Kira watched as the four liberated merchant ships vanished into nova in silence.
“Well?” she finally asked Milani.
This time, a full-size hologram of the armored mercenary had joined her on the flag deck. Her link to the cruiser’s bridge was active, and another hologram of Captain Davidović stood across from the ground commander.
“I do not know what our Bodegan friends are,” Milani said slowly. “That is outside the scope of a mere and lowly grunt to guess.”
“But they’re not a merchant crew,” Kira guessed.
“We shut down the external firewalls and gave them access to Indigo Iris’s systems,” her ground commander continued, their voice still slow and measured. “It took them eleven minutes to undo the encryption and lockdown that had baffled my best electronic warfare troops for six hours, Admiral.
“Eleven minutes.”
“So, Wanderer is a spy ship,” Bueller concluded. “Whose, I wonder?”
“Bodega’s, I suspect,” Kira told her people. “I can see many Rim systems wanting more intelligence than they can easily acquire on the greater galaxy. How far does Redward’s knowledge truly extend, for example?”
“Not even to here,” Davidović—who had been a Redward Royal Fleet officer until the last year—replied. “We know little of the Samuels-Colossus Corridor, let alone of Apollo or Brisingr, except at the highest levels. We know more of the Royal Crest—we knew more of the Crest before you worked for them, even—but that is because the Bank of the Royal Crest has made itself the currency of choice in much of this sector of the Rim.”
And the royal family of the Royal Crest owned their bank. It was one of their key sources of power—and the money that came from it had funded the coup that Kira had helped birth.
A strange galaxy they lived in, where the Crown Zharang of a constitutional monarchy helped launch a coup to make said monarchy more democratic. But, of course, the Royal Crest’s lack of democracy had favored their dominant political party, not their monarchs.
“Maps, the Encyclopedia Galactica and rumors,” Kira concluded aloud. “That’s all the people of most systems know once they’re more than maybe a hundred light-years from home. Ninety percent of humanity never leaves the planet they were born on. Another eight percent never leaves their star system.
“An intelligence network that can give reliable, even if dated, information about the galaxy can be worth its weight in gold.”
Not that any government she’d ever worked for had spent the time and money to achieve that. The only one that she knew of that had was the Solar Federation, the loose coalition of most solar systems in the Core around Terra.
SolFed Intelligence had operatives even this far out. She’d met one in the middle of their op against Crest, even engaged in a trade of favors to help complete the Fortitude mission.
“So what have we learned?” Mwangi asked.
“I’m just finishing up going through the data Milani sent me now,” Soler reported, the Tactical officer looking up at the meeting going on around her. “It’s not our worst-case scenario, but it’s more than Samuels told us to expect.”
“Lay it out,” Kira ordered.
“It looks like Commander Bueller’s guess of them pulling the older ships from Syndulla was correct,” Soler said. “N45-K, I53-R, D5D-12, D5D-09, D5D-A2, and D5D-B1 were all Brisingr SSR, leased to the Syndulla government, and they were all transferred to Colossus.
“The files on Indigo Iris suggest that she and her sister ship, Violent Variance, were undergoing conversion to act as junk carriers for Colossus before they acquired their stack of BKN ships. There was a quick and dirty completion job to use them as depot ships instead, while the yards did a refit sweep on the six immediately useful ships.
“From Iris’s files, all of those ships are here, spread across the three trade-route stops the CNW flagged as the most efficient for blockading the system—the fourth we’d IDed they figure is covered by the other three. Two of the destroyers are with N45-K at the far side, where we can’t reach without discharging static.”
“And Violet Variance is with I53-R at the third nova stop?” Kira asked.
“Exactly, boss,” Soler replied. “Twenty Liberators and a light cruiser.”
Kira nodded as the regional display updated with the marks of the three trade-route stops and their known blockading forces. Samuels and Colossus were on either side of the rough triangle of mapped nova locations. Theoretically, someone could hit each of the three spots the CNW had blockaded and not stop at either system.
Of course, each of the three spots was four or five novas from the next nearest stopover except Samuels or Colossus. One stop was where they were currently, the closest if coming in from the Outer Rim toward Samuels. One was on the opposing side, the closest stop if coming from the Inner Rim toward Samuels. The last was “north,” based on the poles and ecliptic plane of the Sol System per ancient tradition, for those coming in from “above.”
If anyone had built a nova drive that didn’t need a couple of planets’ worth of mass to discharge static and tachyon buildup every thirty-odd light-years, Kira didn’t know about it. That meant that anyone coming to Samuels had to stop at one of those three trade-route stops—unless they had a secret addition to the standard galactic map.
“Anyone think we’ll have a problem taking I53-R?” Kira finally asked. “We can nova into Samuels to discharge static and resupply first if needed.”
“Deception alone could probably take her and her escorting fighter wing down,” Mwangi told her.
“Probably, but we need to realize that four Liberators jumped from here,” Davidović reminded them all. “It’s only two novas from this stop to Colossus, so they might have gone home…but there’s a good chance they jumped to the I-Fifty. Forewarned is forearmed, and they almost certainly know we’re coming.”
“Agreed,” Kira said. “But we’ll go by the plan, people. We send Springtime Chorus and Macey’s people back home, then we jump after the cruiser. Even if they bring N45-K and the destroyers into the mix, we still have the edge in fighters and firepower.”
“And that’s assuming that N45-K is fully loaded,” Bueller added. “If she’s split her fighter group to provide the blockade wings rather than just ferrying squadrons from Colossus…”
“The two depot ships can theoretically carry their own fighters,” Kira pointed out. “They can’t launch them quickly enough to act as carriers, but you can stuff any freighter full of planes. I don’t want to assume that N45-K is under-armed.”
Fully loaded, that would give the Colossus Nova Wing eighty fighters, a cruiser, a carrier, and two destroyers to go up against Kira’s carrier, ninety-two fighters, and heavy cruiser.
She figured the odds were still in her favor, though she’d far rather take on the cruiser separately.
“If N45-K is there, we’ll need to be a lot more careful,” Kira noted. “But I don’t think Colossus even has the hulls to make a real fight of this just yet.”