“Is there anything we can do to make your crew less…restive?”
“If I could arrange an R&R schedule to send people off-ship somewhere, that could help,” he admitted. “We’re orbiting alongside one of the most impressive spacegoing civilizations I’ve ever seen, but we’re stuck on our own ship.”
“Those ships are their homes, their factories, their farms,” Sylvia pointed out. “They’re not generally willing to let strangers tramp all over them.”
“I know,” Chavez agreed. “My grandmother was Roma. From the stories she told—legends, thankfully, at this point—they would never let anyone inside their wagons without good reason.”
“I’ll ask,” Sylvia promised. “It will be good for both of our peoples, I think, for well-behaved UPSF crew to visit and see what’s on their ships. I’ll speak to the Protector-Commander.”
If nothing else, making the request gave Sylvia something to do.
Sylvia was surprised by how easily she was able to get in touch with Third-White-Fifth-Gold. She contacted their flagship and asked to speak with them, expecting to have to make an appointment.
Instead, she was immediately connected to the Protector-Commander, their Face Mask glistening in the light of their office as they gazed levelly at her.
“Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich,” he greeted her. “I will admit, I expected your people to make contact at least twenty hours ago.”
“We are twelve days from the earliest I would expect your messengers to return,” Sylvia observed. “Why would you expect us to make contact?”
“I know how long my warriors would tolerate sitting and doing nothing,” Third-White-Fifth-Gold said. “I believe that the discipline of your arms is as strong as ours, but distraction serves better than idleness.”
“That it does,” Sylvia agreed. “You know us well, then, Protector-Commander.”
They shrugged.
“I know warriors, Ambassador, and people,” they told her. “Much is common across all races, be they Ashall or Unseeded. Limbs and eyes and organs define much…but much, I find, is a constant of the condition of sentient life.”
Ashall meant Seeded Races. No one knew quite what that meant—except, perhaps, the Kenmiri—but the term covered a slim majority of species known to the UPA. Every one of those species could pass for human—and vice versa—given carefully selected clothing.
That was part of why the Drifters were as cloaked as they were, after all. It concealed everything about them—including their species.
“I see,” Sylvia said. She didn’t disagree with them, either. Her own experience said much the same—even the Enteni on La-Tar, aliens whose eyes were inside massive mouths, were recognizably people in their actions and choices.
“Then you have guessed that I wish to negotiate some relaxation opportunities for the crew of my escort vessel,” she told the Protector-Commander. “I have no desire to risk the safety of the Convoy or even the goodwill of your people. Anything you and your Council are prepared to offer would be welcome.”
“We have an opportunity available now that we did not have when Shaka first arrived,” Third-White-Fifth-Gold told her. “The casino vessel Trust in Fortune has returned to the Convoy from a sojourn to the Tak System.
“Trust in Fortune is designed to handle significant numbers of strangers in a controlled manner,” the Protector-Commander concluded. “While her normal customers are, frankly, wealthier than I expect your crew to be, I am sure we can arrange some level of group discount or prepaid credit between us.”
Sylvia let her face settle into a sharp and disapproving look—even as she concealed a smile internally.
Of course the Drifter’s suggestion for R&R was going to end up costing her more refined metals. Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe was going to profit from this encounter in every way they could.
That was how nomadic merchants survived, after all.
Chapter Nine
“Sensor sweep complete. Ra-One is clear of any active spacecraft,” Ihejirika reported. “We are utterly alone out here except for a single skip drone headed to Zion.”
“Have we confirmed that drone’s bona fides?” Henry asked.
“Really, ser?” O’Flannagain asked from the flight deck. “Do we even know anyone else with skip drones?”
“Not yet, but that will change,” Henry replied. “It’s too obvious a solution to remain unique for long.”
O’Flannagain was right that he was probably being too paranoid about the realspace maneuvers she wanted to put her new fighters through. He wished there’d been time to test the SF-130s in Zion or even the numbered systems between the UPA and Ra Sector.
Their stops in each of those systems had been too short to both confirm the system was clear and get a useful amount of exercise time in.
“Drone is definitely ours,” Moon reported, the tall and heavyset Martian communication officer sounding amused. “On her way from the station at Beren.”
“Understood,” Henry acknowledged. “Commander O’Flannagain, you are cleared to commence your exercises. I want all of your birds back aboard in ten hours, an hour before we skip. Understood?”
“Yes, ser,” she said crisply. “Rocking and rolling.”
Readiness icons started flicking to green on Henry’s repeater displays immediately, and he grinned.
“Was the Commander already in her starfighter, ser?” Ihejirika asked in amusement.
“O’Flannagain wasn’t,” Henry told him. “But it looks like most of her pilots were.”
He sucked a breath in through his teeth as the readiness icons solidified. Of the eight SF-130 Lancers on his flight deck, five were glowing solid green, “ready to launch.” The other three were flashing amber.
These fighters hadn’t even left the hangar bay yet and a deep foreboding settled onto Henry’s shoulders.
“O’Flannagain?” he asked.
“I see it too,” she said grumpily. “Techs are on their way. Initiating launch of the fighters that are clear.”
