39

They gave the students a day to rest and grieve. Kira and the rest of the trainers spent that day moving everything to a new space on Shadow Ward. One of the advantages of an asteroid battle station was that it had a lot of space to work with.

The area they’d been given was basically a surface apartment building with some attached conference rooms, a few minutes by transit tube from the landing field they were storing the training fighters at.

By the end of the day, Kira even had an office to collapse into in a half-exhausted state. The students would be shuttled up in the morning, and then they would be back to work.

There’d be no chance to pause for grief if there were more losses. The timelines were already tight—and they had no way to judge if they were getting tighter for external reasons. Ypres could have fallen already, and they wouldn’t know.

Local politics, on the other hand, were definitely a factor. The news playing on a hologram above her desk was painful.

“One does not wish to impugn the wisdom of our King,” an MP was saying. “But I have to question what we are fighting for. Without interstellar trade, there is no Free Trade Zone. Have we even made an attempt to communicate with the blockaders? Surely, they must have some demands we can negotiate around!”

“Someone doesn’t know how this works,” a dry voice said from Kira’s door. Kira looked up to find Milani standing just inside the entrance, the dragon on their armor looking very unimpressed with the politician.

Kira turned the news report off with a wave of her hand.

“I’ll admit the lack of communication makes me twitchy,” she told the merc trooper. “It’s been a month and we haven’t seen a single ship from outside. No demands, just a complete blackout.”

The good news was that the ships the RRF had sent out to map secondary exit points would be returning in another month. That would at least give Redward some options for communication.

They would need a visible and clear victory to break the blockade and get shipping to start coming back, though. Once the RRF had secondary exit points, communications could be reestablished, but only defeating the Bengalissimo force would actually change anything.

“Says the Institute is playing an ugly game to me,” Milani observed. “One where Redward disappearing is more useful than a Redward brought to heel.”

“Or they don’t think they can bring Redward sufficiently to heel, and blockading keeps them in line,” Kira said. “If they think we’re still on the old construction timelines, they may think they have time. I don’t quite believe that, given how badly we’ve been penetrated in the past.”

“On that note, sir, I have someone who wants to talk to you,” Milani told her.

“Who?”

“Neha Bradley,” the merc told her. “The one we grounded for cheating and passed onto the RRF for interrogation. I’m guessing you haven’t had a chance for an update there?”

“Not yet,” Kira admitted. “Buried in my email somewhere.”

“She’s Equilibrium,” Milani said bluntly. “Made some interesting offers to Redward Intelligence but insisted on talking to you. Alone.”

“That sounds like a trap, Milani,” Kira replied.

“I was planning on chaining her to a chair and giving you a blaster,” her subordinate said brightly. “She seems straightforward enough, but…it’s your call.”

“What’s she offering?” Kira asked.

“The man who recruited her, her handler, and the woman she thinks runs the Institute’s intelligence on the planet,” Milani told her. “But she won’t make a deal with Redward. She wants to make it with you.”

Kira sighed. She needed six hours of sleep and a shower, but…that was probably worth it.

“All right. Bring her in.”

* * *

Neha Bradley was, without question, gorgeous. A lithe young woman with athletic curves and raven-black hair, even in a prisoner’s jumpsuit she was catching more than a professional gaze from the two RRF Military Police who escorted her into Kira’s office.

Milani was true to their word, though. Bradley was handcuffed to a heavy steel chair before the MPs left, and the mercenary visibly paused to put a large hand blaster on the desk in front of Kira.

“If you shoot her attempting escape, no one’s going to blink much,” the merc told Kira—clearly enough for Bradley to hear. “She might be useful, but I suspect Redward thinks you’re more so.”

The dragon-armored mercenary stepped out the door of the plain office, leaving Kira alone with the prisoner.

“Em Bradley,” Kira said, studying the young woman. “You cheated your way through half of my training program and apparently work for the people who’ve been making my life misery since before I even knew they existed.

“Milani tells me you insisted on talking to me before making any kind of deal,” she concluded. “I’m…not enthused. So talk.”

