Under Siege, page 22
“I’ve got to go get a few things set up,” Christine said. “I’ll still be back in time for dinner, but I might be a little late. I’ll tell some of your stewards what we have in mind and let them get the biggest compartment rigged up for an after-dinner wedding.”
And with that, Christine ran off to begin setting things up.
Amanda slid over to stand next to Derek. “If you don’t want to do this tonight, we don’t have to,” she said softly. “It started off as me yanking your chain, but I kind of would like to get married sooner rather than later. Even so, we’ll only do this when we’re both ready.”
“I am ready,” he said back equally quietly. “You make me happier than I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m ready to move on to the next step. It’s happening quickly, but it feels right. The two of us are good together, and while I hadn’t planned on having the wedding before we’d finished the Novarites, I’m fine with it being tonight. More than fine. Being your husband would make me very happy.”
“And being your wife will be a lot of fun. I love you, Derek.”
“I love you, too.”
She kissed him soundly on his lips and then stepped back. Even as she did, she saw the large hatch at the other end of the compartment slide open and the first of the kingdom cutters make its appearance. Their guests had arrived, and it was time to begin the diplomatic dinner that might set the tone for how the Confederation and the Kingdom of Kastelara got along with one another in the future.
Amanda hoped it would be a peaceful relationship, but the tempestuous nature of the kingdom couldn’t be ignored. They were a bit volatile, and this was the time to make the right kind of impression on them before they did something that couldn’t be walked back. That was where her attention needed to be, and she steeled her mind to be laser-focused on helping the admiral keep the peace and turn these others into allies rather than enemies. No matter how much it might want to wander to more pleasant subjects.
24
Lisa stood near Admiral Romanoff as their guests began accumulating in the small craft bay. There were a lot of them. Just like when Field Marshall Strange arrived the first time, all of them looked around like tourists trying to take everything in. There were plenty of introductions, but Lisa didn’t even try to remember the names. There were far too many people for that.
What stuck out for her was the fact that she was introduced to a mixture of captains and executive officers. They had different titles, but those were the positions they held. That wouldn’t have been unusual except for the fact that they weren’t from the same ships.
Her guess was that roughly half the captains had remained aboard their vessels and sent their first officers in their places. She supposed that made sense, as one wouldn’t want to put all their eggs in one basket. A decapitating blow would be far too easy that way.
She wondered if there was some kind of parallel between which captains had stayed aboard their ships and which ones had been sending signals back and forth to one another. Probably not, but if there was, that would undoubtedly mean something, even if she didn’t know what it was.
Admiral Romanoff, Sara Nastasi, Derek Calvo, and Amanda Harris had been joined by the department heads. Most of them looked polished, but Kelly Danek had a stain of some kind right above her left eye. The area around it looked red, as though someone had attempted to scrub it off and failed.
By the time everyone had gathered and were starting the jaunt toward the admiral’s dining room, Christine Hooghuis had joined the group, slowing to a walk beside Lisa while she tried to catch her breath. “Did I miss anything?”
“How could you possibly miss anything?” Lisa asked. “You’ve got drones circling around us, and I know you’re using the ship’s internal cameras to record everything.”
“The drones were only circling around you in the landing bay. It would be weird for them to follow you down the corridors. Once everybody’s in place, I’ll call them in and set them loose inside the dining room. I’ll try to be low-key because I don’t want everybody being paranoid about them.”
“You might even get away with that,” Lisa said. “Where were you off to?”
“Talking with Jack’s stewards so they could get something set up for after dinner. We’ll be having a special ceremony.”
“Oh? What kind?”
Christine grinned. “Derek and Amanda are getting married. I haven’t gotten all the details yet, but I think this was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I suppose it’s possible by the time dinner is over that one of them will have gotten cold feet, but it’s best to be prepared just in case.”
Lisa thought about that and shook her head. “Young people, always rushing into things.”
Christine raised an eyebrow. “They’re not that much younger than we are.”
“A decade can make a lot of difference. For example, you don’t see me running off to get married.”
“True, but the most likely candidate to be your husband isn’t even the cluster right now.”
That made Lisa roll her eyes. “I am not in a romantic entanglement with Patrick. Believe me, I’m not exactly sure what we’ve got going, but it’s… complicated.”
“If that’s what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, you go ahead and do that. Those of us on the outside can tell the two of you have this attraction thing going. He’s the man of mystery who can slip in and out of a place without being detected and kill anyone he sets his mind to. You’re the hacker that no computer can stand against. Together you’d make babies that would rule the Confederation with an iron fist holding a baby rattle made of bones.”
Lisa laughed. “If that wasn’t so absurd, I’d be worried. I’m not having babies with anyone. Well, not anytime soon, anyway. Joking aside, I will confess that there is an element of attraction, but I’ve hardly spent any time in the man’s presence. Other than when he kidnapped me, of course. Don’t you think it’s a little hasty to try and shove us into marriage and add in a baby or two?”
