With Deception’s jamming down, at least, Kira was able to get a clearer view of the situation in the overall trade-route stop. While the computers on Deception were generally decent at picking out what was near the cruiser in the jamming fields, seeing beyond the jamming fields was impossible.
Now she could see the bubble, several light-minutes away, marking where Huntress had been fighting for her life. Kira didn’t know, yet, how that battle had ended. She knew Cartman had taken another twenty fighters into it and that the capital ships supporting the enemy fighters were gone.
The Liberators’ pilots might not know it, but they’d already lost the battle. For that matter, they might know it—the battle around Huntress could already be over, but Kira wouldn’t see that for several minutes.
“We’re about fifty-five minutes from rendezvous,” Wallis reported. “Neither we nor Huntress will be able to nova to speed that up.”
Kira nodded silently. The nova fighters would flit back and forth between the two capital ships, but that was why the parasite ships with their fast-cooling short-range FTL drives existed.
“We have to trust that Davidović and our fighter wings have the situation under control,” she murmured. A hundred and twenty Liberators versus sixty Wolverines and Hussar-Sevens—and Scimitar had sent six of the Hussars away with his bombers, turning the odds even further against his people.
Kira trusted Colombera’s judgment. The fact that he’d sent any escorts at all with the bombers told her that the battle had been more even than her worst fears. Now those escorts were presumably back in the fray—and Cartman’s planes were reinforcing them, bringing the numbers to eighty on one-twenty.
Memorial Force’s fighters were the latest designs from the Navy of the Royal Crest, a peer power to Apollo or Brisingr. She figured they were at least a generation ahead of the Liberators, and the Wolverines were specialized interceptors.
She suspected that the Colossus Nova Wing was getting a harsh education in why, sometimes, a master of one was better than a jack of all trades.
“Outside Huntress’s jamming bubble, nova zone is clear,” Solar reported. “I’ve got three clusters of civilian ships, all making a run for it away from all types of battle zones.”
“Good,” Kira replied. “We want the civilians well clear.” She paused. “Are there any Watchtower ships left?”
“Not that I have ID files for,” Soler told her. “Might be someone we can talk into carrying a message to Samuels, but I suspect anyone who can nova has.”
“I would,” Kira conceded. She eyed the nearest cluster of ships. Some of the ships looked familiar, but her brain was still riding an adrenaline high. Whatever was familiar about the ships wasn’t a threat, at least.
“Group one,” she said slowly. “Soler, can you run IDs on those ships for me?”
“Standard sixty-kilocubic freighters, mostly,” the Tactical officer replied. “Couple of tramps, few others of assorted sizes. I’ll start a closer analysis if you want, but we were focusing on the area around Huntress.”
“Are any of them missing since we jumped in?” Kira asked softly.
There was a long pause.
“No… Wait… No… Huh.”
“Commander?” Mwangi demanded a moment before Kira could.
“We have the same number of ships, but they’re different ships,” Soler said. “Two new sixty-kilocubic ships since we arrived, but two similarly sized ships have left, too.”
In a perfect world, they’d have gone to Samuels and updated the SDC on what had happened. But the chill rippling down Kira’s spine suggested another option. A much uglier option.
“Mwangi, pull the repair teams back inside,” she ordered softly.
“We still need to replace damaged dispersal webs and plating,” the cruiser captain complained. “The faster the teams get to work, the sooner—”
“Get them back inside now,” she snapped. “And stand by for incoming!”
She was too late. Even as she barked the order, she knew she was too late—even before the nova flares flashed across the screen, someone else was doing what she’d done to the Colossus Nova Wing and emerging barely outside heavy-cannon range.
But where she’d done it with one capital ship, the newcomers did it with three. And escorts. She barely needed to reference her headware to identify them, either. In the stark light of their own emergences, her memories were more than sufficient to identify two K-90-series heavy cruisers and one HC-10 series battle carrier of the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy.
The six D12-class destroyers arrayed around the carrier and cruisers were just the icing on the cake, even though the escorts alone out-cubed Deception two to one.
“Evasive maneuvers,” Mwangi snapped. “Jammers up!”
“Hold off the jammers for a moment,” Kira ordered. “Maintain evasives and get us clear…but if they’re not jamming, they want to talk.”
The first confirmation was that the carrier group didn’t immediately attempt to close, though the Weltraumpanzer heavy fighters and other starfighters spilling out of the three capital ships were hardly a pleasant greeting.
A moment later, a chirping sound on several consoles confirmed her suspicions.
“Incoming transmission from the carrier,” Smolak said in a small, very tired, voice.
