21

It was a telling part of the limitations of Kira’s current main operating base that they didn’t have enough class two nova drives to spare for shuttles. While Fortitude had carried a handful of nova-capable pinnaces when they’d stolen her, the vast majority of their fighter-sized nova drives came from Redward.

And Redward, until recently, had only had the one manufacturing plant, stolen from an Equilibrium patsy. Class two nova drives had very specific manufacturing requirements, down to a precise level of natural gravity. Even Kira’s Wolverine was based on the nova drive core of her old Hoplite-IV starfighter, as Memorial Force recycled every class two drive they possibly could to keep their fighter strength up.

That meant it took ten hours for Kira to make it back to Huntress and Deception on the shuttle they’d taken to Bennet, which was almost half the time the two capital ships needed to discharge their static buildup.

Deception, this is Memorial Actual on approach,” she told the control center. “Any news on the home front?”

She presumed anything major would have been communicated to her by radio. Worst-case scenario, Colombera might even have sent a nova fighter to act as courier.

“Quiet and calm out here, boss,” Dilshad Tamboli told her. The cruiser’s flight deck boss shouldn’t have been the person answering the coms for flight control. That they were suggested that things were very calm indeed.

“Locals have a damn good idea of how to run a discharge station,” Tamboli continued. “If we’d been willing to let them, they’d have docked a sub-boat with its restaurants and casinos aboard to our airlocks.”

Kira chuckled.

“Can’t be that many people who’d let them do that,” she replied.

“They’ve got four of them out here that I’ve seen, so at least some people aren’t paranoid about the idea,” the deck chief replied. “We’ve taken deliveries of food and let some people take leave, but it’s quiet out here, boss.”

“Good.” Kira checked her implants. “I have the bouncing ball, Tamboli,” she told them, confirming the computer link between Deception and the shuttle. “Turning over control.”

“We have the link,” Tamboli confirmed. “Welcome home.”

Kira glanced back at her passengers and smiled. It might be weird to a lot of people for a warship to be home, but to all four of the people aboard her shuttle that day, Deception was definitely home.

* * *

A night’s sleep, a shower and an impressive breakfast later, Kira settled into a virtual conference with her senior commanders.

“All right, people,” she greeted them. “My math says we should finish discharging everything in about half an hour. What’s our status across the board?”

Her attention focused on Davidović first, and the carrier CO smiled calmly.

Huntress went through her first two combat actions with flying colors, sir,” Davidović noted. “A few of the fighters took glancing blows, though that’s Scimitar’s area to speak to. Huntress herself didn’t take any fire and didn’t take any self-inflicted issues, either.

“We are good to go as soon as the static levels are cleared.”

She gestured to Colombera in turn and the dark-skinned CNG coughed.

“As Captain Davidović said, three of our planes took hits in the second engagement,” Scimitar told them all. “Mostly zigged when they should have zagged. It wasn’t anything that the deck team couldn’t patch up, and none of the pilots or copilots were injured.”

Both the Hussar-Seven fighter-bombers and the Wildcat-Four bombers had a copilot aboard, managing the heavier defensive electronic warfare suite and the torpedoes. The Wolverines traded that copilot space and life support for more powerful Harrington coils.

“All three of my flight groups are fully back up to speed and itching to get back out there,” Colombera concluded. “Couple of my fresher pilots made ace in the kerfuffle, and the couple dozen who haven’t want the chance to even up the numbers.”

Even on Apollo, the “three kills make a pilot an ace” rule had been sacrosanct tradition. Kira had never hesitated to allow it, even encourage it, among her mercenary recruits.

“And Deception?” she asked, turning to Mwangi. “I know I stole your CNG and your chief engineer, but my impression is that everything is in hand?”

“We took a few more hits than the starfighters did,” Deception’s gaunt Captain confirmed. “But given that we went toe-to-toe with another cruiser, however much smaller, I’m content with how we handled ourselves.

“We did take half a dozen real hits from the I-Fifty’s guns but nothing that breached the armor,” he continued. “We’ve replaced two thousand four hundred and sixteen square meters of external armor and refitted the energy-dispersal networks behind roughly thirty percent of the exterior hull.

“Bueller can speak to the tests as well as I can”—he gestured to the engineer—“but they all show as green from my end. Our armor did exactly what it was supposed to: sacrifice itself to protect the function and personnel of the ship.

“We do have wounded, but Dr. Devin assures me none require off-ship treatment, and the worst should be out of sickbay in a few days,” Mwangi concluded. “I don’t see any reason to hold off from deploying as soon as we’re finished discharging.”

Kira glanced at the three who’d accompanied her to Bennet.

“Mel, Milani, Konrad. I know it’s not fair for me to ask you to know more than I do,” she noted. “But still. Anything in your areas I should be worrying about?”

Deception’s fighters didn’t take any hits,” Cartman replied. “We’ve got a lot fewer newbies than Huntress, though.”

