Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Raven’s class of battlecruiser remained the newest and most powerful ships in the UPSF’s inventory. A fleet carrier was still more dangerous, but the basic design for the big ships hadn’t changed since early in the war. Their upgrades had been focused on their fighter wings.

  The Corvids, on the other hand, incorporated everything the UPSF had learned in seventeen long years of war.

  “Three Corvids and a fleet carrier should handle whatever the Drifters or Kozun throw at us, ser,” Henry agreed.

  “You’ll be getting an eyes-only technical briefing for you and your chief engineer before you leave the system,” Hamilton told him. “We snuck some upgrades into Raven’s repairs, ones we’re trying to keep quiet.”

  “From who?” Henry asked. They’d have to tell Song if they’d made changes to his ship—and he suspected his engineer was going to pissed if they’d snuck changes in without telling her. He wasn’t entirely happy himself!

  “Everyone,” his superior said with a laugh. “They’re not officially approved yet. A bunch of my people went through the data Song gave us and had a bunch of different ideas on counteracting the disruptor warheads.

  “You’ve got fifty more resettable breakers in the grav-shield projector setup than you had before. The shield will fail in smaller sections and be turned back on more easily—and you have more spare projectors as well.

  “Heat and power limits mean you can’t run a much more powerful shield than you had before, but it should stand up to the disruptor warheads more effectively.” Hamilton waved a hand in the air as she drank her coffee. “The briefing will explain it better than I can; my eyes glazed over when they made their presentation.”

  “You ordered my ship modified in secret based on something you didn’t understand?” Henry asked sharply.

  “I understand what it does just fine, thank you,” she snapped. “The technical details aren’t truly relevant to me…or you, for that matter.”

  “Fair, ser,” he conceded.

  “You said Raven is ready to go,” she continued. “How quickly?”

  “Twenty-four hours or less, depending on support,” Henry said instantly. “Orders?”

  “Paperwork will follow,” Hamilton told him. “I’m sending you back to La-Tar. That’s where Todorovich is sending her drones right now, and I do want you on hand once we know the terms of the gathering.”

  “Plus, we want a battlecruiser in La-Tar in case the Hierarchy gets clever.”

  “Plus, we want a battlecruiser in La-Tar in case the Hierarchy gets clever,” she agreed. “You’re keeping two of Lioness’s destroyers. They are being handed over to us permanently. They’re Tyrannosaurs, not new ships, but they’re effective enough.”

  “I wish we’d kept Lexington,” Henry said.

  “We barely had the carrier for a week,” Hamilton said with a snort. “Escort carrier or not, Command wants the carriers home and saving fuel, not gallivanting around the Ra Sector, burning cash.”

  “And yet they’re sending us Scorpius.”

  “I think Kosigan and Saren are worried about the Drifters,” the Admiral noted. Admiral Lee Saren was the CO of SpaceDiv, the uniformed commander of the UPA’s actual space fleet. “They’re the people who were most integrated with the Kenmiri before their collapse. We’re not sure what they want…and they probably have a better idea of the UPA’s location and layout than we think they do.”

  Henry grimaced. The UPSF hadn’t exactly tried to keep the location of their home stars secret, but they hadn’t been handing the information out, either. It hadn’t been relevant to most of their allies.

  And since Zion was thirty light-years from the edge of the Ra Sector, that meant that most of the UPA’s former allies didn’t even know where to look for them. That was part of what made the government’s isolationist policy possible.

  But if the Drifters were actually an enemy, at least some of them did know where the UPA’s populated systems were.

  “So, we need to know, one way or another,” he said.

  “If everyone is aboveboard, no one will ever officially know that Admiral Cheung left UPA space,” Hamilton told him. “If they’re not…well, you’ll have the best backup we can possibly provide.”

  “If I’m leaving tomorrow, how close is Scorpius behind me?” Henry asked.

