His companion was silent for several seconds.
“Is that good or bad?” she finally asked.
“Good,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t get me wrong, Sylvia. Peter and I didn’t part on good terms—we hadn’t seen each other in over two years when we divorced, and I found out later he’d been having an affair with his Admiral’s intelligence officer—but I know him. He’s one of the best in the UPSF for starfighter tactics.
“If Scorpius has to come for us, we have some of the best people out here coming to our rescue. And he won’t hesitate. Our former personal relationship is more likely to motivate him to jump too quickly than too slowly.”
Henry sighed, remembering the conversation with the apologetic IntelDiv officer. He’d thought Henry and Peter had the kind of arrangement common with fleet officers—and Peter hadn’t disabused the man of the belief.
“Good to know, I guess,” she said. “And Cheung? Do you know the Admiral?”
“By reputation only,” Henry said. “I’ve probably been in the same star system as him on a few occasions, but I’ve never served with or under him.”
The UPSF was a small world in many ways, but it wasn’t that small. Henry had only personally met a quarter or so of the UPSF’s flag officers, and that was probably high even for a capital-ship commander.
He met Todorovich’s gaze and ground a momentary inner spark under a mental heel. If there ever was going to be an appropriate time to mention his feelings, it wasn’t going to be while they were preparing for a negotiation that could set the fate of tens of billions of lives.
“Is there anything we need to send back to Scorpius?” she finally asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “They’ll start getting the regular updates we send Zion pretty quickly now, and that’s all they need until and unless we actually call for help.”
“I still think I’d be more comfortable if they were less than twenty-four hours away,” she admitted.
“Me too,” he said. “But it is what it is.”
He shook his head and pulled up an astrogation chart.
“I need to brief the senior officers on Yellow Bicycle,” he told her. “Do you want to sit in?”
“I think that’s best left between you and your officers, Henry,” she said. “No reason to drag the civilian into the middle of it.”
“All right. Let me know if your team needs anything,” Henry said. “We’re two days out.”
“I think we have everything we need until we see just what everyone has brought to the party,” Todorovich replied. “I’m planning for the actual talks to take place on Carpenter. The Cluster are the people this is all about, after all.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“All right, everyone,” Henry told his officers. They’d taken over the secure briefing room again and he’d even dragged Lieutenant Colonel Anna Song out of Engineering for this. Two people, Lieutenant Colonel Heléna Orosz and Glorious’s executive officer, Commander Agnethe Van Andel, were linked in from the destroyer via encrypted hologram and laser tightbeam.
“All of you know our mission,” he said. “We’re the primary escort for the La-Tar Cluster side of this negotiation. You also all know that the Drifters are providing a neutral security force that is probably as powerful as our escorts and the Kozun force combined.”
He smiled thinly. From the reactions, not everyone had thought through what “three Guardians” meant as a potential threat.
“I, frankly, do not trust the Kozun as far as I can throw this battlecruiser,” he told them. “And while I trust the Drifters in many circumstances, I also trust them to follow their objectives over mine…and I don’t necessarily know their objectives here.
“Command agrees with me, which resulted in what we’re calling Operation Yellow Bicycle.”
He waited a moment to see if anyone said anything. Moon and Iyotake were already briefed, but this was news to everyone else. He had the attention of the ten officers physically and virtually present.
“If the Kozun or the Drifters betray us, our objective becomes the survival of our delegation at all costs,” he told them. “We will use our fighters and gravity shields to protect Carpenter while all three ships run for whatever cover we can find as we can go.
“As we’re running for the hills, we’re going to fire a salvo of skip drones at one of the skip lines,” he continued. “On the other side of that skip line, unknown to anyone outside this room except Ambassador Todorovich, will be a UPSF carrier group.”
“Wait, what?” Orosz demanded. “What’s a carrier group doing this far out?”
“Being very quiet and hoping to not be needed,” Henry told her. “UPSF Command suspects a trap. I agree with them, though no one is certain which of the potential ambushers will pull the trigger.
“In either case, our job will be to keep everyone alive for twenty-four hours until our backup can arrive. Unless the Kozun have shaken up three dreadnoughts that we don’t know about, our carrier group will be easily able to handle the combined Kozun and Drifter forces we expect in the Lon System.”
Henry looked around at the officers.
“Questions, people?” he asked.
“Which carrier?” O’Flannagain asked. “No offense to the rocket-jocks I serve with, but there are carrier groups I’d rather take care of myself than rely on help from.”
“Your old base,” Henry replied. “Assuming you’re willing to take help from them?”
“Yeah,” the pilot grunted. “They’re good peeps with good birds and solid escorts. I’ll take Scorpius over dying alone; that’s for sure. Some of the others would just result in us dying with extras.”
“The hope is to avoid anyone dying at all,” he reminded everyone. “The existence of Operation Yellow Bicycle is not to be distributed further, understood? This remains need-to-know. While no one is actually expecting the battle group to go unactivated, that would definitely be our preference.”
“Hope for peace but prepare for war,” Iyotake murmured.
“We can go into all of the various pithy sayings on that one for days and days,” Henry told his executive officer. “I want you all to put your heads together on how best to protect Carpenter. Worst-case scenario, even Glorious has a better-than-even chance of surviving the full firepower of the Guardians long enough to get clear.
“Carpenter doesn’t and will likely be carrying the delegation.”
“Question, ser,” Ihejirika said slowly. “If we’re expecting the Drifters to betray us…what do we do about the Kozun in that circumstance?”
Henry paused. He hadn’t thought about that, but his tactical officer had a point.
“If they betray us, they also might be betraying the Kozun, I suppose,” Henry conceded. “It’s possible the two will be working together against us, though, which I think has been everyone’s default assumption.”
“If the Kozun really want peace and the Drifters blow this up because they want us at each other’s throats, don’t we have a responsibility to protect them as well?” Ihejirika asked.