“I did. Thanks for coming,” she told him. “I’m looking at our escort formation plan. I was assuming we were only seeing the three freighters RRF said we were picking up.”
He’d stepped up closer to see the hologram, even as she could tell that he was sidling sideways to respect her personal space. The man didn’t even need training—at least when he wasn’t actively being an idiot.
“I was expecting some extras,” he admitted. “I was not expecting twelve. What are you thinking?”
“Conviction is functionally defenseless, which means she and the freighters are all in roughly the same boat,” Kira noted. “That gives us sixteen escortees and we only have fourteen fighters. Short of an outright emergency, we can’t field them all at once.”
“Agreed. Suggestions?”
“We did the security sweep on our way out,” she reminded him. “So, we don’t need to do it on the way back—which is good because we just plain don’t have the nova fighters for it.
“We have to deploy by wings of two. I’m thinking one wing of mine, one wing of yours. We rotate your birds to keep your crews rested and provide us with a ready reserve of the One-Fifteens.
“Nova fighters that are out use the Patterson-Five sweep and nova,” she continued, thinking the icons in the display into motion. Patterson-Five would see the four fighters carrying out a figure eight sweep around and through the formation of their charges, using novas to cross the main axis at random intervals.
“Why Five?” Mbeki asked. “Most of the Patterson sequences call for novas.”
“The novas are at a random interval in Five. It keeps even people watching closely guessing,” she said. “That way our Costar Clans friends won’t know exactly where we are in the sequence at any given moment.”
“You think we’re being watched?” he asked.
Kira chuckled.
“Look at those ships, Daniel,” she told him, gesturing at the ragtag collection of extras. “At least two people in there are trading intelligence for immunity from Clan raiders. Probably by an automated program that any Clan ship can trigger by laser, so we can assume that if the Costar Clans show up, they know everything we’ve been doing.”
He was silent for a moment.
“You’re probably right,” he conceded. “It’s a good plan. Four birds up, six in reserve, four crews off?”
“Exactly.”
They were both silent, studying the hologram for a minute.
“So, it’s Daniel again, is it?” he finally asked, his voice warmer than it had been.
That warmth sent a shiver down her spine, and Kira very pointedly told her body to get over itself.
“Never said you couldn’t call me Kira,” she told him. “Don’t make too much of it, Daniel. Everybody on this ship—including us!—is better off if you and I get back to where we were before we decided to turn into hormone-addled messes.
“So, let’s shelve that particular problem until we get back to Redward, at least, and try to get back to working together. Sound good?”
There was a long silence and she turned to look at him. The dark-eyed black man was studying her, and his gaze was back to being intense again.
“It does, actually,” he conceded.
“Not least because something about this convoy makes my neck itch.”
Kira nodded her agreement. Behind that nod was the irritated realization that a very eager part of her did not want him to stop looking at her like that.
24
“Patrol pattern calls for nova across the formation in ninety seconds,” Kira said to Galavant over the com channel. “Darkwing flight, do you confirm?”
“This is Gizmo; I confirm your nova course,” the pilot in charge of the two PNC-115s holding the other half of the shifting figure eight of the Patterson-Five patrol.
The two Hoplites flipped in space as they reached the far end of their current loop. After almost twenty hours in the first rest stop system, the gaggle of civilian freighters weren’t even spooking away from the sweeping nova fighters anymore.
Sooner or later, the flock stopped spooking at the scent of the sheepdog, Kira reflected with a grin. None of the freighters had caused the slightest problem when Zoric had calmly issued them all positioning instructions.
Conviction still hadn’t even officially acknowledged that the non-RRF freighters were even there, but Kira’s patrol plan had required the freighters to be in a particular formation. So, the freighters had been told to get in that formation.
If there’d been a dozen extra slots in that formation, oops?
“I have the course,” Galavant replied. “I make a four-hundred-thousand-kilometer nova in forty seconds. Confirm?”
“Confirmed,” Kira replied. A nova that short would only shut down their drives for a few seconds, but it would also cross that distance in far less time than their current velocity would take.
A timer ticked down and she didn’t give the other woman any new instructions. She’d had the younger pilot on her wing for six hours now on this patrol and she’d done just fine. Few non-combat missions called for novaing quite this often, either. It was good practice.
The final call was mostly made by the computer based on the instructions Kira had given, but the line where a headware-augmented human ended and their computer began was…vague at best.
Time.
Nova.
The clocks always said that a nova was instantaneous. Kira had seen enough of them from the outside to even believe those clocks.
Inside a nova fighter it always dragged on for her. And it hurt, like the worst menstrual cramps she’d ever had, as her guts tried to turn themselves inside out in rebellion against the strange not-space she found herself in.
A class one drive with its ten-thousand-plus-cubic-meter field and its larger ship didn’t have this effect in a nova. It was unique to the class two drive in her experience.
An experience only nova fighter pilots shared and that no one else would ever understand.
Then her Hoplite plunged out of the nova into regular space, on the opposite side of the formation.
