35

The final debrief was a lot smoother than the first one. Kira even let Sagairt lead the briefing as practice, which her people were taking in good humor as he walked through the multiple sequences of their training program.

When the RRF officer finally sat down, Kira stepped up and gestured for everyone to pay attention to her. The crowd was expanded over the usual, and they were actually on Deception’s flight deck, to allow for space for the officers from the other ships and for at least all of the squadron commanders to be physically present aboard the flagship.

“Colonel Sagairt has been suffering from the unfortunate fate of having volunteered to be apprenticed to me for this operation,” she told them, an explanation she hadn’t given any of the pilots prior to this.

“I hope the process hasn’t been as awful for him as I fear,” she continued to a chorus of chuckles. “But here we are, everyone. For the terminally unobservant, we are currently sitting three light-weeks from the Crest System, with the navigation departments already working on the novas to drop the fighters and ships of the strike into the correct positions at the correct time.

“It is…” she paused, letting the timer in her headware tick down, then continued dramatically. “T minus thirty-six hours exactly.

“This was our final training run. You will spend the next thirty-six hours resting and preparing for heavy combat,” she continued. “I’m not going to stop you doing dogfighting exercises or anything like that, but there will be no more scheduled training between now and T zero.”

She gave them a moment, smiling.

“Unfortunately, those of you paying attention may also remember that Memorial Force brought along a particular regulation from the Apollo System Defense Force,” she told them. “And that is that no one is permitted alcohol in the thirty hours before a planned combat operation.”

Kira waved around the flight deck.

“That includes me, the spacers, all the officers, but is mostly meant for you lot,” she told the pilots. “But since that deadline doesn’t kick in for six hours, most of you have encountered the Apollo pre-mission tradition of the strike party.”

Stewards were rolling tables into the room behind her people, quickly forming a near-solid line across the eight-meter-wide fighter deck.

Deception’s stewards have outdone themselves with a spectacular spread for you,” she told them. “Most of the crew will be getting the same spread in their messes, but this is the big party. It’s the one with the Commodore!”

That got her more laughs, but most of her people were eyeing the food and drink behind them now.

“I’m not going to keep speechifying,” she promised. “You’ve done good, people. We’re as ready as we are going to be. So go, eat, drink, be merry.”

She didn’t finish the thought aloud, but she knew most of the older pilots would do it automatically.

Eat, drink and be merry—for tomorrow we die.

* * *

Kira knew that the Commodore could only stay at the party for so long. Her presence would inevitably suppress the enthusiasm of the event—though there were aspects of that she was planning for as she carefully positioned herself near the punch table.

She was just in time, in fact, and caught Evgenia Michel’s hand as the destroyer Captain was about to add something to one of the bowls.

“Ev,” she said warningly. “Just what is that?”

“A mild thirty-second hallucinogen,” Michel said cheerfully. “Well, it is when mixed with alcohol, anyway. It’s completely neutralized by the cannabinoids in those punches.” She waved the small pouch at several of the mixed drinks.

“Hallucinogens are fine when people are consenting to them,” Kira pointed out. “They make for a terrible prank.”

“That’s why it’s mild and short-duration, and Scimitar and I hang around to keep an eye on people,” Michel insisted.

“How many times have we had this argument?” Kira asked.

The destroyer Captain paused thoughtfully, her heavy metal legs adjusting with clearly intentional drama.

“Twenty-three,” she answered. “Which is why Abdullah is coming this way with a sign.”

“A sign?” Kira asked, not quite following—until the dark-eyed form of Abdullah “Scimitar” Colombera, Deception-Bravo’s squadron commander and Michel’s age-old partner in crime, appeared and placed a small tripod with a hand-lettered sign next to the punch bowl Kira and Michel were arguing over.

MOON JUICE. CONTAINS HALLUCINOGENS.

Now can I add the powder?” Michel asked with a laugh.

“You’re still supervising the damn bowl, kids,” Kira told the two officers, chuckling herself. Consent was the critical part. Slipping drugs into the drinks was a prank she couldn’t allow—at least two-thirds of the prank at this point was the knowledge on Michel and Colombera’s parts that Kira or Zoric would catch them—but a labeled hallucinogenic drink was…fine.

“Of course,” Colombera agreed cheerfully. “But if you call us kids, do we have to start calling you the Old Lady?”

“If you call the Commodore the Old Lady anywhere that I can hear you, you might start finding the systems in your quarters surprisingly glitchy,” Konrad told the two Apollon officers as he materialized. “I won’t do anything to damage the ship, but I understand that unexpected cold showers are fantastic for increasing efficiency!”

Michel shivered dramatically.

“Be good, Scimitar,” she told her partner in crime. “I don’t trust my engineer not to do exactly what Bueller tells her.”

“That’s because Em Hoang knows what’s good for her,” Konrad replied. “Something I’m not entirely sure either of you has ever worked out.”

“Please, Konrad, neither of them is past thirty-two,” Kira said. “Their brains haven’t fully developed yet.”

“Yet you gave one of them a destroyer,” he pointed out.

