“They thought the grav-shields were the only thing that made them worthwhile,” Henry told her. “Even with the grav-shields, well…we lost a lot of birds and rocket-jocks.”
He finally turned, looking away from the orb-like starfighter to study his Commander, Air Group.
As Iyotake had suggested, Commander Samira O’Flannagain looked so stereotypically Irish, it had to be intentional. She was a gawky woman with red hair in a tight circular braid on top of her head. Even now, she wore a flight suit instead of a uniform, though her wings and the two steel bars of her rank remained visible.
“Is there a point to this, ser?” she finally asked.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps I’m meeting the woman who commands my only truly long-range strike option—or perhaps I’m meeting the only officer who has managed to get into a fistfight on a ship that’s only been in commission for two weeks.”
She hadn’t been expecting that and visibly flushed.
“That did—”
“Please, Commander. Just because the Chief didn’t sell you out didn’t mean that your superior officers are idiots,” he pointed out. “I don’t need to prove it for administrative punishment, either. Do you understand me?”
“Ser.”
“I get rocket-jocks,” he told her. “I get the friction between the starfighter deck and engineering. What I also get, however, is that it is your job, as CAG, to reduce that friction and make sure that relationship flows smoothly.
“Not aggravate it by throwing punches.”
She was silent.
“Since the Chief involved is apparently willing to let things go, I will too. This time. But if things don’t improve…” He shrugged. “We’re a peacetime military now, Commander. In another time, I might end up going for charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. Right now?”
He turned and met her gaze, and his smile was gentle…and utterly without mercy.
“Right now, O’Flannagain, if you don’t shape up, I will beach you,” he told her. “A reserve commission with no flight hours, no duties. Just a tiny stipend in case we end up going back to war in the next ten years.
“Do you understand me, Commander?” he asked.
“Yes, ser,” she ground out.
“Good. Because I’ve seen your record, Commander O’Flannagain, and it would be a damn shame to ground one of the half dozen or so best pilots I’ve ever seen—even if my ex-husband did think you’d be a great headache to hand me!”
Chapter Nine
“All departments, report ready for departure,” Henry ordered.
His command seat’s repeater screens told him they were ready. His internal network was interfaced with Raven’s computers, which told him the departments were ready. He was surrounded by the two-sided screens that showed him what all of his bridge crew were doing—which showed him those departments were ready.
The Book still called for verbal acknowledgement and he agreed with it. There were times to rush, to cut corners and do things as fast as possible.
Leaving a safe port at the start of a mission that could not last less than six weeks even if they turned around the moment they reached Resta was not that time. There were problems that wouldn’t show up in the automated checks that could still need to be addressed before they went beyond the reach of help.
“Tactical department is standing by,” Commander Okafor Ihejirika reported. Raven’s tactical officer was a short and stocky black man. Like Henry himself, Ihejirika was from Earth itself. The homeworld still accounted for roughly forty percent of all humans—the entire Sol System accounted for just under fifty percent in total—but Earth natives made up less than twenty percent of the UPSF.
“All weapons report green and are safed for transit,” Ihejirika continued. “Sensors are green and live. We are ready to go.”
“Communications is green.” Lieutenant Commander Lauren Moon was from Mars, tall from growing up in low gravity but heavily fleshed out despite living in a full gee aboard UPSF warships. “Radios are all checking green. Lasers and tightbeams are checking green. Subspace network link is stable. We are ready to go.”
“Engineering reports all reactors are up to thirty percent,” Lieutenant Mariann Henriksson reported. The blonde young woman was the bridge officer for Engineering, a job that nine times out of ten just required repeating what the Chief Engineer—Lieutenant Colonel Anna Song aboard Raven—told her.
The other ten percent of the time, it required collating reports from across the ship and providing the summaries the Captain needed when the Chief Engineer was too busy making sure the ship didn’t fall apart to answer questions.
“Feed lines to the engines all report clear and operational,” Henriksson continued. “Engineering is go for departure.”
“Helm?” Henry asked, directing his attention to the currently most critical department on the ship.
Commander Iida Bazzoli looked about as mixed ethnically as her Finnish and Italian name suggested. Her skin was the same vague shade of brown as Henry’s own, but she had brilliant green eyes and blond hair so pale as to be almost white.
She was also the woman of the hour and in full control of Raven’s engines, inertial dampeners and skip drives.
“Course is plotted all the way to Resta, ser,” she reported. “Base Skyrim has provided initial clearance and is standing by to retract the docking arm. Navigation and helm are good to go on your order, Captain.”
“Well, then. Let’s not keep the stars waiting, shall we?” he replied. “Moon, inform Skyrim we are ready to depart and request docking port and clamp retraction. Bazzoli…you have the ship.”
“Understood.”
Most of the screens were showing Raven at this point, with the clamps and docking tubes lit up in orange. First, the docking tube moved away from the hull, the highlight changing to green once it had cleared the safety zone.
