Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “As I reminded the Drifters when they suggested the same thing, the Hierarchy knows how the UPA makes war,” Sylvia said. “They still exist, which means they are not at war with us.”

  It would take roughly two-thirds of the active UPSF units to guarantee victory over the Hierarchy, but Sylvia knew that the UPA could have sent those ships and soldiers if they’d actually felt threatened by the Kozun.

  The Peacekeeper Initiative was out there to try and fix the problems the Kenmiri had left behind, but it would forever be the poor sibling among the UPSF. The United Planets Security Council did not think anything in the Ra Sector could threaten the UPA—and that the forces that could were a long way away.

  “Like the Kozun, I have seen the UPSF make war,” Ran said quietly. “I would rather not see that ruthlessness again.”

  “Neither would we,” Sylvia agreed. “At this point, Arbiter Ran, the next steps are up to you. We know that a Voice of the Kozun will be in the Lon System in ten days. We are prepared to provide the one UPSF unit the Hierarchy requested, and I will, of course, accompany the delegation.

  “But the delegation must be the Cluster’s and the choices must be yours.”

  The room was silent for a full minute.

  “Ambassador Rising Principle will speak for the Cluster,” Ran finally told her, gesturing to the Enteni diplomat. “They have served all of our people well before and I have faith in them.”

  “Your assistance is-was of immense value before and can-will be of immense value again,” Rising Principle told Sylvia. “We would-will be ecstatic if you joined us.”

  “I intend to,” she replied. “My intention, that I will confirm with Colonel Wong, is to travel aboard Raven to the Lon System. The Kozun requested that each side bring three ships.”

  “We will send Carpenter with Rising Principle aboard,” Ran said instantly.

  Carpenter was one of the escorts he’d commanded as a Vesheron leader. As Sylvia understood it, those ships had the most experienced and long-standing crews available to the Cluster.

  “Given the need for security over firepower, I would ask that the UPSF provide a second ship,” Ran continued. “One of your destroyers would add more survivability to the delegation than another of our escorts.”

  “Carpenter has-will be updated to act as a meeting site,” Rising Principle told Sylvia.

  Sylvia didn’t know what that might entail from the Cluster’s perspective, but it would probably be useful.

  “Again, I will need to confer with Captain Wong,” she admitted. “But I see no problem with us committing both Raven and one of our destroyers to the delegation.

  “I did also commit to the Drifters to present their price for providing the neutral security detail to you,” she continued. “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe required exclusive trading rights with the La-Tar Cluster—shared with the UPA—for ten Kenmiri years in exchange for this service.”

  Ran’s head tendrils twitched.

  “You did not, I note, commit us to this without our permission,” he said. “That is appreciated, though I see little choice on our part unless we want to abandon the entire conference.”

  “It is possible that you could negotiate a different deal if you reached out to them yourselves,” Sylvia said. “I did not have the authority or the desire to commit you myself.”

  “Which is, again, appreciated,” Ran told her. “But the reality is what the reality is. We will agree to these trading rights.” His tendrils shivered again. “It is not as if we are trading with anyone other than ourselves and the UPA so far. I do not surrender much.”

  “They have committed three Guardian warships to secure the conference,” she said. “I do not believe the Kozun even have a force that could defeat three Guardians in battle.”

  “Even with the UPSF’s support, I am certain that we do not,” Casto Ran agreed. “We will want to get our ships in motion sooner, Ambassador. If we are agreed on the plan, I ask that you speak with Captain Wong and we will prepare our expedition.”

  “Of course, Arbiter,” Sylvia said with a small bow. “The UPA is here to support your people in any way we can.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  If O’Flannagain hadn’t already smashed a brick into Henry’s emotional state, his reaction to waiting for Sylvia Todorovich to arrive aboard Raven would have been enough of a hint on its own. Years of practice kept his face impassive as he stood with a formal welcome contingent, but he was nervous to see her again.

