“We know,” Patil finally said. “The truth of the matter, Ambassador, is that it is always about money. The United Planets Alliance is limited under the constitution to a one percent flat income tax on all individuals. Systems under our direct administration see us receive the full revenue of a more standard income tax structure, but we only control minor colonies at best.
“To fund the expansion and operation of the UPSF required special funding agreements with the member systems. Those agreements are up for renewal in less than six months. With the Kenmiri no longer an active threat, they will not be renewed.”
“And without those agreements, every battlecruiser we send beyond our borders is a battlecruiser back home we need to decommission,” Saqqaf said flatly. “Expanding our external trade options will increase the funding available to the UPA, and in the long run, we see that eventually being self-funding with regards to the force necessary to secure those routes.
“In the short term, however, we need to limit what we can deploy to what we can afford.”
“Which is why Ambassador Todorovich has the instructions she has,” Wattana concluded. “We cannot get involved in the future—or even the current problems—of the Vesheron. We want a series of stable successor states.
“Unfortunately, in at least some cases, those successor states will be born out of the warlordism that Em Todorovich mentioned. Stability is going to be more important than palatability for a long time, people.”
That chilled the conversation again. As the American in the room, Henry could reflect on exactly how well policies like that had worked in the past.
“That brings us back to the intelligence briefing,” Kosigan noted. “Our sources in the Londu military have been…quite open about their desires at the Gathering.”
“This is new information, I take it?” Patil asked.
“Our agent on the scene wanted to confirm the details as best they could before risking a subspace transmission out of Londu space,” the Admiral replied. “But there’s no question now: the Londu are preparing a new battle fleet, at least a dozen battleships, with attendant escorts…and invasion forces.
“If the Gathering does not provide the territorial gains they want in the Isis Province, they have every intention of taking them by force,” Kosigan noted. “The Londu Scion wants to double his territory as his price for their aid in the war. They’re aiming for a hundred stars and at least a dozen inhabited worlds.”
“The Vesheron are not going to give that up,” Henry said softly. “The worlds closest to the Londu like them well enough that voluntary annexation is entirely possible, but that’s a fifth of the Province. They’re not going to sign over a dozen inhabited worlds, of which maybe three will have a voice at the table.”
“If they don’t, they’re going to be looking at another war. A war we can’t fight,” Kosigan replied.
“I hate to say it, but we may need to back the Londu up,” Wattana said. “Their presence would secure an entire former province. They will not tolerate chaos near their borders. Our influence may well swing the decision on conceding to their ambitions.”
She smiled coldly.
“Of course, they don’t need to know our objectives. Ambassador Todorovich should be able to extract quite a price for our assistance.”
Henry felt a little sick, but he understood the point. If the alternative to letting the Londu gobble up a dozen inhabited worlds and a hundred star systems’ worth of resources was to see five hundred systems with fifty inhabited worlds degrade into chaos and bloodshed, then let the Londu gobble away.
And since the UPA’s objectives lined up neatly with what the Londu wanted—they wanted stable trading partners in Kenmiri successor states, after all—they could support that. But since what the Londu wanted was against the desires of most of the Gathering, Todorovich could extort quite a price for her help.
“That’s not a bad basic plan to apply overall,” Patil noted. “Kosigan, Vang, I want you and your people to sit down and flag who are the most likely stabilizing influences in each province. If we can subtly direct the weight of authority in their regions to them, then we increase their ability to stabilize entire sections of space.
“The Gathering isn’t going to create some grand Vesheron federation to replace the Kenmiri Empire. The Vesheron simply don’t have enough in common with each other to manage that.
“Our focus has to be on the Ra Province, with Apophis and Hathor second and the rest a distant third at best,” the Secretary-President admitted. “The General Assembly has tasked us to see to our own matters first, so that is your guiding light, Ambassador Todorovich.
“We can’t save six thousand stars from chaos, even if the Assembly handed us an infinite budget. So, let’s use this Gathering to help create islands of stability among those stars, islands that we can trade and negotiate with to mutual benefit.”
“Those are my instructions, then?” Todorovich asked stonily.
“They are,” Wattana confirmed. “They’re not much different than what you already had, but I’ll make sure it’s all codified in writing for you, Em Todorovich.”
“And as for you, Captain Wong,” Admiral Saren said, locking her gaze on Henry, “your task remains as it always has been: no matter what happens, Ambassador Todorovich is to be kept safe. If the Gathering comes under threat, your first priority is the Ambassador. You are authorized to attempt to protect the Gathering from any external threat you believe you can safely engage, but if you do not see a way to victory, you are to extract Todorovich and her staff and get the hell out of Resta.
“Am I clear?”
Any situation where the massed fleet at the Gathering couldn’t, combined with the Restan defense fleet, stand off an incoming threat…well, Henry wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the Ambassador out in that situation.
“I understand, ser,” he replied. Saren knew the limits and knew exactly what kind of scenario she was postulating. Her orders covered his working with the Vesheron against any threat short of a doomsday scenario.
Which was good…because that was probably what he’d have done anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Two
One of the less significant problems of serving in the military for twenty-seven years—seventeen of those actively at war—and being good at your job was the sheer amount of metal you ended up wearing when the situation called for full dress uniform.
