Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I am not aware of any technology that can reliably hide a starship,” Henry replied slowly. His new reactionless fighters were harder to detect, as they lacked a drive plume, but they were still far from invisible.

  “Neither am I,” Casto Ran agreed. “I commanded starships for the Vesheron for half my life, Captain Wong. I have never seen or heard of anything like what we are encountering in the Satra System. But we are definitely encountering something.”

  “And you want me to go to check it out,” Henry guessed.

  “In company with several of my own ships, yes,” Ran confirmed. “Admiral Zast is assembling a task force around one of our carriers. The use of starfighters should enable a large number of scan angles that should unveil whatever is hiding from us.”

  Henry paused his direct display to conceal his moment of concern. The La-Tar Cluster’s “carriers” had been a brilliant solution to bringing extra firepower to the liberation of La-Tar, but the retrofitted freighters were still fragile and slow ships…carrying fighters that were just as fragile.

  But Ran was correct in that starfighters would help them narrow down a station or ship someone had managed to hide.

  “I will have to meet with the destroyer commanders here before I commit to anything,” he told Ran. “But I see no reasons why Raven should not be able to assist in this mission. We await news from Ambassador Todorovich’s mission, in any case.”

  “We hope for her success,” Ran told him. The Tak’s tone suggested his hopes were low, but that was his job. Pessimism was part of the job description for running a five-star-system nation, Henry was certain.

  “I have faith in the Ambassador,” Henry replied. “But even with an explicit peace agreement, we do not want a Kozun scouting outpost next to La-Tar.”

  “We do not,” Ran agreed.

  “We will speak again once Raven is fully in orbit and I have consulted with my fellows,” Henry promised. “Or should I reach out directly to Admiral Zast?”

  “Let me know when you can assist and I will arrange a meeting,” Ran told him. “We appreciate your help as always, Captain Wong.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Henry woke up from his dreams bolt upright, breathing rapidly as his internal network flashed an alert. For a few moments, he sat on his bed, staring blankly into space, then sent a mental command to bring the lights up.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against the bed as he worked through his breathing exercises. Once he’d calmed his body, he carefully ran through the vague memory of the nightmare.

  This was an old one with a few new twists, a memory of one of the more horrific scenes of his time with Mal Dakis. A small group of mid-level officers in the Vesheron faction had tried to make a deal with the Kenmiri, to betray the rebels and their Terran allies to the Empire.

  Mal Dakis had found out and trapped them. The six leaders had then been crucified in the main loading bay of the asteroid base they’d all been operating out of.

  In the past, Henry hadn’t known any of those officers, and they’d all been given a lethal dose of painkillers before being put on display. In his dream, the victims had still been alive—and they’d included both Sylvia Todorovich and Kalad, his old Kozun friend who’d commanded the retreat from La-Tar.

  He was reasonably sure that Sylvia was still alive, even if the last report from Shaka was several days old. Kalad, on the other hand…she had not expected to survive returning to the Hierarchy. Refusing would have doomed her mate and child, so she’d gone back to face the penalties of failure.

  So, Kalad was joining his dead in his nightmares. Henry couldn’t blame his subconscious for that. He ran through the dream scenario again in his mind, facing it and letting it flow over him. He had a lot of practice with that now.

  He’d lost a lot of friends and subordinates in the war. He’d lost a marriage—consummated with the immortal certainty of young men and then sacrificed on the cold realism of old soldiers. He’d spent months under medical supervision to make sure he didn’t commit suicide…and he was far from the only one.

  The psychic wounds of war and genocide were torn deeply into the soul of the United Planets Space Force. That was why he was there, in La-Tar, trying to keep strangers safe.

  With a long exhalation, the dark-skinned Chinese American officer rose from the floor and crossed to his desk. He wasn’t going to get back to sleep, which meant he may as well go over the files for his new officers.

