Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  Estanza sighed and gave her A Look.

  “I have seen this dance a thousand times,” he repeated. “I can’t say for sure where you and Daniel are in the steps, but I know the dance. You’re far too angry at him for this to have been a one-way issue.”

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?” she replied.

  “You’re not a soldier anymore, Demirci,” Estanza reminded her. “You’re a mercenary now. Even if I had rules about on-ship fraternization—and I don’t—they wouldn’t apply to you unless they were in your contract.

  “Which they’re not.”

  She shook her head.

  “Just because there’s no rules doesn’t mean it isn’t a terrible idea,” she pointed out. “That rule exists for a reason. Anything between Mbeki and me would be a distraction and a danger to ourselves and our people.”

  “That’s the reasoning behind the rule, yes,” Estanza agreed. “I’ve flown in four mercenary squadrons under three commanding officers. I’ve been a merc for fifty-three years, and I was a military officer a long way from here for seven.

  “In sixty years as a pilot and a commanding officer, I have never seen an active relationship between pilots in different squadrons, regardless of the ranks involved, become a problem. I have seen a boneheaded determination to do the right thing combined with people mooning over each other get pilots killed.

  “Believe me, Demirci, you and Mbeki ‘giving in,’ or however you want to phrase it, is not going to undermine the chain of command or discipline on this ship. We’re mercenaries. We follow the rules that work; we discard the rest.

  “A specified number of manual landing drills per month? Probably garbage. Making sure that all of the pilots have done at least one manual landing drill in real space in the last few months? Almost certainly worth it.

  “I’m not going to tell you to kiss and make up, Commander,” Estanza concluded with a grin. “I’m far too old to pretend I have any business giving personal advice. I will tell you that I think your reason for rejecting what you want is complete garbage.”

  Kira had choked down several hot retorts while the older officer had been speaking, and now she took another sip of the whisky while she marshaled her thoughts.

  “I haven’t seen either in my experience, I have to admit,” she finally conceded. In twenty years of service, she was surprised to realize that. It was unlikely that no one around her had ever fallen for a superior or subordinate.

  On the other hand, Apollo culture was generally discreet on romantic matters in general, so her comrades might just have had enough practice to conceal affairs they weren’t supposed to be having.

  “I’m uninclined to throw out rules built on literally millennia of accumulated experience without a better reason than a glorified teenage crush, either,” she continued. “I can deal with my own emotions, sir. I’d hope that Commander Mbeki can say the same.”

  “It’s your call,” Estanza replied. “I’ll talk to him either way.”

  22

  Kira did her two new pilots the courtesy of finally finding chairs for her office before she called them on the carpet. The desk was still a hologram, but Asjes and Banderas could at least sit down as she stood behind it with her coldest gaze.

  “So.”

  She let the word hang in the air.

  “One of you—I do not care which—decided you were being bullied and went to Commander Mbeki,” she said flatly. “That has led to all kinds of entertaining conversations, which I doubt anyone is going to enjoy the results of.

  “What’s most relevant to you is that, since you appear to have been under the impression working for me was going to be a vacation, Captain Estanza and I have come to a compromise agreement.”

  She watched both of the pilots try to shrink into their chairs. One advantage, it seemed, of the Captain being a near-complete hermit was that coming to his attention was very definitely a bad thing for anyone aboard the ship.

  “The training regimen we’ve undergone so far isn’t going to change,” she told them. “If you fly for me, even temporarily, you will be expected to maintain the training levels and performance standards I would expect of a pilot in Memorial Squadron—which are those of a pilot in the ASDF’s most elite squadrons.

  “It appears that wasn’t properly communicated to you before you signed on for this contract, so if you want to back out now, Estanza is covering the buyout portion of your contract.”

  The pilots didn’t need to know the exact details of the compromise. That was close enough for their purposes.

  “If you stick it out from here, I expect you to stick it out,” she said calmly. “We’re three novas into an eight-nova trip. Make it back to Redward, you get paid out, everyone wins. If nothing else, you’ll probably be better pilots at the end than you were at the start.

  “But if you want out, now’s the time,” she concluded. “I won’t hold it against you—and I am going to look into the com and video records to make sure my people weren’t bullying you. It won’t happen again, I promise you that.”

  The two pilots were still sitting in front of her, their gazes fixed on the holographic desk.

  “Well?” she asked after a few moments of silence. “We’re two hours from the nova to New Ontario. Time to make the call, people.”

  “I’m in,” Asjes said firmly. “If nothing else, rumor has it that we’re all going to be doing manual landing drills once we’re back in Redward. May as well get it out of the way under your watch.”

  “I’ll stick it out,” Banderas said, but her voice was quieter. Kira figured she knew who’d complained to Mbeki now—but she doubted that the pilot had expected things to go quite as high and loudly as they had.

  “Good.” Kira studied them. “I’ve studied your performance in the tests and training we’ve done. Both of you can hack it. The question was only ever whether you would make the attempt. Am I understood?”

  That, it seemed, got under both of their skins in the right way, and she smiled as they finally looked her in the eyes.

  “New Ontario is safe space,” she told them. “You’ll both be making manual landings before we reach orbit. I suggest you go run through the simulator on them.

