5

Conviction’s flight deck made Deception’s look like the squeezed-in compromise it was. Cramming twenty starfighters into a K70-class cruiser had taken impressive ingenuity on the part of the ship’s designers.

Conviction was built around her flight deck, capable of serving up to sixty starfighters. It also fit in search-and-rescue craft, transport shuttles and a landing place for visiting shuttles like the one carrying Deception’s senior officers.

Kira was the first one off the shuttle, taking in the familiar scent of a working flight deck with a deep inhalation. There was no greeting party waiting for them—the mercenaries might run warships, but they didn’t run anything resembling a proper military.

“Demirci, welcome back,” a familiar deep voice boomed. Angel Waldroup, the broad-shouldered and muscular deck boss, emerged from behind a moving cart of supplies. “Hearing all kinds of crazy shit about what went down at Lastward.”

“Most of it’s probably true,” Kira replied, glancing behind her to check in on her boyfriend and Zoric. “Clan ships tried to jump the King and Queen’s transport—backed up by a bunch of Crest nova fighters that no one outside the fight ever saw.”

“Shit,” Waldroup cursed. “Work for us?”

“Almost certainly,” Kira agreed. “But for you? I lost three Hoplites and I’m expecting new work from the RRF within the week at most. I need to steal three planes.”

Waldroup drew herself up and glared.

“I’ve only barely got the squadrons up to strength as it is,” she said. “I haven’t even managed to get the replicator pattern for the Viers working yet.”

“They’re my birds,” Kira pointed out. “And Conviction is in dry dock for weeks, at least.”

“Argue it with Hoffman, I guess,” the deck boss said grouchily. “He’s sacked out right now, but I can get someone to wake him.”

“I sent him a message,” Kira said. “But if he’s asleep, yeah. We’ve got a meeting with Estanza and we need the top hands.

“Things might be about to get messy.”

“Things haven’t been messy?” Waldroup asked. “The man getting off the shuttle behind you used to be a Brisingr officer!”

Bueller stepped up beside Kira and gave the woman—native of a Fringe system at least six hundred light-years away—a broad grin.

“Switching to a mercenary made things much less complicated for me, I’ll admit,” he told her. “But I’m not sure that’s Kira’s point.”

“Things have been messy, but not of late,” Kira told the others as Zoric stepped up on the other side of her. “After we drove off Equilibrium’s mercenaries in Ypres, things have been pretty calm. The King and Queen apparently even got the factions to agree to a system-wide government, somehow.”

“I’ve been in the Syntactic Cluster for five years,” Waldroup noted. “I find that harder to believe than the interstellar conspiracy part!”

“The Yprian Federation,” Kira said. “A new light for the future, I guess.”

She shook her head.

“Anyway, we need to get to that meeting. I’ll ping Hoffman’s headware again—but you need to start prepping Hoplites for transport over to Deception.”

“Fine, fine.” Waldroup shook her head. “I guess they are your planes, after all.”

* * *

When Kira had first met John Estanza, she’d only really known of him as Gold Cobra, one of the pilots of a near-legendary elite mercenary squadron from the outer Fringe and Inner Rim. Her own late CO had been Jay Moranis, White Cobra.

When she’d first arrived in the bridge-attached office she and her officers now entered, she’d found the man drunk as a skunk, with an impressive wet bar spread out along the wall behind him.

There was no trace of that drunkard in the solidly built older man sitting behind the desk today—and even less trace of the wet bar. The wall of booze had turned out to be mobile and was replaced with a small table with a coffee machine.

Today, Estanza’s heavy desk had been pulled closer to the wall to allow for a half-dozen seats to be set up in a rough circle that included the desk. Only one of the chairs in front of Estanza’s desk was occupied, the gaunt black form of Akuchi Mwangi leaning backward as he studied the new arrivals.

Mwangi was Conviction’s new executive officer, replacing Zoric after Kira had stolen the woman to command her cruiser. He was a long-standing member of the mercenary crew, though not one Kira had met much before he’d risen to second-in-command of the carrier.

