38

“Okay, so, we found the MPD team.”

A heavy blaster thunder-crackled down the corridor as Kira helped Bertoli pull a wounded mercenary back. No one had died yet, but the resistance had toughened just as they hit the bridge.

“I noticed,” she told Milani drily. “What’s your take?”

“Four and a half minutes till Penalty Fee arrives,” they replied. “We can probably spin it out for five minutes of ‘ignoring them’ after that.”

There was a moment of silence and the heavy blaster crackled again.

“I make it one heavy blaster,” Milani said, clearly identifying it just from the sound. “They’re laying down suppressive fire—quite competently, I might add. Secondary fire suggests eight troopers. Quick glance I got showed low-profile high-density power armor, probably Fringe manufacture.”

Kira whistled silently inside her helmet. You could get Fringe weapons in the Rim—especially if you were head of government of a wealthy system like the Crest—but they’d come a long way and they didn’t travel cheaply.

“If you don’t want the prize crew, you have to warn them off now,” Kira hissed.

“We’ll be fine,” the mercenary replied sharply. “They aren’t the only ones with wonderful toys.”

A panel in Milani’s armor opened up and they removed what looked like a piece of plastic, roughly forty centimeters long by twelve wide and three thick.

They held it in front of them as they closed the panel, and the dragon swirled to look at Kira.

“You never saw this, sir,” they told Kira calmly—and then crushed the panel between their armored gauntlets.

Kira watched in not-quite-horror as the plain plastic block dissolved into dust—dust that took to the air and flashed around the corner at high speed.

Attack microbots were technically a gray area, not quite covered by the general ban on attack nanoweaponry, but most people regarded them as extremely questionable regardless.

“Non-replicating,” Milani told her. “No worse, really, than regular explosives, except self-mobile. But…people get twitchy.”

The explosion that echoed down the corridor as the mercenary finished speaking silenced the heavy blaster.

“What…do they do?” Kira asked.

“Go the target area designated by my headware, attach themselves to any available source of human-level body heat—capable of both scanning through and penetrating power armor—and then detonate on my signal,” Milani said quietly. “Everyone in that hall is dead.

“We should move.”

* * *

The gore and debris scattered across the hallway sent a shiver of atavistic fear down Kira’s spine. From the suddenly slow pace of most of Milani’s lead squad, she wasn’t the only one looking at the nonbinary mercenary commander slightly askance now.

The bridge door was jammed open by the wreckage of the heavy blaster itself. The Ministerial Protection Detail had been using the armored hatch as cover, which left more than enough space for Milani and Bertoli to insert their powered gauntlets and pull the accessway open.

Fortitude’s bridge was immense to Kira’s eyes, a fifteen-meter-diameter space with two levels, focused on a central hologram tank at least five meters across on its own. A dozen techs and officers were still in there, wisely backing away from their consoles as the mercenaries entered.

“This is an outrage,” a tall woman of apparent Korean extraction snapped. “And madness. You cannot possibly plan to escape the wrath of the Navy of the Royal Crest—and you have no—”

The ship’s computers dinged.

“Command transfer, recognized. Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon authorizations, removed. Captain Random Sample Six, activated.

“All current officer authorizations, removed. All personnel authorizations, removed.

“Standing by for new personnel listings from Captain Sample Six.”

Kira couldn’t resist. She removed her helmet as she walked onto the bridge so that Captain Moon could see the brilliant grin on her face.

“Captain Moon, I do believe you are relieved,” she told the other woman. “And you’re standing next to my chair.”

“How… That’s…” Moon spluttered, but Fortitude happily informed Kira that the Crester was trying to access ship’s systems…and failing.

Moon had the commanding-officer codes. Kira had the builder codes, the ones that would have been deactivated at the end of her trial—plus a set of commanding-officer codes and a set of Admiralty codes, just in case. The woman had never had a chance of retaining control of Fortitude’s systems once any of Kira’s people were on the bridge.

“Commander, please detain these gentle people without hurting them more than you have to,” Kira told Milani as she brushed past the stunned Captain and lowered herself into the command chair.

She could fly a carrier. It wasn’t going to be an efficient or elegant process, but she could do it. Right now, though, all she had to do was bring the carrier’s engines down to “we are making test maneuvers” levels instead of “we are running from a threat” levels.

Mercenaries produced cuffs from various panels on their armor and began restraining the NRC crew. None of them resisted—a combination of shock and realizing they were utterly outclassed, Kira suspected.

“Internal sensors are being fucked by our multiphasic jammers,” she told Milani as they joined her at the command station. “Which is the point, I know. Any updates from your side?”

“Everyone is supposed to send runners to the flight deck,” the commando replied. “I’ve dispatched one. Bertoli on the wounded. It looks like we aren’t going to lose anyone.”

“How long have you been carrying attack microbots?” Kira asked softly as she activated the codes they’d given the skeleton crew.

“I picked them up for this,” Milani told her. “Redward can make them. They just don’t.”

“Most people don’t,” she said. “Because they’re banned.”

“Not quite,” they corrected, echoing her earlier thoughts. “And we couldn’t afford failure.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Kira agreed. “Without the warning to break off, nova pinnaces should be coming aboard. Two minutes to Penalty Fee’s arrival.”

She entered more commands and the holotank cleared. Fortitude’s multiphasic jammers were now offline, and all of Kira’s jammers were either gone or locked to her volume of hull.

“I’m not seeing any resistance in the engineering systems,” she told Milani, “so I think your people are in position. I now control the ship’s software, but there are a few places where someone clever can still cause me a lot of trouble.”

“Once main points are secure, all strike groups should be deploying two-commando sweep teams to track down any resistance,” they replied. “The prize crew will be running a manual cable connection from the hangar relay to here to let us hail Penalty Fee with that if nothing else.”

“I know the plan,” Kira said quietly. She shook her head as she looked around the bridge of the most powerful warship she’d ever set foot on.

“Part of me honestly didn’t think we were going to make it this far,” she admitted. “Any concerns on grabbing the PM?”

“If everything goes right, she should just walk right into our clutches,” Milani pointed out. “So, of course I have concerns!”

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