The arrival of the first freighters several days later marked the biggest measure of victory Kira could hope for. For civilian ships to once again be visiting Haven and Sanctuary for static discharge and fuel meant the news of the broken blockade had reached the ends of the Corridor.
Kira watched the relayed report from Haven’s fortresses in her quarters aboard Huntress. The rooms weren’t as personalized as her space on Deception, but they served well enough. The light carrier had never been intended to act as a flagship in the usual sense of the word, which was part of why Kira lived on Deception by preference.
As Haven’s orbitals and service ships began to buzz with activity again, her main attention was focused on a single shuttle rising from the surface toward the carrier. Konrad Bueller was finally done with his two-week contract with the local design team, and the downside of being back aboard ship when he wasn’t was that she wasn’t spending the nights with her boyfriend.
Intellectually, Kira had anticipated the theoretical issue of missing Bueller, but they hadn’t spent much time apart since the blockade of Redward almost two years earlier. It was surprisingly easy for her to justify keeping the most senior and capable engineer in her fleet in her back pocket for almost any mission.
Until she’d spent five days away from him, even she had believed her own justifications. Now, though, she was realizing how painfully she missed his solid presence and assured knowledge. He was reliable, he was capable and he listened.
Now he was on his way back to her, and Kira was finding herself engaged in a level of self-reflection regarding their relationship that she didn’t normally bother with. It was…a surprisingly comfortable thing to put under a microscope and poke at the contours of.
It wasn’t that the contours of the longest-standing relationship in her life were expected, per se, just that the surprises were quite…agreeable.
Kira wasn’t sure what to make of those surprises and the realization that this particular relationship was perhaps even more serious than she’d thought. It didn’t matter, truly. She wasn’t under the impression that Konrad was planning on going anywhere, after all.
But it would be a factor when the time came to shift her flag to Fortitude. Deception’s flag facilities might be better than Huntress’s, but they still paled in comparison to a supercarrier half again the heavy cruiser’s size.
And Kira couldn’t justify operating from the smaller ship just to have her boyfriend in her bed each night…not unless she admitted that as a criterion in advance and made changes.
* * *
From the fierceness of his embrace when he joined Kira in their shared space on Huntress, Konrad had been feeling much the same as she had. Their daily calls had suggested as much to her, but it was still nice to feel loved.
“How was your internship as a design engineer?” she asked him once he released her.
“If there’s an intern in the galaxy getting paid what we charge for my design services, they might single-handedly force us to redefine intern,” Konrad pointed out as he took a seat on the couch.
He winced a moment later.
“I know these quarters are so far down our priority list, they don’t even register, but couldn’t we have found actually comfortable couches for them?” he asked plaintively.
“I…haven’t sat on the couches yet,” Kira admitted. “The chairs are the same as every other standard chair in all of Memorial Force.”
They’d got a deal from a furniture manufacturer on Redward to buy spaceship-style chairs with magnetized wheels in bulk. She was still, over a year later, impressed with Vaduva and Dirix, her purser and ground operations manager respectively, for managing that deal.
They were comfortable, practical and served in almost all settings perfectly well. The couches in people’s quarters on the ships, though, were a far more eclectic mix.
“I believe the couch may be the end result of what happens when the Captain gets a new couch and offers the XO their old one, and a cascade of hand-me-downs occurs until the quarters no one is using get the last couch standing,” she observed.
“Well, I’ve sat on more comfortable benches,” Konrad told her. “Ones carved from stone.”
“I’ll keep that in mind the next time Davidović comes around with a request for a furniture budget,” she promised. “Though we lost the original question.”
He chuckled as he shifted on the couch to get more comfortable.
“Design engineering is always an entertaining vacation,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do it as my main task—I got so bored when I lived behind a desk—but a few days or weeks is a nice change.”
A few months, Kira remembered, had been too much. Though that had probably been as much the nature of the emergency construction program Konrad Bueller had helped lead during the blockade of Redward.
Her partner would never forgive himself for the workers who’d died building those cruisers. Those workers had known the compromises that had been made to accelerate the construction. There’d been no uninformed consent on the risks that had killed them, and with the fate of their star system in the balance, those workers had taken up the tasks freely.