  He was meeting the destroyer captains in the morning, only a few hours away. He’d have been better if he could have rested, but he could tell when that wasn’t happening.

  “Take a seat, people,” Henry ordered the four officers waiting for him. “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me.”

  None of the four were physically present. The four destroyers were all within ten thousand kilometers of Raven, allowing for real-time transmission. The holograms were as solid and present as if the Lieutenant Colonels had shuttled over.

  “We await your orders, ser,” Lieutenant Colonel Heléna Orosz told him. The pale woman commanding Glorious was the youngest of his four destroyer captains, an Earth-native officer responsible for the most advanced of the escort warships.

  “I have reviewed Captain Rahmi’s standing orders for your assignment in the system,” Henry said. “I see no reason to change any of them at this moment, so I won’t be issuing any immediate orders.

  “This is an introductory meeting for us to touch base,” he continued. “I know Captain Spini from my last visit here.” He nodded to Hadrosaur’s captain, the Indian man returning the gesture.

  “If you have any concerns about our position or situation here, now is the time to raise them. From my conversation with the Arbiter on our way in, I expect to be moving Raven out in company with Cluster forces shortly.

  “We are also on standby, waiting for an update from the diplomatic mission attempting to find a peaceful solution to this conflict,” he reminded them. “While Raven is officially posted to La-Tar, there is a reason you four are assigned to the La-Tar station as opposed to a Cruiser Group Raven.

  “The nature of the Initiative and our limited hull numbers require you all to maintain a certain degree of independent posture. While you answer to me as the senior officer while I am present, I expect my duties to have Raven outside of the La-Tar System on a regular basis.”

  He looked around the four virtually present officers.

  “If you have any concerns, any questions, about our mission or our situation, now is the time to raise them.”

  “We are supposed to be a peacekeeping force, ser,” Albertosaur’s captain said slowly. Lieutenant Colonel Omobolanle Abiodun was an immense African with swirling tattoos inked across their face. Henry didn’t know quite what the tattoos meant, but he understood them to be related to Abiodun’s culture’s traditional third gender.

  “Our position here in La-Tar is not a peacekeeping role,” Abiodun continued. “This is a defensive position with clear rules of engagement and an expected enemy. This seems…contrary to our role.”

  “It’s part of the role, unfortunately,” Henry replied. “I agree, Captain. However, sometimes, keeping the peace requires us to get in the way of people trying to fight wars. We do not and cannot recognize the use of force for conquest as a legitimate tool.

  “If the Initiative is to stand behind that statement, we must back it up with the necessary tools. That means we have to be prepared to defend systems that have been the target of violence.

  “We will attempt to find peaceful solutions, and if at all possible, we want to avoid the UPA getting drawn into a real fight with the Kozun or anyone else. But…protecting these people is very much part of our mandate.

  “Our task is to keep the peace and restrain the warlords rising from the Kenmiri’s ashes. We can’t do that without fighting anyone—and the best way to avoid a fight sometimes is to make it very clear you’re ready to have one.”

  He grimac
ed.

  “I hope that our presence here acts as a deterrent and keeps the Hierarchy from repeating their attempt to conquer these systems. If it doesn’t…well, we fight.”

  Abiodun nodded silently.

  “I appreciate you establishing that, ser,” Straton Nosak, the fourth destroyer skipper, said. “It helps us know where we stand and what to tell our people. No one signed up for the Initiative because we didn’t think we needed to do something out here.”

  Even the crews of the two destroyers pulled out of Cruiser Group Lioness, Nosak’s and Abiodun’s commands, had been assembled from volunteers. Not that they’d needed to make much adjustment to Stegosaur or Albertosaur’s crews. They’d basically volunteered as a body.

  “Once we have the situation with the Kozun resolved, this all should become much smaller-scale,” Henry promised them. “We weren’t expecting to stumble into a war out here, after all. All of our missions were supposed to be making contact with single planets or maybe a dependency cluster at the most.

