Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  The skip from Zo to Tadir was fifteen hours, but there had been two courier ships on that skip line every time Henry had looked. So long as there was a courier on each side, a back-and-forth message was thirty hours plus an hour or so of lightspeed lag.

  “Makes sense,” he conceded—and then realized he’d inhaled an entire glass of orange juice. Sylvia promptly reclaimed the glass—her own was only half-empty—and passed him the sandwich.

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “Partners, my love,” she told him. “Convincing the Tadir government to lend you a warship is more a political problem than a military one. That makes it my job. I think I made a good case—the only real question is whether they have the ship to spare.”

  “Always,” Henry agreed around a mouthful of sandwich. He swallowed. “We don’t know nearly enough about the strength of the various successor states, even the ones we have opened channels with.”

  “We simply don’t know nearly enough about anyone,” Sylvia countered. “We know the people who were Vesheron. But everyone else?” She shook her head. “We’re still learning about the Ra Sector, and they’re practically right next door. We haven’t even made contact with the former Kenmiri colonies yet. Our only information on them is secondhand through the Kozun—and the Kozun were shooting at them until recently.”

  The only people left on the Kenmiri colonies were the slave populations who’d run the industry and agriculture, but they had access to better and more-balanced industry and agriculture than anyone else.

  And while Henry’s intelligence on them was shaky, if there was a functioning dreadnought-sized building slip anywhere in the Ra Sector, it was at one of the three former Kenmiri worlds.

  The sandwich finally done, Sylvia passed him a second glass of juice. He eyed the coffee cup past her with greedy eyes but obediently drained the glass.

  “I figure we’ve got another day or so before we hear back from Tadir,” Sylvia noted. “You are going to do a regular shift rotation today, okay? Or I will have Dr. Uehara give me sedatives for Quaid, am I clear?”

  Henry leaned past her and took the coffee cup while intentionally overreacting to the implied threat. Lieutenant Commander Dr. Sho Uehara was Paladin’s ship’s doctor and chief medical officer.

  “That would qualify as an assault on a superior officer,” he told her over the rim of the cup. “You wouldn’t put poor Quaid up to that.”

  “Oh, so I’d have to find other ways to make you rest?” Sylvia said with an overly dramatic leer at his bare chest.

  “Behave, Ambassador,” Henry said. “I need to finish this coffee at least.”

  “Then drink fast, Commodore,” she told him. “Because I’ve set everything up to give us another hour before you need to be on duty—and I don’t plan to waste it.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The first courier ship to come through from Tadir had everyone on the flag deck on edge—except that it was only twenty-four hours since the ship carrying Sylvia’s message had skipped toward the nearby industrial world.

  The courier ship had left six hours before their messages had arrived and only carried the standard daily mail between the logistics base and the crew’s home system.

  It was another twenty-four hours before a response actually arrived—hours in which Henry was careful to keep a proper sleep schedule and even made time to work out. He didn’t need his partner to remind him that the two days he’d spent awake after the battle at Ra-261 had a price to pay.

  He was still in his office when the courier jumped in.

  “Chan, let me know if the courier transmits to us,” he told his coms officer. “Or if Alala reaches out. It’s likely that ship has our answer on it.”

  If he could manage it, he wanted to be on his way with his two combat-ready ships before another day had passed. There was an itch at the base of his neck that told him that something was wrong, and he was running out of time to locate the Drifters.

  “Will do, ser,” Chan replied. “Sensors show they’ve commenced a message download to the station, so the System Authority should know soon enough.”

  “Thank you.” The channel was voice-only, so Henry refrained from nodding, forcing his attention back to the data in front of him.

  He was looking at a “stick and ball” model of the region, showing the skip lines between the assorted systems around him in a simplistic fashion. His internal network could instantly give him the travel time along any given skip line. Crossing times for systems were harder, but he had estimates.

  The Convoy had been there, at Zo, on a known date. They’d been at Nohtoin at a known date. They’d gone to Ra-261 from Zo, but Henry didn’t know how long the main body had stayed in Ra-261 after they’d set their ambush.

  He could investigate Ra-261 again. The Drifters had probably withdrawn after losing their flagship and he could investigate there now—except that the Drifters would have done everything in their power to obscure their course there.

  If he could guess where they’d gone from Ra-261, he could cut their trail at a later point. A point where they perhaps hadn’t been as careful. The answer was somewhere in the map, he was certain of it.

  “Ser, System Authority Alala is requesting a conference with you and Ambassador Todorovich,” Chan’s voice cut into his thoughts. “She asked what your availability was, but you said you would want to talk to her immediately?”

  “Yes,” Henry confirmed, closing the map with a wave of his hand. “Todorovich should be available, but double-check with her. Then link us all in.”

  There was a momentary pause.

  “The Ambassador is available,” the coms officer confirmed, the speed suggesting they’d been talking to her at the same time. “Connecting everyone now.”

  Sylvia Todorovich’s holographic image appeared across Henry’s desk, nodding slightly to him with a small smile—a smile that vanished behind her work mask as System Authority Alala appeared as well.

