Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 3

  The Lodge had been quieter the last time she’d visited. Her shuttle had been the only one parked on the concrete pads concealed beside the old-fashioned dock. Today, a dozen small spacecraft and aircraft were parked on the water—some of them directly, bobbing away on floating pontoons.

  Given that the Lodge’s two outer buildings were storage for watercraft and aircraft, that suggested there were more people there than the concealed haven was really designed to hold.

  That said, there were several large open spaces carefully maintained around the house. As Kira and Zoric made their way up the dock toward land, Kira spotted that hand-carved wooden bridges had been laid over the brook that wrapped around the south side of the Lodge, connecting the two main green spaces to allow for a larger party.

  There were at least three dozen people scattered across the Lodge’s grounds, gathered in small clumps of conversation as half a dozen human servers made their way through with serving trays.

  Kira noted Zoric examining the servers with a watchful eye and concealed a grin.

  “It’s one of Sonia’s parties,” she murmured to the other woman. “Every server is a commando.”

  She’d worked with several of Redward’s elite army troops before. Their dedication to their missions was impressive—and one of their missions was the protection of their monarchs.

  And unlike most of Redward’s citizens, the commandos knew damn well how much Queen Sonia did.

  Kira had barely finished the thought before they reached the end of the dock and the Queen of Redward herself appeared. The delicately tall woman was wearing a dark pink sundress that showed off her athletic frame perfectly, and gave the two mercenaries a genuine wide smile.

  “I’m glad you were back in time to make this party, Kira,” Sonia told her. “Welcome back to the Solitary Lodge. Welcome to the Solitary Lodge, Kavitha.”

  “Do you hold a lot of events out here?” Zoric asked after a modicum of a curtsy. Both of the mercenary officers wore a dark jewel-green jacket over the monochrome, temperature-regulating shipsuit of a spacer. For this situation, the shipsuits were a slightly iridescent black that rippled in the sunlight and offset the jackets perfectly—but they were still entirely functional.

  “More during the local summer,” the Queen replied. “It is a bit too far north here for winter activities other than hunting and skating, and neither Larry nor I are fond of either.”

  From what Kira understood, a significant number of King Larry’s ancestors had been avid hunters and there was a network of lodges like this across the planet, part of the royal family’s personal wealth.

  Larry’s distaste for hunting meant that many were barely used by the royals—a significant number were being rented out as hotels and tourist stops these days.

  Of course, anyone who took the rotund monarch’s dislike of hunting helpless animals for weakness had learned better by now, Kira hoped. Redward might be only one of sixteen signatories to the Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone and only one of the three recognized Major Powers of the FTZ, but there was no question in anyone’s mind that the system was first among equals.

  And while King Larry was a constitutional monarch, limited by law, tradition and personal morals alike, it was his hand behind that creation. Though the cheerfully charming woman in the comfortable dress in front of Kira had definitely had her part in it!

  “Come. The staff will complain if I don’t introduce you to their food before anything else!”

  An impressive defensive array of tables had been assembled around a massive six-grill barbecue. The whole culinary fortification backed onto the brook, protecting the chef working away at the grills from excessive complaints or compliments.

  Compliments, Kira suspected, were more likely. She wasn’t entirely sure what the meat used in the burgers was, but it smelled heavenly enough to convince her to try one.

  “Huh,” she said after swallowing the first bite. “I’m impressed.”

  “You weren’t expecting to be?” Sonia asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “I grew up on handmade and hand-spiced mutton burgers my father made,” Kira replied. “I don’t trust anyone’s burgers to come close enough to be acceptable. This is…acceptable.”

  The Queen laughed.

  “I will attempt to phrase that more delicately to Em Caballo,” she said. “She thinks she might have made the best burger in the known galaxy.”

  “Well, if it helps, I think she’s right,” Zoric said. “Damn, that’s good.”

