Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Deception-Bravo,” Colombera’s voice checked in. “Full fuel and ammo. No torps.”

  “Deception-Charlie,” “Purlwise” Yamauchi reported. “Full fuel and ammo. One torp per plane.”

  Purlwise’s squadron was Kira’s only set of heavy fighters. They could carry two torpedoes—but the second degraded their performance.

  “Raccoon-Bravo, all full, no torps.”

  “Raccoon-Charlie. One hundred percent fuel, one hundred ammunition, no torps.”

  “Deception-Delta. One hundred percent fuel. Capacitors at one hundred percent. One torp per fighter,” Sagairt reported, his voice slightly more formal than the others. He had the Sinisters, the Redward-built fighter-bombers. They could have brought two of their three torpedoes, but they shouldn’t be needed.

  “Darkwing-Alpha,” Ruben “Gizmo” Hersch reported. “Full ammunition, full fuel, one torpedo each.”

  Two more Darkwing squadron commanders counted in the last of Kira’s fighter-bombers, then one last report came in.

  “Raccoon-Zeta online and standing by,” her bomber commander reported. “Full fuel. Fuel ammunition. Twelve torpedoes per bomber.”

  And that was why Kira’s heavy fighters and fighter-bombers were only carrying one torpedo each. If things truly went to hell, she would call in six of the updated Fastball bombers—carrying seventy-two torpedoes between them.

  That strike would be a serious threat to even Deception herself. If Kira’s enemies forced her hand, she had the firepower to obliterate her target.

  Of course, if she had to obliterate Fortitude, things had gone very, very wrong.

  “T minus one minute,” she said aloud, making sure all of the squadron commanders heard her. “If you have a concern or a problem, now is the last possible moment to mention it.”

  “If you forgot to go to the bathroom before we left, I suggest you double-check your flightsuit catheters,” Cartman suggested on the same channel. “Because nobody is mothering anybody.”

  “Be good, Nightmare,” Kira said. “We all know the plan. We all know the drill. We all know who we’re up against.”

  Seconds ticked away. They were giving Fortitude a full minute more than they’d calculated she’d need. There was too much chance of her jumping somewhere slightly differently than expected. That kind of change would be a smart security precaution, though they might also think it was unnecessary.

  “These people have no idea what’s about to hit them,” she continued. “Our reputation reached this place, enough that the Crown Zharang came to find and hire us, specifically, out of the entire galaxy.

  “Pilots of Memorial Force, let’s prove they made the right call.”

  Ten seconds. Five. Kira swallowed. There was no more time. No more second thoughts. She’d taken Jade Panosyan’s money and she’d signed on for the Crown Zharang’s cause. If the Crest was to be free of the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party…if they were going to stick a finger in the Equilibrium Institute’s eye…if Memorial Force was going to have a fleet carrier this year, there was only one thing left to do.

  “Memorial Force…nova and attack.”

  Surprise was total. Fortitude was exactly where they’d projected she’d be, and six of the Hussar nova fighters were in space.

  Kira’s sixty-one nova fighters emerged in a perfectly synchronized wave and activated their multiphasic jammers within moments of arrival. Old habit meant that she tried to lead the way, gunning her Harrington coils to full power and blazing forward through the chaotic mess of the jamming.

  The other interceptors were with her, five squadrons of the Hoplites and their clones swooping in. The Blue Scarlet pilots didn’t even begin to react before the first plasma bolts struck home.

  Four of the Hussars were gone before they even started defensive maneuvering, and Fortitude’s defensive guns weren’t firing either.

  A fifth Hussar vaporized, a kill Kira was reasonably sure was hers, and the sixth finally seemed to wake up, unleashing a spiraling spray of fire as the pilot dodged back behind the carrier.

  They didn’t make it. Kira couldn’t tell which of her pilots had taken down the fighter—she had no more communications in the mess the multiphasic jammers created than Fortitude did.