  He found that realization more than a little amusing, using it as a shield against the emotional somersault his heart turned when the Ambassador stepped out of the shuttle in Raven’s bay.

  He was fifty-one years old, for crying out loud. He had no business reacting like a lovestruck schoolboy at the sight of a conservatively dressed forty-year-old woman.

  “Company, attention!”

  The GroundDiv honor guard snapped to obey the barked order, creating a clear path from the shuttle ramp to where Henry and Iyotake were waiting.

  Todorovich gave the guards a firm nod of acknowledgement and crossed the shuttlebay, her own staff trailing behind her like a flock of goslings.

  “Welcome back aboard Raven, Ambassador Todorovich,” Henry greeted her, taking her hand and bowing over it. “We are delighted to once again play host to your delegation.”

  “Delighted, is it?” she replied with a smile. “That might be the most pleased a UPSF crew has ever been to have us aboard.”

  “Most UPSF crews didn’t watch you save five star systems, Ambassador,” he said. “Raven knows your worth.”

  “And I know Raven’s,” she agreed. “I have detailed updates that weren’t in the skip drone, and I presume you have updates for me. Can we schedule a meeting for once I have my staff settled?”

  “I have several slots clear this afternoon, Ambassador,” Henry confirmed. “And you and Em Leitz are invited to dine with myself and the senior officers this evening, of course.”

  “We’d be delighted,” she said, with a sharp sparkle of amusement in her eyes. She turned back to her chief of staff. “Felix, check over our schedule versus the captain’s and schedule a meeting for myself at the best time you see fit.”

  Henry coughed delicately.

  “Bring Em Leitz, please,” he told her quietly. “I’ll have Iyotake as well. Our…understudies need to be briefed on some things as well.”

  “I see,” she said. “Felix, include yourself in that meeting.”

  “Yes, ser,” the chief of staff confirmed. “Anyone else I should include, Captain?”

  “No,” Henry said. “Just the four of us.”

  He needed to brief the two senior diplomats on Yellow Bicycle, but the fewer people who knew about their covert backup, the more likely they were to be able to keep it secret.

  “Understood. Well, the sooner we get ourselves settled and unpacked, the better off we are,” Todorovich told him. “Shall we get to it?”

  “Chief Headley, please show the Ambassador and her staff to their quarters,” Iyotake said from beside Henry. The Chief Steward had managed to be almost invisibly unobtrusive up to that point, materializing from behind Henry with three large muscular subordinates to take the diplomats’ luggage.

  Most of the time, Henry was willing to trust his crew one hundred percent. Despite his orders to keep Yellow Bicycle secret, he wasn’t overly worried about it leaking to his officers and spacers—he trusted their discretion and their competence. Equally, he had faith in the obstacles that would prevent Kozun intelligence agents getting any reports back to the Hierarchy. With the Kenmiri subspace network permanently offline, interstellar communications were slow and obvious.

  But his orders said Yellow Bicycle remained need-to-know, kept from even his senior officers until they were on their way. His XO and his communications officer knew, but that was it.

  That meant he needed a secure briefing room to talk to Todorovich and Leitz in. Fortunately, Raven’s designers had la
vished every security measure imaginable on the captain’s office. The small breakout meeting room attached to his working space was just as secure as the battlecruiser’s three official secure briefing rooms.

  That room was more than large enough for this meeting, and he gave his steward a grateful nod as she laid a tray of prepared coffees on the table and added a carafe of black coffee.

  “The ambassador is on her way,” the noncom told him. “Do you need anything else, ser? I have a tray of donuts about to come out of the oven as well. They should beat the Ambassador here.”

  “That sounds perfect, Em Guarneri,” Henry replied. “Thank you.”

  The donuts arrived at the same time as Todorovich in the end, allowing the ambassador to carefully snag what appeared to be a glazed carrot donut in careful fingers as she passed the tray.

  Iyotake and Leitz at least waited for the tray to be placed on the table before grabbing snacks of their own. Henry was well aware of the quality of treats the officers’ mess put out and was perfectly willing to grab a donut last.

