2

“Well?”

Mercenary companies lacked most of the formalities for arriving and departing warships that Kira had grown used to in her time in the Apollo System Defense Force, but they were still generally more respectful than one-word questions.

Of course, the dark-haired and shadowy-featured woman asking the one-word question as Kira stepped off her shuttle was Captain Kavitha Zoric, Deception’s commanding officer—which made her Kira’s Flag Captain, Memorial Force’s second-largest shareholder, and Kira’s main business partner.

Zoric didn’t need to be respectful.

“Well, what?” Kira asked, stepping aside so as not to block the traffic out of the shuttle. She hadn’t been the only reason Pegasus’s shuttle had shot over to Deception, after all. The big heavy cruiser—the single largest nova warship in the Syntactic Cluster for at least another year—was their flagship and central brain center.

“Well, did you get what you wanted out of attaching yourself to a destroyer patrol that you had no damn business being on?” the Flag Captain said sharply, gesturing for Kira to walk with her.

Kira snorted and obeyed her subordinate. Deception’s landing bay was currently cramped. Between her two fighter-carrying capital ships, Memorial Force was trying to cram eighty fighters into space meant for sixty—and her carrier was trash.

Literally—the common working name for freighter conversions like Raccoon was junk carrier, and after commanding the ship for nine months, Kira wasn’t going to argue with the label.

“We caught a pirate,” she finally told Zoric. “New Ontario was pleased and threw an added bonus onto the contract from King Larry. Helped confirm the whole concept of the shared-security side of the Free Trade Zone.”

King Larry was Redward’s ruling monarch and the central mind behind the Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone. His star system held Memorial Force’s retainer, covering their ongoing costs in exchange for Kira making her four ships available to him at a moment’s notice.

“From the report I skimmed, McCaig or Michel could have caught that pirate on their own,” Zoric replied. She was leading the way through Deception’s corridors toward Kira’s office, the Commodore realized, checking her headware’s map of the ship.

That was a trap. It could only be a trap.

It was also a trap Kira deserved, so she swallowed her pride and followed meekly.

“Yes, they could have,” she admitted. “But it was the first independent outing for either of them, so having me along as harmless supercargo was good for everyone’s nerves.”

“You mean it was good for your nerves to do something?” Zoric asked drily. “At least if you’d gone on patrol in Raccoon, you could argue that you’re one of our best nova-fighter pilots and strapped on a Hoplite or a Dexter for your excitement.

“But we both know you’re not actually qualified as a destroyer skipper and that any pirate we found on this trip wasn’t going to justify needing a squadron commander, don’t we?”

They were at Kira’s office and she stopped, looking balefully at the door.

“We do,” she conceded. “And you’re not wrong,” she admitted. “But Konrad is waiting for us in there, isn’t he? Can I wait until he lectures me as well before I give my mea culpas?”

Zoric snorted and the door slid open at her mental command.

The man sitting on Kira’s desk was exactly who she’d expected. Despite the obvious trap laid for her, Kira crossed her office and embraced Konrad Bueller before the copper-haired man could say a word.

“Good to see you,” she told him.

“Good to see you too, despite your attempts to find any possible danger in the Cluster,” the broad-shouldered engineer said with a chuckle. “How much of a lecture did you give her, Kavitha?”

“Pretty much all of it,” Zoric conceded. “She’s an idiot and she knows it. Care to explain why you decided to run off without telling your senior staff?”

That, Kira knew, was where she’d doubled down on the stupid.

This time, she audibly sighed and leaned against her own desk as the door slid shut, surveying the room. Deception’s flag officer’s office wasn’t large—nova ships were limited entirely by the cubage their drives could take into an FTL jump, not mass—but it had space for the three senior officers to hash out their problems outside of the eyes of their subordinates.

“That part was dumb,” she finally conceded as she looked over the tiny amount of decoration she’d added to her office. There was a printed portrait of her family on their sheep farm on Apollo, a second portrait of her and Konrad Bueller trying not to grin like idiots, and a handcrafted model of an ASDF Hoplite-IV she’d commissioned one of the flight-deck techs to make for her.

There wasn’t much else. She’d left Apollo with a single duffle bag of personal possessions, accompanying a set of not-quite-stolen nova fighters one step ahead of a team of Brisingr assassins.

“On the other hand, I’m bored out of my skull and needed to do something,” she told them, agreeing with their assessment of her reasoning. “And I both made the decision in very short order and figured you’d try to talk me out of it.”

“Which left me showing up to your office to find it empty without warning,” Zoric said drily. “Your timed message was about twenty minutes too late for my nerves, Kira.”

Kira winced.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “It was supposed to be before your shift started.”

I just woke up to a timed message telling me you’d novaed out with McCaig and would be back in two weeks,” her boyfriend told her. “You can’t do shit like that, Kira. You have responsibilities.”

“You two and Mwangi have Deception and Raccoon well in hand,” she pointed out. “I knew I could leave Redward for a few weeks and things would be fine.”

Kira watched Zoric roll her eyes in exasperation and wilted a bit.

