Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Read online

  “A king, huh,” Hoffman murmured. “That’ll take some getting used to. We staying here long-run?”

  “I don’t know,” Kira admitted. “The extent of the old man’s plan seemed to be to get everyone out here and aboard Conviction. From there, it’s up to us. No one else calling the shots, no high command.

  “Just us, six nova fighters, and a starting contract with the most powerful warship out here. We’ll see where we go.”

  “We wait for the rest before anything else?” Patel asked.

  “Exactly. We’ll probably sortie with Conviction before anyone else arrives, but I’ll make sure someone is waiting for them to keep them safe until we return.”

  13

  “Control, this is Basketball, requesting clearance for launch,” Kira transmitted from her headware.

  Her callsign had been hung on her the first week she’d been at the ASDF flight academy, when a tall senior had seen her at the court and challenged her to a “casual pickup” game. He’d been aiming for a different kind of pickup, she was sure, but after she’d run him ragged around the court for twenty minutes, his friends had been laughing too hard for his ego to take it—and her callsign had already been set when she’d logged into her first sub-fighter the next day.

  “Basketball, this is Conviction. We show all markers green and you are linked into the system.”

  No matter how casual Conviction’s crew took any other matters, this was the one place they could not joke around. If the angles on the catapult or the timing on the activation of the Hoplite-IV’s Harrington coils was even slightly off, she could hammer the nova fighter into the side of the launch bay at a few dozen kilometers per second.

  Conviction would be crippled and she would be very dead. Nobody wanted to muck up a space fighter launch.

  “I have the ball,” she told the control center. “Initiating launch cycle in five.”

  “We have your metric, Basketball,” a different voice replied. Kira smiled to herself as she recognized Mbeki. Of course the other fighter squadron commander was watching the first test flight for the Memorials. “You are green.”

  “Bounce the ball now,” Kira ordered.

  The instruction wasn’t directed at any of the humans involved in the process. Once she had the launch system control—the “ball” or the “metric” or one of a dozen other nicknames—the computers were waiting for her order.

  Her nova fighter was only fifty-two meters from deep space. Gravity control allowed her to have a clean tunnel of vacuum from just behind her Hoplite to the energy field holding the ship’s atmosphere inside—which was good, because she crossed that fifty-two meters in less than a hundredth of a second.

  Her Harrington coils kicked live somewhere in the middle of that process, their reactionless impulse taking over when the artificial free fall out of the carrier ended. Unaugmented human eyes and hands couldn’t handle that switchover—and even Kira could only keep up with the reports through her headware.

  The sequence for a launch took way too little time for even a modern human to exert active control until it was over.

  Once it was over, Kira set herself on the planned course. There was a physical joystick in her fighter cockpit, but it was currently retracted to allow her to fly the fighter with a virtual one that only existed in her headware and the spacecraft’s computers.

  No physical lever could keep up with the speed she needed to make changes at to engage in space combat, after all. The physical joystick—like the visual displays hidden behind her current virtual world—was a backup for if the main computer was completely down or she took a head injury.

  She was already two hundred kilometers clear of Blueward Station, and she flipped her Hoplite-IV in space to look back at it. It would have been hard to see without magnification, but her headware alone was capable of zooming in on the station and the attached carrier.

  “Basketball, this is Conviction,” Mbeki’s voice said in her head. “We have you on the scopes. Clean launch, clean flight. Nightmare is in the tunnel now and has the metric. Launching…now.”

  Kira was watching the carrier and looking for Cartman’s fighter. Years of practice made picking out the launch easy enough, but there was no bright flash of light or anything similar. Harrington coils didn’t create any visible thrust, after all.

  The bright white wedge of a starfighter was clear enough as Mel “Nightmare” Cartman launched into space.

  “Nightmare, this is Basketball,” Kira hailed her. “I’m at low thrust and waiting for you. If you can’t find me, I might need a new number two!”