  “Ambassador Todorovich and I were out here to make contact with just Tano,” he said. “We all saw how that turned out!”

  “These are good people,” Spini added softly. “They never deserved to be slaves, and I don’t think I have it in me to stand by and see them enslaved again.”

  “None of us do, Parvan,” Abiodun assured him. “We all volunteered for this.”

  “We are under your orders, ser,” Orosz told Henry, “but we’re all here for a reason. I have no concerns about our positioning in this system.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now. Supplies? Weapons status? Morale issues? Anything I need to know about or that you need backup on?”

  Both the UPA and the fledgling defensive forces of the Cluster were based on the old Vesheron logistics pipelines—which meant everyone’s missiles were clones of the Kenmiri weapons. The Cluster could easily replenish almost every munition Henry’s people needed.

  Chapter Twelve

  “It is a pleasure to meet you in person again, Captain Wong,” Zast told Henry as he stepped off the shuttle, her Kem smoother than he remembered. The old Tak—she was older than Casto Ran by a significant margin, he suspected, with liver spots that stretched up onto her head-tendrils—took his hands in hers in a strange two-handed gesture.

  “I hear that you are having some unusual problems in the Satra System,” Henry said. “The Arbiter asked me to provide some support.”

  “He came aboard shortly ahead of you,” the Admiral told him. Zast had been a food freighter captain before the Kozun invasion and had helped organize the relief fleet that had fed the industrial worlds, picked up their troops and then liberated La-Tar.

  In exchange, she was now the senior officer of the La-Tar Cluster Defense Fleet.

  “I have a few officers who will be hologramming in, but it will not be a large meeting,” she told him. “Sunshine has been upgraded since you last saw her in action. I would be delighted to give you a tour once we are done.”

  Sunshine was one of the Cluster’s two “carriers,” former food transports refitted to carry a few dozen unshielded starfighters. They’d been handy in the relief effort, but Henry was surprised they’d kept them on as warships.

  He couldn’t say that, however.

  “It will depend on how much time we have,” he said stiffly. “My understanding is that the Arbiter would like this situation resolved as quickly as possible.”

  “So would we all,” Zast agreed. “A Kozun observation post one skip away from La-Tar is concerning, even if we do not think they have been scouting us directly.”

  “Without subspace coms, they are limited,” Henry noted. “Though that is why they would be sending ships to pick up the data dumps.”

  “Exactly what we think,” Zast confirmed. “Come, Captain. I will show you what I can of our flagship on the way.”

  It was flagship now, apparently. Henry held his tongue as they walked through the still-very-clearly-civilian boat bay toward the rest of the ship. Sunshine was a ten-megaton food freighter at her bones. He wasn’t sure what they could have done to her to make using her as a flagship worthwhile.

  The moment the doors to the rest of the ship slid shut behind them, he started to understand. The corridor led to a row of brand-new in-ship transit pods. A directory hung next to the pods—internal networks like those used in the UPSF were rare in former Kenmiri space—listing ship location after location after location.

  “How much did you add?” he asked.

  “We had a lot of space,” Zast said drily. “And, as it turned out, Tano had a lot of spare parts. A prefabricated conference center intended to be part of a space station here, a set of lasers intended as mining gear there…”

  She grinned.

  “You will see the conference and fleet-control facilities yourself,” she promised him. “I will have my people send yours the current specifications.”

  “Current, huh?” Henry asked. He supposed the advantage to a merchant hull was that they could clearly open it up and install just about any prefabricated segment they wanted. “Still a lot of empty space?”

  “The only real defense most of the modules have, yes,” Zast conceded. “We have some armor around key components like reactors and heat radiators, but the emptiness of the ship is part of her protection.”

  A transit pod was already waiting for the Admiral, an armed soldier in face-concealing armor standing next to it. The guardian traded a calm nod with the GroundDiv trooper trying to be inconspicuous behind Henry and stepped aside.

