“That’s what we’re here for, boss,” O’Flannagain agreed with a casual salute. “FighterDiv keeps everyone else breathing.”
Henry forced his incipient grimace into a smile and a nod. Like O’Flannagain, he knew the corollary to that joke: FighterDiv died to keep everyone else breathing.
He’d lost too many friends and subordinates over the war to have forgotten that.
To Henry’s surprise, O’Flannagain waited while everyone else left. A few moments after he’d dismissed the meeting, he was alone in the briefing room with his CAG and arched a questioning eyebrow at the younger woman.
“What trouble are you in this time, Samira?” he asked.
“No trouble,” she told him. “Why do you assume I’m in trouble?”
“Because even though you’ve improved dramatically, you were sent to me as a discipline case,” Henry observed. She’d had one epic drunken disaster before they’d hashed out some of her issues—mostly that crashing after a dogfight left her looking for alcohol or sex, neither of which was safely available to a senior officer on a battlecruiser.
“And I think we both know that Old Man Barrie sent me to you because he figured you’d get what was going on,” O’Flannagain told him. “He certainly did, though the CAG on Scorpius wasn’t as, ah, patient.”
Henry winced.
“Please…do not refer to my ex-husband as ‘old man’ to my face,” he noted stiffly. “I accept that neither of us are spring chickens anymore, but Commodore Barrie is only a year older than I am.”
O’Flannagain snorted.
“Maybe it’s his gold oak leaf, ser, but…you’re a stiff with a stick up your ass, but he’s old.”
Henry raised a warning finger. He’d tolerate quite a bit from O’Flannagain—she was a spectacular pilot and growing into a more-than-competent officer—but there were lines.
“I assume you did not stay behind to remind me about my ex,” he told her. He was reasonably sure that his CAG didn’t know about Yellow Bicycle, either, so she wouldn’t know why Peter Barrie was currently on Henry’s mind.
“What’s up?”
“Todorovich is on her way back?” she asked.
“Yeah. Shaka would have left about six hours after the skip drone.” He shrugged. “They’ll be here in two days.”
“La-Tar might be focused on food production, but they’ve got gardens,” O’Flannagain pointed out. “I’m pretty sure you could find a florist in two days.”
Henry stared at the redheaded woman blankly for a moment.
“And why would I need a florist?” he asked.
O’Flannagain chuckled and took a seat on the briefing room’s table, one leg tucked under her in an awkward-looking fashion.
“I know your type, boss,” she told him. “Takes you a long time to fall, but when you do, you fall hard. And you’ve been falling for the Ambassador at least since Tano.”
“That’s quite the assumption to make,” Henry replied automatically. “The Ambassador isn’t my type.”
His oft-repeated joke sounded false even to him, though. The joke was that no one was his type—he’d been attracted to three people in his entire life. Except…O’Flannagain was correct. Four people.
“She’s been making eyes at you since before that,” the fighter pilot told him. “And she’s not in your chain of command.”
This time, Henry held up a warning hand, and O’Flannagain, thankfully, stopped.
“Might I suggest that matchmaking your captain is generally considered poor form?” he said drily. “I’m twenty years older than you, Commander, I can handle my own relationships.”
O’Flannagain gave him a completely undiscouraged grin.
“But like most men, you can use the occasional brick to the head,” she replied. “To realize what you’re thinking, let alone what she’s thinking.”
“Even coming from FighterDiv, there are days I swear we give you rocket-jocks too long of a leash,” Henry said with a chuckle. “Consider your brick thrown, Commander, and butt out.”
“Wilco,” she said, then paused with a thoughtful look on her face.
“What is it?” Henry asked.
“Rocket-jock,” she echoed back at him. “There’s no rockets on a One-Thirty, Skipper. Some maneuvering jets, but they’re so secondary as to be irrelevant. We’re going to have to come up with a new slang for fighter pilot.”
He shook his head at her and latched on to the change of subject.
“I’ve tried your simulators for the Lancer,” he reminded her. “There’s definitely some rocketing going on, even if we aren’t leaving burnt hydrogen anywhere anymore. If we can reliably get the damn things into space, they’re going to be useful.”
“We’re working on that,” O’Flannagain said. “We’ve got the first squadron in actual service; problems were going to happen.”
“Let’s hope they don’t happen when we have a Kozun battle group charging at us with blood in their eyes,” Henry told her.
Back in his office, Henry caught himself looking to see if there was a florist on the space stations above La-Tar without fully realizing what he was doing.
He had to laugh. He wasn’t entirely sure he bought in to O’Flannagain’s “brick,” but he definitely missed Todorovich. The sharp-edged diplomat had been a valuable partner ever since he’d been tasked with transporting her to the Great Gathering of the Vesheron.
Most of his work since then had been ferrying her around as they tried to hold together the worlds the Kenmiri had abandoned. They’d been in each other’s back pockets the whole time, and he’d grown used to having her to lean on for advice and counsel.
He was pretty sure that feeling was mutual. They had different points of view and skillsets, which meant that she had useful opinions on his missions, and he hoped he had useful insights on hers.
