To Kira’s hopefully concealed surprise, everything proceeded exactly according to plan. She was still watching the red icons on her display of the half-dozen sensor drones they’d picked up from the Navy of the Royal Crest carrier group in-system, but everything she could see said they’d made it to the Shaqvilla Refining Center without being detected.
“Flight SRC-Seven-Seven-Nine, your course is registered,” a bored flight controller told her—as if her shuttle had just launched from the big station ahead of them. “We have you on standard vector to Guadaloop Actual; please confirm.”
Kira checked half a dozen bits of data in her headware before answering—not least making sure she knew what the standard vector to Guadaloop was.
“Shaqvilla Control, this is SRC-Seven-Seven-Nine,” she replied once she was certain. “Three passengers, on standard vector to Guadaloop Actual. I confirm.”
“Safe flight, SRC-Seven-Seven-Nine,” the controller said. “Everything is green on our end. Carry on.”
Kira smiled to herself as the channel dropped.
“What?” Konrad asked.
“Either someone slotted in false data of us launching from the station—or more likely, the bored-sounding traffic controller I just spoke to was decently bribed,” she told her lover. “We’re now on an officially registered course and I’ve coded the autopilot.”
She rose from the controls and stretched. The runabout shuttle was tiny, designed to be stored on ships that were only ten thousand cubic meters in total. It was basically a three-meter-diameter cylinder seven meters long—and it had Harrington coils and antigravity systems stuffed into it.
Every space aboard the runabout was cramped. There wasn’t enough space for any kind of internal separation, which meant that she could hear Bertoli snoring on the fold-down bunk.
“Four more hours,” Kira warned her companions. “Guadaloop Actual is the main orbital, an elevator center point like Blueward Station at Redward. To get there, we’re passing through the battle station perimeter.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?” O’Mooney asked. The red-haired young mercenary looked nervous but ready. Kira knew that Milani and Bertoli had handpicked her for this mission, though, which meant she almost certainly was ready.
“We have a properly registered local course now,” Kira told the ground trooper. “So, the Guadaloop Orbital Defense Command will almost certainly ignore us.”
“GODCom,” Konrad muttered. “Somehow, I doubt that was accidental.”
“Probably not,” she agreed. “But, truthfully, GODCom isn’t our problem. Even if they’ve seen this entire maneuver, we’re not a threat to them. They’ll just track us back to Yerazner.”
“At which point they’ll ask the Crown Zharang about us or decide not to interfere in the Crest’s affairs,” Konrad concluded. “This is what my people are doing to our home sector, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kira said bluntly. “In my more-honest moments, I’ll admit that being a friend of Apollo had its downsides too, but we were a long way short of this level of military threat.”
O’Mooney was looking at the data on Kira’s screens over the Commodore’s shoulders.
“That looks like a lot of firepower to be threatened by anyone,” she said.
“Roughly equivalent to Redward’s defenses,” Kira agreed. “Eight heavy orbital battle stations, a fleet of eighty monitors. But GODCom is the only military Guadaloop is allowed. I think their treaty with the Crest allows them four nova ships totaling no more than one hundred kilocubics.”
That wasn’t even four destroyers, not without being generous with the term. That was four corvettes—though, from what Jade Panosyan had said, Guadaloop maintained a light cruiser, a corvette, and two gunships in that cubage.
“And if they break that treaty, the Navy of the Royal Crest seizes any shipping that leaves the system,” Konrad said grimly. “Even most of the Syntactic Cluster’s systems are functionally immune to invasion and conquest, but you can only do so much if you can’t leave your star system.”
Kira grimaced.
“Like the Apollo-Brisingr Agreement on Nova Lane Security?” she asked him.
“I already said that this was what Brisingr was doing back home,” Konrad pointed out. At O’Mooney’s confused look, he sighed.
“Kira’s homeworld and mine wrapped up an ugly war about three years ago with that beigely named treaty,” he told the bodyguard. “In exchange for Brisingr not fucking with Apollo themselves, Apollo turned over security of the sector’s trade routes to Brisingr.
“Which means the Kaiserreich’s navy has been imposing the exact kind of blockages that Guadaloop is afraid of and extorting pretty similar treaties with the systems around our homeworld,” he concluded. “To give Apollo’s leaders some credit, they snuck a requirement for a minimum allowance of half a million cubic meters for the system fleets into the Agreement.”
Kira arched an eyebrow at him.
“I didn’t know that,” she admitted.
