Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Loading in the ID codes,” Soler reported. “Linking in to the command network.

  “Welcome home, Fortitude,” Zoric told them all the moment the channel opened up. “It’s damn good to see you. We were a tad worried about the Commodore.”

  “My fighter’s a write-off,” Kira replied. “I don’t think we’re even getting her off the flight deck. Lithobraking sucks.”

  “It’s not lithobraking when you do it to a carrier deck,” Cartman replied, the CNG joining channel. She’d been through the same lectures and training as Kira, after all. “What’s the plan now?”

  “First, we need to get the shuttles back over to Deception and Raccoon,” Kira told them all. “We’ll relay personnel back and forth as needed, but we don’t want to have any unexpected ships on the deck when we meet Terminal Loss and her escorts.”

  “There’s a fighter embedded in the deck,” Konrad pointed out.

  “And we’re going to use that,” Kira said. “We’ll pull hands over from the rest of the Force and get everything running aboard Fortitude that we can. But we leave my fighter where she is. If we can sort out how to launch the Hussars past her, I’ll steal pilots for them, but…”

  She sighed.

  “Crashes happen, people. We lost more pilots in the rush training system for Redward than we should have, but we always lose pilots in training,” she said grimly. “And Blue Scarlet, as it turns out, were selected for political reliability at least as much as they were selected for piloting skill.

  “So, they had an accident, and that’s why we don’t put up a combat space patrol when we arrive at Grand Prince,” she continued. “That removes one obstacle to the final escape jump. A light-week nova gives us a thirty-two-minute cooldown. That would be an odd time for us to pull fighters aboard.”

  “The PM and her Cabinet are supposed to be aboard for three hours,” Zoric said. “That does suggest more than just an inspection tour.”

  “It’s still going to be a problem once she’s aboard, since she’s expecting to meet Captain Moon, not me,” Kira said. “We need everything working. If it comes down to it, Fortitude may well have to fight two cruisers and an assault carrier with no easy way out.”

  That chilled the conversation.

  “So, we make this work,” she told them. “Once we’re clear of the Crest, the hard part is done. If nothing else, the rest of Memorial Force will join us for the trip to Guadaloop and the dance party that’s going to be our time there.”

  “‘Dance party,’ sir?” Michel asked, her tone faux-hopeful.

  “I don’t plan on fighting either GODCom or Battle Group Final Usury,” Kira pointed out. “But we have to deliver our ransom demand, and that means we’re going to be novaing around the system like crazy to evade pursuit.”

  “We all know that dance,” McCaig said grimly. “It’s not a favorite, but we know the steps.”

  “For now, we have twenty hours to turn Fortitude into a fully functioning trap for the Prime Minister of a first-rate Rim hegemon,” Kira said calmly. “So, let’s be about it.”

  Kira spent more of the twenty-hour prep time sleeping than she’d expected. The Captain’s office, attached to the bridge, had just enough space that the designers had included a fold-out bed. She crashed on it three hours after they hit the rendezvous point and woke up nine hours later.

  As soon as she got out of the bed, the office coffeemaker started burbling—and the distinctive scent of Redward Royal Reserve wafted through the room. There was no way that Captain Moon had stocked her coffee maker with the private blend of the royal family of Redward, which meant that someone had set it up for her.

  Probably Konrad, who’d done it without waking her.

  A series of quick reports was already waiting for her, updates recorded or dashed off as projects were completed. Angel Waldroup had apparently just reported aboard and had a plan for the Hussars. The guns were proving recalcitrant. Konrad had rigged up his decoy nova cores for the additional Jianhong radiation.

  More reports. None of them were long, but a lot of things had happened in nine hours. Kira swallowed down her coffee—an abuse of the good beans, she knew—and tugged a brush through her hair to make herself more presentable.

  Then she grabbed a cup with a sealing lid, filled it with the Royal Reserve and went looking for Angel Waldroup.

  Angel “Boss” Waldroup had been the deck boss of Conviction when Kira had met her. She’d run that carrier’s fighter tech crews with an iron fist—but not so iron a fist that she’d defied John Estanza’s final evacuation order.

