“Cooldown nearly complete,” Konrad reported.
Everyone was back on station and Kira was watching the three Reliables like a hawk. She’d slept in the daybed in the captain’s quarters, in an uncomfortably restive three-quarters doze, all too aware things could go sideways.
“All right, everybody.” Kira looked at the collection of virtual faces hanging around her. Starship Captains and nova-group commanders. Subordinates and friends.
“Are we good for the final leap?”
Nods answered her. No one was looking entirely comfortable with what came next, but they’d been planning for it for a while.
“Remember, it’s a three-light-year jump, not a six-light-year jump,” Kira said. “That means we only have twelve hours before we can start novaing again, and we’re jumping in twelve light-hours out.
“We should be clear of attack until we’ve finished cooldown. We’ll transmit our demands from the twelve-light-hour point and then begin an outer-system nova hopscotch.”
She shook her head.
“We will come under nova-fighter attack,” she noted. “Sorry, CNGs, but we’re looking at a minimum of five squadrons in the air at all times. Half the planes. Once we’ve seen off the first few strikes, they should hesitate and wait for orders from the Crest.
“Final Usury’s Admiral Dafina Avagyan is related to the royal family by marriage but is not on my list of officers cleared for Protocol Tinkerbell Rising,” Kira continued. “So, either Panosyan briefed her personally when they were in the system, or we can assume that Avagyan will react as any rational NRC officer would.”
“Assume we’ve stolen a carrier and attack?” Zoric asked drily.
“Exactly. Assuming that Avagyan relays our demands to the Crest immediately upon receipt, we’re still looking at a minimum of eighty to a hundred hours for a response,” Kira continued. Without the stopover at the security point, it was only two trade-route stops to the Crest.
“We’re better off assuming a week, people. If things are looking remotely orderly in the Crest, they’re not going according to plan.”
Kira’s next words were interrupted by an alert as Fortitude’s scanners picked up something new…
“Contact, contact!” Soler snapped. “Multiple contacts. I am making it…”
The young woman looked up in concern.
“I am making it a Banking-class fleet carrier and two battlecruisers, plus destroyers,” she noted. “Full carrier group.”
“They’ll launch fighters as soon as they locate us,” Kira said. “Konrad? Cooldown?”
“Ninety seconds,” he reported.
“Your orders?” several people asked simultaneously.
There were no good options. If they were seeing the nova emergences, the carrier had seen them almost a minute before. Long enough ago to already be launching fighters.
“Get the fighters aboard and fire up the jammers,” Kira ordered flatly. “Then stand by to repel fighters with defensive turrets while we prepare to nova!”
* * *
There was one last piece of data Kira needed before the jammers went up, and Soler resolved it for her just in time.
The carrier was Collections Agent. The battlecruisers were Amortization and Amiability.
Those battlecruisers’ commanders had to be furious. They were SPP loyalists who’d watched her kidnap their Prime Minister under their very noses—and according to the files, Collections Agent’s Captain was of a similar vein.
As were the destroyer COs and probably most of the senior officers and crews. This was the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party’s own personal carrier group.
“The SPP can’t control many entire carrier groups,” she muttered. “Why did you send them here?”
It wasn’t the normal organization of the ships, either. Collections Agent had a completely different battlecruiser listed as her escort, but that ship’s Captain was on Kira’s list of Royalists.
The NRC had rearranged ships to create a battle group that was unquestionably loyal to Maral Jeong, and then they’d sent them to exactly the right place.
“That…” Kira bit off several scatological observations about their employer.
“Jammers are live, turrets are live, we are scanning for targets,” Soler reported.
“Nova in forty-five seconds,” Konrad added.
“They’re coming,” Kira said softly. “They knew where to find us. They knew where we were going. They aren’t going to let us go easily.
“Nova emergence!” Soler barked. “Engaging!”
There was no time to report what they were facing. Dozens of flashes of bright-blue radiation lit up the battlespace, met almost instantly by stark-white plasma blasts. The computers struggled to provide a map through the self-inflicted chaos of the jamming zone, but Kira knew enough to pick out the bombers at the core of the formation.
“Target those bombers,” she ordered. It wasn’t a necessary order. Everyone knew that—and Fortitude’s lighter turrets were already concentrating their fire on the heavy torpedo platforms.
Incoming fighters died. Plasma blasts washed over Kira’s ships and she watched, stone-faced, unable to do anything. She was a nova-fighter pilot. This helplessness went against everything she’d learned, everything she knew how to do in a fight.
“Multiple hits,” Konrad reported. “Dispersal networks and armor holding. No critical damage—
“Nova!”
Kira had barely registered that her engineer boyfriend had interrupted himself before the universe changed, the chaos of the battlespace vanishing to be replaced by calmer void.
That void was then instantly filled with new static as their jammers threw chaotic energy into it, but there were no fighters there.
“Cut the jammers, report,” Kira ordered.
“Everybody made it,” Soler said instantly. “Fortitude’s jammers are down; trying to establish links for damage reports.”
Kira exhaled a long breath.
“We made it,” she murmured. “Send the canned ransom demand as soon as all the jammers are down.”
It would take almost as long for the ransom demand to reach Guadaloop and its orbiting battlegroup as it would take her fleet’s nova drives to cool down.
That was the plan. That much was going according to plan.
“How the hell did a carrier group catch up to us?” Konrad growled. “Even if someone from the first trade-route stop reported in, we shouldn’t have seen them already.”
“They used another security point to go around that trade-route stop,” Kira told him. “So they could surprise us there, but they got the timing slightly wrong.”
She shook her head.
“They’ll be here in twenty hours, adding to the dance. And unlike Admiral Avagyan, they know we’re the enemy.”
“But…how did they know where we were going?” Soler asked.
Kira looked at her lover. From the tired expression on his face, he’d guessed.
“Panosyan leaked that part of the plan,” Kira said quietly. “The key components of the Sanctuary and Prosperity loyalists in the NRC are now out-system, heading right at us, while the Crown’s agents move against the SPP headquarters.
“That was their solution to the SPP’s partial control of the military. Everything the SPP controls is coming after us.”