Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  On the other hand, he’d faced those dreadnoughts. So, he took a deep breath and left the car, concealing the bouquet behind his back as he approached the main house.

  The door swung open before he even reached it, a GroundDiv trooper stepping swiftly aside to allow Sylvia Todorovich to step outside with almost undignified haste. She looked every bit as sharp and severe as she usually did, in a crisply tailored suit with her platinum-blond hair tied back in an austere bun.

  When he met her gaze, however, he knew that every scrap of nervousness had been completely unnecessary.

  “Em Todorovich,” he greeted her, bowing slightly.

  “Henry, if you try to be formal with me, I am going to insist on kissing you in front of fifty of your soldiers and my people,” Sylvia told him. “Pick your poison.”

  He laughed, his features splitting in a broader smile than he was used to, and then produced the bouquet as they stepped within reach of each other.

  “As you insist, Sylvia,” he murmured. “For you.”

  For a few seconds, even her sharp-edged features softened as she smiled brilliantly.

  “Really?” she asked, an entirely out-of-character near-gasp. Then she shook herself and held out a hand for the flowers.

  Henry passed them over and Sylvia buried her face in them, taking in the scent. The smile remained when she looked back up, though she’d regained some composure for public consumption.

  “Thirteen red roses,” she murmured. “Or as close as you get on La-Tar. How very Russkiy of you.”

  “I got as far as flowers on my own,” he admitted. “The rest was everyone around us making sure we did it right.”

  Sylvia chuckled at that.

  “Speaking of doing it right, we do have work,” she conceded. “With me?”

  Nodding, he followed Sylvia—still holding the flowers to her heart—into the embassy house.

  It was much what he expected of a building built for the Kenmorad. The doors were designed for beings that were three meters tall on average. The furniture was heavily stuffed and easily able to swallow humans whole. The walls were covered in gold-filigree murals of Kenmiri stories.

  The Artisan Caste of the Kenmiri would never create something plain when something ornate would do—and they saved their best efforts for their parents. A single queen and consort pairing could produce ten thousand Kenmiri larvae a year, which would develop into Drones, Artisans, or Warriors based on the hormones applied during gestation.

  Birthing Kenmorad had been a far more demanding process, actually requiring that a specifically treated larva be implanted into the third Kenmorad sex, the Mora. Any Kenmorad triad was seen as parents by any and all Kenmiri they encountered.

  A world like La-Tar may well have never seen a single triad, let alone a full breeding sect. But the mansions had been built to house and protect them.

  The irony of using those mansions to house the allies that had doomed the Kenmiri Empire was not, Henry suspected, lost on the locals.

  “In here,” Sylvia instructed as they reached a door in the long central corridor.

  Henry followed her into what looked like a conference room—but he didn’t have a chance to take in much of the space before Sylvia had her arms around him and he suddenly had far better things to pay attention to.

  They came up for air after a moment, and Sylvia carefully checked that they hadn’t damaged the flowers.

  “I’ll have to find a vase for these,” she murmured. “I imagine we have some somewhere in the building. Though I suppose the Kenmorad might not have gone in for those.”

  “The Kenmorad generally did not go for living decoration, no,” Felix Leitz said in a perfectly calm tone from the other side of the table. “If we have any vases, they’re going to be ridiculously overdecorated.”

  He paused.

  “I’ll send someone into the city for something and we’ll make it work until then,” the chief of staff concluded.

  Henry stepped slightly back from Sylvia and saw that Leitz was the only person in the room, standing next to a locally made table and chairs lacking in any adornment. The Kenmiri-style furniture wouldn’t have fit any Ashall or Enteni meeting, he supposed.

  Leitz was poking at a trio of datapads on the desk, presumably the briefing files for this meeting. While Henry would have made the trip to see Sylvia regardless, there was actual work they needed to discuss as well—there was a vast gap between getting summary reports on what was going on diplomatically and getting Sylvia’s direct personal assessment.