“Hoffman is on his way up,” Estanza told her. “As is Hersch. I got the impression that we were going to be having some interesting discussions.”

Joseph “Longknife” Hoffman was the man Kira had picked to replace her as Conviction’s acting CNG, but Ruben “Gizmo” Hersch headed up the Darkwing flight group, the pilots who flew the PNC-115 fighter-bombers that provided Conviction’s heavy punch.

“I’ll wait until they’re here, then,” Kira said. “Basic summary is that the Clans jumped the royals, and the Cluster is going to get complicated again. We lost three fighters and a pilot. I’ll be borrowing three Hoplites to fill the hole, since Conviction is in for repairs.”

“That makes sense,” Estanza told her. “Though…”

The door slid open to reveal Conviction’s two senior fighter commanders standing together. Joseph Hoffman was just as gaunt as Mwangi, but only of average height and pale-skinned from a life aboard spaceships. Ruben Hersch was equally pale, but his eyes and hair were far darker than Hoffman’s Aryan features.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Estanza said, indicating the remaining chairs. “Kira, you may as well go back to the beginning, and we’ll talk about your fighters at the end.”

“All right.” Kira glanced around the group. Outside of Mwangi and Bueller, she’d known everyone in the room for at least a year and regarded them all as friends. She was still getting to know Mwangi, too. Bueller, on the other hand, was her lover and she was more comfortable with him than the time she’d known him might suggest.

Deception’s exercises were intentionally scheduled to put us in the region of the short-stop that First Crown was using for her return nova,” she explained to the three Conviction officers who hadn’t known that. “We were about forty light-seconds away when she arrived, in position to see when she was jumped by a flotilla of Costar Clans’ gunships.”

“The FTZ is going to need to deal with those people,” Hoffman said grimly. Neutralizing pirates was one of the key requirements to claim that a power was “in control” of a region. The point of a mutual-trade-and-protection pact like the Free Trade Zone was to make an area safe for trade.

“They’ll get to it,” Kira agreed. “The biggest problem today was that the gunships were as much a smoke screen as anything else. My wing were not the first nova fighters in the jamming zone.”

She had everyone’s attention now.

“Someone had launched a full nova strike on First Crown. Thirty-two interceptors, tentatively identified as Veles-Four-type fighters from Crest, and eight bombers,” she listed off. “The bombers were Uglies, assembled from parts from a dozen systems, but they were fully functioning proper torpedo platforms. Deception ending up taking most of their salvo, but her armor and dispersion networks are enough better than Redward’s that we’re really just looking at surface damage.

“We got lucky. The same number of torpedoes could have done a lot more damage if they’d been properly sequenced, but they thought they were shooting at First Crown.”

Deception’s armor diffused sixty-five percent of the impact energy of the first plasma bursts that hit it. That ratio degraded noticeably as more hits came through, but not as much against simultaneous impacts.

First Crown’s armor, on the other hand, was only rated for a dispersal of somewhere between thirty and forty percent. Kira had never got a solid number out of the RRF on that metric.

“The nova fighters retreated in good order after we and First Crown took out a quarter of the bombers and a third of the interceptors,” she continued. “The gunships continued to press the attack until over three-quarters of them had been destroyed, then bailed as well.

“They were focused on Crown,” Kira concluded. “We only lost three fighters and one pilot, but the attackers were pros.”

“Any idea who?” Hoffman asked. “The Clans definitely don’t have forty Crest-built fighters.”

“A few Brisingr ones from the Institute’s meddling, but that’s it,” she agreed. “Redward Intelligence is noting that the flight group would be exactly right for a Liberty-class strike carrier—and the Institute’s mercs had one of those at Ypres.”

“That would fit with the Crest-built fighters,” Hersch agreed. “Assuming someone wasn’t playing games.”

“There’s an RRF destroyer and a gunship division sweeping the battlespace for their survivors, so we should have some answers on that front soon,” Kira said. “Joseph, I need you to sign off on moving three more Hoplites over to Deception. I don’t like stealing your fighters, but we’re going to need a full deck on Deception sooner rather than later.”

“And we are back to where we were when you gentlemen arrived,” Estanza interjected. “May I make a suggestion, Kira?”

