15

“All ships, stand by for nova. All ships, stand by for nova.”

Commodore Hajna Fini was Admiral Kim’s operations officer, and her voice echoed across every ship and starfighter in the Coalition Fleet.

Kira was in her Hoplite. Her headware was feeding her updates from every one of the sixty-nine starfighters under her command. It was the largest force she’d ever commanded—though not even in the top ten for forces she’d been part of.

The standard Apollo fleet carrier had four or five twenty-four-starfighter nova combat groups aboard. She’d occasionally flown off cruisers or smaller carriers, but it had been common enough to see starfighter strikes of well over a hundred ships.

A map of the Arti System was projected in front of her, with a large green icon marking their intended destination. There might be over four hundred stations and asteroid habitats scattered across the system, but over half of them were concentrated into six clusters.

The entire Coalition Fleet was going to visit the largest cluster to begin with, clearing the way for the Redward Army transports. Sixty thousand soldiers were earmarked for this system, and the Fleet’s job was to make sure they got to their destinations safely.

“All nova fighters are clear to scramble,” she told Fini. There was no verbal acknowledgement, but a checkbox on the prep list in her headware turned green. Other checkboxes changed color as Kira relaxed into her starfighter, ships checking in one by one.

“All ships confirmed green. All ships prepared for nova.”

A moment’s pause caused Kira to suck in her breath.

“All ships nova…now.”

Reality pulsed and the Coalition Fleet was somewhere else. The trade-route stop had been empty space, its every minuscule gravitational effect and particle density mapped. Novaing into a star’s gravity well was actually easier, using the star’s gravity as a guide.

Three cruisers, a carrier, twelve destroyers, ten corvettes and twenty gunships emerged in a surprisingly well-synchronized flash of bright-blue Cherenkov radiation.

“New contacts, new contacts,” Davidović chanted. “On the screens, jammers up!”

“Launch fighters,” Kira ordered, still processing the data. There’d only been a few seconds of live data before the multiphasic jammers had encased the fleet. The jammers rendered them just as blind as their enemies, but the data Davidović was feeding her said they were barely a million kilometers from the enemy.

The defenders were lighter than she’d been afraid of. A trio of corvettes led thirty gunships, backed by a mere two dozen weapons platforms. It was nothing compared to the fixed defenses that covered most inhabited systems—and spoke to the same mind-crushing poverty that had driven the Costar Clans to piracy in the first place.

The world flashed around her for the second time in a few moments as her fighter blazed into space. The status listing for the fighter group was still mostly updated in the initial moments, as the mother ships maintained laser links with each other through the jamming and tried to hold links with the nova fighters.

Her own computers were using that data to line up laser links with her combat group as the fighters drifted into a standardized formation. The Clans’ ships hadn’t entered the Fleet’s jamming bubble—but they also weren’t her job today.

There were three cruisers in the Coalition Fleet. They didn’t need nova fighters to handle corvettes and gunships. The defensive weapon installations, however, had a scale advantage over systems mountable inside the strict size limits of a nova ship. Even the Clans could build a one-shot plasma cannon that could gut a destroyer in one hit.

But the tracking on those big guns was never good…and nova fighters could always be somewhere else.

“This is Basketball,” she said. “All squadrons, check in.”

The last few orange icons flickered to green as a chorus of replies filled her mental ears.

“All fighters. Target is the weapons platforms. Let’s do this by the numbers and come home clean. Coalition Fleet Group…nova and attack!”

* * *

A million kilometers or six light-years, a nova took the same amount of time every time. Kira and her squadrons emerged into the midst of the Clans’ defenses. Multiphasic jamming from seventy nova fighters rendered the area chaos in the moment of their arrival. The corvettes and half the gunships were already moving out toward the Coalition Fleet, sweeping to see if they could assess their enemies.

Sixteen gunships had remained with the fixed defenses, probably as a countermeasure to exactly the strike Kira was leading. Unfortunately for them, the Hoplites and Dexters could carry a torpedo apiece—but it slowed the interceptors down, and the RRF pilots had already picked up the attitude of every interceptor pilot ever handed a torpedo: Get rid of this damned thing.

Thirty Dexter interceptors salvoed thirty torpedoes at sixteen gunships. Three ships survived to nova out, an escape that would leave them out of the fight for at least ten minutes.

Kira was already losing links to most of her people, but she nodded in satisfaction as she saw that none of her Hoplites had fired their torps. That had been the plan if there’d been defensive ships. With the core Memorials there, she had the best interceptor pilots in the Cluster—and some of the defenses were capable of targeting starfighters.

Plasma blasts were already filling the space around her as she led the Memorials forward. Her fourteen fighters had one objective, and part of it required them to draw fire. Kira was tracking as much of the flak as she could as she danced her fighter through it.

“There,” she said aloud, haloing one of the closer platforms. It wasn’t big enough to carry one of the big antiship guns, but it had an impressive collection of lighter guns. There in the Cluster, they were probably intended to target gunships, but they’d make a mess of her heavier fighters and greener pilots if she let them.

A mental command deployed her torpedo, and she dodged around the plasma flak as she opened fire with her own guns. An asteroid with surface guns couldn’t dodge.

The torpedo’s fusion blast swept most of the installations off the smallish rock, and she dove in behind the wave of plasma, her own cannon spitting fire as she targeted the remaining guns.

Forty seconds had passed since her arrival, and one of the installations was dead to her guns alone. The squadron of Weltraumpanzers flashed past her, heading toward the heavy antiship cannon her target had been protecting.

Explosions were lighting up across the battlespace, diffused by the jamming but still clear to her scanners as she popped up to search for threats. Platform after platform was disappearing from her computer’s estimates as torpedoes struck home.

She spent ten seconds attempting to locate a target before the timer flipped green and she did what nova pilots did best: she vanished.

* * *

Icons in her head flickered from orange question marks to green confirmed dots as nova fighter after nova fighter appeared out of nothingness at the rendezvous point and shut down their jammers. Kira watched the list run down and then blinked as the last Sinister fighter-bomber appeared.

“Squadron leaders, check in,” she ordered. “I see everyone. Confirm.”

They’d just punched out the fixed defenses of a cluster home to a million and a half or so people and knocked out two squadrons’ worth of gunships. They couldn’t have done it without losses…could they?

“I confirm, Commodore,” Cartman told her. “All Deception-Bravo fighters are present.”

“All Charlie fighters are here,” Yamauchi agreed.

The Perseus officers took a few moments longer, but it quickly confirmed her surprise. They’d taken seventy fighters, most of their pilots green, into the teeth of a major settlement’s fixed defenses, and brought them all out.

The Costar Clans were poor, but there wasn’t much wrong with the hardware built into their defenses. The crews just hadn’t been ready for this…and they’d paid for that lack of attention with their lives.

“Stand by for group-wide nova recharge,” Kira ordered. They were a light-minute away from anyone right now, though it would be a few more minutes before the battle between the Coalition Fleet and the defenders opened up.

It probably wouldn’t last very long once it did start.

A few more seconds passed as the last fighters reported cooldown.

“All ships, nova to the fleet on my command,” she said. “Hold defensive positions and establish laser links with the motherships. Maintain defensive maneuvers and keep your eyes open; the Clans might be outclassed, but a lucky hit can take down anyone.”

She took a breath and nodded firmly to herself. It wasn’t a lucky hit she was worried about—but if Cobra Squadron decided to get involved, her people weren’t going to need torpedoes.

Which was good, since they’d fired them all at the local defenses.

“All ships…nova.”

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