Raven's Peace Read online

  “There are observer seats on the bridge for a reason, Em Todorovich,” he told her as she reached him. “I presume you have seen a skip before?”

  “A few times,” she conceded. “It seems to be a tradition to watch the first one with the Force, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Helps you know when to expect the hit,” Henry said. She took the nearest observer seat, and he glanced back at the screens to make sure everything was going according to plan. “Right now, even I’m an observer unless something comes out to make us abort the skip. Commander Bazzoli has control of the ship.”

  “Entrance vector achieved. Shutting down main engines and diverting power to icosaspace impulse generators,” the navigator announced, as if she’d heard her name. “We’ll reach entry location in one hundred seconds from…now.”

  “Icosaspace,” Todorovich repeated. “Twenty dimensional, right?”

  “Exactly. To skip, we’re bouncing through seventeen dimensions you and I can’t perceive,” he confirmed.

  “I’ve never been clear on the name,” she admitted. “I see a lot of documents referring to Icosaspace Traversal System.”

  Henry barely managed to keep his laugh to a soft chuckle.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen the full name spelled out anywhere in years,” he admitted. “ITS or skip drive, that’s all I see. The military isn’t going to call it by its full name, and everyone else started calling it the skip drive based on the metaphor Dr. Tsao used to explain it.”

  “Skipping…rocks, right?”

  “You ever done it?” Henry asked. “You throw a rock, a three-dimensional object and vector, at a river or lake, a two-dimensional surface. You bounce, and the two-dee surface doesn’t see it until it lands again.

  “We’re doing the same thing…but with a twenty-dimensional vector and a three-dimensional surface.” He gestured at the screen showing him what Bazzoli was doing.

  “Why the specific location, then?” she asked. “I mostly get the drive, or at least how it works, but if we’re bouncing off realspace in icosaspace, why do we need to line up with stars?”

  “If you skip a rock, it loses energy velocity with each skip,” Henry told her. “Similarly, if we just skip in a random spot, there’s a bit of expansion due to the icosaspace factor, but we only get one skip and it doesn’t go very far.

  “To mangle the metaphor, we need a current. By hitting the direct vector between two stars, we use their icosaspatial gravity to propel ourselves along. The closer and larger the stars, the faster we go. The skip from Sol to Alpha Centauri takes just over twelve hours. If we were to try and directly skip along the line from Procyon to Resta…”

  He snorted.

  “I haven’t done the math, but I think we’d be looking at two or three years,” he told her. “And that would probably kill us.”

  “All hands, this is your final skip alert. Entrance in ten seconds,” Bazzoli barked aloud, her voice going out over the PA system. “If you aren’t strapped in, get strapped in now!”

  Henry fell silent, bracing himself for the impact. He’d lost count of the number of skips he’d made in his life, but that didn’t make it any easier. Zion was a giant star on the edge of what the UPA claimed as their space, nine light-years from Procyon.

  Size helped, meaning they were only looking at a twenty-hour skip to cross those nine light-years.

  That was still cutting close to the edge of the twenty-four-hour limit the UPSF was prepared to accept for anything other than an emergency.

  “Skip…now.”

  After a lifetime of service in the UPSF, Henry had a pretty good idea of what a skipped rock felt like in the moment of impact. Without the same inertial compensators that allowed Raven to accelerate at over fifty gravities, the initial hit could easily be fatal.

  Even with the compensators, the angle and force of the hit were so unpredictable, the impacts couldn’t be completely stopped.

  The ship fell…sideways. Then up. Then backward. Each shift was sharp enough to send Henry’s stomach reeling.

  None were enough to do more than dislodge small random objects, when all was said and done, but the rapid sequence of changing gravity vectors played ugly games with the human inner ear.

  It lasted just over twenty seconds, and then he heard Bazzoli breathe a sigh of relief.

  “All hands, hear this,” she said into the PA. “Skip insertion complete. Initial skip complete. First secondary skip will be in three hours, twenty-seven minutes. Set your alarms. No one wants to clean up after you.”