  The only response she got from Cartman was a chuckle on the radio—and a noticeable spike in the Hoplite’s heat signature as Nightmare’s Harrington coils went to full power and flung the fighter out toward her.

  Conviction could launch her entire squadron at once—she was designed to launch a twelve-fighter squadron at once, a fifth of her complement—but that had a small but measurable risk.

  One nova fighter at a time showed up on Kira’s screens as Longknife—Joseph Hoffman—and Dawnlord—Dinesha Patel—launched from the carrier in sequence.

  Two minutes after leaving the carrier herself, Kira was surrounded by three other nova fighters as she luxuriated in the feeling of being back in open space.

  The “cockpit” of the nova fighter was buried at the center of the structure, inside a shell of the only armor the spacecraft had. A second “living” space was accessible through an armored hatch, but that space was barely large enough for the tiny bunk it contained.

  The Hoplite was capable of interstellar travel, but it wasn’t designed for it. Mbeki’s PNC-115s were better off for that, but they still only had one bunk—for a crew of two.

  “Basketball, we have all four of your birds on the scopes,” Mbeki told her over the radio. “We’ve cleared a flight path with Redward Orbital Control, you’re good to stretch your wings for a bit. ROC has requested that you please not shoot anything. This wasn’t cleared as a live-fire exercise.”

  “Understood,” Kira replied with a chuckle. A quick glance confirmed that her fighter’s guns had never been connected. Right now, her Hoplites were oddly shaped shuttles.

  “All right, Memorials,” she told her people. “We’re going for a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood. Redward-Wardstone Lagrange point two, if you please.”

  Nonverbal acknowledgements flickered back across the squadron net. Wardstone was the Redward System’s star, the inhabited planet having long since taken over as the main name for the tiny monarchy.

  “And just for giggles, we’re switching to laser coms,” Kira continued. “Consider it good practice.”

  No battlespace would allow for regular radio coms. Directed com-lasers could easily lose lock in intensive maneuvers, but were unjammable.

  A two-million-kilometer loop wasn’t an intensive maneuver. It was, as Mbeki had described it, just stretching their wings.

  Kira spent most of the flight out to the L2 point testing her people’s skills in various formations. They were all aces at least three times over, but none of them had been in a cockpit for at least two months.

  What little rust existed was easily blown off. By the time they decelerated to a stop at their destination, Kira was comfortable that her people could at least fly. Gun camera exercises would come another day. Right now, she needed to know that they could get a nova fighter around in sublight.

  And it wasn’t like they were under threat there. L2 was home to the Black Ward, a heavy defensive battle station.

  The Black Ward was a ten-kilometer-wide spherical asteroid. Chunks of its exterior had been effectively refined in place to create hundred-meter-thick layers of hardened steel armor that had then been covered in titanium-ceramic hull metal.

  With no need to ever attempt a nova, the Ward wasn’t limited by the cubage restrictions on a nova drive. The hundred and twenty thousand cubic meter heavy cruisers that had been Apollo’s best would have withered under the B
lack Ward’s guns.

  There was another station at the L1 point and two in orbit. The two in orbit acted as the counterweights for orbital elevators—Blueward Station was the geostationary midpoint of one of those elevator chains. The fortress at the far end was the Azure Ward.

  Redward was somewhat more defended than many planets this far out in the Rim, but most worlds that had been colonized for at least a century had at least one asteroid-based heavy fortress. Conquering worlds was almost impossible. The nova drive didn’t really allow for the kind of massive warships necessary to go toe-to-toe with this kind of fortress.

  Even in the ugly war between Apollo and Brisingr, none of the actual planets had been at risk. The heavily mapped nova zones that made up the trade lanes had been both the prize and the battlefield of that war.

  “Memorial Squadron, Black Ward has you on scanners,” a coms officer reached out to her. “Your flight looks clean from here. We’re not seeing anything that suggests you have any problems, but I can send you our scan data if you think it would be useful.”

