“The vote passed.”
That was the result Kira had been expecting, but from First Minister Buxton’s relieved tone as the mercenary Admiral took a seat at the conference table, it hadn’t felt as sure as everyone had been saying.
“It was…somewhat less narrow than the polling suggested,” Doretta Macey noted.
After almost a month in Samuels, Kira still wasn’t entirely clear on what Mrs. Macey’s formal role in the Ministries was. She wasn’t one of the Ministers, the designated politicians in charge of the civil government’s components, yet she was in almost all of the meetings Kira had with the Ministers.
Macey wasn’t Buxton’s right-hand operative, but Kira judged her to be the First Minister’s left-hand woman.
Their right hand was their husband, and Batsal Tapadia was also at the table. He looked equally relieved as his partner—though it probably helped that he and his company stood to make a vast amount of money from the new fleet.
“Fifty-nine percent in favor, thirty-eight opposed, three percent abstained,” Buxton confirmed, leaning back in their chair and surveying the table.
Kira had brought Davidović with her today, and the SDC had sent Commodore Bachchan, bringing the small meeting to a total of six people gathered around the table in the Rouge House.
“So, you begin construction of the fleet now?” Kira asked. “But still no idea on timeline for commissioning, of course. Not when you’re building your first capital ships.”
“That’s why we engaged your full fleet, Admiral,” Buxton noted. “Speaking of ideas on timelines?”
“The courier will reach Obsidian in about three days,” she told them. “Depending on what, exactly, the contract there is currently involving, Commodore Zoric may be out of the system. Even once she’s received the communique, there will still be components of the Obsidian contract that will need to be completed.”
Kira spread her hands in a shrug.
“It may be as much as another three or four weeks before Fortitude and her escorts can commence their trip here,” she warned. “That trip will take six weeks. I would not count on having Fortitude’s battle group in the Samuels System for at least ten weeks.”
“That was what Mrs. Macey warned me,” Buxton said. “I wanted to hear it from you, however, to be certain. Bachchan.”
“Minister.” The Commodore turned her gaze on Buxton and arched an eyebrow.
“Don’t play innocent,” Buxton warned. “There is exactly zero chance you don’t know what finally landed on my desk this morning. Everyone with half a brain knew you were going to be the SDC’s new CO a while ago, but unanimity takes time.”
The First Minister extended a heavily muscled arm and indicated Commodore Mahinder Bachchan with an index finger.
“You are now Admiral Bachchan, commanding officer of the Samuels Defense Command. Ceremonies and insignia will follow, but if you’re half the commander I’m told you are, you’ve collated an intelligence brief from the civilians arriving.”
“I have,” Bachchan confirmed. “I was expecting to need to present it regardless of how quickly we moved on the promotion.”
Buxton made a clear “get on with it” gesture, and the newly promoted Admiral smiled.
The massive table they were seated around appeared to be carved from a single slice of the trunk of one immense tree. Despite its unmarred surface, it still clearly concealed holoprojectors somewhere, as a map of the Samuels-Colossus Corridor popped silently into existence amidst the small group.
“We’ve now seen ships from most of the usual entry points to the Corridor,” Bachchan told them. “SDC Intelligence officers have talked to most of their captains, and I know that the Ministry of Commerce has had their own discussions. The Ministry was kind enough to provide recordings of their interviews to the SDC Intelligence team as well.
“Basically the same pattern is taking shape in all of the entry systems,” the Admiral continued. “We have updated our local attaché offices with the situation and are advising people that the blockade has been broken and we expect to keep it broken. Our message, which our people are relaying loud and clear, is that Samuels is open for business as usual.
“Of course, Colossus also has people in all of those systems, and they are determinedly sticking to their party line. Samuels is under blockade by the Colossus Nova Wing, and any attempt to reach the system is at risk of seizure or destruction.
“There is an implicit threat of a more aggressive blockade strategy on their part,” Bachchan warned. “If they are to begin a course of commerce raiding along the Corridor, it would be difficult for us to maintain the security of the trade routes.”
“That is…basically how this kind of war is fought, I’m afraid,” Kira warned her employers. “It requires a particularly dominant hand to impose a full blockade as the CNW attempted. Moving through the regions outside your immediate perimeter and destroying or capturing ships headed to Samuels is the logical next step.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Buxton replied. “I do not wish to stand by while Colossus strangles the economic lifeblood of our star system and murders innocents!”
“There are options,” she told them. “None of them are good. With Admiral Bachchan’s permission, I can lay them out.”
“I have no illusions about which of us has more experience at this, Admiral Demirci,” Bachchan pointed out. “Please, let us know what you are thinking.”
Kira nodded her thanks to the Samuels officer and considered the holographic map hanging above the table.
