Kira understood the principles and high-level structure of the runner system that Milani was using to maintain control of the ship. The powerful jammers running on the flight deck—and now several other key structural points in the ship—weren’t true multiphasic jammers, but they were more than capable of shutting out communication emerging from the ship.
They shouldn’t be detectable from outside the ship, but Kira still held her breath when Penalty Fee emerged from nova, exactly on schedule.
“Will we be able to receive their hails?” she asked Konrad. Once again, she’d stolen her boyfriend from his job as executive officer and chief engineer of Deception to support a detached operation.
Strangely, Zoric never seemed to object. Probably because Kira, at least in her own opinion, had a solid judgment of when she needed the best engineer they had.
“No,” Konrad told her calmly. “The jamming field wouldn’t work if it wasn’t covering the external transceiver dishes. We can’t be sure no one is going to be able to hack into the communications network.”
“That’s why my people are setting up a relay on the flight deck,” Milani told her. “It sticks out enough to receive and transmit, but we need— Ah!”
Two of Milani’s commandos, in regular armor instead of the heavy assault suits Milani’s point team was still wearing, appeared at the entrance to the bridge with a large coil of cabling.
“Get that over to the com console and hook it up,” Milani barked. They looked at the screen. “Is it just me, or was Penalty Fee expecting to see us?”
Kira nodded. Even a presumed friendly fleet carrier showing up unexpectedly should have earned some kind of caution or reaction from the battlecruiser. Instead, Penalty Fee had emerged from nova and just…waited.
“They knew Fortitude would be here,” she agreed. “Or at least the new Captain did.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t see any scans or visible energy trails that they can pick up from their location,” she said aloud. “Soler?”
Isidora Soler was a pale-skinned woman with pitch-black hair and eyes who normally served as Deception's senior assistant tactical officer. Today, she was the tactical officer of the skeleton crew Kira had to run Fortitude and was sharing XO duties with Konrad.
“I don’t see anything either,” she confirmed. “I think we’re clear, but we need to communicate with them, or they’ll get suspicious.”
Kira concealed a smile. Soler was being careful to tell her bosses what they might need to know, but everyone in the room knew that. That was the price of the rapid expansion of her mercenary fleet, though. Soler had been a Redward Officer Academy dropout two years earlier.
The woman who’d caused her dropout had picked up a dishonorable discharge and a ten-year jail sentence almost before Soler’s paperwork had finished processing, but even rapid justice didn’t make it any easier to walk back into a building where someone had used physical violence to attempt to recruit you into organized crime.
Both the courage necessary to come forward after that and her mostly complete training had been exactly what Kira and Zoric had been looking for—which brought the pale young woman there, to the Crest Sector, a hundred-plus light-years from home.
“We’re linked,” Konrad announced from the coms console. “Relay is online and chugging. We have a copy of their message on seeing us—standard ship-to-ship courtesy.”
“Send back the same,” Kira ordered. “Then tell them we are on trial exercises and they are to stay at least one million kilometers clear.”
Konrad nodded and pulled a headset on. Like everyone else on Fortitude’s bridge, he’d be holding down multiple roles until this was over.
“Time on the core?” she asked as he finished speaking into the headset.
“No idea,” he admitted calmly. “Jamming is screwing with intraship coms, even system reports. We don’t have a lot of control or feedback systems operating yet.”
“Milani?” Kira turned to the ground-force commander. “How long till we can drop those jammers?”
“My reports are slow,” they told her. “I think we’re clear or should be shortly, but it’ll be two or three minutes after that’s done before I have confirmation.
“At least with the cable, we have a direct link to the flight deck and can shut down the jammers quickly enough.” The big armor suit didn’t transmit a shrug, but Milani’s voice did. “Five minutes, boss. Maybe a couple more.”
“We’ve told Penalty Fee to stand off. That should cover our expected coms and buy us some time,” Kira noted. Holographic control panels appeared around the Captain’s chair at her mental command, and she grimaced.
