“Start the countdown,” Kira ordered calmly. “They should receive our ransom demand in the next few minutes and spot our arrival. How long till nova?”
“Countdown is five minutes,” Konrad replied.
“Are we ready?” Kira glanced over at Soler.
“We’re ready,” she confirmed. “If I’d known we’d be doing this much of this kind of thing, I’d have suggested we bring an actual artist.”
“The thought would never have occurred to me if you hadn’t done such a great job with Moon,” Kira pointed out. “We’ll be fine.”
“There is a hundred-and-thirty-second gap between our message arriving and our being able to nova,” Zoric warned from the command channel. “They may have fighters ready to go.”
“And that is why we’re almost three light-minutes away from where we sent the message,” Kira reminded them. “Yes, they can spread out and locate us, but not in two minutes.”
Plus, nova fighters jumping twelve light-hours would have a ten-minute cooldown. Shorter than the one for a class one drive, but not by much—one light-week was where the two cooldowns converged.
If they sent out a wide fighter sweep, only some of the fighters could possibly be close enough to be a threat. The biggest threat was if they sent a carrier who then deployed fighters to search.
But even that would take more than two minutes to locate Memorial Force and launch a strike.
“Message will now have arrived,” Konrad reported. “Count is at one hundred twenty-five seconds.”
Kira nodded silently and studied the tactical display. Even if someone jumped immediately to the source of their message, she wouldn’t see them for three minutes. Unless someone actually landed fighters right on top of her people, she’d never see them.
“Sixty seconds.”
Nothing. There was probably someone at their origin point now, but nothing was near them.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Nova flare at ten light-seconds,” Soler snapped. “I have a four-fighter section of Cavaliers at ten light-seconds!”
“Scouting sweep,” Kira concluded. “They probably have a carrier out here, but they can’t even go back for sixty seconds.”
She mentally saluted the fighter pilots as the counter ticked down.
“They’re going to be real pissed when they find out where we went,” she noted aloud.
“Ten seconds,” Konrad said. “We better be ready.
“Everything is ready,” Kira promised.
“What happens if this doesn’t work?”
“We die.”
The countdown hit zero.
* * *
Memorial Force emerged from nova in perfectly aligned formation. Parade-ground formation, even, with all of the lights and beacons and glittering array that came with that. Fighters spilled from all three launch decks and flickered into formation with perfect precision.
It was a show—and it was a show with one hell of an audience, because Kira’s entire mercenary fleet had just appeared four light-seconds from Guadaloop itself. They were outside range of GODCom’s fortresses and the two carrier groups still in orbit, but everyone saw them.
“You’re live,” Soler told Kira.
“GODCom and Navy of the Royal Crest forces,” Kira told the camera. “I am Kira Demirci, commanding officer of the Memorial Force mercenary company.
“Before anyone takes any precipitous action, I must advise you that the Prime Minister of the Crest is aboard Fortitude—and her Cabinet has been parceled out across my ships,” she said calmly. “I don’t like using people as human shields, but I need you to listen to me.”
She smiled.
“Besides, do any of us soldiers really regard politicians as people?” she asked. “You have received my ransom demand. If you are smart, it has already been forwarded to the Crest. If it has not, you should get on that. Now.
“And then we will wait for an answer, and you will leave my ships alone. And if you want to argue that plan, well… Listen to the words of your own Prime Minister.”
The feed of Kira cut away to the recording of the meeting in the cell.
“I am ready to deal,” the edited recording of Maral Jeong told the camera. “I feel the noose tighten. I am prepared to consider a deal,” she repeated.
The editing was careful, utterly changing the woman’s original intent…but the words were all Maral Jeong’s.
“Very well,” Kira’s own voice said. “Tell your fleet what we are going to do.”
That had been recorded later, but Kira wasn’t in the video feed. Maral Jeong’s own intentional impassivity worked in her enemy’s favor there.
“I am biased. I wish to live,” Jeong’s recording said. “I order the NRC to stand down in exchange for our lives. We can wait.”
“And your Cabinet?” Kira’s recorded voice asked.
“They will follow me in this,” Jeong said. “Our only hope is to cut a deal.”
Kira’s people, led by Soler and her work on the AI avatar of Captain Moon, had done an incredible job on smoothing the cuts. That Maral Jeong was a politician, with the controlled and frozen body language of six decades of political life, had only helped.
Kira now smiled thinly at the camera as the transmission cut back to her.
“We’re not asking for your surrender,” she told the defenders. “But the Prime Minister of the Crest has agreed to our deal. We will wait to hear from the Crown of the Royal Crest as to whether her ransom will be paid.
“And we are all going to peacefully sit here and glare at each other over our guns until King Sung Panosyan has his say, aren’t we?”
She cut the recording and leaned back in her chair, allowing her nerves to finally hit her.
“What now?” Soler asked.
“All ships remain at battle stations,” Kira ordered grimly as she massaged the knot forming in her neck. “If they come out after us, we’ll have plenty of warning.”
* * *
For a few moments, Kira was worried she’d overplayed her hand. Starfighters spilled out of the two carriers in their dozens, and the escorts closed up under the defensive umbrella of GODCom’s fortresses.
“GODCom has not deployed fighters,” Soler noted, her voice admirably steady. “Our reports suggest they have at least a hundred nova fighters aboard the fortresses, but they are remaining in their hangars.”
“Guadaloop thinks this is the Crest’s problem,” Kira said. “And the NRC isn’t going to lean on them, not unless they really don’t think they can take us.”
The fighter patterns on the displays were…wrong.