  Kira had given the woman a choice between running Deception’s flight deck or Raccoon’s, and she’d refused to displace Tamboli from their existing role. Waldroup wasn’t any fonder of Raccoon than anyone else in Memorial Force, but she’d turned the so-called junk carrier into an effective fighter platform.

  Now she stood on the edge of Fortitude’s hangar deck and surveyed her new kingdom like a conquering queen. She’d set her broad shoulders back and had her hair braided tightly to her scalp, ready to get to work.

  “Commodore,” she greeted Kira. “You made a fucking mess of my new deck.”

  “Are we talking about the cannon holes or the wrecked fighter?” Kira asked.

  “The fighter,” Waldroup snapped, turning to face Kira. She was a large and heavyset woman in every way, looming over her commanding officer. “They’ve got a decent repair-drone setup here. The cannon holes will be patched at least two hours before go time.”

  “And the fighter?”

  “We could move her,” Waldroup admitted. “The bulldozer exists for a reason. It’ll be a nightmare and make a giant mess. I could make this deck fully functional in twenty minutes, but it won’t look good.”

  The deck boss’s sharp description brought back painful memories, and Kira shivered. She’d seen what it looked like when a wrecked fighter was bulldozed off the deck…and in one of the cases where she’d seen it, the dead pilot had still been inside.

  “I don’t care what’s pretty,” she told the mechanic. “I have a lot of faith in your judgment of what’s necessary, Angel. Your message said you had a plan for the Hussars?”

  “I do,” Waldroup replied. “Wouldn’t work with anything less maneuverable. You can’t land a bird through that mess,” she said, gesturing to the wreck. “You need the space to run friction with the wheels and the grav-catch to slow the bird down.

  “Power up the grav-catch a bit higher and you can stop the fighter before it hits the mess, but you can’t take her past it,” she concluded. “So, anybody that launches comes back and goes in a hangar on this side of the deck. Easy to launch from there, but the landing is going to suck.”

  “And the launch?” Kira prodded again.

  Waldroup grinned.

  “Despite how you landed in here,” she said, “all of the landings and launches are going to need to be on full computer control until we clear the deck. I’ve checked the angles and the power on the Hussar’s Harringtons and antigravs.”

  “They can clear it?” Kira asked.

  “They can clear it. Pop up, fly over. They lose most of the velocity punch from the grav catapult, but they can get out,” Waldroup confirmed.

  “But we can’t put fighters back there?” Kira said, turning to look at where the dozen heavy fighters were hidden. They were almost invisible in their hangars, and with the wreck to keep their hopeful prisoners on this side of the deck…

  “Not a chance,” the deck boss admitted. “We could stick another dozen fighters aboard, but we’d need to put them here.”

  “Which is visible to our guests,” Kira concluded. “That’s not going to work.”

  She smiled.

  “Stick around, Angel. Get used to the place. See if you can make her look like the only thing that ever happened here was the crash.”

  “Can do, Commodore,” Waldroup told her. “I brought my best.”

  “Good.” Kira shook her head. “Now I’m afr
aid I need to go talk to my boyfriend about his guns.”

  41

  With every fiber of her being, Kira Demirci wanted to be in one of the Hussar-Sevens on the hangar deck. Each of them was prepped, loaded with a single torpedo, and manned by pilots under Helmet Sagairt’s command.

  By moving those pilots over to Fortitude immediately, she hoped that her people had managed to organize the decks on Deception and Raccoon to avoid the problems they’d been having with too many fighters.

  She wanted to lead that double squadron herself—but if the Hussars launched, so much had gone wrong. Her place, as Commodore of Memorial Force, wasn’t in a fighter today.

  It was on Fortitude’s bridge, playing the role of Captain Gyeong-Ja Moon via a digital simulacrum.

  “Nova complete,” Konrad said, his voice echoing oddly in the carrier’s mostly empty bridge.

  “Soler?” Kira asked.

  “We are on target. Grand Prince is four hundred thousand kilometers away, twelve degrees to starboard, six degrees up.

