“Once those bombs are in place, do the same for the Bravo targets I’m marking,” he continued, haloing another set of six meteors farther into the cluster. “We’ll hold on to those until we’re in place and the Drifters are closer.”
Three more meteors lit up as his Charlie targets.
“Charlie gets the last missiles we’re going to preplace,” he told Ihejirika. “Rig them for proximity detonation at thirty thousand kilometers. They’re not going to do anything to the Drifters, but they’ll add more confusion and hopefully spook their sensor techs.”
He studied the debris and then haloed three massive chunks of ice near the heart of the swarm. They weren’t the first three the Drifters would search, but they’d be in the top ten.
“Thompson, I need…”
He paused and swallowed before anyone could say anything. Alex Thompson was dead. The GroundDiv Commander had been on Carpenter, being the over-ranked commander of Sylvia Todorovich’s bodyguard. Like their ambassador, the man was gone.
“Lieutenant Commander Satine,” he said quietly, pinging the senior company commander left aboard the ship. “I need you to prep three of your shuttles for remote flight,” he told her. “I’m transferring the Delta-designated targets now.
“I want you to embed the shuttles in the designated meteors with a program to keep pulsing their engines and other systems to increase their heat signature. They’re decoys and hopefully they’ll drag the Drifters off-target.”
“Understood, ser,” the company commander replied. “I’ll have people on it straight away.”
Henry swallowed his anger again as Melissa Satine took up the task he’d intended to give Alex Thompson. It was never easy. He knew that.
Today was going to add to his nightmares, he could already tell. He could handle nightmares now, though. He had lots of practice.
“Bazzoli, set a course for what I’m flagging as Target Epsilon,” he told the navigator. “Henriksson, I want you and Song to rig up a system to radiate all of our heat in one direction. Epsilon is a hundred-and-twenty-kilometer-long chunk of ice and rock; it can absorb our heat for a while before it’ll start showing up on anyone’s scanners.
“We’re going to use Epsilon as a giant radiator. Bazzoli, once Henriksson confirms where our new radiator focus is, you’re going to land us on Epsilon with that focus pointed into the target. We’ll use the defensive lasers to excavate ourselves a nice hole while the chaos from the Alpha and Bravo charges covers us, then we’ll radiate our heat deeper into the meteor and slowly sink our way in.
“Eventually, we’re going to end up surrounded by a few billion tons of ice, and that is perfect,” he concluded.
“Just like that corvette in Satra,” Ihejirika said.
“Exactly, Commander. Are we good, people?” Henry asked.
“That’s going to use up pretty much every missile we have left,” his tactical officer warned. “I’m already issuing orders to the system to strip penetrator busses off the shield-penetrator missiles. Those are hard to replicate, and even without them, the missiles have five-hundred-megaton warheads.
“We’ll be down to less than thirty missiles, ser, but they’ll all be penetrators.”
“Those busses are just as useful against energy shields as grav-shields,” Henry noted. “They’ll be handy against the Drifters, but let’s get those explosives set as a priority. We can fabricate more missiles.”
They could even, given the right materials, fabricate the one-shot skip drives their penetrator missiles used to bypass shields. Raven’s stockpile of those exotic elements was generally earmarked for repairing her own skip drive, and Henry would need a damn good reason to release it for missiles.
Missiles were already beginning to jet out from his ship’s launchers. Their usual powerful gravity drivers were firing on minimum, sending the missiles into space with barely enough velocity to counter Raven’s own momentum.
They weren’t evading or trying to hit evading targets this time, after all. The missiles followed gentle courses that nestled them into the surfaces of Henry’s Alpha targets, a dozen five-hundred-megaton warheads per asteroid.
“Alpha targets are ready to detonate on your command,” Ihejirika reported. “Bravo targets will be a bit longer.”
“Shuttles are ready for the Delta deployments,” Satine reported. “Should we be holding off?”
Henry considered.
