41

With every fiber of her being, Kira Demirci wanted to be in one of the Hussar-Sevens on the hangar deck. Each of them was prepped, loaded with a single torpedo, and manned by pilots under Helmet Sagairt’s command.

By moving those pilots over to Fortitude immediately, she hoped that her people had managed to organize the decks on Deception and Raccoon to avoid the problems they’d been having with too many fighters.

She wanted to lead that double squadron herself—but if the Hussars launched, so much had gone wrong. Her place, as Commodore of Memorial Force, wasn’t in a fighter today.

It was on Fortitude’s bridge, playing the role of Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon via a digital simulacrum.

“Nova complete,” Konrad said, his voice echoing oddly in the carrier’s mostly empty bridge.

“Soler?” Kira asked.

“We are on target. Grand Prince is four hundred thousand kilometers away, twelve degrees to starboard, six degrees up.

“I have four major contacts and what looks like four six-fighter squadrons of nova fighters,” she continued. “Twenty-eight contacts. Warbook makes the nova fighters Hussar-Sixes and Cavalier-Sixes.”

“ID those ships, please,” Kira ordered as a spike of nervousness ran down her spine. There were only supposed to be three. That was already enough to render this suicide if it became a fight. Who was the fourth?

“Confirming, seventy-kilocubic light cruiser, Terminal Loss,” Soler reported. “One-hundred-twenty-cubic battlecruiser Amortization. Second battlecruiser, Amiability. Sixty-kilocubic assault carrier Valiant.”

“They brought a second battlecruiser,” Kira muttered. “That…shouldn’t be a problem, I don’t think. Are we set up to hail them?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kira nodded to her limited staff and focused on the recorder. The simulacrum should make this work…should.

Terminal Loss, this is Captain Moon aboard Fortitude,” she reported. “We are ready for our ‘scheduled exercises.’ Standing by.”

A few moments passed and Kira checked the data on the NRC task group. They were currently just over a hundred thousand kilometers away and closing. With no jammers, Kira could basically guarantee direct hits from Fortitude’s turrets at this point.

Of course, so could the three cruisers over there. Valiant only had a pair of single-gun antiship turrets in her defensive arsenal, but even Terminal Loss had eighteen guns on nine turrets. Kira pulled up the specifications on the battlecruisers and swallowed grimly.

Thirty guns in ten triple turrets. Each of them slightly weaker than Fortitude’s more-modern cannon but still notably more powerful than Deception’s.

This could not come to a fight.

Terminal Loss is requesting an active channel, sir,” Soler told her. “Simulacrum processing time shouldn’t be noticeable against the time lag. You’re good to go.”

Kira nodded and inhaled sharply.

It was showtime.

* * *

“Welcome to Grand Prince, Captain Moon,” the middle-aged man in Kira’s screen told her. Captain Tāne Król of Terminal Loss had ground out in his career in the NRC five years before, one of a type of officer destined to serve out a career as a Commander until seniority meant he either had to retire or be promoted—and his superiors would try very hard to find him a non-command billet, from Kira’s reading of his file.

Except his loyalty to the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party had seen him promoted, and now he was one of their most loyal partisans in the Navy and the man they trusted to transport the Prime Minister.

“We managed to scrape together another battlecruiser to keep the Prime Minister and Cabinet safe,” Król told her. “We’re starting to hear some ugly rumors about the Royalists, so extra security seemed wise.”

“It can never hurt; that’s for sure,” Kira agreed. “I’m glad to see the fighter patrol, too. We had an unfortunate accident in one of our test flights, and my deck is currently only half-usable.

“We had to send half the Blue Scarlets home on their own because it was a choice between landing them or landing the Prime Minister.”

“Is it going to be a problem?” Król asked. “Is everyone okay?”

“No, but no,” Kira said. “A Blue Scarlet pilot crashed their fighter in the middle of the hangar deck. They were killed in the crash, and I declined to order it treated like garbage with a body inside.”

She shook her head.

