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

  “We will update as more information becomes available. Thank you, everyone. Dismissed!”

  Chapter Seven

  “Admiral, a moment, please,” Sylvia said severely as the virtual conference faded away, leaving her with the handful of officers from Aeryn. She glanced at the others. “In private, please.”

  Her chief of staff knew that tone, and Leitz was moving before she’d finished speaking. Aeryn’s officers took their cue from the diplomat without Rex saying a word. In under a minute, Sylvia was alone with Twelfth Fleet’s commander.

  “Strange,” he murmured. “I was under the impression those people reported to me.”

  “They’re smart enough to know when to be somewhere else,” she told him. “If we are going to be working together, Admiral, you and I need to lay some ground rules.”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not a diplomat, Ambassador,” he replied. “My job here is very clear. We aren’t necessarily going to be ‘working together.’”

  Sylvia smiled thinly.

  “Admiral Rex, please,” she said. “I’ve seen your record and the officers around you seem impressed. You did not reach the highest rank the United Planets Space Force has by being innocent of politics.

  “This posting, this mission, are political to their bones,” she reminded him. “Diplomacy will be critical. You are operating outside of the borders of the United Planets Alliance and we no longer have the overwhelming threat of the Kenmiri Empire to sand away rough spots.

  “One misstep on your part could undo two years of work by myself and the Peacekeeper Initiative. I will not permit that to happen; am I clear?”

  He remained silent for a moment, leaning on the conference table as he studied her.

  “I’m no bull in the china shop, Em Todorovich, but I’m also not Henry Wong and hanging on your every word,” he said bluntly. “I will do my job. I’m not here to create conflict, but I am here to do that job.”

  “Admiral Rex, we have been in the same system for less than twelve hours,” Sylvia told him coldly. “In those twelve hours, you have now surprised me with a major ceremony without prior warning, asked me to give a briefing without requesting it in advance, and now impugned the judgment and intelligence of the second-in-command of the UPA’s Peacekeeper Initiative.

  “If you are not a ‘bull in a china shop,’” she quoted back at him, “you are doing a good impression of one. You and I have not worked together before—and you just took this meeting from a quiet correction to the active question of whether you retain command of Twelfth Fleet.”

  He straightened his spine, looming over her as he slammed his fists on the table.

  “I will not be threatened by a civilian,” he said flatly. “I think this meeting is over.”

  “If this meeting ends here, Admiral,” Sylvia told him, “there will be a drone headed to Earth by the time I reach the surface of La-Tar. That drone will be directed to the Security Council under an Alpha-One priority, advising them that the senior diplomat on the scene does not believe that you are capable of the delicacy required for this operation.

  “You will be relieved by return drone. I can’t see that taking more than twenty-one days. Your replacement will arrive with Chiana and your career will end.”

  Rex was taller and more heavily built than Sylvia, but she was far from a short woman. She faced him squarely, and she knew how sharp and dangerous her gray eyes looked when she was this mad.

  “The only reason I am willing to consider continuing this meeting is because your officers respect you,” she said into a deathly silence. “I spent ten years as a diplomat in Kenmiri space, and I came to respect the collective judgment of the officers and enlisted of the United Planets Space Force.

  “That your subordinates trust and respect you tells me that I am missing something, Admiral Rex,” she continued. “So, please, tell me what it is.”

  The conference room air could have been cut with a knife as she glared him down, until he finally exhaled. Nodding slowly, he hooked a chair out from the table and sat on it backward, a sudden grin splitting his face.

  “I apologize for surprising you, Em Todorovich,” he said softly, his tone completely different. “And I believe I may have deserved…well, all of that. I also apologize for implying that your relationship with Commodore Wong was likely to impede his judgment.

  “I’ve commanded Wong. I’m not sure bleeding out from a gut wound would impede his judgment.”

  There was a silence, and then a coffeepot stand emerged from a cubby in the wall Sylvia hadn’t noticed. The stand was powered and calmly rolled over to Rex, who poured himself a cup of black coffee.

