The King and his Palace Guards left eventually, leaving John Estanza behind in the small conference room. Bueller joined them after a few minutes, taking a careful seat next to Kira, while Estanza and Zoric set up a channel to bring Labelle and Mwangi into the loop.
“I think everyone has the basic briefing on the shit-show we’re in now, right?” Estanza asked. “Long and short of it: Bengalissimo’s new queen has seven cruisers, four of them eighty-kilocubic units built to much the same standard as Deception. Plus a destroyer fleet, plus mercenaries—including a carrier fleet based around Cobra Squadron that appears to be able to field at least a hundred nova fighters.”
Every one of the five mercenary officers was silent as they processed.
“Redward is down to two cruisers and a carrier, plus us,” Estanza told them. “They’ve got four more destroyers, two seventy-five-kilocubic cruisers, and a pair of hundred-and-twenty-kilocubic units under construction. They’ve also begun emergency conversion of a pair of bulk carriers into forty-fighter escort carriers.
“Labelle, Bueller, they want to hire you as technical consultants,” he continued. “If at all possible, they want you to help turn around the seventy-fives and the escort carriers inside two months.”
“We already did everything that was rational to compress the construction schedules on the seventy-fives,” Bueller replied. “I can try, but…”
Kira squeezed her boyfriend’s hand, not really caring that everyone could see. If there was anyone in the entire mercenary company that didn’t know about the two of them, they were deaf and had broken headware.
“This is now the time for more desperate measures, Konrad,” she told him. “We can’t fight seven cruisers with three. Given the way they’ve divided their forces, we might be able to pin them down in pieces and fight them with five.”
Bueller exhaled a long sigh and squeezed her hand back.
“Lakshmi?” he asked Labelle. “I… There might be a few things, but I think the best bet is to put us and some Redward engineers in an office with a whiteboard.”
“Anything we do will be risky,” Labelle replied, their eyes dark. “Do they realize that compressing what was originally a twenty-four-month construction cycle to ten means they risk losing a ship? They will lose people.”
“I suspect King Larry knows both of those things,” Estanza admitted. “And if he doesn’t, his engineers do. But every day that Redward remains blockaded, Bengalissimo inches closer to permanent dominance of the sector.
“While Redward is blockaded, the Free Trade Zone is dead. They’ll have to rebuild everything once the dust settles, but the less time Larry and his people are out of the loop, the better chance they have to fix things.
“He’s put the marker on two months—nine weeks, really. He might be being optimistic there,” the mercenary Captain told them. “But in terms of what’s needed, nine weeks is pushing it.”
“We’re clearing our slip for a merchant conversion job,” Mwangi reported. “That’s limiting how much work we can do, but I suspect we’ll get more use out of a junk carrier than out of Conviction getting her four heavy turrets back.”
“Agreed,” Estanza said. “I’m going to have to leave that on you, Akuchi. Just like Kira’s going to have to leave Deception and the fighter wings to her people. We’re being hired to assemble and run a sixty-day fighter pilot curriculum.”
Kira and Estanza were the only two fighter pilots in the room, but they set enough of the tone of the combined mercenary organization that everyone in the meeting winced. They knew how much training a nova-fighter pilot needed.
“My current inclination is to move the four of us who will be working locally down to the surface to get us out of the way of the people up here and put us closer to the locals,” Estanza continued.
“We can use my apartment,” Kira replied. “It’s got enough bedrooms for that.” She paused. “Um. I think it has ten?”
“That you don’t even know is part of why you are my favorite business partner,” Estanza said with a chuckle.
“I’m your only real business partner,” Kira said. “I’ll want to go over the list of senior pilots with you for the people we’re going to need to grab for instructors. We need to leave some people up here to keep things running and keep training the non-newbies.”
“Agreed. I suggest you put Hoffman in overall command of the nova group while we go be teachers,” Estanza told her. “It’s him, Cartman or Hersch. I know Hersch will be a better teacher.”
“He and Cartman could both do either role but I’m thinking to leave Patel in space and I don’t split the pair up if I can avoid it,” Kira said. “Konrad, Lakshmi, are you okay to crash at the penthouse until we sort out what we’re all doing?”
“Are we okay to crash at the penthouse, she asks,” Labelle replied. “I’ve seen photos of the place Moranis left you. I think we will be okay to stay in your luxury apartment you barely use…even before we realize we don’t need a bedroom for Konrad.”
Kira smirked as she caught Bueller’s blush. Despite his age and experience and everything, he was still surprisingly teasable. It was adorable.
“We have a plan, then,” she said. “I’ll check in with the pilots and see what we can get sorted out. Konrad—I’ll need you to make sure that everything is set up to take care of our own damages and that tachyon-static problem.”
“Already in place, boss,” he confirmed. “We can rely on the local forts to keep us safe for now, so we’ll begin the process of cooling Deception off to open up the core pretty quickly here.”
“All right.” Estanza shook his head. “We’re all going to stretch our specialties for the next nine weeks, but if everything goes well, we’ll help our employer pull off the impossible.”
“And if we do that, we fuck Equilibrium while they’re not expecting it,” Bueller noted. “I’m looking forward to that part!”
“Agreed. Let’s get to work.”