Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  And when the Empire fell, they’d had the industry and government structures to survive, build fleets and reach out to the stars around them. Some of them had already quietly been doing so during the Empire, their resources underwriting the most powerful of the Vesheron factions.

  Others had served the Kenmiri well and were now free to hopefully serve their people well.

  Henry’s faith was…limited.

  Despite the politics and concerns, Eerdish was so like Sol as to actually trigger a moment of homesickness. Eight worlds, half rocky balls in the inner system, half smaller gas giants in the outer system—and with an asteroid belt dividing the two types of planets.

  The star—Henry assumed it had a name other than Eerdish, but he didn’t know it—was the same G2 type as Sol and the orbits were even similar. The inner two worlds were heat-scorched balls of rock, but the third world was in the liquid-water zone. Warm compared to Earth, Eerdish’s burning skies were likely the cause of its people’s usually dark coloration.

  The fourth world was also warmer than Mars and arguably habitable. Their scans didn’t show much habitation there, but the Kenmiri would hardly have encouraged in-system colonization—and Henry didn’t know how much space travel the Eerdish had had when the Kenmiri had arrived.

  “Our escort has arrived and matched courses,” Ihejirika told him, Paladin’s commander sounding slightly worried.

  “Some concern, Captain?” Henry asked, eyeing the icon of the ship sitting barely ten thousand kilometers from Paladin’s starboard wing. “You’ve never had a dreadnought sit on you before, have you?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to a dreadnought, ser, and that includes the ones standing watch over the Great Gathering,” his former Tactical officer told him. “Did they warn us that we’d have a dreadnought watching us?”

  “Not in so many words, no,” Henry said. “I was expecting a carrier group, to be honest.”

  The ship escorting Paladin had probably been assigned to Eerdish before the Fall. That it was still there suggested that the Kenmiri hadn’t left Eerdish as smoothly as they’d likely hoped—the ship was on the small side for a dreadnought, at a “mere” six megatons, but the Kenmiri hadn’t voluntarily left any dreadnoughts behind.

  Paladin’s shields were as powerful as a Corvid-class battlecruiser’s, a side effect of the more powerful gravity projectors required for her GMS. Even at ten thousand kilometers, Henry would have backed the destroyer against almost any threat in the galaxy.

  Against even a small dreadnought? The odds weren’t in her favor. Six superheavy plasma cannon, eighteen lasers, thirty missile launchers… Paladin might manage to escape before those guns achieved enough blowthroughs to obliterate her.

  Might.

  “ETA to Eerdish orbit?” Henry asked.

  “Just over four hours, ser,” Ihejirika said. “Are the diplomats getting antsy?”

  “If they are, Ambassador Todorovich hasn’t passed it on,” Henry said. Managing the diplomats had eaten up all of Sylvia’s time since bringing the La-Tar contingent on board. He hadn’t actually seen his lover since Yonca and Swaying Reed, her Enteni junior diplomat, had reported aboard.

  “They know the laws of physics limit us,” he continued. “They have some patience. And we, Captain, are keeping our eyes very open.”

  “Every passive sensor we have is feeding to CIC and the flag deck,” Ihejirika confirmed. “Bach hasn’t pointed anything of immediate threat to me yet.”

  “No, but it’s a fascinating sight, isn’t it?” Henry murmured.

  Eerdish might have a similar planetary layout to Sol, but her industry paled in comparison to humanity’s home system. Still, it was almost on par with, say, Keid, the younger of the European Union’s two major colonies. There were a handful of Kenmiri heavy industry nodes in orbit of the homeworld itself, the same style as the Empire had installed over their own colonies, but most of the stations were home-built.

  The homeworlds hadn’t been allowed skip drives, but in-system travel was fine. The asteroid belt mining operations were clearly extensive, feeding raw material back to the refineries and factories that orbited Eerdish.

  Unlike the factory worlds, the homeworlds kept their industry in orbit—where it belonged, according to most people. Gravity wells made for some advantages, but they hardly offset the pollution and devastation caused by massed modern industries.

