41

Even with the damage the cruiser had taken, Deception was still better suited to operate as Kira’s home base than Huntress. The flag deck and Admiral’s quarters were deep enough to be undamaged, which allowed her to continue to work from her usual spaces even as the engineering team under Bueller began to prepare the ship for the repairs.

Deception had moved under the guns of the Samuels fortresses now, orbiting only a few hundred kilometers from the yards that would shortly receive her and her two younger siblings, K92E and K91A.

Eventually, Kira and her people would come up with new names for the ships—she was more willing to risk the superstition that name changes were bad luck than she was to send people into battle aboard ships with only numbers.

A sort of calm watchfulness had descended over the Samuels System over the last few days. It felt like everyone in the star system was watching to see what happened next.

For Kira’s own part, her focus was mainly on the yards. The four ex-BKN destroyers were being refitted in the civilian yards—and the keels of six new Samuels-designed destroyers had been laid alongside them. That was fully half of the nova-ship yards available until the new military yards came online.

Samuels’s population might not want war. They might actively hate the concept—but they clearly hated being pushed around even more. The SDC’s new recruiting programs were having no problems filling their quotas now.

Kira wasn’t sure where she was going to find crews for her new cruisers, but she was prepared to wait for Fortitude and Kavitha Zoric to arrive to sort that out. Once she had her full fleet, it would be a lot easier to send a destroyer or a logistics ship to the Outer Rim end of the Corridor to recruit new crew and pilots.

Everything seemed in order, progressing as expected. It would still be almost two weeks before they heard from Brisingr. And yet.

Somehow, she understood the feeling in the star system. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Kira wasn’t sure what it was, but she could definitely sense it out there, lurking.

A new nova flare drew her attention, and it took her a second to realize why. With the Corridor reopened—to everyone except Brisingr, at least—a minimum of twenty ships came through Samuels each day.

But they stopped at Haven and Sanctuary to discharge static. Only a handful of ships novaed in near Bennet itself, as this ship had done. And the ones that did…didn’t come with an escort of Kira’s own nova fighters, clearly deployed from Huntress’s patrol to make sure that this ship made it in safely.

Marija Davidović and Abdullah Colombera had clearly felt that this particular ship needed to be kept safe, no matter what—and with that thought, Kira finally recognized the Core-built freighter already vectoring toward Deception.

Baile Fantasma spent most of her time pretending to be a regular merchant transport. For her captain to have requested an escort from Davidović and to be coming toward Deception that directly was out of character.

Kira didn’t know Captain Tomas Zamorano well, but she did know that he was a senior officer in the Interstellar Intelligence Service of the Solar Federation, the government that encompassed Earth and the surrounding star systems.

If he was risking his cover, something major was going down.

* * *

“Thank you for seeing me without notice,” Zamorano told Kira as he stepped into the meeting room. Battered as Deception was, the room attached to the flight deck had a visible patch applied over the bulkhead.

Eventually, the bulkhead would be replaced. Right now, a rough-welded sheet of steel covered the hole where a plasma burst had run the full length of the landing bay.

“Take a seat, Captain,” Kira told him.

Zamorano nodded calmly and obeyed, glancing around the mostly empty room. Konrad Bueller was the only other person she’d brought in—but they’d both met the scrawny Spanish spy when they’d been operating in the Crest.

“As for seeing you without notice, you certainly got our attention,” she continued. “When I gave you code words to get help from my people, I honestly didn’t expect to see you again.”

“I expected to see you again,” Zamorano said drily. “That’s the nature of the universe, though. I suspected fate would bring you back to the Apollo-Brisingr Sector. Now, of course, I know that the Kaiser made it happen for his own reasons.”

“His ambush failed,” Bueller noted. “He underestimated us.”

“He also perhaps did not have the resources to spare he might have preferred,” the spy told them. “He’s been busy.”

“Busy?” Kira asked. She studied the Terran. “You’re dodging around something already, Zamorano.”

“I am,” he admitted. “I watched it happen and I still can’t believe it. Brisingr has done the impossible, Admiral Demirci.”

“There are many things in this universe people believe to be impossible that aren’t,” she said slowly. “What exactly has Brisingr done?”

“Apollo has fallen.”

The words didn’t even process for a moment, and even then, they didn’t make any sense.

“What do you mean, ‘fallen?’” Bueller demanded while Kira was still trying to register what had been said.