The base UPSF uniform was simple enough: dark blue slacks and a turtleneck with built-in safety features that allowed them to act as an emergency vac-suit. There were various allowed additions for religious observation, but those weren’t relevant to Henry.
Undress uniform layered a jacket over that basic uniform and put the medals on that jacket. That was bad enough, but Henry had managed to keep himself down to the Class Two Undress Uniform for almost every occasion in the last few years.
Class One Dress Uniform forewent the base layer of every other uniform the UPSF used in favor of old-fashioned slacks, dress shirt and tie. The jacket for the dress uniform was longer than the one for the undress uniform and cut of a dark blue fabric that matched the underlayer of the usual uniform.
All of this was pressed and stiff in a way that would never have been tolerated in a combat uniform and topped off with a sword that Henry, for one, had no clue how to use. Fortunately for his sanity and paranoia, the outfit did allow for wearing a pistol on the other hip.
Assuming the weapon in question was decorative enough, anyway. The energy pistol Henry wore had been acquired from a dead Kenmorad Consort by his GroundDiv troopers years earlier. They’d refitted the platinum-plated weapon with a human-compatible handle and presented it to their Captain as a gift.
Terran-manufactured handheld energy weapons were still relatively rare, but GroundDiv had captured a lot of the guns over the years. Few were quite as decorative as the one Henry had, but many of the ones that were floating around the fleet were “dress uniform qualified.”
All of it
combined to be amazingly uncomfortable on a shuttle, and he sighed loudly as he carefully extracted the sword from where acceleration had wedged it between the seats.
“Behave, Captain Wong,” Todorovich told him with a chuckle. “Be glad we at least get to wear clothes we designed. The first year we were with the Londu, Rembrandt insisted that we wear their clothing as a sign of respect—and to help hide ourselves from potential assassins!”
The Ambassador at least got to wear a regular civilian suit. Current fashion called for higher and stiffer collars than he would ever be comfortable with, but it at least lacked heavy metal objects to throw off the wearer’s balance.
“You don’t have to carry a sword,” he told her. “Or what I swear is over two kilos of metal in the medals.”
“This is true,” Todorovich conceded. “Wait, seriously? Two kilograms of medals?”
He chuckled.
“If I wore the formal decorations, probably. But we don’t do that, even for full dress,” he admitted. “It’s only…a quarter-kilo? With the Medal of Valor?”
That one he wore around his neck, detached from the panel of miniature decorations that occupied his chest.
The Medal of Valor came from the Red Wings Campaign. He’d probably done at least two or three other things that would have earned him that since, but they’d been a bit busy to be submitting awards to the General Assembly for people who already had them.
“Soldiers,” she said dryly, but it wasn’t really a curse. “How many times do you have to nearly die to get that level of signage?”
Henry grimaced. At least Todorovich understood how the things were usually earned.
“I’ve lost count,” he admitted. He tapped a particular decoration in the row of miniatures. “That one is memorable, though.”
“Oh?” she asked, her tone careful.
“Turquoise Star. It’s for going Dutchman in a crippled starfighter and living,” he told her. “The Idiot-Who-Lived badge.”
The station had definitely been built as a mining base. Like many Kenmiri large space installations, it had started life as an asteroid that had been partially melted with Kenmiri plasma guns and spun up to create a neatly cylindrical shape of mostly pure metal.
Artificial gravity turned those former asteroids into multi-kilometer-tall skyscrapers in space. This one was just over three kilometers high, with docking collars evenly spaced every three hundred meters to allow for ten sets of ships to be docked.
The docks were designed to make sure they could handle escort-sized starships, even if their main purpose was to host smaller sublight ships. Studying the collars as their shuttle decelerated toward the station, Henry was comfortable in his initial assessment: he could have docked Raven with the station.
There was no chance in hell he or any other Captain here was going to do that. The Restan hadn’t even bothered to tell anyone they couldn’t. They’d just assigned everyone orbits without asking if they wanted to dock.
A single Restan battleship orbited fifteen thousand kilometers away from the station, and everyone else was at least one light-second away.
Very few of the weapons available to the Vesheron factions had a range of over a light-second, and none of the ones that did were lightspeed weapons. The distance the Restan had put everyone at meant that no one could shoot the station without that battleship having a chance to intervene.
“Ser, we’re handing you off to Gathering Station Control,” Lieutenant Commander Turrigan reported. He was the commander of the two starfighters escorting the shuttle in. “You’re in the perimeter of their defensive lasers now, and they’re taking over responsibility for your security.”
Turrigan paused.
“It’s not been explicit,” he noted, “but they implied pretty strongly that while we were fine escorting you in, we’re not welcome this close to the station otherwise.”
“Understood, Lieutenant Commander,” Henry replied. “We’ll be fine. Safe trails back to the hangar.”
“Good luck with the diplomacy, Captain,” Turrigan said before dropping the channel, drawing another sigh from Henry.
“Why am I here, again?” he asked Todorovich.
