Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)
Page 22
He shook his head.
“I think if I spent my entire team’s annual listening device budget, I might be able to import one of these guys. Anyway, they’re all disabled and being packaged into neat Faraday-cage boxes to go back to the office for analysis.
“The apartment is clear. I apologize for missing them the first time around.”
“Nothing was discussed that would betray our plans or our intentions, Captain,” Queen Sonia told him. “We were worried about the chef, not bugs that don’t belong on this planet, but the discussion was safe.”
She smiled thinly as she gestured for Kira to give her control of the holoprojectors.
“The rest of tonight will not be,” she said flatly. “Everything that will be discussed here is classified Top Secret Orange Topaz. If you review your contract, Captain Estanza, you will note that a violation of any security classification above Top Secret results in a voiding of your contract and seizure of your ship.”
Kira didn’t even need to look at Estanza to know what the carrier captain was thinking: Good luck with that.
It was, notably, the heaviest threat they could realistically level.
“I want the sons of bitches who killed Commander Mbeki,” Estanza noted, his voice chilly. “I haven’t made a career of betraying the trust of the people who hire me, Your Majesty.”
“I know,” Queen Sonia conceded. “But some of what we are to discuss is intelligence that Redward did not acquire ourselves but came through the channels that are developing around the SCFTZ.”
Kira’s headware happily expanded the initialism: the Syntactic Cluster Free Trade Zone. An organization that didn’t officially exist so far but that a quarter of the Cluster’s systems were committed to creating and another quarter were negotiating toward.
Back channels between the four systems who’d already signed on to the draft agreement made sense. They’d presumably been allies for a long time to agree to the concept so readily.
“Other intelligence comes from assets we cannot afford to expose or methods that, frankly, would not hold up in our courts,” she continued. “All of this data, plus Captain Estanza’s trawling of the knowledge of the local mercenaries, ended up in the Office of Integration.
“My people did their jobs and we now have a relatively solid image of just what Warlord Davies is up to,” she concluded.
A wave of her hand brought up the Syntactic Cluster. It was a roughly globular collection of sixty stars forty-three light-years across. Seventeen of the stars held habitable worlds, all of them settled. All seventeen of those systems, Kira saw, were highlighted. Redward was gold, three others were green—the tentative members of the SCFTZ—with five orange icons presumably marking the systems negotiating for entrance. The remaining eight systems were highlighted in silver to mark them as inhabited.
“We have always had a relatively solid grasp of the physical locations of the Costar Clans,” the Queen noted. Ten systems on the map flashed crimson. None of them were systems flagged as having inhabitable planets.
“They represent a mix of outposts from the other systems, daughter colonies from spaceborne settlements closer to the Core, ships that ended up in the wrong place, and in the case of the Crysty System, a planet that suffered a tectonic realignment while the colony ship was en route,” she explained. “All of them are struggling-to-marginal.
“I have a deep and abiding sympathy for the people of those systems,” she continued. “But I have no sympathy for their willingness to embrace raiding and violence as a cultural touchstone and answer to their status.
“Nonetheless, we and most of our partners have generally followed a two-pronged approach to deal with the Clans: on the one hand, we have escorted our critical convoys, swept trade routes, secured the entry and exit points from our systems and generally worked to thwart the actual raiders as thoroughly as possible and as violently as necessary.
“On the other, both private and system-level charitable efforts have dug into many of these systems to try and resolve the underlying problems. This project has been ongoing since before I was Queen. Since before I married Larry, in fact.
“But over the last thirty years, we have been seeing success. Several systems that would once have proudly proclaimed themselves Costar Systems now bar the raiders from their ports and have turned their shipyards to building freighters and futures.”
“A success that has been bought with the blood of hundreds of our spacers,” Admiral Remington noted. “I don’t disagree with the approach, Your Majesty, but I have always felt that a certain degree of direct action into their systems against key facilities would be wise.”
“And traditionally, the Crown has disagreed with you and your predecessors,” King Larry said comfortably, this clearly being a well-worn argument. “For our efforts to bring these systems in from the cold, they needed to trust us.
“But it has always been clear in my mind and my mother’s, when she was Queen before me, that there would be times we needed to strike at the Clans directly. To keep the trust we were trying to foster, we needed to make sure that even the Clans would agree that someone had gone too far.
“I believe we may have reached that point,” the King finished. “Please, Sonia.”
“We know that Warlord Deceiver is based out of the KLN-35XD System,” the Queen of Redward said firmly. “Known to the locals as the Kiln, it’s an uninhabitable hellhole with a vast quantity of rich asteroid belts.
“Cluster systems have always been up for trying to exploit the Kiln, but no one really has the resources to do so successfully or to really defend a claim there,” she continued. “There were a lot of failed mining outposts, and not everybody left when their home companies tried to pull them out.
“The Kiln became a Costar Clan system. Enough resources are present there to make everyone in the system rich, but they’ve never had the tech to exploit it on their own or a partner they trusted to help them do it. So, they started stealing that tech.”
Sonia shook her head.
