“All right, everyone, listen up.”
Kira’s pilots and senior officers were scattered around the briefing room in a semi-organized chaos. The room wasn’t really designed to handle both the ship’s officers and the pilots, but she wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page.
That meant they’d crammed a collection of folding chairs in around the fixed seats for the fighter wing, and several people had clearly decided to stand instead of risking them—including Bueller, who was holding up the wall next to the exit.
“Some of you have already been to the Kiln,” she continued. “Specifically, some of us have vivid memories of Cluster Sixty-Five-X-Nine and the construction base belonging to the Costar Clans’ Warlord Anthony ‘Deceiver’ Davies.”
They’d lost friends there when it had turned out Davies’s support from the Equilibrium Institute had included multiple Brisingr-built D9C heavy destroyers capable of taking on Redward-built cruisers and a swarm of heavy fighters.
“In six hours, we’re going back,” Kira said calmly. “Our destination today is Cluster Forty-Two-K-Seven, the site of the very first attempt by a Cluster power to exploit the Kiln. It failed, for much the same reasons as the rest of them: a lack of political will and financial support to provide food and replenishables for an interstellar facility.
“No one in the Cluster really understood what maintaining facilities in another star system was going to take in terms of resources, time and money,” she concluded. “I was honestly surprised by how much extra the current Redward plan for the system has baked in. I half-expected them to underestimate the cost of uplifting these star systems.”
She made a throwaway gesture. That she was actually impressed by and confident in Queen Sonia’s plan for the Costar Clans wasn’t relevant to today’s briefing.
“But the repeated and consistent failures in these systems are where the Clans were born,” she reminded everyone. “Cluster Forty-Two-K-Seven, while not necessarily the richest or most powerful set of habitats in the Kiln, is the oldest. Home to roughly three million people, the habitats act as the closest thing the Kiln—or the Clans in general, to be honest—have to a central capital.
“We are novaing in ten million kilometers from the Cluster and will move to reduce its defenses as quickly as possible,” she continued. “We do not expect the Kiln to have been abandoned the way Kaiser was. Our estimate, in fact, is that the warships from Kaiser will be here—and, with some confidence, we expect them to be in place to defend Cluster Forty-Two.”
A mental command brought up what information they had on Cluster 42K7 in a holographic display in front of her. It wasn’t much.
“Given how limited our intelligence is, the first stage of the plan is a testing attack,” she told them. “We’re going to open up with the missiles we fabricated to use against Wilhelm.”
She shrugged.
“They’re not going to achieve anything, but they will give us a better idea of what’s out there. Once that is completed, the Sinisters from Perseus will launch an initial fighter strike. With the squadron we left in Kaiser under Major Herrera, that’s only fourteen fighters. Again, it’s a test, and their orders are to prioritize survival and information.”
Kira was grimly sure they were still going to lose several of Sagairt’s fighters, but they needed the information the multiphasic jammers were going to deny them.
“Once we have that information, we will assess whether or not to launch a general nova-fighter strike prior to the main engagement,” she continued. “Most likely, we will go in shortly—as soon as the Sinisters have rearmed—targeting the enemy corvettes and any nova fighters they have.
“We expect to be encountering both a D9C heavy destroyer and a small number of Weltraumpanzer-Fünfs,” she reminded them. “We don’t know for certain that Davies lives, but one of his destroyers did survive our last trip here, and we can assume she’ll show up for this.
“Even so, we expect the weight of metal and firepower to be heavily in our favor. Our biggest concern is third-party intervention.” She looked around the room, assessing how much her people truly believed that.
Despite everything, she knew that not even all of her pilots truly believed that the Equilibrium Institute existed.
“I expect, at a minimum, the arrival of a contingent of mercenary destroyers to try and sucker-punch us,” she told them. “We can also be reasonably sure we’re going to see the survivors of the nova group that hit the King and Queen’s transport in Redward.
“Normally, I would press the initial attack with our fighters and try to neutralize as many of the enemy’s light and medium ships as possible prior to the clash of the main fleets,” she noted. “Given the expectation of a stab in the back, however, we will be holding our positions inside the Coalition Fleet as much as possible.
