Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “That’s what I figure as well,” he admitted. “I’m just afraid of the Kenmiri’s revenge, I suppose.”

  The bedroom was quiet except for the music.

  “Me too,” Sylvia finally whispered. “They…are not inclined to half-measures.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Five skips and nine days brought them to the fourth star system of their search—a star system that technically wasn’t claimed by the Eerdish Gathered Tribes. The Zo System was claimed by Tadir, one of the industrial worlds of the Makata Cluster and a member system of the Eerdish-Enteni Alliance.

  “Scanning for the trail,” Eowyn reported in a tone that hovered between bored and frustrated. In the three prior systems, it had taken coordination with the local pickets to find the ambassador’s trail.

  In the last system, that “picket” had been a joke. The Voso System was only named because its star was visible from Eerdish. Its only value was that, despite being a mere red dwarf, it was conveniently positioned as a link between several systems and made a useful stopover for ships unwilling to risk full twenty-four-hour skips.

  The entire picket was six unshielded starfighters supported by a damaged freighter that had been turned into a logistics depot. Fortunately for Henry and his mission, they’d also seeded the system with surveillance satellites.

  “Ser, we have a trail,” Eowyn suddenly reported, snapping upright in her seat.

  “The ambassador stopped being sneaky, did they?” Henry asked, giving mental instructions to the computers to bring up the main tactical display.

  “Can’t speak to that, but I’ve got the Convoy,” his Ops officer replied. “Looks like they were here for a bit and refueled at the gas giant. Still running analysis on the timeline, but they were here.”

  “So, they weren’t being as careful, were they?” Henry echoed himself with a cold smile. “Good. That makes chasing the ambassador much less of a problem. On the other hand…” He studied the data feeding in from the scanners.

  “Do the analysis on when they left, of course,” he told Eowyn. “But I suspect Chan is going to get us the actual answer. What do you make of the contacts at Zo-Four?”

  Zo-IV was a super-Jovian gas giant, Zo’s junior partner in an eternal dance that left the system’s smaller gas giant and four rocky worlds in an eternally erratic orbit. There were multiple energy signatures in orbit of the gas giant, suggesting at least a permanent infrastructure to Henry.

  “Looks like a fuel depot, probably with a logistics base in support,” Eowyn told him after a moment. “I don’t see any of the Eerdish’s larger carriers, but I am seeing several of what I’m pretty sure are their shielded fighters, supporting a trio of escorts and what might be a converted freighter.”

  “I would be surprised if they didn’t have a pile of converted escort carriers running around somewhere,” Ihejirika noted, the destroyer’s Captain clearly listening in from the bridge. “They had to test the hardware and concept before they started building the proper carriers.”

  That any of Henry’s people were prepared to call the E-Two’s ships “proper carriers” was a telling sign of respect to the Commodore. Henry couldn’t think of any other ships he’d heard Terran personnel give that moniker.

  It helped that the Kenmiri had regarded fighters as a waste of time and most of the Vesheron had treated them as an expendable stopgap to even up the missile launchers in the opening salvos. No one had seen them as worth building specialized ships to carry—except that the E-Two now had starfighters who were far closer to the weight of the UPSF birds than anyone else had.

  They’d built the ships to carry them, and the close-range scans Henry and his people had done told them those ships were worthy of respect. Closer to the UPSF’s light carriers than their fleet carriers in both size and capability, but still capable support platforms mothering effective fighter craft.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t seen them before,” Henry said. “On the other hand, we are pretty close to the edge of the territory the E-Two is protecting. Can we tell if those ships are Tadir or Eerdish?”

  “Unclear at this distance,” Eowyn admitted.

  “Fair enough. Chan, get coms set up with the locals,” he ordered. “Pass on our authorizations from the Eerdish and Enteni and request whatever information they have on the Convoy and the ambassador.

  “If the picket is from Tadir, we’ll have Ambassador Todorovich ask for permission to operate in their space,” he reflected aloud. “For now, let’s get the channels of communication open and see what they can tell us about BGO.”