Like Konrad had said, very few of the internal systems were running. The majority of the network she was trying to access was cabled, but there were enough wireless bridges and sensors the jammers were blocking to render the situation difficult.
The same energy dispersion networks the carrier would use to resist plasma hits were keeping Penalty Fee from seeing the jamming—and would keep an external source of jamming from causing this much trouble. Multiphasic jamming defined the battlespace, after all.
A commando stepped through the bridge accessway and crossed to Milani. A swift whispered conversation followed, and Milani gave the armored soldier a thumbs-up gesture.
“Do we have a crew listing, boss?” Milani asked, turning back to Kira.
“Let me check.” She had full command access, but that thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Yeah, here. Step closer.”
She didn’t quite have to touch her subordinate to send them data, but it was close. The dragon swirled attentively across Milani’s armor as they processed the data.
“Listing says one hundred fourteen people aboard, but doesn’t include the PM’s detail,” Milani noted aloud. “We have ninety-eight prisoners and thirty-nine confirmed corpses. Think the Ministerial Protection Detail brought more than twenty-three people?”
Kira grimaced.
“If they brought twenty-three, they probably brought twenty-four,” she pointed out.
“We also might be miscounting bodies outside the bridge,” her subordinate admitted. “Those would be MPD.”
That did not help Kira’s current grimace or general discomfort with how Milani had accessed the bridge. There were definitely worse deaths than that, but most human cultures had a quite-reasonable aversion to sub-visual-scale weaponry.
“Konrad, if we bring everything back up, how’s the internal surveillance?” she asked.
“Seventy-three percent of the cameras are wireless to allow concealed placement,” he warned. “So, I don’t know. The problem is that it only takes seconds for someone to send a message to Penalty Fee.”
Kira checked the distance.
“They’re at five light-seconds right now,” she said. “Headware coms can’t cross that—best case for those is three—so they’d need to have armor systems or a portable transceiver. It’s a risk, but…”
“We can’t keep the jamming up forever. Not if we actually want to do anything with this ship,” Konrad finished for her.
Kira exhaled and nodded.
“Konrad, Soler, get your eyes on those cameras,” she ordered. “The moment we see anybody, I want to know—and if you see a transceiver or someone in armor, we shut everything right back down.”
“I’m on it,” Konrad replied.
“I’m in,” Soler confirmed a moment later.
“Milani?” Kira said softly.
“You’re the boss.”
“Shut it down.”
With the hardware in her head, Kira knew the moment the jamming cut out. The hardware and software had kept it from having a noticeable effect, but the return of her data channels was still sudden and obvious.
Her team was suddenly in a network in her head. Fortitude was suddenly in her head, her command authority linking her in to the Captain’s control channels.
“We’ve got three solitaries scattered through the ship,” Soler reported an instant later. “None have full armor or appear to have coms. Two are ship’s crew, third is MPD.
“MPD officer is armed with a blaster rifle and appears to be setting up a target blind. Ship’s crew are in hiding.”
“I have the locations on all three,” Milani replied. “Linking to my nearest teams and moving in. Gal with the blaster is not getting her ambush.”
It took another ninety seconds for Milani’s people to check back in, but then their dragon perked up cheerfully and they turned to Kira.
“Fortitude is secured, Commodore,” they reported.
“All right, people.” Kira looked around and smiled. “Next steps. We have an hour or so to pretend nothing has happened, then we jump to the rendezvous.
“We have a lot of work to do to clean up the flight deck and make it look safe for the Prime Minister and her Cabinet Ministers to land. We’ll need a simulacrum of Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon that can talk to the Prime Minister’s people when we meet them, and we need to make sure we’ve unlocked as much of this ship as we can.”
Her prize crew was already studying their consoles.
“I’m not worried about Penalty Fee,” she said softly. “I am worried about the two cruisers and the carrier that are coming with Prime Minister Jeong.
“So, Soler, code me the ability to fool her. Konrad…get me this damn ship’s guns.”