Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  And if the Kozun had some kind of stealth-ship technology, he needed to know that before he took an ambassador to a prearranged meeting with their representatives.

  Mal Dakis might be pragmatically ruthless, but he’d also always had a taste for recruiting assassins and agents who were…both more ruthless and less pragmatic than their boss. And one Henry Wong had made enemies of more than a few of those agents.

  If anyone would use a peace negotiation as an opportunity to attack with a stealth ship, it would be the Kozun!

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Satra System didn’t look particularly unusual to Henry once Raven arrived. A red giant star, it looked very similar to the dozens of similar systems used as stopover points for travel throughout the Kenmiri Empire.

  Skipping between larger stars was faster than skipping between smaller ones, so most journeys would consist of skipping to a giant of some kind, and then skipping to several others before making the final skip to a regular-sized star.

  Red giants tended not to have much in terms of planets. Satra had a midsized gas giant orbiting at several dozen light-minutes, but only asteroids and meteors otherwise.

  “Ihejirika, show us the skip line to Kozun space,” Henry ordered. “And then flag every ghost the locals have seen on the display for me.”

  The Cluster task force was still emerging from skip behind him. Glorious had come through in perfect formation with the battlecruiser, but the La-Tar ships were being more cautious. Sunshine was the last ship through, arriving in a space already covered by the two escorts.

  A green line on the displays around Henry already marked the skip line back to La-Tar. They could, at least theoretically, skip back to the agriworld’s system anywhere along that line. It would require more careful calculations the closer they got to the star, but it was possible.

  Two new lines appeared in response to his order, both colored dark orange. Henry’s internal network filled in the names for him, marking them as the skips toward Kozun space.

  One was a twenty-hour skip to another red giant that would be the first of several skips to get all the way to Kozun itself in about ten days. The other was a twenty-three-hour skip, almost the longest anyone would risk, to the nearest industrial planet under Kozun control.

  “Any contacts yet?” he asked.

  “Negative,” Ihejirika reported. “Scatterplot of ghost contacts going up now. None of them are solid, so the whole map is probabilistic at best.”

  “Understood.”

  On the scale of a display showing most of a star system, even the largest probable zone for a single contact was a mere dot. The data provided by the Cluster ships speckled the star system with more tiny dots. There were at least two hundred of them, Henry estimated, which explained why Ran had decided there was definitely something out there.

  “Sunshine reports that they are launching fighters,” Moon reported. New blue icons spilled out from the marker for the carrier behind Raven. “Admiral Zast is requesting an update on your intentions, ser.”

  Henry nodded, studying the pattern of the dots. There wasn’t a neat single concentration of them. They covered a broad zone, stretching from the moonless gas giant out toward all three skip lines.

  “Get me Captain Orosz,” he ordered. “I’ll update Zast once we have a plan.”

  It only took a moment for the destroyer CO to appear on the screens attached to his seat. He brought Iyotake in from CIC with a mental order and gazed levelly at the two Lieutenant Colonels.

  “I assume you’re both looking at the contact pattern,” he said.

  “Yes, ser,” Iyotake confirmed. “No real solid answers here.”

  “No,” Henry agreed. “I suspect we’re looking at something near the gas giant, though. Orosz?”

  “I guess the same,” the woman said. “Your orders?”

  “I want Glorious to go sweep the gas giant area,” he told her. “There’s less in terms of debris over there than in a lot of the system, so there shouldn’t be anything to hide behind. You’re authorized to use sensor drones at your discretion.”

  “Understood, ser,” Orosz said. “What do you think we’re looking for?”

  “The contacts are too diffuse to be a facility,” Henry said. “We’re looking for a ship, potentially more than one. Make sure your scanners are calibrated for Terzan starfangs. If we know anyone with any kind of stealth tech, it’s them.”

  The Terzan were El-Vesheron like the UPA, but they were most definitely not Ashall. They were ten-legged insectoids who communicated via organic radio. Unlike the rest of the Vesheron and El-Vesheron, though, the UPA knew the Terzan had gravity shields.

