The summons was a surprise when it came. Not so much that Kira was being asked to report to somebody—she’d been expecting that from the moment she’d returned to Redward orbit.
But the request she’d received wasn’t to report to an RRF ship or station or even a surface military base. What she received was a true summons in the classical sense, a formal request calling for her to attend the monarchs of Redward at their palace.
That meant she’d dug up the dark-teal dress uniform used by officers of Conviction Limited—she hadn’t managed to draft one up for the Memorials yet—and loaded herself, Zoric and Bueller onto a shuttle.
Of the three of them, only Zoric wore any insignia—a standard stylized gold rocket marking her as a starship Captain—though all three of them wore the identical uniform: a long jacket in their specific dark teal green over a white turtleneck and black slacks. The outfit could fit handily over a shipsuit, though it would have problems with a proper pilot’s suit.
Bueller probably looked the most awkward in it. The Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy went for a shorter jacket and a black turtleneck, but their version of the jacket was much heavier and carried a lot more gold embroidery than the mercenary version.
“I’m not used to being summoned to royal audiences,” Bueller admitted. “I never even met the Kaiser.”
“King Larry is a bit less formal than the Kaiser, as I understand,” Kira said with a chuckle, watching their approach through her headware. Their course was taking them directly over Red Mountain, the planet’s capital city, toward the titular mountain. She could pick out the tower with her rarely used planetside apartment as they flew over it, but their destination was around the side of the craggy peak.
There was a clear delineation where the luxury condo towers with mountain views ended and the security zone around the palace began. Designed from the beginning as the planetary capital, there was a full ten-kilometer zone where no residential construction was allowed that surrounded the administrative center of Redward.
That zone was a carefully maintained park, gorgeous even from above, where not a single plant was tall enough to block anyone’s line of fire. There were no visible defenses on the interior of that circle of parkland, but Kira knew they’d be there. Concealed bunkers with ground troops and automated guns were probably the least of it.
Behind those invisible defenses rose another series of towers. These were all office buildings, a series of fifty-story buildings designed to be decorative as well as functional. Those towers contained a significant portion—though not all as that would be too tempting a target—of the system administration.
On the north end of the complex of office towers was a structure that looked like a theme-park escapee, a scaled-up fairy-tale castle of red stone whose turrets almost certainly contained real weapons.
Kira was enough of a newcomer to Redward that she thought that structure was the palace for several seconds. Then the shuttle curved around toward the other end of the complex and she queried her headware.
Apparently, the Hóngsè Chéngbao was the home of Redward’s six-hundred-member Parliament. The King and Queen of Redward only spoke to Parliament at preagreed times, usually twice each local year—three times a standard year.
The palace, it turned out, was a sprawling, overgrown bungalow on the south end of the complex, surrounded by another block of mixed high and low parks—for privacy and security, respectively.
Their immediate destination looked to be a landing pad at the center point of the E-shaped building, in clear view of the only unconcealed defensive installation Kira had seen on the entire approach: a decorative-but-clearly-functional three-story bunker that loomed over the road and landing pads necessary to reach the Palace.
Redward took no chances with their monarchs, it seemed.
* * *
The Redward Palace was only extravagant on the outside in its scale, and that pattern continued in its interior. A pair of guards in pristine crimson uniforms led Kira and her people into the building, which proved to have ordinary-looking tile and drywall.
The security officers led them to a small room off a large hallway in the central wing and opened the door.
“Their Majesties are in scheduled court at the moment,” the woman in charge told them. “They will join you here in about ten minutes.”
Kira led the way into the plain room, registering the weight of the door only due to the sound as it thunked shut behind them.
“Welcome, welcome,” John Estanza greeted her with a wide grin, the mercenary Captain waving a coffee cup at them. He wore the same dress uniform as they did, with the same Captain’s insignia as Zoric. “Mwangi’s in the bathroom. Try the coffee; it’s fantastic.”
Kira shook her head at the man as she crossed the room to a rolling table with a coffee machine. Everything in the room looked like it could be easily moved except for the heavy wooden bookshelves that covered the interior wall. A set of dark burgundy couches formed a rough square in the middle of the room around a heavy-looking but wheeled table, and a second rolling table held an array of small sandwiches.
As she took a cup of the coffee and inhaled its familiar scent—Queen Sonia had served her Redward Royal Reserve, the royal family’s personal coffee blend, before—she studied the room.
The west wall appeared to be three giant windows opening on to a carefully manicured grove of trees between the central and western wings of the house. Kira’s practiced eye picked up the lie, though—all three windows were actually extremely high-fidelity screens. They almost certainly showed what the room’s occupants would see if they were windows but also covered what were likely armored walls.
It wasn’t until she looked at the bookshelves that Kira realized that the room wasn’t necessarily for show. The contents of the shelves were not the carefully matched sets of leatherbound books she’d expect to see in a show space. There definitely was one of those sets, an Encyclopedia Galactica, it looked like, but most of the rest were a mismatched collection of textbooks on half a dozen subjects.
“At least they gave us the good coffee,” she observed as she turned back to Estanza. “Have you been here before, sir?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “So has Zoric.” He gestured to Deception’s Captain. “Four or five times, though Larry does prefer to do a lot of business away from the palace.”
“Everyone who comes here is monitored,” Mwangi told them as he stepped into the room through a semi-concealed door. “That we are here will be on the news feeds within the hour. Mercenaries summoned to meet the King; what plans are in the offing? type articles, I’m sure.”
“So, if we’re here, His Majesty wants people to know about it,” Kira concluded. “That makes sense. He wants to be seen to be doing something about the Clans.”
“And so long as we’re on retainer, we do what they ask,” Estanza agreed. “Even if your subcontract is starting to look more and more strained by the day.”
“If I’m not subcontracted by Conviction Limited, deintegrating the crews and fighter groups would be a nightmare,” Kira pointed out. “And this way, I mostly get to leave negotiating to you.”
She looked around the room again before taking a seat next to Bueller and Estanza and sipping her coffee.
“Mostly,” she repeated. “Somehow, I get the feeling today is going to be busy.”