2

Kira was in her office when her headware informed her that Konrad Bueller had returned aboard Deception. The ubiquitous neural implants of modern humanity, in her experience, allowed people to make human mistakes faster and without the excuse of misremembered data.

They also acted as communicators and allowed her to keep working through the seemingly infinite datawork of running a mercenary organization that operated eight—soon to be nine—major nova warships until her boyfriend returned.

And to still make it to their shared quarters at the same time as he did to allow them to share dinner. It was a small luxury, one that she reveled in when they could make it work, and she grinned at her steward as she stepped into the room to find the young woman laying out the plates.

“I see we are becoming predictable, Jess,” she told Jess Koch, the personal keeper she’d finally hired when the addition of Fortitude and three more destroyers to the fleet had finally overwhelmed any excuse she had of being able to take care of herself!

“I figure it won’t last,” Koch replied. “Commander Bueller will be here in about two minutes, though, and dinner is ready. Enjoy!”

One of the things that Kira adored about Koch was that the woman had an extremely solid sense of when to let the principals have time to themselves—hardly a surprise, given that she’d been recommended by Queen Sonia of Redward herself.

Jess Koch was an exceptionally well-trained bodyguard as well as a professional chef and administrator. Kira wasn’t entirely clear on why she’d entered Kira’s service after completing all the training to enter the Queen’s…but she wasn’t complaining.

Konrad Bueller stepped through the door almost exactly two minutes after Koch disappeared, the big engineer’s face lighting up with a brilliant smile at the sight of dinner and Kira.

Probably not in that order, she admitted.

“Ah, my dear,” he said. “I see you once again have escaped the computers at exactly the right moment.”

“It’s like we plan this or something,” Kira said drily. “Eat, Konrad, then tell me how our ship is doing!”

He laughed, but he joined her in digging into Koch’s excellent food. After a few minutes, they both leaned back and sipped their drinks. Here, at least, they were safe enough to drink wine.

It wasn’t like anyone was going to try to attack Redward. Nova drives could only carry so much cubage with them, which strictly limited the size of nova ships. Sublight monitors and asteroid fortresses had no such limitations, which more than balanced out the nova vessels’ greater maneuverability.

CVL-Four,” Konrad murmured, making a tossing gesture as he linked their headwares and created a virtual image of the carrier between them, “is doing just fine.”

Kira could recognize the flattened box of their new carrier in her sleep at this point. She’d been staring at images of the Bastion-class carriers for eighteen months, after all. Redward had built three of them for the RRF and one for Memorial Force.

The ship was a hundred and ten meters long, twenty meters thick, and a tad under thirty-five meters wide. There were two heavy plasma-cannon turrets mounted on top of the hull and a second pair mounted on the bottom, but her main armament was the heavily armored hatches at the bow and stern—or, at least, the seventy-five nova fighters on the flight deck those hatches covered.

Less visible were the ship’s eighteen lighter anti-fighter turrets, spaced along her two thinner surfaces. She was designed to carry her own fighters into action and defend herself against enemy fighters, not tangle with enemy capital ships on her own.

Redward had two Baron-class cruisers for every Bastion-class carrier they’d built and was following a similar ratio for the battlecruisers and fleet carriers. Their carriers weren’t designed to operate alone.

Kira had her own opinions on that matter and generally preferred Fortitude’s design—the big supercarrier had almost as many heavy plasma cannon as Deception and could operate independently if needed.

“Any concerns in the testing?” she asked. “Marija is still sending everyone off the ship at the end of the night, so…”

“An abundance of caution, nothing else,” Bueller told her. “She still thinks like regular Navy—it’s a flaw we suffer from as a mercenary organization, I suspect.”

Marija Davidović, designated to become CVL-4’s new Captain shortly, had been an RRF officer seconded to Memorial Force at one point. The trip into the Mid Rim to pick up Fortitude had awakened a degree of wanderlust the woman hadn’t realized she had, and she’d transferred permanently.

Now Kira was giving the woman the carrier command she wouldn’t have earned in the RRF for another few years—because Davidović could do the job. Everyone benefited.

“We’re all a bit too former-military, sometimes,” Kira conceded. “Even you.”

“I wasn’t exempting myself from the assessment, no,” Bueller agreed. “But I’ve gone over CVL-Four’s systems from stem to stern. She’s up to speed and up to snuff.” He shrugged and smiled.

“I’ll be back over there tomorrow, helping Davidović run the tests and exercises, though,” he continued. “Just because the hardware looks good doesn’t mean it will all work well.

“That said, I’d make sure you have your dress uniform laid out for the Queen’s party. The ship won’t be delaying it!”

Kira chuckled.

“I’m not sure even the shipbuilders in this system want to disappoint Queen Sonia,” she observed. “I certainly don’t!”

She wouldn’t go so far as to call the Queen of Redward a friend, but Sonia made a point of mentoring a lot of the women and enbies around her. The Queen had found Kira an asset of value in her schemes and maneuvering—and she’d made being so quite lucrative for Kira in turn.

“There are many terrifying women in my life I would choose not to disappoint,” her lover pointed out with a chuckle. “I’m still not entirely sure why you are here and Kavitha is with Fortitude.

“The last time we let you get bored, after all, you took a set of destroyers out on anti-piracy patrol.”

Kira shook her head at him.

“I am getting older and more mature; I’ll have you know,” she insisted. “But…well, we flipped a coin and I lost. One of us had to go to Obsidian. One of us had to stay here with Deception and commission CVL-Four.”

“Lucky Kavitha,” Bueller noted, then smiled broadly. “Lucky me, too.”

Kira laughed at him.

“Do you know what she said to me before she left, love?” she asked, the memory hitting her as her boyfriend attempted his best leer. It was a pretty laughable attempt—despite being the same fortyish as Kira, Konrad Bueller was surprisingly easy to embarrass.

He hesitated.

“Knowing our good Commodore…” He sighed. “I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to know. But you’re going to tell me anyway.”

Kira nodded and grinned.

“My beloved and oh-so-professional second-in-command informed me that the high end of the time estimate for the mission was a bit over nine months, and that I should take advantage of that,” Kira told him. “Because I wasn’t going to have any other quiet times to get knocked up anytime soon!”

Konrad joined her in her laugh as she fondly reached across the table to take his hand.

“I presume,” he finally said, very carefully, “that if you were considering that suggestion, you’d give me a bit more warning.”

She squeezed his hand.

“The thought crosses my mind occasionally,” she admitted. “But there’s never a good time, and where would we even keep a kid?” She shook her head. “Not opposed to the idea—in general or with you specifically—it just has a lot of logistical issues right now.”

“Mmm.” Konrad squeezed her hand in turn. “I’m in much the same place, I’ll admit. Plus, if we had a kid, my family would explode if we didn’t bring them home…and I’m not flying you to Brisingr.”

“No offense, my love, but there is no force in the universe powerful enough to get me to even return to our home sector, let alone your homeworld,” Kira admitted, a cold shadow passing over her amused emotions and rare moment of maternal contemplation.

Her lover’s home system, after all, had sent assassins all the way to the Syntactic Cluster to try and kill her. His Kaiser was on the very short list of people Kira would potentially consider killing in cold blood.

He squeezed her hand again and smiled at her as she met his gaze.

“Hey, we’re here and we’re focused on today, all right?” he told her. “We’re not going back there and we’re not dealing with my bloody-handed distant cousin, all right?”

“I know,” she told him, letting herself focus on the warmth of his skin against hers. “We’ve got more than enough work without going within a hundred light-years of home.”

Even if she occasionally missed the rocky fields and wandering sheep of her home village in the hills above New Athens.

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