Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  Now she had to wonder if anyone had told Sagairt that.

  “Yes, sir,” Zoric confirmed. “On Deception, leading Delta Squadron. I had six Sinisters, as opposed to PNC-One-Fifteen clones, so that made sense as a place to put the RRF loaners.”

  “I’ll have to touch base with him and see just what he is thinking,” Kira said.

  The Redward Royal Fleet’s Sinister nova fighter-bomber was heavily based on the PNC-115 fighter-bombers that Conviction had once carried and Raccoon still did. It was not, despite its heritage, a perfect clone.

  While Kira’s pilot/copilot teams from the PNCs could easily handle the Sinisters, the RRF crews were more experienced with that specific variation, so Zoric’s change made sense.

  “Fair enough,” Zoric agreed. “Our various Redward loaners have settled well. I suspect that someone—either Remington or Sagairt himself or both—was very careful about the people we got. They haven’t lorded being regular military over our people, nor have they insisted on, well, any more spit and polish than you do.”

  Kira smiled. That had been a shock for some of Conviction’s people when she’d first come aboard. She’d let a lot of the rules and regs of military service go, but there were also rules and policies that made sense, and she’d enforced those on Conviction’s fighter group.

  Now that mix of mercenary minimalism and military discipline ruled across her entire mercenary fleet.

  “So, we’re doing okay?” she asked.

  “We’re ready for war, Kira,” Zoric said grimly. “But while our people are willing, I’m pretty sure we can’t fight the Crest. Do we have a plan?”

  “The beginnings of one, that we’ll hash out with the rest of the senior officers when we have the full conference. A lot of data to run through as well,” Kira told Zoric. “The Crest is in worse shape than I thought, politically. The SPP basically has complete control and is pretty obviously moving to change de facto to de jure by removing King Sung.

  “The question isn’t whether Jade and Sung are right to move against the SPP,” she noted. “The question is if it’s already too late. Either way, though…”

  She sighed and shook her head.

  “Worst-case scenario I see is that we pull this off and then have to dump the PM and her Cabinet somewhere because no one is going to pay for them,” she admitted. “So long as we manage the mission, we still walk out of this with a carrier.”

  “We’ve got command-and-override codes to take control of her, if we can take physical possession of her,” Konrad added. “Which, I guess, is where that all-officers briefing comes in?”

  “That part of the plan is on Milani and McCaig,” Kira agreed. “But I want everyone in the room to talk about it as we go through the pieces.

  “There’s going to be very little slack to work with.”

  Zoric nodded slowly.

  “How little?” she asked.

  “Seventeen minutes.”

  33

  Kira finished laying out everything they knew about the situation on the Crest and the planned timelines of the trial and paused, studying her audience.

  Even for a mercenary fleet of five ships, counting Lady Tramp, it was a lot of people. Two fighter-group commanders—Cartman and Patel—four ship Captains, four XOs and the ground-force commander. And her.

  She didn’t know the executive officers well, other than Konrad obviously, but the warship Captains were all old friends and colleagues. There was no one in the mixed virtual/physical conference that she didn’t trust.

  “Any questions?” she asked.

  Milani leaned forward, the dragon on their armor flickering around their helmet as they did.

  “I’ve been reviewing the schematics of the carrier,” they noted. “Are there any significant changes that will impact the boarding plan?”

  “Konrad? You got a better look at Fortitude than anyone else,” Kira asked.

  “So far as we can tell, the schematics our employer provided are still fundamentally accurate,” he told Milani. “I have a comparison drawn up between the final builder schematics and the mid-cycle drawings. I’ll pass it on after the meeting, but there’s nothing that should impact the boarding. Flight deck, Engineering and the bridge are all in the same places.”

  “Good.” The armored mercenary leaned back again and shook their head. “Right now, the plan is to load a platoon onto each destroyer and make a close-nova approach. Shuttles should be in space for under thirty seconds and land simultaneously.

