19

Despite the long-standing cultural links between the Costar Clans, the four star systems they controlled were surprisingly far apart. The Coalition Fleet’s course resembled a giant circle, beginning and ending at Redward.

KSR-92RR was the farthest of the four systems from Redward, and still four novas from Arti. One out to the trade route, two along it, and one to the Costar Clans Systems.

It was at the second trade-route stop that the fight she’d been waiting for started. Deception’s crew was made up of four entirely distinct and separate contingents, after all.

“Senior officers to the deck six mess,” an alert rang in her headware. “Somebody to the deck six mess, please.”

Kira’s headware happily informed her that the speaker was Shyam Bartolomeo, a new recruit whose main prior qualification had been rising from barista to manager at a chain coffee shop. He was now the manager of one of the cruiser’s four crew mess halls.

Fortunately for Bartolomeo, Kira was on deck six. The mess hall was only a few dozen meters away, and she was the first senior officer to reach the doors to the large room.

Pausing at the entrance, she heard shouting and a crash of furniture—and brought up the security footage before she charged in. A quick glance confirmed that a contingent of Redward hands and a contingent of Brisingr defectors had come to screaming and blows.

The older mercenary hands from Conviction appeared to be standing off to the side, taking bets, which did not help.

With a sigh, Kira slapped the control panel for the door. A headware protocol she’d coded years ago took control of the room’s speakers and proceeded to induce a brutally loud feedback.

The scream served its purpose, stunning the brawlers into a moment of silence and frozen motion as she walked in.

“Sit your asses down,” Kira barked into that shocked silence. “All of you.”

One of the old Conviction hands started to get up to head for the door—and she mentally commanded it to lock behind her.

“All of you,” she reiterated, pointing at the merc.

It took a few moments, but no one was apparently stupid enough not to listen to the diminutive woman who owned their ship.

“Now. I don’t think anyone here thinks brawling on a warship is remotely appropriate, so just what the fuck happened here?” she asked.

“They’re murderers—”

“They called us murderers—”

At least seven or eight people started speaking, but the words were close enough that Kira could pick out both sides of the argument. She gestured them to silence.

They didn’t obey.

She glared.

The shouting kept getting louder.

She triggered the feedback loop again.

Everyone shut up.

“Really?” she finally asked. She pointed at the Redward crew. “You all know damn well what brought the Brisingr members of this crew here. They signed on in good faith to serve their Kaiser. They were supposed to be making the galaxy a better place—even the ones who didn’t know about the Institute thought they were expanding human knowledge and explored space.

“They were lied to and used. When they realized that, they helped us capture this ship and turn it on the very people who brought them here. To do the right thing, they gave up their right to go home. Ever.”

Kira turned to the Brisingr crew.

“You’ve earned your homes here on Deception,” she told them. “That said, there’s a reason this damn fight came up today and not a month ago, isn’t there? This ship, while you were her crew, killed twenty thousand innocent people.

“We aren’t forgetting that. Not ever. But there haven’t been mass fistfights over it yet, so…someone care to explain?”

The mess hall was deathly quiet, and then the same merc who’d tried to leave stood up and spread her hands.

“I think that was me, boss,” she confessed while Kira’s headware brought up her information. Tijana Roy was an environmental tech for Deception. She’d been an environmental tech for Conviction for over a decade before that, and her home was a system Kira had never heard of in the Inner Rim.

“And just what did you do?” Kira asked.

“Sorg over there burned his toast well and good,” she said, pointing at one of the Brisingr hands. “I made a joke about it being DLI-style toast. That went down like a broken antigrav plate and, well…”

She shrugged.

“Too soon, I think,” she conceded. The DLI-O54 System had been where K79-L had destroyed dozens of civilian outposts to cover her destruction of a Redward ship in a testing engagement—killing tens of thousands along the way.

Kira leveled her flattest gaze on the mercenary tech.

“Yes,” she agreed, then turned the same gaze on the brawlers.

“Really?” she said to them. “You started a fight over a tasteless joke?”

Both contingents looked sheepish.

