“We’ve got eyes on our employer’s ship,” Isidora Soler reported.
The pale, raven-haired Tactical officer’s report was theoretically meant solely for Akuchi Mwangi, but Kira had never quite got around to assembling a proper flag staff for Deception or Memorial Force. Thanks to virtual conferencing and the headware implants all of her people had, she managed by virtually merging the cruiser’s small flag deck with the bridge.
Kira wasn’t alone on the flag deck, but only Mel Cartman was actually present. Every other “person” around her was a holographic mirror of someone who was actually on the cruiser’s bridge—and it was difficult to tell where the physical room she was in ended and the virtual mirror of the bridge began.
It worked for her, but even Cartman looked occasionally thrown off when she joined the Admiral on the flag deck.
“What are we looking at?” Mwangi asked.
“Pretty standard twenty-kilocubic diplomatic fast packet,” Soler replied. “Not a yacht like our Crest friend had, but almost certainly comfortable on the inside. Scans suggest she can keep pace with us sublight.”
The two mercenary capital ships slid into formation around Macey’s transport. At twenty thousand cubic meters, the diplomatic ship was about twice the size of the smallest proper nova ship—but still on the small side for even the Rim.
“She’s armed; I’m seeing both ventral and dorsal dual light turrets,” Soler continued. “Hmm.”
“I see your ‘hmm’ and raise you a ‘that’s interesting,’” Bueller added. Kira threw a glance at her lover’s hologram and sent a mental questioning ping.
“I’ve got scans of her Jianhong radiation signature as we’re spinning up for nova,” the engineer told them. “That’s not as covert as they think it is.”
“Oh?” Mwangi asked. “We’re novaing in a minute. Is this something I should worry about?”
“No, no, not worry,” Bueller replied. “In fact, if we wait for the nova to finish, I’ll be able to confirm what I’m looking at.”
“Fine, fine, play wizard engineer of mystery if you wish,” the Captain replied. “Wallis? We clear to nova?”
Lyssa Wallis was one of the newer members of Deception’s bridge crew—but, thankfully, experienced nova navigators were easier to come by than experienced nova-fighter pilots. The redheaded woman was triple-checking her calculations as Mwangi spoke.
“It’s the standard trade route out to Ypres,” she pointed out. “We’ve made this nova a hundred times. And yes, I’ve checked my calcs, Huntress’s calcs and Springtime Chorus’s calcs.”
Mwangi chuckled. “Last fighters are coming aboard now. Nova on your mark.”
“Novaing…now.”
The world flashed around Kira. Wrapped in the armor of a starship, the only noticeable effect was the flash of her optical nerves getting confused. In a nova fighter, it could hit with waves of pain or nausea, though fighter pilots either got used to it or stopped being fighter pilots.
One way or another.
“Welcome to trade-route stop Y-Six-Seven-Five-Three-L-D-K-Nine-Four-Two-S-S-I-Seven-Five,” Wallis reported.
There was a beat.
“Someone please tell me she’s joking,” Soler asked slowly.
“Sadly, no,” Mwangi admitted. “It’s just that practically no one pays any attention to the catalog numbers for trade-route stops.”
To make a nova, you need detailed information on both the gravitational data of where you were and where you were going. Where you were was, of course, the easy part. With decent sensors and computer support, a pilot could calculate the current status of a destination based on light-lagged data—up to about a light-day. A light-week, potentially, for the truly specialty ships that mapped new nova routes.
To make a full six-light-year jump, a navigator needed to either be jumping into a stellar gravity well—where small variations were completely overwhelmed by the mass of the star—or have excruciatingly detailed information on every possible natural effect at the destination.
Putting together that information was what “mapping a nova point” entailed, and it could easily take weeks or months. Once the map was complete, it would be constantly updated by every ship that passed through the nova point. Part of the subscription cost for the maps of “civilized space” was providing that updated information for every stop a ship passed through.
Those maps were cheaply available to every ship—and regardless of the low price for individual ships, the coalition of corporations behind them had grown fabulously wealthy.
And maintained a list of stops Kira had seen estimated at over two quintillion individual locations. The catalog numbers got mind-boggling after a while, and people actively tried to ignore them.
