Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Sir?”

  “Shang Tzu commands a pair of mercenary destroyers,” Estanza told her. “He headquarters them out of Exeteron, a system that makes New Ontario look rich, because Exeteron is so desperate for help, they basically don’t charge him taxes or licensing fees so long as he keeps money in the bank and swings his destroyers through every couple of months to show the flag.

  “The message I got from him was out of Ypres,” he continued. “You know the system?”

  “Gateway to the cluster, factional clusterfuck, home to the Brisingr embassy and a bounty on my head and all of my people’s,” Kira reeled off. The name of the system made her twitch. “What was Shang Tzu saying that was relevant to me?”

  “I may have intimated to my mercenary friends in the cluster and the next couple of sectors that there was a reward for making sure any members of the Apollo Three Hundred and Third Nova Combat Group made it to Redward alive and unhurt,” Estanza said dryly.

  “That said, Ypres is a hotbed of backstabbery, and it appears that some of Tzu’s crew decided to involve themselves when they saw a pretty young woman being followed into a dark alley.” The carrier Captain shook his head.

  “It did not end well for the people following her—and according to Tzu, not just because of his people. I believe you know Evgenia Michel?”

  Kira blinked back both surprise and tears. More of her people were alive?!

  “She was one of mine,” she confirmed. “Even more than the rest—she flew on my wing for the last two years.” Then she chuckled at the thought of anyone who thought Michel was vulnerable in a dark alley.

  “Also a black belt in some grotesque martial art involving knives and dirty tricks,” she remembered aloud.

  “All Shang Tzu said was that while he was pretty sure his people’s help was useful, he wasn’t entirely sure it was necessary,” Estanza concluded. “And because of my note, he offered her and a friend a ride.

  “He wasn’t coming straight here, but I think they thought traveling on a nova warship was much safer than hopping economy class on a liner. From the note I have from Tzu, Evgenia Michel and Abdullah Colombera will arrive with him in about three days.”

  Kira had to close her eyes to hold back tears of relief.

  “We thought everyone else was dead,” she admitted. “One more is waiting for me at Blueward, but we’d only lost track of three.” Michel and Colombera—Socrates and Scimitar—were an inseparable pair of jokers, the youngest of the surviving pilots now, and she’d be glad to have them.

  If her last lost sheep showed up, she’d be ecstatic, but her hopes were low. To get Michel and Colombera was more than she’d dared hope.

  “Well, they’ll be here in three days,” Estanza repeated. “Though I’d prefer not to pay the reward I promised myself, to be clear.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Kira promised. Memorial Squadron was more than capable of matching the bounty posted for her people’s heads, which seemed a “nice round number” to pay someone who helped get someone home.

  “Good. My understanding is that neither of them knows more than ‘get to Redward,’ but Shang Tzu did. I doubt they’ve had a pleasant trip.”

  “They’re not alone in that,” Kira confessed. “We didn’t plan this as well as we could have.”

  “You were expecting to be betrayed to foreign assassins by your own government?” Estanza asked with an arched eyebrow. “Even Jay’s paranoia wouldn’t have been planning for that until it started happening.

  “Seven out of twenty-four might feel like a failure, Commander Demirci, but against the resources of a major interstellar power, that is a victory you should be proud of.”

  “Too easy to remember the dead, sir,” she confessed.

  “I know,” he agreed. “Drink your coffee, Demirci. You look like you need a moment.”

  The carrier shivered around them as her Harringtons came online. Estanza closed his eyes, clearly checking reports and data as Kira took that moment he’d offered to regain her composure.

  Two more survivors were everything…and they were nothing. Seventeen of her comrades—her friends and family—were dead. Seven pilots would fill out her squadron, but the number would also remind her of how much she’d lost along the way.

  She finished her coffee and Estanza took her cup away, replacing it with a freshly full one. The Captain’s mannerism hadn’t completely changed now that he was suddenly sober, but it was still strange to watch him move without the slight imbalance of being constantly drunk.

