Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  The sections of the outer parts of the Crest System the nova tests would take her to were under near-constant patrol by either nova fighters or lighter ships. Several of her early novas would take her to the projected positions of outer-system monitors, ships even larger than Fortitude herself but incapable of nova travel.

  “There is no way in hell we can take on the monitors,” Kira observed, looking at a rough set of statistics for the Crest’s defensive ships. The sublight warships were a good chunk of why a civilized star system was regarded as uninvadable, after all.

  “So, that rules out most of her test stops in the Crest,” Konrad agreed. “What about the security point?”

  “That’s probably your most likely opportunity,” Hamilton agreed. “I’ve also got a point here, between her two longest in-system novas. Someone miscounted Fortitude’s cooldown, she’ll be able to nova fifteen minutes before the schedule calls for.”

  Kira chuckled.

  “Which means she will nova fifteen minutes before the schedule calls for, most likely,” she agreed. “What kind of gap does that open?”

  “She’s jumping almost three light-days out-system, so there is nothing else out there,” Hamilton replied. “The plan is sending her out to a standard surveillance point where they regularly deploy ships to scan for troublemakers.

  “But if she jumps early, she’ll be alone out there for…” The NRC Commander ran the numbers, then shook her head.

  “Seventeen minutes,” she noted. “That’s…nothing. And the next ship to show up is Penalty Fee. Her crew is basically on a punishment tour—but her new Captain is an SPP diehard.”

  “If we play the right games with timing and jammers, it’s…doable,” Kira said. “But that is not a window I want to work with. Who’s at the security point when they’re there? Those are usually quiet.”

  “Usually,” Hamilton agreed. Security point six appeared next to the display of the Crest System, lighting up with its own patrol routes. “Except…” She exhaled.

  “Mapping mission,” Konrad said, looking at the data. “Looks like a trio of destroyers. We… We could take them, Kira?”

  “We could make no mistakes,” she said softly. “With eighteen nova fighters in play, we’d need to send our bombers against the destroyers unsupported—and if we miss one shot, we lose everything.

  “A single nova ship, whether it’s a fighter or a destroyer or Fortitude herself, getting away wrecks the whole plan. We need to arrive at Grand Prince with nothing to make us appear suspicious.

  “When are those destroyers supposed to report in?” Kira asked.

  “They’re on a cycle; one checks in every twenty-four hours,” Hamilton told her. “There’s a check-in right before Fortitude arrives, which means…”

  “One will be expected to check in four hours or so after she leaves.”

  Kira studied the map.

  “Those are our two biggest weak points,” she admitted. “Here, in the seventeen minutes before the battlecruiser arrives, and here, where she’ll only have three destroyers in company and will be six light-years from the Crest.”

  The three of them looked at the hologram.

  “I need to see both places,” she concluded aloud. “Yes, I know they’re both basically empty void, but…there may be something I can’t see from a map.”

  “And then?” Hamilton asked.

  “Then us mercenaries need to get to the rendezvous point and you need to get back to your normal job,” Kira said. “If you leave us floating in deep space for a day or two, that will help cover your tracks a bit as well.”

  “My tracks are pretty covered already,” Hamilton said. “But fair enough. Let’s go check out this empty void and see if inspiration strikes.”

  31

  There wasn’t much to choose between one patch of void and another. Even the security point was empty, the destroyers not scheduled to start their mapping sweep for several weeks still.

  Looking at empty space didn’t give Kira any inspiration. She found herself spending hours just sitting on her bunk, cycling through data in a virtual display only she could see.

  Raccoon carried six Fastball bombers—a refined evolution of the Screwball improvised bombers they’d used against Equilibrium—which she could support with six heavy fighters and twenty-four fighter-bombers.

  But if she sent all of her heavier nova fighters against the three destroyers, she’d only have thirty-one interceptors—including her own bird—to go up against eighteen advanced heavy fighters in the hands of elite pilots.

