“You have to believe me, Commodore, I did not send an agent onto your ship,” Avagyan told Kira grimly, her face haunted. “Please…let the wounded go. I don’t know what happened, but I will find out…and they had nothing to do with it.”
“While I may not believe that you had nothing to do with it, I do believe the eleven people who were unconscious in my sickbay had nothing to do with it,” Kira conceded. “Their shuttle is leaving now. I kept my end of the deal, Admiral Avagyan.
“It seems you weren’t so capable of keeping yours.”
There was a long silence.
“You are correct,” Avagyan said. “I have no excuse, only my apology. I cannot undo what was done.”
“Fortunately, they did not manage to harm anything,” Kira noted. “They are dead, however.”
The Crester Admiral closed her eyes.
“I assumed such. I presume there is nothing I can do to regain what limited trust we had?”
“Not really,” Kira told her. “Your medevac shuttle is on its way. We’re going to nova shortly and keep ourselves out of your way until we hear from the Crest.”
“I understand,” Avagyan said. “May I suggest that you send a nova fighter to a nearby position every few hours for us to keep you updated? I will honor the truce, Commodore Demirci, and protect your ship, whatever it takes.”
That, Kira realized, was only one step short of an explicit promise to engage her fellow NRC officers and ships to protect Kira’s people. That…didn’t add up with the woman only knowing what was in front of her.
It seemed the Crown Zharang had briefed Admiral Avagyan. Unfortunately, it also seemed that the SPP loyalists in her fleet weren’t entirely under her control.
“I will forward you a list of times we will check in,” Kira told the Crester Admiral carefully. “I will not tell you where my ships and fighters will do so, but you will know when to look for us.”
She attached a file to that message as she formatted it on her screen. Once Bueller had installed a mix of brand-new Redward antivirus software and older Brisingr and Apollon software, he’d been able to identify and eliminate the worm relatively quickly.
Her extra file, labeled Tinkerbell Protocols, was a software counteragent that would clear the inactive worm from Avagyan’s systems.
If the Crester Admiral trusted her that much.
“I hope, Admiral Avagyan, that we can get through the rest of our agreement more…amicably.”
“You kidnapped the Cabinet of my government, Demirci,” Avagyan pointed out. “Amicably isn’t an option. I suggest you settle for calm.”
“I can live with that.”
Kira cut the channel and fired off the data package.
“That’s the last talking we’re doing for a few days,” she told Soler and Konrad. “Is the medevac shuttle clear?”
“She’s clear,” Soler confirmed. “We’re down to six actually important prisoners?”
“Exactly. So, let’s get the fighters back aboard and get the hell out of here.”
Kira grimaced.
“Avagyan agreed to a truce, but we don’t actually know what the result in the Crest is going to be—or if Admiral Matevosyan will honor it. So, let’s make some distance for this dance.”
51
Admiral Matevosyan struck Kira as the type of man who was used to being the biggest person in any given room. He was just under two meters tall and just loomed over his flag bridge in the recording.
Unfortunately for the Crester Admiral, Kira was used to McCaig, who was just over two meters tall. Plus, the reason she was watching a recording was that she now had a significant degree of control over the situation.
“This situation is utterly unacceptable,” he growled. “But I understand Admiral Avagyan’s unwillingness to risk the lives of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Her willingness to trust a jumped-up thug, however, is beyond my understanding.
“I will accept the Prime Minister’s order to stand down and await the ransom payment from the Crest when I hear it from her, in her own voice, on a live channel,” Matevosyan snapped. “Otherwise, I will take the risks I judge necessary.”
The recording ended and Kira leaned back in her seat thoughtfully. Collections Agent had arrived four hours earlier and had joined the NRC formation orbiting Guadaloop.
“We’re keeping outside of his scan-and-nova loop,” she said aloud. It wasn’t really a question. The novas of the fleet were scheduled and arranged so that they moved on before the light from their emergence reached Guadaloop.
“Yes, sir,” Soler confirmed. “We haven’t detected any dispersal of forces, either.”
Kira nodded. That was the risk to their current plan. If the Cresters split their forces up, they created multiple scan-and-nova loops. They also divided their forces and would have fewer fighters to send at any given location, but since they had five or six times the fighters needed to destroy Memorial Force…
“What do you think, Zoric?” she asked Deception’s Captain, eyeing Admiral Matevosyan’s frozen image.
“I think he’s blustering for the cameras,” Zoric admitted. “He knows that if he actually breaks Admiral Avagyan’s deal, it’ll reflect on everybody’s willingness to negotiate with the Navy of the Royal Crest in the future.
“But he doesn’t want to be seen to be abiding by Avagyan’s deal.”
“So, he blusters,” Kira echoed. “That’s about what I was figuring, too.” She looked back at the tactical plot.
“Let’s accelerate our sequence,” she ordered. “Move up to a ninety-minute safety margin on that scan-and-nova loop. Just in case he decides to be clever.”
“Is there a response to his message, sir?” Soler asked.
Kira smiled.
“No, Soler,” she told the younger woman. “If things are going the way I suspect and hope they are, we can leave the good Admiral to stew in his own juices for a little while longer.”
