Unlike the mercenary carrier, Deception did have a separate shuttle bay. Despite that, the next day saw Kira and Zoric standing on the cruiser’s flight deck, watching a shuttle maneuver its way carefully into the ship.
Off to the right, three Hoplite-IVs were being gently ushered into bays while their pilots dismounted, laughing as the trio of old hands dodged around the deck crew with the ease of long practice.
Kira was paying more attention to the spacecraft with active engines and missed who the three pilots were until Zoric cleared her throat carefully.
“Sir, I thought Hoffman was staying on Conviction?” the cruiser’s Captain asked.
Surprised, Kira turned to assess the two men and one woman walking across her flight deck toward her. Sure enough, Joseph Hoffman was in the lead, accompanied by his boyfriend, Dinesha Patel, and Evgenia Michel, one of his squadron commanders.
The three were all veterans of the Apollo System Defense Force, the survivors of the old 303 Nova Combat Group she’d brought out to the far end of nowhere with her. Her own squadrons included Abdullah Colombera and Mel Cartman, which meant that all six of those survivors were now aboard Deception.
“The gang is all here, it seems,” Patel said brightly as the trio reached them. “Are Nightmare and Scimitar around?”
The dark-skinned pilot, callsign Dawnlord, didn’t seem to think there was an issue with all six of the core Memorials being aboard the same ship. If nothing else, the six of them made up the entire shareholdership of the mercenary company!
“They’ll be out as soon as the shuttle is safe,” Kira replied absently, glaring at the heavyset form of the man she’d left in charge on Conviction. “I wasn’t expecting to see Conviction’s Commander, Nova Group, here today.”
“Conviction isn’t going anywhere and you’re going into the teeth of it,” Hoffman said calmly. “I’m a pilot, sir. I’ll fly under you; I’ll fly under Mel. No issues either way. Whatever you need.”
“How generous,” Kira replied. “Except I left you with a forty-fighter nova group to train up, didn’t I?”
The shuttle finished landing and an echoing chime declared the flight deck clear.
“Hersch and I flipped a coin,” Hoffman admitted. “It was his coin, even. If anyone rigged it, blame Gizmo.”
Ruben Hersch—callsign Gizmo—was the most experienced of the PNC-115 pilots from Conviction’s crew. Kira had hoped that both of the two senior officers would remain behind, but she kept her expression level as she turned to see the pilots trooping off the shuttle.
Deception might carry fewer nova fighters than Conviction did now, but when Kira had arrived, her six fighters had brought Conviction’s wing up to fourteen nova fighters. With losses along the way, there were only eleven true veteran pilots across the combined mercenary company.
Including all of her Apollon pilots, it looked like she had ten of them. Gizmo had remained behind, but that still gave her a solid core of experienced hands. The rest of the six pilots transferring over had been PNC copilots when Kira arrived…which still put them ahead of most of their new recruits.
“None of my people even argued about being sent back to Conviction,” she murmured to Hoffman. “The green pilots know they’re green. The more time we can give them in sims and exercises, the better.”
“They weren’t supposed to be facing off against anyone with comparable gear, let alone experience, for a while yet,” Zoric agreed. “The hope was that Redward’s pilots and ours would have the experience edge by the time anyone else out here had nova fighters.”
“We didn’t count on Equilibrium,” Mel Cartman said, Deception’s second squadron commander sliding into the conversation as she joined the crowd. She quickly gave the three other Apollon pilots hard hugs before stepping back to study the crowd.
“All of the Memorials, huh?” she asked.
“I’d like to send Longknife back,” Kira admitted, but she sighed and shook her head as she looked at Patel and Hoffman holding hands and grinning shamelessly at her. “Not going to split up the wonder boys, though. You both are under Mel. Play nice.”
She turned to Michel.
“Sorry, Socrates, you’re flying for me,” she told the blonde woman, the youngest of the surviving Memorials. “Step down from squadron command, I know.”
“If you think I’m holding on to my squadron over backing up the Memorials in the shit-show we’ve found, you’re wrong,” Michel told her. “Plus, doesn’t Scimitar fly for you?”
For a moment, Kira almost reconsidered. Then Colombera followed Cartman out of the ready room and embraced his usual partner in crime gleefully.
“Yes, yes, I do,” the second-youngest of her pilots announced. “We’ll have to see what kind of trouble we can get into!”
Scimitar and Socrates had earned a reputation for practical jokes and trouble in the Three-Oh-Three. The deaths of three-quarters of the old squadron had ground some of that out of them, and Kira didn’t have it in her to step on them.
“Keep it clean,” she ordered, then turned to salute the approaching Conviction pilots. “Indigo. Good to see you. How are you feeling about heavy fighters today?”