“The momma clock never stops ticking,” Christine said piously. “Even with modern medical science, you don’t want to wait too long to have kids. It’s always best to plan ahead.”
“I see. Well, then, what about you and Alan? He’s no spring chicken, and if you want kids, maybe you should be getting married.”
“We have talked about it,” her friend said seriously. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the two of us tied the knot in the next twelve months. Things have been busy, and that’s something I would like to check off the to-do list. Maybe we’ll do it when Jack and Sara get married.”
Now both of Lisa’s eyebrows shot up. “I knew they were a thing, but I didn’t realize it was that serious. What do you know that I don’t? Never mind. I forgot that you spy on everyone with those damned drones. What have you heard?”
“Nothing like that,” Christine said with a grin. “I’m just observant. They’ve taken their relationship to the next level, and I’d imagine it won’t be that long before they decide it’s the right time for them to get married. Him being the captain of this ship, he’d have to get someone else to marry them, but I’d bet Admiral Toth would be willing.”
Lisa shook her head. “If those two get married, it’s sure to be a more traditional setting. Amanda and Derek are almost in an elopement, if you know what I mean. Jack and Sara will have it done up right. If they didn’t, I feel confident that President Ibarra would have a conniption. That’s got to be like a state celebration or something. Everybody and their third cousin would be there, and it would be the social event of the invasion.”
“While you’re probably right, there’s still an outside chance they’ll slide off somewhere and have some judge do it in the middle of the night. Neither one of them wants the spotlight, and I can definitely see them trying to dodge that bullet.”
“It won’t do them any good. Even I know that. If they were silly enough to get married in secret, President Ibarra would simply force them to have a public ceremony, and then they’d have to go through it all again. You know, you might want to have a conversation with Sara about this because it takes time to get a bride the right kind of dress. Speaking of that, what is Amanda wearing?”
“They’ll both be wearing their uniforms,” Christine said as they followed the larger group into the admiral’s dining room. “Apparently, that’s formal enough.”
“I can see Jack and Sara trying to get away with that, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to. It still wouldn’t hurt to talk with her and see what she wants. Maybe she doesn’t want to tie the knot while she’s in uniform. If that’s the case, we’ll need to get things started in earnest once we get back to Argent.”
The stewards were still getting the rest of the people seated around the long table, and Lisa and Christine stepped off to the side to watch. The documentarian was using her comm unit to summon the drones she’d left in the small craft bay, and Lisa could just imagine the swarm of them heading down the corridor, dodging people on their way to catch up with them.
That had to be close to the truth because it took less than a minute for the drones to arrive and begin slipping up to the ceiling and circling around. They were dark, and they dodged around the lights and stuck to the shadows. Any of the guests who weren’t already aware that they were being recorded would probably miss them.
The stewards had broken it up so that the officers and crew from Hunter were seated at various areas around the ornately carved table and matching chairs. It wouldn’t do to have the conversation dominated by just a few people. Instead, pairs of Confederation personnel were seated at intervals all the way around the table so that the kingdom officers would have someone close at hand to speak with. That made sense, and because Lisa and Christine were the last to be seated from the Confederation group, they were put together near the far end of the table.
That gave them a group of about eight kingdom officers that were close enough to have a conversation with. Introductions were quickly made, and once again, she basically forgot their names almost immediately. If she really needed to know who they were, she’d ask Regex. His memory was much better than hers when it came to things like that.
Once they’d got to know one another well enough to have an idea who each person was and what they did, the two women quickly found themselves peppered with questions about the Confederation. It was obvious that the documentarian had been briefed on what she could and couldn’t talk about because she gently deflected any questions that were about subjects they didn’t want to speak about and adroitly redirected to something she thought was more interesting.
Lisa decided there was a lot she could learn from the other woman about small talk. Christine seemed an expert in chatting with any number of people and just going wherever the flow of the conversation went. She could tell that the kingdom officers were relaxing a bit.
As for herself, she was happy to talk about what she did, though only in the most general of terms. She wasn’t going to admit that she was a former criminal and hacker, and she certainly wouldn’t mention that she now worked for Confederation Intelligence, but there were plenty of civilian parallels that she could easily use as cover.
Thankfully, none of the people around them were computer experts, and while there were a few questions about what she did, they mostly seemed uninterested in the details, so she was able to stick to generalities.
When it came to the war against the Novarites, she was surprised at how easily the officers were convinced to go into greater detail. Apparently, they’d been fighting the large aliens for a very long time—which Lisa knew from everything she’d already read and what Patrick had told her—but she was surprised to hear that the war had been going on for close to three centuries.
