Springtime Chorus’s countdown to nova was running in one corner of Kira’s vision as she settled back down in her flag deck. The last thirty-six hours had been surprisingly calm, once the battle itself was over, but her people were about to go back into action.
“Captain Hennessy, any concerns on your end?” she asked the Samuels ship’s CO.
“None,” they replied. “We’ll get everyone home safe and sound and have the party ready for when you arrive.”
“I’m not sure many people in Samuels are down for celebrating a military victory,” Kira pointed out.
“They won’t celebrate the deaths, no,” Hennessy agreed. “But liberation from the blockade and security for our future? They’ll celebrate that. Your people will get a heroes’ welcome.”
“Save the heroes’ welcome for when the work is done,” she said. “We’ve only cleared a third of the blockade, and we have no idea how close the rest of the CNW is to being ready.”
“You know that,” Hennessy said. “I’d put that together as well. But most of my people? We just need to know that traffic will flow again. Good luck.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Kira said as her timer clicked to zero. “Fly safe.”
Hennessy threw her a salute, and then their image vanished from her displays—and so did their ship.
“We ready to nova, Captains?” Kira asked Mwangi and Davidović.
“Yes, sir,” Davidović confirmed.
“We were ready twelve hours ago, boss,” Mwangi replied.
It was sometimes very easy to tell which of the two Captains had been in a traditional military more recently.
“All right.”
Kira leaned back in her chair and took a glance down at the readiness reports for her two ships and their fighters, then exhaled a sharp sigh.
“Nova on schedule,” she ordered.
* * *
Unlike their jump to the first nova point, this time they had a damn good idea of what the enemy strength was and where they were positioned. Almost as importantly, Kira had gone through the steps required by her code of conduct and her morals to attempt to prevent unnecessary deaths.
She wasn’t playing that game this time. There would be no warnings, no attempts to communicate.
Unfortunately, it turned out that their data wasn’t quite as up to date as they’d hoped.
“Contact, contact, contact!” Soler snapped. “Major contact at two hundred thousand kilometers!”
“Jammers up,” Mwangi, Davidović and Kira all snapped at the same time.
“Full deck launch, maximum scramble,” Kira followed up. All of their nova fighters were crewed, but “maximum scramble” cut the intervals between launching the fighters tight. Too tight, in Kira’s informed opinion, given the safety radius of Harrington coils at full power.
But it would shave the time to launch her fighters from seventy seconds to forty-two. And sometimes that was absolutely necessary.
“Set assault course,” Mwangi barked. “Guns up. ID the target!”
“Jammers are live,” Soler confirmed. “Target appears to be an I-Fifty-class light cruiser. She is… She is aware of our presence and maneuvering. I read no fighters in the jamming zone.”
“That won’t last,” Deception’s Captain replied. “Target the cruiser. All guns!”
Kira almost bit her tongue. There was a point where the task of the fleet commander was to shut up and let her subordinates work.
Plus, in all honesty, she had no business meddling in a capital-ship action. She could apply a lot of her training in general tactics to running a battle at the capital-ship scale, but she had very little applicable knowledge in the minutiae of actually running a heavy cruiser.
Twelve heavy guns fired as one, flinging plasma across the void as the starfighters got very clear of the big cruiser’s guns.
A quick glance at the imagery showed Kira why it was only twelve guns: Deception’s angle of approach was wrong and two of her turrets couldn’t bear. They’d expected the Colossus force to be almost three million kilometers from where the cruiser actually was.
But Mwangi and his people were on it, and the cruiser finished turning in time to watch I53-R’s first salvo fly wide. Deception’s own initial fire was no closer, Kira suspected, and the two warships were now hurtling toward each other at the best acceleration their Harrington coils could throw out.
“And now you see why we went to single turrets on this generation,” Bueller murmured in her ear. “The turret-cubage-to-gun went up about twenty percent, but watch.”
Kira wasn’t sure what her engineer partner was saying for the next few seconds…and then realized as Soler plotted the firing pattern on the displays. I53-R had three triple turrets. While she had more guns per cubic meter than Deception did, they fired in sets of three. So while they were trying to track a target through multiphasic jamming, they were only hitting three vectors at once.
Deception was cutting through fourteen individual vectors, allowing Soler to narrow down the space that didn’t hold her enemy far more quickly than the smaller ship.
“New contacts!” Bueller snapped from CIC, acting as XO more than engineer at the moment. “Liberators are on the board. Marking twenty-plus contacts—some of our friends from the last go-around are definitely here!”
Kira had no link with her fighter wings by this point, but Cartman and Colombera had learned their trade from her. The interceptors and fighter-bombers had stuck in close this time, recognizing that either there was no need for bombers once the cruisers had started shooting at each other—or the bombers’ contribution would be too late anyway.
Now most of the Wolverines and Hussars boiled away in a chaotic mess that even Kira had trouble distinguishing in the chaos—and Huntress swung around behind them, positioning the carrier between the incoming fighters and the cruiser.
Deception was better able to take a hit than the carrier was, but Huntress carried no heavy guns.
Instead, she had almost as many light guns as the bigger cruiser did, and they joined her fighters in laying a hail of plasma across the space the Liberators were charging into.
“Got a hit, recalibrating,” Soler announced, her voice technical and calm as a spark of light that cut through even multiphasic jamming allowed her to nail down her target. “Tightening the salvos. We have them.”
The range was down to eighty thousand kilometers, marking the one clear advantage of capital-ship turrets over the one-shot torpedoes that duplicated their firepower at close range. Capital-ship guns fired plasma packets with magnetic fields to keep them together over as much as a hundred thousand kilometers.
A nova fighter’s torpedo was more on the order of a shaped-charge explosive, a space shotgun versus a heavy cannon’s rifle round.
Of course, at this range, they couldn’t really see the enemy ship, and even Deception’s guns weren’t doing a lot of damage to I53-R when they hit. Still, as Soler tightened her vectors, more and more hits hammered into the light cruiser.
“Fighters are down,” Bueller reported. “None of them even got close.”
“Nova!” Soler snapped. “Target has novaed. Wait…no…”
There was a sick tone to the Tactical officer’s reassessment.
“Soler?” Kira asked gently.
“Target has attempted to nova, Admiral,” Isidora Soler said in a small voice. “I have visual on a debris field. We must have hit her nova field while it was forming. Would have caused a…critical stability failure.
“She didn’t make it.”
Kira nodded slowly. A class two drive cycled too quickly for that to happen outside the absolute worst of luck, but it could happen. The threat of it was what made a blockade feasible in the first place.
“Understood,” she told her people. “Bring down the jammers; locate the freighter corral and the depot ship.”
If Violet Variance’s crew were smart, they were taking advantage of that moment to be somewhere very far away—probably even under N45-K’s metaphorical skirts.
The question Kira wasn’t sure of was whether the CNW depot ship’s crew were callous enough to abandon whatever soldiers they’d put on their captured freighters.