  Henry exhaled heavily. Gravity on the ship still felt wrong. Raven’s systems were keeping his sense of down firmly pointed in the right direction, but there was still a slowly swirling sense of gravity in other directions.

  “And there is why everyone wants to watch the skip,” Todorovich noted, her gaze focused on the screens around them.

  Raven was no longer in the same three-dimensional space she’d started in. What, exactly, a ship was in during the “flight” portion of the skip had defied the astrophysicists who’d taught Henry when he’d earned his degree.

  Nothing had changed in the last thirty years. One thing was certain, though: the strangely warped view of the universe available to a ship in mid-skip was beautiful.

  Strange colors and shapes swirled around Raven, her cameras and sensors faithfully reporting the utter garbage they were receiving as data. It was a whirlpool of light and color, one you could easily get lost in if you let yourself.

  “I’m not sure the view is worth the dizziness,” Henry admitted. “My balance is messed up enough if I keep my eyes closed. Adding that”—he gestured to the screens—“leaves my network working overtime to prevent nausea.”

  “I doubt I’m any better,” Todorovich conceded. “But it’s damn pretty, Captain Wong. You have to give the universe that.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Twenty years before, Zion had been an archetypal example of the outpost systems—star systems claimed by the United Planets Alliance that didn’t have an inhabitable world. Originally colonized by a joint Jewish-Mormon-Muslim expedition fleeing the tender mercies of the United States Colonial Administration, there’d been about a quarter-million people in the system, living in asteroids and space stations, when the war started.

  It had been a quiet place, a determinedly self-sufficient society that had only hesitantly accepted UPA authority. Henry had visited the system once aboard Rygel before everything went wrong.

  It looked very different now. Five years of Kenmiri occupation had seen the system repurposed as a logistics base for operations against the UPA. When the Terrans had finally retaken the system, they’d taken the logistics base intact.

  Only half of the quarter-million inhabitants of the system remained. Many had died. Others had been hauled off deeper into the Kenmiri Empire for interrogation or to work on higher-value tasks.

  The logistics base had been repurposed and expanded, and now Base Fallout was on the outer perimeter of the UPA, the main base from which the war against the Kenmiri had been waged. Repairs and leave had sent ships back to Procyon, but refueling and resupply had taken place here.

  “Base Fallout confirms receipt of our subspace IFF,” Lieutenant Commander Moon told Henry. “They don’t have us on lightspeed yet. Rear Admiral Zhao’s staff wants to know if we need anything before we take off ‘into the deep black yonder.’”

  Henry smiled, but there was an odd sense of strangeness to it.

  Zhao Xinyi had been a fixture at Base Fallout for ten years, but she’d never commanded it. The woman had spent a decade making sure that every ship that went out had everything they needed, and anyone who’d taken her soft appearance as weakness had learned otherwise the hard way.

  But she’d risen from Colonel to merely Rear Admiral over that decade, and when Henry Wong had taken Panther through the system for Golden Lancelot, Base Fallout had been a Vice Admiral’s command.

  “We just left Procyon; I think we’re fine
,” Henry said aloud. “What are we looking at at the base? When I last came through here, Aeryn was still holding down the fort with her battle group.”

  Lieutenant Saule Rao, one of Ihejirika’s two assistant tactical officers, was already combing through the data, according to the screen Henry could see.

  “It looks like Jaguar and three Tyrannosaur-class destroyers,” she finally reported. “IFFs mark them as Megaraptor, Albertosaurus and Labocania.” She paused. “It looks like some of the exterior forts are shut down as well. For maintenance, I guess?”

  Henry nodded slowly as the codes crossed his screen and concealed a sigh.

  From a carrier, two battlecruisers and six destroyers to a single battlecruiser and three destroyers. No wonder Base Fallout had been downgraded from a Vice Admiral’s command—the UPSF had clearly already been raiding it for personnel and ships.

