Prodigal

Chapter 1

Despite Admiral Kira Demirci’s best efforts, her boyfriend was still terrible at basketball. The slightly built blonde mercenary dodged around Konrad Bueller on the court, putting her back to her partner to deflect his grab for the ball as she slipped into position and took her shot.

The basket cheerfully dinged her success, and the scoreboard her headware implant was feeding her vision ticked up another.

“Okay, I think I’m done,” her boyfriend said with a chuckle. Bueller was roughly twice his girlfriend and boss’s sixty-kilogram mass, heavyset and muscular with pale skin and copper hair against her slim build, Mediterranean skin and blonde hair.

“You’re not going to try for a second point?” she asked brightly, retrieving the ball from the gymnasium floor and absentmindedly dribbling.

“I think I would need to call it, uh…best of thirteen, I think? And then stop you scoring even once.” He shook his head at her, still smiling. “I’d love to tell myself that you have a program in your headware or some kind of implant to make you a super basketball player, but…”

“I’ve been playing this game for over thirty years, Konrad,” Kira pointed out. “I’ve lost count of the ships and planets I’ve played it on.”

Mostly spaceships, in truth. That she was currently in a planetside gym, with actual dirt underneath the polished wooden floor, was unusual for her. Kira Demirci, after all, ran the Memorial Force mercenary fleet.

Now up to two carriers and three cruisers, plus escorts, her little fleet was actually worthy of the term. Unfortunately, the task before her required…more.

The news had reached Samuels, their current employer and the location of the basketball court, four weeks earlier. Konrad’s homeworld, Brisingr, had invaded and conquered Kira’s homeworld, Apollo.

Interstellar invasion was supposed to be impossible, but Kaiser Reinhardt had managed it.

“Hey,” her boyfriend said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Should take more than the word planet to send you down that rabbit hole, love.”

Konrad had apparently followed her thoughts perfectly.

“Hell of a job in front of us,” she murmured, still bouncing the basketball.

“Yes. And you’re not supposed to be thinking about it right now,” he told her. “Come on. Let’s freshen up. We’re meeting the First Minister in an hour, after all.”

First Minister Buxton was the leader of Samuels and Memorial Force’s employer for a few more months. Kira wasn’t going to break contract, after all. Not when Samuels’ Defense Command had saved her life from a Brisingr-led ambush only a few weeks earlier, anyway!

 

#

 

The house the local government was providing Kira and her people had, until very recently, been the personal residence of the Brisingr Ambassador. The back and forth between Samuels and Brisingr had been entertaining. For Kira, at least.

The government of Samuels—a system founded by Quakers and with pacifism enshrined in their blood, let alone their constitution—had done everything to avoid war with their neighbors in the Colossus System except surrender without a fight.

The wrench in the gears had been the Brisingr Kaiserreich supplying the Colossus System with nova warships. That, Kira could probably lay at the feet of the Equilibrium Institute, a think tank turned militant conspiracy from the inner sectors of human space—but then a Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy carrier group had ambushed her ships and tried to kill her, specifically.

Buxton and the rest of his government had taken the deployment of BKN warships and the fact that Samuels had been manipulated into putting Kira in position for that ambush personally.

So, there was no longer a Brisingr Ambassador to Samuels, and residence and embassy alike had been seized by the Ministries, Samuels’ government.

“The First Minister is on their way,” an armored mercenary soldier told Kira as she stepped out of the change room in a fresh uniform. “We’re coordinating with their security detail.”

“Thank you, Corporal,” she told the woman.

The First Minister’s security detail, like most of Samuels’ military personnel, were Gorkhali. Roughly ninety percent of Samuels’ population were either Quakers or similarly pacifistic branches of Buddhism. But, from what Kira could tell, when a large contingent of pacifist Buddhists had set out to colonize a planet with other pacifists, several clans of their northern neighbors—also known as Ghurkas—had decided to come along to keep them safe.

“What’s the Minister’s ETA?” Kira asked.

“Roughly two minutes before your scheduled meeting, ser,” the mercenary replied.

“Just enough time for Milani to make sure they are who they say they are.” Kira chuckled. “Does Em Koch know?”

Jess Koch was Kira’s steward: a chef, bodyguard and administrator originally trained to enter the service of the Queen of Redward, the mercenary fleet’s current home port. She ran Kira’s life with a level of efficiency Kira wouldn’t have thought possible.

“Of course,” the mercenary confirmed.

Kira gave them a nod of thanks and turned to watch as Bueller emerged behind her. The stress of the last couple of years had carved away any of the chubbiness to her partner’s body, leaving behind hard-edged muscle and far too many stress lines.

