Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Once we break formation, you’re on your own. If they’re shooting at the civvies, return the damn favor.”

  The civilians were in pretty rough shape. The last ten minutes hadn’t gone well for them, but they were still intact. That looked to be mostly due to one larger ship whose owner appeared to have heavily invested in defensive armaments.

  Those weapons were mostly wreckage and metal vapor now, but they’d held the gunships off long enough. Now that six nova fighters were in play, the gunships were ignoring the freighters in favor of the hostiles.

  No more time.

  “Hold your targets until they’re done,” Kira told her wingman, hopefully an unnecessary order. “Memorial wing, break and attack.”

  Her fighter happily informed her she’d lost coms with her compatriots almost instantly. As soon as the three of them were moving randomly to avoid enemy fire and close with their targets, the multiphasic jamming rendered communications impossible.

  Even the best scanners in the galaxy could only get vague details out of the worst multiphasic jamming at any significant range. Visual scanning—well, optical scanning by computers with a dozen cameras—was the best tool a pilot or ship had once battle was closed.

  Coms were down. Sensors were down. Even visual wavelengths of light were badly distorted at a distance from the effects. The multiphasic jammer had been the end to the dream of remote-controlled drone warfare in space at the same time as it rendered most long-range weaponry nearly useless.

  Kira had a gunship in her sights and she dove for the ship fast. The sooner this engagement stopped looking anything like a fair fight, the happier she’d be—and given that the gunships were ten-thousand-cubic-meter ships twenty times the size of her nova fighters, that wasn’t happening anytime soon.

  Plasma fire flickered through space around her as she dodged forward. The pulses were enough slower than lightspeed to add a time delay to even fighting at this range. A hundred and fifty thousand kilometers. A hundred and thirty…the range was dropping fast and she was watching everything.

  In a moment like this, a nova fighter pilot became their fighter. Headware lived in the brain and the fighter’s computers lived outside your skull, but the integration had been updated and revised for centuries now.

  A computerized part of her mind tracked the entire battle, watching the optical pickups and tracking the fate of her people and the freighters. Most of her mind was focused on her target and its desperate attempts to bring its much heavier guns to bear.

  They were far from good enough and she hit her mental triggers. Her first set of plasma pulses missed.

  The second didn’t, walking a line of fire up the seventy-meter-long spine of the gunship. It was a flat-looking thing, wider than it was high to enable two gun turrets on each side.

  Her fire walked right through both of the turrets and tore them to shreds. Secondary explosions rippled through the ship, but her crew was still moving. Harrington coils flashed energy into space, and the gunship rotated to bring her second set of turrets to bear.

  Kira was feeling vaguely generous toward the Costar Clans—she could understand, at least intellectually, how desperation and a desire to help your people could put someone in that position.

  She wasn’t feeling that generous. The gunship never completed her rotation as Kira slammed on her Harringtons to hold her line of fire on the gunship for three full seconds.

  The fighter danced around that line, but she still put over sixty plasma packets into the gunship and watched it disintegrate into a hundred pieces.

  Then part of her mind watching the rest of the battle noted a warning, and she slammed everything to full power, flinging her ship almost a dozen extra kilometers forward in a moment as plasma fire flashed through where she had been.

  That moment of focus on her attacker’s part cost them more than her focus on their compatriot had cost her. Galavant’s fighter swept in at the momentarily immobile ship and emptied a two-second-long salvo into the gunship’s engines.

  The engines ruptured, and secondary explosions gutted the gunship in a spectacular explosion. Kira threw a mental salute to her temp pilot and surveyed the battlespace.

  The gunships might have been twenty times bigger than her fighters, but they’d been utterly outclassed regardless. As she watched, Swordheart micronovaed past the gunship she’d tasked them on. Plasma flashed into empty space as the gunship’s turrets flared—and then Swordheart hammered his target with fire.

  Kira could have intervened to finish the gunship off, but she left the kill to the temp as she checked on her old hands. She apparently hadn’t even needed to worry. The last of the gunships came apart under Dawnlord’s guns as she turned her attention.

  Two seconds to double-check that the zone was clear, and she shut down her own jammers. At least one of her people still had them up, and the now-former-battlespace was still a mess for several more seconds.

  Then the last jammer came down and Kira exhaled. She’d had no worries about her old 303 hands, but Swordheart and Galavant had come through without a scratch. Head-on with an equal number of gunships wasn’t exactly a fair fight, but the gunships were a serious threat to their smaller cousins.

  “Memorials, report in,” she ordered. “Damage, fuel, ammo.”

  Kira wouldn’t have needed the second half of the order if she just had her old hands. Her temps had done well enough to earn her respect, but she still had to account for potential shortcomings.

  “Swordheart here. No damage, fuel at ninety-two percent, ammo at forty,” the first temp replied. “Transferring reaction mass to recharge ammo supply.”

  “Galavant. No damage, fuel at ninety-three percent, ammo at sixty. Recharging guns.”

  “Nightmare here. No damage, fuel at ninety percent, ammo at eighty.”

  “Dawnlord is present and watching,” Patel said in an excessively formal voice. “Minor damage; I took the corona of a couple of shots when somebody got clever. Fuel at ninety-one percent, ammo at sixty.”

