6

Kira’s command staff regathered in the same conference room later that afternoon. This time, they were joined by the two Commanders, Nova Group, from the two ships.

Both Abdullah “Scimitar” Colombera and Mel “Nightmare” Cartman were members of Kira’s old Apollo System Defense Force squadron. The other two survivors of the Three Oh Three were with Fortitude—Dinesha “Dawnlord” Patel commanded the supercarrier’s nova group and Evgenia “Socrates” Michel now commanded Persephone, one of the escorting destroyers.

Vaduva joined them as well at this point, the ever-smiling purser settling into a chair and pouring himself a coffee without waiting for any of the stewards to offer.

This late in the ship’s day, Kira was nursing a beer herself, and an artificial stupid robotic wet bar had rolled into the room. A trio of ship’s stewards had laid out a meal of finger food, carefully kept away from the projectors concealed inside the table.

“The contract is solid, Yanis?” she asked Vaduva as she selected a meatier chicken wing.

“Standard boilerplate,” the purser replied. “Pree and I have been over the template a hundred times at this point.”

Priapus Simoneit had been an old friend of Kira’s late Apollon commander. He was also one of Redward’s top lawyers and had provided legal support to Kira and Memorial Force since its precursor, Memorial Squadron had been a subcontractor to John Estanza’s Conviction Ltd.

“What about escalator clauses?” Mwangi asked. “Deception and Huntress can handle this little fleet of Colossus’s easily if we’re careful, but if Brisingr or Equilibrium is actively backing Colossus’s play…”

“We could be looking at major backup arriving in short order,” Davidović agreed grimly. “Baking in what it costs for us to call in Fortitude and the rest of the fleet makes sense.”

“I agree, which is why that clause is in there,” Vaduva said with a chuckle. “Twenty million pounds for the first month the rest of the fleet is in position, further rates to be negotiated at the time.”

He shook his head.

“They have to activate that clause, of course, and I think Mrs. Macey’s people didn’t think it was likely,” he observed. “I would prefer not to see it activated, seeing as how I will be aboard Deception myself.”

Kira snorted at that and took a sip of her beer.

“Still sticking to my coattails, I see?”

The purser tended to stick with Memorial Force’s senior management—mostly personified by Kira as majority shareholder—and had stayed behind in Redward when they’d sent the majority of their firepower off to Obsidian.

“I do not think that the early stages of construction of our next ship will require that much supervision, Admiral,” Vaduva noted calmly. “So, yes.”

“Konrad, did you get a chance to go over their data?” Mwangi asked. “You know Brisingr ships better than the rest of us.”

“I think Kira would surprise you,” Bueller replied. “But yes, I did. The Samuels folks didn’t have quite enough data to fully identify the classes involved themselves—but they had enough for me to run it against my databases and get us some types and weights.”

He gestured, and the holograms of eighteen ships appeared above the table.

“Most of us are actually familiar with the most modern ships in the flotilla,” he noted as four of the midsized vessels flashed. “D9C heavy destroyers. Given the rest of the ships in play, I’m guessing these four are some of the first units of the class built, but they are the most modern ships in the batch.

“Forty thousand cubic meters, decent gun armament, no fighters,” Bueller laid out. “They also have four D5D destroyers of even older vintage. Those are twenty-seven kilocubic ships that even a Redward corvette might be able to take down in their design specs.

“The remainder of the escorts are six corvettes of the CV4 and CV3D classes,” he told them. “Eighteen and sixteen kilocubics apiece. Like the D5Ds, they’re old ships. Roughly comparable to Redward’s tech when we first arrived.”

The general rule was that for every ten light-years a system was from Earth, their general tech base—and especially their military technology—fell about a year and a half behind.

Right now, Redward was dragging the average military tech level of the Syntactic Cluster up around them, but they were still at least a decade behind Apollo and Brisingr. Almost two light-centuries farther from Earth than Kira’s home sector, they had been thirty years behind when she’d arrived—and lacked key facilities for the production of the class two nova drives essential for nova fighters.

So, the corvettes were thirty years old—but the rest of the ships were newer. Still pre-war vintage, as Macey had said, but that could still allow for ships that were merely twelve to thirteen years old.

“What about the heavy ships?” she asked, eyeing the four blocky vessels at the heart of the virtual formation. Brisingr-built ships—like Deception—looked crude to her eyes, all flat surfaces and sharp corners.

Apollon ships smoothed those corners and curved those surfaces. It made the ships take longer to build, but also meant that they used slightly less material for a given cubage—and that they had less dead cubage rendered useless by geometry.

Brisingr settled for building slightly less effective ships faster and for the same price as Apollo. Given that the BKN had fought the ASDF to a standstill and pushed the Council of Principals to a near-surrender, she supposed the evidence spoke to which model was better.