  “So, now we know that Memorial Squadron is going to have six pilots,” Estanza noted. “That helps with my plans for the near future. If nothing else, I unfortunately now have pilot slots to put Galavant and Swordheart into on my side.

  “But that brings up another problem that I’m facing: the most senior surviving pilot is Lozenge: Boyd Maina. He doesn’t want the squadron command, would be mediocre at the job at best, and doesn’t command the respect of the other pilots.

  “On the other hand, I have Gizmo: Ruben Hersch. Two pilots in addition to Maina are senior to him, but he’d be good at the job and he has the respect of all of the pilots, including those who’ve been with the company longer.

  “But.” Estanza held up a finger. “Hersch is young. He celebrated his thirtieth birthday shortly before you came aboard. He needs seasoning, but I don’t have smaller commands for him to practice on. He can do the job, but starting out will be rough for him…which means that while he can command the Darkwings, I can’t make him Conviction’s Commander, Nova Group.”

  Estanza pulled a virtual document out of the air and tossed it to Kira.

  “I need a second contract with you, Kira Demirci,” he told her. “Separate from but dependent on the contract between Conviction and Memorial Squadron. That contract explicitly says you have no command authority over Conviction personnel except as required to support your squadron.

  “This contract brings you fully into Conviction’s chain of command as Commander, Nova Group,” Estanza explained. “You’ll have complete authority over Darkwing Squadron as well as Memorial Squadron for training, recruiting, organizing—everything. I’ll maintain oversight, of course, but the nova group will be yours. You’ll share authority over the flight deck with Waldroup, but in space you answer to me and God.”

  He smiled.

  “The extra contract is, of course, remunerated appropriately,” he told her. “That won’t go through Memorial Squadron, even if, as I said, this contract is both legally and functionally inextricably linked to the contract for the Memorials.”

  Kira exhaled slowly as she reviewed the contract. The legalese agreed with everything Estanza was saying. The salary was higher than she’d expected, especially given that he was already paying for Memorial Squadron to employ a squadron commander.

  “I’ll have to run it by Simoneit, but it looks good. What’s the catch?” she asked.

  Estanza sat there in silence for several seconds, studying her.

  “The catch?” he said softly. “The catch is that I’m done running and I’m done hiding. If that attack happened for the reasons I think it did, I’m about to go to war, Commander, and hitching your star to mine will make you enemies forever.”

  “I’m already hunted everywhere I go,” Kira said dryly. She wasn’t sure just who or what Estanza was talking about, but it couldn’t be worse than having the dictator of an interstellar power personally signing kill orders for you.

  “I know. It wouldn’t change much for you, but it would still be a change,” Estanza warned. “You need to understand who I am and what I’ve done before you sign that contract—and who Jay Moranis was and what he’d done, too.

  “Tell me, Kira, did Jay ever tell you anything about the Equilibrium Institute?”

  31

  Kira could only stare blankly at Estanza.

  “No,” she finally conceded, though the name sounded vaguely familiar. “I think he might have mentioned the name once or twice
, but he never explained anything about them.”

  “Makes sense.” Conviction’s Captain rose to his feet, a thought turning the wall behind him into a virtual window showing the gas giant Lastward slowly shrinking away behind them.

  “It was an unspoken deal,” he told her. “We didn’t reveal what we knew of Equilibrium and they let us go. No pursuit, no knives in the dark. Cobra Squadron just ceased to exist.”

  “What does Cobra Squadron have to do with this Equilibrium?” Kira asked.

  “Everything,” Estanza said bluntly. “The Griffon Sector wasn’t the first time Cobra helped someone rise to dominance over a region. It was the fourth. Our involvement was easy to miss: we were just one mercenary flight group, operating out of a couple of freighters. Nothing special, except in our numbers.