  “You lot talk too fast,” Hoffman complained. “Longknife. No damage, fuel ninety-four, ammo sixty.”

  “Ammunition” on a nova fighter was a ready capacitor full of superheated plasma. It was the same reaction mass as provided fuel for their fusion reactor, but held at a higher-energy state. Refilling the ammunition capacitors took time—time that was hard to take when a fighter battle rarely lasted long. A second of sustained fire emptied ten percent of the capacitors, and that same ten percent took twenty seconds to recharge.

  The entire fight with the gunships had been over within two minutes of Memorial Squadron’s arrival. It had been a perfect first battle. Kira couldn’t have asked for a better initial test of her people.

  She was honest enough with herself to regret that they’d just killed thirty-odd people—but she hadn’t decided that they were going to attack civilians.

  “All right. Watch my back, people. It’s time for my least favorite part of the job.”

  “Talking to the civilians?” Nightmare asked.

  “Yeah. And to make it even more awkward than I’m used to, this time I should probably hit them up for money!”

  “Civilian ships, this is Memorial Squadron leader,” Kira opened on a wide channel. “Please confirm your status. The gunships are neutralized and we should be able to stick around for a little bit to make sure you all get out of here safely.”

  “Memorial Squadron, this is Captain Davies of Man Forgotten,” a gruff voice replied after a few seconds. “I think I speak for all of us to say that I was not expecting you. I was trying to protect everyone, but when the second trio of gunships showed up, I knew I was a dead man.

  “How can I possibly repay you?”

  Kira forced a chuckle.

  “Memorial Squadron LLC is an active mercenary corporation registered out of the Redward System,” she pointed out. “Our intervention here was under our contract with the government of the Kingdom of Redward, but I won’t turn down rec
ompense to cover our expenses in coming to your rescue.”

  “You just saved my life, Memorial,” Davis told her. “Replacing turrets and such isn’t cheap, but I think I can come up with something to have made the detour worth your while. As can the rest of you, right?”

  That was directed at the other ships who were also on the channel. Several audible chuckles on the line suggested more of them had tuned in than Kira had suspected.

  “I home-base in Redward, too,” Davies continued. “I’d be delighted to personally buy you and your pilots dinner if we’re ever home at the same time. Your timing is impeccable.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Kira promised. There’d been a moment when she’d thought he was offering to buy just her dinner, and she’d had to bite back a retort saying she was taken.

  Which she wasn’t. Right? Just what was her brain doing to her?

  “Man Forgotten’s drives are at seventy percent,” Davies continued. “We’ll need six more hours to get our nova drives ready to go.”

  “The rest of you?” Kira asked, directing her question more widely.

  The answers came back, ranging from needing four hours to needing ten.

  “I’m also sharing responsibility with Conviction to escort another convoy,” she told them. “If you’re all capable of sublight movement, I suggest we start meandering in that direction to meet up with them. Some of you will be able to nova before we get there, but it keeps as many people as safe as possible for as long as possible.”

  The confirmations came back and she got them all accelerating in the right direction. Some of the freighters were damaged enough to really slow things down, but everyone would get to Conviction in under six hours.

  Once she’d rendezvoused with Darkwing Squadron and the carrier, she’d feel much happier about everyone’s security. Plus, she’d be able to talk to Daniel again.

  And that particular thought had sneaked in there without her planning it, and Kira shook her head. Cooling down their not-quite fight, combined with Estanza’s comments, seemed to have put that overly eager part of her brain into overdrive.

  It was still a bad idea; that was the frustrating part. Sooner or later, she was going to have to convince herself of that—but she could already tell that even getting laid would be a problem until she did.

  Shaking her head at her own idiocy, she assembled a databurst summarizing everything and fired it back to Conviction—just as her own fighter launch showed up on her lightspeed scanners.

  The speed of light was hardly slow, but when she’d novaed ten light-minutes away, it caused all kinds of interesting results. She got to watch her own fighters nova out ten minutes before, and knew that the carrier would now be seeing the beginning of the battle.

  And about thirty seconds after her fighters novaed out, someone else novaed in. At least a dozen ships appeared on her screens a second before multiphasic jamming turned the long-range sensor data into complete garbage.

  “Memorial Squadron, check your long-range scopes,” Kira barked. “Anyone have a clean read on Conviction or the convoy?”

  “Negative, negative,” Nightmare replied instantly. “I have multiphasic jamming covering home base. Your orders, ma’am?”

  “We’ll come back for the freighters,” Kira barked as she dropped a new waypoint onto all of her subordinates’ computers. “Form on me, combat formation. Stand by to nova.”

  She spent ten precious seconds making sure her people were aligned on her so they’d have coms on the other, sighed, then exhaled a terrified breath.

  “Memorial Squadron, nova!”

  26

  The universe can change in ten minutes. When Kira and her fighters had left the carrier, everything had been perfectly orderly. There’d been no known threat and local space had been clear. They’d had all of Darkwing Squadron out, but that had been almost entirely paranoia at the presence of hostiles in the region.