  The Blue Scarlets had been slow and…almost amateurish. A far cry from the elite pilots Kira had anticipated. Even faced with complete surprise, veterans should have reacted before they died.

  T plus sixty seconds. The destroyers flashed into existence at the edge of the jamming zone—but the next wave of Blue Scarlet fighters should be launching within seconds.

  Kira twisted her fighter around the carrier—Fortitude’s engines were now online and she was laboring to evade them, but none of her guns had fired yet. The hope that her weapons would have been fully safed after the firing trials seemed to be bearing out.

  She absently noted the deployment of Milani’s shuttles, the boarding ships flashing toward Fortitude as she watched for the launching nova fighters. T plus seventy to eighty seconds had been the expectation for the second-wave launch.

  Now they were at T plus two minutes, with the shuttles about to board…and only now did Kira see energy flares in the carrier deck to suggest the launch. The nova fighters were coming out.

  And it was the worst possible time. There was no way that she could warn off the shuttles, and there was no way her people could intercept the Hussars before they found themselves right in the middle of Milani’s boarding force.

  Even the most incompetent pilots could obliterate half a dozen boarding shuttles with twice as many fighters at point-blank range. Without communications, Kira couldn’t order anyone to intercept or break off.

  Instinct took over and she was feeding power to her Harrington coils and plasma guns before she even consciously realized what she was doing, dropping her fighter in between the assault shuttles and their destination and flying toward the carrier.

  One of the biggest arguments Kira had had with John Estanza and his fighter pilots when she’d come aboard had been over unguided landing drills. She’d demanded that her pilots learn how to land a fighter with no control from the carrier.

  The theory was for if the carrier’s communications were out…but it also worked for coming into the hangar bay of a hostile carrier.

  As twelve enemy fighters tried to come out.

  The last thing the Crester pilots were expecting was for someone to be mad enough to fly into their hangar bay. Without carrier guidance, manual landings were something kept for emergencies and desperation—and a carrier’s defensive guns would make a hostile approach suicide.

  Except Fortitude’s guns were down and Kira had a hundred and twenty lives on the line.

  Her plasma guns opened fire inside the carrier, tearing apart nova fighter after nova fighter as they launched toward her. Debris and vapor sprayed across the deck—but the launch system carried a lot of it at her.

  One fighter managed to open fire, and alarms screamed at Kira as a third of her fighter was torn away. Her remaining guns silenced the Hussar. Debris and chaos had cleared the rest.

  But more alarms were screaming at her, and she finally spared the fraction of a second for her headware to tell her what was going on.

  Nova drives. Gone.

  Microfusion plant. Gone.

  Port guns. Gone.

  Harrington coils. Half-gone, but no power.

  She had about two seconds before she blasted into the back of a carrier, the horrifically named splash plate of armor intended to protect the carrier from a crashing nova fighter. Her Harringtons could stop her, but her power was gone.

  But her guns were still at thirty percent capacitors—and that could be fed back to the power systems as well.

  That gave her half a second.

  For half a second, Kira Demirci had full power for half of her Harrington coils. It might have been enough, but she couldn’t take the chance and went for the age-old solution of a pilot who needed to stop.

 
It wasn’t called lithobraking when you did it to a carrier deck.

  37

  Kira forced her eyes open. For a moment, she wasn’t sure what was going on, then it all came crashing in.

  Her headware calmly informed her that she’d been unconscious for six point four seconds and it wasn’t detecting major head trauma. That was reassuring…though the fact that the system felt it necessary to say that wasn’t.

  She lifted her head and looked around to see what she’d got herself into. Without power, her Hoplite didn’t have an exterior view, so all she could see was the inside of the cockpit.

  An interior that currently had a visible sixty-centimeter intrusion where the hull had collapsed. Nova fighters relied on maneuverability and energy dispersion networks to survive incoming fire. Actual impact wasn’t something they were designed for.

