Equilibrium, page 5
part #3 of Scattered Stars: Conviction Series
“The fundamental math and analysis have been tested a thousand times,” Ivarsson countered. “Given the projections, we cannot stand by and allow the societies we have seen flourish across human space fall and burn.”
“Even if it means destroying everything that makes them flourish? I can’t believe that anymore, Lars. I won’t. Redward’s leadership has a dream, a plan that worked on Old Earth, and I won’t let the Institute tear it down based on math.”
To Kira’s mind, they were more fighting against the Institute than for anyone, though she’d admit that she liked the people of Redward—and that she trusted King Larry and Queen Sonia more than she’d ever trusted the Council of Principals on Apollo.
“You used to understand,” Ivarsson said. “People like the leaders of Redward are too busy trying to do what’s ‘right’ to realize they need to do what’s necessary. Again and again we have seen it: the only answer for peace in a given region is a single unchallenged hegemonic power able to enforce that peace.
“If Redward won’t become that power here in the Syntactic Cluster, then the alliances they have built will fracture into fire and blood,” he concluded. “Which means that if Redward won’t become that power, the Institute has no choice but to make sure someone else does.
“Unfortunately, that requires breaking Redward’s power. But so long as King Larry will not do what is necessary, we have no choice.”
“You always have a choice, Lars Ivarsson,” John Estanza told him. “That was why we deserted. When I realized that the Institute would find ways to justify everything. The math might be wrong. It might not be.
“But I won’t let you shape all of humanity into a single mold because you think it’s safer.”
The room was quiet.
“The ends justify the means,” Bueller said into the silence after a moment. “It’s a seductive belief, Em Ivarsson. Especially when the end is as glorious an image as the Institute likes to project. But I wonder if you have ever spent time in the sectors you have supposedly made better.
“I was only with the Institute for a year. In that year, I saw more bloodshed than I did in three years of a goddamn war. There are means that cannot be justified by any ends. If your goal is peace, there is only so much bloodshed that can be stomached in its pursuit.”
“The goal is peace for all time,” Ivarsson reminded Bueller. “For that goal, I will sacrifice anything.”
He rose.
“It seems I have wasted my time, but old debts required the effort,” he told them. “John, I’d far rather be on the same side again, but I knew that wasn’t possible. I beg you to reconsider. A single eighth-rate heavy cruiser and a carrier that barely qualifies as ninth-rate anymore can’t turn back what’s coming.”
“That depends, in my experience, on the crews and pilots involved,” Estanza said. “Get off my ship, Lars. Platinum Cobra or no, the next time we meet, I’m going to kill you.”
The old mercenary’s voice was calm, collected…and utterly frigid.
“You can try,” Ivarsson told him. “But you’re not facing random mercenaries gathered from three hundred light-years of the Rim anymore, old friend. You’re facing Cobra Squadron…and you, of all people, should remember what that means.”
“Track that ship,” Kira suggested quietly as the Cobra Squadron shuttle drifted out of Conviction’s hangar. “That might give us some clue as to where he’s going.”
“Mwangi’s already on it,” Estanza said calmly. “I don’t expect it to do us much… Yeah, there he goes.”
Kira linked her headware into the sensors and blinked. The shuttle was gone.
“It had a class two nova drive,” Estanza told her. “I didn’t recognize it until I realized he was still with Cobra. Fuck.”
“How bad is it going to be?” Bueller asked. “Last I heard of Cobra Squadron, they weren’t even in the Rim.”
“That pretty much tells you the problem, doesn’t it?” Conviction’s Captain said grimly. “When I last flew for Cobra, we were uniformly equipped with Banshee-Nine-class heavy fighters. They were older planes, but they were from the Periphery, not even the Fringe.”
He shook his head. The Fringe was roughly the worlds from seven hundred to a thousand light-years away from Sol. The Periphery was the worlds from four hundred to seven hundred light-years away. The nearest Periphery System was eight hundred light-years from Redward.
“Thirty years ago, we were flying fifty-year-old fighters from a fifth-rate power in the Periphery while dealing with Fringe states,” he told them. “That meant those nova fighters were still better than most of the ones we fought.
