“It’s not our problem, Lieutenant Colonel,” Henry pointed out. “That’s the General Assembly’s decision. We deal with our worlds; that’s it. Everything else is up to the Vesheron.”
“At least they have subspace coms,” Iyotake concluded. “Instant communication will help, like with us keeping an eye on Attallis and what she does.”
“Exactly. There’s enough Vesheron out there that if they work together, they can keep the peace, at least.”
Iyotake looked past Henry for several seconds and the Captain followed his gaze. He was focusing on the blue UPA flag on the wall behind Henry, with its eight golden stars in a flattened V.
Like most federal unions before it, the United Planets Alliance had been born out of a bloody conflict to prevent future wars. Henry’s guess was that the General Assembly was hoping for something similar to emerge from the Vesheron Gathering.
“What happens if the Gathering fails, ser?” Iyotake asked. “If it all falls apart and the Vesheron turn on each other now that they don’t share an enemy? The only thing that defines us all is that we were fighting the Kenmiri.”
“I don’t know,” Henry admitted. “I suspect the Londu want to leave the Gathering with a lot more territory than they’re starting with—and I have no idea what the Terzan are going to want! The core Vesheron factions, though?
“I’m not sure most of them even know what they want. Until six months ago, I think they all expected to be fighting the Kenmiri for eternity. What happens next…” Henry shivered.
“I don’t think anyone knows, XO. Part of our job is to help the Ambassador make sure the Gathering doesn’t fail.”
“Right. Good.” The Lieutenant Colonel paused thoughtfully.
“How are we going to do that, again?”
Chapter Twenty
People didn’t have sit-down meals during skips. The odds of losing any given meal were between thirty and seventy percent, depending on the individual and the skip, so UPSF crews stuck to ration bars during those periods.
With the timing of the next two skips, that meant it was almost four days after engaging the First Warlord before Henry once again joined Ambassador Todorovich and her people for dinner.
He wouldn’t have needed Todorovich’s warning that Leitz was upset with him. The chief of staff was quite good at hiding his expressions…except that Henry had learned to read emotions on Ashall faces, faces that weren’t quite human.
He’d had to stop playing poker against anyone who hadn’t had the same experience. One memorable casino night in the middle of the war had got him banned from every poker game in Tau Ceti—and made sure that his eventual retirement was going to be quite comfortable.
He hadn’t been the first, but he’d been among the last before casinos starting checking who’d served on the front. Less than one percent of UPSF personnel had regularly interacted with the other Vesheron, in his experience. Less than a tenth of those had learned Kem, and maybe half of those had learned to read Ashall expressions.
That was still a solid cadre of officers who the casinos were rightly somewhat terrified of.
It probably didn’t help Henry’s case, he reflected as he took his seat, that several of the Ambassador’s staff had the telltale sheen in their hair of antiacceleration gel from the latest stint in the tanks.
“Welcome, Captain,” Todorovich greeted him. “My understanding from my chef is that he is starting to run out of fresh ingredients. He wants me to apologize for the dinner.”
“Em Todorovich, I was on a six-month deployment in Set Province only a few months ago,” Henry reminded her. “If I can recognize what he’s feeding me, we are definitely in the realm of my being perfectly happy.”
“Fair enough.” The appetizers started coming out and, regardless of the chef’s complaints, they smelled fantastic.
“I’m assuming there’s a reason the drill frequency went up after Apophis-Four?” Todorovich asked after they were most of the way through the flaky pastry shells filled with a mix of spiced meat and—presumably prepared-from-frozen now—vegetables.
“It didn’t seem like things were that strenuous there,” Leitz added. The chief of staff didn’t have the sheen of tank gel in his hair, but his hair was damp. He’d clearly showered it out in the hour since the skip finished.
“We got lucky,” Henry told the chief of staff. “Our scramble time was longer than UPSF standard, let alone what I’d find acceptable. The senior staff and I hadn’t made sufficient allowance for how thrown together this crew is. We saw that their core competencies were present and forgot they hadn’t worked as a team before.
