13

Deception’s briefing room was intended to hold all twenty of her pilots. It wasn’t really intended to hold them all comfortably, but it at least had the space to fit all of Kira’s new squadron commanders in hologram form.

Cartman and Yamauchi were the only people physically present, the two Deception squadron commanders seated in the front row like particularly eager students. The eight squadron commanders from Perseus were arrayed behind them, their holograms nearly perfect.

Kira suspected that the hologram of her aboard Perseus wasn’t nearly as perfectly life-like as the ones she had from the carrier. The recorders were much the same, but the projectors on Deception were significantly better than those available to Redward’s fleet.

“Colonel Sagairt,” she greeted the carrier’s Commander, Nova Group. “It’s good to see you again.”

The slim, copper-haired RRF officer grinned at her. He was at least five years her junior, but that still left him the most experienced and senior nova-fighter pilot the Redward Royal Fleet had to offer. He’d commanded the grand total of six battered secondhand medium fighters the RRF had possessed before they’d captured an Equilibrium fabricator capable of manufacturing class two drives.

“Likewise, Commander Demirci,” Sagairt replied. “I didn’t even have to argue with Admiral Kim about who the fleet CNG should be this time.”

She returned his grin. When they’d taken a fleet to the Kiln, Kim had tried to insist Sagairt command the nova fighters. Sagairt, realizing that Kira had three times his fighters and four times his experience, had insisted she take command instead.

“As of our last update, everyone, the Bengalissimo force has not yet arrived,” Kira told the squadron commanders. “Despite that, they’re only supposed to be bringing one fighter squadron, so I figured we’d go ahead with this meeting.

“First, introductions.” She gestured to her two officers. “Commander Mel ‘Nightmare’ Cartman commands Memorial-Bravo, a squadron of six Hoplite-IV interceptors. Commander Akira ‘Purlwise’ Yamauchi commands Memorial-Charlie, a squadron of six Weltraumpanzer-Viers.”

Kira would rather fly an interceptor over a heavy fighter any day, but she had to admit that the Viers were the most advanced starfighters available to her and her allies.

“You presumably all know who I am,” she said to a chorus of chuckles. “I fly under the callsign Basketball and directly lead our Memorial-Alpha squadron, which has eight Hoplite-IV interceptors.”

Brisingr used a ten-fighter squadron but Kira was used to the Apollon system, where four six-ship squadrons were combined into a Nova Combat Group. Conviction, prior to her arrival, had operated with a squadron strength of “we only have eight nova fighters.”

When they’d needed a more divided structure, Kira had set it up based on her own experience.

“Equally, everyone knows who I am,” Sagairt said. “I command Perseus’s nova group and, like Commander Demirci, also run Perseus-Alpha—a squadron of eight Sinister fighter-bombers.”

He gestured to his officers.

Perseus-Bravo and Perseus-Charlie are both six-fighter Sinister squadrons, under Major ‘Witch’ Vanhanen and Major ‘Crown’ Herrera.” A dark-haired woman and a shaven-headed man both nodded as they were named.

“We then have thirty Dexter interceptors, in squadrons Perseus-Delta, -Epsilon, -Fox, -Gamma and -Hotel,” he reeled off. “Those are respectively, under the command of Majors ‘Priestess’ Church, ‘Windmill’ Muller, ‘Toybox’ Macauley, ‘Nemo’ Filep and ‘Barnstorm’ Lowe.

“Each squadron has six interceptors. Only Perseus-Alpha is overstrength, because it turned out we could only fit fifty nova fighters into a space designed for sixty sub-fighters.”

Including Sagairt, four of the eight squadron commanders had been the pilots of the single squadron of nova fighters Redward had owned when Kira had arrived. Some of the others were dead and at least one was commanding an entire carrier group.

Even the squadron commanders on Perseus were so green they smelled like mint.

“Let’s get one thing out of the way first,” Kira said after a moment of silence. “Admiral Kim and Colonel Sagairt are perfectly fine with a mercenary officer acting as CNG for the entire fleet. Even once Bengalissimo’s ships show up, a quarter of the destroyers and cruisers in this fleet will be merc ships, and I’m the most experienced nova-fighter officer here.

“I can list off my kills and accomplishments, but truthfully, the only objection I see you having to me is that I’m a merc,” she concluded. “So. Anyone going to have a problem?”

There was an extended silence until Sagairt chuckled.

“I don’t think so, Commander.”

“All right.” Kira skimmed her gaze across the ten officers in the room. “Theoretically, the only opposition we’re going to face in this operation is from the Costar Clans. We know most of their lineup: ten-kilocubic gunships, twenty- to twenty-five-kilocubic corvettes.”

The RRF officers nodded. Regardless of how they’d made it into the nova-fighter wings—mostly from the sub-fighter wings—they’d all been on the wrong side of the Clans’ raiders.

