20

There had been a time when Kira could be convinced to let other people fly the shuttle carrying her. That had been before she’d been forced to almost entirely give up flying her nova fighter, and now she clung to every chance to actually fly a spacecraft she could get.

With only Cartman acting as copilot and Milani and Bueller as passengers, the shuttle was effectively empty as she whisked over the low-slung and widespread districts of Quaker City.

Even from above, Samuels’ capital city was impressive. While the locals had chosen a more horizontal style than many diaspora cities, and Quaker lacked the sweeping skyscrapers Kira was used to, the carefully plotted concentric circles of a high-speed transit network were clearly visible from the air.

The transit network was laid out with sufficient density that she saw far fewer personal vehicles than she would have expected for such a sprawling city—but what was truly impressive in some ways was that the network extended farther out than the city. It had been built for the Quaker City of the future, and at least two full concentric rings of magnetic tracks and transport stations existed past where the current city ended.

And even amidst the city, there were greenery and parks—and her course took her to one of the largest parks, a hundred-hectare, seemingly wild forest surrounded by transit lines on all sides. The landing pad was just past the transit line on the north side, where a still-green collection of red stone buildings filled almost as much space as the park itself…and her threat detectors pinged as she began her final approach.

“Missile launchers on the grounds of the Ministries Compound,” Cartman muttered. “And, unless these sensors suck in a way I know they don’t, those are the only defensive weapons in a city of seven million people.”

“Different cultures, Nightmare,” Kira replied as the Compound fully spilled out beneath them. Unlike the park to its south, where the transit network had been rerouted around it, Quaker City’s transit network interpenetrated the complex of buildings that held much of the Samuels System’s government.

The Quorum and direct democracy might write the planet’s laws, but its day-to-day governance was handled from there. This was the home of the Ministries’ bureaucracy—and in an oddly familiar-looking red stone building with two wings and a central hub, the home of the First Minister themselves.

“Link established with ground control,” Kira said aloud as a silent communication finished and she removed her hands from the flight stick. “Everybody dressed up and ready to party?”

“Did anyone warn them we’re bringing a suit of armor?” Cartman asked, glancing back over her shoulder at Milani.

The dragon flickered across Milani’s armor to offer a rude hand gesture in response, and Kira chuckled.

“Don’t worry, Mel; they have a doctor’s note.”

* * *

Kira and two of her companions wore black and dark-teal dress uniforms, long jackets over full-body shipsuits. Milani, of course, was the fourth, clad in digital-camouflage battle armor currently rendered as light gray with a flickering pattern of a content red dragon.

Doretta Macey was their only greeting party, adding to her sense of a surprising lack of security at the capital of a star system. The negotiator had returned to the neatly tailored pantsuit of the meetings on Redward, though here she had a dark blue kerchief tied over the top of her head.

“Welcome to Bennet and Quaker City, Admiral,” Macey greeted them. “Mix Buxton got tied up in a late committee meeting but should make it to the dining room in time for the meal itself.”

Kira nodded with a small smile, remembering Queen Sonia giving her the same reason for why King Larry had missed Huntress’s commissioning ceremony. Some aspects of leading a world never changed, it seemed.

“If you’ll follow me, please?” Macey asked.

“Is security always this light?” Kira said as she and her companions fell in with the Samuels woman.

“Why would we need security?” Macey replied. “We are a universal e-democracy, Admiral, with a highly religious population dominated by traditions of pacifism. We are not unobserved, if that is your concern, but we have generally low levels of crime and have no recorded cases of political violence in our entire history.”

The native shrugged.

“We take certain precautions because we recognize the realities of the universe, but they have never been needed. There was a time, in the past, when we were recruiting many of our top police and security officers from Colossus.”

Macey looked sad at that and sighed.

“We have not done so for a long time, obviously,” she noted. “But for a while, most of the officers of the First Minister’s detail were veteran bodyguards and security officers recruited from Colossus, often on the personal recommendation of their President or other senior officials.”

That was…new and an odd bit of information. It was a sign, Kira realized, of just how friendly the “friendly competition” between Colossus and Samuels had been until the last twenty years or so.

