7

Deception’s flight deck was silent in the calm before the storm.

Kira knew that the metaphor was exaggerating a bit. They were leaving Redward shortly, but it was a four-week journey to Samuels. Only a week less than the journey all the way to Apollo, a place she would probably never see again.

Her brother probably regretted that. She knew damn well that his wife didn’t—she’d never got along with the woman, but then Kira was a starfighter pilot and her brother was a shepherd.

Their worlds hadn’t really collided in a long time, even before she’d fled her home system one step ahead of Brisingr assassins.

She snorted and ran her hand along the side of her nova fighter. The Wolverine interceptor still felt strange to her. She’d flown a Hoplite-IV interceptor in the war against Brisingr and the first few years since arriving in Redward. The Wolverine, on the other hand, was the Navy of the Royal Crest’s equivalent to the Hoplite-V.

Despite her attachment to the nova fighter that had carried her through her early years as a mercenary, she couldn’t pass up the improved Harrington coils, the more powerful guns, the more efficient fusion reactor or the in-cockpit coffee maker of the more advanced fighter.

Her Wolverine was officially Deception-Alpha-Seven. The seventh fighter in a six-fighter squadron—and that said everything about Kira’s position in the nova group. The nova fighter was stenciled with that hull number, her callsign, and her kill markers in Apollon three-dot style…but she’d never actually flown the craft in combat.

Kira’s fingers rested on those three dots. Purple. Red. Orange. Purple marked thirty-two kills. Red marked sixteen. Orange marked four. Fifty-two kills, by the not-quite-simple metrics of a star system that espoused pacifism and lived pragmatism.

A stranger might see the three dots and assume that an Apollon pilot had only just made ace. In truth, though, the Apollo military had refused to let their pilots put more than three kill markers on their fighters—hence the color coding and the calculations of how many “kills” a sub-fighter or participation in a capital-ship kill was worth.

“What is it with fighter-pilot flag officers and hanging out on flight decks before the operation?” a voice asked behind her. “I’m told Estanza did it. I know Commodore Heller did it back on Victorious.”

Kira smirked at Mel Cartman’s words. The 303 Nova Combat Group had been the interceptor force assigned to Victorious, the fleet carrier anchoring Task Force Victorious at the end of the war.

Heller’s Hellions, the news media had labeled them, as Commodore Heller had led a single carrier and four escorts through a series of minor but real victories during a phase of the war where Apollo hadn’t had many victories at all. There’d been few real defeats in the final year of the war, but no victories. Just bloody draws the ASDF and their allies couldn’t afford.

“It’s weird,” Kira admitted. “I know, intellectually, that I am a thousand times safer aboard Deception than I would ever be flying a fighter. I can even admit, most of the time, that I’m at least as effective in command of the entire fleet as I would be in a single plane.

“But I miss it.”

“I’ll admit, I like the fact that our structure means you can’t promote me out of the cockpit,” her old friend said brightly, joining Kira in leaning against the fighter.

A moment after reaching the Wolverine, Cartman produced two bottles of beer. She casually used the heat cowling over the fighter’s port plasma cannon to pop the tops, then passed one to Kira.

“I think you just violated four different regulations,” Kira noted—but she took the beer.

“Back home, sure. Here? Waldroup wrote the safety rules for our decks, and they rely on a solid sense of ‘Don’t be a moron,’” Cartman replied, taking a sip of the beer. “Homesick?”

“No? Yes?” Kira sighed. She was more honest with Cartman than with most people. The old Three Oh Three hands were special; everyone knew it. Zoric and Bueller had their own special statuses as well, but she’d known Mel Cartman, especially, for over a decade.

“It’s hard to miss a place where the government decided you were expendable,” she admitted. “I was thinking about my family and my old interceptor.” She smiled wryly. “And yes, I know it’s weird to put those in the same sentence.”

“Your interceptor liked you better than your sister-in-law did,” Cartman pointed out. “But yeah. I miss home sometimes. Though I realize that back home, I would probably have either washed out or been promoted to a desk by now.”

“Or a bridge, which I tried,” Kira reminded her. “Hell, I’ll never tell Scimitar, but he knows he was third on the list to command Huntress’s nova group.”

First on the list had been Ruben “Gizmo” Hersch, the senior of the surviving pilots from Conviction’s original group. Then Kira had offered it to Cartman—after Cartman had turned down command of the entire carrier.

“He knows you offered the group to me and Ruben,” Cartman agreed. “Of course, I’m not sure anyone knows that you offered me the big seat.”

“I didn’t expect you to take it,” Kira admitted. “I was surprised you stayed on Deception, though.”

“I’m a shareholder, Kira,” her friend reminded her. “I get paid much the same wherever I am in the squadron—and so long as Konrad Bueller is this ship’s XO, you are using Deception as your flagship.”

Kira waved a hand in the air.

“Touché,” she admitted. “I didn’t realize you were sticking around to watch my back, I’ll admit.”

“Someone has to keep you out of trouble,” Cartman told her. “And keep your feet on the ground.”

She rapped her beer bottle against the Wolverine.

“If I have my way, the only time you’ll ever sit in this bird is for training,” Deception’s Commander, Nova Group, told her boss. “Your job is to find contracts and put us all in the battlespace with a plan.”

“And once the jamming goes up, I’m useless,” Kira said quietly.

Multiphasic jamming was the reality of the battlespace. Complex and high-powered jammers combined with sensor-confusing baffles, the systems rendered everything except visual identification useless within an extended area—and rendered even visual ID difficult beyond maybe fifty thousand kilometers.

Capital ships could maintain laser coms with each other in the chaos at some distance, but fighters had to stay too mobile for that to be more than an intermittent connection. Since nova fighters carried the weight of the fighting in most of Kira’s plans, that left her without command and control once the battle was joined.

“If you do your job right, you’re unnecessary once the jamming goes up,” Cartman countered. “And your track record is pretty solid on that front. You get us paid, boss, and we do the work.”

Kira chuckled.

“I’ve never liked sending other people into battle for me,” she admitted. “Sending Kavitha off to Obsidian with most of the fleet? It grates. Knowing that I have to do the same thing on a smaller scale in every battle…”

She shook her head and rested one hand on the fighter as she drank her beer.

“That would be why I still have my own plane, I guess,” she admitted. “I know it’s a luxury, but…”

“It’s one we can afford,” Cartman replied. “Better than we can afford one of our top half-dozen aces being grounded if we ever actually need you to get behind the stick again.”

“I’m probably too rusty to be on that list anymore,” Kira admitted. “But I appreciate the top-up to my ego.”

“You’ll always have a pilot’s ego, boss. It’s good for us all,” the other woman said. “And I’ve got your back.”

Kira grinned.

“And you staying on Deception has nothing to do with Akuchi Mwangi’s cute butt,” she said drily.

“I won’t say that isn’t a factor, though I have sadly determined that Mwangi isn’t interested,” Cartman admitted. “But hey! The horse may learn to sing.”

Kira chuckled again and then clinked bottles with her friend.

“And so we go on.”

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