Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Lock down their active sensors and engines?” Eowyn asked. “The missile launchers add a thousand KPS to our own velocity, so we should be able to coordinate them to pass through when we do.

  “It’s a risk, though; you’re right,” she confirmed. “The drones will be more detectable and may give away our presence even if the low-energy grav drives cover the destroyers.”

  “Agreed. Second suggestion is to hold them in the magazines until we’re detected,” Teunissen offered. “Then we drop twenty-three of them directly into the Convoy at full drive power with active scanners. It’s not subtle, but it gets us a lot more data if we get detected.”

  Henry nodded slowly.

  “I hadn’t considered sending the drones in without engines,” he admitted. “Good idea, Captain. I suggest we prep for both—we’re already accepting a significant chance of detection and arranging for our own safety, so adding the ballistic drones isn’t a major chance and may get us a lot more data.

  “And then if we are detected, sending in active sensor drones will get us even more while we bolt for the outer system. I like it.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Skips still sucked. There was no real way to describe the sensation of being punched in twenty dimensions when the human brain only processed three. Even outside the moments of icosaspatial impulse, there was always a vague discomfort that Henry had never managed to get used to.

  He’d met a few people who claimed it didn’t bother them. He figured they were lying.

  Sleep helped. Sex helped. Getting drunk, despite his own claims when he was younger, definitely did not help.

  The second impulse moment passed in a blur of getting repeatedly kicked, and Henry exhaled a long sigh of pain. The privacy of his quarters allowed for that, even if he’d never show it on the bridge.

  “Do you ever get used to that?” Sylvia asked, echoing his own thoughts.

  He considered for a moment, then chuckled.

  “No,” he admitted. “Was just thinking about it. I guess you get used to enduring it?”

  “That makes sense,” she conceded. She leaned against him for a few seconds, then sighed. “Still doubting whether your judgment is clouded around my suggestions?” she asked.

  Henry blinked.

  He hadn’t forgotten that he’d said that, per se, but he’d mostly moved past that fear. Sylvia…perhaps hadn’t?

  “Are you worried I rejected your suggestion to be cautious because of that?” he asked.

  “Hard not to wonder,” she admitted. “Emotions are bullshit things, aren’t they? But this won’t work if I’m hiding behind a mask with you, will it?”

  “No, it won’t,” he agreed. He turned to look at her, holding her gaze with his own as he took her hands. “Your reasoning was entirely correct, Sylvia,” he told her. “I agree with it and I respect your judgment.

  “In this case, though, being cautious doesn’t meet all of our needs,” he continued. “I knew that before you ever briefed everyone on the Convoy. We need a better idea of what we’re sending Twelfth Fleet into.

  “So, caution, yes. That’s why we’re making the scouting run in stealth and at high speed, making allowances to make sure we don’t get engaged. The close approach and the speed may not look cautious, Sylvia, but they actually are. Unless something goes very different from what I expect, they can’t catch us—and if they can’t catch us, they can’t hurt us.

  “So, no, my love, I am not mistrusting my judgment with respect to you anymore,” he told her firmly. “Your judgment in this case was impeccable—but you were not aware of all of the necessary military components of the situation. That’s my job, not yours—just as it was your job, not mine, to smooth the ruffled feathers of our charge through Tadir and Makata.”

  “Fair,” she conceded, a small smile hovering around her lips as she relaxed slightly. “Apparently, I still have relationship anxieties in my old age.”

  “If you’re old, Sylvia, I should be planning my retirement,” he said drily. She was a full decade younger than he, though neither of them was young anymore. “And since I think I have something like three decades of active-duty service ahead of me, I’m going to take the risk of saying you aren’t old.”

  “That’s your plan, is it?” she asked. “You’ve already given the UPA thirty years of your life, Henry. Another thirty?”