  “I will leave you to your food for the moment,” Sonia told the mercenaries. “Almost no gathering at the Lodge is without ulterior motives, but today’s are minor. Enjoy, ladies.”

  Kira concealed a smile at Zoric’s momentarily pained expression as the Queen swept away. A pair of nonbinary local businesspeople swept in on the Queen like hovering vultures the moment Sonia was clear of the mercs, which earned a different pained expression from the mercenary Captain.

  “I figured when it was out here,” she murmured to Zoric. “Though the crowd is diverse. Most of the people here are… Well, they’re the people I expect to want to talk to the Crest delegation in detail.”

  “You know these people?” Zoric gestured around.

  “Most of the Redward people by sight and name,” Kira admitted. “There aren’t many I’ve had an actual conversation with, but I’ve met most of them.

  “So have you,” she reminded Zoric.

  “I guess. I’ll admit I’ve only paid attention to the military people at the parties you’ve brought me to,” her business partner replied, shaking her head. “I mean, it makes sense that we’re considered movers and shakers in the business world, but…”

  “But we’re still soldiers, even if we’re soldiers for hire?” Kira finished. She took a moment to focus on her burger while Zoric considered that.

  “I guess. Which makes me wonder what ‘ulterior motives’ Her Majesty has.”

  “Well.” Kira looked around the crowd, considering the people she did know—and the ones she didn’t know but could identify by the angular projections of Crest-style clothing.

  “Most people here are civilian infrastructure,” she concluded after a second. “Executives or major shareholders of companies that build large-scale ground, air or space facilities. Then, of course, we have the female and enby portion of the Bank of the Royal Crest delegation.

  “Most of the ulterior motive I see here is giving the non-male members of that industry a slight edge in meeting their counterparts in the BRC group,” Kira noted. “There’s a lot of work on the table right now, across the Cluster but mostly focused in the Costar Clans Systems.”

  When Kira had first arrived in the Syntactic Cluster, the Costar Clans had been the major source of military actions in the area. The inhabitants of four marginal-to-doomed systems, they had survived by building the cheapest possible nova ships and stealing from everyone.

  Redward had occupied those systems as part of finalizing the creation of the Free Trade Zone. They had the potential to help make the Kingdom of Redward an unimaginably rich five-star-system power—or to drag King Larry and Queen Sonia’s nation into complete bankruptcy trying to keep their promises.

  “So, Her Majesty wants to, what, handicap men in the bidding process?” Zoric asked.

  “Not quite.” Kira shrugged. “My own experience is that everybody, generally, listens to people of their own identifications more easily. Since Redward has a somewhat more male-dominated industrial and economic space than most, that can have a feedback loop effect that closes out everybody else.

  “So, Queen Sonia uses the power of her position to enable women and enbies to talk to each other and form their own connections in an enabling space.”

  “Huh. Despite being here for years, I hadn’t noticed that until you pointed it out,” Zoric admitted. “I’ve seen worse sexism in the galaxy.”

  “I don’t think it’s even sexism so much as just like preferring to talk to like,” Kira sa
id. “Human nature. Like the fact that we’re hanging out near the buffet table, talking to each other, rather than meeting the people around us.”

  Zoric chuckled.

  “I’m not sure who here we need to meet,” she admitted. “But from what you and the Queen said, I imagine there is at least one person we should.”

  “Almost certainly,” Kira agreed. “So, I suggest we each grab one of those iced teas at the end of the table—the Lodge’s staff makes amazing iced tea—and go see who we can find.”

  5

  Kira wasn’t really surprised that the reality turned out to be someone finding her. She had one short conversation with a woman she knew—a continental vice-president for the company that made Astonishing Orange, her second-favorite Redward coffee varietal after the royal family’s own private blend—and then spotted a pair of strangers specifically making their way toward her.

  The Royal Crest’s current fashion seemed to have escaped from the instructional images of a ten-year-old’s geometry class. One of the two individuals approaching Kira wore what she thought was a dress that was formed into a perfect cylinder of the width of the wearer’s shoulders and hips and descended down to just above their feet.

