Raven's Peace Read online

“Rembrandt liked him. I figured you could tolerate him,” Hamilton concluded. “Now, I know you two seem ready to verbally spar until Maya’s throws you out, but I am hungry and would prefer to be eating this restaurant’s vindaloo while I watch you do so.

  “Shall we order?”

  “Your job, Colonel, is going to be to sit in orbit and be a pointed reminder to the Vesheron that their massed fleet couldn’t reliably penetrate your shields,” Todorovich noted as they sipped hot milk tea after the meal.

  “I know it’s not going to be that simple,” she continued as he opened his mouth to argue, “but at least your mission is going to be the same on a day-to-day basis. I’m not so sure of my own.”

  She grimaced.

  “The Assembly is that bad?” Hamilton asked. “I thought we had a pretty solid idea of what we wanted.”

  “To be left alone?” Todorovich replied. “Yeah. Basically. But there’s a lot of variation in what qualifies as an isolationist foreign policy, Admiral. The Monroe Doctrine, after all, was technically an isolationist policy—and it committed the United States to challenging the great powers of the day if they came near areas that weren’t American territory.”

  “Is the Assembly likely to jog your elbow that much?” Henry asked. “I know we have subspace coms and all that, but that seems contrary to even your job title.”

  The Ambassador sighed.

  “The days of radio and telephone undermined the meaning of plenipotentiary,” she noted. “Subspace communication brings us back to that situation. When the Assembly can update my orders daily—hourly, if they really want to be a pain in the ass—or even have a live conversation with me, the question of how much plenipotentiary authority I have is an open one.

  “My orders are to do all within our power to create a situation where the general population of the UPA does not expect their governments to ask the UPSF to intervene,” she concluded. “There are certain red lines the UPA General Assembly will probably act on their own about, but in the main, they’re more worried about popular opinion.

  “War weariness is one thing. News and pictures of atrocities and chaos out of the former Kenmiri Empire is another. If the member systems face populations that demand intervention, then the UPA will have to intervene.

  “We don’t want to do that and neither do the member system governments. So, we want a stable, self-sustaining and self-policing replacement entity or entities.” She shrugged. “While, at the same time, keeping enough counterbalances in place that we aren’t threatened. There’s a lot of stars and planets between us and the old border—and a lot more if we decide to run our colonization efforts in the other direction.”

  “I don’t envy you your job, Ambassador,” Henry admitted. “At least mine is always straightforward once the shooting starts.”

  The hard part was deciding when the shooting should start.

  Dinner wrapped up and the three of them left the restaurant. Pausing just around the corner, Hamilton stretched exaggeratedly.

  “I’ve got twenty years on either of you,” she noted. “And my inbox is going to explode overnight, as per usual. I’m going to bed. You two should probably get better acquainted, given your mission.”

  And with that strange advice, Hamilton traded salutes with Henry and took off.

  He checked his own internal network for the time. At twenty hundred hours, it wasn’t the best time for him to report aboard a starship and take command. On the other hand, that made for a perfect opportunity to see how his new crew and officers responded to the Captain showing up without warning at an awkward time.

  “Barring alternate needs, I think it’s time for me to head to my ship,” he told Todorovich. She gave him an oddly sharp glance.

  “What kind of alternate needs do you think are going to come up, Colonel?” she snapped. “I hardly need to tell you that is going to remain an utterly professional relationship—and I dislike the suggestion that it might not be!”

  Henry blinked, reconsidered what he’d said, then sighed.

  “Poor phrasing, perhaps,” he said slowly. “I apologize. I was unsure if you were intending to brief me further tonight or if there were other plans discussed between you and the Admiral that I was unaware of.

  “I certainly did not intend to make any kind of advance.” He chuckled. “No offense, Em Todorovich, but you’re not my type.”

  He’d never seen an eyebrow arch into quite so perfectly neat an angle before. That probably took practice and particularly careful grooming, too.

