“Us either, Basketball,” Commander Zoric replied. “Launching long-range sweeps in a few moments. Anything for Duck to watch for?”
Duck was Daniel Mbeki. Kira had no idea what the other Commander had done to get saddled with that handle, but she wanted to find out.
Of course, part of her wanted to find out everything about Daniel Mbeki, and that part was making her very grumpy.
“I think you see what I see, Conviction,” she replied. “I’ve got two twenty-kilocubic junkers at the center of the point and nothing as far as the radar with guns except us.”
Zoric snorted.
“Be nice, Basketball. This is the Syntactic Cluster. Those ‘junkers’ might be somebody’s pride and joy.”
“They’re nova ships, Conviction,” Kira replied. “Doesn’t matter where you are; they’re someone’s pride and joy. That pair, on the other hand? Someone needs a bit more pride and a bit more paint!”
The two freighters in question were small enough to be family or even individually owned and run. Running a freighter with a crew of one couldn’t be easy, but Kira knew there were people who did it.
Most of them had more drones than seemed to be the norm out there. And anyone who had labor drones could use the things to repaint the mismatched and battered outer hulls of the two small ships.
“Basketball, we have Darkwing One through Four in the pipe. Final call for clear space.”
There were a dozen automated drones flickering around Conviction, and Zoric didn’t really need Kira’s eyes and sensors. On the other hand, in a combat environment, those drones would be rapidly rendered useless by multiphasic jamming. Having the human double check was never a bad idea.
“Space is clear,” Kira confirmed.
A moment later, Conviction’s launch deck pulsed with gravitic energy and four PNC-115s blasted into space. They took a moment to orient themselves into two two-spacecraft groups, then flashed their running lights in a salute to Conviction and Kira’s group—and then vanished in a blast of tachyons and Cherenkov radiation as they novaed out.
The patrol wasn’t going far, just a light-hour, but they’d sweep the perimeter of the trade route stop to make sure the entire area was clear.
“Conviction, confirmed Darkwing deployment and nova,” she told Zoric. “Maintaining patrol and escort.”
Today, Memorial Squadron had the CSP—Carrier Space Patrol. She’d brought Longknife—Hoffman—out with her and tasked Cartman and Patel with training the temps.
By the time the week-plus journey was over, she was pretty sure the two copilots would be delighted to go back to Mbeki’s Darkwing Squadron. Nonetheless, they were taking her people’s idea of appropriate standards in stride. So far.
They still retreated faster than she liked…but in the quiet of her own head, she’d admit that they were probably closer to the right timing for mercs than she was.
“Boss, one of the junkers novaed,” Longknife reported. “Directly along route six. Nothing to worry about.”
Redward was not quite central to the Syntactic Cluster. It was close enough, however, that nine of the eleven usual trade routes in the Cluster hit a trade stop within one nova of King Larry’s star system.
Route six was headed toward Ypres. That was enough to give Kira a moment of pause, but not a big one. Ypres was where the Brisingr ambassador was and where anyone who killed her was supposed to prove it to get paid.
She’d never even visited the system, and she knew the name was going to make her twitchy for a while.
For now...
“I have a Cherenkov radiation spike,” she told Conviction. “Incoming nova, energy signatures suggest…”
She knew this part of the job. Being a merc, running a squadron with no superiors? Those were new to her—but she knew patrol-and-escort in her bones.
With their pilot and copilot setup, the PNC-115s could do a sixteen-hour sweep of the trade route stop without returning to the carrier. The Hoplite-IVs were single-seat fighters, which meant that the ASDF—and now Memorial Squadron, since Kira had simply copied ASDF policies—limited them to six-hour patrols.
Kira and Hoffman waited until Cartman and Banderas were in space, then carefully began to bring their fighters in.
“This is Conviction, standing by for automatic control,” Waldroup’s voice said in her headware. “I have you on the line, Basketball. Vectors are green, contact in thirty seconds. I request control.”
For a moment, Kira considered going for a manual landing. It was better to practice it now than under fire, after all.
