Konrad Bueller, it turned out, was the kind of man whose attention to detail was carefully rationed to his working hours. This didn’t manifest itself as a particularly large problem aboard a nova ship, where the engineer was arguably always working, but it did result in annoying habits when someone was sharing a master bedroom and en suite bathroom with him.
From specks of depilatory cream to drops of forgotten toothpaste, the self-cleaning function of the sinks wasn’t enough to keep the entire vanity surface clean—and the cleaners were only coming in every week.
It was an annoyance to Kira, though hardly one worth having a fight over. In many ways, that the man had annoying self-care habits was almost a good thing—a reminder that she didn’t know as much as she could about her lover.
She had, for example, known his taste in coffee was execrable, involving creamers and sweeteners to a level she wouldn’t tolerate. It had been a surprise, then, to discover that Konrad was not merely capable of making drinkable black coffee but actually good at it.
The two engineers staying in the penthouse had farther to go in the mornings and so were the first up. By the time Kira, usually the first of the pilots, made her way into the main living area, Konrad had several pots of coffee going to cover the needs of the ten people living in the luxury apartment.
Thanks to Queen Sonia, he had Royal Reserve to work with, but he still was doing something slightly different that brought out the rich flavor of the beans…which he then smothered with cream and a local sweet syrup in his own cup.
Two weeks of living on the surface was bringing a certain degree of routine to them all. Kira traded Konrad a kiss for a cup of coffee and eyed the autochef in the corner of the kitchen. They had everything to cook properly, but none of them had the time.
“Two more minutes,” Konrad told her. “Waffles this morning. I’ll bring them out to you; go grab a seat.”
Kira snorted and hooked a tall stool over so she could sit next to the island and watch him putter around the kitchen.
“So wonderfully domestic we all are,” she murmured. Labelle had presumably grabbed their own coffee already—Conviction’s engineer was the one programming most of the meals into the autochef, the machine’s code no longer recognizable to anyone else—and the pilots were still waking up.
“We get up, we share breakfast, we go off to the impossible tasks before us,” Konrad said with a chuckle. “How’s the training?”
“Seven days into sixty,” Kira said with a shrug. “Encouraging so far, but we’re not even into simulators yet. They’re promising me enough nova fighters for practice maneuvers in three weeks, but I’m not counting them until I’ve put pilots in them.”
“That’s fair,” Konrad agreed. “We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul with the construction right now. The one-twenties are just…sitting there, which hurts to see.”
Kira nodded. She’d give a lot to have the battlecruiser and fleet carrier for the breakout, but they were little more than a keel and a rough prototype for their Twelve-X nova drives. There was no way they could finish the big ships in time for it to matter.
“How’s the rush construction?”
A shadow passed over her lover’s face and he sighed.
“Two worker pods crashed yesterday,” he told her, an explanation, she supposed, for why he’d been the last one home the previous evening. “Ten people aboard. Four are dead…two are crippled for life.
“And I’m in an office playing with computer models that I know are going to result in more deaths,” he growled. “We’re accelerating again and we’re well past what’s safe. Gods, give me two years, and I think we could put together a program that would be rolling out a destroyer every thirty days…but right now, we need to finish two cruisers and a bunch of freighter conversions in two months.”
“Did they sign off on the extra conversions?” Kira asked. There wasn’t much she could say about the dead yard workers, so she just squeezed Konrad’s hand.
“Yeah. If everything works out, we’ll have a grand total of five junk carriers for the breakout,” he admitted. “The new ones don’t carry as many birds as Theseus, but an extra hundred and sixty nova fighters…”
“We need two-to-one odds against Cobra Squadron,” she said quietly. “I don’t like what that means from any perspective. These volunteers we’re training…” She shook her head. “It’s going to be feeding broiler chickens to a wolf pack.”
“That bad?” Konrad asked. “I know the training is abbreviated, but some of the pilots on Deception never had any formal training.”
“It’s not just that,” Kira explained. “They’ll get the best training eight veterans can give them, and I have faith in that training. But they’re only getting two months of it, and then we’re putting them into fighters that are thirty years behind what their most likely opposition has and throwing them up against hardened veterans equal to their instructors.”
“Ah.” Konrad looked down at his coffee, then crossed to open the autochef as it chimed at him. Plates of steaming waffles came out—and the rest of the mercenaries started drifting in, cutting their conversation short.