Neither of them were young—they hadn’t been young when they’d first met, during the last war between Apollo and Brisingr, where he’d been a prisoner of war and she’d been one of his captors—but she had to admit that the heavyset man had a definite look to him.

And she definitely wasn’t biased.

“The First Minister will be here on time,” she told Bueller. “Are you ready for the briefing?”

“I’m not sure why I’m briefing the First Minister on the status of their ships,” her chief engineer said. “But yes, I’m ready.” He chuckled. “I spent two hours yesterday on a videoconference with Buxton’s husband, getting updates.”

“As I understand it, Buxton and Tapadia want an outside perspective on all of the mechanical parts,” Kira pointed out. Batsal Tapadia was the man in charge of the spaceborne construction yards run by Samuels-Tata Technologies, one of the largest industrial concerns in the Samuels System.

He was also First Minister Buxton’s husband, resulting in the First Minister recusing themselves from a lot of decisions around the new nova-capable defense force Samuels was building.

“Well, I can manage that,” Bueller said. “I feel like I spend more time organizing other people’s building programs than acting as engineer for our ships.”

“Well, the only ships of ours currently in Samuels are in the same yards we’re briefing the First Minister on,” she said. “Huntress is due back shortly, but the cruisers are all getting their scratches buffed out.”

“That’s…one description for the hole my old countryfolk put through Deception,” Bueller said. He shook his head. “‘Scratches.’”

 

#

 

First Minister Buxton was one of the largest human beings Kira had ever met. Not the largest, but at over two meters tall, they towered over the petite mercenary Admiral. Even Bueller, who was far from a small man, looked short as he took his seat across from Buxton.

“Admiral, Commander,” Buxton greeted the mercenaries. “I appreciate you making time for me.”

“We are still under contract for several more months,” Kira reminded them. “While that doesn’t necessarily give you complete command of our time, you do have some small priority.”

The First Minister chuckled, glancing aside quickly as Jess Koch emerged from a side door with a tray of drinks. The nervous twitch was new. As someone at least partially responsible for Buxton’s security, Kira approved of their increased attention to potential threats.

She still had to feel a moment of regret, though. Buxton was more practical than some of the other Samuels natives who leaned hard into their pacifism, but they’d never seriously been threatened before.

Koch, though, was a known entity—and that she was serving the drinks herself told Kira that the bodyguard-slash-steward already knew this was a confidential meeting.

“I appreciate it nonetheless,” Buxton told them. “Huntress is due back soon, I understand?”

“Yes.” Kira nodded. “She was making a swing back Rimward after her patrol to pick up some new recruits, but she’s due today or tomorrow.”

“I’ll be glad to see her,” the First Minister admitted. “I know that we are secure here, but we did just flip off the most powerful state in our astrographic region.”

Samuels had maintained the same array of asteroid fortresses and other defenses as any other Rim star system, generally considered impenetrable by a nova-capable force of remotely equivalent technology.

They had not, prior to Colossus getting aggressive, maintained a nova-capable force of their own. That was changing now, but they were still understrength for the commitments they’d taken on.

“We did just receive a new update from Brisingr,” Buxton continued. “With the full withdrawal of Ambassador Schirmer and her staff, our contact is much reduced.”

“You did ban Brisingr ships from the Samuels-Colossus Corridor,” Bueller murmured.

The Corridor was what made the two systems rich—and what made them politically and militarily important. In this region of the Rim, there was a roughly thirty-light-year cube of space where Samuels and Colossus were the only places a ship could stop to refuel and discharge static.

And the farthest a nova-drive ship could go without discharging static was about thirty light-years. To pass through the Corridor and pass between the inner and outer regions of this section of the Rim, a ship had to discharge at either Samuels or Colossus.

Or go around, and add at least two weeks to the trip.

“We did, and so far as we know, no Brisingr civilian ships have challenged that,” Buxton agreed. “I now have formal notice from the Brisingr Diet that they do not recognize our authority to close the Corridor to their shipping, but that’s…pretty toothless.”

“Right up until they use that as justification to force the Corridor with a battle group,” Kira said grimly. “I am much less certain of when the rest of my fleet is going to arrive than of Huntress’s return. And Brisingr has recently promoted themselves to a two-star-system power.”

Those were rare. Very rare. In the entire Rim—the region from about a thousand light-years to about fifteen hundred light-years from Sol—Kira was aware of four.

“Which is, of course, why I want to hear Commander Bueller’s assessment of our repairs and shipbuilding program,” Buxton agreed. He took a glass of water from the tray Koch had delivered, and gestured at Bueller.

“Well?”

The engineer chuckled.

“There’s a few moving parts there, I’ll admit, but let’s take them in turn,” he rumbled. “First up, and most immediately critical, the destroyers.”

