Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “You wished to spin your lies without those who bear the truth to answer, did you?” the Drifter asked calmly. Their Face Mask was exactly what the name they used described: the top two-thirds were white, the bottom third was green, and a diagonal blue stripe crossed from the top right to the bottom left.

  “I am fully prepared to provide, as promised, the full details of the events in the Lon System,” Sylvia told the Eerdish Sovereigns. “If the Drifter Ambassador wishes to provide their people’s version of events, that is more than welcome.

  “I do not desire to deceive the Sovereign of Sovereigns or the Council of Tribes. Our war”—she stressed the word carefully, watching the heavily robed Drifter contingent out of the corner of her eye—“is with the people who betrayed a peace summit and murdered our spacers.

  “The people who, in fact, destroyed the ship I was on to negotiate with the Kozun Third Voice,” Sylvia continued calmly. “I only survived thanks to the ingenuity and foresight of our La-Tar allies—whose protection of the Third Voice brought peace between their worlds and the Kozun Hierarchy.”

  No one here needed to know that the Third Voice, Oran Aval, was the mate of the First Voice, Mal Dakis—and had been pregnant with his child at the time. The Drifters had very nearly killed the heir presumptive to the Kozun Hierarchy before she’d been born.

  Mal Dakis was ruthless and pragmatic enough to delegate his vengeance to the UPSF and Twelfth Fleet—but Sylvia suspected that was only because he knew there was no real point in his reinforcing Admiral Rex. If there had been any chance in Dakis’s mind that the Drifters might escape…there’d have been a lot fewer games being played by the Kozun.

  “In truth, we Drifters do not know all that passed in the Lon System,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green told the Eerdish. “Our ships were ambushed and our people murdered by the United Planets Space Force.”

  “Then perhaps I can illuminate all of the events of that fateful day,” Sylvia offered. “Indeed, you may be able to offer some explanation as to why your people betrayed us and our attempts to bring peace to the Ra Sector.”

  “We were not the ones with an entire fleet standing by, were we, Ambassador Todorovich?” the Drifter asked sharply.

  “A necessary precaution, as it turned out,” Sylvia replied calmly. “Or Commodore Wong here would now be dead and your people’s treachery concealed from the galaxy.”

  “Enough,” the unnamed Eerdish Sovereign who’d spoken before snapped. “You are never going to convince each other to change your positions. The question today is which of you the Council of Tribes will believe.

  “The Drifters came to us in their normal patterns, offering trade and information as they always have,” he noted. “We do not know Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe of old, but we have dealt with the Drifters before. The usual promises of hospitality and trust were exchanged.

  “You, Ambassador Todorovich, come to us in strange ways,” he continued. “Allies to our enemies who claim to not be our foes, you speak of treachery by those whom we have offered sacred hospitality.”

  The Sovereign of Sovereigns held up a hand, wrapped in gloves of the same red silk as their robes.

  “Were you anyone else, Ambassador Todorovich, we would have denied you entrance to this star system,” Eskala told them. “But you bring diplomats from the stolen children of our people, and we would learn their fates and work with them.

  “And we are not blind to the acts of the United Planets Space Force. Was it not Commodore Wong himself who struck the final blow and cast down the last of the Kenmorad? To the UPSF we owe our newborn liberty.

  “We would poorly repay the sacrifices made on our behalf if we were to ignore you.”

  Sylvia didn’t even need to look at Henry to know that wouldn’t sit well with him. Raven had been the farthest-flung force of Golden Lancelot. They’d been less than an hour later than the rest of the attacks, but it was suspected that the Kenmorad breeding sect that had tried to escape him had known they were the last.

  Henry certainly hadn’t known that when he’d killed them—but that was a tiny shield against the realization you’d personally ended a species.

  “I do not ask any of this lightly,” Sylvia told the Sovereigns. “I understand the weight of what I am requesting, but our duty and honor leave us no choice. Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe’s actions cannot go unanswered.