  “We’re scheduled for about two hours for this meeting,” Leitz told them after a moment—probably giving someone the instructions to find a vase via his internal network—“and after that, you’re both free for the local evening. I made sure of it,” he noted drily.

  “My people have made reservations and security arrangements at a local restaurant,” Henry told Sylvia quietly. “If you will permit me to take you to dinner after we are done work?”

  “I think I’ll permit that,” she said with a smile. “First, sadly, I’m not sure two hours is going to be enough for us to go over everything. Shall we get started?”

  By that point, the Peacekeeper Initiative had regained contact with the three homeworlds in the Kozun cluster, the Beren homeworld and—counting La-Tar and the three under Kozun control—seven of the Ra Sector slave-world clusters.

  They had five postal stations in the La-Tar Cluster, one at Beren and currently four in the other dependency clusters. Ten space stations maintaining relatively consistent communication with twenty-one inhabited worlds—and they let the Kozun courier service maintain communication with the Hierarchy and its eighteen inhabited worlds.

  “Our problem remains more the uncontacted systems than anything else,” Sylvia finally told him after spending thirty minutes going over their basic status with each of the contacted worlds. “The Sindic, Orta and Vash Clusters aren’t politically unified the way the La-Tar Cluster is, but they are at least feeding all of the worlds and talking to us.

  “Eventually, we’ll want post stations at all fifteen worlds in those clusters,” she observed. “For the moment, we have four. We’re starting to run out of resources to assemble a sector-wide communication network.”

  “In the long run, we’ll want to either privatize that or bring the locals in on it,” Henry told her. “We want to keep control of the skip drones for now, but that requires us to put people on every inhabited planet we want contact with—and that’s sixty-five worlds in the Ra Sector alone.”

  “My inclination is to help fund a private corporation to take up a post-office role in the region,” she agreed. “That’s something we’ll need to get on quickly, but for now, I’ve sent in the requests for more UPSF communications personnel to be assigned to the Initiative.”

  “Is there anyone I should be making sure my people head toward other than E-Two space?” he asked. “We need to make contact with them now, there’s no way around that, but there are other planets out there still.”

  “Your people got a bit distracted by a war,” Sylvia said drily. “You’re at, what, half the sector?”

  “Around there,” he confirmed. The catalogs were up to about Ra-258 for system names, though they’d never use the number for an inhabited system. “And we’re in contact with thirty-nine worlds and aware of the status of twelve more through the Kozun.”

  The Kozun had given them information on the E-Two Alliance—the Enteni and Eerdish homeworlds and an allied slave-world cluster—and the Trast Cluster, who had managed a defensive alliance against the Hierarchy if not a political union yet.

  “Which I trust as far as I can throw this house,” Sylvia observed.

  “The Kozun or their data?” Henry asked. “I agree with you on both, to be fair.”

  “Felix?” She gestured to her chief of staff.

  “We haven’t yet had any chance to validate information on the Trast or the E-Two Alliance that the Kozun provided us,” Leitz said grimly
. “We have been able to compare their information on Beren and the Sindic Cluster versus what the locals have to say.”

  “How badly are they lying?” Henry asked bluntly. He’d fought alongside the Kozun for years. He wanted to trust them—or, at least, specific individual Kozun—but the Hierarchy had not demonstrated a general trustworthiness.

  “The Sindic Cluster is relatively close to La-Tar, as a region of five hundred stars and several hundred thousand cubic light-years goes,” Leitz noted. “Kozun information on the Sindic Cluster mostly aligns with what the locals have told us. Both sides claim the other lost more ships in the conflict than that side reports, but that’s normal.

  “Hierarchy forces landed on Zotr but failed to take it,” Leitz continued. “The Hierarchy says they made a strategic decision and withdrew with light losses. The Zotrians say they basically wiped out the invasion force, forcing the Hierarchy to retreat with empty transports.”

  “The Zotrians and Sindics have asked us to assist in arranging a repatriation agreement for seventy-eight thousand Kozun ground troops,” Sylvia noted drily as Henry considered Leitz’s words.

