“Until two months ago, she was the commanding officer of the battlecruiser Penalty Fee,” Panosyan told her. “Currently, she is in prison, awaiting court-martial for mutiny.”
“Most systems don’t take that long to try someone for mutiny,” Konrad pointed out.
“Most systems don’t have a political party trying to make sure that the military judge is one of theirs in a system where both the military and judicial organizations are supposed to report to my-father-the-King,” the Zharang said grimly.
“Simonsson and Penalty Fee were posted to the Zabata System,” they told the mercenaries. “One of the outer client worlds. The system director of the Bank of the Royal Crest there is a long-standing donor and backer of the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party, assigned to a client world that’s never been…entirely content with their status.”
“What happened?” Kira asked.
“The director decided to remind the Zabatans of their position and make an example of a larger owner-operator that was delinquent in their payments.”
Panosyan shook their head.
“It wasn’t even good business,” they complained. “The captain could have easily been offered an extension that would have made the bank more money, with all historical evidence suggesting they’d have managed it.
“Instead, Director Traver ordered the ship interned. Except his timing was very specific, such that the ship could easily escape. Which, sensibly, they tried to do—so Director Traver ordered Captain Simonsson to seize or destroy the ship.”
“And she refused,” Kira murmured.
“Oh, she didn’t just refuse,” Panosyan said with a chuckle. “Penalty Fee is a hundred-twenty-kilocubic battlecruiser, and she was the largest nova ship in the system, bigger than the entire fleet Zabata is allowed combined.
“Simonsson broadcast on the shared military frequencies that if anyone else tried to obey Traver’s orders, she would shoot them the fuck down.”
“I like her already,” Bertoli said. “Is she single?”
Their employer chuckled, then shook their head sadly.
“Of course, there are actually structures that allowed Traver to give that order, though they’re intended for far more serious crises,” they told the mercenaries. “The SPP is now using those systems to say that Simonsson is a traitor, basically. Simonsson is saying the order was illegal and unethical.”
“Which I assume it was?” Kira asked.
“Yes.”
Jade Panosyan shook their head.
“The Crest has been a mostly benevolent hegemon for my father-the-King’s entire reign,” they noted. “Some of that is the rose-colored glasses of being the one in charge, I’m sure, but we have not been as bad as we could have been.
“And the reason I can say that is because we’re starting to get a lot fucking worse,” they concluded. “And neither I nor my-father-the-King are going to stand for it. That’s what all of this is about, Em Demirci.”
The room was quiet.
“I was already in,” Kira reminded the Zharang. “And we were always in for more than the carrier. Though the carrier helps, a lot.”
“I’d hope so,” Panosyan muttered. They shook themselves and surveyed the mercenaries with a calm expression. “I assume it will be Commander Bueller who will be accompanying the inspection team?”
“He’s the only one qualified to judge a ship like that,” Kira confirmed.
“You’ll need to be at shuttleport sixty-four at eight hundred hours station time, day after tomorrow. Formal work clothes and shipsuit,” they instructed Konrad. “I’m not certain yet if you’ll be meeting the team or picking them up on the way, but that’s where and when the shuttle will be waiting for you.”
“Understood.”
Panosyan met Kira’s gaze.
“I’ll have the trial plan and the inspection schedule for you as soon as I can,” they told her. “Once I have that, I’ll let you know how to get in contact with Commander Eireen Hamilton, your courier CO.
“I’d trust Eireen with my daughter, let alone my life,” Panosyan concluded. “She’ll keep you safe, find you what you need and get you back to your fleet. How long do you have?”
“Twenty days, but we need five for travel time,” Kira replied. “Two weeks until we need to be moving to the trade lanes.”
“Understood,” the Crester said. “We’ll make it happen, Commodore. Everything depends on it.”
They shook their head.
“I was only gone for six months and everything has visibly gone downhill,” they said quietly. “We have to succeed.”
