Princes at ewin, p.1
Princes at Ewin, page 1
PRINCES AT EWIN
FIRST CENTURION KOSNETT, BOOK 4
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
CONTENTS
Prologues
Prologue: Kosnett
Prologue: Kugosu
Jacoby
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Ewinhome
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Elox
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Confrontation
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue: Kosnett
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About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
PROLOGUES
PROLOGUE: KOSNETT
DATE OF THE REPUBLIC NOVEMBER 27, 411 RAN URUMCHI, FORWARD WAYPOINT MARIE
Phil studied the plot of ships at anchor from a screen in his office, rather than out on the flag bridge. He’d spent an extra day at this point getting everything prepared, because he had swapped out two excellent ships that had sailed great distances with his squadron and replaced them.
As if you could replace the Heavy Escort Morninghawk. The Command Cruiser Storm Petrel was much heavier, as you measured mass. More weapons. More than twice the tonnage.
But they lacked the sorts of heart that Morninghawk and its captain, Makara Omarov, had brought. That willingness to go for the throat against any threat, any size, anywhere. As Iveta Beridze had said at the beginning, other captains had nightmares about Morninghawk coming for them.
Storm Petrel was more of a showboat than a warrior. A vessel where important men were trained for important jobs. Sons of semi-feudal lords such as Omarov or Sugawara. Men, but he could see revolution breaking out there as well, like had happened in the Fribourg Empire.
Storm Petrel’s Command Centurion was Captain Malachi Yukimura, of a clan that was favored by the Shogun. The man who was the true Hegemon of Dalou.
Today, it carried the Imperial Crown Prince himself, nineteen-year-old Shingo Yosan, as a trainee officer. Phil doubted that the man would be allowed to truly serve or be put at any sort of risk, but the mere fact that he was in a black naval uniform had apparently been something of another revolution, according to what Phil had learned. No emperor had served in the navy in centuries before this.
Storm Petrel also carried the fourteen-year-old middle daughter of the Shogun, Lady Kohahu Kugosu. Fourteen going on forty, as his wife Xue Yi liked to say about their oldest, Yi Wen Kosnett, who was planning to join the navy like her famous father from the most recent letters he had gotten from home.
Phil would have liked to carry the young woman representative of her dangerous father aboard Urumchi. He had the ambassadorial space forward from removing the bubble gun. She had insisted, however, on traveling aboard Storm Petrel instead.
Phil had a number of theories, but hadn’t pressed for answers. Nor had he insisted on her joining him here. There had been any number of undercurrents that night when Lord Morninghawk was awarded the Republic Cross and elevated to become his own lordship. Lady Kugosu had spent an interesting amount of time speaking directly with the crown prince.
None of it properly chaperoned, according to Dalou custom.
But Dalou was in the first chapters of a social and political revolution at least as troubling as the civil war centuries ago that had elevated the Shogun and reduced the Emperor to a figurehead.
Phil checked the time. Close enough. He rose and moved to the door, pausing to put on his game face as it were, before emerging.
Markus Dunklin was seated just outside his door, two travel mugs of coffee waiting, but he could read a clock as well as anybody.
“Ten?” he asked his assistant.
Markus held up both hands, palms out and grinned.
“Ten.”
The man liked to play with power tools and occasionally things that went boom. As long as he had all ten fingers, he kept this job. Otherwise, he had to return to Engineering.
A fate, he had assured Phil on more than one occasion, worse than death.
Phil had a good crew. His arrival in the larger space got a few looks, nods, and then folks went right back to what they’d been doing. Nobody needed to pause, stand up, and salute him. That was stupid. Even Fribourg was starting to break themselves of the habit, though it might take them a generation.
Harinder Abbatelli was seated in her usual spot, directly across the main table from where he sat, with her own screens to watch and the big hologram projector between them. Everyone else in here answered to her as Command Flag Centurion, but she had assembled one of the best teams of such folks Phil had ever known.
They were comparable to the folks that had been aboard RAN Vanguard with Jessica Keller during The Expedition. Their legend would hopefully shine as bright.
Phil sat. Markus dropped the other travel mug into a holder and clicked it shut.
The command table on the flag bridge could be set up to display holographic images of all the Command Centurions in an Aquitaine fleet. However, Phil had eleven vessels in this squadron, and only five of them hd RAN hull numbers. The holograms were just presentations of flat screens now. Easier, though it lacked some of the warmth.
But this was a war fleet on a war footing.
Even RAN Varmint had been sent back to Meerut, but they were a former pirate Picket and had no business in the middle of the thing Phil was about to do.