There was a large gap between that and the type of romantic and physical interest that O’Flannagain was suggesting. She’d made jokes about Todorovich being interested in Henry before, but he’d written those off as jokes.
Except.
Except that he was self-aware enough to realize that she was right. It would have taken him longer to realize it on his own, but now he was facing up to it, she was right. At some point, Sylvia Todorovich had slipped over that invisible line in his head from person to attractive person.
That was something that happened rarely enough for Henry that he wasn’t sure how to deal with it even when it wasn’t potentially a giant complication. Sylvia Todorovich might be a civilian and outside his chain of command, but she’d also been his civilian counterpart and his partner for a year now.
He couldn’t risk disrupting the well-oiled machine they’d become. Working together, they’d saved the La-Tar Cluster. Working together, he was certain they could negotiate the peace the Cluster needed to rebuild safely.
So long as they had to work together, trying to make something more of their professional relationship was not only stupid—it was dangerous. Friction between them could end up risking other people’s lives.
And that was unacceptable to Henry Wong. Personal was not the same as important.
Thanks to O’Flannagain, he was aware of the trap his emotions had laid for him now. He could prevent it from causing problems when Todorovich returned aboard Raven…but he wasn’t going to need flowers anytime soon.
Chapter Seventeen
Shaka emerged into the La-Tar System exactly on schedule, leaving Sylvia clenching the arms of the chair in her quarters tightly. Skipping was never pleasant, but for whatever reason, the skip back to La-Tar this time had been even harder than normal.
“Ambassador Todorovich?” Captain Chavez’s voice echoed in her implants. “We have arrived in La-Tar and are on course for the planet. I make our estimated time of arrival eighteen hundred hours GMT.
“Do you know where we’ll be dropping you off yet?”
Six hours to travel six light-minutes was reasonable, even if it left Sylvia feelin
g impatient.
“Let’s plan for First City,” she replied. “I can relay from there to Raven or one of the Cluster ships if needed, but I need to speak with the First Standard and the Arbiter before we do anything else.”
“Understood, Ambassador. I’ll have a shuttle standing by for you and your staff when we reach orbit,” Chavez promised. “Is there anything else you need from us before you arrive?”
“No, thank you, Captain,” she said. “You and your crew have done everything I could desire. I appreciate all you’ve done and hope your crew get a chance to take some R&R in a more normal circumstance soon.”
“If nothing else, Em Ambassador, we’re back in a space where I can run my crew through exercises,” he told her. “I couldn’t justify those while we were with the Convoy.”
“Good to hear, on both counts,” Sylvia replied. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Shaka’s pleasure, Em Ambassador.”
The channel closed and Sylvia regarded the virtual screen her internal network was projecting on her eyes. The screen showed what little data the UPA had on the Lon System, but she wasn’t seeing the blue giant.
She was seeing a mixed-race face, with Chinese angles softened by American chubbiness. She’d missed Henry Wong and not, if she were being honest, just because she could use his advice.
But Sylvia Todorovich was not much of a believer in the “friend zone.” Her attachment to Henry might not be merely platonic, but the man was a worthy friend and that was far more than a consolation prize.
She was looking forward to going through her experiences with the Drifters with him. His insights would be useful, especially since she suspected the Drifters were trying to play more than one game.
There were a lot of layers going on at the peace conference she’d just spent most of a month arranging. The UPA didn’t want to keep a battlecruiser group in the La-Tar Cluster for extended periods, so they wanted to reduce the threat to their ally.
The Cluster wanted peace—but also justice for wrecked ships and murdered innocents. The Kozun had agreed to peace talks more quickly than Sylvia had expected, which suggested that they had their own agenda there. And then there were the Drifters, theoretical neutrals who inevitably had an agenda of their own.
It was going to be a fascinating meeting.
“Welcome to First City, Ambassador Todorovich,” the armed Eerdish soldier greeted Sylvia in Kem. The Eerdish were an Ashall race that looked almost identical to humanity, though their skin tones started at Earth-African black and ranged up to pale green.
The man giving Sylvia a fist-to-chest salute had dark green skin and familiar features as he smiled.
“Trosh,” she greeted him. “How are you doing?”
Trosh had been the noncommissioned officer–equivalent in charge of Rising Principle’s personal security during their extended tour of the La-Tar Cluster.
“I am doing well,” he replied carefully, gesturing to the small squad of soldiers with him. “The Arbiter asked that I meet you at the shuttle pad and see you safely to the meeting.”
The brilliant sunlight at First City was almost painful to Sylvia’s eyes, but she could see several low-slung cars behind Trosh. Like almost every piece of hardware on La-Tar, the cars would have been manufactured off-world.
“My staff and escorts will need to accompany me,” she warned Trosh.
“Of course; we brought enough vehicles for an extra twenty.”
Sylvia laughed.
“That is a few more than needed,” she conceded. “Lead the way, Trosh.”
She was sure the Ashall officer had a rank of some kind, but no one had ever given it to her. The Cluster’s military was still in the process of taking shape as a unified entity, with five different planets’ worth of personnel from seven different species.