The attempt by the Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy to ambush Kira’s mercenaries had ended in the surrender of half a dozen BKN ships to a mixed force of her mercenaries and the Samuels Defense Command.

The joint force had found themselves in possession of two cruisers of ninety-five thousand cubic meters apiece and four destroyers of forty-five thousand cubic meters. There could have been all sorts of arguments over who got what, but Kira had agreed with Buxton that an even split of the cubage was fair—she got the cruisers, and the SDC got the destroyers.

“Two of the D-Twelves had taken relatively light damage and have completed their repairs,” Bueller told Buxton. “As I’m sure Mr. Tapadia told you, they are undergoing trials and training right now.”

The gendered honorific still felt…rough around the edges to Kira. Outside of Samuels, most of the galaxy had long settled on the neutral “Em” for everyone. In Samuels, though, marriage was considered massively important. So, Mister, Missus, and Mix had reemerged in their cultural lexicon, leaving Em for unmarried individuals.

“I was told that, yes,” Buxton agreed. “But I want your assessment, Commander Bueller.”

“The D-Twelves are…” Bueller paused thoughtfully. “They’re decent ships, First Minister. I don’t like the compromises that went into supplying them with heavy guns in single turrets, but that gives them a punch well above what their size would suggest.

“For herding merchants, they’re overkill, but they’ll definitely do the job. The damage on the first pair is pretty light, so Samuels-Tata fixed them first for two reasons: one, to get ships into service faster, and two, to see what a D-Twelve is supposed to look like before someone puts a torpedo into her.”

“But they are appropriate to be reactivated?” Buxton asked. “I am uncomfortable enough with commissioning interstellar warships, Commander Bueller; I do not wish to commission ships that are less safe for our people than possible.”

“The two that are recommissioning are ready,” Bueller confirmed. “The other two…”

He shook his head.

“They are repairable, and I’ve gone back and forth with your people on how best to do so. I think it’s going to take longer than they’re hoping—but we are talking three more months instead of eight weeks. They’re not particularly large ships as Inner-Rim warships go.”

“I believe my husband may have split the difference on the estimates,” Buxton said with a chuckle. “He told me ten weeks. Minimum.”

“For the purposes of the next few weeks, two destroyers backed by Huntress should suffice to maintain the blockade,” Kira told the First Minister. “More hulls will always be better. Even gunships would be helpful right now, though I understand the logic in only building full-scale warships.”

The repairs to the six ex-BKN ships and her own Deception—also an ex-Brisingr ship, though by a longer time period—were occupying every yard Samuels had online and would do so at least until the destroyers were online.

She knew that Bueller was using the repairs to make certain that Samuels-Tata and their partners definitely had the skillsets and toolsets necessary to build ships of their own.

“And will our people be ready to build warships from scratch in ten weeks?” Buxton asked.

The First Minister, it seemed, was also aware of Bueller’s ulterior motive in helping supervise the repairs.

“Yes. Their first pair of destroyers are going to take longer than they think—that’s inevitable and normal. But they have everything they need, I think.”

“Good. And the other pieces of concern?”

“Deception will be back online around the same time as the second pair of D-Twelves,” Bueller said, glancing over at Kira. “Eleven weeks, give or take a week, depending on a few factors.”

Kira’s cruiser had taken some serious hits during the ambush. As the saying went, though, anyone thinking Deception had lost the fight should see the other guys.

“The K-Nineties will be a bit longer,” the engineer continued. “Sixteen to eighteen weeks.” He shrugged. “Basically, the rest of our contract with you, as I understand it.”

They were contracted to guard Samuels for another five months—hopefully with their entire fleet, which was still somewhere in the Outer Rim. Kira had sent the orders for Fortitude and her destroyers to finish up their contract with the Obsidian System months earlier.

Once she had Fortitude, Huntress, all three cruisers and her dozen destroyers… Well, once Kira had her full mercenary fleet around her, then it would be time to start digging into what had happened at Apollo.

“As we promised, your repairs for those ships will be fully paid for by the Ministries,” Buxton assured them. “And Commander Bueller is, I hope, being appropriately compensated for his work with Samuels-Tata?”

“Yes,” Bueller agreed. He wasn’t going to admit he thought he was being overpaid. Kira had made sure of that!

Buxton was about to say something else but paused mid-word as an alert hit the headware implants of all three people in the room.

“Kanchenjunga Fortress is reporting multiple nova emergences on a standard approach,” Kira said swiftly, processing the report faster than the civilian First Minister. “Fourteen ships.”

“Your assessment, Admiral?” Buxton asked.

“I’m waiting for… There it is.” She smiled. “Identity beacons make it Huntress, Fortitude, and our destroyer squadrons. I believe we are activating the price-escalator clause, First Minister.

“The rest of my fleet has arrived.”