Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Captain Wong, Ambassador Todorovich, this is Rear Admiral Cheung Jian Chin,” the other man in the hologram greeted him. Henry’s attention was yanked away from his ex-husband and he focused on the squat Chinese Admiral.

  “We have received various direct and indirect updates on your positions and plans, and I wanted to make certain that you were aware of Battle Group Scorpius’s progress,” Cheung told them. “The effort you have made to keep us fully informed without revealing our presence has been of immense value, Captain.

  “We are en route, as I hope you presumed, to the system we are designating Ra-One-Seventy-Five. Our navigators’ assessment is that Ra-One-Seventy-Five is the most logical system for your skip drones to pass through on their way to Zion, which will allow you to keep us informed on the progress of negotiations.”

  The Admiral smiled.

  “We should also be able to load messages onto Zion’s drones as they pass us, which will allow us to communicate more readily than we have so far. We estimate that we will be in position sixteen hours after you arrive in the Lon System.”

  Henry was relieved. His only real concern about heading out as early as they had was the fear that they’d be in position well before their reinforcements were. If everything went as promised, that would be fine…but he was expecting a trap.

  “We did receive Ambassador Todorovich’s suggestion of a dead-man order,” Cheung noted. “We considered it in the planning stages of this operation, but doing so depended on us being able to set up a communication chain that wouldn’t draw attention. Since we will be able to watch your drones to Zion, we have that chain and her suggestion makes sense.

  “If we don’t hear from you for twenty-four hours once you have reached the Lon System, I will bring Battle Group Scorpius into the system ASAP. We will be positioning ourselves on the skip line to minimize the response time, but keeping everyone alive until we can arrive will fall on you, Captain Wong.

  “Your record gives me faith that this will not be an insurmountable challenge, but I urge you to remember that the survival of your crew and the people under your protection will be the highest priority in that circumstance.” Cheung smiled drily. “In other words, when the shit hits the fan, run, Captain. Don’t fight unless you’re certain you can win.”

  Henry figured that part came from Barrie. They’d both been headstrong fighter pilots once, after all.

  “If everything goes as we hope, we will meet up in Zion and I will buy you a beer,” the Admiral promised. “If it doesn’t…well, you’ll be seeing us sooner than that.

  “Good luck, Captain Wong, Ambassador Todorovich. Scorpius out.”

  The hologram froze and Henry leaned back in his chair. He looked at the still image of the two officers for a moment and then closed it.

  “That was your ex?” Todorovich asked.

  “Commodore Peter Barrie, captain of Scorpius,” Henry agreed. “One of our, what, five fleet carriers? At least I know the quality of my backup.”

  His companion was silent for several seconds.

  “Is that good or bad?” she finally asked.

  “Good,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t get me wrong, Sylvia. Peter and I didn’t part on good terms—we hadn’t seen each other in over two years when we divorced, and I found out later he’d been having an affair with his Admiral’s intelligence officer—but I know him. He’s one of the best in the UPSF for starfighter tactics.

  “If Scorpius has to come for us, we have some of the best people out here coming to our rescue. And he won’t hesitate. Our former personal relationship is more likely to motivate him to jump too quickly than too slowly.”

  Henry sighed, remembering the conversation with the apologetic IntelDiv officer. He’d thought Henry and Peter had the kind of arrangement common with fleet officers—and Peter hadn’t disabused the man of the belief.

  “Good to know, I guess,” she said. “And Cheung? Do you know the Admiral?”

  “By reputation only,” Henry said. “I’ve probably been in the same star system as him on a few occasions, but I’ve never served with or under him.”

  The UPSF was a small world in many ways, but it wasn’t that small. Henry had only personally met a quarter or so of the UPSF’s flag officers, and that was probably high even for a capital-ship commander.

  He met Todorovich’s gaze and ground a momentary inner spark under a mental heel. If there ever was going to be an appropriate time to mention his feelings, it wasn’t going to be while they were preparing for a negotiation that could set the fate of tens of billions of lives.

  “Is there anything we need to send back to Scorpius?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’ll start getting the regular updates we send Zion pretty quickly now, and that’s all they need until and unless we actually call for help.”

  “I still think I’d be more comfortable if they were less than twenty-four hours away,” she admitted.

  “Me too,” he said. “But it is what it is.”

  He shook his head and pulled up an astrogation chart.

  “I need to brief the senior officers on Yellow Bicycle,” he told her. “Do you want to sit in?”

  “I think that’s best left between you and your officers, Henry,” she said. “No reason to drag the civilian into the middle of it.”

  “All right. Let me know if your team needs anything,” Henry said. “We’re two days out.”

  “I think we have everything we need until we see just what everyone has brought to the party,” Todorovich replied. “I’m planning for the actual talks to take place on Carpenter. The Cluster are the people this is all about, after all.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “All right, everyone,” Henry told his officers. They’d taken over the secure briefing room again and he’d even dragged Lieutenant Colonel Anna Song out of Engineering for this. Two people, Lieutenant Colonel Heléna Orosz and Glorious’s executive officer, Commander Agnethe Van Andel, were linked in from the destroyer via encrypted hologram and laser tightbeam.