“I didn’t say my brain had fully developed.” She scooped up two chilled bottles of beer and passed one to her boyfriend.

“Now, are you two done seeing if you can make me jump?” she asked her pranksters.

“That’s the last thing involving spiking the punch, yes,” Michel said virtuously.

“If it wasn’t so unethical I twitch to think about it, I’d have Konrad shut down your legs to protect everyone else,” Kira told the younger woman firmly. “Nothing injurious. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Michel said crisply. “We did learn a sense of proportion along the way, didn’t we, Scimitar?”

“No, Ev,” Colombera corrected. “I learned a sense of proportion. You learned to listen to me.”

* * *

Kira soon found herself holding up a wall, with Konrad, Zoric and McCaig gathered around her. It was hard for the senior officers to get involved in the party—Michel was managing it right now, but Kira suspected that it would become harder for the young woman as time went on.

“Are we ready?” Zoric asked softly.

“Fighters are,” Kira told her. “Maybe more training would help, but there’s a point where you just have to accept that you’re as good as you’re going to get in the time you have. If we make them train up to the final moment of the strike, they’ll be exhausted when they start.

“So, we rest them for a day and then we go in.”

“I’m not liking being the delivery vehicle for the commandos rather than leading them,” McCaig rumbled. “Milani was always my best, and they know the job as well as I do, but…it’s hard to let go.”

“I can’t argue,” Kira admitted. “I’m flying a nova fighter in the strike.”

“Which we’d say you had no business doing if you weren’t one of the two or three best pilots in Memorial Force,” Konrad said.

She truly appreciated that her lover hadn’t even tried arguing with her on that. Konrad Bueller had pushed back on her taking a nova fighter out before—and when he’d done so, he’d been right. And part of how she knew that was how often he didn’t push back on it.

“Are the commandos ready?” Kira asked McCaig.

“Our people are good. Redward’s are…better,” he conceded. “Once everyone’s in armor, soldier boosts don’t matter much, but the fact that the RA commandos are boosted to eleven certainly doesn’t hurt them.

“Milani knows what they’re doing, and they’ve been running virtual training ops the whole time. The timing is everything, but once the destroyers are in the battlespace, the shuttles will be in place in under ninety seconds.”

“And then you’ll be gone,” Kira noted with a sigh. “This whole thing is risky as hell and swings on what Panosyan does on the Crest itself.”

“No updates from them?” Zoric asked.

“No, and we weren’t expecting any,” Kira told them. “The plan is what it is, people. We also need to relax, even if none of us are good at it.”

“What are you implying, sir? That Memorial Force’s senior officers may be workaholics?” McCaig asked. “I, for one, am offended by the suggestion that I am less than brilliant at anything I put my mind to.”

Kira had to laugh at the big man and then kept smiling as Mel Cartman materialized out of the crowd.

The Apollon Commander, Nova Group, was carrying an entire case of chilled beers that she started passing out.

“I figured none of you were going to be in the middle of the crowd, and I knew Kira would be finishing her first beer about now,” Cartman told them.

Kira traded her now-empty bottle for one of the full bottles in the case. Once all of the bottles in the case were swapped for empty, a small light on the case told them to put it on the floor—an artificial-stupid steward support drone was coming to collect it.

“Cartman and I have been doing these parties for a long time,” Kira observed. “She has the timelines down to an art.”

“And this one is better for everyone than just the old Three-Oh-Three hands getting sloshed together,” Cartman said. “That just depresses Dinesha. He keeps looking around and expecting to see Joseph.”

Kira nodded.

“Where is Patel?” she asked. Raccoon’s Commander, Nova Group, was there somewhere.

“Getting plied with drinks by Tamboli,” Cartman said. “I do believe my flight-deck boss is testing to see if he’s sufficiently recovered to be seduced.”

Dilshad Tamboli was the intentionally androgynous former shuttle maintenance shop boss who ran Deception’s fighter deck. To Kira’s knowledge, Dinesha Patel was bisexual but monogamous, so any interest on Tamboli’s part would have been unrequited while Joseph Hoffman had lived.

It might still be now. Grief was a funny thing—but Kira didn’t begrudge Tamboli trying, so long as they didn’t push hard enough to upset or hurt Patel.

“Is someone keeping an eye on that?” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Cartman agreed. “Milani.”

“That seems helpful,” Kira said. “Good.”

Milani was the only person at the party in full body armor, which made them an extremely handy chaperone and watcher. They were capable of both subtlety and a lack thereof as they saw fit—and Kira trusted their judgment.

“Everything seems to be safely in order,” Konrad observed. “Should we be considering retiring and letting the party carry on?”

Zoric chuckled knowingly.

I’m going to keep an eye on things for a bit still,” she noted. “If, say, my CEO and XO want to go bang like bunnies, I’m sure I’ll be able to handle the situation without them.”

Konrad almost managed to not blush that time. It was a faint coloring, one that Kira and the others likely only saw because they were expecting it.

“I don’t know if that’s your executive officer’s plan,” Kira told Zoric, winking at her boyfriend, “but it’s definitely mine.”

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