Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Anyone who runs is probably a lot less innocent than we’d like them to be. Try not to kill anyone, but you’re authorized to shoot to disable,” she concluded. “I want answers, people.”

  “On it.”

  Thirty seconds later, Nightmare and Galavant vanished as she went through the status reports from Darkwing Squadron.

  “Kitsune, Hammer, Oglaf,” she reeled off after going through the data. “Get your birds back aboard ship and into Waldroup’s hands.”

  Oglaf had somehow managed to get her ship under forty percent fuel in the firefight. Kitsune and Hammer had gone the more traditional route to being sent home of being shot to pieces.

  It was a sign of how off-balance everyone was that none of the three argued with her. The three PNC-115s dropped into landing formation with prompt alacrity.

  The four Hoplites were now in a flattened diamond around the main plane of the convoy, as secure a formation as Kira could arrange. The ships were too concentrated under Conviction’s metaphorical skirts for a full patrol pattern to be possible, let alone needed.

  “Basketball, we’ve got a solid count on our flock,” Zoric told her. “Minimal damage; a few people took stray hits, but I don’t think these guys were expecting to run into a full squadron of nova fighters.”

  “They thought you still only had one squadron and they were off saving the innocents,” Kira said. “It was a trap, Conviction. They were aiming for us. Who else has nova fighters?”

  “They hit us with sixteen gunships and a pair of corvettes, Commander,” Zoric replied. “If Mbeki didn’t launch with a torp on half his fighters by habit, we’d have been screwed.”

  Kira had forgotten that the Darkwings did that. It made sense—he’d said that carrying one torpedo didn’t impede his fighter-bomber’s maneuverability much, and it would have been worth every scrap of lost dexterity when two thirty-thousand-cubic corvettes had jumped them.

  It would have been a shock to those corvettes to suddenly find themselves facing conversion torpedoes at close range. Mbeki’s habit had probably saved the carrier.

  “Basketball, this is Gizmo,” the Darkwing pilot reported in. “We’ve located Cataphract’s fighter. One of the corvettes put a heavy plasma cannon right through the center of the ship. Guns are trashed, cockpit is gone.

  “Nova drive might have survived.”

  “Tag it for Conviction’s shuttle and keep searching for Duck,” she ordered.

  “Migraine just tagged him,” Gizmo said, his voice very quiet. “Or at least, what we think is the biggest piece. We’re basing a new vector cone from it, but that chunk doesn’t have the nova drive in it.

  “But it’s got half the cockpit.”

  She winced.

  “Send me your video,” Kira ordered. “Then keep up the sweep.”

  “Understood.”

  She had to see. It was a terrible idea, she was sure, but she had to see.

  The footage from Gizmo’s external cameras and sensor data crossed the link in moments, and she studied it with the harsh eye of a woman who’d seen over two hundred wrecked nova fighters across the years, two dozen of them shattered by her own hand.

  She could tell the difference between a nova fighter where a pilot could potentially be retrieved, one where the pilot had died in agony…and the ones where the pilot had never even known they’d been hit.

  Mbeki’s fighter was the last. If the Clan followed common logic, the two corvettes would have each brought a pair of real guns to the party, heavy cannons that rivaled the force of a conversion torpedo but capable of sustained fire. The cockpit hadn’t been sheared in two.

  The forward half of it had been vaporized. Anyone inside the central brain of the nova fighter would have been burnt to ashes with it, quite possibly before their nervous system even had time to register pain.

  Daniel Mbeki had died about as cleanly as a nova fighter pilot could die.

  But he had died.

  And Kira Demirci had never quite decided what she was going to do about him.

  Despite the orders she’d given, Kira was somehow unsurprised to see her two Hoplites appear out of nova less than five minutes after she’d sent Cartman to retrieve the freighters.

  “They were already gone, weren’t they?” she asked Nightmare without preamble. The light from those novas would probably be reaching them in the next few minutes, even if her long-range scanners still showed her the theoretically civilian ships.

