After a week of “being a tourist,” including sending her boyfriend off into the belly of the beast for two full days, and weeks of acting like a civilian, even aboard Panosyan’s vessel, it was a relief for Kira to step off the runabout in an insignia-less black military shipsuit.
Her companions were a step behind her as she crisply saluted the Chief Petty Officer waiting for her in the NRC’s dark gold uniform shipsuit.
“Welcome aboard TVM-Six,” the Chief told Kira. She was a tall redheaded woman with her hair pulled back into a tight bun. “I’ll be finding a space to put your shuttle,” she continued, glancing around the small boat bay.
There was only one other shuttle in that bay, not much larger than Kira’s runabout, and Kira saw the Chief’s point. She wasn’t sure where to put the runabout other than where she’d landed it!
“My apologies to the bay team,” she murmured.
“I am the bay team,” the Chief replied. “Chief Petty Officer Daniella Lewinsky. I’m the deck officer, shuttle pilot, shuttle maintenance crew, and backup navigator for TVM-Six.
“The skipper is on the bridge, but she asked me to get you landed and settled. Unfortunately, we don’t have much space for anybody. I hope bunk beds aren’t a problem?”
Kira laughed.
“How many people does this ship carry?” she asked.
“Crew of sixteen, Commodore Demirci,” Chief Lewinsky told her. “We each have our own quarters, but there’s no real allowance for passengers. Why put aside two rooms for passengers when you can squeeze in another Harrington coil, after all?”
Kira was familiar with the type of ship. The courier had two defenses: a full set of multiphasic jammers and a power-to-weight ratio comparable to a nova interceptor. It had the same class one nova drive as any other starship, but its sublight maneuverability made it hard to catch and harder to hit.
“Bunk beds are fine,” she told the Chief, gesturing her companions forward. “I once served on a cruiser converted to carry a single squadron of nova fighters. One room for six pilots—and it was three months before it even had bunk beds.”
Hammocks had been the order of the day, and she wasn’t sure her back had forgiven her yet.
“Well, we at least have the beds,” Lewinsky told her. She glanced over the other three mercenaries. “I was only given one name,” she noted softly. “My understanding is that was the plan, to try to keep some level of confidentiality.
“Everyone aboard TVM-Six knows your mission and who you’re working for, Commodore. We serve the Crown of the Royal Crest. You’re safe here.”
“I trusted our employer’s judgment on that,” Kira said. “Bunk beds, huh? I’ll need to coordinate with Commander Hamilton shortly, so I guess we should get started.”
* * *
At twelve thousand cubic meters, TVM-6 was far from tiny. The courier was a slightly squashed cylinder eighty meters long, half a meter wider than she was tall. She had no guns, limited cargo space, and only the one small boat bay they’d landed in.
The cramped nature of her interior had been a design choice, squeezing out as much space as possible to allow the ship to fit three fusion cores into a ship size that would normally carry two, and to install enough Harrington coils to need all three of the fusion plants.
Some spaces, though, had not been sacrificed on the altar of speed. In Kira’s experience, the engineering spaces around those coils and power cores would be spacious—and the bridge was large and comfortable.
With the bridge’s handful of workstations, it could also serve as a secure conference or briefing room—an intended feature of the design, one that left Kira and Konrad alone on the bridge with Commander Eireen Hamilton.
Hamilton was a short woman with night-black skin and an absolutely piercing gaze. Kira had the distinct feeling that the NRC Commander had identified that she and Konrad were a couple within ten seconds of their walking onto the bridge.
The question for the moment, though, was whether the woman could identify the key parts of their target’s schedule.
“We now know everything we’re going to know about Fortitude herself,” Konrad noted. “Our employer has provided the full builders’ schematics, and we have close-in scans and visual data. I have a few thoughts on what to do with all of that, but that’s not really your problem, Commander Hamilton.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “And I’m probably happier that way.” She shook her head, looking at the map of the system hanging in the middle of her bridge. TVM-6 was on her way outward from the Crest itself, heading toward “the Grand,” the system’s gas giants.
“I’m not the largest fan of this whole operation,” Hamilton continued. “I don’t know all of the details, but I can put together the pieces I have. I’m scouting the route of Fortitude’s launch trials with a quartet of mercenaries on board.
“Given that among the schedules I’ve been given is the Prime Minister’s schedule, I suspect I have a damn good idea what I’m helping with. I trust Jade. Beyond all reason, apparently, but this still goes against the grain.”
“Do you expect me to convince you to go along with this?” Kira asked bluntly. “Because that’s not what I’m here for. I’ve been hired to help the Crown Zharang deal with a problem, Commander. I was told you were in and fully briefed.”
That was a slight exaggeration, but from the sounds of it, Hamilton was close enough to fully briefed that Panosyan should have just fully briefed her.
Hamilton snorted and shook her head, running her hand over her shaved scalp.
“No,” she conceded. “Jade told me enough. I’m in. But the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party is a symptom…not the disease. I’m not sure removing them by force is going to solve any problems.”
