Reinforcements started arriving in short order. Lightspeed sensor delays meant the first wave was a pair of nova destroyers and a six-ship squadron of nova fighters from the Lastward security fleet. Redward was still being careful about revealing their new ability to build the drives for nova fighters, but an attack on the monarch meant everything was in play.
Kira watched from Deception’s flight control center as the new starfighters swung into formation around First Crown. The destroyers did the same, but they positioned themselves between the Redward cruiser and the mercenary ship.
She concealed a chuckle at that. If she’d wanted to wreck First Crown, there wouldn’t be much left. Deception was fifteen years out of date by the standards of her home sector, but that meant she was around thirty years ahead of the Redward cruiser.
And she was almost two-thirds again the local ships’ cubage. Deception could take on the cruiser and both destroyers and wouldn’t break a sweat.
There was a reason it had taken Queen Sonia’s explicit support to let Kira keep the ship.
“What’s the status on our search-and-rescue?” she asked the deck boss.
Dilshad Tamboli wasn’t the person she’d wanted for her flight deck boss, but it made no sense to move Angel Waldroup—Conviction’s deck boss—from a carrier now up to almost forty starfighters to a cruiser that maxed out at twenty.
Waldroup had recommended Tamboli, one of her team leads, and the dark-skinned spacer was now one of the handful of officers aboard Deception that held the delightfully vague mercenary rank of Commander.
They were focused on the screens and their headware but brought their attention back to Kira as she spoke.
“We’ve picked up Janda,” Tamboli reported. “One beacon still in space, looks like Saari.” They shook their head sadly. “We’re sweeping in case Zima’s beacon was just disabled, but it doesn’t look like it.”
One pilot lost out of three fighters destroyed. That was good by any standard, but Kira had still lost a pilot. Iris Zima had been one of their greenest recruits, a civilian shuttle pilot who’d leapt at the chance to fly a nova fighter.
“Keep looking for her,” Kira ordered. “Any of our unknowns show up in the sweep?”
“RRF picked up the escape pods from the gunships, but we’re still sweeping for fighter pods,” Tamboli told her. “Either none of them ejected or they’re using timed beacons.”
“They didn’t seem the type to fight to the death,” she noted. “Too professional. Those were damn good pilots, Commander Tamboli. My guess is timed beacons.”
Timed beacons triggered after twelve to twenty-four hours, in case a force didn’t think they were going to be able to control the battlespace but did think they might be able to sneak back in and retrieve their survival pods later.
“Make sure we grab any of their class two drives we can ID as well,” Kira said. “Even if we end up not using them, we can trade them to Redward. They’re not making that many of the things yet.”
Most of her fighters had been manufactured in the fabricators aboard Conviction, but the new ships’ drives had come from Redward. A class two nova drive couldn’t be manufactured in zero gravity or artificial gravity, which was part of what made them so hard to build.
“Sir,” a voice pinged in her headware from the bridge. “This is coms. We have incoming call for you from First Crown.” The junior officer sounded awed. “It’s the King, sir.”
The awe made sense, then. Monica Smolak was a Redward native, hired for her skills with communications software and hardware. She was still getting used to the “ship without borders” nature of a mercenary crew.
“I’ll take it in my office,” Kira told Smolak. “Give His Majesty my apologies; I will be a minute.”
* * *
Despite the horrible lèse-majesté of asking both her employer and the local monarch to wait, King Larry didn’t appear particularly bothered when his image appeared in the hologram above Kira’s desk.
The office still didn’t feel like hers, not yet, but it was the office for Deception’s Commander, Nova Group. It had everything she needed but was stripped down to the basic utilitarian fixtures of a metal desk and a counter with a coffee machine.
At least working for Redward meant they had very good coffee. It was still the planet’s main export.
“Your Majesty,” Kira greeted the immense smiling man on her screen. Lawrence Bartholomew Stewart, His Royal Majesty, First Magistrate and Honored King of the Kingdom of Redward, looked almost exactly like the kind of man who’d use the regnal name of King Larry.
“Sonia will be joining us in a moment,” Larry told her. “She is talking to the analyst team she has with her to get their first assessment of the situation.”
Kira wasn’t entirely sure how many people knew that Queen Sonia was the head of the Office of Integration—or even that the intelligence-consolidation team by that name existed. Via the Office, Sonia ran the entire intelligence apparatus of the Kingdom…and it made perfect sense she had a team with her.
“I’m glad we were in position to intervene,” Kira said. “We’d set it up with the RRF, but I don’t think anyone actually expected it to be needed.”
“Admiral Remington told us there’d be some arrangements for our security, but…as you say, no one expected trouble,” Larry admitted. A second image appeared above Kira’s desk while he was speaking, the tall and delicately built frame of Queen Sonia a distinct contrast to her husband.
From the fond glance the two exchanged, Kira figured they were in separate offices and hadn’t seen each other much since the battle.