30
After a week of “being a tourist,” including sending her boyfriend off into the belly of the beast for two full days, and weeks of acting like a civilian, even aboard Panosyan’s vessel, it was a relief for Kira to step off the runabout in an insignia-less black military shipsuit.
Her companions were a step behind her as she crisply saluted the Chief Petty Officer waiting for her in the NRC’s dark gold uniform shipsuit.
“Welcome aboard TVM-Six,” the Chief told Kira. She was a tall redheaded woman with her hair pulled back into a tight bun. “I’ll be finding a space to put your shuttle,” she continued, glancing around the small boat bay.
There was only one other shuttle in that bay, not much larger than Kira’s runabout, and Kira saw the Chief’s point. She wasn’t sure where to put the runabout other than where she’d landed it!
“My apologies to the bay team,” she murmured.
“I am the bay team,” the Chief replied. “Chief Petty Officer Daniella Lewinsky. I’m the deck officer, shuttle pilot, shuttle maintenance crew, and backup navigator for TVM-Six.
“The skipper is on the bridge, but she asked me to get you landed and settled. Unfortunately, we don’t have much space for anybody. I hope bunk beds aren’t a problem?”
Kira laughed.
“How many people does this ship carry?” she asked.
“Crew of sixteen, Commodore Demirci,” Chief Lewinsky told her. “We each have our own quarters, but there’s no real allowance for passengers. Why put aside two rooms for passengers when you can squeeze in another Harrington coil, after all?”
Kira was familiar with the type of ship. The courier had two defenses: a full set of multiphasic jammers and a power-to-weight ratio comparable to a nova interceptor. It had the same class one nova drive as any other starship, but its sublight maneuverability made it hard to catch and harder to hit.
“Bunk beds are fine,” she told the Chief, gesturing her companions forward. “I once served on a cruiser converted to carry a single squadron of nova fighters. One room for six pilots—and it was three months before it even had bunk beds.”
Hammocks had been the order of the day, and she wasn’t sure her back had forgiven her yet.
“Well, we at least have the beds,” Lewinsky told her. She glanced over the other three mercenaries. “I was only given one name,” she noted softly. “My understanding is that was the plan, to try to keep some level of confidentiality.
“Everyone aboard TVM-Six knows your mission and who you’re working for, Commodore. We serve the Crown of the Royal Crest. You’re safe here.”
“I trusted our employer’s judgment on that,” Kira said. “Bunk beds, huh? I’ll need to coordinate with Commander Hamilton shortly, so I guess we should get started.”
At twelve thousand cubic meters, TVM-6 was far from tiny. The courier was a slightly squashed cylinder eighty meters long, half a meter wider than she was tall. She had no guns, limited cargo space, and only the one small boat bay they’d landed in.
The cramped nature of her interior had been a design choice, squeezing out as much space as possible to allow the ship to fit three fusion cores into a ship size that would normally carry two, and to install enough Harrington coils to need all three of the fusion plants.
Some spaces, though, had not been sacrificed on the altar of speed. In Kira’s experience, the engineering spaces around
those coils and power cores would be spacious—and the bridge was large and comfortable.
With the bridge’s handful of workstations, it could also serve as a secure conference or briefing room—an intended feature of the design, one that left Kira and Konrad alone on the bridge with Commander Eireen Hamilton.
Hamilton was a short woman with night-black skin and an absolutely piercing gaze. Kira had the distinct feeling that the NRC Commander had identified that she and Konrad were a couple within ten seconds of their walking onto the bridge.
The question for the moment, though, was whether the woman could identify the key parts of their target’s schedule.
“We now know everything we’re going to know about Fortitude herself,” Konrad noted. “Our employer has provided the full builders’ schematics, and we have close-in scans and visual data. I have a few thoughts on what to do with all of that, but that’s not really your problem, Commander Hamilton.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “And I’m probably happier that way.” She shook her head, looking at the map of the system hanging in the middle of her bridge. TVM-6 was on her way outward from the Crest itself, heading toward “the Grand,” the system’s gas giants.
