Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  Quiet overtook the entire room as the Captain now had everyone’s full attention.

  “It’s not my place to bullshit you,” Estanza told them. “We all fight for money. Many of us fight for our own stubborn or crazy or bullshit reasons that swept us away from home and world to this cold deck and these scattered stars.

  “I won’t tell you lies about courage or honor or duty. But I knew Daniel Mbeki better than any of you. I knew Lita and Dhaval and Adrienne as well as any of you did, and I can tell you why all four of them died.

  “They fought for money…but they didn’t die for it. They died because if they didn’t launch those bombing runs, Conviction died.”

  Zoric pressed a glass of wine into the Captain’s hand, and Kira realized that, harsh as the opening of Estanza’s speech had been, the whole thing had been planned. It wasn’t just that he was drunk—though from the slurring, he was very drunk.

  “Daniel Mbeki, Lita Oberto, Dhaval De Santis and Adrienne Lehmann died to save this ship and this crew. And they succeeded in doing so. Because of their actions, their determination, we all stand here today to remember.

  “I hope that’s enough for them,” Estanza concluded. “Because it would be enough for me.”

  He raised the glass.

  “Platoon, attention to orders,” McCaig barked.

  “I give you Daniel Mbeki,” the Captain intoned.

  “Fire!” McCaig ordered. Twenty-one blaster rifles fired as one through the gravitic field at the end of the deck, the hiss-crack of the energy weapons an undertone to the response to Estanza’s toast.

  “I give you Lita Oberto,” Estanza continued.

  “Fire!”

  “I give you Dhaval De Santis.”

  “Fire!”

  “I give you Adrienne Lehmann.”

  “Fire!”

  Four twenty-one-gun salutes echoed through the launch deck, and John Estanza lowered his glass.

  “Remember our friends, people,” he told his crew. “Thank you.”

  Apollo-style wakes were far more energetic than the subdued affair that Conviction’s crew had put together. No one was lining up shots of vodka for groups to take at once, the music was quiet and the food was limited to small snacks.

  To Kira, the affair was almost as depressing as her state of mind. She could be a cheerful, if controlled, drunk at a wake. At this more-formal affair, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of herself and ended up the ghost in a larger conversation among the fighter pilots.

  If she was quieter than the average, she wasn’t the only one. Kira might have been considering sleeping with Mbeki, with a potential relationship definitely in the cards, but she’d still only known him for a couple of weeks.

  Most of the people here had known him for years—and the person who’d known him the longest was Captain John Estanza.

  Thinking of the man drew her attention to him and she watched as he brushed off Vaduva’s attempt to say something to him. Estanza wasn’t even walking straight, she noted grimly, and realized it wasn’t just the purser he was rudely dismissing.

  The man was physically present at the funeral, but he didn’t seem to be emotionally or mentally present—and, drunk as he was, probably creating more problems than he was solving.

  Excusing herself from the cluster of pilots—it wasn’t like she’d been paying attention to the conversation in any case—she delicately dodged her way across the funeral to Estanza.

  She got there just as he grouched something at Kavitha Zoric that made the carrier XO turn about as pale as the woman could and step backward away from him.

  The Captain had reached the edge of the room and was standing in the door as Kira stepped up beside him.

  “This is really how you’re going to honor Daniel’s memory?” she asked. “Drinking beyond even your tolerance and alienating your senior officers?”

  “What do you care?” Estanza barked. “You didn’t know him. You don’t know anyone here. Don’t play your little games with me, Demirci.”

  “I care because he would have,” Kira told him softly, almost unconsciously edging them both out into the corridor and closing the door behind them with a thought. This wasn’t a discussion that they needed to have in front of Estanza’s crew.

  “These were his people, his friends and family, and they looked up to you both. Treat them like this and you betray him.”

  “What do you know?” the old man told her. “I’ve buried more friends than I can count. You fought a war? That’s cute. I’ve fought a dozen. Daniel Mbeki fought a third of them at my side. He shouldn’t have died like that.

  “He wouldn’t have—if he hadn’t been distracted! By you.”

  Kira had not been expecting that, and she spent a moment torn between recoiling from Estanza or punching him.

  “Or maybe he was distracted by the fact that his mentor and friend was drinking himself to death and never emerging from his quarters,” she countered. “Maybe he realized the fucking ship was falling apart around him and his so-called boss was only looking for answers in a whisky bottle.

  “Did you throw that muck at Zoric, too?” she demanded. “Is there anyone aboard this ship you haven’t accused of killing Daniel? Are you so determined to deny reality that you will tear your ship and crew apart to find some scrap of reason why he died?

  “Or are you just terrified to look in the mirror? Or maybe, just maybe, after sixty fucking years of war, you should realize no one was to blame—least of all Daniel—and war comes with a shit set of odds we can’t beat forever.”

  She glared at him.

  “You can say I distracted Daniel. I can say he distracted me. I can say you distracted him. We can say that every fucking person on this carrier distracted everybody else, and it’s all true. And it’s all lies.

  “Does it really matter?”

  The corridor was silent for several seconds.

