Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Read online

  Now that the carrier had returned to dock, her largest obstacle to meeting with Captain John Estanza was resolved. The bored-looking Redward Royal Fleet Police standing guard over the entrance to the docking section were her next obstacle, and she had a very simple plan to deal with them.

  Bored-looking or not, the RRFP grunts reacted to her approach with appropriate competence. They were covering two entrances, but they were within shouting and headware coms range of each other. Two of the three guarding the entrance she approached stepped back into the entrance, a seemingly innocent movement that put them behind cover if she decided to cause havoc.

  She suspected the guards at the other entrance were at least aware of her presence, as the third guard, an older woman with cold eyes, stepped out to meet her.

  Kira saluted the guard immediately and watched the woman struggle with reflexes and guard duty before slowly returning the gesture.

  “This is a secure area,” the RRFP noncom told her. “How may I help you, Em…”

  “Demirci,” Kira replied. “Major Demirci, retired, of the Apollo System Defense Force. I need to speak with Conviction’s officers.”

  Carefully controlled, the truth could open a lot of doors.

  The noncom was nonplussed for a moment.

  “I see. What brings you all the way out here, Major?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for work and Conviction seems to be a good place for an ex-pilot to start,” Kira explained. She glanced at the woman’s stripes and hoped her read of the rank was right. “I don’t plan on causing trouble, Petty Officer, but I can give you a message to pass on if you’d prefer.”

  The MP snorted.

  “I’d rather send you to Fleet HQ,” she said. “Why the mercs, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A favor to an old CO,” Kira told her. If she hadn’t been following Jay Moranis’s plan, she probably would have been at Redward’s Fleet HQ. Assuming she’d made it out this far, that is.

  “It ain’t my job to say no for Estanza’s people,” the MP concluded, stepping aside. She gestured in the air, tossing a virtual business card to Kira.

  The Apollon pilot caught it and saved the data.

  “That’s contact info for an officer at HQ,” the noncom told her. “If the mercs give you a cold shoulder, give Sean a call. They’ll know what we can do for you.”

  “Thank you, Petty Officer,” Kira replied, touched by the gesture. “I appreciate it.”

  “Go on in,” the PO ordered. “I’d wish you good luck, Major, but you’ll forgive me for hoping you end up in our uniform, not Estanza’s.”

  “We’re all allowed our biases,” Kira said with a laugh.

  One obstacle down.

  The next obstacle was the actual mercenary security. There was a large loading and mustering bay between the Fleet security perimeter and the docking tubes and umbilicals that connected to Conviction.

  From this open space, cargo could be loaded onto the ship, fuel and oxygen lines were controlled, and humans would make their way aboard. A proper dock would have had those three tasks running through three different locks, but the impromptu arrangement here led to this single, massively chaotic space.

  Kira wasn’t even attempting to hide and she made it over halfway across the dock before anyone noticed her. It was still rapidly clear that she never would have made it to a tube linked to the carrier, as several large troopers in mismatched body armor materialized from multiple directions to converge on her.

  Their armor had clearly been fabricated to the same pattern once. It was probably even still cross-compatible if needed, but each of the mercenaries had customized the gear to their own desires. All of the sets were missing panels the wearer had regarded as unnecessary. One of the five converging grunts had painted their entire armor black and then added a fiery red dragon on top of it.

  None of them had anything she recognized as rank insignia, but they assembled around her with a speed and efficiency she wouldn’t have expected from ASDF Marines.

  “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” the dragon-armored mercenary demanded.

  “How’d ye even get in he’e?” another mercenary rapidly slurred. Kira recognized the signs of one of the more infamous combat drugs.

  “Fleet’s supposed to stop gawkers,” the dragon agreed. “So, I repeat my friend’s question. How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “My name is Kira Demirci and I need to speak to John Estanza,” she said clearly. All of the mercenaries were bigger than her, and their armor was almost certainly proof against the stunner under her coat.

  On the other hand, none of them were visibly armed, and in the absence of blasters, she was confident she could evade them long enough to escape. No one there was in any great danger…even if they thought they were intimidating.

  “The Cap’n don’ spek to gawk’rs,” the drugged merc told her. “G’t g’n.”

  “My friend’s a little under the weather,” dragon-armor noted. “But he’s right. If you haven’t booked something with the Skipper, you shouldn’t be here. You aren’t ours and you aren’t welcome.”

  “I would expect that he’d want to talk to a potential recruit,” Kira offered.

  She wasn’t expecting that to get her in, but she wasn’t expecting the response she got. All five of the mercenaries broke into laughter, like she’d said something utterly hilarious.

  “You don’t have a fucking clue,” dragon-armor told her. “And it’s my job to make sure no one gets aboard Conviction without a clue and a reason…and you don’t have either.”

  “Fine,” Kira allowed. “But there’s a message he needs to hear if you’re not letting me on board.”

  “No deal he’e!”

  The combat drugs were designed to speed a fighter up, accelerating their perception of time and sharpening their nerves. That acceleration was what made it hard to speak, but it also gave the fighter an edge on anyone who wasn’t drugged up.