  “It is easy to feel the lack of the subspace coms we once had,” the being on the screen told Henry and Sylvia. The Tadir officer was Beren, a pale-skinned Ashall race with orange eyes and catlike pupils. Alala was a woman holding the descriptive rank of “System Military Authority.”

  “Ambassador Blue-Stripe-Third-Green and their ship passed through here less than a day ago,” she confirmed. “We had no basis on which to hold them, though their course was such that we might have had difficulty doing so regardless.

  “That ship of theirs was fast.”

  “We have a lot of information on where it has been, Authority Alala,” Henry said with a calm chuckle. He’d limited his own people’s push initially, believing they could catch up without exposing all of their secrets to the E-Two.

  Even if he hadn’t, he didn’t think he’d have caught up now. The needlelike fast courier Blue-Stripe-Third-Green had fled aboard could make almost two KPS2—it accelerated slower than his ships, but not by much!

  “We also do not have permission from the Tadir government to operate in your space,” Sylvia added. “We would need to make contact with you regardless.”

  “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe exited into Enteni space from here,” Alala told them. “Also, I must be clear: enough of the vessels under my command are Eerdish that the Gathered Tribes’ Writ will not be denied here, even if I wanted to.”

  She shook her head, a gesture the Beren shared with their Terran cousins. If cousins was the right word. None of the Ashall were quite sure what Seeded Races even meant, let alone how the various races were connected.

  “The evidence included in the files you sent me is more than sufficient for my action,” she noted. “My people will be spending some time going through the supplies we purchased from the Convoy itself.”

  “How long ago were they here?” Henry asked.

  “Eighteen days,” she told him. Time translation from Kem to English was automatic for Henry, to the point where he barely registered the actual Kem time unit Alala used. “They left toward the Tollal System, in Enteni territory, eighteen days ago.

  “We didn’t see much of the Convoy itself, just the tankers they brought in to pick up fuel and the transports that delivered the goods they paid for that fuel with,” she noted. “They stayed well outside the range at which our sensors would get a clear look.

  “That seemed…about what I expected from the Drifters, so I did not question it.”

  “It is about normal for them,” Henry agreed. “Thank you, Authority Alala. You have been most helpful.”

  “If you require fuel or consumables, your papers from the Eerdish give you authorization to draw on my stockpiles,” Alala told him. “I am also authorized to trade fuel and other items for munitions or other weapons systems.”

  Henry checked the fuel status of his squadron through his mental network and shook his head slightly.

  “We will continue our pursuit at maximum speed, I think,” he told the Beren officer. They’d made the time to swing in to the logistics base as a courtesy, but now he had a course for his enemies.

  And he was itching to be about it.

  The channel from Alala closed and Henry looked over at Sylvia.

  “Do you have time for a senior officers’ briefing or are you booked up?” he asked, returning to English with the smooth ease of long practice.

  “My schedule is surprisingly op
en right now,” she said drily. “My job, for the moment, is to talk to civilian leaders to open doors for you. Since our work on Eerdish seems to be enough for now…I’m wherever you need me, Commodore.”

  The words were perfectly professional, but Henry couldn’t stop his brain going somewhere extremely nonprofessional from that. Sylvia caught up with that a second later and flushed.

  “That too,” she murmured. “Though that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “I know, I know,” he assured her, grinning broadly. He marshaled his self-control and pinged Chan.

  “Commander, can you pull together a staff-captains-and-XOs call ASAP?” he asked.

  “Is this ASAP as in in twenty minutes on the hour or ASAP as in link them to my office now?” Chan clarified quickly.

  “The latter, Commander,” Henry decided.

  “On it,” the communications officer told him. “Activating the virtual conference net now, and I will link people as I pin them down.”

  Half of Henry’s office vanished into a holographic illusion of a conference surrounded by windows on all four sides. The impossible space was clearly positioned on top of a mountain on Earth, with snowy slopes sweeping away in every direction.

