37

Kira forced her eyes open. For a moment, she wasn’t sure what was going on, then it all came crashing in.

Her headware calmly informed her that she’d been unconscious for six point four seconds and it wasn’t detecting major head trauma. That was reassuring…though the fact that the system felt it necessary to say that wasn’t.

She lifted her head and looked around to see what she’d got herself into. Without power, her Hoplite didn’t have an exterior view, so all she could see was the inside of the cockpit.

An interior that currently had a visible sixty-centimeter intrusion where the hull had collapsed. Nova fighters relied on maneuverability and energy dispersion networks to survive incoming fire. Actual impact wasn’t something they were designed for.

Swallowing, Kira unstrapped herself and reached for the emergency survival kit. Urgency was added by both the faint scent of burning—and the distinct sound of blaster fire outside.

The survival kit produced a blaster pistol. The rest of the equipment wasn’t necessary for now, but she definitely needed the gun.

The damage meant that it took her longer to get out of the fighter than she’d expected, and she emerged to discover that Fortitude’s crew were peppering the wreck with blaster bolts.

“Get it off the deck,” someone snapped. “I don’t care if the pilot’s alive—if we don’t get planes up, we’re fucked.”

So, they were trying to keep her head down. Most likely while someone brought up a bulldozer. Kira moved over to the edge of the wing and took a peek. There was a ragged line of half a dozen soldiers in unpowered armor with blaster rifles, along with maybe twice that in techs or maybe even pilots with blaster pistols.

She could see someone heading for the bulldozer and grimaced. While she doubted that the machine would succeed in moving her fighter—it looked very embedded in the deck—it would probably manage to crush her, cover or no cover.

So, she shot at that tech, carefully leaning over the wreck. It took her three blasts to catch the running man, but he fell with a limp finality when the third shot took him in the back.

Of course, that drew a salvo of fire at her position. She could smell more burning as the metal vaporized under the incoming blasts, but she returned fire.

She was staying behind cover, but she knew her role now. She was in everybody’s face, which meant that she was the distraction.

And the real boarding party arrived moments later, the assault shuttle’s heavy blasters crackling like rapid-fire thunder as they swept into hard landings.

Armored troopers swarmed out of the spacecraft, the armor rendering the difference between Kira’s mercenaries and the Redward commandos near-invisible. They moved as a single body, setting up mobile shields and peppering the defenders with precise and deadly fire.

By the time the last shuttle was disgorging troops, the hangar deck was secure—and an unfamiliar armored suit with a very familiar holographic dragon swirling around its shoulders was advancing on Kira like an angry avenging deity.

“Commander,” she greeted Milani. She leaned on the fighter for a moment, then winced away as the retained heat from the blaster bolts burned her through her armored flight suit.

“What. The. Fuck. Were you thinking?” Milani ground out.

“That if a dozen heavy fighters launched into the middle of your landing operation, a hundred and twenty of my commandos were going to die and this whole mission would die with them,” Kira said calmly.

She gestured at the wrecked starfighter.

“I probably should have anticipated this, but I didn’t get that far. Do we have coms off-ship yet?”

“No,” Milani told her. “We’re still activating the localized jammers to knock out Fortitude’s communications. Then we’ll set up a relay at the end of the flight deck to bounce out as we need.”

“McCaig and Michel should already be gone. The fighters will be gone at T plus twelve unless you give them a signal to stay,” Kira said. “They’ll signal the prize crew to come join us.”

She surveyed the deck. Her Hoplite-IV had blocked the launch of the remaining Hussars, which meant there were still twelve of the heavy fighters aboard. By her math, that was twelve more of the advanced heavy fighters than anyone had told her were going to be aboard Fortitude!

“We got lucky,” she told Milani. There was definitely enough space to still land the prize-crew shuttles—the only nova pinnaces her fleet had—and even to tuck them out of sight before the Prime Minister arrived.