  “Coffee, Ambassador?”

  “Not yet, I don’t think,” Sylvia said tersely. The sudden mood shift was positive, but she wasn’t yet convinced that Rex wasn’t going to be a problem.

  He nodded calmly and swallowed at least half a cup of still-steaming coffee in one go.

  “I have not slept enough,” he said grimly. “Always a bad plan, I know, but I’m trying to do my best by these spacers. It’s been three years since we deployed a real fleet this far. Everyone is rusty, and no one is sure how many of the old rules apply or don’t apply.

  “I should have warned you in advance about both the briefing and the command ceremony,” he conceded. “I won’t tell you that I assumed you’d expect both. I might have if I thought about it, but I didn’t even think about it.”

  He shrugged.

  “My staff is as rusty as anyone else. We will do better,” he promised. “I’m also not prepared to let you throw them under the bus, and I get protective of my people. The responsibility was mine, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t end my career over it, Em Todorovich.”

  “Ya schitayu,” Sylvia told him in Russian. I’m thinking.

  “Fair,” he conceded, clearly following her words. Whether that was understanding Russian on his own or through a translator in his internal network, she wasn’t sure. Rex wasn’t Russian. He was from the American Alpha Centauri colonies.

  “This situation out here is messy, Ambassador,” he said. “But my role is extremely simple and extremely clear: I’m to find and neutralize the BGO Convoy. Preferably without actually wrecking the Convoy, given that it’s mostly unarmed ships carrying civilians.”

  He sighed.

  “That’s going to be a mess all on its own, but the problem, Em Ambassador, is that I am specifically tasked to avoid getting involved in any of the Peacekeeper Initiative’s affairs.

  “I’m not authorized to intervene in local situations. Hell, I’m barely supposed to talk to the locals outside of coordinating support for Twelfth Fleet.” He shook his head. “It’s a mess,” he repeated. “Technically, Ambassador, I’m not supposed to be working with you. Simply in the same region as you.”

  “That is a terrible idea,” Sylvia noted.

  “I agree, but those are my orders,” he told her. “We’re to lean on La-Tar for logistics and support units, but otherwise, I am not to get involved in anything.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you at least try not to make my job harder,” she said.

  “I have no intention of doing so, though as we have seen, I’m not perfect,” Rex said drily. “I’m reliant on the Initiative to find the enemy, but I have no authority over Wong’s people. Entirely different chain of command.

  “The Initiative works with you. I’m just sort of…here, Ambassador. An attack dog waiting to be unleashed.”

  “I’m not a fan of that structure,” Sylvia repeated. “I may have to send a drone after all.”

  Not one requesting Rex’s relief—his honest apology had bought him that much—but potentially asking UPSF Command just what the hell they were thinking.

  “I don’t think you’ll convince anyone to change it, Ambassador,” Rex told her. “They want to send a message that our ambassadors are untouchable, but they do not want to get involved in a war.

  “The Convoy will be dealt with.”
He shrugged. “And then I go home. I don’t like it, Em Todorovich, but it’s where we are.”

  “I’ll take that coffee,” Sylvia finally said. “I don’t suppose you have anything to put in it? From the sounds of it, we both need a drink.”

  Chapter Eight

  The block of luxurious mansions built for La-Tar’s rare Kenmorad visitors occupied a tall hill overlooking the capital city. Bulldozers had turned the hilltop into a flat plateau with an artificial ridge and moat at the edge. More landscaping and careful gardening had followed to allow the four homes to retain spectacular views while being near-invisible from anywhere but the hill itself.

  Those mansions now served as the diplomatic quarter for La-Tar City, with Cluster soldiers in pale gray uniforms checking IDs as vehicles approached the entrances. The security inside the perimeter was subtler but still ever-present.

  Even so, the guards outside the Kozun Embassy were Cluster troops. The visible pair were Sana, with pale skin and tusks at the corner of their mouths. They saluted as Sylvia exited the groundcar that delivered her.