“Give us a couple more minutes to get deeper, Lieutenant Commander,” he told Satine. “Ihejirika, set your timers for two minutes. Satine—as soon as the Alpha warheads go up, send out your shuttles. We want them to be as invisible as us.
“Let’s keep the Drifters guessing.”
To his surprise, his plan unfolded like clockwork around him.
The Alpha warheads detonated on schedule. All three of their targets had been at least eighty cubic kilometers of ice and rock, and they made for spectacular plumes of debris as the fusion bombs tore them to pieces.
“We now have zero visibility outside the cluster,” Ihejirika reported. “There is no way they can detect us.”
“Good. Satine?”
“Shuttles on their way,” his new senior GroundDiv officer reported. “They’re operating on remote and preset programming. They’ll do the job.”
“Good,” Henry repeated. “Bazzoli, set your course for Epsilon. Let’s go dig in the snow.”
Bringing the crippled battlecruiser in to a landing required a deft touch that Henry knew he was capable of. Instead, he metaphorically sat on his hands and watched Iida Bazzoli do the job. They were missing over half of their maneuvering thrusters, and this wasn’t an exercise he thought they could easily do with the big main engines.
She surprised him. His navigator took them right up to the hundred-and-twenty-kilometer ice meteor under the main engines, shedding the last of their velocity in carefully measured bursts with the main engine until they were less than ten meters away from Epsilon and finally hit zero relative to the big chunk of ice.
“I have the focal direction from Engineering,” she said softly. “It could be an easier one.”
“We didn’t have a lot of choices,” Henriksson replied. “Sorry, Commander.”
“Don’t apologize, Lieutenant,” Bazzoli told the engineering officer with a chuckle. “I know you’re not intentionally making my life harder.”
Maneuvering thrusters flashed for a second. Raven started rotating, slowly turning until her main engines were parallel to the meteor’s surface. The thrusters flared again, bringing her to a halt “upside-down” above the icy surface. It wasn’t an easy position to get into, but it was required by the awkward angle the ship was now radiating all of her heat toward.
“Ihejirika, make a hole, please,” the navigator requested in a distracted tone.
“Firing.”
This was about as far from the intended purpose of Raven’s defensive lasers as possible, but they were high-energy coherent-light weapons. They slashed chunks of ice free, explosions of vapor marking their work.
The amount of debris this was creating was the reason for the Bravo warheads and the decoys. It was impossible to hide this kind of mess—except in vast quantities of the same kind of mess.
“Clear,” Ihejirika reported as the guns fell silent. “Scanners mark sixty-seven meters to the bottom of the cave.”
“Confirmed,” Bazzoli murmured. “Don’t hold your breath, people.”
The thrusters flared again, more continuously this time, as Raven dropped into a roughly battlecruiser-shaped hole in the side of the meteor. Bazzoli kept adjusting their velocity and angle, and it took them almost a full minute to reach the bottom of the cave and settle, ever so delicately, into their hiding spot.
“We’re down. External temperature one hundred fifty Kelvin and dropping fast,” she reported. “Is this going to work?”
“It will,” Henry replied. It had to, or Raven was going to die in the forty-three hours before Scorpius appeared.
> “Satine?” he continued.
“Delta shuttles are digging their way into their own hidey-holes as we speak,” she confirmed. “It’s taking them a bit longer.”
“Understood.” He hesitated. They still didn’t have visibility on the Drifters, but they needed that cover. He swallowed a sigh and nodded firmly.
“Ihejirika, detonate the Bravo warheads,” he ordered. “And then we all get very, very quiet.”
New energy signatures appeared on his screens as seventy-two five-hundred-megaton warheads went off, shredding another set of ancient ice floes into a protective screen around Raven.
“What now?” Ihejirika asked.
“Stand down to Status Two,” Henry ordered. “Get some sensor probes up on the surface to give us eyes, but send at least half our people to their beds. The Drifters will close the remaining distance over the next few hours.