  “So long as the flight deck is clear, we should be able to get four shuttles down in one go and deploy all sixty ground troops in one wave.

  “Do we know what kind of security is anticipated?”

  “There are not supposed to be any internal defenses other than standard security surveillance,” Kira replied. “We’ve confirmed that she will not have her standard Army of the Royal Crest security detachment aboard, but I would assume we’re looking at at least a security platoon for the ship herself, likely backed by a platoon of executive security personnel for the Prime Minister.

  “They, after all, know she’s doing the inspection.”

  “So, equal numbers, but we have surprise and heavy weapons,” Milani concluded. “All right. We hit them fast and hard, take Engineering and then sweep the rest of the ship to clear up survivors as the prize crew comes aboard.”

  “'Fast and hard’ is good,” Kira told the ground commander. “Because our timing is going to be ugly.”

  She tapped a command, zooming in on the part of Fortitude’s schedule that was relevant.

  “They’ve set up the trials to use their existing patrol pattern to remove the need for escorts,” she noted. “Since the ship needs to swan around most of a star system and its environs anyway, it makes sense and is surprisingly efficient.

  “But if the nova drive performs as expected, Fortitude will arrive at her final in-system nova point fifteen minutes early,” she continued. “Her expected company there won’t arrive for seventeen minutes.

  “That is the only break in the schedule,” she told them. “All other options require us to engage other defenders. If we deploy in this window, we have to deal with her combat space patrol and make sure no future fighters launch.”

  “And remove any debris from the initial dogfight,” Michel pointed out, the former pilot looking grim. “Collect or vaporize; we can’t have evidence if there’s a ship coming—unless we’re planning on taking down that ship as well, anyway. This is pretty far out.”

  “It is, and that’s what makes this possible,” Kira agreed. “But the ship that’s showing up is one of their more-modern battlecruisers. We cannot fight her, which means that by T plus seventeen, every sign that we were there needs to be either aboard Fortitude or gone.”

  Everyone was silent again, looking at the timing.

  “We can deploy localized jammers once we’re aboard,” Milani said after almost a minute of silence. “That will enable us to complete the boarding op if we haven’t fully secured the ship by that time.

  “But you’ll need to have the prize crew aboard at T plus ten, maybe T plus twelve at most. We will not have fully secured the ship by then.”

  “It’s a risk,” Kira agreed. “The bad news is that Fortitude will be expected to communicate with Penalty Fee as well, so that won’t buy as much time as we’d like. The good news is that Penalty Fee’s crew is currently in the doghouse, so they won’t be surprised if Fortitude’s prize crew ignores them for a bit.”

  “So, we’ll have twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes to storm and sweep an entire hundred-and-fifty-kilocubic carrier,” Milani said quietly. “Because if we miss anyone, their headware will be enough for them to com a battlecruiser a few light-seconds away when we drop the jamming.”

  “And we’ll need just seventy-five minutes to cool down the carrier’s drive,” Konrad observed. “After that, we control how far she novas, which gives us some interesting options for dealing with the Prime Minister, but…we’r
e stuck on that hour in Penalty Fee’s company.”

  “We can make that work,” Kira replied. “But we need to take the carrier first. We have the…strategy and operations, I suppose,” she said with a smile. “We know what we’re doing, why, where and when.

  “So, now, people, we need to work out how. One carrier. Eighteen advanced heavy fighters with elite pilots. Seventeen minutes.”

  All of the data on the display slid aside into a three-dimensional “scratch pad” everyone could access. Kira dropped Fortitude into the workspace and added six fighters.

  “We can assume two squadrons are aboard the carrier,” she noted. “That’s our starting point…and then we’ll make contingency plans for if they’re all deployed.”

  Putting together the first cut of the plan took three exhausting hours. When it was finally over, Kira wasn’t even sure it was good.