“I can finger at least three key Institute agents on Redward,” Bradley said quietly. “I’d think you’d be more interested in neutralizing them.”

“Oh, I’m interested; I’m just not sure why you’re talking to me,” Kira replied.

“Because everyone who knows anything knows that the RRF is riddled with informers,” the woman said. “So, if I want actual help, I need to talk to someone who can do things without them. Plus”—she shrugged—“I want back in the training program.”

Kira laughed.

“You cheated your way as far as you did,” she pointed out. “If the program you’d been using was just a bit more sophisticated, you might have kept cheating all the way through. I can’t trust that you know any of what we taught, I can’t trust an enemy agent, and you want me to put you back in a nova fighter?”

“Yes,” Bradley said firmly. “Because these sons of bitches have my daughter.”

Kira’s spine straightened and her feet slammed onto the ground as she held Bradley’s gaze firmly for an assessing ten seconds. The woman’s file said she was twenty-two standard years old and she looked it, which meant Kira had been a military officer and a leader of people for as long as Bradley had been alive.

There was a hang to the other woman’s eyes, an anger to her tone, that spoke to the truth of her words.

“She’d be what, six months old?” Kira said levelly. It was a guess, but an older child would have been hard to excise from the younger woman’s file—and there was nothing about a kid in Bradley’s file.

“Nine months,” Bradley said. “A foolish accident the father wanted nothing to do with, but Jessica is my baby girl. And I will do anything to protect her and make sure she gets the life she deserves.”

“What happened?” Kira asked. She still half-suspected she was being played, but she would let it play out. A young single mother… She could see a dozen ways that the Institute could have co-opted her.

“I…” Bradley inhaled a deep breath, then nodded firmly to herself. “I had a hard pregnancy and had to drop out of the shuttle-pilot training program I was in. With half a qualification, I couldn’t do much, and it was hard to find the time around a baby and keeping us both fed to earn any more qualifications.

“But the RRF was in recruiting mode, and they’ve always had a reputation for good mental-health and family support,” she admitted. “Didn’t even realize they had a fighter pilot program until they offered me a place in it.

“And then the next day, a man I didn’t know started walking next to me on my way home from work.” She shivered. “He was polite, but he made it clear he knew far too much about me. He offered me a lot of money to help him keep an eye on the training program, enough that I wouldn’t need the RRF’s family-support program.”

She spread her hands.

“I…heard him out,” she admitted. “More than I should have, but once he started talking about serving the greater good and saving the galaxy, I realized things were going far weirder than I could deal with. Threw him out of my place before my roommate got home with Jessica.

“Next day, someone broke into the apartment and kidnapped Jessica.”

Bradley said the words without emotion, but the pain her flat tone concealed only confirmed Kira’s initial assessment. The lack of a child in Bradley’s Navy files was both a point against her story…and a point in its favor, if her blackmailer was who Kira thought it was.

“They somehow edited my application to take out the family-support request,” she continued. “I was allowed to visit my daughter and they promised to continue paying me, so long as I kept them fully in the loop.

“I met the third woman at the house where they were keeping my girl,” Bradley noted. “I don’t think I was supposed to—she was furious with my handler and I never caught a name, but…I have headware footage.”

“Of all three, yes?” Kira asked.

“Yes,” the young woman confirmed. “I will give details, headware recordings, whatever is needed…so long as you get my little girl back and let me fly.”

Kira looked down at her hands.

“Neha, you’re a traitor,” she said bluntly. “The RRF is going to cashier you. I can’t change that; I’m just a merc.”

The woman inhaled and nodded slowly. Kira watched her for a few seconds. What she’d said was true, but Kira Demirci had options the RRF didn’t.

“If you save Jessica, I’ll…give you everything anyway. I’ll go to jail. I just need to know she’s safe.”

“Give me what you can on that safe house,” Kira told her. It seemed Bradley had passed her test. “We’ll see what we can find. And if what you give us is worth what you say it is, I will gently remind the RRF that fifty slots in this program are mine to do with as I please.

“If you’re telling the truth, we might have to see how well you fit the mercenary life.”

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