Despite the expansion of the nova-fighter wings of Redward and King Larry’s allies, there were still very few nova-fighter pilots in the Syntactic Cluster—and the vast majority of the ones who existed were still in their tour of duty with the system militaries that had trained them.

Memorial Force had to recruit volunteers and train them from scratch, a process that left them far more inexperienced than most mercenary fleets would prefer. Kira’s people were sufficiently veteran in both combat and training that they came out better than they might have, but almost half of Huntress’s pilots had flown their first combat op against the Colossus blockade.

Not that that was something any of them would admit to outsiders.

“Mwangi covered my part,” Bueller said. “Deception is clear for combat.”

“I’d like time to hold a funeral for Crush,” Milani said. “That can wait a few days, at least. Ground forces are clear to deploy and carry out boarding actions, but I want to make sure that’s on the schedule.”

“This one is a strike-and-return,” Kira told her people. “We’ll be back in Samuels in four or five days, most likely. Shit can always happen, but we’ll make sure there’s time for us to remember our lost.”

She looked around at the collection of faces and smiled slightly, drawing strength from the sheer competence and camaraderie around her.

“We will always make time for our dead,” she promised them. “Our intel suggests it will be another month or so before Colossus can roll out their second wave of ships.

“That gives us a few weeks, once we clear the blockade, to set up patrol and work with the locals on a strategy for long-term security,” she continued. “They have activated the reinforcements clause in the contract and put a courier ship at our disposal.

“That ship is already on her way.”

The courier vessel was the standard ten-kilocubic “small hull” that any system with access to the standard colonial database could build. Coming out of Samuels, her one-thousand-cubic-meter Ten-X class one nova drive was dirt cheap and strapped to an abundance of Harrington coils.

She didn’t carry much in terms of crew or cargo, but the little ship would make it out to Kavitha Zoric and Fortitude as fast as anything human-built reasonably could.

“That puts our objectives into four phases, basically,” Kira told her people. “The first phase is to clear the blockade, which will be done shortly. The second will be to establish patrols through the zones we expect Colossus to cause trouble in and keep an eye on their activities.

“The third phase will be when they finish refitting the rest of their Brisingr hand-me-downs,” she continued. “That will probably be the riskiest, because they’ll know what we’ve got and will likely attempt to concentrate their forces.”

“They can’t concentrate their forces against us and blockade the Samuels System,” Cartman pointed out. “That’s the whole concept of a fleet in being, after all.”

“Exactly,” Kira agreed. “Depending on what the Nova Wing does with their ships, we may attempt to defeat them in detail, or potentially, depending on how many ships they bring up at once, we may even accept the fleet battle they are near-certain to court.”

She didn’t think that was going to be a good idea, but it would be even numbers on cruisers and carriers, and hers were bigger. The destroyers and other escorts would tip the balance, though, and she’d prefer a fleet battle to come after reducing the escorts one way or another.

“The final phase is when Fortitude and our destroyers arrive,” Kira concluded. “At that point, we will use our local superiority to engage in counter-force operations against Colossus, reducing the CNW until their government is prepared to negotiate with Samuels.

“The Samuels government is concerned that there is an additional third party behind the delivery of even obsolete warships to Colossus,” she told her people. “Given our own history, my concerns are directed at different targets than theirs…but the fundamental long-term risk is the same.”

“Whether it’s Equilibrium or Brisingr themselves behind this, we’re still most likely to see Brisingr ships deployed to finish the job,” Konrad Bueller warned. “If it’s an actual Brisingr operation, I suspect the Kaiser will order more ships in than he would to help Equilibrium.

“We don’t know, after all, just what hold the Institute has on my home system.”

“Money,” Mwangi said bluntly. “Any nation at war needs it, and Equilibrium has it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kaiser still regards Brisingr as being at war as they try to secure an entire sector of the Rim.”

“Either way, the fourth phase of our operations here is primarily to play security blanket until the Samuels System has enough of a home-built nova force to secure their own trade routes,” Kira told her people. “They have the industry, the technology and the wealth to do so. Unfortunately, so does Colossus.

“The long-term astro-political ramifications of an arms race between these two systems are ugly, but they’re also outside our control,” she admitted. “Our job, in all of the phases I’ve gone through, is to maintain open passage to and from the Samuels System for the carrying trade that supports their economy.

“We will maintain those trade routes until Samuels is either capable of doing so themselves or otherwise decides our contract is no longer necessary. This is not a retainer contract, people, and active patrols and other activities will be required—but I do hope that by being a fleet in being for Samuels, we can bring Colossus to the negotiating table sooner rather than later.

“Right now, however, we know one of the three access points to the Samuels System is blockaded by the Nova Wing. Conveniently, it would also help my plans for the third phase of this mess if the N-Forty-Five carrier doing said blockading ceased to be a problem.”

No one had raised any concerns yet, and the clock was ticking down until they were ready to nova.

“I believe, my friends, that it’s time to go hunting.”

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