Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  Then the shields were back up—at that point, failing elsewhere as Maharatha’s beams repeated the feat.

  “We’re too close,” Teunissen barked over the channel. “The lasers are getting closer and—”

  Henry didn’t need to check his scans. He knew that sudden silence. At the ranges they were in now, the gravity shield couldn’t stand up to direct laser fire for long—and they were being hammered with missiles every few seconds.

  Their own missiles were too few—and Maharatha was gone. Four hundred of his people were gone with her, but he couldn’t grieve.

  Not yet.

  “We’re clear, we’re clear!” Ihejirika barked. “We’re past, their missiles can’t catch up.”

  “Keep the lasers on her,” Henry ordered. “Sixty seconds, people. We have to make it sixty more seconds.”

  Okafor Ihejirika’s command twisted in the dim light of Blue First Dawn’s largest planet like a worm on a hook. Lasers and plasma scattered in the void around her, as many shots missing as being tossed aside by the shield—but her own beams stayed on the superdreadnought, burning through once again as they fled.

  “Escorts and gunships are accelerating in pursuit,” Eowyn reported. “Estimate one-point-seven KPS-squared.”

  “Not enough,” Henry murmured. “Did we… Did we do it, Okafor?”

  Silence answered him. The range ticked over two light-seconds and Paladin’s beams vanished. The Kenmiri weapons still pocked the space around her, but there was a dull silence aboard the destroyer as her own weapons calmed.

  “Scans are focused on the superdreadnought,” Ihejirika confirmed quietly. “Escorts are in hot pursuit of us; they’re gaining a lot of speed but they’re not closing the range. Do we let them?”

  “Hang out a trail, Captain,” Henry ordered. “The later they realize what we’ve done, the less they can do. But I need to know.

  “Did it work?”

  “Scans complete,” the destroyer Captain said. “Target Bravo’s engines are completely disabled. Her vector is toward Blue First Dawn Beta.

  “Tactical is estimating thirty-five minutes to crush depth.”

  Henry smiled coldly and looked at the escorts chasing him.

  “Unless your engineers are even better than I think they are, you should not be chasing me,” he told their icons.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Energy screens, unlike gravity shields, transferred a portion of the momentum of impacts to the protected bubble. The momentum was transferred across the entire bubble, so it was rarely registered on the inside—but every missile that had detonated seemingly uselessly against Target Bravo’s shields had pushed the superdreadnought ever so slightly toward the planet beneath her.

  And the lasers had done the same—and been targeted on the superdreadnought’s engines with a precision only enabled by the Drifter’s near-perfect data on these exact ships.

  Now Target Bravo fell. It wasn’t a fast process at first, but it accelerated slowly. Ten minutes after Paladin left laser range, the superdreadnought touched the top of Blue First Dawn Beta’s atmosphere—and they finally called the escorts back.

  “It’s too late,” Eowyn said grimly. “Ten minutes just to shed their velocity. Another twenty to get back and match v with Target Bravo. They’re only going to get there in time to watch her die.”

  “No,” Henry countered. “They’re going to get there in time to pick up the escape pods and evac shuttles. And I’m glad to see it, honestly.”

  He couldn’t see Target Bravo directly anymore. Paladin had put the gas giant between herself and the superdreadnought, shielding herself from any clever ideas the Kenmiri might have at the last minute. They were watching through a sensor drone on the other side of the planet, which put everything several minutes out of date.

  Escape pods and shuttles were starting to flee the superdreadnought now. Even combined, the small craft wouldn’t have had enough thrust to move the immense mass of their mothership, but they could get the crew clear.

  “Glad, ser?” Eowyn asked.

  “I hate the Kenmiri,” Henry admitted aloud. He didn’t even like to hear himself say it, but it was true. “I hate everything they’ve done, everything they stand for, everything they created. But I also destroyed any future their race had.

