Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “My staff and I will assess the data from La-Tar,” she promised. “We will have an…offer by the time of our next meeting. As part of that, I believe we should consider a discussion of borders.”

  She laid a small holoprojector on the table, creating a three-dimensional map of the La-Tar Cluster and the surrounding stars and skip lines. The Cluster was highlighted in a pale orange color, while the visible portion of the Hierarchy—Aval wasn’t kind enough to provide a full map of the Hierarchy’s current territory—was teal.

  The closest the two territories came to each other was at La-Tar itself, four skips from the industrial world of Sitros. Sitros was two skips, just under forty-eight hours’ travel, from La-Sho, an agriworld definitively under Kozun control.

  “Satra is-was not negotiable,” Rising Principle said sharply, a tendril pointing at the large star one skip away from La-Tar. It wasn’t the only giant on the map, but it was the one right between the Cluster and the Hierarchy.

  “That is acceptable, though it is not a concession without value,” Aval warned. “My suggestion, in fact, is that Satra, Ichnu, Relo and Kort all be formally recognized as belonging to the Cluster.”

  Sylvia took a moment to place all four of those star systems in the map. None were inhabited systems. All were closer to the Cluster than the Hierarchy, but close enough to Kozun space that they could project power to them.

  All of them were red giants or blue hypergiants, easily skipped to from vast distances. They would be critical components of the trade networks that everyone was hoping to grow across the Ra Sector.

  Right now, they were almost worthless and easy concessions for the Kozun to make—but everyone could see the potential value of the systems, which made them an argument for lesser reparations.

  “We would, of course, consider the value of these systems and our recognition of the Cluster’s ownership as we assess the rest of the treaty,” Aval purred.

  Sylvia had to respect the other woman. She’d managed to maneuver Aval into a position where she had no choice but to concede on reparations, and the Kozun had promptly produced a series of concessions that cost the Kozun nothing but could be counted against the value of the debts owed.

  “We already control those stars,” Rising Principle pointed out. “Kozun recognition is meaningless without true effort. A commitment to help the Cluster defend that ownership, perhaps.”

  The UPA ambassador leaned back in her chair. The Enteni envoy also clearly recognized what Aval was doing and had their own tricks. A mutual-defense agreement with the Kozun, even if only for the skip nexuses, would definitely have its advantages.

  Sylvia was opening her mouth to suggest they take a recess to consider the points raised when the world went mad.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  If Henry hadn’t been on Raven’s bridge, he might never have known what happened. He was having a spirited discussion with Anna Song about the heat radiators, one that had been on and off since they’d arrived in the Lon System.

  “The ship simply isn’t designed to run the gravity shield twenty-four seven for weeks on end,” Song told him, the engineer’s image gesturing energetically in Henry’s screen. “She can, yes, but it’s going to wear on the heat radiators.”

  “All right, Colonel, and what’s the solution?” Henry asked. “We’re not turning the shield off, so…”

  “If we reduce the shield’s shear factor by fifty percent, our safety equipment should suffice for thirty-minute work shifts on the exterior hull,” Song told him. “A team of ten can replace an average of two radiators a minute. If we do a careful analysis of which sectors of radiators are in the worst shape, we can replace them in batches of sixty. One thirty-minute work shift every day should keep us ahead of the degradation from running the shield nonstop.”

  “And if we don’t risk reducing the shield power?” he said.

  “We will start seeing radiator failures after five days,” she replied. “Potentially before that.”

  “We can continue to operate at full capacity with up to ten percent of our radiators offline,” Henry pointed out. “How long until that metric, Colonel Song?”

  “Nine to eleven days, depending on our luck,” she admitted.

  “This hopefully won’t last nine days,” Henry said. “And if it’s starting to look like it will, we can readjust. I don’t want to weaken our defenses when we have enemies right here, Colonel.”

