Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Read online

  “Jay Moranis sent me to you,” Kira told him. “He thought we could help each other.”

  Estanza gestured around him.

  “I command the most powerful warship for thirty light-years in any direction,” he noted dryly. “I’m not sure how much help I need. I might be able to help you, but Jay should know my help isn’t free.

  “How is the old fucker, anyway?”

  “Dead,” Kira said flatly. “Metastatic cancer induced a brain aneurysm.” She considered her next words very carefully. “Despite the situation, it appears to have been natural.”

  Cancer could be treated. Even once it metastasized, there were medications and treatments for it. They were hard on the body and grew more dangerous with the patient’s age. Careful treatment could still have saved Jay Moranis, and that treatment had been underway. But…an only partially controlled cancer could easily have triggered the blood stoppage that had killed him.

  It could also have been induced by the Brisingr Shadows. She couldn’t be sure—but there had been a full autopsy done per Moranis’s will.

  Kira had seen the results just before Future had novaed out of Apollo. There were no signs of foul play.

  But eleven of the Three-Oh-Three’s twenty-four pilots were dead.

  “Fuck.” Estanza stared at her in silence for several seconds, then drained his glass. “Grab a glass from the bar,” he ordered.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Kira obeyed, and the Captain poured them both healthy dollops of the whisky on his desk. His, she noted, was much larger.

  “To fallen friends,” he toasted, and she joined him in swallowing down the whisky. It was better than she’d expected, at least.

  “All right,” he told her. “It sounds like you and Jay thought there was someone who might have tried to kill him. Who? And why?”

  “Brisingr Shadows,” Kira replied. “Fancifully named covert action group out of the Kaiserreich of Brisingr. They’re actively targeting the pilots of the Three-Oh-Three Nova Combat Group, commanded by Colonel Jay Moranis.

  “When I left Apollo, eleven of us were dead, including the Colonel. The survivors are supposed to be joining me out here. Hopefully, we’re beyond the Shadows’ reach here.”

  “Few people can send covert action teams a hundred light-years away,” Estanza agreed. “Of course, a lot of people can send a few million crests that far to hire an assassin or six.”

  He sighed.

  “I owe Jay. Not as much as I once did—fuck knows, the man always could extract blood from a stone where debts and favors were concerned—but I owe him. What do you need, Demirci?”

  “There’s what I need and what I can offer,” she told him. “I need jobs and homes for potentially as many as thirteen fully qualified nova pilots.”

  “Demirci, I have eight nova fighters,” Estanza pointed out. “Every one of them has a pilot and a copilot. I don’t need new—”

  “I have six nova interceptors,” Kira interrupted. “Hoplite-IVs, Apollo’s newest and most advanced nova fighter design. They’re mine, free and clear with no legal entanglements.

  “I’d be prepared to lease those ships to you at a reasonable rate, in exchange for you hiring myself and whoever else of the Three-Oh-Three makes it out here to fly them.”

  The mercenary captain stared at her.

  “You stole six of the ASDF’s most advanced nova fighters?” he asked, chuckling as he spoke.

  “Technically, we illegally purchased six of them from the manufacturer,” Kira replied. “All of the paperwork is correct and legally binding, except that the builder wasn’t allowed to sell them. Which is irrelevant out here.

  “My ownership papers pass Redward legal standards. I checked.” She smiled thinly. “I’ll hold out hope that I’ll have two pilots per fighter, but the truth is that I might not even have that. The Shadows were hunting my people. Hard.”

  “You realize you don’t even need me?” Estanza said dryly. “Six nova fighters. Fuck. The Royal Fleet would buy them from you for enough money to set thirteen of you up for life—and gleefully hire you to fly them. Or, fuck, you could set up as mercs on your own easily enough.”

  “I don’t trust the RRF,” Kira admitted. “I don’t trust any planetary government out here. I did trust Jay Moranis, and he trusted you. He got the fighters, the funds, the flights…everything that got me out here and should get my people out here.

  “I owe Jay Moranis my life and he wanted me to work with you. So, here I am.”

  Estanza leaned back in his chair again, sipping slowly at his whisky this time as he studied her.

  “Like I said, that man could always turn a favor into a life debt,” he said dryly. “Look, I can use your birds. If I’ve got the birds, I can use your pilots. But I’m no white knight. I work for Redward because they’re the richest system out here, not because I think King Larry is some idealized benevolent monarch who is going to save everything.

  “I’m no crusader. I got that out of my system a long time ago when I was Gold Cobra. Today, I take care of my people, I take care of my ship, and I take care of my bank account. Anything else is a bonus, clear?”

  “I don’t know enough about the Syntactic Cluster to know if King Larry is a hero or a tyrant, sir,” Kira told him. “What I know is that the democratically elected government of my oh-so-enlightened home system just sold out the allies I fought and bled for in public—and appears to have sold me and my comrades out in private.”

  The Apollo Council of Principals’ “Agreement on Nova Lane Security” sounded innocent enough, really. What it did, despite that innocent name, was surrender control of the trade lanes in the Brisingr-Apollo Sector to the Kaiserreich. It abrogated every treaty of mutual defense Apollo had signed with other systems in the sector and left every other system in the sector to be forced into tributary arrangements with Brisingr or face the Kaiser’s fleet’s alone.