“Zoric, Cartman, are you seeing what I’m seeing?” she asked softly.
“Those aren’t attack formations,” Cartman said instantly from her own nova fighter. “They started as them, but they’re confused and…”
Now a pattern was starting to emerge, and Kira only half-swallowed a bark of laughter as Final Usury’s ships and fighters formed into a parade-ground formation facing her.
It took Temperance’s escorts longer to follow suit. For at least a moment, the second carrier group seemed to strain at an invisible leash—long enough for Kira to confirm that it was just Temperance, and her usual backup carrier was missing.
Probably because Diligent was chasing ghosts around the outer system, not yet warned that Kira had arrived at Guadaloop itself.
Finally, clearly in answer to an order from on high—or at least Final Usury—Temperance’s battle group joined the larger carrier in a parade-ground formation. With fighters and destroyers on the wings, the combined Navy of the Royal Crest fleet was now in the shape of a hollow swan that “swam” out of the umbrella of GODCom’s fortresses.
They stopped well inside range of the fortresses’ guns and well outside weapons range of Memorial Force, but the immense flying swan was very clear in open space, pointed at Kira but not attacking.
“Show-offs,” she muttered. “Konrad, how long until the drive is cooled?”
“Twenty minutes,” he reported. “Whoever was chasing us around in the outer system will be able to nova back in fifteen.”
“And how long for Collections Agent to show up?” she asked.
“Eight more hours, assuming she’d made a full jump to get to the trade-route stop and ambush us,” he concluded. “Right now, Commodore, I think everything is swinging on Admiral Avagyan. But when Agent gets here…”
“Admiral Matevosyan is senior to Avagyan,” Kira agreed. “But he’s also Maral Jeong’s brother-in-law. So, I guess what happens then depends on how much his husband likes his sister.”
“Sir, incoming transmission from Final Usury,” Soler reported. “Admiral Avagyan is requesting a channel.”
“Put her through,” Kira ordered.
She leveled her best not-quite-a-pirate face at the recorder and smiled coldly as Avagyan appeared.
Dafina Avagyan was a classic Armenian-Korean-extraction Crester, with angular eyes and a sharp hawk-like nose against her shadowed skin and pitch-black hair.
“Commodore Demirci,” she said quietly. “You have us at a disadvantage.”
“Admiral Avagyan,” Kira greeted her. “You must forgive, I’m afraid, my compensation for your larger fleets and more powerful warships. I can afford to take no chances.”
“If you wished to take no chances, Commodore, you should perhaps not have kidnapped my Prime Minister,” Avagyan said. “I also apparently find it necessary to remind more people than I should that Em Jeong has no authority over the Navy of the Royal Crest.”
Kira let that lie where it fell, arching a single eyebrow at the Crester Admiral.
“I won’t bluster and beat my chest about how many more fighters and ships I have, Commodore,” the other woman continued. “We both know I can destroy your fleet. The price would be far higher than I like, but you are completely outgunned here.
“Hence your human shields.”
“Indeed,” Kira confirmed calmly. “The Prime Minister is useless to me unless someone is prepared to pay me for her. That requires me to be somewhere you can find me. Her orders were clear, though, weren’t they?”
“And she has no authority to give them,” Avagyan said. “The Crest does not traditionally negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers, Commodore Demirci. And yet, I do hesitate to blithely accept the head of my government as collateral damage.”
“I have already suggested my solution to this impasse,” Kira pointed out. The two fleets were a million kilometers apart. They were outside the range of the standard weapons of either fleet.
Both of them were perfectly capable of fabricating Harrington-coil smart missiles, but multiphasic jamming would render those missiles instantly dumb and blind. The moment either of their nova fighters jumped, both sides would raise their jammers.
“You do realize, Commodore, that there is no way in hell you are keeping that carrier, right?” the Crester Admiral said calmly. “Even if we agree to pay your ransom for Jeong and her Cabinet, we will hunt you forever for that ship.”
“The Crest doesn’t have the resources to hunt me forever,” Kira pointed out. “Fortitude is nonnegotiable, I’m afraid. The only thing in question from my side is how much Jeong and her Cabinet are worth.”
Avagyan grimaced.
“I have no choice, I suppose,” she admitted. “Know that you cannot run and cannot escape, Commodore Demirci. We will await the decision of the Crown and Parliament of the Royal Crest.
“I will, of course, need to see evidence that the Prime Minister and her Cabinet are still alive, however,” she growled.
“I have no intention of killing the golden goose, Admiral,” Kira replied. “Give me one moment.”
She froze the cameras and looked over at Soler.
“I need footage from every cell,” she told the tactical officer. “For the crew and the MPD officers, too. Everyone we captured. Ten seconds, fully time-stamped. No games this time…but mute their microphones.”
She turned back to Avagyan.
“We will forward proof of life for the Prime Minister, her Ministers, and all of the members of Fortitude’s crew and the Ministerial Protection Detail,” she told the Admiral. “I will also provide a list of the known dead.”
Avagyan nodded slowly and thoughtfully.
“I…appreciate that,” she admitted. “The crew and detail personnel are not part of the ransom demand.”
“They are not,” Kira agreed. “They are not the government of the Crest, merely servants of the Crest’s people, doing their duty. If we can come to a mutually agreeable solution, I am prepared to return them to you immediately.”
That apparently surprised the Crester officer, who took a moment to regain control of her expression.
“I will have my people examine the proof-of-life clips,” she told Kira. “And then we will speak again. We…very well may be able to come to that solution.”