Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4) Read online

  All three of his ships were covered in feather-like heat radiator vanes, easily replaced if damaged, and maintaining full acceleration required them to be functioning almost perfectly.

  There was no way the scout ship didn’t know they were pursuing, but the smaller ship didn’t change its course.

  “Confirm my math, Commander,” Henry told Eowyn, a mental command flipping her his calculations.

  “I make it that we will bring her to laser range at least half a million kilometers short of the skip line and have at least a full minute to engage before the earliest she can skip,” he continued.

  They’d be in missile range for several minutes before that, especially at the closing velocity they’d be coming in at, but there was a chance the scout ship could evade or destroy missiles. It wasn’t a good chance, not with three UPSF destroyers closing with her, but it was a chance.

  “I have the same,” Eowyn told him after a few seconds. “Missile range in seventy minutes.”

  Henry nodded, considering.

  “Assuming they’re capable of one-point-five KPS-squared, how quickly would they need to increase acceleration to evade laser engagement?” he asked quietly.

  “If they can increase their acceleration to one-point-five anytime in the next thirty minutes, they’ll be able to evade a laser engagement,” Eowyn replied. “They can no longer evade missile engagement.”

  Henry’s ships had thirty-six missile launchers. A full salvo would probably be overkill, but Henry wasn’t inclined to let the Drifters know he was coming.

  “All ships have prepped launchers?” he asked.

  “Yes, ser.”

  “Good.” He eyed the tactical plot. The scout had to have some trick in mind, he presumed. But Henry had the advantage in numbers—and each of his destroyers outmassed the scout ship six to one.

  “Chan, record for transmission,” he ordered. “Let’s see if we can talk them down.”

  The Chinese officer flashed him a thumbs-up after a few moments. Henry faced the recorder and sorted his face into a cold mask.

  “Unidentified vessel, this is Commodore Henry Wong of the United Planets Space Force Peacekeeper Initiative,” he told them in Kem, the Kenmiri trade language. “I have reason to believe you are fleeing to advise potential hostile forces of my presence here.

  “If you do not cease acceleration and communicate, I will have no choice but to fire on your vessel. You cannot evade my ships. Surrender.”

  He paused, then glanced at Chan.

  “Send it.”

  “Sent. Do you expect a response?” Chan asked.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Henry admitted to them. “They can do the math on the acceleration we’ve revealed as easily as we can—and the other math on whether I can let them go after seeing it.”

  He shook his head.

  “If they’re an Eerdish ship, they’d have already warned us off,” he noted. “So, they’re either Drifters or they’re somebody else with hostile intent. Either way, I’d expect them to surrender.”

  “But you don’t,” Eowyn said softly, picking up on his tone.

  “If they were going to surrender, they’d already be talking,” Henry said. “Like I said, they can do the math.”

  “Thirty minutes to missile range,” Eowyn reported. “They are continuing on course.”

  “No response to our surrender demand,” Chan said.

  “Not unexpected.” Henry turned to his all-Captains channel. “Captains? Any thoughts?”

  “She’s got to be planning something,” Palmer said. “Or she’d have either surrendered or turned to fight.”

  “Agreed. Make sure all of your helms are standing by for rapid course shifts,” Henry ordered. “I expect to see a significant increase in acceleration and adjustment in vector, but…”

  He shook his head.

  “Ser?” Ihejirika asked.

  “If she could burn faster, she would be doing it by now,” he told them. “Everything she can do at this point is just wriggling on the hook. I’m half-expecting a single salvo for the honor of the flag and then a surrender.”

  “That’s not very Drifter,” Teunissen said quietly. “I’ve worked with them. That would be out of character.”

  “So have I, and I agree,” Henry said. “But Drifters are also known to push the odds if they think they have a trick that can pull it out. So—”

  “Vector change!” Eowyn snapped. “Target has adjusted her vector by seventy degrees in the ecliptic and ‘up’ forty-five degrees. Acceleration is up to one-point-seven KPS-squared.”