  “They won’t even be able to see from the outside,” the engineer argued. “Eight thousand gravities of shear versus sixteen thousand…it’s still going to screw up anything they’re seeing.”

  “We can reverse the shear effect from this side to get accurate sensor data,” he reminded her. “I’d be very surprised if the Drifters, for example, can’t tell the difference between Raven’s shields and Glorious’s. And that, Colonel Song, is only four thousand gravities of difference.

  “Keep an eye on everything,” he ordered. “I am reviewing the reports and I do see the problem, Colonel, but right now, we need that shield more than we nee—”

  “VAMPIRE!”

  The shouted alert shocked Henry to silence—it shocked the entire bridge to silence as Cornelia Ybarra, the assistant tactical officer on duty for his shift, bellowed the single word warning.

  Missiles incoming.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Henry barked as his attention snapped to the tactical displays. “Ybarra, weapons free. Point-defense lasers go!”

  There’d been no warning. One moment, everything was continuing on as normal. The next, every single one of Kalad’s cruisers had opened fire, spitting missiles at the La-Tar and UPA ships.

  Twenty missiles were targeted on Carpenter, forty on Glorious and sixty on Raven—fired at point-blank range with a thousand kilometers per second of launch velocity.

  Thirty seconds should have been enough, but everything had been calm for days. Henry had talked to Kalad; she had seemed fully peaceful. Todorovich had told him that the Kozun ambassador even seemed aboveboard.

  And all of that, it seemed, was a lie—and it seemed Mal Dakis had decided his Third Voice was expendable.

  Carpenter was the first ship to get any of her missile defenses online, several seconds ahead of Glorious or Raven. The La-Tar ship didn’t have any passive defenses that could save her, though, and the range was just too short.

  She shot down six of the twenty missiles. The rest detonated, converting themselves into short-range plasma cannon that washed over the half-megaton escort in the blaze of stellar fusion.

  Glorious and Raven weren’t able to help. They shot down fewer missiles than the La-Tar ship, and Henry’s world shrank as his ship’s gravity generators screamed.

  He knew the sound. He’d heard it twice before, but only once this badly. Resonance-disruptor warheads tore into his ship, sending feedback loops crashing back into her shield projectors.

  And then silence. Devastating, damning, silence…for a fraction of a second before the entire battlecruiser rang like a bell.

  The battle stations alert rang through the ship, but Henry would never remember hitting the button. A second alert added as he hit a second command.

  “All hands to acceleration tanks,” he barked. He took a moment to meet Song’s gaze in the intercom screen. “Relay through Henriksson, Anna,” he told her.

  He rose from his seat, taking in the situation around his command even as the panel in front of him slid open. He didn’t even look at the stand with its mask and hose as it rose up to meet him, his feet finding the right spots instinctively.

  Carpenter was gone, obliterated by a dozen conversion warheads. Sylvia Todorovich was gone with her, and Henry could not let himself feel what that meant to him.

  Glorious was no better. They’d estimated twenty-five resonance-disruptor warheads would take down a destroyer’s shields—and he suspected these ones had been upgraded again. He’d have to go back through the sensor records to learn exactly how Glorious had died, but Raven was
alone.

  He closed the mask over his face, shutting his eyes as he switched his attention to his internal network. Even the automated reports were still updating. Less than a minute had passed since the Kozun ships had opened fire, except…

  The Kozun weren’t firing now. The cruisers were frozen in space, even their engines offline. They weren’t maneuvering, they weren’t firing—they hadn’t even activated their heavy plasma cannon.

  They weren’t following up on their overwhelming alpha strike. If they were expecting him to surrender, Star Voice Kalad was going to learn a harsh lesson about his patience.

  “We are maneuvering at point five KPS-squared,” Bazzoli reported, her voice breathless as Henry finished sinking into his tank. He didn’t even need to check to know that the navigator wasn’t on the bridge. She’d been off-duty and would be in the tank in her quarters.

