Admiral Matevosyan struck Kira as the type of man who was used to being the biggest person in any given room. He was just under two meters tall and just loomed over his flag bridge in the recording.
Unfortunately for the Crester Admiral, Kira was used to McCaig, who was just over two meters tall. Plus, the reason she was watching a recording was that she now had a significant degree of control over the situation.
“This situation is utterly unacceptable,” he growled. “But I understand Admiral Avagyan’s unwillingness to risk the lives of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Her willingness to trust a jumped-up thug, however, is beyond my understanding.
“I will accept the Prime Minister’s order to stand down and await the ransom payment from the Crest when I hear it from her, in her own voice, on a live channel,” Matevosyan snapped. “Otherwise, I will take the risks I judge necessary.”
The recording ended and Kira leaned back in her seat thoughtfully. Collections Agent had arrived four hours earlier and had joined the NRC formation orbiting Guadaloop.
“We’re keeping outside of his scan-and-nova loop,” she said aloud. It wasn’t really a question. The novas of the fleet were scheduled and arranged so that they moved on before the light from their emergence reached Guadaloop.
“Yes, sir,” Soler confirmed. “We haven’t detected any dispersal of forces, either.”
Kira nodded. That was the risk to their current plan. If the Cresters split their forces up, they created multiple scan-and-nova loops. They also divided their forces and would have fewer fighters to send at any given location, but since they had five or six times the fighters needed to destroy Memorial Force…
“What do you think, Zoric?” she asked Deception’s Captain, eyeing Admiral Matevosyan’s frozen image.
“I think he’s blustering for the cameras,” Zoric admitted. “He knows that if he actually breaks Admiral Avagyan’s deal, it’ll reflect on everybody’s willingness to negotiate with the Navy of the Royal Crest in the future.
“But he doesn’t want to be seen to be abiding by Avagyan’s deal.”
“So, he blusters,” Kira echoed. “That’s about what I was figuring, too.” She looked back at the tactical plot.
“Let’s accelerate our sequence,” she ordered. “Move up to a ninety-minute safety margin on that scan-and-nova loop. Just in case he decides to be clever.”
“Is there a response to his message, sir?” Soler asked.
Kira smiled.
“No, Soler,” she told the younger woman. “If things are going the way I suspect and hope they are, we can leave the good Admiral to stew in his own juices for a little while longer.”
She rose and stretched.
“I’m going to go take a nap,” she announced. “Wake me if anything changes.”
* * *
Nothing changed. There were a few more wasted attempts to sweep the spots that Memorial Force had been with heavy assault wings, but after a day, Admiral Matevosyan seemed to feel he’d blustered enough.
He’d also probably noticed the same pattern Kira was noting.
“How long since the last ship?” she asked Zoric. Deception had a full tactical staff, versus Soler and two techs on Fortitude. This kind of analysis was easier there.
“We’ve seen four ships from three systems in the last twenty-four hours,” Zoric told her. “None were from the Crest.
“The last direct ship from the Crest was thirty-six hours ago.”
“How long after Temperance and Collections Agent would they have left?” Kira asked.
“Twelve, maybe eighteen hours,” Zoric replied. “Prior to that, schedules say ships were arriving from the Crest at least every eleven hours, on average.”
“So, we’re missing three, maybe four ships,” Kira noted. “That’s not quite enough to assume there’s a blockade, but…”
“But it’s enough to flag a worry, yes,” her co-owner told her. “Something went down in the Crest about seventy hours ago, I would guess.”
“And our ransom demand is landing in the middle of it about now,” Kira said with a chuckle. She was alone on Fortitude’s bridge right now, though Zoric had a full staff on Deception’s.
They really needed to reallocate staff, but there just weren’t enough spare hands in Memorial Force to do more than fly Fortitude home.
Forty-ish hours each way. Kira had to wonder how long Matevosyan would stay in Guadaloop haunting her when he had to guess something was going on in the Crest. What were his priorities?
“Does it change anything for us?” Zoric asked.
“No,” Kira admitted. “We keep up this dance until we hear from Jade Panosyan.”
Or that Jade Panosyan’s coup had failed, in which case Kira was going to take whatever money the SPP offered her and get the hell out of the Crest Sector.
* * *
“You need to breathe,” Konrad told her as he returned to the bridge. “Have you gone more than twelve steps from this room since we captured the ship?”
“Nope,” Kira confirmed. “And I’m not going to, either, Konrad. I’m responsible for all of our people, everything that’s happening here. I need to be here or reachable from here.”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” he conceded. He walked up to stand next to her, looking at the holographic plot. “It’s what, thirty-five hours until we’re going to hear anything?”
“From the Crest, yes,” she agreed. “But there are three carrier groups in this system, and while they’re being cooperative right now…that could end very, very quickly.”
So far, their every-four-hour check-ins had gone without incident, but that was the most vulnerable part of all of this. Kira was reasonably sure Avagyan wouldn’t let the rest of the Cresters do anything stupid, but she did have to send a single nova fighter into harm’s way to keep the line of communication open.
“Breathe, my love,” he insisted.
Nodding, Kira closed her eyes and focused on her breaths for a minute, controlling her breathing as she tried to find a semblance of calm in the sea of chaos she swam in. There was a soft sound of metal on plastic after a minute, and she opened her eyes to see Konrad attaching something to the command chair,
“For luck,” he told her, gesturing at a new version of the interceptor-over-mountain statuette he’d made for her fighter. This one had a small clamp attached to the bottom, to link it to the arms of Kira’s new seat.
“I don’t have scraps left from Conviction, but we salvaged some pieces of your fighter before we had to push her out,” Konrad continued. “Waldroup helped me put this together.”
That was probably why the fighter and natural mountain were both cleaner and more distinct than they had been before. Plus, she suspected Konrad had been practicing to make sure that the charm was prettier this time.
Her breath caught in her throat and she blinked away tears.
“You goof,” she told him. But her fingers were already tracing the tiny fighter. “Thank you.”
“It’s for luck,” he repeated. “The last one got you through a fighter crash alive. I figure this one is enough prettier to get us all home.”