“Understood,” he told her. “Carry on, Commander. The fighter group is yours.”
There was a double meaning to that phrase that he knew his CAG understood: she could do whatever she wanted with the fighter group…but she was also entirely responsible for it being a combat-ready force when he needed it.
Once in space, the five working fighters blurred on Henry’s sensors as their gravity shields came up. Those shields were stronger than on the old fighters too, he noted. The shear zone was twelve thousand gravities versus the old fighters’ ten thousand.
The difference wasn’t that much—there wasn’t much that could survive hitting a zone of space three centimeters across with a ten-thousand-gravity well. Tidal forces made a mess of missiles, plasma beams, even lasers that crossed that shear zone.
A twenty percent stronger shear zone did reduce the number of hits that would get through. It brought the new-generation starfighters up to nearly the same level as the UPSF’s destroyers on their main defense.
The first enemy to run into the Lancers was going to have a rude awakening when they started to hit the fighters—almost as rude as the one the Kenmiri had suffered when they first met the UPSF’s shielded starfighters.
The initial maneuvers were tentative, the pilots testing the limits of the new craft and comparing them to what they’d seen in the simulators. A sixth starfighter—this one O’Flannagain’s, Henry noted absently—joined the exercises before they started doing anything complicated.
Once the hotshot CAG joined her pilots, the tempo of the maneuvers began to accelerate, and Henry had to nod in approval as he watched his people put the new starfighters through their paces.
“That’s funny,” Ihejirika noted.
“What is?” Henry asked.
“At low acceleration, up to about one KPS-squared, they’re harder to pick up than traditional fighters,” Ihejirika told him. “No reaction plume, combined with the usual dispersal effect of a gravity sh
ield.
“But once they’re at one point five or above, the shield itself is putting off a lot of heat. The combination of increased power generation and space-warping effects…” The tactical officer grunted. “I don’t think they’re going to be easier to hit, not when they’re pulling three kilometers a second squared of accel, but they’re a lot easier to find.”
“Henriksson, any words on our two hangar queens?” Henry asked his engineering officer. The deck personnel were FighterDiv and technically didn’t report to Song’s engineering department, but Henriksson was the best person to ask about the deck with O’Flannagain in space.
“Looks like Lieutenant Commander Turrigan’s fighter is down for the count,” Henriksson admitted. “Chief Lin believes they can get the other bird in the air in an hour, but number four is in full emergency shutdown.
“They think there might be a flaw in the reactor casing that passed all tests short of full live power-up,” the EO concluded. “It happens; that’s why there’s fail-safes for it. Power plant safely shut down; everyone is fine. It’s just a pain.”
“Pass that on to O’Flannagain,” Henry ordered. “Her people should be focusing on getting the birds up, not giving her reports.”
“Yes, ser.”
He turned his attention back to the fighters in the empty space around his ship. The pilot in him couldn’t help but thrill at their maneuvers. The last time he’d flown in combat, his fighter had barely been able to get up to one KPS2—and that had been with him in an acceleration tank.
His people were now dancing in circles around the battlecruiser at three times that acceleration, and he knew they were strapped in at most. The Lancer had acceleration tanks and the pilots were expected to use them in combat as a safety precaution, but with the first truly reactionless drive available to humanity in play…the next generation of the GMS starfighters might not bother.
It would depend on how the Lancers worked out.
Part of that calculation, though, was how many of them turned out to be hangar queens. Henry turned back to the readiness icons. One continued to flash amber but one had turned completely red.
If one in eight Lancers failed to launch every time, well…that was going to be a very big problem for the people who wanted to replace every fighter in the UPSF with them.
Chapter Ten
The La-Tar System was both much the same as it had been when Henry had last seen it and completely different. Six months wasn’t enough time for planets and stars to change in any noticeable way or even for major new space stations to take shape.
It was enough time for regular traffic to start up. When Henry had first visited the system, the food transports intended to feed the four industrial worlds that relied on La-Tar had been stuck in a single lump in orbit.
Now, a dozen similar starships hung in low orbit, a busy stream of shuttles lifting food up from the surface—and presumably delivering the products of the industrial worlds to La-Tar’s population.
Henry had no idea how the economics of that was going to shake out in the long run. The factories on the industrial worlds had been partnerships between the Imperial government and Kenmiri corporation-esque private entities. Neither of those entities existed in the region now, but someone was presumably running the factories that were still online.
In the long run, only the warships scattered around the system in a protective pattern would remain in government control. Right now, though, food and necessary goods were probably being handled by the governments themselves.
“Looks like the Cluster managed to come up with some new warships,” Ihejirika noted. “I make it eight escorts backing up our destroyers.”
“That’s more than the Cluster had to begin with,” Henry agreed. “But my briefing said that they got the skip drives repaired on the damaged units a couple of the worlds had in orbit—plus Tano rushed four new ships out.”
Tano had been the world the UPA had first reached out to because they were the one with skip drive factories and orbital shipyards. They’d built most of the food transports the Cluster was still relying on and had now built two waves of warships.
