Equilibrium Read online

Those opticals were enough to tell her that something had already gone differently from expected. First Crown might only be six times the size of each individual gunship, but she still badly outclassed her attackers.

  There were only nineteen gunships left in the jamming zone—but Kira’s twenty nova fighters weren’t the first nova strike to arrive in the battlespace. A chaotic spiral of forty unknown nova fighters was hurtling toward First Crown, and an eye trained by twenty years of war spotted the real threat.

  She’d already lost coms with most of her starfighters, but she had laser links to a handful, and she tagged them all.

  “Everyone who can hear me,” Kira snapped. “Target the nova bombers.”

  Her Weltraumpanzer-Viers each carried two torpedoes. The heavier specialized anti-capital-ship nova craft in the heart of the hostile formation carried ten. First Crown could probably handle a salvo from one bomber.

  But Kira’s computers were guessing there was something between eight and fourteen bombers hidden in the enemy nova-fighter formation.

  She suited her actions to her words, throwing maximum power to her Harrington coils and diving into the chaos with her guns blazing. A hostile interceptor took a moment too long to react to the presence of nova fighters, ate a full two-second burst from her plasma cannon and vanished in a ball of fire.

  More of her fighters were swarming toward the enemy strike. They might be outnumbered two to one, but enough of her pilots were veterans that they didn’t need her to point out the bombers. The newbies, half-trained and unblooded, were still smart enough to follow the vets.

  Kira twisted her nova fighter through the strangers’ escort formation and hammered another salvo of plasma into a second interceptor. That fighter novaed out in the middle of her blast—damaged and probably out of the fight.

  Instinct dodged her fighter half a kilometer sideways, and plasma blazed through where she’d been. Threat icons flagged at least three interceptors targeting her, but she ignored them as she dove toward the bomber formation.

  One of the interceptors vanished and her computers confirmed that another Hoplite had moved into position to cover her. She wouldn’t know which of her pilots that was until later, but they were doing their job.

  Time was everything and the clock was running out. It took sixty seconds for her nova fighter’s class two drive to cool and allow for a new jump. Their opponents weren’t jumping out, though. The bombers were pressing the attack—and Kira was in their midst.

  Plasma flashed in the dark of space, and a bomber came apart under her guns. More of her wing was in the mix with her, but the back of her mind was also flagging something she didn’t want to know: the enemy pilots were as good as her veterans, and she was definitely missing starfighters that had novaed in with her.

  Once in the battlespace’s jamming, she couldn’t give orders. She focused on the bombers, shattering a second of the capital-ship killers and then cursing as the surviving nova craft salvoed their weapons—and vanished.

  The gunships were still pressing their attack, and First Crown’s weapons were focused on them. Not that it would have mattered. A torpedo was only a physical object for about five seconds before detonating and turning into a massive plasma blast…

  Plasma blasts which, in this case, ran into the armored flank of Deception as the heavy cruiser completed her own precision nova, dropping the big ship between the incoming threat and the monarchs of Redward.

  One of the gunships was now heading directly toward Kira, their gunfire tracking far too closely for her liking, and she fell back on the first adage of nova-fighter pilots: if the battlespace is too hot…be somewhere else.

  She novaed.

  The computers automatically picked a rendezvous point near the battlespace, usually one light-minute away. Kira’s fighter wasn’t the only one of Deception’s parasites at the deep-space point she’d jumped to.

  She could see eleven other fighters. There were almost certainly still some in the battlespace, so she hadn’t lost eight planes and pilots today.

  “Report,” she ordered. “Convert what you can to ammo and nova back on your cooldown. This isn’t over yet.”

  Her fighters could only hold so much energy in the capacitors for their guns, and their microfusion power plants could only recharge those capacitors so quickly with everything else demanding power. Away from the battlespace, the reduced demands allowed for far faster “reloading.”

  “Teach your brother to herd sheep,” her second-in-command, Melissa “Nightmare” Cartman, told her. The commander of her Memorial-Bravo squadron ran the second section of Hoplites flying off Deception. “Who the hell were those fighters?”

