Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  And until then, Sylvia Todorovich would pour oil on troubled waters. Negotiating passage after they’d already breached a system’s territory was nothing compared to some of the things she’d arranged during the war.

  Hopefully, she didn’t have to try to negotiate passage after someone had started shooting. That would be…significantly more difficult.

  The formal permission to travel through the Tadir System finally arrived five hours later. Sylvia wasn’t certain what Tadir was using for a government system, but the delay suggested they had discovered some of the delights of democracy.

  “I thought we had permission to travel through E-Two space,” Ihejirika said when Sylvia told a group conference their permission had arrived.

  “We do,” Sylvia told him. “Both the Eerdish and the Enteni gave us full permission to operate in their space, draw on their fueling stations, et cetera, et cetera. The Tadir gave us permission to operate in their claimed stars and draw on their fueling stations.

  “Included in all of that, though, was the unspoken assumption that we would not charge into inhabited systems at full speed without prior notice,” she said. “We come through a skip line and immediately go to full thrust, everyone is going to assume it’s an attack.

  “Sending messages as far ahead as we can helps, but theoretically, we should be waiting for an okay before we enter Makata, for example.”

  “Are we going to?” Teunissen asked.

  “No,” Henry told them all, arching an eyebrow at Sylvia. “Though as I understand, we may get it?”

  “Tadir has the same courier setup at the Oshala skip line as they had to Zo,” Sylvia noted. “I requested that they forward a message to Makata. It depends on whether there’s a link from Oshala to Kitpal and from Kitpal to Makata.

  “Messages travel at lightspeed inside systems, so if there are couriers in place, Makata could get our message in less than two days. If they respond immediately, we could get it when we arrive in Kitpal.”

  Sylvia ran the math in her head and smiled austerely.

  “Most likely, unless they are completely unable to come to a decision, we should have permission to cross Makata before we reach the Kitpal-Makata skip line. In fifty-seven hours.”

  “What happens if the Makata deny us permission to enter the Makata System?” Teunissen asked.

  “It’s unlikely,” Henry told his Captain. “Right, Ambassador?”

  “Exactly. As Ihejirika pointed out, we have permission to go anywhere in Alliance territory. Requesting permission before we enter inhabited systems is a courtesy that’s only truly required because we’re blazing through at an acceleration they haven’t seen before.”

  Even for Sylvia, watching the destroyers zip around at over two hundred gravities of acceleration was a new experience. She was getting used to it—she certainly had no problem with it—but after a career aboard ships that accelerated at half a KPS2, it was definitely a bit odd.

  “If they decline, we do have an alternative route,” Henry noted. “It will add sixty-three hours, taking us through the Coro System and another unnamed red dwarf. While I think it’s safe to expect that the Drifters will still be there twenty-four to forty-eight hours after our estimate of their arrival, adding sixty hours to that changes the odds drastically.

  “So, let’s hope the Makata are feeling cooperative. I want this done, people. The Initiative has a lot of uses for these ships that aren’t playing scout for Twelfth Fleet.”

  Sylvia had to agree with that. They’d created the Initiative to help people, not fight a war across the breadth of the Ra Sector!

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The Kitpal System turned out to be where the E-Two Alliance had posted their main nodal defense force for the Makata dependency cluster. From what the UPSF people around Sylvia were saying, it sounded like the Kitpal task force actually could catch DesRon Twenty-Seven.

  “That’s four of their carrier conversions,” Ihejirika reported. Sylvia wasn’t sure if the flag captain knew that she was in Henry’s quarters—but Henry was playing the report in audio so she could listen.

  It was also limited to audio because she was currently face-first on his bed while he massaged her naked back with oil. They were now hours past when she’d expected to hear from the Makata government, and she was feeling the stress.

  She wouldn’t show it to anyone else, but she’d admitted it to Henry—who’d insisted on taking time to help her relax, returning the favor from when she’d brought him breakfast after his multi-day stint of wakeful watch.