  She was sure that there was no point in grinding the twelve most expensive minds in her fleet against it. The holograms winked out and she was left alone with Deception’s senior officers—and realized Zoric, Cartman and Milani were all regarding her and Konrad like hungry owls staring at a field mouse.

  “When did either of you last sleep?” Milani asked, the ground-force commander, as usual, faster off the draw than everyone else.

  “On the runabout,” Konrad replied. “I think Kira was sleeping in the pilot seat when you all arrived.”

  “On a shuttle,” the mercenary commando echoed. “In the pilot seat…and then you decided to run an hour-long briefing and three-hour planning session.”

  They turned to Kavitha Zoric.

  “Captain, permission to call the company CEO an idiot and have commandos drag her to her quarters to make sure she sleeps?”

  Zoric chuckled, but her gaze was very focused on Kira.

  “Both the CEO and my XO need to go fall over,” she noted. “We nova in ten hours. If I see either of you before then, I will give Milani that permission.

  “Am I clear?”

  “Who pays who here, again?” Kira asked with false plaintiveness.

  “I own twenty percent of the company and I’m pretty sure I can get forty-nine percent of the shares to vote that you need to go lie down,” Zoric told her. “So. Boss. You’re no longer on covert ops duty, which means you need to be awake enough to think.”

  “She’s not wrong, Kira,” Konrad told her.

  “My plan was to go to bed next,” Kira replied, her plaintiveness slightly less false now as her senior subordinates—her friends—ganged up to mother her.

  “Then shoo,” Zoric said. “Go.”

  34

  Deception had a fully functional flag deck, designed to act as the home base of a senior Commodore or junior Admiral leading a cruiser group. The K70-class cruisers had originally been designed as independent capital ships operating with destroyer support, after all.

  Even when they’d grown too obsolete to risk being deployed where heavier Apollon ships could find them, they’d kept the facilities—and now Kira was making full use of them again.

  Which meant that right now she was watching sixty nova fighters make an enthusiastic attack pass on empty space. The target, of course, was simulated in their systems. So were their guns and even their multiphasic jammers.

  While Memorial Force was currently alone at the trade-route stop, they didn’t want to hash up real space for other people. While multiphasic jamming was only fully effective within a light-second of the emitter, the chaos traveled outward at lightspeed and could ruin someone’s day if it hit at the wrong time.

  “Your people are good,” she told the man standing next to her. “I’m impressed.”

  “I handpicked the best from the volunteers,” Colonel Teige “Helmet” Sagairt told her. The brilliantly copper-haired man grinned. “You’ve made quite an impression, you know. I had complaints from people who didn’t make the list of pilots we were lending you.”

  “To be sent into a fight you knew nothing about beyond that it was outside the Syntactic Cluster and I was getting paid for it,” Kira murmured. “I’m actually touched.”

  “You came from nowhere and saved our planet and our Cluster at least twice, Commodore,” Sagairt said. “I know you were paid for it and paid well, but money doesn’t clear some debts. The Redward Royal Fleet’s nova-fighter wings exist because of you, and we know it.

  “Plus, I think everybody figured you weren’t going that far unless you were sticking a finger in Equilibrium’s eyes—and the RRF has its own accounts to settle with those assholes.”

  “That’s true enough,” Kira agreed. “I’ll admit, I was surprised to get you.”

  He chuckled.

  “You’ve heard the rumors, then,” he said.

  “That you’re supposed to be getting stars and put in charge of a semi-independent fighter corps?” she asked drily.

  “Those ones, yep,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Kira looked away from him to watch Raccoon’s Fastball bombers carry out a perfectly sequenced strike on a virtual cruiser with virtual torpedoes. For a group of pilots that had never seen a bomber a year earlier, her bomber crews were smooth as silk.

  “Are you trying to avoid that promotion?” she said.

  He laughed at that, then winced as he looked at the screen behind her.

  “What?”

  “Well, your Raccoon-Alpha and -Bravo squadrons just pincered my poor Deception-Deltas,” he told her. “I’m checking the metrics…yeah, that dogfight was a bloody massacre.” He shook his head. “My people are not up to speed with yours yet.”