  “If they are innocent, Sovereigns of the Gathered Tribes, why are they running?”

  “Enough, Ambassadors,” Eskala said softly. “Torus, provide Ambassador Todorovich with the control pad for the holographic projector.

  “Show us your evidence, Ambassador. This argument leads us nowhere that we could not predict.”

  Torus was apparently the Sovereign who’d been speaking. He produced a standard Kenmiri datapad and handed it to Sylvia.

  “I presume, Ambassador, that you have your evidence with you?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Sylvia confirmed. Everything she’d needed had been loaded onto a standard Kenmiri datachip, which she slotted into the control pad. It took her a second to make sure she was looking at the correct controls—she would normally have left this part to Leitz, but bringing Henry and the La-Tar diplomats had been more important than bringing an aide.

  Bringing Henry had now been fully worth it, she judged. Her boyfriend might not like the reputation he had in the former Kenmiri Empire, but he’d already paid for it and Sylvia would damn well use it.

  “You are all capable of reading standard Vesheron tactical iconography, I presume?” Sylvia asked. Standard Vesheron iconography was, of course, also standard Kenmiri iconography—and noticeably different from the data presentation used by the UPA or the other external powers that had helped the Vesheron.

  No one admitted they couldn’t, and Sylvia filled the center of the inverted-pyramid meeting room with a holographic display of the Lon System. Three Kozun cruisers, three Drifter Guardians—capital ships built to defend the Convoys against Kenmiri dreadnoughts—a La-Tar escort, a UPSF destroyer, and the battlecruiser Raven. Henry’s old command.

  “Now, certain aspects of what you are about to see are confusing,” Sylvia warned. “It was not a straightforward sequence of events, and I will provide evidence to support certain statements once I have played the recording.

  “Before I begin, however, I would like you to consider one question: who sold the Kozun their missiles?”

  She received several questioning looks, but she ignored them as she started the recording.

  Sylvia had watched this recording several times, but it was still painful. All nine ships seemed to be calm, waiting for the result of the negotiations taking place aboard the escort Carpenter—and then the three Kozun cruisers fired.

  They only fired their missiles, but that was enough. Dozens of weapons launched at close range, swarming over Carpenter, the UPSF destroyer, and Raven.

  Only Raven survived, almost instantly flipping in space to accelerate away from the chaos. If the Kozun had planned this, the Terran battlecruiser would have died in the following moments, as she remained well inside the range of their plasma cannon.

  Instead, the next ships to fire, almost a minute later—about six seconds, in this accelerated recording—were the Drifters. Plasma fire hammered into the Kozun cruisers’ energy screens—and, at least initially, the Kozun didn’t fire back.

  Instead, they ran. One of their ships was almost dead before they started firing back at the Drifters, and even then, many of their turrets—turrets sold by the Drifters—were nonfunctional.

  While the Guardians pursued the Kozun, their fighters blasted out after Raven. A daring strike by Raven’s tiny handful of fighters drove them off, buying the ship time to hide.

  The recording froze after the death of the last Kozun ship—to a pre-laid minefield—and Sylvia cleared her throat.

  “I can continue the recording at a faster time acceleration, but the Guardians’ search for Raven took almost an entire
day before Carrier Group Scorpius arrived to relieve them,” she noted. “None of the Guardians attempted to surrender, and they destroyed several planetoids where then-Captain Wong had rigged up decoys to look like Raven was hiding.”

  The meeting room was quiet now, the Eerdish looking up at the frozen recording silently. Finally, Blue-Stripe-Third-Green broke the silence.

  “I do not see the treachery you claim from my people in this recording,” they pronounced. “Clearly, the Kozun fired on the diplomatic ships—and your people reacted by firing on mine when we attempted to assist!”

  “Certainly, if the Kozun had continued firing after that first salvo, I would have believed that,” Sylvia said quietly. “While I now know that Star Voice Kalad had no such orders, I do believe that she would have obeyed orders to destroy the summit, including her own diplomat.”

