Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Read online

  “You mean it was good for your nerves to do something?” Zoric asked drily. “At least if you’d gone on patrol in Raccoon, you could argue that you’re one of our best nova-fighter pilots and strapped on a Hoplite or a Dexter for your excitement.

  “But we both know you’re not actually qualified as a destroyer skipper and that any pirate we found on this trip wasn’t going to justify needing a squadron commander, don’t we?”

  They were at Kira’s office and she stopped, looking balefully at the door.

  “We do,” she conceded. “And you’re not wrong,” she admitted. “But Konrad is waiting for us in there, isn’t he? Can I wait until he lectures me as well before I give my mea culpas?”

  Zoric snorted and the door slid open at her mental command.

  The man sitting on Kira’s desk was exactly who she’d expected. Despite the obvious trap laid for her, Kira crossed her office and embraced Konrad Bueller before the copper-haired man could say a word.

  “Good to see you,” she told him.

  “Good to see you too, despite your attempts to find any possible danger in the Cluster,” the broad-shouldered engineer said with a chuckle. “How much of a lecture did you give her, Kavitha?”

  “Pretty much all of it,” Zoric conceded. “She’s an idiot and she knows it. Care to explain why you decided to run off without telling your senior staff?”

  That, Kira knew, was where she’d doubled down on the stupid.

  This time, she audibly sighed and leaned against her own desk as the door slid shut, surveying the room. Deception’s flag officer’s office wasn’t large—nova ships were limited entirely by the cubage their drives could take into an FTL jump, not mass—but it had space for the three senior officers to hash out their problems outside of the eyes of their subordinates.

  “That part was dumb,” she finally conceded as she looked over the tiny amount of decoration she’d added to her office. There was a printed portrait of her family on their sheep farm on Apollo, a second portrait of her and Konrad Bueller trying not to grin like idiots, and a handcrafted model of an ASDF Hoplite-IV she’d commissioned one of the flight-deck techs to make for her.

  There wasn’t much else. She’d left Apollo with a single duffle bag of personal possessions, accompanying a set of not-quite-stolen nova fighters one step ahead of a team of Brisingr assassins.

  “On the other hand, I’m bored out of my skull and needed to do something,” she told them, agreeing with their assessment of her reasoning. “And I both made the decision in very short order and figured you’d try to talk me out of it.”

  “Which left me showing up to your office to find it empty without warning,” Zoric said drily. “Your timed message was about twenty minutes too late for my nerves, Kira.”

  Kira winced.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “It was supposed to be before your shift started.”

  “I just woke up to a timed message telling me you’d novaed out with McCaig and would be back in two weeks,” her boyfriend told her. “You can’t do shit like that, Kira. You have responsibilities.”

  “You two and Mwangi have Deception and Raccoon well in hand,” she pointed out. “I knew I could leave Redward for a few weeks and things would be fine.”

  Kira watched Zoric roll her eyes in exasperation and wilted a bit.

  “And if something had come up that required us to sortie the capital ships?” Deception’s Captain asked. “King Larry’s people know I’m the second shareholder, but there’s still a concern if they need me to commit to deploy Deception and Raccoon.”

  Kira wasn’t entirely sure that Raccoon deserved the title of “capital ship”—the junk carrier was only five thousand cubic meters larger than the two thirty-two-kilocubic Parakeet-class destroyers—but Zoric had a point.

  “I know,” she conceded, then sighed. She’d been wrong. She knew it. She’d known it from the moment Pegasus had novaed out, if not before that.

  “I know,” she repeated. “I shouldn’t have done it. But it’s been six months since Bengalissimo got their shit sorted and sent ‘Her Majesty’ Rossella Gaspari to prison. The Institute seems to have written the Cluster off as a bad bet for now, and everything has been very quiet.”

  “Most people would regard that as a good thing,” Bueller noted calmly.

  “It is a good thing,” Kira said. “But I went from the Apollo-Brisingr war to running from assassins to working for Estanza here and fighting the Institute basically nonstop for eighteen months.

