Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

Sagairt nodded slowly as she continued, pointing out the places where the pilots and squadrons on the map were failing that could be fixed—and the places they were doing exceptionally that needed to be praised.

  If he was to lead Redward’s nova-fighter corps, he would need to be able to identify both.

  “All right, people,” Kira said into a virtual debrief when everyone was back aboard their respective motherships.

  Dozens of pilots and copilots looked up at her in various stages of exhaustion, and she smiled. It was a well-practiced smile, one she’d learned when she’d taken on her first squadron command eons ago.

  Her smile projected sympathy for their exhaustion, understanding of their failures…and a warning that she was about to lay some of those failures out for everyone to see.

  “For a first run at the series of simulated scenarios, that was decent,” she told them. “Normally, I might even say good. You understood the scenario parameters, were keeping your simulated and test novas to the right cycles, and flew like you knew what you were doing.”

  That was a higher bar than it sounded. Even the best pilots could lose track of the cycle time and spent sixty-five, seventy, even eighty seconds in the battlespace. The class two nova drive had a minimum cooldown of sixty seconds, and it was almost never a good idea to spend more than that around the enemy.

  “Against any opposition in the Syntactic Cluster, you’d be looking good,” she told them. “Against most pilots in the Rim, even, this would be a promising start.

  “Except everything we have says that the Blue Scarlet Combat Group is an elite formation, handpicked for this mission because they are guarding both the most powerful warship the Crest has built and their Prime Minister and the leadership of the political party that is well on its way to securing total control of the Crest.

  “We can safely assume, pilots, that we are looking at opponents just as capable, just as skilled, just as dangerous as the Cobra Squadron pilots who came after us for Equilibrium.”

  Those veterans had easily taken two of the Cluster’s newly commissioned pilots with each of them when they’d gone down. Kira and her allies had smashed Cobra Squadron in the end, but the price—even excluding the loss of Conviction with John Estanza and Lakshmi Labelle—had been high.

  “So, today was…acceptable,” Kira warned them. “That said…”

  She looked around, meeting gaze after gaze in the physical briefing room aboard Deception and through the virtual link to Raccoon.

  “Performance today was acceptable,” she noted. “And that is against a metric of us needing to go up against an elite combat formation in less than two weeks.

  “Which means, pilots, we have work to do. But this is not a lost cause and we can take Blue Scarlet—and do it, I think, without losing a single damn one of you.

  “Because in my perfect future, people, I bring everybody home from this mess and I get a fleet carrier and we help the Crest short-stop a move to a one-party government and we stick a knife in Equilibrium’s back.”

  She could feel the energy in the room improve as she continued and her carefully practiced smile turned into a near-feral grin.

  “We are going to go over every single place today that you fell short of my hopes,” she told them, but that energy buoyed them. “Not because anyone is to blame but because those are where we need to practice on the next round.

  “Because very, very soon now, we are going to go up against the elite of the Navy of the Royal Crest and you, Memorial Force’s nova-fighter pilots, are going to make them look like amateurs.

  “Who’s with me?”

  35

  The final debrief was a lot smoother than the first one. Kira even let Sagairt lead the briefing as practice, which her people were taking in good humor as he walked through the multiple sequences of their training program.

  When the RRF officer finally sat down, Kira stepped up and gestured for everyone to pay attention to her. The crowd was expanded over the usual, and they were actually on Deception’s flight deck, to allow for space for the officers from the other ships and for at least all of the squadron commanders to be physically present aboard the flagship.

  “Colonel Sagairt has been suffering from the unfortunate fate of having volunteered to be apprenticed to me for this operation,” she told them, an explanation she hadn’t given any of the pilots prior to this.

  “I hope the process hasn’t been as awful for him as I fear,” she continued to a chorus of chuckles. “But here we are, everyone. For the terminally unobservant, we are currently sitting three light-weeks from the Crest System, with the navigation departments already working on the novas to drop the fighters and ships of the strike into the correct positions at the correct time.