  The trooper had clearly built up enough of a tolerance to the drug to undermine that edge…and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Of the five, he’d obviously been the one that was going to take a swing, and she’d been waiting for him to take a swing since he’d first spoken.

  He had at least fifty centimeters on her and they were both unarmed, so she hit him with the heaviest object immediately to hand: Blueward Station. She caught his fist, ducked into him, and flipped him over her shoulder.

  There was a resounding crash as the mercenary thug hit the deck, then silence.

  Dragon-armor looked impassively at their soldier, then shrugged.

  “I’ve seen better, but that wasn’t shabby,” they said. “I’ll give the skipper your message if you get off my deck without breaking anyone’s limbs, deal?”

  “I’m not going to break anyone I don’t have to,” Kira replied. “Message is simple enough: White Cobra says hello to Gold.”

  Dragon stared at her blankly.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” they asked.

  “To Estanza, at least,” Kira replied. “I have your word you’ll pass it on?”

  “You’d take a mercenary’s word?” dragon asked.

  “If nothing else, I think you’re curious now,” the pilot replied.

  Dragon-armor laughed again, reaching down to haul their drugged companion up.

  “You’re not wrong. I don’t know what your message means, crazy lady, but I do want to see just what the boss says. Now get off my deck!”

  Kira nodded and inclined her head.

  Hopefully, curiosity would carry her words to Captain Estanza—because Kira did know what the message meant.

  At one point, like Jay Moranis, John Estanza had been a legend. He’d been a nova fighter pilot in the same mercenary squadron when they’d rewritten the politics of an entire sector.

  The message meant that John Estanza had been Gold Cobra.

  Kira was maybe halfway back to her hotel when a chime sounded in her he
adware, alerting her to an incoming message. She stepped off to the side of the corridor, removing herself from the rush of the crowd, then accepted the call.

  “Demirci,” she answered. If it was who she thought it was, there was no point in concealing her identity—and she doubted any assassins had followed her a hundred-plus light years to the back end of civilization.

  “You just roughed up one of my guards and convinced one of my hardcases to carry a message for you,” a warm male voice replied. “Does that just about cover your activities?”

  “That would be one description,” Kira conceded. “Who am I talking to?”

  The voice didn’t sound right to be John Estanza, who she figured to be a similar age to Moranis or Simoneit.

  A second chime indicated the person on the other end was requesting a visual link. Kira sighed and tossed a small drone up and activated the link.

  If the man on the other end of the call was John Estanza, he’d been piloting nova fighters in his diapers. The stranger was a broad-shouldered black man of her own fortyish age, with close-cropped black hair and a brilliant white smile.

  “Commander Daniel Mbeki,” the stranger introduced himself. “I run Conviction’s fighter wing for the Skipper. He got your message. Which, given Milani’s tendency to be an uncooperative hardass, is impressive in itself.

  “You told Milani you wanted a job. Boss says he wants to see you, so I guess it’s your lucky day.”

  “Do I make an appointment to see Captain Estanza now?” Kira asked dryly.

  “If you want,” Mbeki agreed. “Or you could just turn around and come right back. You’ll find a warmer welcome this time, I promise.”

  5

  The mercenary in the red-and-black dragon armor was waiting with the RRFP guard when Kira returned to the dock. They didn’t do anything so respectful as salute or anything like that, but they clearly acknowledged her as she approached.

  “Milani,” they introduced themselves. “Mbeki sent me to fetch you. Seems your message meant something to the skipper after all.”

  “I knew it would,” Kira replied. “You have a rank, Milani? A first name?”

  The merc grunted and gestured for her to follow them.

  “Squad leader, I guess?” they told her as they led the way across the deck and up to one of the boarding tubes. “Think that’s what it says on my paycheck, anyway. My grunts call me boss, my boss calls me Milani. Everyone else calls me ‘that terrifying fucker with the dragon armor.’

  “It works for me.”

  Conviction’s crew worked very differently from the Apollo System Defense Force, Kira reflected.

  “Is your trooper all right?” she asked as they stepped into the boarding tube. There was a momentary skip of the stomach as they moved out of Blueward Station’s main gravity field into the tube’s local field. A more advanced station would have avoided that.

  “Crush? He’s fine,” Milani confirmed cheerfully. “Probably needed the wake-up call.”

  “Is he always drugged?” Kira asked. The tube was only a dozen meters long, and she tensed her core muscles as she reached the end. The transition from the station to the tube had been noticeable where it shouldn’t have been.

  The tube-to-ship transition was always noticeable, and she swallowed a moment of queasiness as she made the transition. Conviction and Blueward Station were both running ninety percent of a standard gravity, but the variation between the exact settings in play were never good for the inner ear.

  Milani was clearly used to it, taking Kira’s moment of adjustment to consider her question.

  “Not always,” they finally answered. “Most the time. No one ever surprises him, though. He’s too fast.”

  “You know that will kill him sooner rather than later, right?” she asked as she looked at her surroundings.

