Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Eight warheads survived to convert,” Ihejirika reported. “Scans suggest seven kills.”

  “Ten percent in the first salvo, Commander, well done,” Henry replied. They might just make it through this yet.

  He turned his attention to the Engineering section.

  “Henriksson, we’re going to lose the shield,” he told the young officer. “I want it back up as quickly as physically possible. We have at least a hundred seconds this time, but we need to get that time down.”

  “Understood, ser,” Henriksson said, her voice shaky but level. “Song says thirty seconds, ser. We’ll try and get it in less.”

  No one verbally reported when the enemy missiles entered the range of Raven’s defenses. Icons started waterfalling on one side of Henry’s displays as their defensive laser installations started reporting capacitor-drain and -recharge settings.

  Without the main guns, they were dedicating an entire reactor to feeding the dozens of quarter-gigawatt lasers across the hull. Normally, they were often the poor sibling when it came to power draw.

  Today, their capacitors were being kept at full power. There was a minimum-cycle time on the weapons, but Henry had never seen it tested.

  “All conversion warheads destroyed!” Ihejirika snapped. “Disruptors impacting the shield!”

  The scream of a gravity-shielded warship undergoing resonance disruption was familiar now. They’d probably work out a control or mitigation for that in the future, but at that moment, the piercing shriek tore through the bridge—and then the gravity shields flared out.

  Henry held his breath for a second. Five. Ten.

  Then he exhaled.

  “Report,” he barked.

  “No impacts,” Henriksson told him, sounding astonished. “I repeat, zero impacts. Shield will be back up in eighteen seconds.”

  “Ihejirika?” Henry asked.

  “We shot down forty-two missiles,” the tactical officer told him. “The shield ripped apart over sixty, and Commander Bazzoli dodged the rest.”

  Henry looked toward the front of the bridge, where his navigator seemed half-frozen, the woman nearly hyperventilating as she looked down at the emergency manual joystick in her hands.

  “Commander, well done,” he told her. She didn’t respond. “Commander? Iida!”

  Her first name snapped the woman out and she sucked in one final breath before regaining control of her breathing and releasing the emergency joystick. She looked back at him and nodded.

  “Yes, ser,” she said. “Thank you, ser.”

  “Ihejirika, kill me those starfighters,” Henry ordered. Their second salvo erupted amidst the Drifter spacecraft as he spoke, wiping another half-dozen of the enemy from existence.

  The rest opened fire a second time a moment later. Only ninety missiles this time—and their vectors changed dramatically, the formation splitting into five groups of nine fighters apiece as they tried to reduce the risk from Raven’s fire.

  “Designate Bandit groups Alpha through Epsilon,” Iyotake snapped from CIC. New icons appeared on the clusters of starfighters as their vector cones expanded. “None will enter laser range of Raven. All will be in position to see what we do in the meteor swarm…assuming they survive the next ten minutes to get out of our range.”

  “Epsilon is mine,” O’Flannagain reported from her starfighter a few seconds later. “Delta is Turrigan’s. Alpha through Gamma are your problem, Raven.”

  Henry smiled as he looked at the scattering starfighters.

  “Commander Ihejirika, get me the split between conversion and disruptor missiles, please,” he ordered. “Then start focusing your salvos. Do we have the time to put two salvos on each of those groups?”

  “Yes, ser,” the tactical officer confirmed. He paused. “We have five salvos already in space; retargeting one per group. New salvos will target in cycle.”

  The range was dropping fast at this point. If Henry had his main guns, the fighters would be doomed. As it was…they were still doomed. They’d wedded themselves too tightly to the pursuit and failed to keep their relative velocity low.

  “Enemy salvo is seventy disruptors, twenty conversion warheads,” Lieutenant Ybarra reported. “Focusing on conversion warheads.”

  “Raven, you’re stealing my kills,” O’Flannagain said over the radio. “I mark five more down in Bandit Epsilon, and my missiles are online. Fox Three, Fox Three, Fox Three, Fox Three.”