  “It’s easier than people who haven’t done it think it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” she finished with a grin. “So, go practice.”

  New Ontario turned out to be closer to what Kira had originally expected of the Redward System. Conviction’s base system was reasonably well colonized and industrialized, even if their tech base was still backward compared to Apollo.

  New Ontario was…not.

  Only one orbital elevator marked the planet’s equator. The asteroid counterweight was definitely armed, but it barely qualified as a fortress in her opinion. There was the usual infrastructure around the gas giant for refueling starships and allowing them to discharge the static buildup from their nova drives…and that was it.

  No extraction operations on the uninhabited planets. Nothing even in the asteroid belt that stood out to the carrier’s sensors. Half a billion people on the planet but almost nothing in space.

  “Well, this really is the ass end of nowhere,” Kira said aloud. She was standing in Conviction’s flight control, running through the prep for the five manual landings she was about to put the poor retrieval deck crew through.

  “Yup,” Waldroup confirmed. “It’s the tail end of this trade route and the far side of the Cluster from the core. Last bastion of civilization before you leave the Rim and get into real empty space.”

  The Beyond. There were still inhabited star systems and settlements and all of that once you passed the vague edge of the Rim, but there weren’t established trade routes and regions with agreements, treaties…or anything.

  It probably wasn’t as bad as Kira was inclined to think, but even the Syntactic Cluster seemed quiet and backward to her. The trade route stops that Apollo had fought to secure had been physical locations, space stations built from prefabrica
ted sections that provided food and entertainment to the crews waiting twenty hours at each point.

  The Cluster, like most of the Rim, had the mapped-out route stops that made for safe trips, but they didn’t have that infrastructure. The Beyond didn’t even have the mapped-out points.

  “What are we even here for?” Kira asked the deck boss.

  “Well, we have to discharge somewhere, and New Ontario is the end of the line for the route we were patrolling,” Waldroup told her. “So, Zoric is bringing us into Sarnia for that. King Larry has an agreement that lets the Royal Fleet run a base on one of Sarnia’s moons.

  “They keep a wing of sub-fighters here to watch the base and the refueling infrastructure. They cycle squadrons and personnel in and out.

  “We’re meeting a couple of empty supply ships and a transport that’s carrying a dozen sub-fighters and their crews back to Redward.”

  “Should send a carrier for them,” Kira pointed out. “Then they don’t need to send us along to escort them. They’ve got sub-fighter carriers, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes they do,” Waldroup agreed. “This is only the second time they’ve sent us. I’d bet that the RRF wanted to haul the sub-fighters on Conviction but the boss said no. No point launching sub-fighters off our decks when we’ve got nova fighters to deploy.”

  Kira couldn’t argue with that point. The sub-fighters might be the same size as Conviction’s nova fighters and have similar guns and Harringtons, but they’d never pin down an opponent that could be somewhere else at the punch of a button.

  “Longknife is on approach,” one of the flight controllers cut into the conversation to report. “I make ninety seconds to contact.”

  “Understood,” Waldroup snapped. “Is the deck clear for manual landing drill?”

  “Yes, boss,” one of the techs reported. “All systems retracted; maximum volume available. Transfer pad one is online and ready to move Longknife’s bird off the deck ASAP to clear for Nightmare’s landing.”

  Kira smiled as she considered the timing.

  She’d wanted to run all of her people through manual landing drills. It had been Waldroup who’d wanted to do all five landings in sequence, two minutes apart.

  Her determination to bring everyone up to full speed was apparently starting to get infectious.

  Hoffman made the landing perfectly, coming in just fast enough to make several of the techs in flight control inhale sharply as he slammed to a halt exactly above the transfer pad.

  Normally, he’d leave the fighter before the pad moved it out of the way. With another fighter coming in right behind him for a manual landing the pad immediately descended into the tunnels that would move it to its normal resting place.

  Cartman’s fighter entered the bay exactly two minutes after Hoffman’s. The precision was identical, though she didn’t cut the velocity quite as closely.

  Up next was Galavant—Banderas—and even Kira had to admit she was holding her breath as the nova fighter came in. She could see Waldroup leaning over a console with a full array of controls for the retrieval bay’s gravity systems and nodded to herself.

  The retrieval bay’s systems were fully capable of stopping the Hoplite in its tracks. It wouldn’t be great for the fighter—they’d have to downcheck it until Waldroup’s people could go over it from nose to tail—but the carrier would be fine.

  “Velocity is green, green, green,” a tech chanted. “Vector is…vector is orange. Galavant, raise your angle; you’re cutting it too—”

  There was no time. By the time the tech had spotted it, it was too late for Galavant to change her vector, and she slid into the retrieval deck easily two meters lower than she should have.

  Something got hit and went flying for a dozen meters or more before the gravity systems caught it, but the pilot had control of her fighter’s speed even if she’d twitched the angle at the last moment.

  The fighter didn’t land on the transfer pad so much as slide onto it.

  “Activate the pad,” Waldroup ordered into the silence. There was a pause. “Activate the damn pad,” she barked. “Dawnlord is sixty seconds out and I don’t want a fighter on the deck when he comes in.”

