Priddy nodded, the Sandovalan officer swallowing hard against the very guilt Hamilton spoke of.
“Of the twenty-six inhabited worlds we’ve contacted, nineteen—including all five worlds of the La-Tar Cluster—now have postal outposts in orbit with skip-drone magazines,” she told them. “Right now, all of those outposts are sending their drones here, which is resulting in a hub-and-spoke model for reliable communications—but those communications exist and have already enabled new deals that have stabilized food supplies in all six of those clusters.”
“Part of the stabilization has also been deals with our own trade cartels and interstellar corporations,” Nicolosi said. “We had some starting difficulties getting our traders and shippers interested in trading outside our borders, but once we were past them, the success of the early ships has resulted in an explosion of interest.”
“We were given a budget for humanitarian operations as well as a budget to provide incentives for people trading with those worlds,” Hamilton said. “I bribed the six largest trade cartels to carry out the first runs, but once they’d made a couple billion apiece, everyone else was suddenly eager to get involved.”
“There may still be excess deaths over what there should be,” Priddy said, her voice sad, “but most of the fundamental shortages are now under control in the clusters we’re dealing with. Through those clusters, we also now have at least basic intelligence on the remaining systems of the Ra Sector.”
“How many systems are we talking here?” Xinyi asked. “My focus was always on the Kenmiri worlds.”
“Three Kenmiri worlds, eleven five-world dependency clusters, and seven homeworlds,” Priddy reeled off instantly. “We haven’t made direct contact with the Kenmiri worlds or with the homeworlds other than Kozun and Beren. The indirect information we’re receiving suggests much what we expected, though: the homeworlds are fine and the Kenmiri colonies have fallen into the hands of their slave populations.
“In the long term, the Kenmiri colonies may end up being the most successful of the abandoned worlds,” she told them. “They have fully diversified economies and advanced technological industries in a way even the homeworlds don’t.”
The Kenmiri had treated the homeworlds of the various species they’d conquered with relative kid gloves. They’d imposed external rule and harshly punished resistance, but had mostly allowed them to continue with relatively normal, if forcibly insular, economies and societies…except that every few years, the Empire had drafted several million people to help build the agriworlds and industrial planets.
“What’s relevant to today’s discussion is how much of all of that is under Kozun control,” Hamilton interjected. “Rumor tells us that they aren’t the only homeworld to become expansionist in the Ra Sector, just the most aggressive and successful.”
“La-Tar would have been the fourth dependency cluster to fall under their control,” Priddy reported. “The Tak and Sana homeworlds have been conquered by the Kozun as well. Vague rumor, filtered through trade with the Kozun, is that they’re currently at war with an alliance between the Eerdish and Enteni homeworlds.”
“At the same time, they are pressing on at least one other cluster,” Hamilton told everyone. “Admiral Kosigan’s people at Intelligence believe that the Hierarchy has bitten off more than it can chew in multiple directions. Their analysis suggests that the Voices have to be desperate to clarify their borders on at least one side and to find ways to stabilize their existing territory.”
“Meaning that they will likely take Todorovich up on her offer of a conference,” Henry concluded.
“You know Mal Dakis better than anyone else here,” Hamilton pointed out. “Intelligence is basing at least some of that analysis on your own reports on the man.”
Mal Dakis was the First Voice of the Kozun Hierarchy. Now a secular leader and a high priest—theoretically the chosen prophet of the Seven, the Kozun Gods—he had once been a moderately religious but dangerously fanatical Vesheron leader.
And in that role, he’d received support from the UPA battlecruiser Henry Wong had been executive officer of. There were other UPA officers who knew Mal Dakis as well as he did, but he wasn’t sure there were any who knew him better.
“Mal Dakis is…” Henry considered carefully. “Pragmatic. Don’t get me wrong, he believes in his gods. He didn’t declare himself a Voice until his people had already been calling him one for years and he felt he had no choice.
“Everything he has done has been to enhance his power base and to protect the Kozun. He will do whatever he feels is necessary to do both of those things,” Henry said. “He doesn’t care if that is to decimate a planetary population to convince everyone to fall in line…or swallow his pride and negotiate the best surrender he can. Whatever is necessary.”
“That’s Admiral Kosigan’s opinion as well,” Hamilton said. “Which means we are almost certainly going to have that peace conference, which raises the interesting questions that have resulted in the plan for Operation Yellow Bicycle.”
“Does anyone in this room except you know what that means?” Henry asked.
Hamilton laughed coldly.
“Wait a moment, Colonel; I’m getting to the point.”
She took over control of the holographic display and zoomed it in on the vaguely defined crimson area marking the Kozun Hierarchy.
“The Kozun Hierarchy is one of two groups we’ve encountered that deployed disruptor warheads against UPA ships,” she noted. “In both cases, the ship in question was Raven. In the first case, however, the attack wasn’t even in the Ra Sector—but the missiles used at La-Tar show clear development based on the weapons used by the pirates in the Apophis Sector.”
A long finger pointed at the Kozun System, the Hierarchy’s central point.
“Intelligence believes that the Kozun, like those pirates, were provided the disruptor warheads by a third party. Since we do not know where Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe has been in the last two years and we know the Drifter Convoys host some of the best research-and-development facilities outside the Kenmiri Remnant…”
She shrugged and bared her teeth in what could charitably be called a smile.
“Command has the Drifters as an aggregate entity as one of the most likely sources for both the disruptor warheads and the stolen grav-shield-penetrator warheads used at the Gathering,” she told them all. “While Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe is not at the top of the list for the previous encounters, there is a high likelihood they provided the weapons to the Kozun.”
“But why?” Xinyi asked. “The Drifters underwrote the entire Vesheron war effort.”
“The Drifters were the only non-Kenmiri who were allowed to act as merchants under the Empire,” Henry said quietly. “They knew they were giving up that monopoly by helping destroy the Empire, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to stand aside as our trade cartels muscle their way in. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.”
“Exactly,” Hamilton confirmed. “We believe that the Drifters are attempting to neutralize all potential threats, both direct and mercantile, to the Convoys. Their inability to engage grav-shielded ships is unacceptable to them, so they have found proxies to move against us.