Raven's Peace

by Glynn Stewart

  “To do what, Henry? We can’t wage a war out here. We can’t even afford to position ships on trade routes, let alone take on some quixotic mission of peace and justice.”

  “I don’t know what we need to do yet,” he admitted. “But a ‘quixotic mission of peace and justice’ sure as hell sounds better to me than writing off ten thousand star systems and everyone who lives in them, doesn’t it?”

  She was looking at him sharply, and despite all of his experience reading expressions, Henry really wasn’t sure what was behind her gaze.

  “You’re a strange damn man, Henry Wong,” she told him. “You know Don Quixote is a tragedy, right?”

  “Yeah. But maybe I’m thinking a few minor tragedies to avoid a major one is a worthy trade.”

  “Think on it,” she told him. “If you can come up with a plan, I can get you in front of the right people. But it’s going to have to be you, Captain Wong. The man the Vesheron call ‘the Destroyer’. The man who ended the Kenmorad and saved my life.

  “I can put you in front of the right people, but you’re the one who has to know what kind of mission you want and be able to sell it.”

  Henry inhaled deeply, met that strangely intense gaze of Sylvia Todorovich’s, and nodded firmly.

  “Then I’d better get thinking on that plan, shouldn’t I?”

  “I’d suggest a shower first,” she told him with a laugh.

  Chapter Forty

  “Aligning with assigned orbit…now,” Bazzoli reported.

  Every screen surrounding Henry on Raven’s bridge was busy, full of icons and images as dozens—hundreds—of ships swarmed through Earth orbit.

  The homeworld itself was central on most of the screens, its green and blue hues still calming for the descendants of her diaspora. A cleared zone had been established inside geostationary orbit for safety purposes, but above that, space stations were as close to each other as safety margins allowed.

  “Well done, Commander,” Henry told her, rising from his seat. “Lagrange Yards has a slot clearing for us in six hours. You feeling up to that navigation challenge?”

  “Whether I am or not, Earth Traffic Control will feed me the course,” Bazzoli replied. “Nobody picks their own course here.”

  He nodded his acknowledgement and turned to face Iyotake. His XO was standing behind his chair, waiting. The Native American man saluted crisply.

  “You ready, ser?” he asked.

  “No,” Henry admitted as he returned the salute. “This is not my battlespace, Colonel Iyotake. But it’s the battle I got called to. You’ll take good care of her?”

  “It’s one meeting, ser,” his XO pointed out with a grin. “I don’t think they’re planning on shooting you.”

  “You never know,” Henry replied. “You have the conn, Lieutenant Colonel Iyotake. Once I’m in, my network will be cut off for security reasons. If you have any questions, get them to me before I hit the surface.”

  “Raven can take care of herself for twenty-four hours, Captain Wong,” Iyotake assured him. “It’s not the first time the Ambassador has hauled you away.”

  “You should be at Lagrange Yards by the time I’m free,” Henry said. “Send me an update and I’ll arrange a shuttle from there.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you, ser,” his XO confirmed, then offered his hand. They shook firmly and Henry gave his subordinate a nod.

  He almost made it off the bridge before Iyotake’s voice sounded one more time.

  “Company! Atten-tion!”

  Henry paused on his heel and turned around. The entire bridge crew was on their feet, facing him with perfect academy salutes.

  He returned the salute, concealing a smile.

  “I’ll be back,” he promised. “Don’t break her while I’m gone, will you?”

  Todorovich was waiting by their shuttle. Most of her staff would be traveling separately—they were returning to the actual operational offices of the United Planets Alliance on the moon. Felix Leitz stood beside the sharp-edged Ambassador as they waited for him.

  Their pilot stood by the shuttle door as well, and that was not right.

  “Commander O’Flannagain,” Henry greeted his CAG. “I don’t believe you normally pilot shuttles.”

  “Nope,” she confirmed. “But I know how and, well…nobody is flying my Captain into the cesspit that is New York but me.”

  At some point, he’d become her Captain. That was novel.

  “All right, Commander. But only because we’re in as safe an orbit as we possibly can be,” he warned. “You have too much responsibility as CAG.”

  “But we’re in Earth orbit, so Raven is safe…and you’re flying into New York, which means you aren’t,” she said brightly. “The city is full of politicians.”

  Todorovich cleared her throat.

  “You’re a diplomat, Em Todorovich,” O’Flannagain pointed out. “Much more useful breed.”

  “I think that might be the nicest thing a UPSF officer has ever said about us,” Leitz replied. “Regardless of who is flying this bird, we need to get going.” He tapped his ear to indicate he was getting data from his network.

  “Updates are saying that the weather over New York is crap, but you do not miss an appointment with the Security Council!”

  Only years of training prevented Henry from having a spike of panic at the thought as Todorovich ushered him onto the shuttle. It was one thing to be in a meeting with the Secretary-President, her subordinates and several admirals.

  It was quite another to be speaking in front of the Security Council, the representatives of the member systems of the United Planets Alliance. They had no real power over the UPA, but they were also the people who’d go back to their governments and convince them to either support or deny new funding agreements.