“It…went downhill from there,” one of the Redward techs admitted.

“So it did.” Kira surveyed them. “Everyone in this room is docked a half-day’s pay,” she told them. “This ends now and is forgotten. Mostly. If it happens again…”

She drew her finger across her throat in an ancient and evocative gesture.

“Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Now. You are all going to help Em Bartolomeo clean up his mess and then report to your duty stations before I decide that’s not enough. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

The Captain’s private dining room was significantly smaller than the main crew mess halls, though it was larger than was needed for the three officers sitting around the table, watching the recording of Kira’s little speech.

“Well, that was inevitable,” Bueller finally said. “Ugh. I need a drink.”

In answer to a wordless command from Zoric, a panel in one side of the dining room opened and a flat-topped robot trundled out. The artificial stupid crossed over to Bueller and popped up a fifty-centimeter hologram of an androgynous-looking bartender.

“What can I mix for you, sir?” the artificial stupid asked cheerfully.

“I forgot Captain Sitz had that,” he noted. “I’ll have a screwdriver.”

The robot happily chirped. A few seconds of whirring later, a glass emerged from a panel with what Kira presumed to be the mixed vodka-and-orange-juice drink he’d ordered.

“Beer,” she told the robot as it rolled over to her. “Redward Black Bear if you have it.”

“Of course,” the AS replied. “Captain Zoric has provided me with data on the preferences of key officers, and I make certain to have them on hand.”

A frosted bottle of the dark ale emerged from the robot as Kira laughed. She took it—and Zoric didn’t even bother giving the robot instructions. It produced a gin and tonic for her without asking, then returned to its cubby.

“I’m honestly surprised we’ve made it this far without an incident,” Kira admitted after taking a swallow of the beer. “DLI-O-Fifty-Four was an inevitable spark point, an atrocity no one in the Cluster is likely to forget.”

“I know,” Bueller said quietly. “Least of all the Brisingr hands on this ship. We were there, we were responsible, but we couldn’t do anything. No one left aboard this ship gave those orders. No one here had a chance to even intervene.”

“If I remember the report correctly, you blew Sitz’s head off yourself,” Zoric said. “I’m guessing that was satisfying.”

The big engineer grimaced.

“First and only person I’ve killed with my own hands,” he admitted. “And in her case, fuck if it wasn’t easier than I expected. Most of what happened in DLI was her call. The Director added some extras, but the plan was hers.”

Sitz had been K79-L’s Captain, the woman with her finger on the self-destruct button when Bueller had disabled the system and shot her.

“I think if we distribute this little recording, it will remind people of where our Brisingr hands stand,” Zoric suggested. “Though…seriously, Konrad? Your people can’t go home?”

“Nooo.” Bueller shook his head and swallowed a probably overlarge mouthful of the cocktail. “Definitely more me than the rest, but treason is the word you’re looking for. That’s the description of handing a Brisingr capital ship over to a mercenary squadron working for a ninth-rate power on the edge of the Rim.

“That’s excluding the fact that all of us were entirely open with the RRF shipyard people as we went through the ship. The RRF now knows almost as much about the K70 class as anyone in the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy.

“Even the most junior of the crew who stayed is guilty of at least two types of treason—and then we factor in that all of the spacers were still active-duty BKN personnel, seconded to the exploration company. So, add desertion to the list.

“Desertion in time of peace, but all we’d get back home is a jail cell,” he reminded them. “That’s how pissed the people who are left are at the Equilibrium Institute, Kavitha, Kira. They made us murderers and we will never forgive them for that.”

The dining room was silent, and Kira took a long drink from her beer bottle.

“Distribute the speech if you think it will help,” she told Zoric. “For now, though…I believe this was a dinner invite?”

“Yeah. Let me call David,” Zoric told them. “I figured we’d get this out of the way first. The tension between my old mercs, Bueller's ex-BKN hands and the new Redward recruits… It’s a pain in my ass.”

“If we’ve only had one fistfight, I think we’re doing just fine,” Kira replied. “That’s what I’d expect from an actual professional military…which we are most definitely not.”