Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  And at this point, Henry literally had nothing to do unless he saw a reason to change the firing pattern.

  “Range in thirty seconds,” Eowyn chanted. “Flight time, five minutes. Watching for outbound fire. They’ve upgraded their coms and stealth… They may have upgraded their missiles.”

  One of the minor oddities of the war, caused by the fact that the Vesheron and Drifters had started their arsenals with stolen Kenmiri missiles, was that everyone had used basically the same missiles. With a few minutes of flight data, Henry’s people could identify UPA-built versus Drifter-built versus Kozun-built missiles, but the overall performance envelope was fundamentally identical.

  But after three years, that might have changed.

  “Missiles away,” the Ops officer reported. Seconds ticked away. “Missile launches detected on orbital platforms. Estimate two hundred twenty missiles inbound, repeat, two two zero missiles inbound.”

  “Make certain we ID the resonance missiles,” Henry ordered. “Intel still puts the odds at sixty-plus percent that the Drifters got them from the Kenmiri.”

  “Scanning,” Eowyn confirmed. More seconds ticked by as the missiles hurtled toward each other at a combined twenty KPS2.

  “Ser, I do not detect any resonance missiles,” she said formally. “All missiles show radiation signatures consistent with Kenmiri fusion-conversion warheads.”

  “Interesting,” Henry said calmly. He glanced at the individual screens on the arm of his chair, showing the commanders of his destroyers. “Captains. Fight your ships.”

  That was the last trick he’d been watching for. If anything else happened, well…they’d improvise.

  His three ships adjusted formation as the missiles closed. Now they formed an equal-sided vertical triangle, with five thousand kilometers between each ship and her sisters. Close enough to cover each other with antimissile lasers, far enough that the missiles had to pick an individual target.

  “Laser range will be sixty seconds after first missile impact,” Eowyn told him. “Orbit…some fifteen minutes after that.”

  Henry nodded. There wasn’t much chance the Kenmiri platforms would still be around when his destroyers made orbit. It was possible they’d get lucky and damage one of his ships—but their best chance was at close laser range. And they weren’t going to get that chance.

  “Scans confirm the platforms have raised energy screens,” one of Eowyn’s people reported. “We accounted for that in the targeting plan, no adjustments. Impact in sixty seconds.”

  “Defensive systems online, antimissile lasers engaging,” Eowyn added. “Destroyer Tactical teams have control; we are flagging targets for assist.”

  There was no way Henry’s three ships could shoot down over two hundred missiles. A proper battlecruiser group, with a Corvid-class ship and half a dozen destroyers, might have been able to. DesRon Twenty-Seven was doing well, Henry noted, but his estimate was that they’d still have over a hundred and fifty missiles hit the ships.

  So long as the gravity shields were up, his people could handle that.

  Only the after-action report would tell Henry how many missiles of that first salvo made it through the squadron’s antimissile fire. They detonated in a tidal wave of fire that washed over his ships like a storm breaking, and he held his breath.

  He knew this drill, but that didn’t make that wash of flame any less intimidating.

  “Report,” he ordered.

  “Minor blowthrough on Cataphract’s shield,” Eowyn said after a moment. “No damage.”

  The gravity shield created a shear zone a handful of centimeters wide where gravity went from nothing to thousands of gravities and then back to nothing. They could open gunports in it to fire their own weapons and adjust their scanners for the shear factor, but any incoming weapon or plasma burst had to hit that shear zone and stay intact and on target.

  The odds were very much in the shielded ship’s favor.

  “And our fire?” Henry asked.

  “Target one is destroyed. Two and three are showing signs of damage but remain intact,” his Ops officer told him. “Second salvo is adjusting automatically. Laser range in forty seconds, second-wave impact in ten.”

  Their own antimissile fire was already blazing out, tearing gaping holes in the incoming second salvo. There would be multiple full-strength salvos to weather still, fired before the loss of the first defensive platforms.