“The cruisers are about what we were expecting,” Bueller told them. “I-Fifty series, fifty-five thousand cubic meters, no organic fighter complement. Brisingr armed them with nine heavy guns in three triple turrets.”

“What about Colossus?” Kira asked. “If they were fully disarmed, the locals have to build them new guns.”

She had memories of the I50 cruisers when she thought about it, too. There was one of them on her own list of kills, whose silhouettes would be painted on her nova fighter’s hull if Apollo had that tradition.

“I’ll get to that,” her lover replied. “First, though, the joker in our deck of castoffs.”

The last two ships expanded and flashed.

“Mrs. Macey said the flotilla were all pre-war ships,” Bueller noted. “In the case of the carriers, that would require some very careful hair-splitting. The N-Forty-Five series multi-function carriers were designed and laid down prior to the war, but none of them were commissioned until after the war began.”

He shook his head.

“They weren’t a great design. I believe the BKN built eight of them, and I believe the ASDF turned five of them into debris and corpses,” he said quietly. “If they’ve sent two of them to Colossus, those are probably the last N-Forty-Five carriers in existence.

“For a war against a peer power, they suck,” he stated. “To shuttle fighters around or maintain a blockade, however… They carry sixty nova fighters on a fifty kilocubic hull. They have limited self-defense weaponry, but their purpose is to put a crapton of nova fighters into a battlespace and then run like hell sublight and hope nobody catches them.”

“It didn’t work out for them in the war,” Kira said quietly. “They ended up either being sitting ducks or holding back enough fighters for their own defense that the extra carrying capacity was irrelevant.

“But here, where they’re expecting to mostly be handling nova fighters on long-jump cooldown or civilian ships, they are a problem.” She shook her head. “If they get both of them in play, that lets them bring more fighters to a given battlespace than we can.”

“So, we avoid going up against both carriers at once,” Davidović said. “They’re unlikely to keep them together until they know we’re in play. Even then, we can dance around the bastards.”

“Agreed,” Kira said. “I’m not worried about our ability to handle them, though the N-Forty-Fives are definitely a wrinkle.” She considered. “What can Colossus put aboard them, though?”

“So, that’s where we come down to the ‘What can Colossus do?’ part of the question,” Bueller replied. “And the answer is too bloody much.”

The starships disappeared, replaced by a familiar and roughly triangular shape. Most nova fighters shared basically the same structure, after all. The proportions helped define what kind of fighter it was, and Kira quickly noted that the attack ship was a heavy fighter.

“Colossus only builds one type of nova fighter, the Liberator,” the engineer said calmly. “They class her as an MFNC—multifunction nova combatant. I’d call her a fighter-bomber—heavy guns, overpowered engines, two torpedoes.”

Kira nodded slowly.

“Big and expensive,” she murmured. “But not enough so to give Colossus problems fitting them on a carrier.”

“Almost,” Bueller told her. “They’ll have a harder time refitting the N-Forty-Fives to hold them than they would a more standard array of planes, but they’re a damn good fighter. And that carries over to everything else Colossus can do.”

“How bad?” Mwangi asked grimly.

“In BKN service, even the N-Forty-Fives would have had point-six-rated dispersion networks at best,” Bueller noted. “Colossus can build point-six-five networks. If they spend the time to refit the defenses on all of the ships, they’ll be measurably more survivable than their original specifications called for.”

The rating of a dispersal network was an approximation of how much of the kinetic and thermal energy of a plasma burst would be safely grounded. Deception had a point-six-five network—but Redward was only up to building point-five networks.

The Colossus ships would be significantly more able to take hits than Kira’s carrier. Of course, the main point was to avoid letting the carrier get hit.

“While their nova ships were limited to fighters and gunships, Colossus did build heavier plasma cannon for their defensive forts and monitors,” Bueller continued. “Based off the information Samuels has on those guns, I expect that they’ll be able to refit the ships to a standard roughly comparable with Deception, if not slightly better.

“Cubic for cubic, those ships are going to be capable of going toe-to-toe with Deception herself,” he concluded. “Of course, Deception is ninety-six thousand cubic meters versus the fifty to fifty-five kilocubics for their heaviest ships.”

“Between Deception and Huntress and the fighter wings, I’m still confident in our ability to take them all,” Kira repeated. “But we needed to know what we’re up against. The ships may be small, but by the time Colossus is done with them, they will functionally be frontline BKN units—or, at least, to the standard the BKN would bring them up to to keep in the front line.”

“Does Macey know that?” Milani asked. “Might explain why she’s so twitchy.”

“Her home system’s major external economic driver is now under active threat by their nearest neighbor,” Kira said. “I’d be twitchy in her place.”

“So, what now?” Davidović asked.

“We wait until Pree and the Samuels team have finalized the contract, then we check in with our new employer,” Kira told them all. “For us…I suggest everyone make sure their departments and crews have everything they need.

“I don’t expect to be in Redward for more than a few days now.”

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