  Better ones than the UPA, plus a generally more sophisticated tech base. Henry would back Raven against almost anything in the galaxy one on one. The Corvid-class battlecruisers had been designed to engage two Kenmiri dreadnoughts at once, after all.

  Faced with a Terzan starfang, a ship the size of one of his destroyers, though, he’d hesitate. He was all too aware that the weapons and abilities the Terzan had shown in the war had been intentionally understated.

  “The Terzan aren’t anywhere near here,” Orosz objected. “They’re from near Londu space, over by the Set Sector, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t expect you to find Terzan, Captain,” Henry told her. “But they’re the people most likely to have a stealth system of some kind that we have sensor data on. So, if someone is sneaking around, calibrating for a starfang is the most likely way to find them.

  “Understood?”

  “Yes, ser,” she confirmed. “We’ll set our course.”

  “And us, ser?” Iyotake asked.

  “We set our course for the route to Kozun, the Vodo skip line,” Henry replied. “If they’re Kozun and they’re looking to send any information home, they’ll have something there.

  “We have the best sensors in the system, so we’ll take a look there.”

  “Understood, ser.”

  Henry closed the channels and turned to his bridge crew.

  “Bazzoli, course for the Vodo skip line, if you please,” he ordered. “Moon, inform Zast that we’re sending Glorious to the gas giant and Raven is investigating the route to Kozun. We’ll coordinate with units she’s sending to either place, but the best use of her starfighters is a VLA.”

  A Very Large Array was made up of multiple ships spread out at precalculated distances with synchronized sensors. It would let them act as a telescope tens of thousands of kilometers across, providing a resolution no single ship’s sensors could match.

  “I’ll pass that on, ser,” Moon confirmed.

  “Course set,” Bazzoli reported.

  “Engage.”

  Even at half a kilometer per second squared, crossing the distance across star systems took time. With the exception of Sunshine, the La-Tar ships were faster. The escorts and fighters were able to maneuver at one KPS2, though the carrier was limited to the same half KPS2 as Raven—and didn’t have the engine power and acceleration tanks to push past that like the battlecruiser.

  One of the escorts stayed with the carrier as the fighters spilled farther and farther out, their scanner data presumably feeding back to Sunshine to provide a detailed view of the star system.

  Another escort, one of the ones already positioned in the system, was sticking close to Glorious. The destroyer was almost twice the escort’s size but technically more lightly armed. She had three lasers to the escort’s four—though hers were estimated at around twice the power level—and twelve missile launchers to the escort’s twenty. Of course, the escort lacked even Kenmiri energy shields, where Glorious, one of the UPSF’s new Significance-class destroyers, had a full gravity shield.

  Another escort was accompanying Raven as she headed for the Kozun skip route, and the last escort was heading for the remaining skip line.

  “Sunshine is feeding us the data from the VLA,” Moon reported. “Not seeing much. So far, all that this mission is doing is proving the syste
m is empty.”

  Henry nodded, pulling some of the data directly to his own screens. The La-Tar fighters had the worst sensors of any of the ships in the system, but with over a hundred of them synchronized, they had the best overall resolution.

  The data he was seeing from the VLA was old by the time it reached him. Lightspeed delays meant that the minimum age was almost ten minutes, and it got older as he looked farther away from the fighters.

  “We’re counter-analyzing the VLA data,” Iyotake told him. “We’re not finding anything either. Zast is moving the array slowly and sweeping the system.”

  “Ihejirika, flag the zones that we’ve marked as clear on the display,” Henry ordered.

  A pale green haze lit up a large chunk of the system on his screens. It was slowly arcing across the inner system’s asteroids and meteors as Henry watched, the different angles making even the largest chunks of debris useless as hiding spots.

  “Looking like our friends were jumping at ghosts so far,” Ihejirika said. “Except I’ve met too many of Ran and Zast’s people to buy that.”