“Okay, so while we all try not to think about Wallis using actual catalog numbers on us,” Mwangi said, “what was Commander Bueller’s ‘hmm, that’s interesting’?”
Bueller chuckled.
“So, Springtime Chorus is a twenty-kilocubic fast packet,” he said. “A cursory scan shows that she’s operating a two-kilocubic class one nova drive. So, simply enough, they used a cheap nova drive.”
“Who cheaps out on their consular ships?” Wallis asked.
“Nobody who can afford better,” Mwangi replied. “So, what’s the answer, Konrad?”
“She’s running a thirteen-X nova drive,” Bueller said. “That drive can take twenty-six kilocubics into FTL—and the reason why is these.”
An image of Springtime Chorus appeared in the main bridge holodisplay—mirrored to the main flag-deck display for Kira. She was a smooth disk shape roughly fifteen meters thick and forty meters across. Standard iconography flickered across the hologram, and Kira caught at least part of the issue before Bueller explained it.
“She has way more external airlocks than she would normally have,” the engineer said. “And these ones, spaced evenly around the dorsal and ventral turrets, have concealed hatches around them.”
“Docking gear,” Kira concluded. “Our consular ship can carry her own escorts. I make it twelve nova fighters, Konrad?”
“I get the same,” he agreed. “Of course, Samuels has the same ‘big, expensive and overengineered’ style of plane as Colossus, so I don’t think they could actually fit twelve of their birds on her.
“But she’s not supposed to rely on her turrets for self-defense.”
“Which begs the question: where are her nova fighters?” Kira asked. “And if they don’t normally carry them…does Samuels’s diplomatic corps even realize that their consular ships are pocket carriers?”
* * *
Kira was taken aback when she first saw Doretta Macey over the holographic call. The Samuels woman had traded out the formal but stylish pant suit and tied bun for an extremely old-fashioned blue-and-white dress and loose hair.
Assuming that Macey had access to the health care Kira would expect of a wealthy Mid-Rim world, the gray in her hair and wrinkles on her face suggested that she was likely into her second century. Despite that, she mustered flowing curly locks of silver and gold hair that hung down past her shoulders with a grace that Kira, who lived in a military officer’s short ponytail, could only envy.
“Mrs. Macey,” Kira greeted her employer. “I figured now was as good a time to check in as any. My bridge crew and yours are keeping in touch to manage the logistics of the trip.”
“Captain Hennessy is very good at their job,” Macey told her. “They’ll keep things well in hand.”
“I’m not overly worried about the trip,” Kira admitted. “Very few people get up in the morning and decide they need to pick a fight with anybody’s heavy cruiser without real reason. Random piracy is something our mere presence tends to suppress.”
“I see,” the older woman murmured, shaking her head. “I suppose that is the reality of the world. One wishes it were different—I dislike appealing to even the implicit threat of violence, let alone its active use.”
“I can understand that,” Kira said. “Apollo is…nominally pacifist as a culture, though we’re bad at it under pressure.” She shrugged.
“Apollo is nominally many things that they are bad at under pressure, Admiral Demirci,” Macey said acidly. “Including democratic.”
Kira couldn’t even argue. Officially, Apollo was a “democratic oligarchy.” The franchise to vote in planetary elections for the Council of Principals was limited to those who paid taxes in the highest tax bracket.
Standing in those elections wasn’t officially limited at all, but looking back from the outside, Kira could see the way those forty-eight seats had been passed back and forth among a hundred or so families.
Her planet’s saving grace, in her opinion, was that it had a very carefully maintained rule of law, where higher-level courts answered to the lower-level courts, not the Council of Principals, and lower-level courts were managed by the municipal governments, which did have a universal franchise.
“I won’t defend Apollo’s system, Mrs. Macey,” Kira replied. “I’ve grown to be fond of Redward’s style of constitutional monarchy, but I recognize it only succeeds when provided with a certain grade of monarch.”
“And it makes my skin crawl almost as much as organized church,” Macey replied. “Organization has always been where the groups of Quakers split, I suppose. But we are a true democracy, in both worship and governance.”
