Equilibrium Read online

  “We’ll interrogate the prisoners on Redward,” Sonia noted. “But there’s no way we can keep the Clans’ portion of this secret. We can probably quiet down the part about mercenary nova fighters, but…”

  “What happens if people hear about the Clans’ attack?” Kira asked. Sonia sounded worried.

  “Parliament will explode,” Larry replied instantly. “We have a working majority there, one that is loyal to us and the ideals we follow. It’s made up of three parties of the eight in Parliament, but they’ve stuck with us through four elections at this point.

  “But…” He shook his head. “Enough of my opponents in Parliament want the Clans crushed that it’s a perennial argument. Once the people personally loyal to me start demanding we deal with the Costar Clans, we are going to have a problem.”

  “We will deal with that in Parliament,” Sonia told him. “We at least have good news to bring to them as well.”

  “Your Majesty?” Kira inquired.

  “Our mission in Ypres was a complete success,” the Queen said. “For the first time in the two centuries it’s been inhabited, Ypres is united. Their new Federation is going to be a kludge for some time, but it has a unified nova-warship command—and they’ve signed on to the Free Trade Zone.”

  The Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone was the dream the two monarchs had been pushing since before Kira had arrived. By establishing a mutual trade and security pact, they hoped to duplicate the purpose of the Old Earth European Union—economies and cultures so interlinked that war was impossible and unthinkable.

  The problem was that the Equilibrium Institute, a quietly secret organization that had its fingers throughout a good chunk of human space, didn’t think that kind of structure worked. So, to “save” the Syntactic Cluster from itself, they kept interfering.

  “That’s fantastic news,” she told them. “The whole system seemed… Well, they seemed like they deserved better.”

  Ypres was the gateway from the Cluster to the rest of the Rim. Its division had been a long-standing impediment to all sixteen of the inhabited systems in the star cluster.

  “Most people usually do,” Larry said. “As monarchs, it’s our job to get them that something better. As a soldier, it’s your job to protect it.”

  “We try, Your Majesty,” Kira replied.

  “And you succeed,” he told her. “There will be a significant bonus for your Memorials once I’m back home.” He sighed. “There is also, almost certainly, going to be a lot more work coming up. If the Clans are going to provoke us, then I am left with no choice.

  “If Parliament is going to demand that the Costar Clans be neutralized, then we must get ahead of those demands and make certain that it is done my way.”

  A chill ran down Kira’s spine. From her interactions with him, Kira knew King Larry to be a kind-hearted man, affable and cheerful by choice and nature alike…but he was also the constitutional monarch of a system of two billion souls, who’d guided its government without notable difficulty for fifteen standard years.

  She knew underestimating him was dangerous, and even she sometimes fell into that trap.

  4

  Deception returned to Redward orbit in company with First Crown. The two ships novaed together once the royal transport had finished cooling her nova drive. The entire point of having Crown jump to Lastward instead of the main planet had been to protect her arrival and leave her with a ready-to-nova drive when she got home.

  In hindsight, that had been a mistake. Kira didn’t bother to conceal her sigh of relief from her bridge crew as First Crown entered the weapons range of the massive asteroid fortresses orbiting Redward. Like almost every major human world, the planet was more than fortified enough to stand off an attack by any ship small enough to nova.

  The vulnerability was in the hour between emerging from nova and entering that defensive perimeter. With the drive core cooled, Crown could have evaded a threat in that gap by micro-novaing. With her core heated by a full-length six-light-year nova, she’d be trapped by any enemy engaging her.

  Since her course had leaked, that had happened in the far reaches of the star system instead. But Kira had been there with Deception and everything had turned out…mostly okay.

  “Sir, we have docking clearance for Blueward Station,” Smolak told Zoric. “Conviction’s old dock.”

  “Understood. We’ll come in slow and careful,” the Captain ordered. She didn’t bother to glance at Kira for confirmation. “Davidović, where’s Conviction?”