  “Commodore Wong, Ambassador Todorovich,” the Beren greeted them in Kem’s staccato syllables. “I have received news from Tadir in response to our messages, and my superiors have come up with a solution that I believe will work for us all.

  “I am authorized to detach one of the Tadir Fleet escorts under my command to take Cataphract back to La-Tar. A squadron of six of our new-build corvettes will join me in Zo to replace her in a few days.”

  “That is perfect, System Authority,” Henry said. “Will you need to wait until the corvettes arrive to send Cataphract on her way?”

  “I do not believe that will be necessary,” Alala replied. “I believe we are all agreed that the Drifters are unlikely to launch a major offensive against Zo or Tadir, and we are several skips from any threat from the Kozun.

  “I am authorized to send the escort immediately. That should enable you to continue your mission, yes?”

  “It will, yes,” Henry confirmed. He glanced at Sylvia. He wasn’t sure just how effusive he should be in his gratitude, but he understood just how much of a gesture sending a ship away for a full month was.

  “We are grateful, System Authority,” Sylvia said, smoothly taking over for him. “I will send my own thanks and regards to your government. Knowing that Cataphract and our wounded will be seen safely to our comrades at La-Tar is important to us.

  “The UPA will not forget this service.”

  No formal promises, Henry noted, but a formal acknowledgement of a debt. He wasn’t always comfortable with the politics and diplomacy of interacting with other nations, but he was comfortable with one thing: the United Planets Alliance honored their debts.

  “We all do what we can to stand together,” Alala told them. “We hope for a long friendship between our people.”

  “So do we,” Sylvia said firmly. “Our goal is peace in the Ra Sector, System Authority. The more friends we have, the easier that will be.”

  Henry nodded his agreement. His chunk of the Peacekeeper Initiative might have been dragged up i
n this damned punitive expedition, but the Initiative was still working toward that goal.

  The problem, every so often, was the choice between fighting for peace and enabling warlords and conquerors. That had dragged him into the war with the Kozun and now into this pursuit of the Drifters.

  “I wish you luck in your mission, Commodore Wong,” Alala told him. “We will see your people home safe. You have the sacred word of the Tadir Fleet.”

  The System Authority’s image vanished, and Henry sighed, looking over at Sylvia.

  “Back to the hunt,” he told her. “We’ve got work to do. I don’t suppose you have any brilliant insight?”

  “Not particularly,” she admitted. “What do you want insight into?”

  He chuckled and waved the stick and ball model back into existence. A mental command shared it with her.

  “We know the Drifters were here, at the Ra-261 System,” he told her. “Somewhere between six and twenty-some days ago. So, that gives me potential locations of, well…”

  Some twenty systems lit up with pale red highlights.

  “Of course, the Drifters do not enter inhabited systems, so we’re only really looking at these.” Half of the systems disappeared. “Which still leaves us with twelve systems to search for a trail. Systems in which the Drifters were likely trying at least some degree of subtlety and concealment.”

  A pale red line appeared on the map, tracing a route from Nohtoin to Ra-261.

  “We know, roughly, the route they took to get to Ra-261,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure they’re not going to backtrack. They paused in a number of these systems to trade, refuel or acquire raw materials.

  “You’d think they’d be running faster, knowing we’re hunting them,” he noted. “But they’ve been moving only a bit faster than their usual pace.”

  “They can’t move much faster than their usual pace,” she reminded him. “You’ve been aboard a Drifter Convoy, haven’t you? Everything is a careful balancing act of air, food and fuel. They can only press so hard.”

  “I can see a logic to them trying to keep us and the Kozun fighting each other,” Henry said. “But in their place, I think I’d have owned up and paid reparations or something immediately. If they can’t run and they can’t fight…”

  “They might not expect mercy from us,” Sylvia said quietly. “They’re used to the Kenmiri, after all.”

  Henry nodded, staring at the map. A hazy blue highlight appeared over the Nohtoin System as Sylvia poked at it.

  “Your report from Nohtoin said that they split the Convoy there,” she noted. “That…didn’t make sense to me. Any idea what happened there?”

  “No,” Henry admitted. “I’d forgot, to be honest. The main body definitely has the garden ships and the factory ships, so that’s basically the Convoy. Anything else is just…detachments.”

  “But what would they have detached before entering Eerdish space?” she asked.

  “Something they didn’t want the Eerdish to see,” Henry said quietly. “Though…” He was looking at the route the Drifters had taken. “Though definitely something they wanted easy access to.”

  “You sound like you just spotted something,” she told him with a soft chuckle.

  “If we assume that they’re following a preplanned course and coordinated it with whoever they detached at Nohtoin…”

  A purple line appeared on his model, running between gray stars—stars no one claimed and skip lines that Henry’s map didn’t necessarily have confirmed—as he mapped it out.

  “There’s a course here, one that stays outside of E-Two space but keeps that someone within seventy-two hours’ travel of the Convoy,” he said, pointing at the line. “If we assume the entire detachment can pull one-point-five KPS-squared—updated escorts or gunships, basically, no civilian ships—that’s closer to sixty hours.” He took a thoughtful swallow of coffee.