  Their arms were still free to move, and she presumed they had some flexibility under the dress, but it was a quite distinctive outfit.

  The dress-wearer was giving off strong “aide cum bodyguard” vibes, however, and Kira’s attention slid to the person they were “definitely not” escorting. That worthy wore a similar distinctively angular-style blazer suit in dark gray, with shoulders that were clearly supported out past the wearer’s body and then cutting inward to create a sharp triangle.

  It was, as Kira understood it, an extremely masculine style by the Crest’s standards—but the gray blazer was buttoned just below the sternum, revealing one of the most delicately frilly pink blouses Kira had ever seen, carefully cut to expose more cleavage than Kira had.

  Somehow, she was unsurprised when her headware pinged both individuals as nonbinary, using they/them pronouns. What was interesting was that her headware didn’t give her much more information than pronouns and first names: the dress-wearing bodyguard was Voski and the gray-suited businessperson was Jade.

  Kira was used to being aboard ship, where her headware could give her full lifetime files on her mercenaries or other military personnel. The blip of updating from silicon to organic memory was so familiar now that she barely registered that knowledge as not hers in any way.

  The lack of that detail was interesting, and she bowed slightly as the two Cresters approached.

  “Commodore Kira Demirci, yes?” Jade asked. They had darker skin, with a Korean-extraction tilt to their features, but with a sharp nose and heavy eyebrows.

  “I am, yes,” Kira agreed. “And you are?”

  Both of them knew at least the basics from the implants in their heads, but humanity had hundreds of years of tradition behind pretending they didn’t have computers in their heads.

  “I am Jade,” the stranger introduced themselves. “I am one of the directors of the Bank of the Royal Crest assigned to this expedition. This is Voski, my aide.”

  “A pleasure, Em Jade,” Kira told them. “How are you finding Redward so far?”

  Jade quirked their lips.

  “May I be honest, Commodore?” they asked drily. “Between one Mid Rim soul and another?”

  “I like Redward well enough,” Kira replied, “but I won’t hold your opinions against you, Em Jade.”

  “Please, Commodore Demirci, just Jade,” Jade told her. They gestured around the party. “This is hardly formal enough to require Em this and Em that, don’t you think?”

  “As you wish, Jade,” Kira said. She did not invite the banker to use her own first name. If Jade wanted to play identity games, that was fine, but Kira had paid for her rank in blood.

  From the repeated quirk of the lips—not quite a smile but definitely amused—Jade picked up at least part of Kira’s silent message.

  “Redward is less backward than I expected,” they finally said. “But it still pales against home. I have seen less well-amenitied cities on our direct client worlds, but I have seen far better, too.”

  Kira kept her face level. That was right. The Royal Crest maintained an explicit tributary empire—like the one Brisingr was busy setting up around her home system. Their “client worlds” were heavily restricted in their interstellar trade and provided resources and personnel to help maintain the Navy of the Royal Crest.

  They were exactly the type of military-economic hegemon that the Equilibrium Institute had tried to force into existence in the Syntactic Cluster. The Institute believed that kind of hegemony was the only stable long-term interstellar political structure, after all—and the Royal Crest and their client worlds were one of the working examples of that in the Rim.

  “It does grow on you if you live here,” Kira murmured. She gestured around the Solitary Lodge. “Places like this are everywhere, I suppose, but I think they did a good job here.”

  “They did,” Jade conceded. “And the Cluster’s newfound stability is certainly appealing as an investment prospect.” They shook their head. “Of course, while we understand King Larry’s determination to keep control of Syntactic assets in the Cluster, it does limit the resources we’re able to deploy.

  “And there are, of course, those who question how long this stability will last. It was only a few months ago, after all, that the whole region was involved in a war.”