Her impression was that it would also panic the hell out of Conviction’s crew. The carrier had no guns of her own, after all, which meant her crew had probably never had to manage landings inside the multiphasic jamming of a battlespace.
“I yield control,” she said aloud. Surprising her new comrades with a stunt like that was all well and good, but she’d want to make sure at least some people knew what was coming. Probably only Waldroup, now that she considered it.
Kira suspected the deck boss would be entirely on board with spooking her techs.
She felt the twitches of the nova fighter around her as the Hoplite flashed toward Conviction. At this velocity, the Harringtons could bring her to a near-complete halt relative to the carrier in a heartbeat.
Waldroup was actually bringing her in faster than an ASDF controller would have in the circumstances, and a moment of panic flashed through Kira before she suppressed it.
If the woman maintaining her nova fighter wanted to kill Kira, she had far better options than ramming the fighters into the carrier’s retrieval deck.
The maw of that deck swept over the Hoplite-IV and the fighter came to a gentle halt, hovering in the air over one of the transfer platforms for a moment before touching down.
“Contact,” Waldroup declared. “Issuing shutdown orders. Welcome back aboard, Commander.”
Patel was waiting for the two of them as Kira and Hoffman exited the fighters. He and Hoffman embraced and Kira concealed a smile. She wasn’t blind, whatever the two lovers might be thinking.
“Asjes?” Kira asked.
“Sleeping,” Patel replied. “They’ll do. Not so sure about Banderas.”
“She can fly,” Kira pointed out. “For this mission, that should be enough. I didn’t see anything in the briefing Redward provided suggesting a higher-than-usual threat rating.”
“Any escort out here is a higher threat rating than I’m used to,” Hoffman pointed out. “I’m guessing you read the briefing on our ‘most likely hostile’?”
“Local pirate clans, flying around in gunships built with the basic fabricator database,” she confirmed. “I’ve left Kaiserreich gunships in pieces. I’m not going to sweat the Costar Clans.”
“Yeah, any one gunship isn’t worth much,” Hoffman agreed. “But I read the actual report on just who they are.” He shook his head. “The important word is probably desperate, boss. They’re desperate.
“They’re a bunch of assholes from asteroid settlements and marginal worlds and systems no one else lives in,” he continued. “The kind of places that start out on a narrow line and, if they’re unlucky, never get off it. More civilized places, they get snapped up as dependencies of bigger powers.
“Out here? They band together and take what they need. Brisingr gunship pilots were professionals, like us. These Clans aren’t. They’re pirates, they’re amateurs, and they’re convinced that if they fail, their whole settlement dies.”
Patel shook his head.
“The margins are never that thin,” he argued. “I’m from a system like that—one of Apollo’s dependencies, obviously. It’s not an easy life, but even without Apollo, we’d survive.”
“Didn’t say the margins were that thin,” Hoffman replied. “Neither did the Redward intelligence report. What it says is that the Clans’ pilots believe the margins are that thin. It reads like some damn clever propaganda work on someone’s part…but it means that the
y’ll fight like demons.
“They’re pirates that think if they fail, everyone they love dies. Hell of a motivator.”
“And we’ll want to keep that in mind,” Kira agreed. “I’d still stack Memorial Squadron up against an equal number of their gunships. Even with the temps!”
The two men standing with her chuckled their agreement.
“Not arguing that point, Commander,” Hoffman said. “Just…urging caution, that’s all.”
19
“You want to what?” Waldroup stared at Kira in surprise.
Memorial Squadron’s commander wasn’t entirely convinced that Angel Waldroup ever slept. Every time Kira was on the flight or retrieval deck, the massive woman was there somewhere. She seemed to be managing flight control, fighter maintenance, everything.
Kira had caught up with her while she was supervising the functionality check on the carrier’s stockpile of conversion torpedoes.