  “For things to be calm is weird. I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  “We noticed,” Zoric said, her tone now dry enough to sandpaper with. “But…please limit your search for excitement to, I don’t know, contracts and Konrad’s pants?”

  To Kira’s perpetual amusement, her lover was surprisingly easy to make blush. The Brisingr man—from the same nation she’d spent her first military career fighting—was older than she was, but still…innocent wasn’t quite the right word, but it was close.

  Embarrassable, she supposed.

  “That’s fair,” she admitted. “But I’ll point out that I was never in any actual danger—neither was anyone else. Ancillary didn’t even hit our ships before they got close enough to disable her, jamming or no jamming.

  “Redward’s new destroyers are almost up to Apollo-Brisingr Sector standards now,” she told them. “They can handle just about anything native to the Cluster—even some of the new cruisers!—until the next generation of Redward cruisers and carriers roll out.”

  “Fair enough,” Bueller said. Zoric glared at him and he raised his hands. “I saw the Parakeet design before they even started cutting metal, Kavitha,” he reminded her. “It’s as good as the Cluster’s got.

  “Kira’s not wrong that there isn’t much out there that can handle the pair Redward sold us. They’ve done okay by us.”

  “Mostly,” Kira muttered. Deception, at ninety-six thousand cubic meters, was the largest warship in the Cluster—but the Redward Royal Fleet had three one-hundred-twenty-kilocubic warships under construction.

  Everyone, including Redward, agreed that Redward owed Memorial Force a carrier. Conviction had been the largest warship in the Cluster before Deception arrived, and John Estanza had taken his flagship to her death saving the Cluster from the Equilibrium Institute.

  That left Memorial Force running around with a junk carrier they’d been given and waiting on a chance to purchase a new carrier from the Redward yards…but it wouldn’t be the one currently under construction.

  “They’ve done well by the Cluster,” Zoric said grimly. “I mean, the FTZ now covers the whole Cluster again and they’ve got everything well in hand. They need more destroyers, but what interstellar power doesn’t?”

  “And the way they’ve set it up, Bengalissimo and Ypres carry at least half of the weight of that,” Bueller noted. “Our ships… Well, I’m not sure they need us.”

  “They don’t,” Kira admitted. “Or at least, they won’t once the new capital ships commission. Right now, no one wants to let Deception go, so they pay for everything else.”

  Her office was quiet for a few moments. She sighed and slid off the desk, taking her seat and triggering the artificial-stupid drinks machine. It rolled out of its concealed cabinet and started making coffee for the three of them—black for Kira and Zoric, heavily doctored for Konrad.

  Because Kira knew Konrad’s preferences, there were two blends of beans in the robot. Both were from Redward—coffee was a major export of the planet they were orbiting—but one was an export mix, serviceable but not excellent…and the other was the royal family’s private blend.

  “We’re only really still here because a retainer that covers our day-to-day is actually pretty sweet,” Kira told them. “But damn, it gets boring.” She shrugged. “Eventually, I’ve been promised the chance to order a hundred-twenty kilocubic carrier at cost.

  “I trust Larry and Sonia, which is a hell of a thing to say about Outer
Rim monarchs, so here we are,” she concluded. “And if the Institute sticks their nose back in the Cluster, we’ll chop it off.”

  The Equilibrium Institute was an interstellar organization dedicated to very specific political ideals. Kira’s understanding was that it was, at its core, a privately funded think tank out of the Heart. The resources of even a small private organization within two hundred light-years of Sol easily covered the expenses of waging private wars in the Rim twelve hundred light-years farther out.

  But between her, the late John Estanza, and the rest of what was now Memorial Force, the Institute’s intrusions into the Syntactic Cluster had failed both expensively and dramatically.

  “So, we wait,” she conceded with a sigh.

  “And you, Commodore Demirci, stop running off without telling people,” Zoric told her firmly. “If we need to send you on anti-piracy patrols to keep you sane, we can do that…but let’s do it properly and with a plan, okay, boss?”