“Even if Cobra hasn’t upgraded their gear since, well…” Estanza shook his head. “Those fighters were from a world six hundred light-years from Sol. We’re fifteen hundred light-years from Sol. Even an eighty-year-old Periphery nova fighter is probably equal to or better than the Viers aboard Deception.”
Kira sighed. It was generally considered a safe rule that for every ten light-years farther you were from Sol, technology was, on average, about a year and a half further behind. Especially military and other restricted techs.
It was almost two hundred light-years from Apollo and Brisingr to the Syntactic Cluster, and the Cluster’s wealthiest systems were easily thirty years behind her home world in military tech.
From six hundred light-years closer to humanity’s homeworld? The Banshees might be eighty years old, but they were still probably decades more advanced than anything her people had.
Multiphasic jamming was a great equalizer in the battlespace, but those fighters were still going to be an ugly handful. If they’d upgraded to newer fighters, even birds from the Fringe, Kira’s people could be in serious trouble.
“How many?” she asked.
“We had two covert carriers thirty years ago,” Estanza said grimly. “Each carried fifty fighters. So…at least a hundred, plus they definitely seem to have that Crest carrier running around for another forty.”
“At least that one seems to be flying Crest fighters,” Bueller said. “Not stuff that’s going to make us look like cavemen in rowboats.”
“The differences aren’t going to be that severe,” Kira countered. “But if we throw my Hoplites and PNCs up against Banshee-Nines, the odds aren’t in our favor…and that’s not considering that most of our pilots are still green.”
“And Redward’s pilots are worse,” Estanza agreed. “Their production of the Sinisters and Dexters will help make up the numbers, but…we’re facing a disadvantage in both experience and quality of hardware.”
The Dexter interceptors and Sinister fighter-bombers were clones of Conviction’s Hoplite-IVs and PNC-115s, respectively. The Escutcheon-type heavy fighters were still in prototyping, but they would be clones of the Weltraumpanzer-Viers taken from Deception once they hit commission.
“We’ll have to brief the RRF,” Kira said grimly. “I’m not sure we know enough about what Cobra Squadron has today to provide solid data, but just their presence in the Cluster is a major change.”
“The Institute is pulling out everything if they’ve moved Cobra here,” Estanza told her. “Cobra Squadron has always been their most capable active arm. We’ve drawn their attention and they’ve sent their best.”
“Thank god we have Deception, then,” Bueller concluded. “But it sounds like we need to train up the crew even faster.”
“We’re already out of time,” Kira replied. “We’re just waiting for the call that Redward has signed off on whatever Larry and Sonia’s plan for the Clans is. I don’t expect us to spend more than a week here.”
“I’d say the same,” Estanza agreed. “I hope the two of you enjoyed what time you’ve had to relax. Things aren’t going to slow down from here, I don’t think.”
7
Unlike the mercenary carrier, Deception did have a separate shuttle bay. Despite that, the next day saw Kira and Zoric standing on the cruiser’s flight deck, watching a shuttle maneuver its way carefully into the ship.
Off to the right, three Hoplite-IVs were being gently ushered into bays while their pilots dismounted, laughing as the trio of old hands dodged around the deck crew with the ease of long practice.
Kira was paying more attention to the spacecraft with active engines and missed who the three pilots were until Zoric cleared her throat carefully.
“Sir, I thought Hoffman was staying on Conviction?” the cruiser’s Captain asked.
Surprised, Kira turned to assess the two men and one woman walking across her flight deck toward her. Sure enough, Joseph Hoffman was in the lead, accompanied by his boyfriend, Dinesha Patel, and Evgenia Michel, one of his squadron commanders.
The three were all veterans of the Apollo System Defense Force, the survivors of the old 303 Nova Combat Group she’d brought out to the far end of nowhere with her. Her own squadrons included Abdullah Colombera and Mel Cartman, which meant that all six of those survivors were now aboard Deception.
“The gang is all here, it seems,” Patel said brightly as the trio reached them. “Are Nightmare and Scimitar around?”