“It came up in my briefings before I left the Navy for Ghost Explorations and, well, the Equilibrium Institute,” Konrad said quietly. “We knew that it was part of the deal, but it was buried in the appendices, and I think a lot of people only paid attention to the main treaty provisions with regards to Apollo and Brisingr themselves.”
“Where did they bury assassinating Apollo’s pilots?” Kira asked, letting bitterness tinge her tone.
“I suspect the Shadows kept that piece out of the formal documents,” he said. “The longer I’m away from home, the less I like what Kaiser Reinhardt has made of my people.”
Kira exhaled a long sigh and waved away the edge in the room. After a year, she and Konrad had had most of the fights they could really have over the state of affairs between their homeworlds.
She wasn’t sure there was much to choose from between a constitutional oligarchy and a constitutional monarchy, in any case. Being a “Friend of Apollo” prior to the war hadn’t been cheap, and she wouldn’t pretend—now, at least—that her home system hadn’t been running their own disguised tributary empire.
The only point in Apollo’s favor she could see was that most of the “Friends of Apollo” she’d worked with during the war really had regarded Apollo as an ally, a first among equals, not an external conqueror.
“Like I said, we have a few hours left to get to Guadaloop Actual,” she reminded them. “We should be able to find transport for the whole runabout to the Crest from there.
“I won’t claim smooth sailing—there’s a six-nova-ship Crester carrier group in Guadaloop orbit, after all—but we’re on our way and there’s not much we can do until we’re in the Crest itself.”
“Do you need someone to spot you on the controls so you can grab a nap?” Konrad offered.
“No, but we’re going straight to a hotel for a nap when we get to the orbital!”
* * *
There was a certain relief to falling asleep in a normal spacer’s hotel on a normal orbital. Kira would never—could never—complain about the ridiculously comfortable auto-adjusting beds aboard Yerazner, but they were almost too nice.
The more-standard comfort of a decent spacer hotel was fine and, after a month on Panosyan’s beds, a novelty.
Kira’s “nap” managed to turn into a full night’s sleep, which surprised no one. Not even her.
She woke up to find the wall of the hotel room covered in holographic projections as Konrad Bueller worked through the shipping and ticket listings.
“Finding anything useful?” she asked, sitting up in bed and intentionally letting the blanket fall off her. They weren’t in much of a rush, after all.
Her lover was focused on his work, however, and paid more attention to her question than her uncovered flesh.
“If we’re willing to give up the runabout, we’re not going to have any problem at all,” he told her. “There’s at least one passenger ship heading to the Crest every day. Most of them aren’t big—we’re talking stuff about the size of Yerazner but rigged up for regular passengers—but there’s a regular back-and-forth.”
“But the runabout?” Kira said, folding her arms over her chest as she focused on work as well.
“Hauling sixty cubic meters of spaceship is a bit more of an ask,” Konrad admitted. “We’d be paying for quite a bit of cargo on one of the liners if we tried to bring all of the troopers’ gear, so it could easily end up a wash.
“Or, I guess, it would if we didn’t need cabin space either way.”
He leaned on his fist, studying the charts.
“It would take less than a day to ship all of us but not the shuttle,” he said thoughtfully. “Three or four to find a shipping slot large enough for the shuttle—but most of the ships with that kind of space don’t take passengers.”
“So, what are you thinking?” Kira asked. She had her own thoughts, but she was curious what his solution was. She’d hauled six nova fighters across a hundred and fifty light-years by taking a maintenance job on the freighter carrying them.
That wouldn’t work for four people making a one-system hop.
“It looks like there are a few mixed cargo-passenger ships, for people who want to send supercargo along with the goods,” her lover said. “Most of them are running longer distances than to the Crest. We might be able to stick ourselves on one of them that’s making a stop in Crest, but that will take more research and we’ll need to negotiate something in person.”
“The other option is just straight-up hiring a ship,” Kira suggested. “There’s got to be a few ten-kilocubic tramps that make the regular back-and-forth run, right? They can carry the runabout easily enough and would have space for passengers.
“They wouldn’t be on all the fancy boards, though,” she continued, gesturing to his set of displays. “We’ll find them by wandering the docks and asking bartenders more than anything else.”
Konrad snorted.
“That was the obstacle I saw to that option, yeah,” he agreed. “So, my dear boss, shall we wake up your bodyguards and go wander the docks and buy some drinks?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kira agreed, though her grin widened as he finally turned to look at her and took in her nakedness. “In a few minutes,” she purred.