Equilibrium, page 22
part #3 of Scattered Stars: Conviction Series
“Because everyone who knows anything knows that the RRF is riddled with informers,” the woman said. “So, if I want actual help, I need to talk to someone who can do things without them. Plus”—she shrugged—“I want back in the training program.”
Kira laughed.
“You cheated your way as far as you did,” she pointed out. “If the program you’d been using was just a bit more sophisticated, you might have kept cheating all the way through. I can’t trust that you know any of what we taught, I can’t trust an enemy agent, and you want me to put you back in a nova fighter?”
“Yes,” Bradley said firmly. “Because these sons of bitches have my daughter.”
Kira’s spine straightened and her feet slammed onto the ground as she held Bradley’s gaze firmly for an assessing ten seconds. The woman’s file said she was twenty-two standard years old and she looked it, which meant Kira had been a military officer and a leader of people for as long as Bradley had been alive.
There was a hang to the other woman’s eyes, an anger to her tone, that spoke to the truth of her words.
“She’d be what, six months old?” Kira said levelly. It was a guess, but an older child would have been hard to excise from the younger woman’s file—and there was nothing about a kid in Bradley’s file.
“Nine months,” Bradley said. “A foolish accident the father wanted nothing to do with, but Jessica is my baby girl. And I will do anything to protect her and make sure she gets the life she deserves.”
“What happened?” Kira asked. She still half-suspected she was being played, but she would let it play out. A young single mother… She could see a dozen ways that the Institute could have co-opted her.
“I…” Bradley inhaled a deep breath, then nodded firmly to herself. “I had a hard pregnancy and had to drop out of the shuttle-pilot training program I was in. With half a qualification, I couldn’t do much, and it was hard to find the time around a baby and keeping us both fed to earn any more qualifications.
“But the RRF was in recruiting mode, and they’ve always had a reputation for good mental-health and family support,” she admitted. “Didn’t even realize they had a fighter pilot program until they offered me a place in it.
“And then the next day, a man I didn’t know started walking next to me on my way home from work.” She shivered. “He was polite, but he made it clear he knew far too much about me. He offered me a lot of money to help him keep an eye on the training program, enough that I wouldn’t need the RRF’s family-support program.”
She spread her hands.
“I…heard him out,” she admitted. “More than I should have, but once he started talking about serving the greater good and saving the galaxy, I realized things were going far weirder than I could deal with. Threw him out of my place before my roommate got home with Jessica.
“Next day, someone broke into the apartment and kidnapped Jessica.”
Bradley said the words without emotion, but the pain her flat tone concealed only confirmed Kira’s initial assessment. The lack of a child in Bradley’s Navy files was both a point against her story…and a point in its favor, if her blackmailer was who Kira thought it was.
“They somehow edited my application to take out the family-support request,” she continued. “I was allowed to visit my daughter and they promised to continue paying me, so long as I kept them fully in the loop.
“I met the third woman at the house where they were keeping my girl,” Bradley noted. “I don’t think I was supposed to—she was furious with my handler and I never caught a name, but…I have headware footage.”
“Of all three, yes?” Kira asked.
“Yes,” the young woman confirmed. “I will give details, headware recordings, whatever is needed…so long as you get my little girl back and let me fly.”
Kira looked down at her hands.
“Neha, you’re a traitor,” she said bluntly. “The RRF is going to cashier you. I can’t change that; I’m just a merc.”
The woman inhaled and nodded slowly. Kira watched her for a few seconds. What she’d said was true, but Kira Demirci had options the RRF didn’t.
“If you save Jessica, I’ll…give you everything anyway. I’ll go to jail. I just need to know she’s safe.”
“Give me what you can on that safe house,” Kira told her. It seemed Bradley had passed her test. “We’ll see what we can find. And if what you give us is worth what you say it is, I will gently remind the RRF that fifty slots in this program are mine to do with as I please.
“If you’re telling the truth, we might have to see how well you fit the mercenary life.”
40
The Office of Integration operated out of a nondescript office building tucked away in Red Mountain’s main business district. Kira took a certain degree of amusement in Bradley’s confusion as the aircar parked in an underground garage and their mercenary escort was met by a group of youths in black suits.
To Kira, the security handoff between Milani’s troopers and the plainclothes Palace Guard was obvious. She suspected it was less obvious to Neha Bradley, the gorgeous brunette sticking closer to Kira than before as they followed their escort to the elevator.
Unlike Bradley, Kira knew what was waiting for them—and what Milani’s strike team had found at the Equilibrium safe house the young woman had sent them to. She was still irritated enough with the contrite spy to let her squirm as they made their way to the thirty-third floor.
The lobby they entered was plush, decorated in well-balanced shades of blue and orange, and announced itself as a private wealth management company.
The young woman behind the reception desk was supposedly a sign of the wealth of the financiers behind her security doors, since only the richest of clients expected to deal with humans instead of artificially stupid holograms.
In truth, Kira could tell she was cut from the same cloth as the guard ushering Kira and Bradley deeper into the intelligence agency’s office.