“Of course, telling you that the Warlord is in the Kiln System isn’t helpful,” she noted. “A star system is a large place, and there are multiple factions even in the Kiln System. What has drawn our attention more and more to his operation is that he has become increasingly aggressive over the last two years.
“The attack on Conviction was his largest operation to date, but it wasn’t his first strike that was well out of scale with normal Clan resources. The Deceiver clearly feels he has the resources to risk significant losses for significant victories.
“That suggests that he has an outside partner who is enabling him to properly exploit the resources of the Kiln,” she told them. “Our current suspicion is someone on Ypres, but I suspect we’re talking one of the embassies, not one of the factions.”
“Like Brisingr,” Kira suggested. Or the Equilibrium Institute Estanza was worried about. Either would be a problem.
“Brisingr isn’t high on my list of potential troublemakers, but they’re on it,” the Queen confirmed. “The two key points are that Warlord Deceiver must have a large, recently expanded mining-and-construction operation somewhere in the Kiln System.
“One that he built with somebody else’s help. We believe that we can strike at this facility and, so long as we stay within reasonable laws of war, it won’t be held against us.”
“You don’t pay me enough to ignore atrocities, let alone commit them,” Estanza said grimly. “Even knowing what we’re looking for, a star system is not a small place.”
“And that brings us to why I needed to be completely certain that this meeting was private,” Queen Sonia agreed calmly. “We have highly placed assets inside the Costar Clans. Some of them, I am certain, only work with us to undermine their rivals. Others are at least partially aligned with our objectives for their systems.”
The partially aligned was probably key, Kira suspected. She assumed that the systems that had left the Costar Clans were now economic dep
endencies of Redward or another system. They were almost certainly better off…but they were definitely weren’t going to be anything a former pirate colony would call free.
“You know where he’s based?” Estanza asked.
“I know where he’s based,” Queen Sonia confirmed. “I also am absolutely certain that he has spies in this system and has potentially acquired assets at the highest levels of the Redward Royal Fleet. Some of that may be his new friends. Some of that is definitely him.
“Any attempt to actively move against Warlord Deceiver’s main base is going to find empty stations and abandoned mines. There is no way this man hasn’t prepared for a full-on evacuation of his facilities on twenty-four hours’ notice or less.
“If we follow the nova lanes, Kiln is eighty hours from here. If you have someone mad enough to do unmapped six-light-year novas, you can reach Kiln in three jumps.”
Kira was checking the routes as she listened. Kiln was seventeen light-years from Redward. A jump to the nova lane, three jumps—eighteen light-years—along the most convenient nova lane, a jump to the system.
Five jumps, four twenty-hour waiting periods. Eighty hours. But a direct route would be three jumps, with two twenty-hour waiting periods. The only real good news was that Davies definitely didn’t have Conviction penetrated—if he had, his plan to take the carrier out wouldn’t have foundered on the presence of Kira’s squadron.
“They probably have mapped a number of points outside the nova lanes,” Kira pointed out. “I know Apollo had an entire secondary set of mapped nova stops through the entire cluster for our fleet if needed.”
“Fuck me,” Remington replied in a heavy breath. “We have…a few fallback points around Redward mapped. We never even thought to expand a shadow network that far.”
“Think about it,” King Larry ordered. “Get me a plan, Admiral. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.”
Every so often, Kira almost forgot that she was a long way from home and that a hundred light-years farther out from Sol could make a huge difference. And then she had the reminders that things she’d assumed were the case…weren’t out there.
“But we don’t have that network now, and I hesitate to send a significant force via unmapped long-range novas,” Remington noted. “Do we have information on the defenses?”
“No,” the Queen admitted. “It seems that we can safely assume at least twenty gunships and two corvettes, that being the force he sent against Conviction. I would suggest assuming at least twice that.”
“Conviction could handle a large portion of that but not all of it,” Estanza noted. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Commodore Shang Tzu is currently in the system as well, with two destroyers. No one has wasted resources infiltrating our command structures.”
“A carrier and two destroyers are unlikely to suffice,” King Larry said calmly. “Remington, we need Captain Estanza and Commodore Shang, but the mercenaries will not be enough.
“You need to send Perseus.”
“Sir, Perseus—” Remington argued, gesturing at Vice Admiral Ylva Kim.
“Carries the Lancer Squadron, I know,” the King interrupted. “That’s why we need Perseus and Admiral Kim’s group.”
“If I’m deploying the Lancers, we should at least advise Captain Estanza of their nature,” Vice Admiral Kim said delicately. The flag officer had been quiet to this point, and her voice was soft as she spoke.
“Lancer Squadron is six Royal Crest–built Cavalier-II medium nova fighters,” Estanza told her. “They’re fifteen years out of date, and Crest didn’t even bother to downgrade them before selling them to you. They claimed that was because they trusted you, but it was actually because the Cavalier-III was a vastly superior design and they knew the II had severe issues.
“As, I understand, your test and training flights have uncovered,” the Captain said with a grin. “I believe you’ve managed to find answers for most of them, but those birds were born to be hangar queens.”
The table was silent for a moment.
“How many of our secrets do you not know, Captain?” Queen Sonia asked.