“When I fled the system, a hundred thousand Brisingr Weltraumsoldats were already on the surface, and the orbital defenses were either destroyed or in Brisingr hands,” Zamorano said softly. “They had secured Athens itself and were deploying special operations teams to sweep up the members of the Council of Principals they’d missed.

“A second wave of over two hundred troop transports had just arrived in-system, to reinforce the armed transports that delivered the first wave,” he continued. “They were still reorganizing the nova-fighter wings after the battle…but I also get the feeling that they let the civilian ships run.”

“That isn’t possible,” Kira whispered. “There were fortresses…monitors…the ASDF…”

“Treachery and sabotage took out the fortresses,” Zamorano said flatly. “They have to have been laying the groundwork for years—possibly since before the last war. A third of the fortresses just…blew up. Half of the remainder turned their weapons on the monitors and the other forts.

“A third of the nova fleet was gone before the BKN even arrived. The rest tried to fight, but they never expected to fight in Apollo without the fortresses for support. Maybe half a dozen carriers escaped.”

“My god,” Bueller said. “That’s…madness.”

“The impossible, as I said,” Zamorano told them. “I knew where to find you, so I came here. I have other stops, other people to inform and, hopefully, connect.”

Kira was silent in shock, trying to process a changed reality. Even as Apollo had conceded the war and accepted a secondary status versus Brisingr, they’d still remained a potent and major power in the region. Wealthy and technologically advanced by Rim standards, Apollo’s fortifications had been impenetrable, insurmountable by anything except vastly superior technology.

Or treachery. She’d known since the day she’d fled her homeworld that the Brisingr Shadows had heavily infiltrated Apollon society, but she hadn’t thought they were that powerful.

“What do you expect us to do?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” the SolFed spy admitted. “All I can do is make sure the people who have the power and the will to potentially fight Brisingr know what happened and about each other.”

Kira swallowed, looking at Konrad.

“The crews will follow you; you know that,” her boyfriend told her. “I’ll follow you, into the teeth of my Kaiser’s anger. This is…new.”

“This is dangerous,” Zamorano said. “Even if no one else can likely repeat what Brisingr has done, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times a star system has been successfully invaded and conquered.”

“I know,” Kira replied, swallowing again and marshaling her will. “Who else are you contacting?”

“Thanks to your reference, I have a drop point to make contact with Colonel Killinger,” Zamorano told her. “I haven’t spoken with the damn man except by dead drop, but I know he’s acquired a few capital ships that used to belong to the Friends of Apollo that were supposed to be scrapped.

“I also think I picked up enough information on the way out here to know where Admiral Michelakis will have taken the carriers that followed her into retreat,” the spy noted. “I have a few other levers to pull, but those are the names I know you know.”

Fevronia Michelakis had been a Commodore during the war. Kira didn’t know her—but she knew James Heller had respected her. That was all she had…but it would have to be enough.

“It’s going to take time to make contact,” Konrad Bueller said softly. “Time the Kaiser’s people will use to tighten their hold on Apollo.”

“You can only tighten your hold so much over a world that never even anticipated they might kneel,” Zamorano said. “There is time.”

“That’s good,” Kira murmured, pulling up a virtual update on her ships. “Because I don’t know how long it will be before Fortitude gets here, but I know it’s going to be three months before I have cruisers ready to deploy.”

“We make a war of it, then?” her lover asked.

“We reach out to everyone we can, at the very least,” Kira promised. “To hell with your Kaiser, Konrad. I left my homeworld behind, but this… This can’t stand.”

“I’m with you,” Konrad promised.

“There’s not much else I can do,” Zamorano warned. “I’m going to poke at resources and see what I can quietly move in this direction, but I won’t even be able to swing Fringe tech. Don’t expect much.”

“I won’t,” Kira promised. She made a gesture, and the three cruisers—Deception and the new captures—appeared as holograms in the room. “But we’ll fight,” she continued. “And I guess that helps with one decision.”

“Oh?” Both men looked at the holograms of the three warships.

“Names,” she told them. “I wasn’t sure what to name our two new cruisers, but now I know.

“This one will be Harbinger…and this one will be Prodigal.”

She smiled thinly.

“Because I promise you, gentlemen, that Apollo’s prodigal daughter is coming home…and I will be the harbinger of the Kaiser’s destruction.”

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