Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I make it one heavy blaster,” Milani said, clearly identifying it just from the sound. “They’re laying down suppressive fire—quite competently, I might add. Secondary fire suggests eight troopers. Quick glance I got showed low-profile high-density power armor, probably Fringe manufacture.”

  Kira whistled silently inside her helmet. You could get Fringe weapons in the Rim—especially if you were head of government of a wealthy system like the Crest—but they’d come a long way and they didn’t travel cheaply.

  “If you don’t want the prize crew, you have to warn them off now,” Kira hissed.

  “We’ll be fine,” the mercenary replied sharply. “They aren’t the only ones with wonderful toys.”

  A panel in Milani’s armor opened up and they removed what looked like a piece of plastic, roughly forty centimeters long by twelve wide and three thick.

  They held it in front of them as they closed the panel, and the dragon swirled to look at Kira.

  “You never saw this, sir,” they told Kira calmly—and then crushed the panel between their armored gauntlets.

  Kira watched in not-quite-horror as the plain plastic block dissolved into dust—dust that took to the air and flashed around the corner at high speed.

  Attack microbots were technically a gray area, not quite covered by the general ban on attack nanoweaponry, but most people regarded them as extremely questionable regardless.

  “Non-replicating,” Milani told her. “No worse, really, than regular explosives, except self-mobile. But…people get twitchy.”

  The explosion that echoed down the corridor as the mercenary finished speaking silenced the heavy blaster.

  “What…do they do?” Kira asked.

  “Go the target area designated by my headware, attach themselves to any available source of human-level body heat—capable of both scanning through and penetrating power armor—and then detonate on my signal,” Milani said quietly. “Everyone in that hall is dead.

  “We should move.”

  The gore and debris scattered across the hallway sent a shiver of atavistic fear down Kira’s spine. From the suddenly slow pace of most of Milani’s lead squad, she wasn’t the only one looking at the nonbinary mercenary commander slightly askance now.

  The bridge door was jammed open by the wreckage of the heavy blaster itself. The Ministerial Protection Detail had been using the armored hatch as cover, which left more than enough space for Milani and Bertoli to insert their powered gauntlets and pull the accessway open.

  Fortitude’s bridge was immense to Kira’s eyes, a fifteen-meter-diameter space with two levels, focused on a central hologram tank at least five meters across on its own. A dozen techs and officers were still in there, wisely backing away from their consoles as the mercenaries entered.

  “This is an outrage,” a tall woman of apparent Korean extraction snapped. “And madness. You cannot possibly plan to escape the wrath of the Navy of the Royal Crest—and you have no—”

  The ship’s computers dinged.

  “Command transfer, recognized. Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon authorizations, removed. Captain Random Sample Six, activated.

  “All current officer authorizations, removed. All personnel authorizations, removed.

  “Standing by for new personnel listings from Captain Sample Six.”

  Kira couldn’t resist. She removed her helmet as she walked onto the bridge so that Captain Moon could see the brilliant grin on her face.

  “Captain Moon, I do believe you are relieved,” she told the other woman. “And you’re standing next to my chair.”

  “How… That’s…” Moon spluttered, but Fortitude happily informed Kira that the Crester was trying to access ship’s systems…and failing.

  Moon had the commanding-officer codes. Kira had the builder codes, the ones that would have been deactivated at the end of her trial—plus a set of commanding-officer codes and a set of Admiralty codes, just in case. The woman had never had a chance of retaining control of Fortitude’s systems once any of Kira’s people were on the bridge.

  “Commander, please detain these gentle people without hurting them more than you have to,” Kira told Milani as she brushed past the stunned Captain and lowered herself into the command chair.

  She could fly a carrier. It wasn’t going to be an efficient or elegant process, but she could do it. Right now, though, all she had to do was bring the carrier’s engines down to “we are making test maneuvers” levels instead of “we are running from a threat” levels.