  Sixty-seven nova fighters against a ship that was supposed to carry a hundred and fifty was definitely an…interesting challenge. So far as she could tell, though, Fortitude’s guns would be safed after their firing trials.

  They wouldn’t be quickly unsafed. The risk was someone escaping and bringing the rest of the NRC in before Kira could move against the Prime Minister.

  “Still ruminating?” Konrad asked, settling down onto the bunk beside her. The single cramped room they had aboard TVM-6 didn’t lend itself to much privacy, but their companions weren’t going to object to them leaning on each other.

  “Trying to balance the options,” she admitted. “Every so often, I wonder if just hitting Fortitude while the Prime Minister is aboard is even that bad an idea. It takes a lot of the timing issues out, after all.”

  “Except that the Prime Minister is going aboard while the nova drive is in cooldown,” her lover pointed out. “Full cooldown, thanks to the nova from security point six. That’s twenty hours the carrier has to be sublight, and she isn’t that fast.

  “So, you’d have to punch out two capital ships, board a third and do all of this while hoping not one of seventy-odd nova fighters makes a jump for help. I’m no tactical genius—I leave that side of things to you, Kira—but that seems…unlikely.”

  “Trying to take out eighteen fighters and three destroyers at the same time is also a pain,” Kira admitted. “And we have the same problem at the security point of cooldown. If we take her after she completes a six-light-year hop, she’s got a twenty-hour cooldown, which means we need to make sure no one within twenty light-hours sees us.”

  “Grand Prince isn’t even that far out, is it?” Konrad asked.

  “No,” Kira admitted. “Which is a problem for the main plan. We might be able to ambush the Cabinet’s escort with Fortitude’s guns at close range with no jammers up, punch them out and avoid anyone escaping if we control the ship, but…Grand Prince is only three light-hours from the Crest, let alone anything else.”

  “So, we need to, what, capture the PM and hold them incommunicado for twenty hours without anyone noticing?”

  “That is what it looks like, isn’t it?” Kira asked.

  She spread her three options in the air in front of her and tossed the visual to him with a thought and a hand gesture.

  He linked into the display and brought up something else. The schematics and details on…Fortitude’s fighter-launch systems?

  “Sixty-five seconds,” he said quietly. “That’s the minimum scramble time for Fortitude’s fighters, assuming they have pilots in the cockpits ready to go. That seems like…a factor.”

  “Standard nova-fighter combat sweep is sixty seconds; that’s why the carrier has defensive guns and would have a combat space patrol up,” Kira noted. “Her guns are supposed to be offline, but those heavy fighters will be up.”

  “Not all of them, though, right?” he asked.

  “No,” she murmured. “Maybe two-thirds when they realize they’re alone in the outer system.”

  Sixty-five seconds. And while she generally focused on the cooldown time of a nova drive, there was also a warm-up time of about a minute.

  “We need to take out the fighters within a minute and start the commando landing almost immediately after, no matter what,” she said aloud. “It doesn’t matter whether we have seventeen minutes or twenty hours; we have to move fast.”

  “That’s what
I was wondering about,” Konrad told her. “Whether we were thinking too much about the timing.”

  “I think we were thinking about the wrong part,” Kira replied. “If we grab Fortitude at the security point, she has to be at Grand Prince for twenty hours. There’s no way around it; that’s just what the physics says.”

  “And?” her boyfriend prodded, clearly content to have provided his contribution and to now serve as someone to lay out the plan to.

  “But they haven’t officially scheduled any of their escorts except for the ‘maneuvers’ with Terminal Loss,” she said. “So, those destroyers aren’t expecting Fortitude. Which means…if she doesn’t show up, no one is going to notice.

  “If we take her before she’s supposed to jump out…that point is already several light-days out. The risk is that if Penalty Fee doesn’t report in, that’ll raise questions. But if we manage to fool Penalty Fee, no one is going to see the actual attack for days.