“Because we need to show off,” she told him. “Everyone is showing up with escorts and staff. Plus the commanders of our starship escort, because we all brought very decorated people that everyone here knows the name of.
“So, yes, Captain Wong, you’re the UPA’s prize stallion today, and we get to show you off.”
She smiled at him as she gave him a calmly assessing gaze.
“I think it will definitely have the intended impact.”
“I hope so,” he muttered. “I hate this uniform. I feel like the dictator from some bad three-D serial.”
“Perhaps,” she conceded. “But remember that neither that actor nor that dictator earned their decorations. I’ve seen your record, Henry. You earned every damn thing we hung on you. Deal.”
Regardless of Henry’s opinion, this was definitely Todorovich’s part of the mission. He had his orders…and he would soldier on.
Even if he hated his dress uniform. And had to wear a sword.
Todorovich had brought thirteen people with her, including a chef, analysts and junior diplomats. Henry had added sixteen GroundDiv troopers to the party going aboard Gathering Station, bringing them to an even thirty.
He was the odd man out, but he didn’t expect to be on the station for long. His place was aboard the battlecruiser with the rest of the escorts, not taking part in the stream of meetings, parties, dinners and politics that he knew was going to consume this station for the next few months.
“Clear,” the Chief Petty Officer in charge of the half-platoon GroundDiv team announced. “Locals waiting for you, sers. Looks all decorative and friendly, though.”
“Play nice, Chief,” Henry murmured.
“Never nicer, ser,” the other man replied.
The Captain carefully levered himself out of his chair, taking a few tentative steps to rebalance his weapons and get a feel for the local artificial gravity.
“I see the Restan got into the gravity controls as soon as they took over,” Todorovich noted, clearly doing the same. “Always good to see.”
He chuckled and nodded. The Kenmiri set gravity on any facility they used at around 1.15 gee. It was light enough that other races could adapt to it, but it still sucked for anyone who hadn’t grown up on a high-gravity world—GroundDiv trained in 1.5 gee for just that reason.
Ost, on the other hand, had a gravity of 0.97 gee, comparable to Sandoval in Procyon. The Restan had turned Gathering Station’s artificial gravity from where its Kenmiri builders would have set it to where the new management found comfortable.
“I believe it’s us first,” he told the Ambassador. “Shall we, Ambassador?”
“Let’s get this game started,” she confirmed, gesturing for him to fall in beside her.
They stepped out of the spacecraft together, walking down the short ramp to where the locals were waiting for them.
As the Chief had said, they were definitely decorative. There was a line of ten Restan soldiers on either side of the pathway forward. Unlike many Ashall, the Restan didn’t need a hood and distance to pass for human. Most of their ethnotypes had equivalents on Earth and most Terran ethnotypes had equivalents on Ost.
Clad in silvered body armor and carrying homebuilt energy weapons, they could have passed for GroundDiv troopers with ease. As Henry and Todorovich approached, each pair of soldiers saluted crisply with their fist to their chest.
Henry returned each salute with a firm nod as they made their way through the paired soldiers, his own soldiers following behind with the rest of the staff.
Civilian clothing, at least, was different on Ost. The diplomat waiting for them could pass for human, but she was clearly not a UPA citizen. Her formal wear consisted of long purple leggings, a knee-length red kilt, and a sleeveless vest in a matching purple to the leggings.
A gold torc around her neck declared her a senior official, if the fact that she was waiting for them with her two companions one step behind her wasn’t enough of a clue.
“Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich, Colonel Henry Wong,” she greeted them, the two English titles slightly distorted on the tongue of someone who didn’t speak that language. After that, she switched to the Kem trade language they shared.
“Welcome to Gathering Station. I am Under-Speaker Sho Lavah and I am the senior Restan diplomat for the Gathering.” She smiled. “That also makes me your host, and it is a pleasure to meet you both. Your reputations are known to us.”
“Greetings, Under-Speaker,” Todorovich responded with a small bow. “I look forward to our conversations. We have much work to achieve in the days ahead of us.”
“That we do.” Sho Lavah glanced past the two of them to the party waiting by the shuttle. “Quarters have been prepared for yourselves and your staff. Before we send everyone on their way, however, I promised to allow one more greeting.”
Henry’s focus had been on the Under-Speaker and her eye-catching outfit. He’d registered the two officers in their kilted uniforms behind her, but he hadn’t really looked at them beyond classifying them as “not threat.”
Now the taller of the two Restan officers stepped forward and bowed to Henry. She represented one of the ethnotypes that didn’t have a Terran equivalent, a dark-haired woman with dark blue eyes and pale green skin.
“Colonel Henry Wong, it has been a while,” she said as she offered her arm to him.
He’d spent enough time with Restan to recognize the gesture—and the green-skinned woman had been one of the Restan he’d spent that time with! He grasped her arm, forearm to forearm, and grinned at the other soldier.
“Ship-Voice Ta Callah,” he greeted her. “It has been too long. You are well?”
“I am well,” the woman replied. She’d been the flag captain of the Restan force sent into Set Province along with Panther. Their ships had reinforced the disorganized Vesheron factions on the far side of Kenmiri space from the UPA and helped turn them into an actual fighting force.
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