Huntress: Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 5 Read online

  HUNTRESS

  SCATTERED STARS: CONVICTION BOOK 5

  GLYNN STEWART

  Huntress © 2022 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2022 Jeff Brown Graphics

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing Inc.

  Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

  CONTENTS

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

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  Chapter 1

  Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart

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  1

  The hardest lesson for any military commander to learn is when to let go.

  For Admiral Kira “Basketball” Demirci, commanding officer, primary shareholder and Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Force mercenary company, it was a lesson she was still only passable at.

  The slightly built blonde woman had lost the coin toss with her second-in-command and largest minority shareholder, Commodore Kavitha Zoric, and the other woman had taken their primary capital ship and all of the destroyers off on the latest contract.

  Someone had to stay in the Redward System to take delivery of Memorial Force’s newest warship, after all, and either of them could command the supercarrier Fortitude to handle an Outer Rim brush war.

  That left her on the flag deck of the cruiser Deception, watching the Redward Royal Fleet go through maneuvers above the fortresses that safeguarded their system. They were a far cry from the converted freighters and undersized cruisers the RRF had commanded when she’d arrived in the system years earlier.

  “Hell of a difference, huh?”

  She glanced over at her companion. Abdullah “Scimitar” Colombera was one of the few survivors of the original squadron she’d fled her home system with. They’d served in the Apollo System Defense Force’s 303 Nova Combat Group during the war against their homeworld’s enemies in Brisingr.

  Their government had then sold them out to Brisingr as a secret condition of the deal that had ended that war, so they’d wound up out here. Redward was part of the Syntactic Cluster at the edge of the Rim, almost fifteen hundred light-years from Sol and over two hundred from Apollo.

  “They’re starting to look like a modern fleet now,” she told Colombera.

  There were three proper modern capital ships out there anchoring the whole fleet. Each was one hundred and twenty thousand cubic meters, partially designed by Kira’s boyfriend Konrad Bueller, and they were the largest warships ever built in the Syntactic Cluster.

  They fell short of the ships that had fought Apollo’s war in several areas—but size wasn’t one of them. Eventually, Kira had been promised a sister to the carrier Royal Shield, but that wasn’t the ship she was in Redward to take possession of.

  “They are a modern fleet now,” Colombera replied, then snorted. “For the Rim, anyway. Go five hundred light-years Coreward…”

  “And everything changes,” Kira agreed. The zone from a thousand light-years away from Sol to fifteen hundred light-years away was the Rim. Still considered part of “civilized space” and mapped by the major astrography corporations, even her home system only counted as a seventh-rate power in the overall galaxy.

  Redward had dragged itself and its partners kicking and screaming to eighth-rate status—and for all of the battles Kira Demirci had fought on their behalf, most of the help they’d received making that transition had actually been from her boyfriend.

  She’d originally met the now-ex-Brisingr engineer when he’d been a POW during the war. The universe moved in strange ways, and they’d met in the Syntactic Cluster again long after that war was done.

  “Are they still pissed at us over the fighters?” Colombera asked, watching as a wing of nova fighters blinked out of existence on the sensors. It would be a minute or two before Deception’s scanners would locate the starfighters again. Most likely they’d only jumped a light-minute or so, but the scanners were still limited by the speed of light.

  “Some of them are,” Kira agreed, but she was smiling as she said it. “Helmet thinks it’s fair play, though, and he’s the only one whose opinion matters on that point. They screwed us on the new carrier, so we kept the new fighter designs we acquired.”

  The fighters in Deception’s hangars were more advanced than the ones she’d brought to Redward when she’d arrived. Redward’s fighters were based on those Hoplite-IVs and contemporary planes.

  Deception’s squadrons now flew fighters based on the designs Memorial Force had acquired from the Navy of the Royal Crest when they’d procured Fortitude. If the RRF had prioritized building the full one-twenty-kilocubic carrier the way Kira felt they’d promised, she’d have sold them the designs.

  As it was, the Crown Zharang of the Crest, the person who’d hired them to steal Fortitude from their own fleet as part of a complex coup against the totalitarian government of their country, had asked Kira not to. And she’d been feeling far more generous to the Zharang than to Redward.

  “Are your fighters ready?” Kira asked Colombera. The younger Apollon wasn’t part of Deception’s crew, after all. Like many of the Memorial Force officers currently living on Deception and Redward’s Green Ward asteroid battle station, he’d been handpicked to take up a more senior role on their new ship.