  “It is…” she paused, letting the timer in her headware tick down, then continued dramatically. “T minus thirty-six hours exactly.

  “This was our final training run. You will spend the next thirty-six hours resting and preparing for heavy combat,” she continued. “I’m not going to stop you doing dogfighting exercises or anything like that, but there will be no more scheduled training between now and T zero.”

  She gave them a moment, smiling.

  “Unfortunately, those of you paying attention may also remember that Memorial Force brought along a particular regulation from the Apollo System Defense Force,” she told them. “And that is that no one is permitted alcohol in the thirty hours before a planned combat operation.”

  Kira waved around the flight deck.

  “That includes me, the spacers, all the officers, but is mostly meant for you lot,” she told the pilots. “But since that deadline doesn’t kick in for six hours, most of you have encountered the Apollo pre-mission tradition of the strike party.”

  Stewards were rolling tables into the room behind her people, quickly forming a near-solid line across the eight-meter-wide fighter deck.

  “Deception’s stewards have outdone themselves with a spectacular spread for you,” she told them. “Most of the crew will be getting the same spread in their messes, but this is the big party. It’s the one with the Commodore!”

  That got her more laughs, but most of her people were eyeing the food and drink behind them now.

  “I’m not going to keep speechifying,” she promised. “You’ve done good, people. We’re as ready as we are going to be. So go, eat, drink, be merry.”

  She didn’t finish the thought aloud, but she knew most of the older pilots would do it automatically.

  Eat, drink and be merry—for tomorrow we die.

  Kira knew that the Commodore could only stay at the party for so long. Her presence would inevitably suppress the enthusiasm of the event—though there were aspects of that she was planning for as she carefully positioned herself near the punch table.

  She was just in time, in fact, and caught Evgenia Michel’s hand as the destroyer Captain was about to add something to one of the bowls.

  “Ev,” she said warningly. “Just what is that?”

  “A mild thirty-second hallucinogen,” Michel said cheerfully. “Well, it is when mixed with alcohol, anyway. It’s completely neutralized by the cannabinoids in those punches.” She waved the small pouch at several of the mixed drinks.

  “Hallucinogens are fine when people are consenting to them,” Kira pointed out. “They make for a terrible prank.”

  “That’s why it’s mild and short-duration, and Scimitar and I hang around to keep an eye on people,” Michel insisted.

  “How many times have we had this argument?” Kira asked.

  The destroyer Captain paused thoughtfully, her heavy metal legs adjusting with clearly intentional drama.

  “Twenty-three,” she answered. “Which is why Abdullah is coming this way with a sign.”

  “A sign?” Kira asked, not quite following—until the dark-eyed form of Abdullah “Scimitar” Colombera, Deception-Bravo’s squadron commander and Michel’s age-old partner in crime, appeared and placed a small tripod with a han
d-lettered sign next to the punch bowl Kira and Michel were arguing over.

  MOON JUICE. CONTAINS HALLUCINOGENS.

  “Now can I add the powder?” Michel asked with a laugh.

  “You’re still supervising the damn bowl, kids,” Kira told the two officers, chuckling herself. Consent was the critical part. Slipping drugs into the drinks was a prank she couldn’t allow—at least two-thirds of the prank at this point was the knowledge on Michel and Colombera’s parts that Kira or Zoric would catch them—but a labeled hallucinogenic drink was…fine.

  “Of course,” Colombera agreed cheerfully. “But if you call us kids, do we have to start calling you the Old Lady?”

  “If you call the Commodore the Old Lady anywhere that I can hear you, you might start finding the systems in your quarters surprisingly glitchy,” Konrad told the two Apollon officers as he materialized. “I won’t do anything to damage the ship, but I understand that unexpected cold showers are fantastic for increasing efficiency!”

  Michel shivered dramatically.

  “Be good, Scimitar,” she told her partner in crime. “I don’t trust my engineer not to do exactly what Bueller tells her.”

  “That’s because Em Hoang knows what’s good for her,” Konrad replied. “Something I’m not entirely sure either of you has ever worked out.”