  “We don’t know,” Kira said grimly. “Not Clan, not with fucking bombers.”

  Nobody in the Syntactic Cluster was supposed to have nova bombers. The class two nova drive was difficult enough to build that there was only one plant in the cluster making them at all—and Kira had helped acquire that plant for Redward.

  The larger version required for a nova bomber was beyond even Redward right now. The presence of nova bombers suggested someone was playing games.

  “The usual suspects, Mel. Playing the usual games,” she told Nightmare. “We need to save King Larry and Queen Sonia. We won’t get paid particularly well if we lose our employers’ monarchs and a third of their cruisers in one shot!”

  Her old friend snorted.

  “Wilco. Ten seconds,” she warned. “Deception wasn’t there when I left. Hoping?”

  “She took a torp salvo meant for Crown,” Kira replied. “She should be okay; her armor and dispersion networks are good. Hostile fighters novaed, but they might be back.”

  “Understood. Memorial-Bravo, check in,” Nightmare snapped. She listened to reports Kira couldn’t hear for a second.

  “We’re on our way,” she then told Kira. “Memorial-Bravo—nova and attack.”

  Kira’s own countdown still had fifteen seconds left, and she linked in with the pilots with her. All four of her Weltraumpanzer-Viers were now there, along with two more of the Hoplites. It wasn’t one of her formal squadrons, but they’d do.

  “On the timer T minus ten, form on me,” she ordered. “Memorials…nova.”

  By the time Kira and her fighters returned, the battle was over. She saw the pulse of the last gunship novaing out and breathed a sigh of relief. The enemy fighters hadn’t returned so far, though everyone was keeping their own multiphasic jamming up, just in case.

  Even the Clans, after all, were entirely capable of building a smart missile that could cross a star system and hit its target. Multiphasic jamming would render that weapon deaf, blind and stupid in its final approach, making it an easy target, but without that jamming it could potentially be deadly.

  The absence of immediate hostiles allowed Kira to assess the situation. The RRF gunships were gone. No real surprise there, though she didn’t like it. They might be the “small” ships of the main fleets, but a gunship still had a crew of thirty.

  Deception looked intact…ish. Kira’s cruiser had taken sixty torpedoes. That was less than she’d estimated it would need when she was on the other side of the equation, but she still didn’t like the marks her computers were picking up on the ship’s hull.

  Worse, while it was hard to sort out the numbers in the jamming, she was definitely missing at least two fighters. If she was lucky, the pilots had ejected and their nova-drive cores were retrievable.

  If she wasn’t…she’d just lost ten percent of her immediate subordinates.

  On the other hand, First Crown appeared mostly unblemished. Kira was never happy to lose people—or lose allies, for that matter. The RRF gunships weren’t her mercenaries, but she’d still mourn them.

  If nothing else, a significant chunk of the pilots she commanded across Deception and the mercenary carrier Conviction were ex-RRF gunship crew.

  She trained a laser com on Deception and linked in.

  “This is Basketball,” she told the
m. “Report.”

  “A bit cooked around the edges, but we’re fine,” Zoric replied instantly. “DamCon is sweeping the impacted hull sections, and we’ll need some replacement plating and dispersal nets, but we have no casualties.”

  “Thank gods,” Kira murmured. That was better than she’d been afraid of—much better. “Did you get any scans on the nova fighters?”

  Zoric snorted.

  “Boss, we didn’t even see the nova fighters,” she admitted. “I was novaing in to block off gunship fire, not eat a fucking torpedo strike. We got lucky.”

  Multiphasic-jamming fields were starting to come down, and Kira felt her shoulders tense. This was always the riskiest part. If the enemy hadn’t retreated, her people were going to be vulnerable.

  But a battle had to end sometime. It was a judgment call—and if the jammers didn’t come down, no one was going to be able to tell them to take them down.

  She tapped a physical switch, taking her own offline.

