26

The runabout left Baile Fantasma’s hold as cleanly as it had entered it. The cargo containers were all gone now, well on their way to whatever destination they’d had, leaving the hold more than clear enough for Kira’s small craft.

Everyone was back aboard the shuttle now, going over their tools and their data as Kira checked with the flight control for Crest Charming Station.

“Confirmed, Control, all identity documents and manifests are uploaded,” she told the person on the other end. That person probably had half a dozen artificial stupids helping them, but the Crest seemed to agree that a human should have the com channel.

“So…you and your husband, Em Riker, plus your business partners?” the flight controller asked. “The manifest is all personal supplies that aren’t intended to land?”

“Exactly,” Kira confirmed. “We’re in-system to play tourist and have a meeting with the Bank of the Royal Crest with regard to financing a major business expansion. Having our own spacecraft always has its value, though it makes booking flights a pain.”

Ramirez had gone through their false IDs with a toolset of his own while they’d been aboard the spy ship, a freebie thrown in with their data on the carrier construction. Kira had been confident in the identification that Panosyan’s people had set up for them—but she doubted that SolFed Intelligence had made the profiles less solid.

“That’s all cleared,” the controller told her. “If you are bringing anything onto Crest Charming or anywhere else in the system, beyond clothes and personal effects, you’ll need to clear it with security and customs in your location.

“Whatever remains on the shuttle is fine, but your visa does not authorize you to engage in the sale or trade of goods. Understood, Em Riker?”

“Of course,” she agreed. Putting everything on the manifest as “personal supplies” had helped cover up the fact that she had armor and significant weaponry aboard. She didn’t expect to need that gear—but if they were landing power armor and blaster rifles, they weren’t going to be playing nice with customs.

“You’re cleared to shuttle port one-five-niner,” the controller said. “Course is downloading to you now. I require a headware validation stamp on the paperwork.”

“Of course.” Kira reviewed the file the local had sent back, and then returned it with her validation.

“Let me be the first to welcome you and yours to Crest Charming Station, Em Riker,” the local said. “I hope you enjoy your stay in our system.”

The channel closed and Kira checked the course they’d given her. It wasn’t far—but it also wasn’t fast. If there had been no other shipping around, she probably could have put the shuttle at the port in under five minutes.

Given that her contact screen was practically covered in other ships, shuttles and space stations, she figured she needed to stay on the course they’d provided.

“We on our way?” Konrad asked, dropping into the copilot’s seat.

“We are. Everything is clear. Between our friends on Fantasma and our friends who live here, we’re clean and legally registered.”

“And so, it’s time to start looking around,” he said. “I can tell you one thing?”

“Oh?” she asked.

“I’m not going to need as close a look at Fortitude as I expected,” her boyfriend told her. “Fantasma’s data is better than we were ever going to get with the runabout’s scanners at any reasonable distance.

“It’s going to take me a bit to go over everything Zamorano gave us, but I think I have enough to make my assessment of Fortitude.” He chuckled. “And the two battlecruisers and the other carrier they’re building in the same yards.”

“I didn’t want to get that specific in what I asked the Captain for,” she said. “How badly bugged is the data? I’m assuming it’s going to call home to Zamorano.”

“Me too,” Konrad admitted. “But I can’t find it. Which, unfortunately, does not mean it isn’t there. My best guess is that the hardware and software this ship has is at least twenty or thirty years out of date by SolFed standards, but…”

“That still puts it way ahead of anything we have,” Kira murmured. “So, we can assume that Zamorano knows that we’re focusing in on Fortitude.” She sighed. “Oh, well. Price of the data, I suppose.”

“With this data, I’m not sure how much scouting we really need to do,” her boyfriend told her. “I think I have everything I need on the ship.”

“We still need final confirmation on the planned course for the trials, and then I want to check out the nova stops they’re planning,” she said. “Anything in the Crest is probably too risky, but I doubt they’re jumping to a standard trade-route stop for the tests of their new carrier.”

“You think they’re going to hop around the system and use a dark stop for the long-range test?”

A “dark stop” was a trade-route-stop equivalent that wasn’t added to the civilian maps. They were just as thoroughly mapped, but that mapping was done entirely by the local military, and the stop was used solely for their purposes. While a dark stop’s mapping wasn’t as regularly updated as a standard trade-route stop, it was still sufficient for a safe nova.

