Huntress

Chapter 1

The hardest lesson for any military commander to learn is when to let go.

For Admiral Kira “Basketball” Demirci, commanding officer, primary shareholder and Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Force mercenary company, it was a lesson she was still only passable at.

The slightly built blonde woman had lost the coin toss with her second-in-command and largest minority shareholder, Commodore Kavitha Zoric, and the other woman had taken their primary capital ship and all of the destroyers off on the latest contract.

Someone had to stay in the Redward System to take delivery of Memorial Force’s newest warship, after all, and either of them could command the supercarrier Fortitude to handle an Outer Rim brush war.

That left her on the flag deck of the cruiser Deception, watching the Redward Royal Fleet go through maneuvers above the fortresses that safeguarded their system. They were a far cry from the converted freighters and undersized cruisers the RRF had commanded when she’d arrived in the system years earlier.

“Hell of a difference, huh?”

She glanced over at her companion. Abdullah “Scimitar” Colombera was one of the few survivors of the original squadron she’d fled her home system with. They’d served in the Apollo System Defense Force’s 303 Nova Combat Group during the war against their homeworld’s enemies in Brisingr.

Their government had then sold them out to Brisingr as a secret condition of the deal that had ended that war, so they’d wound up out here. Redward was part of the Syntactic Cluster at the edge of the Rim, almost fifteen hundred light-years from Sol and over two hundred from Apollo.

“They’re starting to look like a modern fleet now,” she told Colombera.

There were three proper modern capital ships out there anchoring the whole fleet. Each was one hundred and twenty thousand cubic meters, partially designed by Kira’s boyfriend Konrad Bueller, and they were the largest warships ever built in the Syntactic Cluster.

They fell short of the ships that had fought Apollo’s war in several areas—but size wasn’t one of them. Eventually, Kira had been promised a sister to the carrier Royal Shield, but that wasn’t the ship she was in Redward to take possession of.

“They are a modern fleet now,” Colombera replied, then snorted. “For the Rim, anyway. Go five hundred light-years Coreward…”

“And everything changes,” Kira agreed. The zone from a thousand light-years away from Sol to fifteen hundred light-years away was the Rim. Still considered part of “civilized space” and mapped by the major astrography corporations, even her home system only counted as a seventh-rate power in the overall galaxy.

Redward had dragged itself and its partners kicking and screaming to eighth-rate status—and for all of the battles Kira Demirci had fought on their behalf, most of the help they’d received making that transition had actually been from her boyfriend.

She’d originally met the now-ex-Brisingr engineer when he’d been a POW during the war. The universe moved in strange ways, and they’d met in the Syntactic Cluster again long after that war was done.

“Are they still pissed at us over the fighters?” Colombera asked, watching as a wing of nova fighters blinked out of existence on the sensors. It would be a minute or two before Deception’s scanners would locate the starfighters again. Most likely they’d only jumped a light-minute or so, but the scanners were still limited by the speed of light.

“Some of them are,” Kira agreed, but she was smiling as she said it. “Helmet thinks it’s fair play, though, and he’s the only one whose opinion matters on that point. They screwed us on the new carrier, so we kept the new fighter designs we acquired.”

The fighters in Deception’s hangars were more advanced than the ones she’d brought to Redward when she’d arrived. Redward’s fighters were based on those Hoplite-IVs and contemporary planes.

Deception’s squadrons now flew fighters based on the designs Memorial Force had acquired from the Navy of the Royal Crest when they’d procured Fortitude. If the RRF had prioritized building the full one-twenty-kilocubic carrier the way Kira felt they’d promised, she’d have sold them the designs.

As it was, the Crown Zharang of the Crest, the person who’d hired them to steal Fortitude from their own fleet as part of a complex coup against the totalitarian government of their country, had asked Kira not to. And she’d been feeling far more generous to the Zharang than to Redward.

“Are your fighters ready?” Kira asked Colombera. The younger Apollon wasn’t part of Deception’s crew, after all. Like many of the Memorial Force officers currently living on Deception and Redward’s Green Ward asteroid battle station, he’d been handpicked to take up a more senior role on their new ship.

“Seventy-two planes, with pilots, munitions, the works,” Colombera confirmed. “Though I think some of Helmet’s people are eyeing my planes a little too closely.”

Admiral Teige “Helmet” Sagairt had skipped a few grades to reach his current rank, entirely by virtue of being the senior nova-fighter pilot in the entire RRF. He was now the commanding officer of the RRF Nova Fighter Corps and directly reported to the senior commanders of the system’s military…including His Majesty, King Larry.

He might understand why Kira hadn’t sold him the designs for the ships she built for her own use, but with twelve squadrons of those planes currently in an expensive private hangar on a semi-civilian station above his homeworld…she’d have been shocked if he didn’t have people taking pictures and other scans.

“He wouldn’t be doing his job if they weren’t,” she conceded. “And we wouldn’t be doing our job if we made it too easy. We made some promises with regards to those planes, after all.”

“We’re doing what we can,” Colombera agreed. “But the RRF does own Green Ward. Even if we’re renting hangars in the civilian sections to store the fighters.”

He shook his head.

“How long?” he finally asked.

“Davidović is already aboard,” Kira told him. “Plus about thirty or forty chiefs and techs, plus Bueller. I expect to hear from them tomorrow with a go/no-go on the final commissioning date.”

“I knew that,” Scimitar replied. “I lent her the best people I have.” He sighed theatrically. “Though I’ll point out that we ran this Cluster dry of people who know which end of a star fighter the guns fire from a long time ago.”

There had been less than twenty nova fighters in the Syntactic Cluster when Kira and her friends had arrived. They weren’t solely responsible for Redward’s sudden explosion in starfighter capability—that had taken unintentional assistance from several old enemies—but they’d certainly helped nurture it.

But there were very few people in the six habitable systems of the Cluster who Kira would trust to maintain a nova fighter—and most of them already worked for either the Redward Royal Fleet or Kira Demirci herself.

“We’ve been training techs almost as hard and fast as we’ve been training pilots,” Kira reminded him. “And techs have a lower casualty rate.”

That rate wasn’t zero. The RRF had lost enough capital ships with their tech crews aboard over the last few years to prevent that—but they’d also lost over half of their existing pilot base when they’d finally kicked the inner-world meddlers of the Equilibrium Institute out of the Cluster.

“But we expect to have the new ship cleared for duty by the end of the week, with a formal commissioning party once we have everyone aboard,” she noted. “My understanding is that Their Majesties are planning on making it a big deal at their expense, so I can all but guarantee the Redward side of things will run smoothly.”

Her old subordinate chuckled. “No one wants to disappoint them, that’s true. So, two weeks?”

“About that,” she confirmed.

“And when do we get to start using the name?” Colombera asked. “CVL-Four is a bit…bland. Almost Brisingrian.”

Deception was a Brisingr-built heavy cruiser and had delighted in the name K79-L in their service. The Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy, Kira’s old enemies, didn’t believe in ship names as a rule.

“Redward tradition is that it’s bad luck to name a ship before she’s finally commissioned,” Kira told him. “So, when we take full possession and turn the lights on, we start calling her by name. Until then, she’s just the hull number.”

Even if everybody knew that Redward’s fourth light carrier was going to be Huntress.