  Eowyn linked in moments later, followed by Aoife Palmer and her XO. Avshalom Sandor was an Orthodox Jew, with special dispensation around his hair and headwear that made him stand out from most UPSF officers.

  Nina Teunissen and Visvaldas Lemaire linked in from Maharatha about ten seconds later, joined by Ihejirika and Chan.

  “Commander Giannino is off-duty and asleep,” Ihejirika said. “She’s due on Paladin’s bridge in three hours. Should I wake her, ser?”

  “No,” Henry decided after a moment. Waking someone unnecessarily in the middle of their sleep cycle was not just rude, it would be counterproductive for a meeting. Aruna Giannino wouldn’t be able to contribute to the meeting if she was groggy—she could review a recording later to catch up.

  “All right, everyone,” he greeted his officers. “Ambassador Todorovich and I have spoken with the local commander, System Military Authority Alala of the Tadir.

  “Both the ambassador and the main BGO Convoy passed through here,” he continued. “The Convoy left for Tollal eighteen days ago. The ambassador followed in the same direction just over one day ago.

  “We have the scent of our prey again at last,” Henry told them. “We’re going to go after them at full acceleration. No games, no worrying about concealing our new maneuverability. We need to pin these people down.”

  “What about ambushes?” Eowyn asked. “If they’re being this obvious, they might have thought E-Two space was safe, but they could also be preparing a trap for us.”

  “There’s a good chance of something,” Henry agreed. “We’ll keep our eyes open and watching for oddities ahead of us.”

  “And the Kenmiri?” Ihejirika asked.

  “If we locate more listening posts, we will make a call based on their location,” Henry told them. “If there is an E-Two force within a single skip of the post, we will send them a drone and carry on our way. The E-Two have no more interest in having the Kenmiri in their space than we would—and while we managed to not tell them about the subspace transceiver at the listening post, I’m not so wedded to keeping that secret as to not tell friends about a nearby enemy.”

  “And if the E-Two aren’t that near?” Eowyn asked.

  “Then we will follow Protocol Twenty-Seven and neutralize the outpost ourselves,” he concluded. “Where we have friends who can and will deal with them, we will enable that. But we will not leave intact Kenmiri listening posts behind us.

  “It’s not our primary mission today, and if we hit enough of them that it starts to seriously slow us down, we’ll reconsider,” he conceded. “But we will deal with them.”

  “We lost sixteen GroundDiv troopers taking the last one,” Eowyn noted quietly. “We can’t sustain losses like that very often.”

  “And that, Commander, is why I have no intention of landing at the next one,” Henry told her.

  Against an atmosphereless target like the last listening post, his space-to-space missiles would handily bury a five-hundred-megaton warhead a hundred meters into solid rock before detonating. A dozen missiles from his command might not destroy the entire listening post…but they could be very sure the post wouldn’t be talking to anyone.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Three destroyers flashed back into three-dimensional space with a final twenty-dimensional kick to the stomach, and Henry grimaced. The trail said the Drifters had spent six days in Tollal, which meant they should have gained almost a week on the Convoy now.

  “Scanning for trails,” Eowyn reported. “I have zero energy signatures on the scope. System is dead.”

  “I’m not sure anyone even bothered to claim this place,” Chan replied, their voice dry. “Most people wouldn’t ever skip to this small a dwarf.”

  They’d spent twenty hours in skip to travel a bare handful of light-years. The system didn’t have a name on any records—it probably hadn’t even been counted in the “five hundred stars” of the Ra Sector.

  Henry’s records now made it Ra-261. The two hundred and sixty-first system in the Ra Sector visited by the UPSF.

  “I have the Convoy’s trail,” Eowyn said. “It’s hard to miss a few hundred starships blazing their way across a star system. Especially a place like this, where there is nothing to hide the trail.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Henry pointed out. “It looks like they ran pretty close to the asteroid belt, such as it is.”

