9

Admiral Vilma Remington was the first person to enter the room after the mercenaries, followed immediately by a trio of other uniformed RRF flag officers—and a group of Redward Palace staff who quickly refreshed the snacks and coffee while the burgundy-uniformed officers filled their own coffee cups.

The straight-backed Admiral gestured her own officers to seats on one of the couches but remained standing herself as she drank her coffee.

“You’re lucky, you know,” she told the mercenaries. “You didn’t get called in front of Parliament to talk about all of this bullshit.”

“The joys of the mercenary life,” Estanza agreed cheerfully. “We just get to drink coffee, fly where we’re told and collect a paycheck. We also have to pay for our own ships, though,” he added thoughtfully.

“And you have to pretend you don’t care,” Remington said, her gray eyes leveled on Estanza.

“That can be harder some times than others,” the Captain agreed. “I’m guessing things are in motion?”

“Have some patience, John,” the Admiral said. “The King wants to make his own announcements.”

“And not letting the King have what he wants is treason,” a loudly cheerful voice said from the door as King Larry stepped in. Sonia was a step behind him, and two of the crimson-uniformed Palace Guards were in front, peeling off to flank the door.

King Larry walked over to the snack table first, filling a plate before he took a seat in one of the chairs. He took a sandwich in his fingers and surveyed the room.

“You don’t actually have to be silent when I walk in, you know,” he reminded them. “I’m going to eat this before I brief anyone.”

“Regular court, for the strangers to our world, is a scheduled affair where any of our citizens can apply to come before the Royal Us,” Sonia told them all. She had grabbed coffee while her husband had been grabbing food, and passed him a cup while she took one of the sandwiches he’d acquired.

It looked like long-practiced teamwork, in fact.

“In truth, it’s a mix of a lottery and a waiting list,” she continued. “But we do our best to make sure that everyone who applies gets into Court sooner or later.”

“And some days they’re useful,” Larry added. “And some days they’re trying to get us to implement dog-breed bans.”

He shook his head and inhaled the rest of his sandwich.

“The science and logic—or lack thereof—around that isn’t what we’re all here to discuss, though,” he told them after swallowing. “What we’re here to discuss is the nightmare some idiots in the Clans have decided to create for all of us.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Remington said, her tone long-suffering.

The King made a vague, probably joking, dismissive gesture. Then he leaned forward in his chair and his countenance completely changed.

“The situation is much what I predicted when we spoke after the attack, Commander Demirci,” he told her. “For the Clans to dare to enter the Redward System and directly attack myself and Sonia is a drastic change.

“We know that the Equilibrium Institute is probably behind this, but they’re little more than a conspiracy theory to my Parliament. Enough of my MPs have wanted to see the Clans wrecked that the current anger leaves us little choice.”

“There is also a legitimate argument to be made that neutralizing the Clans as a long-term threat is the best way to meet our commitments under the Free Trade Zone agreements,” Sonia added. “Of course, those same agreements only give us an avenue for requesting assistance in specific situations.

“An invasion of what are technically sovereign systems is not one of those situations.”

“Fortunately, we have ambassadors and such here on Redward for most of the major players,” Larry noted. “I’ve met with them all and we have commitments for ships and resources to wage this campaign. A coalition of the willing, I think, is the term.”

Kira winced. That was not a term with a positive history over the last few thousand years or so.

“The simplest way to deal with this situation, and the way I’m sure some of our MPs would like us to handle it, is the destruction of the Clans’ stations and colonies,” Larry said quietly. “Few of them are more than marginal, and most of them are easily exposed to vacuum. The destruction of their mobile forces would easily enable…extermination.

“This will not be our strategy.”

It was clear from the expressions of the officers sitting with Admiral Remington that at least some of the RRF thought it should be—but no one was going to argue with King Larry when he made his orders clear.

“Our commitments under the SCFTZ require that the Clans be defeated,” Sonia said into the silence. “The morals and ideals that we uphold require that the Clans survive.”

“Neither Conviction nor Deception would be available for hire for a campaign of extermination,” Estanza said levelly. “My own morals may be more flexible than yours, Your Majesties, but I will not participate in wholesale murder.”

“Nor will the Kingdom of Redward,” Larry said firmly. “The units are being selected as we speak, but major Redward Army detachments are being prepared to occupy the four primary Clan star systems.”

“Each has significant economic potential,” Sonia reminded everyone. “That’s why the various abortive efforts at outposts and colonies that became the Clans existed in the first place. Given a committed external partner—Redward initially, but hopefully the entire SCFTZ in the end—those systems can and should become able to support their populations at a high standard of living.

“Without piracy.”

“They lack the seed capital to become more than they are,” Larry noted. “Theft has only ever kept them alive. The closest they got to what they needed was when Equilibrium was trying to turn them into our local space Mongols.”

“So, what is the plan?” Kira asked.

“Vilma?” Larry gestured to the Admiral.

Remington gestured a holographic map of the Syntactic Cluster into the air above them.

“The Cluster,” she said unnecessarily. “Sixty stars, sixteen systems with habitable and inhabited worlds. And then these four systems.”

The inhabited systems—now all members of the Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone—were highlighted in blue. Four systems, scattered through the Cluster but mostly sitting between multiple inhabited systems, were flashing in red.

“KDC-15RT, KLO-32DE, KSR-92RR and KLN-35XD,” Remington reeled off. “Arti, Klo, Kaiser and the Kiln. Each lacks a truly inhabitable world, though Kaiser does have Wilhelm, which is…marginal at best.”

