Back aboard Deception, Kira linked into a virtual conference with her senior officers and Macey. She hadn’t even had time to steal a kiss from Konrad, but the timer before they got underway was ticking down.
“Apollo Intelligence was late on the ball for this,” she told them all. “The trade attaché figured our mission is in Apollo’s interest, so he gave me their report.
“Numbers and types of ships match up with Samuels’s intel, but at least one carrier was in the Secondary Service Reserve in the Syndulla System.” She glanced at Macey and didn’t elaborate further. From their expressions, her officers understood completely.
Konrad Bueller especially looked…frustrated. She was going to have to pin her boyfriend down for more than personal reasons after the meeting.
“The Apollo staff here figures that Colossus did a quick refit on an SSR ship that hadn’t been demilitarized at all, then loaded her up with their fighters and sent her out,” she concluded. “Mrs. Macey, what did you dig up?”
“I don’t have any useful background,” the Samuels delegate said quietly. “So, you know more about where these ships came from than I do. I did have a conversation with our people here who’ve been trying to sort out a way around the blockade.”
Macey paused and looked down, making an unnecessary attempt to straighten her dress.
“The Mowat System is perhaps not the best place for my people to look for help,” she conceded, “but there has been a surprising lack of support or even empathy for our situation. Even shipping lines that have used Samuels exclusively for decades appear to simply be shrugging and replotting their courses to go through Colossus.”
“It’s not a freighter captain’s or a shipping line’s business to breach a blockade,” Kira reminded her. “They have to do business, one way or another, and so long as there is a way through the Corridor, they can do that.
“They may personally regret what’s happening with Samuels, but very few people get involved in other star systems’ politics. And of those who do, it’s rarely a good thing for the star systems in question.”
“Perhaps,” Macey said. “I feel we’re lacking even any personal regret. The people our staff here have dealt with don’t seem to care at all, barring some minor complaints about the change in cost. We know some of what is out there now, but that’s mostly thanks to our own ships that have turned back after being forced to discharge at Colossus.”
“I’m surprised Colossus is letting your ships go,” Mwangi said. “A blockade implies a state of war. No one is going to blink if they started interning all of your ships that had to discharge there.”
“They may well be now,” Davidović pointed out. “Any ship that Mrs. Macey’s people have made contact with left Colossus at least six days ago.”
“What do we know?” Kira asked Macey gently. “The more information we have, the easier it will be for us to break the blockade.”
“You will break it, then?” Macey asked.
“That was our contract, Mrs. Macey,” Kira reminded the other woman. Again. Sometimes, it was very obvious that the Samuels diplomat had never played this game before. “There are specifics in the contract for what Memorial Force gets paid for doing so. I wouldn’t have added those if I hadn’t planned on breaking whatever blockade Colossus put in place.”
She shrugged.
“In truth, I figured the likelihood that Colossus was moving sooner than you expected was at least fifty-fifty,” she told Macey. “It wasn’t in their interests for you to have months of warning. We were prepared for this.”
“I hate to accept that this must come to violence,” Macey said. “But…thank you.”
She made another pointless attempt to arrange her dress, then straightened.
“The information we have on the blockading force is limited,” she told them. “But we have confirmed the presence of at least one carrier, multiple squadrons of Liberator MFNCs, and at least two active destroyers. Our analyst here said… Delta-Nine-Charlies?”
“D-Nine-C heavy destroyers,” Kira filled in. “They were on the list, and I’m familiar with them.”
A handful of Brisingr-built D9C heavy destroyers had played a role in one attempt by the Equilibrium Institute to reshape the Syntactic Cluster.
“We don’t have a lot of extra maneuvering room as far as nova jump on the starships goes,” she continued. “But we’ll be arriving through one of the most heavily trafficked stops coming in from the Outer Rim. If they haven’t secured that stop, they haven’t blockaded Samuels.”
A mental command linked a map to the rest of the conference.
“Here and here,” she told them, highlighting two trade-route stops. “We take one extra jump before we head to Samuels, and we should clear two major entry points to the system. Once we’ve discharged static at Samuels, we sweep back out and hit the other parts of the blockade.”
Four more trade-route stops flashed on the screen.
“We don’t know how many ships are in play yet,” she reminded everyone. “We can guess that it’s only one N-Forty-Five and the four D-Nine-Cs. A carrier and four destroyers are sufficient for an effectively unopposed blockade of a star system if they’re bold enough.”
She glanced at Macey’s image and smiled at the concerned expression the older woman was trying to conceal. Macey was good, but Kira hadn’t expected the pacifist to be comfortable with going into the middle of a fight.
“Springtime Chorus will not accompany us into the battlespace,” she said drily. “Once we reach the blockade zone, Chorus will wait twelve hours before following us into nova. She will then nova directly to Samuels before we move on to the second trade-route stop.
“Your people and your ship can’t contribute to the fight, Mrs. Macey, and you’re paying us to protect you. I see no reason to risk a consular ship in the middle of a firefight.”
“I…appreciate that, Admiral,” Macey said calmly. “Of course, once Huntress and Deception have engaged the Colossus Nova Wing, I will authorize payment of the combat portions of your contract.”
She paused.
“Is there any chance of resolving this without violence, Admiral?” she asked softly. “I understand the advantage of surprise in this situation, but if we can avoid unnecessary bloodshed…”
“There’s a protocol,” Mwangi pointed out. Deception’s Captain had served aboard Conviction under John Estanza before Kira had ever joined them. He’d been a mercenary for longer than any of the other senior officers with them.