  “And then we nova out on schedule…and only go a few more light-days. Tighten up our control, link up with the rest of Memorial Force to solidify the plan, and then nova to Grand Prince on schedule.

  “With minutes of cooldown on the drive instead of hours.”

  “Might work,” Konrad said. “Only thing I’ll point out is that they may be able to tell. Even with warship shielding, if they’re looking, they’ll see the wrong levels of Jianhong radiation.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, then looked away from her virtual maps to face her chief engineer. The man who, in addition to being her boyfriend, was one of the best engineers and gearheads she’d ever met.

  “Can you fake it?” she asked bluntly.

  “My dear, I never fake anything,” he said with mock indignation. That faded into a grin. “But I can definitely produce some extra Jianhong radiation by exposing a couple of spare class two cores when we make the nova.

  “I’m pretty sure we can cover it.”

  “It has to be perfect,” Kira said grimly. “If we take Fortitude without being caught, we then meet the Prime Minister and her escorts with just the carrier.

  “And the ten million credits we’re supposed to be paid for finishing this mess says that Maral Jeong has a nova pinnace for her personal craft. If we screw up, she is going to nova the hell out and leave her escorts to deal with us.

  “We won’t get a second chance.”

  “Then we’d better not make any mistakes,” Konrad told her. “No pressure, right?”

  “Right.”

  32

  Waves of brilliant blue light flickered across the runabout’s displays, a mix of Cherenkov radiation, Jianhong radiation and regular light that blazed across the empty space of the trade-route stop.

  An alert woke Kira from her nap in the pilot’s seat as the nova pulses flashed across her scanners and identity beacons began to trickle in.

  “They’re on time,” Bertoli noted from the copilot’s seat. “I can’t say I loved two whole days in the runabout, cycling between two bunks and two chairs that fold back, but our friends are on time.”

  Kira chose to ignore the complaint, focusing in to validate the identification. It was easy enough—even there, in the Crest Sector, few nova ships approached a hundred thousand cubic meters.

  She still thought Deception’s lines were ugly, the warship cut in the blocky and angular shape preferred by the Brisingr shipyards for ease of construction, but the ship had definitely grown on her. Compared to the rough cylinder of Raccoon and the logistics freighter, she was definitely a more modern and powerful ship.

  The distinction was less obvious versus the two Parakeet-class destroyers. She could see Konrad’s influence in the fact that the Parakeets looked more like Brisingr ships than the older Redward destroyers she’d seen, but their systems showed his influence as well.

  “That’s everyone,” she said aloud. “Are O’Mooney and Konrad awake?”

  “I’m awake,” Konrad said, her lover stepping up into the cockpit. “O’Mooney probably had an alarm set for this, too, but she’s not bothering to get up.”

  “I’m awake,” the youngest mercenary called from the back of the shuttle. “But there is not enough space for four in that cockpit.”

  “I am not going to miss this runabout,” Kira noted, entering the commands to bring up her Harrington coils. Deception was almost two full light-minutes away, so it was going to be a while yet before they were aboard.

  But they could see home—and two new nova flashes appeared next to them as a pair of Weltraumpanzers dropped into escort formation around the runabout.

  “Basketball, this is Purlwise,” Deception-Charlie’s commander, Akira “Purlwise” Yamauchi greeted her. “Confirm ID, please?”

  “Sending, Purlwise,” she replied, pinging him with her Memorial Force codes. “It’s damn good to see you all. Safe flight?”

  “Safe, yes. Boring, mostly,” the pilot replied. “Though when we get back to Redward, a few of us are going to find the gentleperson who sold Commander Bueller Lady Tramp in a back alley.”

  That had to be the logistics freighter…and didn’t sound good.

  “I’ll have Zoric brief me, I suppose,” Kira allowed. “You’re our escort in?”

  “All the way, Commodore. It’s good to have you back.”

  “Everything was fine until we hit the third static-discharge stop,” Zoric told Kira and Konrad a few hours later, gathered in Kira’s office breakout room.

