34

Deception had a fully functional flag deck, designed to act as the home base of a senior Commodore or junior Admiral leading a cruiser group. The K70-class cruisers had originally been designed as independent capital ships operating with destroyer support, after all.

Even when they’d grown too obsolete to risk being deployed where heavier Apollon ships could find them, they’d kept the facilities—and now Kira was making full use of them again.

Which meant that right now she was watching sixty nova fighters make an enthusiastic attack pass on empty space. The target, of course, was simulated in their systems. So were their guns and even their multiphasic jammers.

While Memorial Force was currently alone at the trade-route stop, they didn’t want to hash up real space for other people. While multiphasic jamming was only fully effective within a light-second of the emitter, the chaos traveled outward at lightspeed and could ruin someone’s day if it hit at the wrong time.

“Your people are good,” she told the man standing next to her. “I’m impressed.”

“I handpicked the best from the volunteers,” Colonel Teige “Helmet” Sagairt told her. The brilliantly copper-haired man grinned. “You’ve made quite an impression, you know. I had complaints from people who didn’t make the list of pilots we were lending you.”

“To be sent into a fight you knew nothing about beyond that it was outside the Syntactic Cluster and I was getting paid for it,” Kira murmured. “I’m actually touched.”

“You came from nowhere and saved our planet and our Cluster at least twice, Commodore,” Sagairt said. “I know you were paid for it and paid well, but money doesn’t clear some debts. The Redward Royal Fleet’s nova-fighter wings exist because of you, and we know it.

“Plus, I think everybody figured you weren’t going that far unless you were sticking a finger in Equilibrium’s eyes—and the RRF has its own accounts to settle with those assholes.”

“That’s true enough,” Kira agreed. “I’ll admit, I was surprised to get you.”

He chuckled.

“You’ve heard the rumors, then,” he said.

“That you’re supposed to be getting stars and put in charge of a semi-independent fighter corps?” she asked drily.

“Those ones, yep,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m here.”

Kira looked away from him to watch Raccoon’s Fastball bombers carry out a perfectly sequenced strike on a virtual cruiser with virtual torpedoes. For a group of pilots that had never seen a bomber a year earlier, her bomber crews were smooth as silk.

“Are you trying to avoid that promotion?” she said.

He laughed at that, then winced as he looked at the screen behind her.

“What?”

“Well, your Raccoon-Alpha and -Bravo squadrons just pincered my poor Deception-Deltas,” he told her. “I’m checking the metrics…yeah, that dogfight was a bloody massacre.” He shook his head. “My people are not up to speed with yours yet.”

“My people are also learning, most of them,” Kira admitted. “I’m worried about these Blue Scarlets. We’ve got the numbers edge, but everything I’m seeing says the new Hussars can match the PNCs and Sinisters for gunpower and the Hoplites for maneuverability.”

She shook her head.

“A heavy fighter that can dance with my interceptors and shoot with my fighter-bombers is not what I want on the other side,” she admitted. “Though, to be fair, they have to leave their torpedo behind to match the Hoplite-IV’s maneuverability.”

Her Hoplites only barely had enough plasma-cannon firepower to really threaten a real warship. The PNC-115s, on the other hand, were a decent threat even without their torpedoes, as were the Weltraumpanzers.

The new Hussars carried a single torpedo, like her Hoplites, and, also like her Hoplites, suffered for maneuverability when they did so. Even with the torps, the Hussars weren’t a threat to Deception…but the threat for this operation was their nova drives, not their weapons.

“And who knows if they’re carrying them,” Sagairt agreed. He shook his head. “As for the promotion they’re talking about, when I say it’s why I’m ‘here,’ I mean ‘here on this flag deck with you,’” he clarified.

“I’m here to learn how to command a nova-fighter group from the best example I have available,” he told her. “Do I think you’re perfect? No. Do I think you’re damn good at this job? Yes.

“Plus, you’re around and you were willing to let me join you to observe the exercise,” he continued. “Availability makes up for a lot of shortcomings, Commodore.”

“I’m both flattered and vaguely insulted, Colonel,” she told him, but she laughed. “Seriously, you’re, what, apprenticing yourself to me for this mission?”

“Between you and Cartman, I’m getting a good feel for a completely different way of running an organization of nova fighters,” he pointed out. “And I’m watching you manage the nova fighters from the half-step back I’m going to need to use once they hang those stars on me.

“It’s a learning experience for me, and one that will serve both me and Redward well.”

He smiled sharply.

“And if the last time I strap on a nova fighter is to ram a torpedo through an Institute plan, I will regard it as time well spent.”

Kira snorted, keeping her eyes on the exercise.