“We won’t have the people to move my fighter, but that gives us an excuse not to have Hussars out when the PM arrives,” she continued. “The Cabinet aren’t going to know the difference between a Crest heavy fighter wreck and an Apollon interceptor wreck. You didn’t lose your landing ships, and the state of the flight deck will work for us.”

“You should have died in that stunt,” Milani told her. “You might still. I’ve got teams out into the ship, but I’ll remind you that we are badly outnumbered by even the skeleton crew running a ship on trials.

“And all it takes to blow this whole apart is one person managing to get a headware com to Penalty Fee.”

“I’ll be good, Commander,” Kira promised. “I’ll stick to you like glue until we have the bridge. Then… Well, I guess you don’t need to pretend to be a prize captain. I can conn a carrier.”

“Finally, something in this mess that I agree is good news,” Milani told her. “If I think you’re going to wander off, I will stun you. Potential concussions be damned.”

“I’ll be good,” Kira repeated. “I wasn’t planning on getting in a ground fight today.”

Milani swore. Kira didn’t recognize the words—Arabic, she thought? —but the tone was unquestionable.

“Bertoli!” they snapped. “Get me a spare unpowered vest and a blaster rifle. If the Commodore is going to join us, she’s going to need some damn party favors!”

* * *

Kira shifted uncomfortably in the vest. Her flight suit was armored against light blaster fire and more capable of surviving it than, say, the leather jacket that had saved her life twice now. It wouldn’t, however, stop the high-powered plasma bolts from a full-size blaster rifle.

The armored vest Bertoli had strapped her into would. Not repeatedly—not even the powered heavy armor the point troops were wearing would stop more than a handful of shots—but she’d survive a hit.

And that seemed important as Milani and their point troops hammered toward the bridge. Even against normal powered armor, the bulky suits the mercenaries around Kira were wearing seemed immense.

These, apparently, were what half a million kroner had rented from the Redward Army. She was pretty sure they were supposed to bring the ten suits of heavy boarding armor back, though from the hits they were taking, she wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

“Okay, so, where are the real guards?” Milani muttered after several minutes.

“What do you mean?” Kira asked. “Your people are getting shot to hell.”

“I expected that,” they growled. “I expected to have lost at least two people on this squad, but so far, we’ve managed to keep pace by rotating people out and letting the suit self-repair handle it. This is…yard security with decent gear. I was expecting real marines.”

“There should be a Ministerial Protection Detail team somewhere on the ship,” Kira told them. “I don’t know where, though. Where would you send them?”

“Communications,” Milani replied. “Which means Major Klerken is going to run into them.”

Klerken was their borrowed commando company leader. Hopefully, she was as good as the other commando officers Kira had met.

“The pilots weren’t even half as good as I was expecting,” Kira admitted in a pause in the fighting a moment later. “Like they were…”

“Political,” Milani finished for her—then shoved her against the wall as a trio of armored defenders jumped through a bulkhead that unexpectedly slid aside. Their armored body was between Kira and the blaster fire for a critical second.

One that saved Kira’s life—and allowed her to open fire on the Cresters. The armor took two shots from her rifle, and then her target went down with a horrible cracking noise and a spray of ash across the wall behind them.

The other two were already down, and Milani grunted.

“Commander?” Kira snapped.

“I’ll live,” they replied. “Pass-through burn. The suit is handling it and rebuilding the web, but that hurt.”

“How close are we to the bridge?” she asked. Time was getting short. It was T plus ten minutes.

“Two minutes. I know; we’re almost out of time.”

“We were always going to make the call before we had control,” Kira told him. “Even if these are political troops.”

Not military veteran elites. Political elites. Pilots and soldiers and crew the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party could trust to protect the Prime Minister and do what she said no matter what.

She’d misjudged the Blue Scarlet Combat Group and Fortitude’s defenders. That was to their advantage, thankfully, but the realization bothered her.

What else had she missed?

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