  “So, a hundred and twenty fighters?” Henry replied to Ihejirika, his hands still moving across her back and massaging out knots.

  “About that,” the Captain confirmed. “Other ships, too, but with the geometry and our acceleration, the fighters are the only thing I’m worried about. So far, they’re not acting like we’re doing anything outrageous, though.”

  “They knew we were coming,” Sylvia silently messaged Henry.

  “They did know we were coming,” he echoed to Ihejirika. “If the nodal fleet isn’t freaking out at us, verbally or otherwise, we probably don’t have to worry too much about our passage into Makata.

  “Still, I’d be more comfortable if we’d heard from them. Let me know the moment any courier ships come through from Makata.”

  The audio channel closed with an audible click and Henry sighed.

  “Silence is nerve-wracking,” she told him.

  “And knot-inducing, it appears,” he replied. She winced as his questing fingers found a key point. “We have ten and a half hours in Kitpal still before we make the skip to Makata. Those carriers aren’t as far out of our weight class as I imagine they’d like to think, but they can still be a real problem.

  “If only because their fighters can catch us and not much else here can.”

  Sylvia exhaled into the pillow as the knot he was working on suddenly released.

  “You know, if I’d known you were this good at massages, I might have tried to bribe you into them even before I jumped you,” she purred. “It helps.”

  “I was married during a war, Sylvia,” Henry pointed out. “Peter and I took massage classes together on several of our shared leaves. Everything was stressful then.”

  “And now?” she asked.

  He chuckled.

  “Many things are stressful,” he conceded, his fingers moving up to her neck. “But not everything. We’ll hear from Makata, Sylvia. Soon enough, I’m sure.”

  “Soon enough that I’ll even keep my pants on,” she agreed with a dramatically mournful sigh.

  “Probably, yes,” he agreed with his own exaggerated patience.

  Sylvia was back in her office when the response finally arrived—less than four hours before they were due to hit the skip line. Chan forwarded the video to her and she started it immediately.

  A dark-blue-skinned Kozun, with the armored forehead spikes of that race, appeared in front of her. He wore a baroque blue and gold robe that had clearly originally been made for a Kenmiri Artisan and modified to fit him.

  Everything about the room around the Kozun man was similar to the robe. Converted from Kenmiri furniture and decorations, but in a way that intentionally left it clear that the conversion had been done.

  “I am Kal Satirus,” the man greeted her, bowing slightly over crossed hands. “I greet Commodore Henry Wong, the Destroyer, and Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich.”

  Sylvia was alone and allowed herself to wince as Satirus used the nickname several of the Vesheron had started for Henry. It came with being the man to kill the last Kenmorad, she supposed—but she also knew he hated it.

  “I am the Secular Voice of Makata,” he explained after a moment. “I speak for no god, but I speak for this world.”

  The Voices who led the Kozun Hierarchy were technically priests—even prophets, supposedly—picked by their gods. The adjacent symbolism was fascinating.

  Not that Sylvia was going to have time to do comparative x
enoanthropology on this trip.

  “I have reviewed your message and request again and again,” he told them. “At first, I must admit I was offended that you wished to pass through our glorious system without setting foot on our world and seeing what we have to offer.

  “Makata is a beautiful planet, one that I am pleased to show to all outsiders,” he continued. “But…I was Vesheron once. I understand the urgencies of war, and so I calmed my offense before I chose to respond to your missive.

  “You have permission to pass through the Makata System,” he told them. “But.” He held up a delicately manicured hand. “I ask that, in turn, you both come visit our planet when you can. With neither gods nor masters, we are building a new paradise here, and I wish to show it to all who could be our friends.”

  Neither gods nor masters certainly sounded hopeful enough, but everything about the Secular Voice of Makata’s presentation made Sylvia suspect he was one of the people who had become the unquestioned dictator of their world.

  “I look forward to meeting you in person,” Kal Satirus concluded, and the message ended.

