Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  Remington laughed aloud and Kira raised an eyebrow.

  “Hope is more briefed on this than most,” the Admiral told her. “And now I owe her fifty kroner.”

  Brigadier Hope Temitope was one of the most senior officers the Redward Army Commandos had—but as Colonel Temitope, she’d led the Redward component of the operation that had taken Deception away from the Equilibrium Institute.

  “We can’t spare the Brigadier,” Larry admitted. “But I will ask her to recommend a commando platoon to send with you. She likes you. You’ll get her best.”

  “Then that should do it, Your Majesty,” Kira said. “I won’t pretend I like losing the retainer…but I’ll be damned if I’ll let the chance to poke the Institute in the eye pass by, either.”

  13

  “Gather round, gather round and listen up well,” Kira barked as she stepped into the pilots’ lounge on Deception.

  While both Deception and Raccoon had their own Commanders, Nova Group, everyone understood that Kira would fly a nova fighter in action and command the combined group. She was both the Commodore and Memorial Force’s nova-group commander.

  Still, she wasn’t in the pilot’s lounge much. Traditionally in the ASDF, even squadron commanders stepped lightly in the lounge—and the CNG only entered when something absolutely critical was going on. This was the space for the pilots, not their commanders.

  The only reason she’d spent much time in Deception’s lounge was that it was where the cruiser’s Brisingr designers had put the simulator pods. There was only so much space to spare on a ninety-six-thousand-cubic-meter cruiser for the fighter wing and its supports, after all.

  Like most pilots’ lounges she’d been in, this one was messy but not dirty. No one in space would allow a ship compartment to actually get dirty. There were still empty dishes that hadn’t made it to a dishwasher yet, jackets strewn randomly about, and a collection of cushions and pillows that were never in the same place twice.

  Right now, the space also held twenty-five pilots. Mel Cartman had made sure the word was leaked that the Commodore was coming to speak to the pilots, so they were all there—and the lounge wasn’t designed to have twenty-five people in it.

  “Not much gathering around, I suppose,” she said with a chuckle as she took in the crowd. “So, I guess I’ll settle for listening up. Anyone missing?”

  “Everyone’s here,” a lithe raven-haired woman said from the back of the room. “Hark to the Commodore’s words, people!”

  Kira laughed at Neha “Backstab” Bradley. The pilot’s callsign had been born out of the fact that she’d been an Equilibrium plant in the fighter-pilot training program Kira and John Estanza had run for Redward—but she’d been blackmailed, and her intel had broken the Institute’s network in the Redward System.

  Still, the RRF had refused to take her and she had come to work for Kira. She was a perfect representative of what this meeting was about, though—she had a toddler living on Redward.

  “I don’t need to ask if you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on,” Kira finally said. “Every one of you knows we’re prepping for an op. A big one—and the smarter folks in this room know that there’s not much going on in the Syntactic Cluster that calls for a big op, is there?”

  She let that sink in.

  “I’m not here to brief you all on the mission before us,” she continued. “There’ll be a time for that when we’re well away and preparing for battle. What I’m here to tell you, because I owe you this, is that we’re going outside the Syntactic Cluster and we’re going to be gone for months.

  “Best guess is four to five. Might be six, even seven,” she said. “Memorial Force, despite what we do, is not a military. I don’t have you all locked into contracts that say you can’t leave. I know you all knew this was a possibility, but I don’t want anyone feeling trapped.

  “So.” Kira looked around. Backstab was definitely looking concerned, but she wasn’t the only one.

  “There are terms in your contracts around notice and buyout and all of that shit,” she told them. “I’ll assume you’re all familiar with them and not reiterate. That said, I’m not a monster—most of the time—and I’ve made some arrangements.

  “Anyone who isn’t comfortable spending six months outside of the Cluster and away from Redward, talk to the CNG in private after this,” she instructed. “We’ve made arrangements to swap a small number of pilots with the RRF, at least temporarily. We send you to their orbital squadrons and they play musical chairs to send me people up to your weight to replace you.”