  “You’ll be fine,” Todorovich murmured in his ear as they took their seats.

  “Feels like this should be anybody but me,” Henry replied. “An Admiral or an undersecretary or somebody with authority.”

  “Even if we sent an Admiral or an undersecretary or, hell, me on my own, we’d still just be presenting the plan you put together,” she reminded him.

  Six weeks had been plenty of time to put the skeleton of a plan together, even given the resource limitations Henry knew the UPSF faced.

  “Plus, if we were sending someone else, you’d have to sell the UPSF or UPA leadership on this in advance,” she said with a chuckle. “This way, we only have to sell the plan to one hostile audience.”

  “I’m not sure that helps,” Henry replied. “One shot, with a starship captain as the only one to speak to the plan.”

  “You’re the Destroyer, the man who landed the final blow against the Kenmorad,” Todorovich pointed out. “I know that’s a nightmare for you, but it gives you weight. But more than that…it means you understand why this has to be done.”

  She squeezed his shoulder.

  “You know what you need to do, Colonel Henry Wong,” she told him, her hand lingering on his shoulder to reinforce her message. “Make your battle plan, and when you meet the enemy, toss it aside and improvise.”

  The complex had started in the twentieth century as the United Nations building. That organization had waxed and waned in influence over the years until the final three-way conflict between the United States Colonial Administration, the Novaya Imperiya and the Terran Alliance of the rest of the colonies had consumed human space in fire for eleven years.

  When the peace conferences had severed all the colonies from their mother nations, a new structure had been needed to keep humanity at least nominally unified. The United Planets Alliance had been born, absorbing chunks of the interstellar administration of the Terran Alliance powers alongside all of what was left of the UN.

  The UPA operated primarily out of offices on the Moon under the watchful guns of UPSF Base Mario, but tradition said that the General Assembly met on Earth: in the old UN building, now the central structure of the UPA complex.

 
The guards who met their party at the shuttle pad were overtly decorative, in dark red uniforms that were cut in the style of the old French Foreign Legion. The way the Assembly Security Force soldiers moved, though, told Henry they were far less decorative than they looked.

  The fact that they carried fully functional energy weapons, still a rarity in human space outside of elite UPSF GroundDiv assault companies, finished the story. Dressed up or not, the ASF were real soldiers doing a very real job.

  “We need to scan everyone before you leave the pad, please,” the woman leading the team told them. “No weapons are permitted in the UPA Complex except with ASF personnel.”

  Henry shrugged and unbelted the sword and gun from his dress uniform.

  “I have these,” he told her. “I presume you have safe storage for them?”

  The officer eyed the platinum energy pistol—a third of the size and three-quarters of the power of her rifle, as befitted the former personal weapon of a Kenmorad—with cautious respect.

  “Of course, Colonel Wong,” she said. “We’re used to the requirements of UPSF dress uniform. At some point, we’ll even convince your superiors to tell people they need to leave those behind when they come here.”

  “Military tradition grinds slowly, Em…?”

  “Lieutenant Cole, ser,” she replied as her team finished scanning them. Henry winced as his network threw up an alert informing him that its external scan protocols had been activated. “Sergeant?”

  “No weapons, and networks are clear of intrusion worms,” the ASF noncom replied. “They are clear. IDs match the appointment.”

  “Good.” Cole shook her head. “If we had to run anything more intrusive, you’d be at risk of being late. And even we, Colonel Wong, do not want to waste the Secretary-President’s time.”

  Let alone the Security Council’s went unspoken.

  “Come,” she instructed. “I’ll show you the way.”

  From the way Cole’s team fell in around Henry and his companions, strangers in this place were kept under escort. Show you the way made for a solid excuse for doing so without offense, though.

  It was all very smooth and friendly and diplomatic…and still probably more effective than a harsher approach might have been.

  “Are you ready?” Todorovich repeated as they approached a large set of double doors. She was whispering. Their networks were now truly internal, wireless-suppression nodes throughout this section of the building keeping them from linking to anything else.

  “No more than I was earlier,” Henry told her.

  “Remember who you are and why you’re here,” she suggested. “Everything else is logistics, Colonel.”

  “We’re here,” Cole told them, stopping beside the door. She tapped a hand against a panel, presumably checking data with her network—she probably had a specialty system that let her network connect despite the suppression field. “You are one minute early, but they’re ready for you.

  “Go on in.” She held up a hand to Leitz. “Just the Ambassador and the Colonel, Em Leitz.”

  The chief of staff nodded his acknowledgement and faded back against a wall as the doors slid open. Henry swallowed hard, years of training failing to control the instinct this time, and then stepped forward into the belly of the beast.

  Said belly was surprisingly familiar. It was a midsized conference room, the same as would have been attached to any Admiral’s suite on a space station or planetside base. It had been arranged slightly differently, with a single table facing the rest of the room to allow for witnesses to be questioned, but the furniture and the room itself were identical.

  He recognized Secretary-President Vasudha Patil at the back of the room. The lighting had been rearranged at some point to keep the dark-skinned woman from blending into the shadow. Instead, she was highlighted like she was sitting in a halo of divine light.