“Why are we here?” Bradley whispered to Kira. She was still handcuffed and had—correctly—guessed that Kira had the keys for her manacles.
“You’ll see,” Kira promised.
A security door slid open and their guards ushered them into a more plainly decorated corridor that still reeked of expensive interior design. Their destination was an even more heavily secured door, though the corridor door took them past several open-plan office sections. Those desks were full of analysts even at this early hour in the morning, though their data exchanges had automatically gone full-headware when strangers entered the office.
The secured conference room door belonged in a bunker, not on the midlevel floors of an office tower, and Kira could see Bradley’s nervousness as they approached. It swung open and Kira’s amusement broke into a full grin as she recognized the woman standing in the door.
Brigadier Hope Temitope was now the second-in-command of the entire Redward Commando Corps, the elite special forces Kira had worked with to seize Deception. The golden-eyed woman had been a Colonel then, but victory shared many rewards.
Most importantly for Kira’s companion, however, was that the whip-thin, dark-haired Black woman was holding a child with equally dark hair, the baby curled into Temitope’s shoulder as the commando held her prize with extreme delicacy.
“You found her?” Bradley gasped, lunging across half the distance to the commando officer before pulling herself up short.
“And seven other children of various ages,” Milani’s voice told them, the armored mercenary stepping up next to Temitope with a duplicate of the control Kira had tucked in her pocket.
They tapped a command and Bradley’s cuffs unlocked, falling to the floor forgotten as the young mother completed her aborted lunge and gently took her baby from Brigadier Temitope.
“Other children?” Bradley said, her voice choked with tears as she rocked her child.
“Let the poor woman sit down,” Queen Sonia ordered. “We still need quite a bit from her this morning.”
Kira let Milani, with uncharacteristic gentleness, take Bradley by the shoulder and guide her to a seat around the conference table. Like the rest of the office, the conference room kept up the illusion of being a private finance company for wealthy clients, providing comfortable seats and absolutely up-to-date electronics.
Well, up to date for Redward, Kira reflected.
Bradley collapsed into the seat, clutching her baby to her. Kira would freely admit that she didn’t have much of a maternal instinct, but the sight twinged even her heartstrings.
Despite her tears, she managed to transfer a file to Kira’s headware.
“Everything I promised,” she told Kira. “Faces, names, locations… Everything I was able to learn while I was working for them.”
Kira flipped the file to Sonia, who smiled.
“Thank you, Em Bradley,” the Queen told the young woman. “Brigadier, we need to move on this quickly.”
“That’s why we have an office full of analysts outside and I have a battalion of commandos I trust on standby,” Temitope replied. “I’m on it.”
With a sharp salute, the woman bowed her way out.
“We are currently identifying the parents of the other children at that safe house,” Sonia told Bradley. “I took the liberty of ordering the officer responsible for your recruitment detained as well. They might be innocent, but it seems…unlikely.”
“I will give you anything I can,” Bradley promised. “I… I understand I committed treason. But…” She looked down at her daughter’s face. “I didn’t know what else to do to protect her.”
The room was silent and Sonia sighed.
“Do you know who I am, young lady?” she asked.
Kira couldn’t help but smirk at the shocked look on Neha Bradley’s face when the woman finally looked at her Queen and realized who she was talking to.
“Yes, ma—Your Majesty.”
“We cannot permit you to remain in the RRF after your actions, but there will be no further consequences after your discharge without prejudice,” Sonia told the young woman. “The files on this matter will be sealed. Kira?”
“You already retested on what I could test you on tonight,” Kira pointed out. “You passed all the tests, so I have to wonder just why you kept using the cheat program. I’m forced to conclude that you were trying to get caught.”
“I… I wasn’t sure,” Bradley confessed. “I was trying… I needed to keep her safe, but…”
“I understand,” Sonia told her. “I have a daughter of my own, Em Bradley. Not much older than your Jessica and my only child. I understand. But I also have to protect Redward.”
“I understand,” Bradley echoed. “So, what happens now?”
“The records are sealed,” the Queen repeated. “You will need to remain in protective custody for at least a week while we clean up as much of the Institute’s network as we can, as much to keep you safe as anything else.”
“I would prefer if she was able to keep up with at least a simulator routine in that week,” Kira said. Both women looked at her in confusion. “If, of course, Em Bradley is still interested in being a nova-fighter pilot and is prepared to become a mercenary.”
“I don’t know,” Bradley admitted, looking down at Jessica’s face. “I need… I need the money and it’s the only thing I’ve worked toward qualifications on. But I don’t want to leave Jessica, either. I don’t know.”
“That’s fair,” Kira allowed, looking over at the Queen. “I know she’s safe with you for now. If the Queen is willing to let me recruit you, I can give you a few days to make up your mind.”
“It seems a reasonable solution for everyone,” Sonia agreed. “If you don’t think her fellow trainees will be a problem?”
“Believe me, Your Majesty, I can make sure they aren’t.”
“Then I believe the decision is entirely Em Bradley’s,” Sonia noted. “For now, though, rest assured that you and your child are under the protection of the Crown of Redward.”
