Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  But only three people came off the shuttle. Voski led the way, still in full uniform, accompanied by two junior-looking Army of the Royal Crest officers with attaché cases.

  “They’re clear,” Milani announced loudly after the troopers finished their scans.

  Kira glanced over at Jeong, who was looking…concerned. Not yet worried, but she clearly hadn’t been expecting a Dinastik Pahak general.

  Concealing a smirk, Kira crossed to meet Voski and gave them a crisp salute. She was in her own fanciest dress uniform, to live up to the occasion.

  “Have you considered our offer, Commodore Demirci?” Voski asked quietly, clearly managing their voice so the Ministers couldn’t hear them.

  “I have, and I intend to hold you to the original contract,” Kira replied. “You owe me ownership papers, General.”

  “And twenty million crests,” they agreed. “Lieutenant Avakian. The red case, if you please. Lieutenant Hourig, both of your cases, please.”

  The left-hand aide checked the markers on the top of the two attaché cases he was carrying. He stepped forward and handed Voski one of them, then stepped back.

  Voski entered a security code and popped the secured case open, presenting it to Kira open-side first.

  The contents were sparse. A small stack of physical paper and a single black datachip. The contracts and paperwork that would confirm to all the galaxy that Memorial Force were the legitimate owners of Fortitude.

  “I told them,” they noted with a smile. “Congratulations on your new carrier, Commodore.”

  Kira nodded and took the case. It closed easily, with a small green light on the controls telling her that it wasn’t locked.

  Voski then took one case from the second aide and gestured for her to open the other one. Both cases were swiftly presented to Kira. This pair was much more heavily packed, with each of the finger-sized gray datachips representing a bearer credit for fifty thousand crests—two hundred chips per case.

  Kira picked a chip at random and scanned it with her headware, confirming the contents. Then she gestured for the commandos to take the cases.

  “I believe that is all but one piece of our business complete, then,” she told Voski.

  “Two, really,” the General replied. “Despite everything, you must understand neither you nor Memorial Force will be welcome in the Crest Sector for quite some time. Once this exchange is complete, I must ask that you leave the Sector as expeditiously as possible.

  “For their private purposes, Jade says they hope to dine with you by the lake again,” Voski added, “but the Crown Zharang must protect the Royal Crest.”

  Kira wasn’t surprised in the slightest. If anything, she was actually warmed by the fact that Jade Panosyan and Voski were taking the effort to make it clear that the banishment was entirely non-personal.

  “Very well,” she told Voski. “May I ask one small favor in return?”

  “You may ask,” the General said carefully.

  “I want to observe the exchange from here,” Kira said.

  Voski clearly swallowed a chuckle.

  “Very well, Commodore Demirci. She is, after all, your ship now.”

  The two army lieutenants returned back into the ship, replaced by a sharp-faced group of eight middle-aged people in Crest civilian-style angular suits who could have passed for bodyguards. They spread out to form a vague receiving line in front of the shuttle.

  “Milani, let them go,” Kira ordered.

  The heavy suit of armor with the red dragon draped over its shoulders flashed her a thumbs-up. The commandos released Maral Jeong and her Ministers simultaneously, unlocking their manacles and pointing them across the flight bay.

  Maral Jeong led the way instantly, striding across the deck like she owned the place. Her glare was reserved for Kira as she reached the shuttle.

  “I am glad we reached some kind of deal in the end,” she noted. “But you will find there are consequences for all that has happened.”

  “Oh, I know,” Kira agreed, then waved Jeong to the line of hard-faced bureaucrat types.

  The oldest-looking of them was a woman with pure white hair tied back into a tight bun that highlighted the sharp lines of her face as she stepped forward to look down at Jeong.

  “Em Maral Jeong?” she asked sharply.

  “You know who I am,” Jeong snapped.

  “Very well,” the official said. “Em Maral Jeong, you are under arrest for abuse of authority, receipt of illegal funds, conspiracy to conceal illegal funds, conspiracy to commit murder and treason.”

  The presumably former Prime Minister of the Crest just gaped at the Crest Planetary Police officer as a pair of handcuffs emerged from a hidden pocket of the suit and snapped onto Jeong’s wrists.

  The other CPP officers moved forward swiftly to sweep up the other Ministers. They were unrestrained for at most ninety seconds before the Crester police had them cuffed and were leading them onto the shuttle behind them.

  And Kira stood there, watching as the most delightful schadenfreude ran through her.

  Finally, only Voski remained on the flight deck, and they gave her a crisp salute.

  “You have twenty-four hours to discharge static or refuel here in Guadaloop if necessary,” they told her. “But I suggest you get on your way as soon as you can.

  “The situation here will be…complex for some time, and you and Fortitude will make for an aggravating factor we cannot afford.”

  “I understand,” Kira said. “Good luck, General.”

  54

  “Well. That’s done.”

  From the chorus of chuckles on the conference call, Kira’s phrasing was a little on the excessively mundane side.

  “We got paid, contract complete, ownership documents for Fortitude are now on digital and physical file,” Kira told them all. “Guadaloop is behind us, and now we just have the long and boring trip home.”