Kira’s headware brought up the specifications of KSR-92RR’s second planet. The central star was a cold dwarf that would burn forever but didn’t create much heat. Wilhelm had an annual average temperature barely above freezing in most latitudes and had basically no freshwater. Most of the surface was covered in shallow seas of brine and the planet’s life had adapted to that heavily salted water.

The planet had an unpleasant but barely breathable atmosphere. That was all it had going for it.

“All told, the four systems have a shared population of just under fifty million human beings, mostly living in abject poverty,” the Admiral noted. “They have access to the basic colonial fabricator setup and have assembled a couple of small shipyards in each system, sufficient to produce the small freighters that keep them alive—and the gunships we have grown all too familiar with in the Cluster.

“The RRF and the RRA have spent most of the last century trying to game out ways to neutralize the Clans in one way or another,” she said. “Without destroying the Costar Clans’ ability to survive at all, we can’t remove their ability to build more gunships.

“Without a major commitment of troops from somewhere, occupying four star systems and an estimated three thousand habitats is an exercise in impossibility. We now, thanks to His Majesty and Parliament, have that troop commitment.”

“Roughly sixty percent of the Redward Royal Army,” Larry agreed. “The first wave alone is four corps. Two hundred and forty thousand soldiers.”

“Which would be barely sufficient for us to put a couple of platoons on each habitat,” Remington warned. “We have instead selected a list of one hundred habitats in each system that will receive anything from a company to a pair of battalions, depending on need.

“Those four corps represent the entire troop transport capability of the RRF.” She shook her head. “If we could bring more troops in the first wave, we would.

“As it is, the plan is simple: we are concentrating a new fleet, designated the Coalition Fleet, at the trade route near the Arti System. Redward will be contributing a carrier with a fully operational nova-fighter group, Perseus, along with both Last Denial and Guardian. Bengalissimo is committing a cruiser, and we will have a total of ten destroyers and thirty corvettes or gunships from assorted systems.

“We want to contract Deception to provide the fourth cruiser for the fleet,” Remington concluded. “While you shouldn’t be required to deal with the Clans’ forces, we have every reason to expect Institute intervention.”

“Especially with Cobra Squadron in the region,” Estanza said grimly. “Putting that large a chunk of the Cluster’s military forces in one place…”

Kira nodded her unwilling agreement. That was half of Redward’s capital ships and a third of Bengalissimo’s. With Deception along and Conviction under refit, they would have half of the Cluster’s active capital ships in a single fleet.

No one else had cruisers or carriers, after all.

“Part of the logic is to assemble a force that has a decent chance of going toe-to-toe with a Cobra Squadron detachment,” Remington agreed. “Our odds in that situation are always going to be difficult. Even including Deception, the Coalition Fleet will only muster a total of about eighty nova fighters.”

“Having Deception and the other cruisers for fire support will even the odds,” Kira noted. “Everything we’ve seen suggests that the Cobras are drawing on the same mercenary fleet as we saw at Ypres for support. The only real change is the addition of two new carriers and fighters with a major tech edge over ours.”

“While we must prepare for their intervention, we must also complete the mission before us,” Remington said. “Can we count on Deception for the job?”

“Yes,” Kira confirmed. “You can sort out the pay scale with the purser.”

King Larry snorted.

“We’ll pay you what you’re worth,” he told her. “We’ve always paid Conviction generously and I see no reason to change that. Captain Estanza has always been worth it.”

“You realize, Your Majesty, that this is a trap?” Estanza said softly, his first words since Remington had started her briefing. “The Admiral has allowed for the possibility of intervention, but it’s not a possibility. It’s a certainty. The fighter strike on the cruiser carrying you and the Queen was intended to create this exact response.

“They will ambush you. This Coalition you’ve assembled… Even with Deception, I’m not sure they can face off against Cobra Squadron.”

“We have no choice,” the King replied. “To create the SCFTZ, we promised we would secure the trade routes as a group, but the lion’s share of the work was always going to fall on us and Bengalissimo.

“To hold the FTZ together, the Clans must be neutralized sooner or later. My Parliament is determined that now is the time and that this attack on our space cannot be allowed to stand.”

“Even if we revealed everything we know about Cobra and the Institute, we would still be pressured to move forward on this,” Sonia told them. “And we’ve put too much in play assembling this Coalition.

“If we back down now, we sacrifice both internal and external political capital we cannot afford to lose. Without the proof that Redward will defend our own space, let alone the rest of the Cluster, the Trade Zone agreements themselves might be in danger.”

“That seems unlikely,” Zoric said, Deception’s Captain looking thoughtful. “The Trade Zone is about money, isn’t it?”

“And safety. And if we can’t provide safety to our own, no one is going to trust us to protect others,” Remington countered. “You are correct, Captain Estanza. This is almost certainly a trap—but it is a well-laid one. One we have no choice but to walk into.”

“Assembling this Coalition is a risk as well,” Larry admitted. “But if we start acting alone, throwing our military weight around without partners, we become exactly what Equilibrium wants us to become.

“Some of our MPs would be more than okay with that. Control is always more reassuring than cooperation—but that it is the harder path helps reassure me that it is the right one.”

The King spread his hands wide, smiling as his wife took the one closest to her and squeezed it.

“We will remove the threat of the Costar Clans,” he said firmly. “We will do it with our allies at our side and the general agreement of our neighbors that it is necessary—and we will do it in a way that preserves their culture while helping them out of the hole fate handed them.

“If we do anything less than all of these, we are not the beacon of hope that I insist Redward become.”

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