  “I’d appreciate that, Black Ward,” she admitted. “Thanks for the offer.”

  Her headware pinged with the receipt of the data and she smiled. The locals didn’t seem too bothered that she’d signed on with Conviction rather than them. Whatever relationship Estanza had with the local fleet seemed warm enough.

  “The flight path I have for you has you turning around here,” the officer continued. “I don’t see any reason to adjust. Starwinds speed you, Memorial Squadron. Always good to see some new faces.”

  “The welcome is appreciated, Black Ward. We’ll be seeing you around.” Kira flipped channels to her squadron with a smile.

  “All right, Memorials, we’ve played nice and clean and flown in formation so far,” she told them. “Now let’s really stretch our legs. No novas and no buzzing the locals, but I’ve got a bottle of retsina for the first of you back to the barn!”

  She only had three bottles of the specially made wine, too. Redward had a small wine industry that didn’t make anything they bothered to export—on par with Apollo’s coffee—but they didn’t make the very Greek retsina.

  “You’ll start your runs…now.”

  Energy spikes flashed on her screen as all three fighters threw their Harrington coils to maximum power, and Kira grinned to herself.

  She wasn’t convinced any of her pilots actually liked retsina…but it was a taste of a home they would probably never see again.

  14

  “Commander.”

  “Pilots.” Kira returned her people’s salutes crisply. The four nova fighters were now nestled back in their hangars, and Waldroup’s people were swarming over them for final checkups.

  The salutes were far from academy-crisp, but protocol had always been loose for Apollo’s nova fighter squadrons. Loose or not, it had existed, which made the salutes and titles a reminder of who they’d been.

  There’d been no salute from the flight deck crews, and Waldroup’s grunt of acknowledgment as she stepped up to the group of pilots barely qualified as paying attention to them, let alone being respectful.

  “I’m dumping the birds’ computer cores for any problems,” the big deck boss told Kira’s pilots without any introduction. “If anything flagged for you, let me know.”

  “I want the guns on those birds in twenty-four hours,” Kira told Waldroup. “Couple of civvie ships were flying too close for my peace of mind. Nothing came of it today, but it was a reminder that right now, we’re flying glorified shuttles.”

  “Shuttles can’t nova out of trouble,” the deck boss replied. “You’ll have your guns, Demirci. Anything else?”

  She surveyed the pilots, then shrugged and turned to walk away.

  Kira exchanged looks with her people.

  “That’s going to take some getting used to,” Patel observed. “Not even sure I can yank her up for it, either.”

  “You can’t,” Kira said flatly. “We run like we always ran, clear? The rest of the ship runs how it runs and we deal with that, but we stay military.”

  “Yes, Commander,” her pilots replied in a ragged chorus.

  “We may end up bringing our own ground team at some point,” she continued. “Right now, we’re leaning on Conviction’s people—which means Waldroup’s people. If they can handle the PNC-One-Fifteens, they can handle our Hoplites.”

  “I’m concerned about turnaround when we take a team that supported eight and ask them to support fourteen,” Cartman noted. “Do we have a plan?”

  “See how it goes on our first flight out,” Kira admitted. “We have the funds to bring aboard techs of our own, but we’d have to find decent people out here. My guess is that anyone familiar with class twos is either already aboard Conviction or working for the Redward Fleet.”

  Her people got that. Without Moranis’s plan, they’d have ended up working for King Larry’s fleet if they’d gone this far out into the Rim.

  “Oh, yeah. Hoffman. You made it back first by enough that Conviction landed you first. So, catch,” Kira told the oldest of her three pilots. She didn’t actually throw the retsina to him, but the gesture was implied.

  His “desperate” attempt to catch it was intentionally melodramatic and earned a chuckle from her people.