Kira sighed.
“We’re not assassins, Commander,” she told the other woman. “At the end of the day, part of what I’m going to get paid for is delivering the Prime Minister to Crester police. The Crown Zharang has a plan.
“I’m not privy to it all either,” she admitted. “But I know they want Maral Jeong to stand trial.”
“And here you say you’re not supposed to be convincing me,” Hamilton murmured. “That actually helps. Though…” She ran her hand over her scalp again in a clear nervous gesture. “I won’t pretend I wouldn’t be doing this even if I thought you were just planning on killing Jeong.
“I really do trust Jade Panosyan that much. I just would like it a lot less.”
“I appreciate the honesty,” Kira told Hamilton. “To return it in like: if this was a targeted assassination, I would not have taken the contract. We’ll keep our own peace on details of our part, but I can assure you of that much.”
“Fair. To work, then?”
“To work.”
“Finally,” Konrad muttered—but he was grinning widely enough that Kira figured even Hamilton wouldn’t take it the wrong way.
“I assume they’re following a standard trial pattern?” he asked.
“Yes. We do the core tests over twelve days, but the part that we’ve been talking about is the actual flight trials,” Hamilton told them, waving a series of lines and spheres onto the three-dimensional map of the star system.
“The first technical flight trial will happen in twenty-four days, two days before the rest of the flight trials,” the NRC officer continued, highlighting the first line and sphere. “That will move Fortitude to the gunnery range on the far side of Grand Duchess from Rampant, where she will test her weapons and, according to the schedule, her fighter-handling equipment.”
“She’s taking on fighters there?” Kira asked. “For the rest of the tour?”
That was a complication.
“Looks like three squadrons out of the Blue Scarlet Combat Group,” Hamilton confirmed. “They’re an elite formation that usually operates off of Valiant, the current flagship. But Valiant carries a hundred and twenty fighters and bombers. They can spare eighteen heavy fighters.”
“Do we have a solid listing of what they’re getting in terms of pilots and birds?” Kira said. “That could be complicated.”
“Nothing is solid, but my understanding is that the selection will be warped by the chance to meet the Prime Minister,” the NRC officer told her. “So, almost certainly Blue-One, Blue-Two, and Blue-Three. The most senior and elite squadrons, equipped with brand-new Hussar-Seven heavy fighters.”
Kira nodded slowly. A brand-new heavy fighter from the Crest almost certainly outmatched her Weltraumpanzer-Fünf planes—but probably not by much. The Weltraumpanzer-Fünfs were the current main heavy fighter of the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy.
Her interceptors and fighter-bombers were about on par with the Fünfs. Her interceptors were Hoplite-IVs from Apollo, and while her PNC-115 fighter-bombers were an older design than the Hoplites or Weltraumpanzers, they were also from the Fringe, not the Rim.
Between Deception and Raccoon, she was definitely bringing in enough fighters to take on even eighteen new heavy fighters with elite pilots. The problem was that if even one of those fighters novaed to report, they were going to be in real trouble.
“We’ll work with it,” she said aloud. “How long will they be doing gunnery and landing trials?”
“Two days,” Hamilton told her. “Actual flight trials will start in twenty-six days, eight days before the original schedule Jade said they gave you.”
Kira nodded. She only had seven days before she needed TVM-6 to be heading for Memorial Force, but that was already part of the plan. They shouldn’t need that long.
“There will be twenty-four hours of real-space flight trials on her Harringtons in the region of Grand Duchess,” Hamilton said. “That will be followed by a series of novas of increasing length over another twenty-four hours.
“Then they will make a full-length nova to security point six.” A new icon flashed up on the side of the map, marking a light-hour-wide zone six light-years from the Crest. “They will be there for twenty hours while the novas cool, and then they will nova to here, above Grand Prince, where officially they will be engaging in a maneuvering test with the cruiser Terminal Loss.”
“And in reality, they’re meeting the Prime Minister and a good chunk of her Cabinet?” Konrad asked.
“Exactly. Terminal Loss is scheduled to pick up the PM and five Cabinet Ministers seventy minutes before Fortitude novas to Grand Prince. She’ll nova there ahead, with her own escort consisting of a battlecruiser and an assault carrier.
“The Prime Minister’s classified schedule says that the two ships will rendezvous and the PM and Cabinet will spend six hours aboard, inspecting the Crest’s first hundred-and-fifty-kilocubic warship and glad-handing with the SPP loyalist crew.”
“I’m guessing the schedule doesn’t phrase it that way,” Kira said.
“No,” Hamilton admitted. She inhaled deeply. “Looking at this, I have to admit…”
She trailed off.
“Commander?” Kira prodded.
“The Prime Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister. The Minister for the Navy. The Minister for the Client Network. The Minister for Internal Security. The Minister of Communications.”
The list didn’t mean much to Kira initially, but as she thought about it, a sense of impending doom swept over her.
“If I was planning a coup to remove the King and impose a one-party government on the Crest, those are the Ministers I’d want in a private, absolutely secure, meeting, aren’t they?” she asked.