He paused, confirming that all the images were frozen and overriding the switch himself, then addressed himself to Harinder. She was as close to him as anybody in the fleet, having spent years preparing for this, after having been trained by the legendary Enej Zivkovic himself, Keller’s old Flag Centurion.
She knew Phil’s moods and foibles. She was watching him now with interest and empathy.
“I won’t ask if anybody thinks this is a dumb idea,” he told her quietly. “Most of them are chomping at the bit, if I had to guess. Do me one favor, Harinder?”
“Done,” she said. “What is it?”
Just like that. She would agree, then find a way to move heaven and hell to do it. But that described most of the force around him.
“If I look like I’m going too far, poke me,” he said.
“Too far?”
“Dalou behaved and Ewin launched a surprise attack when they knew I wasn’t going to be around,” he reminded her. “Just about the opposite of what I expected. Today, we are going to make an example of someone. I don’t think I will let it get out of hand, but I might. Your job is to ask me at the critical moment.”
She nodded. She would do that.
Phil took a breath and opened the line to the squadron.
PROLOGUE: KUGOSU
COMMAND CRUISER STORM PETREL
Kohahu had worked assiduously to keep Captain Yukimura from growing nervous, but the man was not prepared to deal with her aboard his ship. She doubted that any captain would be.
Female. Young. Well-connected. Highly intelligent. Deadly. For most of the gentlemen of Dalou, about as intimidating as it could possibly get. A few looked on her with covetous eyes, but that was the connection to her father, where she was just an image.
It was the ones who saw her as a woman who were interesting. Most of those were foreigners. Unsurprising, as Kosnett’s force was nearly equally split by gender, with many of his closest officers women.
Dalou captains didn’t know how to deal with Harinder Abbatelli or Heather Lau. They were all pitifully out of their depth with the Tactical Officer Iveta Beridze.
Kohahu had much to learn. Fortunately, she had excellent examples. Perhaps her dear father would figure out that aspect of things eventually as well. Or not.
He had three daughters, in a culture that did not allow women to wield power as anything but dangerous dowagers. Kohahu knew that there were Houses out there maneuvering to marry favored sons to the three Kugosu daughters, so that they might be in position to claim the Shogunate at some point.
She planned to keep it. If it took years, she had years, as her father wouldn’t retire or announce an heir any time soon.
Looking around the chamber, she noted the players today.
Captain Yukimura in command. Short, stout. Of the ancient African ethnotype that was somewhat rare in Dalou and other places. Gray hair kept severely short but not shaved, a rough stubble intended to convey something fierce. Dressed in black. Polite but not obsequious. He ran a warship entrusted with training well-bred sons of the nob
Crown Prince Shingo sat next to the captain. Young, though who was she to say. Nineteen, so five years her senior, though his years had been spent in the gilded cage of the Sunflower Palace, rather than the Shogun’s realm. In that, she had an advantage.
The other officers were an interesting mix. Storm Petrel was an important vessel in the Shogun’s fleet, and she herself had caused it to be here with Kosnett, rather than back someplace safe.
Kohahu didn’t think that they were at risk, given the immense firepower Kosnett’s people had demonstrated previously, but they were still going to do something rare and dangerous.
The screen at the front of the conference room came live now, showing the First Centurion in the center and ten other captains around him so that everyone could see each other.
“All vessels, this is Kosnett, aboard Urumchi. I have the flag,” he said in a dark, sober voice.
She watched the man’s face for clues. Here was a terrible warlord who had chosen instead to be an explorer. Most folks would see the latter and forget the former.
At least for one more day.
She shivered at the thought of what was coming.
“When we went to Ellariel to honor our friend Lord Morninghawk, my fear had been that Dalou might launch a sneak attack behind us,” Kosnett continued, laying things out more starkly than the Shogun’s Court would do. Especially with serving officers. But this was Kosnett. “Instead, we found many new friends among the folks of the Dalou Hegemony. People committed to doing the right thing, just as Morninghawk.”
He paused there. She watched his eyes shift around, as though taking in all the small images of his own captains, either Aquitaine or forwarded on to assist him in dealing with pirates. She thought that they were perhaps stretching their writ some, but she also understood just how immensely angry the man was.
That much she had seen in one of their final, private meetings before departure, when she had asked him the important question.
Why are you doing this?
