Emilio Broderick’s house was a sprawling villa of ancient design, a style that Kira’s headware labeled as “North American Colonial.” While the government structures had similar heritage, they’d been built of the local reddish stone.
The industrial magnate’s house, on the other hand, had either been built of stone carefully sourced for its color, or someone had applied a small fortune worth of dyes and chemical transmutations to turn it all white.
It made for an impressive backdrop for the full acre of carefully manicured grounds resting between the two extended wings of the horseshoe-shaped structure. The plants, at least, were local, though they’d been carefully shaped to conform to the overall esthetic.
Kira found the whole affair distinctly artificial, but she couldn’t argue with the impact or the effect. It was pretty. Just not to her taste.
“How are you finding Quaker City, Admiral?” Doretta Macey asked, separating herself from a cluster of older women to intercept Kira at the drink table.
“Fascinating,” Kira murmured. She watched Koch refill her glass, eyeing the heavily sweetened local iced tea with scant favor. Whatever Samuels people grew for tea—and it was quite probably the standard Terran-stock camellia sinensis tea plant—combined with the local soil to taste distinctly off to Kira.
In the same way as Redward’s unique biochemistry produced some of the best coffee she’d ever tasted, Bennet’s unique biochemistry produced some of the worst tea she’d ever been given—and she wasn’t sure exactly what fruit cordial had been mixed with it at Broderick’s party, but it managed to make it even worse.
She took it from her bodyguard and sipped it anyway as Macey poured her own drink.
“That sounds like mixed feelings, I have to admit,” the older woman noted. She eyed Koch for a moment, but the Redward woman’s beatific smile made it clear this wasn’t going to be a private conversation.
“It’s an interesting experience to watch a bunch of people have an internal war over the fact that they need me to keep them safe and the fact that they despise everything I am and stand for,” Kira murmured.
Macey sighed and took a sip.
“Fair enough, Admiral. We do need you, though. I’ve been having conversations all night, and I now know the answer to a question my son kept changing the subject on.”
Kira arched an eyebrow.
“Your son? The CEO of Macey Industries?”
“I do have two others, but yes,” Macey confirmed. “Roy was being cagey about the orbital yards to me. We’re one of the key partners in the Lagrange-point shipyard, so I figured we were involved in the new military yard.”
“And?”
“We are, but he’s trying to keep the board from realizing,” Macey said grimly. “Neither he nor Broderick nor I think we have a majority on the board to support the project. We’ve got the votes to save Roy’s job when it comes out that he did an end run around the board—especially given that a one-third share in the warship yards stands to make us a lot of money.”
“Ouch.” Kira grimaced. “The support for building your own warships is that thin?”
“Fifty-six percent,” the local told her. “That’s what we’re projecting when the bill for long-term funding goes to general vote next week. Everything up to this point has been funded out of standing SDC allotments, but we can’t maintain a significant nova fleet out of those.”
Macey shook her head.
“For that matter, I’m not sure I really want to fund a permanent warship fleet,” she admitted. “I just know we need it now. It goes against the grain, and I worry that once we have a standing fleet, we’ll find reasons to use it.”
“Everything I can see, Mrs. Macey, suggests that Colossus is also going to have a standing fleet, which means that keeping an eye on them is going to keep your ships busy,” Kira pointed out. “It’s not my place to tell you how to protect your world, but Memorial Force won’t be able to stay here forever.”
“You were at Redward for a long time,” Macey said.
“And we’ll be going back to Redward. We home-base there, for a few reasons,” Kira replied.
Not least that she really wanted the carrier they were building her. That she owned a penthouse apartment there was quite a bit lower on her priority list.
“That is fair. We will build our own ships,” Macey said. “It just feels wrong, after two centuries of living by the values of our various faiths, to find ourselves funding a major military now.”
“Your nova fleet will likely never even begin to rival the costs and personnel requirements of your defensive forts,” Kira observed. “Without a major change in strategic priorities, it will never even need to.”
“Fair.” Macey turned to survey the garden. “A year.”
“A year?” Kira echoed. “Before you have any nova ships, that is?”
Macey nodded.
