“And ours are the only ones with a gravity shield,” Henry said slowly. “The Dragoons are getting eyed for capture, aren’t they?”
“Exactly,” Iyotake confirmed. “I’m not sure who in this mess to even call allies, ser, but even the Restan wouldn’t hesitate if they thought they could manage to snap up one of our starfighters. Even if they had to give it back in a day or two, having unrestricted access to one of our birds to dissect for even twenty-four hours…”
Henry nodded. They’d never based grav-shield starfighters off Vesheron ships, and while the occasional pilot had been picked up by the UPA’s allies, they’d always ditched and destroyed their fighters.
It had taken a ruthless degree of paranoia to get through the war without the grav-shield technology ending up in Kenmiri hands. The price had been higher than Henry thought many of his superiors guessed. A lot of the Vesheron were bitter over it.
“The longer I’m here, the more I expect the Gathering to explode before it actually resolves anything,” he admitted. “And the actual Gathering itself hasn’t started yet.”
“Tomorrow?” Iyotake asked.
“Day after,” Henry said. “And it’s going to take them a week just to get through opening remarks. I’m looking forward to hearing how the Londu Ambassador spins the Scion’s position. I suspect that is going to throw as much of a wrench into this affair as our own desire to get the hell out and be left alone.”
They reached his office, and his XO was shaking his head as they stepped inside.
“It doesn’t feel right, ser,” Iyotake told him. “We had a big hand in breaking the Kenmiri, but now we just walk away and leave everyone to their own devices?”
“Twenty-four battlecruisers. Six thousand stars. How much can we really do?” Henry asked. He shook his head.
“Getting the Vesheron aligned and focused on peace will make a far larger difference than sending us out into the wilds, XO.”
“I get that, ser,” Iyotake confirmed. He tugged on his braid. “It just feels…wrong, ser. Like we should do something.”
“I agree with you, XO,” Henry pointed out. “But unless you think you can get yourself in front of the General Assembly with a presentation to change their minds, there’s not much we can do.”
Iyotake chuckled.
“I can’t do that,” he agreed. “But I bet I know who could. Ser.”
Henry shook his head.
“I think you overestimate how much my name can conjure,” he pointed out. “I’m just one Colonel.”
“We may not use the nickname the Vesheron have hung on you, ser, but believe me that ‘the Destroyer’ is not a meaningless distinction back home, either,” Iyotake told him. “Not least since even our government is growing a guilty conscience, even if most of it is in denial.”
“Let’s focus on the problem in front of us, Colonel,” Henry suggested. His XO probably wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t something he’d ever thought about. He’d been too busy trying to hide from any public recognition or adulation for his role in “ending the war.”
Could he use that? Possibly. It wasn’t his skillset or his usual battlefield…but it was Sylvia Todorovich’s. A conversation for another day, perhaps.
“Did Command get back to us about Lord of Ten Thousand Miles Kahlmor’s request to tour Raven?” he asked.
“They did,” Iyotake confirmed, a flash in his eyes suggesting that the conversation around the UPA’s responsibilities in Kenmiri space wasn’t over yet. “It’s an entertainingly phrased response.”
“Oh?” Henry asked.
“Admiral Hamilton managed to remind you that a tour of the ship is entirely at your discretion, recognize that you asked them for an opinion so they could say no, and give us a neat sound bite to provide to the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles,” the XO replied. “The Admiral suggests that we not give any tours out here, in general.”
“But it is my decision,” Henry concluded. “By kicking it upstairs and letting Admiral Hamilton say no, however, we keep a potential channel with the Londu officer on the scene open.”
“Like I said, she recognized that,” Iyotake said with a chuckle. “Shall I have your staff talk to his staff, ser?”
“He offered me a tour of his ship even if I couldn’t let him tour mine,” Raven’s Captain replied. “Let’s set that up. Todorovich thinks he’s flirting with me and trying to establish a back channel.” He snorted. “I think he’s just trying to establish a back channel.