  “Except that we were at the turning of the tide of a dozen wars,” he continued. “Always in favor of turning the arc of history to where the Equilibrium Institute said it should go. Take the Star Kingdom of Griffon, for example.

  “They were wealthy and technologically advanced. They didn’t claim any great degree of pacifism; they just had far better things to spend their money on than fleets and didn’t feel the need to enforce hegemony around them.

  “So, the Institute arranged for a massive pirate fleet to raid the system. They had just the right amount of firepower, timing and inside assets to seize control of the refueling infrastructure for a day or so before Cobra Squadron ‘coincidentally’ arrived. We threw the balance in favor of Griffon, drove the pirates out.

  “The fleets started building up then. There was a not-quite-legal change of government, and suddenly Griffon was aggressively expansionist and massively powerful. Two of their local rivals challenged them. We flew for one of those rivals for long enough to get it unavoidably involved, then ended up flying for Griffon as they smashed them into the ground.

  “Griffon became what the Equilibrium Institute wants: a regional hegemon powerful enough to prevent war among the other star systems. They imposed trade deals and tariffs, seized military control of the trade routes, the works. Much as Brisingr is doing right now in your home sector.”

  “But why?” Kira asked.

  “The Equilibrium Institute’s goal is peace for all humanity,” Estanza said quietly. “The goal is hard to argue with. The image of a humanity at peace—still disunified, but at peace—was tempting and convincing as all hell.

  “We might have officially been mercenaries, but we were an Equilibrium Institute special ops team. Those ‘freighters’ we were flying around in were Heart World–built escort carriers with fake plating on top. We kept the fighters local, but our support infrastructure outclassed everything else in the sector.

  “We were the unexpected knife that built four hegemonies from nothing, creating regional powers that would enforce peace. It was only in Griffon that we saw the other side of the Equilibrium Institute’s plan.”

  “Which was?” Kira asked, stunned at the grand scope of what Estanza was telling her. She wasn’t sure if it was his paranoid conspiracy theory or an actual conspiracy she was stunned by, but the scope was mind-boggling either way.

  “To stabilize regions, they needed their local hegemons,” he explained. “But to keep their precious equilibrium, they needed to make sure that none of the powers they’d propped up and made expansionist were powerful enough to get too expansionist.

  “They wanted people who could enforce ‘peace’ within one or two nova recharges but lacked the strength to end up in conflict with the next designated hegemon over. So, when Griffon started looking at expanding beyond what the Equilibrium Institute thought was their appropriate territory, they sabotaged the shipyards.”

  Kira looked past Estanza at the image of Lastward behind him. At this distance, the Redward Royal Navy shipyards were just shiny dots above the moon they used as an anchor, but she knew there would be millions of people on the stations and the moon beneath them.

  “Fourteen million dead,” Estanza concluded. “Maybe…six people in the galaxy who weren’t involved knew enough to put together all of the pieces. Four of them were Cobras. I was one. Moranis was one.

  “We told the rest of the squadron.”

  “And?”

  “We liked Griffon,” he admitted softly. “Compared to some of the people we’d supported over the years, the Star Kingdom had more than just greed in mind when they’d turned expansionist. A lot of their expansion at this point was even peaceful—they’d pick a nova stop, move in and secure it, then cut trade and protection deals with the local governments.

  “Their carrot was money and they had a lot of it. Their stick was their carrier fleet…and they had a lot of that, too. With the shipyards wrecked, they stopped, pulling their ships back to defend the areas they’d already secured.

  “Expansion was contrary to their general political discourse. Once it stopped, it never really restarted. Another victory for the Equilibrium Institute…and a couple dozen of their best assets looking in the mirror and realizing how much damn blood we’d shed in pursuit of a goal that couldn’t really be achieved.”

  “So, you abandoned them?” Kira concluded.

  “I think some of the Cobras stayed,” he told her. “But at least half of us deserted, abandoning ships and fighters in the night. We had money and reputation. Turning that into new options for us was easy enough.