“I don’t know,” Estanza said with a chuckle. “I made it my business to know everything I could about nova fighters in the cluster. With the Lancers alongside us, we’ll have twenty nova fighters. The Cavalier-II has maintenance issues, but if you’ve kept them up, they’re solid fighters.
“Barring any significant phalanx of capital ships, I’d take that nova group against anything in the cluster.”
“We’ll hire Shang and send the full Perseus group,” King Larry ordered. “That’ll be a cruiser and four destroyers, backing up your two carriers.”
“Neither carrier is armed,” Remington noted. “Protecting them will be a challenge.”
“That’s Admiral Kim’s job,” Larry told her. “And your mercenary COs’. The biggest issue is going to be avoiding giving away our hand.”
“The oldest of problems with the oldest of solutions,” Estanza suggested. “Sealed paper orders. Captain’s eyes only, opened after novaing out. Admiral Kim already knows the mission, so unless she is compromised, you send out her carrier group individually and used sealed orders to have them converge at a particular nova point with no further details.
“From there, Admiral Kim gives the direction to proceed to the Kiln System and the target. Shang’s orders are to accompany Conviction, and I bring us to the same rendezvous and place ourselves at her disposal.”
The mercenary captain smiled grimly.
“I know this dance, officers, Your Majesties. I suspect I know our enemy, but that’s a problem for another day. For now, sealed orders and a handful of people in the know will get our forces where they need to be.”
Seven warships. Even by Apollo standards, that was starting to sound like a real task group to Kira. They might all be tiny, obsolescent or both by her standard, but it was still a real force.
Deceiver was going to regret coming after Conviction.
38
The Redward party left the apartment shortly afterward, leaving Kira and Estanza alone with their thoughts.
The two mercenaries sat in silence, watching Wardstone set over the system’s capital city. As the sunlight faded, the apartment automatically sensed that there was someone inside and brought on lighting around them.
“I didn’t know Redward had nova fighters,” she finally said, as much to fill the silence as anything else.
“There are twenty-four nova fighters in the Cluster that aren’t aboard Conviction,” Estanza told her. “Redward has six. The Ypres factions have five between them. Bengalissimo has four. Serengeti has three. There’s four in ‘private ownership’ scattered around, and the Hassani System has the last two.”
She snorted.
“And how public-knowledge is all of that?” she asked.
“The twenty-four-nova-fighter number seems to be surprisingly public,” the mercenary captain admitted. “The breakdown, specifically? I suspect most of the major systems have an idea of at least who has nova fighters, if not how many.”
Kira nodded. A thought brought up what was publicly available on the Cavalier-II. It had been built as a medium fighter, theoretically more heavily armed but less maneuverable than her interceptors. Both ships could carry a single conversion torpedo, but the age of the design meant that the Hoplite-IV’s technically lighter guns were just as powerful.
And even with a torpedo attached, her interceptors could fly rings around the Crest fighter. Still…a nova fighter was a nova fighter, to a large degree.
“I’m guessing you figure the bugs were Equilibrium?” she asked after another few minutes of silence.
“Who else would be putting Meridian-level tech in an apartment in an Outer Rim system?” he asked. “I know you don’t entirely believe me, Kira, but who else would put those resources into bugs on Jay Moranis’s contingency hideout?”
“I’d say Brisingr, but I d
on’t think they have the resources for that kind of gear,” she admitted. “I don’t disbelieve you, either, boss. It’s just a lot to swallow, to believe there’s this shadowy organization in the background trying to influence astropolitics on that level.”
“Honestly? I thought they were bullshitting me on the scale for the first few years that I worked for them,” Estanza admitted. “The scope, the sheer audacity of their intent…it didn’t seem like it could be real. How do you organize something like that across three thousand light-years of known space?”
He shrugged.
“I’m still not sure, to be honest,” he said. “What I encountered was a cell structure with access to seemingly infinite accounts and large, but not infinite, quantities of Meridian and Heart tech. Communication was by couriers who spoke for vague ‘higher-ups’ but had access to even more infinite amounts of money—couriers nobody questioned.”
“Sounds like a classic bad movie conspiracy,” Kira countered.
“It’s classic because it works. I only ever knew the name of one person outside of Cobra Squadron with the Institute, but I saw their handiwork again and again. I had no reason to disbelieve their existence, shadowy as they felt even to people on the inside.”
“It just all seems mad, that’s all,” she admitted. “Molycirc bugs in my apartment? It’s just…”
“I’m not convinced that whoever set the Institute in motion isn’t insane,” Estanza told her. “I’m not even a hundred percent convinced every day that I’m not insane. I’m almost grateful that Queen Sonia’s people found those bugs.
“It helps me be sure this isn’t some paranoid delusion.”
“Or in your delusions, you planted them while you were checking the bedrooms,” Kira said slyly.
She almost instantly regretted it as Estanza clenched his hands together and stared at them.
“Sir, they said the bugs had been there for months,” she pointed out gently. “They were installed when Jay bought the apartment, not today.”
“Right, right,” he agreed, unclenching his fists. “It’s weird, let me tell you, to remember having worked for a massive organization that the rest of the galaxy doesn’t know exists. I don’t know if they’re here, Kira.