Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “We have to initiate the skip at exactly the right moment in the pulsar’s rotation.”

  Lieutenant Fulvia Charmchi looked nervous to be briefing the squadron Commodore. There wasn’t much Henry could do to reassure the dark-skinned young woman, so he simply gestured for Paladin’s navigator to proceed.

  This meeting was in Captain Ihejirika’s office and was just the three of them—giving the young Lieutenant the best opportunity she was ever going to have to screw up in front of superiors in a safe environment.

  Assuming, of course, she considered being alone with a Lieutenant Colonel and a Commodore the safe environment her Captain had intended for it to be.

  “It’s a vector-addition problem,” Charmchi said slowly after a moment. “The pulsar’s radiation beam has an icosaspatial aspect to it as well, which impacts our velocity when we skip. If we time it correctly, it’s a huge boost.”

  “And if we get it wrong, it slows us down,” Ihejirika concluded. “So, how narrow is the window?”

  “Three milliseconds,” the navigator told them.

  Henry swallowed.

  “Is it as bad coming to the pulsar?” he asked.

  “No, that’s a more standard mass-to-mass calculation,” she said, a little bit more confident. “But when we’re this close to the source neutron star…” She spread her hands. “We’re lucky in that Ra-Two-Oh-Six is a relatively low-frequency pulsar with an eleven-millisecond cycle.”

  “So, there are three milliseconds of that cycle in which we can make the skip?” Henry asked, to confirm his understanding.

  “Yes, ser. We’ll sequence the computers to the sensors and rig up everything as best as we can, but it’s a very tight window. There can be no human intervention once the program is triggered.”

  “How short do we fall if we get it wrong?” Henry said quietly. “If we jump in the other eight milliseconds of the cycle?”

  “From three light-months to twelve light-years, depending on how far we miss the window,” Charmchi admitted. “I’m not certain of the exact range, but in almost all cases, we are…”

  “Fucked,” Ihejirika finished for her. “We have six months of supplies aboard and can maybe recycle food and water to stretch that to a year. Even with the GMS, we maybe have enough delta-v to get to Nohtoin in a year.”

  “Let’s not make any mistakes, then,” Henry replied. “The Drifters took hundreds of ships and millions of civilians through this skip line. So long as we get it right, we’re fine.”

  “We’re working on refining the program, sers,” Charmchi said. “Current expected error is two-point-two milliseconds.”

  Henry wasn’t even looking at Ihejirika and he knew the younger man had just swallowed hard. Henry, on the other hand, smiled at the young navigator.

  “And what does Navigation think is an acceptable expected error?” he asked quietly.

  “A tenth of that, sers,” she replied. “If we cannot refine the program to under a quarter-millisecond timing error, I cannot responsibly recommend that the squadron make the skip.”

  Henry was still smiling as the young Persian woman faced him, her shoulders suddenly square and her spine straight. She was still intimidated and nervous, but she was solid on that point. That was her responsibility.

  “Good,” Henry told her. “I look forward to confirmation that we’re there, Lieutenant, but I have no intention of overruling our navigators’ collective judgment today.

  “How long until we reach the skip line?”

  The three destroyers were in position along the skip line, their formation a rough arrow with Paladin at the tip.

  Henry was once again on the tiny flag deck aboard his flagship, considering the large screen that was the only thing that really made the room a flag deck.

  “All ships are in position,” Eowyn confirmed. “Standing by word from the Navigation departments.”

  “All vessels are to skip independently,” Henry said quietly. “We’ll arrive at much the same time in the end, I suspect.”

  “Understood.”

  The Captains were also linked in via internal network coms, the computers in their heads sustaining a digital coms channel that would fail the moment any of them entered the skip line.

  “All Nav departments confirm their programs are within acceptable parameters,” Eowyn said. “Your orders, Commodore?”

  “All ships will skip when ready,” Henry ordered.