  On the factory worlds, the rapid degradation of the air and ability to grow crops was part of the point. Some of them had never even had a breathable atmosphere—though most had. It made the initial setup easier.

  The part of all of the industry that Henry was most interested in, though, orbited the fourth planet—the not-quite-uninhabitable world the Kenmiri had to have actively banned the Eerdish from living on.

  The industry there was clearly new, but rows of building slips now orbited the planet, gleaming with fresh steel as another dozen destroyers and three more carriers were coming together—and two even larger construction yards took shape behind them.

  “If these are the resources of a homeworld, no wonder the Kozun have been such a pain,” Ihejirika said quietly. “They had Kozun free what, a year before the Fall?”

  “Thirteen months,” Henry agreed. “So, look at everything the Eerdish have done here and add a third more time. Plus, they’ve conquered two more homeworlds along the way. Until they ran into us and an alliance of multiple homeworlds, I think they were starting to think nothing could stop them.”

  “I guess there still are the old Kenmiri colonies,” Paladin’s Captain murmured. “Do we know what’s going on there?”

  “No,” Henry admitted. “Truthfully? Because the E-Two are between them and both us and the Kozun. There are three true Kenmiri colonies in the Ra Sector, and we haven’t communicated with them since the subspace coms went down. The Kozun have fought them and talked to them, but they haven’t told us much of anything.”

  Though that told Henry one thing: the Kozun had lost when they’d fought the ex-Kenmiri colonies. The systems couldn’t be doing too badly.

  “I’m guessing they’re on the list.”

  “When we get to them,” Henry agreed. “Making peaceful contact with the Eerdish and the Enteni is key to that. So, Captain?”

  “Ser?”

  “I know we like to throw our weight around and remind everyone that we fly our own course, et cetera, et cetera,” Henry said quietly. “But if the Eerdish ask you to do something over the next few days…just do it. We’re not sure of the protocol here, and if we get it wrong, we’re going to be in real trouble.”

  The dreadnought was a problem for Paladin. War with the Eerdish…well, that would kill a lot of people from a lot of places.

  Henry didn’t want to be responsible for that.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Coordinating eight people of three species onto a shuttle was harder than it had any right to be, in Sylvia Todorovich’s considered opinion. She’d done it enough times that it was hardly new to her, but it was still…frustrating.

  Finally, she got herself, Henry Wong, their two UPSF GroundDiv bodyguards, Yonca, Trosh—Yonca’s lover, bodyguard, and chief of staff—Swaying Reed and Burning Skies—the Enteni diplomat and their Enteni bodyguard—settled into the tiny spacecraft.

  “We’re all good to go,” Henry said into thin air. Presumably, his internal network passed the words to the shuttle’s pilot, allowing Sylvia to knock one final task off her list.

  The shuttle’s engines flickered to life, lifting them gently off Paladin’s deck.

  “Does this shuttle have one of your gravity drives?” Yonca asked in Kem.

  “No,” Henry replied. “It actually does not even have gravity plating. Sacrifices were made to equip shuttles of this class with a defensive gravity shield. She is designed to accelerate at one gravity the majority of the time, providing an equivalent downward thrust.”

  “Please remain seated for the trip,” Sylvia adde
d. “We will be approximately fifty-five minutes.”

  She was half-expecting someone to ask where the bathroom was, but her diplomatic contingent simply nodded and settled into their seats. Fitting the mobile Venus flytraps of the Enteni into proper safety gear had taken some arranging by Paladin’s crew—but at least they’d known it was coming!

  The non-Terran members of the delegation drew tablets from their gear. The humans had their internal networks to review files on.

  Sylvia quickly realized just how sparse the files she had on the Eerdish homeworld were. Henry’s analysts had a decent assessment of the Eerdish’s likely industrial and combat strength, plus the system’s defenses, but that didn’t tell her what she needed to know about the people she had to deal with.

  “Envoy Yonca,” she finally said. “Would you be able to brief us on the Council of Tribes and the Sovereign of Sovereigns? Just what are we getting into here?”

