Conviction (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I have vectors on a lot of wrecked fighters and escape pods,” McNee replied. “I think we got a solid visual on the Hoplite that went down, too,” she continued, as if she’d heard Kira’s private thoughts. “If you can cover them against potential risks, I can get search and rescue up.”

  “We need the drive cores even if we can’t save the pilots,” Kira confessed sadly. “We’ll cover them until everyone comes home.”

  There was another pause.

  “I have an update from Admiral Kim,” McNee told her. “The carriers are coming in at full speed now, along with the attack transports. We’re to flag targets for Marine landing forces and see if we can negotiate surrenders.”

  “That’s on your side, I think, Captain McNee,” Kira replied as she checked her people’s fuel. They were down to fumes, basically. They could nova once or recharge their guns twice…but the sublight Harringtons didn’t need much fuel. They were still more maneuverable sublight than the capital ships, which meant they still had a role to play.

  “I’ll babysit the search and rescue. There are still at least four hostile nova fighters out there. They’re probably smart enough to keep running, but I can’t count on that.”

  “Agreed. You keep my people safe, I’ll go be diplomatic,” the cruiser captain confirmed. “And Demirci?”

  “Sir?”

  “Thank you. Again.”

  Kira had done damage cleanup over a dozen battlespaces over the years. Losing Hoffman hurt, after everything they’d done to get everyone this far out, but it was an old, familiar pain. It was worse, but it was the same pain.

  And she couldn’t argue that the victory hadn’t been worth it for Redward, at least. With more time to study them, she could confirm that the two destroyers under construction were both D9Cs. The two heavy destroyers alone would make a huge shot in the arm for the Royal Fleet, and if the fabricators and schematics were taken intact, Redward had the resources to do far more with them than Warlord Davies had.

  The sheer scale of the facility felt off to her. Whoever was backing Davies—she wasn’t quite buying the Institute theory just yet, but someone had put a lot of money and tech into a pirate warlord—had thrown way more resources into his base than was reasonable.

  From Davies’ perspective, it made sense. With these yards, mines and factories, he could build an empire. A fleet of D9Cs and Weltraumpanzers, even if the nova fighters were operating on their own and strategically slow, could conquer the entire Cluster.

  But it would have taken years to build that fleet. Davies had lacked the numbers of laborers needed to turn what he’d been given into what he needed. Redward, on the other hand, could make massive use of what he had.

  Which…fit disturbingly well with Estanza’s conspiracy theory. They armed Davies with the tech to build a fleet, and either he conquered the Cluster himself—or everything they gave him fell into the hands of a bigger power like Redward.

  With that shot in the arm to their fleet, she had to wonder what King Larry would do. He didn’t seem the type to turn into an all-conquering warlord, but given the power to do so…how would Redward’s monarch jump?

  She snorted at her woolgathering and opened a channel.

  “S&R–Six, finding anything?” she asked quietly. That shuttle was following the vectors for her fighters.

  “We were just about to call you, Commander,” the shuttle responded. “We have located Darkwing-Five’s fighter. Scans suggest multiple life forms aboard. It looks like Megavolt is still with you, sir. We’re beginning extraction now.

  “S&R–Seven is continuing to sweep the vector cone for Memorial-Three,” the pilot continued gently. “We have not located the fighter yet.”

  “Understood, S&R,” Kira noted. “Thank you.”

  Two fewer deaths on her conscience. That made Hoffman the only person she’d lost.

  The RRF hadn’t been as lucky as Conviction’s crew in that sense, and those losses stung—but they hadn’t been her people. She’d grieve the RRF’s and Shang’s dead more than she’d grieve the Costar Clans’ dead, but she’d grieve them all second.

  She flipped her fighter, coming back around for a second patrol sweep across the zone. Her new angle brought the destroyer slips into the center of her view, and she shook her head again as she studied the two-thirds-complete warships.