  “Thirty-four years, actually,” he corrected softly. “Four years of training, thirty of active service. I figure another decade to full Admiral, at which point Hamilton will probably chain me to the big desk at the Peacekeeper Initiative for a decade.

  “But…nightmares and trauma and all of that included, this is what I do, Sylvia. And I’m damn good at it. Better to be damned to hell by my own hand than sent to heaven by someone else’s.”

  She leaned against him silently for a minute or so.

  “Not much I can say,” she finally admitted. “I may want you to do something safer, but that’s selfish and I know it. And…it’s not like I’m retiring from the diplomatic corps anytime soon, and that is going to be sending me into all kinds of situations, isn’t it?”

  “Give us thirty years, love, and we’ll have the entire former Empire eating out of your hand,” Henry said with a chuckle. The Ra Sector might be taking them longer to put in order than he’d hoped, but there was a definite light at the end of the tunnel—and the sheer amount of money the new trade deals were sending home was going to do positive things to the Initiative’s budget in the long run.

  “They didn’t know what they were getting into, did they?” she asked. Her smile was a bit forced, but it was real, and he kissed her.

  “I’ve got the warlords who won’t talk to us and you’ve got the sensible folks who will,” he told her. “How could we go wrong?”

  Sylvia paused thoughtfully, then dramatically checked the time.

  “Not enough of either sleep or sex,” she told him with a wicked tone. “But my math says we have time enough for both still.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “Contact.”

  Henry hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath since they’d emerged in Blue First Dawn until Eowyn’s quiet single-word report echoed through the bridge.

  “Distance is just over nine light-minutes,” she continued after a few seconds. “We’re not getting much in terms of detail, but it’s a big contact.”

  “Big enough?” Henry asked softly.

  “Big enough,” she confirmed. “If it’s not the Drifter Convoy, it’s another collection of several hundred ships that have decided to all refuel at the same gas giant.”

  The system geography was filling in as the contact report updated. Blue First Dawn was a blue star, a rare Be stellar type that glittered blue as it engaged in an eternal dance with an immense gas giant just too small to ignite on its own. A smaller gas giant roughly the size of Jupiter orbited both, and the intermingled gravity waves of the three massive objects had prevented anything else of significant size from forming.

  “Where are they?” Henry asked.

  “Contact is approximately one light-minute from the smaller gas giant, making a slow approach into orbit,” Eowyn told him. “They’re taking it easy. I estimate another six hours before they’re in a close-enough orbit to commence fueling.”

  “They may well be planning on staying here for a bit if they think they’ve lost us,” Chan suggested. “This system is pretty off the beaten track, though Blue First Dawn’s size may make a useful relay point as we expand the contact network.”

  “If they want to wait here for Twelfth Fleet, that will make everyone happy,” Henry replied. “We need to get close enough for a confirmed ID, I think. Bring the squadron up to point-five and set a zero-zero course based on stepping down as we get closer.”

  “Understood. It’ll be just seven hours for us to get to five light-seconds from them,” Eowyn said. “Passing maneuvering orders to both ships.”

  “Let’s be about it, people,”
Henry ordered. “Let’s see what the Drifters have been so desperate to hide.”

  Minutes became hours as the distance shrank. Half a KPS2 shouldn’t have felt slow to Henry or his people—they’d spent most of their careers with that being the maximum thrust that didn’t require them to retreat to acceleration tanks—and yet…

  After months aboard the Cataphracts with their gravity maneuvering systems, they seemed to crawl across the star system. Four hours had allowed them to cross almost six light-minutes in Ridea, but here, four hours barely carried them three and a half light-minutes.

  It was close enough for one part of the mission.

  “We have now confirmed in excess of five hundred individual signatures,” Eowyn told him. “While we can’t ID warships reliably at this range, we have definitely picked up several garden ships and matched their emissions to those reported by Shaka.

  “This is definitely the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Drifter Convoy.”

