Raven's Peace by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989674024
Amazon: B07Z6PP4DG
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2019-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

The call with UPSF Command, Henry and Ambassador Todorovich had been scheduled since before they even left Procyon. It had been rescheduled after the delay in Apophis, but now they had reached their destination and it was time for the final updates.

It was just the two of them in the secured conference room, and as Todorovich fussed with a carafe of coffee, Henry input the codes that locked everyone else aboard Raven out of the subspace communicator.

Usually, they were running multiple parallel channels to allow for a dozen different necessary communications to take place. For a secure call like this, everything else would have to wait.

“We’re locked in,” he told Todorovich. “Ready?”

“For the biggest and messiest challenge of my life? Of course,” she replied with a smile. She slid a coffee cup across the table to him and took a seat herself. The fussy nervousness of a moment before was gone, vanished behind a mask that would have fooled even Henry if he hadn’t seen her a second before.

“I learned to read microexpressions to deal with Ashall,” he noted. “You scare me, Em Ambassador.”

“Good,” she said calmly. “That means the Ashall can’t read me, either.”

He shook his head at her, put on his own professional mask—far less controlled than Todorovich’s, if still enough to conceal his emotions from his crew in the middle of a battle—and opened the subspace communicator link.

“This is Raven reporting in,” he said aloud. “Authentication code is Michael Gabriel Raziel Aziraphale One Six Niner Four One. Captain Henry Wong on the call.”

“This is Ambassador Sylvia Todorovich reporting in,” the Ambassador added a moment later. “Authentication is Raven Raven Wolverine Seven Niner Badger Duck.”

A green light flashed in the middle of the table, replaced a moment later by a rotating image of the eight-star seal of the United Planets Alliance.

The seal lasted through one twelve-second rotation and vanished. The empty chairs around the conference table were suddenly full, each of them mirroring a chair somewhere in the UPA.

Given the collection of stars and titles around the table, Henry would have been very surprised to learn that the rest of the call was in one room.

“Em Secretary, we now have Captain Wong and Ambassador Todorovich on the call,” the clear organizer of the meeting reported. Even Henry recognized Senna Dirksen, the extraordinarily pale and androgynous Senior Undersecretary of the United Planets Alliance.

“While I’m certain Ambassador Todorovich knows half the people on the call and Captain Wong knows the other half, perhaps some introductions would be in order, Undersecretary?” the woman Dirksen had addressed replied.

Vasudha Patil was so dark-skinned as to nearly blend in with the tailored leather chair she was sitting in but wore a traditional Indian sari and had the red-dot bindi tattoo of a married Hindi woman on her forehead.

She was also the Secretary-President of the United Planets Alliance. Her power inside the actual member star systems of the UPA might be limited, but there was still no question that she was the single most powerful human being alive.

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