“I want to make a surprise manual landing on the next patrol run, after the nova,” Kira repeated. “If we’re in the jamming field of an active battlespace, you can’t take remote control of the nova fighters. Hell, you don’t even have the sensors to guide us in if we’re in full multiphasic jamming.”
“Nobody is flying this carrier into a battlespace,” Waldroup objected. “She’s completely defenseless. Zoric’s job is to get the hell out of the way while you and Mbeki deal with threats.”
“Defenseless?” Kira asked. “Last I checked, if nothing else, Conviction has fully functional multiphasic jammers of her own. She might need them to keep herself safe from long-range fire—and the kind of ships that can throw that kind of fire are the kind we’ll need torpedoes to kill.
“How do you plan on rearming the One-Fifteens if you can’t land them, Waldroup?”
“You’re nuts,” the deck boss replied. “Nobody practices a manual landing.”
“The ASDF and the Kaiserreich do,” Kira said. “I’ve made over a hundred practice manual landings—and three real-world ones, under heavy fire each time. I know I can land on Conviction manually without any problems at all.
“I want to see how your people handle it when I do, but I didn’t want to pull that without at least talking to you.”
“You’re nuts,” Waldroup repeated, but Kira could see the beginnings of a wicked grin forming around the technician’s lips. “All right.” She raised a finger. “Assuming, of course, that the next route stop is clear. Let’s not complicate an actual fight more than we need to.”
“Of course not,” Kira agreed. “It’s a drill, Waldroup. I want to do this once to surprise your people, but once your people have their procedures down, I’m going to run all of my pilots through it.
“I want to know that, no matter what happens, my people can land on this carrier.”
“Going to sell Mbeki on that one?” Waldroup asked drily.
“Darkwing isn’t my squadron,” Kira said sharply. “They’re not my pilots; they’re not subject to my training regimen. But the five people whose salaries I’m paying this week?
“They are. And three of them already know this regimen.”
And if the other two couldn’t hack it, they had no business flying her nova fighters!
Kira was awake and back on the flight deck in time for the nova along route three. There was no noticeable sensation aboard the carrier, even for a full six-light-year nova. Standing on the deck, however, she noted that there were going to be at least four people feeling the ride: two of the PNC-115s were still in space.
The nova fighters were capable of a six-light-year nova. Of course, a class two nova drive would need almost forty hours to recharge after that jump compared to a class one nova drive’s twenty.
The flip side was that a class two drive could recharge after a one light-minute or shorter jump in ten seconds at most, where a class one drive was looking at a ten-minute minimum recharge time, no matter how short the jump.
A thought command opened her fighter and she clambered into the cockpit.
“This is Basketball, I’m clear to launch,” she announced as she strapped herself in. “Who’s flying nova escort?”
“Darkwing Seven and Eight,” Conviction control replied. She didn’t recognize who was speaking this time. “Hammer and Fern. They’ll land once you and Longknife are in space, Memorial Lead.”
“Understood. Proceed with the launch.”
The standard back-and-forth followed, but Kira went through it on autopilot as she looked at the plan for this stop. Not much had changed. Memorial Squadron would guard the carrier while Darkwing sent two flights out on twenty-hour patrols.
Different flights than last time, she noted. Mbeki had flown the sixteen hour patrol at the last stop and was leaving his second in command to lead this one.
Space flashed dark around her and she thought an order to her fighter, flickering her running lights at the two Darkwing fighters as she and Longknife took over high escort.
The changeover continued. Shortly after the two escorts landed, two PNC-115 fighter-bombers shot into space. Two more followed a minute later, and then all four nova fighters vanished into their own FTL jumps.
“Conviction, anything out here that you’re worrying about?” Kira asked over the channel. “I make it slightly busier than the last stop. Four ships, all freighters. Nothing that looks interesting at all.”
Three of the ships looked much the same as the twenty-kilocubic junkers at the first rest stop. The last was bigger and in better shape, a Redward-registry freighter of thirty-five thousand cubic meters.
“Nada,” Control replied. “We know the Redward ship; she’s been part of a few convoys we’ve escorted. Not well enough that anyone is inviting anyone over for dinner, so no real worries.”