“You’re the man in charge around here,” she said. “I’m just a subcontractor.”

Just,” Estanza echoed. “The subcontractor with the most powerful warship in the Cluster. I feel a bit outclassed here.”

He grinned to remove any bite from his words.

“But my thought is that Conviction is in dry dock for at least sixteen weeks and Deception is going to get called up for whatever the RRF does next,” he reminded everyone. “I suggest we rearrange the fighter wings again. Move the greenest pilots from Deception to Conviction and send the vets who aren’t commanding squadrons the other way.

“That way, we can run exercises here with the pilots who need them, and you have old hands on Deception. Not just a full deck but an experienced deck.”

“There’s only one way to get an experienced deck,” Kira warned, but she nodded. “We’ll go over it.” She gestured to Hoffman and Hersch. “See who we can best move.”

“What happens next?” Mwangi asked, his voice soft.

“The nova fighter part of the attack is almost certainly Equilibrium-backed,” Kira said. “The Queen thinks that the Institute has their fingers back into the Clans—but it doesn’t really matter.”

“Why not?” the carrier XO asked.

“Local politics,” Estanza and Zoric said simultaneously, in a chorus that reminded Kira that Zoric had been the old man’s XO for a long time. Estanza leaned back and gestured for the newly minted cruiser Captain to speak.

“Redward’s Parliament has long been divided into three camps on the Costar Clans,” Zoric explained. “Basically: contain them, ignore them, destroy them. The theory behind containment has always been that humanitarian efforts in the Costar systems will remove the underlying desperation that drives their raids.

“So, they destroy any Clans forces that attack shipping on the one hand and try to lift the actual home stations out of their desperate poverty on the other.” Zoric shook her head. “My own impression is somewhat uneducated and biased by the RRF’s prejudices, but it does appear to be working.

“But the cost is too damn high. It requires more patrols and countermeasures to engage the Clans in the act of piracy than to eliminate their anchorages.” She shrugged. “The ‘Ignore’ grouping is pretty small, basically the last bastion of Redward isolationism, and very much an ‘I’ve got mine’ movement.

“Basically, they hold that doing more than protecting Redward shipping is a waste of money, and the Clans should be ignored if they’re not bothering us. It’s a bloody stupid position, especially given the creation of the SCFTZ and the definite policy and plans of the King and government.”

“So, they’ve been following containment as a policy?” Mwangi asked.

“Exactly. But ‘Destroy’ has always been a powerful force in Parliament, not least because it’s the preferred choice of many of the RRF’s senior officers. Different levels involved, but they want to move against the Clans’ home stations and colonies and destroy them as anchorages.

“Since most of the Clans’ bases are also their homes and are marginal at best, this isn’t a…”

Zoric trailed off.

“It’s genocide,” Kira said bluntly. “Which is why King Larry and Queen Sonia hate it as an option. There are people in the ‘Destroy’ grouping who recognize the consequences of what they’re suggesting and have ideas for reducing the impact, but in the main, they see pirate bases as legitimate targets.

“Regardless of whether those bases are home to thousands of innocents who are one system failure away from starvation or asphyxiation.”

“But the Clans keep attacking,” Estanza said grimly. “And while the King holds together a coalition in Parliament, much of that is personal loyalty. A lot of people who’d follow him on the current plan because it’s his plan are going to see this attack as spitting in the face of their help.”

“That was what he told me, yes,” Kira agreed. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to keep their plan as it is. He said something about ‘getting out ahead’ of the demands, so I hope he can come up with a better plan.”

“Either way, he’s probably going to be hiring Deception,” Estanza told her. “But…”

“It depends on the plan,” Kira said bluntly. “I have enough money that I can and will pay back my bloody retainer if they want to contract me for genocide.”

She felt as much as heard Bueller shift uncomfortably next to her. She didn’t think anyone was explicitly looking at Deception’s ex-Equilibrium executive officer, but the thought had to be on everyone’s minds.