She rose and stretched.
“I’m going to go take a nap,” she announced. “Wake me if anything changes.”
Nothing changed. There were a few more wasted attempts to sweep the spots that Memorial Force had been with heavy assault wings, but after a day, Admiral Matevosyan seemed to feel he’d blustered enough.
He’d also probably noticed the same pattern Kira was noting.
“How long since the last ship?” she asked Zoric. Deception had a full tactical staff, versus Soler and two techs on Fortitude. This kind of analysis was easier there.
“We’ve seen four ships from three systems in the last twenty-four hours,” Zoric told her. “None were from the Crest.
“The last direct ship from the Crest was thirty-six hours ago.”
“How long after Temperance and Collections Agent would they have left?” Kira asked.
“Twelve, maybe eighteen hours,” Zoric replied. “Prior to that, schedules say ships were arriving from the Crest at least every eleven hours, on average.”
“So, we’re missing three, maybe four ships,” Kira noted. “That’s not quite enough to assume there’s a blockade, but…”
“But it’s enough to flag a worry, yes,” her co-owner told her. “Something went down in the Crest about seventy hours ago, I would guess.”
“And our ransom demand is landing in the middle of it about now,” Kira said with a chuckle. She was alone on Fortitude’s bridge right now, though Zoric had a full staff on Deception’s.
They really needed to reallocate staff, but there just weren’t enough spare hands in Memorial Force to do more than fly Fortitude home.
Forty-ish hours each way. Kira had to wonder how long Matevosyan would stay in Guadaloop haunting her when he had to guess something was going on in the Crest. What were his priorities?
“Does it change anything for us?” Zoric asked.
“No,” Kira admitted. “We keep up this dance until we hear from Jade Panosyan.”
Or that Jade Panosyan’s coup had failed, in which case Kira was going t
o take whatever money the SPP offered her and get the hell out of the Crest Sector.
“You need to breathe,” Konrad told her as he returned to the bridge. “Have you gone more than twelve steps from this room since we captured the ship?”
“Nope,” Kira confirmed. “And I’m not going to, either, Konrad. I’m responsible for all of our people, everything that’s happening here. I need to be here or reachable from here.”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” he conceded. He walked up to stand next to her, looking at the holographic plot. “It’s what, thirty-five hours until we’re going to hear anything?”
“From the Crest, yes,” she agreed. “But there are three carrier groups in this system, and while they’re being cooperative right now…that could end very, very quickly.”
So far, their every-four-hour check-ins had gone without incident, but that was the most vulnerable part of all of this. Kira was reasonably sure Avagyan wouldn’t let the rest of the Cresters do anything stupid, but she did have to send a single nova fighter into harm’s way to keep the line of communication open.
“Breathe, my love,” he insisted.
Nodding, Kira closed her eyes and focused on her breaths for a minute, controlling her breathing as she tried to find a semblance of calm in the sea of chaos she swam in. There was a soft sound of metal on plastic after a minute, and she opened her eyes to see Konrad attaching something to the command chair,
“For luck,” he told her, gesturing at a new version of the interceptor-over-mountain statuette he’d made for her fighter. This one had a small clamp attached to the bottom, to link it to the arms of Kira’s new seat.
“I don’t have scraps left from Conviction, but we salvaged some pieces of your fighter before we had to push her out,” Konrad continued. “Waldroup helped me put this together.”
That was probably why the fighter and natural mountain were both cleaner and more distinct than they had been before. Plus, she suspected Konrad had been practicing to make sure that the charm was prettier this time.
Her breath caught in her throat and she blinked away tears.
“You goof,” she told him. But her fingers were already tracing the tiny fighter. “Thank you.”
“It’s for luck,” he repeated. “The last one got you through a fighter crash alive. I figure this one is enough prettier to get us all home.”
52
Sometimes, the messenger was as important as the message.
After over three days of a complete lack of ships and communication from the Crest, the first ship to arrive in-system was Penalty Fee…Captain Lorelei Simonsson, commanding.
That data barely percolated into Kira’s scanner reports before the second wave of ships arrived. A full carrier group, guarding multiple Army of the Royal Crest assault transports.
They dropped into Guadaloop orbit like a descending herd of locusts. Even the fragments of messages Kira was picking up from a light-hour away were fascinating—and their scanners were able to clearly pick out the shuttles swarming over multiple ships of the Navy of the Royal Crest.
“Someone is cleaning house,” Soler said with a satisfied tone. “That’s…enthusiastic.”
“Hopefully, they’re sticking to arrests and not lining people up against walls,” Kira said. She’d picked her side in this particular fight—and not just for money—but she was still all too aware of how messy and ugly civil wars could get.
In this case, speed and surprise carried the day. None of the SPP loyalists aboard the NRC ships had been expecting relief-and-arrest orders. They’d had, from what Kira could tell, the structures to convince their crews to follow them into mutiny—but they hadn’t had time to activate them.
“This was all an hour ago,” Kira said softly.
“Do we change our scheduled check-in?” Soler asked.