  “That does suggest that the Zotrians’ version is more correct, doesn’t it?” he murmured. “Have we had that discussion with them yet?”

  “Not in detail,” Sylvia admitted. “San Taval has not been as available for discussions as I would like—and far from as cooperative as I’d like.”

  Henry grimaced. He’d read the names in her briefings and looked up his old mission reports.

  “I haven’t met San Taval,” he admitted. “I did know his sister, but she died storming the prison camp he was held in. A common-enough story then.”

  Going through the mission reports had been a grim reminder. Over seventy percent of the Kozun fighters, operatives and ship handlers he’d met during his tour with them had died before his tour was over. Maybe a quarter had lived to see their homeworld liberated—and he didn’t want to check to see how many had died in Mal Dakis’s wars of conquest.

  “You knew him by reputation, then?” Sylvia asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Panther provided fire support for those rescue ops as one of the last things we did with the Kozun,” he told her. “Those prison camps provided Mal Dakis the numbers to actually invade Kozun.”

  For all of his concerns about the post-Fall Hierarchy, he had to admit that Mal Dakis had achieved the almost-unequaled feat of freeing his homeworld while the Kenmiri Empire existed. Henry’s battlecruiser had been whisked away to other duties within hours of that victory, but he’d been there for it.

  “San Shora specifically chose to lead the assault on the camp her brother was in, but that’s all I know about him,” he said. “There’s a few mission reports from other officers who’ve interacted with him since, but I assume you’ve read those.”

  “I have,” Sylvia admitted. “He lost his legs in the assault on Kozun and ended up serving as a key part of Mal Dakis’s transition administration, earning the First Voice’s trust. Now he’s here, where his job is to waste my fucking time.”

  Henry saw her inhale sharply after the curse and hesitated. That was out of character for her.

  “He’s spinning things out, I take it?” he asked.

  “I am reasonably sure San Taval knows the answers to most of our questions and has the authority to negotiate on the rest,” Sylvia said. “He is under orders to hold out as long as he can on any point. They haven’t even committed to what they’re providing Twelfth Fleet beyond ships.”

  “So, two corvettes?” Henry guessed. From Leitz’s concealed snort, that had been the diplomatic staff’s guess as well.

  “We’re hoping for better, but Taval’s job is to obfuscate and cover while his government attempts to finish the one war they have left,” Sylvia told him. “I don’t blame him for doing what he’s been told to do, but it makes him irritating to interact with.

  “The Kozun, so far as I can tell, believe they can defeat the E-Two Alliance, seizing another seven worlds, two of them homeworlds, before finally stopping to digest their conquests,” she concluded.

  “We’ve advised them of the terms we’ll accept their conquests under,” Henry pointed out. “Is there any sign that they’re planning on meeting them?”

  “Again, San Taval is equivocating,” Sylvia said with a sigh. “We have some data.”

  “The La-Tar Cluster government has infiltrated agents into the Roaf Cluster,” Leitz told Henry. “That’s helped by the fact that there is a significant Kozun population on the former slave worlds.”

  Henry nodded. There were seven species homeworlds in the Ra Sector. The fifty-five slave worlds had been set up with massive drafts of workers from those planets—which was why the homeworlds had been allowed to operate with some degree of internal autonomy.

  So long as they were willing to hand over ten million people every few years. It wasn’t a deal Henry would have taken—but he also knew the Kenmiri hadn’t given those races any choice.

  “What intelligence the Cluster has provided us suggests that the Kozun are actually planning on meeting our terms,” Leitz said. “They certainly seem to be implementing administrative structures that would allow for a moderate level of local autonomy, at least on par with the homeworlds under Kenmiri rule.”

  “That’s a low bar,” Henry observed.

  “Frankly, it’s the bar I was hoping for,” Sylvia admitted. “Nobody out here knows what a democratic government looks like, Henry. Even most of the La-Tar Cluster basically just swapped out Kenmiri administrators for locals and used the same infrastructures.”