“Let’s make sure at least some of our people have rested when they get here.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“We have a confirmation signal,” Thompson told Sylvia. “Transmission received by the drone and a confirmation sent back by tightbeam. If I’m reading the automatic message correctly, it skipped thirty minutes ago.”
“That was farther out than we expected,” she noted. “I’m glad our transmission caught it.”
They were speaking in English, though the same results were showing on all of the tablets scattered around the escape pod. Food wrappers crinkled as the handful of survivors dug in to the horrible-but-nutritious emergency rations the Cluster crew had supplied the emergency capsule with.
Sylvia was mostly just glad that they’d included a bathroom. That could easily have been the kind of oversight that added an extra layer of unpleasantness to a survival situation.
“Ambassador, I have lost track of Raven,” Trosh told her, the Eerdish officer stepping over to join them. “Please look at the datafeed from the sensor.”
She obeyed, but it took her a moment to process just what she was seeing.
“That is a lot of explosions for the Drifters still being two million kilometers away from Raven,” she noted. “And a lot of debris.”
“It appears Captain Wong is vaporizing large pieces of a meteor swarm to help conceal his exact position,” Trosh told her. “I am uncertain if it will work, but it is impressive.
“The Drifters have better sensors than our hastily rigged telescopes. They may be able to hold on to his signature better.”
“Even if they lose him, there are only so many meteors in a swarm like that that can hide a battlecruiser,” Sylvia said quietly. “He is buying time—and we, hopefully, have bought even more. If the drone skipped on schedule, we will have reinforcements in under twenty-four hours.
“Captain Wong will not expect them for over forty.” She shook her head. “He will do whatever it takes to buy his ship and his people time. I worry about the price.”
“Surely, he will see the reinforcements before he does anything dangerous, yes?” Trosh asked.
“I am not concerned about what Wong will do after Scorpius arrives,” she admitted. “I am concerned about what he will do when Scorpius is an hour away…and he thinks his reinforcements are twenty hours out.”
Trosh nodded his understanding as Sylvia looked over at Thompson.
“Is there anything we can do for Raven?” she asked the GroundDiv officer.
“Stay alive,” Thompson replied. “That is all we can do right now, and it is the most critical thing we can do. Right now, if Raven dies and we live, we can stand witness to the Drifters’ betrayal. If we die and Raven lives, they can stand witness.
“But one of us has to live. Right now, they are probably better hidden than we are…but the Drifters know they exist, and so far, everyone still thinks we died.”
“We need to lower our power curve,” Sylvia told Trosh, turning back to the Eerdish. “They flew right past us twice now, but we cannot rely on that happening again. They have to come back and sweep for escape pods eventually if they want this deception to hold up.”
“Everything we do creates heat the pod has to radiate,” the Cluster officer pointed out. “Breathing, eating, walking…everything.”
“We can lower the lights, turn off climate control…turn off the damn gravity,” Sylvia told him. “Everything we do creates heat, yes, so we need to create less.”
“Very few of us have any zero-gravity experience,” Trosh admitted. “I am afraid of the risks, Ambassador. That is why—”
“There are three dreadnought-level warships out there with a critical interest in making sure we never tell anyone what we saw,” Sylvia told him. “Turn off the gravity, Trosh. A few bruises and broken limbs are going to hurt us less than a plasma cannon. This pod was armored enough to survive Carpenter getting destroyed—but I doubt it can survive the full firepower of one of those Guardians.”
Trosh nodded.
“You are not wrong,” he conceded. “We will do what we must. May I impose on you to warn everyone? I do not wish to remove the gravity without warning.”
So long as no one moved, they didn’t drift off. By the time the gravity actually turned off, Sylvia had ensconced herself in the chair set up for her at the negotiating table, with carefully arranged tools and food around her.
Oran Aval had done the same, hooking herself into the chair carefully and hanging on to a bulb of water as she drank. Rising Principle joined them several moments after the gravity cut out, the Enteni’s trilateral tendrils proving surprisingly graceful in zero-gee.