“We are not the striking sword today. Today we watch the Fleet’s back and make sure we don’t get shanked.”
She looked around at her people again.
“Questions?”
* * *
As her people drifted out, Kira was somehow unsurprised that all five of her old Apollon hands remained. Bueller was one of the last to leave as well. He looked like he was waiting for her, then looked at the five still seated and shrugged at her before heading out.
Finally, there were only the original Memorials left, and Kira leaned on the lectern and looked them over.
“Well?” she asked. “What’s the trap this time?”
Cartman laughed.
“I dunno; is this a trap?” she asked, then produced a case of Black Bear beer from under her seat. “Seems like a good chance for us all to grab one last drink together.”
“We should probably try to avoid being too much of a clique, you know,” Kira observed. She took a beer anyway. “On the other hand, I guess we are the shareholders.”
“And the old Memorials are special and everyone knows it,” Colombera told her, taking a beer of his own. “We’ve been through a lot in your wake, Basketball.”
“And we might not all make it through what’s coming tomorrow,” Patel added grimly. “If Cobra Squadron jumps the fleet, we’ll be outnumbered two to one by people with better nova fighters.”
“But not better pilots,” Kira said. “You’ve all done a good job of working with the old Conviction hands and the best of the Redward pilots. The Coalition Fleet’s nova fighters might not be what I’d like them to be, but there is a shortage of perfect demigods in the world.”
“Yeah, just six of us,” Hoffman replied with a chuckle. “Probably should have kept Konrad, but even he knows we’re a special lot.”
“He’s getting laid before we nova; he doesn’t get to complain,” Kira told the older pilot with a grin. “I made sure there was a gap in both of our schedules for it.”
Her subordinates—her friends—laughed at that.
“But yes. If you want to pull a party like this, we should probably be pulling Konrad in,” she told them. “Maybe even Kavitha and Milani, too. They’re almost as good with us as we are with each other. And we need them.”
“I can’t say I ever expected to command a squadron flying off a Brisingr heavy cruiser on the ass end of nowhere,” Cartman said after draining half of her beer. “We’ve made more new friends out here than I was afraid of when we left home, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t terrified when we came out here.”
“Those of us that made it made it one step ahead of assassins and bounty hunters,” Kira said quietly. Several of the old Three-Oh-Three pilots had died in Redward when people chasing the Brisingr death mark had caught up to them.
They hadn’t seen any bounty hunters in a while. They had a reputation out there now, and no one wanted to tangle with them.
“To absent friends,” Michel said, raising her beer. “Never forgotten, for all that happens.”
“Absent friends,” Kira agreed. “Absent friends and new homes. Redward has been good to us, but so has Conviction and now Deception. I don’t know about you lot, but this ship is more home to me than anywhere else now.”
Hoffman chuckled and gestured around at the other pilots. He had to wave vaguely over Patel, as his boyfriend was well inside his personal space.
“Home to me isn’t a ship or a planet anymore,” he admitted. “It’s you lot. We went through one war together. I’m not afraid of what Bengalissimo is bringing. I’m not afraid of the Equilibrium Institute.
“Not so long as we’re together.”
“Hey, be careful with jinxing us like that!” Colombera snapped. “This isn’t going to be easy and we can’t afford bad luck when we’re going out there later.”
“Didn’t say it would be easy,” Hoffman countered. “I agree with you, in fact. It’s going to be ugly and it’s gonna be messy, but I see two definite upsides to all of this.”
“Oh?” Kira asked.
“First, that we’re going in together,” her most senior subordinate told her.
“And second, that if Anthony Davies survived the last time we came to the Kiln, this time we are definitely going to scatter his ashes across the star system,” Joseph Hoffman said grimly. “If that fucker is still breathing, I don’t think any of us or the old Conviction hands are done with him yet.”
Kira bared her teeth in what was definitely not a smile. Her first encounter with Anthony Davies had ended with Daniel Mbeki, a man she’d been rapidly falling in love with, dead in space.
Konrad Bueller was growing on her by the day, but Mbeki’s loss was still a sore spot.
“Fair,” she allowed. “If Davies is still alive, we’re definitely going to have to finish the job.”