  “Agreed,” Henry said. He studied the orange line they were drawing closer to. It wasn’t in the green haze yet, but a good chunk of the space he’d actually expected to find trouble in was. There were no dense clusters of debris near the skip line, but there were asteroids and meteors, and he’d presumed their ghost would be hiding behind one of them.

  “Moon, send Orosz a warning,” he said calmly. “If we’re not picking up anyone in the debris fields, then the most likely hiding spot left is that gas giant.”

  “Do we divert back, ser?” Bazzoli asked.

  Henry hesitated. He was still certain that the Kozun would have something close to the skip route back to the Hierarchy’s capital, but they weren’t seeing anything.

  “Do we have a telemetry link for Bushel of Hope?” he asked, looking at the escort keeping pace with his cruiser. “We might be able to see what’s closest to us if we sync our sensors.”

  He didn’t overly like sharing telemetry at that level of detail, otherwise he’d have asked for it already. He was fine getting their data, but the VLA data had been freely offered and he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask for data without offering his in return.

  “Upright-Hope wants a direct line, ser,” Moon told him after a moment, the translated Enteni name sounding awkward to her.

  “Put them through,” Henry ordered.

  The image that appeared in front of him looked like nothing so much as a mobile, smooth-exteriored Venus flytrap. The massive black-skinned mouth was facing the camera and wide open to allow Upright-Hope’s eyes—mounted on stalks inside the mouth as a protective measure—to look Henry in the face.

  “We is-are seeing nothing here,” the Enteni officer told him. Even their Kem was an artificial translation; few Ashall had the hearing and visual acuity to register Enteni communication. “We feel this fate-time is-were clear of threats.”

  “If the Kozun are here, then there is a good chance of a relay station close to the skip line,” Henry replied, speaking in Kem himself instead of relying on translators. “If there is nothing else, that will be concealed here and could give us clues. I suggest we synchronize our scanners and increase the distance between our vessels to see what we can find.”

  Upright-Hope hesitated, then fluttered a tendril in agreement.

  “This will-can cost little,” they conceded. “And the Kozun skip line is-will-be the greatest potential threat.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  The channel dropped and Bushel of Hope’s acceleration shifted as she moved away from Raven. Her acceleration shifted up to almost half again Raven’s, and Henry swallowed a moment of jealousy.

  Someday soon, the UPSF would crack the interference problems and install Kenmiri-grade compensators in their ships. On that day, Henry would be rid of the last lingering sense of inferiority versus his allies and old enemies.

  “Ser, CIC has picked out four objects large enough to conceal a small automated relay despite the VLA,” Iyotake told him. “I’m flagging them on the display. If Bushel takes the right course, we should be able to clear all four within a few minutes.”

  “Moon? Pass on the details CIC is providing to our La-Tar friends,” Henry ordered as the new icons appeared on the display. His understanding was that only about ten percent of Bushel’s crew was Enteni, with the rest being members of the several Ashall species living in the La-Tar Cluster.

  Given that the Kenmiri had actively avoided letting an agriworld or industrial world have a population of one race, some of the warship’s crew would even be Kozun.

  More of the star system was being marked in green. Their ghost, whoever it was, was doing a disturbingly good job of hiding itself. As Henry looked over the displays, he received a notification that Glorious was deploying sensor drones above the gas giant.

  There didn’t appear to be anything in orbit, which was the last place he’d really expected to see anything.

  “Contact!” Ihejirika suddenly snapped. “Spectrography on target four is wrong. She has ice facing Bushel, but we just pinged metal. That’s not a meteor, ser!”

  “Well done,” Henry murmured. “Range, Commander?”

  “Two hundred thousand kilometers,” the tactical officer reported grimly. “They’re in weapons range, ser. It’s not a relay station. That’s a ship.”

  “Charge the grav-driver and fire a warning shot from the lasers, Commander,” Henry ordered. “Moon, summon them to surrender.”

