“What about Anderson?”
“Prisoners from the Ceres base confirmed that he was aboard Canberra,” Salvatore said with grim satisfaction. “Captains Lougheed and Sade killed the bastard.”
“In more mixed news,” Villeneuve told them, “it appears that while some of our infiltrators were significantly more senior than I would have hoped, we actually had far fewer of them than I was afraid of.
“Commander Warner snuck past our screenings because, so far as we can tell, he was never actually tagged for the Weber Network,” he continued grimly. “Anderson recruited him after the annexation. We had just over a hundred infiltrators, all told. Enough to barely man the two ships they stole once they brought more people in.
“The key traitors, however, were two of the security shift commanders aboard BugWorks, both Militia O5s like Warner. One was aboard London. The other was shot dead when Camber and Davies stormed the command center.”
“Who the hell was Camber?” Annette demanded. “She seemed to come out of nowhere.”
“Corporate spy,” Elon replied. “She’s known to my people, I’m not quite sure how the hell she made it onto BugWorks, but…for once, I’m not complaining.”
“We have her in protective custody right now,” Salvatore noted. “She’s being cooperative, if silent about her employers.”
“I’ll have a word with her once we’re done,” Annette said. “She might be useful.”
“She’s a double-edged sword,” Elon warned. “She might cut us.”
“If she signs on, Zhao gets her,” Annette said with a smile. “Let her try and run rings around him.”
“The situation is under control, Your Grace,” Villeneuve said finally. “I don’t like the damage. We’re down to just the Lunar Yards, and the super-battleships are arriving in ten days.”
And Tornado would hopefully arrive with Annette’s money four days before that, unless something had gone wrong on Tortuga. They wouldn’t know either way until either the cruiser returned or it went overdue.
“We didn’t lose any of the plates we’ve been prefabricating for the first ship,” Elon noted. “We’ll be able to commence the first super-battleship refit as planned.”
“How long will it take?” Annette asked. “We have sixteen of them to go through, after all.”
“Unlike the destroyers, the Majesties have the power and engine capacity to carry the armor and the defensive systems without updates,” the shipbuilder told her. “The first will be a test case, where we’ll be learning as we go, but we’ve also prefabricated most of her systems. She’ll be twenty-five days.
“At the same time, we’ll be fabricating more drones, turrets and armor, and expanding the Yards. Once the first ship is complete, we’ll be able to do them two at a time in about the same time frame,” he concluded. “Nine months to fully refit them all, but we’ll have eight over a month before the deadline.”
“That’s good news,” Annette told him with a sigh of relief. The Imperium had intentionally given them an impossible deadline—and they were going to make it anyway.
“I suggest,” Villeneuve said, “that we do much as we did with the destroyers. Captain Lougheed’s ship isn’t worth repairing, and Captain Sade’s… Well, Beijing will be our only unarmored ship.
“I suggest we use the crews intended for the first set of Capitals to man the two Majesties in the first tranche we won’t be able to refit. They may not have our fancy toys, but they’ll more than make up for not having the Capitals.”
“Do we have enough people?” she asked. “Those ships take, what, four thousand people apiece?”
“Roughly,” he agreed. “But we need to train those crews anyway. Better to start earlier than later, especially as we’ll need sixteen such crews before we’re done, Your Grace.”
Manpower was rapidly becoming a problem. The hundred or so ships of the UESF had only required eighty thousand people between them. Barely half of those people had expressed interest in joining the Duchy’s Militia, and many of those were still in security screening.
The defense platforms and super-battleships alone would have employed every man and woman who’d been in the UESF.
“I’ll talk to Nash,” she said after a long moment’s thought. “He’s focused on the elections, but I think we need to seriously step up our recruitment efforts.”
#
Annette entered the room outside Camber’s cell with a single bodyguard, Sergeant Wei Lin. The ex-SSS noncom had been one of her main bodyguards since they’d first visited Tortuga, and the hulking power armor more than compensated for any lack of intimidation inherent in her slight frame.
Camber was sitting calmly in a chair, eyeing the Duchess through the glass as Annette took a seat of her own.
“I apologize, Your Grace; I wasn’t expecting quite so illustrious a guest,” the spy said. “What can I do for you?”
“You’ve already done me a rather large favor by making sure this station didn’t explode,” Annette pointed out. “What can I do for you?”
“Letting me out of the cell would be nice,” Camber replied.
“Miss Camber—if that is your name—you may have chosen patriotism, but do you truly think your employers will back your decision unquestioningly?” Annette asked. “If you want to, I’ll arrange a shuttle back to Earth and we won’t bother you unless you interfere in the Duchy’s affairs again.
“I’m not sure your employers might be as willing to forget and forgive your choices.”
“They’d probably be fine with my choice if the fact that I was a corporate spy hadn’t been exposed,” Camber riposted. “They are not your enemies, Your Grace. Casimir’s…maybe, but even there the opposition is economic, not personal.”
“I can understand that,” Annette admitted. “But I still can’t stand for spies infiltrating my Militia and trying to bribe my commanders.”