  Another report came in from Turrigan, and eight new icons appeared on the display. Launched at far shorter ranges and with even higher relative velocities, they slashed into targets that were clearly expecting the shorter-ranged fighter missiles the UPSF had equipped their older fighters with.

  “Delta and Epsilon are down, and mark for the record, please, that both myself and Lieutenant Commander Turrigan just made ace,” O’Flannagain reported.

  Henry concealed a grin. The Kenmiri had never built starfighters, which meant that there were very few aces—pilots with five or more fighter kills—in the UPSF’s FighterDiv now.

  Today there were two more.

  “They’re running as best they can, but they aren’t going to make it,” Iyotake reported. “Situation is under control, Captain.”

  Henry nodded and exhaled.

  “We’ll remain at battle stations until we’re in the meteor swarm,” he ordered. “Then…we’ll see how it looks.”

  Despite all of the excitement, any chance of reinforcements was still over forty-five hours away.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The sensors Trosh rigged up told a story far beyond the worst of Sylvia’s worst-case scenarios. They weren’t much more than automated telescopes linked to an optical processing program the Ashall had set up on a portable computer, but it was enough for them to watch the final death of Kalad’s flagship.

  And it was enough for Sylvia to watch the Drifter fighters attempt to swarm Raven.

  “Raven is limping,” she admitted as she looked at the data. “Point three KPS-squared? She has been badly damaged if Henry is only running at that.”

  “There is-was nothing we can-will do from here,” Rising Principle told her. “I see no answers in this-that. Only fate-time of our doom.”

  “Please, let me see,” Aval asked, projecting her voice from across the room. “I need to know what happened to my people as much as you do what happened to yours.”

  Sylvia looked at Rising Principle, the alien’s mouth open to show their eyes. They closed their mouth and made an odd gesture with a tentacle, one she chose to take as go ahead.

  She picked up one of the several tablets Trosh had linked to the computer and walked it over to the Kozun ambassador.

  “The Drifters destroyed your ships,” she told Aval bluntly, setting up a replay of the death of the last Kozun cruiser. “Exactly as their agreement with us both required them to.”

  “The Drifters,” Aval repeated as she stared at the recording of the fate of her ships, and something in her eyes made Sylvia nervous. “I will hunt that Convoy across the stars. I will burn their Guardians and shatter their ships and scatter the ashes of their precious gardens into a thousand Seven-cursed suns.”

  Sylvia waited for Aval to regain her breath as the Voice glared at the sensor data.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “They were the ones who sold us the missiles we used against your ships,” Aval replied. “I am sure you had guessed that. Much of our military buildup was based on technology and weapons they sold us.

  “They called on that debt to get us to agree to a Drifter escort for this conference.”

  A chill ran down Sylvia’s spine.

  “They told us you asked for neutrals,” she told Aval.

  “Did they?” the Voice asked bitterly. “They told us you had suggested it, and they insisted, out of a desire to make certain the talks went well. We know the UPA, Ambassador. We may not like you, but we know the weight of your word.

  “We would have taken your guarantee of
safety, but the Drifters insisted on being here. And…” she gestured helplessly. “The disruptor missiles in our magazines, loaded and ready to defend us against potential treachery…those were Drifter weapons.”

  “Drifters bug everything,” Sylvia murmured, remembering the extended process of removing the beacons from missiles they’d bought. “More so now than before, even.”

  “I would now guess that the bugs hid a remote-activation system,” Oran Aval told Sylvia. “I do not believe Star Voice Kalad would fire on your ships without orders, Ambassador Todorovich. I do not believe Mal Dakis would give the order to kill me, if nothing else.”

  “Why are you so certain of that, Voice Aval?”

  The Kozun woman was silent, then looked at her bodyguards.

  “We will live or die together, I suppose, but there are secrets held closely even among the Kozun,” she said. “I guess it does not matter as much now.”

  “Voice Aval?” Sylvia asked softly.