“I’m not the largest fan of this whole operation,” Hamilton continued. “I don’t know all of the details, but I can put together the pieces I have. I’m scouting the route of Fortitude’s launch trials with a quartet of mercenaries on board.
“Given that among the schedules I’ve been given is the Prime Minister’s schedule, I suspect I have a damn good idea what I’m helping with. I trust Jade. Beyond all reason, apparently, but this still goes against the grain.”
“Do you expect me to convince you to go along with this?” Kira asked bluntly. “Because that’s not what I’m here for. I’ve been hired to help the Crown Zharang deal with a problem, Commander. I was told you were in and fully briefed.”
That was a slight exaggeration, but from the sounds of it, Hamilton was close enough to fully briefed that Panosyan should have just fully briefed her.
Hamilton snorted and shook her head, running her hand over her shaved scalp.
“No,” she conceded. “Jade told me enough. I’m in. But the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party is a symptom…not the disease. I’m not sure removing them by force is going to solve any problems.”
Kira sighed.
“We’re not assassins, Commander,” she told the other woman. “At the end of the day, part of what I’m going to get paid for is delivering the Prime Minister to Crester police. The Crown Zharang has a plan.
“I’m not privy to it all either,” she admitted. “But I know they want Maral Jeong to stand trial.”
“And here you say you’re not supposed to be convincing me,” Hamilton murmured. “That actually helps. Though…” She ran her hand over her scalp again in a clear nervous gesture. “I won’t pretend I wouldn’t be doing this even if I thought you were just planning on killing Jeong.
“I really do trust Jade Panosyan that much. I just would like it a lot less.”
“I appreciate the honesty,” Kira told Hamilton. “To return it in like: if this was a targeted assassination, I would not have taken the contract. We’ll keep our own peace on details of our part, but I can assure you of that much.”
“Fair. To work, then?”
“To work.”
“Finally,” Konrad muttered—but he was grinning widely enough that Kira figured even Hamilton wouldn’t take it the wrong way.
“I assume they’re following a standard trial pattern?” he asked.
“Yes. We do the core tests over twelve days, but the part that we’ve been talking about is the actual flight trials,” Hamilton told them, waving a series of lines and spheres onto the three-dimensional map of the star system.
“The first technical flight trial will happen in twenty-four days, two days before the rest of the flight trials,” the NRC officer continued, highlighting the first line and sphere. “That will move Fortitude to the gunnery range on the far side of Grand Duchess from Rampant, where she will test her weapons and, according to the schedule, her fighter-handling equipment.”
“She’s taking on fighters there?” Kira asked. “For the rest of the tour?”
That was a complication.
“Looks like three squadrons out of the Blue Scarlet Combat Group,” Hamilton confirmed. “They’re an elite formation that usually operates off of Valiant, the current flagship. But Valiant carries a hundred and twenty fighters and bombers. They can spare eighteen heavy fighters.”
“Do we have a solid listing of what they’re getting in terms of pilots and birds?” Kira said. “That could be complicated.”
“Nothing is solid, but my understanding is that the selection will be warped by the chance to meet the Prime Minister,” the NRC officer told her. “So, almost certainly Blue-One, Blue-Two, and Blue-Three. The most senior and elite squadrons, equipped with brand-new Hussar-Seven heavy fighters.”
Kira nodded slowly. A brand-new heavy fighter from the Crest almost certainly outmatched her Weltraumpanzer-Fünf planes—but probably not by much. The Weltraumpanzer-Fünfs were the current main heavy fighter of the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy.
Her interceptors and fighter-bombers were about on par with the Fünfs. Her interceptors were Hoplite-IVs from Apollo, and while her PNC-115 fighter-bombers were an older design than the Hoplites or Weltraumpanzers, they were also from the Fringe, not the Rim.
Between Deception and Raccoon, she was definitely bringing in enough fighters to take on even eighteen new heavy fighters with elite pilots. The problem was that if even one of those fighters novaed to report, they were going to be in real trouble.
