“Carpenter,” she confirmed. “Apparently, she’s been refitted to handle this kind of mission. I have no idea what that looks like, but I’ll take their comments at face value for now.”
“Did the Kozun give any sign of what kind of ships they’ll be sending?” he said.
As he spoke, he was giving his internal network commands. Six holographic models appeared above his desk. Raven, Glorious and Carpenter were all true-to-life, current images from Raven’s sensors. The three Guardians were placeholders, standardized versions of a type of ship that was never standard.
“Only that they were sending three ships. My understanding is they don’t even have three ships that could stand up to a Guardian one-on-one?”
“They have one,” Henry confirmed. A new model appeared above the table, hovering away from the other two groups. “The Kenmiri-built dreadnought Mal Toranis, named for Mal Dakis’s grandfather.
“They lost their other dreadnought at the Gathering.” Under the command of an assassin-turned-diplomat, the ship had tried to ambush Raven. It hadn’t ended well for the Kozun warship.
“Are they likely to send Toranis?” Leitz asked, the chief of staff looking askance at the model of the dreadnought. It was smaller than the Guardians but it was also more clearly built for this exact purpose. The eight-hundred-meter-long dreadnought was sleek and intimidating in a way the crudely assembled Guardians weren’t.
“No,” Henry guessed, waving the ship away. “From what I understand, Toranis hasn’t left the Kozun System since Mal Dakis took control of his homeworld. She is the last line of defense for the Kozun Hierarchy, and they won’t risk sending her out.”
“My guess would be that we’ll be looking at one of their new cruisers with a pair of escorts,” he continued. Holograms of those ships appeared where Toranis had vanished. The escorts were rough ovoids, a familiar shape to them all. The Kenmiri had built the half-megaton warships in their thousands to maintain order across the Empire.
The broad flying-wing shape of the cruiser was new, and there were still a lot of questions around the vessel’s capabilities. Raven had fought and defeated one at La-Tar, but that only meant that the remaining units had probably been upgraded.
“Can we handle that force?” Todorovich asked.
“The Kozun force? Yes,” Henry replied. “Raven was designed to engage and destroy dreadnoughts. I’m concerned by Kozun cruisers, especially since the Kozun clearly have sufficient resonance disruptor warheads to pose a real threat to our gravity shields, but I’m confident in our ability to handle a single cruiser.”
All nine vessels hung above the table, and Henry pointed an accusatory finger at the Drifters.
“I’m worried about the Drifters,” he admitted. “Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe was in what is now Remnant space during Golden Lancelot and didn’t leave for some time afterward. They weren’t in the right place to supply the pirates who ambushed Raven on our way to the Gathering, but they have definitely followed a course that would have allowed them to supply the Kozun with disruptor warheads.”
The breakout room was quiet.
“That was the Diplomatic Corps’s assessment as well,” Todorovich said. “It’s possible that the Hierarchy developed the disruptor warheads themselves and provided them to those pirates, but the Drifters had far more exposure to our ships in action than any other single Vesheron group.”
“If anyone had the data to develop a weapon against our gravity shields, it was them,” Henry agreed. “While this Convoy wasn’t in position to supply those pirates, IntelDiv was keeping tabs on several at the time that could have managed it.
“And since the subspace network was still online at that point, the Drifters could have been acting as a single group then. They lost that with the rest of us, but they may still be following a plan they set into motion before the Gathering.”
All four of them looked at the three Guardians in the floating display for a few seconds. They were ramshackle ships, assembled from whatever was to hand, but they all shared extremely powerful energy screens and large numbers of the same superheavy plasma turrets that made the Kenmiri dreadnoughts so dangerous.
“So, what do we do?” Leitz asked. “Are you expecting them to betray us?”
“I think the Kozun betraying us is more likely,” Henry admitted. “If the Drifters betray us, though, Raven and our Cluster friends can’t win that fight. Potentially, given sufficient warning, I can cover Carpenter’s retreat, but I can’t fight three Guardians.
“However, UPSF command has even less trust for either of these groups than I do,” he told them. “Lieutenant Colonel Iyotake is already briefed on this, but I’m tasked to update our senior diplomats on Operation Yellow Bicycle.”
“Yellow Bicycle?” Leitz asked.
“All operation names are randomly generated,” Todorovich explained before Henry could say anything. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Captain. What is this operation?”
“If everything goes according to plan, you have a peaceful and calm discussion with the Kozun and we resolve the conflict between them and the Cluster,” he said. “If that happens, there will never be any sign that Yellow Bicycle existed. It is a backup plan for if one or both of our counterparts in the Lon System betray us.
“If we are betrayed, however, Yellow Bicycle has been put in place to make certain that we have heavy reinforcements one skip away. Timing will be a problem, given minimum skip times, but having an entire carrier group one skip away is much more helpful than having them in UPA space.”
“An entire carrier group?” Todorovich said.
“Battle Group Scorpius will have received the update on the peace conference by now and will have adjusted their course,” Henry said. “I don’t have a name or a designation for the system they will be waiting in, but it is on my maps. We will make certain that our skip drones back to La-Tar and the UPA pass through that system, allowing Commodore Barrie and Admiral Cheung to remain fully updated on the situation.”
“That is reassuring,” the ambassador noted drily. “I’m surprised the UPSF was willing to even lend the Initiative a fleet carrier, let alone her entire battle group.”
“Yellow Bicycle is not an Initiative operation,” Henry admitted. “Battle Group Scorpius remains part of Fifth Fleet and answerable to the regular chain of command. This operation is intended to minimize a threat to the actual Alliance as opposed to our Ra Sector allies and protectorates.”
“I see.” She brought a holographic map up above the table, shifting the images of the ships to one side. “I take it our route to the Lon System will bypass the carrier group?”
“Yes. The shortest route for our drones back to Zion, however, passes through the system they will be waiting in,” Henry told her. The ship models vanished with a thought, allowing the map to be more clearly seen.
“Do we have an allowance for what happens if we stop communicating?” Todorovich asked. “That seems almost more likely, unfortunately, than our calling for help.”
“There’s nothing official in the orders I’ve seen,” Henry admitted. “I imagine that Cheung would deploy forward if he didn’t hear from us, but I don’t think there is an exact time frame specified.”