  “I have four major contacts and what looks like four six-fighter squadrons of nova fighters,” she continued. “Twenty-eight contacts. Warbook makes the nova fighters Hussar-Sixes and Cavalier-Sixes.”

  “ID those ships, please,” Kira ordered as a spike of nervousness ran down her spine. There were only supposed to be three. That was already enough to render this suicide if it became a fight. Who was the fourth?

  “Confirming, seventy-kilocubic light cruiser, Terminal Loss,” Soler reported. “One-hundred-twenty-cubic battlecruiser Amortization. Second battlecruiser, Amiability. Sixty-kilocubic assault carrier Valiant.”

  “They brought a second battlecruiser,” Kira muttered. “That…shouldn’t be a problem, I don’t think. Are we set up to hail them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kira nodded to her limited staff and focused on the recorder. The simulacrum should make this work…should.

  “Terminal Loss, this is Captain Moon aboard Fortitude,” she reported. “We are ready for our ‘scheduled exercises.’ Standing by.”

  A few moments passed and Kira checked the data on the NRC task group. They were currently just over a hundred thousand kilometers away and closing. With no jammers, Kira could basically guarantee direct hits from Fortitude’s turrets at this point.

  Of course, so could the three cruisers over there. Valiant only had a pair of single-gun antiship turrets in her defensive arsenal, but even Terminal Loss had eighteen guns on nine turrets. Kira pulled up the specifications on the battlecruisers and swallowed grimly.

  Thirty guns in ten triple turrets. Each of them slightly weaker than Fortitude’s more-modern cannon but still notably more powerful than Deception’s.

  This could not come to a fight.

  “Terminal Loss is requesting an active channel, sir,” Soler told her. “Simulacrum processing time shouldn’t be noticeable against the time lag. You’re good to go.”

  Kira nodded and inhaled sharply.

  It was showtime.

  “Welcome to Grand Prince, Captain Moon,” the middle-aged man in Kira’s screen told her. Captain Tāne Król of Terminal Loss had ground out in his career in the NRC five years before, one of a type of officer destined to serve out a career as a Commander until seniority meant he either had to retire or be promoted—and his superiors would try very hard to find him a non-command billet, from Kira’s reading of his file.

  Except his loyalty to the Sanctuary and Prosperity Party had seen him promoted, and now he was one of their most loyal partisans in the Navy and the man they trusted to transport the Prime Minister.

  “We managed to scrape together another battlecruiser to keep the Prime Minister and Cabinet safe,” Król told her. “We’re starting to hear some ugly rumors about the Royalists, so extra security seemed wise.”

  “It can never hurt; that’s for sure,” Kira agreed. “I’m glad to see the fighter patrol, too. We had an unfortunate accident in one of our test flights, and my deck is currently only half-usable.

  “We had to send half the Blue Scarlets home on their own because it was a choice between landing them or landing the Prime Minister.”

  “Is it going to be a problem?” Król asked. “Is everyone okay?”

  “No, but no,” Kira said. “A Blue Scarlet pilot crashed their fighter in the middle of the hangar deck. They were killed in the crash, and I declined to order it treated like garbage with a body inside.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s peacetime, after all. We can land the PM on half a deck and have the body extracted properly to return to their family when we get back to the Crest.

  “You’ll need to let the PM’s pilot know—they’ll have to surrender full control to our flight deck on approach. I’m told the landing is going to be extremely precise.”

  “I will,” Król promised. “Is everything in place for the inspection?”

  “Everything is brand-new and my hands have spent every moment they weren’t running tests polishing,” Kira replied drily. “I don’t think you’ll find a more ready-for-inspection ship in the entire Navy of the Royal Crest, my friend.”

  Król laughed.

  “On behalf of my ship and crew, I would like to challenge that, but I suspect we’re all better off if you’re right,” he said. “Her Excellency and the Ministers are boarding their pinnace now. I’ll check with the CNG, but I suspect we’ll have fighters from either Amiability or Valiant escort them over, if your fighters are down.”