  “The Kenmiri who died today cannot be replaced, Commander Eowyn.” He looked at the scans of the doomed superdreadnought, surprised at the emotions he was feeling. “I will fight them without hesitation. I will stand against all of their works and any attempt to restore their power.

  “But I will not hasten their demise any more than I must. We are already well revenged. I hope those captains have the moral courage to retreat once they’ve picked up the evacuees.”

  He shook his head.

  “They could still win,” he admitted. “Or, at the very least, destroy Paladin. But a lot of the people they’re pulling from the wreck of that superdreadnought would die along the way. If they want Paladin, they’ll bleed for her.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Henry turned his attention to other situations.

  “Chan, do we have any updates from the Drifter Convoy?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet, ser. On the other hand, Target Bravo pulsed a subspace message right after Target Alpha was destroyed,” the coms officer told him. “And they never got a response. I think our masked friends may have done all right.”

  “They better have.”

  Henry considered the situation for a few moments.

  “Captain Ihejirika, set your course for the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy,” he ordered. “We’ll keep an eye on our Kenmiri friends, but it’s time to start wrapping this up.”

  The superdreadnought continued its slow fall to its doom as Paladin’s course curved toward the Drifter Convoy. At fifteen minutes after it hit the gas giant’s atmosphere, the pace of evacuation ships leaving suddenly spiked.

  Even from a distance, Henry could see as various systems began to flick out across the ship. Her captain had made the difficult choice to write the superdreadnought off as a lost cause to save the crew—a decision that probably had slightly different weights when your species was dying.

  For the last few minutes before it hit crush depth, the stream of small craft slowly declined until nothing left the ship for a full minute. By that point, the sensor drone could barely even make out the dreadnought. It was over a thousand kilometers deep inside the gas giant and sinking lower by the second.

  And then, moments before Henry’s people calculated it would reach crush depth, a massive explosion lit up the surface of the gas giant.

  “What do we have on that?” he asked.

  “Multiple fusion charges, estimated total yield at least a hundred gigatons,” Eowyn said. “Either suicide charges or they overloaded their fusion cores—or both. Making damn sure no one could salvage anything from the wreck.”

  The escorts and gunships were still making their way back to orbit of Blue First Dawn Beta, but the escape pods and shuttles were clustering together. It looked like there were probably enough small craft to carry the warship’s entire crew.

  “Let’s watch what they do carefully,” Henry murmured. “What’s our ETA to the Convoy?”

  “Still an hour to bring our velocity to zero, then five to zero-zero with the Drifters,” Eowyn reported. “Commander Bach is maneuvering some of the sensor probes around to get us a better look at them and see what’s going on there.”

  Six hours. Henry nodded to his Ops officer and leaned back in his chair again. Nothing left for the Commodore to do. He only had one ship left. Most people would say trading a destroyer for two superdreadnoughts was good work, but it still left him with limited resources for what came next.

  Nina Teunissen hadn’t deserved to die like that, but who did? Going back over the recording of the action, Henry caught the exact moment of Maharatha’s destruction.

  With fifteen superheavy plasma cannon from the superdreadnought
and four heavy plasma cannon from the gunships, plus the hundreds of missiles that had hurled themselves against DesRon Twenty-Seven’s shields, he was lucky to have only lost one ship.

  It had been one of the superdreadnought’s guns, he judged. The blast had been on track to miss, but the same gravity shear that protected the ship had torn the plasma ball into pieces—and changed the course enough that three of those pieces had hammered into Maharatha like the flaming arrows of an angry sun god.

  “Kenmiri escorts have made rendezvous with the evacuation ships,” Eowyn reported. “Gunships have assumed a defensive formation. Hrm. They’re certainly not expecting help from the Convoy.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Henry agreed. “Do we have those eyes on the Convoy yet?”

  “Just coming in now,” Ihejirika told him. “Feeding to your display.”

  For a moment, the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy looked unchanged from when they’d made their high-speed scouting run. Then Henry began to pick out the subtle and not-so-subtle changes.