“Link me,” Kira ordered. “Time lag?”
“Third of a second each way,” the coms officer told her. “Practically real-time.”
Kira nodded and set the channel carefully. She’d see everything the BKN was sending—and they’d only see her. Hopefully, that would give the impression she had a full flag bridge and be a tad more intimidating than the empty space around her.
She received the same thing from the Brisingr ship as she was sending: a holographic image of a single person, standing stiff-backed at attention as they appeared in front of her.
“I am Vice Admiral Maxi Bueller,” the stranger said grimly. Their basic headware beacon information came through on the transmission, informing Kira that the androgynous gray-haired officer was nonbinary…and a member of “those Buellers,” as Macey had asked Konrad Bueller when they’d met.
This officer, like Kira’s boyfriend, could theoretically stand for election to Kaiser.
“I am Admiral Kira Demirci,” Kira replied. “I am not certain, Admiral Bueller, why your ships are present here. You have no conflict with Samuels or Colossus. That said, I have no contract to engage you and will not interfere with your passage through the Corridor.”
“I am not one to cut fancy words and lies from whole cloth, Admiral Demirci,” Bueller told her. “We both know how to play the political games, but I do not feel that deception or prevarication will serve us here, will they?”
“Perhaps not,” Kira admitted. “I am aware, after all, that Brisingr provided Colossus with the ships that attacked Samuels.”
“The ships you have handily dispatched,” Bueller said, with clear admiration in their voice. “The argument over how much firepower was necessary to bring you in was heated, Admiral, but I saw Heller’s Hellions in action at the end of the war.
“I had no illusions about the ability of an officer trained in that school.”
Kira had to swallow a wince of both concern and surprise. She hadn’t expected that the BKN carrier group was just passing through—the timing was suspicious enough, but the fact they’d been backing Colossus had made it likely they were making a play.
She just hadn’t expected it to be that explicitly about Memorial Force.
“Neither I nor my employer are currently at war with Brisingr,” she said softly. “I am…not certain what you mean by ‘bring me in.’”
“You are a complicating factor, Admiral Demirci,” Admiral Bueller told her. “One my Kaiser has decided we can no longer afford.
“Out of recognition of the situation, professional respect for your achievements and a desire not to have to kill a fellow member of the Succession in Commander Konrad Bueller, I have an offer to make.”
“There will be consequences for this,” Kira warned.
“Samuels is years from being even a threat to the Kaiserreich,” Admiral Bueller replied. “Redward is too distant to ever be a real concern. Your friends are weak or distant, Admiral. There is only one way out of this.”
“Then state your offer.”
“Surrender. Yourself, K79-L, Commander Bueller, any other survivors of the Three Hundred and Third Nova Combat Group, and the Brisingr traitors from K79 will enter my custody,” the Brisingr Admiral told her. “We will permit any Syntactic Cluster crew members of K79-L to return to the Cluster aboard Huntress, but K79-L is our ship.
“I am authorized by my Kaiser to guarantee the lives of the Apollon and Brisingrian personnel surrendered to us,” they continued. “You will all be placed under house arrest on one of the Kaiser’s personal estates, where you will remain in a state of comfort and luxury until such time as Kaiser Reinhardt decides you are no longer a threat to the Kaiserreich.”
As demands for total surrender went, the offer was surprisingly generous. The BKN did have a legitimate claim on Deception, not that Kira would acknowledge it, and there was a real argument that the forty-odd Brisingr members of Deception’s crew, like Konrad, had committed treason.
There was no legitimate claim on Kira, Colombera and Cartman, the only three members of the ASDF’s 303 Nova Combat Group aboard Deception or Huntress, but sheer firepower made a lot of laws. Kira couldn’t deliver Dinesha Patel or Evgenia Michel, the last two Three Oh Three survivors, into the Kaiserreich’s hands—Patel commanded Fortitude’s fighter group, and Michel commanded one of the escort destroyers—but she had to admit that Admiral Bueller’s carrier group could take the two ships she had.
Jamming is down around Huntress; they’re updating us, Mwangi informed her by silent headware message. Scimitar’s people were hurt bad. They’ve got tracks on a lot of ejector pods, but all told, we’re down thirty-five fighters.
In Kira’s experience, there was about a seventy percent chance that the ejector pods had worked properly, blasting the fighter crews out at the last possible second. That meant she’d likely only lost twelve to fifteen people, including copilots, so far today.
Those were names and faces she’d have to register later. Right now, the cold numbers that came along with Mwangi’s message were critically important.
Memorial Force had twenty-seven Wolverines, twenty-two Hussar-Sevens, and eight Wildcat-Fours left. Fifty-seven nova fighters.
