“Gather round, gather round and listen up well,” Kira barked as she stepped into the pilots’ lounge on Deception.
While both Deception and Raccoon had their own Commanders, Nova Group, everyone understood that Kira would fly a nova fighter in action and command the combined group. She was both the Commodore and Memorial Force’s nova-group commander.
Still, she wasn’t in the pilot’s lounge much. Traditionally in the ASDF, even squadron commanders stepped lightly in the lounge—and the CNG only entered when something absolutely critical was going on. This was the space for the pilots, not their commanders.
The only reason she’d spent much time in Deception’s lounge was that it was where the cruiser’s Brisingr designers had put the simulator pods. There was only so much space to spare on a ninety-six-thousand-cubic-meter cruiser for the fighter wing and its supports, after all.
Like most pilots’ lounges she’d been in, this one was messy but not dirty. No one in space would allow a ship compartment to actually get dirty. There were still empty dishes that hadn’t made it to a dishwasher yet, jackets strewn randomly about, and a collection of cushions and pillows that were never in the same place twice.
Right now, the space also held twenty-five pilots. Mel Cartman had made sure the word was leaked that the Commodore was coming to speak to the pilots, so they were all there—and the lounge wasn’t designed to have twenty-five people in it.
“Not much gathering around, I suppose,” she said with a chuckle as she took in the crowd. “So, I guess I’ll settle for listening up. Anyone missing?”
“Everyone’s here,” a lithe raven-haired woman said from the back of the room. “Hark to the Commodore’s words, people!”
Kira laughed at Neha “Backstab” Bradley. The pilot’s callsign had been born out of the fact that she’d been an Equilibrium plant in the fighter-pilot training program Kira and John Estanza had run for Redward—but she’d been blackmailed, and her intel had broken the Institute’s network in the Redward System.
Still, the RRF had refused to take her and she had come to work for Kira. She was a perfect representative of what this meeting was about, though—she had a toddler living on Redward.
“I don’t need to ask if you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on,” Kira finally said. “Every one of you knows we’re prepping for an op. A big one—and the smarter folks in this room know that there’s not much going on in the Syntactic Cluster that calls for a big op, is there?”
She let that sink in.
“I’m not here to brief you all on the mission before us,” she continued. “There’ll be a time for that when we’re well away and preparing for battle. What I’m here to tell you, because I owe you this, is that we’re going outside the Syntactic Cluster and we’re going to be gone for months.
“Best guess is four to five. Might be six, even seven,” she said. “Memorial Force, despite what we do, is not a military. I don’t have you all locked into contracts that say you can’t leave. I know you all knew this was a possibility, but I don’t want anyone feeling trapped.
“So.” Kira looked around. Backstab was definitely looking concerned, but she wasn’t the only one.
“There are terms in your contracts around notice and buyout and all of that shit,” she told them. “I’ll assume you’re all familiar with them and not reiterate. That said, I’m not a monster—most of the time—and I’ve made some arrangements.
“Anyone who isn’t comfortable spending six months outside of the Cluster and away from Redward, talk to the CNG in private after this,” she instructed. “We’ve made arrangements to swap a small number of pilots with the RRF, at least temporarily. We send you to their orbital squadrons and they play musical chairs to send me people up to your weight to replace you.”
That got her a few chuckles, but there were worried and concerned looks as well.
“Look.” She pulled a seat over to herself and sat down. “I’d rather go into action with all of you, but I owe you this chance. We’ll call it a sabbatical for the folks who take it, and we’ll talk about what that looks like when we come back.
“I won’t hold staying in Redward against anyone and I will not stand for any of you holding it against anyone,” she told them. “We’ll be home-basing out of Redward for a while yet, but I suspect that a lot of our future operations are going to look like this—extended deployments to other sectors.
“We’ve helped bring peace to the Syntactic Cluster. That means we’ve got to go further to find work—but find work we shall.”
* * *
Bradley was at Kira’s office door less than five minutes after Kira sat down. Unsurprised, Kira had the young woman’s preferred coffee mix waiting when she allowed Backstab in.
“Have a seat, Neha,” Kira told the younger pilot. “I was expecting you.”
“Despite telling us to go to Nightmare?” Bradley asked—but she took the seat and the coffee.
“Nobody ever admits that the bosses have favorites, but everyone in the nova group can point them out all the same,” Kira admitted. “After everything you went through to get here, Neha, I feel more responsible for you than most of the pilots we recruited here.”
The young woman nodded steadily, but her hands trembled slightly as she drank from the coffee cup.
“I…was wondering…well, if the transfer deal applied to me,” she told Kira. “The rest of the pilots from the training program chose to be Memorials. I…was discharged from service with the RRF.”
“You were,” Kira agreed levelly. “Bringing down the Institute’s spies here got you out from under treason and espionage charges, but even Queen Sonia couldn’t keep that from tainting any chance of you flying for the Redward Fleet.”
Bradley looked much less steady now.
“I see, sir,” she admitted. “But I… But Jessica…”
“Jessica is with your mother these days, right?” Kira asked gently. Jessica was Bradley’s daughter—the not-quite-two-year-old daughter the Equilibrium Institute had kidnapped to force her cooperation with their plan to infiltrate the training program.
“Yes, sir. The Queen encouraged me to reach out after…everything,” Bradley said quietly.
“Your situation is the most complicated,” Kira admitted. “But you’re also among the pilots and crew with the most powerful reason to want to stay in Redward. So…”
She shrugged.
“You were discharged without prejudice from the RRF and returned to the training program as an explicitly Memorial recruit,” Kira noted. “The sabbatical exchange that has been discussed is not a commission in the RRF. Those taking it will remain officers of Memorial Force under detached subcontract with the Redward Royal Fleet.
“Which means, Pilot Bradley, that your previous interactions with the RRF are completely irrelevant.”
Kira could hear the raggedness in Bradley’s exhalation, despite the younger woman’s efforts to control her emotions.
“Are you sure, sir?”
“I checked, Neha,” Kira said quietly. And Queen Sonia had leaned on the people setting up the program on the RRF’s side, though she wasn’t telling Bradley that. “If you want to take the sabbatical and remain here, there will be no issues.”
“I… I have to, sir,” Bradley told her. “I can’t be away from Jessica for six months, not right now.”
“I agree,” Kira replied. She’d been preparing a backup plan where Neha Bradley was transferred to their shore office for the six months, before Sonia had involved herself.
“So, I’ll make sure you’re on the list for that subcontract,” she told Bradley. “It’ll all be taken care of, I promise.”
First, though, she had to get over to Raccoon, where she’d give a similar briefing and have, she estimated, three only somewhat-less-complicated conversations with pilots there.
Some days, she missed just running from assassins.