  “Got it in one,” Nightmare replied. “Fuckers.”

  “Whole thing was staged,” Kira concluded. “Davies—or whatever the hell his name actually is— didn’t save the convoy. He and the gunships had been staging that fake duel, occasionally turning the jammers on and off, for a while. Definitely hours. Probably not days, if only because we were here only a few days ago.”

  “Commander, I suggest we pull at least a third of the fighters back aboard,” Zoric told her. “The ones who were just patrolling at the last rest point, if nothing else. You’ve basically been in the cockpit for eight hours now, Basketball.

  “You need to rest.”

  Kira didn’t want to do any such thing. She wanted to find the sons of bitches who’d killed Daniel Mbeki and burn them to pieces. Intellectually, she knew that he’d killed his own killers, firing his torpedo into the corvette even as its main gun had vaporized him.

  “All right. Nightmare—assume command,” she ordered.

  They’d have to sort out who was in charge of Darkwing Squadron going forward, but that was Estanza’s problem. Not hers.

  Her problem was how to deal with losing a man she had no real reason to call hers.

  27

  Insomnia was as unlikely to happen to a human with modern headware and vaccines as the common cold. Nightmares, on the other hand, were hard to get rid of without long-term damage.

  Kira was asleep the moment she hit her bunk and woke up exactly seven hours later…drenched with cold sweat from dreams she could only vaguely remember. She was grimly certain, from the fragments that she recalled, that her subconscious had spent most of her seven hours of unconsciousness accusing her of killing Daniel Mbeki herself.

  Several new messages flagged as high-enough urgency for her to push through them as she showered and dressed. They had successfully novaed to the next stop on their route without any further problems.

  To help everyone relax a bit more, one of Redward’s ships was already there. Armed Sedation was a forty-five kilocubic heavy destroyer, easily a match for the one Ypres ship they’d seen on their trip and more than a match for any half-dozen gunships.

  If Sedation had been subjected to the same trap Conviction had faced, she’d have been obliterated. Combined with Conviction and her squadrons as backup, Zoric had felt the destroyer was enough to stand all of the nova fighters down.

  Everyone was aboard and asleep now, which was probably a good thing, in Kira’s opinion.

  The next message was from Waldroup, including Kira on a note meant for Estanza and Zoric. They’d recovered enough of both Cataphract and Mbeki’s fighters to allow for the deck boss to build new fighters. Conviction had the complete schematics for the PNC-115, after all—but they needed new Harrington coils they’d have to buy from Redward.

  That was probably good news, but it was so clinical that it left Kira’s skin crawling. There was no mention of the crews in Waldroup’s message, and Kira didn’t even need to ask why. She’d seen the footage from Cataphract’s fighter as well.

  There hadn’t been enough left of any of the four Darkwing officers to bother burying.

  The last note informed her that Zoric had called a senior officers’ briefing in an hour. Estanza was supposed to be there, but given the carrier commander’s complete absence from the communications since Mbeki’s death, Kira wasn’t sure she believed it.

  Searching through the rest of her messages, Kira found the note she was looking for as she finished dressing. The funeral for the dead officers was scheduled for one
hour before they novaed to Redward. There were no bodies to bury, so there was no concern about where to bury them at least.

  More memorials and wakes. After mourning the deaths of every pilot killed in the fight against Brisingr—and then the deaths of over half of the 303 in the aftermath of the war—Kira would have thought she’d get used to it.

  But she hadn’t. And Mbeki’s funeral was going to be particularly hard to face.

  If she’d known then what was going to happen, she would never have controlled herself after that damn kiss.

  It wasn’t until she was in the meeting room that Kira realized that the call Zoric had sent out had been the first senior officers’ briefing she’d seen so far aboard Conviction. There were three people in the room that she’d never met.

  She wanted to write part of that off as “mercenaries are weird,” but she was starting to suspect that it was specifically Conviction that was weird and a little bit broken.