“They’ll challenge us to honor the blockade; we’ll inform them of our contract and give them a chance to lift the blockade of their own accord,” he continued. “It’s…effectively a declaration of war on the part of Memorial Force, as opposed to Samuels.”
“Were Samuels engaging in active operations on their own and we were supporting, the rules would be different,” Kira told Macey. Inasmuch as any of the “protocols” Mwangi mentioned were rules. More like…a recommended voluntary code of conduct.
“But we will give them a chance to back down before we bring up jammers,” she continued. “After that… Well, it’s damn hard to talk when every wavelength used for communication has been turned into hashed garbage.”
“I have faith that you will do the best you can,” Macey finally said. “I understand the realities of the situation, Admiral Demirci, Captains, Commanders. I just…do not like them.”
That was fair. Kira was very good at her job—but that didn’t mean she liked killing people.
At all.
* * *
“So?” Kira asked from the bed as Konrad came out of the bathroom, teeth freshly brushed.
“So?” he echoed back.
“You had a look when we were talking about where the active N-Forty-Five came from,” she told him. “She’s N45-K, if that helps with the feeling like you just ate a lemon.”
Her lover sighed and shrugged, which did fascinating things to his broad-shouldered physique when he was shirtless.
“It confirms the lemon, at least,” he told her. He leaned against the bulkhead and eyed her. “I don’t know if it’s relevant citrus, though. It’s old.”
“And we’ve officially killed that metaphor,” Kira told him. She was still wearing her shipsuit, but she was still enjoying the way Konrad’s gaze clung to her body. That said…
“But you do think it’s relevant, don’t you?” she murmured.
“N45-K was in Syndulla when we were,” Konrad admitted. “That was back when Deception was K79-L and in the SSR herself. Working for Ghost Explorations… Equilibrium.”
It wasn’t something either of them talked about much, but Konrad Bueller had been a knowing Equilibrium agent before they’d met. He’d actively defected after a sickening synergy between the Equilibrium standard of “no witnesses” and the Brisingr standard of “test before battle” resulted in the massacre of thousands of innocents.
“They were with Ghost?” Kira asked. If N45-K was actively an Equilibrium asset, this whole contract was closer to home than she’d feared.
“No, N45-K was being leased to the Syndulla government,” he told her. “I didn’t think of it earlier because they were also leasing a newer N-Sixty-class carrier and a destroyer flotilla, and frankly, I assumed the N-Forty-Five had been scrapped by now.”
“But if they’re using the SSR ships from Syndulla, that explains a lot,” Kira murmured. “And gives us more data, if they’re using ships of the same vintage.”
“I’m not sure any of that is useful, though,” he admitted. “They had eight D-Nine-Cs on the same lease, two I-Fifties, and another K-Seventy like Deception. Plus their own home-built nova ships.”
Kira whistled silently, and not at Konrad’s physique.
“I thought Brisingr’s tributaries were limited to half a million cubic meters of nova ships?” she asked. That was what Brisingr had imposed on the former Friends of Apollo as part of the surrender agreement.
“SSR leases don’t count,” he said. “The BKN and the Kaiser keep a tight leash on those ships. We both know that those leases entail them acting as deniable assets for Brisingr or Equilibrium as often as assets for their supposed operating navies.”
Like K79-L. The ship that was now Deception had been brought out to the Syntactic Cluster with a mixed BKN/Equilibrium crew. Not a soul aboard had actually been in the service of the Syndulla System, though most had been employees of the Ghost Exploration front on paper.
“So, most likely, all four of Colossus’s new D-Nine-Cs came from Syndulla,” Kira concluded. “Or, at least, we won’t be underestimating them if we assume that. And they might have grabbed the I-Fifty as well, though no one was reporting her at Samuels.”
“They’ll have split their forces pretty evenly if they sent all of that forward to lay the initial blockade,” Konrad said. “I’m not the tactics guy, so you’ll know better than I if that’s the right call.”
“It depends on your threat environment,” Kira replied. “Most likely, they have sent the I-Fifty and she’s just on the other side—I’d split my heavies between Inner and Outer Rim routes in their place.”
“And we change the threat environment, do we?” he asked.
“We do,” she confirmed, grinning at him.
“I’m sorry, Kira,” he said softly. “I really didn’t think it was relevant until you mentioned Syndulla…and even then, I still think the data is badly out of date.”
“It is and it might still be useful,” she told him. “It’s all good, my love. Even tells me something entirely new.”
“And what’s that?” he asked.
“That Syndulla is entirely in Equilibrium’s pocket, even more than we thought,” Kira murmured. “But also that Syndulla is the only real asset they have to play with out here, with resources flowing through Brisingr.
“After almost half a decade of feeling like they’ve got their fingers in every pot and pie around here, it’s reassuring to see them going back to the same well—even if they’re doing so to mess with someone else.”
“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” Konrad admitted.
“That’s because you’re not the tactics guy,” she echoed back to him. “You’re the engineer and the reason we even have a home base.”
Still grinning at him, she ran her finger down the seam of her shipsuit and let it fall open to the waist.
“We nova shortly, but I believe we still have quite some time before we actually get into trouble, don’t you?” she purred.