  “You have no damn clue what you’re talking about or to who,” Estanza told her, but there was no heat in his voice. Just a massive, bone-deep exhaustion. “You don’t know what I need to forget—or what I can’t afford to become.

  “Daniel did. He was the only one. He had a full damn pension on Sorvedo, a quiet life without needs if not necessarily full of luxury. And I talked him into coming out here with me. And dragged him into all of my messes.

  “So, yes, Demirci, I know half the blame is in the mirror. But he’d flown with that blame a thousand times. You, though. That distraction was new.”

  “Even if you hang it on me, it doesn’t change anything,” Kira said gently. “It doesn’t change that you can’t afford to burn this crew down around you and you can’t afford to disrespect Daniel’s memory. You need to hit a de-alcoholizer, go back in there, and fix the bridges you just tried to burn.

  “Because Daniel didn’t die to save this ship so you could wreck it. Sir.”

  Estanza stared at her. She could see the moment he triggered the emergency routine stored in his bodyware. She would have had to go get a dose from the medbay, but it appeared that the Captain kept a de-alcoholizer in his system.

  He closed his eyes. There was a reason Kira only had a de-alcoholizer loaded into her bodyware when she expected to need it. The nanite purge was not pleasant.

  “You’re a bitch, you know that?” he said conversationally.

  “I’ve been told that before,” she agreed. “Right now, no matter what else, you owe it to Daniel to keep this ship together. He did it for you. I don’t know how long he did it for you, but I’m guessing years. Long enough for you to drink yourself into hermitdom.

  “He’s gone now. You’re going to have to be the Captain now. Captain.”

  29

  Returning to Redward was as uneventful as they could have hoped. Armed Sedation was planning on staying at the rest stop for another twenty-four hours, which gave Conviction a clear conscience as they novaed back to the Redward System.

  Redward itself was almost sacrosanct. There were asteroid fortr
esses above the planet and the gas giant with the refueling infrastructure, each of them capable of engaging an entire fleet of nova-capable warships.

  But a ship had to leave the weapons range of those fortresses to enter nova, and the heavily mapped trade route stops were the safest places to nova to. Redward was rich by Syntactic Cluster standards but poor by any more objective one. It was still almost immune to direct assault—but an enemy with the power to engage and defeat her nova-capable forces could trap her civilian shipping behind those forts.

  The six hours that Conviction took to discharge her tachyon static at the gas giant Lastward were enough for messages to flow back and forth with the planet, which meant that Kira had a chance to review the video from Simoneit and Stipan Dirix in private.

  The lawyer and the current admin manager for Memorial Squadron were an interesting study in contrasts, one slim and one as broad as a brick wall. She was, however, surprised to see them in the same room in the recording.

  “Commander Demirci, we wanted to give you an update on where things stand on Blueward Station,” Dirix told her. “Em Simoneit has been more essential than any of us hoped, as we’ve…had some problems.”

  “What Em Dirix is trying to brush over was that he didn’t make sure he had a valid bodyguard license before getting involved in a firefight on Blueward Station,” Simoneit noted primly. “Technically, he’s been released to your jurisdiction until after his hearing, with myself acting as your agent, but the situation is under control. While it wasn’t open-and-shut self-defense, Redward law does recognize the concept of immediate defense of others at a similar level.”

  A firefight? That was bad…but on the other hand, it almost certainly meant that a 303 pilot had made it to Redward.

  “I have a reputation with the local bounty hunters,” Dirix said grimly. “Not one I’m proud of or one I really want to talk about how I acquired, but I ‘knew’ they’d back down. The people who came for Bardacki were not local.”

  Kira didn’t like the sound of that. She did, on the other hand, like the idea of having Evridiki Bardacki on her side. Bardacki had been the single most experienced pilot in the 303, a man who’d been transferred over from another combat group that had been smashed.

  He’d been next up on the list for a squadron command of his own if the 303 hadn’t been forced to flee.

  “My guess is that your enemies have an even longer reach that we thought, Commander,” the Redward native continued. “Em Bardacki is under lock and key now, behind a squad of Ironborn. That security isn’t cheap, but I don’t go to jail for it, either.”

  “Em Bardacki is the only one who made it through, Commander,” Simoneit concluded. “I’ve put out inquiries, but it looks like the five of you may be it, Demirci. Every other member of Moranis’s NCG I can find is dead. There are two or three I can’t find any trace of, but I wouldn’t hold out hope.

  “I’m sorry. Bardacki will be here when you arrive. You and Dirix will need to decide how much of a shore establishment you want at the point where we know everyone is either here or not making it.”

  “I’ll see you when you land, boss,” Dirix told her. “I’m restricted to Blueward Station for the foreseeable future, but inside that, I’m yours to command.”

  The recording ended and Kira shook her head to clear the video feed. Had Brisingr’s Kaiser sent Shadows this far? From what she understood of the Kaiserreich’s goals, they’d really been achieved the moment the 303 had dissolved into flight and desertion.

  The 303 Nova Combat Group wouldn’t fly against Brisingr again. She was grimly certain there would be another war—Apollo had conceded her allies but hadn’t agreed to pay tribute herself. The oligarchy that ruled her homeworld would never do that, not without having it forced down their throats.