  Somehow, Sylvia felt vaguely oily after watching it, and she shivered.

  “Not everyone on our side has to be good people,” she told herself aloud.

  She suspected the E-Two Alliance had their own thoughts on the Secular Voice…and she doubted it was unrelated that the Makata Cluster was determinedly staying as five separate states rather than unifying as La-Tar had done.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The Ridea System—named for an ancient Tak hero and forming the “eye” of one of their key constellations, as Henry understood it—was an immensely bloated red supergiant with no planets of any kind. A vast ring of debris, like a gas giant’s rings on a supercharged scale, orbited the star. Some quirk of geometry had prevented it ever coalescing into planets, making the Rings of Ridea a fascinating challenge in navigation.

  One that, thankfully, Henry’s people didn’t need to worry about. The skip line from Leba—the system after Makata—brought them into the outer system. A six-light-minute arc around the outside of the Rings would bring them to the skip line to Blue First Dawn.

  Four hours. In four hours, they’d begin the final skip to see if their estimate was correct.

  It was a long skip, though—a full twenty hours. There were longer skips, but Henry knew his navigators were twitchy about anything over eighteen hours that hadn’t been previously charted by UPSF ships.

  The next UPSF crew to make the jump to Blue First Dawn would have their data. But Paladin and Maharatha did not.

  He leaned back in his chair and studied the maps and displays swirling around him. There were no new answers falling out today. If the Drifters weren’t at Blue First Dawn, he had three secondary places to investigate within two skips of the unclaimed system.

  Of course, if the Drifters had gone to those systems instead, he was once again running against the clock of distance and probability. Only the limited speed of a convoy of hundreds of ships had given him any chance of bringing them to bay—and part of him knew that if he missed the trail on this round of investigations, the mission was over.

  He wasn’t even sure that was a bad thing. He understood the logic of a punitive expedition and he knew that Rex wasn’t planning atrocities against the civilian population of the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy, but it still felt vaguely wrong.

  Still…he was confident they’d guessed right. And that meant he needed to pull the ideas and discussions everyone had been having over the six days of their high-speed run through E-Two space into an actual plan.

  “Chan,” he pinged his coms officer. “Get the captains, staff and Ambassador Todorovich together on a call. On the hour if everyone is available for it. ASAP after that if they’re not.”

  With Cataphract sent back to La-Tar, the six of them could have fit in the breakout meeting room in Henry’s office. Eowyn, Chan and Todorovich did join him there, with the two ship Captains linking in from Ihejirika’s bridge and Teunissen’s office, respectively.

  “We are hopefully less than a day away from finally having eyes on the BGO Convoy,” Henry told them. “I know we all have rough ideas of what we’re planning on doing there, but I want to go over my plan and make sure we’re all on the same page.”

  He looked over at Sylvia.

  “First, though, Ambassador Todorovich is the only one who has seen Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe themselves,” he noted. “Ambassador, if you could remind us what you saw?”

  Sylvia nodded—he’d let her know what he needed before his staff had joined them—and took mental command of the shared holographic display.

  “BGO is a three-stripe Convoy,” she explained as images of the Convoy from when she’d visited came onto the screen. “That means a minimum of five hundred ships and five million people. When I visited aboard Shaka, they had six hundred and forty-plus ships and an estimated six million people aboard.”

  She paused, studying the image of the immense fleet. The ships in the Convoy ranged from a handful of small couriers to the immense self-sustaining biospheres of the garden ships. Almost all of them dwarfed the hundred-and-fifty-meter length of the two Cataphract destroyers—just as they had dwarfed the destroyer Shaka that had brought her to visit the Drifters.

  To challenge that armada seemed the height of arrogance—but then, that wasn’t DesRon Twenty-Seven’s task.

  A mental command highlighted sixty of the ships in a bright red.

