35

Huntress completed her patrol sweep. Deception completed a patrol sweep, then the carrier went out again. It was a simple cycle, one that put one of the two capital ships in every system near Samuels every five days.

Throughout, Kira remained in the Samuels System, rotating between ships to remain available to their employer as questions, concerns and problems arose. None of them were critical, but all of them were best served by her remaining in the system.

“Contact at the Bennet perimeter,” Soler’s assistant announced on the bridge. “Signature makes it twelve kilocubics.”

Kira could have easily been on the flag deck or, really, anywhere on the cruiser at this point. Outside of combat, all she needed was access to the command net and the critical updates.

But she was bored and frustrated. The Colossus Nova Wing had done exactly what she was afraid of, and while two destroyers couldn’t cut that wide a swathe through the shipping in the Corridor, they were doing enough.

And Kira couldn’t do anything about it without uncovering Samuels itself.

So, she was on the bridge, sitting in the observer seat at the back of the U-shaped room and listening to Akuchi Mwangi’s team competently go about their jobs.

“SDC has interrogated the IFF,” Ronaldo reported, the assistant com officer sounding only slightly less bored than Kira felt. “Wait…it’s Harvest of Hopes.”

“On schedule,” Kira said aloud. “That’s not a great sign.”

“Got to love when a courier returning on schedule is a bad sign,” Mwangi said drily. “But yeah. If Colossus was willing to talk, Harvest would have been in-system for a while.”

“On schedule” in this case meant that Harvest of Hopes had transited from Samuels to Colossus, transmitted her request for diplomatic clearance to talk to the Colossus government—and then been rejected and novaed right back.

It said something about the determination of Kira’s employer that Harvest was making the same trip roughly every ten days right now. So far, Colossus had respected the courier’s diplomatic papers, but they had also refused to even consider any discussions with the envoy aboard while the woman was stuck in their system for twenty hours.

“She should have passed through the same trade-route stop as Huntress,” Mwangi pointed out. “Ronaldo, ping them and ask if they have any updates from Captain Davidović.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kira had been about to make the same request, but now she simply needed to wait. Her people knew their jobs—especially Deception’s crew, who’d been together the longest out of any of her ships now.

Davidović would have sent an update along with the courier if they had crossed paths, but it wasn’t likely to be anything critical. The Nova Wing had settled on the strategy of trying to make it too risky for shippers to fly through Samuels. They certainly hadn’t made any attempt to reimpose the blockade or even get within a single nova of the Samuels System.

“Any word from our Watchtowers?” Kira asked. That was a collection of freighters under contract to the SDC to act as an early-warning net. At least one was sitting in each nova point within one jump from Samuels, ready to nova home, at all times.

If there was any word, it would have gone straight to the top of everyone’s priority queue.

“Rotation is in twelve hours,” Mwangi pointed out. “We’ll get updates when the ships nova home in thirty-two. Nothing before then unless Colossus actually makes a move.”

“I know,” Kira conceded. “See if you can get the sensor data from Harvest for the Colossus System as well,” she instructed. “Sooner we have that, sooner we can start looking for clues.”

Deception’s Captain turned far enough in his seat to give her a raised eyebrow—and sent a silent message to her headware.

Anything new in this cycle, boss, or are we just worrying out of habit now?

She shook her head silently at him. At least he wasn’t calling her a mother hen out loud!

Nothing new, sorry, she sent back. Just hate waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“We’ll forward everything to your office once it comes in,” Mwangi promised aloud. “CIC will go over the Colossus data, too.”

“They may be hiding the ships, but they only have so many yards, and if we have enough data samples…” Kira smiled, as much at her own twitchiness as anything else. “Sooner or later, we will locate them.”

She didn’t need to know where the ships were being refitted to launch a counter-force strike—if she launched that kind of op, it would open with her spreading nova fighters across the perimeter of the system for a very detailed look at her targets—but the more she knew about the CNW’s refit program, the better she could anticipate when they were going to feel ready to attack.

* * *

After reviewing the data from multiple diplomatic couriers, as well as the SDC’s maps, Kira was now almost as familiar with the Colossus System as she was with the Samuels System—and she’d been in the Samuels System for over a month now.

There was a general standard to most inhabited systems, a pattern that seemed to help create habitable conditions. At least one gas giant in the outer system to sweep up debris and keep the worst of the meteors and comets away from the liquid-water zone. Usually an asteroid belt, formed in the gravity “dip” created by that gas giant. Then, of course, a planet in the liquid-water zone, often with a moon of some size.

Colossus checked off all of those boxes. Unusually, the habitable planet, Colossus itself, was the first actual planet of the system, with an inner system asteroid belt filling the orbit that the math would have put another planet into.

A couple of other rocky worlds, a large mid-system asteroid belt and a single gas giant with the wrong proportions to be easily processed into fuel made up the rest of the system. Artificial constellations of captured asteroids hung over both Colossus and Lindos, the gas giant.

All of this was lit by Helios, one of the larger G-type stars Kira had seen. And somewhere in the mess—she had her guesses, but they didn’t have enough data to nail it down—was a brand-spanking-new military shipyard refitting the warships Colossus had bought from Brisingr.

CIC—both the combat information center and the tactical-analysis team that lived there—was doing their own analysis of the latest data as she stared at the holographic map she’d conjured above her desk, but she figured it never hurt to have multiple different perspectives on the data.

It had been extremely easy to confirm that the refits weren’t taking place at the civilian yards in orbit of Colossus or at the planet’s Lagrange points. Those yards were active and busy, but even at the distance that Harvest of Hopes took her scans from, it was straightforward enough to confirm that none of them appeared to be warships.

“Huh.”

Kira exhaled thoughtfully as she looked at a missing data point.

