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

  “That is promising to hear,” Sylvia said. The whole conversation was a fascinating dance. She wondered how many people had underestimated San Taval and ended up in deep trouble in the past—his presence there suggested that many of Mal Dakis’s opponents had underestimated him.

  “And leads to the final question,” she continued. “We understand that the Hierarchy is attempting to extricate itself from its extensive collection of wars. As with the La-Tar Cluster, we are prepared to act as neutral mediators in those conflicts.”

  “I did forward that offer on to the Voices,” San Taval said. “And I did receive a response, Ambassador. As I believe you are aware, we have in fact succeeded in ending most of those wars on reasonable terms.”

  The Initiative and the UPA were now in contact with most of the people the Kozun had been fighting. From Taval’s tone, the Kozun were well aware of that.

  “My understanding is that you still have several major conflicts remaining,” Sylvia told him.

  “You mean the war with the Enteni and the Eerdish homeworlds,” he replied. “Their alliance has proven problematic for us, yes. However, based on our peace with the La-Tar, we do not believe we can afford your mediation.”

  Sylvia held his gaze for several long moments. The peace with the La-Tar Cluster had been bought by the Hierarchy admitting their crimes, conceding multiple contested uninhabited systems, and paying a significant indemnity.

  The UPA did not, as a rule, recognize the transfer of sovereignty by conquest. They had a tentative agreement in place to recognize the Hierarchy’s control of its conquered worlds so long as a number of criteria around internal autonomy were met within a year.

  Apparently, the Kozun weren’t enthused with being forced to concede everything they’d won in a second war. But that meant they were assuming they were going to get to keep it anyway…

  “That is, of course, the Hierarchy’s choice,” she told him. “A risky one. The Hierarchy, like the UPA, faces the threat of the Drifters now.”

  “We believe we can find an appropriate balance,” Taval told her. “We may change our minds on bringing in Terran mediation, but for the moment, we intend to press the conflict against the Enteni and Eerdish until we find a satisfactory conclusion.”

  Sylvia nodded gravely, her face showing none of her thoughts as she considered what that meant.

  “We understand,” she told him. “The offer, of course, will remain open. So long as we are on friendly terms with the Hierarchy, it is in our interests to keep the Hierarchy from wrecking themselves.”

  Sylvia waited until they were back in the—heavily secured by her Marines—car before saying anything. She didn’t trust the Kozun not to be eavesdropping on even the encrypted radios their internal networks could use to communicate.

  “That mu’dak,” she finally snapped when it was just her, Leitz and the bodyguard.

  “Em?” Leitz said carefully. “He seemed decent.”

  “Oh, he did, didn’t he?” she observed. “His job, Leitz, is to make us feel nice and comfortable while the Hierarchy slides a knife into our back—and he is very, very good at it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re getting two ships for Twelfth Fleet,” Sylvia told him. “Vessels, plural, but barely. They’re focused on that appropriate balance. Now that they’ve wrapped up all but one of their wars, the Hierarchy is going to dump fighting the Drifters on us while they press their war against the E-Two.”

  Leitz was silent for a moment, considering everything that had been discussed.

  “And he’s going to stretch out everything as long as he can before he says anything specific, isn’t he?” her chief of staff finally said.

  “Exactly,” Sylvia agreed. “The Kozun were always risky allies to take on. We knew that, but we also didn’t want to fight them, and the Drifters attacked us all.

  “The truth is they don’t have any useful capital ships left, so unless they’re sending us entire squadrons of escorts and gunships, they can’t really contribute to Twelfth Fleet’s firepower and they know it,” she admitted. “So, they’ll send a token force, because they know it won’t matter, and focus their real strength on winning the war we want them to stop fighting.”

  “And we can’t stop them fighting it unless they let us,” Leitz concluded. “And he sits there and smiles and makes us trust him, I take it?”

  “He will blame every thing that looks out of line or remotely untrustworthy on his superiors,” Sylvia said. “But I bet you five credits that he already knows exactly what they’re planning to send to Twelfth Fleet.”