  That got her a few chuckles, but there were worried and concerned looks as well.

  “Look.” She pulled a seat over to herself and sat down. “I’d rather go into action with all of you, but I owe you this chance. We’ll call it a sabbatical for the folks who take it, and we’ll talk about what that looks like when we come back.

  “I won’t hold staying in Redward against anyone and I will not stand for any of you holding it against anyone,” she told them. “We’ll be home-basing out of Redward for a while yet, but I suspect that a lot of our future operations are going to look like this—extended deployments to other sectors.

  “We’ve helped bring peace to the Syntactic Cluster. That means we’ve got to go further to find work—but find work we shall.”

  Bradley was at Kira’s office door less than five minutes after Kira sat down. Unsurprised, Kira had the young woman’s preferred coffee mix waiting when she allowed Backstab in.

  “Have a seat, Neha,” Kira told the younger pilot. “I was expecting you.”

  “Despite telling us to go to Nightmare?” Bradley asked—but she took the seat and the coffee.

  “Nobody ever admits that the bosses have favorites, but everyone in the nova group can point them out all the same,” Kira admitted. “After everything you went through to get here, Neha, I feel more responsible for you than most of the pilots we recruited here.”

  The young woman nodded steadily, but her hands trembled slightly as she drank from the coffee cup.

  “I…was wondering…well, if the transfer deal applied to me,” she told Kira. “The rest of the pilots from the training program chose to be Memorials. I…was discharged from service with the RRF.”

  “You were,” Kira agreed levelly. “Bringing down the Institute’s spies here got you out from under treason and espionage charges, but even Queen Sonia couldn’t keep that from tainting any chance of you flying for the Redward Fleet.”

  Bradley looked much less steady now.

  “I see, sir,” she admitted. “But I… But Jessica…”

  “Jessica is with your mother these days, right?” Kira asked gently. Jessica was Bradley’s daughter—the not-quite-two-year-old daughter the Equilibrium Institute had kidnapped to force her cooperation with their plan to infiltrate the training program.

  “Yes, sir. The Queen encouraged me to reach out after…everything,” Bradley said quietly.

  “Your situation is the most complicated,” Kira admitted. “But you’re also among the pilots and crew with the most powerful reason to want to stay in Redward. So…”

  She shrugged.

  “You were discharged without prejudice from the RRF and returned to the training program as an explicitly Memorial recruit,” Kira noted. “The sabbatical exchange that has been discussed is not a commission in the RRF. Those taking it will remain officers of Memorial Force under detached subcontract with the Redward Royal Fleet.

  “Which means, Pilot Bradley, that your previous interactions with the RRF are completely irrelevant.”

  Kira could hear the raggedness in Bradley’s exhalation, despite the younger woman’s efforts to control her emotions.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “I checked, Neha,” Kira said quietly. And Queen Sonia had leaned on the people setting up the program on the RRF’s side, though she wasn’t telling Bradley that. “If you want to take the sabbatical and remain here, there will be no is
sues.”

  “I… I have to, sir,” Bradley told her. “I can’t be away from Jessica for six months, not right now.”

  “I agree,” Kira replied. She’d been preparing a backup plan where Neha Bradley was transferred to their shore office for the six months, before Sonia had involved herself.

  “So, I’ll make sure you’re on the list for that subcontract,” she told Bradley. “It’ll all be taken care of, I promise.”

  First, though, she had to get over to Raccoon, where she’d give a similar briefing and have, she estimated, three only somewhat-less-complicated conversations with pilots there.

  Some days, she missed just running from assassins.

  14

  “Seven pilots, thirty-five crew.”

  “That’s better than I was expecting,” Kira admitted after Bueller listed the number. “My guess was we’d lose ten of the pilots and at least forty of the crew.”

  “Our people mostly like their jobs, their colleagues and their superiors,” Zoric said, glancing around the half-virtual senior officer meeting.