“Either way, we need to find out what the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles is about. And I’m not passing on a tour of one of the Londu’s newest battleships!”
“Understood, ser. We’ll get it set up. How soon?”
“First day of the talks, I think,” Henry replied. “I suspect we’ll both need the distraction.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The commands to the honor guard were in a language Henry Wong didn’t understand, and the uniforms were vastly different from what he was used to…but the structure of the drill was entirely recognizable as a double file of Londu soldiers lined a pathway from his shuttle.
They wore a red version of the armored-robe dress uniform Lord of Ten Thousand Miles Kahlmor had worn to the party and held energy rifles in front of them, barrel tips resting on the floor in a formalized sign of nonaggression.
Henry gave the dozen soldiers a crisp salute and then made his way down the pathway to meet the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles himself. Like Henry, Kahlmor was wearing a slightly dressed-up version of his space duty uniform.
Where Henry’s uniform was slacks and a turtleneck that could link together to act as a bodysuit, the Londu uniform was a perfectly fitted black bodysuit that linked into the iron collar of his rank. The soldiers were probably wearing a version of it under their robes, though Henry hoped it had climate-control functions, if that were the case.
In place of Henry’s undress uniform jacket, Kahlmor wore a knee-length open white robe. It was held in place by a strip of metal on either side of the opening—and that metal bore the same inscriptions as Kahlmor’s dress uniform breastplate.
“Lord of Ten Thousand Miles,” Henry greeted his host with a salute. His Kem would serve today, a better choice than computer-translated Londu, he figured. “I appreciate your invitation aboard Rigid Candor and your flexibility.”
“Your suggested time worked well for us both, I think, Colonel Wong,” Kahlmor replied in the same language. “My Lord of Hundred Thousand Miles required my time yesterday. The number of ships here at the Gathering always raises concerns.”
A Lord of Hundred Thousand Miles was more senior an officer than Henry would have expected to command the Londu escort, the equivalent of Vice Admiral Hamilton in the UPA. The Londu really had sent a detachment able to speak for the Scion and act on his behalf.
“It does,” Henry agreed. “But we are all trusted allies here, are we not?”
“Allies, yes,” Kahlmor confirmed. “But I imagine you are no more trusting of everyone here than I am. We shared an enemy once. Who we are now…”
“Is what the Gathering is meant to decide, isn’t it?” Henry asked.
Kahlmor laughed.
“This is true,” the Londu officer conceded. “Come, Colonel Wong. From your record, I presume beginning the tour with Rigid Candor’s starfighter bays is acceptable?”
“She is your ship, Lord of Ten Thousand Miles,” Henry replied. “I will follow as you lead.”
The starfighter bays were impressive. If Henry had needed any reminder that Rigid Candor was almost twice the size of Raven, the bays would have been enough. Where his ship had eight ships in individual cramped bays, Rigid Candor had twenty-five sharing ridiculously spacious working bays.
They only had five of those bays, though, with the starfighters themselves stored in a rotating magazine with an automatic system that delivered them into the bays for maintenance or rearming.
Henry made the appropriate appreciative noises at the system, a clever way
to maximize the limited space any line warship could devote to its parasite missile platforms. Despite the lack of grav-shield, the Londu starfighters were otherwise extremely similar to the Dragoon. They had the same spherical shape to maximize the volume-to-armor ratio, similar divots for modular weapon systems, even similar-looking engines.
The Londu craft could accelerate at two KPS2 to the Terran ships’ one point five, though. They’d needed the extra maneuverability against the Kenmiri.
The former rulers of the region had never bothered with fighters, mostly because their lasers were very effective at shooting them down. Unfortunately for them, a living pilot at the controls added just enough randomness to make it worthwhile for many of the Vesheron powers.