She supposed she shouldn’t have been shocked, but she hadn’t put all the pieces together, even though, looking back, she could see how that would be the case. The war had been fully in motion when Patrick had made the trip to the Confederation, so why shouldn’t it have been in progress for a couple of centuries more?
The stewards brought out the first serving, and the meal began. The dishes were all from the Confederation—obviously—and their guests seemed enamored with eating something so different than what they no doubt ate at home. The food was well prepared, and Lisa was more than happy to eat the small serving and wait for the next. If this is what Jack ate on the regular, she was surprised he didn’t weigh a ton. She would, in his place.
They also served wine with dinner, and that was also a big hit with their guests. Lisa found that she was much more relaxed after a glass of wine. She still kept good control over where she let the conversation roam and what she allowed herself to talk about, but it made the process of meeting new people a lot easier.
Christine was in her element. She was telling stories about some of the early parts of the invasion—leaving out the kinds of things that Jack wouldn’t want her to tell—and had her audience fully enraptured.
For her part, Lisa was more than happy to hear about the details of the fighting inside the kingdom against the Novarites and was surprised to pick up on an undercurrent of hostility between the four people she was speaking with and the other officers who were talking with Christine.
It took a few delicate questions to figure out what was going on, but it seemed that the officers Christine was talking to all served the duchy that had only recently joined the war. The four that Lisa were speaking to served the feudal lord that had originally become embroiled with the Novarites.
As she listened to more about the start of the war, she learned an interesting fact. Lisa would’ve expected the Novarites to have been the aggressors, but apparently, the duke that the officers around her served had decided to push himself into a war with them, and that was why he’d been forced to fight them by himself.
There was something going on there, so she made a mental note to tell Jack about it as soon as she could. Whether that would impact what they were trying to do or not was still up in the air, but if he didn’t know there was something going on, he couldn’t make plans to account for it or potentially use it to his advantage if circumstances permitted.
By the time the meal itself was finished and dessert was brought out, she was beyond stuffed. She hoped that there really wasn’t going to be a wedding after dinner because she felt like she needed a nap or three.
She was so caught up in the feeling of stuffed contentment that she almost missed a comment that the man next to her made to his associate. The comment wasn’t whispered, but it wasn’t very loud either. The first man asked the other what he was going to do when he returned to the kingdom. It was a benign question, but the other man’s response was to tell his friend to shut up. Not what she would’ve expected at all, and more than enough to make her take notice.
Lisa listened closely as she took another sip of wine, but the first man had apparently decided to follow his friend’s advice, and they turned their attention back to her and asked questions about the Confederation.
She answered those as well as she could and found a way to slip in a question of her own after about ten minutes, where she asked what the two of them would do when they returned to the kingdom once the Novarites were dealt with.
Both of them said that as serving officers, they didn’t have concrete plans, but they had a lot of money due for the time they’d spent in cold sleep. Their pay kept accumulating even though they weren’t doing anything. She supposed that made sense because they had left friends and family behind who would be dead or ancient by the time they returned. The impact on their lives would be quite serious.
The man who had asked his friend what he planned to do when they returned home smiled at her and said that he thought it was possible that their lord would grant them a knighthood or some other award that brought them into the lowest ranks of the nobility. His friend shot him a withering look and said that that was very unlikely.
Before she could dig into the matter further, Jack stood and tapped a fork against his wine glass. He then offered a toast to the Confederation, and everyone drank. Field Marshal Strange quickly offered a toast to the kingdom, and everyone drank again.
With that accomplished, Jack continued. “I hope you all enjoyed the meal and the company. You’re welcome to return to your ships immediately, but two of my officers are getting married shortly, and if you’d like to attend the ceremony, we would be more than happy to have you join us. There will be cake.”
There was some talking back and forth, but Field Marshal Strange quickly indicated they would attend. With that decided, Jack presented Amanda and Derek as the bride and groom, and everyone clapped while the two of them blushed. It was sweet.
Two stewards whisked the bride and groom away, and everyone else rose to their feet and began heading toward where the ceremony would be conducted. Lisa was a little disappointed that she wouldn’t have more time to try and figure out the undercurrents amongst the kingdom personnel, but there was little she could do about that. Maybe another dinner could be arranged, and she’d find out more. She’d definitely start digging for that information if she had an opportunity.
If it weren’t too risky, she might have been tempted to sneak aboard some of the kingdom cruisers and try to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. The spy ship might’ve had information, but she hadn’t thought to look for that kind of thing, so she hadn’t taken it. It was a lapse on her part, but she’d been in a hurry.
Well, there was no use crying over spilled milk. She’d do the best she could, and the situation would sort itself out. Whatever happened, it probably wasn’t going to be dangerous for her and her friends, and likely not for the kingdom either. After all, the animosity between the two groups had been in place for centuries.
