Kira had never seen the scan Waldroup was doing…but she had enough of an eye for what the conductive pathways through the coupling should look like to pick out the point where several of the lines of superconducting ceramic didn’t line up.
“And there’s your problem,” the merc deck boss concluded. Multiple spots in the model acquired red highlights. “This was a bad one, to be clear. Sixteen fracture points.
“None of them are big, but that’s sixteen points where you’re trying to pulse hundreds of megawatts of energy through as much as ten micrometers of insulator.”
The big woman shrugged.
“The coupling blows,” she concluded. “In theory, one or two fractures should be okay if you’re at less than a dozen micrometers of total misalignment. This particular one is a deathtrap that even your people should have caught.”
“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Kira admitted glumly. “I’ve only seen one nova fighter actually blow up when they pulled the trigger…but I have seen it. What do we do?”
“Well, I run the deeper scan and scrap the units that fail,” Waldroup told her. “Then I run the specifications for couplings for your ships into Conviction’s fabricators and make new ones.”
She grinned.
“The only things I can’t make for your birds are Harrington coils and nova drives. Both of those need gravity to build. If we need Harringtons, we can buy them from the locals.”
“And if the class two goes, I’m down a nova fighter,” Kira confirmed. That was why her fighters were so valuable out there, after all. Nobody in the Syntactic Cluster had worked out how to build a class two nova drive yet.
Kira knew some of the tricks involved—but she also knew a lot of it was having certain fabrication tolerances and very specific tools that the general fabricator didn’t have.
The general standard fabricator could build a regular class one nova drive. Assuming it had gravity and exotic matter, at least—but the exotic matter itself required zero gee to make.
And for reasons that Kira did not have the physics degrees to understand, the gravity requirements for exotic matter and exotic-matter-derived production could not be met with artificial gravity.
“So long as your class twos survive, I can rebuild your fighters from wreckage,” the deck boss confirmed. “Lose your class twos and, well…when I came aboard, we had fourteen of the One-Fifteens.”
Kira nodded, stepping back to look at all six of her fighters.
“You replaced the damaged couplings, so they’re all good to go?” she asked.
“We pulse-tested the couplings we installed and everything looks good,” Waldroup agreed. “No fractures that we can detect and they passed the tests. Live fire is always a different question, but I’m as comfortable with them as I can be.
“You have six combat-ready Hoplite-IVs, Commander.” She chuckled. “Not that anything else was ever going to happen. We launch in two hours. I wouldn’t like what would happen to my paycheck if your birds weren’t online.”
“Thanks, Waldroup,” Kira told the other woman. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like what happens to my contract rate if I don’t have six ships.”
“Which does bring up a problem,” Mbeki said calmly behind her.
She cursed internally. Her situational awareness was usually too good to let people sneak up on her like that—but she’d been focusing on the fighters to specifically not think about Mbeki. That had apparently spilled over into her headware actively ignoring him.
Computers installed in human brains picked up far too many of those brains’ quirks.
“I only have four pilots,” she conceded as she turned to face him. Waldroup clearly registered this conversation as none of my business and was calmly trundling the cart with the useless coupling away from the fighter.
“And your contract calls for six fully manned and functional nova fighters,” Mbeki agreed. His tone was professional. Too professional. He’d been warm and casual with her from the beginning, and almost all of that was gone now.
“I was hoping for more of my people to show up,” Kira admitted awkwardly. This wasn’t a conversation they really should have been having in the middle of the fighter bay, but Mbeki didn’t show any sign of moving elsewhere. “With two hours until we ship out, that isn’t happening.”
There wasn’t even any inbound civilian shipping that could be carrying her people.
“I’ve reviewed the contract this morning,” he noted. “You do remember what the penalties for deploying less than a full squadron are?”
“Yes,” Kira finally snapped. If she lost a fighter, the contract called for a renegotiation of the fee schedule. If she failed to deploy a fighter she had, she was docked twenty-five percent of the fee for that cruise.
“I also don’t think is an appropriate conversation to have in the middle of a hangar deck, Commander Mbeki,” she continued, her tone still sharp as she intentionally didn’t use his first name. “My office, if you please?”
“Very well,” he conceded with a bow of his head. “Lead the way.”
Kira’s office was exactly halfway between the launch and retrieval decks. Mbeki’s office was similarly positioned, a single floor above hers, but he politely followed her to her space.
It wasn’t far, but it took long enough to get there for her to regain her calm. Entering the room, she mentally ordered coffees from the built-in machine.
There was still only one chair in the room and neither of them took it. Mbeki accepted the coffee with a nod, then glanced back at the door to make sure it was closed.
“Despite occasional glitches, I’m not your enemy,” he said quietly. “I pinned you down to offer a solution, not a problem. If you’d actually read my messages, I wouldn’t have had to track you down on the flight deck.”
Kira checked her headware and grimaced. In the ASDF, there’d been a clear template her headware had used to classify her contacts. She was so used to that being done automatically, she hadn’t manually classified the Conviction crew and officers.