  None of the pastries would have been unacceptable, after all.

  “We’ve sorted out a plan for meeting the Kozun?” he asked Todorovich as she finished her donut and wiped her fingers on a napkin.

  “We have,” she said. “You saw most of the details we sent, yes?”

  “Went over the entire package with my officers, yes,” he confirmed. “Three ships from each side, three Guardians from the Drifters. It sounds balanced but has the potential to be messy.”

  “It does,” Todorovich agreed. “The Cluster has asked us to send Raven and one of the destroyers to escort their ship. They seem to think that our warships are more protected than theirs.”

  “They’re not wrong,” Henry said. “I’d been planning on something like that. We’ll bring Glorious with us—she’s one of the Significance-class ships, with almost half again the firepower of the Tyrannosaurs that make up the rest of the battle group.”

  “That’s your area of expertise, not mine,” she said. “I promised I would discuss it with you and make sure we were bringing the right ships.”

  “They’re sending an escort, I presume?” Henry asked. “I imagine they wouldn’t want to risk Sunshine with just UPSF protectors.”

  “Carpenter,” she confirmed. “Apparently, she’s been refitted to handle this kind of mission. I have no idea what that looks like, but I’ll take their comments at face value for now.”

  “Did the Kozun give any sign of what kind of ships they’ll be sending?” he said.

  As he spoke, he was giving his internal network commands. Six holographic models appeared above his desk. Raven, Glorious and Carpenter were all true-to-life, current images from Raven’s sensors. The three Guardians were placeholders, standardized versions of a type of ship that was never standard.

  “Only that they were sending three ships. My understanding is they don’t even have three ships that could stand up to a Guardian one-on-one?”

  “They have one,” Henry confirmed. A new model appeared above the table, hovering away from the other two groups. “The Kenmiri-built dreadnought Mal Toranis, named for Mal Dakis’s grandfather.

  “They lost their other dreadnought at the Gathering.” Under the command of an assassin-turned-diplomat, the ship had tried to ambush Raven. It hadn’t ended well for the Kozun warship.

  “Are they likely to send Toranis?” Leitz asked, the chief of staff looking askance at the model of the dreadnought. It was smaller than the Guardians but it was also more clearly built for this exact purpose. The eight-hundred-meter-long dreadnought was sleek and intimidating in a way the crudely assembled Guardians weren’t.

  “No,” Henry guessed, waving the ship away. “From what I understand, Toranis hasn’t left the Kozun System since Mal Dakis took control of his homeworld. She is the last line of defense for the Kozun Hierarchy, and they won’t risk sending her out.”

  “My guess would be that we’ll be looking at one of their new cruisers with a pair of escorts,” he continued. Holograms of those ships appeared where Toranis had vanished. The escorts were rough ovoids, a familiar shape to them all. The Kenmiri had built the half-megaton warships in their thousands to maintain order across the Empire.

  The broad flying-wing shape of the cruiser was new, and there were still a lot of questions around the vessel’s capabilities. Raven had fought and defeated one at La-Tar, but that only meant that the remaining units had probably been upgraded.

  “Can we handle that force?” Todorovich asked.

  “The Kozun force? Yes,” Henry replied. “Raven was designed to engage and destroy dreadnoughts. I’m concerned by Kozun cruisers, especially since the Kozun clearly have sufficient resonance disruptor warheads to pose a real threat to our gravity shields, but I’m confident in our ability to handle a single cruiser.”

  All nine vessels hung above the table, and Henry pointed an accusatory finger at the Drifters.

  “I’m worried about the Drifters,” he admitted. “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe was in what is now Remnant space during Golden Lancelot and didn’t leave for some time afterward. They weren’t in the right place to supply the pirates who ambushed Raven on our way to the Gathering, but they have definitely followed a course that would have allowed them to supply the Kozun with disruptor warheads.”

  The breakout room was quiet.