“I’m exposed, Your Grace,” the spy pointed out. “Your Militia is safe from me, at least for now.”
“And are you actually safe from your employers?”
“They’re not that kind of boss,” Camber said. “They won’t hire me again, but I’m not worried about high-velocity retirement packages, if that’s what you’re implying. I’ll miss the work, but I’ll live.”
“Want a job?” Annette asked. “This whole mess helped demonstrate that we need more top-tier counterintelligence operatives.”
“Does your Duchy even have an intelligence branch?” the spy replied.
“If you haven’t heard of it, isn’t that a good sign?”
Camber laughed.
“Fair. Under Zhao at Treasury, I’m guessing?”
“But apparently not as effective as I’d hoped.”
“And you want me to help upgrade their skillset?”
“If Zhao will take you,” Annette replied.
“He’ll take me,” Camber said confidently. “There’s no one better.”
“You’re in, then?”
Camber laughed.
“All right, Your Grace. One Jane Bond, reporting for duty.”
#
Chapter 44
Teddy Nash’s rented office in Geneva looked more lived-in than most of the offices in the Wuxing Tower that the Duchy now owned. There was almost no paper, but various props and similar mementos from his movies were roughly mounted to the walls, and the steaming carafe of coffee sat in the center of a set of overlapping coffee-stain rings.
“Your Grace, have a seat,” the actor told her as he ushered her in. “Coffee?”
“Please,” Annette replied. “Can you grab a cup for Sergeant Lin as well?”
With the bright smile that had charmed a generation, Nash produced three coffee cups—all labeled with the logo of the movie studio he owned—from inside his desk and laid them out.
“Sergeant,” he called out toward the door. “How do you take your coffee?”
“Black,” Lin replied instantly.
“Triple-S,” Nash said with a
chuckle. “I should have known.”
He left two cups black, for Annette and Lin, then added a premixed package of flavored creamer to his own. He stepped out to pass the Sergeant her coffee, then dropped into the big leather chair behind his desk and faced Annette attentively.
“All right, boss, what can I do for you?” he drawled.
“How’s the election setup coming?”
She had been given exactly one long-cycle, one hundred and ninety-five days, give or take, to send representatives to two of the three Houses of the Imperial Legislature. Since those reps had to leave in about six weeks, the election for the House of Races was about to kick off.
“We’re restricting it to a four-week campaign and keeping the selection utterly transparent,” Nash told her. “It’s going to be interesting to watch: with one position for the entire planet, we have sixty-three names on the ballot.”
“But everything’s in place?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I’ve also laid the groundwork for the Charter Convention here in Geneva. I’m assuming we’ll want to elect those people, too?”
“Unless someone has a brilliant idea to somehow magically find the six hundred or so most qualified people on the planet, yeah,” Annette agreed. “And the House of Worlds elections?”
“The structures are all in place around the Houses of Races election,” Nash told her. “We’ll stress-test it for scale and regional divisions with the Charter Convention reps, and then we’ll be good to run the House of Worlds campaign by the end of the year.”
“Well done,” she congratulated him. The elections, while utterly necessary, had also failed to truly make it onto her radar as a priority. Nash, with some assistance from the rest of her Council, had taken her instructions and run with them.
“The reward for a job well done, of course, is another job,” she continued with a small smile. “You and Lebrand were setting up Militia recruitment campaigns. We need them accelerated.”
Nash looked thoughtful.
“What kind of scale are we talking?” he asked.
“We need seventy thousand more recruits in the next six months,” she said calmly.
He winced.
“That’s a tall order.”
“We’ve got about thirty thousand people from the UESF,” she told him. “Once training and security checks are done, that still leaves us fifty thousand short just for the defense constellation and the super-battleships—and we need logistics infrastructure and want to man the destroyers and build new ships.”
“I can’t even speak to the training regimen you’ll need,” Nash warned. “We’re pulling on an entire planet’s population, but we’re also still building the recruiting infrastructure. Give us a year and I can all but guarantee a quarter-million recruits a year.”
“But can we do seventy thousand now?” she pressed.
“I’ll have to go over our plans and probably accelerate our hiring,” he said, “but…I think so.”
“Good. Make sure your staff is fully in the loop as well,” Annette warned.
He paused. “Oh?”
“When we send our elected rep off to the House of Races, you will be going to the House of Duchies as my representative,” she told him. “More rewards for a job well done.”
Teddy Nash grinned like an excited ten-year-old.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You’re sending me to A!To? I get to see an alien world?”
#
Her visit to Nash was only the third time Annette had ever been to Geneva, but she had no time to play tourist in the former Swiss capital. Her shuttle landed next to the office the election was being run from ten minutes before her meeting and took off from the same place ten minutes after it finished.
The aftermath of the attack on BugWorks had only accelerated the mess of her schedule, and she went from meeting with Nash in Geneva to meeting with Medit! in orbit. Arguably, she didn’t need bodyguards when visiting with the A!Tol leader of the Imperial Uplift Team, but…
The Duchy of Terra might be part of the A!Tol Imperium, but that didn’t mean Annette’s people trusted their overlords. Sergeant Lin and her people forewent powered battle armor, but they came with Annette and they were carrying anti-armor plasma weapons.
