They were almost home. For Wiley, Command Centurion Shiori Ness, commander of the Corynthe flagship Kali-ma, it had been a long year at sea, but she had no real life beyond sitting on this command deck, commanding.
Nobody waiting for her to open the door. Everyone else would be happy to be home, if for no other reason than to see what Jessica’s people had done with a year to work and enough firepower to crack any two heads together.
Hopefully, those fine folks from Aquitaine, in their pretty uniforms, had kept the peace, and she wasn’t about to drop into a palace where someone other than David was regent, but her intelligence was weeks old, picked up at their last food-and-supplies stop.
Times like this, she missed that old rascal Bedrov. Anders Himura was probably a better officer, but Yan had developed a knack for gunnery she had rarely encountered. He might have been the best tactical officer she had ever served with. Still, he had trained a good crew, and Himura had driven them to be better people, better officers, and not just better killers.
But she might need killers in four minutes when they dropped out of JumpSpace.
“Anders,” she called from her command station, waiting for him to turn. “Status?”
“All gun crews green, Top,” he replied with a hard, predatory smile. “Flight Wing reports green and ready to hot launch on command. Damage Control teams suited up and ready to play.”
Yes, they had spent too much time training with the Imperials, those weeks when the ship was dry-docked for repairs. At least they had been able to fly way sooner than the Blackbird, but nobody had mauled them.
“Science Officer,” Wiley continued, circling her bridge. “We’ll be coming out low, down on Petron’s south pole, and relatively hot. We’ll need probes fired over both horizons.”
Bryn Maki looked up from his boards a second later and met her eyes across the space. His was a rare genotype on Petron, a descendent of one of the early families, colonists originally from Nihon, themselves almost pureblooded Japanese from the Homeworld, however many millennia ago. He was tall and slender, with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a golden hue to his skin that was so much brighter than her own tone. And rare, with all the pale-skinned Anglos that made up so much of the rest of the crew.
“Already programmed, Command Centurion,” he said crisply, never once losing touch with his boards.
It was good. Wouldn’t do to drop out of jump on top of a hostile fleet that had taken over while they were gone, even if Wiley couldn’t imagine the circumstances where that happened.
She opened a comm back to Baxter.
“Desianna, this is Wiley,” she said. “Final warning before we drop out. You should be on station in about two hours.”
“Already packed and set for a spiral launch, Shiori,” the Prime Minister said in her happy voice.
That woman would be happy to be back. To see her son, her friends, her home.
Not for the first time, Wiley wondered if she should convince Galen Estevan to make good his threat to build some warships, rather than motherships, and sail off to help Jessica.
How are you going to keep them on the farm, after they’ve been to St. Legier?
But that was a tomorrow problem. She had a year to get caught up on.
“All hands, prepare for insertion,” came the call, followed a few seconds later with “What the hell is that?”