The task force that novaed out of the Kiln System a week after arriving was a pale shadow of the Coalition Fleet that had arrived. Two cruisers and five destroyers were still a powerful force by the standards of the Syntactic Cluster, but they’d started with a lot more ships than that.
The numbers were filled out by the empty army transports the warships were herding. The remaining army corps had been deployed in the Kiln to reinforce Westley, leaving Kira’s ships with only empty hulls to bring home.
Those empty hulls were still valuable enough that she’d prefer not to lose any of them, and a flight of nova fighters flashed green on the screens around her moments after they emerged into the trade-route stop.
“Scans show the area is clear,” Davidović reported.
Kira was back on the bridge now, keeping a mental eye on the route to her starfighter. She might technically be in command of the task force, but she was certain she’d better serve everyone in a nova fighter.
“Helmet has his wing out and flying patrol,” Kira told Zoric. “Anything else going on we should be watching for?”
“Nothing,” the cruiser Captain replied. “Twenty hours, then we nova again. We’ll be back to Redward soon enough, boss.”
Kira nodded.
“There is a very spiky itch in the middle of my back,” she said. “I can’t help but feel that we’re vulnerable right now—and while we’ve bruised Cobra Squadron, they’re still in the fight.”
There were prisoners aboard Guardian, but so far, they’d proven surprisingly closed-mouthed. From the reports Hodzic had forwarded, they weren’t even getting name, rank and serial number out of the nova pilots.
“You wrote the patrol schedule,” Zoric replied. “Anything else you think we should do?”
Kira studied the tactical display. The five warships were assembled into a rough cone around the transports, close enough to support each other if needed, with half a dozen nova fighters circling the entire formation.
“No,” she admitted. “Unless someone can conjure a fleet carrier out of nothing, we stick with each other and head back to base.”
Deception was lightly fried around the edges from her encounter with Cobra Squadron, but most of the other ships were showing mild to moderate damage despite their repair efforts.
“I’m going to go rest,” she finally decided. “Wake me if something comes up. We’ll be ready for anything.”
“We always are,” Zoric agreed. “And we’re readier if the Commodore isn’t running on a sleep deficit.”
Kira snorted.
“What, are you and Konrad on the same team or something?” she asked.
“I wasn’t going to push you while we were in the Kiln, but I know you didn’t get enough sleep,” the Captain murmured. “Now we’re on our way home, we can wake you if something comes up, and you need to rest.”
“Already heading to bed, Kavitha,” Kira promised. “See you on the other side.”
* * *
“The other side” turned out to be almost twelve hours later. Kira always woke up quickly, but this time, it was almost a struggle for her to emerge from her rest.
She could have pushed it, but no one had triggered an alert, and long experience told her that if she was having trouble waking up, she’d truly needed the sleep.
Finally getting up and showering, she checked over the reports. Sagairt and his fighters had returned aboard, replaced by her Weltraumpanzers under Yamauchi. She only had four of the heavy fighters left now, though they’d retrieved enough class two drive units from the wreckage that Tamboli would be able to fabricate replacement fighters.
Once the decks were empty, anyway. They could fabricate components, but they had nowhere to put whole nova fighters. The sub-fighter bays on the army transports were both full and too small for proper nova fighters.
The trade-route stop had been quiet while she slept. The cooldown timer said they were eight hours from novaing, and the sensors said that their battered fleet was in control of the situation.
Once dressed and ready to face the day ahead, she checked her messages and decided the best thing she could do was check in with the cruiser’s chief engineer—and if that happened to also let her visit with her boyfriend, well, she wasn’t going to turn down that bonus.
* * *
The Engineering section was surprisingly quiet, with only a handful of the techs present watching the reactors. Kira made her way through the narrow confines of Deception’s beating heart, taking a moment to study the nova drive itself.
Even thirteen hours into the cooldown, the radiators were glowing red behind their protective shields. Most of the actual heat venting was taking place outside the ship’s hull, but not all of the “cooling” was actually heat.
Two long transparent tubes were positioned next to the drive, clearly visible from everywhere in the Engineering section. Blue and white sparks flashed up and down them, arcs of electricity drawing from the electrostatic buildup on the nova drive to act as a warning sign.
A thousand computer systems and sensors measured every aspect of the buildups and cooldowns inherent to the nova drive, but one of the biggest dangers in the system was trying to nova with too much static built up. The levels of electrostatic buildup were a leading indicator for other types of buildup the human eye couldn’t see, which made those two tubes a key tool for the chief engineer.
When she knocked on the door of Bueller’s office, he was watching the static tubes through the one-way window of his office wall.
“Concerns?” Kira asked, taking a seat across from him. She’d brought her own coffee this time, pouring it from a thermos into the cup he half-consciously slid across to her.
“Couple of the hits left a few things more fragile than I like,” Bueller admitted. “Nothing unfixable, but we need to take the ship fully cold to do so.”
He shrugged.
“That means a thirty-six-hour cooldown on the drive core and a full shutdown on all of the main reactors for at least eighteen hours,” he said. “We’re not doing that until we’re in Redward, under the guns of their defensive fortresses.”