Kira snorted.
“Understood, Conviction, no need to make friends.”
As the unfamiliar voice chuckled and the channel went dormant, she realized one of the things that had been bothering her since they’d left Blueward Station. Really, it had been bothering her since she’d come aboard the carrier.
Where the hell was John Estanza? Gold Cobra owned the carrier and was supposed to be her captain, but Commander Zoric seemed to fill the actual “ship captain” role on a day-to-day basis. She’d seen him to negotiate the contract, and that was it. Zoric and Mbeki were the people actually running the carrier and the mercenary corporation that manned it.
On Blueward Station, he’d supposedly been negotiating contracts. What was he doing out there in deep space?
Somehow, she was grimly certain it involved the bottle that had been sitting on the old man’s desk when she had met him.
A freighter disappeared. Another appeared. It was a quiet patrol for the first hour, so Kira was surprised when her Hoplite informed her that she had a laser-com link from the other fighter.
“Longknife, you see something I don’t?” she asked quickly.
“Not out here, no,” Hoffman told her quietly. “This is secure, right?”
“It’s laser com,” Kira said with a snort. “Nobody else out here can even see it. What’s up?”
“I had a long talk with Nightmare after her patrol with Galavant,” the other pilot told her. “She doesn’t think we’re going to keep her.”
Galavant was Annmarie Banderas’s callsign. Kira wasn’t even surprised to hear that.
“She didn’t seem overly impressed with the training regimen,” she agreed. “I’m not sure Mbeki’s people take the Costar seriously.”
Her wingman snorted.
“I’m not sure you take the Costar seriously,” he countered. “But you’re right. They’ve fought them and they regard them as practically harmless.”
“Which is a terrible classification to hang on anyone who is shooting at you,” Kira muttered. “I don’t rank them high as threats go, Longknife, but they’re definitely a threat!”
“Glad to hear it.” She felt as much as heard or saw Hoffman’s headshake. “Banderas seems to
figure all of this is a waste of time, and she didn’t sign on as a mercenary to get run ragged.”
“She’s entitled to her opinion, but while she flies under me, she does the training,” Kira said. “And then she never flies under me again. That’s also her privilege.”
“Nightmare seemed to think it might come up sooner than that, but neither of us has a feel on how,” Hoffman told her. “She wanted to touch base with you, but you were asleep when she landed and then we were novaing.”
Timing was everything. Kira suppressed a curse. Secondhand assessments like this were always risky.
“I’ll keep my eyes and ears open,” she responded. “Galavant’s half-decent, so unless she causes trouble, I’ll keep her as a temp until this cruise is over.”
“Swordheart is fine, according to Dawnlord,” Hoffman told her, clearly trying to add some good news about Shun Asjes. “They don’t say much, but Dawnlord figures they thought the Darkwings were under-prepped for what’s out here.”
“I’d agree,” Kira said. “But they’re Mbeki’s squadron, not mine. He can do whatever the hell he wants with them. So long as anyone flies for me, they’re going to be ready.”
“Oh, I know,” Hoffman confirmed. “But Nightmare and Dawnlord wanted those updates on your mind and didn’t want to drop a message through the ship.”
Conviction was a temporary home for Memorial Squadron right now. That could—almost certainly would—change as they stayed aboard and got to know the crew. Right now, the carrier was a stopover and Kiras people only trusted the mercenaries so far.
“We’ll worry about—shoot!”
The tachyon pulse that lit up Kira’s screens was one of the largest she’d seen in the Syntactic Cluster.
“I have nova,” she reported to Conviction. “I have warship nova,” she clarified a moment later. “Forty-five kilocubics; she’s running hot and moving to sweep the trade route rest stop.”
Almost unconsciously, she brought the fighter’s reactor to a higher readiness. Her mental finger rested on the command sequence that would activate the Hoplite-IV’s two multiphasic jammers as she waited for the warship’s identity codes to register.
Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Page 11