“We should have been pressing the drills harder before. We’re making up for lost time now, though I’ll ease up on the crew once we reach Resta.”
“I look forward to it,” Leitz replied. “The acceleration tanks are…unpleasant.”
“Try the one in a starfighter sometime,” Henry replied. “At least the ones on Raven are lit. In a starfighter, it’s all dark. Even with your internal net projecting an interface, it’s claustrophobic.”
“I believe you,” Leitz said with feeling. “These ones are bad enough. I…will admit it seems odd we’re going into them and then not seeing acceleration.”
There was no bite to the man’s tone, which was actually impressive. The chief was doing a good job of not projecting his frustration at the situation.
“My crew is trained to operate up to three pseudogravities,” Henry pointed out. “Command consoles and so forth are designed to reorient under thrust gravity, and every part of the ship is rigged for movement and work under those conditions.
“Your people are not so trained. At three gravities, you’re already at risk, Em Leitz. And at three pseudogravities, we’re only at about point six KPS squared for acceleration. If I only need a twenty percent edge, I can push my crew to that without requiring them in the tanks—but I would be risking my passengers.”
He shrugged.
“It’s safer for everyone if you go in the tanks as soon as we call battle stations,” Henry told Leitz. “We got lucky in Apophis-Four, but it wouldn’t have taken a very different situation for me to push the ship to sixty percent acceleration.” He snorted. “Had I decided to avoid engagement, we would have needed every scrap of power Raven’s engines could produce. Everyone aboard would have been in tanks…and given the scramble times I saw for everything else, that could have been a problem.”
“I’m guessing you’re drilling tank stations as well?” Todorovich asked.
“Not for the pre-emergence battle-stations call, but yes,” Henry confirmed. “The pre-emergence call is only partially a drill. It is entirely possible we may emerge from skip into an unexpected combat situation. I don’t want to add that extra layer of drill on top of the need to be ready for action.
“On the other hand, if we do enter a combat situation, knowing I can maneuver without risking the passengers this entire mission is about is useful,” he finished with a grin. “I prefer not to break my diplomats, Ambassador Todorovich, Em Leitz. You’re a nonexplosive payload, but no less effective for that in my experience.”
Leitz nodded slowly, relaxing a couple of tense muscles he probably hadn’t even realized were locked up.
“I appreciate the explanation, Captain,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Another question, if you don’t mind,” one of the junior members of Todorovich’s staff said, barely loud enough to be heard. The younger woman was clearly being somewhat intimidated but curious.
“Well, the soup appears to be arriving,” Henry pointed out. “But please, Em Morris, hold that thought.”
He remembered Sibyl Morris’s name on his own, but the soup course gave him a chance to bring up the young diplomat’s file, and he suspected he knew her question. Morris was a twenty-five-year-old Spanish brunette who seemed about as inelegant as a ten-week-old puppy and had spent the two years of her time with the UPA’s diplomatic corps working entirely on trade deals between
the member systems.
“Em Morris,” he addressed her as the soup bowls were cleared away. “You had a question.”
He didn’t necessarily want to answer the inevitable question an unblooded diplomat was going to ask, but she was going to need to be educated sooner or later. That was Todorovich’s job, really, but since he was here and she was asking…
“Yes, Captain Wong.” She swallowed nervously, her eyes ticking ever so slightly around her.
Ah. She wasn’t the only one among the junior diplomats and analysts supporting the Ambassador who wanted to ask the question. She was just the one who’d been put up to it.
He wondered if they’d drawn straws or played poker for it or what.
“Go on, Em Morris,” he instructed. “I don’t bite.”
“Why did we engage?” she asked in a rush. “As you said, we could have evaded contact. We didn’t know who they were, and we fired first. I thought this was a diplomatic mission!”