  “Arbiter Ran’s role is still more of a mediator than a ruler,” Leitz pointed out. “He’s determined to come up with some kind of popular mandate for his replacement. We’re helping.”

  Casto Ran had been the Lord Nominated of the Skex System, a Tak tradition where an individual was given dictatorial powers for a specified length of time—with assassins infiltrated into their bodyguards to make sure the term limit was respected, one way or another!

  Now he was the Arbiter of the La-Tar Cluster and determined to create something that would survive his term in that role.

  “I trust Ran further than some of our people,” Henry admitted. “But he can only commit so much firepower to Twelfth Fleet.”

  “We’re honestly expecting Ran to match whatever the Kozun give us,” Sylvia admitted. “So, the dance with San Taval is frustrating—but we’re still weeks away from Chiana’s arrival with Twelfth Fleet’s new fighters.”

  “And Twelfth Fleet can’t deploy until we know where the BGO Convoy went,” Henry said. “And that means we need to know what’s going on with the E-Two Alliance—which means our next steps are a political question, not a military one.

  “Not even a Peacekeeper Initiative one.”

  That was the meat of the meeting. The briefings and explanations back and forth brought the two of them up to speed on what the other was thinking, but the real task in front of them was the Eerdish-Enteni Alliance.

  “The Kozun would be delighted if we were to move against them militarily,” Sylvia noted. “Admiral Rex seems…a tad too ready to embrace that option, in my opinion.”

  “Admiral Rex has been a UPSF officer since I was two years old,” Henry murmured. “When your entire life is spent working with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He’s flexible enough, I believe, but if we’re depending on his diplomacy, his words will be backed by fleet carriers.”

  “And that is a very particular type of diplomacy, isn’t it?” Sylvia said. “I do not believe, Henry, that conflict with the Eerdish-Enteni Alliance is necessary or desired. Quite the opposite—I think that they represent a critically important potential ally and counterweight to the Kozun Hierarchy.

  “We’ve already basically agreed to leave the Hierarchy in place,” she reminded him. “That means that Mal Dakis and his people are going to be the preeminent power of the Ra Sector for the foreseeable future.r />
  “We’ll try to bend the arc of their development toward what we regard as a moral world, but that will be easier to do if they can’t just overrun everyone who irritates them.”

  “The more active powers there are in the Ra Sector, the more the Kozun are limited, and the better off I think we’ll all be,” Henry agreed. “Plus, based on our encounters here, I like the Enteni. Crazy meat-eating plants that they are.”

  La-Tar’s planetary government had ended up being led by an Enteni, Adamant Will—and Adamant Will’s child, Rising Principle, had accompanied Henry and Sylvia to negotiate the alliance that had liberated La-Tar from the Kozun.

  They were also the only non-Ashall aliens native to the Ra Sector. Some of the slave worlds would have other non-Ashall people on them—the Kenmiri hadn’t always limited the colonist drafts to nearby worlds—but most of the Ra Sector’s people were Ashall. The Seeded Races.

  Folks who could pass for human in a dark alley.

  “Me too,” Sylvia told him. “Which I think actually gives us our answer, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh?”

  “The La-Tar Cluster has both Eerdish and Enteni diplomats and officers,” she noted. “I suggest we organize a meeting with Adamant Will and Casto Ran and arrange to borrow some.

  “We assemble a diplomatic contingent of our own people and the Cluster’s people, and then we go pay the E-Two Alliance’s leaders a visit. Rather than chasing the Drifters in via that pulsar, we just knock on the front door and go say hello to their leadership.”

  “That does reduce our chances of confusing people or surprising them,” Henry admitted. “My inclination is to bring that diplomatic contingent and still chase the Drifters in, though. Then we’re in ‘hot pursuit’ and have a clear objective.”

  “The problem is that everything they know about what’s going on comes from the Kozun,” she pointed out. “And they’re at war with the Kozun.”

  “So, they’re going to see us as an enemy,” Henry guessed. “And if we don’t come through, lights shining and asking to be taken to their leader…”