Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Read online

  “Pause, shut down,” a voice said clearly before the hologram could respond to whatever the computer dredged up. “Main door, lock.”

  The hologram blinked out and Kira heard a small click in the door. Half-unconsciously, her hand slipped inside the jacket as she turned to face the man who’d entered the room.

  He was old, easily into his second century, with pure white hair and visible liver spots across his face. The man’s suit was a long-tailed white outfit that had been in fashion in Apollo twenty years before but might be cutting edge here.

  “I am Priapus Simoneit,” the old man told her with a small sad smile. “If you are here alone, I am guessing that Jay is no longer with us?”

  “That’s a leap, I think, Em Simoneit,” Kira said slowly.

  “Please, Em Demirci, I know who you are,” he replied. “Jay and I corresponded over the years, and there’s a reason he trusted me with this affair. He did not expect you to leave Apollo until you either had no choice or he was dead—and he rather expected those two things to coincide.”

  Simoneit shook his head.

  “Come into my office, Em Demirci,” he continued. “I know some of what Jay set in motion, but I doubt he trusted it all to interstellar mail. I have resources he put in place for you, but I don’t know what his plans for them or you are.”

  Kira was more than a bit taken back. She’d known the lawyer was supposed to be her first point of contact and was holding funds in escrow for her, but she hadn’t expected the man to know Colonel Moranis.

  “How did you know the Colonel?” she asked as she entered the office. It was almost painfully stereotypical. Wooden paneling—probably fake, but who could tell?—covered the walls and anchored wooden bookshelves. Some of those bookshelves were the usual holographic database interface, but several of them appeared to contain real books.

  “I never knew him as a Colonel,” Simoneit told her. “He and I met shortly after Cobra Squadron dissolved. We ended up on the same transport heading out to the Periphery and became good friends. We ran a ship together for some years before he met his husband in Apollo and settled down.”

  The lawyer shrugged.

  “He stayed in Apollo, even after Carl passed. I kept going farther towards the edge of known space until the ship broke down here and I hired my now-wife to repair it. Somehow, I just never left after that.”

  “Colonel Moranis told me that you’d be my contact here,” Kira told Simoneit. “He didn’t tell me that he knew you.”

  “That was likely to protect us both,” the lawyer said. “Given all that I have heard happened in Apollo, would you disagree?”

  Kira winced but had to shake her head.

  “When I left, eleven of the Three-Oh-Three’s pilots were dead,” she said quietly. “I think Moranis died of natural causes. Eight of the others are, at least officially, accidents. Two were definitely murdered and someone shot at me before I managed to disappear.”

  “Moranis knew he was dying when he sent me his last message,” Simoneit replied, his voice equally soft. “But he set into motion the safety valve, the escape plan for you and your people. Most of what he sent me was money without much instruction. It’s not enough to set up lifetime pensions for you and your people, but it would cover you for a while as you all get set up.”

  “What to do with it is a question for another day, I suppose,” Kira told him. “What I need right now, Em Simoneit, is a specialty storage facility here on Blueward. Ten thousand cubics, high security—and either no questions asked of me or no questions answered for anyone else. Absolute confidentiality.”

  The lawyer considered.

  “I can manage that,” he confirmed. “There are several ways, but the one that’s going to cost us the least is if my firm puts up a bond that says we know what’s in the storage and it is no threat to Redward or the owners of the storage. That, of course, would require me to know what we’re storing.”

  “I need that storage by end of day today,”

  “The only way that’s happening is if the firm puts up a bond,” Simoneit admitted. “So…what did you bring, Em Demirci?”

  “Six Hoplite-IV nova interceptors,” Kira said flatly. “I need them safely stowed until I either have somewhere else to put them or the people to fly them.”

  The lawyer was very still for several seconds before he finally, slowly, nodded.

  “I assume you have no intention of waging war against Redward or you wouldn’t be here,” he noted calmly.