Vice Admiral Bueller had three squadrons of Weltraumdachs-Fünf bombers, four of Weltraumfuchs-Sechs Interceptors, and eight Weltraumpanzer-Fünf heavy fighters. A hundred and fifty nova fighters, all told.
Plus the two K90 cruisers, slightly smaller than Deception but twenty years newer, and the D12 destroyers, half the size of the cruisers but still newer than Deception. And it wasn’t like the carrier was unarmed either—and with the entire carrier group hanging just outside cannon range, that was far too relevant.
Your orders? Mwangi asked silently.
“My patience is not infinite, Admiral Demirci,” the Brisingr officer said quietly. “I know your reputation, and I’m disinclined to let you come up with a clever solution. These terms are generous, but they are not negotiable.
“If you have not powered down K79-L’s engines and cannon in ninety seconds, I will assume you do not intend to accept my offer.”
“Your terms are generous,” Kira conceded, trying to play for time to think, searching through the scanner feeds of the trade-route stop for some kind of answer. Huntress could send the nova fighters back, but with the communication lag, Deception could be gone by the time her fighters made it.
The only nova fighter available, in fact, was Kira’s own spare Wolverine. Kira was good—she knew it. Even rusty, she could fly circles around all but a handful of her own pilots.
But the Brisingr nova-fighter wings would have pilots forged in the same cauldron that had shaped her. Her Wolverine still had a slight edge over even a Weltraumfuchs-Sechs in speed and firepower, and she figured she could take the average BKN pilot at two-to-one odds.
Not at a hundred and fifty to one.
“You understand, Admiral, that surrender does not come easily to any of us, especially in the face of what is frankly an illegal demand,” Kira said. “And you ask me to surrender people who have placed their lives and trust in my hands, not merely myself.”
“Legality in interstellar affairs is a question of tradition and firepower,” Admiral Bueller told her. “I have the firepower…and my Kaiser’s order says damn the tradition. Your clock is ticking, Admiral.”
Konrad. Maxi Bueller. You know them? She silently messaged her lover.
Her headware conversations were passing between the blink of an eye, but she knew that Maxi Bueller figured she was having them. The Brisingr Admiral could afford to be patient, and they’d already stated the limits of their patience.
Kira had forty-eight seconds left.
I know them, Konrad told her. Not well. We’re about as distantly related as we could be and still both stand in the Succession. They have a reputation as a straight shooter—but when you are the hammer, all problems are definitely nails.
And that description sent a harsh chill down her back, and her gaze snapped back up to meet Maxi Bueller’s gaze.
“This whole war between Colossus and Samuels,” she said slowly. “Was it just to set this up?”
Bueller shrugged.
“Outside my area,” they admitted. “But from my conversations with my counterpart in the Shadows…yes.”
Straight shooter, indeed. Kira would almost have preferred they not be that honest. She perhaps could have surrendered if she’d thought this had been an opportunistic strike. As it was…
Admiral, we just received a transmission from Group One, Smolak told Kira.
What? Kira asked. One of the freighters? What did they say?
I think so, yes. Message was two words: “standing by.”
Kira flipped her data feed to the collection of civilian transports, and a suspicion struck her. They were clustered in a strange fashion, one that made no sense for civilian freighters trying to evade a hostile fleet…but one that made a lot of sense for freighters trying to hide something.
“You started a war,” Kira told Maxi Bueller softly. “Memorial Force has destroyed ten nova ships. Best guess…we’ve killed over fifteen thousand human beings. Ignoring the civilian losses that were inevitable in the commerce raiding and blockades that Colossus engaged in.
“So, what, twenty thousand or so people died to set up this ambush?”
“I won’t pretend I like it, Admiral Demirci, but it doesn’t change my objectives or my orders,” Admiral Bueller told her. “You’re just about out of time. I don’t want to kill you. I really don’t want to kill my cousin, but I have my orders.
“Surrender, Admiral Demirci, or die.”
Kira swallowed and placed her faith in her friends.
“My contract with the Ministries of Samuels requires me to secure these trade-route stops against any and all threats to the Samuels System,” she told the Brisingr officer. “By your own admission, you have effectively allied yourselves with the Colossus System in their war against Samuels.
“By the authority of my contract and the general acceptance of the exclusive security zone around a settled star system, I am ordering you to withdraw or be fired upon.”
“That is an answer, isn’t it?” Admiral Bueller said flatly. “I’m sorry, Admiral Demirci.”
“So am I. When you get to hell, tell them your path was paved with your Kaiser’s orders!”