  Henry doubted that the symbolism was unintentional.

  Admiral Lee Saren sat at Patil’s right hand, but the back of the conference room was otherwise unoccupied.

  The middle row was the key. Thirteen people occupied those seats, each with a nameplate stating their name and who they represented. One Councilor for each of the UPA’s eight star systems, plus five for the Earth powers that weren’t considered part of the Sol Councilor’s area of authority.

  The United States, Russia, China, the European Union and the African Union were all powerful enough to equal the economic weight of entire star systems. It was telling that of the thirteen Councilors, only the American, Russian and Chinese Councilors represented truly single-bloc nations in the old sense.

  “Take a seat, Colonel Wong, Ambassador Todorovich,” Patil instructed, gesturing toward the table facing the Security Council. “The Security Council is waiting.”

  The Security Council, Henry figured, could probably speak for themselves. They almost certainly would before this was over.

  Nonetheless, he took his seat and faced the fifteen people who would decide whether his quixotic quest was going to crash and burn or be the flag that led humanity into a new era.

  “Ambassador Todorovich has called in more favors than I thought she was owed and has probably blackmailed at least one person to get this meeting, Colonel Wong,” Patil told him once they were seated. “You understand, I’m sure, that the United Planets Alliance is in a state of flux, dealing with an all-new environment now that the subspace network is gone.”

  “I presume the Kenmiri’s message made it this far,” Henry said softly.

  “It did,” Admiral Saren confirmed. “Fortunately for us, we had the schematics and automated construction templates for the skip-drive courier drones used prior to the Unity War. They were even modernized, as aspects of that technology are key in our grav-shield penetrator weapons.”

  “We are back in regular communication with all of the UPA’s stars and outposts,” Patil continued. “It will take time for us to get used to a two-week to four-week communication turnaround, but humanity has run governments with that before. We will meet this challenge, as we have met the challenges that faced us in the past.”

  That was directed at the Security Council rather than him, Henry suspected.

  “But this calls for much of the focus and funding of the UPA,” the Keid Councilor said in accented English, the massive black man’s Nigerian heritage still coming through. “And you would have Secretary-President Patil expand that focus—an expansion that would require new funding agreements. More money from a population that has not seen a practical increase in their safety from their investment in a decade.”

  “Em Kariuki summarizes the situation well, I think,” the American Councilor said crisply. Em Kennedy was a redheaded woman in an old-fashioned suit, glaring at Henry with cold eyes.

  He’d hoped for at least some support from his countrywoman, but it seemed he was going to have to start from the beginning.

  “I think the proposal is quite straightforward,” he said slowly. “Beginning with long cruises to survey stars and locate potential trouble spots, we would locate systems in need of our assistance and provide that assistance. We would secure alliances, friends and trade routes, starting in the Ra Sector and expanding as rapidly as practically possible.

  “In the long run, the expanded trade routes should make the increased strength of the UPSF required for this operation self-supporting. In the short term, as Em Kariuki notes, the UPA would require new funding agreements with the member nations to support expanded operations of our battlecruisers and an expansion of our destroyer strength.”

  He studied the Security Council and laid his hands flat on the table in front of him.

  “All of the details of the logistics, the trade routes we know we should be able to open, the potential threats we know are out there…all of those details are in the download you have all been provided,” he reminded them. “Ambassador Todorovich’s analysts and my own crew aboard Raven have calculated cost-benefit ratios under a dozen scenarios, done Monte Ca
rlo analyses, and projected the long-term economic benefits of this plan to the United Planets Alliance and our member stars.

  “But that is not what you are questioning, and that is not why we need to do this,” Henry told them. He’d stood up. When had he stood up?

  “We can argue the costs and the benefits of becoming peacekeepers to the galaxy, but they are entirely secondary,” he continued. “We need to do this. Because if we don’t, if you decide you would rather spend a piddling amount of money at home than outside our borders, millions are going to die.

  “We broke the galactic order. We shattered the peace the Kenmiri enforced. We committed genocide.

  “There is blood on your soldiers’ hands. We are drowning in the blood of a species, and we keep denying it,” Henry said fiercely, hoping that his words would have some impact. “We set into motion the fall of the greatest civilization we have ever known. It needed to fall. It needed to be broken, but ours are the hands that broke it.

  “The consequences of that now fall upon the galaxy. Ten thousand stars face an uncertain future, and a million greedy potential warlords look to their neighbors as prey. We caused that. We made their predation possible.

  “We can let that stand. We can let ten thousand stars fall into anarchy and fire and death. You can watch your soldiers fall, one by one, to the ancient curse of our kind as our very souls rebel against what we did.

  “Or we can do what humanity always does when our back is to the wall. We can fight.”

  He realized he couldn’t even see the Councilors, and he brushed angry tears from his eyes.

  “It was my hand that finished the Kenmorad,” he told them, forcing his voice to calm. “My hand that set into motion the final doom of a race of a trillion sentient beings. Therapy can give me the ability to live with that, but it can never give me peace.

  “We have damned ten thousand stars. Let us reach out our hands and help as many of them as we can reach.”