They were all in the personal acquaintances group…a group her headware would automatically hold messages from until she wasn’t angry at them.
Or, in Mbeki’s case, being angry at herself about them. Computers followed instructions, after all. Computers that were part of your head followed all of your instructions. Even the ones you didn’t necessarily mean to give.
“I never even saw that,” she admitted. “My headware isn’t used to having fellow officers that aren’t ASDF. It’s getting confused.” She snorted. “Which means, I suppose, that I’m getting confused.”
“I’ve never met anyone whose headware did anything but make them more human,” Mbeki conceded.
He exhaled, then took a sip of his coffee as he marshaled his thoughts.
“Your pay gets cut by fifty percent if you don’t field those two nova fighters,” he noted. “Mine doesn’t get cut for shit; I’m a part-owner in Conviction Mercenary Ops LLC itself.”
“Your point?”
“A PNC One-Fifteen needs a pilot and a copilot,” Mbeki told her. “If one of my pilots is out, for illness or injury or whatever, I sub up a copilot, and I’ve got a couple of spare copilots on the payroll who do other jobs around the ship.
“I can put two of my better copilots on ‘leave’ for this mission,” he continued. “They’re qualified to fly nova fighters—if I were to suddenly acquire two new birds, they’d be the people I’d put behind the stick.”
“And then I temporarily hire them, I presume?” Kira asked. “At full standard pilot rates, plus combat pay, of course.”
“Which is why they won’t say no,” Mbeki agreed. “That’s almost double copilot pay without bonuses. Everybody knows up front it’s temporary, because you’re still waiting on your people, but it gets you six fighters in the air, which gets you full contract payment and puts a nice chunk of change in two of my people’s pockets.”
“You like that pair, huh?” she
asked.
He snorted.
“The greenest crew member on Conviction outside your squadron has been here for two years,” he pointed out. “I’ve known all of my people for at least three. There’s nobody left that I don’t like, and that pair are the best I’ve got.
“Everyone wins, Demirci.”
“So it would seem,” she murmured. “Their names?”
He tossed her the data and then leaned against the wall with his coffee while she reviewed the files for the two pilots. Both had been with Conviction for five years and earned their nova pilot’s wings aboard the carrier. Neither was native to the Syntactic Cluster, but the sector they were from wasn’t any better off financially or technologically.
They were the kind of people who would sign on to a mercenary ship with no intention of ever coming home. There was no real data in Mbeki’s files as to why Annmarie Banderas and Shun Asjes had left their home systems behind, but they had to have had a reason.
It might be as simple as they’d wanted to fly nova fighters or as complicated as Kira’s own flight from assassins. Either way, there was a reason they were aboard Conviction.
“All right,” she said aloud. “Run it by them, and if they’re aboard, send me a message. I promise I will get this one.”
She’d applied the ASDF fellow-officer template to the other two Conviction Commanders while they’d been talking. She wasn’t going to make that much of a fool of herself again.
“I’ll need them in simulators by the time Conviction makes her first nova,” she continued. “They might have their wings, but a Hoplite and a One-Fifteen have quite different performance envelopes.
“You think they’re up to it?” She smiled at Mbeki. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant expression. “That gets them a shot. But they need to prove they can hack my standards and my squadron, Commander.
“I’ll take the pay cut before I’ll send out people in those fighters I don’t expect to bring them back. Am I clear?”
“Those fighters are your stock-in-trade, your biggest asset,” the other mercenary told her. “That’s the rules you have to follow. I’ll talk to them both; they should be ready to go before we even break dock.”
“Good. The sooner I have them in sims, the more likely they are to learn what I want before it’s too late!”
17
“Simulation over.”
Kira studied the result hovering above the simulator pod. The first test she’d thrown her two temporary pilots into was a Thermopylae Scenario. They were tasked to protect a convoy until their nova drives recharged against a continuing and growing attack.
If a group of pilots somehow managed to survive and protect the convoy for the fourteen hours necessary for the convoy’s drives to recharge…those drives would break. Given that the simulation in question would start throwing full Kaiserreich carrier groups at the defenders around hour two, she was reasonably sure it was impossible.
She’d been part of a fighter group that held out in this scenario for ninety-six minutes. That was when the sim threw two full nova fighter wings supported by a pair of cruisers at the defenders.
If nothing else, the freighters became indefensible at that point.
“Eleven minutes. They both novaed out,” Cartman said quietly beside her. “Abandoned the mission to preserve assets.”
“They lived eleven minutes, I suppose,” Kira allowed. That wasn’t particularly terrible, all things considered. Her mental benchmark had been ten—but she’d expected them to go down swinging. “And took down three nova fighters apiece along the way. But as soon as they were outnumbered two-to-one, they bailed.”
She didn’t bother to wipe the grim expression from her face as the pods opened and the two pilots stepped out.
“Well?” she asked. “Care to explain?”
Banderas and Asjes shared a look.
“Explain what, Commander?” Asjes finally asked.
