“And yet they’re sending us Scorpius.”
“I think Kosigan and Saren are worried about the Drifters,” the Admiral noted. Admiral Lee Saren was the CO of SpaceDiv, the uniformed commander of the UPA’s actual space fleet. “They’re the people who were most integrated with the Kenmiri before their collapse. We’re not sure what they want…and they probably have a better idea of the UPA’s location and layout than we think they do.”
Henry grimaced. The UPSF hadn’t exactly tried to keep the location of their home stars secret, but they hadn’t been handing the information out, either. It hadn’t been relevant to most of their allies.
And since Zion was thirty light-years from the edge of the Ra Sector, that meant that most of the UPA’s former allies didn’t even know where to look for them. That was part of what made the government’s isolationist policy possible.
But if the Drifters were actually an enemy, at least some of them did know where the UPA’s populated systems were.
“So, we need to know, one way or another,” he said.
“If everyone is aboveboard, no one will ever officially know that Admiral Cheung left UPA space,” Hamilton told him. “If they’re not…well, you’ll have the best backup we can possibly provide.”
“If I’m leaving tomorrow, how close is Scorpius behind me?” Henry asked.
“They’re due to arrive in about forty-eight hours,” Hamilton told him. “I wanted you at La-Tar ASAP anyway…and I figured you wouldn’t mind avoiding that reunion.”
Chapter Seven
Henry loved Raven’s bridge in many ways. It was sufficiently different from the bridge of the battlecruiser he’d commanded at the end of the war to serve as a shield against the memories and nightmares of the genocide.
It was an oval two-story space eleven meters long and six meters wide. Including the upper balcony and the support consoles around each senior officer, it was designed to hold forty-eight people in five sections: Communications, Navigation, Sensors, Weapons and Engineering.
Two-sided screens divided the central pit from the support sections, physically isolating the captain and officer of the watch from the support teams while mirroring all of the information into the captain’s line of sight. The screens were transparent enough to provide visibility to his crew—and the holoprojectors a civilian ship would have used were too fragile for a ship at war.
On the screens behind him, the bulk of Base Fallout drifted away from them as Raven accelerated toward the skip point.
“All departments, check in,” he ordered calmly. He didn’t even need to send a command to the systems of the captain’s chair, with its own screens and computers, for it to relay that to everyone on the bridge.
“CIC is online and fully functional,” Tatanka Iyotake confirmed instantly over the network. The Lieutenant Colonel would often be the occupant of either the watch officer chair or one of the observer seats in the main command bubble. His battle station was in the Combat Information Center, running support for the entire bridge crew from a space that could act as a secondary bridge if something happened to Henry and his command crew.
“Engineering reports power and engines are green,” Lieutenant Mariann Henriksson reported. The engineering officer was one of the most junior section heads on the bridge, mostly because there was very little for the EO to do most of the time. Ninety percent of the time, the EO acted as a relay between the chief engineer and the captain, relaying information the chief didn’t have time to pass on themselves.
The rest of the time, the EO spent their time desperately collating damage-control data from across the ship to keep both the captain and the chief engineer informed while the chief spent her time trying to fix the warship.
“We’re back to twelve missile launchers, a gravity driver, and two battle lasers,” Commander Okafor Ihejirika reported, the big black man’s tone cheerfully relieved. “I didn’t realize how much I could miss having all of our weapons until we were down a quarter for so long. Tactical and guns are green.”
“Sensors are green,” Lieutenant Cornelia Ybarra, the assistant tactical officer, and the woman in charge of the Sensors Department, reported. “No unexpected signatures here in Zion.”
“I’d hope not,” Henry murmured. “Admiral Xinyi would have words for her people if we were the first to spot something here!”
“Communications are clear; we are linked into the drone cycle to La-Tar,” Lieutenant Commander Lauren Moon reported. There was no need for her to worry about Raven’s drones while they were on their way to one of the systems with a postal outpost, not unless there were an emergency.
A skip drone was leaving Zion for La-Tar and vice versa every twenty-four hours. It would take days for the drones to make their trip each way, but a continual cycle of the robotic spacecraft was now in place. Their news from Zion would get older and their news from La-Tar would get fresher as they made their journey, but they’d be getting news from both places.
The skip drones took the same amount of time to skip between systems as a starship, but they could accelerate at almost a thousand kilometers per second squared compared to Raven’s point five when traveling between skip points. They made the trip in about seventy percent of the time.
“Navigation is online, and our course is set,” Commander Iida Bazzoli reported, the platinum-blonde navigator’s attention focused on her consoles. “We’ll hit the skip point out of UPA space in nine hours toward to Ra-One.”
Henry nodded.
“Execute, Commander Bazzoli,” he ordered. His internal network then opened channels to the two officers who weren’t automatically linked to the bridge.
“Thompson, O’Flannagain,” he greeted his GroundDiv and FighterDiv commanders. “Status reports?”
“GroundDiv is rearmed and reinforced back up to strength, which you know,” Commander Alex Thompson told him. “I have a meeting with Kuroda in twenty minutes to talk about coordinating with the MPs for the trip.
“I presume that if something else comes up that requires a company or three of boots, you’ll let me know.”
Henry concealed a smile. Despite everything—and the La-Tar campaign had called for some hard, close actions and heavy losses on the part of the GroundDiv detachment—Thompson remained an eager young officer.
He knew Thompson was seeing the ship’s counselors and approved. The UPSF regarded mental injuries on the same level as physical injuries. They needed to be addressed and treated as best as possible—and in an age when every military officer had a computer network in their head, the UPSF had options other ages might not have had.
“If we don’t schedule a time to test-fly these birds, my people are going to go rogue on me,” O’Flannagain said once Thompson was done speaking. “The stats, metrics and simulators say they’re amazing, but we haven’t got all of them out into real space yet.”
“Take a look at Bazzoli’s route and pick three systems we have at least sixteen hours in,” Henry ordered. “We need to make sure you aren’t observed—the GMS birds are going to be a surprise to everybody, and I want to keep them under wraps—so Ihejirika will need to sweep each system ahead of time.