The crowd gathered on the Green Ward observation deck oohed appreciatively as the nova fighters flashed past in lockstep formation. Running lights gleamed on the three-squadron formation of Wolverines, all eighteen starfighters shining like beacons in the night.
The running lights were necessary because the spacecrafts’ reactionless Harrington coils produced no light when running. Heat, yes, Kira knew, but no light. The dispersal webs woven into modern armor to handle plasma fire had begun with systems to handle the heat from Harrington coils.
Memorial Force’s Admiral stood silently next to the observation deck’s massive windows, feeling like an undersized gargoyle watching the crowd gathered for the ceremony collectively inhale again as the second set of squadrons made their pass.
Apollo’s nominal pacifism and anti-militarism had limited the amount of pageantry involved in most of their military activities. The Kingdom of Redward, on the other hand, had no such false imagery of itself.
She waited for the flybys to complete. There would be five of them, three of two squadrons apiece and two of three squadrons, showing off all seventy-two of the carrier’s new fighters as they made their formal transfer from the Green Ward hangars to the still officially unnamed CVL-4.
“I still wish you’d let us buy at least the bomber design,” a voice murmured to her.
She looked over to see that she’d been joined in her spot by the window by a slim man with brilliant copper hair. He wore a similar dress uniform to hers—a decorated long jacket over a military shipsuit—but his jacket was the dark blue of the RRF to the dark teal of her Memorial Force uniform.
And, of course, he had three stars on his collar to her two. Kira might have accepted the Admiral title, but Teige “Helmet” Sagairt was one of RRF’s dozen or so full Admirals.
“I promised the Panosyans I wouldn’t,” she told him. “And they played almost completely straight with us.”
Sagairt didn’t even wince. He just shrugged.
“If you change your mind, let me know,” he said. “Feels like that should make up for at least some of the retainer you lost.”
“Fortitude has brought us enough work to make up for that,” Kira said calmly.
Redward had paid Memorial Force a hefty retainer up until they’d first left the Syntactic Cluster on the mission that had acquired Fortitude. Part of the reason she’d given that retainer up, though, was that it had already been becoming politically untenable for King Larry to keep paying it.
“It should. Not many hundred-and-fifty-kilocubic carriers this far out,” Helmet replied. “Even Royal Shield couldn’t take Fortitude assuming equally skilled fighter groups.”
The bombers that had started their conversation made their own flyby and Kira nodded silently.
Royal Shield was the new one-hundred-twenty-kilocubic carrier the RRF was putting through its paces as they spoke. She carried four dual plasma-cannon turrets to Fortitude’s five and only one hundred and eight nova fighters to Fortitude’s hundred and fifty.
But no one pretended that Memorial Force wouldn’t leap to Redward’s defense if they were around when the system came under attack—not least because Kira Demirci and the rest of her senior staff trusted King Larry to make good on a reasonable price afterward.
Eventually. Even if they were still grumpy about the carrier slip.
“Her Majesty is almost here,” Helmet told her after watching the bomber. “She sent her regrets for missing the beginning of the ceremony. Larry sends even more regrets—he got locked up in a committee meeting at the Hóngsè Chéngbao and won’t be free today.”
Kira nodded. The Hóngsè Chéngbao was the physical seat of Redward’s Parliament, and while King Larry wielded a great deal of day-to-day power in the government of Redward, he also very definitively answered to the elected representatives of his people.
“This is just…parading so far,” she said. “I can delay the next piece for a few minutes if Her Majesty is late.”
“That might be helpful,” Sagairt conceded. “Sonia wants to make sure everyone sees her support for you and your people.”
“It’s appreciated,” Kira said. “Even the guests are mostly here because of her, after all.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” he replied. “At least half of the people here are RRF, either from the nova ships or from Green Ward itself. We’re here because we respect and value Memorial Force. Very few members of the Fleet don’t understand where we’d be without you.”
Kira chuckled.
“And even some of the politicians and industrialists and foreign dignitaries understand the same, I guess,” she said. “But at least forty percent of the people in this room are here because the King and Queen of Redward were supposed to be here.”
“And they will be a tad disappointed that King Larry can’t make it, but they’ll survive,” Sagairt told her. “And the rest of us are here for you.”
He smiled.
“Who’s throwing the traditional champagne bottle, anyway? Sonia?”
“Your Commander Bradley’s little girl,” Kira said. “A sign of remaining connections, I suppose.”
“Mmm.” Sagairt nodded. “By which you mean Neha is throwing the champagne bottle, given that Jessica isn’t quite three.”
Neha Bradley was now a squadron commander with the RRF—but she’d once been blackmailed into acting as a spy for the Equilibrium Institute conspiracy that had tried to undermine Redward. Once she’d come clean, Kira had taken her into Memorial Force, and she’d eventually transferred back to the RRF.
But, like so much of the system’s military infrastructure, Commander Bradley had been shaped by Memorial Force. It was a subtle reminder, Kira figured—but it was a reminder nonetheless.
Redward and the Syntactic Cluster owed her people, and she didn’t want them to forget!