The Corridor wasn’t really a true geographic feature. There weren’t many other star systems in the area around Samuels and Colossus, but they did exist. But they lacked habitable planets—and the two systems with habitable planets were in the rough center of the region, creating an easy stopover point for shipping through a significant volume of otherwise-empty space.
The biggest problem that any freighter captain heading through the Samuels-Colossus Corridor faced was the maps. Because those easy stopover points at the center of the region existed, the mapped trade routes led to them. Kira wasn’t even sure that any of the other stars in the Corridor were within six light-years of the mapped nova points—let alone if those stars had planets for easy discharge.
“The first option would be to aggressively patrol the Corridor ourselves,” she began. “But…” She gestured at the map. “Once we’re past the initial surroundings of the Samuels and Colossus systems, the routes diverge quickly. We’re looking at around sixty different mapped nova stops.
“To guarantee full security along those routes, you would need…well, at a minimum, sixty nova ships,” she told them. “And they would need to be of sufficient weight to take down their most likely challengers.”
Kira let that sink in for a moment, then shook her head.
“No one actually maintains security at that level,” she continued. “A level of acceptable risk has to be decided, but the truth is that we don’t have the ships to maintain any level of security.”
Bachchan had clearly anticipated that, though the civilians looked unhappier.
“Deception is due back in a day,” Kira reminded them. “When she arrives, Huntress will leave to commence the same patrol of the nova points near Samuels. So long as there are only two ships available, securing the immediate area of this star system is honestly the limit of our ability.”
“We cannot simply leave the Colossus Nova Wing to ravage shipping through the Corridor,” Buxton said grimly.
“There are other options, First Minister,” Kira told them. “But you have to realize that the CNW only has three ships at the moment. While they can threaten the entirety of the Corridor, they can only actively interdict one or two trade-route stops.
“That danger is not negligible, but it is one that will be acceptable to many freighter captains and shipping lines,” she continued. “Especially so long as the CNW restricts themselves to forcing the ships they catch to discharge at Colossus.
“That will still swing the balance in the Corridor against you, not least by earning them goodwill, but it will keep the passage through Samuels open.”
“And what are our options if they become more aggressive?” Macey asked quietly.
“Four of them,” Kira laid out. “No. Five.”
“Five?” Buxton asked. “That’s about six more than I was expecting.”
That got a bitter chuckle from the room’s occupants, and Kira smiled thinly.
“First two are variations of the same thing. Turnabout,” she told them. “We send the message to all of the systems at the ends of the Corridor that Colossus is under blockade. Then we either invest Colossus, as they did Samuels, or engage in the same kind of hopefully genteel commerce raiding we’re worried they’re planning.
“With only two capital ships, a close investment of Colossus itself is…hard,” Kira warned. “Our blockade is going to leak like a sieve either way. The only real advantage of a close blockade over a commerce-raiding campaign is the likelihood that we can lure N45-K out into a carrier action.”
“Even with the plan being to take ships intact and accept surrenders, a campaign of piracy is unacceptable,” Buxton told her firmly. “I will not abandon the values our ancestors built our society on and lower ourselves that far.”
“Fair enough,” Kira told him. “Suffice to say there are versions of that campaign that I would refuse to take the contract for.”
A campaign of true commerce raiding, where her fleet fired on any ship that was headed for Colossus with no regard for human life, would certainly be effective. It would also destroy the reputations of both Samuels and Memorial Force, even putting aside Kira’s stringent moral objections to the idea.
“The other options,” Macey demanded. “You said you had five. That’s two.”
“Three leads on from the close blockade,” Kira replied. “In a close blockade of Colossus, we would be at least partially hoping to lure their remaining active warships out into an open engagement. Option three makes that the sole objective: a pure counter-force strike.
“But we don’t just engage their active ships,” she continued. “With a decent amount of scouting, we can make a hard run into Colossus itself. While we couldn’t risk capital ships under the guns of the fortresses, I would be able to send bombers and heavy fighters into the military shipyards where they are refitting the rest of the Brisingr hand-me-downs.”
Both Bachchan and Tapadia could clearly envisage the equivalent strike in Samuels and looked faintly sick. There were countermeasures to what Kira was suggesting, though she doubted Colossus had fully implemented them—and even if it went perfectly, she would lose a lot of the planes she committed.
“Civilian losses would be horrific,” Tapadia said softly. “I can intellectually concede that the yards are legitimate military targets, but the people working on those ships aren’t soldiers.”
“There are ways to minimize it, but yes,” Kira confirmed. “I can promise you that those losses would be as few as possible, that we would launch as clean a strike as we can, but we would be novaing into the system, popping multiphasic jammers and then hitting the under-refit ships with torpedoes.
“Even if our strike were perfect—and we would only have a minute,” she warned, “we would vaporize anyone working aboard the ships in question.”