  “And the Institute didn’t come after us, not initially. I think they were watching and waiting. They knew we’d been loyal, so what would we do now that we’d run? We kept their secrets…and they let us go.”

  “And now?” she asked. “I thought Redward was trying to do just that kind of setup here.”

  “King Larry is trying to negotiate a trade and mutual protection association,” Estanza said. “There’s no illusion that Redward wouldn’t be first among equals, but the goal is to get everyone signed on voluntarily and working together.”

  “So, exactly what do they want? Why do you think this Institute is involved now?”

  “Because their ‘Seldonian Analyses’ tell them that mutual-benefit associations don’t work,” the old mercenary told her. “There’s a bias in their numbers, in their calculations. I worked with one guy who went back and reanalyzed the reports they’d done, and they figured that the Institute had twisted Seldonian social-projection analysis pretty badly so it always produced the answers they wanted.

  “In the absence of a key power prepared to become a military hegemon, the Institute will create one,” Estanza concluded. “One of the methods they’ll use to encourage whoever they work with to play along is to arm the local pirates. So, right now, I’d bet money that there are Equilibrium agents negotiating with at least three governments in the Cluster.

  “But most importantly, the Costar Clans have become more aggressive in recent months and years, and more willing to use their heavier ships. That tells me that they’re not as concerned about their ability to replace those ships.

  “Something has changed and it stinks of the Institute. I have spent thirty years running from them, Kira. Thirty years trying not to be a threat, intentionally not opposing their operations.

  “I’m done. If they’re behind the Costar Clans’ new aggression, then the Clans need to be broken. And nobody knows the Equilibrium Institute better than me.”

  “Why tell me all of this?” she asked softly.

  “Because Daniel knew it,” he replied. “Because if you sign on for this fight, they’ll mark you as an enemy—and because if I’m right, someone other than me has to know what’s going down. I’m only one man.”

  “And if you’re wrong, sir?” she asked.

  “Then at least one more person knows about this galaxy’s most aggressive societal cancer and we go kill pirates for shits and giggles,” Estanza concluded. “Nobody loses. You’re right in having Simoneit review the contract, but I’d like a verbal answer now. We can sort out details later.”

  “I might ask you for more money
after that lecture,” Kira countered.

  “Then that’s one of those details,” he confirmed. “But are you with me, Kira?”

  Either John Estanza was crazy paranoid or he’d encountered one of the most dangerous conspiracies in the galaxy and learned how it operated. Both options were concerning, but neither really impacted whether or not Kira would help the man hunt pirates.

  “I’m with you. Sir.”

  “Good. Sort out the contract with Simoneit and check in on your pilot who landed. We’ll have a few days while Waldroup rebuilds my fighters and I talk to the RRF, but I suspect you and I are going to be sitting down with Redward Command before the week is out.

  “If the Costar Clans can now produce corvettes reliably enough to expend corvettes, we need to act decisively and quickly. Conviction can’t do that alone and won’t do that for free, so if everything breaks right, well…”

  He grinned.

  “I’m pretty sure King Larry will be more than happy to pay for our revenge!”

  32

  Kira had arranged to bring Cartman with her on her trip aboard station, keeping with the “buddy system” requirement that McCaig had ordered. Both of the women were armed with bead pistols tucked away under armored leather jackets.

  The outfit that Kira had adopted on her way out to the Redward System was extremely practical for their current situation, and she’d grabbed a few equivalent jackets for her people before leaving Blueward Station last time.

  She was comfortable enough with that level of armed and armored that she was surprised to find two of the more heavily equipped mercenary troopers waiting in the docking bay—one of them in Milani’s distinctively painted red dragon armor.

  Kira hadn’t seen the mercenary out of the armor yet. She wasn’t even sure she’d seen their face, as the handful of times she’d seen Milani aboard ship, they’d still been wearing the gear.