47

Eight hours later, Kira wasn’t sure she trusted her own judgment. She was cycling nova fighters through her fleet patrol, but she’d remained out in her Hoplite except for a short stop to refuel.

She’d figured that Cobra Squadron likely had one of their carriers supporting the Redward blockade. Everything they’d seen except the cruisers themselves had been mercenary ships, so she’d suspected that the Institute had put their hands all over the blockade.

“No contacts within range,” Zoric told her. The Captain had stood down the cruiser to ready status, along with the rest of the fleet. “We might have actually scared them off.”

“You realize saying that might have jinxed it?” Kira replied. “Two-thirds of my pilots are asleep, and I’ve only a hundred fighters in space.”

The patrol was also busy assisting in search-and-rescue. They’d pulled six of their missing pilots from the wreckage, along with three copilots. Kira had still lost as many people today as in the entire training program, but nine had lived despite losing their ships.

Civilian shipping was also everywhere now. The official convoy to Ypres was twelve ships on its own, and at least four times that many had now arrived at the trade-route stop. Once people were certain the path had been secured, there appeared to be a small exodus of non-locals who’d been trapped.

Kira could sympathize. She liked Redward well enough, but she could guess how it would have felt if she’d been planning on going back to Apollo.

“Most likely, Commodore, they had an accurate enough feel of the Fleet’s strength that they’re retreating to Ypres with the news,” Zoric told her. “How long are you going to maintain the nova group at this level of readiness?”

“Until we’re under the guns of somebody’s fortresses,” Kira replied. “One-third in space, two-thirds on the carriers.”

“Fine. When are you coming back aboard?”

Kira checked the clock.

“Call it four more hours,” she told the cruiser Captain. “If they haven’t hit within twelve hours, they’re playing a longer-term game than I was expecting. I just want to make sure we don’t get another eight-bomber strike landed on Deception.

“I still feel bad about the last one.”

“Better us than anything else in Seventh Fleet,” Zoric said philosophically. “I mean, if you could keep it down to a six-bomber strike or even a one-bomber strike, I’d be happy, but we can live through eighty torpedoes.”

Kira felt as much as saw Zoric’s grimace.

“Once,” the other woman admitted. “Which is once more than anyone else in the damn fleet.”

“I’ll make sure to send the Bengals in your dire—”

“Multiple nova flare!” a voice interrupted. Kira hadn’t even seen it yet—but Neha “Backstab” Bradley had. The young woman had hit the alert command, and every ship in the fleet got the warning at the same instant—as forty individual nova signatures flashed into the middle of the fleet.

There was no time for more conversation. The newcomers’ multiphasic jamming tore apart the communication, and Kira prayed her people knew that most ancient of navigation tools—just as critical in the age of the nova-fighter as in the age of sail.

Sail to the sound of the guns.

* * *

The enemy knew the odds they were facing. Kira had a hundred fighters in space, half-and-half interceptors and fighter-bombers—there was little to really distinguish the Hoplites and PNC-115s from their RRF clones—against forty.

It took her less than five seconds to determine the real problem: there was a nova bomber wing in the heart of the formation. It was the same trick they’d pulled against First Crown months earlier—and Kira had made sure everyone in Seventh Fleet knew about it.

She wasn’t even the first pilot there. A squadron of Hoplites from Conviction blazed into the enemy formation within seconds of the jamming going up. Even without knowing who they were, Kira figured it had to be Hoffman.

No one else was good enough to cause as much confusion as those six fighters caused. She swore that she saw one of the mercenary interceptors shoot another mercenary fighter.

These were the Veles-4s, Crest-built ships comparable to the Hoplites and their Dexter clones. Their only hope had been complete surprise, and Kira had been waiting for them.

At least two squadrons’ worth of fighters had coalesced behind her before she slammed into the front half of their formation, dodging around the interceptors and ignoring their fire as she hunted the Ugly bombers at the heart of the formation.

Like the Screwballs aboard her own ships, the enemy bombers were a crude but effective solution to needing to kill real capital ships without real bombers. These ones had sacrificed enough maneuverability that they needed the escorts, but Kira left those interceptors to the second wave of her own fleet as over twenty of her fighters slashed in on ten nova bombers.

It was over in seconds and the Veles-4s scattered in shock. The squadrons that had charged in had been the best Kira had, the ones commanded by her Apollo veterans and made up of the veterans from both Conviction and the RRF.

The interceptors scattered away from them and collided with Kira’s trainees. Her former students might not rank up with the veterans of a dozen battles that had broken the mercenary formation, but they could handle taking on that broken formation at two-to-one odds.

Nova flashes announced the end of the attack, and Kira smiled coldly as the computers projected the enemy course.

They’d headed right for Conviction, trying to punch out the weaker of the two big mercenary ships. Unfortunately for them, some of the best pilots in the cluster called that ship home, and Joseph Hoffman, it seemed, really liked his new bunk.

The jammers stayed up for a few more minutes as her fighters orbited back out. There were still four hours left on patrol…and victory against this wave didn’t meant there wasn’t another one.

There was only one real good piece of news out of this to her: if they’d only thrown the Crest-equipped mercenary squadrons at her, there were no other fighters around. Cobra Squadron was somewhere else.

Kira was damned certain they weren’t making it to Ypres without colliding with Estanza’s old colleagues-in-arms, but she’d take every chance she could get to blood her new pilots before then. Every scrap of combat experience they could accumulate would save lives when they went up against those veteran Institute pilots.

And she was going to bring as many of her people home as she could.

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