Of course, the handful of Vesheron powers that had built their own capital ships during the war were a long way away. Kenmiri dreadnoughts and Drifter Guardians were all they knew of in the Ra Sector.
“Four escorts should suffice to level the field between Raven and Sunshine and any likely enemy,” he conceded. “Raven is ready to move as soon as you are, Admiral Zast. I see no reason to delay, not without more information on this ghost than we have.”
And if the Kozun had some kind of stealth-ship technology, he needed to know that before he took an ambassador to a prearranged meeting with their representatives.
Mal Dakis might be pragmatically ruthless, but he’d also always had a taste for recruiting assassins and agents who were…both more ruthless and less pragmatic than their boss. And one Henry Wong had made enemies of more than a few of those agents.
If anyone would use a peace negotiation as an opportunity to attack with a stealth ship, it would be the Kozun!
Chapter Thirteen
The Satra System didn’t look particularly unusual to Henry once Raven arrived. A red giant star, it looked very similar to the dozens of similar systems used as stopover points for travel throughout the Kenmiri Empire.
Skipping between larger stars was faster than skipping between smaller ones, so most journeys would consist of skipping to a giant of some kind, and then skipping to several others before making the final skip to a regular-sized star.
Red giants tended not to have much in terms of planets. Satra had a midsized gas giant orbiting at several dozen light-minutes, but only asteroids and meteors otherwise.
“Ihejirika, show us the skip line to Kozun space,” Henry ordered. “And then flag every ghost the locals have seen on the display for me.”
The Cluster task force was still emerging from skip behind him. Glorious had come through in perfect formation with the battlecruiser, but the La-Tar ships were being more cautious. Sunshine was the last ship through, arriving in a space already covered by the two escorts.
A green line on the displays around Henry already marked the skip line back to La-Tar. They could, at least theoretically, skip back to the agriworld’s system anywhere along that line. It would require more careful calculations the closer they got to the star, but it was possible.
Two new lines appeared in response to his order, both colored dark orange. Henry’s internal network filled in the names for him, marking them as the skips toward Kozun space.
One was a twenty-hour skip to another red giant that would be the first of several skips to get all the way to Kozun itself in about ten days. The other was a twenty-three-hour skip, almost the longest anyone would risk, to the nearest industrial planet under Kozun control.
“Any contacts yet?” he asked.
“Negative,” Ihejirika reported. “Scatterplot of ghost contacts going up now. None of them are solid, so the whole map is probabilistic at best.”
“Understood.”
On the scale of a display showing most of a star system, even the largest probable zone for a single contact was a mere dot. The data provided by the Cluster ships speckled the star system with more tiny dots. There were at least two hundred of them, Henry estimated, which explained why Ran had decided there was definitely something out there.
“Sunshine reports that they are launching fighters,” Moon reported. New blue icons spilled out from the marker for the carrier behind Raven. “Admiral Zast is requesting an update on your intentions, ser.”
Henry nodded, studying the pattern of the dots. There wasn’t a neat single concentration of them. They covered a broad zone, stretching from the moonless gas giant out toward all three skip lines.
“Get me Captain Orosz,” he ordered. “I’ll update Zast once we have a plan.”
It only took a moment for the destroyer CO to appear on the screens attached to his seat. He brought Iyotake in from CIC with a mental order and gazed levelly at the two Lieutenant Colonels.
“I assume you’re both looking at the contact pattern,” he said.
“Yes, ser,” Iyotake confirmed. “No real solid answers here.”
“No,” Henry agreed. “I suspect we’re looking at something near the gas giant, though. Orosz?”
“I guess the same,” the woman said. “Your orders?”
“I want Glorious to go sweep the gas giant area,” he told her. “There’s less in terms of debris over there than in a lot of the system, so there shouldn’t be anything to hide behind. You’re authorized to use sensor drones at your discretion.”
“Understood, ser,” Orosz said. “What do you think we’re looking for?”
“The contacts are too diffuse to be a facility,” Henry said. “We’re looking for a ship, potentially more than one. Make sure your scanners are calibrated for Terzan starfangs. If we know anyone with any kind of stealth tech, it’s them.”
The Terzan were El-Vesheron like the UPA, but they were most definitely not Ashall. They were ten-legged insectoids who communicated via organic radio. Unlike the rest of the Vesheron and El-Vesheron, though, the UPA knew the Terzan had gravity shields.
Better ones than the UPA, plus a generally more sophisticated tech base. Henry would back Raven against almost anything in the galaxy one on one. The Corvid-class battlecruisers had been designed to engage two Kenmiri dreadnoughts at once, after all.
Faced with a Terzan starfang, a ship the size of one of his destroyers, though, he’d hesitate. He was all too aware that the weapons and abilities the Terzan had shown in the war had been intentionally understated.
“The Terzan aren’t anywhere near here,” Orosz objected. “They’re from near Londu space, over by the Set Sector, aren’t they?”
“I don’t expect you to find Terzan, Captain,” Henry told her. “But they’re the people most likely to have a stealth system of some kind that we have sensor data on. So, if someone is sneaking around, calibrating for a starfang is the most likely way to find them.
“Understood?”
“Yes, ser,” she confirmed. “We’ll set our course.”
“And us, ser?” Iyotake asked.
“We set our course for the route to Kozun, the Vodo skip line,” Henry replied. “If they’re Kozun and they’re looking to send any information home, they’ll have something there.
“We have the best sensors in the system, so we’ll take a look there.”
“Understood, ser.”
Henry closed the channels and turned to his bridge crew.
“Bazzoli, course for the Vodo skip line, if you please,” he ordered. “Moon, inform Zast that we’re sending Glorious to the gas giant and Raven is investigating the route to Kozun. We’ll coordinate with units she’s sending to either place, but the best use of her starfighters is a VLA.”
A Very Large Array was made up of multiple ships spread out at precalculated distances with synchronized sensors. It would let them act as a telescope tens of thousands of kilometers across, providing a resolution no single ship’s sensors could match.
“I’ll pass that on, ser,” Moon confirmed.
“Course set,” Bazzoli reported.
“Engage.”