  “If we use that as a constraint and assume they’re otherwise pushing on a direct line away from UPA space, a projected course is…”

  A yellow line appeared from Nohtoin, cutting through the space of the Eerdish and their allies…and almost exactly matching the course the Drifters had taken.

  “They’d rendezvous with their detachment here, wouldn’t they?” Sylvia asked, highlighting one of the gray stars in the same blue haze. “We don’t know that system, do we?”

  “It’s visible from the Enteni homeworld,” Henry noted. “They call it Blue First Dawn. It’s apparently visible about an hour before dawn on one of their main habitable landmasses. We’ve got long-distance data on it but otherwise…nothing.

  “No habitable worlds, no really useful skip lines. That’s about all that’s in the high-level Kenmiri atlases, and we don’t have detailed files for that area.”

  The Kenmiri Empire had done detailed surveys on each of the ten thousand star systems they had claimed and subdivided into twenty provinces. So far as anyone had been able to discover, though, most of those surveys had not been kept in the provinces themselves.

  So, now twelve provinces had been abandoned, and all they had for most of those six thousand stars was the high-level atlas information.

  “If they’re heading there, when would they get there?” Sylvia asked.

  Henry checked.

  “Assuming they’re following my projected course and have to make their usual stops for fuel, et cetera…another five days,” he said. “And if we take the GMS to full power and make a run along the shortest possible route—which will take us through both Tadir and Makata, which is why the Drifters wouldn’t use it…”

  A green line now marked the map, cutting a near-straight line between Zo and Blue First Dawn.

  “Six days,” he said quietly. “We can almost certainly be there before they leave—assuming we’re right.”

  “You have to put your own eyes on them to be sure of that?” she asked.

  “I think I need to put my own eyes on them for the E-Two to give us permission to bring three fleet carriers through their space,” Henry replied grimly. “Twelfth Fleet could conquer the entire Alliance in a week. Their leadership is understandably nervous about it.”

  “But Blue First Dawn isn’t in their space, so they’re more likely to give Rex permission to pass through,” Sylvia murmured. “As opposed to giving us permission to attack the Drifters in their space.”

  “Agreed.” Henry smiled thinly. “It’s no guarantee, but it’s the best logic we’ve got. If you’ll excuse me, Sylvia, I need to bring my team in on this.

  “The sooner we’re on our way, the more likely we are to find them where we want them.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Both during and after the war, Sylvia Todorovich had seen a lot of Kenmiri factory slave worlds and their star systems. Tadir was a representative example. The Kenmiri picked the systems for having technically habitable planets, rich asteroid belts and at least one gas giant.

  Tadir had been more technically habitable than most, and the sheer scale of the industry and pollution unleashed upon a factory slave world had put paid to that limited habitability quickly. The planet was a sickly yellow color from a distance, a toxic mess that required breathers to go outside and still somehow supported three hundred million people.

  Another thirty million people lived in the orbital stations and the asteroid belts, an unusually high proportion for a slave system and likely responsible for the Tadir government’s focus on their fleet.

  “I assure the Governor that, as we promised before we entered the system, we have no intention of doing anything except passing through at maximum speed,” she told the recorder point at her office desk.

  “Our mission requires us to take the shortest route possible to hopefully head off a mutual threat to both the UPA and the Tadir System. While I understand that we do not have an alliance or even any treaties between our worlds, we both desire positive long-term relationships.

  “I ask that you regard Destroyer Squadron Twenty-Seven as favorable ne
utrals at worst, friends at best,” she urged the locals. “The estimate I have from our Navigation departments is that we will be exiting the system in approximately seven hours and forty-six minutes, via the Oshala skip line toward Makata.

  “Both I and Commodore Wong understand that you would have preferred we request passage before entering the system, but we are up against a tight deadline.”

  She considered her closing carefully.

  “We await further communication. Ambassador Todorovich, signing off.”

  Shaking her head in the privacy of her office, she gave a mental command and flipped the recording over to Chan to send to the planet.

  Sylvia and Alala had sent a courier on ahead to request passage. She’d warned in the message on the courier that they would be only a few hours behind the ship—three, as it turned out.

  That clearly had not been enough time for Tadir’s government to make a decision, so now Sylvia was presenting them with a fait accompli. The fastest ships in the system could maybe make one-point-five KPS2.

  DesRon Twenty-Seven’s two ships were accelerating at two KPS2. The locals could intercept them if they chose, especially as they decelerated toward the exit skip line, but what was the point? Everyone there wanted to be friends, after all.

  But the time limit that Henry and his navigators had calculated hung over the two destroyers like the Sword of Damocles. If they got to Blue First Dawn before the Drifter Convoy left, the com drones they carried could set the whole complex mechanism of permission and deployment around Twelfth Fleet into place.

  But they needed a confirmed sighting and identification before they could do that. Sylvia knew that Felix Leitz was working on laying the groundwork for Twelfth Fleet’s passage through E-Two space—and that everyone would be happier if the UPSF fleet caught up with the Drifters in unclaimed space.

  The sooner they had eyes on the Convoy, the better off they were.