Medit!’s office had moved aboard Orbit One when she’d ceased to be Governor and sent the battleship she’d been operating from back to Kimar. While the addition of the A!Tol-built defense platforms had left the old UESF command center aboard the big station empty, it remained the major civilian hub for Earth’s space travel.
Thanks to the Uplift Office, most of that travel now had civilian interface drives. Medit! had even helped a syndicate backed by Councilor Miyamoto’s company to put in bids on several used hyper-capable freighters being sold off in the nearer A!Tol worlds.
Nova Industries was going to have a lock on the Duchy’s military needs for the foreseeable future, but Elon’s competition wasn’t being left in the dust of the new world.
The Uplift Team’s offices lacked the power-armored marines that had guarded Governor Medit!’s facilities, but Annette knew the security was no less effective for being subtler. Even she was being scanned and checked against a list as she stepped through the door.
A young-looking A!Tol male—mostly identifiable as such because he was the first of his species Annette had ever met under two meters tall—greeted her as she came in, his skin flushing a mottled mixture of red and green—pleasure and determination not to screw up, she guessed.
“The Supervisor is waiting for you, Dan!Annette Bond,” he told her, using the modified version of her name that now included her title. “This way, please.”
He led her down a corridor into a surprisingly utilitarian office. It didn’t look like it was intended to be a permanent fixture, with no decorations and only a utilitarian desk and couch. The only sign of the ex-Governor’s importance was a massive screen, where Medit! was using a haptic interface field to scroll through dozens of images at once while issuing multiple commands with her fluttering manipulators.
“Thank you, Keltan,” Medit! told the assistant as Annette entered. The Advisor was the second-largest female A!Tol Annette had ever met, an old, old female as she understood A!Tol aging.
There were chairs for both Annette and her bodyguards, and a small robot trundled out with coffees for everyone and a selection of small pastries.
“I appreciate you making the time to meet with me, Dan!Annette,” Medit! told her, the alien’s skin flashing a soft red of pleasure as the bodyguards took the food—a sign of trust the Advisor clearly recognized. “More than anyone else here, I suspect, I know how busy you must be.”
“The last I checked, Medit!, you remained the Empress’s direct representative,” Annette pointed out. “You’ve also been busy yourself. Humanity owes you much.”
“Even in my lifetime, we have only uplifted two new member races,” Medit! replied. “I trained my whole life for the possibility of doing what I am doing this cycle, Dan!Annette. I am pleased to assist your world.”
“And most of us are grateful,” the Duchess told her. “How may I assist the Uplift Office?”
“I need to borrow some people from your government,” the alien said. “There are sections of your African and North American continents where it is proving almost impossible to carry out investigations or attempt to assist safely without local personnel.
“I refuse”—green determination flashed across Medit!’s skin—“to allow any portion to receive less support than another, no matter how stubborn. But our efforts to penetrate those regions have resulted in a number of injuries and few successes.
“I believe that your people should be able to interact with these holdouts safely and enable us to assess the level of assistance needed there,” she concluded.
“We should be able to come up with some teams to lend you,” Annette said after a moment. “Our own manpower is stretched thin, though.”
“Of course,” the Advisor agreed.
“That was also something I wished to discuss with you.”
“Oh?” Annette replied carefully.
“I am aware of the purchase you’ve made from the Indiri Deep Houses, of course,” Medit! told her. “I’m also aware that those ships will require far more personnel than you currently have to hand. Even training crews for those vessels will be difficult for you to put together.”
“We should be able to manage.”
“I have faith in your species’ ability to stubborn your way through almost any challenge, Dan!Annette Bond,” the alien told her, her skin flashing red in the equivalent of a chuckle. “But there are resources available through the Uplift program that could help.
“If you are willing, I can arrange for a Navy training team to arrive in roughly four five-cycles. They won’t even truly be enough for cadre for a single ship, but combined with your existing experienced personnel, they should be sufficient for you to begin training crews on the ships you have.”
“That…would be immensely helpful,” Annette admitted. Even a few hundred extra trainers could make the difference between being able to properly use the two ships they were planning to commission as Queen of England and Emperor of China and the ships’ being glorified training hulks.
“And while I am going to refrain from asking how you plan on paying for the ships,” Medit! continued, her skin the blue-red mottling of amused curiosity, “it is within my resources to provide you a loan to cover the payment due when the first tranche arrives, if your own plans have not yet come to fruition.”
She wondered, for a moment, just how much Medit! actually knew. Tornado was due back in a day at the earliest, but the super-battleships were due in five. If the cruiser was late, she might well have problems making the payment.
“I don’t expect to need that,” Annette told Medit!. “But I appreciate the offer. I am surprised you’re being this helpful,” she admitted.
Medit!’s tentacles fluttered in a pseudo-shrug.
“We set you an impossible challenge, Dan!Annette,” she admitted, “but we set you one that benefited us if you succeeded as well. You appear to have met our challenge, and so the Imperium benefits.
Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Page 30