No wonder it had taken Samuels’s leadership so long to adapt to the possibility that Colossus might actually wage war on them.

“Welcome to the Rouge House, Admiral, Commanders,” Macey told them as they approached the red stone building at the center of the Ministries Compound.

* * *

Buxton entered the dining room from the other side as Kira’s party, though only a few seconds after the mercenaries. A pair of suited bodyguards scattered to the corners of the room—the first sign of security she’d seen since the threat detectors on the shuttle had pinged.

The First Minister of Samuels was nothing like what Kira had expected. She’d known from pronouns and honorifics that she was dealing with a nonbinary individual, but even that had only led her off the track.

They towered well over two meters in height, easily rivaling the largest humans she’d ever known. Their shoulders were immense, clearly rippling with muscle under the perfectly tailored burgundy skirt suit they wore—and if the skirt hadn’t been cut to free up Buxton’s range of motion, Kira would eat her own uniform.

Expertly delicate makeup accentuated the curves of the First Minister’s face and drew attention to their dark brown eyes, with the kind of gaze that even Kira would call soulful and intense.

“Admiral Demirci,” they greeted Kira, striding across the room to offer her their hand. After a brief-but-firm handshake, they pressed a swift kiss to Macey’s cheek and then gestured everyone to the table.

“Please, I am running late—but the food is not,” they noted. “Mrs. Alarie informs that the turkey has been carved and the plates are being finished as I speak. Sit, sit!”

Kira obeyed with a smile, squeezing Bueller’s hand under the table as her engineer sat at her right. Cartman and Milani settled in on either side of them, pilot and trooper alike seeming bemused by the First Minister.

“We were advised of Commander Milani’s requirements by Mrs. Macey,” Buxton continued. “Mrs. Alarie has prepared a nutrition shake that you should be able to both easily scan and intake through your armor’s emergency induction port.”

Milani bowed their armored head.

“I appreciate that, First Minister,” they said carefully. “To use that port, I may require a straw.”

“Mrs. Alarie believes she has included everything. We shall see, of course, but she rarely disappoints,” Buxton replied.

A pair of middle-aged men in tuxes emerged from the kitchen as the Minister spoke, each carrying a platter loaded with plates—and one large, surprisingly decorative, sealed jug with a flexible metal straw emerging from the top.

The jug was placed in front of Milani, who ran an armored gauntlet up and down it in a clear scanning gesture.

The irony to that, Kira knew, was that Milani had no need to make any kind of gesture. They would have scanned the plates presented to the other Memorial Force officers from across the room. They were only making a show of scanning the shake because the locals were trying to be accommodating.

Though, to be fair, Kira had never seen Milani touch food anyone else had prepared and was a bit shocked when they pulled the flexible straw up and connected it to a covered port on the side of their helmet.

“Please, eat,” Buxton instructed. “There is business for us to discuss, but a full stomach always clears the air!”

The food was unsurprisingly excellent. Kira wasn’t entirely sure the bird was what she would have called a turkey on Apollo, but the subtly different flavor could have been entirely preparation as well.

Once they had all eaten, the servers reappeared at a silent command from the First Minister and cleared the plates, leaving cups of steaming hot coffee in their place.

Kira sniffed the coffee carefully. It met her minimum standard—of being hot, black and caffeinated—but it didn’t smell nearly as smooth or rich as she was used to. On the other hand, she knew she’d been spoiled by living on a planet that exported coffee.

“You said there was business to discuss,” she reminded Buxton after the first sip confirmed her initial impression.

“There is,” the First Minister agreed. “You understand that Mrs. Macey arguably exceeded her authority by only hiring the two ships you had available, yes?”

“Mrs. Macey’s documentation was sufficient to sign on your government’s behalf by any common-law statute our lawyers are aware of,” Kira said calmly. “While she may have been given different instructions, her legal authority to sign the contract was not in question.”

“No, of course not,” Buxton conceded, laying Kira’s worst fears to rest. “But, as you are aware, the contract was written to allow the Ministries to decide on the activation of several ancillary clauses.”