“That’s what I was thinking as well,” the NRC officer said. “We might not be the only people thinking about a coup, Commodore. The Crown Zharang may just be moving first.”
“I hope we’re moving first,” Konrad said. “Now. Kira…we can take Fortitude, but I’m wondering if she’s going to actually be alone. Lightspeed delays give us some chances, I suppose.”
“We need to be careful relying on that,” Kira warned. “If someone sees us jump the carrier, even if it’s twenty or thirty minutes later, they can still warn the PM and short-stop the entire damn mission right there.
“Whenever we hit them, we need to either not be seen—or if there’s a chance of us being seen, it has to be after the rendezvous with Terminal Loss.”
She considered the Grand Prince rendezvous point. “Do we know what ships Terminal Loss’s escort will be?”
“There are at least two battlecruisers and two assault carriers that could get pulled in,” Hamilton replied. “Those are just the ships with Captains I know to be SPP loyalists. They may even swap out a fleet carrier, depending on availability and what they think they can swing without drawing attention.”
Kira nodded slowly.
“We can’t reliably jump and secure Fortitude while fighting off two cruisers and a second, fully functional carrier,” she noted. “I think that negates any plan of hitting them while the PM is aboard.
“That limits our options. A lot.”
She looked at the map and sighed.
“She’s not being officially escorted at any point, right?” she asked.
“No, but they’ll have set the trials to coincide with when other ships are around,” Hamilton said.
“Do we have those schedules?” Kira asked.
“If I don’t already have them downloaded, I have the authority to get them,” the courier captain said. “Give me a minute.”
* * *
Overlaying the patrol patterns on Fortitude’s trials made it very clear that the Navy of the Royal Crest were far from incompetent. The new fleet carrier might not be officially escorted during her nova and sublight flight trials, but that was because she didn’t need to be.
The sections of the outer parts of the Crest System the nova tests would take her to were under near-constant patrol by either nova fighters or lighter ships. Several of her early novas would take her to the projected positions of outer-system monitors, ships even larger than Fortitude herself but incapable of nova travel.
“There is no way in hell we can take on the monitors,” Kira observed, looking at a rough set of statistics for the Crest’s defensive ships. The sublight warships were a good chunk of why a civilized star system was regarded as uninvadable, after all.
“So, that rules out most of her test stops in the Crest,” Konrad agreed. “What about the security point?”
“That’s probably your most likely opportunity,” Hamilton agreed. “I’ve also got a point here, between her two longest in-system novas. Someone miscounted Fortitude’s cooldown, she’ll be able to nova fifteen minutes before the schedule calls for.”
Kira chuckled.
“Which means she will nova fifteen minutes before the schedule calls for, most likely,” she agreed. “What kind of gap does that open?”
“She’s jumping almost three light-days out-system, so there is nothing else out there,” Hamilton replied. “The plan is sending her out to a standard surveillance point where they regularly deploy ships to scan for troublemakers.
“But if she jumps early, she’ll be alone out there for…” The NRC Commander ran the numbers, then shook her head.
“Seventeen minutes,” she noted. “That’s…nothing. And the next ship to show up is Penalty Fee. Her crew is basically on a punishment tour—but her new Captain is an SPP diehard.”
“If we play the right games with timing and jammers, it’s…doable,” Kira said. “But that is not a window I want to work with. Who’s at the security point when they’re there? Those are usually quiet.”
“Usually,” Hamilton agreed. Security point six appeared next to the display of the Crest System, lighting up with its own patrol routes. “Except…” She exhaled.
“Mapping mission,” Konrad said, looking at the data. “Looks like a trio of destroyers. We… We could take them, Kira?”
“We could make no mistakes,” she said softly. “With eighteen nova fighters in play, we’d need to send our bombers against the destroyers unsupported—and if we miss one shot, we lose everything.
“A single nova ship, whether it’s a fighter or a destroyer or Fortitude herself, getting away wrecks the whole plan. We need to arrive at Grand Prince with nothing to make us appear suspicious.
“When are those destroyers supposed to report in?” Kira asked.
“They’re on a cycle; one checks in every twenty-four hours,” Hamilton told her. “There’s a check-in right before Fortitude arrives, which means…”
“One will be expected to check in four hours or so after she leaves.”
Kira studied the map.
“Those are our two biggest weak points,” she admitted. “Here, in the seventeen minutes before the battlecruiser arrives, and here, where she’ll only have three destroyers in company and will be six light-years from the Crest.”
The three of them looked at the hologram.
“I need to see both places,” she concluded aloud. “Yes, I know they’re both basically empty void, but…there may be something I can’t see from a map.”
“And then?” Hamilton asked.
“Then us mercenaries need to get to the rendezvous point and you need to get back to your normal job,” Kira said. “If you leave us floating in deep space for a day or two, that will help cover your tracks a bit as well.”
“My tracks are pretty covered already,” Hamilton said. “But fair enough. Let’s go check out this empty void and see if inspiration strikes.”