Raven’s Flag

Chapter 1

“Admiral on deck!”

Rear Admiral Henry Wong of the United Planets Space Force took a full four seconds to remember that the traditional call, the pipe fanfare behind it and the honor guard of Ground Division troops flanking the route from his shuttle ramp were all meant for him.

The gaunt Chinese-American officer had, after all, been a Rear Admiral for all of three and a half hours.

Returning the salutes from the honor guard, he crossed the flight deck of the cruiser Amethyst and made a point of saluting the woman waiting for him before she could salute him.

The United Planets Alliance Medal of Valor, after all, was still mind-bogglingly rare in the twenty-fourth century—even after a seventeen-year conflict for the UPA’s very existence and the six years of active “peace” that had followed.

Colonel Andriana O’Brin had earned hers the hard way, as he understood it, and even the best medical technology couldn’t quite cover the join line along the pale-skinned woman’s face, jaw, and neck marking where roughly thirty percent of the right side of her body had been reconstructed.

“Welcome aboard Amethyst, Admiral Wong,” she greeted him, extending her hand. “As I understand, you might have seen as much of her as I have.”

Henry smiled and shook the proffered hand.

“I’ve seen her schematics in excruciating detail,” he confirmed. “But the last time I was aboard her, she didn’t even have her wings yet.”

Two and a half years earlier, Henry Wong had been informed that, regardless of what he might think was the best use of his abilities, he needed at least a year in a desk job to qualify for his star—and the UPSF wasn’t going to wait any longer to put him in that desk.

He’d spent most of those two and a half years flying a desk for the UPSF Technical Division, working on the implementation of the brand-new systems and technologies that underlay Amethyst and her entire class.

“We weren’t sure your shuttle was going to catch up in time,” O’Brin admitted. “I was expecting to bring you aboard somewhat more…conventionally.”

“There was never any chance I was missing the promotion ceremonies on the Iron Ring,” Henry said. “As I understand it, the Drifters moved up the schedule on us all.”

O’Brin gestured for him to follow her. The new-fledged Rear Admiral had spent long enough in the cruiser’s schematics to recognize the route to the bridge with his eyes closed.

“We got the drone twelve hours ago, aye,” O’Brin confirmed. “They were only going to make the skip line three hours early, but it was enough to throw a wrench into everybody’s plans. Most everyone is in place, though.”

“Hell of a day,” Henry murmured as they entered an elevator. “First alien delegation to ever enter Sol.”

“The first?” O’Brin asked. “That can’t be right. I know I spent a lot of time in Kenmiri space or in rehab, but I know I’ve seen aliens around Earth.”

“Individuals,” he explained. “Not delegations. Even with our allies, we always sent people out to them. Kind of silly, really, given that the Kenmiri knew where we were!”

The seventeen-year-long war with the Kenmiri Empire had started when the insectoid aliens had invaded human space. Henry’s fingers touched on his pilot’s wings almost absently. Unlike the vast majority of the insignia for qualified starfighter pilots, his had the center enameled red.

That marked him as one of the people who had flown starfighters against that invasion—and the UPSF had lost almost the entirety of its starfighter strength in that campaign. There were very few people left who wore red wings.

“So, the Drifters are the first to send diplomats to Sol?”

“Exactly. Red Stripe White Stripe Convoy is a big deal,” Henry pointed out. “They’re a two-stripe convoy, which means there are over five thousand ships under their authority and some hundred million sentients.”

O’Brin whistled silently, then slid easily back into the mask of command as the lift doors opened.

“All of those ships are in Proxima Centauri,” she pointed out. “But that’s still a big deal. The delegation is just ten ships, though.”

“Two escorts on the Kenmiri pattern and eight transports,” Henry confirmed. He might have been busy at the Iron Ring—the training facility over Mars where Commodores were given a harsh and intensive bout of training before they were made Admirals—but he’d been watching this news with care.

O’Brin led him onto her bridge, gesturing him to an observer’s seat next to the command station. Henry took a moment before sitting to survey the space, taking in the reality of the space he’d helped finalize.

The new generation of ships had, arguably, started with the Cataphract class of experimental destroyers—but those, in Henry’s opinion, had been little more than modified Significance-class destroyers. They were no more a fully distinct class than the G-mod sub-classes being used for the ships being refitted to use the new gravity maneuvering system.