  “The Embassy has been advised of your arrival, Ambassador Todorovich,” the soldier greeted her in Kem.

  The Kenmiri had ruled ten thousand stars, with over a thousand inhabited planets and ninety species. With seven different El-Vesheron powers added to the mix, the Vesheron rebels had faced an immense language barrier.

  Any resistance to using the language of their enemy had been long gone by the time the United Planets Alliance had joined the Vesheron. The Kenmiri trade language, Kem, had been the lingua franca of the Vesheron factions—and now it was the language of interstellar trade and diplomacy among the Kenmiri’s former subjects.

  Even for fluent speakers, it was a simpler and more formal language than English. The soldier speaking was obviously not a fluent speaker, but she was clear and understandable.

  A necessity for an embassy guard, Sylvia supposed.

  “Thank you, soldiers,” she told the two troopers. “Usual rules?”

  “You, one aide, one bodyguard,” the same woman replied. “The spikeheads are still being paranoid.”

  The other soldier made a hissing sound, twisted by their tusks into something truly odd-sounding to Sylvia’s ears.

  “My apologies,” the first guard corrected herself. “The Hierarchy remains somewhat concerned about potential retaliation for the actions of rogue soldiers during their presence on La-Tar.”

  Sana didn’t roll their eyes the ways humans did. The various Ashall species shared many microexpressions, entirely unconscious muscle reactions to stress and other emotions, but only a handful of more-conscious expressions would be shared between any two cultures.

  Sylvia still had no doubts about the amount of sarcasm included in the description of the reasoning behind the Kozun’s security protocols.

  “It’s nothing new,” she told the guards, gesturing Leitz and a Marine out of the car behind her. “We know the drill.”

  Inside the perimeter of the mansion itself, security was provided by Kozun Hierarchy commandos in black dress uniforms. None of the personnel assigned to the embassy had served on La-Tar during the occupation, Sylvia knew, but she suspected the uniforms alone would trigger PTSD in a good chunk of the planet’s population.

  Envoy San Taval, on the other hand, would have a hard time intimidating anyone. The Hierarchy representative to the La-Tar Cluster—no one had yet graced him with the title of “Ambassador”—used a wheelchair as he was missing both legs just above the knee—and he radiated plush softness as his powered chair rolled him into the drawing room to meet Sylvia.

  Like all Kozun, he only had hair on the back of his head. Where most of his people kept it in a ponytail or braid that ended up looking like a Manchurian queue, San Taval kept his black hair cropped close. The only decoration he wore was silver tips on the spike parts of his forehead armor plates. Otherwise, he wore a plain black tunic that was probably easier to put on than more-formal wear.

  He gestured for Sylvia and her escorts to sit, ignoring the pair of armed guards who accompanied him into the plushly decorated room. The furniture was thickly upholstered, and hand-carved bookshelves lined the walls.

  Those shelves had almost certainly held something at one point, but they were empty now—a reminder that the embassy had been taken from the Kenmiri and had only been lent to the Kozun in the last two weeks.

  The old decorations were gone and the Hierarchy hadn’t had a chance to bring in new ones yet. The alliance was still tentative—which told Sylvia Todorovich that San Taval was almost certainly more dangerous than he appeared.

  “Welcome to my humble home, Ambassador Todorovich,” Taval greeted her. “May I offer you and your companions something to drink? Water? Liquor? Another stimulant? I believe we have Terran coffee on hand.”

  That would have taken some doing, Sylvia knew. Most species had a stimulant that served much the same role as coffee—indeed, she knew people who made a hobby of trying all of the ones that were safe for Ashall and humans.

  “Water will be fine,” she told him. “Has your staff had any problems settling in, Envoy?”

  Taval spread his hands wide.

  “Less than I expected, considering the travails of our occupation of La-Tar,” he noted. “Most people who would regard us as friends are no longer in power. Such is the way of things.”

  Sylvia concealed her surprise.

  “I did not believe the Hierarchy was officially calling their time here an occupation,” she said.