41
Seven deaths. Thirty-one withdrawals. Sixteen injuries severe enough to require more than a few days’ recovery, washing those trainees out.
On the final day of the sixty-day program, Kira stood next to John Estanza on the edge of the Shadow Ward landing field. They’d eventually received enough nova fighters for all their pilots to train at once—even including Sinisters and Escutcheons.
Now the trainers were lined up in their spacesuits, watching almost two hundred and fifty nova fighters make their approach, six at a time. The spacing was greater than Kira would have wanted for veterans, but it was closer than she’d have expected even ten days earlier.
Starfighter after starfighter swept in to soft landings on the low-gravity field. Squadron after squadron took shape over the course of about fifteen minutes while the mercenary and RRF trainers alike stood at attention.
“They’re not what I’d want,” John Estanza admitted on a private channel to Kira. “But they’re better than I’d dare hope.”
“Agreed.” Kira watched the “lucky” pilots who’d drawn the heavy fighters today bring up the end of the formation. “The irony is not lost on me, either, that one of our best students was the Institute spy who cheated her way through half the course.”
Estanza chuckled.
“You know she’s going to be lucky if she manages to avoid getting stuck with Traitor or something similar as her callsign, right?” he asked. “I’m glad we gave her another chance, her situation was horrific, but no one is going to let that go any time soon.”
“Everything we see suggests her defection shattered the Institute network on Redward,” Kira pointed out. “We came out ahead for her being a ‘traitor.’”
“And that is why she’ll be flying for you,” Estanza agreed. “Still seems weird to have a Commodore answering to a Captain.”
“We’re business partners; I only answer to you sometimes,” Kira replied. “I figure we’re adults and can handle it.”
“That we can.” The last squadron edged toward the ground. “Speaking of being adults, how’s Bueller?”
“Exhausted and stretched to paper-thin, like everyone else involved in ship construction right now,” Kira said. “On the other hand…they did it.”
“I hadn’t heard that officially yet,” Estanza murmured. “Where are we at?”
“Baron and Duke are just closing up plates today; they’re done,” she told him. “They officially launch tomorrow. The destroyers were finished a week ago, and the last of the carrier conversions was done yesterday.
“We didn’t lose a ship in the process, though…” She sighed. “Konrad stopped talking about the death numbers with me weeks ago. Official death toll is over three hundred.”
“I know,” Estanza said. “That’s going to hurt him. Fuck, I’m torn up enough about the kids we lost.”
“Me too. They were volunteers and they knew the risks, but fuck if I don’t feel like I killed them,” Kira agreed. “And I swear, the ones that lived through it all… I’m not feeling much better about sending them into a goddamn war.”
“Not much choice,” the carrier Captain agreed. “But for now, we graduate them and we send them to get a drink.”
“And us?” Kira asked.
“We have a briefing with Their Majesties,” Estanza reminded her. “And unless I miss my math, that means the first covert couriers are back and we have some idea what the Cluster looks like today.”
Briefings and the future would wait. Kira and the rest of the trainers split to lines on either side of the path as their graduating trainees made their way back into the underground segments of Shadow Ward and the marshaling ground where Estanza would give the final speech.
It took less time for the pilots to enter the asteroid than it had taken for the fighters to land, and the trainers followed them in at the end. Kira accompanied Estanza to the podium at the front of the big room and stood at his right hand as he removed his helmet and looked out at the class.
“Pilot Trainee Class One,” he greeted them. “You are no longer trainees.”
That earned raucous applause, made louder by the flight suits the pilots were wearing. Armored hands smacked together loudly, echoing in the large man-made cavern.
“As of today, you are graduates of this rush training program,” he told them. “We all know this program was more compressed than any of us would like. You rose to that challenge and exceeded our expectations.
“The price has been high,” he said grimly. “Don’t forget those we lost to get here, but you all know why we were rushing. An enemy fleet blockades this system. You will not go from this training program into easy peacetime service.
“You will go from this training program into war. Within days, weeks at most, you will pilot your fighters in a breakout attempt against the best that Bengalissimo could muster in mercenaries and loyal patriots alike.
“I wish we could have given you more time,” Estanza admitted. “We have given you all we can. I have faith in you to rise to your training and your gifts. To become more than we dare hope.
“I have faith in you to save Redward and the Syntactic Cluster—and I remind you all that I will be right with you the whole way, as will most of the pilots who’ve trained you.
“Forty-two of you are officially mercenary recruits and will be joining me aboard Conviction,” he continued. “You’ve received your orders and contracts with Conviction LLC already. Shortly, I will be delighted to welcome you aboard my ship.
“The rest of you aren’t going to dragged all over the galaxy by my ancient ass,” he continued to a loud series of chuckles. “Five carriers, four cruisers, and a dozen stations like Shadow Ward itself call for your services. If you have not already received your orders from the RRF, you will be receiving them shortly.
“For all of you, mercenary and royal officer alike, your next set of orders is the same: you are being given thirty-six hours’ leave. Shuttles are awaiting to return you to Redward for a final visit with friends and family to celebrate your graduation.”