  “Trapped behind a stack of debris, unfortunately,” Kira confirmed. “Everything else is in order. I do hope the Prime Minister will overlook the crash.”

  “She was a pilot herself once,” Król said. “I’m sure she’s familiar with the risks of even normal flight operations.”

  “Thank you, Captain Król,” Kira said. A pilot? She’d missed that in the Prime Minister’s file…but if they’d missed it, it had been so long ago it shouldn’t impact anything.

  She hoped. It was too late to change much of the plan.

  “For the Crest,” he replied, voice heavy with sincerity.

  “For the Crest,” she echoed, and let the channel fall.

  She turned away and looked around.

  “You heard him,” she told her crew. “Waldroup, get the landing program ready. Milani, get the welcome party ready. All the pieces.”

  “We’ll be there when ‘Her Excellency’ lands,” the commando promised.

  “Stunners only, Milani,” Kira warned. “We need them all alive.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but they were better off stunning the entire Ministerial Protection Detail than they were accidentally killing Maral Jeong!

  “Pinnace deployed. Definitely nova-capable,” Soler reported. “ETA two minutes.”

  Kira was watching the entire flight deck through various cameras as the shuttle approached. It took a thought to add an optical pickup zoomed in on the Prime Minister’s spacecraft.

  She recognized the lines and styling instantly. Jade Panosyan had kept one of the nova pinnaces in the shuttle bay aboard Yerazner. Whether the class two nova-drive–equipped shuttlecraft were bought from elsewhere or built in the Crest, the Prime Minister and the Crown Zharang were clearly drawing on the same source.

  “Everyone ready?” Kira murmured. It wasn’t even a real question. If someone wasn’t ready, they’d have told her by now—and her people sensibly ignored the question.

  “Pinnace Crest Two has surrendered control to the flight deck,” Waldroup’s voice said instead. “We have her locked on approach to landing point six.”

  “Understood,” Milani replied in a clipped tone.

  Sixty seconds. Thirty. Now Kira could make out the two people in the cockpit of the pinnace—a fundamentally civilian ship, it had actual windows on the cockpit. The pilot was roughly what she’d expected, a uniformed MPD officer wearing a standard headset and utterly focused on their task.

  The woman in the copilot seat was a surprise.
Maral Jeong wore the same standard headset as her pilot but was dressed in a wide-shouldered angular suit. There was no question as to who she was, though. Kira had seen enough pictures of the petite Prime Minister over the last few months to pick her out.

  Jeong was an older woman with graying black hair and skin the color of age-stained hardwood—and eyes the color of fictional acid, a bright vivid green that likely spoke to genetic modification.

  A shiver ran down Kira’s spine as Jeong’s gaze appeared to lock on to hers through the camera for a moment. That was impossible; it was simply a fluke of the Prime Minister studying the carrier as her shuttle approached.

  “Ten seconds, slowing the pinnace and bringing her in,” Waldroup reported.

  Several of Kira’s video feeds faded out as the pinnace slid into Fortitude’s flight deck under Angel Waldroup’s control. Everything was going smoothly—and then Kira saw the moment Maral Jeong saw the wrecked fighter.

  It was the moment the Prime Minister who had apparently once been a fighter pilot clearly recognized that the wreck was not a Hussar-Seven.

  42

  Kira watched as Jeong grabbed the pilot’s shoulder, and looked the complete collapse of her plans in the eye.

  And went to her first contingency plan.

  “Jam the pinnace’s coms,” she snapped. “Now. Jeong was a fighter pilot.”

  She saw the alert as the same jammers they’d used to take over Fortitude now flared to life at lower power, just blocking off the flight deck itself.

  They had never even considered the possibility that Maral Jeong would be able to identify the type of wrecked fighter by sight. Kira was running back through the Prime Minister’s file in her headware and swallowed a curse.

  Jeong was over eighty standard years old and they’d focused on her political career and her connections with the Equilibrium Institute. There had been so much going on that even the reference to her being a pilot hadn’t left Kira time to re-check the PM’s file—and she had missed that the woman had served a six-year tour of duty in the Navy of the Royal Crest’s fighter wings…sixty years before.