32

Waves of brilliant blue light flickered across the runabout’s displays, a mix of Cherenkov radiation, Jianhong radiation and regular light that blazed across the empty space of the trade-route stop.

An alert woke Kira from her nap in the pilot’s seat as the nova pulses flashed across her scanners and identity beacons began to trickle in.

“They’re on time,” Bertoli noted from the copilot’s seat. “I can’t say I loved two whole days in the runabout, cycling between two bunks and two chairs that fold back, but our friends are on time.”

Kira chose to ignore the complaint, focusing in to validate the identification. It was easy enough—even there, in the Crest Sector, few nova ships approached a hundred thousand cubic meters.

She still thought Deception’s lines were ugly, the warship cut in the blocky and angular shape preferred by the Brisingr shipyards for ease of construction, but the ship had definitely grown on her. Compared to the rough cylinder of Raccoon and the logistics freighter, she was definitely a more modern and powerful ship.

The distinction was less obvious versus the two Parakeet-class destroyers. She could see Konrad’s influence in the fact that the Parakeets looked more like Brisingr ships than the older Redward destroyers she’d seen, but their systems showed his influence as well.

“That’s everyone,” she said aloud. “Are O’Mooney and Konrad awake?”

“I’m awake,” Konrad said, her lover stepping up into the cockpit. “O’Mooney probably had an alarm set for this, too, but she’s not bothering to get up.”

“I’m awake,” the youngest mercenary called from the back of the shuttle. “But there is not enough space for four in that cockpit.”

“I am not going to miss this runabout,” Kira noted, entering the commands to bring up her Harrington coils. Deception was almost two full light-minutes away, so it was going to be a while yet before they were aboard.

But they could see home—and two new nova flashes appeared next to them as a pair of Weltraumpanzers dropped into escort formation around the runabout.

“Basketball, this is Purlwise,” Deception-Charlie’s commander, Akira “Purlwise” Yamauchi greeted her. “Confirm ID, please?”

“Sending, Purlwise,” she replied, pinging him with her Memorial Force codes. “It’s damn good to see you all. Safe flight?”

“Safe, yes. Boring, mostly,” the pilot replied. “Though when we get back to Redward, a few of us are going to find the gentleperson who sold Commander Bueller Lady Tramp in a back alley.”

That had to be the logistics freighter…and didn’t sound good.

“I’ll have Zoric brief me, I suppose,” Kira allowed. “You’re our escort in?”

“All the way, Commodore. It’s good to have you back.”

* * *

“Everything was fine until we hit the third static-discharge stop,” Zoric told Kira and Konrad a few hours later, gathered in Kira’s office breakout room.

They hadn’t managed to sleep yet. Kira hadn’t even seen her quarters—and they had an all-senior-officers briefing in less than an hour.

The rush was probably unnecessary, but the longer everyone had to plan for what was coming, the better.

“So…eighteen novas from Redward and already outside the Cluster,” Kira observed. Nova ships built up a mix of electrical and tachyon static on the hulls and on the nova-drive cores themselves with each jump.

It was easily discharged in a significant gravity well, but that required a nova into a star system, which added a delay to travel. A number of systems had received significant economic benefits from being spaced roughly thirty light-years apart along the common trade lanes—including both Redward, at the center of the Syntactic Cluster, and Ypres, at the “entrance” to the Cluster from the rest of the Rim.

“Yeah. That’s when Lady Tramp’s Harrington coils started to fail,” Zoric said. “Fortunately, Captain Woodcock is an old RRF engineering hand and realized what was happening before we’d lost more than half.”

Half?” Konrad exclaimed. “I checked her coils.”

“From what Laure said, you did,” Zoric agreed.

Kira wasn’t familiar with Laure Woodcock, but her headware confirmed that Zoric had hired the woman away from the RRF to command their logistics ship. Her file said she’d been an engineer turned logistics-support officer, but Redward didn’t deploy outside the Cluster and didn’t need logistics or repair ships.

That limited the opportunities for a woman like Woodcock to command her own ship—which was probably why she’d jumped at the chance to move to Memorial Force.

“Then how?” Konrad asked.

“Woodcock’s people checked every coil after that,” Deception’s Captain told them. “They didn’t say anything, but the systems automatically record replacement dates.”

Kira could guess what that meant—and from the way Konrad started gritting his teeth, she wasn’t wrong.

“They swapped them all?” he demanded.

“All of them,” Zoric confirmed. “Woodcock figures they either had the old coils in the shop already or traded them. The ones they pulled had almost seventy-five percent operating lifetime, on average.

