40

Despite what she’d said about not worrying, Kira spent the fifty-eight minutes they remained in the company of Penalty Fee watching the battlecruiser like a hawk with hungry chicks at home. At one hundred and twenty kilocubics, the ship was the same size as the battlecruisers and carriers Redward was laying down, but more modern in a dozen small ways.

One of those ways was almost certainly her sensors, which meant that she might well see something Kira didn’t anticipate.

But as minutes stretched to an hour, the battlecruiser carried on her patrol without ever hinting her crew thought something was amiss.

“You know, I would not like to be her new Captain,” Konrad murmured, stepping up to her seat. “The last Captain mutinied. This one? They’re going to work out that Penalty Fee was here after we took the ship eventually.”

“They’re probably loyal enough to protect them… Well, from the SPP,” Kira replied. “Are we ready?”

“Cooldown complete. Nova vector for the rendezvous point set.” He looked at the holodisplay and the battlecruiser hovering four light-seconds away. “If Penalty Fee is paying enough attention, they may realize we didn’t nova very far.”

“They shouldn’t know that we’re scheduled for a full-length nova test now,” Kira said. “If they do… Well, it’s a risk we have to take.”

She nodded to Konrad and glanced around her new bridge.

“Make it happen, Commander Bueller,” she told him.

He didn’t move, grinning down at her and activating the command from his headware. A momentary chill ran through her—a smoother reaction than many ships, if not quite as smooth as Captain Zamorano’s ship.

Then they were in deep space, a full light-week away from the Crest’s Herald—and only two light-seconds from the rest of Memorial Force.

All of them flashed up as unknown contacts on Fortitude’s scanners, of course, though it quickly resolved Deception as a Brisingr K70 cruiser.

“Loading in the ID codes,” Soler reported. “Linking in to the command network.

“Welcome home, Fortitude,” Zoric told them all the moment the channel opened up. “It’s damn good to see you. We were a tad worried about the Commodore.”

“My fighter’s a write-off,” Kira replied. “I don’t think we’re even getting her off the flight deck. Lithobraking sucks.”

“It’s not lithobraking when you do it to a carrier deck,” Cartman replied, the CNG joining channel. She’d been through the same lectures and training as Kira, after all. “What’s the plan now?”

“First, we need to get the shuttles back over to Deception and Raccoon,” Kira told them all. “We’ll relay personnel back and forth as needed, but we don’t want to have any unexpected ships on the deck when we meet Terminal Loss and her escorts.”

“There’s a fighter embedded in the deck,” Konrad pointed out.

“And we’re going to use that,” Kira said. “We’ll pull hands over from the rest of the Force and get everything running aboard Fortitude that we can. But we leave my fighter where she is. If we can sort out how to launch the Hussars past her, I’ll steal pilots for them, but…”

She sighed.

“Crashes happen, people. We lost more pilots in the rush training system for Redward than we should have, but we always lose pilots in training,” she said grimly. “And Blue Scarlet, as it turns out, were selected for political reliability at least as much as they were selected for piloting skill.

“So, they had an accident, and that’s why we don’t put up a combat space patrol when we arrive at Grand Prince,” she continued. “That removes one obstacle to the final escape jump. A light-week nova gives us a thirty-two-minute cooldown. That would be an odd time for us to pull fighters aboard.”

“The PM and her Cabinet are supposed to be aboard for three hours,” Zoric said. “That does suggest more than just an inspection tour.”

“It’s still going to be a problem once she’s aboard, since she’s expecting to meet Captain Moon, not me,” Kira said. “We need everything working. If it comes down to it, Fortitude may well have to fight two cruisers and an assault carrier with no easy way out.”

That chilled the conversation.

“So, we make this work,” she told them. “Once we’re clear of the Crest, the hard part is done. If nothing else, the rest of Memorial Force will join us for the trip to Guadaloop and the dance party that’s going to be our time there.”

“‘Dance party,’ sir?” Michel asked, her tone faux-hopeful.

“I don’t plan on fighting either GODCom or Battle Group Final Usury,” Kira pointed out. “But we have to deliver our ransom demand, and that means we’re going to be novaing around the system like crazy to evade pursuit.”

“We all know that dance,” McCaig said grimly. “It’s not a favorite, but we know the steps.”

“For now, we have twenty hours to turn Fortitude into a fully functioning trap for the Prime Minister of a first-rate Rim hegemon,” Kira said calmly. “So, let’s be about it.”