“No. We’re fifteen minutes from our next nova, sixty-five from the next check-in,” Kira estimated, eyeing the clocks. “We’ll check in as normal and we’ll move forward from there.
“The good news is that they sent Simonsson, so it looks like they’re arresting the SPP people, not the Royalists, which means that our employer appears to have pulled this off. The bad news is that our employer already set us up once. So…we shall see.”
Two hours later, Kira pulled her key staff together.
“We have a recorded message relayed by Dawnlord,” she told them, nodding to Patel. “It came encrypted under a cipher provided to us by the Crown Zharang, so this should be a good sign.”
Memorial Force’s ships were close enough together to talk in real-time and carry on a live virtual conference. Kira waited to be sure she had everyone’s attention and then started the decrypted video.
The image of Voski, Jade Panosyan’s aide and Dinastik Pahak bodyguard, appeared on the screen. The guard was in full gold-on-black uniform, with the two stars of a general on their collar.
“Just a bodyguard, I see,” Zoric muttered.
“Voski was the commander of the Crown Zharang’s bodyguard,” Kira pointed out. “That would make them the second-ranked officer of the Dinastik Pahak.”
The conversation was cut off when Voski started speaking.
“Commodore Demirci, this is General Voski of the Dinastik Pahak,” they said calmly. “While aspects of this conversation will be obvious to everyone, there are details and elements that I think should remain private between those already briefed on this affair.
“Firstly, I wish to update you on the state of affairs in the Crest. The Crest Planetary Police executed a search warrant on Sanctuary and Prosperity Party offices across the system five days ago.
“We were expecting some degree of legislative and active pushback,” they continued. “If Prime Minister Jeong had been in place, I suspect the pushback would have been more…measured.
“On the other hand, the level and type of evidence we came into possession of might have triggered the reaction we faced regardless,” Voski noted. “Several divisions of the Army of the Royal Crest attempted to seize the capital and arrest the King and Crown Zharang.
“They failed. The violence—and the SPP’s clear responsibility for it—provided the final straw. Over forty percent of the SPP’s members of Parliament are now under arrest, along with key supports in the NRC and ARC.
“His Majesty has officially dissolved the Parliament of the Royal Crest and called new elections for fifty-six days from today. Crown Zharang Jade’s plan has worked…sufficiently, if not perfectly.”
Kira nodded in silent relief. She’d figured, from the moment Penalty Fee’s beacon had been so clear on her commanding officer, but it was good to hear it confirmed.
“Along with that, however, I also am tasked to deal with the situation we created as our distraction,” Voski noted drily. “I must note that the ransom demand we received was for significantly more money than had been discussed previously.”
Maral Jeong had insisted she was worth more money than Kira thought—and Kira had been a little angry with her employer.
“Jade asked me to give you their personal apology for leaking your course,” Voski said levelly. “Removing one of the military levers from the SPP’s playbook was far too valuable to us. We hoped that you would be able to handle the situation, one way or another, but we made the call we had to.
“We will meet the increased random demand,” they concluded. “One ARC transport will be at the coordinates attached to this message at the listed time. No escorts. We will retrieve the Prime Minister and Cabinet then.”
Kira pulled the numbers and nodded. They were entirely workable.
“I also must confess that we did not actually expect Fortitude to survive this process,” Voski admitted. “While we cannot prevent you from leaving with her, I am authorized to offer a ten-billion-crest ransom for the carrier herself.
“I hope to see you shortly, Commodore Demirci.”
The message ended and Kira found herself glaring at the hologram tank.
“Som
etimes, I would prefer that my employers be slightly less bluntly honest,” she said aloud. If Fortitude had gone down to the SPP loyalists’ bombers, Kira would not have survived.
“We’re not taking their money, are we?” Zoric asked. “The only reason we took this damn contract was to get the carrier.”
“Exactly,” Kira agreed. “I mean, we also took it to stick a finger in the Equilibrium Institute’s eye—mission accomplished there. But…”
She shook her head.
“No, we’re keeping Fortitude and Voski is going to give me the papers that say that’s legal,” she told her people. “Because those were promised to us.”
She turned to Milani.
“Get the prisoners ready for the exchange,” she ordered them. “But…don’t tell them anything. Let’s have this all be a pleasant surprise for Em Jeong.”
53
Fortitude dwarfed the army transport. She was almost four times the smaller ship’s size, and Kira had made sure that every one of the carrier’s heavy guns was trained on the assault ship.
She was ninety-plus percent sure she could trust Voski and Jade Panosyan, but if there was a point in this entire mission where betrayal would be easiest and most profitable for the Cresters, this was it.
Still, she let them bring their own shuttle over to collect the prisoners. Milani and their commandos stood around Jeong and the five cabinet Ministers, weapons held in parade-ground stances but still clearly ready.
Kira had to conceal a smirk. Maral Jeong and her Ministers clearly felt that they were finally back in control of the situation. Money for their freedom was a transaction they could understand—and they’d have the power to seek vengeance later.
They thought.
The ARC shuttle touched down and the ramp descended. Four of Kira’s commandos marched over in full boarding armor, weapons ready in case something happened.
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 30