  More plasma fire washed over Henry’s ships and he grimaced.

  “Still no resonance warheads?” he asked.

  “None,” Eowyn confirmed. “Their ECM has improved; we’re not getting as many as I’d like. No blowthroughs that time, though.”

  “Trouble tracking their missiles?” Henry said.

  His Ops officer chuckled.

  “No, because our counter-ECM has improved more than their ECM,” she noted. “But against their wartime missiles, we’d be scoring ninety percent kills-per-shot. We’re actually around eighty, it looks like.”

  “And them?”

  “Target two and three are destroyed; four is leaking hydrogen fuel and has ceased firing missiles. Five through eleven…”

  Eowyn shrugged.

  “Laser range in five,” she concluded.

  Henry barely had time to nod and breathe before they crossed the line where his computers calculated they could reliably hit evading targets—roughly seven hundred thousand kilometers.

  “Laser strikes on the gravity shields,” Eowyn reported. “Multiple strikes on all ships, multiple complete misses… No blowthroughs so far.”

  Each of the remaining eight platforms had two lasers, very similar to the armament of Henry’s three destroyers. Their energy shields were far less resilient than his people’s gravity shields, though, and the focused beams of three destroyers obliterated target four in a single salvo.

  Five through eight died a few moments later as the lasers shattered shields in time for missiles to detonate, converting their mass into enormous shotgun blasts of plasma that vaporized huge chunks of the space stations.

  Sixty seconds after they reached laser range, still over ten minutes from slowing into orbit of Moti-V-6, there was nothing left in orbit of the moon but drifting debris.

  “Maharatha took a glancing blow from one of the lasers,” Eowyn reported. “Captain Teunissen reports that they’re mostly looking at lost heat radiators, and she has teams on their way to replace them.”

  “Watch for ground installations,” Henry ordered. “We’ve eliminated the defenders we can see, but let’s not take any extra chances. Especially if Teunissen is putting people on her hull.”

  It was a measured risk. Unlike older ships, the Cataphracts actually had enough power to run everything at once—even on Raven, Henry had had to balance capacitors to feed his lasers and shields simultaneously—but they paid for that by having almost no excess heat-radiation capability at full power.

  With Maharatha at full battle readiness, she needed every heat radiator she could get—but they were also the first thing she was going to lose to glancing blows.

  “Orbit in ten minutes,” Eowyn reported as the clock ticked down. “Is Commander Nguyen clear to deploy?”

  “Not yet,” Henry ordered. “Full active sweep of the target site, please, Commander. We’re guessing where the weapons systems are and that there are no antispace systems.

  “Let’s stop guessing. I want to be able to read the base commander’s name tag.”

  So far as he knew, the Kenmiri didn’t use name tags. Certainly, the UPSF didn’t—why, when every citizen of the UPA had an internal network installed at age six? Henry’s network would give him the name of every person he encountered, though cultural tradition still required introductions.

  “Understood. Scanning the target site.”

  Henry kept himself impassive, his face a mask as the distance continued to evaporate. He was all too aware of Sylvia’s presence behind him, conscious of the fact that an error there would kill her as we
ll as him and his people.

  That had bothered him a bit when she’d “just” been a civilian advisor. Now that bothered him quite a bit…but Henry was also confident in his ability to do his job.

  “We are picking up multiple installations outside the crater,” Eowyn told him. “I’m guessing they’re linked by cable, as first analysis suggests that they’re communication and sensor-relay platforms.

  “Nothing looks big enough to be an antispace laser or missile platform.”

  “And in the crater?” Henry asked.

  “They’ve activated some kind of jamming field that is diffusing both EM and infrared signatures, ser,” Eowyn admitted. “I suspect there are definitely antispace weapons in the main facility that they are attempting to conceal.”

  “Adjust course to position us over the northern pole,” Henry ordered. “Set kinetics to drop at one hundred thousand kilometers to bombard the entire circumference of the crater rim to support Commander Nguyen’s approach.”

