Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Read online

  “ASDF didn’t want to glorify killing that much, but they compromised by letting us paint up to three markers on the hulls to mark aces. So…” The pilot shrugged. “We color-coded them. Black is one kill. Three black dots says you’re an ace.

  “Green is two kills. Replace the black dots as you go, count up to six. Orange is four kills. Blue is eight. Red is sixteen.”

  Cartman shrugged. “Supposedly, purple is thirty-two and yellow is sixty-four, but I’ve never seen anyone with yellow or purple kill markers.”

  “Sub-fighters count as half and full nova ships under twenty thousand cubics count as one,” Kira concluded.

  She knew that the dots she’d given Waldroup were red, blue and orange. The deck boss was clearly doing the math and looked up at her questioningly.

  “Eighteen nova fighters, twelve sub-fighters, three gunships and a partial kill on a cruiser,” she listed quietly. “I was one pilot out of twenty-four that took out the cruiser, so we all got counted for a single kill-equivalent.”

  “Okay,” the deck boss exhaled. “You want your kill markers or mine?”

  “We’ll keep Memorial Squadron on Apollo markers for now,” Kira told her. “If someone wants to assume I’m a ‘mere’ ace, I’d rather disabuse them of that notion when it’s far too late.”

  The deck boss snorted.

  “Makes sense to me. I’ll have your birds out and prepped in a few hours. Any idea who’s flying them yet?”

  “Cartman will be my number two,” Kira replied. “I’m heading back stationside to look for the others in a few. Think you’ll have my bird ready for a test flight by this evening?”

  “Do rocks fall in gravity?” Waldroup asked. “You’ll be good to go.”

  Kira ran into Mbeki before she left the fighter bay area, the other Commander looking even darker than usual, with grease smeared over his skin and down a rumpled gray ship-suit.

  “What happened to you?” she asked him.

  “I like to keep my hand in on the guts of my fighter,” he told her. “My nova drive was having some frequency issues, so I was helping my techs track it down.” He grinned, the brilliant expression warming Kira’s soul a little bit.

  “That doesn’t normally involve getting covered in grease,” Kira noted.

  “My copilot could read those displays better than I could,” Mbeki said. “I was down in the wiring with the tech. We got it sorted. Want to see them?”

  The sudden detour left her blinking for a moment. Mbeki was proving surprisingly pleasant to be around, but she was still getting used to his thought process.

  “Them? Your fighters?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I looked up the specs on your Hoplites, but you don’t even know what my squad are flying. Want to see?”

  Kira laughed and checked the time in her headware. She was supposed to meet with Simoneit in about ninety minutes, so she had time.

  “Sure.”

  Mbeki grinned like a kid showing off their new puppy and gestured for her to follow him. That grin was unsettling.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the grin that was unsettling, Kira admitted, so much as how that grin made her feel. A smile shouldn’t be making her feel like she’d just chugged a hot chocolate, should it?

  Shaking her head against her own idiocies, she followed Mbeki into the fighter launch bay. Conviction had separate retrieval and launch bays, a luxury only one of the Apollon carriers she’d served on had shared.

  That luxury, of course, was why at peak, she’d carried twelve fewer fighters than an equivalent carrier of her size in Apollo service. It would enable far faster turnaround of nova fighters, but it took up a lot of space.

  Kira stepped through the doors into the bay and stopped as she spotted the nova fighters. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d been expecting Mbeki’s squadron to fly, but part of her had been anticipating the fighters to look like the carrier: solid but worn.

  Instead, the eight nova fighters in the launch bay—looking almost lost in hangar spaces designed for sixty—were gleamingly sharp war machines. One of them was clearly in the process of having side paneling reassembled, but even there, the fighter was already clean.

  Not a single one of the fighters was plain white. All of them carried audacious, even ridiculous, designs and patterns on their hulls. All of that paint was sharp and clean…and the ships were big.

  “What are they?” she asked. All eight fighters were identical, too.

  “PNC-One-Fifteens,” Mbeki told her. “The Star Kingdom of Griffon’s finest…from thirty years ago, I’ll admit, but still damn fine fighter-bombers.”