  Her assessment that Waldroup was more senior than the deck boss gave herself credit for was bang-on. She and Zoric were the only two people in the room Kira actually recognized. The other three were new to Kira.

  Headware meant that she could at least ID them as she took a seat. The terrifyingly gaunt and pale officer at the far end of the table was Lakshmi Labelle. They ran Conviction’s engineering department and were responsible for keeping the old ship running.

  Oddly, the starship’s database had very little data on Labelle beyond their role aboard the carrier. Privacy was one thing, but that kind of blank on the personnel database could only be intentional.

  A similarly pale but far beefier man sat at Labelle’s right. Caiden McCaig was probably the largest person Kira had met aboard Conviction…if not ever. The leader of the mercenaries’ small ground and security contingent was easily two and a quarter meters tall and massively broad with it.

  Sitting to the engineer’s left was another man who was a study in contrast with both of the other strangers. Maybe a hundred and fifty centimeters tall, Purser Yanis Vaduva was a swarthy man whose teeth were spread in what looked like a permanent grin.

  Somehow, Vaduva’s grin managed to not seem particularly opposed to the overall chill tone of the room.

  “Captain Estanza will not be joining us,” Zoric told them all as Kira took a seat, last to arrive. “He’s busy arranging the funeral later today.” She shook her head. “For the moment, Ruben ‘Gizmo’ Hersch will handle command of the Darkwing Squadron, until Captain Estanza officially promotes someone to fill Commander Mbeki’s role.”

  “What’s this about, Zoric?” McCaig asked. “I thought briefings were kept to the end of the mission so Estanza could show. Otherwise, we’d have actually introduced everybody to the new Commander, wouldn’t we?”

  He nodded to Kira.

  “Commander,” he added in extra acknowledgement.

  “That was my request,” Vaduva told the platoon leader. “I ran our gun-camera footage and so forth by Captain Shaheed aboard Armed Sedation. Her tactical department has reviewed them and she’s signed off on the bounty payments.

  “While our pay scale was based around the known vessels available to the Costar Clans, there was an entry included for vessels such as the corvettes Commander Mbeki destroyed.”

  The purser’s smile widened.

  “The bounties on twenty gunships and two corvettes dramatically outstrip our payment for the nova-lane patrol or the escort run from New Ontario.” The numbers downloaded to everyone’s headware as they spoke.

  “Even with the additional expense of covering the reconstruction of two PNC One-Fifteens, this will have been one of our most profitable missions in some years,” Vaduva concluded. “That will trigger almost all, if not all, of the bonus criteria in the crew and pilot contracts, which I wanted to discuss with Estanza and you before we released that to the crew.”

  “I’m on the ‘bonus criteria in the contracts’ side of this discussion,” Kira pointed out humorlessly. “Mercenary or not, I have to admit that the financial aspects of this fall far below the fact that we just lost four of our people.”

  Vaduva nodded unhesitatingly.

  “I agree,” he told her. “I knew Daniel Mbeki for four years. He was a respected coworker and a personal friend. But we are responsible for the function and operation of both this ship and the corporation that runs it.

  “If nothing else, Commander Demirci, you need to be aware that the other pilots will be receiving bonuses after this mission, and that may be a factor in your discussions with your own people.”

  “I have my own arrangements for that,” she said coldly. The fact that her people owned three point five percent of the company apiece made that pretty straightforward—her current plan was to pay out that percentage of whatever was left after fixed salaries and expenses after each mission.

  And there were bonuses built into her contract if Conviction brought in additional bounties.

  Still…

  “I don’t really have a place in a financial discussion around Conviction’s corporate structure,” she continued. “If that’s all we have to discuss…?”

  McCaig chuckled loudly.

  “I like this one, Zoric,” he told the carrier XO in a thick, throaty accent. “And she’s not wrong. My people are just sitting around right now, but everyone else in this room has work to do. I’ll keep the bonuses in mind, but was there more to this?”