  Kira was about to ask if anyone had IDed the design for the corvettes building in the smaller slips when the first destroyer exploded.

  The under-construction ship was only the beginning. Explosions—presumably pre-planted nuclear warheads—tore through the entire shipyard complex. Both destroyers vanished in the first moments, rapidly followed by the corvettes.

  The industrial nodes feeding the yards followed suit, and Kira was grimly certain no one had properly evacuated them. Rolling mills for hull plating, smelters for the asteroid ore, large-scale fabricators…an industrial site to rival many small systems’ entire capacity went up in a series of explosions the Redward fleet could do nothing about.

  “Change in orders,” Admiral Kim’s voice interrupted every channel in the system. “Priority is now search and rescue. Colonel Brigham, take your transport to the habitation stations and impose order.

  “The rest of you Marines: sweep the largest debris pieces for survivors. We can search for usable tech and machinery later. Right now, we need to save ‘Warlord Deceiver’s people from his petty revenge.”

  Of course. The Equilibrium Institute had intentionally set it up so that Davies’ whole campaign would end up benefiting whoever brought him down more than him—and he’d done the math and decided he wasn’t going to stand for that.

  “Nova fighters, begin close-in sweeps with your scanners,” she ordered her people. “We can get in tighter than anything except the shuttles themselves, and our sensors can confirm if anyone is left.

  “There would have been thousands of people on those stations,” she continued grimly. “Let’s save as many as we can.”

  She was already on her way as she transmitted, bringing up her fighter’s full sensor suite as she dove into the wreckage of the shipyards.

  The Costar Clans might be the enemy most of the time, but at this point, it didn’t matter who was drifting in space. Anyone aboard a wrecked space station was a fellow human being.

  A fellow human being with minutes or hours to live at best without help.

  48

  In some ways, the aftermath of the bombs was more chaotic than the battle itself. The debris from the starships and fighters wrecked in the fight was joined by the wreckage of industrial platforms, some of the pieces as large as the corvettes lost in the fight.

  Kira slipped her fighter slowly through the mess, training her sensors on debris after debris and flagging the sections that showed up as having life signs aboard.

  Assault shuttles were on their way to follow up on those flags. The spacecraft had been brought along to insert Marines onto the space stations to capture them. Now they were running with partial Marine contingents as they prepared to take aboard as many survivors as they could find.

  Kira’s sensors couldn’t say how long any given group of survivors had. She was flagging life signs, but the Redward forces had almost no ability to prioritize. The shuttles could only start at the edge and work their way in.

  Hopefully, the larger pieces closer to the center of the disaster had more air and would buy people more time. All of those were showing at least some life, but they’d get swept last.

  As she flew closer to the heart of the wrecked base, she realized that at least some modules appeared to be undamaged. An entire section of the fabricator portion of the shipyards was intact.

  Intact enough that warnings went off on her systems as sensors dialed in her fighter. Grimacing, she tapped a command to send a transmission.

  “Unidentified station, either use your sensors for search and rescue or shut them down,” she ordered. “Keep them locked on me and they’re going to cease to exist.”


  She wasn’t certain what to expect as a response, but to her surprise, she actually received a request for a coms channel.

  “This is one of Captain Estanza’s fighters, correct?” a skittish voice asked. “I need to make contact with the good Captain.”

  “I don’t know who you are or what you think is going on,” Kira replied. “But you’re in the middle of a disaster zone triggered by an asshole with a pile of nukes. Captain Estanza is a bit busy. My scans suggest your life support is intact, so hold tight and we’ll get to you.”

  “We are surrounded by enough debris that the continued intactness of this facility is at risk,” the voice told her primly. “You do not want to allow damage to this station, pilot. Please connect me with Captain Estanza.”

  “This is Commander Demirci, Captain Estanza’s Commander Nova Group,” Kira told the voice, goosebumps running down her arms as suspicion hit her. “He doesn’t have time to spare for you, but I can afford a few seconds.”