  “Have the deck prep the ball,” she ordered. “This was short and ugly, as per usual. I’m going to have to run gun-camera footage, but I think we gave a good account of ourselves.”

  “Only six of the gunships got out,” Zoric said in a satisfied tone. “They were not prepared to face two cruisers.”

  “It’s a trap,” Kira said in a blatantly faked Brisingr accent. “There’s two of them.”

  The humor was forced, though. As the jammers came down, it was clear she was missing three of her Hoplite-IVs. None of her Apollo veterans, but still…

  “Get search-and-rescue out ASAP,” she ordered. “We want our own survival pods and any escape pods from the RRF gunships.” Her eyes scanned the sensor data she was receiving as well.

  “Prisoners might be handy, too.”

  3

  Reinforcements started arriving in short order. Lightspeed sensor delays meant the first wave was a pair of nova destroyers and a six-ship squadron of nova fighters from the Lastward security fleet. Redward was still being careful about revealing their new ability to build the drives for nova fighters, but an attack on the monarch meant everything was in play.

  Kira watched from Deception’s flight control center as the new starfighters swung into formation around First Crown. The destroyers did the same, but they positioned themselves between the Redward cruiser and the mercenary ship.

  She concealed a chuckle at that. If she’d wanted to wreck First Crown, there wouldn’t be much left. Deception was fifteen years out of date by the standards of her home sector, but that meant she was around thirty years ahead of the Redward cruiser.

  And she was almost two-thirds again the local ships’ cubage. Deception could take on the cruiser and both destroyers and wouldn’t break a sweat.

  There was a reason it had taken Queen Sonia’s explicit support to let Kira keep the ship.

  “What’s the status on our search-and-rescue?” she asked the deck boss.

  Dilshad Tamboli wasn’t the person she’d wanted for her flight deck boss, but it made no sense to move Angel Waldroup—Conviction’s deck boss—from a carrier now up to almost forty starfighters to a cruiser that maxed out at twenty.

  Waldroup had recommended Tamboli, one of her team leads, and the dark-skinned spacer was now one of the handful of officers aboard Deception that held the delightfully vague mercenary rank of Commander.

  They were focused on the screens and their headware but brought their attention back to Kira as she spoke.

  “We’ve picked up Janda,” Tamboli reported. “One beacon still in space, looks like Saari.” They shook their head sadly. “We’re sweeping in case Zima’s beacon was just disabled, but it doesn’t look like it.”

  One pilot lost out of three fighters destroyed. That was good by any standard, but Kira had still lost a pilot. Iris Zima had been one of their greenest recruits, a civilian shuttle pilot who’d leapt at the chance to fly a nova fighter.

  “Keep looking for her,” Kira ordered. “Any of our unknowns show up in the sweep?”

  “RRF picked up the escape pods from the gunships, but we’re still sweeping for fighter pods,” Tamboli told her. “Either none of them ejected or they’re using timed beacons.”

  “They didn’t seem the type to fight to the death,” she noted. “Too professional. Those were damn good pilots, Commander Tamboli. My guess is timed beacons.”

  Timed beacons triggered after twelve to twenty-four hours, in case a force didn’t think they were going to be able to control the battlespace but did think they might be able to sneak back in and retrieve their survival pods later.

  “Make sure we grab any of their class two drives we can ID as well,” Kira said. “Even if we end up not using them, we can trade them to Redward. They’re not making that many of the things yet.”

  Most of her fighters had been manufactured in the fabricators aboard Conviction, but the new ships’ drives had come from Redward. A class two nova drive couldn’t be manufactured in zero gravity or artificial gravity, which was part of what made them so hard to build.

  “Sir,” a voice pinged in her headware from the bridge. “This is coms. We have incoming call for you from First Crown.” The junior officer sounded awed. “It’s the King, sir.”

  The awe made sense, then. Monica Smolak was a Redward native, hired for her skills with communications software and hardware. She was still getting used to the “ship without borders” nature of a mercenary crew.

  “I’ll take it in my office,” Kira told Smolak. “Give His Majesty my apologies; I will be a minute.”