* * *

Kira spent more of the twenty-hour prep time sleeping than she’d expected. The Captain’s office, attached to the bridge, had just enough space that the designers had included a fold-out bed. She crashed on it three hours after they hit the rendezvous point and woke up nine hours later.

As soon as she got out of the bed, the office coffeemaker started burbling—and the distinctive scent of Redward Royal Reserve wafted through the room. There was no way that Captain Moon had stocked her coffee maker with the private blend of the royal family of Redward, which meant that someone had set it up for her.

Probably Konrad, who’d done it without waking her.

A series of quick reports was already waiting for her, updates recorded or dashed off as projects were completed. Angel Waldroup had apparently just reported aboard and had a plan for the Hussars. The guns were proving recalcitrant. Konrad had rigged up his decoy nova cores for the additional Jianhong radiation.

More reports. None of them were long, but a lot of things had happened in nine hours. Kira swallowed down her coffee—an abuse of the good beans, she knew—and tugged a brush through her hair to make herself more presentable.

Then she grabbed a cup with a sealing lid, filled it with the Royal Reserve and went looking for Angel Waldroup.

* * *

Angel “Boss” Waldroup had been the deck boss of Conviction when Kira had met her. She’d run that carrier’s fighter tech crews with an iron fist—but not so iron a fist that she’d defied John Estanza’s final evacuation order.

Kira had given the woman a choice between running Deception’s flight deck or Raccoon’s, and she’d refused to displace Tamboli from their existing role. Waldroup wasn’t any fonder of Raccoon than anyone else in Memorial Force, but she’d turned the so-called junk carrier into an effective fighter platform.

Now she stood on the edge of Fortitude’s hangar deck and surveyed her new kingdom like a conquering queen. She’d set her broad shoulders back and had her hair braided tightly to her scalp, ready to get to work.

“Commodore,” she greeted Kira. “You made a fucking mess of my new deck.”

“Are we talking about the cannon holes or the wrecked fighter?” Kira asked.

“The fighter,” Waldroup snapped, turning to face Kira. She was a large and heavyset woman in every way, looming over her commanding officer. “They’ve got a decent repair-drone setup here. The cannon holes will be patched at least two hours before go time.”

“And the fighter?”

“We could move her,” Waldroup admitted. “The bulldozer exists for a reason. It’ll be a nightmare and make a giant mess. I could make this deck fully functional in twenty minutes, but it won’t look good.”

The deck boss’s sharp description brought back painful memories, and Kira shivered. She’d seen what it looked like when a wrecked fighter was bulldozed off the deck…and in one of the cases where she’d seen it, the dead pilot had still been inside.

“I don’t care what’s pretty,” she told the mechanic. “I have a lot of faith in your judgment of what’s necessary, Angel. Your message said you had a plan for the Hussars?”

“I do,” Waldroup replied. “Wouldn’t work with anything less maneuverable. You can’t land a bird through that mess,” she said, gesturing to the wreck. “You need the space to run friction with the wheels and the grav-catch to slow the bird down.

“Power up the grav-catch a bit higher and you can stop the fighter before it hits the mess, but you can’t take her past it,” she concluded. “So, anybody that launches comes back and goes in a hangar on this side of the deck. Easy to launch from there, but the landing is going to suck.”

“And the launch?” Kira prodded again.

Waldroup grinned.

“Despite how you landed in here,” she said, “all of the landings and launches are going to need to be on full computer control until we clear the deck. I’ve checked the angles and the power on the Hussar’s Harringtons and antigravs.”

“They can clear it?” Kira asked.

“They can clear it. Pop up, fly over. They lose most of the velocity punch from the grav catapult, but they can get out,” Waldroup confirmed.

“But we can’t put fighters back there?” Kira said, turning to look at where the dozen heavy fighters were hidden. They were almost invisible in their hangars, and with the wreck to keep their hopeful prisoners on this side of the deck…

“Not a chance,” the deck boss admitted. “We could stick another dozen fighters aboard, but we’d need to put them here.”

“Which is visible to our guests,” Kira concluded. “That’s not going to work.”

She smiled.

“Stick around, Angel. Get used to the place. See if you can make her look like the only thing that ever happened here was the crash.”

“Can do, Commodore,” Waldroup told her. “I brought my best.”

“Good.” Kira shook her head. “Now I’m afraid I need to go talk to my boyfriend about his guns.”

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