  Henry took a minute to confirm what she was seeing. He trusted Eowyn beyond a doubt, but when that conclusion required him to set into motion the largest offensive deployment of the UPSF since Operation Golden Lancelot, he wanted to be certain.

  “I agree,” he finally said aloud. “Chan?”

  “Ser!”

  “Prep…seven skip drones,” he told them. “Three for La-Tar, two for Eerdish, two for Enteni. Duplicate data to them all, supporting the conclusion that we have confirmed the location of the BGO Convoy.

  “Envoy Felix Leitz is to confirm passage rights for Twelfth Fleet,” he continued. “The drones to the Enteni are for their information only, as we have no one there to negotiate with them.

  “Leitz is to communicate directly with Admiral Rex, but the Ops plan calls for Admiral Rex to begin movement along the minimum-time course to the target system immediately. That sets a strict time limit on Leitz’s work.”

  And a dangerous risk for failure. Rex wouldn’t stop if Leitz hadn’t confirmed authorization to pass through E-Two space. Henry was putting a lot of faith on people he couldn’t say much more to.

  Fortunately, he knew Felix Leitz. Sylvia’s chief of staff might not like military officers—and most of Henry’s people had generally returned the opinion—but Henry had a solid respect for the man’s competence in his own field.

  Leitz would open the path. Even if he didn’t do so in time, Henry knew Rex’s reputation and doubted that Twelfth Fleet’s CO would make the situation worse than it needed to be. He’d brush past any E-Two ships that tried to stop him, but he’d never fire first.

  And Henry figured there’d be enough questions being asked that just bulling past the Eerdish and their allies would be enough to get Twelfth Fleet through without bloodshed.

  “Once all of that is loaded, launch the drones immediately,” Henry ordered softly. “They shouldn’t be detected at this range.”

  “Drones loading sensor data,” Chan confirmed after a moment. “We ran a downgrade algorithm on the data for the Eerdish and Enteni. The Convoy isn’t quite as clear afterward, but it should be good enough.”

  They paused.

  “Download complete. Drones launching.”

  “And that’s that,” Henry murmured, his gaze riveted on the green icons as they flashed away. They’d hit the Ridea skip line and follow the shortest possible course to their destination—and with six KPS2 of acceleration to play with, they’d be there a lot sooner than any of the ships.

  Seven days to Eerdish. Eight to Enteni. Twelve to La-Tar—and eighteen days for Twelfth Fleet to make it to Blue First Dawn.

  For the next thirty days, at least, Henry needed to shadow the Drifters without being caught. Fortunately for everyone, he really wasn’t worried about that part.

  Despite his assurances to Sylvia, he was worried about this part. By the time DesRon Twenty-Seven arrived, the Drifters would be in orbit of the gas giant. His ships would pass them at five light-seconds, traveling at over eleven thousand kilometers a second. If he wanted, he could fire missiles into the Convoy while closing and cause untold havoc.

  Instead, he was going to send in drones. Today was about information. Information allowed precision—and while precision was a frail shield against atrocity, it was the only shield he could create.

  And the die had been cast. Twelfth Fleet was coming.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Everything was going according to plan, and that made Henry nervous. His two ships were rapidly catching up with the pre-launched sensor probes, all of the distances he was tracking rapidly trending toward zero.

  “Probes will make their closest approach at between fifty thousand and three hundred thousand kilometers,” Eowyn reported. “All are ballistic and fully locked down. They should be invisible or mistaken for natural meteors.”

  “And us?” Henry asked.

  “One million five hundred and twenty-two thousand kilometers,” she told him. “In about five minutes. I don’t recommend that anyone hold their breath.”

  “And our velocity?”

  “Eleven thousand two hundred kilometers per second, and we continue to accelerate at point-one KPS-squared,” Eowyn confirmed. “We are in the field of the Drifters’ active scanners, but nothing we’re detecting through the grav-shield suggests that we have been seen.”