  “They’re due to arrive in about forty-eight hours,” Hamilton told him. “I wanted you at La-Tar ASAP anyway…and I figured you wouldn’t mind avoiding that reunion.”

  Chapter Seven

  Henry loved Raven’s bridge in many ways. It was sufficiently different from the bridge of the battlecruiser he’d commanded at the end of the war to serve as a shield against the memories and nightmares of the genocide.

  It was an oval two-story space eleven meters long and six meters wide. Including the upper balcony and the support consoles around each senior officer, it was designed to hold forty-eight people in five sections: Communications, Navigation, Sensors, Weapons and Engineering.

  Two-sided screens divided the central pit from the support sections, physically isolating the captain and officer of the watch from the support teams while mirroring all of the information into the captain’s line of sight. The screens were transparent enough to provide visibility to his crew—and the holoprojectors a civilian ship would have used were too fragile for a ship at war.

  On the screens behind him, the bulk of Base Fallout drifted away from them as Raven accelerated toward the skip point.

  “All departments, check in,” he ordered calmly. He didn’t even need to send a command to the systems of the captain’s chair, with its own screens and computers, for it to relay that to everyone on the bridge.

  “CIC is online and fully functional,” Tatanka Iyotake confirmed instantly over the network. The Lieutenant Colonel would often be the occupant of either the watch officer chair or one of the observer seats in the main command bubble. His battle station was in the Combat Information Center, running support for the entire bridge crew from a space that could act as a secondary bridge if something happened to Henry and his command crew.

  “Engineering reports power and engines are green,” Lieutenant Mariann Henriksson reported. The engineering officer was one of the most junior section heads on the bridge, mostly because there was very little for the EO to do most of the time. Ninety percent of the time, the EO acted as a relay between the chief engineer and the captain, relaying information the chief didn’t have time to pass on themselves.

  The rest of the time, the EO spent their time desperately collating damage-control data from across the ship to keep both the captain and the chief engineer informed while the chief spent her time trying to fix the warship.

  “We’re back to twelve missile launchers, a gravity driver, and two battle lasers,” Commander Okafor Ihejirika reported, the big black man’s tone cheerfully relieved. “I didn’t realize how much I could miss having all of our weapons until we were down a quarter for so long. Tactical and guns are green.”

  “Sensors are green,” Lieutenant Cornelia Ybarra, the assistant tactical officer, and the woman in charge of the Sensors Department, reported. “No unexpected signatures here in Zion.”

  “I’d hope not,” Henry murmured. “Admiral Xinyi would have words for her people if we were the first to spot something here!”

  “Communications are clear; we are linked into the drone cycle to La-Tar,” Lieutenant Commander Lauren Moon reported. There was no need for her to worry about Raven’s drones while they were on their way to one of the systems with a postal outpost, not unless there were an emergency.

  A skip drone was leaving Zion for La-Tar and vice versa every twenty-four hours. It would take days for the drones to make their trip each way, but a continual cycle of the robotic spacecraft was now in place. Their news from Zion would get older and their news from La-Tar would get fresher as they made their journey, but they’d be getting news from both places.

  The skip drones took the same amount of time
to skip between systems as a starship, but they could accelerate at almost a thousand kilometers per second squared compared to Raven’s point five when traveling between skip points. They made the trip in about seventy percent of the time.

  “Navigation is online, and our course is set,” Commander Iida Bazzoli reported, the platinum-blonde navigator’s attention focused on her consoles. “We’ll hit the skip point out of UPA space in nine hours toward to Ra-One.”

  Henry nodded.

  “Execute, Commander Bazzoli,” he ordered. His internal network then opened channels to the two officers who weren’t automatically linked to the bridge.

  “Thompson, O’Flannagain,” he greeted his GroundDiv and FighterDiv commanders. “Status reports?”

  “GroundDiv is rearmed and reinforced back up to strength, which you know,” Commander Alex Thompson told him. “I have a meeting with Kuroda in twenty minutes to talk about coordinating with the MPs for the trip.