“That was the other answer I got out of the fact that Samuels-Tata and Macey’s boards and senior executives are both well represented here,” she noted. “The military yards are still weeks away from being ready, and the plan is to lay down cruisers at the civilian yards. They’ll take a year to build, and our first destroyers will come out of the military yards around the same time.”
“Once the keels are laid, it’s harder to stop the process,” Kira murmured. “Not impossible…but harder. There’s a momentum at that point.”
“And Colossus has laid their own keels. We don’t know how long until their ships commission.”
“We have a good idea how long before their Brisingr acquisitions are online,” Kira said. “Memorial Force is still only contracted for six months right now.”
“That will be extended soon enough,” Macey promised. “The First Minister can’t say that officially yet, but the decision’s been made.”
“Useful to know,” Kira said.
She looked around the garden with its swarm of VIPs.
“Do me a favor, Mrs. Macey,” she told the other woman.
“What’s that?”
“Find some damn bodyguards,” Kira instructed. “Look at this. Samuels-Tata and Macey are both well represented here, you said. Who else, industry-wise?”
“Oats Orbital. Shindig Manufacturing. A few others, but Oats and Shindig are the other—”
“Partners in the military yards?” Kira finished.
Macey sighed.
“Yes,” she conceded. “There are five companies that run the Lagrange-point yards. Several of the yards are solo operators, others are joint ventures, but it’s basically five corporations that manage ninety percent or so of the civilian yards.
“Four of us are directly or indirectly involved in the military yards, though Samuels-Tata leads the work.”
“And all four of those firms have major executives and board members here, in a basically undefended garden with four glorified mall cops running exterior patrol,” Kira said flatly. “Tonight, there are another dozen armored mercenaries discreetly running backup. But if I wasn’t here, the rest of you would be, and those mercs wouldn’t be.”
Macey was even safer than Kira was implying, given that she was within the “operational radius,” so to speak, of Kira’s covertly soldier-boosted bodyguard.
“A single shooter could throw the entire balance of power in the boards of the companies building Samuels’s new fleet into disarray.” She shook her head. She knew she was repeating Milani’s point…but it was a good one.
“Colossus may not be thinking in terms of sabotage and assassins just yet, Mrs. Macey…but if they are working with Brisingr, the suggestion is going to get made,” she told the other woman. “You want to make sure you have security precautions in play before someone decides to start causing trouble.”
“This is Quaker City,” Macey pointed out. “There are no killers for hire here. There aren’t even many blasters in the city. We are safe here.”
“You are safe from your people, most likely,” Kira countered, glad that Macey probably couldn’t read Koch’s body language with the Redward agent behind her. “But your entire economy hinges on the flow of people and goods through Samuels. Most of that is passing through, stopping at Haven and Sanctuary, but people stop here on Bennet, too.
“The trade routes are open, and people will be coming back quickly enough. Infiltrating covert operators will not be hard. You. Are. Vulnerable.”
Macey stared off into the distance for a few long moments, her gaze seeming to traverse over the gathered crowd of Very Important People.
She sighed.
“I’ll talk to Roy and Batsal,” she murmured. “Because both of them should also get security—and because Batsal Tapadia is probably the best person I know to find that kind of resource. I’m…guessing there are some Gorkhali SDC veterans running something of the sort, if nothing else.”
“Buxton has security,” Kira pointed out. “They’re hired from somewhere.”
“Mostly off-world, if we’re being honest,” Macey admitted. “Not from Colossus anymore, and not generally from Apollo or Brisingr for obvious reasons, but…from elsewhere.”
“Might be time to change that. And that’s speaking as a mercenary you hired from elsewhere,” Kira said. “You are at war, Doretta Macey. You cannot continue to rely on the good faith and general peaceful nature of your people for the security of your leaders. Not if you want to stay peaceful.”
“I get it, Demirci,” Macey said sharply. “And I will make arrangements for myself and my son, and encourage others to do the same. You’re right.”
She shook her head.
“I just hate it,” she whispered.
* * *
Despite all of her and Milani’s fears, the party went as smoothly as planned. Kira mingled and made nice with the industrialists building the fleet that would eventually replace her people. She said the right things, smiled at the right people.
She’d been…okay at that part of the job when she’d arrived in Redward. No one made it to squadron commander in any military without having some ability to play the game, but she’d been under her old CO’s wing for much of her time in the ASDF.
