And according to the updated briefing Henry had just received by subspace, the Restan had done the impossible when they’d been conquered and occupied: they’d hidden the fourth colony.
Not only that, they’d kept it hidden. A good chunk of that, Henry had to admit, had been by not telling even their Vesheron allies about it. The Vesheron factions had been enthusiastic and determined but not…good at spycraft.
The Restan clearly were. That, unlike the news of the fourth world of the reborn Restan state, was not a surprise. They’d been one of the handful of factions fully briefed on and involved in Operation Golden Lancelot. The fleet that had covered the carriers while Commodore Breslau and her fighters made their bombing run on the Kenmiri homeworld had been almost entirely Resta.
Henry had served with dozens of Restan ships and hundreds of Restan officers, but he’d never set foot in the Resta System itself. He took in the scans with a smile as Raven’s sensors trawled the theoretically friendly system.
“Well, that is…a lot of floating metal,” Iyotake noted from CIC. “And I’m not talking about the infrastructure.”
“I’m more impressed by the infrastructure,” Henry replied. “The Kenmiri took over most of the Restan infrastructure intact and then added to it. They’re not going to be hurting for industry going forward.”
Ost was a densely populated world of ten billion souls, once home to a garrison of a hundred million Kenmiri. Most of those drones had even managed to evacuate before being murdered.
The three Kenmorad sects that had split the rule of the system hadn’t died in space battle like most of the targets of Golden Lancelot. The Restan had smuggled tactical nukes into the three supposedly super-secure palaces and set them off.
Much less destructive than full-scale space battles, and part of why the industrial infrastructure the Kenmiri had built was intact…and working.
“The infrastructure is going to make a huge difference for whatever they want to do going forward, yeah,” Iyotake confirmed. “But can we pay some attention to the hundred-odd warships?”
“That’s the Gathering, XO,” Henry pointed out. Swift gestures highlighted the key points.
“We won’t be going anywhere near Ost,” he continued as he highlighted the Resta homeworld. “Right now, they’re guarding that like the holy grail. I make it twelve capital ships, fifteen escorts. They’re what, half-and-half Kenmiri and homebuilt?”
“Fifteen capital ships, Captain,” Iyotake corrected. Three icons blinked inside the Lagrange point station clusters. “I don’t know if the last three are intentionally hiding or just there to support the forts they took from the Kenmiri, but that’s three ex-Kenmiri dreadnoughts in close to the shipyards.”
“Okay, so the Restan have thirty ships defending their home planet,” Henry agreed. “That’s…mostly irrelevant today. No one is going after Ost unless they’re insane.
“The coordinates we have put the Gathering here.” He pinged a location on the scan of the system for Iyotake. “Looks like a big space station, which was what I expected. It’s on the edge of the asteroid belt, so it was probably a mining station or a mining ship base originally.”
The Resta System had one of the biggest asteroid belts he’d ever seen. Ost was the fourth planet of a hot-burning F-sequence star. It shared a similar orbit to Mars in Sol but was even warmer than Earth.
The fifth planet was a small gas giant. The sixth planet was a larger gas giant, and the two were close enough to each other that their gravity wells had formed a giant catcher’s net over the untold millennia.
Both gas giants had smaller-than-normal rings. The system’s outer ice cloud was sparser than usual. There were even fewer comets than most systems.
All of that debris was bound up in an asteroid belt that had a radius twenty percent larger than Sol’s, half again the width, and almost twice the density. Even under the Kenmiri, that belt had to have been swarming with mining ships—and faced with building a new fleet to defend themselves against a potential Kenmiri return, the belt now practically glowed with the energy signatures of Restan mining ships.
“And the Gathering is around that station,” Iyotake agreed. “All eighty fucking starships of it.”
“I leave it to Todorovich to guess who’s late, who’s early and who we needed to beat here,” Henry said dryly. “We can figure out who’s here, at least.”
He wasn’t the only one doing so. The combat information center analysts around Iyotake were already at work.