  “I presume that if something else comes up that requires a company or three of boots, you’ll let me know.”

  Henry concealed a smile. Despite everything—and the La-Tar campaign had called for some hard, close actions and heavy losses on the part of the GroundDiv detachment—Thompson remained an eager young officer.

  He knew Thompson was seeing the ship’s counselors and approved. The UPSF regarded mental injuries on the same level as physical injuries. They needed to be addressed and treated as best as possible—and in an age when every military officer had a computer network in their head, the UPSF had options other ages might not have had.

  “If we don’t schedule a time to test-fly these birds, my people are going to go rogue on me,” O’Flannagain said once Thompson was done speaking. “The stats, metrics and simulators say they’re amazing, but we haven’t got all of them out into real space yet.”

  “Take a look at Bazzoli’s route and pick three systems we have at least sixteen hours in,” Henry ordered. “We need to make sure you aren’t observed—the GMS birds are going to be a surprise to everybody, and I want to keep them under wraps—so Ihejirika will need to sweep each system ahead of time.

  “But we should be able to find a system where we can kick you out into space for a few hours to test them out. No one wants you to be flying them in a crisis on pure sim time.”

  Henry unconsciously touched the pair of red-enameled wings on his own chest. He would need to get his own realspace flight hours soon enough to keep those. So long as he remained a qualified pilot, the uniform violation inherent in their color would be ignored.

  Given what the red wings represented, he’d probably get away with wearing them even after his pilot qualifications lapsed, but he wasn’t going to do that.

  Staying qualified as a pilot was as much a part of respecting the pilots who hadn’t come back from the first campaign against the Kenmiri as painting the wings red. Of the pilots who’d flown in that campaign, only thirty had survived…and most of those were dead now.

  It had been a long war.

  “All departments, report ready for skip,” Henry ordered calmly. Between the two-sided screens surrounding the command pit, the repeater screens on his chair, and his internal network’s interface with the starship, he knew the status of the departments.

  But verbal confirmation made sure nothing was missed—and the Book called for it anyway.

  His officers’ responses were as rote as the question, repeats of the responses he’d asked for when they first left Base Fallout.

  “We are on target vector and approaching the skip point now, ser,” Bazzoli reported once the chorus had died down.

  “Understood,” Henry acknowledged. “Commander Bazzoli, you have the ship.”

  He could feel the tensions as everyone on his bridge prepared themselves for the blow. The skip drive was never a pleasant ride. It was named for the metaphor used to describe the effect: they were a three-dimensional rock skipping across the surface of a twenty-dimensional lake.

  And no rock enjoyed the sensation of hitting the surface of that lake.

  “Shutting down main engines,” Bazzoli continued. “Power to icosaspace impulse generators. Transit in one hundred seconds.”

  An alert was automatically going out to the internal networks of every member of Henry’s crew, warning them to make sure they were seated and that their gear was secured. It wouldn’t be the first skip for anyone board the battlecruiser, but humans were forgetful creatures.

  Some people even claimed they could get used to the sensation of a skip. Henry hadn’t met any of them himself, but he’d heard about them.

  He didn’t believe them.

  “All hands, this is your final skip alert,” Bazzoli said sharply, Henry’s internal network confirming her words were going out across the starship. “Entrance in ten seconds. If you aren’t strapped in, get strapped in now.”

  A skip had to be between stars, and a ship traveled faster the larger the stars were. Zion was a red giant and so was RX-54R3, their most immediate destination. That meant they were making a twenty-two-hour skip that would take them fifteen light-years. From RX-54R3, they’d skip to another numbered star and then to Ra-1.

  It was a nine-day journey to La-Tar, a sign of just how far away from the former Kenmiri Empire the UPA truly was.

  “Skip…now,” Bazzoli announced.

  Raven had internal compensators that allowed her to accelerate at fifty gravities without pulverizing her crew. Those compensators couldn’t keep up with the speed of the change as Raven bounced through seventeen dimensions her crew could only barely recognize.