  “Please, Konrad, neither of them is past thirty-two,” Kira said. “Their brains haven’t fully developed yet.”

  “Yet you gave one of them a destroyer,” he pointed out.

  “I didn’t say my brain had fully developed.” She scooped up two chilled bottles of beer and passed one to her boyfriend.

  “Now, are you two done seeing if you can make me jump?” she asked her pranksters.

  “That’s the last thing involving spiking the punch, yes,” Michel said virtuously.

  “If it wasn’t so unethical I twitch to think about it, I’d have Konrad shut down your legs to protect everyone else,” Kira told the younger woman firmly. “Nothing injurious. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Michel said crisply. “We did learn a sense of proportion along the way, didn’t we, Scimitar?”

  “No, Ev,” Colombera corrected. “I learned a sense of proportion. You learned to listen to me.”

  Kira soon found herself holding up a wall, with Konrad, Zoric and McCaig gathered around her. It was hard for the senior officers to get involved in the party—Michel was managing it right now, but Kira suspected that it would become harder for the young woman as time went on.

  “Are we ready?” Zoric asked softly.

  “Fighters are,” Kira told her. “Maybe more training would help, but there’s a point where you just have to accept that you’re as good as you’re going to get in the time you have. If we make them train up to the final moment of the strike, they’ll be exhausted when they start.

  “So, we rest them for a day and then we go in.”

  “I’m not liking being the delivery vehicle for the commandos rather than leading them,” McCaig rumbled. “Milani was always my best, and they know the job as well as I do, but…it’s hard to let go.”

  “I can’t argue,” Kira admitted. “I’m flying a nova fighter in the strike.”

  “Which we’d say you had no business doing if you weren’t one of the two or three best pilots in Memorial Force,” Konrad said.

  She truly appreciated that her lover hadn’t even tried arguing with her on that. Konrad Bueller had pushed back on her taking a nova fighter out before—and when he’d done so, he’d been right. And part of how she knew that was how often he didn’t push back on it.

  “Are the commandos ready?” Kira asked McCaig.

  “Our people are good. Redward’s are…better,” he conceded. “Once everyone’s in armor, soldier boosts don’t matter much, but the fact that the RA commandos are boosted to eleven certainly doesn’t hurt them.

  “Milani knows what they’re doing, and they’ve been running virtual training ops the whole time. The timing is everything, but once the destroyers are in the battlespace, the shuttles will be in place in under ninety seconds.”

  “And then you’ll be gone,” Kira noted with a sigh. “This whole thing is risky as hell and swings on what Panosyan does on the Crest itself.”

  “No updates from them?” Zoric asked.

  “No, and we weren’t expecting any,” Kira told them. “The plan is what it is, people. We also need to relax, even if none of us are good at it.”

  “What are you implying, sir? That Memorial Force’s senior officers may be workaholics?” McCaig asked. “I, for one, am offended by the suggestion that I am less than brilliant at anything I put my mind to.”

  Kira had to laugh at the big man and then kept smiling as Mel Cartman materialized out of the crowd.

  The Apollon Commander, Nova Group, was carrying an entire case of chilled beers that she started passing out.

  “I figured none of you were going to be in the middle of the crowd, and I knew Kira would be finishing her first beer about now,” Cartman told them.

  Kira traded her now-empty bottle for one of the full bottles in the case. Once all of the bottles in the case were swapped for empty, a small light on the case told them to put it on the floor—an artificial-stupid steward support drone was coming to collect it.

  “Cartman and I have been doing these parties for a long time,” Kira observed. “She has the timelines down to an art.”

  “And this one is better for everyone than just the old Three-Oh-Three hands getting sloshed together,” Cartman said. “That just depresses Dinesha. He keeps looking around and expecting to see Joseph.”

  Kira nodded.

  “Where is Patel?” she asked. Raccoon’s Commander, Nova Group, was there somewhere.