  The transfer pad started descending and Kira was running over the footage in her head.

  “Waldroup?” she said quietly.

  “We’re fine,” the deck boss told her. “She came in with twenty-six centimeters of clearance and hit a transfer pallet that should have been safe…and still shouldn’t have been on my damn deck.”

  “The fighter?”

  “I need to take a look at it,” Waldroup replied. “It should be fine. If not, it’ll be repairable. Energy signature didn’t even blip.”

  “Dawnlord is in the chute, thirty seconds to contact,” someone reported. “Velocity: green, green, green. Vector: green, green, green.”

  “Double check Swordheart’s vector,” Kira ordered. “I’m not worried about Patel, but let’s make sure Asjes is coming in with the right clearance. I don’t need them to bounce a fighter off the toolbox somebody forgot!”

  From the way Waldroup winced, whoever had left the pallet behind was going to hear about it. In detail.

  “Dawnlord is in, clearance is wide…he’s down. No issues.”

  Kira exhaled.

  “And Swordheart?”

  “Green across the board,” the tech replied. “They should be fine.”

  “All right,” she said calmly. “Well, Waldroup?”

  “Your people pass just fine,” the deck boss told her. “Mine, on the other hand, are pulling a double shift to help fix the dent we just put in your starfighter. Galavant should have been fine.”

  “I’ll make sure to tell her that,” Kira said dryly. “From past experience, I can tell you that right now, she feels like she just had a heart attack!”

  But she’d made the landing—and Swordheart made his as they were talking—which meant that Kira’s little argument over whether her two new pilots could hack it was over.

  Part of her immediately asked if that meant she could talk to Daniel yet.

  She concealed a snort. The part of her brain that wanted to refer to Commander Mbeki by his first name didn’t get a say in anything.

  Not yet, anyway.

  23

  Conviction ran her combat operations from two rooms: flight control and the bridge. Both had full access to the carrier’s sensors, full suites of both holographic and headware interfaces, and large amounts of old-fashioned visual displays.

  What they shared aboard the merc carrier was a strange lack of the Captain. Commander Zoric ran Conviction from the bridge. Kira and Mbeki would run their squadrons from their nova fighters.

  Waldroup, who glorified in absolutely no title at all, appeared to run flight control. Along with the flight and retrieval decks.

  Lack of title or not, Kira was realizing that Waldroup was arguably equal to the three Commanders in authority aboard the ship—which also meant she was a good person to ask questions of.

  And as Conviction entered high orbit of Sarnia and set her course for the Redward naval base on Canatara, Kira had a few burning questions.

  “Who the hell lets a bunch of civilians that close to a military base?” was the first one she actually asked. “I thought we were escorting a Fleet convoy.”

  “We are,” Waldroup confirmed. “The rest of them are just tagging along.”

  It was easy to pick out the three Redward Royal Fleet transports. They were matching forty-kilocubic hulls, rough cylinders that were easy to build and efficient to carry cargo in.

  The other fifteen ships were a mess. If any two of them were the same, it would have surprised Kira. All of them were far too close to the RRF base on Canatara and the fuel tanks orbiting it.

  “Zoric reports we’ve reached close-enough approach to Sarnia to begin tachyon-static discharge,” one of Waldroup’s people mentioned. “We have coms with the RRF.”

  “And who has coms with the rabble?” Ki
ra asked.

  “Traditionally, we don’t bother to establish coms with them,” Waldroup admitted. “We can’t really chase them off without getting more violent than anyone wants to, so we let them come along so long as they obey orders we send them.

  “And other than that, we ignore them.”

  “Great,” Kira replied. “That’s going to mess with my patrol planning.”

  “It always does,” the deck boss told her. “Talk to Mbeki. We’ve made this run before.”

  Kira shook her head.

  “What a bloody mess. Is everything out here this much of a disaster?”

  “I’d say welcome to the Rim, but you never left it,” Waldroup said. “But you’re from the Mid Rim. This is very much Outer Rim.” The big woman shook her head. “They’d probably be safe flying on their own, but probably isn’t good enough when your copilot is your husband and your fifteen-year-old kid is the purser.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t sympathize,” Kira conceded. Waldroup sounded like she knew the situation more intimately than Kira, too. “But I don’t see any coordination or security sense going on here. Even if Canatara Base brought up their multiphasic jammers, most of those freighters are still in range to shoot it.”

  “No one at a planetary base worries about people shooting them with plasma guns, Commander,” the other woman pointed out. “They worry about people ramming starships into them. Canatara Base will be very happy to see that convoy on its way.”

  Waldroup shrugged.

  “We can’t be rid of them, Commander,” she concluded. “We may as well find some pleasure in that we’re helping people who need the protecting.”

  “Fair.” Kira shook her head. “Time to go shred a mission plan and start from the bottom. Let me know if anything comes up I need to worry about!”

  “You pinged me to swing by?”

  Kira couldn’t see Daniel Mbeki, but she had at least known he’d entered her office this time. She was facing away from the door, studying a massive holographic image of a formation based around Conviction and their flock of fifteen individual sources of trouble.