  And the Kaiser would demand it. Apollo was the wealthiest system in the region, so they would be forced to bend the knee. The Council of Principals clearly hadn’t agreed with Kira on that, obviously, or they would never have signed the treaty they had.

  Today, her answers were on Redward. Tomorrow, they might be somewhere else. For now…well, she had more messages.

  As Vaduva had told her, payment had been sorted out for Conviction’s mission. That fee, with the additional bounties included, had triggered a significant bonus payment for Memorial Squadron that she’d need to distribute to her people.

  She had salaries to pay and bonuses to calculate, even if both of those things were new to her. There was really only one thing she’d want to buy for Memorial Squadron and, well, it didn’t look like she’d have pilots for them even if she could find someone able to sell her nova fighters.

  And there was no one who could do that within fifty light-years.

  30

  They were preparing to leave Lastward when Kira got a ping asking her to meet Estanza in his office. She didn’t have much to do with moving the ship, and it wasn’t like she could ignore the Captain, so she followed instructions.

  The biggest surprise was that Estanza wasn’t in his office. He was on the bridge, presumably relying on the fact that she had to step around at least the edge of the ship’s control center to reach his working space to intercept her.

  The old mercenary was standing next to the command chair, one hand supporting himself on the back of the seat and the other gesturing through an interface display only he could see. It might have looked strange if everyone else on the bridge wasn’t doing much the same thing.

  “You have the course laid in?” he asked the carrier’s helm officer.

  “Seventy minutes’ thrust at fifty percent, one ten-light-minute nova, seventy-eight minutes deceleration to bring us in to Blueward Station,” the woman replied crisply. “All vectors are coded in. Unless there’s trouble, we should be fine.”

  “Less than twenty minutes of that course is outside the range of the forts,” Estanza replied. “We’ll be fine.”

  He turned to face Kira.

  “Thank you for coming, Commander Demirci. I think everything is finished up here.” He glanced around with an oddly bemused smile.

  “You have the conn, Officer Stefanidis,” he told the helmswoman, then turned back to Kira. “My office, Commander?”

  Kira was more than a bit bemused herself. Every time she’d seen John Estanza before, he’d had the dull edge to his eyes of someone who was at least partially drunk. Today, that edge was completely gone and replaced with a hard glint she’d only seen on a handful of people in her life.

  One of those people had been Jay Moranis. There’d always been hints that Estanza had come from the same mold that had produced her war-hero commander, but this was the first time Conviction’s Captain had truly put on the cloak of his role.

  It looked damn good on him.

  “Of course, sir,” she told him. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, I must admit.”

  Estanza chuckled and led the way. The door slid closed behind him and she watched as some of the aura of command slipped. His shoulders drooped slightly and he closed his eyes for a long sigh.

  “I’m out of practice,” he said aloud. “Coffee, Commander?”

  “Please.”

  It was only as she watched him draw the cups from the machine that she realized what had changed in the office: the bar was gone.

  “The bar moves?” she asks.

  “On its own, actually,” Estanza confirmed. “Wheels, stupid-brain, the works. I do trust my self-control, if you were wondering, but it seemed wiser to put the bar in my closet rather than have it close to hand.”

  He placed two black coffees on the table.

  “I’m terrible at admitting when I’m wrong and I’m worse at apologies,” he told her. “But I was wrong and I apologize. I was out of line and you called me on it in a way that no one who knew me better would have dared.”

  There was a smile dancing around his lips as he drank. It didn’t entirely reach his eyes and there was a sad edge to it, but Kira understood that.

  “If
I kept on going the way I have been going, I would have failed Daniel,” he conceded. “I won’t let that happen. I won’t let his death go unavenged.”

  “I’d rather not myself,” Kira agreed. “Though I understand that he did take out the ship that killed him.”

  “I checked the footage,” Estanza said. “He put his conversion torpedo right through their main power core. They never stood a chance—they were already dead when they fired the shot that killed him. They just didn’t know that.”

  He shook his head.

  “But groups like the Costar Clans don’t fade away after one failure. More interestingly, I’ll note, is that the Costar Clans are extremely protective of their limited corvette strength. They have the fabricators to build the nova drives, but most of their population lives in habitats and asteroid colonies.

  “They don’t have the gravity to build Harringtons and nova drives in significant numbers. To build a bigger nova drive for a corvette costs them time and resources better used building a gunship squadron.”

  “So, they really wanted Conviction dead,” Kira noted.

  “Which feels damn personal,” Estanza replied. “And that may well be the core of it, too, in which case I at least have some answers as to what’s going on.”

  He shook his head and took a long sip of his coffee.

  “I’m getting ahead of myself,” he noted. “That’s either the third or fourth thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “You have an agenda, sir?” Kira asked.

  His smile hadn’t reached his eyes but his laugh did.

  “Apparently, Commander Demirci, you’re as good for me as Daniel Mbeki was,” he said after a moment. “It’s a good thing I was planning on keeping you.

  “I needed to apologize, which I believe I’ve done with my usual half-assed disaster of an attempt,” he continued. “But I have an update for you as well. I received a message from a friend that you’ll be interested in.”