“I expected trouble,” Sonia insisted. “We knew the RRF was penetrated to an unacceptable degree when we moved against the Clans last year. That battle group was sent out with sealed paper orders to cover against an intelligence apparatus we knew couldn’t be Warlord Davies’s.”
“The RRF still struggles with the concept of an interstellar conspiracy specifically targeting us,” Larry admitted. “So do I. But…” He sighed. “We have enough evidence that it exists.”
“Including this,” Sonia said. “Someone has the RRF sufficiently penetrated that our heavily protected and secret itinerary was leaked to a hostile force with access to both Clans-owned gunships and modern nova fighters.”
“Regardless…thank you, Commander Demirci,” Larry told Kira. “Or is it Captain now?”
“Commander for the moment,” Kira said. “Kavitha Zoric commands Deception while I command her fighters…and head Memorial Squadron LLC. We, of course, work for Redward through the subcontract from Conviction Limited.”
Larry laughed.
“I’m sure that all makes sense to you,” he told her. “All I really need to know is that you’re on our side with that behemoth.” He turned his attention back to Sonia. “You may as well fill the Commander in on what your team concluded at the same time as me.”
“The gunships were from the Costar Clans,” the Queen told them. “We have more than enough data on the Clans’ construction methods and available materials to confirm. The starfighters are more questionable. The interceptors were Veles-Four-type ships, Crest-built. The bombers aren’t in our intelligence databanks.”
“I can have my people go over the data we have,” Kira offered. “I don’t think there’s anything in Deception's databanks we didn’t give you, though.”
“I would appreciate that, Commander,” Sonia said. “Right now, my analysts’ best guess is that we’re looking at the flight group from that Liberty-class ship that showed up at Ypres. We know there’s a mercenary carrier working for Equilibrium in the region, and a Liberty-class would field forty nova fighters.”
“And Equilibrium has worked with the Costar Clans in the past,” Kira said.
“Indeed.” Larry’s voice was grim. “Our scans show you lost three fighters, Commander. Were…any of your pilots retrieved?”
“Two of them, thankfully,” she replied. “We only lost one person today.”
“We lost fifty-five,” Larry told her. “The gunships were taken out too quickly for escape pods. We have a handful of lucky survivors, nothing more. These people attacked without warning and killed far more of my subjects than I can tolerate.”
“We’ll interrogate the prisoners on Redward,” Sonia noted. “But there’s no way we can keep the Clans’ portion of this secret. We can probably quiet down the part about mercenary nova fighters, but…”
“What happens if people hear about the Clans’ attack?” Kira asked. Sonia sounded worried.
“Parliament will explode,” Larry replied instantly. “We have a working majority there, one that is loyal to us and the ideals we follow. It’s made up of three parties of the eight in Parliament, but they’ve stuck with us through four elections at this point.
“But…” He shook his head. “Enough of my opponents in Parliament want the Clans crushed that it’s a perennial argument. Once the people personally loyal to me start demanding we deal with the Costar Clans, we are going to have a problem.”
“We will deal with that in Parliament,” Sonia told him. “We at least have good news to bring to them as well.”
“Your Majesty?” Kira inquired.
“Our mission in Ypres was a complete success,” the Queen said. “For the first time in the two centuries it’s been inhabited, Ypres is united. Their new Federation is going to be a kludge for some time, but it has a unified nova-warship command—and they’ve signed on to the Free Trade Zone.”
The Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone was the dream the two monarchs had been pushing since before Kira had arrived. By establishing a mutual trade and security pact, they hoped to duplicate the purpose of the Old Earth European Union—economies and cultures so interlinked that war was impossible and unthinkable.
The problem was that the Equilibrium Institute, a quietly secret organization that had its fingers throughout a good chunk of human space, didn’t think that kind of structure worked. So, to “save” the Syntactic Cluster from itself, they kept interfering.
“That’s fantastic news,” she told them. “The whole system seemed… Well, they seemed like they deserved better.”
Ypres was the gateway from the Cluster to the rest of the Rim. Its division had been a long-standing impediment to all sixteen of the inhabited systems in the star cluster.
“Most people usually do,” Larry said. “As monarchs, it’s our job to get them that something better. As a soldier, it’s your job to protect it.”
“We try, Your Majesty,” Kira replied.
“And you succeed,” he told her. “There will be a significant bonus for your Memorials once I’m back home.” He sighed. “There is also, almost certainly, going to be a lot more work coming up. If the Clans are going to provoke us, then I am left with no choice.
“If Parliament is going to demand that the Costar Clans be neutralized, then we must get ahead of those demands and make certain that it is done my way.”
A chill ran down Kira’s spine. From her interactions with him, Kira knew King Larry to be a kind-hearted man, affable and cheerful by choice and nature alike…but he was also the constitutional monarch of a system of two billion souls, who’d guided its government without notable difficulty for fifteen standard years.
She knew underestimating him was dangerous, and even she sometimes fell into that trap.