  She’d known Conviction was old, but it was something else to actually stand on her decks. The boarding tube delivered her into a small open space that did double duty as an airlock or a muster point, depending on what it was connected to.

  There should have been lockers or something for spacesuits, but the walls were plain. Anything that had been mounted there was long gone, and spots of rust marked where the steel connectors had been.

  The hull was a titanium-ceramic matrix that would never rust. Removing the rust stains from the steel add-ons was possible but time-consuming. No one on Conviction had ever taken the time.

  Milani gestured her through the inner airlock door, past a pair of mercenaries in much the same mismatched gear as the grunts on the loading dock, as they considered her question.

  “I know spark will kill Crush sooner or later,” they admitted. “Our doc knows and occasionally argues with him over it. Starfires, Crush knows. He just doesn’t care—and so long as he does his job, it’s his problem.”

  That was so far from how Kira had seen subordinates treated in the past that chewing on it kept her silent most of the way to their destination. The state of the ship was enough to keep her attention as well.

  When Conviction had been built, someone had etched a decorative wave pattern into the decking. Similar things were common to most starships—the ones that didn’t have carpet or another deck surfacing, anyway—but here the pattern only showed where people had been walking for the last century and a half.

  In the center of the corridors, the pattern had been worn away by thousands of feet. There was no maintenance that could undo that and it added to the general sense of ancient fatigue of the ship.

  For all of that, every system she saw was in perfect working order. Her headware was flashing up warnings about needing conversion protocols that weren’t currently loaded, but the net was there, and the physical controls a warship would rely on by preference were there and functional too.

  Some of them looked more worn than she’d prefer, but they all looked like they worked.

  Milani still used a headware command to open the heavy security door when they reached it. Kira had just enough time to wonder why they were at a security door before she stepped onto Conviction’s bridge.

  For all of the ship’s age, the bridge didn’t even look particularly outdated to her. Apollo ships were easily fifty years behind Conviction’s builders still, so she’d only have been a century out of date by Apollon standards, and warship bridges rarely changed on the surface.

  Two rows of consoles formed a doubled V pointed away from a large viewscreen. A single seat sat on a dais in the central angle, with multiple screens on levered arms around it.

  All of those screens were currently in their rest position, and a broad-shouldered black man rose from the captain’s seat to greet her.

  “Major Demirci,” Daniel Mbeki said with a sweeping bow that seemed out of place on the warship bridge.

  “I don’t recall giving you my rank,” Kira noted as she returned the bow with a smile. The man was vaguely ridiculous—but he was a nova fighter pilot. That wasn’t out of the norm by any stretch.

  “I looked you up while I was waiting,” Mbeki replied. “I thought I recognized the name. The Three-Oh-Three made a reputation for themselves. I wouldn’t have expected to see one of their squadron commanders out here.”

  “Our lives don’t always give us a choice, do they?” she murmured. She was flattered by his effort, especially since looking up her history this far from Apollo should have been difficult.

  “They don’t,” he confirmed. “The Captain is waiting for you.” Mbeki gestured to a door leading off the bridge.

  He turned to Kira’s escort.

  “Milani, get the rest of your squad awake and on the dock,” he ordered. “Our friend here might be gorgeous, but she’s also got a death mark. While she’s on our turf, nobody fucks with her. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  Kira barely concealed a grimace. She’d hoped that information hadn’t made it this far.

  At no point in her career in the Apollo System Defense Force had Kira spent any significant time in
the office of a carrier’s commanding officer. She’d been a squadron commander, subordinate to the Commander, Nova Group. She’d reported to Colonel Moranis as CNG, so her called-on-the-carpet moments had been in the CNG’s office.

  She was relatively sure John Estanza’s office was almost the same as the equivalent space on an Apollon carrier. The walls were the same material as the main hull matrix. If they’d ever been painted or decorated, that had been thoroughly and cleanly removed to leave only bare metal.

  There was a wooden bar tucked into one corner of the office and a large metal-and-wood desk in the middle of the space. The quarter-full bottle holding pride of place on the desk should probably have been in the bar.

  There were no visible screens, though she thought she spotted several projectors for holographic imaging built into the ceiling. Anything John Estanza did in there, he was doing with his headware.

  Right now, he was studying her like someone had delivered him an unwelcome package…and said package was ticking. He held a glass of amber liquid in one hand and leaned back in his chair as she came in, leaving Kira a few seconds to study her host and hopeful employer.

  Estanza was younger than she’d expected, but that meant he was probably only seventy instead of a hundred. That was solidly middle-aged, even out there, and she could still see that his shoulder-length hair had once been pitch-black.

  Now it was streaked with a mix of silver and dirty gray and partially unkempt. A faint smell of liquor filled the room, and it wasn’t just coming from the glass in his hand. His eyes were fixated on her but still vaguely unfocused.

  The man she’d come all of this way to meet was drunk.

  “Sit down, kid,” he ordered. He gestured and a chair slid out of a concealed panel and rolled itself across the room to her. “You’ve got names to conjure with. I have to wonder if you know what the hell they mean.”