  Most of the base defenses were automated, but the sphere of sixteen forts that provided her inner defenses had a crew of two hundred apiece. The icons he could see said that four of them had been completely shut down.

  Potentially it was just maintenance, but he doubted it. The UPA was already determined to claim a “peace dividend” from the “victory” over the Kenmiri. Their cash flows were intentionally restricted, after all, and funding the expansion of the UPSF had required special agreements with the member systems.

  Those agreements would need to be renewed in another year or so, but until they ran out, the UPA had wartime funding…and since their enemy was reacting roughly as expected to the annihilation of their future, they didn’t have a war to spend it on.

  “Commander Moon, send my regards to both Rear Admiral Zhao and to Colonel Tyson aboard Jaguar,” he ordered. “We won’t be in need of anything, and we won’t be stopping in Zion. Give Zhao our updated timeline for our next skip.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  His bridge crew set to work and Henry leaned back in his chair. It would take them a little over thirty hours to establish the vector for their next jump—not a twenty-hour endurance run this time—but once they hit that jump, they were truly on their way.

  Zion, after all, was twenty light-years away from Sol on a direct line toward the Kenmiri Empire. This was the border, where the UPA’s claim and reach ended.

  From here on out, they were no longer in friendly stars.

  While the UPSF eschewed holograms at combat stations, there was an impressive setup in the Captain’s office that could easily rival the ones in Raven’s conference rooms. Henry was using it to review their course when there was a knock on his door.

  “Enter,” he ordered.

  He hadn’t been expecting Ambassador Todorovich, and he raised a questioning eyebrow at the diplomat.

  “How may I assist you, Ambassador?” he asked politely.

  “I’m sorry; am I interrupting?” she asked, gesturing to the hologram.

  “Not really. Going over our course,” Henry told her.

  She stood across his desk for a few more seconds, looking at the hologram.

  “We’re here?” she asked, tapping the green icon of Raven. It was in a very symbolic orbit of Zion, given that it was almost as large as the star in the display.

  “That’s right,” he confirmed. “And we’re heading here.” He tapped the gold icon marking the Resta System. “Resta, also known as Geb-Nine before we actually met the inhabitants. One of the major industrial worlds of the Kenmiri province we designated Geb.”

  “And the homeworld of one of the three largest Vesherons,” Todorovich noted. “Even acting as a government in exile, the Restan managed to access far more of their homeworld’s resources than I would have expected.

  “Weren’t they still building their own warships?”

  “I don’t know where the ships were being built,” Henry admitted. “I know they were one of only two ‘true’ Vesheron factions with capital ships that weren’t stolen Kenmiri dreadnoughts.”

  There hadn’t been many of the latter, either. Kenmiri escorts and gunships had been easy enough for the various Vesheron factions to acquire, relatively speaking. Dreadnoughts had been almost impossible.

  Most of the heavy ships in the Vesheron fleets had been refitted freighters that no UPSF officer or analyst had ever dignified with the descriptor of capital ship.

  “And now the war is at least mostly over, they just moved back home and set up shop,” she said. “With surprisingly little difficulty, according to our people on the scene. Disturbingly organized people, the Restan.”

  “They’re Ashall,” Henry pointed out. Most Ashall looked related to each other as opposed to the same species, but the Restan specifically could pass for human without even trying. “They think a lot like we do—and they knew the Kenmiri were coming before they arrived.”

  “We’d have spent the effort fighting them, I think,” Todorovich said.

  “They did. They also applied a very Chinese methodology to losing,” Henry said, thinking back to his own ancestors’ reaction to the Mongols. “Yes, ser, we work for you now, ser, this is how things work here, ser, we’ll just drop you into the Emperor’s role now…”

  It wouldn’t have worked forever with the Kenmiri, he suspected, but it had bought three Restan worlds enough calm and autonomy that they’d secretly built an entire fleet.

