38

“Accelerating evasive maneuvers; jammers online,” Mwangi reported grimly. “Three minutes until Huntress knows what’s happening.” He paused. “Seventy-two seconds before their cruisers range on us. Their fighters could be here anytime.

“Your orders?”

“Vector toward Freighter Group One, maximum thrust,” Kira ordered levelly. “Time until they see what’s going on?”

“The freighters?” Deception’s Captain asked.

“The freighters,” Kira confirmed.

“Twenty seconds left,” Soler replied. “Their nova strike can arrive anytime after that.”

Mwangi stared at his Tactical officer for a moment, then swore under his breath.

“The depot ships?”

“They need ten times as long as a carrier to launch fighters, but they can deliver them to the nova stop,” Kira reminded him. “It seems Bachchan wasn’t willing to leave things entirely up to us.”

“We still have no fighter cover, and they’re about to be on top of us,” Mwangi warned. “This is going to hurt, boss.”

For a single glorious moment, Kira was about to charge down to her nova fighter and take to space. Practicality shot that down far too quickly—if nothing else, the odds were that Dilshad Tamboli, Deception’s deck boss, hadn’t even prepped Wolverine Thirteen for action.

And the math wasn’t in Kira’s favor, anyway.

“My faith is in your gunners, Captain,” Kira murmured. “Fight your ship.”

She met his gaze for a long second, then he nodded firmly and turned away to snap more orders.

Kira’s own focus was on trying to pierce the jamming fields around all of the involved ships. It was unlikely the Brisingr fighters were going to make a sub-light-second nova—the cooldown was still a full minute at that distance, so they were more likely to nova out and nova back in.

Or they would come in with the capital ships, only lunging ahead when the cruisers started pounding Deception. There was a solid logic to that, especially when they knew there’d be no fighter cover until well after their strike.

There was no point in risking bombers to Deception’s turrets when they could get cruisers to cover them. With everything known, it was the right call.

And Kira desperately hoped she’d guessed right and that it was going to be the wrong call. Because if she’d guessed wrong…she should have surrendered.

“No contacts,” Mwangi murmured on a private channel. “We…may be in real trouble here. Cruiser range in thirty seconds.”

“Our job right now, Akuchi, is to stay alive,” Kira told him.

Testing shots began to sparkle on the display. Deception was running away from the enemy as fast as she could, but the sad truth was that the Brisingr ships were newer and faster. Even the hundred-and-ten-thousand-cubic-meter HC-10 carrier had an acceleration edge on Mwangi’s ship, and the entire carrier group was slowly closing the range.

The irony was that the K-90s had basically the same armament as Deception. Fourteen heavy guns and twenty heavy fighters. The newer ships were faster and better protected, but their offensive capabilities were near-identical.

The carrier had the same guns but was hanging ever so slightly back from the cruisers, letting them take the long-range potshots that were slowly narrowing the target zone.

“Here they come,” Kira said aloud as the movement she’d been watching for appeared on her display. She couldn’t pick out individual nova fighters through the jamming, but she could see when over a hundred of them lunged forward.

Unlike Colossus, the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy knew their game. They also knew that Memorial Force still had almost sixty fighters left, including enough bombers to easily take out a carrier if given a chance. Kira couldn’t tell how many fighters Admiral Bueller had held back to protect their ships, but she assumed it was at least three ten-ship squadrons of heavy fighters.

“Their cruisers are being careful to avoid hitting their fighters, but we have to keep the heavy turrets on the big guys,” Mwangi warned. “We’ve got nothing to keep them fro—”

“Nova flares!” Soler snapped. “Multiple nova flares… The hell? Jianhong radiation suggests full six-light-year novas!”

The jamming field would make it difficult for Deception’s sensors to even identify how many ships had just novaed in, but the difference in radiation between a light-minute nova and a multi-light-year nova was still discernible.

And somewhere over eighty Guardian heavy fighters had just appeared between Deception and the oncoming Brisingr fighter strike. Their position wasn’t perfect, but given that they’d novaed all the way from Samuels based on data one of the fleeing freighters had brought them, Kira was impressed by how close they had managed it.

“Watch the SDC fighters,” Mwangi ordered. “Let’s not shoot our rescuers in the back, shall we? Pick a destroyer and focus her down; leave the fighters to the fighters.”

Bueller’s destroyers were advancing behind the nova-fighter squadrons, but they weren’t nearly as tough as the cruisers behind them in turn. It took only a handful of salvos for Deception’s gunners to get the rhythm of the lead destroyer—and only two more to reduce the forty-two-kilocubic ship to spinning debris.

Meanwhile, the entire zone in front of Deception was turning into a free-for-all dogfight, as the SDC’s pilots threw themselves into the chaos of the fight. Kira saluted her allies mentally, but she knew the odds were against them. The BKN fighters had a wider edge over the SDC planes than her own craft had over the Brisingr ones—and there were more BKN nova fighters in space than SDC ones.

And then a second series of nova flares announced the arrival of Memorial Force’s fighters, and Kira bit back a moment of hope. The same observer who’d sent a call for reinforcements across the light-years back to Samuels had also sent one across a handful of light-minutes to Huntress—and Mel Cartman and Abdullah Colombera were every bit as good as Kira was in a starfighter.