  He considered the display for a few more seconds.

  “If they’re holding on to those weapons, they’ve wasted them,” he concluded. “We’ll be out of their arc of fire momentarily, and Nguyen’s plan renders them pointless.”

  “It’s down to GroundDiv then, ser?”

  “It is.” Henry paused, then nodded firmly. “Once we’re in that polar position, Commander Nguyen is cleared to deploy. Time the kinetic strikes with his approach.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You’re secure to bring the ships around to this side of the planet now, ser,” Nguyen reported. The visual attached to the call was of what the GroundDiv officer was seeing: currently, the inside of an underground tunnel with a twisting abstract mural along its walls.

  “Shuttles took out two of the lasers and we are in control of the third,” the GroundDiv officer continued. “It looks like they had most of their Warriors dug in on the ridge. We found the remnants of some pretty complex defensive structures there—they probably had an underground link to the main complex, but the kinetics didn’t leave them in a state to be worth looking for.”

  A distinctive and memorable crackle echoed in the background of Nguyen’s channel and Henry buried a shiver. He’d been trapped on the ground for one memorable disaster during the war. He knew his place: on the decks of a warship!

  One of his therapists had pointed out that that was a trauma reaction…and then laughed and said it was the right call anyway. Just because an impulse was reinforced by trauma didn’t make it wrong.

  “We have control of the power plant, which doesn’t appear to have been large enough to wreck the facility if overloaded,” the GroundDiv officer told them. “We’re having less luck with the datacores. It looks like they’ve got one last squad of fully armored Warriors and they are holding that part of the complex.

  “We have not encountered any Artisans,” Nguyen observed. “Currently eyeballing the Kenmiri at about a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty hands all in. Eighty-plus are Drones, the rest Warriors. This is unquestionably a military installation.”

  “Any prisoners, Commander?” Henry asked.

  “A handful, all wounded,” his subordinate replied. “We’ve medevacked them back to the shuttles, but my medics say they’ll make it. Seven, I think?”

  Henry nodded grimly. He wasn’t going to order Nguyen to risk lives to take prisoners, and Kenmiri Drones and Warriors weren’t known to surrender. Artisans had been known to order Drones and Warriors under their authority to lay down arms—and their subordinates would usually obey—but without the often-wiser Worker Caste, the Kenmiri would fight to the death.

  “Is there any support we can provide from up here?” Henry asked. “Once we’re in position, we should be able to do penetrating scans of the site and provide intelligence.”

  “That’s what I was hoping for, Commodore,” Nguyen admitted. “Tell me where they are, and I can finish this in short order. They have the advantage of interior position guarding the computer cores.”

  Henry couldn’t see the man shrug, but the movement of the helmet camera suggested the gesture.

  “Pull them back,” Nguyen suddenly snapped, the words addressed at one of his subordinates. “We are not charging into the teeth of a multiblaster if we have any alternative.”

  He turned his attention back to the call.

  “Intel would be handy,” he reiterated. “I don’t think we’re getting the computers intact, ser. On the other hand…”

  “Commander?” Henry prompted.

  “We are in possession of a chunk of the complex that definitely includes what I recognize as a major subspace-com installation…and a lot of gear I do not recognize but appears to be intact.”

  “If that’s the subspace stabilizer, Commander, you may have just earned yourself that second steel bar,” Henry said calmly. “Taking that intact will more than outweigh losing the computer cores.”

  Even if the Kenmiri had wiped the operating software of the subspace communicator, the hardware would give the UPA’s scientists everything they needed to duplicate the tech. That would definitely be enough for Henry to recommend promotions all around for Nguyen’s people.

  “We’ll be in position above the site in two minutes,” Henry said after a glance at the main display. “We should be feeding you live tactical data within sixty seconds of that.”