  Kira, Zoric and Bueller were the only ones currently aboard Deception. The other three Captains were on the call, but it was still a small meeting of the core leadership. Kira would have preferred to pull Patel and Cartman into even these meetings—especially as Patel was the company’s third-largest shareholder!—but the two nova-group commanders were currently at the RRF’s Pilot Academy.

  Giving a commencement address, of all things. Kira was busy enough that she’d been able to get out of it, but given that her people had been at the heart of the training program that had become the Pilot Academy, someone from Memorial Force had needed to give the address.

  “I’ll admit it’s a warm, fuzzy feeling to have people stick with us as we go into the deep beyond,” Kira said. “The headache will be when we get back and need to swap our RRF loans for our originals.

  “Some of them will end up joining the RRF permanently, I suspect.”

  “We’ll have to deal with that then,” Michel noted. The mechanical-legged woman grimaced. “I’m hoping we’re getting good people from the RRF, though?”

  “I trust Remington that far, at least,” Kira replied. She’d trust the RRF a bit further than that, in fact, which meant she wasn’t overly worried. “I’m starting to focus more on what’s in front of us.

  “Konrad, how’d the freighter shopping go?”

  “Well, that depends,” he admitted. “Last I checked, we’re only getting twenty million crests in cash for this whole affair.”

  “Given that we’re promised a hundred-billion-crest carrier, I’m not side-eyeing the cash payment too hard,” Zoric said. “But that sounds like a problem?”

  “I found a perfect ship for us,” Bueller told them. “Same class as Raccoon pre-conversion, so forty-five kilocubics. Secondhand, which puts a bit of a handle on the price, but in good shape.

  “Even secondhand, though, well…she’s thirty-five million kroner.”

  Kira nodded calmly, though she heard both McCaig and Michel inhale sharply in surprise.

  “That’s more than we’re getting cash for this whole mission,” McCaig pointed out.

  “And that’s why I wanted to check in with the senior officers before I closed the deal,” Bueller replied. “I’ve got lines on a few cheaper ships, but this one really matches our needs—plus the extra cover of helping hide Raccoon.”

  “Secondhand merchant nova ships don’t generally go for much less than half a million per kilocubic,” Zoric pointed out. “And that’s crests, not kroner. She’s exactly what I’d expect for a ship like that.”

  “We’re going to need logistics support for this mission—and for most missions after this,” Kira said. “While I intend to continue home-basing out of Redward until we get our carrier from them, we’re not likely to see a lot of operations in the Syntactic Cluster.

  “That means we need a decent support base, a ship that can haul fuel and munitions and all of the other matériel of making war.” She looked at her subordinates. “I think we buy the ship Konrad has found, but I’m open to counterarguments.”

  Everyone in the meeting except Bueller had at least some shares in Memorial Force, but Kira held fifty-one percent—to Zoric’s twenty and Patel’s eight. Michel and the other old Apollo hands had four apiece. The last nine were scattered through old Conviction hands like Mwangi.

  “I agree,” Raccoon’s Captain said calmly. “The price is quite reasonable, honestly, and we need the support. I wouldn’t mind having somewhere to stuff spare torpedoes and class two drives, even though I’ll be damned if I’ll give any of them up!”

  McCaig sighed, a surprisingly gentle sound from the massive man, and nodded.

  “I’m not going to argue with Demirci, Zoric and Mwangi,” he told them. “I’m just a grunt with a share in the company who’s learning how to skipper a destroyer.”

  He was doing far better at that than Kira had dared hope, too. It was probably going to matter.

  “I know my vote is irrelevant at this point, but I agree,” Michel said with a chuckle. “I haven’t been aboard Raccoon since I got grounded. With the amount of space I take up these days, I almost felt bad for visiting!”

  “You’re always more than welcome, Captain Michel,” Mwangi told her. “But yes, my ship is feeling a tad cramped these days.”