  The Kaiserreich couldn’t invade planets—no one really could, not practically—but they could blockade them until they paid tribute. Apollo had stood against them a dozen times, but the “Agreement on Nova Lane Security” said they wouldn’t.

  So far as Kira was concerned, the Agreement was an outright surrender.

  Estanza snorted.

  “Right,” he conceded. “I’ll have Mbeki and Horn draw up the paperwork, but my suggestion is that I hire you as a complete squadron. You can have as many pilots as you want and pay them whatever the hell you want.

  “I’ll pay you a rate that covers six crewed and equipped nova fighters. We’ll cover operational expenses and combat repairs. I’ll provide ground crew and security, but you can handle your own flight personnel.”

  “I’ll need to see that rate before I agree,” Kira countered. It sounded reasonable enough, especially with the cash reserves that Moranis had made sure she had, but she wanted to build up that reserve working for Estanza, not grind it down.

  He drained his whisky again and set the glass down.

  “All right, Em Demirci,” he told her, and grinned. “Jay Moranis taught me mercenary negotiating. Let’s see what he taught you.”

  6

  The conversation that followed didn’t take nearly as long as Kira had feared, and she relatively quickly found herself in a different office with Daniel Mbeki as they waited for the carrier’s admin staff to finalize the contracts.

  She’d need to take them back to Simoneit and get some help from the old lawyer in setting up a properly organized mercenary squadron, but they’d sorted out the important details of what Conviction would pay to hire her six nova fighters and whatever pilots she found for them.

  Estanza filled Mbeki in on the details, then offered Kira his hand.

  “I don’t know if it will be a pleasure to work with you, Demirci, but I think it’s going to be interesting. Daniel will get everything set up.”

  Without so much as a goodbye after that, the carrier captain left Mbeki’s office. His gait was just unsteady enough for Kira to be quite su
re she’d never misjudged his sobriety.

  “Is he okay?” she asked aloud, watching Mbeki out of the corner of her eye.

  “He’s no worse than he’s been at any point in the last twelve years or so,” the man told her. “He can still fly rings around most of us when he gets in a fighter.”

  “Does he do that often?”

  “Nah,” Mbeki said. “I think he’s got a simulator tucked away in his quarters, but he only flies when he feels like it. Most of the time, he lets me run the fighter wing and Zoric runs the ship.”

  “Zoric?”

  “Kavitha Zoric,” Mbeki explained. “Conviction’s XO and the only other person on this ship who calls themselves Commander.” He grinned. “I guess you’ll make three of us, though I suppose you can call yourself whatever you want. Your people will be a separate legal entity, though I doubt any of us will remember that after the first week.”

  “I doubt it,” Kira admitted. “Commander will do. Major would confuse too many people, from the sounds of it.” She shook her head. “What is the rank structure here?”

  “Commander, Department Chief, Pilot, everybody else,” the mercenary reeled off. “Zoric and I have a long list of specialities and skills that we pay extra for, but only the Department Chiefs and Pilots get a title. Too many pissing matches when we tried anything more formal.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for chaos and even more pissing matches to me,” Kira told him. “But I was never a mercenary.”

  “You are now,” Mbeki replied. He pulled a physical tablet from inside his desk, a thin piece of transparent ceramic that was updating with information as he looked at it. “Or at least, you will be once the contract is done and signed. We have a template for this; we just haven’t used it in a long time.”

  “You’ve based other squadrons before?”

  “Yeah, back when I was a dumbass kid with fresh wings and an even fresher medical discharge from the Sorvedo Security Patrol, Conviction was anchor to four different mercenary squadrons.” Mbeki shook his head. “One belonged to the skipper; the other three were independents. As we moved out to the Periphery, we stopped being able to replace ships.

  “Two squadrons ended up bailing and going back coreward. Skipper bought out the other. It’s been at least fifteen years since we had an independent squad on the deck. I’m not even sure how many people here other than me will remember it!”

  “They’ll get used to it again,” Kira said. “My pilots are coming from Apollo, same as me. We might be mercs now, but we were military.”

  “We’ll make it work.” The attractive black man shook his head. “Assuming your people make it out here at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A gesture opened a data window in front of her.

  “That’s a million-crest bounty on you, Kira Demirci, specifically,” he told her as she read over the details with a sinking heart.

  The window was a glorified classified listing, an entry on a set of bounty boards most people wouldn’t know existed, let alone have access to. It stated that one million crests, drawn on the Bank of the Royal Crest, had been placed in escrow with an agency in the Ypres System.

  Upon validation of video footage or sensor data providing confirmation of death for one Kira Demirci—image and biometric data in an attached file she could readily pull up with a thought—delivered to either the Ypres escrow agency or to the Brisingr embassy in the Ypres System, the funds would be released to the owner of said imagery.

  “That, I’ll note, is in addition to this posting,” Mbeki continued.

  The first window slid sideways in the air and a second one opened. That one was more generic on the surface, offering payment for the validated death of any member of the ASDF 303 Nova Combat Group.