  The PNC-115s were the same length as Kira’s Hoplites, but they were visibly thicker wedges and fifteen meters wide to the Hoplites’ ten. They had visible torpedo hardpoints as well, something the Hoplites didn’t have the mass or cubage for.

  “PNC?” she asked, studying the ships.

  “Parasite Nova Combatant,” he explained. “The hundred series means they’re fighter-bombers. The One Fifteen can carry two plasma conversion torpedoes, one on each side.” He shrugged. “We lose a bit in sublight maneuverability if we’re loaded with both, but I usually load at least some of my people with one torp.”

  “Sublight maneuverability doesn’t matter that much with a nova fighter,” Kira said absently. “But then, how often do you need a conversion torp out here?”

  Torpedo was an inaccurate descriptor of the system. It did launch out of the ship, but only went a few dozen kilometers at most before detonating. A conversion torpedo was a single-shot version of the heavier plasma cannon mounted on large warships.

  Like the class two nova drive that underpinned the entire nova fighter, it was harder to manufacture than the system it miniaturized, but was cheaper if you could build it. The two systems combined made a nova fighter with torpedoes a deadly threat to anything in space.

  “And now that we have your squadron, we’ll have backup next time we need to go up against a full-size warship,” Mbeki told her. “We’ll lose a bit in maneuvering, but less than you would if we strapped a torpedo to a Hoplite. Best of all worlds.”

  “I’ve flown a Hoplite with a torp,” Kira replied. “I think I might have maneuvered better without my engines.”

  Mbeki laughed.

  “We’re better off with my birds carrying them, then,” he agreed. “If we drop the torps, my birds can go toe-to-toe with any gunship or nova fighter out here. Your Hoplites would be a challenge for my people, but hey! You’re on our side.”

  “Best place for all of us, isn’t it?” Kira murmured. The PNC-115s were thirty years old, but Griffon was a more advanced power than Apollo. They were probably just as advanced as her Hoplites.

  Most likely, the only reason her fighters had any edge over the PNC-115s was that her birds were more specialized. She’d assumed she had the most advanced fighters on Conviction.

  She’d been wrong…and hopefully, that would help remind her of the age-old lessons around assumptions.

  12

  “Two more of your people arrived around lunchtime,” Simoneit told Kira as he collected their coffees. “I took the liberty of hiring private security for them with Memorial Squadron funds. They’re on their way here.”

  “I worry that we’re attracting too much attention to you,” Kira admitted as she took a sip of the excellent coffee. “I also need to sneak a pallet of this stuff onto Conviction. I’m going to miss your coffee.”

  “Astonishing Orange is one of Redward’s finest coffees and I’d expect Conviction to be stocked with Redward coffee in general. All of which is supposed to be good.”

  “Every coffee-growing planet has a brand that is the wrecked leftovers of every other growing crop thrown into a grinder together,” she pointed out as her headware brought up the contract Simoneit had signed for security.

  Ironborn Security was a name she recognized, an organization spread across at least half a dozen sectors and probably at least a few million bodyguards and office staff. She di
dn’t even need to check to know that hiring Ironborn was probably the most expensive option—but Ironborn’s reputation was, well, iron.

  “Ah,” Simoneit sighed. “That would be Redward Premium Choice, I suppose. They claim to choose their blends carefully, but you aren’t the cheapest coffee on a planet that exports coffee by doing things right. They can’t even get an export license.”

  “If that’s what Conviction is serving, I can see why,” Kira told him. “The ASDF was legally required to source as much as possible of our supplies on Apollo itself, so all of our coffee was homegrown. We don’t have any decent coffee-growing climates…and ASDF coffee was still better than whatever it is Conviction has.”

  “I’ll give you the card for our supplier,” the lawyer said, tossing a virtual datacard between their headware. “You probably want to consider setting an administrative office up here, what with needing to make sure your stragglers get picked up and wanting to arrange supplies.”

