“We do not have sensor footage of the key moments,” Sylvia pointed out. “Raven does. That the Drifters appear to have been willing to give up any protestation of innocence in the eyes of Henry Wong and his crew to make certain that footage is destroyed tells me it might be damning enough.
“Our footage of the attack on Raven is probably enough too, but the Drifters might start hunting escape pods once Raven is destroyed. We will not stay concealed forever.”
“My people…” Aval sighed. “It will be weeks before anyone is truly concerned over my silence. There is nothing they could send, even if they did know there was a problem.” She grimaced. “Every one of our cruisers was here, Todorovich. Mal Toranis is our only remaining capital ship, and we cannot afford to uncover Kozun.
“We sent everything here as a show of force, to try and end our most dangerous war on the best terms we could manage.”
“And now you confess all of this?” Sylvia asked.
“Either we will die together here, Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich, or the Kozun, the La-Tar and the UPA will fight the Drifters together,” Aval told her. “I do not believe honesty at this point will fail me.”
“Probably not,” Sylvia said quietly. “In that vein, then: There is a UPSF task force on the other side of the Ra-One-Seventy-Five skip line…this one.” She indicated the skip line on the tablet display since she had no idea what the Kozun called the system. “If they have not heard from us in twenty-four hours, they will skip through to investigate.
“If we can survive the next forty-six hours, Scorpius will save us.”
“You did not trust us,” Aval said.
“We did not trust anyone,” Sylvia replied. “You. The Drifters. We only mostly trust Rising Principle and their people. So, yes, we had a backup. But I have no way to reach that backup. Henry—Captain Wong—might have been able to reach them, but I have no way to know.”
“And that he runs so desperately suggests not,” the Kozun said. “You fear time.”
“Time is not our ally. By the time Scorpius gets here, Raven will be dead. We will have been found. Your people’s escape pods will have been destroyed. And the Drifters will have a story and sensor footage lined up to explain everything.”
“What if there were a way for you to contact this Scorpius?” Aval asked. “A way I am…mostly certain the Drifters cannot intercept.”
“Unless you have a miraculously-still-working subspace communicator, I am not sure what you could offer,” Sylvia admitted.
“A skip drone,” the Kozun told her. “One we prepositioned at a skip line we did not expect you to survey…to the star you called Ra-One-Seventy-Five. Our emergency report system, that only I can activate.”
“Sending it through Ra-One-Seventy-Five…”
“Added forty-three hours to the flight time, but it reduced the chance that you would detect and intercept it to almost zero. We believed that if the drone was needed, avoiding interception was critical.”
“How close to the skip line is it?” Sylvia asked. “If Raven did not get a drone through, the Drifters had to have done something.” And if Raven had got a drone through, this was unnecessary.
“It is on the skip line, following a ballistic course through the outer system well away from anywhere you or the Drifters could see it,” Aval told her. “I would need to send a tightbeam message.”
“That could get us found and killed,” Sylvia replied. “And that is assuming everything you are saying is true.”
“Yes,” Aval replied. “But these people killed Star Voice Kalad and twenty-four hundred of my people. I want them dead, Ambassador Todorovich. Every bone in my body and the voices of my Gods scream for vengeance.
“I will let you record the message. I will provide the activation codes for the drone. My estimate puts it far enough that the Drifters will not detect it.”
“That means we will have a transmission delay,” Sylvia noted. “But…we can cut twenty hours off the timer. That is worth it.
“Assuming you do not get us killed.”
“I cannot promise that,” Aval admitted. “That depends on what we end up using for a transmitter.”
“Impossible,” Rising Principle snapped. “She must-will betray us. We can-will die.”
“The only transmitter we have is too wide a beam to be hidden, either way,” Trosh admitted before Sylvia could argue with the Enteni diplomat. “All we really have is an emergency beacon. It can be used as a transmitter, but it is an omnidirectional system, designed to make sure we can be found.”
“The exact opposite of what we need,” Sylvia conceded. “Look, the Drifters just killed over two thousand of Aval’s people. She is not going to betray us to them. Our worst-case scenario is, what, she has a secret fleet in the outer system? They would still rescue her and us.
“Right now, our only hope is over forty-five hours away,” she continued. “If this drone exists and works, we cut that to twenty-five hours. I am not certain we have twenty-five hours,” she admitted. “But I am entirely certain that even Henry Wong cannot buy us forty-five.
“How long do you think we will be able to hide once they start sweeping the wreckage for escape pods, Rising Principle?”
“That fate-time is-has not yet come,” they replied. “You ask-demand too much. To trust this Kozun…”
“Rising Principle, we might yet survive if we have to wait for Scorpius to arrive, but…” Sylvia gestured to the tablets displaying the sensor data, “Raven will not. The Guardians are already in pursuit. They have higher acceleration than she does now. They will catch her, and she cannot defend herself. Not against three dreadnought-equivalents.”
“I agree with you,” Trosh admitted, looking carefully at his boss, “but we still lack a directional transmitter. Unless the hardware you humans have in your heads is more powerful than I think, we have no way to reach this drone. Even if we trust Aval enough to concede its existence.”
“Our internal networks cannot do it, no,” a new voice interjected. Sylvia looked up to see Leitz and Thompson joining the conversation, her chief of staff and the GroundDiv officer looking drained.
“There is a very distinct limit on how powerful a transmitter we can install in somebody’s skull,” Thompson continued. “Which is always a pain for GroundDiv operations, so our combat gear contains more powerful transceivers. One might not do it, but we have multiple sets of combat gear here, plus the La-Tar gear, plus the Kozun gear.
“Both of them are using Kenmiri systems that are more powerful but less precise than ours,” he continued. “I think we can rig up a directional transmitter with enough range. But…it will probably only work once.”
Thompson shrugged.
“Battlefield tech upgrades.”
“This is your ship, Rising Principle,” Sylvia said, turning her gaze on the Enteni diplomat. “But…we doom Raven and probably ourselves if we do nothing.”
“I trust your heart-soul,” the envoy finally said. “This fate-time must-will destroy us all if we do nothing. Do what you must-will.”