  The Eerdish nodded slowly, focusing on her tablet as she clearly pulled up notes to review.

  “Remember that while I am Eerdish, I have not set foot on my homeworld before,” she told them. “Everything I know is from my parents, and my parents were part of a labor draft for La-Tar fifty-six years ago.

  “Things may have changed in that time or during the Fall.”

  Having laid out her preconditions, Yonca nodded firmly and checked her notes one last time.

  “The Eerdish population is divided into tribes. My parents did not know the exact number, and it does not appear to be in the files we have access to. The tribes are each led by a Chieftain, whose method of selection varies from tribe to tribe.

  “Each group of tribes selects a Sovereign. This was once the ruler of those tribes and regions but under the Kenmiri was their representative to the global government, the Council of Tribes. When my parents left, there were one hundred and twenty Sovereigns.

  “From their own number, the Sovereigns selected the Sovereign of Sovereigns, the theoretically absolute ruler of the Eerdish.” She lifted a hand in a one-handed shrug. “Of course, even laying aside that the Sovereign of Sovereigns was answerable to the Kenmiri Governor, it was generally accepted that the Council of Tribes held the real power.

  “While the form and esthetic of absolute power on the part of the Sovereign of Sovereigns was upheld, they could make no decisions on their own and that ‘absolute power’ was actually held by the Council of Tribes, each member of which was subject to recall by their Chieftains.”

  Who were, Sylvia presumed, subject to recall by their own tribes. Tiered representative democracy—at least in theory.

  “The etiquette and rules around interacting with the Sovereign and Council require that we cannot meet with the Sovereign of Sovereigns alone,” Yonca told them. “We will always meet with the full Council, but we are required to ignore the other Sovereigns. They are supposedly irrelevant servants and only the Sovereign of Sovereigns is worth our speaking with.”

  “But it is-was the Council that can-will decide our fate,” Swaying Reed concluded, their translator having the usual struggles with Enteni tenses. “By popular vote, yes-yes?”

  “Exactly,” Yonca agreed. “But when meeting with them, we must act and speak as if we are dealing with the absolute ruler of the Eerdish in the person of the Sovereign of Sovereigns. Of course, the Sovereign of Sovereigns will not speak Kem and will speak through an interpreter. We must also ignore the interpreter.”

  “I have done worse,” Sylvia said drily. “What else?”

  “The Sovereign of Sovereigns is…” Yonca paused, clearly considering how to phrase something in Kem. “An entity without dimension.”

  “I do not understand,” Sylvia admitted after a moment.

  “They have no tribe, no clan, no family, no gender,” Yonca said simply. “They are addressed as the gestalt of all Eerdish. To imply they are male or female, or of a tribe—even the tribe of their birth—is a grave insult.

  “They are the people of Eerdish. All of them…and none of them. They have no dimensions of their own.”

  The explanation actually made sense to Sylvia—but she was used to twisting her mind around different cultures. She glanced over at Henry and sent him a mental question.

  “I’ve put in our files that the Sovereign is nonbinary,” his mental voice replied in her head. “That should suffice to avoid most problems.”

  Sylvia nodded and smiled. It wasn’t like they were going to try to add different names other than the one they were given. Pronouns were their most likely mistake.

  And she refused to blow up an interstellar negotiation because she couldn’t use the singular they in Kem.

  Chapter Thirty

  Hazalosh—the name meant “Place of Tent Gathering,” according to Sylvia’s translation software—had clearly once been a fortified mesa, a neutral meeting ground for a nomadic people in the center of an immense rolling plain.

  The Eerdish had not, so far as Sylvia knew, been primarily nomadic for centuries before the Kenmiri had invaded. But Hazalosh remained the center of their culture and their government.

  That, of course, meant that it was far more than a place to pitch tents. There was a ceremonial field of tents visible from the shuttle. Sylvia counted a hundred and twenty, which she guessed meant that all of the Sovereigns were present.