  “I have her on the scopes,” the tactical officer replied, throwing the old carrier up on their displays. “She’s about three-quarters to the slip they threw together for our refit,” she concluded.

  “That was the plan,” Kira reminded them. “Once Deception could take over the role of being the RRF’s mercenary heavy, Conviction needed some tender care of her own.”

  A hundred and sixty-eight years old, the carrier had been demilitarized roughly on her second decommissioning, the removal of her original plasma turrets done in such a manner that she lacked the structural integrity for new ones.

  “First Crown has launched a shuttle squadron heading for the surface,” Davidović reported. “A wing of sub-fighters from the fortress is rendezvousing with them. Their Majesties are heading to the capital.”

  “Good,” Kira said. “I have some conversations to have with Waldroup and the RRF logistics teams. We need to get three replacement Hoplites aboard ASAP.”

  That was going to be an argument with Conviction’s deck boss. The old carrier’s fabricators were among the best in the system—edged out by Deception’s now but better set up in general for building nova fighters.

  Conviction had eighteen Hoplite-IV clones aboard, and Kira wanted to steal three of them rather than waiting for new fighters to be fabbed. She’d have an easier time borrowing a pilot from Joseph Hoffman, Conviction’s new Commander, Nova Group, and one of her Apollo veterans, than she was going to have stealing three fighters from Angel Waldroup.

  “That’s your job, not mine,” Zoric told her with a chuckle. She was clearly following Kira’s thought process. “Did you ever think your mercenary company was going to be this much of a pain, Demirci?”

  “I thought I was going to have six nova fighters forever,” Kira admitted. “Not a heavy cruiser and forty-odd pilots and crews that belonged to me across two ships!”

  What was going to make her life easier right now was that the three Hoplite squadrons aboard Conviction still belonged to Memorial Squadron. Waldroup ran Conviction’s flight deck, but those squadrons were still subcontractors.

  As King Larry had said, it all made sense to her. Most of the time.

  Once the cruiser docked, Kira’s headware cheerfully informed her that she had a backlog of messages at her stationside office—even though she’d been out of Blueward Station for less than twenty-four hours, saving the King and Queen included.

  Instead of checking any of them, she called the man who was in charge of the Memorials’ planetside affairs.

  “Stipan, why is my email exploding?” she asked him.

  Stipan Dirix was a former Captain in the Redward Army that she’d recruited to run her dockside office when she and her people had first arrived in Redward. There was a Brisingr death mark worth millions on her and all of her Apollon pilots, so she’d needed an intermediary.

  “You have a working heavy cruiser, sir,” Dirix pointed out. “While Deception was in dry dock and Conviction was doing all of the work, it was easy to redirect people to Estanza. Now that the reverse is true, people want to hire you.”

  “Is there anything in that pile I actually need to care about?” Kira asked.

  “Are you planning on taking any jobs outside the Redward retainer?” he replied.

  Kira’s conversation with Larry and Sonia suggested that Redward was going to be leaning on that retainer shortly. Technically, she didn’t even have that retainer—it was Estanza’s retainer and she was merely a
subcontractor.

  “I’m not doing anything that isn’t run through Estanza and Conviction Limited just yet,” she told Dirix.

  “Then you can ignore most of those emails,” Dirix said calmly. “Flag ’em back to me and I’ll let people down gently.” The big man shrugged in the image her headware was feeding her. “I turned down everyone who was obviously not offering enough money, but didn’t want to say no to jobs that looked half-decent or better.”

  “The RRF is going to need us soon enough,” Kira said. “We’re not going anywhere. What’s the rest? Personal and ads, looks like?”

  There was a message there from Hope Temitope, for example. The Redward Commando Colonel had been instrumental in capturing Deception, and they’d kept in contact since.

  “I cleared most of the ads out based on the usual rules,” he agreed, “but a few looked interesting. We don’t actually have a provisioning contractor for Deception yet, and having one supplier makes it easier to manage safety and suchlike.”