Then, one by one, the docking clamps holding the battlecruiser safely against the space station released and switched to green. Once the last of them was a safe distance away, the highlights vanished. The connectors were no longer relevant except as part of Base Skyrim.
“Base Skyrim confirms we are clear of all connections, and they have sent us clearance all the way out,” Moon reported. “I’ve forwarded the clearance to Commander Bazzoli.”
Bazzoli paused for several seconds, hopefully to make sure the clearance aligned with the course she’d submitted and was planning on taking Raven along.
“Course is cleared. Bringing up the maneuvering jets,” she finally said.
There was no detectable change aboard Raven. Inertial compensation designed to absorb half a kilometer per second squared of acceleration—over fifty times Earth’s gravity—wasn’t going to blip at five meters per second squared.
Raven’s icon drifted clear of the space station. More maneuvering thrusters came online as the distance opened, bringing the ship up to thirty meters per second squared.
That was as much as the secondary thrusters could manage. Pure ion engines were extremely efficient, but didn’t have a lot of power. That efficiency and lack of power, however, meant that they were a far lesser danger to anything around the battlecruiser than her main drives.
“Shutting down maneuvering thrusters,” Bazzoli noted aloud. “Course calls for thirty seconds of ballistic drift.”
No one responded. There was no need. The Book called for the report, but it was the navigator’s next report that actually mattered.
“Bringing engines up at ten percent in ten seconds,” she finally stated. “Stand by. Engines online.”
Notification lights flickered across a dozen screens. Raven’s four reactors crept up from thirty percent utilization to thirty-five, and the numbers representing her acceleration and velocity started changing rapidly.
Ten percent was point one kilometer per second squared. “Full acceleration” would only be fifty percent of the actual maximum acceleration Raven was capable of—but anything a
bove point five kilometers per second squared couldn’t be fully compensated for by the artificial gravity and inertial compensation systems.
For every meter per second squared they went over their listed maximum, the crew would experience point four meters per second squared of acceleration. Point six KPS2 would put roughly four point one gravities on the crew.
A full KPS2, Raven’s actual top acceleration, would put twenty point four gravities on the human crew. They had a dozen systems they could use to make that survivable, but it still required special preparation to not be suicide.
It took the same threefold authorization to take Raven to maximum acceleration as it did to turn her fusion cores into a thermonuclear self-destruct.
“Bringing the engines up to forty percent and holding,” Bazzoli finally concluded. “We are lined up with the Zion skip line and will reach the entrance velocity vector in eleven hours. Enjoy your flight, people. Life gets icky at midnight.”
Henry Wong had met many people who insisted that humans could get used to the sensation of skip-drive travel.
He had never met one who said that they had done so themselves.
Chapter Ten
The Captain’s dining room aboard Raven wasn’t large enough to host all of Henry’s officers. If he needed to do that, he’d have to take over the officers’ mess, which was large enough for all sixty-plus of those people.
His dining room was listed as big enough to host himself and all seven of his senior officers plus up to six guests. With only Ambassador Todorovich and Felix Leitz there beyond his senior officers, there was extra space. Not that anyone could ever tell. Putting another four people in the room would have been doable…but Henry was left with the conclusion that the fourteen-person capacity of his dining room was an exaggeration.
“Have you and your people had any problems getting settled?” he asked Todorovich.
“Nothing serious,” the Ambassador told him. “We’ve got one analyst who hasn’t been aboard a warship before. He’s having some adjustment pains, but he’ll get over them.”
Henry chuckled.
“They always do, don’t they?” he murmured. “I haven’t spent much time hauling diplomats around, but I’ve made sure a few contact teams made it to their destinations with the Vesheron.”
The Vesheron hadn’t had anything resembling a combined leadership until the last three years of the war. Even that had only been the result of a combined stance from the UPA and the Londu that they needed someone to coordinate with.
The other two El-Vesheron powers had seen the Kenmiri coming. The UPA had just had the red insectoids show up on their doorstep and start trying to take systems over. It had been years before they’d even known the Vesheron existed.
The UPA and the Londu showing a united front had forced the rebels into a more formal alliance and joint command, one that Henry was pretty sure had been critical to ending the war.
He wanted to blame someone other than UPSF Command for Golden Lancelot, but he was too honest with himself. “Exterminate the leadership caste and leave the rest to swing” was far too present a concept in human science fiction for him to believe it hadn’t occurred to his superiors.
“You were there at the end, weren’t you?” Leitz asked. “Golden Lancelot?”
“I was,” Henry confirmed, glancing down the table. He’d checked his people’s records, and most of them had been involved in the support operations. Ihejirika was the only other person in the room who had been involved in a Golden Lancelot strike mission.
The tactical officer’s face had grown noticeably more shadowed at the mention of the operation name. Hopefully, Henry was doing a better job of hiding his emotions than his subordinate was.
“Right at the end,” he continued after a moment of silence that probably stretched too long. “Intelligence confirmed after the fact that the Kenmorad breeding sect Panther took out was the last one.”
He raised a hand before Leitz could ask any more questions.