“Hardest part is splitting up the ex-Kenmiri ships,” Iyotake told him. “The rest are easy enough. There’s another three capital ships and three escorts from the Resta. That’s a Terzan…whatever they call it.”
Henry chuckled. The Terzan were the strangest of the Vesheron. Like the UPA and the Londu, they were El-Vesheron—outsiders rather than rebels, despite what the word Vesheron meant—but unlike the UPA and the Londu, they were not Ashall. They were, in fact, insectoid sentients with ten legs and some kind of low-grade organic radio communication with each other.
The UPA had no idea how the Londu had brought them into the alliance against the Kenmiri, but the other El-Vesheron power was credited with making contact. And even with translation equipment, the Terzan were hard enough to communicate with that they couldn’t really dispute that assessment.
“Starfang,” he told his XO. “The mind-concept they use for their lighter warships translates as starfang. Just the one of them?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Iyotake replied. “I don’t suppose you know why I’ve got an intel warning here classifying the starfang as the biggest threat here?”
“You’re not cleared for that,” Henry admitted. “If you need to know, I’ll brief you. Otherwise, let’s just not pick a fight with the ten-legged spiders, okay?”
He had been briefed. One Terzan ship during Golden Lancelot had demonstrated a form of gravity shield when under pressure. The sensor data was unclear, but it had suggested that the Terzan not only shared the system the UPA had regarded as their main advantage over the rest of the galaxy…but that their version was significantly more sophisticated.
And if they had a grav-shield, they almost certainly had grav-shield penetrators.
“Right.” Henry could hear Iyotake’s lack of enthusiasm. “As for the rest, well, I see a Londu battleship with four escorts, a Drifter Convoy’s Guardian that I think two of the ex-Kenmiri escorts are attached to, a pair of homebuilt corvettes from Trintar…ten other midsized homebuilt ships from factions the UPA doesn’t care about, six ex-Kenmiri dreadnoughts that could belong to anybody and fifty or so ex-Kenmiri escorts and gunships of the same stripe.”
“Start digging into the IFFs and intel files and see if you can at least flag who the dreadnoughts belong to,” Henry ordered. “With the Restan ships, that gets us to ten dreadnoughts in the system, and the last I’d heard, the entirety of the Vesheron factions had only captured fourteen!”
“We should be able to ID them,” Iyotake promised. “What about the rest?”
“Moon?” Henry turned to his communications officers. “Do we have an orbit from local control?”
“Just arrived, ser.”
“We set our course for the Gathering, then,” he told his officers. “I’ll touch base with the Ambassador and with Command to see if we have any last-minute adjustments.
“For us, however, it looks like the hardest part of the job is done. Well done, everyone. We made it in one piece.”
The call with UPSF Command, Henry and Ambassador Todorovich had been scheduled since before they even left Procyon. It had been rescheduled after the delay in Apophis, but now they had reached their destination and it was time for the final updates.
It was just the two of them in the secured conference room, and as Todorovich fussed with a carafe of coffee, Henry input the codes that locked everyone else aboard Raven out of the subspace communicator.
Usually, they were running multiple parallel channels to allow for
a dozen different necessary communications to take place. For a secure call like this, everything else would have to wait.
“We’re locked in,” he told Todorovich. “Ready?”
“For the biggest and messiest challenge of my life? Of course,” she replied with a smile. She slid a coffee cup across the table to him and took a seat herself. The fussy nervousness of a moment before was gone, vanished behind a mask that would have fooled even Henry if he hadn’t seen her a second before.
“I learned to read microexpressions to deal with Ashall,” he noted. “You scare me, Em Ambassador.”
“Good,” she said calmly. “That means the Ashall can’t read me, either.”
He shook his head at her, put on his own professional mask—far less controlled than Todorovich’s, if still enough to conceal his emotions from his crew in the middle of a battle—and opened the subspace communicator link.