  “Getting plied with drinks by Tamboli,” Cartman said. “I do believe my flight-deck boss is testing to see if he’s sufficiently recovered to be seduced.”

  Dilshad Tamboli was the intentionally androgynous former shuttle maintenance shop boss who ran Deception’s fighter deck. To Kira’s knowledge, Dinesha Patel was bisexual but monogamous, so any interest on Tamboli’s part would have been unrequited while Joseph Hoffman had lived.

  It might still be now. Grief was a funny thing—but Kira didn’t begrudge Tamboli trying, so long as they didn’t push hard enough to upset or hurt Patel.

  “Is someone keeping an eye on that?” she murmured.

  “Yeah,” Cartman agreed. “Milani.”

  “That seems helpful,” Kira said. “Good.”

  Milani was the only person at the party in full body armor, which made them an extremely handy chaperone and watcher. They were capable of both subtlety and a lack thereof as they saw fit—and Kira trusted their judgment.

  “Everything seems to be safely in order,” Konrad observed. “Should we be considering retiring and letting the party carry on?”

  Zoric chuckled knowingly.

  “I’m going to keep an eye on things for a bit still,” she noted. “If, say, my CEO and XO want to go bang like bunnies, I’m sure I’ll be able to handle the situation without them.”

  Konrad almost managed to not blush that time. It was a faint coloring, one that Kira and the others likely only saw because they were expecting it.

  “I don’t know if that’s your executive officer’s plan,” Kira told Zoric, winking at her boyfriend, “but it’s definitely mine.”

  36

  There was a moment in the wait where everything shrank down to the timer. It was on the screens in the nova fighter around Kira. It was in her headware. Everything else was secondary to the countdown to T zero.

  Five minutes.

  Kira forced herself to exhale, running her hands over the familiar lines and controls of the Hoplite-IV nova fighter. Most of the interceptors in Memorial Force were clones now. They had the fabricators for manufacturing Hoplite-IV parts and had used those, combined with Redward-built class two nova drives and Harrington coils, to build exact duplicates.

  Her
fighter wasn’t. It was one of the original six nova fighters she’d smuggled out of Apollo with her. She’d arrived in Redward with a duffle bag full of cash, a lawyer’s address and six nova fighters.

  So many things had changed, but her Hoplite-IV hadn’t.

  She smiled as she remembered that wasn’t exactly true. Just past where her right hand normally sat was a small statuette. Formed by hand out of bits of scrap metal from Conviction, the model was hardly a thing of great artistic beauty. It was a crude facsimile of a Hoplite interceptor flying over a mountain, only really identifiable as such if you knew the intent.

  But Konrad Bueller had made it for her with his own hands as a favor and a good-luck charm. The fighter flew over the mountain, after all, and that was supposed to represent that she’d always rise above any obstacles.

  It was silly and ugly and dumb and beautiful and thoughtful and romantic—and she loved it more than words could say.

  Three minutes.

  Kira carefully breathed in, then out again, and opened a channel.

  “All squadron commanders, check in,” she ordered. “Confirm fuel and ammunition status for your squadrons.”

  There shouldn’t be any surprises there, but they had the time. Every fighter was in space around her, almost seventy nova fighters and bombers waiting for the order.

  “Deception-Alpha reports hundred percent fuel, hundred percent ammunition. No torpedoes,” Cartman reported almost instantly.

  Ammunition for a nova fighter was the plasma capacitors that fed their close-range cannon. They could be refilled from the microfusion plant that powered the starfighter—but not at nearly the pace they emptied. Usually, a fighter would use up half of their capacitors in a sixty-second pass and recharge about two-thirds of what they’d lost in the sixty-second pause before the next strike.

  “Raccoon-Alpha reports hundred percent fuel and capacitors. No torpedoes,” Patel’s voice said crisply.

  That covered both of her CNGs and their direct squadrons. Both were interceptor squadrons of Hoplite clones. Carrying their torpedoes would have sacrificed the maneuverability they were going to need—and they weren’t planning on destroying Fortitude.