“Agreed,” Kira replied. “Anything I should worry about?”
“Nah.” He shook his head and turned to look at her. “We’re not venting as much tachyon static as we should, but we’ve excess margin built into that system, anyway. We’d probably be clear for a full six novas, and the trip to Redward is only five.”
“We took a few knocks,” she said. “Are we okay?”
“Deception is designed for this. On the heels of that bomber strike in Redward, I’d like to pull her up for a full review again, but I don’t have the impression we’ll have time.”
Kira grimaced.
“Who knows? Bengalissimo has seven cruisers…and Redward now has two. Three with us.”
“And Cobra Squadron and the rest of the mercs put them at three or four carriers to our three, even with Conviction,” her lover agreed. He shook his head. “I knew that the Institute had vast resources by even Brisingr standards, but they just keep fucking coming.”
“Queen Sonia suggested that Gaspari might have been their real plan all along,” Kira said. “If they couldn’t get Redward to build up their fleet and enforce their will by blockades and force, well, they had a fleet at Bengalissimo ready to go.”
“And everything else was just setting up to give her an excuse?” Bueller asked. He sighed. “I think that assessment puts a bit too much weight on any given option, from what I remember of the Director.”
She nodded slowly. It was easy to forget that Bueller had met and worked with the unnamed man who was heading Equilibrium Institute operations in the Syntactic Cluster.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think the Director had four bloody plans moving in parallel with every intention of letting them fight it out for dominance,” he guessed. “They were arming the Clans, they were pushing for Yprian unification under their terms, and they were arming Bengalissimo. Any of those would work for their ultimate objective.”
“And the fourth plan?” Kira said.
“Convincing Redward to become Brisingr,” Bueller said. “I don’t think they even planned to overthrow Larry. If enough of his Parliament got sick of compromise and diplomacy, they could force his hand.”
She grimaced.
“Yeah, that would do it. He’s tried to keep a balance of building new ships and not pushing too hard on the smaller powers,” she said. “I could see the Parliament pushing to fund new ships by some suitably euphemistic tribute payments from the smaller powers.”
“The label Free Trade Zone has covered that in the past,” he agreed. “I don’t think that’s what Larry and Sonia are doing, or we’d be arguing a lot more, but I suspect it might be Gaspari’s plan.”
“Between us and Redward, at least the Costar Clans and Ypres plans are spiked,” Kira noted. “But Bengalissimo is in play with a lot more firepower than anyone expected. We’re months away from any expansion to the RRF.”
“What does the RRF even do in the face of a challenge like Bengalissimo’s?” Bueller asked. “I guess…break the Ypres blockade?”
“That’s how the war between Apollo and Brisingr was fought,” Kira agreed grimly. The struggle between the two powers had been a series of blockades, counter-blockades and blockade assaults. “But if Bengalissimo really has seven cruisers and that entire mercenary fleet, the numbers Sonia gave me for the Ypres blockade make me nervous.”
“Why?” She had Bueller’s attention now.
“If they only sent two cruisers and a dozen destroyers to Ypres, the rest are going somewhere else,” Kira told him. “And there’s only one other target on the board.”
She half-consciously looked around to confirm they were alone in the private office.
“I think we’re moving fast enough that we’ll get into Redward before the gate drops,” she said grimly. “And we’ve got enough firepower, we can hopefully blast our way in if we need to, but…”
“You think they’re going to cut off Redward as well as Ypres?”
“They have to,” she told him. “And if they do, they win.” She shrugged helplessly. “If Redward can’t even secure their own exits, who’s going to look to Redward for protection? With the losses they’ve taken and the timeline for their upgraded ships…”
“This could all be over before their first wave of new cruisers commissions, let alone the Twelve-X ships,” Bueller finished grimly. “What do we do, Kira?”
“We get two cruisers back into Redward,” she told him. “I haven’t seen specifications on the BF’s new cruisers, but I’ll bet Deception can take them one-on-one easily. With Guardian backing us, I’m betting we could take two.”
“Neither we nor Guardian are in perfect shape,” he warned. “And if they bring decent escorts, well…”
“We have nova fighters, and their cruisers don’t. If they bring one of the Cobra carriers alone, well.” She sighed. “There’s only so much we can do, Konrad. Your old friends have put us on the wrong side of the firepower differential again.”
“I would love to go back to having an infinite budget,” he said. “What a mess. So, we fight?”
“Like I said, I think we can get back into Redward without a fight,” she told him. “After that…our only advantage is that they don’t know where and when the RRF will try to break out. We can throw the entire nova-capable fleet at one chunk of the blockade.”
“Except…” He swallowed.
“Finish your thought, Konrad,” she told him. “It’s not like you can make me more stressed at this point.”
“Redward is sufficiently penetrated by Institute or Bengalissimo agents that they knew where the King and Queen were novaing into,” he reminded her. “They might well be able to anticipate a breakout.”
Kira exhaled and bowed her head, closing her eyes as that sank in.
“Then we deal with that when it happens,” she said firmly, with a certainty she didn’t feel. “Fortunately, that isn’t my problem.
“I just have to get seven warships and thirty-plus army transports back to Redward.”