“Basketball, this is Conviction,” Mbeki’s voice said in her headware. “We’ve got a full charge on the drive and the RRF freighters report the same. I’m pulling everyone back aboard for the nova.”
“Plan calls for us to nova with the carrier, Conviction,” Kira countered.
“And if you nova with the carrier, four of our birds can’t nova for forty hours,” the other squadron commander said reasonably. “I didn’t think of it when we wrote the plan, but my skin is crawling today, Basketball.
“Let’s take the risk at the nova to help cover the flock.”
She could argue. Technically, the only person she answered to was Estanza—but Mbeki was the official Commander, Nova Group—and he was the man in flight control with all of the data.
“Understood, Conviction,” she replied. “Basketball and Galavant headed back to the barn.”
She considered the dozen freighters that Conviction wasn’t validating the charge status of before she novaed.
“Anyone care if I drag my feet so our lost sheep get a few extra minutes to charge their nova drives?” she asked.
Mbeki chuckled, the warm rumbling that kept sending heated ripples down her spine.
“Not at all, Basketball. Take your time, Memorial Lead.”
Kira wasn’t going to argue with Mbeki’s crawling skin. She wasn’t on quite the same page, but given all of the things in play, she couldn’t argue with the paranoia. It had been a while since the Clans had jumped one of these convoys, there was a significant bounty on her head in particular, and she was damn sure at least one of the freighters was a Costar plant.
That meant there were no real space drills. No manual landings. Only the patrol regimen designed to keep sixteen ships safe.
She came in last, after the two Darkwings and Galavant.
“I yield control,” she told Waldroup. “Everything looks clear ou
t there, but everyone is huddling close to us.”
“I would in their place,” the deck boss replied as the computers took over flying Kira’s fighter. “I hear Mbeki on the crawling.”
“Out of curiosity, do we know how many sub-fighters they have on that transport?”
“Thirty,” the deck boss replied instantly. “Next time we pull this stunt, can we please talk the boss into letting us haul them? At least if they’re on our decks, they can go out and shoot somebody if needed instead of sitting in a box.”
“I don’t think we’re transporting the pilots,” Kira pointed out. “And we don’t have thirty spare pilots floating around, even if you could convince any of us to fly something without a nova drive.”
“Prima donna,” Waldroup replied as the fighter touched down. “Get out of that fighter and grab a coffee. We’ll refuel her and have her ready to go for your next shift.”
Kira snorted. The plan had been for them to swap patrol wings right after the nova, so she was technically off-duty until her shift as a reserve pilot. The Patterson-Five patrol was fuel-draining, which meant her bird was already down forty percent of fuel. If she’d novaed with the carrier, she’d have been at her combat reserve.
Of course, “combat reserve” was enough to fight and combat-nova for about thirty minutes and still get back to the carrier.
“How fast can you turn them around?” she asked Waldroup as she dropped out of the fighter. Transferring the conversation from the fighter system to her own headware was almost entirely unconscious.
“I was planning four hours, to have them ready well in advance of your reserve shift,” the other woman replied. “Why?”
“Do a combat turnaround, Waldroup,” Kira replied. “We’re ten light-years into the black, as far from both New Ontario and Redward as we’re going to get. I want my nova fighters.”
“I can have them up in five minutes without risking anything quite as dangerous as a full combat turnaround,” the deck boss replied. “Go get that damn coffee, Demirci.
“By the time you’re done, you’ll have six fighters ready to go.” She paused. “And before you say a word, I’ll have Gizmo and Migraine’s birds ready on the same time frame.”
The flight ready room was as full as it ever got. Either Mbeki’s paranoia was infectious or, well, it was shift changeover and no one was currently asleep or in a nova fighter. Fourteen pilots and eight copilots were strewn around the tables in a room sized for a wing of thirty.
There was another ready room on the other side of the launch deck, but this was the one everyone was using today.
Mbeki’s headware had obviously given him enough warning to have a coffee ready when she stepped in.
“Busy today,” she murmured. “Wait, did we nova yet?”
“We should be—”
The world rippled.
“Right now,” he concluded with that damn chuckle. “Second rest stop on our trip, which means that I and a few friends need to get out to our fighters. Enjoy the coffee, Kira.”
“Thank you,” she said softly, then held up a hand as he headed out. “Hey, Daniel?”
“Yeah?” He looked back over his shoulder.
“Fly safe. Fly true.”
“I will,” he promised with a smile and a small bow.
Cartman and Patel followed him out, trading nods with Kira as she drank her coffee and linked in to the sensors.
Their lost sheep had followed them through the nova as a block. Four fighters would be in space to guard them shortly—and enough of the pilots were gathered there to provide a full scramble in under a minute.
“There’s a second cluster at ten light-minutes,” Zoric’s voice said in the back of her head. “Looks like half a dozen civvies.”
“What?” Kira asked back, keeping the conversation in her headware.
“You wouldn’t be half the officer I think you are if you aren’t looking at the sensor feeds right now,” the carrier XO replied. “There’s us here and there’s a bunch of civvies at ten light-minutes; vector is one-oh-eight by two-thirty-five.”