  The moment of impact was always bad. Without the compensators, humans would need acceleration tanks to survive skip entry. With them, it merely felt like someone had dropped three large men on Henry…from beneath him.

  Raven fell up. Then down. Then alternated through seven different versions of sideways. Each shift was enough to leave Henry’s inner ear screaming objections.

  It lasted twenty seconds—or a few eternities, depending on your opinion. Then it finally stopped, and Henry slowly breathed a sigh of relief. Things still felt slightly odd, even with the compensators and artificial gravity plants doing everything they could to create normality aboard the ship.

  “All hands, hear this,” Bazzoli said into the PA. “Skip insertion complete. Initial skip complete. First secondary skip will be in four hours, thirteen minutes. Set your alarms.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sylvia was bored.

  She wouldn’t dream of letting her staff or Shaka’s crew realize that for even one second, but their limbo-esque status with the Drifter Convoy was frustrating. After their initial visits, they had been politely but firmly informed they were to remain on Shaka unless they had new business.

  That meant she was left sitting in the guest quarters of a destroyer, watching six hundred Drifter ships go about their daily business, ignoring her.

  “Em Ambassador?” Captain Chavez greeted her from the door of her tiny office. “May I come in?”

  “Certainly. How may I help you, Captain?”

  Chavez gave her a salute he technically shouldn’t and leaned against the wall opposite her desk. There was a chair concealed in a compartment on that wall, Sylvia knew, but she suspected Chavez was more comfortable standing than trying to fit himself into the collapsible seat.

  “I was hoping you could give me an idea of how much longer we’re going to be here,” the Spanish officer told her. “We’ve been sitting here for over a week, and some of my people are getting antsy. I can run virtual exercises all I want, but so long as we just…sit here, well.”

  “I understand, Captain,” Sylvia allowed. “Unfortunately, I can’t say for certainty. One of our drones could get to Kozun in just over seven days, but a ship…” She shrugged. “Shaka would take twelve. My understanding is that a Drifter should take ten.”

  “They have Kenmiri compensators,” Chavez allowed. “We don’t.”

  Sylvia nodded. Shaka c
ould accelerate at one kilometer per second squared if her crew went into acceleration tanks against the twenty pseudogravities that leaked through. A Drifter ship—or any Vesheron vessel, for that matter—could reach the same acceleration with full compensation.

  The Kenmiri had been known to push their ships to one point one KPS2 in combat, but even they had recognized that as risky. Few Vesheron powers would risk losing one of their ships. None of them could replace ships as readily as an empire of ten thousand stars had been able to.

  “Why don’t we?” Sylvia asked Chavez. There was no urgency to their conversation, which made it a perfect time to ask random questions that bothered her. “I know we dragged samples of everything the Kenmiri had back to the UPA.”

  One of her more challenging tasks during the war had been to negotiate with several Vesheron for the UPA to take possession of a wrecked-but-potentially-repairable Kenmiri dreadnought, after all. The UPA had access to samples of everything from energy shields to plasma guns to compensators.

  “Same reason we don’t use their energy shields, as I understand it,” Chavez told her. “They interfere with the grav-shield. Our compensators aren’t as good, but if we use theirs, the gravity shield loses an unacceptable level of efficiency.”

  Sylvia nodded her understanding. The gravity shield was humanity’s key advantage over everyone else they’d encountered outside their borders, but it was also a fragile technology in several ways.

  “So, somewhere back home, someone is working on reinventing a whole bunch of Kenmiri technology so it works with the gravity shield,” she guessed.

  “Almost certainly, but they don’t brief destroyer captains on that,” Chavez told her. “But as to my question…twenty days until we hear back?”

  “From when they left, which was eight days ago,” Sylvia confirmed. “I’d expect that it will take at least two days for the Kozun to make up their minds, so we’ll be here at least fourteen more days, Captain.