  “My people are also learning, most of them,” Kira admitted. “I’m worried about these Blue Scarlets. We’ve got the numbers edge, but everything I’m seeing says the new Hussars can match the PNCs and Sinisters for gunpower and the Hoplites for maneuverability.”

  She shook her head.

  “A heavy fighter that can dance with my interceptors and shoot with my fighter-bombers is not what I want on the other side,” she admitted. “Though, to be fair, they have to leave their torpedo behind to match the Hoplite-IV’s maneuverability.”

  Her Hoplites only barely had enough plasma-cannon firepower to really threaten a real warship. The PNC-115s, on the other hand, were a decent threat even without their torpedoes, as were the Weltraumpanzers.

  The new Hussars carried a single torpedo, like her Hoplites, and, also like her Hoplites, suffered for maneuverability when they did so. Even with the torps, the Hussars weren’t a threat to Deception…but the threat for this operation was their nova drives, not their weapons.

  “And who knows if they’re carrying them,” Sagairt agreed. He shook his head. “As for the promotion they’re talking about, when I say it’s why I’m ‘here,’ I mean ‘here on this flag deck with you,’” he clarified.

  “I’m here to learn how to command a nova-fighter group from the best example I have available,” he told her. “Do I think you’re perfect? No. Do I think you’re damn good at this job? Yes.

  “Plus, you’re around and you were willing to let me join you to observe the exercise,” he continued. “Availability makes up for a lot of shortcomings, Commodore.”

  “I’m both flattered and vaguely insulted, Colonel,” she told him, but she laughed. “Seriously, you’re, what, apprenticing yourself to me for this mission?”

  “Between you and Cartman, I’m getting a good feel for a completely different way of running an organization of nova fighters,” he pointed out. “And I’m watching you manage the nova fighters from the half-step back I’m going to need to use once they hang those stars on me.

  “It’s a learning experience for me, and one that will serve both me and Redward well.”

  He smiled sharply.

  “And if the last time I strap on a nova fighter is to ram a torpedo through an Institute plan, I will regard it as time well spent.”

  Kira snorted, keeping her eyes on the exercise.

  “Well, if you want apprenti
cing, it’s a good call to mention it,” she observed. “Because half of what you need to know goes on in my head—assuming my methods are even worth observing. Apollo runs an entire three-month intensive training course for officers moving to starship or full nova-group command, but I never took it.”

  She’d been supposed to, but then Jay Moranis had warned her that the death of one of their other squadron commanders was fishy as all hell—and told her to retire and get out of Apollo.

  Gods, did she miss the man. John Estanza, too, the old troublemaker. The pair of them—comrades in Cobra Squadron and Equilibrium alike before they’d learned better—had put her where she was. They’d set her up to be successful, wealthy and the commander of a mercenary battle fleet that would have few equals when she was done.

  And she’d trade it all for having both of them back.

  “You’ve spent more time in the cockpit of a nova fighter than I have,” Sagairt said quietly. “You’ve commanded a nova-fighter squadron in more actions than I’ve flown in. You’re the best option I have to learn from, and I don’t give two flying rats whether you got the formal training or not.

  “I’m sure as hell not getting any formal training before I take command of an entire planetary nova-fighter force!” He grinned. “So, feel free to start narrating your thought process if you think it’ll help, boss.

  “Because I am ready to learn…and I need to.”

  “All right.” Kira swallowed and looked back at the map. “First thing to note, then, is that we’re watching by squadron right now,” she told him. “We’ll analyze by individual pilot afterward, but that will just be a quick run-through to make sure the squadron commanders don’t miss anything.

  “So, we’re comparing performances of squadrons—their maneuverability, their formation-keeping—and if you look here, you can see that Purlwise and Deception-Charlie squadron are still occasionally flying like they’re in fighter-bombers, not heavy fighters.”