“Fleet is synchronized; the count is on. Sixty seconds.”
Kira was in her fighter this time, which meant she was getting the count from Tamboli. She was starting to wonder if her flight deck officer ever slept, which was a point she was going to have to raise with them.
Once she was back aboard ship, anyway. The eight fighters of Memorial-Alpha were ready to go, and her screens told her the other squadrons of the fleet patrol were also standing by.
Seconds were ticking on both her dash and her headware, and Kira tensed. She knew some of Seventh Fleet’s officers weren’t expecting to run into the Bengals until the very last trade-route stop—and that was part of why she was expecting to see the enemy here.
“Nova…now.”
Reality rippled and Kira’s hands tensed on the controls.
“Memorial-Alpha, Deck has the ball,” Tamboli announced. “Basketball, I’ve got you. Launching now.”
The Hoplite-IV flashed into space, three of Kira’s fighters gathered around her. Backstab was one of the four, and Kira grinned as she saw that the new pilot was already holding her position better.
Bradley might have ended up trapped by the Equilibrium Institute, but she learned quickly and had a gift for the job. She’d be a great pilot someday, assuming she lived through the next few days.
“Zone is clear,” Konrad Bueller’s voice echoed in her ears. “No contacts on the scopes; all regions clear.”
“Thanks, XO,” Kira replied, keeping her own tone professional. “Commencing patrol.”
Icons and lines took shape ahead of her in response to a series of mental commands. There was very little she had to actually change beyond confirming squadron assignments, but she checked it all over in a few seconds before sending it out.
“Memorial-Alpha, form on me,” she ordered. “Patrol route should be downloading to your computers. We’ve got outside patrol today; stand by for nova.”
Outside patrol meant they were the ones doing the sweep at one light-hour, looking for people trying to be sneaky. The trade-route stop might be dead to everyone’s eyes and sensors right now, but distance degraded accuracy.
A starship couldn’t hide its heat signature at less than a light-minute or so but could hide at longer distances. It depended on tech, of course. Both Deception’s sensors and her emission-control systems were superior to anything else in the cluster.
“Nova coordinates locked in,” Kira said. “Everyone good?”
A chorus of affirmations answered her, Bradley’s a noticeable moment later than the rest. That was fine. The kid was learning.
“Nova on my mark. Three. Two. One. Nova.”
They flashed across space and Kira grimaced. Without the adrenaline distraction of a fight, the kick in the stomach of a fighter’s less-protected nova rivaled her worst cramps. It lasted a few moments after the nova itself was complete, an old worry she tended to notice less while battle was going on.
“Commence scan sweep,” she ordered. “We’ll follow this route for twenty minutes, then nova to waypoint two.”
The nature of the drive imposed the time frames. A one-light-hour jump required a twenty-minute cooldown for a nova fighter’s class two drive—versus thirty-seven for a class one. It wasn’t just the minimum distances where the class two had an edge, though the class one took the edge at anything beyond a light-day.
“Let’s see what we find, everyone.” She smiled thinly. “I’m hoping for nothing, but the only way we keep finding nothing is if the Bengals decided to run all the way home without a fight.”
She didn’t need to tell the seven pilots accompanying her that that wasn’t likely.
* * *
Waypoint one was much what Kira had expected—nothing, nothing and more nothing. The trade-route stops were in deep space, at least a light-year from the nearest star with even the tiniest gravitational fluctuations mapped a thousand times for safety.
Novaing away from or toward a gravity well was simple enough. It was the side vectors that were dangerous for longer novas, even at practically undetectable levels. All of that could be handled and accounted for, so long as it was known. That was the point of the heavily mapped trade routes, to make sure that even small gravity fluctuations were known.
But it also meant that there was literally nothing out there. In the Fringe and the Rim, the outer eight hundred light-years or so of human space, there were only occasionally even space stations at trade-route stops. Closer in to the Core, interstellar rest stops became more common, but out here?
Nothing. Just empty space for as far as their sensors could see.
“Stand by to nova to waypoint two,” she told her people. “Confirm your coordinates.”
“Coordinates confirmed,” Bradley said instantly, a moment ahead of everyone.
Kira grinned, taking one last look around the sweeping expanse of nothing around them.
“Anyone see a threatening speck of space dust I missed?” she asked.
That got her the expected chuckle.
“All right. Nova on my command,” she told them. “Keep an eye for that dust, though. You never know when it’s going to produce a knife!”
Her pilots were still chuckling as they novaed away.
* * *
Waypoint two was more of the same, but the hairs on the back of Kira’s neck were prickling. They were orbiting around at one light-hour from the fleet, which meant that anyone in the points they were visiting wouldn’t have even seen Seventh Fleet yet.
“Any anomalies?” she asked her pilots. “Anything look out of the ordinary at all?”
“It’s a lot of black, sir,” Swordheart told her. “I don’t even see the fleet.”
