“In six months,” Zoric murmured. “So, what, we get a light carrier in eighteen months and a fleet carrier in three years?”
“It could be worse,” Kira said. “Who else is going to sell a mercenary company anything they regard as a modern fleet carrier at all?”
“Hell, with three years to play with, we could go right to Sol and have the Federation build us something that’s utterly obsolete trash by their standards—and still be back here before we get the ship Redward promised us!” Zoric snapped.
Kira raised an eyebrow at her Flag Captain.
“SolFed doesn’t build armed ships for anybody,” she pointed out.
The Solar Federation was the stars closest to humanity’s home system, one of the few multi-system powers in existence and the unquestioned primarch of human space. Given that SolFed was fifteen hundred light-years away, Zoric was exaggerating how quickly they could get there.
“It would take us longer to find someone willing to sell us their surplus closer to the Core than it would take us to wait on Redward,” she told her people quietly. “Let’s not leap to suggestions that we know are almost impossible.
“Yes, that meeting was a bit of a knife in the back,” she agreed. “But Redward, overall, has treated us pretty well. They’re still definitely selling us a modern—by their standards, anyway—fleet carrier. At cost.
“We can wait a couple of years for an at-cost carrier.”
“You’ve been on our flight decks, boss,” Zoric countered. “We have a contract that lets us purchase class two drives from Redward, but we have nowhere to put the drives, let alone the nova fighters.
“We’re making it work, but we’re pushing the limits.”
“I know,” Kira replied. “But the truth of the matter is that no one else is going to sell us a real carrier, people. And the Redward retainer is covering all of our ongoing operating costs, including all of our salaries.”
She gestured at the three of them.
“Raccoon isn’t a good carrier.” That was just a statement of fact. “But we have four ships, and Redward is happy to pay for their crews and maintenance for now. The Syntactic Cluster is probably safe, but us being here helps keep it safe.
“Admiral Idowu might have been less than straightforward with us—and believe me, I’m going to make sure the right people hear about that!—but Larry and Sonia have played fair with us all along.
“So, we can wait for now.”
Kira smiled thinly.
“Unless one of you knows someone with a better offer, anyway?”
7
For all of the trials and travails of Kira’s job—and her current rising undercurrent of sheer boredom—there was still something incredible about watching her squadron maintain formation and knowing that it was all hers.
Well, fifty-one percent hers. The rest of the ownership was split between Kavitha Zoric and the survivors of her original Apollo fighter pilots. Still, Kira Demirci held the majority share and was Commodore and CEO of the company.
Of course, Deception dwarfed the other three ships of Memorial Force. She was almost three times as large as the Parakeets and well over twice the size of Raccoon. The junk carrier could still easily be mistaken for a freighter by someone who didn’t know what a converted freighter-carrier looked like.
Her headware pinged an incoming call and she checked. She smiled when she realized it was Mel “Nightmare” Cartman—Deception’s Commander, Nova Group.
Cartman was one of the first people who’d made it out to Redward to join Kira and also one of her oldest friends. Her role as CNG for Deception was a bit of an odd fit, since Kira also flew off the cruiser and acted as CNG for the whole of Memorial Force.
“What’s up, Nightmare?” Kira answered the com. Deception’s flag bridge was empty other than her, which gave her the privacy to be more casual than usual.
“Checking to make sure you haven’t stolen a nova fighter and gone off on a one-woman crusade against tax fraud or something,” her old friend said drily. “Still here, though?”
Kira snorted.
“I got bored and attached myself to one destroyer patrol,” she argued. “From the way you all are acting, you’d think I’d been doing this every week for years.”
“Because it was dumb and we want to make sure you don’t do it again,” Cartman told her. “Eventually, we’ll feel you’re sufficiently chastened.” She paused. “Maybe.”
“Wonderful,” Kira said. “Well, I am still here. Sitting on Deception’s flag deck, watching a hologram of our ships orbiting Redward.”