“And if something had come up that required us to sortie the capital ships?” Deception’s Captain asked. “King Larry’s people know I’m the second shareholder, but there’s still a concern if they need me to commit to deploy Deception and Raccoon.”

Kira wasn’t entirely sure that Raccoon deserved the title of “capital ship”—the junk carrier was only five thousand cubic meters larger than the two thirty-two-kilocubic Parakeet-class destroyers—but Zoric had a point.

“I know,” she conceded, then sighed. She’d been wrong. She knew it. She’d known it from the moment Pegasus had novaed out, if not before that.

“I know,” she repeated. “I shouldn’t have done it. But it’s been six months since Bengalissimo got their shit sorted and sent ‘Her Majesty’ Rossella Gaspari to prison. The Institute seems to have written the Cluster off as a bad bet for now, and everything has been very quiet.”

“Most people would regard that as a good thing,” Bueller noted calmly.

“It is a good thing,” Kira said. “But I went from the Apollo-Brisingr war to running from assassins to working for Estanza here and fighting the Institute basically nonstop for eighteen months.

“For things to be calm is weird. I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“We noticed,” Zoric said, her tone now dry enough to sandpaper with. “But…please limit your search for excitement to, I don’t know, contracts and Konrad’s pants?”

To Kira’s perpetual amusement, her lover was surprisingly easy to make blush. The Brisingr man—from the same nation she’d spent her first military career fighting—was older than she was, but still…innocent wasn’t quite the right word, but it was close.

Embarrassable, she supposed.

“That’s fair,” she admitted. “But I’ll point out that I was never in any actual danger—neither was anyone else. Ancillary didn’t even hit our ships before they got close enough to disable her, jamming or no jamming.

“Redward’s new destroyers are almost up to Apollo-Brisingr Sector standards now,” she told them. “They can handle just about anything native to the Cluster—even some of the new cruisers!—until the next generation of Redward cruisers and carriers roll out.”

“Fair enough,” Bueller said. Zoric glared at him and he raised his hands. “I saw the Parakeet design before they even started cutting metal, Kavitha,” he reminded her. “It’s as good as the Cluster’s got.

“Kira’s not wrong that there isn’t much out there that can handle the pair Redward sold us. They’ve done okay by us.”

“Mostly,” Kira muttered. Deception, at ninety-six thousand cubic meters, was the largest warship in the Cluster—but the Redward Royal Fleet had three one-hundred-twenty-kilocubic warships under construction.

Everyone, including Redward, agreed that Redward owed Memorial Force a carrier. Conviction had been the largest warship in the Cluster before Deception arrived, and John Estanza had taken his flagship to her death saving the Cluster from the Equilibrium Institute.

That left Memorial Force running around with a junk carrier they’d been given and waiting on a chance to purchase a new carrier from the Redward yards…but it wouldn’t be the one currently under construction.

“They’ve done well by the Cluster,” Zoric said grimly. “I mean, the FTZ now covers the whole Cluster again and they’ve got everything well in hand. They need more destroyers, but what interstellar power doesn’t?”

“And the way they’ve set it up, Bengalissimo and Ypres carry at least half of the weight of that,” Bueller noted. “Our ships… Well, I’m not sure they need us.”

“They don’t,” Kira admitted. “Or at least, they won’t once the new capital ships commission. Right now, no one wants to let Deception go, so they pay for everything else.”

Her office was quiet for a few moments. She sighed and slid off the desk, taking her seat and triggering the artificial-stupid drinks machine. It rolled out of its concealed cabinet and started making coffee for the three of them—black for Kira and Zoric, heavily doctored for Konrad.

Because Kira knew Konrad’s preferences, there were two blends of beans in the robot. Both were from Redward—coffee was a major export of the planet they were orbiting—but one was an export mix, serviceable but not excellent…and the other was the royal family’s private blend.

We’re only really still here because a retainer that covers our day-to-day is actually pretty sweet,” Kira told them. “But damn, it gets boring.” She shrugged. “Eventually, I’ve been promised the chance to order a hundred-twenty kilocubic carrier at cost.

“I trust Larry and Sonia, which is a hell of a thing to say about Outer Rim monarchs, so here we are,” she concluded. “And if the Institute sticks their nose back in the Cluster, we’ll chop it off.”

The Equilibrium Institute was an interstellar organization dedicated to very specific political ideals. Kira’s understanding was that it was, at its core, a privately funded think tank out of the Heart. The resources of even a small private organization within two hundred light-years of Sol easily covered the expenses of waging private wars in the Rim twelve hundred light-years farther out.

But between her, the late John Estanza, and the rest of what was now Memorial Force, the Institute’s intrusions into the Syntactic Cluster had failed both expensively and dramatically.

“So, we wait,” she conceded with a sigh.

“And you, Commodore Demirci, stop running off without telling people,” Zoric told her firmly. “If we need to send you on anti-piracy patrols to keep you sane, we can do that…but let’s do it properly and with a plan, okay, boss?”

Kira snorted and nodded.

“All right, Kavitha, Konrad, you’ve made your point,” she said. “I’ll be good!”

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