* * *
Finding a shipsuit sized for a toddler hadn’t been as difficult as Kira had initially assumed. The nature of the nova drive resulted in a lot of small, cheap ships traveling the laneways—and the vast majority of the default ten- to twenty-kilocubic freighters doing that were family-owned.
Those families couldn’t afford to stop moving just because they’d had a baby, so there was an entire market for shipsuits that allowed small children to move around, gave their parents some degree of control over what they could access, and were size-adjustable to handle the rapid growth spurts of kids of all ages.
Despite her general neutral feelings on kids, even Kira had to admit that Jessica Bradley was adorable as she stood on the skiff jetting out toward CVL-4. The child’s mother was holding her in the uncertain gravity, fully wrapped in her own RRF shipsuit with barely-visible safety cables connecting the two vac-suits.
“Gentlefolk,” Kira said calmly. She crossed from the side of the window to stand on the dais in front of the view, turning a gentle smile on her audience.
She traded a firm nod with Queen Sonia, the elegantly tall monarch now standing at the back of the room. Several people had already tried to pin the Queen down for conversation, only to be brushed aside.
Right now, the Queen was there for the show.
“I hope everyone here knows who I am, but I accept the reality that some of you are here for the buffet and some of you are here because you knew the Queen would be here,” she told them. “My name is Admiral Kira Demirci, and I am the commanding officer, CEO and primary shareholder of Memorial Force.
“We have operated out of the Redward System for as long as we have existed, and a significant plurality of our personnel are drawn from Redward or the rest of the Syntactic Cluster.
“This is a significant moment for all of us, though,” she continued. “Five years ago, the only carriers in Redward’s possession were crude freighter conversions.”
One of those conversions had, in fact, been given to Memorial Force after their previous carrier had been destroyed in Redward’s service.
“Today, Redward has not only built four carriers for their own service but has also built a carrier for what is arguably an export sale. While I think we all recognize that Memorial Force and the Kingdom of Redward have a special relationship, it is still true that very few powers in this universe ever export capital ships.
“But here we are.” She waved behind her, where CVL-4 was slowly drawing into view at minimum power. The carrier was flanked on all sides by a skeletal sphere of Scimitar’s fighters. Most of the nova craft were now aboard the carrier, but Colombera had left a dozen of his planes in space to provide safety beacons for her safe travel.
“Gentlefolk of the Kingdom of Redward, this ship will serve Memorial Force, yes. But Memorial Force will always be the friend of Kingdom and Cluster alike. You have my word.”
Anyone who was stupid enough to try to hire Memorial Force to operate against Redward or the Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone that King Larry had built with blood, tears and sacrifice deserved the rude awakening Kira would give them.
“And so today, Memorial Force takes possession of Redward Industrial Shipbuilding’s hull CVL-Four,” Kira concluded. “Em Bradley?”
“We’re ready,” Neha Bradley said over the com.
“Carry on.”
The open-canopied skiff slid closer to the carrier on its Harrington coils, and Bradley lifted up her daughter with the oversized champagne bottle in her hands. The little girl hefted the bottle up to the edge of the skiff’s gravity field, then tossed it gently at her mother’s instruction.
The bottle left the child’s hands and drifted slowly across space toward the carrier. Behind it, the skiff slowly pulled away to make sure its systems didn’t interfere with the process.
A three-year-old’s arms didn’t impart that much velocity to a two-kilogram ceremonial bottle of what Kira knew to be absolutely terrible sparkling wine, but the skiff had brought the Bradleys within ten meters of the hull.
It only took a few seconds for the bottle to cross that void and hit the hull. Jessica Bradley might not have thrown the bottle with enough force to break it, but it didn’t matter. A tiny explosive charge in the middle of the bottle detected the impact and went off.
Glass disintegrated into fine powder and faux champagne went spraying and fizzing across the carrier’s hull. A moment later, the running lights lit up as one, illuminating the thick playing-card shape of the starship—and the name painted on her hull.
“Gentlefolk, I give you the Memorial Force carrier Huntress,” Kira told her audience. “A mercenary ship, yes, but also a force for justice and decency in this universe.
“Like Fortitude before her, and Conviction before her, Huntress will stand against the darkness and the fire of mankind’s worst,” she continued. “We have stood with Redward before, and we will stand with others in the future, but I can promise you this: no carrier under my command will ever stand with those who would conquer or harm the innocent.”
That got her a round of applause, especially once it was clear that was the extent of her speech. With a nod to her audience, Kira stepped down from the dais and went hunting for the buffet.
Now that she’d given the speech, she needed a drink.
* * *
Kira barely managed to eat a brownie and grab a beer before a pair of perfectly turned-out women appeared out of the crowd. Their simple black suits might as well have been uniforms, and the presence of two members of the Queen’s private security detail created an instant bubble of space.
Both women moved with the slightly off grace of heavily boosted individuals, augmented with either biotech, nanotech or cybertech to be more than human. In Kira’s experience, once people were in battle armor, boosts made no difference—but she could see the value for a bodyguard.