It was a notable sign of trust that her independently operated warships were permitted to orbit autonomously, without being required to dock with a station or being positioned under the guns of one of the asteroid fortresses.
Her four ships weren’t much of a threat to a planet, but any warship could fabricate a Harrington-coil missile that would ruin a large city’s century with pure kinetic energy. Only trusted warships were left to swan around in planetary orbit without escort.
Redward was basically home for Memorial Force at this point—but they were still independents.
“Well, since you’re still here, it’s Dinesha’s birthday today,” Cartman told her. “He’s…well, I’m your other ship CNG, boss. I’m guessing you’ve noticed what he’s doing, but I’m the one working with him.”
Kira sighed. She didn’t need Cartman to tell her what Dinesha Patel, the third-largest shareholder of Memorial Force and Raccoon’s Commander, Nova Group, had been doing. Patel had lost his long-standing boyfriend in the battle against Equilibrium and was…surviving.
“He’s working too much and not coming up for air,” Kira said aloud. “I’m familiar with the coping mechanism.”
If for no other reason than that she tended to do the same thing.
“I checked in with Dr. Devin and he says that throwing Dinesha a birthday party with the old salts should be good for him,” Cartman said. “I didn’t go so far as to ask if Dinesha was getting counseling through Devin or someone else—I know the lines!”
Kira chuckled softly.
“A party would be fine, I agree,” she said. “I’m guessing you’ve organized something and want me there? Does Patel know about this yet?”
“Yes and yes,” Cartman replied. “I didn’t think a surprise party was a good idea. We’re all a bit squirrelly after Hoffman’s death…and, well, it’s not what he would have wanted.”
Joseph “Longknife” Hoffman had been the most senior pilot to make it to Redward from the old Three-Oh-Three Nova Combat Group in the Apollo System Defense Force after Kira herself. He’d taken over as CNG aboard Conviction when Kira had moved to Deception, but she’d worked with him for over a decade and had known him well—if not as well as Dinesha Patel!
And Mel Cartman was right.
“My schedule is clear for the moment,” Kira told her friend. “And if it wasn’t, I’d make it so. Where do you need me and when?”
As the Commodore and CEO, Kira knew she was going to have to leave the party early—that was even more true now than it had been when she was merely her friends’ squadron commander. They were her friends, but they were also her subordinates, and her presence was always going to be at least a little suppressing.
Despite the space problems aboard both of their ships, Cartman had managed to take over a pilots’ briefing room on Raccoon and clear it out for the party. There was a rack of torpedoes—hopefully with the hydrogen tanks for their cores and warheads emptied!—against one wall, but otherwise it looked almost normal.
There were only four of them there to start. Kira herself, Mel Cartman, Dinesha Patel, and Abdullah Colombera.
Patel looked tired. His beard had grown in enough to be visible on his darker skin, but he was keeping it enough under control to keep it from looking unruly. Still, his eyes were focused more on his beer than on his friends, and he was quiet despite Cartman attempting to engage him in conversation.
Colombera had been one of the troublemakers in the Three-Oh-Three. Now he commanded one of Cartman’s squadrons on Deception and was usually completely professional.
That meant that no one was expecting the whoopie cushion when Patel took a seat next to the table of snacks. A loud, ear-shattering fart noise tore through the briefing room and shocked them all to complete silence.
Patel’s bottle of beer hit the ground in the midst of that silence with a solid thunk, followed by a small burble as the liquid started to dribble out—and then Raccoon’s CNG burst out laughing.
Kira had to join in as the tension in the room, tension none of them had really acknowledged, snapped. After a second, they were all laughing.
A fifth voice joined them from the door and everyone turned to see Evgenia Michel make her way in. The bulky specialty prosthetics that had replaced her legs and pelvis weren’t quiet, and they made their own clanking noise as Michel crossed to the snack table.
“A whoopie cushion, really, Scimitar?” she asked the squadron commander with a broad grin.