  They hadn’t managed to sleep yet. Kira hadn’t even seen her quarters—and they had an all-senior-officers briefing in less than an hour.

  The rush was probably unnecessary, but the longer everyone had to plan for what was coming, the better.

  “So…eighteen novas from Redward and already outside the Cluster,” Kira observed. Nova ships built up a mix of electrical and tachyon static on the hulls and on the nova-drive cores themselves with each jump.

  It was easily discharged in a significant gravity well, but that required a nova into a star system, which added a delay to travel. A number of systems had received significant economic benefits from being spaced roughly thirty light-years apart along the common trade lanes—including both Redward, at the center of the Syntactic Cluster, and Ypres, at the “entrance” to the Cluster from the rest of the Rim.

  “Yeah. That’s when Lady Tramp’s Harrington coils started to fail,” Zoric said. “Fortunately, Captain Woodcock is an old RRF engineering hand and realized what was happening before we’d lost more than half.”

  “Half?” Konrad exclaimed. “I checked her coils.”

  “From what Laure said, you did,” Zoric agreed.

  Kira wasn’t familiar with Laure Woodcock, but her headware confirmed that Zoric had hired the woman away from the RRF to command their logistics ship. Her file said she’d been an engineer turned logistics-support officer, but Redward didn’t deploy outside the Cluster and didn’t need logistics or repair ships.

  That limited the opportunities for a woman like Woodcock to command her own ship—which was probably why she’d jumped at the chance to move to Memorial Force.

  “Then how?” Konrad asked.

  “Woodcock’s people checked every coil after that,” Deception’s Captain told them. “They didn’t say anything, but the systems automatically record replacement dates.”

  Kira could guess what that meant—and from the way Konrad started gritting his teeth, she wasn’t wrong.

  “They swapped them all?” he demanded.

  “All of them,” Zoric confirmed. “Woodcock figures they either had the old coils in the shop already or traded them. The ones they pulled had almost seventy-five percent operating lifetime, on average.

  “The ones they installed were all on their last thousand hours,” she said grimly. “Worth maybe a quarter of what the ones they pulled were worth. Woodcock says that even if they bought the ones they installed and just sold the original ones, they probably cleared half a million kroner on the switch.”

  “Dark alley
. Right,” Konrad gritted out.

  “More send everything to Pree,” Kira corrected. “You or Milani might break the asshole’s legs—Pree will end his entire business.”

  Why send thugs when she could send lawyers, after all?

  “We had replacement coils for the fleet on Lady Tramp, of course, so Woodcock was able to get everything running again without us losing too much time,” Zoric noted. “I’m a fan of both thugs and lawyers in this case, boss.

  “Those coils could have failed at a far worse time than us heading into orbit for static discharge—and Woodcock’s people are still going over the rest of the ship.”

  Kira winced.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “Worst was the nova-drive discharge capacitors,” the Captain said grimly. “They only swapped half of those, at least, but one of their swap-ins already had a hairline fracture. She’d have made it to the Crest, most likely.”

  “And not made it back to Redward,” Konrad replied. “Dark alleys and lawyers, yes.”

  Kira snorted.

  “It’s fixed, though?” she asked.

  “Woodcock thinks so,” Zoric confirmed. “Everything else is fine. We picked up new crew, new pilots—you know some of them.”

  “Oh?” Kira asked.

  “I figured I’d make life easier and reorg so all of our RRF pilots were in one squadron flying RRF planes,” her second-in-command told her. “I’m glad I did that, because I’m not sure I could have justified asking Colonel Sagairt to do less than command a squadron.”

  “Helmet is aboard?” Kira demanded. Teige “Helmet” Sagairt had commanded the original single squadron of battered ex-Crest nova fighters Redward had owned when she’d arrived.

  He’d remained one of the key officers and pilots of the RRF’s expanding pilot corps ever since. Last she’d heard, he was slated to skip several grades straight to Admiral and become the official CO of the nova-fighter corps.