Kira focused her mental attention. There they were. Far enough away to not be a major concern.
“Numbers look pretty vague,” she told Zoric. “You’re not wrong on what I’m looking at, I’ll admit.”
“Yeah. It’s odd. I’m focusing sensors now but…no, that’s not right.”
The data they were getting on the cluster dissolved into garbage, and Kira understood exactly what Zoric was talking about.
“That’s an active multiphasic jamming field,” Kira snapped. “Someone is jumping those ships.”
“They’re not our escortees, but I’m not going to sit here and watch them burn, either,” Zoric replied. “What do we do?”
“The only thing we can, Commander Zoric,” Kira said firmly. “Call battle stations and order a full scramble. Everything we’re seeing is ten minutes out of date—their lives ride on seconds.”
“Go!” Zoric urged, the single word hanging on the channel like an anvil.
Kira yanked her attention back to the ready room.
“Everyone!” she bellowed, gathering their eyes and ears. “Combat scramble now. Briefing on the way, but you need to be in your fighters now.”
Mercenaries or not, every pilot in the room was moving before the alarm started flashing ten seconds later.
25
Kira’s headware said it had been exactly five minutes, but her fighter was already in its dock waiting for her. The indicators the spacecraft downloaded to her headware told her it was fully refueled but that the regular service checks had been abbreviated.
Not quite a combat turnaround but pretty damn close—and exactly what the situation had turned out to need.
By the time she finished reviewing the indicators, she was already in the fighter and initiating the start-up sequence.
“Memorial Lead, this is Conviction,” Zoric said in her headware. “We have no further information on the target zone. Multiphasic jamming continues. Stand by for full deck launch in sixty seconds.”
That was risky…but not as risky as rushing the preflight checks or not having their entire fighter strength in space.
“Memorial Lead, this is Conviction Actual,” John Estanza’s voice sounded a moment later. “Darkwing Lead, this is Conviction Actual. Conviction Two is on the channel.
“We can’t uncover the carrier, but I agree that we must respond to the situation,” Estanza told them. “Darkwing Lead, hold your squadron in close escort around Conviction and the convoy. Memorial, the strike is yours.
“Conviction Two’s analysis of the scans suggests four to ten gunships, almost certainly Costar Clans. If they’re Clan, take them out.”
“And if they’re not Clan, sir?” Kira asked. “What if they’re someone else’s gunships?”
“Then fuck them,” Mbeki said harshly. “Our contract says we counter piracy in all forms, sir. We only specifically get paid for Costar kills, but we are authorized and required to protect any shipping in the region.”
“Agreed,” Estanza said after a moment. “Regardless of their colors, Memorial Lead, you will protect civilian shipping by any means necessary.” He snorted. “We just get paid better if they’re Costar Clans.”
“Understood.”
A ten-second timer started on her headware. Right now, Mbeki was in space with three other fighters. When that timer hit zero, ten more nova fighters—including Kira’s—would be in space.
“Ambushes are not outside the Costar Clans’ methodology,” Estanza continued. “Darkwing Lead, you need to keep the convoy and Conviction safe.”
The timer hit zero and acceleration gently pressed Kira back into her seat. Her Harringtons activated as she cleared the carrier, and she twisted her fighter around to point at where they’d identified the ongoing attack.
“Memorial Squadron, form by wings,” she ordered as she established laser coms with her people. “We have six civilian ships under attack by unkno
wn forces at ten light-minutes. You should have the waypoint on your scopes.
“Dawnlord, Longknife, form on Nightmare. You’ll nova to the waypoint plus two hundred thousand kilometers and catch them from the other side. Multiphasic jammers online as soon as you emerge from nova.
“Galavant, Swordheart, form on me. Nova to the waypoint on my command and hold formation to sustain laser coms in the jamming.
“Everyone understand?”
Wordless acknowledgments responded and her fighters fell into formation.
“Conviction, Memorial Squadron is deploying. We’ll be back in time for dinner.”
“We’ll keep it warm for you. Good luck.”
Kira nodded, inhaled sharply.
“Memorials…nova.”
The waypoint she’d set up based on Conviction’s scans brought her wing back into real space just outside the multiphasic jamming field. The three Hoplites were in a perfect position to see as much of the situation as physically possible—even if it was slightly hampered by all three of them bringing their own multiphasics online.
Radio coms ended instantly, but that was why they were in formation. Multiphasic jammers badly limited the range of laser coms and laser sensors, but they didn’t render them as useless as many other sensors and communicators.
“Memorial Wing, I read six gunships,” she told Banderas and Asjes. She’d kept her two temp pilots with her for a reason. “That’s enough for both of you to make ace if you want us old hands to hold back for you.
“We’re probably better off taking them as a team,” Banderas—Galavant—said calmly. “Your orders, sir.”
“Flagging a bogey for each of you, but we all know how useful that will be once we lose coms.”
They were hurtling into the gunships’ jamming and their targets had definitely seen them. Headware and computers meant the conversation was happening fast enough to be safe, but they were still running out of time.
Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1) Page 14