3

Even with Zoric handling most of the business of the four-ship mercenary fleet for the two weeks Kira had been gone, her headware happily informed her that she had a stack of messages waiting for her once her two senior subordinates left her be.

At the top of the list was a message flagged as priority from Stipan Dirix. The former Redward Army officer ran their semi-permanent dockside establishment in the Redward System and helped coordinate Kira’s affairs with the locals.

There were, she realized, several messages from Dirix, of increasing urgency.

The most recent was just to call him, which Kira sighed and did.

“Stipan, what’s going on?” she asked him. “Captain Zoric should have told you I was out-system.”

“Oh, thank god,” Dirix replied. “You’re back in time. Zoric wasn’t sure when you’d be returning, and we were running down to the wire on this.”

“On what, Stipan?” Kira said. “I have six messages from you, and I’ll freely admit I only read the most recent.”

“Fair, fair,” he conceded. “Queen Sonia wanted to have you at a grand reception yesterday, but since you weren’t here, I gave her your regrets.”

“Her Majesty knows I’m not in Redward full-time,” she told her aide with a chuckle. “She’ll forgive me this once, I’m sure.”

“That would be my normal assumption, yeah,” Dirix agreed. “But she seemed… Well, I wouldn’t say Queen Sonia would show frustration to someone like me, but the fact that she called me directly says something, yes?”

Kira straightened in her chair. She’d been invited to a number of parties of various levels of privacy by Queen Sonia. Among other things, King Larry’s wife was the true head of his intelligence services.

She also had a habit of trying to build up women across the star system, mostly by inviting them to parties so they could make connections with each other.

But all of the invitations Sonia had sent Kira had been recorded messages, often the digital equivalent of written invites, sent by the Queen’s staff to Kira’s staff.

If Sonia had directly called Stipan, something important was happening.

“I understand,” Kira murmured. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“I know the grand reception last night was for some delegation of bankers from the Royal Crest,” he told her. “They’re here to discuss financing for a series of new infrastructure projects across the Cluster—people are here from the Yprian Federation, Bengalissimo…everywhere, honestly, to talk to them.

“My read is that the new stability in the Cluster is potentially going to see a lot of money flowing in—and Their Majesties want to make sure there’s no offsetting flow of resources and power out.”

That was always the risk with foreign investment, Kira knew. It was one of the ways a hegemon like the Royal Crest maintained their control.

On the other hand, the Royal Crest’s banks provided the default interstellar currency across several hundred light-years of the Outer Rim, including the Syntactic Cluster. That gave them a lot of power, even before they started financing projects.

“So, I missed an important party, I take it?”

“Not as bad as it could be, I think,” Dirix told her. “Because when she called me”—the mercenary administrator still sounded terrified by that—“she told me that I should get Zoric for today’s event, regardless of whether you were back yet.”

The big man raised his hands helplessly.

“We don’t have many other senior officers she’d invite to something like that,” he admitted. “Tamboli or Milani, I guess, but neither of them can speak for the company.”

Kira had to hide a smile at the thought of the two nonbinary officers at one of Sonia’s soirees. Dilshad Tamboli was self-admittedly a jumped-up shuttle mechanic turned nova-fighter flight-deck boss—and Milani, Deception’s chief ground trooper, never left their armor.

Ever.

“But Zoric could, even if I wasn’t here,” Kira noted. “On the other hand, I am here now. What kind of invitation am I looking at?”

“Private party at the Solitary Lodge,” Dirix told her. “You’re familiar with the place, right?”

“It was the first place Sonia ever invited me to one of these,” Kira agreed. “That was where she recruited me for a suicidal covert op.”

A covert operation that had ended up with her in control of an Institute-crewed ex-Brisingr warship—the ship that had become Deception. Almost as fortunately for Kira, in hindsight, had been meeting Konrad Bueller.

Of course, they wouldn’t have ended up in control of Deception without Bueller, so that was a win all around.

“My impression is that this is a significantly larger event,” her aide warned. “Invitation says outdoor barbecue party. Semi-formal, which in this case I think means clothes you can clean ketchup off of.”

Kira snorted.

“I hate burgers,” she noted. That wasn’t entirely true, but nothing she’d encountered in her adult life lived up to her father’s mutton burgers. “So, I hope there are other options.”

“It’s the Queen’s personal private retreat in the heart of a protected wilderness,” Dirix reminded her. “Last I checked, they have a top-tier chef out there.”

“And from what Sonia says, they’re bored out of their minds,” Kira murmured. “I sympathize. All right, Stipan. Make the arrangements. Captain Zoric and I will attend Her Majesty’s barbecue.

“How long do I have?”

“Four hours. It’s a midafternoon thing and it’s already noon at the Lodge.”

Just getting from orbit to the Lodge could easily take an hour, Kira knew. That didn’t give her much time.

“Good thing I checked in with you first,” she told him. “Anything else in my messages that will explode if I don’t read it today?”

“Nothing from me, though that’s not a perfect guarantee,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with the Queen’s staff. Good luck, boss.”

* * *

The most critical component of Kira’s emails was a note from Angel Waldroup—formerly the flight-deck boss of Conviction, now the flight-deck boss of Raccoon—that she’d rigged up some of the less-used cubage aboard Raccoon as a storage rack for class two nova-drive units.

The class two nova drives were a complex piece of technology. Unlike the class one drive, they required very specific gravitational and energy levels in the area where they were being produced. A class one nova drive had to be built on a planet.

Class two drives had to be built either on an asteroid or in an actively orbiting facility at a carefully calculated altitude. Once you had all of the pieces in place, though, they were actually mass-producible in the way the larger class one drives weren’t.

Their main advantage, though, was having a far shorter minimum cooldown than a class one drive. A class two could cool down from a nova of a few light-minutes in a minute. A class one took a minimum of ten minutes to cool down, even from the shortest of novas.

That, combined with the class two drive’s smaller size, had created the nova fighter. Kira’s nova fighters could jump across a light-minute of space, engage a target, and then jump out after a minute.

Those hit-and-run attacks were devastating. On the other hand, the class two drive’s long-distance nova cooldown was significantly longer than a class one’s, which was why carriers existed.

Waldroup’s storage solution was the answer to one of Kira’s problems, though. Redward was the only system within a hundred light-years that could make class two nova drives, and they were willing to sell them to Memorial Force.

With the fabricators available to Waldroup, they could easily build nova fighters so long as they had the drives. Without the drives, their ability to build the rest of the plane was useless.

So, being able to store nova drives for later was important. It also might allow Memorial Force to dismantle some of their excess fighters, the ones that were currently crammed into every scrap of spare deck space aboard Deception and Raccoon.

Kira hesitated to do that, but given that they and their allies currently had a monopoly on nova fighters in the Syntactic Cluster, it might be an idea.

She sighed and put that thought aside for a later moment, firing off a thank-you to Waldroup.

They’d see what possibilities it opened later, but for now, her important messages were handled. That meant she needed to get ready for the party—and, thankfully, Queen Sonia wasn’t so foolish as to expect Kira or Zoric to wear a dress.

OceanofPDF.com