  “All of you know our mission,” he said. “We’re the primary escort for the La-Tar Cluster side of this negotiation. You also all know that the Drifters are providing a neutral security force that is probably as powerful as our escorts and the Kozun force combined.”

  He smiled thinly. From the reactions, not everyone had thought through what “three Guardians” meant as a potential threat.

  “I, frankly, do not trust the Kozun as far as I can throw this battlecruiser,” he told them. “And while I trust the Drifters in many circumstances, I also trust them to follow their objectives over mine…and I don’t necessarily know their objectives here.

  “Command agrees with me, which resulted in what we’re calling Operation Yellow Bicycle.”

  He waited a moment to see if anyone said anything. Moon and Iyotake were already briefed, but this was news to everyone else. He had the attention of the ten officers physically and virtually present.

  “If the Kozun or the Drifters betray us, our objective becomes the survival of our delegation at all costs,” he told them. “We will use our fighters and gravity shields to protect Carpenter while all three ships run for whatever cover we can find as we can go.

  “As we’re running for the hills, we’re going to fire a salvo of skip drones at one of the skip lines,” he continued. “On the other side of that skip line, unknown to anyone outside this room except Ambassador Todorovich, will be a UPSF carrier group.”

  “Wait, what?” Orosz demanded. “What’s a carrier group doing this far out?”

  “Being very quiet and hoping to not be needed,” Henry told her. “UPSF Command suspects a trap. I agree with them, though no one is certain which of the potential ambushers will pull the trigger.

  “In either case, our job will be to keep everyone alive for twenty-four hours until our backup can arrive. Unless the Kozun have shaken up three dreadnoughts that we don’t know about, our carrier group will
be easily able to handle the combined Kozun and Drifter forces we expect in the Lon System.”

  Henry looked around at the officers.

  “Questions, people?” he asked.

  “Which carrier?” O’Flannagain asked. “No offense to the rocket-jocks I serve with, but there are carrier groups I’d rather take care of myself than rely on help from.”

  “Your old base,” Henry replied. “Assuming you’re willing to take help from them?”

  “Yeah,” the pilot grunted. “They’re good peeps with good birds and solid escorts. I’ll take Scorpius over dying alone; that’s for sure. Some of the others would just result in us dying with extras.”

  “The hope is to avoid anyone dying at all,” he reminded everyone. “The existence of Operation Yellow Bicycle is not to be distributed further, understood? This remains need-to-know. While no one is actually expecting the battle group to go unactivated, that would definitely be our preference.”

  “Hope for peace but prepare for war,” Iyotake murmured.

  “We can go into all of the various pithy sayings on that one for days and days,” Henry told his executive officer. “I want you all to put your heads together on how best to protect Carpenter. Worst-case scenario, even Glorious has a better-than-even chance of surviving the full firepower of the Guardians long enough to get clear.

  “Carpenter doesn’t and will likely be carrying the delegation.”

  “Question, ser,” Ihejirika said slowly. “If we’re expecting the Drifters to betray us…what do we do about the Kozun in that circumstance?”

  Henry paused. He hadn’t thought about that, but his tactical officer had a point.

  “If they betray us, they also might be betraying the Kozun, I suppose,” Henry conceded. “It’s possible the two will be working together against us, though, which I think has been everyone’s default assumption.”

  “If the Kozun really want peace and the Drifters blow this up because they want us at each other’s throats, don’t we have a responsibility to protect them as well?” Ihejirika asked.

  Henry exhaled sharply…and then nodded.

  “It will depend heavily on the circumstances,” he admitted. “Most likely, if the Drifters betray us both, the Kozun delegation will be aboard Carpenter and we’ll protect both delegations at once. They’re as capable of outrunning the Guardians as we are, and depending on the situation, we may even tell them that help is coming.

  “I don’t think that we can decide our response to the Kozun in advance,” he told his people. “Ihejirika is right, though. We need to consider the possibility that the Drifters are setting everybody up, with the intent of keeping the war going.”

  “Why would they want to keep the war going?” Bazzoli asked.

  “Because it doesn’t include them,” Thompson said grimly, the GroundDiv commander looking ill at the thought. “We and the Kozun represent the largest potential competitors to the Drifters as trade partners or even just cargo shippers. Our merchants are already beginning to penetrate the Ra Sector.

  “A Hierarchy that’s made peace with its neighbors could be a significant commercial power as well. But if we’re busy fighting each other…”

  “The Drifters are the only people available to haul cargo long distances and to buy tech from,” Kuroda, the battlecruiser’s logistics officer, concluded. “They wanted exclusive trading rights with the La-Tar Cluster as part of their price for protecting the peace conference.

  “If we and the Kozun get stuck fighting each other instead of expanding our trade networks, the Drifters benefit.”

  “And two threats to the Convoys are neutralized,” Henry added. “That’s high on their list of priorities; remember that. They want the people they’re responsible for to be safe. Any threat they can remove is a benefit to them.”

  “No matter what it costs,” Iyotake concluded softly.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The moment of disorientation on returning to normal space was an old friend for Henry. It made him grateful that there was no way to predict where a ship would emerge from a skip along the line. There were more likely areas, but nothing that would allow a ship to be ambushed on arrival.

