2

Like any nova ship, Deception was not particularly large by any objective scale. Roughly twenty-five meters across, she was only a hundred and fifty meters long. She was huge by the standards of nova ships in the far Rim, but that was still small enough that it took Kira under ninety seconds to reach the fighter deck.

Her scrambling fighter pilots only barely beat her into their starfighters. She was the last to lock in, but only by a few seconds.

“All fighters, deck has the bouncing ball,” she ordered. “Launch on their timing. Deck, this is a full scramble. Get us out there.”

Her headware was still linking in to the fighter’s software as a new gravity well was conjured in front of her Hoplite-IV, flinging the small ship into deep space and automatically bringing up her own Harrington coils.

Davidović and her second, Iyov Waxweiler, had broken out as much as they could of the arrival of their hostiles. The sixty-thousand-cubic-meter cruiser First Crown had arrived on schedule with two ten-kilocubic gunship escorts from the Redward Royal Fleet.

Thirty seconds after that, twenty-four ten-kilocubic gunships had novaed in. The timing was too close for them to have even had an agent watching for First Crown. They’d known the schedule.

“Davidović, do we have an ID on our gunships?” Kira demanded as her hands and implants took control of the Hoplite.

“I’m making it seventy percent that they’re from the Costar Clans,” the tactical officer replied. “Lot of those raiders have grudges against the Crown.”

Kira grimaced. She’d had her own run-ins with the Syntactic Cluster’s perennial problem children. A loosely affiliated collection of hardscrabble, borderline, or outright failing colonies and mining outposts scattered through secondary systems of the Cluster, the Costar Clans sustained the existence of their settlements by raiding more fortunate systems’ shipping.

The operation seemed a bit too slick for them—but the Equilibrium Institute had used them as patsies before.

“Understood,” she told the tactical officer. “Memorial Wing, form on me. Check your targets when we hit the battlespace; Redward had two gunships in play when they arrived, and we can hope they’re still there!”

Ten thousand cubic meters was the default hull that anyone with a base colonial fabricator could build the systems for. Everybody had ten-kilocubic gunships, and there wasn’t that much to distinguish between them.

Kira didn’t want her people to shoot down friendlies.

She took a moment to absorb the mental confirmations from her pilots and push herself into the right headspace.

“Memorial Wing…nova and attack!”

* * *

Forty light-seconds vanished in a heartbeat, and Kira’s starfighter was in the middle of the multiphasic-jamming bubble of the hostile gunships. Inside that bubble, every non-visual scanner was worthless, and even computer-enhanced opticals were only reliable at limited distances.

Those opticals were enough to tell her that something had already gone differently from expected. First Crown might only be six times the size of each individual gunship, but she still badly outclassed her attackers.

There were only nineteen gunships left in the jamming zone—but Kira’s twenty nova fighters weren’t the first nova strike to arrive in the battlespace. A chaotic spiral of forty unknown nova fighters was hurtling toward First Crown, and an eye trained by twenty years of war spotted the real threat.

She’d already lost coms with most of her starfighters, but she had laser links to a handful, and she tagged them all.

“Everyone who can hear me,” Kira snapped. “Target the nova bombers.”

Her Weltraumpanzer-Viers each carried two torpedoes. The heavier specialized anti-capital-ship nova craft in the heart of the hostile formation carried ten. First Crown could probably handle a salvo from one bomber.

But Kira’s computers were guessing there was something between eight and fourteen bombers hidden in the enemy nova-fighter formation.

She suited her actions to her words, throwing maximum power to her Harrington coils and diving into the chaos with her guns blazing. A hostile interceptor took a moment too long to react to the presence of nova fighters, ate a full two-second burst from her plasma cannon and vanished in a ball of fire.

More of her fighters were swarming toward the enemy strike. They might be outnumbered two to one, but enough of her pilots were veterans that they didn’t need her to point out the bombers. The newbies, half-trained and unblooded, were still smart enough to follow the vets.

Kira twisted her nova fighter through the strangers’ escort formation and hammered another salvo of plasma into a second interceptor. That fighter novaed out in the middle of her blast—damaged and probably out of the fight.

Instinct dodged her fighter half a kilometer sideways, and plasma blazed through where she’d been. Threat icons flagged at least three interceptors targeting her, but she ignored them as she dove toward the bomber formation.

One of the interceptors vanished and her computers confirmed that another Hoplite had moved into position to cover her. She wouldn’t know which of her pilots that was until later, but they were doing their job.

Time was everything and the clock was running out. It took sixty seconds for her nova fighter’s class two drive to cool and allow for a new jump. Their opponents weren’t jumping out, though. The bombers were pressing the attack—and Kira was in their midst.

Plasma flashed in the dark of space, and a bomber came apart under her guns. More of her wing was in the mix with her, but the back of her mind was also flagging something she didn’t want to know: the enemy pilots were as good as her veterans, and she was definitely missing starfighters that had novaed in with her.

Once in the battlespace’s jamming, she couldn’t give orders. She focused on the bombers, shattering a second of the capital-ship killers and then cursing as the surviving nova craft salvoed their weapons—and vanished.

The gunships were still pressing their attack, and First Crown’s weapons were focused on them. Not that it would have mattered. A torpedo was only a physical object for about five seconds before detonating and turning into a massive plasma blast…

Plasma blasts which, in this case, ran into the armored flank of Deception as the heavy cruiser completed her own precision nova, dropping the big ship between the incoming threat and the monarchs of Redward.