  Knowing what she did about Oran Aval and Mal Dakis, Sylvia knew there was no chance such an order would have ever been given—but Kalad would have obeyed it.

  “But she would have carried out such an attack with far more competence than that,” she continued. “A single missile salvo, then no follow-up fire for several minutes? While the Drifters fired on them? Does that strike you as a clever plan for destroying a peace summit, Sovereigns?”

  She tapped a command, and the hologram zoomed in on the minefield that had destroyed the last Kozun ship.

  “I am not familiar with the design of these mines,” she noted. “They’re not a Kenmiri design, though they appear quite standardized. I don’t suppose any of you are familiar with them?”

  “They are a Drifter export product,” Torus pointed out, his tone grim. Sylvia had apparently guessed correctly that that particular Sovereign was military or former military—the spacesuit was a dead giveaway.

  “One that the Kozun have purchased in quantities as large as you have, Sovereign,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green pointed out.

  “The Drifter Ambassador’s point is fair,” Sylvia said. “On the other hand, would Kozun mines have fired on a Kozun ship? And Commodore Wong…does the UPSF have any significant quantity of those mines?”

  “The UPSF does not have any space mines, Ambassador,” Henry said formally. “We have generally judged that the variability in skip-line emergence renders them useless unless you know your enemy’s exact target. We could fabricate some, but the design in our fabricators is actually Kenmiri, not Drifter.”

  “All of that is secondary, however,” Sylvia said, her tone pristinely calm as she looked at Blue-Stripe-Third-Green’s mask and brought up a second set of data. “We had the opportunity, after the Battle of the Lon System, to dismantle several missiles sold to us, the Kozun, and the La-Tar Cluster by Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe.”

  The schematics of the missiles glowed brightly in the air, sliding apart and lighting up with new icons that marked who had owned each set of missiles.

  “All of the missiles contained software and hardware capable of initiating an emergency-jettison cycle from any standard missile launcher,” she told her audience. “I am not certain, given the explanation I was provided, that any sanely designed missile launcher would retain these missiles once the process was initiated.

  “Once so jettisoned, the missile would acquire a target based on a profile downloaded to it and activate exactly as if it had been normally launched—but this entire process could be activated remotely via a coded signal.”

  That had the attention of the Eerdish and Enteni contingents.

  “Reviewing the sensor records from the Lon System, we confirmed that such a signal was sent from the Drifter Guardians shortly before the Kozun appeared to fire on the UPA contingent,” Sylvia concluded. “The failure after that of the plasma turrets mounted on the cruisers that had been provided by the Drifters tells a similar story.

  “The Kozun purchased much of the hardware and ammunition for their initial military buildup from Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe,” she told the Eerdish, her gaze focused on Torus. “And the Drifters made very sure they held the triggers.

  “I suggest, Sovereigns, that we take a recess while you provide this data to the Eerdish Security Forces and they review your Drifter-purchased missiles,” Sylvia concluded.

  “This is preposterous,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green spluttered. “Why would we sell tainted hardware to our allies?”

  “I see no reason,” Eskala said, sounding like they agreed with the Drifters. “Which means, of course, that such a review would turn up no such traps in the missiles and systems we purchased from your Convoy, would it?

  “Sovereigns, I believe a review of the munitions and so forth acquired from the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy would be wise. Does anyone disagree?”

  “You already had-will reviewed them when you took them into service, I would-will hope,” Passionate Iron observed, the Enteni’s translated voice flat.

  “A sample of a specific modification could perhaps permit us to find something we missed before,” Torus said calmly. “I believe it would be in everyone’s interest for us to check our systems. If there are no such traps, then the Drifters have dealt fairly with us and we must consider the evidence presented to us by other metrics.

  “But if the Drifters have betrayed us as well…”

  The Sovereign trailed off, glancing at his fellows.

  “I believe that a recess to review the evidence and allow our forces to examine the Terrans’ data is in order,” he suggested. “I second the Sovereign of Sovereigns’ call.”