  Names, images, and biometric data attached.

  “My gods,” she murmured.

  “You’re on the list for the second posting,” the mercenary commander told her. “There’s no dead or alive, if you were wondering. There’s no reward for delivering you or your people alive at all. It’s a death mark—a cool quarter-million for any pilot and I’d guess a full million for any of the squadron commanders, though I only saw yours.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “We fought them,” Kira said quietly. “Apollo and Brisingr have been fighting for a decade, and the Three-Oh-Three served in fourteen battles over the last five years. I’ve flown against Brisingr’s finest and sent more than my fair share of them home in pieces.

  “Apollo caved six months ago. This”—she gestured at the bounties—“is just one more manifestation of my government’s surrender.”

  “An expensive one for Brisingr,” Mbeki told her. “I mean, it’s not enough money that anyone I know would court murder charges out here—too many of the Syntactic Cluster’s systems still carry the death penalty on the books for murder—but there will be people looking for you and measuring out what they can pull off.”

  He reached his hand across the desk and squeezed her wrist gently. His fingers were warm and reassuring in a way she hadn’t expected.

  “While you’re on Conviction or under contract with us, we’ve got your back and we’ll provide security,” he continued. “You’re safe with us, Kira. But I figured you needed to know just what you were looking at.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She’d known she was being hunted back home, but the sheer impersonality of the illegal bounty was painful. In Apollo, at least, she was being hunted by people from Brisingr. Here? She’d apparently just get killed for a paycheck.

  “And on that morbid note, it looks like our contract is finally written up,” Mbeki said with an obviously forced grin.

  “I’ll need to go over it with a lawyer and get the squadron officially set up,” Kira told him. “I’ll need a day or so.”

  “Right.” The black man’s lips thinned in thought—clearly unpleasant thought. “Technically, we’re not responsible for your security until you’re working for us, but we all know that’s happening.

  “I’ll have Milani send a grunt with you. Redward mostly has Blueward locked down, but for the amount of money your old friends have put on the barrel, I’m willing to put some of our cash on the line to make sure you make it to joining up!”

  7

  Even in a law office, physical paperwork was a thing of the past. The contracts and paperwork that Kira were shuffling through were all digital, a mix of holograms projected by the imaging systems in Simoneit’s office and data fed directly into her headware.

  All of it boiled down to one simple point: once Kira Demirci authorized it all, she would become Commander Kira Demirci, sole shareholder and director of Memorial Squadron Limited Liability Corporation.

  Memorial Squadron would absorb all of the funds held by Simoneit, providing it with an enviable operating reserve. According to the “papers” Kira was reviewing, her contribution of the six Hoplite-IVs was valued equally to the cash infusion from Jay Moranis.

  There was a contract in there that specified that she would hire all survivors of the ASDF 303 Nova Combat Group in exchange for the cash infusion and specified share allowances for those survivors.

  “Even if all twelve other pilots survive and make it out here, the fighters were entirely your legal possessions,” Simoneit told her as she paused on the sections laying out the ownership proportion of the company and the projected ownership as the rest of the pilots made it out there.

  “With three squadron commanders and ten pilots surviving at last report, I allocated ten percent of the funds Colonel Moranis provided to each commander and seven percent to each junior pilot,” the lawyer continued. “Since the fighters constitute fifty percent of the opening capital, your minimum ownership would be fifty-five percent, leaving you in full control of Memorial Squadron.”

  “I’m not sure I trust my people that little,” Kira said slowly. Counting the fighters for half the capital, that meant each commander would own five percent of the company and
each pilot would own three and a half percent.

  “It’s not about trust,” the lawyer said. “It’s about security. Trust but verify, always. This means that if any of the pilots show up and don’t want to fly for you, you can buy them out easily enough without risking them causing problems in the operations.

  “I’ll continue to act as your agent here in Redward and can make sure any arrivals are taken care of if you’re out of the system with Conviction.”

  He shrugged.

  “The value of the Hoplite-IVs is probably conservative, Em Demirci,” Simoneit told her. “You need to be certain that you are in full legal control of those spacecraft at all points in time.”

  “True enough,” Kira agreed with a sigh. She scanned through the last few sections and nodded one last time.

  “I authorize all documents, authenticate,” she said aloud.

  “Validate identity for the documentations,” a softly female computerize voice replied.

  “I am Kira Margaret Demirci, born in Vendel on Apollo, March Seventeenth, Two Thirty Six After Landing,” she told the computer. “Data authentication transmitted.”

  That came automatically from her headware. The computers spoke for less than a second, then the law office’s machine beeped happily.

  “Identity validated; authorization authenticated. All documents updated and transferred to your headware.”

  “Congratulations, Commander Demirci,” Simoneit told her. “I look forward to working with you on a continued basis as legal counsel for Memorial Squadron.”

  “Your first job for that is to make contact with Conviction’s legal counsel,” Kira replied. “I want to have a separate legal team than Estanza has, but you’ll need to talk to his.” She waved at the files still hovering in the air.

  “If nothing else, we need to make sure that they have copies of all of this. Technically, the contract right now is between Conviction’s LLC and me. We’ll want that revised.”