  It was easier to predict where someone would enter skip, though that was as often a matter of knowing where they were and how fast they could accelerate. Maneuver cones were useful prediction tools.

  “Report, Ihejirika,” he ordered. His internal network and the displays around him were focused on Raven, informing him that the battlecruiser was at battle stations. He hadn’t sent everyone to the acceleration tanks, but in every other way, his ship was ready for battle.

  Expanding his view showed him that Glorious and Carpenter had arrived around him, maintaining the formation they’d entered skip with.

  “Well, nothing has changed about the star compared to the Drifters’ survey data,” the tactical officer said drily. “One very large OB-type blue star. An asteroid belt. Looks pretty much exactly like what we were expecting.”

  “Are we alone?” Henry asked.

  “Still resolving…no,” Ihejirika concluded. “I have three Kozun cruisers in open space near the skip line back to the Hierarchy. They’re half a light-hour away, so I’d say they’ve been here for at least two hours. They didn’t beat us by much.”

  “No sign of the Drifters?”

  “We’re all here early,” his subordinate pointed out. “They’re not due for a couple more days.”

  “Well, that’s going to be entertaining, isn’t it?” Henry said. “Moon, record for transmission to the Kozun ships.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, mentally recalibrating to the Kenmiri trade language before he began speaking in Kem.

  “Kozun ships, this is Captain Henry Wong aboard Raven,” he introduced himself politely. “I am acting as escort for the delegation from the La-Tar Cluster as well as the UPA ambassador intended to assist in negotiations.

  “In the interests of avoiding any potential problems before our neutral guarantors arrive, I suggest we both remain at our current positions until the Drifters are here. That way, we are well outside each other’s weapons range and can be certain of the safety of our respective delegations.”

  He paused, considering the recorder.

  “I assume we are all here in good faith, but this seems a reasonable precaution to keep us all safe.”

  He ended the recording and nodded to Moon.

  “Send that over, Commander,” he told her. “Bazzoli, coordinate with Carpenter and Glorious. We’ll maintain position for the moment; it’s going to be at least an hour until we hear from our friends.”

  “Assuming the spikeheads are actually friendly.”

  Henry very carefully did not identify the voice that had said that.

  “We are here to negotiate the end of war,” he pointed out. “Let’s not risk that with childish insults, shall we?”

  He gave that a moment to sink in across the bridge. He figured the silence meant he’d made his point, and he turned his attention on Ihejirika.

  “Focus all of our passive scanners on those ships,” he told his tactical officer. “Iyotake, I want you to link up with Carpenter and Glorious and pull their sensor data for collaboration.

  “I need you to confirm that count on ship types. IntelDiv thinks the Hierarchy only has four cruisers, but if they sent three of them here, that suggests we’ve underestimated them,” Henry warned.

  “We’ll confirm the IDs, ser,” Ihejirika promised.

  “Already on synchronizing the sensor telemetry,” Iyotake said in his ear. “Should we be standing down from battle stations? They are thirty light-minutes away.”

  In theory, they could still hit each other with their heavy lasers. In practice, at thirty light-minutes, the beams would be so diffuse, they’d be lucky to cause sunburns. There was no real threat at this distance.

  “Stand down to Status Two,” Henry ordered. “But get me that confirmed ID.”

  Three cruisers meant t
hat Henry was actually concerned. Each of the ships outmassed Raven by fifty percent and they were built as pocket dreadnoughts, with the same heavy plasma guns as the larger Kenmiri ships.

  He was reasonably confident he could take all three, especially with Glorious in support. He was concerned that he wouldn’t take out all three before they destroyed Carpenter. That was the concern here and now…but the strategic message was a big one too.

  If the Hierarchy even had six cruisers instead of the four IntelDiv calculated, the balance of power at the negotiations wasn’t what they’d expected. That could cause Todorovich all kinds of problems.

  Henry leaned back in his chair, carefully projecting relaxed calm as he looked at the displays around him.

  They’d been in the system for less than ten minutes, and the carefully built forecasts and assumptions they’d built their plans on were already crumbling.

  “Ser, incoming transmission from the Kozun,” Moon told Henry an hour later.

  The downside to keeping everyone at this distance was that communications were going to take forever. It was hard to carry on a conversation with a full-hour time lag.

  “Put it on, Commander,” he ordered. He closed the analysis he was going through with a mental command and a concealed sigh.

  Everyone aboard Raven’s little flotilla was agreed: there were definitely three of the Kozun’s homebuilt cruisers in the Lon System. Unless the Kozun were playing games at a technical level the UPA couldn’t match, they’d sent three capital ships to the negotiations.

  There were a lot of possibilities behind that, though one point was clear to Henry: regardless of whether the Kozun had sent all of their capital ships or a tenth of them, they’d sent that many to be impressive.

  “Sending the message directly to your internal network, ser,” Moon informed him.

  Henry was about to question why the Lieutenant Commander was sending him the message in a private format when it began—and he found himself facing the familiar eyes and forehead plates of a woman he’d thought was dead.