  Once they were in the tanks, the true bridge was a virtual space now. Her avatar was present in that space, which made her physical location irrelevant.

  They lost efficiency from using the virtual space—but less than they’d lose to being under the twenty gravities they’d face at full acceleration.

  “Get us away from Kalad’s people,” Henry barked. “We’re at eighty percent in the tanks. The instant we hit one hundred, you take us to everything the girl will handle.”

  “I don’t have engineering reports on the damage; I don’t know what that is,” Bazzoli admitted. “Compensators are online now; we’ve definitely got half a KPS-squared, but I don’t know if she’ll take any uncompensated accel.”

  Ninety percent in the tanks.

  “Ser, damage reports updating,” Henriksson cut into Henry’s head. “Gravity shield is offline; we’ve got drones inspecting but no idea when we’ll have a timeline.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Henry said grimly. He could hear that.

  “No, ser. The…” She swallowed. “The keel is broken, ser. Gravity driver is offline. Lasers are offline. Structural integrity is…questionable at best. Colonel Song doesn’t believe the heavy weapons are repairable, ser.”

  Henry said nothing as he processed. The keel was the central chamber that ran the length of the ship, the heavily armored core that contained both the lensing chambers for Raven’s heavy lasers and the gravity tube for her main gun.

  If the damage had penetrated that deeply in the hull…

  “How are we still here?” he asked.

  “There weren’t any conversion warheads in the salvo that hit us,” Ihejirika told him, the tactical officer linking into the command net. “Just disruptor weapons. And ser?”

  “What?”

  “The Guardians.”

  Henry’s situational awareness had been laser-focused on his ship and the threats to his ship. For whatever reason, the Kozun hadn’t continued firing—no one was even following Raven as she accelerated away from the wrecks of her charges.

  Presumably, the last several minutes had been filled with a desperate exchange of messages between the Drifters and the Kozun, but that was clearly over. The Guardians opened fire first, the three Drifter ships mustering thirty heavy plasma cannon between them.

  They weren’t even using missiles at this range. Massive blasts of plasma hammered into the shields of the Kozun cruisers, and Kalad’s ships finally stirred from their shocked stillness—to fire back.

  “You still have us in range,” Henry murmured. “You didn’t finish us off.”

  “Ser, the Kozun…not all of their cannon are firing,” Ihejirika reported.

  “I’m guessing the numbers line up with the weapons we know they built themselves,” Henry said quietly.

  There was a long pause.

  “Yes, ser,” Ihejirika agreed.

  Henry checked. Only ninety-two percent of the crew listed as being in acceleration tanks. There were still dozens of people scattered through the ship, many of them likely trapped by debris and damage.

  Others were dead. The system was giving him that estimate and he refused to let it do anything but define whether all of his people were in the tanks.

  “Dr. Axelrod,” he said grimly, linking himself to the medbay. “You have three minutes to get the wounded into acceleration tanks.”

  “That’s not possible,” she replied. “I only have twelve surgery tanks and they’re already full. We still have people on their way to medba—”

  “Get them into the nearest emergency tanks,” Henry told her. “They’re as safe there as they are in the tanks in sickbay if you don’t have surgery tanks free for them.”

  “Ser, some of them will die.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Axelrod.” He intentionally used Shani Axelrod’s military rank instead of her medical title. “If we don’t get clear of the battlespace, we’re all going to die. You have three minutes.”

  He cut her off and turned his attention back to the virtual bridge.

  “Moon, fire off the Yellow Bicycle skip drones,” he told his coms officer. “Code is D, I repeat, the code is D.”

  His attention shifted to the engineering officer, the young woman responsible for collating damage reports from across the battlecruiser and telling him what he needed to know.

  “Lieutenant Henriksson, you have three minutes to work out how much strain Raven can take,” he told her. “Because in three minutes, Commander Bazzoli is going to take us to the maximum acceleration we can handle.”