  “All right,” Kira said. “Konrad, close the deal as soon as you can. We’re going to be picking up a platoon of Redward commandos along with our pilots and crew, and the freighter will probably be a handy place to store them.”

  “That’ll make Milani happy,” McCaig said. “The task you’ve set them isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly not easy.”

  “And if it wasn’t Milani, I might be concerned,” Kira replied. “But I know them. They’ll get it done.”

  “Your faith in my former subordinate is touching,” McCaig said. “Are we going to learn more about what we’re getting into before we send them on a near-suicide mission?”

  “That’s next up,” Kira told them all. “We need eyes on the ground in the Crest. While there is intelligence that we can only get from the Crown Zharang and their allies, I don’t want to be entirely reliant on them.

  “I want to take a forward party to the Crest ahead of the fleet and scout the yards and everything else I can find.”

  “And by take you mean going yourself?” Zoric asked.

  “If I’m going to commit this entire mercenary fleet to a potential suicide mission, I want to put my eyes on the target,” Kira replied. “Only problem I see is the timeline. I’ve started mapping out civilian transport to the Crest, and it’s looking like eight weeks, minimum.

  “Versus five to six for the rest of you. If I take a scouting party ahead now, working subtly, the rest of Memorial Force might just beat us there!”

  “We have three months until the trials, correct?” Mwangi said. “We’ll want to wait here and double-check everything before we move out, anyway.”

  “But you can also ask our employer for assistance in travel,” Zoric suggested. “They may have people moving back and forth with messages. I don’t know how much authority even three directors and the Crown Zharang of the Royal Crest have to sign off on hundred-trillion-crest loans on their own!”

  “From what Jade said, you might be surprised,” Kira noted. “But you’re right. They may be able to get us a ride that won’t take two months.”

  “You’ll want to keep the team small,” McCaig told her. “In a perfect world, I’d say take Milani, but…that won’t work. They’re needed to coordinate the integration of the commandos.”

  “The fact they don’t take their armor off wouldn’t be a problem?” Mwangi asked.

  “They have a medical-prosthetic version that they wear in places they cannot go armed,” Milani’s former boss told the carrier Captain. “And a doctor’s note, for that matter. Even I don’t know what Milani looks like under the dragon armor.”

  M
ilani, Kira reflected, had managed something truly unusual in their time: a physical and gender presentation that people found strange. And that, she knew, just amused the hell out of the mercenary commando.

  “Take Bueller,” Zoric said after the amused chuckle faded. “My suggestion, in fact, would be just the two of you and a handful of commandos to protect you.”

  “I was figuring that Bueller was needed here,” Kira admitted, glancing over at her lover. They hadn’t talked about it in advance, though she hadn’t been planning on leaving for a week or so yet. “With bringing in new crew and everything…”

  “Not having him will suck, yes,” Zoric agreed cheerfully. “On the other hand, do you know what will suck more?”

  She glanced around the virtual meeting.

  “If we steal that carrier and something fails because the Crest shipyards screwed up something basic. Bueller is the best engineer we’ve got and the most familiar with the tech level we’re looking at for Fortitude.

  “If anyone can identify a problem before the ship launches, it’s him. If the trials are going to fail before the inspection ever happens, we need to know that chance exists.”

  “The more time I have to look at the ship instead of the schematics, the better I can judge her,” Kira’s boyfriend admitted. “But there’s only so much I can do from the outside, and I don’t get the impression we’re going to be able to get aboard her in advance.”

  Kira chuckled.

  “Not a chance in hell,” she said. “From what Panosyan has said, the SPP is treating that ship as their own private baby. She might be Navy of the Royal Crest, but every officer and spacer aboard her is going to be a Sanctuary and Prosperity Party loyalist.”

  “Damn. That’s fucked-up,” Mwangi said grimly. “They’re playing political games of that level with their fleet?”

  “System defenses are probably more reasonable,” Kira pointed out. “The nova fleet can afford to be a bit weaker if it’s loyal. It’s not a trade I’d make, but I’m not surprised to see politicians making it.