“Everybody here needs to stop feeling so damn sorry for themselves,” the younger man told them all. “We lost Joseph. That fucking sucks. We lost Estanza. That’s awful. We lost home. We lost the Three-Oh-Three.
“All we have is each other.”
Colombera gestured around them.
“Except that’s bullshit,” he snapped. “Who’s in this room, folks? A Commodore. A starship Captain. Two CNGs. And one squadron commander.
“We’re not alone. All of Memorial Force is with us. That’s our family now. A party with just the five of us isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t feel right, either, does it?”
Kira snorted.
“I bring Konrad and Kavitha to most things these days,” she conceded. “You’re all special to me, though. All of you.”
She looked around, meeting each of their eyes. Patel and Michel were the worst; she had to admit that to herself. Patel had lost the man he loved—and Michel had learned the hard way that her nervous system rejected the regeneration tech available to Redward.
Out there, at least, they couldn’t even get her to grow the nerves necessary to interact properly with prosthetics. The clunky, oversized units she wore were linked to her headware instead of properly interfacing with her regular nervous system.
Colombera picked up the dropped beer bottle and tossed it into the recycling chute.
“Whoopie cushions are old and crude, but no one looks for them,” he said with an impish grin. “And this party needed the tension kicked. So.” He looked around. “Are we going to have a party or a sob fest?”
“There’s not enough room to invite anyone else, not with these legs,” Michel said with a loud grin. “So, I suggest someone toss me a damn beer—and if no one else has the old dirty drinking songs memorized, they’re in my headware!”
Kira laughed—and threw Evgenia Michel a bottle of beer.
Her old squadron still had some kick to it, it seemed—and she realized that Dinesha Patel wasn’t the only one who’d needed the kick.
8
“What do we have on the plate this morning?” Kira asked.
The morning virtual conference was a standard of their last few months in Redward. All four ship Captains, both CNGs, Kira and Stipan Dirix all linked together from their assorted offices in a meeting that was supposed to keep everyone fully up to date.
“We forwarded those reports on to the locals on the Parakeets’ performances,” McCaig answered, the big man looking more amused than anything. “Interesting to know that we took them into action before the RRF did.”
“Not much shooting going on in the Syntactic Cluster these days,” Michel noted. “It’s a fluke that we happened on Ancillary—they were going to get hit by someone, they were drawing too much attention, but the odds it was going to be us weren’t good.”
“That didn’t work out so well for them,” Raccoon’s Captain Mwangi noted. “And I saw the statements for our bonus on bringing them in. That was good work.”
“That was easy,” Michel admitted. “Ancillary was smaller than either destroyer. She was a thirty-kilocubic tramp that had had a handful of plasma guns welded on. She was never a threat to anyone except a merchant ship.”
“And you handled her well,” Kira pointed out. “So, let’s not talk ourselves down too much, shall we? New Ontario was pleased to get the crew alive. My understanding is that they’re hoping to track down whoever was buying their prizes—with the Costar Clans absorbed by Redward, the usual markets are no more.”
“There’s always someone willing to buy at a discount without asking questions,” Stipan Dirix said grimly. “And stolen goods are never sold at a loss to the thief.”
“This is true. We’ve benefited from that ourselves,” Kira agreed.
That was part of why she’d managed to hang on to Deception, after all. It wasn’t like Redward had paid for or built her themselves, and letting her keep someone else’s ship was easy enough.
“Raccoon is about where we’ve been for the last bit,” Mwangi told the others after a moment. “Waldroup is doing the best she can to keep things organized, but we’ve packed fifty-plus nova fighters into a deck designed to hold forty at a stretch.
“We’re crowded and my launches are going to be short,” he admitted. “That said, I can get those fifty fighters into space; it’ll just take longer than it should.”
