And the virtual space was a clone of a temple near where Henry had grown up in Montana, anyway. Just because it clashed to many people didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
“Arbiter Ran,” he greeted his host in Kem. “It is good to hear from you again.”
“Welcome back to La-Tar,” Casto Ran greeted him. Ran had pale red skin, weathered by age and radiation, with a small forest of sensory tendrils on his head instead of hair. In Ran’s case, those tendrils were pure white, a sharp contrast to the rest of his skin.
“It is always reassuring to be reminded that the UPA means what they say when they promise to protect us,” Ran continued. “Raven is fully repaired?”
“She is,” Henry confirmed. “And I see you got promoted?”
“My term as Lord Nominated was almost up, and I was looking forward to going back to being a mere fleet commander,” Ran replied. “It appears that I am once again denied that. I agreed to a term of two La-Tar years.”
That was twenty-seven months, Henry’s network informed him.
“With or without assassins?” Henry had to ask. A Lord Nominated served for a specified term—and if they didn’t step down at the end of that term, they were assassinated by killers who’d spent that entire term familiarizing themselves with the Lord’s security.
Ran laughed.
“Without, I believe, though I did promise not to run for the role of my replacement,” he noted. “I suspect my role is going to be exactly what the title says: playing arbiter in arguments between system governments.
“I am not certain anyone is going to want it.”
“You might be surprised,” Henry said. Most people didn’t quite seem to realize how much work was involved in being in charge of something. Even one ship was a lot. He couldn’t imagine running one star system, let alone five.
“Likely,” Ran conceded. “This was not entirely a social contact, Captain Wong. We have a situation of some concern, and I would like to impose on the UPA forces in the system to assist us.”
“We are here to guarantee the sovereignty of the La-Tar Cluster,” Henry said. “I can justify quite a bit inside that mission, if it seems reasonable to me.”
“You know the Satra System,” Ran told him. “Your people designated it Ra-Fifty, I believe.”
“I do,” Henry confirmed. “I have not visited it myself, but it was definitely on our minds when the Kozun were retreating.”
It was the first system along the short route to Kozun itself. When the Kozun forces had withdrawn from La-Tar, they’d skipped to Ra-50—Satra.
“We have two ships in Satra,” Ran said. “It is more of our force than I like sending forward, but a single ship is vulnerable in ways that two are not.”
“I understand.” That made sense to Henry, though it suggested that even more of the Cluster’s ships were in La-Tar than he’d thought.
Skex only had five escorts. Ratch had two, neither of which had been skip-capable when Henry had last encountered them. Tano had built four that he knew of. The entire Cluster only mustered eleven escorts and no true heavier warships.
Yet. Tano was expanding their yards and Skex was building new ones. All four industrial worlds had orbital defenses and starfighters, too, defenses that La-Tar lacked.
Still, that put ten out of eleven active warships in or next to La-Tar.
“We have seen the occasional Kozun scout through the system, but we had, until recently, regarded Satra as otherwise completely secure,” Ran said. “We…can no longer do so.”
“What happened?” Henry asked.
“For as long as we have had vessels posted in Satra, our sensor technicians have been seeing what we thought were glitches in the software,” the Arbiter told him. “While we have had few solid contacts, the continual presence of these vague detections forces us to conclude that there is something there.
“We now believe the Kozun have a concealed facility of some kind in the Satra System and are using ships with an unknown-to-us level of stealth technology to maneuver around Satra and keep an eye on our activities. The corvettes we have seen are picking up the information from the facility, as a skip cannot be concealed.”
“I am not aware of any technology that can reliably hide a starship,” Henry replied slowly. His new reactionless fighters were harder to detect, as they lacked a drive plume, but they were still far from invisible.
“Neither am I,” Casto Ran agreed. “I commanded starships for the Vesheron for half my life, Captain Wong. I have never seen or heard of anything like what we are encountering in the Satra System. But we are definitely encountering something.”
“And you want me to go to check it out,” Henry guessed.
“In company with several of my own ships, yes,” Ran confirmed. “Admiral Zast is assembling a task force around one of our carriers. The use of starfighters should enable a large number of scan angles that should unveil whatever is hiding from us.”
Henry paused his direct display to conceal his moment of concern. The La-Tar Cluster’s “carriers” had been a brilliant solution to bringing extra firepower to the liberation of La-Tar, but the retrofitted freighters were still fragile and slow ships…carrying fighters that were just as fragile.
But Ran was correct in that starfighters would help them narrow down a station or ship someone had managed to hide.
“I will have to meet with the destroyer commanders here before I commit to anything,” he told Ran. “But I see no reasons why Raven should not be able to assist in this mission. We await news from Ambassador Todorovich’s mission, in any case.”
“We hope for her success,” Ran told him. The Tak’s tone suggested his hopes were low, but that was his job. Pessimism was part of the job description for running a five-star-system nation, Henry was certain.
“I have faith in the Ambassador,” Henry replied. “But even with an explicit peace agreement, we do not want a Kozun scouting outpost next to La-Tar.”
“We do not,” Ran agreed.
“We will speak again once Raven is fully in orbit and I have consulted with my fellows,” Henry promised. “Or should I reach out directly to Admiral Zast?”
“Let me know when you can assist and I will arrange a meeting,” Ran told him. “We appreciate your help as always, Captain Wong.”
Chapter Eleven
Henry woke up from his dreams bolt upright, breathing rapidly as his internal network flashed an alert. For a few moments, he sat on his bed, staring blankly into space, then sent a mental command to bring the lights up.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against the bed as he worked through his breathing exercises. Once he’d calmed his body, he carefully ran through the vague memory of the nightmare.
This was an old one with a few new twists, a memory of one of the more horrific scenes of his time with Mal Dakis. A small group of mid-level officers in the Vesheron faction had tried to make a deal with the Kenmiri, to betray the rebels and their Terran allies to the Empire.
Mal Dakis had found out and trapped them. The six leaders had then been crucified in the main loading bay of the asteroid base they’d all been operating out of.