  “If my main plan falls through, I’ll probably end up looking to work for Redward,” Kira admitted.

  “I am familiar with the legal structures involved in mercenary nova fighter squadrons,” Simoneit reminded her. “If that is your plan, I can help you set it up. The Syntactic Cluster doesn’t have many such, but that would only increase the demand for your services.”

  “It’s a backup plan,” she told him. “For now, I need that storage set up so I can tell the freighter that currently has my fighters where to put them. After that, we can have another conversation about what I’m doing next.”

  “Of course,” Simoneit confirmed. “I’ll need to make some calls. You can wait here if you’d like, but there’s also a nice breakfast place at the corner of the section. By the time you’ve eaten, I should have everything you need for the storage unit.”

  Her stomach growled in a reminder that she hadn’t eaten before leaving Future.

  “Can I leave my luggage here?” she asked.

  “Of course; the office is quite secure,” he told her. He paused, studying her. “May I also suggest, Em Demirci, that you leave the blaster behind? Redward is generally quite liberal about firearms, but Blueward Station does heavily restrict blasters on the orbital.”

  She was relatively sure that the lawyer had never seen even a hint of the gun—but the man was also over a hundred years old and had apparently been a tramp freighter captain.

  “Fair. What can I carry?” she asked pointedly.

  3

  It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that the restaurant Simoneit recommended was good. A chunk of its menu was unfamiliar to Kira, but she’d visited eleven different star systems in the Three-Oh-Three and six more on her voyage with Hopeful Future.

  Redward was the twentieth star system she’d gone looking for breakfast in, and it didn’t break the pattern of every breakfast diner having “two eggs over easy with toast” as an option. Someday, Kira would meet a diner that didn’t have it.

  That day, she’d actually have to think about what to eat for breakfast. Today was not that day.

  She returned to Simoneit’s office an hour after she left. This time, the hologram had been updated on who she was and turned a bright smile on her.

  “Em Demirci, Em Simoneit is finalizing details on the matter you discussed,” the digital woman told her. “He will be ready in a few minutes. May I get you a coffee?”

  “Please.”

  The hologram didn’t move. The coffee machine was perfectly capable of selecting and brewing a coffee on its own, sliding a cup out onto a saucer for her a minute later.

  She hadn’t been asked or given a coffee preference, but she was unsurprised to see it was pretty close. Spacers in general were notorious for their taste in coffee, and Kira was no exception.

  The coffee was black and strong. That was all she needed. That it was also astonishingly good was a nice bonus.

  “Where’s the coffee from?” she asked the hologram.

  “Our machine is supplied by Blueward’s Finest Coffee Company,” the hologram told her instantly, the required advertising spiel probably provided by the company. “It is currently stocked with Astonishing Orange, a variety of beans grown at particular farms on Redward’s South Tangerine continent.

  “I can give you contact information for Blueward’s Finest or a data file on Astonishing Orange if you’d like?”

  “That’s fine, thank you,” Kira said. The artificial stupid was exactly what the name
implied. She’d known what she was getting when she asked the question, but she definitely didn’t need more information on the coffee than that.

  “Redward grows several surprisingly impressive varieties of coffee,” Simoneit told her from the door. “They built their trade empire on coffee first, after all.”

  He gestured for her to step into his office.

  “Come in. I think I have your storage sorted out.”

  Kira followed the lawyer back into his wood-paneled office and took her seat again, the coffee in her hand.

  “Here.” He tossed a digital file across the room, their headwares connecting for a moment to transfer the data. “You have a storage bay at one of Blueward Station’s top-tier secured cargo bays, run by a group named Transition Storage. They’re expecting ten thousand cubics of containers by end of day.”

  “I’ll forward that to Future,” she told him. That was only matter of moments. There were several queries in the station information network around the cargo, but Roland knew he was waiting on her to get set up, and her response had literally only needed an address.