  The man behind the voice spent those seconds hesitating, she suspected.

  “My name is Cameron Burke,” he finally said. “Captain Estanza and I worked together, a long time ago. I have eleven technicians and twenty-two security officers aboard this station. We apparently succeeded in preventing our erstwhile host from planting bombs aboard our facility, but we have no shuttles or docks.”

  “We will get to you,” Kira promised with a sigh. “You can talk to Captain Estanza then. You are far more secure than many people currently in danger.”

  “Yes, well, you’re going to move this entire module immediately, and it is safer to do so without us aboard,” Burke told her. “I have a self-destruct command for the fabricator on this station, but I am prepared to trade it for the immediate extraction of myself and my people and our transfer to the Ypres System.”

  She knew. There was only one thing in the mess that would fit on one standard module that would be worth that effort.

  She had to push back anyway.

  “I repeat, Em Burke, that you are more stable than anyone else in this wreckage. We will extract you and discuss repatriation later,” she told him. “If you are external parties who have been arming Warlord Davies, that may resemble POW negotiations.”

  “Commander, this facility is a fabrication line for class two nova drives,” Burke confessed in a rush.

  Kira had figured. Its position relative to the larger asteroids suggested very careful alignment to create the exact amount of “real” mass-based gravity required for the process. A normal nova drive required in excess of point three gees to manufacture.

  A class two nova drive required between point zero five two and point zero five eight gees. Kira didn’t understand why, but she knew what the range was.

  “I am prepared to trade the fabrication line and associated software and manuals for safe passage for myself and my personnel to Ypres, aboard Conviction specifically,” he repeated. “But the longer this module remains in the center of this mess, the more likely it is that the fabricator will be damaged.”

  The fabricator wouldn’t build the hulls, guns or Harringtons of a nova fighter—but Redward could build all of those already. If they could arrange the gravity and build the nova drives, Estanza’s clients would suddenly become a true carrier power.

  And that meant she had to talk to her boss.

  “Who?” Estanza demanded.

  “He says his name is Cameron Burke and he is in charge of a team of techs and security officers, presumably from our ‘outside supporter,’” Kira repeated. “He’s in control of the class two nova drive fabricator, sir.”

  “Fuck me,” the Captain murmured. “And he’s in the middle of that mess from your scan, which means the facility is in danger. I don’t want to prioritize that over people’s lives, but…fuck.”

  “I don’t know about the One-Fifteens, but the Hoplites have tow cables,” she pointed out. The hypertensile nanotube cables took up very little mass or volume, little enough that any Apollo fighter carried two ten-kilometer lengths.

  “Seriously?” Estanza asked. “That’s… Okay. That’s useful. You can’t tow that station with people aboard it.”

  “That was what Burke said,” she agreed. “My assessment is the same. We could leave him there until we’ve finished evacuating everyone else.”

  “We’d risk losing the fabricator,” her boss admitted. “Burke? Really?”

  “You do know him?” she asked.

  “How well do you know Waldroup’s second munitions technician?” Estanza replied. “Because that was his role—on the Cobras’ other carrier. We’ve met, I think, but I wouldn’t say I know him.

  “What I do know is that if he’s out this far, after this much time…he’s Equilibrium, Commander.”

  “And he wants a ride on our ship as part of his price for handing over the fabricator, sir,” she reminded him. “He seemed to think his name would open doors with you.”

  “Most likely because he realizes I’d guess he had to be Equilibrium,” Estanza replied. “It’s not like we knew each other.” He made a wordless sound of disgust. “Keep the EI angle under your hat, Commander. I’m looping in Kim.”

  A moment later, the Redward Vice Admiral’s mental voice joined the conversation.

  “This better be good, Estanza. We’re coordinating search and rescue across a rapidly expanding AO with thousands of lives on the line.”