  Icons across his displays lit up as Raven’s weapons activated. His two heavy lasers were probably the most powerful lasers in the star system, but he only had two of them. The spinal gravity driver that ran the full length of the battlecruiser took more power to fire, but her capacitors flashed green as the first laser flashed in the darkness.

  “Unknown vessel, this is UPSV Raven,” Moon barked into her microphone in Kem. “You are in violation of the security zone of the La-Tar Cluster. Stand down or be destroyed.”

  “They’re rabbiting!” Ihejirika snapped. “Multiple explosions, damn.”

  The ship was smaller than the meteor it had embedded itself in, and had prepared for a situation where it might have to escape unexpectedly. Instead of bringing up their engines, they detonated a sequence of carefully planted explosives that hurtled them away from Raven at a full kilometer a second squared for several seconds—a crude but effective evolution of an Orion drive.

  “Debris everywhere; I can’t get a lock for a shot,” the tactical officer reported. “Moon, is Bushel on them?”

  Lasers flashed in the night as the unknown opened fire on the La-Tar escort. The same debris cloud that protected her from Raven prevented her from shooting the battlecruiser. It did not stop the ship firing on Bushel of Hope.

  The escort had started to maneuver, but not quickly enough. Two heavy lasers smashed into her and sent the ship reeling off, her engines flickering to silence.

  “Tell me she’s still with us,” Henry barked.

  “Engines are disabled but scans show she’s still intact,” Ihejirika reported. “Orders, ser?”

  “That’s a Kozun corvette,” Henry noted, identifying the ship as it blazed away from them at over a kilometer and a half a second squared. “Can we bring her down before she skips?”

  “Debris field is still interfering with targeting; I think they must have seeded it with chaff to screw with our sensors,” the big Black officer said grimly. “And she’s only a million klicks from the line. We might catch her, ser, but…it’s fifty-fifty at best.”

  And Bushel of Hope was leaking oxygen and fuel alike, a dangerous combination even in deep space.

  “Fuck,” Henry swore. “Bazzoli: intercept course for Bushel of Hope. Thompson, O’Flannagain: stand by for rescue operations.

  “Ihejirika: if you get a shot, take it. But our priority is rescuing our allies, not chasing that prick.”

  At least they’d found the ghost. Or
a ghost, anyway. Henry watched the no-longer-concealed corvette run for the skip line and shook his head.

  That was definitely who the Kozun had been communicating with, but that disguise wouldn’t have held up to any kind of maneuvering. He didn’t quite buy that the La-Tar sentries would have missed the ship accelerating around the star system.

  They’d found what they’d been looking for. But he had to wonder if they’d found everything that was there.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Trust in Fortune was exactly what Third-White-Fifth-Gold had named her: a casino ship.

  Sylvia had let Chavez make the call over whether his people needed a relief enough for them to risk a vessel specifically designed to separate its customers from their valuables, and then waited until almost all of the crew had cycled through the ship before visiting herself.

  She was touring the ship with the destroyer’s XO, Commander Lilia Vasilev, a hawk-faced young woman from her own home system of Epsilon Eridani. Once the beating heart of the Novaya Imperiya prior to the Unity War, Eridani had become independent as part of the peace treaty.

  In many ways, Eridanans like Sylvia were more-Russian-than-Russians now. She and Vasilev both regarded the glittering gaudiness of the public portions of Trust in Fortune with cold cynicism.

  “I believe they are specifically stocking drugs tailored for humans,” Vasilev noted. “I expect to find actual poker tables here somewhere.”

  “Kosa is close enough,” Sylvia replied, naming the Kenmiri game of chance that mirrored much of Terran poker. It had twenty suits of five cards apiece instead of a Terran deck with its four suits of thirteen, but kosa and poker played surprisingly similarly, in her experience.

  “I will need to check in with the MPs,” Vasilev said. “We have been making sure people didn’t gamble anything they weren’t supposed to, but now I wonder if we were careful enough.”