  “I’ll admit, Colonel Wong, that my familiarity with Earth history prior to the twentieth century isn’t what it should be,” Todorovich told him. “My own focuses of study were mostly on post-space travel politics. The USCA and the Novaya Imperiya, primarily.”

  He made a throwaway gesture. Both the United States Colonial Administration and the Russian New Empire had been very…patriotic in their objectives.

  “Resta’s a long way away,” he said. “Almost a hundred light-years from Zion, even. We’ll pass through unclaimed space, the Ra Province and the Apophis Province before we reach Geb.”

  Todorovich nodded, tracing the pale green line through the three-dimensional map.

  “I can see the line,” she told him. “How do I read the icons?”

  He chuckled and stepped over to her.

  “The entire map is at five millimeters to the light-year,” he told her. “So, the length of a line will tell you how far we’re skipping. If you tap the line”—he did so for the skip from Zion—“it will give you numbers.”

  Directly beneath the line, small text appeared. Seven light-years, ten hours. They were jumping between two big stars this time.

  “Twenty more days,” he said. “Eighteen more skips. We’ll be averaging five point four light-years per skip and just under eleven hours.”

  “So, we’re jumping from giants to giants most of the way?” Todorovich asked. “Bigger stars give us more of a speed boost, right?”

  “Exactly. The rest of the trip is spent lining ourselves up for the next skip in each system,” he told her. “We’re at our most vulnerable in that time period. The Kenmiri used to patrol the stars most easily used for rapid transit. So did the Vesheron.”

  “It’s a long trip,” the Ambassador noted. “I’ve been on a few longer, but not many.”

  “Each way to the Set Province was five weeks,” Henry said. “We were out there for six months before Lancelot.”

  They’d still been three weeks from home when the news that they’d been the ones to strike the final blow and finish off the Kenmorad had arrived. It was a slow genocide that they’d inflicted, but it was Panther and Colonel Henry Wong that had inflicted it.

  He doubted anyone aboard his ship had been in a great mental state by the time they’d made it back to Procyon. He wasn’t the only one who’d ended up a psych casualty out of that realization.

  “We spent a year with the Londu,” she told him. “It was about the same to get there, I think.”

  She shook herself.

  “Sorry, Captain, I got distracted by the map and forgot why I was here,” Todorovich said with a small smile. “With the section of the ship you gave us, it turns ou
t that I have a dining room of my own. While I’m well aware that we’re eating food you’re providing for us, I do have a chef with me.

  “I’d like to invite you and your executive officer to join my senior staff and me for dinner tonight. Preferably before we skip again.” Her smile sharpened. “I don’t think any of us are up for eating when our sensation of down keeps changing!”

  Socialization and politics were an inevitable part of Henry’s job, if not his favorite. For a moment, he considered trying to just send Iyotake.

  But no. This was Todorovich’s mission. He was just the driver, which meant he needed to know which way she was planning to go.

  “We’d be delighted.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Exit in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Exit.”

  Raven lurched in a direction that Henry Wong could never describe, and they were suddenly back in reality.

  “Welcome to the Apophis-Four System and Apophis Province of the Kenmiri Empire,” Bazzoli announced aloud. “For those of you who lost your brochure for our little tour, that puts us just over two-thirds of the way to Resta. Four more skips to Geb Province, and then two more to take us all the way there.”

  Henry shook his head, but he didn’t rebuke the navigator for her exuberance. Getting back into real space hit people differently—but for a not-insignificant portion of the population, the feeling was akin to a few minutes of mania or a drug high.

  “Ihejirika,” he addressed his tactical officer instead. “How’s Apophis-Four looking?”

  “Like a red giant about twenty-five million years from nova,” the broad-shouldered black man replied. “Looks like the Kenmiri fueling station has been abandoned. I’ve located it, but I’m not picking up any energy signatures.”

  They’d been in Kenmiri space for over a week now, and that was the story everywhere. The systems they’d traveled through had never been heavily populated, but they’d been useful to the Kenmiri for the same reasons Raven was traveling through them.