  Home.

  When had Redward become home? It had been a while ago, she realized.

  “And the equally boring but much more intense task of finding enough crew to get Fortitude up to snuff,” Zoric said. “Who do I need to punch out to get the captain’s seat on the carrier?”

  “There’s going to be a hell of a reorg when we get back to Redward,” Kira conceded. “And we all know that Redward is the home base until we can buy that carrier we’ve been promised.”

  “Are we going to have any money left after all the planned ships?” Vaduva asked, the purser still smiling as usual.

  “If we sit on our butts and do nothing for three years while Redward builds us a carrier, no,” Kira agreed. “But you knew that, being the one who handles my bookkeeping!”

  That got her more chuckles.

  “So, yes, we’re going to be working. And most of our contracts are going to look like this one in at least one respect: our ops zones are going to be weeks away from Redward. And, frankly, since I’m kind of attached to Redward at this point, I’m okay with that.”

  “Speaking as the man seconded from the RRF, I’m glad,” Sagairt noted. “I’m not staying, but I suspect some of our traded personnel may want to make the switch permanent. On both sides.”

  “We’ll have to sort that out with the RRF when we get back,” Kira agreed. “Hopefully, the commander of the RRF’s new fighter corps will be on our side.”

  Sagairt chuckled.

  “That seems like a safe assumption,” he told her.

  “Four weeks home, people,” Kira told them all. “Probably about the same just to get new crew and officers recruited—plus no matter what we do, we’ll need to fabricate ourselves some new fighters.”

  Conveniently, Fortitude’s computers had the specifications for several of the Crest’s newest nova fighters. Kira would be spending some time deciding whether the new designs were worth swapping over the entire fighter force—she liked the Hoplite-IV, but the Crest’s new Wolverine interceptors were an entirely new design. They might well be superior overall.
<
br />   It was the same with the Hussar-Sevens versus her Weltraumpanzer-Fünfs and PNC-115s. Most of her nova fighters were, by one source or another, contemporary to the Hoplite-IV. Given access to the latest and greatest of the Navy of the Royal Crest’s nova fighters…they had some work to do.

  “I guess there’s one question still in play,” Akuchi Mwangi admitted. Raccoon’s Captain looked thoughtful. “Are we going to keep Raccoon when we get back? The plan was to replace her with Fortitude entirely, after all.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a decision we even need to make yet,” Kira said. “We were planning on selling her back, yes, but there’s a lot to be said for an extra forty nova fighters when we get stuck in. If we rework things a bit and stop trying to cram extra fighters on her deck…Waldroup?”

  She looked at their senior deck boss, who shrugged.

  “She’s not called a junk carrier for nothing, sir,” Waldroup noted. “We can make her work better than she does, but I don’t think we can make her work well. And we do have another carrier to crew up now.”

  “Well, folks, we’ll think about it,” Kira said. Selling Raccoon back to Redward—or to another Syntactic Cluster power, potentially—would free up resources for a while.

  Even without it, Memorial Force was now one of the most powerful mercenary organizations in the Rim. Somehow, Kira wasn’t worried about them finding work.

  “Regardless, officers, friends.” She raised her coffee. “A toast. To Fortitude and Memorial Force. Long may we fly!”

  Thank you so much for reading Fortitude. Read on for a preview of Starship’s Mage, book 1 in the Starship’s Mage series.

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  Preview: Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart

  Enjoyed Fortitude? You may enjoy Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart.

  A ship that cannot leave

  A Mage that will not stay

  A meeting of desperations

  In a galaxy tied together by the magic of the elite Jump Mages, Damien Montgomery graduates into their numbers—only to discover that without connections, he can't find a ship and is stuck in the Sherwood system.

  Pirates attacked David Rice’s jump freighter, leaving him with a dead Mage and a damaged ship—stuck in Sherwood, where a grieving father has blacklisted him from hiring a replacement Jump Mage.

  When their desperate needs meet, Damien Montgomery is drawn into a conflict with the most powerful criminal organization in the galaxy—and to the attention of the Mage-King of Mars himself!

  1

  “Welcome aboard, Mage Montgomery,” the spacer waiting just inside the starship told him. “Captain Michaels is waiting in his office. If you’ll follow me, please?”

  Damien nodded as he carefully maneuvered himself through the zero-gravity boarding area. Behind him, a short metal boarding tube linked the central hub of the massive rotating rings of Sherwood Prime to the keel of the container ship Gentle Rains of Summer. He checked the personal computer wrapped around his left arm as discreetly as he could, making sure he was on time for his job interview with the Captain.

  “Our outer ribs are on a low rotation right now, as some of our thrusters are under repair,” the crewman warned Damien as he moved toward one of the doors on the outer walls of the main keel. “We’re only under about a tenth gee, so watch your step.”

  “That will be fine,” Damien told the man. He watched the spacer move from handhold to handhold up the ladder to the outer keel, and carefully followed suit. If necessary, he was able to control his own motion even in zero gravity, but Mages learned quickly that blatant, unnecessary use of magic didn’t make friends.