  “Come on, Captain,” Zast told him. “We will have work to do.”

  “Our attempts to locate the stealth scout have so far proven a complete waste,” Casto Ran told the people in the meeting room a few minutes later. “We know there is something in the Satra System. It may be a concealed facility. It may be a ship equipped with technology we are unfamiliar with.

  “Whatever it is, we need to identify it, locate it and either capture or destroy it,” the Arbiter concluded. “Our UPA allies have agreed to provide us some assistance, but the key component is Sunshine herself. Admiral Zast?”

  Zast nodded to her boss and joined him at the front of the room. Rows of semicircular chair arrangements focused on the stage, though the room was sized for ten times as many people as joined Henry there today.

  From what he’d seen, most of Sunshine’s command facilities were structured like that. She was a command ship without a fleet, but she’d been future-proofed against a vast expansion of the Cluster’s forces.

  Hopefully, that would prove unnecessary, but he couldn’t blame the Cluster for it. The UPA couldn’t always be there. With five star systems to protect, a fleet of a hundred ships started to sound quite reasonable.

  “Whatever stealth systems the ghost commands, they are more than sufficient to prevent our current generation of sensors from detecting the target with any certainty,” she said calmly. “Our solution to this has two edges to the blade.

  “Firstly, Captain Wong has agreed to bring Raven with us.” She gestured to Henry. “Raven’s sensors are superior to any in our current possession.”

  The UPSF’s current generation of sensor suites were superior to any sensors in the Kenmiri Empire, Henry knew. That meant they were almost certainly better than anything available to the Vesheron with their ex-Kenmiri systems.

  The other El-Vesheron powers, the outsiders like the UPA who’d helped fight the Kenmiri, were more in question…but they were all a long way away now.

  “The second part of the plan is to swamp Satra with sensor platforms,” she continued. “We have rigged up a high-intensity detection array that can replace a missile on one of our starfighters, and Tano has helped the LCDF assemble a stockpile of these arrays.

  “Mounting them on all of Sunshine’s fighters will provide us with over one hundred and twenty different sensor arrays. Combined with Sunshine, Raven, and the escorts we are bringing with us, I do not believe our mystery visitor wi
ll remain hidden for long!”

  It was a good plan, partly relying on Sunshine’s having vastly expanded her fighter strength from the last time Henry had seen her. He hadn’t thought there were a hundred and twenty starfighters in the Cluster.

  The spacecraft were still what UPSF pilots referred to as “TIEs”—fast and potentially decently armed starfighters completely lacking in shields of any kind. It was theoretically possible to fit energy shields on a starfighter-sized vessel, but Henry had only seen it a handful of times.

  Without gravity shields, the Cluster’s fighters were far more vulnerable than his own wing. For this mission, it wouldn’t matter.

  “What are we bringing with us for escorts?” he asked. “The plan seems solid to me, but we are assuming that this mystery scout is minimally dangerous.”

  “There are two escorts in the system, and we will be bringing two more with Sunshine,” Zast told him. “We would welcome the presence of one of your destroyers, though we do not believe it will be necessary.

  “I suspect we are looking at a small specialty vessel or potentially a minimally armed facility,” she continued. “The worst case I can see is one of the Kozun’s new cruisers, which would suggest dangerous abilities for those vessels.”

  “I cannot see them having a cruiser to spare,” Henry admitted. The ships weren’t dreadnoughts, but they were the largest ships he’d seen built by a Vesheron power since the war had ended.

  Of course, the handful of Vesheron powers that had built their own capital ships during the war were a long way away. Kenmiri dreadnoughts and Drifter Guardians were all they knew of in the Ra Sector.

  “Four escorts should suffice to level the field between Raven and Sunshine and any likely enemy,” he conceded. “Raven is ready to move as soon as you are, Admiral Zast. I see no reason to delay, not without more information on this ghost than we have.”