  “We are not,” Taval said bluntly. “But in these meetings, I find that clarity is the most important thing.”

  He hadn’t said anything, but a servant emerged from one of the doors with a tray of glasses and a jug of water. The Kozun woman laid the tray on a Kenmiri-made wooden table and filled the glasses.

  Taval took the first glass himself, sipping from it before Sylvia or her people even received theirs. All poured from the same jug, which meant he was making a point.

  “Have you had a chance to consider our proposals?” Sylvia asked after taking a small sip herself. If he was going to make an effort to show himself as trustworthy, Sylvia would make a show of trusting him.

  And she also wasn’t going to trust him for a moment. There was no way Mal Dakis, the First Voice of the Kozun and the unquestioned secular and religious leader of the Kozun Hierarchy, had sent someone to La-Tar who was as apparently blunt as San Taval was pretending to be.

  San Taval fluttered his hand in the air.

  “I have reviewed them,” he conceded. “Of course, my communications home are quite limited, and some of your proposals are outside my scope.”

  Sylvia waited.

  “We will, of course, be contributing vessels to your Twelfth Fleet,” Taval continued. “The proposal that we position our ships in the Satra System to avoid offending the Cluster’s sensibilities is…offensive but acceptable. We accept that our allies are potentially overly sensitive to the presence of Hierarchy warships in their systems.”

  Even in Satra—a red giant system a single skip from La-Tar—Sylvia knew the Cluster would be watching the Hierarchy like a hawk. They had a permanent scout presence in most of the key skip nodes around their worlds—systems the Hierarchy had formally acknowledged their ownership of.

  Several of those systems would be key trade routes if the Ra Sector ever managed to fully get a new order into place. The Hierarchy’s concession of them had been far from meaningless, if cheap in immediate costs.

  “But you don’t know what vessels yet?” Sylvia asked.

  “As of the last courier, it had not yet been decided,” Taval told her. “We, of course, do not have as regular a communications cycle as you do.”

  The Peacekeeper Initiative had declined to put a permanent postal station in Kozun space—and Sylvia wasn’t signing off on giving drones to the Hierarchy just yet. They’d develop their own courier drones soon enough, but they hadn’t earned humanity’s trust enough to ge
t the UPA’s.

  The small five-crew courier ships they were using were a decent alternative, at least.

  “But you have some idea?” Sylvia prodded.

  “I am not privy to the military discussions of the Hierarchy’s commanders,” Taval said genially. “You will know when I do, Ambassador Todorovich.”

  Somehow, she doubted every word of that.

  “I will rely on that, then,” she conceded. “And our other proposals, Envoy?”

  “I have no authority to engage in the particulars of those proposals,” Taval told her. “Trade, military cooperation, technology exchange…these are all outside the scope of my authority. I am solely here to coordinate our promised alliance against the Drifters.”

  He even managed to tell her that with a straight face, though his control of his microexpressions wasn’t what he thought it was. He had more authority than he was pretending, but his job was to draw out the expectations and timelines on everything.

  San Taval’s job was to never say no…or yes, for that matter. Sylvia suspected he was very good at it.

  “I see, Envoy,” she said calmly. “It is a shame that the Hierarchy has limited your authority so. It almost renders your presence here a waste of resources.”

  She caught him by surprise, and he choked down a chuckle at her bluntness.

  “We work within the limitations we must,” he finally told her. “The Voices control most of our foreign policy directly. This worked better in the age of instantaneous communication, but habits do not change easily.”

  “The Hierarchy only had instantaneous communications as a nation for, what, a year?” Sylvia asked.

  “Habits are formed more easily than lost,” he said with a chuckle. “I am sure you understand.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed. “I must still poke on one last proposal before we decide this meeting has been a complete waste of both our time.”

  “Ambassador, meeting with you is never a waste of my time,” San Taval told her. “The relationship between our nations is fragile and frayed. It is one of my first duties to rebuild that connection between Terran and Kozun.”