  “I’m not sure when Conviction next ships out, but I’ll add it to my list,” Kira agreed with a sigh. “Not sure how many stragglers I’ve got left, for that matter. I was waiting on thirteen. If you’ve got two coming in, I’ve found three and I know three are dead.

  “That’s half if we include me. I worry about the fate of anyone who didn’t make it out in time.”

  “You’re still going to need a station or planetside office,” Simoneit replied. “Your work and funding are going to run through Conviction for the foreseeable future, but having a base of operations that’s separate from Estanza’s people is probably wise. At the very least, you don’t want to use your lawyer to order your coffee,” he concluded with a grin.

  A chime in Kira’s headware told her that one of her bodyguards was opening a channel.

  “Demirci,” she answered mentally.

  “It’s Bertoli.” The mercenary had apparently been assigned as her permanent bodyguard. Crush was with him today, which Kira wasn’t entirely happy about, but…Conviction provided the bodyguards. The ground troops weren’t her people.

  “We got a party at the door. Two scrawny peeps who look like pilots and three meatslabs from Ironborn. Trouble or fine?”

  Bertoli wasn’t supposed to be blocking people from entering Simoneit’s office, though Kira could understand his concern at the Ironborn team. Pulling up the video feed Bertoli was providing from his helmet, she recognized the two Apollon pilots—and had to concede the accuracy of the “meatslab” descriptor for the uniformly two-meter-tall Ironborn guardians.

  “We’re expecting them, Bertoli,” she told him. “Send them in. Keep an eye on the Ironborn. Just to soothe my paranoia.”

  “My paranoia was going to require that,” the merc replied. “Nobody else dies under my watch.”

  Kira winced at the reminder and closed the channel.

  “They’re here,” she told Simoneit. “Which I assume you knew.”

  The law office’s security might be automated, but if it wasn’t telling Simoneit when people came in, it wasn’t worth whatever he paid for it.

  From the helmet feed, Kira had known who she was meeting in the conference room Simoneit put aside for her. The two 303 pilots—neither of whom had served under her but both of whom knew her—hadn’t.

  Or, least, hadn’t believed it. Both stared at her in near-shock and relief as the door slid shut behind them, leaving the three Apollons alone.

  “Sit, please,” Kira told them. “Hoffman, Patel. It’s good to see you.”

  Joseph Hoffman and Dinesha Patel were both gaunt men of average height. That was where the resemblance between them ended. Hoffman was a fair-haired man with pale skin and blue eyes, where Patel was dark-eyed and dark-haired with skin that looked permanently tanned.

  “Tathastu,” Patel breathed. “Thank all that is holy. I wasn’t going to argue with three large soldiers, but after everything…I couldn’t believe we were safe.”

  “Thank god,” Hoffman said, echoing Patel’s sentiment if not his exact words. “It’s been a hell of a trip.”

  Kira buried a wince. Her own trip had been pleasant enough, even if the reasons and causes had been nerve-wracking. She’d been shot at before she’d left Apollo, but that had been before her trip.

  “Are you both all right?” she asked.

  They shared a glance and Patel reached over to squeeze Hoffman’s hand.

  “We’re fine,” Patel answered for them both. “Too many others aren’t. I think we were the last of the Three-Oh-Three out. Not everyone made it.”

  “I know about Hughes and Espinoza,” she admitted. “Who else?”

  “Conroy died back home,” Hoffman replied. She realized that he had covered Patel’s hand with his own and hadn’t let go. If that meant what it looked like, at least some positive had come out of their trip. “Spark overdose, the reports said.”

  “Neither of us was exactly the coroner, so hard to be sure,” Patel added.

  Kira remembered Denis Conroy. He’d been one of the youngest pilots in the 303 and had only barely made ace before the war ended. He’d been young, earnest…and straitlaced enough to worry her on a warship.

  “I’m not sure Conroy even knew what drugs were, let alone what spark was,” she pointed out softly.

  “Me either,” Hoffman said with a sigh. Conroy had been his wingman. “I wasn’t in touch with the kid and maybe I should have been. I don’t know what his getaway plan was, and he was probably the most vulnerable of us all.”