“This is Raven reporting in,” he said aloud. “Authentication code is Michael Gabriel Raziel Aziraphale One Six Niner Four One. Captain Henry Wong on the call.”
“This is Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich reporting in,” the Ambassador added a moment later. “Authentication is Raven Raven Wolverine Seven Niner Badger Duck.”
A green light flashed in the middle of the table, replaced a moment later by a rotating image of the eight-star seal of the United Planets Alliance.
The seal lasted through one twelve-second rotation and vanished. The empty chairs around the conference table were suddenly full, each of them mirroring a chair somewhere in the UPA.
Given the collection of stars and titles around the table, Henry would have been very surprised to learn that the rest of the call was in one room.
“Em Secretary, we now have Captain Wong and Ambassador Todorovich on the call,” the clear organizer of the meeting reported. Even Henry recognized Senna Dirksen, the extraordinarily pale and androgynous Senior Undersecretary of the United Planets Alliance.
“While I’m certain Ambassador Todorovich knows half the people on the call and Captain Wong knows the other half, perhaps some introductions would be in order, Undersecretary?” the woman Dirksen had addressed replied.
Vasudha Patil was so dark-skinned as to nearly blend in with the tailored leather chair she was sitting in but wore a traditional Indian sari and had the red-dot bindi tattoo of a married Hindi woman on her forehead.
She was also the Secretary-President of the United Planets Alliance. Her power inside the actual member star systems of the UPA might be limited, but there was still no question that she was the single most powerful human being alive.
“Of course, Em Secretary,” Dirksen replied lightly. They gestured at the other six people at the table, neatly divided into military on one side of the table and civilian on the other side.
“Captain Wong will be familiar with Admirals Saren, Kosigan, and Bailey,” they said, indicating each of the officers in turn. “Lee Saren is the head of SpaceDiv, Miles Kosigan heads IntelDiv and Jean Bailey heads GroundDiv.”
Lee Saren was a shaven-headed Asian individual almost as androgynous as Dirksen. A Tau Ceti native, she’d come up through FighterDiv and switched to SpaceDiv much like Henry. And like him, she wore the Red Wings of someone who’d been a combat pilot in that first bloody campaign.
She, however, had been the third-most senior pilot in that desperately thrown-together fleet and had been in charge of feeding the massed starfighter wings of the UPSF into that meat grinder again and again. And again. And again.
Miles Kosigan, on the other hand, was a tall and dark-haired Slavic man from Russia’s Epsilon Eridani colony. In Henry’s experience, he combined an exceptional personal attractiveness with a dizzying intellect and a degree of hyperactivity normally seen in small terriers. It had apparently been a dangerous combination in a spy and was a deadlier one in a leader of spies.
Henry didn’t know Jean Bailey as well as the other two, but the broad-shouldered woman from Altair had a nasty scar along one side of her face. That could easily have been healed, so the simple fact that Bailey still had that scar said volumes about the GroundDiv Admiral.
Dirksen gestured to the other side of the table. “Ambassador Todorovich, on the other hand, knows Trade Undersecretary Shahira Saqqaf, UPA Intelligence Director Njal Vang, and Undersecretary of State Sukhon Wattana.”
Saqqaf was a petite woman in a niqab marked with a constellation pattern in what Henry suspected was actual gold and gems. Only her eyes were visible through the embroidered veil, but they were bright green and sparkling with interest in the discussion around her.
Vang was a study in contrasts with his military counterpart. Where Kosigan was tall, dark and Slavic, Vang was short, blond and Scandinavian, with a neatly braided beard that reached down to the collar of his perfectly tailored business suit.
Wattana was one of the three Earth natives on the call with Dirksen and Henry, a heavyset broad-shouldered Thai woman with piercing black eyes.
“We currently have most of the civilian and military administration of the United Planets Alliance on this call,” Secretary-President Patil noted. “This conference was not entirely about the Gathering, but it does behoove us all to move with alacrity.”
“And to make sure we cover things completely,” Dirksen added, earning themselves a vaguely accepting wave from Patil.
