“We’ll want to fix that. Am I able to communicate with the Admiral?” she asked.
“I see no reason not to,” he said. “Talk to Moon; she’s fully in the loop on this and has been including small detours on several of her drones. You should be able to exchange messages with the Admiral with…well, about the delays we’d expect. We do want to make sure we don’t do anything too obvious with the drones.”
“So, we’re not even telling the Cluster?” Leitz asked. “That seems…rude.”
“Scorpius isn’t entering anyone’s claimed space,” Henry noted. “The Lon System is enough away from everyone that no one regards it as strategically important; that’s why the Kozun picked it.
“That works to our desires, as it means Admiral Cheung will bypass everyone getting into position…and returning to the UPA, if everything goes smoothly.
“We don’t want to admit we ever had a carrier group outside the UPA,” he told them. “My understanding is that the reason for that is twofold: one, that the Security Council doesn’t want to be seen spending that much money outside Terran space right now; and two, that we don’t want our allies thinking that we are willing to send carrier groups out to fix their problems.
“A potential betrayal by the Drifters represents the first thing I’ve seen Command and the Council regard as a serious strategic threat since the war ended,” Henry said flatly. “And I think they’re right. There are no other players as geographically widespread or as technologically advanced.
“Even the Kozun are operating with what is fundamentally the Kenmiri base-level tech. The Drifters aren’t. They’ve been working on that tech for years, and they’ve been skimming off the best and brightest of the Kenmiri slave worlds for generations.”
“They’ve been hugely valuable allies,” Leitz reminded him. “It seems strange to regard them as such a threat.”
“That’s why Yellow Bicycle is as quiet and low-key as it is,” Henry said. “We’d very much like to be wrong. If the Kozun are honestly coming to talk peace and the Drifters have made honest deals to be neutrals at the peace talks, then Scorpius and her escorts get an extensive exercise in long-distance logistics.
“But if our fears are realized, there will be multiple capital ships a day’s flight away, ready to come haul us out of the fire.”
Henry might not like the idea of being rescued by his ex-husband, but he’d take that over fighting a squadron of multiple Guardians without any kind of support or backup.
“That’s reassuring, at least,” Todorovich agreed. “I’m going to suggest a twenty-four-hour dead-man order to Admiral Cheung to make that even more reliable. If we don’t send a message for twenty-four hours, he brings the carrier group through.
“We’ll need to make sure we have the skip drones to send a message at least every twenty-four hours—preferably every twelve, really—but that limits the worst-case scenario.”
“It does,” Henry agreed. “I’ll back you on that, Ambassador.”
He looked at everyone in the room as he snagged a second donut.
“Iyotake, Em Leitz. Questions? This is only a high-level summary, though it’s not like there’s much in terms of detail to share.”
“Do we know the skip time to the system they’ll be waiting in?” Iyotake asked. “That could become critical.”
“It’s a red giant eleven light-years from Lon,” Henry said. “We don’t have exact masses for either star, but they’re big. My calculations say nine hours, plus or minus forty minutes if the mass data is off significantly.”
“So, we need a plan to survive against three Guardians for eighteen hours,” Iyotake noted. “Even that is a hell of a call, ser.”
“I know,” Henry agreed. “But barring stealth tech the UPSF definitely doesn’t have, we can’t hide a fleet in the Lon System. We work with what we’ve got, Colonel.”
“And we hope that I can keep everyone talking,” Todorovich concluded. “No pressure, I take it?”
“Between the Cluster and the Hierarchy, these talks will decide the fate of twenty-one inhabited worlds and about fifty billion people,” Henry said quietly. “I don’t think worrying about betrayal should be adding much to the pressure.”
Chapter Nineteen
Home.
It was strange to Sylvia, but that was very much the feeling that being back aboard Raven was giving her. The crew wasn’t entirely the same as it had been before, but the losses in the La-Tar Campaign hadn’t been that large.
She hadn’t known many of the dead well enough to grieve them, but she knew the people who remained well enough to trade greetings and courtesies with many of the battlecruiser’s crew. Shaka’s crew had been respectful enough and had grown more accepting of her over the time she’d spent aboard, but they hadn’t made it to the level of warmth she shared with Raven’s crew.
The stewarding crew had put her in the same quarters as her last stay aboard. If anything had changed while she’d been away, they’d made certain to put it back exactly the way she’d left it. By the time she got back from her meeting with Henry Wong, much of her gear had been unpacked for her and the room looked exactly as it had before.
It felt like home and she smiled to herself as she took a seat at her desk. If her experience with the UPSF suggested anything, this would be the last tour of Raven’s current complement. They’d all achieved too much for the next round of promotions not to tear huge holes in the battlecruiser’s hierarchy.
If the UPSF were smart, they’d move people up inside Raven’s hierarchy and shift as few people off the ship as they could. That would keep the battlecruiser at nearly the same superb level of competence and function.
On the other hand, she could see why the UPSF would want to take the officers who’d been blooded at the Gathering and in the La-Tar Campaign and move them over to other ships. The Peacekeeper Initiative, especially, was in need of officers who’d fought alongside nonhumans and could both speak Kem and respect strangers.
Those three criteria were true of more of Raven’s officers than most ships, and that would only make it worse. The promotions would be well deserved, but they’d leave Henry Wong with gaping holes in his crew.
Assuming, of course, that Wong went unpromoted himself. Sylvia knew her own reports had been positive enough to contribute to his making the jump to a Commodore’s gold oak leaf, and who knew what would happen to Raven when the man became the Peacekeeper Initiative’s second flag officer.
She checked through her messages. They were much what she expected. Rising Principle and their escorts and staff would be aboard Carpenter by morning First City time. Once the Cluster representative was ready to go, the entire delegation would get underway in a few hours.
It would be five days to the Lon System. The scheduled date was a week away, though Sylvia expected the Kozun and Drifters to beat them there. Both the Kozun and the Drifters had slightly farther to go, but they’d known sooner than the Cluster had.
That didn’t help her fear of a trap, but the UPSF seemed to have that well in hand.