That was a sufficiently broad statement that Kira had to check her headware database. She hadn’t paid that much attention to the governing structure of their employer. Macey spoke for some kind of executive branch, and she’d assumed Samuels was a relatively standard presidential republic, much like Colossus.
She was apparently wrong.
“How does that even work?” she asked as her download filled her in on a government structure where the lower house of the legislature was, basically, the entire population.
“The First Minister and the Quorum are directly selected at each election,” Macey told her. “The First Minister presents a list of Ministers to the Quorum for approval, and those Ministers run the day-to-day government of our planet.
“The Quorum—who are unpaid, I must note—prepare and review potential legislation in coordination with the Ministries. Twice a local year—three times a standard year—all legislation that has passed the Quorum is presented to the populace via the system datanet, and we vote.”
“Sounds complicated as all hell,” Kira admitted. “And likely to result in all kinds of confusion.”
“Part of the Quorum’s job is to make sure that nothing goes to the wide vote without being simple enough that it can be explained in a one-hour presentation,” Macey told her. “Our founders, though, were of the Interstellar Society of Friends. They believed that faith was between an individual and God—and felt that governance should be similar.
“Power derives from the will of the people, after all.”
“Or the barrel of the gun that convinces the people to lie down,” Kira murmured.
“That option is not one the people of Samuels will ever accept,” the diplomat said. “The reality of the world is that we must have defenses and soldiers, so we do. But even our soldiers recognize that violence is the last option. No military junta will ever rule our world.”
“Military juntas don’t have a great success rate over the long term,” Kira said. “But militaristic states… That’s a different story.”
Kira, at least, knew that the Equilibrium Institute existed and was happily getting involved in politics, economics and war in their area of the Rim to twist the galaxy toward their vision, where military hegemons maintained peace in carefully delineated territories.
“Hence why we came to you for help.”
“True,” Kira conceded. “Though that leaves me with an interesting question, Mrs. Macey.”
Macey leaned back and adjusted her dress.
“We are, as you said, on the same side now,” she noted. “I will endeavor to assist in any way I can.”
Macey had already signed a twenty-million-pound transfer to cover Memorial Force’s deployment to Samuels. That was the kind of “help” Kira mostly cared about.
“Where is Springtime Chorus’s nova-fighter escort?” Kira asked. “My people noted that she’s designed to carry two squadrons as Apollo counts them, and I would have expected you to bring them with you, coming this far out.”
Macey shook her head.
“It was a point of discussion, yes,” she admitted. “I overruled our military advisors. I did not want to draw attention to ourselves on what was supposed to be an economic mission. Plus…” She paused to consider her words. “Frankly, twelve nova fighters were more likely to make a difference in securing our home than in protecting a single ship, months away from Samuels.”
“I see,” Kira said. “That’s quite a risk you took on yourself. While consular ships are theoretically off-limits, I wouldn’t want to count on that myself.”
“We traveled safely to Redward,” Macey told her. “And now we have you to protect us on our way home. What do I have to fear?”
“Nothing while you’re with us,” Kira agreed. “I was worried you’d been attacked on the way here and concealed that from us.”
“No, we simply didn’t bring them,” Macey confirmed.
“How many ships like Springtime do you have?” Kira asked. “That’s an edge I didn’t think Samuels possessed.”
The Samuels woman sighed and shook her head.
“Three,” she said quietly. “All built by my late husband. Springtime Chorus and Autumn Songs were eventually bought into Ministries service, but Summer Drums remains the property of our corporation.”
“I apologize,” Kira said. “I didn’t realize your husband had passed.”
“A shuttle accident,” Doretta Macey said. “One I now find suspicious, given that the dear man was one of the few who saw what Colossus was becoming and urged us to prepare. But…”
She spread her hands.
“I am a negotiator, a linguist and an economist,” she noted. “I am not a spy or an investigator. When our law enforcement tells me there was nothing abnormal about Jacob’s death, I must accept that.”
“I appreciate the warning,” Kira said. “It’s good to know what concerns may yet await us.”
It was one thing to face the enemy she knew about, but if there was rot in Samuels itself, she and her people would need to watch their backs.