  What followed looked like nothing so much as a twelve-player game of rock-paper-scissors to Sylvia. Each of the ten Sovereigns who hadn’t made a statement made a three-beat hand gesture.

  She didn’t know what the gesture of three fingers splayed out in the air meant, but it was a clearly unanimous choice.

  Eskala made a sweeping hand gesture.

  “Servants of the Palace will see the ambassadors back to their suites,” they told them. “We require that the Drifter and UPA contingents remain in their suites until our investigation is complete.

  “You will hear from our Servants when you are summoned once more.”

  And if nothing else, the fact that the Drifters now appeared to also be under house arrest told Sylvia she was winning.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A full day passed in “quiet contemplation”—mostly pacing around in circles, since there was a limit to what they could talk about aloud and Sylvia wasn’t sure how far they could trust even their network-to-network coms. Those radios were extremely low-power and heavily encrypted, but nothing was unbreakable.

  In a diplomatic suite, she didn’t even feel that she could get away with dragging Henry to bed. That left her and everyone else just…waiting.

  “Sunset,” Henry murmured. He’d been the least noticeably bothered of her people, but she knew that was simply long practice at hiding his stress. Even the Enteni were more obviously stressed than he was, to Sylvia’s eyes.

  But she also knew him. She followed his gesture and looked up from the small courtyard in the center of the Suite of the Morning Sun Garden. Dawn looked prettier from the garden—hence the suite’s name, she presumed—but the sunset lit up the red brick of the Palace of Palaces and the rest of the mesa’s building in glorious colors.

  It was sufficiently epic a view that she missed the sound of the doors opening until they thunked into place and footsteps echoed through the suite.

  “We have visitors,” she told Henry, rising from the bench and turning toward the entrance. The door was still open behind the visitor, with two jade-armored guards and two white-robed Servants waiting in the open entrance.

  Ahead of them, delicately stepping into the sunken garden, was Torus. The black-shipsuited Eerdish was almost blending into his faux uniform in the mixed lighting as he approached them, but his eyes were calm and his jaw was set.

  “Is the recess over, Sovereign Torus?” Sylvia asked politely.

  “Not officially,�
�� he said calmly. “May I sit?”

  “These are your people’s benches,” Henry said drily beside her. “We are your…guests.”

  “You would never have been prevented from leaving,” Torus said, taking a careful seat on the stone bench. “We would always have gladly transported you to your shuttle, though it would have done your cause a great disservice.”

  “So we waited patiently,” the Commodore agreed. “If the recess is not over, Sovereign…”

  “The Drifters left, didn’t they?” Sylvia asked.

  There was a long pause, then Torus laced his hands together and rolled them to splay, palm-outward, toward them. He chuckled along with the gesture.

  “More than our hardware was corrupted by the Drifters, it seems,” he said calmly. “A software worm was introduced into our orbital scanners. I do not know when. Combined with an authorization for launch that their shuttle should not have received, the Drifter embassy has now left Hazalosh.”

  “You did find the trigger devices, then,” Sylvia guessed.

  “We did,” Torus confirmed. “Our own missile production is such that we will not be significantly impeded by discarding the Drifter weapons, but it is unfortunate and awkward. The plasma cannon we had purchased from them have not yet been installed, which renders their additions there even less harmful.

  “But that is a matter of timing and luck,” he noted. “While I do not expect that we would have come to conflict with the Drifters without your visit, we would have been at a dangerous disadvantage without your warning.”

  “You are welcome,” Sylvia said. “We provided that information for our own reasons, but I am pleased that our honesty has served you as well.”

  “Will the Drifter Ambassador be captured?” Henry asked, his tone eager.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Torus replied. “Their ship is faster than most of our warships and appears to be equipped with stealth technology we have not encountered before. We know which skip line they are heading for, but…that is insufficient to catch them.”

  “Damn. Our ships are faster,” Henry offered. “We can help.”