  “Understood. I’ll hold all my people in position until then,” Nguyen replied. “If the bugs decide to rush me in that time, I’m not going to argue!”

  “I don’t suppose there’s much point in us going down there, is there?” Sylvia asked as Paladin’s scanners showed Nguyen’s final assault.

  With three destroyers using penetrating radar and high-resolution infrared scans at barely ten thousand kilometers of altitude, there was no hiding from the GroundDiv troops. That had allowed Nguyen to find an entrance they hadn’t identified before—and then to both launch a feint and know that the Warriors had fallen for it.

  “The prisoners will be brought up here,” Henry replied. “We’ve already arranged a team that’s going to go down and very carefully dismantle the subspace communicator.”

  He shook his head.

  “I would very much like to not give that to the Eerdish,” he told her. “The prisoners are theirs unless they don’t want them, and I’ll use the fact that this place existed as a lever, but I’d prefer to keep the communicator.”

  “They do have a legitimate claim to it,” Sylvia said. “This is their space.”

  “I know, and that’s why my techs are going to take every possible scan of the communicator as we bring it aboard, but R-Div is going to be very upset if we don’t deliver it.”

  “I know,” his partner agreed. “We’ll do what we can. We’re not exactly going to be starting on the best foot with the Eerdish, though. The presence of the Kenmiri in their space should help, you’re right, but us unilaterally deciding to deal with them might not.”

  “And here I was hoping dealing with the old enemy would gain us brownie points,” Henry replied. He exhaled and shook his head as several icons on the display suddenly flickered and changed color—from red to yellow.

  There was a cascade from there, and in a few seconds, there were no red dots left.

  “Huh,” he said. “That’s it…but that’s different.”

  “Henry?”

  “The Warriors laid down their arms,” he told Sylvia. “They’ve surrendered—but the Warriors started it. There’s no Artisans on the base, just Warriors and Drones.

  “And neither of those usually surrenders.”

  “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Henry agreed. A stab of the usual guilt took him in the gut, but he pushed it down. “I suppose they’re as aware of their species’ doom as anyone else. That’s got to change how suicidal you’re willing to be.”

  “I’d assume.” Sylvia looked over his shoulder at the display. “Ca
n we transport that many prisoners?”

  “Looks like thirty or so to me,” he noted. “We can handle that. I imagine we’ll be lucky to get name, rank and serial number out of them, but we’ll see what they say before we turn them over to the Eerdish.”

  “And if the Eerdish don’t want them?”

  “Then we haul them back to La-Tar and impose on the locals there,” Henry suggested. “I suppose, in the worst case, we can even take them all the way back to UPA space. We’ve…never had to worry about handling Kenmiri prisoners before.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I was under the impression that we did take them,” Sylvia said slowly.

  “Oh, we did,” he confirmed. “And once they were interrogated, we loaded them into an escape pod and dropped them off in the nearest Kenmiri star system. No point keeping POWs when the enemy’s resources are as immense as the Empire’s were.”

  He shivered.

  “And we didn’t trust the Vesheron with them,” he admitted. “Sending them home in escape pods was a reliable way to repatriate. Handing them over to our allies…not so much.”

  “And now you want to hand them over to the Eerdish?” Sylvia asked.

  “I don’t feel we have a choice—though you are the diplomat and can tell me I’m wrong,” he noted. “But that said…I also feel that the post-Fall government is less likely to torture them to death for amusement than the wartime revolutionaries were.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was a relief to finally see the Seppen System.

  They’d ended up spending six whole days in Moti, packing up everything of value they could find in the Kenmiri surveillance outpost. Neither the base computers nor the Kenmiri prisoners had been forthcoming about anything, but the facility itself was useful.

  And a dark sign of things to come, Henry knew. Protocol Twenty-Seven had been written with the understanding that the Kenmiri might not regard the war as over the same way their former enemies did. If they were secretly spying on their old stars, it suggested they might still be planning on reclaiming them.