  He brought up a virtual window through his internal network, projecting a feed of Paladin’s bridge in the air in front of him. Ihejirika held down his central chair with an air of calm that Henry suspected was copied from him.

  Charmchi was watching a series of readouts on her screen, then looked back at her CO.

  “Skip in ten seconds,” she reported. “Program is initiating with countdown.”

  An alarm rang through the ship, followed by Charmchi’s words.

  This skip had been hours in preparation. Everyone should be ready for it, with loose objects secured and so forth.

  But there was only so much bracing that could be done, and Henry suspected that this one would be worse than normal.

  He was right.

  His stomach fell left. His brain fell right. The universe kicked him in the nuts from nineteen different directions, most of which his brain couldn’t process, and then smacked him in the face from a dozen more as he winced from that.

  A skip impulse only lasted seconds, but it always felt longer.

  Henry exhaled a long, pained breath and looked around at his staff. Eowyn had her eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully. Chan was doing much the same, but their eyes were open and focused on their screens.

  “No external coms,” Chan finally reported. “Internal coms are good.”

  “Thank you.” Henry reactivated his link to the bridge. “Captain Ihejirika?”

  “All signs show successful insertion, ser,” Ihejirika told him. “Secondary impulse generation in eight hours. Everything should be quiet until then.”

  “I hope so,” Henry muttered. There wasn’t anything in space that could affect a ship in skip transit, not that he knew about. “I’m going to close down here for the night,” he continued to his flag captain.

  “Let me know if anything comes up.”

  Chapter Three

  The battlecruiser Panther was a deadly weapon in Henry’s hands, slicing through the Kenmiri dreadnoughts like they weren’t even there. The flow of time was wrong—wrong enough for Henry to pull himself back from the old dream as his ship closed with the Kenmorad evacuation transport.

  “She’s the last one, ser,” his old executive officer proclaimed as Panther closed with their target. “If we kill that ship, we commit genocide. We end a species.”

  Neither Henry nor Emil Tyson had known that then. Operation Golden Lancelot had been structured so that none of the officers involved knew that their attack on a Kenmorad breeding sect was one of dozens.

  Henry watched his dream-self give the orders that had doomed a species. The Kenmiri were made up of biologically separate castes—and only the Kenmorad could breed. Without the Kenmorad, the Kenmiri—and their galaxy-spanning empire of ten thousand stars—were doomed to a slow death over a century.

  The actual battle had lasted almost half an hour and seen the deaths of half a dozen Vesheron escorts watching Panther’s back, but his nightmare blew through all of that in moments. A single gravity-driver round pierced the Kenmorad evac ship amidships, detonating with a force no real warhead could match.

  “That’s it, then,” a grotesque goblin that no longer resembled anyone who’d been there, declared. “The Kenmorad are no more. The Kenmiri will die. We are victorious!”

  Blood drenched dream-Henry’s hands, but the scene was already shifting as Henry tried to regain control of his dreams.

  He failed and was suddenly in a place he’d only ever seen on video feeds: the main plaza of La-Tar’s capital city. He was standing on a wooden platform, watching as a h
undred people of a dozen races were marched up in front of a Kozun firing squad.

  Many of the people were of the Ashall races, people like the Kozun and Eerdish who could pass for human at a distance. About a tenth were Enteni, the clearly inhuman aliens who looked like walking Venus flytraps.

  “Give the order,” a voice barked in Henry’s ear. He turned to see his old friend Kalad standing next to him, glaring at him. Like all Kozun, she looked human enough—except that she only had hair on the back half of her head, with armor plating protecting her forehead.

  “What?” he asked helplessly.

  “These people die by your order,” Kalad said calmly. “So, give it.”

  “No,” he snapped. “I won’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “You aggravated us, left the innocents to die. Then you let their killers get away. So, give the order.”

  His body moved without his permission, his hand rising and dropping in a gesture that sometimes seemed universal.

  Energy weapons crackled in the night, innocents screaming and falling as another Kozun mass execution marred the once-beautiful park.

