“I hear that you are having some unusual problems in the Satra System,” Henry said. “The Arbiter asked me to provide some support.”
“He came aboard shortly ahead of you,” the Admiral told him. Zast had been a food freighter captain before the Kozun invasion and had helped organize the relief fleet that had fed the industrial worlds, picked up their troops and then liberated La-Tar.
In exchange, she was now the senior officer of the La-Tar Cluster Defense Fleet.
“I have a few officers who will be hologramming in, but it will not be a large meeting,” she told him. “Sunshine has been upgraded since you last saw her in action. I would be delighted to give you a tour once we are done.”
Sunshine was one of the Cluster’s two “carriers,” former food transports refitted to carry a few dozen unshielded starfighters. They’d been handy in the relief effort, but Henry was surprised they’d kept them on as warships.
He couldn’t say that, however.
“It will depend on how much time we have,” he said stiffly. “My understanding is that the Arbiter would like this situation resolved as quickly as possible.”
“So would we all,” Zast agreed. “A Kozun observation post one skip away from La-Tar is concerning, even if we do not think they have been scouting us directly.”
“Without subspace coms, they are limited,” Henry noted. “Though that is why they would be sending ships to pick up the data dumps.”
“Exactly what we think,” Zast confirmed. “Come, Captain. I will show you what I can of our flagship on the way.”
It was flagship now, apparently. Henry held his tongue as they walked through the still-very-clearly-civilian boat bay toward the rest of the ship. Sunshine was a ten-megaton food freighter at her bones. He wasn’t sure what they could have done to her to make using her as a flagship worthwhile.
The moment the doors to the rest of the ship slid shut behind them, he started to understand. The corridor led to a row of brand-new in-ship transit pods. A directory hung next to the pods—internal networks like those used in the UPSF were rare in former Kenmiri space—listing ship location after location after location.
“How much did you add?” he asked.
“We had a lot of space,” Zast said drily. “And, as it turned out, Tano had a lot of spare parts. A prefabricated conference center intended to be part of a space station here, a set of lasers intended as mining gear there…”
She grinned.
“You will see the conference and fleet-control facilities yourself,” she promised him. “I will have my people send yours the current specifications.”
“Current, huh?” Henry asked. He supposed the advantage to a merchant hull was that they could clearly open it up and install just about any prefabricated segment they wanted. “Still a lot of empty space?”
“The only real defense most of the modules have, yes,” Zast conceded. “We have some armor around key components like reactors and heat radiators, but the emptiness of the ship is part of her protection.”
A transit pod was already waiting for the Admiral, an armed soldier in face-concealing armor standing next to it. The guardian traded a calm nod with the GroundDiv trooper trying to be inconspicuous behind Henry and stepped aside.
“Come on, Captain,” Zast told him. “We will have work to do.”
“Our attempts to locate the stealth scout have so far proven a complete waste,” Casto Ran told the people in the meeting room a few minutes later. “We know there is something in the Satra System. It may be a concealed facility. It may be a ship equipped with technology we are unfamiliar with.
“Whatever it is, we need to identify it, locate it and either capture or destroy it,” the Arbiter concluded. “Our UPA allies have agreed to provide us some assistance, but the key component is Sunshine herself. Admiral Zast?”
Zast nodded to her boss and joined him at the front of the room. Rows of semicircular chair arrangements focused on the stage, though the room was sized for ten times as many people as joined Henry there today.
From what he’d seen, most of Sunshine’s command facilities were structured like that. She was a command ship without a fleet, but she’d been future-proofed against a vast expansion of the Cluster’s forces.
Hopefully, that would prove unnecessary, but he couldn’t blame the Cluster for it. The UPA couldn’t always be there. With five star systems to protect, a fleet of a hundred ships started to sound quite reasonable.
“Whatever stealth systems the ghost commands, they are more than sufficient to prevent our current generation of sensors from detecting the target with any certainty,” she said calmly. “Our solution to this has two edges to the blade.
“Firstly, Captain Wong has agreed to bring Raven with us.” She gestured to Henry. “Raven’s sensors are superior to any in our current possession.”
The UPSF’s current generation of sensor suites were superior to any sensors in the Kenmiri Empire, Henry knew. That meant they were almost certainly better than anything available to the Vesheron with their ex-Kenmiri systems.
The other El-Vesheron powers, the outsiders like the UPA who’d helped fight the Kenmiri, were more in question…but they were all a long way away now.
“The second part of the plan is to swamp Satra with sensor platforms,” she continued. “We have rigged up a high-intensity detection array that can replace a missile on one of our starfighters, and Tano has helped the LCDF assemble a stockpile of these arrays.
“Mounting them on all of Sunshine’s fighters will provide us with over one hundred and twenty different sensor arrays. Combined with Sunshine, Raven, and the escorts we are bringing with us, I do not believe our mystery visitor will remain hidden for long!”
It was a good plan, partly relying on Sunshine’s having vastly expanded her fighter strength from the last time Henry had seen her. He hadn’t thought there were a hundred and twenty starfighters in the Cluster.
The spacecraft were still what UPSF pilots referred to as “TIEs”—fast and potentially decently armed starfighters completely lacking in shields of any kind. It was theoretically possible to fit energy shields on a starfighter-sized vessel, but Henry had only seen it a handful of times.
Without gravity shields, the Cluster’s fighters were far more vulnerable than his own wing. For this mission, it wouldn’t matter.
“What are we bringing with us for escorts?” he asked. “The plan seems solid to me, but we are assuming that this mystery scout is minimally dangerous.”
“There are two escorts in the system, and we will be bringing two more with Sunshine,” Zast told him. “We would welcome the presence of one of your destroyers, though we do not believe it will be necessary.
“I suspect we are looking at a small specialty vessel or potentially a minimally armed facility,” she continued. “The worst case I can see is one of the Kozun’s new cruisers, which would suggest dangerous abilities for those vessels.”
“I cannot see them having a cruiser to spare,” Henry admitted. The ships weren’t dreadnoughts, but they were the largest ships he’d seen built by a Vesheron power since the war had ended.