  The battle had well and truly been joined behind them, but Henry knew the risks. His ship had only added ten thousand kilometers to the range. He needed to add five hundred thousand kilometers before he’d be safe.

  At half a KPS2, that would take over twenty minutes. He’d save seven minutes if Raven had her full acceleration.

  “I’m sorry, old friend,” he murmured to Kalad as her three cruisers flung their crippled weapons at the Guardians. “I can suspect but I can’t trust.”

  And it wasn’t like Raven was going to change the course of that battle in her current state.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Despite the handicaps the Drifters had inflicted on the Kozun, Raven was almost a quarter million kilometers distant when the first cruiser finally died. Everyone, including Henry, appeared to have underestimated the shield upgrades the Kozun had installed on their new warships.

  “Remaining ships are breaking off,” Ihejirika reported. “Guardians are pursuing.”

  “That’s going to be painful to watch,” Iyotake said from the CIC. “The cruisers have point four KPS-squared on the Guardians, but they’re not going to make it.”

  Even as Henry’s XO spoke, the Guardians finally started launching missiles. The range was short enough that they would be coming in slowly. Without surprise, they’d be vulnerable to Kalad’s missile defenses. Some would get through anyway.

  Raven continued to open the range at point seven KPS2. It was all the battered starship could take, and Henry was praying for every second Kalad’s ships could buy him. The Drifters might just be enforcing the peace as they’d promised…but nobody was talking to Raven.

  “Ser, we have a problem,” Moon told him. “The skip drone…”

  “Commander?” Henry asked. “What happened?”

  “I launched eleven skip drones at the Ra-Seventy-Oh-Five skip line,” she reported. “We also had one prepositioned eighty percent of the way there. Paranoia, I thought…but they’re all gone.”

  “Gone,” Henry repeated, turning his attention to that section of the display. There were no skip-drone icons on the display…and there was a glittering array of new red hostile icons near the Ra-175 skip line.

  “Data is limited,” Moon said quickly. “But it appears that someone positioned laser satellites along the line to Ra-One-Seventy-Five. They were tracking our skip drones as they were sent home before, so when new drones went out…”

  “They shot them down.” The satellites were millions of kilometers away, well outside the range at which Henry could do anything about them. The presumab
ly robotic craft would be no threat to Raven in her normal state, but right now…

  “Launch a new spread,” he ordered. “At least twenty drones; send them as far around as you can.”

  “Yes, ser,” Moon confirmed. “Already programming the courses and messages.”

  “Include all the data we have on the mines,” Henry told her. “They shouldn’t be able to threaten Battle Group Scorpius, but let’s make sure.”

  “The Kozun just lost another cruiser,” Iyotake reported as Moon set to work. “It’s almost over.”

  “What’s their maneuver cone?” Henry asked. “Are we out of their range?”

  “Their vector is away from us now. Combined with our own acceleration, we’ll be clear of their laser and plasma range in two minutes,” Ihejirika reported. “Maneuver cone is similar. We have a small thrust advantage, less than we’d have normally, but…”

  The vector cones appeared in the virtual screens around Henry. He could keep the range open for a while. In the long run, the Drifters would be able to spread out and cut off his escape routes…even ignoring their fighters.

  “When was the last drone dispatched to Scorpius?” he asked Moon.

  “The light from its skip arrived thirty seconds before the Kozun launched,” she told him after a moment. “They were watching for that.”

  “Forty-eight hours,” Henry concluded. “Twelve hours for that drone to arrive. Twenty-four for them to realize they’re not getting more messages, and then twelve hours for Scorpius to skip here.”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s hope the second wave of drones gets through,” Iyotake reported. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get two days.”

  “New bogeys, ser,” Ihejirika reported. “Multiple bogeys. I am detecting fighter wings deploying from all three Guardians. Estimate sixty, six-zero, starfighters…vectors hostile. I repeat, vectors hostile.”

  That meant they were on an intercept course and weren’t communicating. Sixty starfighters…