  Henry tried to pull himself away and found himself somewhere else, aboard a Kozun warship. Kalad was still there, but there was a meter-long spear of metal embedded in her stomach.

  “You did this,” she accused him. “You organized it all. A trap—and then you abandoned us. My daughter will never know her mother. Because of you.”

  Somehow, that was the final straw and Henry managed to yank enough control of his dreams to jerk awake, sweating in the dark as he cursed.

  His internal network pinged a warning across his vision.

  Trauma nightmares detected. Repetition at level of concern. Recommend immediate appointment with ship’s doctor.

  “Fuck. That.”

  The curse word hung in the air as Henry shook himself. He’d spent four months on psychiatric leave after Golden Lancelot had ended, only to demand that the United Planets Alliance do something for the worlds the Kenmiri had abandoned.

  That had put him on La-Tar, facing down a Kozun invasion—and now, here, in an unsteady alliance with the Kozun, the very people who had carried out mass executions to try to hang on to control of La-Tar.

  “The Drifters killed you, Kalad,” he whispered. “We couldn’t have done anything.”

  His ship had been half-wrecked by the Drifters’ ambush, and he’d fled into hiding while Kalad’s ships had been overrun. His old friend had died to their betrayal.

  His internal network was right. He needed to set up more counseling appointments—but there was one thing Commodore Henry Wong was definitely not doing.

  He was not stepping back and turning the fight against the Drifters over to someone else. This was personal now.

  Chapter Four

  “Skip emergence in sixty seconds.”

  Charmchi’s voice echoed through Paladin’s entire hundred-and-fifty-meter-long hull, the PA system warning every member of the crew that reality was about to normalize.

  Henry didn’t find the exit warning as necessary as the entry warning. There was no “kick” from the impulse generators when they left twenty-dimensional space. They just fell back into normal space, like a skipped stone sinking beneath the surface of a river.

  The question today was whether they’d be entering regular space in the right place. Henry was reasonably confident, but accidents did happen.

  “Captain Ihejirika, status,” he asked Paladin’s CO.

  “We are at battle stations and standing by,” Ihejirika replied. “Lasers are charged, and missile launchers are clear. Paladin is ready for combat, ser.”

  Henry took a moment to miss the gravity driver that served as a battlecruiser’s main gun. Since the size of a battlecruiser was currently set entirely by the size of the grav-driver, there was no way the smaller destroyer could carry the gun.

  He still felt the absence of a main gun firing a smart projectile at seven percent of the speed of light—and the battlecruiser’s small but effective fighter wing, for that matter. Paladin had just as many missile launchers and heavy lasers as Raven had carried, but she lacked the fighters and the main gun.

  Her antimissile defenses were weaker, but her gravity shields were just as powerful. That was new for the Cataphract-class ships, a side effect of using the same projectors for the shield as the GMS.

  “Emergence in ten seconds,” Charmchi reported.

  Henry exhaled a quiet sigh, linking his internal network into the combat systems and checking the tactical plot in front of him. Right now, the screen was empty—but Eowyn would fix that the moment they emerged.

  “Emergence.”

  It was like someone had lifted a weight off his shoulders that he hadn’t seen. A dizziness he’d ceased to notice disappeared, as did a small headache in his left temple. Everything came slightly more clearly into focus as reality returned to the regular three dimensions humans could handle.

  “Welcome to the Nohtoin System,” Eowyn said drily. “I’m pulling Paladin’s scans into the squadron tactical net… We have Cataphract linking in.”

  Several seconds passed and Henry looked at the screen with growing concern. They had made it to the target system, but if he’d lost a destroyer along the way, that was going to be a big problem…

  “We have Maharatha,” Eowyn reported as the third destroyer flashed into existence, the inverted canoe shape of her hull seeming to fall into existence out of nowhere. “Linking with all Tactical departments and pulling together initial reports.”