Chaos swirled across the battlespace, fighters intermingling in the radiation haze of the multiphasic jammers. Kira had no coms with her allies, only with the crew of Deception. She didn’t have full visibility—she didn’t even know how many fighters her allies and her subordinates had thrown into the growing dogfight around her cruiser.

Not everything was guesswork. Deception had incredible optics and powerful computers analyzing the imagery they picked up. Multiphasic jammers rendered even optical imagery messy, but it gave her a concept of what was going on.

But she had to guess what the SDC was thinking—and the main clue she had was that the only SDC fighters she’d seen had come all the way from Samuels. That was workable for a defensive formation like they were currently holding, but it didn’t work for offensive strikes.

“Akuchi, we have to go after the cruisers,” she told Deception’s Captain. “Leave the destroyers to the SDC heavies. We need to fix the capital ships’ attention on us and kick the shit out of them.

“Bring us about, take us over the dogfight and ram our cannon down those bastards’ throats.”

Akuchi Mwangi had been a mercenary for far longer than Kira, and she could feel his urge to object, to point out Deception was their irreplaceable asset there…

But all he did was nod and turn to his crew.

“Wallis, bring us about,” he ordered, repeating Kira’s instructions. “Full thrust at the Brisingr cruisers! Soler, focus your fire on the cruiser to port. Let’s show Junior that having the shiniest toys isn’t everything!”

The cruiser shivered around Kira as she flipped in space. Their timing had been almost perfect—the moment before they turned was the moment the Brisingr carrier group finally dialed them in.

Half a dozen plasma blasts, each as powerful as a bomber’s torpedo, hammered into Deception as the mercenary ship flipped in space. Damage alerts flashed red across Kira’s displays, but none of it slowed the maneuver.

But when her ship finished the flip, only twelve heavy guns opened fire on the enemy cruiser. Two turrets were flashing red on the internal displays, a problem Kira needed to leave to her boyfriend and her flag captain.

Her focus had to be on the battle, judging the openings. Mwangi had to fight his ship—Kira had to fight the battle and tell him where his ship should be. There’d been an opening to get around the fighters and she’d taken it, but that had exposed the cruiser to the full fire of all three Brisingr capital ships.

Over thirty cannon blazed a pattern through the void around Deception. Soler’s gunners were better. They got a lock on their target cruiser faster, hammering her with plasma blast after plasma blast, but the enemy had too many guns firing too many shots for the mercenary ship to go untouched.

“Come on,” Kira hissed as damage alerts flared on the display again. “I know you, Scimitar. Use the opening.”

People were dying on her flagship. She knew that. But she also knew, given everything that she believed Colombera had known when his fighters had novaed into the battle, what she would have done…and she’d trained Abdullah Colombera from the moment the man had left the flight academy.

“Nova flares!” Soler snapped. “Multiple flares on the far side of the carrier!”

“And there we go,” Kira whispered.

Rearming the bombers took longer than any other type of nova fighter, and bombers were ineffective at best without their torpedoes. But the eight surviving bombers could carry sixty-four torpedoes—and Vice Admiral Maxi Bueller’s ships’ focus was entirely on the cruiser making a suicide charge on them.

The fighters tasked to protect the carrier and the cruisers had managed to remain focused on their mission—but sixty Guardians came with Huntress’s Flight Group Avalanche. Outnumbered three to two and taken by surprise, there was no chance for the Weltraumpanzer pilots to get in the bombers’ way.

Maxi Bueller would be talking to the devil rather sooner than they’d anticipated, though it had been a long time since Kira could take pleasure in the destruction of a starship. At least five thousand people died aboard the HC-10 carrier as dozens of torpedoes slammed into the warship.

The Guardians had saved their own torpedoes while keeping the defenders off the bombers. Now they swung around and salvoed the weapons at the cruiser Deception wasn’t hammering, following the opening Kira had ordered Mwangi to make.

Even through the jamming, Kira could see the Brisingr cruiser reel as her Harrington coils went wild. The destroyers and starfighters were torn, some trying to turn in space, some trying to win their close-range dogfights.

Then one of Isidora Soler’s shots hit something critical and a gout of flame the size of a corvette blazed out the side of the still-fighting cruiser. Vacuum smothered the flame in moments, but even in the chaos of the battlespace, that got everyone’s attention.

And then both cruisers brought every exterior light they had online, white and bright. A second later, engines and cannon shut down, the badly damaged ships drifting away from the battle while glowing with a stark brilliance.

It took ten seconds for the most-damaged destroyer to follow suit, but the domino effect was clear from there. First the destroyers, then the remaining fighters. Light after light came on and turned to a brilliant white, until the shattered survivors of a Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy carrier group resembled nothing so much as a scattered handful of pearls across the void.

“Cease fire,” Mwangi ordered softly. “They’re surrendering.”

“That they are,” Kira confirmed after a moment. “Cut the jamming; link up with our fighters and the SDC birds.”

She smiled sadly.

“The rest of this is up to Milani’s people, I think.”

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