There were two people who’d originally been scheduled to be in the meeting with Henry and Hamilton, which meant he was the last out of the core Initiative group. Adding Base Fallout’s commander…something was going on.
“Bring more coffee when you come in to take minutes?” he suggested.
“Always, ser,” she promised.
Admiral Sonia Hamilton was a sparsely built woman in her early eighties. Age hadn’t slowed her down yet in Henry’s experience, and the gaze she leveled on him as he entered the utilitarian meeting room was sharp.
“You’re late,” she snapped.
“The meeting is scheduled to start in forty-two seconds,” Henry replied precisely. “I am the last of the original attendees to arrive. I am not late.”
He’d tolerate a lot from Admiral Hamilton. She’d sent a medical team to his quarters and ordered him onto medical leave in response to actions that another flag officer might have seen him cashiered for.
The UPSF being what it was, he’d probably have got the medical team at least. She still could have ended his career. She hadn’t.
For that reason alone, Henry Wong would deal with Hamilton’s sharp edges.
“Sit down,” she ordered. “We may as well wait on Xinyi before we get started, anyway. It will be useful to bring her up to speed on our operations before we deal with the scorpion Command sent us.”
Henry swallowed his curiosity with another gulp of coffee as he took his seat across from the Admiral. He traded nods with the other two officers in the room, both Lieutenant Colonels.
Veer Priddy was a native of the Sandoval colony in the Procyon System, a child of the European Union. She was petite, green-eyed and platinum blonde—and the officer who acted as Admiral Hamilton’s whip hand. She was the Peacekeeper Initiative’s operations officer, responsible for making sure their dozen starships ended up where they needed to be when they needed to be there.
Aetius Nicolosi was, despite his name, an American like Henry. He had the swarthy skin and dark eyes of his southern Italian ancestry and he was the yin to Priddy’s yang. Where Priddy was responsible for sending ships out, Nicolosi was, as logistics officer, responsible for making sure they had what they needed to get there and do their jobs.
“That scorpion would be Yellow Bicycle?” Henry asked.
“It would,” Hamilton agreed. “Priddy will update everyone on where we are, and then I will brief everyone on just what Command is doing. It’s the weirdest half-bullshit excuse for giving us what we need without giving us what we want I’ve seen…and I’ve seen sixty years of military bullshit.”
Henry buried his smile beneath more coffee, emptying his mug and setting it down.
“Raven is fully repaired, resupplied and rearmed,” he told the Admiral. “We even have the new starfighters aboard. I’m guessing we’re tasked as a test deployment?”
“If you mean you’re the Force’s guinea pigs, yes,” Hamilton agreed. “Some of the senior officers in FighterDiv are twitchy about giving up their rockets, so the deal was struck that the Initiative would get the first batch of One-Thirties. I figure you’re more likely to end up in a fight than anyone else, so you got them first.
“Jaguar will get her set when she returns from her current sweep. I’m sure Colonel Sharma will appreciate them as much as you do.”
Henry chuckled softly.
“Unlike Colonel Sharma, I could fly one,” he pointed out. “Though if I were to do so in combat, you’d have to cashier me.”
“Yes,” Hamilton said bluntly. “Though you were easier to train that into than some of our other independently deployed battlecruiser skippers.”
She tilted her head as she finished speaking, an unconscious tic that marked her receipt of a message to her internal network.
“Admiral Xinyi is here,” she told the officers. “Let Kukk know if you want something other than coffee, people; it’s time to get to work.”
Admiral Xinyi was a towering woman with heavyset Mongolian features. She took her seat with the careful precision of a large and physically powerful person who didn’t want to break anything.
“I appreciate you joining us, Vice Admiral,” Hamilton said in an unusually soft and courteous tone of voice for her. “While only part of the meeting is going to be immediately relevant to you, I believe you will find the background of our current status useful.”
“Even Vice Admirals jump when full Admirals say tiu,” Xinyi observed calmly. “I am only peripherally aware of the Initiative’s operations, so an updated background briefing will be valuable, given what I understand of Yellow Bicycle.”
Hamilton grunted and gestured to Priddy.
“Lieutenant Colonel, can you update us on the status of the Initiative’s outreach operations and current deployments?”
“Yes, ser,” Priddy confirmed.
Orders from her internal network brought a three-dimensional map of the Ra Sector and the nearest UPA stars up above the table. The Ra Sector, like the other former Kenmiri provinces, was exactly five hundred stars in a roughly cubical region of space.
Its Kenmiri name was completely unpronounceable to humans—and had turned out to be the name of their sun god. Since humanity had labeled the region “Ra” before learning that, Egyptian gods had ended up being the basis of the naming system the UPA used for the provinces.
“In many ways, the Initiative’s current sweep and penetration into the Ra Sector is more complete than our scouting of the region during the war,” Priddy noted. “Our focus then was on routes into the other provinces to make contact with the Vesheron, and on the three Kenmiri colonies themselves.
“We had only visited sixty of the systems in the Ra Sector at the end of the war, designated Ra-One through Ra-Sixty, though we know local names for about half of those stars now.
“Since the formation of the Initiative, we have only visited about forty of the previously scouted systems but have visited just over one hundred new systems,” she continued. “We have made contact with six different industrial-agriworld clusters and twenty-six individual planets, including the Beren homeworld.”
“All of the clusters have made some progress in reestablishing trade links,” Nicolosi added. “The Kenmiri left them no choice, but thankfully, they’ve mostly been more successful than our projections.”
“Which does not mean successful,” Henry said grimly. He’d read the reports.
“No,” Priddy agreed. “We’re looking at around fifty million dead on the worlds we’ve contacted alone since the Kenmiri withdrawal. That’s including deaths in various conflicts over resources, as well as starvation and deaths due to medicine shortages.”
Henry barely managed to conceal a shiver, and the chill in the room was perceptible.
“We cannot take responsibility for that,” Hamilton said bluntly into the room. “I know we can draw a direct line from our actions to the Kenmiri’s to those deaths, but I remind you: we did not set up those clusters and then take away the ships required to keep them running.
“I won’t deny our part of the guilt, nor our guilt in the genocide of the Kenmorad, but we are not responsible for the innocents killed in the systems of the Kenmiri Empire or due to the direct choices of the Kenmiri Remnant.”