“And after that?” Chavez asked.
“Hopefully, I’ll be able to meet with one of the Ancients,” Sylvia told him. “My chief of staff will meet with a Quartermaster with our shopping list, but our main mission is political. That means I need to speak to the people in charge.”
The Ancients weren’t always the oldest members of the Convoy as they had once been, but the title remained. The Council of Ancients ran the fleet…and that meant that Sylvia needed to talk to them if she was going to get them to do what she needed.
Sylvia could tell who on Shaka’s bridge had seen a Drifter Convoy before and who hadn’t in the moment the destroyer crested the horizon of the gas giant and the contacts started to propagate on the sensor reports.
They’d seen half a dozen ships already by that point, but those were escorts, the standard Kenmiri light warship. Everyone in the former empire had escorts, either stolen from Kenmiri docks or built to Kenmiri templates.
As they came over the gas giant, hundreds of icons began to appear on the displays. Small ships. Big ships. Everything in between.
Chavez himself was stunned to silence along with his officers. Two of the noncoms clearly had seen a Convoy before, one of them meeting Sylvia’s gaze long enough to wink at her before getting back to his work.
“I knew they were a nomadic fleet, but that’s…”
“I make it six hundred and forty-three contacts,” the tactical officer replied. “Looks like sixty warships, a quarter of them Guardians.”
“It’s a three-stripe Convoy, Captain Chavez,” Sylvia pointed out. “That means a minimum of both five hundred ships and five million people. If Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe had fewer ships or fewer people than that, they’d be a four-stripe Convoy.”
“We’ve confirmed our destination, ser,” the communications officer reported. “As the Ambassador suggested, it’s one of the Guardians. Looks like the biggest.”
“Set your course,” Chavez ordered. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Sylvia. “Anything I should be worried about?”
“We don’t know this Convoy in particular,” Sylvia said. “They were deeper in Kenmiri space than most of our operations and weren’t one of the ones we leaned on to supply Golden Lancelot. With subspace coms, the Drifters were more unified than anyone suspected. Without them…”
She shrugged. Golden Lancelot had been the final solution to the Kenmiri war, a term chosen with deadly historical propriety afterward by the officers and spacers who’d carried it out. The UPSF, combined with their Vesheron allies, had launched a campaign of precision attacks across the entire Kenmiri Empire and killed every single one of the Kenmiri’s Kenmorad breeding caste.
Without the Kenmorad, the Kenmiri were a dying race. They had abandoned entire worlds to concentrate their remaining population into eight of their original twenty provinces—and the former Vesheron expected that remnant to shrink over the next eighty years until there were no Kenmiri left.
But the Kenmiri’s return salvo had been devastating. The subspace communicators every known race had relied on for faster-than-light communications had turned out to be using an artificially stabilized segment of subspace. In revenge for their destruction, the Kenmiri had disabled the stabilizers.
The Grand Alliance of the Vesheron had collapsed into infighting within hours of the loss of that instant communication. Sylvia didn’t know how the Drifters’ fragile inter-Convoy unity had handled it, but the UPA had lost a lot of friends to the Kenmiri’s final blow.
“Remember that the Guardians are modular warships,” she finally said. “You know more about what that means for them as combatants than I do, I hope.”
Chavez chuckled.
“I’m hoping not to underestimate them again,” he agreed. “My understanding is that each of those Guardians is more dangerous than a Kenmiri dreadnought, if not as tough. And, well…” He shrugged. “Shaka couldn’t fight a dreadnought, let alone something nastier.”
“Then let’s follow instructions and go say hello as they ask,” Sylvia told him. “We are, after all, here to ask for a favor.”
Chapter Two
Shaka’s shuttle slipped through a sea of behemoths. Most of the ships in the Convoy made the hundred-and-forty-meter-long destroyer look like a toy, which left the twelve-meter shuttle looking like nothing.
Most of the ships were freighters, refitted to act as flying arcologies holding everything from hydroponics to living quarters to factories. Some of the largest ships were flying refineries or mobile, self-lit agriculture domes.
Drifter Convoys were self-sufficient in a way the Kenmiri had prevented many of the planets they controlled from being. Arrayed around the edge of the Convoy were the ubiquitous Kenmiri-style escorts and gunships, but the core of the Convoy’s defenses were Guardians like the one their shuttle approached.
It was a misshapen vessel a kilometer and a half long and half a kilometer high. Several of its components had clearly started as other ships, welded together by a mobile production setup that could never have built a single ship of this scale.
The asymmetrical hull glittered even to the unaided eye with the power of its energy screens. Those shields were normally imperceptible in the visible spectrum, but the power of the Guardian’s defenses changed that.
“There, there and there,” the Chief Petty Officer in charge of Sylvia’s escort murmured, pointing at particular parts of the outline.
“What’s there?” Felix Leitz, Sylvia’s chief of staff, asked. The heavyset man had his own tasks on the Drifter Convoy, though he would accompany Sylvia today.
“Look, Em Leitz,” the Chief said, pointing. “You can see the turrets for her plasma guns. Her silhouette is visibly shaped by the extra reinforcement around the batteries.”
“Shaka would probably survive a full salvo from that thing’s guns,” Sylvia said. “Probably. But they’re overpowered even compared to a Kenmiri dreadnought’s. It wouldn’t take more than one blowthrough to end our little destroyer.”
“Any battle with a gravity shield is a question of odds,” the Ground Division noncom confirmed. She grinned, bright white teeth flashing against dark skin. “Given that Shaka would be running from that behemoth, not fighting it, I like our odds.”
Sylvia smiled thinly and glanced at the woman’s name tag. DAKARAI ARENDSE.
“Chief Arendse, have you seen a Guardian in action?” she asked.
“I haven’t,” Arendse admitted. “I’m GroundDiv, ser, not a spacer. I’ve seen Drifter commandos in action, though, and if their ships are half as competent as those terrifying masked bastards…”
“My understanding is that their ship crews are more competent than their ground troops,” Sylvia pointed out. “The ground troops are small escort detachments, after all. The ships are the life of the Convoy.”
The war against the Kenmiri had had three sources of capital ships: stolen Kenmiri dreadnoughts, capital ships from El-Vesheron powers like the UPA, and the Drifter Guardians. The Guardians had rarely been deployed, since the Convoys had maintained at least the appearance of neutrality until the very end, but their involvement had been critical in multiple battles.