  “Seventy-two planes, with pilots, munitions, the works,” Colombera confirmed. “Though I think some of Helmet’s people are eyeing my planes a little too closely.”

  Admiral Teige “Helmet” Sagairt had skipped a few grades to reach his current rank, entirely by virtue of being the senior nova-fighter pilot in the entire RRF. He was now the commanding officer of the RRF Nova Fighter Corps and directly reported to the senior commanders of the system’s military…including His Majesty, King Larry.

  He might understand why Kira hadn’t sold him the designs for the ships she built for her own use, but with twelve squadrons of those planes currently in an expensive private hangar on a semi-civilian station above his homeworld…she’d have been shocked if he didn’t have people taking pictures and other scans.

  “He wouldn’t be doing his job if they weren’t,” she conceded. “And we wouldn’t be doing our job if we made it too easy. We made some promises with regards to those planes, after all.”

  “We’re doing what we can,” Colombera agreed. “But the RRF does own Green Ward. Even if we’re renting hangars in the civilian sections to store the fighters.”

  He shook his head.

  “How long?” he finally asked.

  “Davidović is already aboard,” Kira told him. “Plus about thirty or forty chiefs and techs, plus Bueller. I expect to hear from them tomorrow with a go/no-go on the final commissioning date.”

  “I knew that,” Scimitar replied. “I lent her the best people I have.” He sighed theatrically. “Though I’ll point out that we ran this Cluster dry of people who know which end of a star fighter the guns fire from a long time ago.”

  There had been less than twenty nova fighters in the Syntactic Cluster when Kira and her friends had arrived. They weren’t solely responsible for Redward’s sudden explosion in starfighter capability—that had taken unintentional assistance from several old enemies—but they’d certainly helped nurture it.

  But there were very few people in the six habitable systems of the Cluster who Kira would trust to maintain a nova fighter—and most of them already worked for either the Redward Royal Fleet or Kira Demirci herself.

  “We’ve been training techs almost as hard and fast as we’ve been training pilots,” Kira reminded him. “And techs have a lower casualty rate.”

  That rate wasn’t zero. The RRF had lost enough capital ships with their tech crews aboard over the last few years to prevent that—but they’d also lost over half of their existing pilot base when they’d finally kicked the inner-world meddlers of the Equilibrium Institute out of the Cluster.

  “But we expect to have the new ship clear
ed for duty by the end of the week, with a formal commissioning party once we have everyone aboard,” she noted. “My understanding is that Their Majesties are planning on making it a big deal at their expense, so I can all but guarantee the Redward side of things will run smoothly.”

  Her old subordinate chuckled. “No one wants to disappoint them, that’s true. So, two weeks?”

  “About that,” she confirmed.

  “And when do we get to start using the name?” Colombera asked. “CVL-Four is a bit…bland. Almost Brisingrian.”

  Deception was a Brisingr-built heavy cruiser and had delighted in the name K79-L in their service. The Brisingr Kaiserreich Navy, Kira’s old enemies, didn’t believe in ship names as a rule.

  “Redward tradition is that it’s bad luck to name a ship before she’s finally commissioned,” Kira told him. “So, when we take full possession and turn the lights on, we start calling her by name. Until then, she’s just the hull number.”

  Even if everybody knew that Redward’s fourth light carrier was going to be Huntress.

  2

  Kira was in her office when her headware informed her that Konrad Bueller had returned aboard Deception. The ubiquitous neural implants of modern humanity, in her experience, allowed people to make human mistakes faster and without the excuse of misremembered data.

  They also acted as communicators and allowed her to keep working through the seemingly infinite datawork of running a mercenary organization that operated eight—soon to be nine—major nova warships until her boyfriend returned.

  And to still make it to their shared quarters at the same time as he did to allow them to share dinner. It was a small luxury, one that she reveled in when they could make it work, and she grinned at her steward as she stepped into the room to find the young woman laying out the plates.

  “I see we are becoming predictable, Jess,” she told Jess Koch, the personal keeper she’d finally hired when the addition of Fortitude and three more destroyers to the fleet had finally overwhelmed any excuse she had of being able to take care of herself!

  “I figure it won’t last,” Koch replied. “Commander Bueller will be here in about two minutes, though, and dinner is ready. Enjoy!”

  One of the things that Kira adored about Koch was that the woman had an extremely solid sense of when to let the principals have time to themselves—hardly a surprise, given that she’d been recommended by Queen Sonia of Redward herself.