“We’ll work with it,” she said aloud. “How long will they be doing gunnery and landing trials?”
“Two days,” Hamilton told her. “Actual flight trials will start in twenty-six days, eight days before the original schedule Jade said they gave you.”
Kira nodded. She only had seven days before she needed TVM-6 to be heading for Memorial Force, but that was already part of the plan. They shouldn’t need that long.
“There will be twenty-four hours of real-space flight trials on her Harringtons in the region of Grand Duchess,” Hamilton said. “That will be followed by a series of novas of increasing length over another twenty-four hours.
“Then they will make a full-length nova to security point six.” A new icon flashed up on the side of the map, marking a light-hour-wide zone six light-years from the Crest. “They will be there for twenty hours while the novas cool, and then they will nova to here, above Grand Prince, where officially they will be engaging in a maneuvering test with the cruiser Terminal Loss.”
“And in reality, they’re meeting the Prime Minister and a good chunk of her Cabinet?” Konrad asked.
“Exactly. Terminal Loss is scheduled to pick up the PM and five Cabinet Ministers seventy minutes before Fortitude novas to Grand Prince. She’ll nova there ahead, with her own escort consisting of a battlecruiser and an assault carrier.
“The Prime Minister’s classified schedule says that the two ships will rendezvous and the PM and Cabinet will spend six hours aboard, inspecting the Crest’s first hundred-and-fifty-kilocubic warship and glad-handing with the SPP loyalist crew.”
“I’m guessing the schedule doesn’t phrase it that way,” Kira said.
“No,” Hamilton admitted. She inhaled deeply. “Looking at this, I have to admit…”
She trailed off.
“Commander?” Kira prodded.
“The Prime Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister. The Minister for the Navy. The Minister for the Client Network. The Minister for Internal Security. The Minister of Communications.”
The list didn’t mean much to Kira initially, but as she thought about it, a sense of impending doom swept over her.
“If I was planning a coup to remove the King and impose a one-party government on the Crest, those are the Ministers I’d want in
a private, absolutely secure, meeting, aren’t they?” she asked.
“That’s what I was thinking as well,” the NRC officer said. “We might not be the only people thinking about a coup, Commodore. The Crown Zharang may just be moving first.”
“I hope we’re moving first,” Konrad said. “Now. Kira…we can take Fortitude, but I’m wondering if she’s going to actually be alone. Lightspeed delays give us some chances, I suppose.”
“We need to be careful relying on that,” Kira warned. “If someone sees us jump the carrier, even if it’s twenty or thirty minutes later, they can still warn the PM and short-stop the entire damn mission right there.
“Whenever we hit them, we need to either not be seen—or if there’s a chance of us being seen, it has to be after the rendezvous with Terminal Loss.”
She considered the Grand Prince rendezvous point. “Do we know what ships Terminal Loss’s escort will be?”
“There are at least two battlecruisers and two assault carriers that could get pulled in,” Hamilton replied. “Those are just the ships with Captains I know to be SPP loyalists. They may even swap out a fleet carrier, depending on availability and what they think they can swing without drawing attention.”
Kira nodded slowly.
“We can’t reliably jump and secure Fortitude while fighting off two cruisers and a second, fully functional carrier,” she noted. “I think that negates any plan of hitting them while the PM is aboard.
“That limits our options. A lot.”
She looked at the map and sighed.
“She’s not being officially escorted at any point, right?” she asked.
“No, but they’ll have set the trials to coincide with when other ships are around,” Hamilton said.
“Do we have those schedules?” Kira asked.
“If I don’t already have them downloaded, I have the authority to get them,” the courier captain said. “Give me a minute.”
Overlaying the patrol patterns on Fortitude’s trials made it very clear that the Navy of the Royal Crest were far from incompetent. The new fleet carrier might not be officially escorted during her nova and sublight flight trials, but that was because she didn’t need to be.
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 18