The Amethyst– or Gem-class cruisers were the true firstborn of the new generation. Built from the keel out not only to incorporate the GMS, providing them with twice the maximum acceleration of their older reaction-drive siblings, but to include a thousand lessons and small technologies learned from the Kenmiri and the Vesheron rebels against the Kenmiri.

Among the more minor aspects were the holographic displays that gleamed around the horseshoe-shaped bridge. Only very recently had holodisplays become reliable enough to use in a combat situation—and they were still more of an augment than a key system. The key systems were still hard displays and neural feeds connected to the crews’ cybernetic internal networks.

The bridge also lacked the clearly discernable hatches an older ship would have had for acceleration tanks. The GMS didn’t pass inertia onto the ship at all, which rendered the protective fluid tanks unnecessary.

There were other subtle changes in both the hardware and the displays, but the design of the bridge was fundamentally Terran and Henry took his seat with a warm sense of familiarity.

Even without linking into the network shared by the bridge officers, Henry could take in much of Amethyst’s current status at a glance. The cruiser was running hot at her full two KPS² of acceleration as she pushed to make up the time they’d lost letting his shuttle from the Iron Ring catch up.

“Feels weird to see the icons for plasma cannon on a UPSF ship,” he admitted to O’Brin. “Even having gone through the whole discussion around putting them on the Gems and the Phoenixes.”

The Phoenix-class battlecruisers were still a draft, but the General Assembly had authorized funds to build six of them. They were the new generation of capital ship to go with Amethyst and her sisters—but every yard that could handle capital ships was either refitting the current ones or finishing the ships that had been frozen on the slips when the war had ended.

“We won’t be the only people with plasma cannon around, even if the Drifters aren’t bringing any,” the Colonel told him. “Looks like everybody brought a battleship to the party. Shame none of them can skip.”

“As we discovered in the Red Wings Campaign, it’s wise to assume that’s something they can fix faster than we would like,” he reminded her.

The five Earth powers that sat on the Security Council of the United Planets Alliance had once possessed skip-capable fleets of their own. After the Unification Wars that had created the UPA, they’d agreed to reduce those fleets down to two ships, only one of which was supposed to have a full offensive armament.

The United Planets Space Force was the only faster-than-light-capable battle fleet in human space. But it was not, as O’Brin pointed out, the only fleet in human space.

More accurately referred to as guardships in Henry’s opinion, the somewhat standardized battleship of the solar fleets had been designed for a last-ditch defense of the Solar System against the Kenmiri, which meant they were gravity-shielded reaction-drive ships with arrays of Kenmiri-style heavy plasma cannon.

The previous national fleets had been called up to aid the UPSF during the Red Wings Campaign, the initial invasion—and had proven sufficiently straightforward to refit with skip drives that it was absolutely certain all of them had been designed for just that modification.

“Ten battleships, two from each of the national fleets,” O’Brin told him. “Helios from the Solar Fleet. Crichton and her battle group to represent the UPSF—and us, as a showpiece.”

The Solar Fleet, as opposed to the national fleets, was a joint organization funded and crewed by basically every nation and planet in the Sol System that didn’t get their own seat on the Security Council. Helios was that group’s allowed skip-capable ship and was, for all intents and purposes, a modern UPSF Corvid-class battlecruiser. That she was the only non-UPSF skip-capable warship in the honor guard was likely an intentional point.

“Amethyst is the most modern warship in the UPSF,” Henry noted. “That means she can fight above her weight class against anything in space. Kilo for kilo, she outclasses even our G-mod ships.”

“Which means we’re doing what the old Commonwealth Extrasolar Squadron used to do,” O’Brin said with a chuckle. “Acting as a sales pitch without ever saying a word.”

“There’s not much on Amethyst that we’re likely to sell the Drifters,” he pointed out, glancing at the ETA for the Drifter delegation. “But then, not that long ago, I wouldn’t have expected us to ever let a nonhuman power send diplomats into Sol.”

Especially the Drifters, who had come very close to war with the UPA at one point—and who Henry and the UPSF High Command knew included actual Kenmiri among their number.