  Damien was shorter and lighter than the spacer, though, so he was slower and more careful with the handholds until they reached far enough out on the rotating outer keel for the pseudo-gravity to kick in. He settled onto his feet with a carefully concealed sigh of relief, straightening out his clothes and unconsciously checking on the gold medallion settled into the hollow of his throat.

  The medallion announced to all who saw it that Damien Montgomery had the Gift and was recognized by the Royal Orders and Guilds of the Protectorate of Humanity as a Mage. A member of one of those Orders would also recognize the symbols on it marking him as having completed a degree in Practical Thaumaturgy as well as being a fully qualified Jump Mage.

  The last was why he was aboard Gentle Rains of Summer. The container ship consisted of a central steady-state keel with the boarding pod at one end and the engines at the other, around which four “outer ribs” rotated to give the living and working spaces a semblance of gravity. She was a wondrous technological creation capable of accelerating at several gravities while carrying up to twelve million tons of fuel and cargo, but it was the silver runes inscribed throughout the interior of her hull that made her a starship. With those runes, a Mage like Damien could jump her up to a light-year in an instant.

  “This is the Captain’s office,” the spacer announced. He knocked on the hatch sharply and then stuck his head in. “The young Mage is here to see you, sir.”

  “Come in, come in,” the man behind the desk said loudly as the spacer gestured Damien into the room. “Montgomery, right?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Damien answered. “I’m here about the junior Ship’s Mage position?”

  Most starships that could afford it would have two Jump Mages aboard. A Mage was only able to jump so often without using up so much energy as to fatally burn out their brains, so having two aboard would double how fast the ship would move.

  “Yes, yes of course,” the Captain replied, gesturing for Damien to sit. “I’m Andrew Michaels, Captain of Gentle Rains of Summer. I’m afraid I owe you an apology.”

  Damien took the offered seat, glancing around the Captain’s cabin. It had the lived-in look of somewhere the occupant spent much of their time. The bookshelves, filing cabinet, and desk were all worn green ceramics, and the floating projected terminal on the desk was a model older than Damien himself.

  The only “decoration” in the room was a bronze plaque engraved with the silver runes that channeled mana to create magical effects once charged by a Mage.

  “An apology?” Damien asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid we couldn’t contact you earlier this morning,” Michaels told him, to which Damien nodded slowly. Sherwood Prime’s internal communications net was oddly spotty for the main orbital dock of a world of two billion souls. “An old friend called me this morning and I’ve given the Ship’s Mage position to her son. I would have let you know in advance, but once we couldn’t, I figured I owed you an explanation in person.”

  Damien swallowed. “Thank you, sir,” he said politely. He’d figured he’d at least get the interview, not be shut down almost before he’d introduced himself. “Is there any chance you’d be taking on a second junior Mage?” he asked carefully.

  The Captain had the good grace to look somewhat sheepish. “I’ve actually agreed to take on two juniors already,” he admitted. “Kyle and Grace McLaughlin; I would guess that you know them?”

  Damien nodded his recognition of the names of his classmates. The McLaughlin family were the core Mage family of the Sherwood system, traditionally providing the system’s Mage-Governor and generally acting as an established aristocracy. Kyle and Grace were two of six members of the family who’d gone through Jump Mage training with him—he knew them both well and had been “close” with Grace.

  “Thank you for your time, Captain,” he said politely. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be heading back to the station—I’ll need to see if any other ships have available slots.” He knew perfectly well that none did—and if any did, one of the o
ther McLaughlin youths would likely have already snapped it up.

  “I know it’s a point of pride not to lean on one’s parents,” Michaels said quietly, “but you really should see if your family knows a ship’s crew who owes them a favor.”

  Damien focused his gaze on the spell plaque above the Captain’s head. “I’m a Mage by Right, sir,” he said quietly. “My parents were bakers…and died years ago.”

  Mages by Blood were born to the core families of the Protectorate, the inherent nobility defined by the Compact that ended the Eugenics Wars of the twenty-second century. Mages by Right were identified by the testing every human child underwent at age thirteen. They had all the rights of Mages born of the main families, all of the powers and all of the official support from the officers of the Mage-King of Mars…but none of the family connections.

  “I’m sorry,” Captain Michaels said quietly.

  The young Mage shook his head in response, his gaze still on the spell plaque as his Gift traced the lines of power and he read the runes. He blinked at it confusedly. “Um, sir, what is that plaque supposed to do?” he asked, intentionally changing the subject.

  “It’s a security spell,” the Captain explained, seizing on the topic change. “It detects if anyone enters the office with hostile intent.”

  Damien traced the flow of energy through the runes and shook his head again. “You might want to have your senior Mage look at it,” he told the Captain. “The scribe used future imperative tenses instead of future-probabilistic. It’s actually slightly encouraging the chance of violence, not predicting it.”

  He turned his gaze back down to the Captain, blinking away the lines of magic. “Magic doesn’t predict the future very well, sir. If the plaque was detecting hostile intent, it would be obvious to you well before it triggered an alarm.”