  Kira snorted and nodded.

  “All right, Kavitha, Konrad, you’ve made your point,” she said. “I’ll be good!”

  3

  Even with Zoric handling most of the business of the four-ship mercenary fleet for the two weeks Kira had been gone, her headware happily informed her that she had a stack of messages waiting for her once her two senior subordinates left her be.

  At the top of the list was a message flagged as priority from Stipan Dirix. The former Redward Army officer ran their semi-permanent dockside establishment in the Redward System and helped coordinate Kira’s affairs with the locals.

  There were, she realized, several messages from Dirix, of increasing urgency.

  The most recent was just to call him, which Kira sighed and did.

  “Stipan, what’s going on?” she asked him. “Captain Zoric should have told you I was out-system.”

  “Oh, thank god,” Dirix replied. “You’re back in time. Zoric wasn’t sure when you’d be returning, and we were running down to the wire on this.”

  “On what, Stipan?” Kira said. “I have six messages from you, and I’ll freely admit I only read the most recent.”

  “Fair, fair,” he conceded. “Queen Sonia wanted to have you at a grand reception yesterday, but since you weren’t here, I gave her your regrets.”

  “Her Majesty knows I’m not in Redward full-time,” she told her aide with a chuckle. “She’ll forgive me this once, I’m sure.”

  “That would be my normal assumption, yeah,” Dirix agreed. “But she seemed… Well, I wouldn’t say Queen Sonia would show frustration to someone like me, but the fact that she called me directly says something, yes?”

  Kira straightened in her chair. She’d been invited to a number of parties of various levels of privacy by Queen Sonia. Among other things, King Larry’s wife was the true head of his intelligence services.

  She also had a habit of trying to build up women across the star system, mostly by inviting them to parties so they could make connections with each other.

  But all of the invitations Sonia had sent Kira had been recorded messages, often the digital equivalent of written invites, sent by the Queen’s staff to Kira’s staff.

  If Sonia had directly called Stipan, something important was happening.

  “I understand,” Kira murmured. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “I know the grand reception last night was for some delegation of bankers from the Royal Crest,” he told her. “They’re here to discuss financing for a series of new infrastructure projects across the Cluster—people are here from the Yprian Federation, Bengalissimo…everywhere, honestly, to talk to them.

  “My read is that the new stability in the Cluster is potentially going to see a lot of money flowing in—and Their Majesties want to make sure there’s no offsetting flow of resources and power out.”

  That was always the risk with foreign investment, Kira knew. It was one of the ways a hegemon like the Royal Crest maintained their control.

  On the other hand, the Royal Crest’s banks provided the default interstellar currency across several hundred light-years of the Outer Rim, including the Syntactic Cluster. That gave them a lot of power, even before they started financing projects.

  “So, I missed an important party, I take it?”

  “Not as bad as it could be, I think,” Dirix told her. “Because when she called me”—the mercenary administrator still sounded terrified by that—“she told me that I should get Zoric for today’s event, regardless of whether you were back yet.”

  The big man raised his hands helplessly.

  “We don’t have many other senior officers she’d invite to something like that,” he admitted. “Tamboli or Milani, I guess, but neither of them can speak for the company.”

  Kira had to hide a smile at the thought of the two nonbinary officers at one of Sonia’s soirees. Dilshad Tamboli was self-admittedly a jumped-up shuttle mechanic turned nova-fighter flight-deck boss—and Milani, Deception’s chief ground trooper, never left their armor.

  Ever.

  “But Zoric could, even if I wasn’t here,” Kira noted. “On the other hand, I am here now. What kind of invitation am I looking at?”

  “Private party at the Solitary Lodge,” Dirix told her. “You’re familiar with the place, right?”

  “It was the first place Sonia ever invited me to one of these,” Kira agreed. “That was where she recruited me for a suicidal covert op.”

  A covert operation that had ended up with her in control of an Institute-crewed ex-Brisingr warship—the ship that had become Deception. Almost as fortunately for Kira, in hindsight, had been meeting Konrad Bueller.