  Leitz nodded. The trip to their own embassy was almost over, and he glanced out at the La-Tar Cluster guards outside the car as they slowed.

  “Do we rely on the Cluster, then?” he asked.

  “We rely on the three carrier groups the Security Council decided to commit,” she said. “Because the Cluster has to watch the Kozun, which means they can only spare a handful of ships.

  “We knew we were only getting a nominal commitment from the Cluster,” she continued. “We figured they’d end up matching the Kozun contingent, because Kozun ships with us weren’t ships that could threaten them.

  “But if the Kozun only send a handful of escorts—or, cutting vessels as narrowly as they can, two corvettes? That’s all the Cluster can risk sending, too.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we got three carrier groups, I guess,” Leitz said grimly. “I wish we could resolve this without a fight, Em Ambassador.”

  The car slid to a final halt inside their compound, and Sylvia’s face fell back into her normal calm mask.

  “We can’t,” she told her chief of staff. “We need the galaxy to know that our ambassadors cannot be touched. The BGO tried to kill me. Even if I am prepared to let that go—and I could be convinced—the UPA can’t.

  “Or our entire plan out here comes down in flames.”

  Chapter Nine

  Three destroyers hung in empty space in the Nohtoin System, their images the backdrop to everything Henry Wong thought or did. Right now, a wallscreen behind him was showing the ships in formation above Nohtoin’s star.

  “Where are we at?” he asked his people, looking around the conference room. His actual staff was only two people, Eowyn and Chan, which brought Ihejirika in as an extra set of eyes and brains.

  It was still a small group—one that fit in the breakout conference room attached to the flag officer’s office. It had the wallscreen and the holoprojectors for their work and shared an automated drink system with the office itself.

  Four coffees sat on the small black table as Henry stood in front of his team and looked back at them.

  “The Drifters clearly did not think that skipping through a pulsar was enough to cover their tracks,” Eowyn told them. “They spent at least two days laying false trails all over this system, and sorting out truth from deception took a while.”

  A holographic map of the Nohtoin System appeared above the table.

  “We are now ninety percent certain the Convoy skipped here.” One of the skip lines to Eerdish space flashed. “That would take them to the Otradis System, which is a red giant that acts as a central transfer point for much of the area the Eerdish now claim.”

  “Which makes following them one step too far, per our orders,” Henry said grimly. “I have no intention of risking a diplomatic incident with the Eerdish. We were hoping the Drifters would try and avoid Eerdish and Enteni space.

  “If Otradis is as important as that, there’s probably a sentry post there,” he noted. “So, the Drifters made direct contact with the Eerdish. That could be a problem.”

  “They’ll be spinning some kind of story about us,” Ihejirika agreed grimly. “And given that the Eerdish and Enteni are at war with the Kozun…”

  “Us working with the Kozun looks bad,” Henry agreed. “The plan was always to make diplomatic contact with them in short order, but it looks like that will need to be accelerated.”
<
br />   He shook his head.

  “Ihejirika, I’ll want the Navigation teams to set up the fastest course back to La-Tar,” he told his flag captain. “We’ll be coming back here—or at least to Eerdish space—soon enough, so let’s keep an eye on anything that might be of use. For example, nailing down that pulsar’s skip sequence.”

  “Yes, ser,” Ihejirika confirmed.

  “Should we leave someone here?” Chan asked. The communications officer’s role in the meeting was mostly to act as a glorified secretary, but Henry was perfectly willing to consider their input as well.

  “If we had a full squadron, I’d consider it,” Henry replied. “With only three ships—and with the Cataphracts being a higher concentration of classified tech than anything else I know!—we’ll pull everyone back to La-Tar.

  “Like I said, we’ll be back quickly enough.”

  His mental network flicked a command to the hologram, narrowing it in on an icon near his ships. That icon marked where the hostile corvette had self-destructed—there wasn’t even enough left to make a debris cloud.