  Memorial Squadron returned to an ongoing battle. With multiphasic jamming covering the entire region, she could only guess at how many ships were gone, but she could see how many of the attackers and defenders were left.

  All of the escortees, from Conviction herself to the fifteen freighters, were intact. Only six fighter-bombers were still actively defending them, a number that send a cold chill down Kira’s spine as a full dozen gunships swarmed in for another attack run.

  The Darkwings were tied down defending the convoy. They’d clearly done enough damage that their opponents were respecting their presence, but their careful allocation of weapons fire told Kira everything she needed to know.

  Mbeki had smashed the crap out of the first few strikes, but his people’s capacitors had to be drained now. He was using whatever recharge they’d managed since the last clash, and it wasn’t going to be enough, not when he was down two fighters.

  Unfortunately for the gunships, Kira and her people were there.

  “Memorials, nova and attack!” she barked over the laser-com link to her other fighters. She didn’t wait to see if her people obeyed her—she knew they would.

  The nova was only a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, a distance that wouldn’t have been worth the fuel to jump across in other circumstance. Today, however…

  That nova brought her in behind the attacking gunships, barely ten thousand kilometers behind the trailing warship—and her guns were fully charged.

  Five seconds of sustained fire burned half of Kira’s ammunition—and left a gunship scattered across a thousand kilometers of empty space before the attackers even realized they were caught.

  Her people were right behind her. Their formation wasn’t intact enough for her to hold coms with them, but she saw the results of their arrival. Plasma fire hammered into the formation in a crashing wave, and half of the Clan gunships were gone before they even knew the tide had turned.

  One moment, they’d outnumbered the defenders two-to-one and had run the nova fighters out of ammunition. The next, the gunships were outnumbered two-to-one and Conviction’s pilots were very, very angry.

  Kira tried to flip to a new target, only for that gunship to flail away from her, already being flayed by one of her compatriots’ guns. Her fire was only insult to injury, and she switched her focus to the entire battlespace.

  The jamming made tracking everything hard, but she could get the overtone of the fight. Mbeki’s One-Fifteens were sortieing now. Their guns weren’t any better than her Memorials’ guns, but an extra six sets could make all of the difference.

  Four more gunships came apart before the survivors hit their own nova drives, vanishing into the night just as completely as the destroyed ships.

  Her jamming dropped and she tried to ping the Darkwings. Only more jamming answered her for a few seconds, then the various jamming fields slowly came down.

  “Darkwing Lead, what’s your status?” she barked. “Duck, what’s going on?”

  “Memorial Lead…this is Gizmo,” someone else answered. “Duck’s gone, sir.”

  The words didn’t process. For a second, nothing processed.

  But while Kira’s headware might have cooperated with that refusal to function, her nova fighter’s computers were less a part of her brain. They cold-bloodedly IDed the surviving Darkwing fighters.

  Duck—Daniel Mbeki—was missing. So was Cataphract, though she’d barely met that pilot and her copilot.

  “I need an update on your ammunition, fuel and damage status,” a long-trained part of her reeled off. “Can Darkwing’s fighters maintain patrol?”

  A silent thought brought her Squadron and Conviction into the loop.

  “Conviction, do we have status updates on our lost sheep?” she asked. “Officially part of the convoy just became irrelevant. Do any of them need assistance our fighters can provide? I need to deploy at least some fighters to bring the other convoy into our immediate patrol shell.”

  “We’re linking with the transports now,” Zoric’s voice replied. Her tone was just as stiff and forma
l as Kira’s. She’d known Mbeki for even longer.

  “Commander, I need you to do something,” Waldroup’s voice joined. “I’ve got retrieval birds on the deck, but multiphasic jamming is a bitch. I need to know where Duck and Cataphract’s fighters are.

  “We might get lucky with them. We might not,” the deck boss cautioned. “Either way, I need their nova drives or we’re permanently down two fighters.”

  Kira bit back a shout. Waldroup wasn’t being callous, not really. She was right—they needed to retrieve the fighters. There was a chance that someone had survived. It was a miniscule chance, but it was something to latch on to.

  “Understood,” she said grimly. “Gizmo, you’ve got live data from the entire fight. Do you have a vector cone?”

  “I think so,” the pilot replied.

  “Take whoever has the most fuel left from the Darkwings with you and find those ships,” Kira ordered. Technically, she wasn’t in command of Mbeki’s people, but no one was going to argue right now.

  “Nightmare, take Galavant and nova back to the convoy we rescued,” she continued. “They probably won’t like being dropped down the priority list, but they’ll deal. Bring them home.”

  “Do we let them nova?” Cartman asked grimly. “This is not looking incidental to me, boss.”

  Kira grimaced. No one could see her, so there was no need to appear as calm and level as she had to sound. Everything had been too perfect. This had been a trap—a trap targeted at a carrier.

  Which meant Conviction. One of Redward’s carriers, stuffed full of sub-fighters, would have taken hours to intervene in an incident they saw at ten light-minutes. They might have novaed in closer—and the same trick would have worked with a smaller distance scale without nova fighters.

  “We want full IDs on everybody,” she said grimly. “Order them to return to Conviction and tell them that we’ll be interviewing everyone.