  “And there we go,” Henry concluded. “Captains, adjust your courses and prepare your missiles. I don’t think she’s getting away.”

  He started running data through his personal network, trying to find the answer. It appeared quickly enough, and he hissed through his teeth in shock.

  “Ser?” Eowyn asked. “They’re still not going to evade us. Their vector is still going to take them into the skip line, but we’ll have missile range for long enough to put at least two salvos into them.

  “But why didn’t they push this hard sooner? If they’d gone to one-point-seven straight away, we’d never have caught them.”

  “Look at the exhaust spectrograph, Commander,” Henry told her. “Titanium. Iron. Carbon.”

  “She’s burning out her thrust nozzles,” the Ops officer realized.

  “Exactly. And her Captain knows it. They can keep that up for maybe an hour—and then that ship is scrap.”

  “What do we do, ser?” Eowyn asked.

  “How long is the ballistic course if we fire on her now?” he asked.

  “Over a minute,” she admitted.

  “Good enough.” Henry tapped a command. “Captain Ihejirika?”

  “Ser?” Paladin’s CO asked, realizing they had a private channel.

  “I want a warning shot across our friend’s bow. I don’t want to hit her. I don’t even want to get close, really. But let’s make the damn point.”

  “Yes, ser. It’s on its way.”

  A single weapon blazed away from the destroyer’s stubby “wings.” Accelerating at ten KPS2, it accelerated across space for five minutes until it ran out of fuel.

  After that, it took seventy-eight seconds to reach its closest approach to the target, where it calmly detonated in a five-hundred-megaton explosion. A simple warhead was probably the least threatening weapon in DesRon Twenty-Seven’s arsenal, but the point was made.

  With a gesture to Chan, Henry focused on the camera again.

  “Unidentified vessel, I can see you wrecking your engines,” he told them. “You have fifteen minutes to cease acceleration and prepare to be boarded. If you do not, the next missiles won’t miss.”

  Henry wasn’t surprised by the lack of response this time. He was looking forward to having a conversation with the scout’s captain about what the hell the sentient was thinking—if the idiot survived.

  “All ships standing by to fire,” Eowyn reported. “Range in ninety seconds and counting.”

  He nodded in silence. He’d given all the orders he could. There was no way they could reliably disable the ship, much as he would like to.

  Seconds ticked away as the range plummeted. Five minutes after they passed the line, that scout would cease to exist.

  “Vector change!” Eowyn snapped. “Target is now accelerating toward us. Range is dropping—hostile has fired.”

  Ten light-seconds of delay was enough for that to work. The scout had flipped and entered her range of DesRon Twenty-Seven before anyone had realized it.

  “I have eighteen missiles incoming,” Eowyn continued. “All ships have fired, three-six in space.”

  Henry grimaced. For the scout to have that many missile launchers, the little ship had no lasers and probably almost no ammunition for the launchers themselves.

  They’d still get whatever salvos they had off. Five minutes was nothing in the time frame of crossing star systems—and an eternity in the time frame o
f a battle.

  “Do we launch a second salvo, ser?” Ihejirika asked from Paladin’s bridge.

  “Negative,” Henry ordered. “Focus on defending your ships, Captains. We’re a long way from home. Let’s not waste ammo.”

  Two more salvos blasted clear of the scout over the following hundred-odd seconds, and then nothing.

  “Three-missile launchers,” Henry concluded. “That’s a Vesheron trick. A pirate trick.”

  He’d worked alongside enough Vesheron ships in the war to recognize it. Since the rebel factions had limited supplies of ships and weapons alike, they’d often been forced to fall back on stolen ships with boxed weapon installations.

  Those installations were easy to add to an existing ship, allowed for large salvos…and ran out of ammunition very quickly.

  They’d still put over fifty missiles in space, all targeted on Paladin.

  “Coordinated defense net online,” Eowyn reported. “Antimissile lasers engaging.”

  “Scan for resonance warheads,” Henry ordered—and then paused as his tactical display flickered and updated. “What the hell?”

  Cataphract had just fallen out of formation, her acceleration dropping to zero as she charged her shields to defensive levels.