“Extensions and reinforcements,” Kira confirmed. “The base six-month contract and stipulated bonuses and fees for engaging blockade forces are not subject to additional approvals.”

“My Minister for Legal Affairs argues differently on the bonuses and additional fees,” the First Minister told her. “Several other Ministers in my government believe that combat bonuses mis-incentivize your operations toward an armed conflict that we wished to avoid.”

“That would be an annoying discussion to have in court,” Kira murmured, leaning back in her chair and studying Buxton. They didn’t seem nearly enough on edge to be trying to screw Memorial Force over in the way their words implied, but they were also a politician.

They could easily lie as well as she flew.

“And, of course, while such a discussion was tied up in court, there would be an open question over whether my forces were actually obligated to engage the remaining blockade forces,” she continued. “I dislike even raising that point, First Minister, but I must act to protect the interests of my organization and personnel.”

“I understand that, Admiral,” Buxton told her. “Frankly, I believe that engaging in that level of legalese wrangling with regards to people who have already fought on our behalf would be churlish of us.

“Plus, unlike my colleagues in that meeting, I have had time to engage with initial reactions from our voting populace. It is very clear to me that if we were to attempt to deny your people the compensation due for acting in our service, our voters would be quite displeased.

“Pacifist leanings of the majority of our populace or no, we recognize that we are under threat and that you have already acted decisively to protect us.”

“Do you,” Kira murmured.

“Regardless of the technical reading of the contract, I feel that we are bound by its intent, and I wish to formally confirm that we will be honoring the bonus and additional fees for combat operations,” Buxton told her. “I feel that a government that is obliged to be able to explain everything we do to our populace, usually in short video lectures, should be more careful in our uses of intentionally obfuscatory language.”

“Your world is fascinating, First Minister,” she said drily. “A trade-route stop remains under the control of the Colossus blockade. My ships are discharging static as we speak, but we will deploy to clear that last piece of the blockade when we are done.

“I appreciate knowing that I’m not going to have to fight two wars: one against your enemies to protect you, and one against you for my money.

“Even if the latter would be fought in a courtroom and not the battlespace.”

“You must understand, Admiral Demirci, even having recognized the slowly growing hostility of Colossus’s governments over the last twenty years, we never expected it to come to this,” Macey told her. “And what the Ministries didn’t realize, our voting populace certainly did not. To build a nova fleet required legislation passed by the body politic.”

“The Ministries did not recognize the threat until too late,” Buxton agreed. “We are not, by nature, a warlike world. Finding personnel for our defenses and fighters has always been a struggle.”

“If it weren’t for the Gurkhas, I’m not sure we’d succeed at all,” Macey admitted. “They’re Nepali-extract Hindus. Old, old martial traditions. While most of our Hindu population is on similar pacifistic paths as our Quaker and Buddhist citizens…the Gurkhas—the Gorkhali—are quite different.”

“I suspect that some of our Gorkhali founders came here with the explicit intent of protecting their more peaceful coreligionists,” Buxton noted. “They are approximately three percent of our population and provide roughly seventy percent of our military personnel.

“Without them, I am not certain we would have been able to do anything except surrender to Colossus,” the First Minister admitted. “We are barely prepared to defend our own star system, Admiral Demirci. In many ways, we are at your mercy.”

“I told Mrs. Macey when we completed the contract that the negotiations were the last time we would be on opposite sides,” Kira told Buxton. She felt Bueller squeeze her hand under the table and drew strength from it as she smiled.

“We are mercenaries—I make no attempt to conceal that—but I have always attempted to find contracts where I believed we were on the right side,” she noted. “There are enemies out here that few people know of, that play games with worlds and lives. I take their presence on the other side of the battlespace as a hint that I’m in the right place.

“And yes, I have reason to believe they are involved in the scheme to arm Colossus,” she told them. If Samuels’s government wasn’t aware of the Equilibrium Institute, well, she’d have to educate them.

“Which brings me to our greatest fear, Admiral,” Buxton replied. “These warships that make up the Colossus Nova Wing—Colossus didn’t build them. They are well in advance of us in the construction of nova warships, but they have yet to commission anything of their own.”

