Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Of course. Why would we ever look at Mr. Radar without having first visited Mr. Coffee?”

  Kira assumed that there was something behind the phrase that made Zamorano sound less insane to himself, but she simply nodded and smiled as she grabbed her coffee.

  “Lead the way, Captain.”

  He bowed slightly and led the way through a door that had never opened for Kira and her people. The corridor on the other side of the bulkhead didn’t look any different from the parts of the ship she’d been allowed in, but there was still a momentary spike of excitement.

  Just what did the IIS hide on their intelligence ships?

  The answer, at least for this part of the ship, was “nothing unusual.” Kira wasn’t surprised, but she was a bit disappointed.

  “Apparently, my Em Ramirez and your Em O’Mooney were quite disgruntled to realize that her doctor’s orders precluded horizontal exercise,” the SolFed Captain murmured as he led her down the hall, past a series of unmarked doors.

  “We’ve all been there, I suspect,” Kira replied. She’d had more than one fling that had been specifically time-limited by a journey on a shared ship. “Though most of us haven’t had the desire prevented by being gut-shot.”

  “Hell of a first impression your enemies make, Em Demirci,” Zamorano told her. “And that’s not even delving into the darker waters you swim in.”

  That, she suspected, was as close as the man was going to come to admitting anything about the Equilibrium Institute. There was no way the Solar Federation’s intelligence service didn’t know about the Institute, but that they hadn’t done anything about it, well.

  That suggested a lot of things to Kira—the ugliest and most likely being that the Institute was carefully operating in a place where SolFed truly could not be bothered to care.

  “Here.”

  There was no door leading to the bridge. An entire bulkhead dissolved into the roof, turning a wall into a double-wide door in a moment of dramatic active nanotech. Zamorano grinned at Kira’s shock.

  “Carbon-nanotube-reinforced active nanomaterials,” he told her with an impish grin. “Key systems in the ship are surrounded by a bubble of them. For most people, I program them to fake a door…but it’s kind of fun to show off sometimes.”

  Kira shook her head reprovingly at the spy.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to expose so many of your secrets to me?” she asked, following him onto the bridge. The space looked normal enough—a quarter of the space was taken up by a holotank and four stations were positioned in a shared working space—despite its odd defenses.

  Only Ercilia Martinez was in the room, holding down the navigation station, which reinforced Konrad’s suggestion that Baile Fantasma might only have three crew members.

  “Are you ever going to be able to admit that you were in the Crest at this point in time, Em Demirci?” Zamorano asked drily. “You’re traveling under an assumed name, dozens of light-years from your mercenary fleet, and hiding from everyone.

  “You’re here doing prep work for a covert contract, one you haven’t told me about.” He raised his hands as he dropped into his seat. “One I’m not going to ask about,” he noted. “But to betray my secrets would require revealing some of your own.

  “Dangerous ones of your own.”

  He smiled.

  “Plus, you now command a powerful mercenary force rapidly building a legend of its own. It will be useful for me, I suspect, for you to know who I am in the future.”

  “Maybe,” Kira said calmly. “It’s still a risk for you, isn’t it?”

  “Everything I do is a risk,” Zamorano pointed out. “On the other hand, if I never take risks, it’s difficult to build a network of trustworthy contacts. For example, now that you know what I do, would you be prepared to act as an informant for us?”

  She blinked, taking a moment to glance around the bridge. The screens and holograms were all using standard iconography. They were at one of the trade-route stops—the heavily mapped chunks of space that were safe to nova to—that serviced the Crest.

  There were two dozen other ships of assorted sizes visible on the scanners, including a pair of Navy of the Royal Crest destroyers. Those made Kira a bit nervous, but that was the reality of her current situation. She was going to be under the guns of the people hunting her for a while.

  “I’m a tad twitchy about conspiracies and shadows, Captain Zamorano,” she told him.

  “I understand,” he said. “To be clear, I’m not asking you to do anything active—not even betray confidences or nondisclosure agreements or…anything.

  “Currently, IIS has no assets, whatsoever, in the Syntactic Cluster,” he continued. “We are reliant on news reporting that reaches places like the Crest Sector and our assets in place here. You can imagine, I suspect, how accurate or complete that data is.”

  “You didn’t even know Konrad worked for me,” Kira noted.

  “Exactly. What I need, Em Demirci, is not a spy. What I need is someone who can aggregate news and public reporting from across the Cluster, apply some level of sense and local knowledge to flag the egregious falsehoods, and forward it to a drop point by standard interstellar post.”

  That was a multiply redundant system of “pay the ship going that way to carry a few terabytes of data” in the Rim. Even in the Crest Sector, there weren’t dedicated mail couriers. A standard post packet would make its way from Redward to the Crest in anywhere from sixty to ninety days, but it would get there.

  “If you’re willing to put Memorial Force’s analysis teams to work for me and actually prepare intel briefings to go with that—based on unrestricted information, of course—I can arrange for a formal contract to cover those expenses.

  “On the other hand,” he chuckled. “While I would insist on paying you for your information if you simply do the news aggregation, we both know you’re wealthy enough, it wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.”