  Mercenaries produced cuffs from various panels on their armor and began restraining the NRC crew. None of them resisted—a combination of shock and realizing they were utterly outclassed, Kira suspected.

  “Internal sensors are being fucked by our multiphasic jammers,” she told Milani as they joined her at the command station. “Which is the point, I know. Any updates from your side?”

  “Everyone is supposed to send runners to the flight deck,” the commando replied. “I’ve dispatched one. Bertoli on the wounded. It looks like we aren’t going to lose anyone.”

  “How long have you been carrying attack microbots?” Kira asked softly as she activated the codes they’d given the skeleton crew.

  “I picked them up for this,” Milani told her. “Redward can make them. They just don’t.”

  “Most people don’t,” she said. “Because they’re banned.”

  “Not quite,” they corrected, echoing her earlier thoughts. “And we couldn’t afford failure.”

  “No, we couldn’t,” Kira agreed. “Without the warning to break off, nova pinnaces should be coming aboard. Two minutes to Penalty Fee’s arrival.”

  She entered more commands and the holotank cleared. Fortitude’s multiphasic jammers were now offline, and all of Kira’s jammers were either gone or locked to her volume of hull.

  “I’m not seeing any resistance in the engineering systems,” she told Milani, “so I think your people are in position. I now control the ship’s software, but there are a few places where someone clever can still cause me a lot of trouble.”

  “Once main points are secure, all strike groups should be deploying two-commando sweep teams to track down any resistance,” they replied. “The prize crew will be running a manual cable connection from the hangar relay to here to let us hail Penalty Fee with that if nothing else.”

  “I know the plan,” Kira said quietly. She shook her head as she looked around the bridge of the most powerful warship she’d ever set foot on.

  “Part of me honestly didn’t think we were going to make it this far,” she admitted. “Any concerns on grabbing the PM?”

  “If everything goes right, she should just walk right into our clutches,” Milani pointed out. “So, of course I have concerns!”

  39

  Kira understood the principles and high-level structure of the runner system that Milani was using to maintain control of the ship. The powerful jammers running on the flight deck—and now several other key structural points in the ship—weren’t true multiphasic jammers, but they were more than capable of shutting out communication emerging from the ship.

  They shouldn’t be detectable from outside the ship, but Kira still held her breath when Penalty Fee emerged from nova, exactly on schedule.

  “Will we be able to receive their hails?” she asked Konrad. Once again, she’d stolen her boyfriend from his job as executive officer and chief engineer of Deception to support a detached operation.

  Strangely, Zoric never seemed to object. Probably because Kira, at least in her own opinion, had a solid judgment of when she needed the best engineer they had.

  “No,” Konrad told her calmly. “The jamming field wouldn’t work if it wasn’t covering the external transceiver dishes. We can’t be sure no one is going to be able to hack into the communications network.”

  “That’s why my people are setting up a relay on the flight deck,” Milani told her. “It sticks out enough to receive and transmit, but we need— Ah!�
�

  Two of Milani’s commandos, in regular armor instead of the heavy assault suits Milani’s point team was still wearing, appeared at the entrance to the bridge with a large coil of cabling.

  “Get that over to the com console and hook it up,” Milani barked. They looked at the screen. “Is it just me, or was Penalty Fee expecting to see us?”

  Kira nodded. Even a presumed friendly fleet carrier showing up unexpectedly should have earned some kind of caution or reaction from the battlecruiser. Instead, Penalty Fee had emerged from nova and just…waited.

  “They knew Fortitude would be here,” she agreed. “Or at least the new Captain did.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t see any scans or visible energy trails that they can pick up from their location,” she said aloud. “Soler?”

  Isidora Soler was a pale-skinned woman with pitch-black hair and eyes who normally served as Deception's senior assistant tactical officer. Today, she was the tactical officer of the skeleton crew Kira had to run Fortitude and was sharing XO duties with Konrad.