  The factory ships had carried out a coordinated movement that had positioned their raw-material hoppers around the garden ships. Other ships were moving in to fill gaps in the sphere as Henry watched, the Convoy using their own hulls to protect the factory and garden ships that allowed them to survive.

  The factory ships would be hard to replace—but without the garden ships, the Convoy could easily starve before they found a food source. Five million people were not easy to feed.

  “I’m picking up no warships in the Convoy,” Eowyn said quietly. “Both Guardians are gone. All of the escorts are gone.”

  “Most of the passenger ships will have some limited defensive and offensive firepower,” Henry told her. “Look for targeting radar if we can.”

  “It’ll take a moment. Let me check.”

  She turned her focus back to her screens for a few moments.

  “You’re right,” she confirmed. “It looks like the outer shell has active targeting radar sweeping the space around them. I’m guessing missile launchers and lasers, but those are very much last-ditch defenses, ser.”

  “And the Kenmiri probably underestimated them,” Henry said. “I would assume that’s what killed the dreadnought.”

  Those beams might not be as powerful as a dreadnought’s or as well aimed or have as reliable a power-supply…but there were hundreds of them scattered through the Convoy. Only fear and a carefully calibrated amount of violence had kept the Convoy in line.

  That was the Kenmiri way. And here, like in so many other places in the past, it had finally failed.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The defensive shell was still intact when Paladin came to a relative halt exactly nine hundred thousand kilometers from the Convoy. Scans were telling Henry how many missile launchers the Drifters had—and while it was significant, there were a lot more lasers in the Convoy.

  If those missile launchers were all loaded with resonance warheads, they could make a serious mess of his ship. On the other hand, the gravity shield versus lasers was a probability game—and having a thousand lasers to throw at it was one way to play that game.

  There’d only been intermittent communication as they’d approached. Enough for Henry to know that the situation was a chaotic mess—but he now knew something else. Something the Drifters might not know yet.

  The Kenmiri were leaving. The escorts and gunships had to be stuffed to the bulkheads with the crew they’d rescued from the doomed superdreadnought, and whoever was in command had chosen to preserve those lives over pushing for a meaningless victory.

  They were still a few hours from the skip line, but they were far enough along their vector that Henry had no worries about them coming back.

  “Are we on?” he asked Chan.

  “Feed is live when you want it, ser. Broad-beam to the entire Convoy,” they confirmed.

  He nodded his thanks to them and glanced over at Sylvia. His diplomatic attaché had stayed off the bridge during the battle, but now they were on the edge of her bailiwick.

  “This one is still mine, Ambassador,” he told her. “There will be time for diplomacy later, but right now…this is still a military situation.”

  “I’ve got your back,” she confirmed. “I know what you’re thinking—and I think you’re right.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. If she’d guessed what he was thinking, he hoped she was ahead of the Drifters.

  With a soft exhalation, he masked his face, stilling his muscles and eyes as he focused on the recorder in front of him. A mental command activated the camera and he simply glared at it for several seconds.

  “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy, this is Commodore Henry Wong of the United Planets Space Force,” he said in Kem. “We have defeated the Kenmiri forces in this system.

  “We are here, however, because of the actions of warships under the authority of this Convoy,” he told them. “I must speak with the Council of Ancients or with Fourth Speaker Blue-Spirals-On-Silver.

  “We will maintain our position for now while you find someone able to negotiate with me, but I warn you: my patience is not infinite, and I already destroyed two superdreadnoughts today.

  “I am waiting for your response.”

  Another command from his internal network stopped the recording and transmitted the message.

  “How long do you think?” Sylvia asked.

  “Not very long,” he admitted. “I don’t know how seriously they’re going to take my threats—they have a lot of ships and a lot of weapons over there, but Paladin will shortly be the only warship left in the system.”