“You know, Melissa, Cora, I don’t know if we necessarily need to intimidate everyone else away from the buffet before I grab a glass of wine,” Queen Sonia Stewart said drily as she stepped up behind the two bodyguards.
Kira snorted as the Queen approached the buffet—and Kira herself.
“One of them has to scan the wine for you, anyway,” she told the monarch. “They may as well be intimidating and save you time in line.”
“Perhaps.”
As Kira and Sonia spoke, one of the two women was doing exactly that—running a scanner wand over the wine and the trays of pastries. Once the scan was complete, the woman snagged a glass of wine for Sonia and a plate of brownies for the bodyguards themselves.
If the confections being passed around Sonia’s guardians slowed their reactions or attention to detail one iota, Kira didn’t notice it. Holding her bottle of beer, she followed the Queen’s unspoken command and joined her back by the window.
“I’m glad we’re able to begin paying back the vast debt my system owes your organization,” the monarch told her. “And don’t give me any crap about being paid, Kira. We both know Estanza, Zoric and you have all gone far beyond what contract truly required.”
John Estanza had commanded Conviction, the carrier that Kira had brought her people out there to join. A mentor and a friend, he’d died fighting the Equilibrium Institute to preserve the Syntactic Cluster’s freedom to choose their own future.
The Institute wanted to mold all of humanity into a single path, a path they were prepared to enforce with fire and blood. John Estanza had once flown for them—but he’d died stopping them out there.
One debt paid, Kira supposed.
“We’ll be here at least until the other carrier is commissioned,” she told Sonia. “Your help along the way has been invaluable.”
Sonia, after all, had put her in touch with Jade Panosyan, the heir to the Royal Crest and the person who’d used Memorial’s theft of Fortitude to effect regime change in that system.
While the Queen of Redward played the socialite, trophy wife and mother—and played those roles well—she was also the secret head of Redward’s combined intelligence and covert operations apparatus. Her fingers and eyes spread throughout the entire Syntactic Cluster and beyond.
“Larry and I fully recognize the sacrifices and efforts you have made on our behalf,” Sonia repeated. “The debt we owe you and your people—and John Estanza’s memory—can never be repaid, Kira. Mere money and matériel cannot clear an account balance built of honor and blood.”
Kira nodded silently. There wasn’t really a response she could make to that beyond recognition. She and Sonia both knew the Queen was right.
“Larry is, well, about as angry as my Santa Claus wannabe of a husband gets that he couldn’t be here,” Sonia continued. “We thought the whole situation with the bill to fund the south continent’s canal system was resolved and in hand, but…” She shrugged.
“Politics,” Kira replied. “The last thing you could ever get me to do is run a planet! A dozen or so mercenary ships is more than enough.”
“It has its rewards—and I don’t mean the perks,” the Queen said. “Thanks to us and the millions of others who’ve worked with us, I believe Larry and I will leave both our system and our neighbors better off than we found them.
“Not many can say that at all—let alone on the scale that Larry and I can. You’re up there, though,” she noted. “Mercenary fleet or no. Between here, the Crest, half a dozen other Rim brush fires…you and Memorial Force are making a difference.”
Kira chuckled softly.
“You’re not just buttering me up for giggles,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Sonia sighed.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “But I also want to remind you that nothing I just said was a lie or even particularly exaggerated. The Equilibrium Institute has to regret the day you and John Estanza ever met.”
“I hope so,” Kira said levelly. “Have we found another patsy of theirs?”
“Not that I know of,” Sonia said. “But I have been making quiet conversation with an economic delegation that could use some military muscle they don’t have. I think you may even know the Samuels System better than I do.”
Kira nodded slowly.
“I know of the Samuels System,” she conceded. “They were a strategic concern for Apollo—but they’re about as far as you can be and still register as a strategic concern. One of two systems that act as a choke point between the Apollo-Brisingr Sector and a few others and the Outer Rim—them and…Colossus, I think?”
“Exactly. They have a delegation here, negotiating some trade deals with a few of our local corporations,” Sonia explained. “They drifted into my circles of context a little too smoothly for me to think it was unintended, but they seem aboveboard for that.
“I want you to talk to them,” she said. “No weight on it from my side—if nothing else, I know most of your capital ships are in Obsidian right now—but I think everyone would benefit from that conversation.”
Kira chuckled again. Putting people in the same room to have a conversation sounded like a small thing, but she’d come to realize it was an extraordinarily powerful tool. A tool that Sonia Stewart wielded with the same grace and precision and skill Kira wielded a nova-fighter group with.
“I’ll talk to them,” she agreed. “I’ve never gone wrong following your suggestions before. I’m guessing they’re here?”
The Queen chuckled.
“They are,” she agreed. “Em Doretta Macey is the senior delegate. Officially she’s just a trade attaché, but I have my suspicions.”
“Oh?” Kira asked.
“That’s part of why I’m putting you in touch with her at all,” Sonia said. “Unless I misread the situation, Kira, Em Macey’s entire purpose out here is to meet you.”