“That’s the point, I guess,” Kira said. “We’re here before anyone here would see the fleet.” She checked the timer. They’d leave waypoint two after twenty minutes, hitting waypoint three forty-three minutes or so after the fleet had arrived.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” she ordered. “How’s everyone’s paranoia?”
“Finely honed after years of diligent practice and heavy exercise,” Scimitar replied, Colombera barely getting the crack out before he chuckled at his own humor. “The last year especially.”
“If we’re very lucky, paranoia is all this is,” Kira murmured. “But we’re not the only squadron out here and we need to keep our eyes open.”
There was even the possibility that Seventh Fleet was already under attack and they wouldn’t know until they’d completed their cooldown at waypoint three. Hoffman had orders to send fighters to recall the outer patrol if he could spare them—but the four fighters needed to recall those four squadrons could easily make the difference in a critical fight.
“Waypoint three, here we come,” Scimitar said. “I’ve got the same itch on my neck, Basketball. We’re being hunted.”
“We knew that,” Swordheart replied. “Haven’t you lot been hunted since you left Apollo?”
“Yes, but that’s different,” Kira said. “Assassins can be a pain in the ass, but carrier fleets are a bit more problematic.”
She checked the cooldown status.
“My fighter is clear. Report in,” she ordered.
Confirmations of similar status rippled back from the others. Kira shook away the vagaries of her fears and synchronized their systems.
“Nova to waypoint three on my mark,” she ordered. “Three. Two. One. Mark.”
If the nova itself hadn’t punched her in the gut, she might not have realized they’d moved. Empty space was empty space, after all.
“Sweep.”
Her own sensors reached out, soaking up every scrap of data they could. The void was dark and cold, and that was good. Empty void didn’t have ships in it—on the other hand, waypoint three shouldn’t have been empty.
“Got the rogue,” Backstab reported, Bradley still sounding very young. “Eleven-point-six-kilometer ferro-carbon asteroid, exactly as the mapping says. Heat signature is as expected.”
Which meant that the chunk of iron and carbon was barely above absolute zero, roughly four to five Kelvin versus the normal average in space of a bit below three.
The asteroid was big enough to have a gravity impact on the trade route, so its course was mapped and predicted for the next hundred years. It was still the only hiding spot within a light-year or so in any direction.
“Hit the rock with active sensors,” Kira ordered. “We’ll orbit and scan for anomalies. We have the time.”
That was simple enough to do, the mostly iron rock giving up all of its secrets in a matter of minutes—not that it turned out to have any.
“Take a look at that,” Jowita “Lancer” Janda observed. “One-seventy-by-eighty-six, people. That’s what home looks like from a light-hour away.”
Kira snorted, keeping most of her focus on the scan of the asteroid as the light from Seventh Fleet’s arrival finally caught up with them.
“Stop checking your hair in the long-range scanners, Lancer,” she told Janda with a chuckle. “What’s around us is a lot more critical.”
“There’s nothing here, sir,” Lancer replied. “Just empty space.”
“I’d rather be paranoid and wrong than optimistic and dead,” Kira replied grimly. “Keep the sweep.”
Nothing. Her own sensors were showing nothing and she grimaced. Maybe she was just being paranoid.
“Nothing can hide in space,” Swordheart pointed out. “Cooldowns complete here, sir. I think we’re done.”
“Nothing can hide in space forever,” Kira corrected. “We couldn’t, but Apollo and Brisingr both had special-purpose vessels that could pull assorted tricks. We’d learned all of each other’s tricks by the end of the war, but we both pulled some nasty surprises thanks to stealth scouts…and Cobra Squadron has Fringe tech.”
“Sir,” Backstab interrupted. “I’ve got something.”
“If you have something, everyone else would have something,” Lancer said.
“Show me, Backstab,” Kira said sharply, the rebuke intended for Lancer, not the green pilot.
“It looks like a nova signature, but it’s spread over a massive area about two light-minutes closer to the fleet than we are,” the young woman said quietly. “Almost… A ten-thousand-cubic-meter ship can’t spread its nova signature across twenty thousand square kilometers, could they?”
“Filament dispersal net,” Kira said, each word a curse in her mouth. “Apollo tried the theory but we couldn’t pull it off—we couldn’t refine the nova extension that neatly. If Cobra’s suppliers did, then yeah.
“That’s a ten-thousand-cubic ship where half of its volume is a spiderweb of radiators eight thousand kilometers wide.”
The squadron channel was silent and Kira stared at the kid’s data. It wasn’t conclusive. Even if it was a dispersal net, it should have been clearer than that…but she didn’t know what tech the Institute had access to.
“We’re changing your callsign, Backstab,” Kira decided aloud. “Because even I was going to miss that. You might have just saved the fleet!
“All fighters, set your course for Seventh Fleet. Nova home, people. The enemy is coming.”