“We is-are trapped,” they admitted. “Fate-time must-will come. I wonder.”
“Ambassador?” Aval asked, her tone amused.
“If we is-are all trapped anyway, perhaps we should-could complete our discussions,” the Enteni told them. “If we live, a fate-course for peoples can-will have been set. If we die, we will-can have distracted ourselves in our final fate-time.”
The Kozun chuckled, a surprisingly warm sound.
“I think, Ambassador Rising Principle, that if we survive this, there will be far different discussions to be had,” she told them. “The Drifters betrayed us all, I think. I cannot prove they fired the weapons in my people’s launchers, but I know we came here for peace.
“This treachery will be answered, and I think both our peoples are better served if we answer it together. Do you not?”
“This can-will be a possibility, but peace must-will be established first,” Rising Principle told her.
“The Kozun Voices will take formal responsibility for the invasion, recognize the Cluster’s borders as we were discussing, and pay an indemnity of one hundred thousand tons of refined palladium,” Oran Aval said flatly. “In exchange, we want a nonaggression pact for ten years, a good-faith attempt to negotiate trade rights and mutual defense against other aggressors.
“Does that suffice for the La-Tar Cluster to accept peace with the Hierarchy, Ambassador?”
Sylvia had a decent idea of what the La-Tar Cluster wanted out of the negotiations, and unless she was severely mistaken, Oran Aval had just offered Rising Principle’s entire wish list.
The Third Voice of the Kozun was angry—and the Drifters were going to regret betraying her.
Which was fine in Sylvia Todorovich’s books. The Drifters were going to regret betraying her, too.
“Sers, ambassadors,” Trosh interrupted. “We have a problem. The Guardians are splitting up…and as Ambassador Todorovich predicted, one of them is coming here.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
If the soft chime had been an external alarm, it probably would have failed to wake Henry up. Since it was in his internal network and had almost nothing to do with his physical hearing, it actually couldn’t fail.
To his surprise, he’d managed the three hours of sleep he’d set the alarm for. Checking into the status reports as he quickly showered and dressed told him that the Drifters were being surprisingly cautious.
They’d spent hours posit
ioning two of the ships to sweep the entire meteor swarm from the outside while the third swept back along the course Raven had followed to get there. Now he could see the search-and-rescue shuttles sweeping the debris cloud that had been sixty Drifter starfighters, and understood their mission.
From their vector, though, the Guardian was going to continue on to the original ambush site and likely sweep for Kozun escape pods from there. Somehow, he didn’t think anyone they rescued from the UPSF, La-Tar or Kozun wreckage was going to be well treated.
“Ser, it’s O’Flannagain.” Her message popped into his network. “Do you have a moment?”
“I’m awake and the Drifters are only now vectoring into the meteor swarm,” Henry replied. “What’s up, CAG?”
“I need you on the flight deck, ser,” she told him. “We need to talk about this mess.”
“You can talk to me now,” he pointed out.
“Props are necessary,” his CAG replied. “Be here in five.”
Henry arched an eyebrow at a blank wall. That was mildly inappropriate and insubordinate, but he was used to that from starfighter pilots. He pinged Iyotake.
“XO, any idea what’s going on with O’Flannagain?” he asked.
“She wants you to sign on putting our last few missiles on our fighters; I know that much,” Iyotake replied. “I take it she pinged you as soon as you were awake?”
“She did,” Henry confirmed. “Wants me to meet her on the flight deck. Can’t hurt.” He shrugged. “Status?”
“We’re embedded in a hundred-plus-kilometer ice cube, and someone is about to come hunting for us with a laser,” his XO said. “So far, everything I see suggests we’re well hidden and it will take them time to find us. I’m just not sure how much time we’re going to have.”
“I’m hoping for about thirty-eight hours,” Henry replied, checking his network for the time. “That’s why we laid a bunch of traps and distractions. Surprised they haven’t triggered any of them yet.”
Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3) Page 22