Henry held up a hand to Todorovich as the Ambassador leaned forward.
“It’s an honest question, Em Todorovich,” he said softly. “And not an unreasonable one. We are now at peace, everyone says. The war is over, everyone says. The Gathering is to shape the post-war world.
“But no one told the Kenmiri that,” he reminded his audience fiercely. “The Kenmiri have withdrawn from twelve of their provinces, yes, but there’s been no formal peace negotiations. No surrender. No armistice.
“Any Kenmiri warship we encounter will still see us as the enemy and will still engage,” he continued. “Which makes Kenmiri ships we encounter out here and can’t validate as Vesheron units an active threat not only to ourselves but to anyone else in the region.”
He raised a finger as Morris opened her mouth to try and extract herself.
“That said, I figured the odds they were Kenmiri at under forty percent,” he told the young diplomat. “The other possibility was that they were exactly what they were: ex-Kenmiri units in Vesheron hands, turned to piracy.
“Their refusal to respond to our repeated hails and aggressive maneuvering may not qualify as ‘firing first,’ Em Morris, but they were a definite threat presented to Raven. More, their actions suggested that the ships in question presented a clear and present threat to neutral shipping in the area.
“Our long-term objectives may call for us to avoid entanglements in the former Empire, but we are here, right now. Pirates or rogue Kenmiri units alike, there was no way that engaging those ships wasn’t going to leave this region better off than if we let them go.
“By acting, we cleared the local spaceways for civilian travel and may have provided a significant reinforcement to an at-least theoretically allied local power. I call that a win, Em Morris, and it’s the win I expected when I ordered Commander O’Flannagain to engage the enemy.”
He smiled.
“Does that answer the question your compatriots put you up to asking?”
From the flush on Sybil Morris’s face and the uncomfortable shuffling of chairs and cutlery around her, he’d nailed exactly what had happened.
“It does, Captain Wong,” she said. “I…appreciate your patience.”
“You are far from the first diplomat to question whether violence was the appropriate answer to a situation,” he told her. “You aren’t even the first person on this ship to.” He smiled. “The first person on this ship to question whether that was the right call, after all, was me.”
Dinner was cleared away, and Todorovich gestured for him to join her in her office. He followed readily enough, checking in with his internal network for messages as he did so.
Nothing had threatened to burn the ship down in the seventy minutes of the extended meal. They were ticking toward their next skip—their third and last within Apophis Province—in about seventeen hours.
“I apologize for Em Morris,” Todorovich said when the door closed behind them. “I didn’t realize my back office was going to be that troublesome.”
“That wasn’t troublesome, Ambassador,” Henry replied. “Troublesome is when they ask that question and argue with me afterward rather than being willing to listen and learn. Morris, at least, seems bright enough to have picked up my point.”
He grinned.
“I can’t speak for the rest of your back office, but she had the fortitude to ask a UPSF Colonel if shooting at the enemy was the right call. I like her.”
Todorovich snorted and shook her head.
“Trust you to like the troublemaker that makes you think,” she said. “I’m barely starting to get a feel for you, Captain Wong, but I’m starting to wonder if you’re happy without someone trying to contradict you.”
“On the contrary, Ambassador, I quite enjoy it when everyone agrees with me,” he replied. “Of course, it also makes me worry I’ve done something wrong. A Captain who surrounds themselves with yes-officers sooner or later ends up a dead Captain, Ambassador…and their crew with them.”
She shook her head.
“We’re alone, Captain,” she noted. “You may as well call me Sylvia.”
“Only if you call me Henry,” he said. He tilted his head to get a better view of Todorovich’s face to read her…but she had learned to conceal her expressions from everyone. It was more impressive, to his mind, than his ability to read people across cultural and racial lines.
“Fair enough, Henry,” Todorovich conceded. She opened a cupboard and produced a bottle. “Wine?”