One of the gunships was now heading directly toward Kira, their gunfire tracking far too closely for her liking, and she fell back on the first adage of nova-fighter pilots: if the battlespace is too hot…be somewhere else.

She novaed.

* * *

The computers automatically picked a rendezvous point near the battlespace, usually one light-minute away. Kira’s fighter wasn’t the only one of Deception’s parasites at the deep-space point she’d jumped to.

She could see eleven other fighters. There were almost certainly still some in the battlespace, so she hadn’t lost eight planes and pilots today.

“Report,” she ordered. “Convert what you can to ammo and nova back on your cooldown. This isn’t over yet.”

Her fighters could only hold so much energy in the capacitors for their guns, and their microfusion power plants could only recharge those capacitors so quickly with everything else demanding power. Away from the battlespace, the reduced demands allowed for far faster “reloading.”

“Teach your brother to herd sheep,” her second-in-command, Melissa “Nightmare” Cartman, told her. The commander of her Memorial-Bravo squadron ran the second section of Hoplites flying off Deception. “Who the hell were those fighters?”

“We don’t know,” Kira said grimly. “Not Clan, not with fucking bombers.”

Nobody in the Syntactic Cluster was supposed to have nova bombers. The class two nova drive was difficult enough to build that there was only one plant in the cluster making them at all—and Kira had helped acquire that plant for Redward.

The larger version required for a nova bomber was beyond even Redward right now. The presence of nova bombers suggested someone was playing games.

“The usual suspects, Mel. Playing the usual games,” she told Nightmare. “We need to save King Larry and Queen Sonia. We won’t get paid particularly well if we lose our employers’ monarchs and a third of their cruisers in one shot!”

Her old friend snorted.

“Wilco. Ten seconds,” she warned. “Deception wasn’t there when I left. Hoping?”

“She took a torp salvo meant for Crown,” Kira replied. “She should be okay; her armor and dispersion networks are good. Hostile fighters novaed, but they might be back.”

“Understood. Memorial-Bravo, check in,” Nightmare snapped. She listened to reports Kira couldn’t hear for a second.

“We’re on our way,” she then told Kira. “Memorial-Bravo—nova and attack.”

Kira’s own countdown still had fifteen seconds left, and she linked in with the pilots with her. All four of her Weltraumpanzer-Viers were now there, along with two more of the Hoplites. It wasn’t one of her formal squadrons, but they’d do.

“On the timer T minus ten, form on me,” she ordered. “Memorials…nova.”

* * *

By the time Kira and her fighters returned, the battle was over. She saw the pulse of the last gunship novaing out and breathed a sigh of relief. The enemy fighters hadn’t returned so far, though everyone was keeping their own multiphasic jamming up, just in case.

Even the Clans, after all, were entirely capable of building a smart missile that could cross a star system and hit its target. Multiphasic jamming would render that weapon deaf, blind and stupid in its final approach, making it an easy target, but without that jamming it could potentially be deadly.

The absence of immediate hostiles allowed Kira to assess the situation. The RRF gunships were gone. No real surprise there, though she didn’t like it. They might be the “small” ships of the main fleets, but a gunship still had a crew of thirty.

Deception looked intact…ish. Kira’s cruiser had taken sixty torpedoes. That was less than she’d estimated it would need when she was on the other side of the equation, but she still didn’t like the marks her computers were picking up on the ship’s hull.

Worse, while it was hard to sort out the numbers in the jamming, she was definitely missing at least two fighters. If she was lucky, the pilots had ejected and their nova-drive cores were retrievable.

If she wasn’t…she’d just lost ten percent of her immediate subordinates.

On the other hand, First Crown appeared mostly unblemished. Kira was never happy to lose people—or lose allies, for that matter. The RRF gunships weren’t her mercenaries, but she’d still mourn them.

If nothing else, a significant chunk of the pilots she commanded across Deception and the mercenary carrier Conviction were ex-RRF gunship crew.

She trained a laser com on Deception and linked in.

“This is Basketball,” she told them. “Report.”

“A bit cooked around the edges, but we’re fine,” Zoric replied instantly. “DamCon is sweeping the impacted hull sections, and we’ll need some replacement plating and dispersal nets, but we have no casualties.”

“Thank gods,” Kira murmured. That was better than she’d been afraid of—much better. “Did you get any scans on the nova fighters?”

Zoric snorted.

“Boss, we didn’t even see the nova fighters,” she admitted. “I was novaing in to block off gunship fire, not eat a fucking torpedo strike. We got lucky.”

Multiphasic-jamming fields were starting to come down, and Kira felt her shoulders tense. This was always the riskiest part. If the enemy hadn’t retreated, her people were going to be vulnerable.

But a battle had to end sometime. It was a judgment call—and if the jammers didn’t come down, no one was going to be able to tell them to take them down.

She tapped a physical switch, taking her own offline.

“Have the deck prep the ball,” she ordered. “This was short and ugly, as per usual. I’m going to have to run gun-camera footage, but I think we gave a good account of ourselves.”

“Only six of the gunships got out,” Zoric said in a satisfied tone. “They were not prepared to face two cruisers.”

“It’s a trap,” Kira said in a blatantly faked Brisingr accent. “There’s two of them.”

The humor was forced, though. As the jammers came down, it was clear she was missing three of her Hoplite-IVs. None of her Apollo veterans, but still…

“Get search-and-rescue out ASAP,” she ordered. “We want our own survival pods and any escape pods from the RRF gunships.” Her eyes scanned the sensor data she was receiving as well.

“Prisoners might be handy, too.”

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