“I would strongly recommend against asking too many questions about Lancelot of the people who served in it,” he told the chief of staff gently. “Golden Lancelot was a tactical genocide. The officers and crew who served in that didn’t know that at the time, but we know it now.
“We have to live with that. I don’t think the officers who drew up the plan realized how bad it was going to be for us to do that, though I doubt they’re sleeping easy at night either. Leave the wound be, Em Leitz. Your curiosity isn’t worth it.”
He realized the entire table had gone silent and was hanging on his words. Hopefully, none of them saw his shivers or realized how much the simple statement he’d made was threatening his calm.
“I understand, Captain Wong,” Leitz said. “I apologize; I did not think through the…consequences of what happened.”
“You should have access to the official reports,” Henry said gently. “They may not be as useful as first-person encounters, but you’re at least not tearing wounds wide open.”
The room was silent for several more seconds, then Leitz coughed.
“I understand you were one of the ships that pulled Ambassador Rembrandt out?” he asked. “I never had the pleasure of meeting him myself. What was he like?”
Henry glanced over at Todorovich—who had known Rembrandt for far longer than he had—and chuckled.
“I think Em Todorovich might have more to say about him than me,” he noted. “But yes. Panther was part of the task group that went into Apophis-Six after the Kenmiri caught him. I doubt I saw him at his best—he’d been in the hands of one of the more imaginative Kenmorad queens.
“They’d been playing mind games on him—trying to turn him, I think—for at least two weeks by the time we got there. It didn’t work, so they decided that they’d rather him dead than rescued. My GroundDiv teams got in without much trouble, but the Kenmiri threw everything they had at us to stop us getting him out.
“The Ambassador lost his legs to a round that went low,” Henry concluded. They’d also lost over two hundred GroundDiv troopers, but they’d wrecked Apophis-Six’s defenses and the maximum-security prison itself. The follow-up attack by the Vesheron had liberated the system and rescued about a hundred thousand Vesheron fighters of different races and factions.
“He took the loss of his limbs with surprising grace, but from the conversations I had with him, he took it as a sign it was time to retire.” He shook his head. “He seemed smart, capable and surprisingly lucid, given the pain meds he was on!”
“If there was anything Rembrandt was, it was smart and capable,” Todorovich agreed. “Never saw him face a situation he seemed perturbed by. He was one of the first diplomats we sent to the Vesheron, which meant he was the first one to meet a near-human face to face.”
Even once the UPSF had found the Vesheron, communication had been via text messages through a Kenmiri channel they both knew. No one had realized that a good three-quarters of the species in the Kenmiri Empire could pass for human until the delegations had met on neutral ground.
Henry hadn’t been there for that, but he remembered the first time he’d met a member of another of what the Kenmiri called the Ashall: the Seeded Races. She’d at least had head-tentacles to help remind him that she wasn’t human.
“Don’t call them near-humans around anyone but us, either,” Henry noted. “They don’t like it any more than we’d like being called near-Londu.”
“Which is the approximate translation of the Londu term for us,” Todorovich agreed. “Some day, we might find out what the Kenmiri know about why half the sentient species in the galaxy could pass for each other under a hood.
“The whole name of Seeded Races implies they know something.”
“The Kenmiri didn’t talk to us much before we…ended the war,” Henry pointed out, choosing his phrasing carefully. “Somehow, I don’t think we’re getting access to their archives.”
“They may have left something behind on the worlds they abandone
d,” Leitz pointed out. “Maybe that’s something we should be negotiating for at the Gathering.”
“You know our negotiating goals,” Todorovich pointed out. “The biggest objective for all of us, including the Space Force, is to get out of this without getting ourselves trapped in any major commitments.”
“We’ll try not to start any blood feuds,” Henry said with a chuckle. “Outside of that, I think most of the not-making-promises falls on you, Ambassador.”
“Oh, believe me, Captain Wong, I learned how to not make promises from the best.”
The only two people in the room who’d ever met Karl Rembrandt met each other’s gazes again, and Henry nodded his understanding to Todorovich. The old man had been many things, but in another age, he’d have been buying land from Native Americans with shiny glass beads.
Henry didn’t like the terms that the UPA wanted to walk away from the Vesheron Gathering with…but it wasn’t his call. And, thankfully, it wasn’t his job to sit in a negotiation and tell people that, either.
Chapter Eleven
“We are approaching the target vector and location now,” Bazzoli said calmly.
The bridge wasn’t usually full at midnight ship’s time. The first skip of a journey always seemed to bring everyone out, even when only one watch was supposed to be on duty.
Not that Henry had a problem with that. He was supposed to be on duty only because he’d told Iyotake to make sure he was. Rank hath its privileges—but he’d also shown up for the first skip when he wasn’t on duty, too.
As he was thinking that, Iyotake sent him a silent ping telling him to check the door. The XO was currently holding down the tactical station—Ihejirika had the next watch and was doing the sensible thing and sleeping.
Turning around slightly in his seat, Henry was only mildly surprised to see Sylvia Todorovich standing in the door. He gestured her over to him.
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