  Despite the horrible lèse-majesté of asking both her employer and the local monarch to wait, King Larry didn’t appear particularly bothered when his image appeared in the hologram above Kira’s desk.

  The office still didn’t feel like hers, not yet, but it was the office for Deception’s Commander, Nova Group. It had everything she needed but was stripped down to the basic utilitarian fixtures of a metal desk and a counter with a coffee machine.

  At least working for Redward meant they had very good coffee. It was still the planet’s main export.

  “Your Majesty,” Kira greeted the immense smiling man on her screen. Lawrence Bartholomew Stewart, His Royal Majesty, First Magistrate and Honored King of the Kingdom of Redward, looked almost exactly like the kind of man who’d use the regnal name of King Larry.

  “Sonia will be joining us in a moment,” Larry told her. “She is talking to the analyst team she has with her to get their first assessment of the situation.”

  Kira wasn’t entirely sure how many people knew that Queen Sonia was the head of the Office of Integration—or even that the intelligence-consolidation team by that name existed. Via the Office, Sonia ran the entire intelligence apparatus of the Kingdom…and it made perfect sense she had a team with her.

  “I’m glad we were in position to intervene,” Kira said. “We’d set it up with the RRF, but I don’t think anyone actually expected it to be needed.”

  “Admiral Remington told us there’d be some arrangements for our security, but…as you say, no one expected trouble,” Larry admitted. A second image appeared above Kira’s desk while he was speaking, the tall and delicately built frame of Queen Sonia a distinct contrast to her husband.

  From the fond glance the two exchanged, Kira figured they were in separate offices and hadn’t seen each other much since the battle.

  “I expected trouble,” Sonia insisted. “We knew the RRF was penetrated to an unacceptable degree when we moved against the Clans last year. That battle group was sent out with sealed paper orders to cover against an intelligence apparatus we knew couldn’t be Warlord Davies’s.”

  “The RRF still struggles with the concept of an interstellar conspiracy specifically targeting us,” Larry admitted. “So do I. But…” He sighed. “We have enough evidence that it exists.”

  “Including this,” Sonia said. “Someone has the RRF sufficiently penetrated that our heavily protected and secret itinerary was lea
ked to a hostile force with access to both Clans-owned gunships and modern nova fighters.”

  “Regardless…thank you, Commander Demirci,” Larry told Kira. “Or is it Captain now?”

  “Commander for the moment,” Kira said. “Kavitha Zoric commands Deception while I command her fighters…and head Memorial Squadron LLC. We, of course, work for Redward through the subcontract from Conviction Limited.”

  Larry laughed.

  “I’m sure that all makes sense to you,” he told her. “All I really need to know is that you’re on our side with that behemoth.” He turned his attention back to Sonia. “You may as well fill the Commander in on what your team concluded at the same time as me.”

  “The gunships were from the Costar Clans,” the Queen told them. “We have more than enough data on the Clans’ construction methods and available materials to confirm. The starfighters are more questionable. The interceptors were Veles-Four-type ships, Crest-built. The bombers aren’t in our intelligence databanks.”

  “I can have my people go over the data we have,” Kira offered. “I don’t think there’s anything in Deception's databanks we didn’t give you, though.”

  “I would appreciate that, Commander,” Sonia said. “Right now, my analysts’ best guess is that we’re looking at the flight group from that Liberty-class ship that showed up at Ypres. We know there’s a mercenary carrier working for Equilibrium in the region, and a Liberty-class would field forty nova fighters.”

  “And Equilibrium has worked with the Costar Clans in the past,” Kira said.

  “Indeed.” Larry’s voice was grim. “Our scans show you lost three fighters, Commander. Were…any of your pilots retrieved?”

  “Two of them, thankfully,” she replied. “We only lost one person today.”

  “We lost fifty-five,” Larry told her. “The gunships were taken out too quickly for escape pods. We have a handful of lucky survivors, nothing more. These people attacked without warning and killed far more of my subjects than I can tolerate.”