“Nova.”
The world flickered around Kira as she double-checked her links. She was beginning to understand some of the problems with not having a flag-deck crew—not least that it felt weirdly lonely in the empty space, even with the holographic link to the bridge.
There were half a dozen stations around the big holotank at the center of the flag deck, but all of them were empty. Several were completely covered by the illusory merge with the bridge. If Kira had had people at them, those people would have been available to answer her questions without being focused on the minute-to-minute combat operations of the heavy cruiser.
Of course, if she was being honest, Fortitude’s flag deck was almost four times the size of Deception’s. The K70-class cruiser’s flag facilities were very much an afterthought, where the Crest-built Fortitude had been designed from the keel out to be one of the flagships of the Navy of the Royal Crest.
She should be commanding Memorial Force from the flag deck of the supercarrier. Instead, she was on Deception for personal reasons—well, those and the fact that she’d lost the coin toss with Zoric.
Right now, Kavitha Zoric had the supercarrier and the bigger contract. Kira got to spend time with her boyfriend. It had seemed a fair enough deal, though the contract with Samuels was expanding on them.
“Scopes are clear of hostiles,” Soler’s hologram reported crisply. “I have a cluster of transports at sixty-five by ninety-three, eighty-two light-seconds. No other contacts. No warships or fighters.”
“Well, that’s not what we were expecting, was it?” Kira murmured. “No sign of N45-K?”
“Nothing,” the Tactical officer confirmed.
“They may have recognized the blockade was broken and abandoned the whole affair until they had reinforcements,” Mwangi suggested. “They lost their only active cruiser and half their destroyers. N45-K’s CO could have chosen to withdraw while they still had a carrier and two destroyers.”
“It would probably even be the right call,” Bueller said. “I’m not sure I’ve met many officers I’d trust to make that call, but from everything we know of the situation…”
“From my perspective, it’s a pain,” Kira told them. “But Bueller is right. Given that we expected to roll over her and her escorts in a single fight, the carrier-group CO had every chance to recognize the same balance of forces.
“Those three ships will be worth more to Colossus in two months when they have the rest of the fleet than they would be right now in a battle all of us can fight in our heads.”
She shook her head.
“That said, I’d have laid a trap,” she admitted wryly. “So, let’s get the fighters into space and send a squadron of Wolverines to check on those freighters. If everything is as it appears, we just waste some fuel that Samuels has already agreed to pay for.”
“And if they’re playing silly buggers, we can lure them out and kick their asses rather than getting hit by surprise,” Mwangi agreed. “Cartman?”
“I’ll take the recon squad out myself,” Nightmare said instantly. “Puts a senior, maybe even wiser, head on the scene rather than waiting three minutes for an answer.”
“Agreed,” Kira said after a moment’s thought. “Be prepared for surprises. I don’t think the Nova Wing is good enough to pull the wool over our eyes, but I’ve been underestimated too many times to want to get into the habit!”
* * *
Kira watched Nightmare’s Deception-Alpha squadron bear down on the cluster of merchant ships with an edge of nervousness. She’d seen this kind of post-blockade cleanup operation go very, very badly in the past—and their only fatality so far on this particular contract had been in exactly this situation.
The six Wolverine interceptors were over eighty light-seconds away, which meant that everything Kira was seeing was almost a minute and a half out of date. Given the sixty-second cooldown on the nova drives after this short a jump, in theory she should have already seen them retreat if things had gone obviously wrong.
Or, of course, all of her people could already be dead. Lightspeed delays did not help Kira’s nerves.
“All contacts are showing dead in the water,” Cartman’s voice reported. The transmission was just as old as the light they were receiving. “I’m reading zero Jianhong radiation across all contacts. Their nova drives are either off-line or missing.
“Power, heat and gravity signatures are…weak but live,” she continued after a moment. “I’d say primary power is off-line on all eleven ships. No Harringtons, no fusion plants—but I think I’ve got active grav plants and secondary power sources.
“No active sensors or coms. We are continuing our approach and watching for new contacts.”
There was nothing to stop Nightmare from simply vaporizing the eleven freighters the CNW had left behind. There was, equally, no point to the pilots doing any such thing. No hostile contacts, no charged weapons. Only the silence of half-dead ships.
“Freighters are a mix, about what I’d expect for this section of the Rim,” Soler reported. “Two eighty-kilocubic haulers, five in the forty-to-sixty range, one twenty-kilocubic fast packet and three ten-kilocubic tramps.”
The basic ten-kilocubic nova-capable hull only really had one virtue, in Kira’s opinion: it was cheap and any society with the standard colonial database could build it. The ancient term “tramp freighter” had been quickly resurrected for the vast numbers of cheap freighters hauling whatever small cargo they could find that underlay the interstellar economy.