  Grabbing a query from the net and sending the response back was a matter of a few seconds’ thought and a hand gesture through an interface no one else could see.

  “Now that’s handled, I suppose I should find out just what the Colonel sent on ahead for us,” Kira told Simoneit. “Do you have time for me this morning?”

  “Fortunately, this morning was scheduled for a long meeting with an old friend of mine,” Simoneit told her. “He and I will complete his business over dinner tonight, and I have this morning free for you.”

  He smiled, only half-humorously.

  “My fee for that isn’t insignificant, but you are the executor of the funds Jay Moranis ‘sent on ahead.’ You can afford it.”

  “Good to know,” Kira told him. “How large of a fund is that?”

  He gave a number and she winced.

  “I probably don’t want to know where that came from,” she admitted. Her own stockpile amounted to roughly the annual operating budget of the 303, and she’d been concerned enough when Moranis had put that in her care.

  That had apparently only been a third of the money that her old mentor had sent on ahead.

  “Jay also had his own emergency retreat plan set up out here,” the lawyer told her. “It was a far smaller-scale thing, but his instructions to me are clear: you’re the executor for the funds for the Three-Oh-Three’s survivors.

  “You are his heir for the personal funds.” Simoneit gestured a picture of an apartment building and what looked like a balance sheet into the air for her. “There’s an apartment in Redward’s capital city that a service takes care of and about ten million kroner in Redward currency.”

  He paused.

  “Kroner convert to new drachmae at about two to one,” he noted thoughtfully. “The reserve produces enough revenue on an annual basis to cover inflation and the apartment. If you were to live solely on those funds, you would most likely dip into the capital on an ongoing basis.”

  Five million new drachmae was around twenty years of Kira’s salary as a ASDF Major. She could live on that for a while, though she did have another century or so of life expectancy left.

  It was also only about a fifth of the reserve Moranis had set up out there for her and the rest of the 303. The old man had apparently had a lot more money to throw around than Kira had ever realized.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” she admitted. “The money I knew about was supposed to be seed capital for our operating as mercenaries out here, putting our skills to use. There’s a lot of support personnel that go into operating nova fighters. If we go with the backup plan, we’re hiring all of that locally and acquiring a ship.”

  The ship alone would probably wipe out most of that seed capital. Nova fighters were nova-capable—it was in the name—but their FTL systems were optimized for short jumps. For interstellar trips, they were slower and shorter-ranged than a proper class one nova drive.

  She knew how she’d convert a decent-sized freighter into a pocket carrier, but she wasn’t sure how many thirty- to forty-thousand-cubic-meter ships were available out there.

  “You’ve mentioned that as a backup plan before,” Simoneit noted. “I have no idea what kind of ship you’d need for that—I can help you out with arranging financing for it, but it won’t be easy to acquire.”

  “A forty-thousand-cubic-meter nova freighter,” Kira replied instantly. “Preferably one already designed for deep-space cargo transfer; those systems are more easily retrofitted. We could probably refit a thirty-thousand-cubic bulk ship for our needs, but it would be a lot harder.”

  The lawyer chuckled.

  “Redward probably has the most efficient class one nova drive designs in the Cluster,” he noted. “But even they are running forty-thousand-cubics as their premium product. This isn’t the Core, or even Apollo.”

  “We’re a long damn way from the Core,” she agreed. Every colony ship sent out had roughly the same basic fabricator database. Given an iron deposit and salt water, they could set up to build antigrav systems, Harrington coils and class one nova drives inside twenty years.

  The standard class one drive was a thousand-cubic-meter unit that could take ten times its own volume into a nova jump with a maximum range of six light-years. Bigger ships required bigger nova drives or more efficient ones that carried greater ratios.

  Apollo’s top-tier class ones had been five-thousand-cubic-meter units that took twenty-five times their own volume into a nova—but she was a long way from Apollo.