Kira raised a hand with three fingers upright.

“But there are three known jokers in this deck and one of them is a trump card,” she told them, mixing her card game metaphors terribly.

“The first two jokers are both in the hands of the same asshole. Anthony Davies got the hell out of Dodge when we went after him at the Kiln. He isn’t dead…and he’s got at least one Brisingr-built D9C heavy destroyer in his hands, plus an unknown number of Weltraumpanzer-Fünf heavy fighters.

“Intelligence is pretty certain he’s been able to repair the D9C and that at least six Weltraumpanzers survived the Battle of the Kiln,” she counted out. “That’s our first two jokers in the deck.

“The D9C is forty thousand cubic meters of Brisingr warfighting tech of the same generation as Deception. The repairs the Clans will have been able to do might have cost her some capability, but she’s still likely capable of going up against any cruiser in the sector except Deception on an even keel.”

Kira shook her head.

“I’m sure RRF Command would love to capture her, but despite my recent track record, capturing starships is actually quite difficult,” she said drily. “If she shows up, she’s our primary focus until she’s debs, people. Same with the Weltraumpanzers.

“The third joker in the deck is the trump card, though,” she continued. “It’s the same trump card that almost screwed everybody at Ypres. There’s a third party out here with deep pockets and a grudge against Redward and the SCFTZ.

“We’re reasonably sure at this point that the mercenary fleet we saw at Ypres remains intact and under contract to that party,” she told them. She wasn’t going to name the Equilibrium Institute, though most of the people here had probably been briefed on it.

Too many people were willing to dismiss a galaxy-spanning conspiracy as just a conspiracy theory. That was probably healthy in Kira’s opinion, even when she was one of the people with proof.

On the other hand, she didn’t need to say who their third party was for people to accept that a rogue mercenary fleet had shown up at Ypres and might show up again here.

“For assorted reasons I can’t go into, we know that fleet has been reinforced with some serious sucker-punch capability,” she continued grimly. “I’ll be downloading some scenarios for simulations for you to run your squadrons through, and we’ll try to set up a full-fleet nova group simulated exercise before we move on Arti.”

“Is this an exercise I should expect my people to survive?” Sagairt asked carefully.

“Not the first time,” Kira replied. She appeared to have a reputation…but on the other hand, no one seemed to mind her throwing them into near-impossible virtual situations anymore, either.

“We will do what training we can as a group, but my understanding is that we will be moving within twenty-four hours of the Bengalissimo cruiser group arriving,” she told them all. “That should be enough for Perseus’s squadrons to run through a few iterations of the updated scenario deck I’ll be providing.”

She’d spent most of the time she hadn’t been in a fighter on the trip there working on the new deck. It should run them through what they needed to expect.

“How bad are we expecting, sir?” Major Church asked. She was a soft-spoken woman with wispy blonde hair and watery blue eyes, but she seemed present enough as she spoke. “What’s the worst case, I suppose?”

“Around a hundred and forty modern Inner Fringe standard fighters,” Kira said bluntly. “Nova fighters and bombers easily eighty years ahead of ours technologically.”

“No one would let mercenaries have planes like that,” Herrera said, the shaven-headed officer looking perturbed.

“It depends on who’s doing the buying for the mercs—and from where,” she replied. “I don’t know exactly what we’re looking at, people, but that’s our worst case. The tech level of the fighters in the simulations I’m providing is closer to our mostly likely scenario.” She forced a grin. “So, of course, there are more of them.”

That got her chuckles again, which slowly died into silence as everyone considered her words.

“Sir,” Cartman asked, Kira’s friend being more formal than usual. “One question, I guess.”

“Of course.”

“How long are we going to wait for Bengalissimo to show up?” she asked. “If they don’t, that is.”

“Thirty-six hours,” Kira told her. “We’ve already seen civilian shipping come through here. It says good things about the RRF that that shipping has tried to get closer to this fleet while it’s been here, but it also means that the Clans will shortly know we’re coming.

“We can’t avoid that, but if we move in the next thirty-six hours, we can be reasonably sure we won’t meet any reinforcements from the other Costar Systems.”

“What the heck could delay an entire cruiser group?” Herrera asked. “Bengalissimo was sending what, eight ships?”

“Seven,” Kira told him. “Per the last update we had, anyway. A cruiser, two destroyers and four corvettes. Second-heaviest contingent after the RRF, and the only other one with nova fighters.

“Lots of stuff could have delayed them, so we’ll wait. I don’t think anyone is overly worried that the Bengalissimo component of the fleet has gone missing, after all.”

Well, anyone except Kira. She’d been running fully automated simulations that she wasn’t going to share with her subordinates just yet…simulations that said she didn’t need to get anywhere near her worst-case scenarios of Cobra Squadron’s strength to allow them to punch out that cruiser group.

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