  Despite her earlier suggestion of ignoring the spirit of King Larry’s orders, it seemed that when push came to shove, Vice Admiral Ylva Kim shared her leaders’ general concern for human life.

  “Demirci, brief her,” Estanza ordered.

  “Sir, there were outside contractors running Davies’s fabricator for the class two nova drives,” Kira said crisply. “They had their own security and prevented bombs being deployed on their station.

  “The fabricator is intact but aboard a station module in the middle of the debris zone,” she continued. “Davies likely believed that the destruction of everything around it would take care of the fabricator.

  “There is a self-destruct code in the hands of the head contractor. He’s prepared to turn the fabricator over to the RRF in exchange for immediate extraction and transportation to Ypres aboard Conviction.

  “If we want to retrieve the fabricator, we need to move the module ASAP, as the odds of it taking critical damage increase by the second—and we can’t move the module with people aboard.

  “Not without killing them, anyway, and I suspect they’d trigger the self-destruct at that point.”

  There was silence on the channel for several seconds, an eternity in headware coms.

  “The last thing I want is to rescue our outside operators as a priority over Clan civilians,” Kim noted. “Even the most innocent of those techs is more responsible for this mess than the poor bastards Davies dragged into building his war machine.

  “But we need that fabricator. How many people?”

  “Under forty,” Kira said.

  “That’s one shuttle’s passenger capacity, even if we’re treating them as prisoners,” the Admiral replied. “But one shuttle can’t move a space station.”

  “Five Hoplites can if you remove the passengers,” she said. “We have nanotube tow cables, ten-kilometer lengths. Hooking up might take longer than more specialized vessels, but we can get the station module out of the debris zone.”

  They couldn’t nova it. The module itself was the size of one of the RRF destroyers. They’d either need to extract the fabricator in pieces or bring in a bulk freighter of a rare size for the cluster.

  “I’ll have the shuttle redirected,” Kim decided aloud. “Start hooking up your cables now, Commander. We’ll meet the bastard’s terms.”

  “They also insisted that their transport to Ypres be aboard Conviction,” Kira pointed out. “I’m not sure they trust Redward.”

  “Consider yourself contracted, then, Captain Estanza,” the Admiral snapped. “I may not like it, but we need th
at damn fabricator. Move.”

  “What are you doing?” Burke’s voice asked, his pitch rising to a near-squeak of fear as Kira’s fighters swept in and launched the first round of tow cables. Ten nanotube cables shot into space.

  Roughly in line with Kira’s expectations, six hit and only four actually managed to form a magnetic connection.

  “We are beginning the irritating-as-hell process of hooking your station up for towing while we wait for your extraction shuttle,” Kira told him. “Redward has agreed to your terms.”

  She could have told him that before she started shooting magnets at his space station, but she wasn’t feeling that generous.

  Six cables slowly retracted and Kira concealed a bitter chuckle as she realized that both of hers had missed but the rest of her people had landed a cable apiece.

  “Oh. That’s acceptable, then,” Burke told her. For a member of a galaxy-spanning conspiracy, he was surprisingly trusting. There wouldn’t be much warning when Kira’s fighters brought their engines online to tow the station clear.

  There’d probably be enough time to fire the self-destruct code off if he was ready. But only probably. She’d have been more argumentative in his place—and probably even set up a dead-woman switch in her headware.

  The computer would survive the organic portion of her brain by at least two or three seconds, after all.

  “Your shuttle will arrive in a little over sixty seconds,” she continued as her cables shot out again. This time, both of hers hit…but only one made the connection. Still, they had seven of ten cables connected now.

  “Get everyone grouped together and have your security people leave their weapons behind,” she ordered. “You are potential hostiles on an enemy station. Any resistance or appearance will be met with lethal force.”

  “Right,” Burke squeaked. “I’ll let them know.”

  By now, she was certain that either he was the most optimistically naïve conspirator she’d ever known—or a superb actor who was attempting to play her. Her guess was somewhere in between.