“Kosigan, Vang. Have there been any major changes in our situation with regards to our allies since Raven departed Procyon?” Patil asked.
“Our agents on the ground are suggesting that we’re seeing even more of a pullback on the part of the Kenmiri military than we are seeing of their population,” Kosigan told them. “We’re seeing every sign that the Kenmiri are on the edge of dissolving into civil war over how to proceed without the Kenmorad.”
“Our contacts with the Vesheron closer to the Horus Province agree,” Vang added. “At least one of those factions, I must note, is suggesting a campaign of mass genocide into the former Empire. The logic, I suppose, being that if they can’t rule, no one will.”
“If they launch such a campaign, can the Vesheron stop it without us?” Patil asked.
“It won’t matter either way,” Kosigan said. “Without prepositioning Admiral Saren’s ships throughout the former Empire, there’s no way we could get forces into position in time to stop the Kenmiri remnants if they launch a suicide campaign.
“To make sure we secured our allies against that kind of attack would require the forward deployment of almost the entire UPSF.”
“And the cost of that kind of deployment would be extravagant,” Wattana pointed out. “Saqqaf? Do we have numbers on that?”
“Every battlecruiser deployed outside UPA space costs us approximately one point two million dollars per day more than a battlecruiser on deployment inside UPA space,” the Trade Undersecretary said instantly, though she seemed oddly unenthused with giving the numbers to Henry. “That is in additional wear, the need to supply precious metals for trade goods for acquisition of fuel from allied sources, hazard pay and similar costs.”
“The UPA can’t afford to continue prosecuting this war,” Wattana concluded.
That, Henry noted, had not been what Saqqaf had said. Someone was playing games here…and he didn’t think he liked the one being played.
“We know that,” Patil said calmly. “Even if that wasn’t the case, the General Assembly and the member systems have made it clear that they have no interest in continuing a war far beyond our borders now the threat to us has been neutralized.
“This does, obviously, impact your potential options, Ambassador Todorovich,” she continued. “While I have categorically refused to forbid you from offering deployments of our ships to secure trade routes, the General Assembly has made the limits of what can be offered in that case very clear.”
She gestured to Saqqaf. Henry only had the Undersecretary’s eyes to go on, but he would not have wanted to be the target of the anger he saw in them.
“The General Assemb
ly has officially authorized you to offer deployment of up to two battlecruisers or an equivalent mass of lighter units,” Saqqaf said flatly. “I don’t personally see how that could possibly be sufficient to secure trade lines even through the Ra Province, let alone all the way to, say, Resta.”
“We answer to the Assembly, not the other way around,” Patil said, the only concession Henry was seeing to the fact that Saqqaf kept getting pulled into the conversation.
“We might be better off with a half-dozen destroyers than two battlecruisers,” Admiral Saren noted. “How heavy are pirate forces likely to be in the wake of the Empire’s fall?”
“Heavy,” Henry injected calmly. “I presume only summaries of our reports from Apophis-Four made it all the way up the chain, ser? We faced a six-ship flotilla of ex-Kenmiri ships, including two gunships, that had been acting as pirates.”
“That had to be an isolated incident, though,” Saren argued. “They were Vesheron gone rogue. We can’t be expecting to see much of that…”
From the way she trailed off, she could see the expressions on the intelligence officers’ and diplomats’ faces.
“The likely situation is that most of the smaller Vesheron are going to turn to banditry,” Todorovich said quietly. “Unless there are specific groups trying to sweep them up to form new nations in their area, they’re going to go home. And they’re not going to find anything waiting for them there. Certainly, few of the Vesheron were in position to step back in as a government in exile like the Restan were.
“Piracy, warlordism, violence and chaos…this is going to be the Kenmiri Empire for the next hundred years,” the Ambassador noted. “That is why this Gathering is taking place—because many of the larger Vesheron realize that and want to head it off.”
The table, with its mix of holographic and physical people, was silent.
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