  Jess Koch was an exceptionally well-trained bodyguard as well as a professional chef and administrator. Kira wasn’t entirely clear on why she’d entered Kira’s service after completing all the training to enter the Queen’s…but she wasn’t complaining.

  Konrad Bueller stepped through the door almost exactly two minutes after Koch disappeared, the big engineer’s face lighting up with a brilliant smile at the sight of dinner and Kira.

  Probably not in that order, she admitted.

  “Ah, my dear,” he said. “I see you once again have escaped the computers at exactly the right moment.”

  “It’s like we plan this or something,” Kira said drily. “Eat, Konrad, then tell me how our ship is doing!”

  He laughed, but he joined her in digging into Koch’s excellent food. After a few minutes, they both leaned back and sipped their drinks. Here, at least, they were safe enough to drink wine.

  It wasn’t like anyone was going to try to attack Redward. Nova drives could only carry so much cubage with them, which strictly limited the size of nova ships. Sublight monitors and asteroid fortresses had no such limitations, which more than balanced out the nova vessels’ greater maneuverability.

  “CVL-Four,” Konrad murmured, making a tossing gesture as he linked their headwares and created a virtual image of the carrier between them, “is doing just fine.”

  Kira could recognize the flattened box of their new carrier in her sleep at this point. She’d been staring at images of the Bastion-class carriers for eighteen months, after all. Redward had built three of them for the RRF and one for Memorial Force.

  The ship was a hundred and ten meters long, twenty meters thick, and a tad under thirty-five meters wide. There were two heavy plasma-cannon turrets mounted on top of the hull and a second pair mounted on the bottom, but her main armament was the heavily armored hatches at the bow and stern—or, at least, the seventy-five nova fighters on the flight deck those hatches covered.

  Less visible were the ship’s eighteen lighter anti-fighter turrets, spaced along her two thinner surfaces. She was designed to carry her own fighters into action and defend herself against enemy fighters, not tangle with enemy capital ships on her own.

  Redward had two Baron-class cruisers for every Bastion-class carrier they’d built and was following a similar ratio for the battlecruisers and fleet carriers. Their carriers weren’t designed to operate alone.

  Kira had her own opinions on that matter and generally preferred Fortitude’s design—the big supercarrier had almost as many heavy plasma cannon as Deception and could operate independently if needed.

  “Any concerns in the testing?” she asked. “Marija is still sending everyone off the ship at the end of the night, so…”

  “An abundance of caution, nothing else,” Bueller told her. “She still thinks like regular Navy—it’s a flaw we suffer from as a mercenary organization, I suspect.”

  Marija Davidović, designated to become CVL-4’s new Captain shortly, had been an RRF officer seconded to Memorial Force at one point. The trip into the Mid Rim to pick up Fortitude had awakened a degree of wanderlust the woman hadn’t realized she had, and she’d transferred permanently.

  Now Kira was giving the woman the carrier command she wouldn’t have earned in the RRF for another few years—because Davidović could do the job. Everyone benefited.

  “We’re all a bit too former-military, sometimes,” Kira conceded. “Even you.”

  “I wasn’t exempting myself from the assessment, no,” Bueller agreed. “But I’ve gone over CVL-Four’s systems from stem to stern. She’s up to speed and up to snuff.” He shrugged and smiled.

  “I’ll be back over there tomorrow, helping Davidović run the tests and exercises, though,” he continued. “Just because the hardware looks good doesn’t mean it will all work well.

  “That said, I’d make sure you have your dress uniform laid out for the Queen’s party. The ship won’t be delaying it!”

  Kira chuckled.

  “I’m not sure even the shipbuilders in this system want to disappoint Queen Sonia,” she observed. “I certainly don’t!”

  She wouldn’t go so far as to call the Queen of Redward a friend, but Sonia made a point of mentoring a lot of the women and enbies around her. The Queen had found Kira an asset of value in her schemes and maneuvering—and she’d made being so quite lucrative for Kira in turn.

  “There are many terrifying women in my life I would choose not to disappoint,” her lover pointed out with a chuckle. “I’m still not entirely sure why you are here and Kavitha is with Fortitude.

  “The last time we let you get bored, after all, you took a set of destroyers out on anti-piracy patrol.”

  Kira shook her head at him.

  “I am getting older and more mature; I’ll have you know,” she insisted. “But…well, we flipped a coin and I lost. One of us had to go to Obsidian. One of us had to stay here with Deception and commission CVL-Four.”

  “Lucky Kavitha,” Bueller noted, then smiled broadly. “Lucky me, too.”