Battle Song by Laura Brewer

Author:Laura Brewer [Brewer, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“Good news, Ta-Alcar,” Joram said as soon as he entered Operations. “I just got an update; 92% of the Fleet ships are ready for action. The Equinox and the Destrier will be ready in two weeks. We do have two hundred fighters in production. They were already on order and I put a rush on it, so they should be ready soon.”

Alcar grinned in relief. That had been bothering him since the last engagement. They had lost far too many of the smaller ships. Replacing both ships and crews took time. He didn’t think they had any to spare. They had to keep up the pressure and not give the Thess’ns a chance to regain the initiative. To that end he had formulated an interim plan.

“That is good news. I’d like to send some of the stealth capable ships on some random raiding missions. I want to hit some of the fairly soft targets like supply depots and communications relays. The idea is to keep them confused. If they think we don’t dare anything more serious, so much the better. They need to be hit and run, like we were doing with the Guild earlier. It’s relatively low risk with a decent gain. They can do recon while they’re out as well. Any objections?”

“No. I trust you mean to use the Vortexes for this?” Joram asked his voice concerned.

“Yes, with some of the scouts and traders who’ve run this kind of operation. What I want is diversionary. It needs to be serious enough to keep their attention, yet random enough to keep them guessing about what we’re up to and where we’ll be next.” He also wanted to set a particular pattern in their minds and not offer them a different picture until they attacked the shipyards.

“I’ll get that out to them, by sending?”

Alcar nodded at Joram’s question.

“Also, Gen. Moulren came to me with a suggestion of putting your new Spec Ops teams on the Vortex cruisers.”

“Good, that will give them the best mobility and adequate backup. I agree that our teams are ready to go on their own. I’ll still keep in contact with them. Two of the teams are tasked to Tekushar to help with the pirates already. It shouldn’t take too much effort to clean them out.” Alcar thought two teams tasked to the pirates and the rest doing ops in Thess’n territory. In both cases, the other scouts and the Traders would make up the rest of the forces.

***

It was raining and she was already late. Verteshii frowned, wondering if Stalker would still be waiting. It had been a horrid day at work and then not a flitter to be hired after the storm broke. Her usual well-groomed self looked like a mongrel. She felt like a half drowned port rat. Her frown stayed as she ducked into the tavern. Late or not, she headed straight for the public rooms to dry off and try to repair some of the damage to her appearance.

Drying off made her more comfortable, but the further delay made her irritation threaten to boil over.

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