Rosalinda “Indigo” Navratil was a PNC-115 pilot and had spent the entire time Kira had known her in the fighter-bombers. But since Kira didn’t have any experienced pilots for the Weltraumpanzer-Viers…
“The Vier looks damn shiny,” Navratil said quickly. “Is that where you want the Darkwing hands?”
“Exactly,” Kira confirmed. “Purlwise is already heading up the squadron, so I have a neat alignment of six heavy fighters and six fighter-bomber pilots.”
Akira “Purlwise” Yamauchi was currently on the planet, spending time with a local girlfriend Kira hadn’t met. He was on-call and they were keeping him up to date, but it made him the only squadron commander not already on the ship.
“It’s a party,” Cartman said brightly. “Should I be planning on booking a room for an actual party, sir?”
Kira gave her second a cautioning glance. It had been at a party of that style where she’d ended up confessing her feelings for the former commander of the Darkwings—a man who was now dead.
“We don’t know how long we have until we ship out,” she warned everyone. “We play it carefully. Sims and real-space exercises until we’re certain we can go against people just as experienced as us…and with better nova fighters.”
That earned her several grimaces.
“Do I want to know what’s going on?” Navratil asked.
“I’ll brief you on some of it later,” Kira promised. “For now, I think I need to actually make some announcements.
“Hey, everybody!” she shouted.
She might be one of the shortest people in the room and was almost certainly one of the lightest, but she had a lot of practice at making herself heard. The conversations outside the small circle of Apollons and senior officers died down.
“Clear a circle, people,” Kira ordered. “Everybody get over here!”
She wasn’t at all surprised to realize she now had seventeen pilots on the flight deck and gathering around her. Only nine had arrived, but the existing pilots she hadn’t sent back to Conviction had trickled out of the woodwork while she’d been talking to her friends.
That had been part of the point in having those conversations, after all.
Looking around, she identified the missing pilots and grinned.
“All right, so I know Purlwise is MIA getting laid, but what happened to Galavant?” she asked.
“She had a date last night,” Cartman told Kira. “Headed onto the station when you went over to Conviction.”
“So, am I sending search parties or congratulations cards?” Kira asked.
“She has leave and she warned me she might not be coming home, so I’m guessing she’s also MIA getting laid,” Cartman replied. Annmarie “Galavant” Banderas had been a PNC-115 copilot Kira had co-opted to fly a Hoplite before she’d had her full squadron.
She’d earned both her spot in one of the Hoplite squadrons and the right to stay overnight on the station with a date. Assuming she checked in, which it sounded like she had.
“All right, so that leaves me just you lot!” Kira looked over the crowd with a grin. “You all know some of what’s going on. We moved everyone we thought needed more experience before being thrown into the fire back to Conviction.
“Captain Estanza has put the old girl in dry dock for upgrades. That means her nova group gets to spend the next few months doing exercises and training with Redward’s new nova squadrons.
“Everybody needs that time, but somebody’s got to do the real work, so you’re all here. With me.” She grinned. “All of you have seen enough of my training regimens to know that you’re not winning that exchange.”
“What do we exercise against this week? SolFed?” Shun “Swordheart” Asjes asked. Asjes was one of Kira’s pilots, the other copilot who’d been recruited alongside Banderas.
“If I had sim files for SolFed, you know I would put you up against them,” Kira warned.
The Solar Federation was one of the few multi-stellar nations in existence, consisting of Sol and about half the star systems in the Core—the space within a hundred light-years of the home system. It was the most technologically advanced society known, to a nearly legendary level from this far away.
The nearest SolFed system was fourteen hundred light-years away, after all.
“As it happens, I may have picked up some sim files from the Fringe,” she continued. “Sold under the table from the Breslau Principality’s system security forces, as I understand it, then illegally copied a few dozen times.
“But hey, the files are only ten years old and have the Principality’s best simulations of their own ships and a decent guess at the Star Kingdom of Griffon’s!”
Everyone groaned at that. Griffon Sector might be where John Estanza had made his legend—but it was also a Fringe sector six hundred light-years closer to Sol and almost seven hundred light-years’ actual distance from the Syntactic Cluster.
Their fighters were a lot better than her people’s gear, which was some of the best they could steal from Apollo or Brisingr.
“But this time, it’s not just me wanting you ready for everything,” she warned. “We have data, data I can’t share details of yet, suggesting that we’ll be running into nova fighters of about that vintage and quality.
“We’re unlikely to have the edge in numbers facing them, and they’re going to have the edge in tech,” she said grimly. “Which means, pilots, we need to have the edge in skill. We need to be better than they are.
“And I have complete faith that we can do that! Do you?”
She was asking nova-fighter pilots. She already knew the answer they were going to give her—and the shouts were still rattling the metaphorical rafters as she began handing out squadron assignments.