The first wave was long gone, destroyed in the desperate defense against the original Kozun conquest of La-Tar.
“So, all of their ships are here again?” Ihejirika asked.
“Plus four from their allies, which makes it two more ships than they had last time the Kozun came,” Henry pointed out. “Plus four of our destroyers and one of our battlecruisers.”
There’d been about six days between Lioness leaving and Raven arriving, but the Kozun shouldn’t have had time to learn about that and take advantage of it—and clearly hadn’t.
“We have an incoming transmission for you, ser,” Moon told Henry. “From… Arbiter Casto Ran?”
Henry concealed a smile.
“I see our old friend didn’t manage to dodge that promotion,” he observed. “Who exactly was going to be appointed as the Cluster’s interim head of state was still in flux last I’d heard, but the odds were on Casto Ran.”
Casto Ran had been the Lord Nominated of the Skex System, a role with notable similarities to the old Roman concept of dictator. Skex had been the last system they’d recruited for the liberation of La-Tar…and Casto Ran had made a permanent alliance his price for joining.
That alliance had turned into a loose political confederation over the last six months, one that needed an interim leader. And the title of Lord Nominated came with an assassin-enforced end date.
“I’ll take it on my internal network,” Henry told Moon. He didn’t want to leave the bridge just yet, and his network could easily provide a private virtual meeting.
The Tak politician and soldier appeared in front of Henry as the bridge faded away in favor of his preferred virtual meeting space. To someone from Earth, the Chinese-style temple might clash with the Rocky Mountains behind him, but Arbiter Ran wouldn’t know that.
And the virtual space was a clone of a temple near where Henry had grown up in Montana, anyway. Just because it clashed to many people didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
“Arbiter Ran,” he greeted his host in Kem. “It is good to hear from you again.”
“Welcome back to La-Tar,” Casto Ran greeted him. Ran had pale red skin, weathered by age and radiation, with a small forest of sensory tendrils on his head instead of hair. In Ran’s case, those tendrils were pure white, a sharp contrast to the rest of his skin.
“It is always reassuring to be reminded that the UPA means what they say when they promise to protect us,” Ran continued. “Raven is fully repaired?”
“She is,” Henry confirmed. “And I see you got promoted?”
“My term as Lord Nominated was almost up, and I was looking forward to going back to being a mere fleet commander,” Ran replied. “It appears that I am once again denied that. I agreed to a term of two La-Tar years.”
That was twenty-seven months, Henry’s network informed him.
“With or without assassins?” Henry had to ask. A Lord Nominated served for a specified term—and if they didn’t step down at the end of that term, they were assassinated by killers who’d spent that entire term familiarizing themselves with the Lord’s security.
Ran laughed.
“Without, I believe, though I did promise not to run for the role of my replacement,” he noted. “I suspect my role is going to be exactly what the title says: playing arbiter in arguments between system governments.
“I am not certain anyone is going to want it.”
“You might be surprised,” Henry said. Most people didn’t quite seem to realize how much work was involved in being in charge of something. Even one ship was a lot. He couldn’t imagine running one star system, let alone five.
“Likely,” Ran conceded. “This was not entirely a social contact, Captain Wong. We have a situation of some concern, and I would like to impose on the UPA forces in the system to assist us.”
“We are here to guarantee th
e sovereignty of the La-Tar Cluster,” Henry said. “I can justify quite a bit inside that mission, if it seems reasonable to me.”
“You know the Satra System,” Ran told him. “Your people designated it Ra-Fifty, I believe.”
“I do,” Henry confirmed. “I have not visited it myself, but it was definitely on our minds when the Kozun were retreating.”
It was the first system along the short route to Kozun itself. When the Kozun forces had withdrawn from La-Tar, they’d skipped to Ra-50—Satra.
“We have two ships in Satra,” Ran said. “It is more of our force than I like sending forward, but a single ship is vulnerable in ways that two are not.”
“I understand.” That made sense to Henry, though it suggested that even more of the Cluster’s ships were in La-Tar than he’d thought.
Skex only had five escorts. Ratch had two, neither of which had been skip-capable when Henry had last encountered them. Tano had built four that he knew of. The entire Cluster only mustered eleven escorts and no true heavier warships.
Yet. Tano was expanding their yards and Skex was building new ones. All four industrial worlds had orbital defenses and starfighters, too, defenses that La-Tar lacked.
Still, that put ten out of eleven active warships in or next to La-Tar.
“We have seen the occasional Kozun scout through the system, but we had, until recently, regarded Satra as otherwise completely secure,” Ran said. “We…can no longer do so.”
“What happened?” Henry asked.
“For as long as we have had vessels posted in Satra, our sensor technicians have been seeing what we thought were glitches in the software,” the Arbiter told him. “While we have had few solid contacts, the continual presence of these vague detections forces us to conclude that there is something there.
“We now believe the Kozun have a concealed facility of some kind in the Satra System and are using ships with an unknown-to-us level of stealth technology to maneuver around Satra and keep an eye on our activities. The corvettes we have seen are picking up the information from the facility, as a skip cannot be concealed.”
Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3) Page 6