4

Kira made her way across the party with the ease of long practice, greeting acquaintances and friends as she approached Doretta Macey and her party.

The Samuels delegation was presumably larger than the four middle-aged women forming a solid block in one corner, quietly chatting with a man Kira knew ran a midsized shipping line out of Redward. If nothing else, none of the women had the body language that said they were in charge of security, which meant Macey and her companions were relying on Kira’s security for this event.

If any of them had ever met Memorial Force’s ground-force commander, they would have known that was a safe reliance. Milani might never leave their body armor, but they were among the top two or three small-force infantry tacticians Kira had ever met.

Kira might be wearing an armor vest underneath her dress uniform and have a blaster tucked into a concealed holster, but that was at Milani’s insistence, not from any lack of faith in the mercenary.

Macey was aware enough to see Kira approaching and give swift whispered instructions to her companions. The other Samuels envoys slipped away, moving the conversations away from Doretta Macey and clearing a small bubble of privacy for her and Kira.

It was an impressive and clearly practiced maneuver, one that spoke to the recurring role of these women as negotiators and diplomats for their star system.

Macey watched Kira approach impassively, giving the mercenary a chance to examine her. She wore a conservative navy-blue pantsuit, with her silvering blond hair tied back into a tight bun. Blue eyes surveyed Kira in turn as the diplomat pursed her lips like she’d eaten something sour.

“Em Doretta Macey?” Kira asked as she stepped inside the circle Macey’s companions had created.

“Mrs.,” Doretta corrected softly. “I know it’s archaic, Admiral, but most of the people of Samuels put a weight on marriage. Em is reserved for the unmarried among us.”

“I see,” Kira said. That was the sort of thing most people would include in their headware beacons—the small identity tag transmitted by their implants. Hers, for example, contained her rank, pronouns and name.

That Mrs. Macey didn’t include it in her beacon—which simply gave her name and pronouns—suggested she was intentionally using it to set people on the wrong foot when they met her. In an age where it was easy to get everything right when addressing people, it was disconcerting to get someone’s preferred address wrong.

“A mutual friend told me you were looking for me,” Kira continued after a momentary pause. “Since you’ve gone to so much effort to track me down, all the way from Samuels, I figured I should at least see what you have to say.”

“Oh, I didn’t come all this way to see you,” Macey replied. “We’re here purely as an economic delegation, dealing with the new Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone. I’m led to understand your organization may be able to help us resolve a problem back home, though.”

Kira smiled thinly.

“Mrs. Macey, I don’t play games,” she said quietly. “We both know that the Syntactic Cluster is too far away from Samuels to be of major economic interest to your world. We both know that anything Samuels would need here would be as easily negotiated in Ypres as Redward—and that every conversation you and your people have had since you arrived has been directed at making contact with Queen Sonia as an avenue to make contact with me.

“You’ve come a very long way to talk to me, and I’ll give you the favor of hearing you out—but not unless we are entirely honest with each other.

“Frankly, my people don’t need work that badly.”

She started to turn to leave, but Macey held up her hand and returned the thin smile.

“I could argue that is egotistical of you,” she told Kira. “Or question how you draw that analysis. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. I need your help.”

“All right,” Kira said. “You managed to get yourself an invite to this party and convince Queen Sonia that I should speak to you. So, speak.”

“Is this really the place?” Macey asked, glancing around at the party.

“I’m not planning on negotiating here, Mrs. Macey,” Kira replied with a chuckle. “But it’s as good a place as any for you to make your pitch, don’t you think?”

“Fair enough. Water, Admiral?”

One of the servers had arrived with a tray of glasses that were distinctly lacking in champagne or other alcoholic beverages. The tall flutes only held clear water, and Macey took two of them with a nod to the waiter.

“Certainly.” Kira took the drink.

“None of my team drink alcohol,” Macey explained. “This young man has been extremely accommodating.”

The “young man” in question—one of Milani’s ground-force troopers and part of the security arrangements—grinned at Kira and inclined his head.

“Carry on,” she told him. “Tag the rest of the team—Mrs. Macey and I will need to talk semi-privately for a bit.”

“Yes, sir.”

Macey watched the waiter walk away with a sharp look.

“Security?” she asked, surprised.

“Every waiter here is either one of my mercenaries or a Redward Army Commando tasked to protect Queen Sonia,” Kira told her. “Did you expect differently?”

“We are not…so focused on defense, I suppose, on Samuels,” Macey admitted. “The dominant culture on our world remains the Interstellar Society of Friends—Quakers, you may know us as.”

Kira didn’t know them by either name off the top of her head, but her headware brought up the information rapidly. The key point was that the Quakers were almost uniformly anti-war if not outright pacifist.

“Pacifists,” she murmured aloud.

“And most of the population of my system that are not Quakers are Baha’i or Buddhist or, well, other groups that lend themselves strongly to pacifism and a refusal of violence,” Macey confirmed. “We don’t generally have security to this level.”

“I am the commanding officer of a mercenary fleet, in a system that has spent most of the five years I’ve been here in one war or another,” Kira pointed out. “I am not a pacifist, and I have real enemies. So does Queen Sonia.”

“I understand that intellectually,” Macey conceded. “We maintain our own defense forces, after all. But it is still an oddity to encounter in the wild, so to speak.”

“You didn’t travel a hundred and fifty light-years to be surprised that I have guards and guns, Mrs. Macey,” Kira said. “What do you need?”