  “I was thinking, Commander,” Hoffman said as he looked at the bottle. “We didn’t get to attend funerals for most of our people. Fifteen of our friends—of our family—are dead and we never saw them laid to rest. We should do something…like a wake, maybe? There’s a few bars near the dock I think we could rent a room for five or six folks.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Kira agreed, looking around at her people. The four of them had come a long way. She was still hoping to see five more of the 303 join them, but her hopes were dimming. For every pilot who’d joined her, she’d heard at least one story of a pilot who’d died at the hands of the Brisingr Shadows or rogue bounty hunters.

  “Book it, make it happen,” she ordered as she made a snap decision. “We can celebrate our friends who didn’t make it and that we did at the same time. We’ll remember them best by surviving and thriving out here.

  “We’re Memorial Squadron, people—and that means we never forget where we came from.”

  Hoffman had clearly done more than just think about the wake. Kira had a ping to her headware with the address of the bar and a time the next evening before she made it back to her office aboard Conviction.

  Her office was in the same state as her quarters. It was one of the two wing commanders’ offices, designed for the officers who would have led groups of thirty nova fighters in her original service.

  Mbeki’s people had found her a chair. There appeared to be a desk in the middle of the room, but that was the holographic projectors in the room creating a useful illusion. Thankfully, in an era of data packets and virtual paperwork, she didn’t need much in terms of physical tools to do her job.

  She pulled up the same data that Waldroup would be reviewing. The deck boss knew the engineer side better than she did, but she knew the Hoplite-IV inside and out.

  The nova fighters had flown well, as cleanly as any fighter just out of the box ever had. There were adjustments to be made, and Kira started flagging her points of concern for the deck techs as she ran through the recordings.

  The four virtual nova fighters paused at a thought as a ping told her that Mbeki was at the door.

  “Come in,” she told him, ordering the door to open at the same moment.

  The broad-shouldered black mercenary stepped into the room, his smile expanding as he saw her in a way that left her questioning her own judgment.

  Kira was forty years old. She had no business mooning over a coworker, especially not one where it would be absolutely inappropriate to act on those warm feelings in her stomach. Squadron commanders couldn’t be in relationships with each other. Too many risks, too many potential problems—the kinds of risks and problems that got other people killed.
/>   “I saw the test flight,” he told her. A moment later, he tried to lean on the holographic desk replacement and stumbled as he discovered the lack of furniture in the room.

  He had enough muscle and reflexes to recover before he hit the floor, stabilizing himself with an adorably sheepish grin.

  “I knew how much furniture was in here,” he noted conversationally. “I’m an idiot.”

  “It’s a good hologram,” Kira replied with a chuckle and a shake of her head. “But I need to buy furniture and hire an admin team for stationside. The joy of being in charge never stops.”

  “Advantage: me,” Mbeki told her with a chuckle of his own. “I just have to run the squadron. Zoric handles all of that stuff.”

  “And Estanza?” she asked quietly. “What does he do? I haven’t seen him since we hired on.”

  “He’s in command, Kira,” he replied. “Right now, that means he’s talking to Royal Command and making sure we keep our retainer with the King.”

  “Conviction is half again bigger than any of Redward’s warships,” Kira pointed out. “Hiring us is a bargain.”

  “I think so. Estanza thinks so. King Larry, presumably, thinks so,” Mbeki confirmed. “Some of the King’s Members of Parliament, on the other hand, have concerns about the cost-effectiveness of mercenaries and point out that Conviction’s fighter group is seventy-five percent under strength.”

  “Good luck finding another forty-five nova fighters out here,” she said dryly. “I imagine if Estanza could have, he would have.”

  “I’ve served on Conviction for twenty years,” he reminded her. “At our peak, we fielded thirty-four nova fighters.

  “Of course, the other thing they like to point out is that Conviction has no real guns of her own. She was built with them, but Florin stripped them before selling her.”

  Kira snorted.

  “I mean, if they want to sell us heavy plasma cannon to mount on her, I’m sure the mounts are still there.”