  “I’d have to do some research, but I am absolutely certain that the fund that Moranis set up wouldn’t cover the cash purchase of your best-case ship,” Simoneit told her. “I might be able to swing financing, but given the refits needed…”

  He shrugged.

  “Add in crew costs and operating costs, and I’m not certain we could convince the banks that your mercenary company would be a good investment,” he admitted. “Not without a record out here, anyway.”

  “That’s about what I figured,” she agreed. “It’s a backup plan and not a terrible one, but Jay sent me out here to meet someone. We keep the funds set up for the Three-Oh-Three carefully concealed to make sure our people are taken care of, but my first plan is to sign on with an old friend of the Colonel’s.”

  The lawyer studied her for a moment.

  “There’s only one possible person out here you could be talking about,” he said quietly. “Conviction.”

  “Captain John Estanza,” Kira confirmed.

  Captain John Estanza was the commander of the most famous mercenary ship in the Syntactic Cluster. Few even in Apollo would have heard of him, but he commanded the escort carrier Conviction and her wing of mercenary nova fighters.

  Exactly the type of people that Kira had come out here to become. Except that Conviction was a proper warship, built to carry sixty nova fighters in battle. Of course, she was utterly obsolete even by Apollo standards, let alone the fourth-rate power that Kira knew had built her, but out there…

  “I didn’t know Estanza and Moranis knew each other,” Simoneit told her. “Though I’ve never even met Estanza. I’m not sure I could even get you an appointment with him. My connections don’t run in that direction.”

  “The Colonel left me instructions on making contact with Estanza,” Kira said. “And it’s not like Conviction is here right now. I’m not fully into the station net yet, but even Hopeful Future would have picked her up in the system.”

  “It’ll be all over the news when she gets in,” the lawyer replied. “Conviction is quite famous here—and equally unpopular with our politicians. She shipped out ten days ago. I don’t know what her mission is, but there’s not much in the Cluster that could see her gone for more than two weeks.”

  The entire Syntactic Cluster was only about forty light-years across. It was a globular group of stars with thirteen habitable planets, all colonized bet
ween two hundred and two hundred and fifty years earlier.

  The Cluster was a tenth-rate sector with a single ninth-rate power in Redward. But any nova ship could cross the entire sector in two weeks with only one stop to discharge static buildup.

  There were a few places Conviction could have gone that would take her more than fourteen days for a return trip, but not many. Redward was central to the Cluster. Most ships would make that static discharge stop at the system’s gas giant.

  “I’ll find a hotel room for a few days and keep in touch,” Kira told Simoneit. “Can I trust you to handle folding the cash I carried into the main fund?”

  “Of course,” the lawyer replied. “I’m on retainer for the fund, Em Demirci. Until you run out of money, I am yours to command.”

  The codicil there wasn’t entirely heartwarming, but Jay Moranis had trusted the man.

  That was enough for Kira. Not that she had a choice.

  4

  Blueward Station wasn’t the main anchorage for the Redward Royal Fleet. There was a small military section at the Station, but the docks that Kira was looking at had clearly been designed to host four of the ten-thousand-cubic-meter gunships that were ubiquitous in human space.

  Instead, the RRF had rededicated the four docking arrays to handle a much larger ship. The imagery she was playing in her headware came from the main planetary news network, and the final arrangement just looked awkward.

  The locals might not know how atrocious the connections Blueward Station had with Conviction were. Kira suspected that Conviction’s crew did, but that was probably the nature of mercenary work.

  Instead of the ship being nestled against the station in a hard lock, flimsy-looking umbilicals had been extended from the ports intended for the smaller ships. The anchoring connection was a series of cables rather than a hard link, but it was enough.

  Kira had to assume it was enough, at least, since the carrier hadn’t crashed into or fallen away from the station in the five years they’d been operating from there. And in fairness, at seventy-five thousand cubic meters, Conviction was the largest ship in the star system by over twenty thousand cubics. The RRF didn’t have a dock big enough for her.