“It’s peacetime, after all. We can land the PM on half a deck and have the body extracted properly to return to their family when we get back to the Crest.

“You’ll need to let the PM’s pilot know—they’ll have to surrender full control to our flight deck on approach. I’m told the landing is going to be extremely precise.”

“I will,” Król promised. “Is everything in place for the inspection?”

“Everything is brand-new and my hands have spent every moment they weren’t running tests polishing,” Kira replied drily. “I don’t think you’ll find a more ready-for-inspection ship in the entire Navy of the Royal Crest, my friend.”

Król laughed.

“On behalf of my ship and crew, I would like to challenge that, but I suspect we’re all better off if you’re right,” he said. “Her Excellency and the Ministers are boarding their pinnace now. I’ll check with the CNG, but I suspect we’ll have fighters from either Amiability or Valiant escort them over, if your fighters are down.”

“Trapped behind a stack of debris, unfortunately,” Kira confirmed. “Everything else is in order. I do hope the Prime Minister will overlook the crash.”

“She was a pilot herself once,” Król said. “I’m sure she’s familiar with the risks of even normal flight operations.”

“Thank you, Captain Król,” Kira said. A pilot? She’d missed that in the Prime Minister’s file…but if they’d missed it, it had been so long ago it shouldn’t impact anything.

She hoped. It was too late to change much of the plan.

“For the Crest,” he replied, voice heavy with sincerity.

“For the Crest,” she echoed, and let the channel fall.

She turned away and looked around.

“You heard him,” she told her crew. “Waldroup, get the landing program ready. Milani, get the welcome party ready. All the pieces.”

“We’ll be there when ‘Her Excellency’ lands,” the commando promised.

“Stunners only, Milani,” Kira warned. “We need them all alive.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but they were better off stunning the entire Ministerial Protection Detail than they were accidentally killing Maral Jeong!

* * *

“Pinnace deployed. Definitely nova-capable,” Soler reported. “ETA two minutes.”

Kira was watching the entire flight deck through various cameras as the shuttle approached. It took a thought to add an optical pickup zoomed in on the Prime Minister’s spacecraft.

She recognized the lines and styling instantly. Jade Panosyan had kept one of the nova pinnaces in the shuttle bay aboard Yerazner. Whether the class two nova-drive–equipped shuttlecraft were bought from elsewhere or built in the Crest, the Prime Minister and the Crown Zharang were clearly drawing on the same source.

“Everyone ready?” Kira murmured. It wasn’t even a real question. If someone wasn’t ready, they’d have told her by now—and her people sensibly ignored the question.

“Pinnace Crest Two has surrendered control to the flight deck,” Waldroup’s voice said instead. “We have her locked on approach to landing point six.”

“Understood,” Milani replied in a clipped tone.

Sixty seconds. Thirty. Now Kira could make out the two people in the cockpit of the pinnace—a fundamentally civilian ship, it had actual windows on the cockpit. The pilot was roughly what she’d expected, a uniformed MPD officer wearing a standard headset and utterly focused on their task.

The woman in the copilot seat was a surprise. Maral Jeong wore the same standard headset as her pilot but was dressed in a wide-shouldered angular suit. There was no question as to who she was, though. Kira had seen enough pictures of the petite Prime Minister over the last few months to pick her out.

Jeong was an older woman with graying black hair and skin the color of age-stained hardwood—and eyes the color of fictional acid, a bright vivid green that likely spoke to genetic modification.

A shiver ran down Kira’s spine as Jeong’s gaze appeared to lock on to hers through the camera for a moment. That was impossible; it was simply a fluke of the Prime Minister studying the carrier as her shuttle approached.

“Ten seconds, slowing the pinnace and bringing her in,” Waldroup reported.

Several of Kira’s video feeds faded out as the pinnace slid into Fortitude’s flight deck under Angel Waldroup’s control. Everything was going smoothly—and then Kira saw the moment Maral Jeong saw the wrecked fighter.

It was the moment the Prime Minister who had apparently once been a fighter pilot clearly recognized that the wreck was not a Hussar-Seven.

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