“You haven’t even laid keels,” Bueller said. “Do you have design work? Schematics? Plans?”

“Some,” Buxton said. “Not, perhaps, as much as we would like, but we have acquired partial designs of last-generation Apollo, Crest and Santerran warship designs. Putting the three together, we believe we have assembled designs for practical and effective cruisers and destroyers.”

“Commander Bueller was heavily involved in the updating of the Redward Royal Fleet to a by-Rim-standards modern nova fleet,” Kira noted. “He was also both a combat-duty engineer during the war and a post-war design engineer for the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy.

“For a small fee, I’m sure he could take a look through your designs and have some suggestions.”

“There are easy mistakes to make that can cost you weeks or months to fix if you catch them later,” her boyfriend told the Samuels politicians. “I can identify them relatively quickly.”

Buxton and Macey shared a long look.

“I will talk to my husband,” Buxton finally said. “Batsal has been central to the organization of the construction and design work. He retired from our defense force as commander of one of the orbital forts… He will be far more qualified to assess if Commander Bueller can be of use to us than I am.”

“The first priority remains fully clearing the blockade,” Kira told them all. “If there’s nothing else, we’ll return to our ships in short order and prepare for that strike. Once we have secured the trade routes around Samuels, we can discuss patrol plans and patterns while you send couriers to the key entry points to the Corridor.

“Colossus has passed the word that Samuels is blockaded,” she warned the locals. “Once my job is done for the moment, you must make sure that the word of the blockade’s failure is passed as well.”

“We have the ships and the contacts,” Buxton confirmed. “We will wait until you confirm the blockade is completely lifted, but the couriers are already standing by.”

“Give me forty-eight hours to finish discharging static and investigate the last trade-route stop,” Kira requested. “That should be plenty.”

“You are that confident in your ability to defeat the Colossus Nova Wing?” the First Minister asked.

“With all due respect, First Minister, the CNW are amateurs with old ships,” Cartman pointed out. “We expect their second wave, the refitted units, to be more dangerous—but they still lack real experience at this.

“It’s not like we’re facing the Kaiserreich Navy.”

Kira figured there were likely BKN advisors supporting the CNW, but it wasn’t the same—especially not with the balance of forces until the rest of the ships came online.

“And yet,” Buxton said softly, “that is where these ships came from. We know Apollo and Brisingr of old, Admiral, Commanders, but we know neither well. The Kaiser has armed our enemies. I will not—I cannot—set my system on course for more war.

“Yet I must fear the man behind the war we already face,” the leader of the Samuels System told them. “Between the four of you, there are two Apollons and a Brisingr. Is the Kaiser truly likely to have simply sold the ships and care nothing for what happens next?

“Or is this simply the first stage in a plan to seize the Corridor for himself?”

Kira shared a long glance with Bueller, then sighed.

“The Kaiser does not simply sell old warships on a whim,” she conceded. “And I see the hand of a different enemy behind this all—the Equilibrium Institute.”

“That is a name I have heard,” Doretta Macey noted. “But not an entity I know of beyond rumor. A conspiracy theory, a shadow.”

“And all too real for that,” Kira warned. “Three times they launched schemes against the Syntactic Cluster, before we finally convinced them their return on investment wasn’t going to be there.” She shook her head. “They are ideologues driven by flawed Seldonian psychohistorical calculations.

“They believe there is only one way that humanity can be stable and at peace—and they are prepared to destabilize regions and start wars to get to that status. The irony, it seems, eludes them.”

“The Corridor was stable until one side of Colossus’s political divide decided to use us as an outside enemy,” Buxton noted. “And now this Institute, what, arms Colossus in pursuit of a goal of peace?”

“Suffice to say, I don’t find the Equilibrium Institute’s logic or methods overly convincing,” Kira replied drily.

“They can make a very convincing pitch, though,” Bueller warned.

Kira squeezed his hand under the table again. He didn’t need to say more than that, at least. No one there who didn’t already know needed to know he was an Institute defector.

“We have encountered Brisingr ships being supplied or even operated by Equilibrium fronts before,” she told the Samuels politicians. “We have reason to believe that the Institute has its claws deeply into Brisingr’s power structures, potentially even into Kaiser Reinhardt himself.

