral Zhao Xinyi.

  In one of the usual oddities of military bureaucracy, Base Fallout was also home to the Peacekeeper Initiative, under the command of Admiral Sonia Hamilton. Henry Wong was significantly junior to Zhao Xinyi, but he wasn’t in Base Fallout’s chain of command—and Admiral Xinyi wasn’t in the Initiative’s chain of command.

  That made Henry Wong, as the senior Colonel, Admiral Hamilton’s second-in-command. He’d spent a large amount of his time while Raven was being refitted aboard the main station of Base Fallout, conferring with the Admiral.

  Hamilton’s flag lieutenant had a black coffee waiting for him when he arrived, passing the steaming beverage across her desk.

  “Did you get the latest u
pdates on the agenda?” Lieutenant Jelena Kukk asked him. The swarthy young woman was half Henry’s age at most, and he had to wonder when junior officers had started being quite so young.

  “I did,” he confirmed. They’d arrived in his internal network while he was in the elevator, and he’d skimmed them. “I’m noticing a complete lack of detail around this ‘Operation Yellow Bicycle.’”

  The UPSF randomly generated operation names, which ended up with some very strange-looking combinations. Golden Lancelot had been the genocidal campaign against the Kenmiri. Hopefully, Yellow Bicycle would be somewhat less psyche-shattering for the officers and spacers who carried it out.

  “I know the name and that’s it, ser,” Kukk admitted. “The Admiral got a drone update this morning from Earthward, so I’m guessing it’s to do with that, but…I’m not sure what official operation would be impacting us.”

  “Me either,” Henry conceded, taking a large gulp of the coffee. “Am I the last?”

  Hamilton tried to keep most of her meetings small enough to fit in the six-person breakout meeting room attached to her office on the base. It was almost impossible, though, for her to keep most of those meetings from filling that room.

  “Admiral Xinyi got added to the meeting at the same time as the Operation Yellow Bicycle item got added to the agenda,” Kukk told him. “I’ll be holding down the fort until she gets here. Boss said to send you right in, though.”

  There were two people who’d originally been scheduled to be in the meeting with Henry and Hamilton, which meant he was the last out of the core Initiative group. Adding Base Fallout’s commander…something was going on.

  “Bring more coffee when you come in to take minutes?” he suggested.

  “Always, ser,” she promised.

  Admiral Sonia Hamilton was a sparsely built woman in her early eighties. Age hadn’t slowed her down yet in Henry’s experience, and the gaze she leveled on him as he entered the utilitarian meeting room was sharp.