  “I see,” she replied. Her tone was still cold, but it had warmed a bit. “I have had…averse interactions with SpaceDiv Captains before, Colonel. In men especially, that collar seems to cut off blood flow to parts of the brain.”

  “My experience is that fighter pilots are the worst, but in that case, I think it’s the helmets cutting off higher circulation,” he told her.

  “I haven’t met many pilots, I’ll admit,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind. In any case, Colonel, I believe I should let you get to your ship before I embarrass either of us further.”

  He chuckled.

  “Em Todorovich…I was a starfighter pilot. A minor misunderstanding is far from the most embarrassing thing I’ve dealt with.” He gave her a precise salute. “Do you know when you’ll report aboard Raven? My understanding is that we have less than seventy-two hours remaining before we’ll need to be on our way.”

  “I have a few items to deal with here still, but I should be able to report aboard around nineteen hundred hours tomorrow,” she told him. “An additional twenty-four hours would be optimal, but if we’re in a hurry…”

  “Let’s plan for a hurry, Ambassador,” Henry suggested. “It’s your call, of course, but it’s a long trip with multiple potential delays. From the Vesheron I’ve dealt with, we’ll want to make sure we aren’t the last ones there.”

  “Which is a vast difference from making sure we aren’t late,” she noted. “I’ll bring my staff aboard tomorrow night, then, Colonel. Good luck with your ship.”

  “It’s appreciated, but I doubt I’ll need it,” he said with a firm smile. “It’s not the first time I’ve taken command of a battlecruiser, after all.”

  Chapter Six

  A quick visit back to Visiting Officers Administration reclaimed Henry’s duffle bag from the desk and produced an eager young Spacer Second Class to carry the bag for him. Self-sufficiency was secondary to appearances when taking command of a new starship.

  That young woman followed him onto the docks as he approached the tube connected to Raven. The area was quiet right now, with both the station and the ship running on GMT from Earth. There would still be activity outside as supplies were loaded onto the battlecruiser, but the UPSF tried to keep personnel movements during the ship’s “day” where possible.

  Admiral Hamilton had clearly not cared about that particular tradition, and Henry had every intention of abusing that choice. He approached the entryway at a brisk pace, watching to see how quickly the two black-armored GroundDiv troopers standing guard spotted him.

  They clearly spotted him at least ten meters away. The pair moved slightly, one shifting toward Henry as the other one pulled back. It wasn’t much of an adjustment, but it was enough to put one of them mostly out of any potential line of fire.

  “This area is restricted,” the closer guard stated as Henry approached more closely. “There’s no one on the schedule supposed to be coming through here. What’s your business?”

  “She’s with me,” Henry said, gesturing at the young Spacer behind him. “As for my business, well…”

  He slowly and carefully drew the archaic paper out of his uniform jacket. Slow and careful was necessary, since the paper was inside the jacket and the guards were being properly paranoid.

  Their watchfulness was calibrated just about perfectly, and he made a note to get their names and pass that on to Commander Thompson. His companion on the shuttle to Base Skyrim was now going to be his GroundD
iv commander, after all.

  “I’m here to take command of Raven,” he told the two guards. “Now, I suggest we continue on as we’ve started and you check my ID and orders before you take me at my word.”

  The closer Spacer chuckled and held out his hand.

  “Orders and ident scan, please, ser,” he told Henry. “We received notification of your assignment earlier today, Colonel Wong, but I’ll admit we were expecting you tomorrow.”

  One guard made a point of reviewing the writ, but the real test was the physical handshake between Henry and the other guard. That linked their networks and allowed the security trooper to check that Henry was who he said he was—and to compare the orders on Henry’s internal network against both Base Skyrim’s and Raven’s networks.

  “Everything is clear, ser.”

  “Good. Your names, Spacer?” Henry asked.

  “I’m Spacer First Class Reginald Osprey and this is Spacer Second Class Carol Hammond,” the GroundDiv trooper told him. “It’s a pleasure to be the first to welcome you to Raven, Captain Wong.”