And while the Kenmiri defenses could shoot down missiles and starfighters, they had serious problems trying to do both at the same time. Once the starfighters had launched, they were often allowed to escape—because a wing of a hundred starfighters put four hundred missiles into space. That would strain the missile defenses and energy screens of even Kenmiri dreadnoughts.
“Unfortunately, I have been advised that I am not allowed to show you our energy-screen projectors,” Kahlmor told Henry. “Would you rather see our plasma cannon or the bridge?”
Henry chuckled. The UPA had enough samples of the Kenmiri version of the technology that they could readily duplicate it—if they ever found a way to make it compatible with the gravity shield. Since the UPA didn’t deploy the system, though, he understood why the Londu might be protective of their version of it.
“I have seen a lot of Kenmiri plasma cannon. Are yours particularly different?” he asked.
“I would like to think so,” Kahlmor replied. “We get the same power out of a somewhat smaller installation…but truthfully, I don’t think they look that different, myself.”
“The bridge, then, Lord of Ten Thousand Miles,” Henry said. “It is always good to see the brain and beating heart of a warship, don’t you agree?”
“Indeed,” his host confirmed, gesturing for him to follow. “I always did love our starfighters, though I never flew one myself,” Kahlmor continued as they left the bays. “They seemed a more…elegant system than yours. Requiring more skill to evade enemy fire than a ship that can just bull through on the strength of their gravity shield.”
Kahlmor wasn’t just talking about the starfighters, Henry knew. For all that Rigid Candor was twice Raven’s volume and three-quarters again her mass, her base safe acceleration was the same one KPS squared that Henry’s ship could make only with every crew member and passenger in the acceleration tanks.
Of course, Rigid Candor didn’t have any acceleration tanks, since her engines weren’t capable of pushing her past about one point one KPS2 and an attendant five pseudogravities of thrust.
“And it is not like you can even mount energy screens on a starfighter,” Henry agreed with a smile. The defensive systems could significantly enhance a ship’s survivability, shrugging off everything from lasers to the plasma blast of a conversion warhead…but they were massive installations, too big for anything smaller than a battleship to fit them aboard.
They had to pause the conversation to climb a ladder—Henry figured the Lord was taking him on the shortest route, which always led to visiting some entertaining portions of the ship, in his experience.
“Even energy screens do not allow the same cavalier behavior I’ve seen in your ships and fighters,” Kahlmor told him as they approached a set of heavy security doors. The six-layer-deep armored bulkheads were open right now, but a pair of Londu soldiers in decidedly non-ceremonial armor stood outside them.
“I have watched your battlecruisers charge right through entire Kenmiri dreadnought groups, convinced of their own immortality,” the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles continued. “Your shield is a powerful tool, but in everything I have seen of your people, they have used it as a replacement for actual skill in battle.”
Stepping through the security door, Henry stopped at the top of the bridge and stared. He was confident he was concealing most of his outright awe, but he still had to just look at the massive space that controlled a Londu ship of the line.
From the entrance Henry stood at, a peninsular platform extended out into the middle of the bridge, hanging above the working spaces. The floor of the peninsula was transparent, allowing the Captain and his senior officers to look down and see what everyone was doing.
Stairs swept down to the left and right, allowing access to the neatly subdivided sections of the floor. There were at least a hundred individual stations on the floor beneath him—and the entire space in front of the command peninsula was taken up by an immense hologram.
He took a slightly deeper-than-normal breath and looked around again, trying to find the mundanity and weaknesses in the design. It was awe-inspiring, yes, but it could easily hurt crew morale—and necks—to have to literally look up at the command staff. It wouldn’t help that the lower level resembled nothing so much as an array of office cubicles, where the data-entry drones happened to be doing data entry on missiles and starships instead of transactions and assets.
Plus, there was a reason the UPA didn’t use holographic projectors on their ships. They were inherently fragile things. It didn’t matter how much better Londu tech was, a few solid hits to the warship would knock out the big display.