“This has allowed them to draw on ships from the BKN’s Secondary Service Reserve in the past,” she continued. “We have traced several of the ships Colossus now possesses not only back to the SSR but back to a particular SSR deployment that we know the Institute has drawn on before.”

She smiled coldly.

“We know that, I should point out, because it’s where Deception originally came from,” she told them.

“All of this is…useful context,” Buxton told her. “But it does not allay my fear. If we are victorious today, will we see the full force of the Kaiserreich Navy blockading my system in six months?”

“The full force? No,” Bueller said quietly. “The BKN has set itself too many tasks since the end of the war. If they cannot secure the trade routes they claimed from Apollo, they cannot enforce the other, less…positive aspects of the treaty.

“But…if Reinhardt sees this as a project of his, you may well see further forces committed. Either more modern ships, still through the shield of the SSR—or potentially, depending on the importance the Diet and the Kaiser’s government place on this operation, a full carrier group of the BKN under their own banner.”

“If it’s an Equilibrium project as opposed to a Brisingr one, we’re more likely to see SSR ships or mercenaries from other Rim powers,” Kira noted. “We ran them dry of mercenary assets a few years back when we took out Cobra Squadron, but the Rim is wide and the Institute has a vast amount of money by our standards.”

Until recently, there would have been a decent chance that the Institute would have been able to access forces from the Royal Crest, too. Thanks to Crown Zharang Jade Panosyan, with some help from Kira and Memorial Force, their control of that power was no more.

“So, you agree, then, that we have not seen the last of this with just the forces Colossus now possesses,” Buxton said. “I know more than I did at the start of this dinner, and for that I thank you all.

“It does not, however, change the decision that I discussed with my cabinet earlier today. I am grateful that Mrs. Macey was wise enough to include the possibility in the contract—and I must state clearly that I am grateful for your presence here and the work you have already done.

“But looking to the future, I see a growing threat to the people I am sworn to serve. A threat that we will not be able to defend ourselves from…and a threat that will require far more than a single cruiser and carrier to stand off.”

They shook their head.

“Admiral Demirci, we are activating the reinforcements clause in your contract,” they told her. “While I understand that you have other commitments for your forces in the Outer Rim and I will not ask you to breach those commitments, we wish to contract for the arrival of Fortitude and her escorting ships as quickly as possible.

“When Memorial Force’s full strength guards the routes to my people, then, perhaps, I will be able to breathe while we build our own fleet. Until then, I must fear the dark and hate every minute of the time that has come to me.”

“No one ever wants to live through a war, First Minister Buxton,” Kira told them. “Fate and experience have made me good at war, but even I would rather never raise arms again.

“If you are prepared to pay the fees written into the contract, I will send the messages to Obsidian,” she continued. “With the communication time, the contract in place with Obsidian and the travel time for Commodore Zoric to bring the rest of the fleet to Samuels, we are looking at four months or more before Fortitude can arrive.”

“And that, Admiral, is why we are activating that clause now and not when the CNW shows up with a Brisingr carrier group in support,” Buxton said drily. “I wish for peace, Admiral. I will pray every night that I have made a mistake and the money we pay for this is wasted funds.

“But the day I became First Minister of Samuels, I accepted that there were certain ideals and beliefs that I would have to sacrifice on the altar of my sworn duty,” they told the mercenaries. “Were a threat merely to me, I would stand aside.

“But the threat is to Samuels…and I swore an oath.”

“I understand completely, First Minister,” Kira said. “One of my pilots, Evridiki Bardacki, chose to retire rather than face war again after fleeing Apollo. I was tempted to join him—but then I learned of the Institute and all that they sought to do to the people of the Syntactic Cluster…and the rest of the Rim.

“I took up arms to defend my homeworld once. I may take up arms for money now, but I also stand for a cause. And that cause, First Minister, will be well served by protecting Samuels.”

She would be well paid for that task, but she had a fleet to maintain out of those funds. Kira herself, after all, was already wealthy beyond many people’s dreams of avarice.

Even if she tended to forget that part.

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