  “Cataphract has lost acceleration; GMS has failed,” Palmer snapped. “Shields are at forty percent expected power; acceleration is at zero.”

  “Maneuvering Paladin in front of her,” Ihejirika reported. “They’re aimed at us; let’s make sure the missiles don’t see Cataphract.”

  Henry closed his eyes in frustration. His ships were still half-experimental, and that experiment had just failed…at the worst possible time.

  “I have to shut down reactor cores to manage thermal production,” Palmer reported. “Sensors are heat-blinded.”

  “Understood. Focus on your ship, Captain Palmer,” Henry ordered. “Ihejirika, Teunissen. Stop those missiles.”

  As lasers flashed across space and the missile salvos closed with his ships, Henry realized he’d forgotten his question.

  “Eowyn,” he asked quietly. “Do we still have time to scan for resonance warheads?”

  The gravitic-resonance weapons, designed by the Drifters, were one of the few systems that seriously threatened a gravity-shielded starship. Any weapon could, in theory, pass through the gravity shear zone around Henry’s ships.

  The resonance warheads could destroy that shear zone, leaving his ships vulnerable to weapons they’d normally shrug off.

  “No time, ser,” she admitted. “I…”

  “Was distracted by Cataphract,” Henry finished. “Same as me.”

  The first salvo plunged in on Paladin, the smart weapons dodging and weaving as two ships’ antimissile lasers did their best to take down the incoming fire. It was almost enough—close enough that Henry could be certain that adding Cataphract’s defenses would have kept any missiles from hitting his ships.

  With Cataphract crippled and falling behind, three missiles dove toward Paladin and detonated, converting their entire mass into massive shotgun blasts of superheated plasma.

  “No blowthrough,” he heard Bach report from the bridge. “All plasma diverted. We’re fine.”

  In theory, the odds of any given plasma conversion warhead or plasma cannon burning through a UPSF gravity field were low…but probability played no favorites and Henry had seen destroyers lost to a single missile.

  “Multiple hits on the target,” Eowyn reported. “Her engines are down and she is leaking atmosphere. I’m still detecting power signatures, but she is crippled.”

  “Understood,” Henry replied. “Inform Lieutenant Commander Ngu—”

  The explosion that lit up the screen cut off his instruction to prepare for boarding. He didn’t even need to ask Eowyn to confirm what he was looking at.

  If nothing else, the suicide charge looked exactly like the five-hundred-megaton warhead they’d used for their own warning shot.

  “Target has self-destructed,” Eowyn reported uselessly.

  “Understood,” Henry said grimly. “All ships, reverse acceleration and fall back on Cataphract. Maintain defensive perimeter and take down those missiles.

  “Not much point in closing the range now.”

  The suicide charge would have vaporized the entire ship. No one would have installed one that didn’t—the UPSF certainly didn’t!

  The only problem was that he’d never met a Drifter ship with a suicide charge installed.

  Chapter Five

  There were no Kozun warships in the La-Tar System. The Cluster’s government—born with surprising rapidity out of an emergency defensive alliance—was willing to accept that they shared an enemy with the Kozun Hierarchy.

  They were not, to Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich’s strong approval, willing to permit armed Kozun vessels back in a star system that had far too recently been under the Hierarchy’s boot.

  Even so, the view from the flag deck of UPSV Scorpius was full of ships. If nothing else, there was the rest of the Crichton-class carrier’s battle group: two battlecruisers and seven destroyers.

  Beyond that, though, La-Tar local space was full of civilian shipping—and that was a heart-warming sight to Sylvia. When she and Henry Wong had arrived in the region, the Kozun had been holding on to the limited shipping available to the agriworld, leaving the four industrial worlds depending on her to starve.

  Now she could pick out dozens of glittering dots that she knew were freighters, hauling food out to the rest of the Cluster and bringing technology back. The specializations of the five worlds would fade over time, but for now, their economies and livelihoods were utterly interlinked.