And a Londu battleship was supposed to be able to take those solid hits and keep fighting.
“Impressive, is it not?” Kahlmor asked. “Come, Colonel. Follow me.”
Henry obeyed, following his host out onto the clear peninsula. Now that he was standing on it he could see the support struts linking it to the roof, the floor and the surrounding walls. It was still a structural vulnerability, even as it required the bridge to take up precious volume that could have been used for magazine space for easily forty or fifty missiles.
He had to admit, though, that it gave Kahlmor as thorough a view of what everyone on the bridge was up to as his own double-sided screens. And the holodisplay allowed for a spectacular view of the star system around him.
“Were you suggesting, Lord of Ten Thousand Miles, that your crews are inherently more skilled than UPA crews?” he asked, delicately picking up the challenge that Kahlmor had laid down.
The Londu officer grinned brilliantly.
“It follows logically, does it not?” he asked. “Your officers rely on the security provided by the gravity shield. It allows them to take their maneuvers more slowly, to miss shots because they know they will get a second one. Those of us without such systems, well, we must become better if we are to survive.”
Henry could tell when he was being set up, but he could also see the value in what he was being set up for.
“That sounds, Lord Kahlmor, like something we should put to the test,” he noted softly. “A test of maneuvering and gunnery, perhaps? Skills that would atrophy aboard my ship, according to your logic.
“We would need to arrange an environment where your ship’s acceleration advantage would be irrelevant as well,” he continued. “Since it may well be that your crew relies on speed to escape what we must face.”
Kahlmor grinned and stepped up to the main command seat on Rigid Candor’s bridge. It was practically a throne, but the arms were inlaid with the same kinds of controls Henry had on his own ship.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Miles tapped one of those commands, and the hologram of the star system in front of them zoomed in…on Resta’s massive asteroid belt.
“The belt would provide much of that environment, would it not?” he asked. “If we have our hosts lay out an obstacle course and arrange the deployment of gunnery targets, neither of us would have an unfair advantage. I think we could both trust them to arrange a fair contest?”
Henry wasn’t certain his ship was ready to be put up against the best of the Londu Blades of the Scion. He had good people, he knew that, but he’d had mere weeks to pull them together. Rigid Candor’s crew hummed arou
nd him with the calm confidence of a crew that had worked together for months or even years.
“We can certainly trust the Restan for that,” he said aloud. “Surely, though, there must be some kind of wager for a contest like this.”
They couldn’t officially wager “biggest dick in the dick-measuring contest that is the Gathering escorts,” after all.
“I have a flat of covilla liqueur in my mess deck stocks,” Kahlmor replied. “I think two hundred bottles should suffice for your entire crew to sample my Scion’s preferred drink?”
“It should,” Henry agreed. “I think we can manage to counter that with a thousand bottles of Earth wine. Ambassador Todorovich adores it.”
That was easily half the stock of wine aboard Raven, but he hadn’t thought to come prepared for this kind of challenge. The crew would just have to win.
“Done,” Kahlmor agreed. “We will have the Restan set it up, and in a few days, we shall see just who truly has the better crews!”
“So we shall,” Henry murmured.
“And just so you know what we are offering, I have arranged for covilla liqueur to be served with dinner,” the Lord of Ten Thousand Miles told him. “Which should be ready by the time we reach my dining room.”
“Lead on, Lord Kahlmor,” the UPA officer replied. “I look forward to it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Henry drank sparingly at the best of times, and a private dinner with an untrusted ally captain was not that. Covilla liqueur was extremely pleasant, with the fire he associated with spiced drinks but far smoother than any Terran-made drink he’d had with that heat.
Nonetheless, he was still stone-cold sober when he returned aboard Raven and promptly downloaded the entire recording of his trip aboard Rigid Candor for review. Most likely, only Intelligence would go through it unless there was reason to think he’d acted inappropriately, but just having it on file was a shield against accusations of colluding with the enemy.
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