  “I don’t see anything either,” she confirmed. “I think we’re clear, but we need to communicate with them, or they’ll get suspicious.”

  Kira concealed a smile. Soler was being careful to tell her bosses what they might need to know, but everyone in the room knew that. That was the price of the rapid expansion of her mercenary fleet, though. Soler had been a Redward Officer Academy dropout two years earlier.

  The woman who’d caused her dropout had picked up a dishonorable discharge and a ten-year jail sentence almost before Soler’s paperwork had finished processing, but even rapid justice didn’t make it any easier to walk back into a building where someone had used physical violence to attempt to recruit you into organized crime.

  Both the courage necessary to come forward after that and her mostly complete training had been exactly what Kira and Zoric had been looking for—which brought the pale young woman there, to the Crest Sector, a hundred-plus light-years from home.

  “We’re linked,” Konrad announced from the coms console. “Relay is online and chugging. We have a copy of their message on seeing us—standard ship-to-ship courtesy.”

  “Send back the same,” Kira ordered. “Then tell them we are on trial exercises and they are to stay at least one million kilometers clear.”

  Konrad nodded and pulled a headset on. Like everyone else on Fortitude’s bridge, he’d be holding down multiple roles until this was over.

  “Time on the core?” she asked as he finished speaking into the headset.

  “No idea,” he admitted calmly. “Jamming is screwing with intraship coms, even system reports. We don’t have a lot of control or feedback systems operating yet.”

  “Milani?” Kira turned to the ground-force commander. “How long till we can drop those jammers?”

  “My reports are slow,” they told her. “I think we’re clear or should be shortly, but it’ll be two or three minutes after that’s done before I have confirmation.

  “At least with the cable, we have a direct link to the flight deck and can shut down the jammers quickly enough.” The big armor suit didn’t transmit a shrug, but Milani’s voice did. “Five minutes, boss. Maybe a couple more.”

  “We’ve told Penalty Fee to stand off. That should cover our expected coms and buy us some time,” Kira noted. Holographic control panels appeared around the Captain’s chair at her mental command, and she grimaced.

  Like Konrad had said, very few of the internal systems were running. The majority of the network she was trying to access was cabled, but there were enough wireless bridges and sensors the jammers were blocking to render the situation difficult.

  The same energy dispersion networks the carrier would use to resist plasma hits were keeping Penalty Fee from seeing the jamming—and would keep an external source of jamming from causing this much trouble. Multiphasic jamming defined the battlespace, after all.

  A commando stepped through the bridge accessway and crossed to Milani. A swift whispered conversation followed, and Milani gave the armored soldier a thumbs-up gesture.

  “Do we have a crew listing, boss?” Milani asked, turning back to Kira.

  “Let me check.” She had full command access, but that thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Yeah, here. Step closer.”

  She didn’t quite have to touch her subordinate to send them data, but it was close. The dragon swirled attentively across Milani’s armor as they processed the data.

  “Listing says one hundred fourteen people aboard, but doesn’t include the PM’s detail,” Milani noted aloud. “We have ninety-eight prisoners and thirty-nine confirmed corpses. Think the Ministerial Protection Detail brought more than twenty-three people?”

  Kira grimaced.

  “If they brought twenty-three, they probably brought twenty-four,” she pointed out.

  “We also might be miscounting bodies outside the bridge,” her subordinate admitted. “Those would be MPD.”

  That did not help Kira’s current grimace or general discomfort with how Milani had accessed the bridge. There were definitely worse deaths than that, but most human cultures had a quite-reasonable aversion to sub-visual-scale weaponry.

  “Konrad, if we bring everything back up, how’s the internal surveillance?” she asked.

  “Seventy-three percent of the cameras are wireless to allow concealed placement,” he warned. “So, I don’t know. The problem is that it only takes seconds for someone to send a message to Penalty Fee.”

  Kira checked the distance.