  Local warships stood guard over those freighters; watchdogs all too aware of how close to devastation all of them had come at Kozun hands.

  The La-Tar ships, crewed by a mix of half a dozen races, were all built to the standard of the old Kenmiri escorts. The Cluster had not yet had the time or resources to design their own warships, but two of the industrial worlds had shipyards with the patterns for the lighter Kenmiri ships.

  “There she is,” Rear Admiral Cheung Jian Chin said softly, gesturing to one of the local warships.

  “Admiral?” Sylvia asked. She was a guest on Cheung’s flag deck, but she didn’t pretend to fully understand the tactical display she stood in front of. She was passingly literate in military iconography, but she couldn’t pick out details beyond “big ship, little ship, friendly ship, enemy ship.”

  “That’s Vengeance,” Cheung said quietly, the squat Chinese Admiral making a gesture that zoomed in on the ship. “The locals have built a lot of Kenmiri escorts at this point—almost three dozen, counting the ones the Kozun destroyed when they first came to La-Tar—but Vengeance is their first gunship.

  “Which also makes her the first time they’ve built a heavy plasma cannon, which is a stepping-stone to Kenmiri-style capital ships we didn’t expect them to manage,” he admitted. “They’ve laid down keels for laser-armed cruisers, but that Vengeance even exists tells me that our friends are going to be valuable allies in the future.”

  Sylvia chuckled.

  “If unneeded this time, correct?” she asked.

  “That’s a discussion for politicians and Admiral Rex,” Cheung told her. “I command the Scorpius group, but our future alliances are more a question of the Peacekeeper Initiative—which makes them your problem and Commodore Wong’s problem.”

  The sharply built blonde ambassador shook her head at the older man.

  “And today’s crisis?”

  “That discussion is for you and Admiral Rex,” Cheung repeated calmly. “He is slated to command this new fleet, after all.”

  “Speaking of which?” Sylvia asked.

  “Any minute now,” Cheung replied. “Aeryn should be arriving shortly.” He shrugged. “At last report, Chiana was still loading boxed fighters from Base Fallout. She’ll be another two weeks.”

  “How many fighters are you all bringing
?” Sylvia asked.

  Cheung grinned, the schoolboy-esque expression out of place on his old face.

  “A Crichton-class carrier is the base for one hundred twenty starfighters,” he told her. “We have another forty boxed in storage. Chiana isn’t coming out to La-Tar with any complete fighters on her decks.

  “If the reports I have are correct, we’ll be swapping all of our starfighters for the new Lancers once she arrives. The battlecruisers too,” he added thoughtfully. “That will cut our reserves to the bone and most of our backups will be thruster fighters, but we’ll have a first-line strike of three hundred and sixty SF-One-Thirty GMS starfighters.”

  Sylvia looked back at the screen. The La-Tar Cluster had a handful of converted freighter carriers, but their fighters were crude and inferior, even compared to the SF-122 Dragoon “thruster fighters” Scorpius currently carried.

  The Dragoons had gravity shields and the local fighters didn’t.

  “I presume we’re not going to be handing our old fighters over to the locals,” she murmured. “Someone would have told me if we were breaking that particular stricture.”

  The UPA would supply the locals with anything but gravity shields and gravity maneuvering systems. Every ex-Vesheron power, including the UPA, used basically identical missiles, lasers, and thrusters.

  Only the UPSF had gravity shields—in the Ra Sector, anyway. There had been another El-Vesheron power—external allies like the UPA—who’d possessed them, but they were a long way away.

  The destruction of the subspace-communication network had cut everyone off from each other and shrunk the galaxy. Once, UPSF starships had struck at the far side of the Kenmiri Empire. Now, they were still fumbling in the dark in much of the Ra Sector, right next door.

  “We have a Cherenkov pulse,” one of Cheung’s officers reported crisply. “Multiple skip signatures along the Tano line. Timing is correct for Carrier Group Aeryn, sers.”

  “And Admiral Rex is exactly on time,” Cheung said after a pause to check a network clock. “Confirm signatures and ID codes as they come in, Commander.”