  It was relatively easy for Kira to forget that she was technically fabulously wealthy by most standards. The vast majority of that “wealth” was tied up in the value of Memorial Force’s ships, investments and contracts. There was an investment portfolio run in her name, left to her by Jay Moranis and John Estanza and regularly expanded with her salary and bonuses, but that was comfortable wealth, not buy nova carrier wealth.

  “My concern, Captain Zamorano, is far more about what SolFed is likely to do with that information than anything else,” she finally said.

  “Do you want the truth or the fancy appeal to honor and justice?” Zamorano said with a sigh.

  “The truth, if you please,” she told him.

  “Nothing,” he said flatly. “That information, even with the intel briefings and everything else, will go to an analytics office in the Inner Rim section of their operational zone. It will be aggregated with the data from another few hundred star systems into a report that gets sent to SolFed.

  “Most likely, even that report won’t be read by the time it reaches the Federation. It will be several years old at that point,” he said quietly. “But it will be used to provide background information on the state of the galaxy for the Federation. It’s my job to make sure that we have that data, Em Demirci, but I have no illusions about the level of activity that SolFed is prepared to engage in out here.”

  “I see,” Kira said slowly. That turned it into a probably harmless source of extra revenue, but still…

  “Think about it,” Zamorano told her. “We have some time still. Martinez?”

  “Standing by to nova; sixty-second countdown,” the other officer replied. “Was about to interrupt.”

  “Well, Em Demirci, are you ready to see the system it has taken you so much effort to get to?”

  Kira had already noticed that novas aboard Baile Fantasma were ever so slightly—but noticeably—smoother than aboard most ships she’d served on. Any full-size nova ship with a class one nova drive was a far gentler experience than a nova fighter, but Baile Fantasm
a’s nova was almost ignorable.

  Standing on the bridge, watching through the sensors as the ship displaced itself in the space-time continuum, it was obvious. One moment, they were hanging in deep space, with only a few dozen other ships visible.

  The next, after a barely perceptible twist of reality, they were in a star system. A brilliantly white F0 star of almost twenty solar masses, the Herald had burned its six closest worlds to uninhabitable crisps. Six gas giants swung around in the outer portion of the system, their various types and fluids providing the fuel for a massive modern industry.

  And hung between the two sets of six was a single perfect world. Minimal axial tilt. Eighty percent water and several large continents. Two large moons for easy access to resources without damaging the ecology of the habitable planet. Everything humans could desire.

  “The Damned,” Martinez introduced with a grandiose tone to her voice, highlighting the six inner worlds. “The Grand.” She highlighted the six outer worlds. “And the Crest.” The habitable planet lit up.

  “Welcome to the Crest System, Em Demirci,” Zamorano told her. “Five point two billion human beings, one of the most heavily inhabited systems in the outer hundred and fifty light-years of the Rim.

  “The Damned and the Grand also have individual names, of course, but the only important one is Rampant, here.” One of the moons of the innermost gas giant lit up. “Rampant is, thanks to the interface of the Herald and the Grand Duchess, the gas giant it orbits, habitable.

  “Less amenable in many ways than the Crest itself, it is technically a military reservation with the rest of the Grand Duchess, home to a hundred million support workers and military family members. The Navy of the Royal Crest runs their main shipyard above the Grand Duchess.”

  Which made the Grand Duchess Kira’s main target, and she focused her attention on it. There wasn’t much data at this range, unfortunately, but she could see the energy levels that spoke to Zamorano’s explanation.

  “Ninety percent of the system population lives on or above the Crest itself, of course,” he continued. “That’s where we’re headed. No civilian shipping contract from out-system would ever let a ship approach the Grand Duchess—we’d get one warning.”

  “And then we’d be vaporized?” she guessed.

  “That depends on whether the nova fighters they sent out decided we were a threat or not,” Zamorano told her. “If they decided we were harmless but stupid, a nova destroyer would be sent to board us.”

  “Pleasant,” Kira murmured. “Though Apollo had a similar area around Hephaestus.”

  Redward, now that she thought about it, didn’t. They kept their military secured zones quite small and centered around the asteroid fortresses guarding Redward itself. Part of that had to be concentrating resources, though. Both Apollo and the Crest could afford to build a second set of monitors and asteroid forts to defend a gas giant and the infrastructure there.

  Baile Fantasma was already heading toward the Crest. The planet was even more heavily defended and industrialized than Guadaloop—the client system hadn’t been a significant step up from Redward.

  The Crest, on the other hand, had six orbital elevators positioned at equal distances around its equator. Each had an orbital battle station acting as a counterweight, with a civilian station at geostationary orbit three-quarters of the way up.

  Each orbital elevator acted as the anchor for constellations of civilian and military platforms, with refinery and factory platforms concentrated under the defensive shell—and leaving the majority of the planet’s space free for satellites and spaceships.

  Rich as the Crest was, though, Kira wasn’t there for the habitable planet. She was going to need to get closer to the Grand Duchess—hopefully, once she’d reestablished contact with Jade Panosyan, the Crown Zharang’s assets would suffice to get her runabout to the military reservation.