  Swallowing, Kira unstrapped herself and reached for the emergency survival kit. Urgency was added by both the faint scent of burning—and the distinct sound of blaster fire outside.

  The survival kit produced a blaster pistol. The rest of the equipment wasn’t necessary for now, but she definitely needed the gun.

  The damage meant that it took her longer to get out of the fighter than she’d expected, and she emerged to discover that Fortitude’s crew were peppering the wreck with blaster bolts.

  “Get it off the deck,” someone snapped. “I don’t care if the pilot’s alive—if we don’t get planes up, we’re fucked.”

  So, they were trying to keep her head down. Most likely while someone brought up a bulldozer. Kira moved over to the edge of the wing and took a peek. There was a ragged line of half a dozen soldiers in unpowered armor with blaster rifles, along with maybe twice that in techs or maybe even pilots with blaster pistols.

  She could see someone heading for the bulldozer and grimaced. While she doubted that the machine would succeed in moving her fighter—it looked very embedded in the deck—it would probably manage to crush her, cover or no cover.

  So, she shot at that tech, carefully leaning over the wreck. It took her three blasts to catch the running man, but he fell with a limp finality when the third shot took him in the back.

  Of course, that drew a salvo of fire at her position. She could smell more burning as the metal vaporized under the incoming blasts, but she returned fire.

  She was staying behind cover, but she knew her role now. She was in everybody’s face, which meant that she was the distraction.

  And the real boarding party arrived moments later, the assault shuttle’s heavy blasters crackling like rapid-fire thunder as they swept into hard landings.

  Armored troopers swarmed out of the spacecraft, the armor rendering the difference between Kira’s mercenaries and the Redward commandos near-invisible. They moved as a single body, setting up mobile shields and peppering the defenders with precise and deadly fire.

  By the time the last shuttle was disgorging troops, the hangar deck was secure—and an unfamiliar armored suit with a very familiar holographic dragon swirling around its shoulders was advancing on Kira like an angry avenging deity.

  “Commander,” she greeted Milani. She leaned on the fighter for a moment, then winced away as the retained heat from the blaster bolts burned her through her armored flight suit.

  “What. The. Fuck. Were you thinking?” Milani ground out.

  “That if a dozen heavy fighters launched into the middle of your landing operation, a hundred and twenty of my commandos were going to die and this whole mission would die with them,” Kira said calmly.

  She gestured at the wrecked starfighter.

  “I probably should have anticipated this, but I didn’t get that far. Do we have coms off-ship yet?”

  “No,” Milani told her. “We’re still activating the localized jammers to knock out Fortitude’s communications. Then we’ll set up a relay at the end of the flight deck to bounce out as we need.”

  “McCaig and Michel should already be gone. The fighters will be gone at T plus twelve unless you give them a signal to stay,” Kira said. “They’ll signal the prize crew to come join us.”

  She surveyed the deck. Her Hoplite-IV had blocked the launch of the remaining Hussars, which meant there were still twelve of the heavy fighters aboard. By her math, that was twelve more of the advanced heavy fighters than anyone had told her were going to be aboard Fortitude!

  “We got lucky,” she told Milani. There was definitely enough space to still land the prize-crew shuttles—the only nova pinnaces her fleet had—and even to tuck them out of sight before the Prime Minister arrived.

  “We won’t have the people to move my fighter, but that gives us an excuse not to have Hussars out when the PM arrives,” she continued. “The Cabinet aren’t going to know the difference between a Crest heavy fighter wreck and an Apollon interceptor wreck. You didn’t lose your landing ships, and the state of the flight deck will work for us.”

  “You should have died in that stunt,” Milani told her. “You might still. I’ve got teams out into the ship, but I’ll remind you that we are badly outnumbered by even the skeleton crew running a ship on trials.

  “And all it takes to blow this whole apart is one person managing to get a headware com to Penalty Fee.”

