Raven's Course (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 3) - Glynn Stewart Page 0,1
that once you see the Convoy itself,” she told him. “But before you make any more assumptions, let me remind you that every missile in your magazines was based on a reverse-engineering project we ran in a lab we rented from a Drifter Convoy—and a good chunk of the missiles you hauled into Kenmiri space in the war were outright bought from Drifters.”
“It’s…easy to forget that, Em Ambassador,” Chavez said. “Do you think it’s likely that those fighters have disruptor warheads?”
Sylvia studied the starfighters decelerating to match Shaka’s course.
“Probably not, if only because they weren’t waiting for us,” she told him. “We didn’t exactly tell them we were coming.”
Sylvia, like Shaka, was assigned to the Peacekeeper Initiative, a special project of the United Planets Alliance to try and stabilize the Ra Sector now the Kenmiri Empire no longer existed. They’d deployed postal outposts throughout the portion of the Sector they’d made contact with, small prefab stations with a small crew and a stockpile of skip-capable courier drones to keep everyone in contact with each other.
Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe had appeared on the perimeter of the zone the Initiative was in contact with several weeks earlier. The UPA could have sent a drone, but it wouldn’t have been far ahead of Shaka itself…and Sylvia knew things Chavez didn’t. Like that the UPSF was reasonably certain at least one Drifter Convoy was responsible for the Kozun Hierarchy’s possession of resonance disruptor weapons.
“Fighters are in formation,” the tactical officer reported.
“We are being sent a course for Epsilon,” an older man, the destroyer’s coms officer, said. “ETA is just over an hour.”
“Plug it in and let’s see what we find,” Chavez confirmed. “Any instructions yet?”
“Nothing detailed,” the coms officer replied.
“We’ll be rendezvousing with one of the Guardians,” Sylvia told the captain with a concealed sigh. “I will meet with a Protector-Commander who will decide whether Shaka and I represent a threat to the Convoy.
“In the last years of the war, that would have been a formality. Now…” She shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll have any problems, but with the Vesheron alliance shattered, we have no guarantees of access anymore.”
Sylvia had been aboard Drifter Convoys before, though not Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe itself.
“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