8

“What do we have on the plate this morning?” Kira asked.

The morning virtual conference was a standard of their last few months in Redward. All four ship Captains, both CNGs, Kira and Stipan Dirix all linked together from their assorted offices in a meeting that was supposed to keep everyone fully up to date.

“We forwarded those reports on to the locals on the Parakeets’ performances,” McCaig answered, the big man looking more amused than anything. “Interesting to know that we took them into action before the RRF did.”

“Not much shooting going on in the Syntactic Cluster these days,” Michel noted. “It’s a fluke that we happened on Ancillary—they were going to get hit by someone, they were drawing too much attention, but the odds it was going to be us weren’t good.”

“That didn’t work out so well for them,” Raccoon’s Captain Mwangi noted. “And I saw the statements for our bonus on bringing them in. That was good work.”

“That was easy,” Michel admitted. “Ancillary was smaller than either destroyer. She was a thirty-kilocubic tramp that had had a handful of plasma guns welded on. She was never a threat to anyone except a merchant ship.”

“And you handled her well,” Kira pointed out. “So, let’s not talk ourselves down too much, shall we? New Ontario was pleased to get the crew alive. My understanding is that they’re hoping to track down whoever was buying their prizes—with the Costar Clans absorbed by Redward, the usual markets are no more.”

“There’s always someone willing to buy at a discount without asking questions,” Stipan Dirix said grimly. “And stolen goods are never sold at a loss to the thief.”

“This is true. We’ve benefited from that ourselves,” Kira agreed.

That was part of why she’d managed to hang on to Deception, after all. It wasn’t like Redward had paid for or built her themselves, and letting her keep someone else’s ship was easy enough.

Raccoon is about where we’ve been for the last bit,” Mwangi told the others after a moment. “Waldroup is doing the best she can to keep things organized, but we’ve packed fifty-plus nova fighters into a deck designed to hold forty at a stretch.

“We’re crowded and my launches are going to be short,” he admitted. “That said, I can get those fifty fighters into space; it’ll just take longer than it should.”

“We’ll need to optimize as best as we can,” Kira said. “We know it’s going to be a while before we get our hands on a real carrier again. We’re going to be talking exact currency amounts with the locals, but we have a tentative plan for two more destroyers, a light carrier and a fleet carrier, but…”

“Nothing soon, I’m guessing?” Patel asked.

“Bingo,” Kira agreed. “Eighteen months for the destroyers. Two years, minimum, for a seventy-five-kilocubic carrier. Four for the fleet carrier.

“So, we’re going to be home-porting, if nothing else, in Redward for a few years,” she told everyone. “Depending on what work we get over those years, we may buy a second round of ships after we get the destroyers and the CVL.

“We’ll see. For now, I just have meetings with Pree and Yanis later to poke through bank accounts and see what we can afford.”

That got her a chuckle. Pree—Priapus Simoneit—was Memorial Force’s main lawyer in Redward, and Yanis Vaduva was the Force’s purser. He’d held the same job for John Estanza on Conviction, and now he held it for the entire mercenary fleet from an office on Deception.

Kira was well aware of Vaduva’s importance to the fleet. If he’d wanted to be in this meeting, he’d be in it. Despite his perpetually smiling cheerfulness when interacting with people, the purser vastly preferred accounts and text transcripts to meetings and conversations.

Part of his contract with Estanza had specified that he could not be asked to attend more than two hours of meetings per business week. Kira had duplicated the contract exactly when Vaduva had moved over to Memorial Force—and had never had a reason to regret it.

“Well, that’s a good segue for me, I think,” Dirix said after a moment. “We got a request for a meeting with the Commodore and Captain Zoric late last night. Potential contract.”

Kira raised an eyebrow.

“Normally, we have a bit more information than that,” she observed. “What have we got this time?”

“Very little,” Dirix admitted. “Normally, I’d have rejected it and asked for more info, but in this case, I figured I’d leave that up to you two.”

She exchanged a glance with Zoric.

“Okay, Stipan, stop beating around the bush,” Kira ordered the ex-Redward Army officer. “What’s going on?”

“The meeting request is vague as fuck,” he told her. “No details on who you’ll be meeting or what they want to talk about other than ‘a contract.’ But it was forwarded by Her Majesty’s personal secretary, Em Hamasaki—and it does specify that it’s from the Bank of the Royal Crest delegation.”

Kira nodded slowly. That made…sense. As usual, Sonia was playing games. But she’d never lost out playing the Queen’s games yet.

“I had a fascinating conversation with one of their directors at Queen Sonia’s barbecue,” she told the others. “If they were sounding me out for a potential contract, that would add another layer to that meeting.”

Including a question around why Jade had asked so many questions about the Equilibrium Institute.

“Can we deploy to anywhere the Crest might want us to operate?” McCaig asked. “Our retainer limits how far we’re supposed to be from Redward, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Kira confirmed. “But there are allowances for us taking on other contracts, with enough notice to the Redward government—and if Sonia is forwarding the meeting request herself, I’m guessing they’re willing to work with us.

“That said, it depends on how far away they want us to deploy,” she continued. “There could be operations they need in or near the Syntactic Cluster, which should be fine. But if they want us to go all the way to the Crest Sector, that’s a bigger deal.

“And raises the question of why. The Bank of the Royal Crest’s largest shareholder is the King of the Royal Crest—there aren’t many situations near home that they can’t throw the Navy of the Royal Crest at.”

The meeting was quiet.

“That said, Sonia’s recommendation is a damn big deal,” Kira noted. “Book the meeting, Dirix. Unless someone has some reason why we shouldn’t even meet with them?”

“They’re the biggest bank in four hundred light-years,” Zoric said flatly. “I suggest we be prepared to go quite a bit out of our way to get in their good books.”

“There are limits,” Mwangi warned. “Let’s not get too eager—banks aren’t known for being generous employers, either.”

“Captain Zoric and I will keep it in hand,” Kira told them all. “We’ve both dealt with Mid Rim bankers before, after all.”

While a good chunk of her people were now from the Syntactic Cluster, none of the people on the conference call were. Zoric wasn’t even from the Rim—she was from a world only nine hundred light-years from Sol, which made her solidly from the Fringe.

“They’re sharks, but they want something from us, and at the worst, we can always say no.”

OceanofPDF.com