But Konrad Bueller had been one of the people in charge, and he would always bear the weight of those deaths. If they hadn’t worn on him, he wouldn’t have been the man Kira loved.
“When do they lay keels?” she asked.
“Apparently, a lot of it is riding on the legislation going to popular vote tomorrow,” he warned. “If I’m reading what I saw correctly, the SDC only has the authorization to assemble the military yards and build a single five-escort carrier group.”
He shook his head.
“Those keels are explicitly restricted to the military yards, too,” he observed. “A carrier, two cruisers and three destroyers. That authorization let them spend the time and money to draft designs for all three classes, but if the general vote blocks them building a real fleet…”
Kira grimaced.
“Everyone I’ve spoken to has presented that as a near-guaranteed thing,” she noted. “But any vote is a risk, I suppose.”
“Always,” Konrad confirmed. “If the Nova Fleet Construction Bill passes the populace tomorrow, they’re authorized to construct a two-million-cubic fleet anchored on five fleet carriers and associated escort groups.”
Kira ran through the numbers in her hundred.
“So, at four hundred kilocubics a carrier group, I’m guessing thirty-ish-kilocubic destroyers and hundred-kilocubic capital ships?” she asked.
“Bingo,” he told her. “Everything is built around twelve-X class one drives, but they’re planning hundred-ten-kilocubic carriers, hundred-kilocubic cruisers, and thirty-kilocubic destroyers.
“Some obvious mistakes in their initial designs, some less obvious,” he continued. “The biggest problem is one I can’t fix in two weeks of flagging issues in the schematics, though.”
“Oh?” Kira asked, then paused thoughtfully. “The nova fighters.”
“The nova fighters,” he confirmed. “Their current plan is to load the Regiment-class fleet carriers with a hundred Guardian heavy fighters each. It’s not the worst plan, but the Guardians are jacks-of-all-trades.”
A multirole heavy fighter like the Guardian—or the Colossus Nova Wing’s Liberator or the Hussar-Sevens of Memorial Force—served a very necessary purpose. It was useful to have a nova fighter that could take on any role from carrier defense to torpedo strike competently. The problem was that an interceptor or a bomber of a comparable tech level did the specialty job better and for less money.
Plus, Kira could easily fit sixty interceptors in the same space occupied by fifty heavy fighters.
“But if the vote passes, they lay more keels in the civilian yards?” she asked.
“The plan is that they lay down ten destroyers in the Lagrange-point yards over the next three weeks if the bill passes,” Konrad confirmed. “And when the military yards come online in two months, they’ll focus on building the carriers and cruisers. Fifteen capital ships and fifteen destroyers to finish the fleet.”
“That’s a huge expansion, and they don’t even have monitors to draw crews from,” Kira noted. “But once two or three of those carrier groups are online, we’ll be able to take our money and head home without any worries.”
“Agreed.”
Her boyfriend’s gaze drifted to the display she’d been watching, showing the ships clustering around Haven.
“I wonder what news is coming from home,” he murmured. “And, well, home.”
Kira chuckled as she understood his point.
“Redward should be fine,” she told him. “I can’t speak to Apollo or Brisingr. I’ve had no idea what was going on at ‘home’ for a long time.”
“Me either,” Konrad admitted. “This is the closest I’ve been since Equilibrium sent us out to fix the Syntactic Cluster.”
“Still far enough that none of it should impact us,” Kira murmured. “And it’s not like any of us are ever planning on going back, is it?”
“No,” he agreed. “Especially when my Kaiser appears to really want you dead.”
She shivered.
“A listed death mark was one thing,” she admitted. “Most of the Rim knows Memorial Force too well for random bounty hunters to try shit anymore. Random Shadow cells trying to check off the Mark in the Crest’s space… That was bad.
“But this… They passed up a chance to turn an entire war in favor of an ally to take a better shot at me. I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” her boyfriend agreed. “I’m not sure what to do about it—and the fact that my Kaiser has assassins this far out does not fill me with warm fuzzy feelings about home.”