  “Eowyn, Ihejirika, what did our teams pull out on our friend?” he asked.

  “Not much,” Henry’s operation officer admitted. She took control of the hologram, bringing up a diagram of the scout ship they’d fought. “They did a damn good job of vaporizing themselves, which leaves us with battlefield scans only.

  “That’s enough for us to draw some conclusions but not enough for me to say anything with certainty.”

  “Fair,” Henry conceded. “What do we know?”

  Eowyn nodded and highlighted sections of the diagram.

  “As we assessed at the time, she was armed with twelve box launchers with three-shot ready magazines,” she reminded them. “Minimal laser armament, only half a dozen defensive lasers.

  “She isn’t, I have to note, a retrofit of any kind,” Eowyn said. “Our scans are pretty clear that the box launchers were integrated into her hull. She was designed for a short, high-intensity engagement.

  “We’ve never seen anything like her, to be honest,” the Ops officer concluded. “What’s interesting is that her engines and styling… Well.”

  She zoomed the hologram in a bit and wiped away the datacodes and highlights, allowing the other officers in the room to study the sleek lines of the scout ship and the baroque detailing concealed around them.

  “She’s Kenmiri,” Henry concluded. “Artisan-built, too, not just built to Kenmiri designs.”

  “So are half the ships the Kozun are still flying,” Ihejirika pointed out. “And every dreadnought I’m aware of.”

  “So, she’s not a custom job by the Drifters,” Henry concluded. “They picked her up from the Kenmiri at some point.”

  “That’s my guess as well,” Eowyn confirmed. “As Captain Ihejirika points out, there’s a significant number of ex-Kenmiri ships around the galaxy. The only odd part to me is that we haven’t seen this class of ship in Kenmiri hands before.

  “They had a pretty standard set of both military and civilian ships. They had special-purpose units, but we’d never seen their scouts.”

  “Turns out the Drifters had,” Ihejirika noted. “Shame they didn’t tell anyone.”

  Henry chuckled at that.

  “We are only beginning to scrape the surface, I suspect, of what the Drifters didn’t tell everyone,” he noted. The Drifter Convoys had been tolerated by the Kenmiri, acting as semi-illicit merchant convoys providing luxuries and special services across the Empire.

  They’d also provided logistical and technological support for the Vesheron rebellions, while remaining officially on the Empire’s side. While the Drifters were regarded as part of the Vesheron, Henry was starting to suspect that the Vesheron might have been as used and deceived as the Kenmiri in some ways.

  “So, they have a class of Kenmiri ship we’re not used to that would normally be harder for us to detect and track,” he noted. “We saw them from farther away and we caught up with them more easily than they were expecting.

  “I can live with that.”

  “They still know we’re looking for them,” Ihejirika noted. “They just don’t know how close we are.”

  “And I don’t think all of their games are directed at us, ser,” Eowyn said.

  Henry made a go-ahead gesture as she paused.

  The Ops officer returned the hologram to its zoomed-out view of the Nohtoin System and highlighted the routes the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy had taken around the system.

  “Like I said at the start, we’re ninety percent sure the main Convoy went here,” she gestured at the Otradis skip line. “But we’re about seventy percent sure they split off at least two other detachments, ser, that skipped either here or here.”

  Two other skip lines flashed.

  “Those skip lines aren’t on the maps we have from the Kozun and the Vesheron,” Eowyn told them. “My assessment of their alignment puts them as skipping to stars on the perimeter of Eerdish space.

  “Systems where whoever is there can keep in touch with the main Convoy…while not being seen by the Eerdish.”

  “Interesting,” Henry murmured. “Any guesses, Commander?”

  The room was silent.

  “There may be portions of the Convoy that they don’t trust the Eerdish with,” Eowyn finally guessed. “The agricultural ships, for example, are critical to their medium- and long-term survival.”

  “But they also might be hiding something from the Eerdish,” Henry noted. “Military ships or…something else.”