  “There aren’t many threats in the Cluster to cause that again,” Kira pointed out. “Bengalissimo and Ypres look to make more money as part of the Free Trade Zone than trying to break it. The Costar Clans are now under Redward control.” She shook her head with a smile.

  “With the Bengalissimo Republic, the Ypres Federation and the Kingdom of Redward all upgrading their fleets at a breakneck pace, I don’t think anyone who tries to cause trouble here is going to enjoy it,” she noted. “They’re going to up to a Mid Rim standard soon enough.”

  “And your Memorial Force will be here to protect them until they are?” Jade asked.

  “If needed,” Kira agreed. “Deception will remain the most powerful warship in the Cluster for a while yet, though she’s no longer as necessary as she once was. Conviction, in many ways, was more dramatic an influence on the Cluster than Deception.”

  “So I heard,” Jade said softly. “Were you close to Captain Estanza?”

  “He was a mentor and a friend,” Kira murmured, swallowing the usual spike of grief. She had a lot of practice at hiding grief these days. She’d lost a lot of friends before she’d ever come to the Syntactic Cluster—and the fighting there had been no gentler.

  “But he died doing what he swore to do,” she continued. “He stopped the Equilibrium Institute and their patsies from wrecking the Syntactic Cluster.”

  Kira watched Jade and Voski exchange a glance. There were a lot of people who regarded the story about a third party interfering in the Cluster as a lie designed to permit the new Bengal and Ypres governments to wash their hands of the actions of their system’s factions.

  “I have heard the…theory about the Equilibrium Institute,” Jade allowed. “I would be interested to hear your take on it, Commodore.”

  “For that, Jade, I will need to refresh my drink,” Kira said carefully. She suddenly suspected that this was what the Crest bureaucrat was after—and that meant she wanted a few moments to think.

  “Voski, can you grab the Commodore and myself new drinks?” Jade said instantly. “I see some free chairs over in that gazebo. Voski can grab us some food as well, if you wish. Shall we, Commodore?”

  Kira smiled. She wasn’t sure why the Bank of the Royal Crest delegation wanted her take on the Equilibrium Institute, but she now understood why Sonia had been so desperate to get her to this party.

  Kira waited for Voski to return with grill-roasted potato wedges and a full pitcher of iced tea before she said
anything. The gazebo was surprisingly comfortable, a tucked-away seating area on the edge of the forest around the Solitary Lodge.

  There was an energy screen between the gazebo and the woods, of course—but it was intriguing to Kira that both Jade and Voski both clearly made note of that shield as they took their seats. She expected the bodyguard to pick out the defenses, but the banker themselves? That was interesting.

  “You seem quite determined to get my opinion on the Equilibrium Institute, Jade,” Kira noted after trying the first wedge. Like everything else she’d ever been fed at the Lodge, it was amazing.

  “I can think of a dozen reasons why the governments of the SCFTZ would make up a story to cover up the various conflicts of the last few years,” Jade said bluntly. “While you are contracted with them, you have less reason to toe the party line than most.

  “We are talking trillions of crests’ worth of investment, Commodore Demirci. Trillions. While these are both sums that the Bank of the Royal Crest can lend and that we can reasonably expect the Free Trade Zone to be able to repay, it is my obligation to the people whose accounts and investments will be supporting and supported by those loans to make sure I fully understand the situation.

  “There are already concerns in the halls of the BRC about the long-term stability of a free trade zone,” they noted. “Any uncertainty around the likelihood of resumed conflict in the area changes our risk assessment—which will, at a minimum, drive up the rates we can offer the Free Trade Zone’s members or even render those loans non-underwritable.

  “Do you understand?” Jade asked.

  “Mostly,” Kira said. She wasn’t an expert on loans or financing—Memorial Force was fortunate, in a lot of ways, that between their sources of hardware and the cash reserves assembled by both John Estanza and Kira’s old CO who’d sent her out to Redward, they had no debt—but she understood the basics.