Macey took a sip of her water and nodded slowly.

“You used to be with the Apollo military, yes? So, you are familiar with Samuels and Colossus?” she asked.

“I was and I am, but only vaguely,” Kira admitted. “Not much more than the astrographic location and its implications for Apollo, plus whatever is in the Encyclopedia Galactica.”

The EG was a charity project maintained by the same loose coalition of corporations that updated the trade-route maps of “civilized space.” Like the maps, it was a subscription service that had a constantly updated location in every star system that a ship would upload updates to and download updates from when they arrived.

The trade-route maps told civilian ships where to jump. The Encyclopedia Galactica gave them a very high-level idea of what would be there when they arrived.

Macey sighed.

“That’s enough to know that Samuels and Colossus are two sides of the same coin,” she said. “The only two inhabited worlds in a roughly thirty-light-year cube. A ship can go around it, but for a significant chunk of the Rim, if you are going outward or going inward, you are passing through either Colossus or Samuels to discharge static.

“For a century, we have competed for that business. Colossus takes one fewer nova on most routes, so we have traditionally offered lower discharge toll rates and better amenities.”

Kira nodded.

A nova ship could make six long-distance novas, with a usual max of around six light-years per nova, before they needed to stop somewhere and discharge tachyon and electrostatic buildup into a convenient gravity well.

The process took a full day, so even though inhabited systems charged a toll to do so, ships would usually discharge in “civilization” to have access to supplies and entertainment while they were stuck in place.

“And now?” she prodded Macey.

“For most of the last century, that competition has been relatively good-natured and polite,” the Samuels woman told her. “As polite as any competition that is critical to the economies of the star systems involved can be, anyway.

“However, about twenty years ago, a more…nationalistic tone began to rise in Colossus politics,” she noted. “We didn’t take it overly seriously at first. All democracies go through phases, and our relationship with Colossus has always been solid.”

She shook her head.

“But over twenty years, the Colossus Rising Party has gone from third-party status, to junior coalition member, to majority ruling party,” she told Kira. “The CRP has held control of the system for about ten years now, to one degree or another, and remains stunningly popular.

“Of course, my feelings on the Rising Party are highly suspect,” Macey admitted. “Much of their foreign policy goals and selling points to their membership have been based around removing Samuels as an economic threat to Colossus.

“We are an external threat that they have successfully mobilized a large portion of their population against. While we are a purely economic competitor to Colossus, they appear to be considering…non-economic methods of resolution.”

“The usual ‘continuation of politics by other means,’ I assume?” Kira asked, then took a long drink of water. The story wasn’t unfamiliar. In a slightly different format and structure, it was how Apollo and Brisingr had come to blows.

“War,” Macey said bluntly. “We are…reasonably secure in the defenses of Samuels itself, but our military officers tell me that we lack the ability to secure the key trade routes through the zone we share with Colossus.”

“If they have a nova-capable fleet, they would be able to blockade you and prevent you receiving customers, yes,” Kira agreed. That was how war was fought in their era, after all. Any reasonably advanced star system usually had half a dozen or more asteroid fortresses that outmassed the largest nova ships a thousand to one.

“They didn’t use to,” Macey said quietly. “There was a semiformal agreement between our governments to reduce that risk. Both of our systems can build nova ships and regularly build nova freighters, but we have both traditionally restricted our nova combatants to a pure nova-fighter force.”

That spoke to the sophistication of the two systems’ military technology as well. If they could build nova fighters at all, they could easily build real nova warships. Fighters had advantages but were also a specialty tool. By only building fighters, well…

Kira could see that being a problem. There was a reason that nova fighters were usually deployed by carrier, after all. They could make the same six-light-year nova as a ship with a class one nova drive, but their cooldown was almost thirty-six hours instead of the larger ship’s twenty.

The price the class two drive paid for its short cooldown for short-range novas was a long cooldown for long-range jumps. Nova fighters could patrol the trade routes around a star system—but only by giving up their main tactical advantage.

“And now?” Kira asked.

“They have recently acquired a flotilla of decommissioned Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy warships of pre-war vintage,” Macey told her. “While we believe the ships to have been properly disarmed, it will not be difficult for Colossus’s yards to refit them to be combat-ready.

“They can definitely do so more quickly than we can build new ships on our own,” the woman concluded. “They will shortly be in position to impose the exact type of blockade you warned of, and according to our military officers, we will not be able to stop them.”

“I see.” Kira finished her glass of water as she considered. “And you want to hire Memorial Force to either prevent or break said blockade, plus a potential counter-force mission to eliminate their new fleet while you build a proper defensive force of your own?”

“That…about sums it up, yes,” Macey said slowly. “I dislike violence, Admiral Demirci. I dislike organized violence even more. But I must, pragmatically, recognize that there is a threat to the world and the people I love and serve.

“So, yes. We want to hire your Memorial Force to protect the Samuels System.”

“All right,” Kira told her. “My people will be in contact this evening to arrange an appointment tomorrow.”

Macey blinked at her. “Admiral?”

“You’ve made your pitch,” Kira said. “I am prepared to at least consider the mission. Tomorrow, I want you to bring every piece of information you have on Colossus’s military production capabilities and these ships they’ve acquired.

“Then you and I will negotiate over what this contract is going to look like. As you said, this is not the place for negotiations—and you are not the only person here I need to meet before the party is done!”

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