  There were four different emails around that topic, Kira realized as she sorted the messages. Even Deception’s somewhat understrength crew was several hundred people. So far, they’d just been acquiring food and similar supplies from the station chandlery, but a contract supplier made sense.

  “Fair,” she said. “Do me a favor, Stipan?”

  “You pay me for seven hours a day, five days a week, sir,” he pointed out. “Inside that, you own me. I don’t really do you favors.”

  She didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

  “Of course, sir,” he finished.

  “Throw together a request for proposal based around Deception’s current crew strength,” she told him. “You should have the list for allergies and religious restrictions already, so you know as much of what we need as I do.

  “Get me at least four proposals and I’ll try to find time to talk to the two best ones.” She looked at her schedule. “I’m keeping things relatively open because I’m expecting to get called into a Fleet briefing sooner rather than later.

  “I’ve got some work to sort out around the nova fighters, but I also need your backup list. We lost a woman today. Iris didn’t make it back from rescuing the King.”

  “All right,” Dirix said, his tone more subdued. “I’ll have you three names and files by the end of day.”

  “Thanks, Stipan,” Kira told him. “I’ll be heading over to Conviction shortly, probably with both Zoric and Bueller. Let me know if you need anything more immediate.”

  “Wilco.”

  5

  Conviction’s flight deck made Deception’s look like the squeezed-in compromise it was. Cramming twenty starfighters into a K70-class cruiser had taken impressive ingenuity on the part of the ship’s designers.

  Conviction was built around her flight deck, capable of serving up to sixty starfighters. It also fit in search-and-rescue craft, transport shuttles and a landing place for visiting shuttles like the one carrying Deception’s senior officers.

  Kira was the first one off the shuttle, taking in the familiar scent of a working flight deck with a deep inhalation. There was no greeting party waiting for them—the mercenaries might run warships, but they didn’t run anything resembling a proper military.

  “Demirci, welcome back,” a familiar deep voice boomed. Angel Waldroup, the broad-shouldered and muscular deck boss, emerged from behind a moving cart of supplies. “Hearing all kinds of crazy shit about what went down at Lastward.”

  “Most of it’s probably true,” Kira replied, glancing behind her to check in on her boyfriend and Zoric. “Clan ships tried to jump the King and Queen’s transport—backed up by a bunch of Crest nova fighters that no one outside the fight ever saw.”

  “Shit,” Waldroup cursed. “Work for us?”

  “Almost certainly,” Kira agreed. “But for you? I lost three Hoplites and I’m expecting new work from the RRF within the week at most. I need to steal three planes.”

  Waldroup drew herself up and glared.

  “I’ve only barely got the squadrons up to strength as it is,” she said. “I haven’t even managed to get the replicator pattern for the Viers working yet.”

  “They’re my birds,” Kira pointed out. “And Conviction is in dry dock for weeks, at least.”

  “Argue it with Hoffman, I guess,” the deck boss said grouchily. “He’s sacked out right now, but I can get someone to wake him.”

  “I sent him a message,” Kira said. “But if he’s asleep, yeah. We’ve got a meeting with Estanza and we need the top hands.

  “Things might be about to get messy.”

  “Things haven’t been messy?” Waldroup asked. “The man getting off the shuttle behind you used to be a Brisingr officer!”

  Bueller stepped up beside Kira and gave the woman—native of a Fringe system at least six hundred light-years away—a broad grin.

  “Switching to a mercenary made things much less complicated for me, I’ll admit,” he told her. “But I’m not sure that’s Kira’s point.”

  “Things have been messy, but not of late,” Kira told the others as Zoric stepped up on the other side of her. “After we drove off Equilibrium’s mercenaries in Ypres, things have been pretty calm. The King and Queen apparently even got the factions to agree to a system-wide government, somehow.”

  “I’ve been in the Syntactic Cluster for five years,” Waldroup noted. “I find that harder to believe than the interstellar conspiracy part!”

  “The Yprian Federation,” Kira said. “A new light for the future, I guess.”

  She shook her head.