N45-K had been present in orbit of Colossus in every previous data set. The two D9C-class destroyers had occasionally been with her, but mostly the CNW’s single active carrier had orbited close to what Kira guessed was the command station for Colossus’s defenses.

Now that orbit was empty. For the first time in the four trips Harvest of Hopes had made to the Colossus System as Samuels tried to negotiate peace, the carrier was missing from her position under the defense constellation’s guns.

Mental commands highlighted several sections of the system she’d been keeping a careful eye on. Harvest had been too far out, and her sensors didn’t have high-enough resolution to be certain, but those sections were where Kira would have put capital-ship yards.

The data they had from Harvest suggested that there were, at least, space stations at each of the locations. Now, though…

“Mwangi, I need your eyes and the analysis team to focus somewhere in the Colossus data,” she ordered.

“If it’s Colossus orbit, we already know that N45-K has moved. That’s a problem, isn’t it?” the Captain asked.

“It is, yes,” Kira agreed. “But I want you to take a look at the map location I’m sending you now. It’s hard to be sure with the resolutions we’ve got, but I’ve been watching this zone as one of the places I would have put a concealed military shipyard.”

It was anchored on a larger-than-average asteroid that didn’t quite qualify as a dwarf planet, one that orbited near the outer edge of the inner asteroid belt and was easily accessed from Colossus for at least half of the habitable planet’s year.

“I’m flipping it to Analysis, but what am I looking for, Admiral?” Mwangi asked.

Kira was suddenly very aware that, experienced as her people were at this point, the vast majority of her officers and crew were from the Syntactic Cluster, a region only now being dragged kicking and screaming into military and economic technology parity with her home sector.

“That large asteroid creates a lee zone that’s shielded from debris but has the asteroid belt to protect it,” she told him. “My analysis of the previous scans suggested refined metals, power signatures, the works for a midsized complex.”

There was a pause as Deception’s Captain ran through the same data.

“Okay, I can kind of see it,” he conceded. “It looks like a mining outpost or something, though, nothing major.”

“Compare it to the same location on the last scan, Akuchi,” Kira ordered.

The pause was longer.

“Kuso,” Mwangi swore. That was, she suspected, his only Japanese—but it was enough.

“There was a lot more activity there ten days ago, wasn’t there?” she asked. “Am I right?”

“I’ll let Tactical look at the map point themselves,” her flag captain replied. “See if they hit the same pattern—but you’re right. Whatever was under construction there is gone.”

“Which means they’ve finished refitting at least one ship,” Kira concluded.

* * *

Admiral Bachchan listened to the analysis report silently, her face impassive as she waited for Commander Soler to finish laying out what Kira’s people knew.

“That’s not much,” she finally said. “Just enough to panic, not enough to action.”

Kira, Mwangi and Soler were linked to the SDC’s commander by hologram. She’d been expecting Bachchan to include other officers, but instead they were only speaking to the Admiral.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Kira agreed. “Worst-case scenario, they’ve finished the entire refit ahead of schedule.”

“How likely is that?” the Samuels officer asked.

“Possible, not likely,” Kira estimated. “I mean, Brisingr could have finished bringing those ships up to speed in the time they’ve had, but Brisingr knows those classes inside and out. My guess is that they’ve focused their efforts on getting a portion of them online—as they did with the first wave from the Secondary Service Reserve.”

Bachchan looked like she’d eaten something sour as she considered.

“So, it depends on their strategy and how they’d decided to work with it a month or more ago,” she said grimly. “If they are sticking with the commerce raiding, they may have focused on getting the escorts online. If they’ve done that…”

“They may well have enough hulls to run a blockade across an end of the Corridor,” Kira replied. “Leave merchants with no choice but to discharge at Colossus.

“That would be unlikely to be looked on positively by the systems on the edge of the Corridor,” she noted. “And it would be a thin blockade, a fragile one. Fragile enough that even armed merchant ships would be able to breach it in places.

“But it would serve their strategic purposes quite well—until we decided we were prepared to risk uncovering Samuels and sent my ships after the blockade.” She shrugged.

“There is no single ship in the flotilla that Brisingr sold Colossus that I am not confident in the ability of either of my ships to handily defeat,” she reminded Bachchan. “While a blockade with their escorts would be a temporary inconvenience to your trade, it would spread out their ships and expose them to defeat in detail.”

“Which they know,” Bachchan concluded. “So. They will have commissioned as many of the heavy ships as possible and will attempt to force a fleet action. What is our countermeasure?”

Huntress will have just novaed to her last trade-route stop,” Kira said. “She’ll return here in a bit over twenty hours.

“My recommendation at this point is that you see if we can reasonably configure the Watchtower volunteers to act as depot ships for your Guardians—and finish getting the depot ships we have online,” she told the Samuels woman. “If we hold both of my ships at the ready, the Watchtower ships can bring us out from Samuels as soon as the Nova Wing makes their move.”

“If they’ve commissioned the full strength that they purchased, that is more than you can handle,” Bachchan pointed out. “What happens then?”

“They cannot both blockade Samuels and maintain sufficient force concentration to fight Deception and Huntress,” Kira replied. “If they bring the full flotilla, we see what they do. If they attempt a new blockade, we defeat them in deta—”

“Contact! Unscheduled contact!”

Bachchan was receiving the alert from a different source than Kira and Deception’s officers, but she was clearly getting a notice from someone.

“It’s Shenzhen,” Bachchan told them. “Watchtower unit…from the nova-route stop Huntress should be at.”

“Get the data from them, Admiral,” Kira told her employer. “Mwangi, take Deception to battle stations.”

“Demirci?” Bachchan demanded.

“We’re not the only ones who can attempt a defeat in detail, Admiral!”

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