“Well, if you want apprenticing, it’s a good call to mention it,” she observed. “Because half of what you need to know goes on in my head—assuming my methods are even worth observing. Apollo runs an entire three-month intensive training course for officers moving to starship or full nova-group command, but I never took it.”

She’d been supposed to, but then Jay Moranis had warned her that the death of one of their other squadron commanders was fishy as all hell—and told her to retire and get out of Apollo.

Gods, did she miss the man. John Estanza, too, the old troublemaker. The pair of them—comrades in Cobra Squadron and Equilibrium alike before they’d learned better—had put her where she was. They’d set her up to be successful, wealthy and the commander of a mercenary battle fleet that would have few equals when she was done.

And she’d trade it all for having both of them back.

“You’ve spent more time in the cockpit of a nova fighter than I have,” Sagairt said quietly. “You’ve commanded a nova-fighter squadron in more actions than I’ve flown in. You’re the best option I have to learn from, and I don’t give two flying rats whether you got the formal training or not.

“I’m sure as hell not getting any formal training before I take command of an entire planetary nova-fighter force!” He grinned. “So, feel free to start narrating your thought process if you think it’ll help, boss.

“Because I am ready to learn…and I need to.”

“All right.” Kira swallowed and looked back at the map. “First thing to note, then, is that we’re watching by squadron right now,” she told him. “We’ll analyze by individual pilot afterward, but that will just be a quick run-through to make sure the squadron commanders don’t miss anything.

“So, we’re comparing performances of squadrons—their maneuverability, their formation-keeping—and if you look here, you can see that Purlwise and Deception-Charlie squadron are still occasionally flying like they’re in fighter-bombers, not heavy fighters.”

Sagairt nodded slowly as she continued, pointing out the places where the pilots and squadrons on the map were failing that could be fixed—and the places they were doing exceptionally that needed to be praised.

If he was to lead Redward’s nova-fighter corps, he would need to be able to identify both.

* * *

“All right, people,” Kira said into a virtual debrief when everyone was back aboard their respective motherships.

Dozens of pilots and copilots looked up at her in various stages of exhaustion, and she smiled. It was a well-practiced smile, one she’d learned when she’d taken on her first squadron command eons ago.

Her smile projected sympathy for their exhaustion, understanding of their failures…and a warning that she was about to lay some of those failures out for everyone to see.

“For a first run at the series of simulated scenarios, that was decent,” she told them. “Normally, I might even say good. You understood the scenario parameters, were keeping your simulated and test novas to the right cycles, and flew like you knew what you were doing.”

That was a higher bar than it sounded. Even the best pilots could lose track of the cycle time and spent sixty-five, seventy, even eighty seconds in the battlespace. The class two nova drive had a minimum cooldown of sixty seconds, and it was almost never a good idea to spend more than that around the enemy.

“Against any opposition in the Syntactic Cluster, you’d be looking good,” she told them. “Against most pilots in the Rim, even, this would be a promising start.

“Except everything we have says that the Blue Scarlet Combat Group is an elite formation, handpicked for this mission because they are guarding both the most powerful warship the Crest has built and their Prime Minister and the leadership of the political party that is well on its way to securing total control of the Crest.

“We can safely assume, pilots, that we are looking at opponents just as capable, just as skilled, just as dangerous as the Cobra Squadron pilots who came after us for Equilibrium.”

Those veterans had easily taken two of the Cluster’s newly commissioned pilots with each of them when they’d gone down. Kira and her allies had smashed Cobra Squadron in the end, but the price—even excluding the loss of Conviction with John Estanza and Lakshmi Labelle—had been high.

“So, today was…acceptable,” Kira warned them. “That said…”

She looked around, meeting gaze after gaze in the physical briefing room aboard Deception and through the virtual link to Raccoon.

“Performance today was acceptable,” she noted. “And that is against a metric of us needing to go up against an elite combat formation in less than two weeks.

“Which means, pilots, we have work to do. But this is not a lost cause and we can take Blue Scarlet—and do it, I think, without losing a single damn one of you.

“Because in my perfect future, people, I bring everybody home from this mess and I get a fleet carrier and we help the Crest short-stop a move to a one-party government and we stick a knife in Equilibrium’s back.”

She could feel the energy in the room improve as she continued and her carefully practiced smile turned into a near-feral grin.

“We are going to go over every single place today that you fell short of my hopes,” she told them, but that energy buoyed them. “Not because anyone is to blame but because those are where we need to practice on the next round.

“Because very, very soon now, we are going to go up against the elite of the Navy of the Royal Crest and you, Memorial Force’s nova-fighter pilots, are going to make them look like amateurs.

“Who’s with me?”

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