  The title sent a shiver down his spine and he inclined his head to the trooper.

  “Please send a ping ahead to the XO,” he told the man. “Command didn’t see fit to assign me quarters aboard Skyrim, so I imagine I won’t make his evening too hectic…but I will be taking command first.”

  “Yes, ser!”

  “Party to attention!”

  Either the boarding tunnel was longer than Henry thought it was, or the guards at the door had been exaggerating the expectation that he’d arrive tomorrow.

  The welcoming party of saluting spacers were all SpaceDiv, so maybe neither. It looked exactly, in fact, like an on-the-ball Chief had grabbed everyone within a minute’s walk of the personnel dock to form a party.

  He returned the salute as his internal network scanned the spacers. Not a single GroundDiv or FighterDiv spacer among them, and they were in duty fatigues. Some of them looked like they’d barely managed to doff their toolbelts.

  Plus, there wasn’t a single commissioned officer present. Out of twenty spacers, there were two Petty Officers…and one Chief. Whenever something went more right than expected, Henry’s experience said to always look for the Chief.

  “Thank you, Chief, POs, Spacers,” he told them. “Anyone got an ETA on the XO?”

  “Chief Wang Xi,” the CPO introduced herself. “Lieutenant Colonel Tatanka Iyotake should be here…now.”

  The man in question rounded the corner as Chief Wang finished the name-dropping. A perfect piece of timing and theater on the Chief’s part, and Henry made a mental note to keep an eye on her.

  “Reporting, ser,” Iyotake said crisply as he came to a halt in front of Henry and saluted. If he’d been on the bridge, the dark-skinned man must have started running when the guard called in Henry’s approach, but he showed no signs of it.

  Iyotake was a Native American man with broad shoulders and shoulder-length black hair tied into a neat braid. He radiated solid reliability, but Henry had seen men who managed to radiate that but snapped under pressure.

  Most of them didn’t make Lieutenant Colonel in the United Planets Space Force, let alone become the executive officer of a battlecruiser.

  He returned Iyotake’s salute.

  “Colonel Henry Wong, here to assume command,” he told the junior officer. “Everyone’s doing a damn fine job dealing with my unexpected arrival so far, so I’ll admit I’m impressed.

  “Shall we proceed to the bridge, Colonel Iyotake?”

  “Yes, Captain Wong.”

  “Not yet,” Henry said softly. “Not quite. Lead the way.”

  The entire point of removing Captain from the rank structure, after all, was to avoid the confusion about who was in command of a ship. Several people had given him the title so far today, but Wong hadn’t been a Captain since surrendering command of Panther—and was not yet a Captain until he read himself in on Raven’s bridge.

  It was probably a good thing for Henry’s calm that Raven’s bridge looked very little like Panther’s. The Corvid-class ship might be sixty meters shorter than her older sibling, but she was actually a bigger ship in terms of volume and mass.

  The bridge was six meters wide and eleven long, an absolutely immense two-level space designed to allow a dozen officers and three dozen crew to handle every aspect of a three-hundred-meter-long warship that massed two million tons fully loaded.

  Right now, there was only a station-keeping watch on the bridge. Two Petty Officers and five Spacers were holding down consoles on the second-level balcony, running sensors and communications.

  Two-sided screens marked the edge of the balcony and divided the pit from the center of the bridge on the main level as well, surrounding the command crew with the information their people were working on. From the seat at the center of the space, the Captain could orient themselves with any department and see what was going on at a glance.

  Communications.

  Navigation.

  Sensors.

  Weapons.

  Engineering.

  Five major sections, each intended to have an officer and three to six enlisted at their consoles. Engineering had the smallest bridge section; Weapons had the largest. There was a spot for a junior officer of the watch and two observers inside the central bubble alongside the Captain.