  “I can’t see them splitting off defenses when moving into even neutral territory,” Ihejirika noted. “Everything the Drifters do is to defend the Convoy. If they’re moving the main body of the Convoy through a location where the Eerdish will know where they are…they’d keep all the big guns there to watch their own backs.”

  “Let’s keep that in the back of our minds,” Henry agreed. “You’re sure that we’re seeing a detachment of the Drifters and not another group of ships at a different time?”

  “Absolutely, ser,” Eowyn told him. “We might be misreading something on how many ships detached and went where, but they were definitely with the rest of the Convoy first.”

  “Maybe IntelDiv will have some idea once we drop that in their laps,” Henry said. “I eyeball it at eight days back to La-Tar for us and five for the drones—using the pulsar. Twice that if we take the long way. Navigation will work up better numbers, of course.”

  If any of his officers couldn’t at least do the napkin math to get the right number of days, he’d be shocked—and disappointed. From the nods around the room, though, at least his key staff could.

  “La-Tar is almost starting to feel like home,” Ihejirika mused. “At least as much as Zion and Base Fallout, anyway.”

  “Not quite there for me,” Eowyn said. “But you and Commodore Wong have spent far longer out here.”

  “And if we’re very lucky, someday soon we’ll go back to swanning around making contact and negotiating trade treaties,” Henry told them all. “The Peacekeeper Initiative was never intended to fight a war, after all.”

  But the price of peace was eternal vigilance—and humanity owed the wreckage of the Kenmiri Empire something.

  Chapter Ten

  La-Tar was definitely starting to feel like home to Henry, but he was also willing to admit—at least in the privacy of his own head—that was as much due to who he knew was there as anything about the planet or the locals.

  It was still always a small shock to return to the system. Every time he came back to La-Tar, things had changed, with the locals throwing every resource they could think of into levering themselves onto their own feet.

  The number of freighters in La-Tar orbit was always growing, and a new transshipment station had opened since they’d left on their scouting run. There were now six of the orbital platforms, smaller and more dispersed than the Kenmiri platform they’d replaced…but since the Kenmiri ha
d destroyed the original platform on their way out, dispersal seemed worth it.

  Over a dozen small warships, locally built escorts based on Kenmiri designs, hovered protectively over the agriworld as well. Henry knew that industrial nodes were opening in La-Tar’s asteroid belts, reducing the central planet’s dependency on the factory worlds for technology, but the former industrial planets were a long way from growing their own food.

  The Kenmiri slave worlds had been designed to fall apart without the Empire. For that, if nothing else, Henry Wong would never forgive the Kenmiri.

  “Ser, we’ve established radio contact with Twelfth Fleet,” Chan told him, their voice amused. “Admiral Rex politely requests that you visit him aboard Aeryn at your convenience.”

  “It’s actually a request, Commander Chan,” Henry pointed out with a chuckle. “Admiral Rex is astronomically senior to me, yes, but he’s not in my chain of command. I report to Admiral Hamilton…and only to Admiral Hamilton.

  “Get us links with the other Peacekeeper Initiative ships in the system,” he ordered. “I’ll meet with the Admiral as soon as we’re in orbit—you’re not wrong on the Admiral’s priority, after all—but it’s more important that we touch base with the people I’m in charge of.”

  “Yes, ser,” Chan reported. “It looks like we’ve got two destroyers in system, plus the postal station and the ground compound.”

  “Check in with everyone; make sure there’s nothing that needs me,” Henry told them. “Shouldn’t be, but we’ve been gone for weeks. Things change.”

  The courier-drone cycle meant that his news from La-Tar was reasonably up to date, but things could change on no notice in his experience.

  Henry was responsible for all Peacekeeper Initiative operations around the La-Tar Cluster. That was, including his DesRon Twenty-Seven, eight destroyers, a dozen small stations with courier drones, and a ground facility on La-Tar that supported the UPA Diplomatic Corps embassy.