  On the other hand…even Deception’s sensors would have been getting more data from the military reservation than the screens and holograms around her were showing.

  Kira sighed.

  “How badly are you degrading your sensor data to conceal your full abilities from me?” she asked Zamorano and Martinez.

  Fantasma’s Captain laughed aloud.

  “I can’t answer that,” he told her. “I really can’t, Em Demirci.”

  “All right,” Kira conceded. She looked at the data for the Grand Duchess and considered her options. “Let me ask a different question, then: how much better data can you get me on the Grand Duchess and the military reservation if I agree to be your agent in the Syntactic Cluster?”

  The bridge was silent for a few seconds.

  “Quite a bit,” he said, his voice suddenly perfectly serious. “If you agree to those intel briefings, for the Syntactic Cluster or wherever else Memorial Force ends up, I’ll give you our full passive scan of part of the Grand Duchess. We’ll need some time to clean up the data, but I can have it ready for you when we land.”

  As he’d noted when they’d talked about it, Kira didn’t need his money personally. Even the contract for Memorial Force wasn’t likely to make a huge difference to the bottom line of the mercenary company.

  It was favor-for-favor…and while she wasn’t entirely certain she could trust Zamorano completely, she suspected that the SolFed Captain would trade fairly with her.

  “Done. I want everything you can get me on the capital ship yards,” she told him. “And as detailed a scan as you can get of any carriers under construction.”

  Zamorano nodded slowly.

  “Done,” he echoed. “I’ll have Ramirez start on the scan and data prep immediately. I’ll have a contract and delivery details for you to pass to your people by the time he’s done.

  “As I said, Em Demirci, I see value in you knowing who I am. I think we will both benefit from today—and I look forward to working with you again in the future.”

  “I’d look more forward, Captain Zamorano, if I actually expected your employers to do anything out here,” Kira admitted.

  He sighed and nodded.

  “I know,” he admitted. “But we all have our duties, Em Demirci. Even your loyalty, as a mercenary commander, isn’t only to money.”

  26

  The runabout left Baile Fantasma’s hold as cleanly as it had entered it. The cargo containers were all gone now, well on their way to whatever destination they’d had, leaving the hold more than clear enough for Kira’s small craft.

  Everyone was back aboard the shuttle now, going over their tools and their data as Kira checked with the flight control for Crest Charming Station.

  “Confirmed, Control, all identity documents and manifests are uploaded,” she told the person on the other end. That person probably had half a dozen artificial stupids helping them, but the Crest seemed to agree that a human should have the com channel.

  “So…you and your husband, Em Riker, plus your business partners?” the flight controller asked. “The manifest is all personal supplies that aren’t intended to land?”

  “Exactly,” Kira confirmed. “We’re in-system to play tourist and have a meeting with the Bank of the Royal Crest with regard to financing a major business expansion. Having our own spacecraft always has its value, though it makes booking flights a pain.”

  Ramirez had gone through their false IDs with a toolset of his own while they’d been aboard the spy ship, a freebie thrown in with their data on the carrier construction. Kira had been confident in the identification that Panosyan’s people had set up for them—but she doubted that SolFed Intelligence had made the profiles less solid.

  “That’s all cleared,” the controller told her. “If you are bringing anything onto Crest Charming or anywhere else in the system, beyond clothes and personal effects, you’ll need to clear it with security and customs in your location.

  “Whatever remains on the shuttle is fine, but your visa does not authorize you to engage in the sale or trade of goods. Understood, Em Riker?”

>   “Of course,” she agreed. Putting everything on the manifest as “personal supplies” had helped cover up the fact that she had armor and significant weaponry aboard. She didn’t expect to need that gear—but if they were landing power armor and blaster rifles, they weren’t going to be playing nice with customs.

  “You’re cleared to shuttle port one-five-niner,” the controller said. “Course is downloading to you now. I require a headware validation stamp on the paperwork.”

  “Of course.” Kira reviewed the file the local had sent back, and then returned it with her validation.

  “Let me be the first to welcome you and yours to Crest Charming Station, Em Riker,” the local said. “I hope you enjoy your stay in our system.”

  The channel closed and Kira checked the course they’d given her. It wasn’t far—but it also wasn’t fast. If there had been no other shipping around, she probably could have put the shuttle at the port in under five minutes.

  Given that her contact screen was practically covered in other ships, shuttles and space stations, she figured she needed to stay on the course they’d provided.

  “We on our way?” Konrad asked, dropping into the copilot’s seat.

  “We are. Everything is clear. Between our friends on Fantasma and our friends who live here, we’re clean and legally registered.”

  “And so, it’s time to start looking around,” he said. “I can tell you one thing?”

  “Oh?” she asked.

  “I’m not going to need as close a look at Fortitude as I expected,” her boyfriend told her. “Fantasma’s data is better than we were ever going to get with the runabout’s scanners at any reasonable distance.

  “It’s going to take me a bit to go over everything Zamorano gave us, but I think I have enough to make my assessment of Fortitude.” He chuckled. “And the two battlecruisers and the other carrier they’re building in the same yards.”