  “I am with child, Ambassador,” Aval admitted. “Mal Dakis’s child. So, Ambassador, I am very certain my head of state, who is both my lover and the father of the baby I carry, did not order my death for a pointless betrayal.”

  Sylvia nodded slowly and then reached over to tap a new command on the tablet, releasing the lock that was keeping it to the recording she’d set up for Aval.

  “I believe you,” she told Aval, watching the other woman’s reaction as the video of the attack on Raven played out on the screen. “So, what do we do about it?”

  “I…do not know,” Aval said. “We survive? We challenge what the Drifters say happened here?”

  “We do not have sensor footage of the key moments,” Sylvia pointed out. “Raven does. That the Drifters appear to have been willing to give up any protestation of innocence in the eyes of Henry Wong and his crew to make certain that footage is destroyed tells me it might be damning enough.

  “Our footage of the attack on Raven is probably enough too, but the Drifters might start hunting escape pods once Raven is destroyed. We will not stay concealed forever.”

  “My people…” Aval sighed. “It will be weeks before anyone is truly concerned over my silence. There is nothing they could send, even if they did know there was a problem.” She grimaced. “Every one of our cruisers was here, Todorovich. Mal Toranis is our only remaining capital ship, and we cannot afford to uncover Kozun.

  “We sent everything here as a show of force, to try and end our most dangerous war on the best terms we could manage.”

  “And now you confess all of this?” Sylvia asked.

  “Either we will die together here, Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich, or the Kozun, the La-Tar and the UPA will fight the Drifters together,” Aval told her. “I do not believe honesty at this point will fail me.”

  “Probably not,” Sylvia said quietly. “In that vein, then: There is a UPSF task force on the other side of the Ra-One-Seventy-Five skip line…this one.” She indicated the skip line on the tablet display since she had no idea what the Kozun called the system. “If they have not heard from us in twenty-four hours, they will skip through to investigate.

  “If we can survive the next forty-six hours, Scorpius will save us.”

  “You did not trust us,” Aval said.

  “We did not trust anyone,” Sylvia replied. “You. The Drifters. We only mostly trust Rising Principle and their people. So, yes, we had a backup. But I have no way to reach that backup. Henry—Captain Wong—might have been able to reach them, but I have no way to know.”

  “And that he runs so desperately suggests not,” the Kozun said. “You fear time.”

  “Time is not our ally. By the time Scorpius gets here, Raven will be dead. We will have been found. Your people’s escape pods will have been destroyed. And the Drifters will have a story and sensor footage lined up to explain everything.”

  “What if there were a way for you to contact this Scorpius?” Aval asked. “A way I am…mostly certain the Drifters cannot intercept.”

  “Unless you have a miraculously-still-working subspace communicator, I am not sure what you could offer,” Sylvia admitted.

  “A skip drone,” the Kozun told her. “One we prepositioned at a skip line we did not expect you to survey…to the star you called Ra-One-Seventy-Five. Our emergency report system, that only I can activate.”

  “Sending it through Ra-One-Seventy-Five…”

  “Added forty-three hours to the flight time, but it reduced the chance that you would detect and intercept it to almost zero. We believed that if the drone was needed, avoiding interception was critical.”

  “How close to the skip line is it?” Sylvia asked. “If Raven did not get a drone through, the Drifters had to have done something.” And if Raven had got a drone through, this was unnecessary.

  “It is on the skip line, following a ballistic course through the outer system well away from anywhere you or the Drifters could see it,” Aval told her. “I would need to send a tightbeam message.”

  “That could get us found and killed,” Sylvia replied. “And that is assuming everything you are saying is true.”

  “Yes,” Aval replied. “But these people killed Star Voice Kalad and twenty-four hundred of my people. I want them dead, Ambassador Todorovich. Every bone in my body and the voices of my Gods scream for vengeance.

  “I will let you record the message. I will provide the activation codes for the drone. My estimate puts it far enough that the Drifters will not detect it.”

  “That means we will have a transmission delay,” Sylvia noted. “But…we can cut twenty hours off the timer. That is worth it.

