Deception returned to Redward orbit in company with First Crown. The two ships novaed together once the royal transport had finished cooling her nova drive. The entire point of having Crown jump to Lastward instead of the main planet had been to protect her arrival and leave her with a ready-to-nova drive when she got home.
In hindsight, that had been a mistake. Kira didn’t bother to conceal her sigh of relief from her bridge crew as First Crown entered the weapons range of the massive asteroid fortresses orbiting Redward. Like almost every major human world, the planet was more than fortified enough to stand off an attack by any ship small enough to nova.
The vulnerability was in the hour between emerging from nova and entering that defensive perimeter. With the drive core cooled, Crown could have evaded a threat in that gap by micro-novaing. With her core heated by a full-length six-light-year nova, she’d be trapped by any enemy engaging her.
Since her course had leaked, that had happened in the far reaches of the star system instead. But Kira had been there with Deception and everything had turned out…mostly okay.
“Sir, we have docking clearance for Blueward Station,” Smolak told Zoric. “Conviction’s old dock.”
“Understood. We’ll come in slow and careful,” the Captain ordered. She didn’t bother to glance at Kira for confirmation. “Davidović, where’s Conviction?”
“I have her on the scopes,” the tactical officer replied, throwing the old carrier up on their displays. “She’s about three-quarters to the slip they threw together for our refit,” she concluded.
“That was the plan,” Kira reminded them. “Once Deception could take over the role of being the RRF’s mercenary heavy, Conviction needed some tender care of her own.”
A hundred and sixty-eight years old, the carrier had been demilitarized roughly on her second decommissioning, the removal of her original plasma turrets done in such a manner that she lacked the structural integrity for new ones.
“First Crown has launched a shuttle squadron heading for the surface,” Davidović reported. “A wing of sub-fighters from the fortress is rendezvousing with them. Their Majesties are heading to the capital.”
“Good,” Kira said. “I have some conversations to have with Waldroup and the RRF logistics teams. We need to get three replacement Hoplites aboard ASAP.”
That was going to be an argument with Conviction’s deck boss. The old carrier’s fabricators were among the best in the system—edged out by Deception’s now but better set up in general for building nova fighters.
Conviction had eighteen Hoplite-IV clones aboard, and Kira wanted to steal three of them rather than waiting for new fighters to be fabbed. She’d have an easier time borrowing a pilot from Joseph Hoffman, Conviction’s new Commander, Nova Group, and one of her Apollo veterans, than she was going to have stealing three fighters from Angel Waldroup.
“That’s your job, not mine,” Zoric told her with a chuckle. She was clearly following Kira’s thought process. “Did you ever think your mercenary company was going to be this much of a pain, Demirci?”
“I thought I was going to have six nova fighters forever,” Kira admitted. “Not a heavy cruiser and forty-odd pilots and crews that belonged to me across two ships!”
What was going to make her life easier right now was that the three Hoplite squadrons aboard Conviction still belonged to Memorial Squadron. Waldroup ran Conviction’s flight deck, but those squadrons were still subcontractors.
As King Larry had said, it all made sense to her. Most of the time.
* * *
Once the cruiser docked, Kira’s headware cheerfully informed her that she had a backlog of messages at her stationside office—even though she’d been out of Blueward Station for less than twenty-four hours, saving the King and Queen included.
Instead of checking any of them, she called the man who was in charge of the Memorials’ planetside affairs.
“Stipan, why is my email exploding?” she asked him.
Stipan Dirix was a former Captain in the Redward Army that she’d recruited to run her dockside office when she and her people had first arrived in Redward. There was a Brisingr death mark worth millions on her and all of her Apollon pilots, so she’d needed an intermediary.
“You have a working heavy cruiser, sir,” Dirix pointed out. “While Deception was in dry dock and Conviction was doing all of the work, it was easy to redirect people to Estanza. Now that the reverse is true, people want to hire you.”
“Is there anything in that pile I actually need to care about?” Kira asked.
“Are you planning on taking any jobs outside the Redward retainer?” he replied.
Kira’s conversation with Larry and Sonia suggested that Redward was going to be leaning on that retainer shortly. Technically, she didn’t even have that retainer—it was Estanza’s retainer and she was merely a subcontractor.
“I’m not doing anything that isn’t run through Estanza and Conviction Limited just yet,” she told Dirix.
“Then you can ignore most of those emails,” Dirix said calmly. “Flag ’em back to me and I’ll let people down gently.” The big man shrugged in the image her headware was feeding her. “I turned down everyone who was obviously not offering enough money, but didn’t want to say no to jobs that looked half-decent or better.”
“The RRF is going to need us soon enough,” Kira said. “We’re not going anywhere. What’s the rest? Personal and ads, looks like?”
There was a message there from Hope Temitope, for example. The Redward Commando Colonel had been instrumental in capturing Deception, and they’d kept in contact since.
“I cleared most of the ads out based on the usual rules,” he agreed, “but a few looked interesting. We don’t actually have a provisioning contractor for Deception yet, and having one supplier makes it easier to manage safety and suchlike.”
There were four different emails around that topic, Kira realized as she sorted the messages. Even Deception’s somewhat understrength crew was several hundred people. So far, they’d just been acquiring food and similar supplies from the station chandlery, but a contract supplier made sense.
“Fair,” she said. “Do me a favor, Stipan?”
“You pay me for seven hours a day, five days a week, sir,” he pointed out. “Inside that, you own me. I don’t really do you favors.”
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“Of course, sir,” he finished.
“Throw together a request for proposal based around Deception’s current crew strength,” she told him. “You should have the list for allergies and religious restrictions already, so you know as much of what we need as I do.
“Get me at least four proposals and I’ll try to find time to talk to the two best ones.” She looked at her schedule. “I’m keeping things relatively open because I’m expecting to get called into a Fleet briefing sooner rather than later.
“I’ve got some work to sort out around the nova fighters, but I also need your backup list. We lost a woman today. Iris didn’t make it back from rescuing the King.”
“All right,” Dirix said, his tone more subdued. “I’ll have you three names and files by the end of day.”
“Thanks, Stipan,” Kira told him. “I’ll be heading over to Conviction shortly, probably with both Zoric and Bueller. Let me know if you need anything more immediate.”
“Wilco.”