“We’ll need to optimize as best as we can,” Kira said. “We know it’s going to be a while before we get our hands on a real carrier again. We’re going to be talking exact currency amounts with the locals, but we have a tentative plan for two more destroyers, a light carrier and a fleet carrier, but…”
“Nothing soon, I’m guessing?” Patel asked.
“Bingo,” Kira agreed. “Eighteen months for the destroyers. Two years, minimum, for a seventy-five-kilocubic carrier. Four for the fleet carrier.
“So, we’re going to be home-porting, if nothing else, in Redward for a few years,” she told everyone. “Depending on what work we get over those years, we may buy a second round of ships after we get the destroyers and the CVL.
“We’ll see. For now, I just have meetings with Pree and Yanis later to poke through bank accounts and see what we can afford.”
That got her a chuckle. Pree—Priapus Simoneit—was Memorial Force’s main lawyer in Redward, and Yanis Vaduva was the Force’s purser. He’d held the same job for John Estanza on Conviction, and now he held it for the entire mercenary fleet from an office on Deception.
Kira was well aware of Vaduva’s importance to the fleet. If he’d wanted to be in this meeting, he’d be in it. Despite his perpetually smiling cheerfulness when interacting with people, the purser vastly preferred accounts and text transcripts to meetings and conversations.
Part of his contract with Estanza had specified that he could not be asked to attend more than two hours of meetings per business week. Kira had duplicated the contract exactly when Vaduva had moved over to Memorial Force—and had never had a reason to regret it.
“Well, that’s a good segue for me, I think,” Dirix said after a moment. “We got a request for a meeting with the Commodore and Captain Zoric late last night. Potential contract.”
Kira raised an eyebrow.
“Normally, we have a bit more information than that,” she observed. “What have we got this time?”
“Very little,” Dirix admitted. “Normally, I’d have rejected it and asked for more info, but in this case, I figured I’d leave that up to you two.”
She exchanged a glance with Zoric.
“Okay, Stipan, stop beating around the bush,” Kira ordered the ex-Redward Army officer. “What’s going on?”
“The meeting request is vague as fuck,” he told her. “No details on who you’ll be meeting or what they want to talk about other than ‘a contract.’ But it was forwarded by Her Majesty’s personal secretary, Em Hamasaki—and it does specify that it’s from the Bank of the R
oyal Crest delegation.”
Kira nodded slowly. That made…sense. As usual, Sonia was playing games. But she’d never lost out playing the Queen’s games yet.
“I had a fascinating conversation with one of their directors at Queen Sonia’s barbecue,” she told the others. “If they were sounding me out for a potential contract, that would add another layer to that meeting.”
Including a question around why Jade had asked so many questions about the Equilibrium Institute.
“Can we deploy to anywhere the Crest might want us to operate?” McCaig asked. “Our retainer limits how far we’re supposed to be from Redward, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Kira confirmed. “But there are allowances for us taking on other contracts, with enough notice to the Redward government—and if Sonia is forwarding the meeting request herself, I’m guessing they’re willing to work with us.
“That said, it depends on how far away they want us to deploy,” she continued. “There could be operations they need in or near the Syntactic Cluster, which should be fine. But if they want us to go all the way to the Crest Sector, that’s a bigger deal.
“And raises the question of why. The Bank of the Royal Crest’s largest shareholder is the King of the Royal Crest—there aren’t many situations near home that they can’t throw the Navy of the Royal Crest at.”
The meeting was quiet.
“That said, Sonia’s recommendation is a damn big deal,” Kira noted. “Book the meeting, Dirix. Unless someone has some reason why we shouldn’t even meet with them?”
“They’re the biggest bank in four hundred light-years,” Zoric said flatly. “I suggest we be prepared to go quite a bit out of our way to get in their good books.”
“There are limits,” Mwangi warned. “Let’s not get too eager—banks aren’t known for being generous employers, either.”
“Captain Zoric and I will keep it in hand,” Kira told them all. “We’ve both dealt with Mid Rim bankers before, after all.”
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 5