“I won’t argue, Sylvia,” he agreed, letting her name roll off his tongue carefully. A glass of the dark red liquid almost magically materialized in front of him, the dint of long practice on the Ambassador’s part.
“I’ll warn you, I’m not a wine drinker,” he told her. “If this is any good, you’re probably wasting it on me.”
“I’m afraid I don’t keep cheap wine on hand for people with no taste,” she replied with a grin. “You’ll have to suffer the waste, I’m afraid.”
He snorted and saluted her with the glass.
“To the United Planets Alliance,” he toasted.
“The UPA,” she replied. “The UPA and absent friends.”
“God knows we all have enough of them,” Henry agreed, and drank. The wine was good, smooth and dry on the palate. There were probably a billion layers to it he was missing, but it was acceptable to him.
“Even us diplomats,” she agreed. “Let alone officers like you, Henry. Not many still in uniform who were here at the beginning.”
“More than you’d think,” he said. “All of the Admirals were around then. I think the most junior Rear Admiral now was a Commander when the shooting started.” He shrugged. “There aren’t many Colonels or Commodores who weren’t in uniform seventeen years ago, either. A few, yeah, but I think you’ll find most of the senior ranks were in UPSF service from the beginning.”
Of course, even with the dramatic expansion of the UPSF over the war, there were a lot fewer command- and flag-rank officers now than there had been Ensigns and Lieutenants twenty years before. Attrition had taken its toll, and for every officer promoted, there’d been half a dozen flag-draped coffins brought home or fired into a star.
“Fair,” she conceded. “It was a smaller war in many ways than ones we’ve fought in the past. We didn’t feed an entire generation into the meat grinder.”
“We’re better off this way,” Henry agreed. “Though I wonder sometimes if the General Assembly might feel more committed to the stars we just spent ten years fighting through if it really had been total war on our side.”
The gravity shield hadn’t made the UPA’s ships invulnerable, but it had made them tough beyond any rational amount of firepower. They’d taken far fewer losses than their allies, which had allowed the UPA to maintain the war with only a moderate commitment from the member systems.
“It’s intentional that the UPSF is far weaker than the old colonial fleets,” Todorovich noted. “The Novaya Imperiya and the USCA are better left in the ashbin of his
tory.”
“I’d take Raven against the massed fleets of the USCA or the Novaya Imperiya, thanks,” Henry said with a chuckle. “A hundred years of technological advancement will give you that.”
He shook his head. The UPA had banned its member systems and their lower tiers of government—like, for example, Russia or the USA—from owning skip-capable warships. Those were the sole province of the United Planets Space Force.
It was hard to wage war between star systems without skip-capable ships, after all, and the UPSF was less likely to be drawn into politics between member systems.
“I’m not sure a bloodier war would have made the General Assembly more concerned about what happened afterward,” she told him. “I think the war-weariness factor might have been even worse. We were only just starting to see new colonies get to the point of asking for entry-level Assembly membership when the war started.
“There’s a dozen systems begging for more attention and money to grow new colonies—attention and money that’s gone to the UPSF of late. The Assembly has focuses closer to home that they’d like to deal with.
“They don’t want commitments outside our borders.”
“I know,” he allowed. “But I know these people out here, too. If we hadn’t tangled with the First Warlord, it would have been years before Trintar or the other local powers could have dealt with six escorts without exposing their home systems.
“We happened to be passing through, and we probably saved dozens of ships and thousands of lives. What happens without us?”
“I don’t know,” she conceded. “But I do know that you and I? We don’t make those decisions. Even diplomats get their marching orders, Henry. And we follow them. Whether we like them or not.”
“So do soldiers,” he said, looking at the wine. “I guess we have at least that in common.”
Chapter Twenty-One
With one last kick—relatively gentle, all things considered—Raven’s skip drive delivered her to the Resta System. Once the homeworld of four minor colonies, all settled with sublight ships that had taken twenty to forty years to reach their destination, it had become almost a provincial sub-capital under the Kenmiri occupation.
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