  “That was the Diplomatic Corps’s assessment as well,” Todorovich said. “It’s possible that the Hierarchy developed the disruptor warheads themselves and provided them to those pirates, but the Drifters had far more exposure to our ships in action than any other single Vesheron group.”

  “If anyone had the data to develop a weapon against our gravity shields, it was them,” Henry agreed. “While this Convoy wasn’t in position to supply those pirates, IntelDiv was keeping tabs on several at the time that could have managed it.

  “And since the subspace network was still online at that point, the Drifters could have been acting as a single group then. They lost that with the rest of us, but they may still be following a plan they set into motion before the Gathering.”

  All four of them looked at the three Guardians in the floating display for a few seconds. They were ramshackle ships, assembled from whatever was to hand, but they all shared extremely powerful energy screens and large numbers of the same superheavy plasma turrets that made the Kenmiri dreadnoughts so dangerous.

  “So, what do we do?” Leitz asked. “Are you expecting them to betray us?”

  “I think the Kozun betraying us is more likely,” Henry admitted. “If the Drifters betray us, though, Raven and our Cluster friends can’t win that fight. Potentially, given sufficient warning, I can cover Carpenter’s retreat, but I can’t fight three Guardians.

  “However, UPSF command has even less trust for either of these groups than I do,” he told them. “Lieutenant Colonel Iyotake is already briefed on this, but I’m tasked to update our senior diplomats on Operation Yellow Bicycle.”

  “Yellow Bicycle?” Leitz asked.

  “All operation names are randomly generated,” Todorovich explained before Henry could say anything. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Captain. What is this operation?”

  “If everything goes according to plan, you have a peaceful and calm discussion with the Kozun and we resolve the conflict between them and the Cluster,” he said. “If that happens, there will never be any sign that Yellow Bicycle existed. It is a backup plan for if one or both of our counterparts in the Lon System betray us.

  “If we are betrayed, however, Yellow Bicycle has been put in place to make certain that we have heavy reinforcements one skip away. Timing will be a problem, given minimum skip times, but having an entire carrier group one skip away is much more helpful than having them in UPA space.”

  “An entire carrier group?” Todorovich said.

  “Battle Group Scorpius will have received the update on the peace conference by now and will have adjusted their c
ourse,” Henry said. “I don’t have a name or a designation for the system they will be waiting in, but it is on my maps. We will make certain that our skip drones back to La-Tar and the UPA pass through that system, allowing Commodore Barrie and Admiral Cheung to remain fully updated on the situation.”

  “That is reassuring,” the ambassador noted drily. “I’m surprised the UPSF was willing to even lend the Initiative a fleet carrier, let alone her entire battle group.”

  “Yellow Bicycle is not an Initiative operation,” Henry admitted. “Battle Group Scorpius remains part of Fifth Fleet and answerable to the regular chain of command. This operation is intended to minimize a threat to the actual Alliance as opposed to our Ra Sector allies and protectorates.”

  “I see.” She brought a holographic map up above the table, shifting the images of the ships to one side. “I take it our route to the Lon System will bypass the carrier group?”

  “Yes. The shortest route for our drones back to Zion, however, passes through the system they will be waiting in,” Henry told her. The ship models vanished with a thought, allowing the map to be more clearly seen.

  “Do we have an allowance for what happens if we stop communicating?” Todorovich asked. “That seems almost more likely, unfortunately, than our calling for help.”

  “There’s nothing official in the orders I’ve seen,” Henry admitted. “I imagine that Cheung would deploy forward if he didn’t hear from us, but I don’t think there is an exact time frame specified.”

  “We’ll want to fix that. Am I able to communicate with the Admiral?” she asked.

  “I see no reason not to,” he said. “Talk to Moon; she’s fully in the loop on this and has been including small detours on several of her drones. You should be able to exchange messages with the Admiral with…well, about the delays we’d expect. We do want to make sure we don’t do anything too obvious with the drones.”