  Their thermal signature was as low as they could make it. Despite the unconscious urge, there was no point in staying still and quiet aboard the ship—with multiple fusion reactors running, at however low a level, anything a human could do was irrelevant.

  The gravity shield and the gravity maneuvering system smeared that thermal signature across hundreds of kilometers—thousands, at this velocity. What would have been noticeable as a single point source was a minor background anomaly when spread over a hundred thousand cubic kilometers.

  Hopefully.

  “The data is solid?” Henry asked.

  “As a rock,” Eowyn confirmed. “We probably don’t need to close to five light-seconds, though…”

  He waited. His subordinate knew better than to leave him hanging—though her questioning tone drew his attention to the data they were gathering. His focus had been on their stealth maneuvers and the overall location and threat level of the Drifter Convoy.

  “They’ve got to be playing some kind of game,” Eowyn finally finished her thought. “I’m reading one Guardian here, at the front of the Convoy; and one here, at the tail end. And that’s it.”

  “And only eight escorts,” Henry concluded for her, looking closely at the data now. “That’s a fifth of the warships I was expecting. What about the civilian numbers?”

  “We’ve got enough information from Shaka’s scans to identify specific larger ships,” his Ops officer pointed out. “I’ve mostly delegated that to Commander Bach’s people, but the numbers are lining up.”

  He nodded slowly, then pinged his shared channel with Paladin’s Captain.

  “Okafor, your people are seeing the same data mine are,” he noted. “Are you seeing the same problem I am?”

  “Where’s their security force?” Ihejirika rumbled instantly. “So far, Commander Bach’s team has identified over sixty individual ships and matched them to Shaka’s data. Every ship we’ve looked for appears to be there, except the warships.”

  “We know they had at least one detachment of a Guardian and six escorts out to ambush us, but that doesn’t explain them missing nine capital ships,” Henry said grimly. “I’m with Commander Eowyn. They’re playing games—but our approach and drones should let us see through whatever illusions they’re working.”

  “We know they detached something when they passed through Nohtoin,” Eowyn pointed out. “Maybe a larger chunk of their warships than we expected?”

  “They’d never cut the defenses of the Convoy itself this much,” Ihejirika said. “Something’s wrong, Commodore.”

  “Closest approach?” Henry asked, careful to maintain his outward calm.

  And his inward calm, fo
r that matter. This was strange. It wasn’t a threat—not an immediate one, anyway.

  “Still two minutes,” Eowyn replied. “Still no sign that we or the sensor drones have been detected. Clean and straight so far.”

  All of that made Henry more nervous. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up and every instinct of thirty years of military service was screaming TRAP.

  Except he’d already done everything he could. If it was a trap, his ships would increase their acceleration twenty-fold and leave the Drifter Convoy behind at a significant percentage of the speed of light.

  “There are no more contacts to resolve,” Eowyn said quietly. “We have tentative IDs on all contacts. Confirming, six hundred and two contacts. Repeat, six zero two contacts. Eight warships, including two Guardians.”

  Range was under two million kilometers, and now it took conscious effort for Henry not to hold his breath.

  “Minimum range in forty seconds.”

  More data was flowing in on each individual contact now, and Henry could see the work being done behind the scenes by both Eowyn’s Operations team and Paladin’s Tactical department as new codes attached themselves to each contact.

  Shaka had been in and amongst the Convoy and had more accurate data on most ships, but she’d also been attempting politeness. The level of even passive scans that Henry’s ships were doing was detectable at reasonable range—they’d extended a series of antennae and receiver dishes they didn’t normally have out.

  If anyone was close enough to see them, they’d have known what they were doing. But sixteen hundred thousand kilometers wasn’t that close, and there continued to be no sign they’d been detected.

  “Minimum range in ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  Eowyn audibly exhaled.

  “Minimum range. We are now at one million five hundred thousand and twenty-five thousand kilometers…and rising. We have passed the Convoy. All signs show that we were not detected.”