The reason Konrad Bueller and dozens of his shipmates were now part of Deception’s mercenary crew was because the ship had committed genocide under Institute orders. That had been a step too far for many of them, and they’d joined her after she’d taken them prisoner.

Their help was the only reason Deception had managed to be involved in the Battle of Ypres at all…but they’d all been aboard her and involved when then-K79-L had murdered thousands of innocent people in the DLI-O54 System.

“I can’t see King Larry signing off on any operation that would count as that,” Estanza admitted. “Though he may well end up counting on our refusing an immoral contract as part of his argument against it. The RRF is stretched damn thin at the moment.”

“Their two new cruisers are still at least a year from completion, even after their shipbuilders and I went through everything I could think of to improve their construction time,” Bueller said quietly.

Most of what he’d contributed, as Kira understood, was schematics for more efficient equipment. The actual processes and people involved were already effective. He’d just helped them build better gear.

“The big ones are going to be at least twice that,” Estanza agreed. “So, for the foreseeable future, Redward is running around with three cruisers and three carriers plus us. Including Deception, there’s only seven cruisers in the entire sector.”

“If my being unwilling to commit war crimes for Redward helps keep things stable, I’ll call it a win,” Kira replied. “Details are messy, though. It’s not like I’m going to go sit in their Parliament and listen to the arguments.”

“RRF will brief us when the contracts come up,” Zoric said calmly. “Unless the Queen decides to invite you to another private party.”

Kira snorted. Queen Sonia had a tradition of holding small private parties with carefully selected guests that she felt would do well out of knowing each other. The first of those parties Kira had been invited to, though, had been to recruit her for the covert op that had ended in her ownership of Deception.

“She probably will, but I doubt I’m getting another covert-operation briefing at a party,” she told them. “The last one I went to was just a party.”

“The contract should technically come through me,” Estanza noted. “I’ll keep an eye on the terms and plans—though if it’s just Deception being deployed, I’m leaving the final call to you, Kira.”

“Of course, sir,” Kira said. “I’m looking forward to Conviction not being quite as vulnerable. The refit specs I saw looked promising.”

“I haven’t had a yard I trusted that was capable of doing the work needed before,” the carrier’s Captain admitted. “Redward’s earned that trust, at least, even as we’ve helped them get to the point where they can do the work.

I’m looking forward to flying something with actual guns again.”

The gathered officers chuckled, but Kira spotted the moment where Estanza froze and flicked his eyes upward—an almost-universal tic of people receiving an unexpected headware message.

“Link to the office audio and repeat, please,” he ordered aloud.

A moment later, the voice of one of Conviction’s com techs echoed through the room.

“Sir, we have an unknown shuttle on approach to Conviction and requesting docking clearance,” the young man reported. “They have no identity or authentication codes the system recognizes, but we’re only detecting one person aboard.

“He has identified himself as ‘Platinum Cobra’ and says he’s an old friend of yours, Captain.”

Kira inhaled sharply. Moranis had sent her out to Redward with his old White Cobra handle as a key to get into Estanza’s presence, but she’d had a few other points in her favor: not least, six nova fighters in the time before Redward had acquired a class two nova-drive factory.

“That’s…” Estanza trailed off. “I was going to say impossible, but I suppose I don’t know that Lars Ivarsson is dead. Send my headware whatever imagery or audio you got, son.”

He paused again, watching a video only he could see, then swallowed hard.

“The decades haven’t been as bad for him as I figured,” he admitted. “That’s Ivarsson. That’s Platinum Cobra.”

“Sir…Cobra were Equilibrium,” Kira warned quietly. Everyone in the room knew that both Konrad Bueller and John Estanza were former Equilibrium Institute operatives. Their experiences made the existence of the organization inarguable to their comrades.

“We deserted,” Estanza argued. “But…you’re right. I’m not sure why he’d be here.” He exhaled.

“Mwangi, get back to the bridge,” he ordered. “Scan that shuttle for everything.” He looked around the office. “Kira, could you and Bueller join me in a meeting room by the flight deck?

“We’ll brief everyone else after, but I think we want this quiet and private—but bringing both of the ex-Equilibrium agents and my second-in-command makes sense to me!”

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