It was a chaotic mess she was glad she wasn’t responsible for, but it seemed Trosh had his own team well in hand. The cars moved up and opened in smooth order, allowing Sylvia and her people to board with mixed local and GroundDiv escorts.
“Are there any threats I should be worried about?” she asked Trosh, looking at the scale of the escort.
“We do not know of any, but we cannot risk the Ambassador from the United Planets Alliance,” the noncom told her. “We value both our alliance and you highly.”
“I appreciate that, I think,” Sylvia replied with a chuckle.
La-Tar had minimal local industry and a lot of agriculture, but the administration of a planetwide agriculture system required vast numbers of clerks and bureaucrats and logistics managers and…
First City was one of several metropolises on the planet that existed to support that infrastructure. When the Kenmiri had left, that bureaucracy had turned itself from managing the planet on behalf of their overlords to trying to make sure five worlds stayed fed.
Despite the interruption due to the Kozun, they’d managed it. The estimates Sylvia had seen suggested that the Cluster had lost several million people to hunger—but they could have lost up to ninety percent of the population of the industrial worlds.
There had been a Kenmiri governor, and there was the traditional Kenmiri governor’s palace, which was where Sylvia was expecting to be taken. They drove past that site, however, and she saw that a work crew was busily dismantling the luxurious residence.
Presumably, the underground command bunker would remain intact, but she saw the propaganda virtues of destroying that symbol rather than using it.
Instead, their convoy drove into the central administration district, where a cluster of hundred-story towers held the tens of thousands of workers who had turned their skills from extracting the largest quantity of food from their planet to trying to run a balanced economy across five star systems.
They stopped at a seemingly random tower, and Trosh’s people formed a perimeter to allow Sylvia and her people to access the office building. While there was nothing aggressive or forceful about the perimeter, there were definitely crowds gathering outside it.
Sylvia was halfway into the building when she realized the crowds had gathered to see her, the human diplomat who had helped save their world. She’d spent so long fighting the Kenmiri that she barely registered what she’d done for La-Tar as unusual.
To the crowds carefully gathering to try to get a glimpse of her, she was one of a handful of people responsible for saving their entire planet.
She took a moment to look over the crowd and wave back to them. It was a small gesture, but it seemed to mean something to the La-Tars—and it helped remind her what she was working toward.
The Arbiter’s office was completely barren. A corner office two-thirds of the way up the building, it had probably belonged to a senior Artisan-caste Kenmiri, but the decorations had been stripped down to a desk, a table, and the chairs around each.
The view of the city was enough. First City was small to Sylvia’s eyes—and likely to Casto Ran’s, given the industrial factory-cities he was used to—but it had been built on hills that couldn’t be readily farmed.
Those hills gave it an enviable elevation, and from the tower on the edge of the central cluster, the view stretched out for untold miles of glittering golden fields.
Casto Ran stood next to the glass, looking out at those fields. Two familiar-looking Enteni were perched on stools near the table, and those three were the only occupants of the room.
“Arbiter Casto Ran,” Sylvia greeted the semi-elected leader of the La-Tar Cluster in their shared Kem. “Standard Adamant Will. Rising Principle.”
She wasn’t sure what title Adamant Will’s child would currently command, though their presence suggested they’d be the Cluster’s representative at the peace conference.
“Thank you for coming, Ambassador,” Ran told her, still looking out at the fields. “We received the update from your skip drone. The Kozun have agreed to meet with us.”
It wasn’t a question, but Sylvia nodded anyway.
“They have. More quickly than I
expected,” she said. “They may need peace themselves, more than we anticipated.”
“If they have-will aggravate all the worlds around them, then they must-will make peace or fate-time will see their ending,” Adamant Will replied. “The news we receive is-was of war all around them.”
“The Kozun made no friends in their expansion,” Ran agreed. “They may well see us as the one conflict they have an opportunity to end before they lose too much while they are challenged on other fronts. We may be able to exert more pressure than we hoped.”
“The opportunity to make alliances and push them back exists,” Sylvia said. “The UPA has no interest in a war of that magnitude, and our commitments to the Cluster are entirely defensive, but I would be remiss as an ally to not point that opportunity out.”
“We can-will not be the agents of fate-time death on that scale,” Adamant Will told her. “Our children must-will cry for peace.”
“Almost as importantly, dragging the Cluster into an extended war would be an obstacle to establishing proper long-term governance,” Ran said, finally turning around and joining the two Enteni at the table.
“The mandate I wield is one I was given by the various leaderships of our worlds, but none of those leaderships are the unquestioned voices of their people,” he noted. “I am designated to arbitrate conflicts between worlds, not decide the fates of all of our worlds at once.
“If the Cluster is to wage war, that decision should belong to a government that is truly chosen by and speaks for the entire population. I lack the moral authority to commit our worlds to a conflict that is not solely in our defense.”
“The United Planets Alliance is fully committed to assist in the security of the La-Tar Cluster,” Sylvia reiterated. “We acted as your agent to arrange this conference, but this is a conference between you and the Hierarchy. The UPA is…more than an observer, but we are not at war with the Kozun.”
“I am not certain the Kozun must-will see these fate-times the same,” Rising Principle noted, the younger Enteni sounding amused even through the translator.
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