  “Assuming you do not get us killed.”

  “I cannot promise that,” Aval admitted. “That depends on what we end up using for a transmitter.”

  “Impossible,” Rising Principle snapped. “She must-will betray us. We can-will die.”

  “The only transmitter we have is too wide a beam to be hidden, either way,” Trosh admitted before Sylvia could argue with the Enteni diplomat. “All we really have is an emergency beacon. It can be used as a transmitter, but it is an omnidirectional system, designed to make sure we can be found.”

  “The exact opposite of what we need,” Sylvia conceded. “Look, the Drifters just killed over two thousand of Aval’s people. She is not going to betray us to them. Our worst-case scenario is, what, she has a secret fleet in the outer system? They would still rescue her and us.

  “Right now, our only hope is over forty-five hours away,” she continued. “If this drone exists and works, we cut that to twenty-five hours. I am not certain we have twenty-five hours,” she admitted. “But I am entirely certain that even Henry Wong cannot buy us forty-five.

  “How long do you think we will be able to hide once they start sweeping the wreckage for escape pods, Rising Principle?”

  “That fate-time is-has not yet come,” they replied. “You ask-demand too much. To trust this Kozun…”

  “Rising Principle, we might yet survive if we have to wait for Scorpius to arrive, but…” Sylvia gestured to the tablets displaying the sensor data, “Raven will not. The Guardians are already in pursuit. They have higher acceleration than she does now. They will catch her, and she cannot defend herself. Not against three dreadnought-equivalents.”

  “I agree with you,” Trosh admitted, looking carefully at his boss, “but we still lack a directional transmitter. Unless the hardware you humans have in your heads is more powerful than I think, we have no way to reach this drone. Even if we trust Aval enough to concede its existence.”

  “Our internal networks cannot do it, no,” a new voice interjected. Sylvia looked up to see Leitz and Thompson joining the conversation, her chief of staff and the GroundDiv officer looking drained.

  “There is a very distinct limit on how powerful a transmitter we can install in somebody’s skull,” Thompson continued. “Which is always a pain for GroundDiv operations, so our combat gear contains more powerful transceivers. One might n
ot do it, but we have multiple sets of combat gear here, plus the La-Tar gear, plus the Kozun gear.

  “Both of them are using Kenmiri systems that are more powerful but less precise than ours,” he continued. “I think we can rig up a directional transmitter with enough range. But…it will probably only work once.”

  Thompson shrugged.

  “Battlefield tech upgrades.”

  “This is your ship, Rising Principle,” Sylvia said, turning her gaze on the Enteni diplomat. “But…we doom Raven and probably ourselves if we do nothing.”

  “I trust your heart-soul,” the envoy finally said. “This fate-time must-will destroy us all if we do nothing. Do what you must-will.”

  Sylvia gave Rising Principle a firm nod, then turned back to Thompson.

  “Rig up that transmitter, Commander,” she ordered. “I think I have a message to record.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  There was a general unconcealed sigh of relief across Raven’s bridge as they finally crossed into the meteor swarm. They were still, for the moment, visible to their pursuers—but the presence of the hundreds of chunks of ice in their fast orbit of Lon made them harder to find.

  And Henry had plans.

  Meteor was an understatement for many of the objects around them. Some were nearly large enough to qualify as planetoids, dozens to hundreds of kilometers across.

  The largest ice chunks would be the focus of the Drifters’ search when they arrived, but also presented the best chance to hide Raven. Without some kind of additional confusion, the debris field was still sparse enough that their pursuers would be able to follow them right to their hiding spot.

  “All right,” Henry said firmly. “Ihejirika, I’m feeding you targets.

  “Alpha-One through Alpha-Three, I want you to park a dozen conversion warheads on,” he ordered, highlighting three large chunks of ice on the edge of the swarm. “Fly them gently and wait for the order, but we’re going to blow those pretty quickly here. I just want to make sure we aren’t creating a trail for ourselves.