  “Anyway, we need to get to that meeting. I’ll ping Hoffman’s headware again—but you need to start prepping Hoplites for transport over to Deception.”

  “Fine, fine.” Waldroup shook her head. “I guess they are your planes, after all.”

  When Kira had first met John Estanza, she’d only really known of him as Gold Cobra, one of the pilots of a near-legendary elite mercenary squadron from the outer Fringe and Inner Rim. Her own late CO had been Jay Moranis, White Cobra.

  When she’d first arrived in the bridge-attached office she and her officers now entered, she’d found the man drunk as a skunk, with an impressive wet bar spread out along the wall behind him.

  There was no trace of that drunkard in the solidly built older man sitting behind the desk today—and even less trace of the wet bar. The wall of booze had turned out to be mobile and was replaced with a small table with a coffee machine.

  Today, Estanza’s heavy desk had been pulled closer to the wall to allow for a half-dozen seats to be set up in a rough circle that included the desk. Only one of the chairs in front of Estanza’s desk was occupied, the gaunt black form of Akuchi Mwangi leaning backward as he studied the new arrivals.

  Mwangi was Conviction’s new executive officer, replacing Zoric after Kira had stolen the woman to command her cruiser. He was a long-standing member of the mercenary crew, though not one Kira had met much before he’d risen to second-in-command of the carrier.

  “Hoffman is on his way up,” Estanza told her. “As is Hersch. I got the impression that we were going to be having some interesting discussions.”

  Joseph “Longknife” Hoffman was the man Kira had picked to replace her as Conviction’s acting CNG, but Ruben “Gizmo” Hersch headed up the Darkwing flight group, the pilots who flew the PNC-115 fighter-bombers that provided Conviction’s heavy punch.

  “I’ll wait until they’re here, then,” Kira said. “Basic summary is that the Clans jumped the royals, and the Cluster is going to get complicated again. We lost three fighters and a pilot. I’ll be borrowing three Hoplites to fill the hole, since Conviction is in for repairs.”

  “That makes sense,” Estanza told her. “Though…”

  The door slid open to reveal Conviction’s two senior fighter commanders standing together. Joseph Hoffman was just as gaunt as Mwangi, but only of average height and pale-skinned from a life aboard spaceships. Ruben Hersch was
equally pale, but his eyes and hair were far darker than Hoffman’s Aryan features.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” Estanza said, indicating the remaining chairs. “Kira, you may as well go back to the beginning, and we’ll talk about your fighters at the end.”

  “All right.” Kira glanced around the group. Outside of Mwangi and Bueller, she’d known everyone in the room for at least a year and regarded them all as friends. She was still getting to know Mwangi, too. Bueller, on the other hand, was her lover and she was more comfortable with him than the time she’d known him might suggest.

  “Deception’s exercises were intentionally scheduled to put us in the region of the short-stop that First Crown was using for her return nova,” she explained to the three Conviction officers who hadn’t known that. “We were about forty light-seconds away when she arrived, in position to see when she was jumped by a flotilla of Costar Clans’ gunships.”

  “The FTZ is going to need to deal with those people,” Hoffman said grimly. Neutralizing pirates was one of the key requirements to claim that a power was “in control” of a region. The point of a mutual-trade-and-protection pact like the Free Trade Zone was to make an area safe for trade.

  “They’ll get to it,” Kira agreed. “The biggest problem today was that the gunships were as much a smoke screen as anything else. My wing were not the first nova fighters in the jamming zone.”

  She had everyone’s attention now.

  “Someone had launched a full nova strike on First Crown. Thirty-two interceptors, tentatively identified as Veles-Four-type fighters from Crest, and eight bombers,” she listed off. “The bombers were Uglies, assembled from parts from a dozen systems, but they were fully functioning proper torpedo platforms. Deception ending up taking most of their salvo, but her armor and dispersion networks are enough better than Redward’s that we’re really just looking at surface damage.

  “We got lucky. The same number of torpedoes could have done a lot more damage if they’d been properly sequenced, but they thought they were shooting at First Crown.”