“What’s on the plate today?” Cartman asked as she grabbed her food. “At work, I mean.”
“Waffles?” Estanza replied, intentionally ignoring her clarification. “Come on. Let’s debrief with a view.”
Konrad joined them in the main seating area, where the officers collapsed into comfortable chairs looking out over Red Mountain, Redward’s capital city. There were a few moments of silence as everyone tucked into the waffles.
“Today we’re going over types of warships,” Estanza finally answered Cartman’s question. “Starting with gunships, all the way up to the battlecruisers and fleet carriers they’re not going to see anytime soon.
“Basic divisions between types, general likely armament, countermeasures and approach tactics…” The old mercenary shrugged. “We’re cramming a lot of data into their heads, but we’ll come back to it in exercises once they’re in simulators. Today is just establishing a baseline.”
A baseline that should have taken a week all on its own, Kira knew. She—like Cartman—had helped write the curriculum. There wasn’t much time for questions or review with that kind of compression.
“Speaking of bigger ships,” Hersch said, the Conviction pilot turning a look on Konrad. “Bueller, is it looking like we’re actually going to have those cruisers?”
Kira hadn’t been quite so blunt, but she’d also been derailed by his discussion of lost workers. It was an important question.
“When Labelle and I first started working with their people two weeks ago, I would have told you that you were going to have an extra month at least for your training,” Konrad replied, gesturing toward the other engineer with his plate as they joined the crowd.
“I would have said two,” Labelle noted. “Bueller had worked more closely with them than I had and had a more accurate assessment of what they could do.”
“And?” Estanza asked.
“We’re now up to a definite maybe,” Bueller told him. “It’s not…easy. In two weeks, we’ve already lost almost forty people, dead or maimed. The kind of pressure we’re putting the yards under isn’t safe, and neither are some of the things we’re doing to put those ships together.”
“It’s also hurting the ships,” Labelle pointed out. “The RRF’ll have two seventy-fives…for about three years. Then they’re going to have to either scrap them or rebuild them. We’re sacrificing internal stability for weapons and armor. They’ll still be able to take a hit and give a hit, but they won’t stand up to long-term service.”
“For comparison, Deception was designed to operate for twenty years without a major overhaul and as many as fifty without the kind of rebuild we’re talking about for the revised Baron-class ships,” Konrad said. “My understanding is that they’ll be laying one-twenty keels in the yards as soon as we move the Barons out.”
“What about the carrier conversions? Or escorts?” Hersch asked.
“You’ll have carrier conversions, but they are more truly junk carriers than anything I’ve ever seen,” Labelle warned. “And I’ve seen some shitty-ass carriers in my life.”
“They’ll be freighters that can launch fighters,” Konrad agreed. “Nothing more. They won’t be able to maneuver like a warship; they won’t be able to take a hit like a warship. But they’ll bring a hundred and sixty nova fighters to the fight.”
“And it’s our job to make sure those fighters have pilots,” Kira reminded the rest of the trainers. “What’s your time looking like, Konrad?”
“Pretty much gone,” he admitted. “Labelle?”
“Meet you in the hall,” the other engineer agreed.
* * *
Kira took a moment to walk Konrad out to the elevator and give him a hug.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted. “This kind of rush construction program is hell. I can’t imagine the training is any better, though.”
“No,” she agreed. “We at least aren’t going to see many of our students die in training, but we’ll be sending a lot of these kids to their deaths.”
“And I’m sending people to their deaths right now, working them too hard and cycling processes too close together,” Konrad said with a sigh. “But what can we do? I’m not surrendering to Equilibrium.”
“Redward isn’t surrendering to Equilibrium, whether we help them or not,” Kira told him. “Do you think they’ll succeed as well or lose less people without us?”
“They won’t get the ships and they’ll lose more people trying without Lakshmi and me,” Konrad said grimly. “And they’d lose a lot more of those pilots without you training them. We do what we can, save as much as we can.”
“Exactly. But that still doesn’t make you all right, does it?”
“No. You?”
“No. It’s just what we’ve got to do.”
Labelle’s emergence from the apartment cut the conversation short again, though Kira didn’t rush to release Konrad from her embrace.
“We’re all in rough shape and I don’t want to rush you,” the older engineer told them after a moment, “but the RRF aircar is only two minutes out and we are on the fifty-eighth floor.”
“Go,” Kira said, stepping back. “I’ve got work to do as well.”