  The rest of the mesa was crammed with structures, squat rounded buildings twenty meters in height at most. Some were clearly much older than others, with the majority of the structures made of a baked brick that would have been familiar to any denizen of Earth’s Middle East.

  At the north end of the mesa, like a tumor of steel, gold and guns, rose the baroque edifice of a Kenmiri Governor’s residence. At the south end of the mesa rose a smaller but still-palatial structure of stone and brick.

  The mesa was about a kilometer in diameter, elevated about a hundred meters above the plain. Other than the Kenmiri palace, everything on the mesa itself was either ancient or built to an ancient style.

  The city around the mesa had been built with no concern for matching those aesthetics. The towers had bricks built up around their bases and were more rounded than most Terran structures, but they were the same steel-reinforced concrete of skyscrapers the galaxy over. Several towers rose to the same height as the mesa—Sylvia even saw one with a skybridge linked to the ancient fortifications on the mesa’s edge.

  Even with the skyscrapers, Hazalosh spread for dozens of kilometers in every direction. There had to be a hundred million people living in the megalopolis, making this single city rival the population of some of the Kenmiri slave worlds.

  “Sers, we are being directed to the Kenmiri Governor’s mansion,” the pilot reported—speaking in Kem out of consideration for their passengers. “Is that expected? The antiair defenses are active and tracking us.”

  “There is unlikely to be a shuttle pad at the Palace of Palaces,” Yonca pointed out. “I expect either the Sovereign and Council have taken over the Kenmiri Governor’s mansion, or we will be transported to the Palace of Palaces to meet with them.

  “Either way, I suspect that the old Governor’s mansion has the only shuttle landing site on the mesa.”

  “Take us in, Lieutenant,” Henry ordered calmly from next to Sylvia. “We don’t want to be rude.”

  Sylvia was unsurprised that there were vehicles waiting for them—low-slung and open-topped electric groundcars of a style she hadn’t seen before. The local style, she supposed, safe enough for dry plains where rain could be seen coming for days.

  The real surprises came when they entered the Palace of Palaces. Sylvia was familiar with the Eerdish people, but she’d never truly encountered their culture. Most of the citizens of the slave worlds adopted a generic mishmash of cultural wear and grooming, a mix that didn’t suggest any threat to their overlords.

  The guards wore armor carved from what she suspected was jade—or the local equivalent to the semiprecious stone, anyway. Finger-length scales of dark green rock were
linked into modern body armor, shifting with surprising quiet as the guards moved and carried their equally modern energy rifles.

  They led Sylvia and her companions along jade-tiled floors that had clearly been polished within the last twelve hours. None of the guards spoke, making the entire process an eerie journey. The silence was broken by the soft sound of chimes hidden away throughout the palace, a delicately beautiful background chorus.

  The grand hall of the Palace of Palaces was roughly what she’d expected in terms of shape. She’d seen enough audience chambers over the years to know the type. This one resembled a high school gymnasium in many ways, with neat rows of benches on stepped rows on either side of the room, creating a long passageway to the immense dais at the other end.

  The dais and its throne had been carved from a single immense piece of flawless pale green jade. Collectors and gem enthusiasts alike on Earth would have fallen over themselves to spend billions to own the thing. It was literally priceless, and even in its simplistic styling Sylvia guessed that the Eerdish would kill to keep it from moving a single centimeter.

  The occupant of the throne—and the occupants of the stone benches lining the walls of the grand hall—was not simplistically styled. The profusion of colors and complex hairstyles that filled the stone benches along the sides of the hall were a kaleidoscope that could easily draw the untrained eye.

  Sylvia’s eye was not untrained. Her focus was on the dais ahead of her as she walked along the grand hall. Her network told her that the bodyguards had paused at the entrance, leaving only the diplomatic contingent to approach the being in the jade throne.

  There were two Eerdish soldiers flanking the throne, wearing the same jade armor as the guards outside. Sylvia presumed there were others concealed behind the walls—she’d be stunned if there weren’t individual concealed soldiers with weapons trained on each member of her party.