  The system’s minuscule M9 primary hadn’t managed to coalesce its collection of dust and space debris into actual planets. Instead, a roughly defined belt of small planetoids, the largest maybe three thousand kilometers across, hung between two and three light-minutes from the star.

  “Total mass of the belt is estimated at about a quarter again that of Sol’s Belt,” Eowyn said after a moment. “It ends up being a bit less dense, but still. That’s everything in this joke of a star system.”

  “Do we have a line on the Convoy’s exit skip?” Henry asked. “I’m guessing they didn’t stick around here for long. It’s a good place to hide, but a few too many people saw them head here.”

  “They might have still been trusting the E-Two to keep their mouths shut and stayed here until the ambassador caught up,” Sylvia suggested softly. “The surrounding systems only became neutral-to-hostile recently.

  “And as you said, it’s a good place to hide.”

  “We’re tracking the burn path now,” Eowyn replied. “Haven’t picked up an exit skip yet, but there aren’t very many options. The star is small enough to seriously limit where it’s safe to skip to from here.”

  “We’ll follow the trail,” Henry ordered. “Two KPS-squared; keep an eye on that belt. There’s nothing else to hide in in this system.”

  “Scanners are active and wide,” the Ops officer said calmly. “No contacts so far, just the burn trail.”

  “Let me know the moment we’ve IDed their exit skip,” Henry said. “Not much in this place that makes me want to stay.”

  Henry jerked awake as his internal network chimed an alarm. For once, he wasn’t having a nightmare—probably because Sylvia was currently pressed against his back, her arms wrapped around his midsection.

  The time wasn’t right for his usual alarm, which meant one of his officers was trying to reach him. He accepted the call on “mental audio” only.

  “Wong,” he subvocalized as crisply as he could.

  “Ser, it’s Ihejirika,” his flagship Captain said grimly. “I hate to wake you…but we’ve lost the Convoy’s track.”

  Henry was bolt upright in a moment, slowed only by removing Sylvia’s arms as gently as possible as he moved to the edge of the bed.

  “How do we lose five hundred starships?” he demanded.

  “The trail cut into the asteroid belt and then dispersed,” Ihejirika told
him. “It looks like they may have used plasma cannon and some fusion warheads to conceal their next steps. Ser…if the trail ends—”

  “It’s an ambush,” Henry snapped, no longer subvocalizing. “Take all ships to battle stations. Shields to maximum grav-shear. I’ll be on the flag deck in two minutes.”

  Sylvia was awake, her gaze meeting his as he rose.

  “Are we in trouble?” she asked.

  “I think we got suckered,” he told her. “The question is whether they have enough of a sucker punch ready for us.”

  “Go,” she urged. “You don’t need me to fight your squadron.”

  “No,” he agreed. He was still dressing but took a moment to press a kiss to her forehead anyway. He could spare the seconds.

  It only took forty seconds to make it to the flag deck from his quarters, after all.

  Reaching the flag deck, Henry realized there was one more order he should have given over the com.

  “Vector the squadron away from the trail and the asteroid belt,” he ordered as he took his seat, systems activating around him. “Do we have any contacts yet?”

  “Negative,” one of the Chiefs replied, looking gratefully toward the door as Commander Eowyn stepped in. “No artificial energy signs, nothing. Scopes remain clear.”

  “But the trail is gone,” Henry concluded, looking over the display. “All ships at battle stations?”

  “Yes, ser,” Eowyn replied as she slid into her seat. “Paladin is green. Cataphract is green. Maharatha is…green. DesRon Twenty-Seven is at full battle stations and ready for your command, Commodore.”

  Henry hesitated. The distance between them and the asteroid belt was now growing by the second…but at the same time, the next clue to their enemy’s location was in the asteroid belt.

  “Eowyn, get me a full analysis of what we’re looking at with the trail,” he ordered. “All ships are to maintain acceleration away from the belt. Ihejirika—have your Nav team draw up a course for the squadron that brings us to a halt relative to the last location we have confirmed of the trail at long missile range.”