“Instead, Ewin chose to try my patience,” Kosnett continued, syllables like a hammer driving nails into hard wood. “I have suggestions that Baron Russand is a renegade to his own Duke and King. That his attack at the moorage at Meerut was similar to what Utkin did previously. Except that he failed. Badly failed. Viking and our reformed pirate friends saw them off with terrible casualties. Russand lost half his fleet in an afternoon. I am still not satisfied.”
Kohahu watched the men around her stir uncomfortably now. Previously, demonstration raids were all anybody truly engaged in. Wars among the Five Nations were rare, as piracy had been the biggest issue until recently. Each held their borders as hard as they could, but few worlds actually changed hands.
Kosnett was introducing a new kind of warfare. The men in this room were only now internalizing what that meant.
Kohahu already knew.
Tsunami. The terrible wave, where the waters pulled back sharply, followed by utter devastation.
It was a thing for planets, not starships, but Kohahu understood that Kosnett’s anger would not be assuaged any other way.
She just blessed whatever deities would listen that they had chosen someone else to be made an example of.
“Understand this,” Kosnett said after that short break. “They respect us, the folks of the Balhee Cluster. That is good. However, they have not been taught to fear my wrath, so they may choose to continue pushing their luck when they think I might not strike them down. Baron Russand is about to learn the hard way what a poor choice he has made.”
Even Kohahu quailed inwardly at the lurid images his words painted. Many would call the foreigners barbarians, but that was a mistake. Merely alien. And folks who had just spent more than a century engaged in a series of wars for their very survival.
It bred strong, deliberate warriors. Ewin would be learning what that meant shortly.
“As Striker Solo of Shadowbolt has reminded me, we are also about to make a political statement,” Kosnett said. “Because Russand is renegade, and not acting under the orders of King Doysan IV. We are making a larger statement as well.”
He stopped and his eyes seemed to grow enormous as Kohahu watched.
“You will not try my patience,” he growled.
It was like a beast at the edge of the firelight growling.
“Shadowbolt, you will have the van,” Kosnett said now. “Come to three-five-five, down five, and begin accelerating standard. Forktail, you will switch places with Shadowbolt for this run. All ships conform to Shadowbolt in three lines astern. Ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to teach someone better manners. Shadowbolt, as you bear.”
He cut the line and Kohahu felt like the temperature in the room had just fallen chill enough that she needed a jacket over her half-kimono.
Captain Yukimura turned to her now, sober and focused.
“He intends to attack them without any warning?” the man asked, mostly confirming.
She had seen the original orders Kosnett had transmitted.
“They had their warning to behave, Captain,” Kohahu replied. “That the Baron chose to ignore it is simply bad decision-making on his part.”
“Kosnett intends us to sail down prepared for battle,” Yukimura countered.
“No,” Kohahu corrected him. “Kosnett intends you to destroy the moorage at Jacoby and anyone who disputes his ownership of it today. Whether the Ewin king chooses to accept that or cause a larger issue is secondary, as I doubt that the entire Ewin fleet is a threat to Kosnett. And if they are, he might return to Meerut and summon all his little pirates, plus the three vessels he left there.”
“That would be sufficient?” the Crown Prince spoke up now.
Technically, he was the lowest ranked officer in the room. He was also the son of the Emperor.
“With Viking and the rest, I expect he could annihilate them,” she said. “If truly pressed, he might send home for a fleet capable of sweeping the entire Cluster clear of threats.”
The men around her were all older. Generations in some cases, with Captain Yukimura being in his early fifties. Every one of them still trembled a little at her words.
Kohahu was just happy someone else had chosen to try Kosnett’s patience.
JACOBY
ONE
DATE OF THE REPUBLIC NOVEMBER 28, 411 RAN URUMCHI, APPROACHING JACOBY ORBIT
Heather had worked with Iveta and the rest on this, taking everything Striker Solo of Shadowbolt had been able to tell them about how Ewin forces usually worked. Barnaby Silver, Command Centurion off Viking, had also sent his full scan logs.
Baron Russand had attacked Meerut with a Hunter as his flagship. A cruiser-sized hull that carried a squadron of snubfighters like the famous Jessica Keller had done when she transferred to Auberon. Russand’s people weren’t nearly as good.
He’d also brought a Heavy Bombard, which was the other thing that Ewin did with cruisers, and a Light Bombard like Shadowbolt.
Throw in four missile frigates and he must have thought he was the king shit. Certainly, most fleets around here weren’t equipped to deal with that many missiles tracking down on you at once.
Fool had severely underestimated the RAN. And Bedrov-designed Expeditionary vessels. All those Pulse-Twos and Type-3-Pulse were tailor made for annihilating missile swarms.