“We have no coms with anyone,” Cartman continued. “I don’t think I’ve seen this before, but I’m not sure there’s any threat here.”
“Commander Bueller?” Kira queried her boyfriend, her attempt at professionalism probably undermined by the fact that everyone knew he was her boyfriend—but necessary for the task regardless.
“It looks like they activated the hardware lockouts on the fusion cores before they left,” Bueller replied thoughtfully. “They’re designed as a safety measure for when ships are being built and refitted.
“Even with all of the access codes and authorizations, it can take as much as twelve hours to reactivate a locked-out fusion plant,” he told her. “Assuming the CNW reset all of those codes…even the best engineering teams are looking at twenty-four hours, easy, to get the power plant back online.
“That’s part of why the secondary power generators can’t be locked down like that,” he continued. “To make sure there’s life support and such if someone pulls exactly this kind of shit.”
“So, what are we looking at?” Kira asked. “Can we speed that up?”
“Maybe,” Bueller replied. “But most likely we’re looking at three days or so before any of them can nova.”
“And no sign of the Nova Wing,” she noted. “All right. Davidović, Mwangi—get us moving toward the freighters.
“Keep the guns online and the fighters up for now. We’ll stand down to a lower security level once we’ve made contacts with the crews, but for now we’ll stand watch. I can’t help feeling that these bastards have another arrow in their quiver.”
* * *
If there was another shoe to drop, it was still hanging when the two capital ships settled in near the cluster of impounded freighters and Milani’s shuttles started moving people around.
After that, the details began to fall into place with speed.
“They up and left about a day before you arrived,” the Captain of one of the large haulers told Kira. Yoshi Sakata was an elderly man of Japanese extraction, with thinning white hair crowning fiercely sharp eyes.
“A handful of nova fighters appeared, and they started to become agitated,” Captain Sakata continued. “We all had a few soldiers aboard, but up to that point, things were…”
He pursed his lips as he sought a word.
“Polite-ish?” he concluded. “We were under their guns and we were definitely prisoners, but they’d interned everybody heading to Samuels from the Apollo-Brisingr Sector. There are rules for handling neutrals when you do that, I suppose.”
“Expectations, at least,” Kira told him. She was appearing to the merchant captain as a hologram projected by Milani’s suit, allowing them to have a conversation despite her never leaving Deception.
“Indeed. Once those fighters arrived, though, there was about a day where they were quite agitated. Then a Commodore Vanessa Rivers got on the radio with everyone and told us she was releasing us all on the condition that we not nova to Samuels for at least seventy-two hours…and that she was going to guarantee that we kept that condition.”
“Her people locked out your power plants,” Kira concluded, based on Konrad’s guess.
“Exactly.” Sakata shrugged. “She had a pocket carrier group. I have an eighty-kilocubic freighter with a pair of light guns to discourage pirates. Whatever her techs wanted to do on my ship, we couldn’t stop them.”
“And everyone else was in the same boat,” Kira said. “Did you get a good look at what this ‘pocket carrier group’ consisted of?”
Sakata smiled.
“I may have, I may have,” he observed. “But that seems like it would have some worth to everyone, wouldn’t it? I have to fly the Corridor, Admiral, no matter what happens in this little tiff.
“If I’m going to irritate a star system government that I have to work with, it should probably be worth my while, don’t you think?”
Kira sighed. The Admiral of a mercenary fleet had no legs to stand on when complaining about other people being mercenary.
“Fine,” she told him. “Name your price.”
Sakata had clearly been expecting at least a bit more pushback and had to think for a moment. Kira, on the other hand, knew that Samuels was on the hook for anything she had to pay him.
“One hundred thousand Samuels pounds,” he finally said.
“Done.” Kira glanced over at the holographic link to Deception’s bridge. “Smolak, make the transfer.”
The coms officer flashed her a thumbs-up, marking it as done.
“A pleasure to do business with someone reasonable,” Sakata told her. “Shinohara’s sensors are nothing special, I must admit, Admiral, but I will forward you our full scan information on everything we saw of the carrier group.
“We saw a carrier and two destroyers here, though there was also a cruiser present when we arrived,” he noted. “She jumped away after we were interned.
“We were instructed to shut down our sensors, but, frankly, Shinohara doesn’t have any active sensors except close-range collision radar,” Sakata said. “Running our passive receivers is undetectable and, I hoped, might be of use to someone.
“While Commodore Rivers was perfectly polite and operated her force entirely within the letter and the spirit of those ‘expectations’ you mentioned, some of her people were significantly ruder…and the whole affair leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth, yes?”
“So it does,” Kira murmured. “Send us the data, Captain Sakata. What we do with it after that isn’t your problem or your responsibility, is it?”
He bowed over his hands.
“May fortune favor you, Admiral.”