  Henry tried to conceal his sigh of relief. There were four hundred people aboard each of his destroyers. If he’d killed four hundred people by taking a risky skip, he’d never have forgiven himself.

  From a couple of the looks his staff sent his way, he wasn’t as successful as he’d have liked. The flag deck aboard Paladin was far too small for his taste, and he turned his focus back to the main display.

  Nohtoin’s geography matched the files they had from other sources. The star was an A-type small blue giant, orbited by three gas giants, all smaller than Sol’s Jupiter. There were no rocky planetary bodies, though all three planets had enough rings and moons to make up for the lack.

  “Nohtoin B was host to the Kenmiri fueling base,” Eowyn reminded him. “Standard skip lines used in this system are here, here and here.”

  The skip line from the pulsar had brought them out closer to Nohtoin C. B, on the other hand, had an orbit that kept it reasonably close to at least one of the useful skip lines at least ninety percent of the time.

  “Are we picking up anything useful at B?” Henry asked.

  “Nothing from this distance,” Eowyn admitted. “The entire place is dead as a graveyard.”

  Henry nodded his acknowledgement as he looked over the tactical plot.

  “And the Convoy?” he asked.

  “We have a trail heading to B,” his Operations officer told him. “Potentially, they refueled there. What data we have suggests that B has a higher hydrogen-helium ratio than C or A.”

  Which would also explain why the Kenmiri had put their base there.

  “Chan, orders to the squadron,” Henry told his coms officer. “We’ll set our course for B and investigate. Maintain one-half KPS-squared. Let’s not give away any secrets until we’re sure we’re not being watched.”

  This was the first place he’d expected to be watched since they’d started the pursuit, which made it time to be careful. Point-five KPS2 was the standard acceleration of the rest of the United Planets Space Force, slower than both the Kenmiri and their former Vesheron allies.

  The Cataphracts could pull two kilometers per second without any difficulty, but that was a surprise Henry was hoping to keep under wraps. Even without expected observers, he’d kept the squadron to a maximum of one KPS2 so far.

  “Let’s see if we spook anyone,” he murmured. “If I were the Convoy, I’d have left a scout—but a scout isn’t much use if she doesn’t report.” />
  Crossing star systems was never a fast process. With most sensible people limiting their skips to twelve hours, most starships spent longer crossing star systems than they ever did in skip. The flight to Nohtoin B was estimated at just over a day, which sent Henry back to bed.

  He was awoken by an emergency alert that hammered into his internal network, the implanted computer waking him far more effectively than any audio alarm ever could and, thankfully, with much less disorientation.

  “Wong,” he answered the alert crisply. “Report.”

  “Ser, we have a contact at Nohtoin B,” Lieutenant Commander Medb Bach’s voice said in his skull. The Procyon-born officer was Paladin’s Tactical officer—and probably should have gone through Commander Eowyn to wake Henry.

  On the other hand…

  “Details?” Henry asked.

  “Estimate one hundred and fifty thousand tons,” the Tactical officer reported crisply. “She’s burning for the skip line for the Osonal System at one-point-two KPS.”

  Henry blinked a map of the region into existence in front of him. Osonal was in Eerdish space, which confirmed their suspicion of where the Convoy had gone after refueling.

  With the current geometry, though…the scout was quite distant from the Osonal skip line. At point-five KPS2, his ships could never catch her—the scout’s captain had chosen a balance between getting out safely and getting as much information on Henry’s ships as possible.

  But.

  “Are Eowyn or Chan up?” he asked the Tactical officer.

  “No, ser,” Bach said. “That’s why I contacted you.”

  “Wake them up,” Henry ordered. “And pass the orders for all ships to enter pursuit course…at full acceleration.”

  By the time Henry made it to the flag deck, the geometry of what was going to happen was already clear. At two KPS2, his destroyers were radiating a lot of energy. The lack of engine exhaust was more than made up for by the heat created by the gravity wells themselves.