And a dark stop would be a spot the Navy of the Royal Crest would assume to be completely safe.

“You’re thinking of jumping them at the dark stop?” Konrad asked, continuing the thought without waiting for her to answer his first question.

“It depends on their sequence,” Kira told him. “The twenty-hour cooldown of a full-length nova will definitely help us get any evidence of our takeover secured before we meet with anyone else—but if the inspection is prior to the full nova test, then that’s useless to us.”

She shook her head, keeping an eye on the contacts around their shuttle. There was a reason this part of the flight wasn’t left to autopilot, even though the artificial stupids were doing most of the flying.

Something could always go wrong.

“So, thanks to Zamorano, we’re skipping our first problem of getting a good look at Fortitude,” she concluded. “We’re still going to need details on the trial plan and a nova ship to run around the local area in.

“Both of those I’m hoping to get from Panosyan.” She grinned. “And if the Crown Zharang is feeling particularly helpful, they may even help us get out of this system to rendezvous with the fleet.”

They had three weeks until they were scheduled to meet the fleet, at a randomly selected trade-route stop four novas from the Crest. Depending on just what was going on with their target, that should give them at least three more weeks to actually plan their strike.

“Once we’ve docked, I’m going to leave it to Bertoli to see if he can source us a hotel that’s secure enough for our needs,” Kira continued. “If we can’t—and I only give it fifty-fifty odds at best—a lot of our planning sessions are going to be taking place in here.”

She gestured around the runabout.

“What about you and me?” Konrad asked.

You are going to stay on the runabout and go through that data,” she told him. “Unless you think there’s something else you should do?”

He laughed.

“No. We’ve got a lot of information and a lot of detail. More than I expected to have at this point, so that’s what I was hoping you’d let me do.”

“'Let,’ the man says,” Kira snarked. “Like I could stop you digging into a massive pile of fascinating technical scans.”

“There are definitely ways you could,” he murmured with an artfully arched eyebrow.

She grinned at him and he promptly flushed.

“You’re getting better at that,” she noted. Her adorably embarassable boyfriend would need a lot of practice before he could really handle dirty jokes at his own expense. He could handle them in general—he was a warship engineer—but his defenses cracked when his own sex life was in play.

“It amuses you, so it’s worth learning,” he told her. “What are you going to be doing?” he asked, looking at the massive expanse of steel that was the nearest side of Crest Charming.

“I’m taking O’Mooney and hitting three random dead drops from a list of seven possibilities on Charming,” Kira said. “We need to make contact with the Panosyans.”

“It is Jade we’ll be working with, right?” Konrad asked, raising a thought that hadn’t even occurred to Kira. “I mean, King Sung is behind all of this. He might want to be involved himself—or have other agents.”

“I think part of the cover of this, if it goes wrong, is that Jade is operating on their own authority and at least half-intending to overthrow their father, the King,” Kira said slowly. “I don’t think they’ll want to shift our contact person at this stage in the game—not when the Crown Zharang is here to keep up that role.”

“Though they are the Crown Zharang,” her lover said. “And they’ve been gone for a few months. They might be swamped.”

“We’ll know in about twenty-four hours, I suspect,” Kira admitted. “That’s how long they said it would take to get back to us from the dead drops.”

“You know, I hate all of this cloak-and-dagger,” he said calmly. “And I hate a lot of what I did for Equilibrium. But I’m glad to be here with you. If it wasn’t for…” He trailed off, then sighed.

“I can’t change it, and nothing would be worth what happened.” His voice was sad now. While Deception—then K-79L—had been under Institute control, her Captain had ordered the extermination of all of the witnesses to an attack on a Redward warship.

Of the former Equilibrium crew members with Kira now, Konrad had been the most senior then—and he hadn’t been in a position to stop the ship destroying dozens of asteroid colonies and killing tens of thousands of people.

“I know,” she told him gently.

“You’re as close to worth it as anything could be,” he finished, his tone awkward. “But…damn the Institute to hell.”

“That, my love, is quite literally what we are in the Crest to arrange.”

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