  Henry wasn’t the largest fan of how the design separated the Captain from his bridge crew, but he had to admit he could still see and hear his people through the screens and it put all of the information easily in the Captain’s line of sight.

  A civilian ship would have used holoprojectors, but those were fragile things, more vulnerable to battle damage than the time-tested screens that filled Raven’s bridge.

  Henry looked around, taking it all in as he approached the seat at the center of the entire space, with its own set of additional screens in case the Captain needed something that wasn’t on the big displays around them.

  He stopped next to it and glanced over at Lieutenant Colonel Iyotake.

  “It’s my watch,” the XO confirmed. “But it’s your chair, ser.”

  “Not yet,” Henry echoed his earlier comment. He pulled the writ out of his suit jacket and studied the command seat for a few seconds.

  They hadn’t changed it that much from the Jaguar class, and he opened an all-hands channel with practiced ease.

  “All hands, attention to orders,” he snapped. No one aboard the battlecruiser would be sleeping yet. He might wake them up if they were, but that was unavoidable.

  “I am Colonel Henry Wong and I am in possession of a writ of authority from UPSF Command,” he said formally. “Tradition requires I read those orders into the record with you all as witnesses. So, I repeat myself: attention to orders.

  “To: Colonel Henry Wong. From: Admiral Lee Saren, United Planets Space Force Command, Base Halo, Sol.

  “You are hereby ordered to proceed aboard the United Planets Space Vessel BC-Zero-Six-One Raven and assume command of said vessel in the joint defense of our member systems. You are charged to carry the duties and responsibilities of Captain and commander of UPSV Raven to the highest and best standards and traditions of the United Planets Space Force.

  “We charge you with the memory of those who came before and the fate of those yet to come.

  “Signed: Admiral Lee Saren. Personnel Division. United Planets Space Force.”

  Henry paused, letting the formal words hang on the channel for several moments.

  “I assume command of this vessel. You’ll hear from me again before we leave, I promise you that, but twenty-one hundred hours two days before we set out is not the time for me to be keeping you all awake. Good luck, spacers.”

  He closed the channel and turned his attention back to Iyotake.

  “I assume command,” he repeated to the junior officer.

  “I stand relieved,” Iyotake confirmed. “Not least to have a Captain, ser. Even yesterday, all I was being told wa
s that there would be someone in that chair before we launched for Kenmiri space!”

  “I can see that being intimidating,” Henry conceded. “Many would have hoped for the chair themselves.”

  “I just made Lieutenant Colonel after a three-year stint as XO on a destroyer, ser,” his new XO replied. “I’d take command on a destroyer if the Admiralty ordered it, but I’m not ready to command this ship, ser.”

  “A wise man knows both his limits and when to push past them,” Henry said. “I was never great at the second part.” He gestured around at the bridge. “Normally, this is the point where I ask you for a tour, XO, but in truth? This morning, I didn’t know if I was getting released from medical leave today.

  “It’s been a whirlwind and I need a solid eight hours. I assume the Captain’s cabin is ready?”

  “I had the stewards in it as soon as they told me you were coming. Your bag should have made it there already.” Iyotake paused. “Chief Wang asked if there would be more effects coming that she should be watching for.”

  “Not…today, XO,” Henry said slowly. His effects from his quarters on Panther were in storage on Sandoval. He had expected to have more than an hour’s warning of his next command. He didn’t think he could get his stuff out of storage in less than two days, anyway.

  “I’ll want that tour and a full briefing on our status at oh six hundred hours in the morning,” Henry told the other man. “Any problems?”

  “I’ll make sure the stewards check the coffee machine in your office,” Iyotake told him. “It should work, it’s brand-new, but I don’t think anyone’s touched it yet—and if oh six hundred is your time of day, we’re both going to need it!”

  Chapter Seven

  The Captain’s office on Raven was identical to the one on Panther. That gave Henry a moment of twitchiness, but he was able to push past it with ease. Probably because his office didn’t feature in his nightmares of the battle in Set-Sixteen.