“I cannot, in the face of a threat that I do not believe to be utterly existential, accept a course of action I know will inflict mass civilian casualties,” Buxton told her, his voice calm but firm. “I do not and cannot accept that the ends justify the means. I do not believe that even a negotiated surrender to Colossus will see such a complete loss of who and what we are that it requires a sacrifice of who and what we are to avoid.
“So, I believe, Admiral, that negates all of your first three options,” the First Minister told her.
“I…admire your certainty, Minister,” Kira said. She was even telling the truth, though she could tell that Davidović wasn’t as sure.
From a lot of perspectives, the counter-force strike was the best option. It wasn’t the best option to Kira, but that was because it called for the knowing sacrifice of a significant portion of her fighter wings to complete. Her first responsibility was to her people, and she didn’t want to lose any of them she didn’t have to.
But she also had the obligation to tell her employers what the options were.
“My recommendation would, in all honestly, be for a partial close blockade,” she told Buxton. “But I am your contractor, Minister Buxton, not even the commander of your military. I can and will only do what you pay me for.”
“You said you had two more options for us,” Taparia said.
“I do, but both are…more passive than I suspect is the true best option,” she warned. “The fourth option is to seek allies.”
She gestured at the map, where a dozen systems served as the entry points to the Corridor.
“Right now, the systems people come here from have chosen to remain neutral in this conflict,” she told them. “But those systems have between five and fifteen hundred thousand cubic meters of nova warships apiece, over ten million cubic meters of combatant starships, all told, per the last data I have.”
Given how most star systems reported their military strength to even their own populaces, she figured that total could be off by as much as a million cubic meters—a dozen capital ships or multiple carrier groups—either way.
The only ones she was certain of were the ones on the Apollo-Brisingr side that were covered by the blandly named Agreement on Nova Lane Security—the peace treaty that restricted Apollo’s former allies to five hundred thousand cubic meters of nova warships apiece.
“They have their own priorities and objectives,” she warned, “but right now, the Colossus Nova Wing fields barely a hundred and fifty kilocubics of true warships, all told. It wouldn’t take many allies to tip the balance against Colossus.”
“The moment we start signing military alliances with non-Corridor systems, Colossus will do the same,” Macey cautioned. “We could turn a relatively contained conflict between us and our nearest neighbor into a region-wide conflagration.”
“The last option I see would avoid that, I think,” Kira said. “But it’s not one that’s easy for anyone to swallow.”
“The last option is to do nothing,” Bachchan said grimly, “isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “Right now, we have superior firepower to the deployable assets of the Colossus Nova Wing, but we don’t have the hulls to provide security across the entire Corridor.
“Without some idea of where N45-K is going to be, I can’t force a fleet battle. That means our best options are either almost purely defensive or extremely aggressive.” She shrugged. “There is no question that we can prevent Colossus from imposing a close blockade, even once the rest of their hand-me-downs come online.”
She couldn’t fight a fleet battle against two carriers and a cruiser, plus escorts, but Deception and Huntress between them meant that the CNW had to keep the three capital ships together to keep Kira from taking them down in isolation.
“So, we just…wait,” Buxton said slowly. “We let them raid the ships heading toward us and do nothing?”
“So long as Colossus continues to attempt to run a relatively clean war, the death toll should be minimal to nonexistent,” Kira told them. “Once Fortitude arrives, I will have the force to push them back and impose a full closed blockade of Colossus. At that point, I can nearly guarantee the prevention of civilian casualties.
“We are currently in a state of strategic stalemate, barring a change in the priorities you want to bring to this conflict,” she concluded. “They are waiting to finish their refits. We are waiting for the rest of Memorial Force to arrive.”
“So, it’s a race, then,” Tapadia said.
“No,” Bachchan told her civilian counterpart. “Because Fortitude will swing the balance of force so thoroughly in our favor that Colossus won’t be able to wage war against us without an entire new generation of construction—a wave of construction we will match.”
“From where I sit, Minister Buxton, Colossus has not yet lost…but from the moment Memorial Force arrived, they no longer had the ability to win this war,” Kira told them. “Which worries me.”
“That sounds like good news, Admiral,” the First Minister replied. “Why does it worry you?”
“Because half the damn Rim knows that Memorial Force has Fortitude,” she explained. “So, they almost certainly know that she’s coming—but they haven’t tried to negotiate yet, have they?”
“They have not,” Buxton admitted. “They respected diplomatic immunity sufficiently to permit our courier to leave after they arrived in Colossus, but they were not prepared to let the envoy land.”
“So, they know everything I know,” Kira said. “And can, presumably, do the same math I can. I have bigger ships and better starfighters here already. Once Fortitude arrives, I will have just as many ships as them, including a supercarrier larger and more modern than anything they can build.
“That math tells me they can’t win this unless they somehow convince you to surrender before Fortitude gets here,” she continued. “So, if they’re unwilling to talk, that means they know something I don’t.
“Or at least they think they do.”