  “I’ll be good, Commander,” Kira promised. “I’ll stick to you like glue until we have the bridge. Then… Well, I guess you don’t need to pretend to be a prize captain. I can conn a carrier.”

  “Finally, something in this mess that I agree is good news,” Milani told her. “If I think you’re going to wander off, I will stun you. Potential concussions be damned.”

  “I’ll be good,” Kira repeated. “I wasn’t planning on getting in a ground fight today.”

  Milani swore. Kira didn’t recognize the words—Arabic, she thought? —but the tone was unquestionable.

  “Bertoli!” they snapped. “Get me a spare unpowered vest and a blaster rifle. If the Commodore is going to join us, she’s going to need some damn party favors!”

  Kira shifted uncomfortably in the vest. Her flight suit was armored against light blaster fire and more capable of surviving it than, say, the leather jacket that had saved her life twice now. It wouldn’t, however, stop the high-powered plasma bolts from a full-size blaster rifle.

  The armored vest Bertoli had strapped her into would. Not repeatedly—not even the powered heavy armor the point troops were wearing would stop more than a handful of shots—but she’d survive a hit.

  And that seemed important as Milani and their point troops hammered toward the bridge. Even against normal powered armor, the bulky suits the mercenaries around Kira were wearing seemed immense.

  These, apparently, were what half a million kroner had rented from the Redward Army. She was pretty sure they were supposed to bring the ten suits of heavy boarding armor back, though from the hits they were taking, she wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

  “Okay, so, where are the real guards?” Milani muttered after several minutes.

  “What do you mean?” Kira asked. “Your people are getting shot to hell.”

  “I expected that,” they growled. “I expected to have lost at least two people on this squad, but so far, we’ve managed to keep pace by rotating people out and letting the suit self-repair handle it. This is…yard security with decent gear. I was expecting real marines.”

  “There should be a Ministerial Protection Detail team somewhere on the ship,” Kira told them. “I don’t know where, though. Where would you send them?”

  “Communications,” Milani replied. “Which means Major Klerken is going to run into them.”

  Klerken was their borrowed commando company leader. Hopefully, she was as good as the other commando officers Kira had met.

  “The pilots weren’t even half as good as I was expecting,” Kira admitted in a pause in the fighting a moment later. “Like they were…”

  “Political,” Milani finished for her—then shoved her against the wall as a trio of armored defende
rs jumped through a bulkhead that unexpectedly slid aside. Their armored body was between Kira and the blaster fire for a critical second.

  One that saved Kira’s life—and allowed her to open fire on the Cresters. The armor took two shots from her rifle, and then her target went down with a horrible cracking noise and a spray of ash across the wall behind them.

  The other two were already down, and Milani grunted.

  “Commander?” Kira snapped.

  “I’ll live,” they replied. “Pass-through burn. The suit is handling it and rebuilding the web, but that hurt.”

  “How close are we to the bridge?” she asked. Time was getting short. It was T plus ten minutes.

  “Two minutes. I know; we’re almost out of time.”

  “We were always going to make the call before we had control,” Kira told him. “Even if these are political troops.”

  Not military veteran elites. Political elites. Pilots and soldiers and crew the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party could trust to protect the Prime Minister and do what she said no matter what.

  She’d misjudged the Blue Scarlet Combat Group and Fortitude’s defenders. That was to their advantage, thankfully, but the realization bothered her.

  What else had she missed?

  38

  “Okay, so, we found the MPD team.”

  A heavy blaster thunder-crackled down the corridor as Kira helped Bertoli pull a wounded mercenary back. No one had died yet, but the resistance had toughened just as they hit the bridge.

  “I noticed,” she told Milani drily. “What’s your take?”

  “Four and a half minutes till Penalty Fee arrives,” they replied. “We can probably spin it out for five minutes of ‘ignoring them’ after that.”

  There was a moment of silence and the heavy blaster crackled again.