  The flag deck was quiet. Eowyn’s Operations team was coordinating with Commander Bach’s Tactical team to analyze the ships in front of them. Every few moments, another ship in the Convoy flashed as the analysts updated the information on it.

  There was nothing left with any kind of heavy armament. Most of the ships had a single offensive laser, a small suite of antimissile systems and two missile launchers.

  The aggregate was still impressive—and even the civilian launchers might have the resonance warheads that had wrecked Cataphract.

  Still, Henry suspected that coordination would be badly lacking in anything resembling a real fight—and the current chaotic mess of the Convoy wouldn’t help. It made for a hell of a sucker punch and it was intimidating, but there was a reason the Drifter Convoys usually had real warships in company.

  “Ser, we have an incoming com request,” Chan reported. “It appears to be coming from the center of the Convoy. I’d guess one of the garden ships, but there are enough other ships in the way to make identification difficult.”

  “Understood,” Henry told them. “Connect it to the main screen. Show them a feed of myself and Ambassador Todorovich.”

  His internal network warned him when the cameras on him and Sylvia came online. He leveled his best working glare on the familiar masked individual on the screen.

  It was not Blue-Spirals-On-Silver. The Face Mask on the screen had a diagonal blue stripe over a white base, with its bottom third painted green. Ambassador Blue-Stripe-Third-Green stood in front of one of the forested glades the Drifters used for important ceremonies and private meetings aboard the garden ships.

  “Commodore Henry Wong,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green greeted him. “I will not pretend I am pleased to see you again—but I am, perhaps, grateful.” They then nodded to Sylvia. “Ambassador Todorovich as well. It seems you have completed your mission.”

  “My mission was to find your Convoy,” Henry said bluntly. “I completed that mission several days ago, and the power of the United Planets Alliance is already in motion. Blue-Spirals-On-Silver, however, managed to suggest that the situation was more complicated than we perceived.”

  “It was and is,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green confirmed. “We successfully neutralized the Kenmiri presence in the Convoy, but not without a price.” They paused. “You will have already detected that Signs of
Providence is no more. Protector-Commander Third-White-Fifth-Gold perished with her.

  “Our commandos have secured most of the critical systems of most of our ships,” they said carefully. “Careful preparation allowed us to disable almost all of the bombs.”

  “Almost,” Henry prodded.

  “The garden ship Alignment of Dreams is also no more,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green said quietly. “Blue-Spirals-On-Silver was aboard her, leading a desperate attempt to reach a bomb we learned about too late. One hundred twenty-six thousand of my people are now dead—and so is a third of the Council of Ancients.”

  “A UPSF destroyer died here today,” Henry replied. “I mourn your dead with you, Ambassador, but we have losses of our own—and I remind you that Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe are no longer my allies.”

  “I understand,” Blue-Stripe-Third-Green said heavily. “We are prepared to negotiate, Commodore. We understand that we have gravely betrayed the trust of those who should have been our friends, but we felt we had no choice—and the deaths today are a bitter reminder of the threat that hung over us when we made no choices.”

  “The past is what the past is,” Henry told the Drifter. “You speak for your people, Blue-Stripe-Third-Green. I speak for mine. For those who have died. For those who have been betrayed.

  “You brought these stars to the edge of war for your own fear and gain,” he concluded. “Regardless of your reasons, if we are to have peace…I have no choice but to ask for the formal surrender of the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy.”

  Sylvia’s calm certainty next to him didn’t even flicker. She clearly had guessed what he intended.

  From the dead silence of the rest of the flag deck, most of Henry’s staff hadn’t.

  With the Face Mask guarding their emotions and thoughts, he couldn’t tell if Blue-Stripe-Third-Green had, but the Drifter was silent for a long time.

  “You understand, Commodore, that I am bound by sacred oaths and sacred charges?” they asked.

  “You have my word, upon the honor of my dead, that your people will come to no harm so long as they cooperate,” Henry told the Drifter. “And as our prisoners, we will defend you as our own.”