  Of course, they wouldn’t have ended up in control of Deception without Bueller, so that was a win all around.

  “My impression is that this is a significantly larger event,” her aide warned. “Invitation says outdoor barbecue party. Semi-formal, which in this case I think means clothes you can clean ketchup off of.”

  Kira snorted.

  “I hate burgers,” she noted. That wasn’t entirely true, but nothing she’d encountered in her adult life lived up to her father’s mutton burgers. “So, I hope there are other options.”

  “It’s the Queen’s personal private retreat in the heart of a protected wilderness,” Dirix reminded her. “Last I checked, they have a top-tier chef out there.”

  “And from what Sonia says, they’re bored out of their minds,” Kira murmured. “I sympathize. All right, Stipan. Make the arrangements. Captain Zoric and I will attend Her Majesty’s barbecue.

  “How long do I have?”

  “Four hours. It’s a midafternoon thing and it’s already noon at the Lodge.”

  Just getting from orbit to the Lodge could easily take an hour, Kira knew. That didn’t give her much time.

  “Good thing I checked in with you first,” she told him. “Anything else in my messages that will explode if I don’t read it today?”

  “Nothing from me, though that’s not a perfect guarantee,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with the Queen’s staff. Good luck, boss.”

  The most critical component of Kira’s emails was a note from Angel Waldroup—formerly the flight-deck boss of Conviction, now the flight-deck boss of Raccoon—that she’d rigged up some of the less-used cubage aboard Raccoon as a storage rack for class two nova-drive units.

  The class two nova drives were a complex piece of technology. Unlike the class one drive, they required very specific gravitational and energy levels in the area where they were being produced. A class one nova drive had to be built on a planet.

  Class two drives had to be built either on an asteroid or in an actively orbiting facility at a carefully calculated altitude. Once you had all of the pieces in place, though, they were actually mass-producible in the way the larger class one drives weren’t.

  Their main advantage, though, was having a far shorter minimum cooldown than a class one drive. A class two could cool down from a nova of a few light-minute
s in a minute. A class one took a minimum of ten minutes to cool down, even from the shortest of novas.

  That, combined with the class two drive’s smaller size, had created the nova fighter. Kira’s nova fighters could jump across a light-minute of space, engage a target, and then jump out after a minute.

  Those hit-and-run attacks were devastating. On the other hand, the class two drive’s long-distance nova cooldown was significantly longer than a class one’s, which was why carriers existed.

  Waldroup’s storage solution was the answer to one of Kira’s problems, though. Redward was the only system within a hundred light-years that could make class two nova drives, and they were willing to sell them to Memorial Force.

  With the fabricators available to Waldroup, they could easily build nova fighters so long as they had the drives. Without the drives, their ability to build the rest of the plane was useless.

  So, being able to store nova drives for later was important. It also might allow Memorial Force to dismantle some of their excess fighters, the ones that were currently crammed into every scrap of spare deck space aboard Deception and Raccoon.

  Kira hesitated to do that, but given that they and their allies currently had a monopoly on nova fighters in the Syntactic Cluster, it might be an idea.

  She sighed and put that thought aside for a later moment, firing off a thank-you to Waldroup.

  They’d see what possibilities it opened later, but for now, her important messages were handled. That meant she needed to get ready for the party—and, thankfully, Queen Sonia wasn’t so foolish as to expect Kira or Zoric to wear a dress.

  4

  The Solitary Lodge was an intentionally rustic structure, a two-story building of raw wood and glass built on the edge of a lake at the heart of a planetary park. To Kira, the defensive screens shimmering in front of the large windows and the armor behind the wood were obvious, but the defenses were subtle.

  Most civilian craft from the Outer Rim would never have picked up the anti-spacecraft missile batteries concealed in the woods around the Solitary Lodge, either. Kira’s transport was a Brisingr-built combat shuttle, however, and the weapons in the forest stood out like sore thumbs.