“Why you withdrew,” Kira told them. “The objectives you were given didn’t include withdrawal criteria. Your orders were to protect the convoy. As I’ve traditionally run this sim, running is the only way to lose.”
“We were outnumbered two-to-one, in the middle of a full multiphasic jamming bubble and unable to maintain more than intermittent coms with each other, let alone the convoy,” Banderas said slowly. She was a tall blonde who towered over Kira and was trying very clearly to not obviously “look down on” her new boss.
“The battle wasn’t sustainable. Continuing the engagement would have risked our nova fighters for no purpose.”
“No purpose,” Kira echoed. A gesture opened a holo image of the convoy the two pilots had been supposed to protect. She’d adjusted the sim slightly to make them ships likely to show up in the Syntactic Cluster, which meant it was made up of twenty-thousand-cubic-meter ships instead of the forty- to fifty-thousand-cubic ships she was used to.
“Seven civilian ships were depending on you, pilot,” she pointed out. “At that size, average crew of twelve to fifteen. Let’s be generous and say you only abandoned eighty-five people to their deaths or capture.”
“It’s capture at worst out here,” Asjes objected. “The pirates know that if too many people end up dead, it goes badly for them. They don’t even keep the ships a lot of the time. They just strip the cargo and let them go.”
“So, your plan was to put the safety of the people paying you on the good will of pirates?” Kira asked. “And this seemed reasonable to you?”
“We’re mercenaries, Commander,” Banderas replied. “Every time we go out, it’s a cost-benefit analysis. Without the fighters we’re flying, you’ve got nothing.”
“That’s my call to make,” Kira said flatly. “Which means if I send you out there in real life, you’re going to have withdrawal criteria. You’ll have orders. It’s not your place to decide if holding the line is worth your ships, pilots.”
“It is under Mbeki.”
She wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.
“I hear that,” she told them. “So, you have a choice. A very simple one. You passed my minimum capability standard, so I’m willing to keep you for this cruise as we planned. But you need to decide if you work for me—or Mbeki.
“Because I don’t run my squadron like he runs his,” she concluded. “I run this squadron like it’s part of a proper damn military. That we’re mercenaries will affect our objectives, but that’s my call to make. Not yours.
“If you can’t live with that, I don’t want you on my wing. We clear?” she asked.
“We’re clear,” both echoed back at her.
“Well?” she asked.
The two pilots shared another look and an almost-synchronized shrug.
“I can get used to anything,” Asjes said bluntly. They were looking at the floor as much as at Kira. “I’ll do a lot for money and more to fly. I can follow orders.”
“It’s all a learning experience, isn’t it?” Banderas asked with a chuckle. “I’ll learn. Can’t hurt anywhere along the way, can it?”
“All right.” Kira studied for a moment longer. “Fall out. We’ll have all six of us in sims in half an hour for one mass exercise, but then we get to hope it was enough as we join the patrol cycle.”
Two fighters from each squadron would be in space at all times while Conviction was outside the Redward System. Once the carrier made her first nova, there’d be no more chances for squadron exercises.
Kira’s headware kept her fully aware of the carrier’s position and status at all times. She was halfway into a sandwich after the exercise when Conviction finally began to move. There was nothing in the mess hall to suggest that dozens of umbilicals and several large docking and transfer tubes had just detached.
There wasn’t even anything to suggest that the Harringtons had engaged. Conviction fell away from the station at a rapidly growing pace.
“We’re on our way,” she murmured aloud. Her headware brought up the cruise route that Mbeki had shared with her. They’d
accelerate out from Redward for two hours to get up to a decent velocity and then nova out.
Their first jump would be four and a half light-years and require a sixteen-hour cooldown. That would put them at the first of the “trade route stops,” the heavily mapped points in deep space where most ships would stop.
The nova fighters would patrol the area, their faster-recharging drives allowing them to sweep out several light-months in every direction and return in that sixteen-hour cooldown. Then Conviction would make a full six-light-year jump to another trade route stop.
The fighters would repeat the sweep over the twenty-hour recharge, the carrier would jump again, they’d sweep again. Then the carrier would jump into the New Ontario System and discharge her drives’ tachyon-static buildup at the gas giant there.
They’d return by the same route, this time with a planned convoy of freighters. That part of the trip would be the actual dangerous one. The nova fighters would keep close in for the entire trip, running patrols over the carrier and her flock.
Kira had seen dozens of similar patrols over her time in the ASDF. Only three of them had ever been attacked—but on one of those attacks, the 303 had lost their carrier.
They had, however, saved the convoy and got a critical mass of supplies through a Brisingr blockade. She wasn’t sure it had been worth it, but it hadn’t been her call then.
It was her call now. That was the point she’d made to her new pilots, as well.
No matter how many of the missing 303 pilots showed up, she was always going to have a majority stake in Memorial Squadron. They were her fighters, her pilots…her mercenaries.
She was going to have to get used to that.
18
“Conviction, this is Basketball,” Kira said over the radio. “Memorial One and Two holding high escort position. I have the rest stop on my scopes and I’m not seeing any signs of trouble.”
Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Page 10