  “Of course there was,” Zoric said sharply. “The announcement that Hersch would be running Darkwing was important. We also need to consider the effect on our people’s morale of what just happened.

  “There are no idiots on this ship, people,” she continued. “Anyone who hasn’t already worked out that we just walked into a trap that would have killed us all without Commander Demirci’s squadron will do so shortly. We’ve fought the Costar Clans under contract before, but this is more targeted. More personal. It may get under our people’s skin, realizing that the Clans are now specifically hunting us as a target.”

  “We’ll want to raise security at port,” Kira said with a sigh. “I know you did some of that when my people came aboard, but if we’re all being hunted, then we need to plan around that.”

  “Redward should still be safe enough,” McCaig said. “But you’re right. Buddy systems, moving with guards.” He shook his head. “I’ve got twenty-three grunts. I can’t provide individual escorts for all hundred and fifty-six crew and pilots.”

  “Which will, once again, hit our people’s morale,” Zoric concluded. “Talk to your people, everyone. Keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on. If anyone wants out, there are always clauses in their contracts for that—and big bonuses are when we’ll usually see people buy out.

  “I need to know if we’re going to lose anyone critical and have to plan to replace them. Most skillsets we can pick up in Redward, but there’s a few we’d have to train up from near neighbors.”

  The room was quiet.

  “And we need to consider that while funerals are essential for long-term morale, morale tonight is going to be in the shit,” Waldroup told them all bluntly. “I’m pushing my people to get the last repairs we can do finished before that, but we can’t even start the rebuilds until we’re back in Redward.”

  “Four hours to the nova, two hours after that to dock,” Zoric told them. “I don’t think we’ll be launching for at least a week after that, but that’s down to the Captain and the client.

  “Plan for worst cases, plan for losing people after we pay out the bonus, plan for recruiting to fill holes ASAP.” The carrier XO shook her head.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to go after these fuckers before they come at us sideways again. I think the Captain does too, so it boils down to what we can convince Redward to pay us for.”

  Kira was silent now, considering her own people and considering what kind of mission going after the Costar Clans entailed.

  Even with the body blow the Clans’ deployab
le forces had just taken, there was no way that Conviction alone could take on whatever home base the pirates had.

  And that was assuming they even knew where to go.

  28

  The gravitic field at the end of the launch deck always had a slight ripple to it, just enough for the human eye to catch the process that kept breathable air inside the ship despite the open end of the deck.

  The massive hatches that closed the end of the deck outside of flight operations were visible on either side of the opening. The gravitic field kept ninety-nine percent of the air in, but there were inevitable losses when you opened a thirty-by-forty-meter portal into open space.

  There were no bodies or coffins to fire into space today, but the hatches were open anyway as the fighter squadrons and much of Conviction’s crew gathered to say goodbye to four of their pilots.

  “Attention to arms,” McCaig’s voice bellowed, drawing everyone’s attention to where a thin line of mercenaries had formed on the edge of the deck, looking out into the void.

  In front of them stood John Estanza, and Kira shivered at the sight of the mercenary captain.

  It had been mere days since she’d seen him, but it looked like he’d aged years. He held an open whisky bottle in one hand, passing it off to Zoric only as everyone’s attention gathered to him.

  “Our job sucks,” Estanza told them all. Kira was relatively sure she’d never seen him sober…but she’d never seen him this drunk. “We get up each day and we do our jobs. Our paychecks are high, but there’s a reason for it.

  “This is the reason for it.” He gestured at the long tables with the food and drink in the room. “Four of our own died yesterday. Were we a national military, I could tell you they died righteously, fighting for what they believed in or for some grand cause.

  “We’re not a national military,” he reminded them, his voice slurring slightly. “We’re a mercenary company. So, I can’t tell you that Daniel Mbeki died doing the right thing. I can’t tell you that Lita Oberto died with honor at his side, or that Dhaval De Santis honored his ancestors, or that Adrienne Lehmann ‘held the line’ against some great threat.”