  “Shaka’s crew identified sixty warships,” she noted. “Fifteen were Guardians; the remainder were a mix of Kenmiri-style escorts and assorted self-built ships of equivalent or lesser size and firepower.

  “Those ships were distributed around the exterior of the Convoy in defensive positions. I met with the commander of BGO’s defenses, Protector-Commander Third-White-Fifth-Gold, aboard this ship.”

  The largest Guardian flickered on the screen.

  “We have every reason to assume that all of the defensive ships carry a full complement of antigravity resonance disruptor warheads,” she noted softly. “I recommend caution.”

  Henry knew his plan didn’t qualify as cautious—though Sylvia was right. Survival was his highest priority once he’d found the Convoy, but only the highest. There were other priorities, and those called for at least some risk.

  “We know they are down at least four Guardians,” he reminded everyone. “Between us, the Kozun and Battle Group Scorpius, three were destroyed at the Lon System. We took out another at Ra-Two-Sixty-One.

  “Eleven Guardians still represents more capital ships than the Kozun and the E-Two muster between them at this point,” he said grimly. “My best-case scenario for the E-Two gives them five real carriers, and both sides have a dreadnought.

  “Even with shields on the E-Two’s fighters, destroyers and escorts, the Convoy’s defensive forces are sufficient to engage and destroy every known military in the Ra Sector except the UPSF. That’s why Twelfth Fleet exists.”

  Henry manipulated the data Sylvia had provided, focusing in on the sixty warships Shaka had identified.

  “Twenty-two escorts. Twenty-three smaller ships—we’ve encountered at least one raider corvette that was probably Drifter. Fifteen Guardians—now eleven.”

  He shook his head.

  “If they did not possess resonance missiles, I wouldn’t be worried about Twelfth Fleet engaging them at all,” he told his people. “As it stands, I want Twelfth Fleet to have all of the intelligence they can.”

  “That doesn’t sound like caution, ser,” Ihejirika pointed out.

  “Because it’s not,” Henry agreed. “We are going to make a close-range scouting run of the BGO Convoy. Emerging into Blue First Dawn, both ships will maintain point-three KPS-squared until my command.

  “At any significant distance, that should leave us functionally invisible.” Not quite as much as the stealth ships they’d seen in the Avas System—ships he now grimly
assumed were Kenmiri—but enough that he was comfortable getting way too close to the Convoy.

  “Once we’ve located the Convoy, we will proceed toward them at point-five KPS-squared,” he continued, converting the data on the Drifters into a tactical plot. “We will step down our acceleration by a tenth-KPS-squared at four light-minutes, three light-minutes, two light-minutes, and one light-minute.

  “At point-one KPS-squared, my understanding is that we should be able to approach as close as five or six light-seconds before being detected—and our base velocity at that point will be significant.”

  “How close are you thinking about getting, ser?” Eowyn asked. She’d run a lot of the numbers for this plan for him, but she clearly hadn’t anticipated this.

  “At five light-seconds, we are outside reasonable weapons range for both us and them,” Henry noted. “Their likelihood of detecting us at that point is decent, but we will have both the base velocity and the reserve acceleration to escape pursuit without being engaged.

  “I want as much data on the Convoy as we can get,” he concluded. “We will fire drones back to La-Tar and Eerdish the moment we have confirmed their location, but I intend to maintain both a continuous watch over the Convoy and a continuous communication with Twelfth Fleet until Admiral Rex arrives.

  “And if we happen to spook the Drifters while we do so, I’m not going to worry overly much,” he told them. “We’re going to buzz them fast and dark and hope they don’t see us—but if they do see us, all it’s going to do is make them nervous.

  “Now. I’m open to suggestions for improving and expanding the plan. Your thoughts, people?”

  There was a long silence as his people looked at the maneuvering icons and notes on the tactical plot he’d created.

  “Drones,” Teunissen finally suggested. “Two options. First is a risk, but if we fire them early enough, they may be able to coast through the Drifter formation at even closer ranges without being detected.”