“Victory is a hell of a disease.”
Kira looked up from the status reports she was reviewing in the office attached to her quarters. She was supposed to be sleeping, but her nerves were on edge. Seventh Fleet was preparing for the next nova along the route to Ypres. She had a plan for everything and there was nothing she could do…but it was hard to sleep.
Konrad had knocked on her door an hour earlier with a similar complaint. Now he was reviewing engineering reports on a virtual projection from his headware while she poked at fighter status reports at her desk.
“What do you mean?” she asked. The first fight of the campaign had gone better than they could have hoped. The loss of a destroyer and over a dozen fighters wasn’t nothing—and neither were the two hundred and eighty-six officers, pilots and spacers who wouldn’t be going back to Redward.
“Confidence is good,” he said slowly, waving away whatever virtual image he’d been looking at to focus on her. “But I’m coordinating with a lot of people as Deception’s XO right now, and they’re feeling very confident.
“Maybe overconfident. It’s hard to be sure.”
“There was only one of the Bengal’s new cruisers here,” Kira said. “And Cobra Squadron and their godawful fighters weren’t here either. This was the easy fight—and I’m glad for it.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the conversations on the fleet admin channels,” Konrad warned her. “They think this is in the bag. Your pilots?”
“My pilots know that, for us, Cobra Squadron is the big fight,” she said. “I hammered that in as hard as I could. If they’re smart, the Crest mercs are out of the game—given the casualties they took going after the King and Queen in Redward, they’re now over a hundred percent losses in the last three months.
“That carrier has a few guns but not enough to be worth putting her into a fight alongside the cruisers.” She shrugged. “We’re down a carrier, but the other bunch of Rim mercenaries were never the fear.”
“No. The Fringe mercs and the Bengal cruisers are the key, and those are still ahead of us,” Konrad agreed.
He sighed.
“Never been an XO before, so this is taking some getting used to,” he continued. “But the tone of the fleet worries me. Too many of the RRF officers were jumped to their current positions. Too many of their spacers are fortress and monitor crew who’ve never served on a nova ship before.
“They needed a confidence boost, but…I worry.”
“Do you ever not?” Kira asked with a smile.
“Sometimes,” he argued. “I’m not a permanent downer, I swear. But it serves an engineer well to be conservative, even a little pessimistic.”
“It serves most military officers well, too,” she said. “So long as the crew doesn’t pick up on the pessimism.”
“I know that much,” Konrad said. He stared blankly at the wall. “Deception is ready,” he promised her. “And it’s not my place to run down morale on other ships; that’s for sure. But I have a sinking feeling about how far out of our depth Seventh Fleet actually is.”
“We evened the odds a lot yesterday,” Kira told him. “That makes a lot of difference.”
She closed her files and joined him in sitting on the bed. Her nerves weren’t easing, but she did need to at least try to sleep.
“We’re both buzzing like someone fed us spark,” she told him. “We need to stop worrying over the rest of the fleet and get the rest we both need.”
She considered him for a moment, then grinned.
“Let’s say I rub your back and we see where it leads?”