31

There wasn’t much to choose between one patch of void and another. Even the security point was empty, the destroyers not scheduled to start their mapping sweep for several weeks still.

Looking at empty space didn’t give Kira any inspiration. She found herself spending hours just sitting on her bunk, cycling through data in a virtual display only she could see.

Raccoon carried six Fastball bombers—a refined evolution of the Screwball improvised bombers they’d used against Equilibrium—which she could support with six heavy fighters and twenty-four fighter-bombers.

But if she sent all of her heavier nova fighters against the three destroyers, she’d only have thirty-one interceptors—including her own bird—to go up against eighteen advanced heavy fighters in the hands of elite pilots.

Sixty-seven nova fighters against a ship that was supposed to carry a hundred and fifty was definitely an…interesting challenge. So far as she could tell, though, Fortitude’s guns would be safed after their firing trials.

They wouldn’t be quickly unsafed. The risk was someone escaping and bringing the rest of the NRC in before Kira could move against the Prime Minister.

“Still ruminating?” Konrad asked, settling down onto the bunk beside her. The single cramped room they had aboard TVM-6 didn’t lend itself to much privacy, but their companions weren’t going to object to them leaning on each other.

“Trying to balance the options,” she admitted. “Every so often, I wonder if just hitting Fortitude while the Prime Minister is aboard is even that bad an idea. It takes a lot of the timing issues out, after all.”

“Except that the Prime Minister is going aboard while the nova drive is in cooldown,” her lover pointed out. “Full cooldown, thanks to the nova from security point six. That’s twenty hours the carrier has to be sublight, and she isn’t that fast.

“So, you’d have to punch out two capital ships, board a third and do all of this while hoping not one of seventy-odd nova fighters makes a jump for help. I’m no tactical genius—I leave that side of things to you, Kira—but that seems…unlikely.”

“Trying to take out eighteen fighters and three destroyers at the same time is also a pain,” Kira admitted. “And we have the same problem at the security point of cooldown. If we take her after she completes a six-light-year hop, she’s got a twenty-hour cooldown, which means we need to make sure no one within twenty light-hours sees us.”

“Grand Prince isn’t even that far out, is it?” Konrad asked.

“No,” Kira admitted. “Which is a problem for the main plan. We might be able to ambush the Cabinet’s escort with Fortitude’s guns at close range with no jammers up, punch them out and avoid anyone escaping if we control the ship, but…Grand Prince is only three light-hours from the Crest, let alone anything else.”

“So, we need to, what, capture the PM and hold them incommunicado for twenty hours without anyone noticing?”

“That is what it looks like, isn’t it?” Kira asked.

She spread her three options in the air in front of her and tossed the visual to him with a thought and a hand gesture.

He linked into the display and brought up something else. The schematics and details on…Fortitude’s fighter-launch systems?

“Sixty-five seconds,” he said quietly. “That’s the minimum scramble time for Fortitude’s fighters, assuming they have pilots in the cockpits ready to go. That seems like…a factor.”

“Standard nova-fighter combat sweep is sixty seconds; that’s why the carrier has defensive guns and would have a combat space patrol up,” Kira noted. “Her guns are supposed to be offline, but those heavy fighters will be up.”

“Not all of them, though, right?” he asked.

“No,” she murmured. “Maybe two-thirds when they realize they’re alone in the outer system.”

Sixty-five seconds. And while she generally focused on the cooldown time of a nova drive, there was also a warm-up time of about a minute.

“We need to take out the fighters within a minute and start the commando landing almost immediately after, no matter what,” she said aloud. “It doesn’t matter whether we have seventeen minutes or twenty hours; we have to move fast.”

“That’s what I was wondering about,” Konrad told her. “Whether we were thinking too much about the timing.”

“I think we were thinking about the wrong part,” Kira replied. “If we grab Fortitude at the security point, she has to be at Grand Prince for twenty hours. There’s no way around it; that’s just what the physics says.”

“And?” her boyfriend prodded, clearly content to have provided his contribution and to now serve as someone to lay out the plan to.

“But they haven’t officially scheduled any of their escorts except for the ‘maneuvers’ with Terminal Loss,” she said. “So, those destroyers aren’t expecting Fortitude. Which means…if she doesn’t show up, no one is going to notice.

“If we take her before she’s supposed to jump out…that point is already several light-days out. The risk is that if Penalty Fee doesn’t report in, that’ll raise questions. But if we manage to fool Penalty Fee, no one is going to see the actual attack for days.

“And then we nova out on schedule…and only go a few more light-days. Tighten up our control, link up with the rest of Memorial Force to solidify the plan, and then nova to Grand Prince on schedule.

“With minutes of cooldown on the drive instead of hours.”

“Might work,” Konrad said. “Only thing I’ll point out is that they may be able to tell. Even with warship shielding, if they’re looking, they’ll see the wrong levels of Jianhong radiation.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, then looked away from her virtual maps to face her chief engineer. The man who, in addition to being her boyfriend, was one of the best engineers and gearheads she’d ever met.

“Can you fake it?” she asked bluntly.

“My dear, I never fake anything,” he said with mock indignation. That faded into a grin. “But I can definitely produce some extra Jianhong radiation by exposing a couple of spare class two cores when we make the nova.

“I’m pretty sure we can cover it.”

“It has to be perfect,” Kira said grimly. “If we take Fortitude without being caught, we then meet the Prime Minister and her escorts with just the carrier.

“And the ten million credits we’re supposed to be paid for finishing this mess says that Maral Jeong has a nova pinnace for her personal craft. If we screw up, she is going to nova the hell out and leave her escorts to deal with us.

“We won’t get a second chance.”

“Then we’d better not make any mistakes,” Konrad told her. “No pressure, right?”

“Right.”

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