Queen Sonia of Redward, however, had made something of a project out of Kira, and she could handle the game well now. She was confident that, over the course of the last week, she’d helped nudge the balance in the boardrooms and investor community of Samuels in favor of the military buildup.
Kira knew perfectly well the value of her work. She’d probably done as much to secure her employer’s safe future with a week of parties and dinners as Konrad Bueller had done spending the same week reviewing and improving their warship schematics.
Unfortunately, because she knew it was important, she put just as much work into it as she put into actual combat, and after a week, she was exhausted.
“Aircar is standing by,” Milani said in her implants. “J has taken Bravo team and fallen back on the hotel to pre-sweep before our arrival. Charlie team is in a second aircar for overwatch. We’re ready to move, boss.”
“And where are you?” Kira asked drily.
“Aircar with Alpha team,” they replied instantly. “Watching threat detectors and leaning on a black box that I swear is entirely decorative.”
“I do not believe the locals okayed us bringing heavy weapons to the surface,” Kira observed as she located the aircar and started crossing the front lawn. There was enough space for two dozen vehicles in front of Broderick’s house, and her vehicle wasn’t even the only aircar present.
“Like I said, the box is entirely decorative,” Milani replied. “Emotional support armor and a decorative box. What’s the problem?”
The problem was that Kira knew perfectly well that the box contained either a heavy assault cannon or a hyper-velocity missile launcher. Both unquestionably qualified as heavy weapons, designed to take down combat aircraft and tanks.
If there were twenty of either of those things on Bennet, Kira would be surprised.
“Someday, Milani, you are going to get me in a lot of trouble,” she told them. “On my way to the aircar. Threat detectors showing anything?”
“Negative. Got you on my headware, tracking. Everything is looking surprisingly calm.”
Kira half-expected the world to reach out and explode after Milani taking things that much in vain, but she made it to the aircar without incident. Her armored troop commander gave her a calm nod and slid the big black box—shaped more like an HVM launcher than an assault cannon, Kira judged—into the aircar’s storage bay.
“Charlie team is the air,” Milani noted. “Linked with Quaker City Air Control. We are clear back to the hotel, where Jess has commenced the security sweep.”
“I wish I could regard all of this as unnecessary theater, you know,” Kira said. But she stepped into the aircar and nodded to the pair of armored troopers already inside.
“The thing is, boss, that the hope is for it to be unnecessary,” Milani replied. “The point, in fact, is for us to do more than is necessary to convince any potential attacker that it’s just not worth it.”
The aircar door closed behind Milani and they took their seat across from Kira as the vehicle took off. Antigravity coils made liftoff supremely smooth, to the point where Kira knew a lot of people might have even missed the moment.
She linked her headware into the car’s sensors, checking the area around them as they moved over Quaker City.
“I do wish we could borrow an antigrav fighter or two,” Milani admitted. “Charlie team has blaster rifles, but that’s it. They’re covering us, but even a single fighter would be better protection.”
“I don’t think the SDC has enough AG fighters to lend anyone,” Kira replied. “Including themselves.”
“I could love this planet if they weren’t at war,” the enby merc told her. “If I didn’t think that their enemies were lurking, waiting for the right moment, a place like this could be rela—”
“Charlie is down!” the pilot suddenly snapped—in the same instant as an explosion lit up across the sensors Kira was watching.
There’d been no threat ping, no warning—the second aircar with three of Kira’s people aboard it had just exploded.
“Get us on the ground!” Milani snapped. “AA lasers in play!”
The pilot did something and the aircar dropped like a stone. Even knowing what was coming, Kira barely picked out the coronal effect of the laser beam that clipped their vehicle. If the pilot hadn’t moved as fast as she had, they’d have died right there.
“Starboard AG coils are out,” the pilot said grimly. “Down, down, down. I have control, but they have a fucking laser. Only one option.”
Kira could fly an atmospheric aircraft, but she had only theoretical knowledge about air combat. Even she could guess what the one option was: a rapid miss-generation maneuver.
In layman’s terms: crashing the aircraft before it could be shot down, and hoping everyone walked away.
“Brace for impact!”