18

Kira woke from an extended twelve-hour collapse feeling notably more human and refreshed. Another shower finished the job, and she considered the news from Bengalissimo as she dressed.

She’d never met Admiral Gaspari, though she understood that the woman had been in command of the Bengalissimo detachment at Ypres. Somehow, watching the coups and civil wars in Ypres hadn’t been enough to convince her this was a terrible idea.

Going through her messages, she found a short note from Bueller asking her to meet with him once she was awake. It looked like work, though a no-longer-tired part of her certainly took a moment to consider the option of being bent over the desk in one of their offices.

Shaking that off in favor of professionalism, she pinged his headware for a voice call.

“Konrad. I’m awake and handling paperwork while I consider where to start my meetings,” she told him with a chuckle. “My usual plan would be to sit down with Tamboli and see how our fighters are handling after a thirty-six-hour series of sorties. Since they don’t know I’m awake yet, I can put that off.”

“Can you grab Zoric and swing by my office?” he replied. “I think we want to talk about this news, and I think Zoric probably needs to be in on it.”

That was a no on getting bent over a desk. Shame.

“Yeah, I can do that,” Kira confirmed. “What do you think is going on?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve got some pieces of the puzzle I want to share,” he told her. “And then we can put all of our brains on working out how much trouble we’re in. Something smells.”

“Something always smells,” she said. “And the fact that everything smells like Equilibrium makes me feel like I’m paranoid.”

“You’re only paranoid if you’re wrong,” her boyfriend said. “And believe me, I know exactly how you feel. I’m half-considering fabricating string and a corkboard.”

Apollo and Brisingr shared enough popular media that Kira got the reference and grinned.

“Well, let’s all get together and put our conspiracy-theorist hats on before we get that far. That way, we all agree on what goes on the conspiracy board!”

* * *

Bueller was staring off into space, studying something in his headware, when Kira entered his office. She took the moment to pour herself coffee from his machine, sniffing it in surprise before tasting it.

“You know this ship has a full stock of several very good Redward coffee varieties and the Queen gave me a pallet of the royal family’s personal blend I keep for the senior officers, yes?” she asked as she took another sip.

“You’ve seen me drink coffee,” he said, gesturing toward the cup on his desk without changing his focus on empty air. “Why would I subject good coffee to cream and honey?”

“How are you a spacer again?” Kira said, noting the pale brown color of his drink. “I thought black coffee was a requirement?”

“Only for fighter pilots,” Zoric told her, the cruiser Captain carrying a thermos in her hand as she joined them. She poured herself a coffee from the thermos and grinned at Kira. “Our engineer executive officer always had access to a fridge, after all.

I, on the other hand, spent too long on a carrier to not pick up bad pilot habits. I’ve learned to bring my own coffee to meetings with Konrad.”

Kira chuckled.

“When I finish this cup, I might steal some of that,” she admitted.

Bueller refocused his gaze on the two women and shrugged, taking a sip of his coffee-cream-and-honey beverage.

“I’m not going to subject good coffee to the way I drink coffee,” he repeated genially. “And I wouldn’t torture myself with black coffee… Especially not black coffee from Brisingr.”

“Oh, is that the reason? Your homeworld’s coffee is awful?” Kira asked.

“Pretty much,” he agreed. “Even during the war, we never managed to stop people smuggling Apollon coffee. I don’t think anyone even tried very hard.”

“So, some of your people are sensible. Good to know.”

He shrugged.

“I could say the same about Apollo,” he noted. “We at least don’t have a cash requirement for the voting franchise.”

Kira grimaced. To vote for the Council of Principals on Apollo, you had to have paid a minimum amount of average tax over the last five years. That minimum amount was, roughly, what someone who’d just entered the top tax bracket would be paying. Since certain minimums on that bracket were set in the constitution, it was supposed to provide the wealthy some sense of public obligation.

She’d never qualified to vote in anything except municipal elections—and nova-fighter squadron commanders were paid well.

“I’d argue that we don’t have a hereditary ruler, but I suspect it washes out,” she admitted. “Plus, our current employers have the same system.”

“Don’t be that generous to the Kaiser,” Bueller replied. “He has a lot more direct authority than King Larry does. Larry built a political coalition to achieve his objectives. The Kaiser didn’t need to.”

“Fun as watching you two snipe about your homeworlds is, we were here to talk about Bengalissimo?” Zoric said dryly.

“That’s actually where this coffee comes from,” Bueller noted, taking another drink.

Kira finished the rest of the aggressively mediocre coffee and gratefully took a refill from Zoric’s thermos.

“You had thoughts,” she told Bueller. “You want to lay them out? I think we’re all kind of in the same direction.”

“Gaspari is an Equilibrium patsy,” the engineer said. “Quite possibly an active agent. It would fit with some of the bits and pieces I saw before we took the ship. There were definitely several other irons the Director had in the fire outside Ypres.

“I suspect he had them set up so he could pull the plug easily enough on them all, but there were more strings to their bow than Ypres.”

“I’m getting really sick of clearing up one Institute scheme and finding another one waiting for me,” Kira said. “First the Clans. Then Ypres. Now Bengalissimo?”

“They’re fond of military dictatorships and sovereign-tilted constitutional monarchies,” Bueller noted. “Stable ones, at least. Establishing a military dictatorship is always a mess, but a solidly run one can last the lifetime of the dictator—or longer, if they’re smart about the succession plan or have a council of generals backing them up.”

“Because those dictatorships are so much better for the average citizen,” Zoric grumbled. “These people piss me off, Konrad. How the hell did you end up with them?”