“The ones they installed were all on their last thousand hours,” she said grimly. “Worth maybe a quarter of what the ones they pulled were worth. Woodcock says that even if they bought the ones they installed and just sold the original ones, they probably cleared half a million kroner on the switch.”

“Dark alley. Right,” Konrad gritted out.

“More send everything to Pree,” Kira corrected. “You or Milani might break the asshole’s legs—Pree will end his entire business.”

Why send thugs when she could send lawyers, after all?

“We had replacement coils for the fleet on Lady Tramp, of course, so Woodcock was able to get everything running again without us losing too much time,” Zoric noted. “I’m a fan of both thugs and lawyers in this case, boss.

“Those coils could have failed at a far worse time than us heading into orbit for static discharge—and Woodcock’s people are still going over the rest of the ship.”

Kira winced.

“How bad?” she asked.

“Worst was the nova-drive discharge capacitors,” the Captain said grimly. “They only swapped half of those, at least, but one of their swap-ins already had a hairline fracture. She’d have made it to the Crest, most likely.”

“And not made it back to Redward,” Konrad replied. “Dark alleys and lawyers, yes.”

Kira snorted.

“It’s fixed, though?” she asked.

“Woodcock thinks so,” Zoric confirmed. “Everything else is fine. We picked up new crew, new pilots—you know some of them.”

“Oh?” Kira asked.

“I figured I’d make life easier and reorg so all of our RRF pilots were in one squadron flying RRF planes,” her second-in-command told her. “I’m glad I did that, because I’m not sure I could have justified asking Colonel Sagairt to do less than command a squadron.”

Helmet is aboard?” Kira demanded. Teige “Helmet” Sagairt had commanded the original single squadron of battered ex-Crest nova fighters Redward had owned when she’d arrived.

He’d remained one of the key officers and pilots of the RRF’s expanding pilot corps ever since. Last she’d heard, he was slated to skip several grades straight to Admiral and become the official CO of the nova-fighter corps.

Now she had to wonder if anyone had told Sagairt that.

“Yes, sir,” Zoric confirmed. “On Deception, leading Delta Squadron. I had six Sinisters, as opposed to PNC-One-Fifteen clones, so that made sense as a place to put the RRF loaners.”

“I’ll have to touch base with him and see just what he is thinking,” Kira said.

The Redward Royal Fleet’s Sinister nova fighter-bomber was heavily based on the PNC-115 fighter-bombers that Conviction had once carried and Raccoon still did. It was not, despite its heritage, a perfect clone.

While Kira’s pilot/copilot teams from the PNCs could easily handle the Sinisters, the RRF crews were more experienced with that specific variation, so Zoric’s change made sense.

“Fair enough,” Zoric agreed. “Our various Redward loaners have settled well. I suspect that someone—either Remington or Sagairt himself or both—was very careful about the people we got. They haven’t lorded being regular military over our people, nor have they insisted on, well, any more spit and polish than you do.”

Kira smiled. That had been a shock for some of Conviction’s people when she’d first come aboard. She’d let a lot of the rules and regs of military service go, but there were also rules and policies that made sense, and she’d enforced those on Conviction’s fighter group.

Now that mix of mercenary minimalism and military discipline ruled across her entire mercenary fleet.

“So, we’re doing okay?” she asked.

“We’re ready for war, Kira,” Zoric said grimly. “But while our people are willing, I’m pretty sure we can’t fight the Crest. Do we have a plan?”

“The beginnings of one, that we’ll hash out with the rest of the senior officers when we have the full conference. A lot of data to run through as well,” Kira told Zoric. “The Crest is in worse shape than I thought, politically. The SPP basically has complete control and is pretty obviously moving to change de facto to de jure by removing King Sung.

“The question isn’t whether Jade and Sung are right to move against the SPP,” she noted. “The question is if it’s already too late. Either way, though…”

She sighed and shook her head.

“Worst-case scenario I see is that we pull this off and then have to dump the PM and her Cabinet somewhere because no one is going to pay for them,” she admitted. “So long as we manage the mission, we still walk out of this with a carrier.”

“We’ve got command-and-override codes to take control of her, if we can take physical possession of her,” Konrad added. “Which, I guess, is where that all-officers briefing comes in?”

“That part of the plan is on Milani and McCaig,” Kira agreed. “But I want everyone in the room to talk about it as we go through the pieces.

“There’s going to be very little slack to work with.”

Zoric nodded slowly.

“How little?” she asked.

“Seventeen minutes.”

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