  “It’s not your fault, Joseph,” Patel told Hoffman. “We all had our own ways out; it didn’t occur to me or Major Cummins, either.”

  Both men closed their eyes for a moment at the mention of Major Iola Cummins, the last of the four squadron commanders in the 303 that Kira didn’t know the fate of.

  “Cummins was with you?” Kira asked.

  “The three of us left on the ship,” Patel confirmed, his voice shaky. “She died to save us.”

  “Us and two hundred and fifty other people on that ship who’d never done a damn thing to anyone,” Hoffman said harshly. “Gunship jumped the liner at a rest point two novas out from Apollo. They’d stripped the colors and IFF, but it was a Kaiserreich ship. I’d know the lines anywhere.”

  “Our ship was a passenger liner heading to Sophista,” Patel said, his voice a soft contrast to Hoffman’s. “It was unarmed, but no one was really worried. Brisingr’s supposed to be securing the trade lanes now, right? It’s what Apollo got from them as a promise in exchange for betraying everyone.”

  “What happened?” Kira asked.

  “Everyone was panicking; the gunship was shooting at the liner. Probably warning shots, since they weren’t hitting us, but…” Patel shook his head.

  “Major Cummins stole one of the passenger transport shuttles and took it out,” Hoffman concluded. “It didn’t have any guns, so she did the only thing she could.”

  “She rammed them,” Kira concluded.

  “They never saw it coming,” Patel whispered. “Neither did we. Crippled the gunship, got us out, but there was no way she survived.”

  “Damn.” She was running the math in her head. That brought the known dead members of the 303 to fifteen. Four of them were here, which meant five were in the wind somewhere. Even assuming all of them made it to Redward intact, her hopes of having two pilots for each of her fighters were long gone.

  “Mel Cartman is here,” she told them. “Sandip was murdered on the station by hired hitmen. There’s only nine of us left.”

  “And you’re the only Major left, aren’t you?” Hoffman asked. “We were told to get out this far and find the Majors. I mean”—he gestured at the conference room—“you seem to be doing okay.”

  “The old man sent a lot of money and resources out this way to make sure we had a fallback position when everything went to hell,” Kira explained. “I have the legal structure in place for a mercenary nova squadron flying off a merc carrier—Conviction—but right now, I’ve only got two pilots.”


  “Pilots will only do you so much good,” Patel noted. “My research says that nobody out here can build nova fighters. I doubt the one local nova-capable mercenary force is lending us fighters, so, what…we’re flying sub-fighters?”

  Sub-fighters were the nova fighters’ smaller and less capable siblings. They often had everything the nova fighters had in terms of Harrington coils and plasma weapons, but they didn’t have nova drives. Apollon nova fighter pilots flew them for the first half of their training, but nova fighter combat tactics relied on that short-range FTL capability.

  “No,” she told the two men. “Colonel Moranis and I got six Hoplites out here. Like I said, unfortunately I only have two pilots. I could use a few more.”

  The two men exchanged a glance.

  “I’d want to see the pay scales,” Patel quipped. “I mean, really, I don’t have a comparison out here, but I should probably ask what you’re paying first.”

  “Fixed salary equivalent to ASDF ace pilot rate and three point five percent of the company as a signing bonus,” she told him. “No combat bonuses, as we’re all going to be part-owners. Moranis sent the money out here for all of us, so we share the company.”

  “We’re in,” Hoffman said before Patel could say anything more. “Dinesha is just making noise. A chance to get back in a nova fighter? Neither of us is turning that down!”

  She nodded and concealed a sigh of relief.

  “I’ll have the Ironborn take you back to Conviction,” she told them. “Cartman is going to be the number two for a while, so she’ll see you settled and give you a chance to check out your birds.

  “We’re going for a test flight this evening to stretch our wings, but we don’t have much control over when Conviction sails,” she continued. “As a squadron, we’re contracted to John Estanza, the carrier owner.

  “He’s under contract to Redward. So, for the moment at least, we sail at King Larry’s pleasure.”