“I come from a constitutional monarchy where the Kaiser holds the balance of power,” he pointed out. “Exactly the Institute’s preferred government.” He shrugged. “I don’t have any proof that they helped tilt the scales against Apollo, but the Kaiser was certainly willing to do them favors afterward.”

Like sending a K70-class cruiser to the far end of nowhere, Kira knew. That was how they’d ended up with their heavy cruiser, after all.

“And the ideal they sell is powerful,” Bueller reminded the two women. “Peace and prosperity. It’s easy to accept when someone tells you that the math says exactly what sacrifices are required to get there. Especially when you’re in a field where math controls everything you do.”

“He’s with us now, Kavitha,” Kira said. “So’s Captain Estanza, for that matter. Our little mix-up of mercenary companies has plenty of ex-Institute guilt to go around.”

“Sorry, Konrad,” Zoric apologized without further prompting. “You think Gaspari is Institute, though?”

“If she’s not, the Director has his hooks into her closest advisors and supporters,” Bueller said. “The descriptions of the coup I can find read like a laundry list of standard Equilibrium assets. On the other hand…even if she wasn’t Institute, the Director will have latched on to her within days.”

“So, she’s not just going to have the Bengalissimo Fleet,” Kira concluded grimly. “Every one of those mercenaries we saw at Ypres, plus Cobra Squadron, is probably contracted to her by now.”

“Exactly.” The engineer shook his head. “I’d be surprised if the Institute hasn’t already installed a class two nova-drive fabricator somewhere in Bengalissimo. If they’re far enough along that their asset is seizing power openly, they’ve probably upgraded the BF more than we’re counting on.”

“I think we’d know if the BF was building new capital ships,” Zoric said.

“Zoric, how big is a star system?” Kira asked.

“Touché,” the cruiser Captain allowed. “A lot of places to hide a shipyard. Redward’s building four cap ships at the moment. Do we think Bengalissimo got ahead of them on cap-ship building?”

“They haven’t shown their hand on new ships yet,” Kira observed. “Redward Intelligence thinks they’re still at the same three cruisers they’ve had for twenty years, but I don’t think anyone had any reason to look for secret construction programs.”

“Gaspari is independently wealthy,” Bueller told them, his gaze focused on thin air again. With a wave of his hand, he transferred the file he was looking at to the air above his desk. The hologram was the Bengalissimo system-pedia entry for the woman.

“She comes from money, the top tier of Bengalissimo’s unofficial aristocracy if I read between the lines,” he continued. “That probably helps her case for control right now…but probably more relevant is this.”

He highlighted a section of the text. Rossella Gaspari is the only sibling of Luigi Gaspari, primary shareholder of Victory Star Manufacturing.

“Do I dare guess what Victory Star Manufacturing does?” Kira asked.

“I didn’t know, so I checked,” Bueller told her. A new article popped up into the hologram. “As it turns out, Victory Star Manufacturing is the primary contractor that builds the Bengalissimo Fleet’s warships.

“VSM, in fact, built two of the three cruisers that currently anchor the BF and carried out the twenty-year refits on all three ships,” he concluded. “They have both the funds and the resources to have built warships, even capital ships, without involving the Bengalissimo government.

“If the Institute helped underwrite the costs, the BF could be about to dramatically expand under their new military dictator.”

“Starfires and horseshit,” Zoric cursed. “That’s bad. That’s really bad.”

“Bengalissimo already had as many cruisers as Redward,” Kira said. “That Redward had the sub-fighter carriers and Conviction on retainer was the only thing that made the RRF the premier navy of the Cluster.

“Once Deception came into the picture and Redward replaced the sub-fighters with nova fighters, the balance of power was clearer…but if Bengalissimo even has another three sixty-kilocubic cruisers, that balance is in question.”

“Throw in that mercenary Crest carrier and Cobra Squadron, and Redward is outnumbered and outgunned,” Bueller agreed. “I just feel like if they had this in play, it would have been a problem for both of the plans we collided with earlier.”

“That depends,” Kira admitted. “If they were holding back the class two drives, then it makes sense. Deceiver and the Clans with a nova-fighter fleet would have been able to arrange the destruction of even six cruisers. Or they could have had an arrangement where Gaspari’s family were compensated with power and wealth for the cruisers suddenly up in Ypres’s hands after the system’s forceful unification.

“But now that Deceiver is a shadow instead of a warlord and the Ypres Federation is solidly onside with the SCFTZ, they’ll pull out all of the stops. If VSM was building cruisers for them and now Gaspari runs Bengalissimo, they’re only, oh, a mercenary carrier fleet away from having their hegemon.

“They just need to convince the rest of the Syntactic Cluster to fall in line.”

The three of them stared at the hologram, currently focused on a listing of warships built by Victory Star Manufacturing.

“What do we do?” Bueller asked.

“We stick with the Coalition Fleet for now,” Kira told them. “Right now, enough of the Cluster’s warships are concentrated here to represent both a strength and a weakness. I don’t think the BF can break enough ships free, even with merc backing, to take on the Coalition Fleet just yet.

“They need to break it up, get the individual components to go home, and defeat us in isolation,” she continued. “They need to do what Brisingr did back home: demonstrate that no one can travel the trade routes without paying for their protection.

“They can’t do that while we’re out here with the largest concentration of ships the Cluster has ever seen. Plus, securing the Clan Systems is a solid counterargument: a proof that the FTZ can provide security for the Cluster.”

“So, we do what we were already doing?” Zoric nodded slowly. “Seems like it leaves us open.”

“It does,” Kira agreed. “But it’s the best plan we’ve got. We watch the news that comes by courier and we keep our options open. Worst-case scenario, I’m pretty sure Kim will listen to me if I tell her we need to get back to Redward ASAP.”

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