  “They’re at five light-seconds right now,” she said. “Headware coms can’t cross that—best case for those is three—so they’d need to have armor systems or a portable transceiver. It’s a risk, but…”

  “We can’t keep the jamming up forever. Not if we actually want to do anything with this ship,” Konrad finished for her.

  Kira exhaled and nodded.

  “Konrad, Soler, get your eyes on those cameras,” she ordered. “The moment we see anybody, I want to know—and if you see a transceiver or someone in armor, we shut everything right back down.”

  “I’m on it,” Konrad replied.

  “I’m in,” Soler confirmed a moment later.

  “Milani?” Kira said softly.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Shut it down.”

  With the hardware in her head, Kira knew the moment the jamming cut out. The hardware and software had kept it from having a noticeable effect, but the return of her data channels was still sudden and obvious.

  Her team was suddenly in a network in her head. Fortitude was suddenly in her head, her command authority linking her in to the Captain’s control channels.

  “We’ve got three solitaries scattered through the ship,” Soler reported an instant later. “None have full armor or appear to have coms. Two are ship’s crew, third is MPD.

  “MPD officer is armed with a blaster rifle and appears to be setting up a target blind. Ship’s crew are in hiding.”

  “I have the locations on all three,” Milani replied. “Linking to my nearest teams and moving in. Gal with the blaster is not getting her ambush.”

  It took another ninety seconds for Milani’s people to check back in, but then their dragon perked up cheerfully and they turned to Kira.

  “Fortitude is secured, Commodore,” they reported.

  “All right, people.” Kira looked around and smiled. “Next steps. We have an hour or so to pretend nothing has happened, then we jump to the rendezvous.

  “We have a lot of work to do to clean up the flight deck and make it look safe for the Prime Minister and her Cabinet Ministers to land. We’ll need a simulacrum of Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon that can talk to the Prime Minister’s people when we meet them, and we need to make sure we’ve unlocked as much of this ship as we can.”

  Her prize crew was already studying their consoles.

  “I’m not worried about Penalty Fee,” she said softly. “I
am worried about the two cruisers and the carrier that are coming with Prime Minister Jeong.

  “So, Soler, code me the ability to fool her. Konrad…get me this damn ship’s guns.”

  40

  Despite what she’d said about not worrying, Kira spent the fifty-eight minutes they remained in the company of Penalty Fee watching the battlecruiser like a hawk with hungry chicks at home. At one hundred and twenty kilocubics, the ship was the same size as the battlecruisers and carriers Redward was laying down, but more modern in a dozen small ways.

  One of those ways was almost certainly her sensors, which meant that she might well see something Kira didn’t anticipate.

  But as minutes stretched to an hour, the battlecruiser carried on her patrol without ever hinting her crew thought something was amiss.

  “You know, I would not like to be her new Captain,” Konrad murmured, stepping up to her seat. “The last Captain mutinied. This one? They’re going to work out that Penalty Fee was here after we took the ship eventually.”

  “They’re probably loyal enough to protect them… Well, from the SPP,” Kira replied. “Are we ready?”

  “Cooldown complete. Nova vector for the rendezvous point set.” He looked at the holodisplay and the battlecruiser hovering four light-seconds away. “If Penalty Fee is paying enough attention, they may realize we didn’t nova very far.”

  “They shouldn’t know that we’re scheduled for a full-length nova test now,” Kira said. “If they do… Well, it’s a risk we have to take.”

  She nodded to Konrad and glanced around her new bridge.

  “Make it happen, Commander Bueller,” she told him.

  He didn’t move, grinning down at her and activating the command from his headware. A momentary chill ran through her—a smoother reaction than many ships, if not quite as smooth as Captain Zamorano’s ship.

  Then they were in deep space, a full light-week away from the Crest’s Herald—and only two light-seconds from the rest of Memorial Force.

  All of them flashed up as unknown contacts on Fortitude’s scanners, of course, though it quickly resolved Deception as a Brisingr K70 cruiser.