The dark-skinned pilot, callsign Dawnlord, didn’t seem to think there was an issue with all six of the core Memorials being aboard the same ship. If nothing else, the six of them made up the entire shareholdership of the mercenary company!
“They’ll be out as soon as the shuttle is safe,” Kira replied absently, glaring at the heavyset form of the man she’d left in charge on Conviction. “I wasn’t expecting to see Conviction’s Commander, Nova Group, here today.”
“Conviction isn’t going anywhere and you’re going into the teeth of it,” Hoffman said calmly. “I’m a pilot, sir. I’ll fly under you; I’ll fly under Mel. No issues either way. Whatever you need.”
“How generous,” Kira replied. “Except I left you with a forty-fighter nova group to train up, didn’t I?”
The shuttle finished landing and an echoing chime declared the flight deck clear.
“Hersch and I flipped a coin,” Hoffman admitted. “It was his coin, even. If anyone rigged it, blame Gizmo.”
Ruben Hersch—callsign Gizmo—was the most experienced of the PNC-115 pilots from Conviction’s crew. Kira had hoped that both of the two senior officers would remain behind, but she kept her expression level as she turned to see the pilots trooping off the shuttle.
Deception might carry fewer nova fighters than Conviction did now, but when Kira had arrived, her six fighters had brought Conviction’s wing up to fourteen nova fighters. With losses along the way, there were only eleven true veteran pilots across the combined mercenary company.
Including all of her Apollon pilots, it looked like she had ten of them. Gizmo had remained behind, but that still gave her a solid core of experienced hands. The rest of the six pilots transferring over had been PNC copilots when Kira arrived…which still put them ahead of most of their new recruits.
“None of my people even argued about being sent back to Conviction,” she murmured to Hoffman. “The green pilots know they’re green. The more time we can give them in sims and exercises, the better.”
“They weren’t supposed to be facing off against anyone with comparable gear, let alone experience, for a while yet,” Zoric agreed. “The hope was that Redward’s pilots and ours would have the experience edge by the time anyone else out here had nova fighters.”
“We didn’t count on Equilibrium,” Mel Cartman said, Deception’s second squadron commander sliding into the conversation as she joined the crowd. She quickly gave the three other Apollon pilots hard hugs before stepping back to study the crowd.
“All of the Memorials, huh?” she asked.
“I’d like to send Longknife back,” Kira admitted, but she sighed and shook her head as she looked at Patel and Hoffman holding hands and grinning shamelessly at her. “Not going to split up the wonder boys, though. You both are under Mel. Play nice.”
She turned to Michel.
“Sorry, Socrates, you’re flying for me,” she told the blonde woman, the youngest of the surviving Memorials. “Step down from squadron command, I know.”
“If you think I’m holding on to my squadron over backing up the Memorials in the shit-show we’ve found, you’re wrong,” Michel told her. “Plus, doesn’t Scimitar fly for you?”
For a moment, Kira almost reconsidered. Then Colombera followed Cartman out of the ready room and embraced his usual partner in crime gleefully.
“Yes, yes, I do,” the second-youngest of her pilots announced. “We’ll have to see what kind of trouble we can get into!”
Scimitar and Socrates had earned a reputation for practical jokes and trouble in the Three-Oh-Three. The deaths of three-quarters of the old squadron had ground some of that out of them, and Kira didn’t have it in her to step on them.
“Keep it clean,” she ordered, then turned to salute the approaching Conviction pilots. “Indigo. Good to see you. How are you feeling about heavy fighters today?”
Rosalinda “Indigo” Navratil was a PNC-115 pilot and had spent the entire time Kira had known her in the fighter-bombers. But since Kira didn’t have any experienced pilots for the Weltraumpanzer-Viers…
“The Vier looks damn shiny,” Navratil said quickly. “Is that where you want the Darkwing hands?”
“Exactly,” Kira confirmed. “Purlwise is already heading up the squadron, so I have a neat alignment of six heavy fighters and six fighter-bomber pilots.”
Akira “Purlwise” Yamauchi was currently on the planet, spending time with a local girlfriend Kira hadn’t met. He was on-call and they were keeping him up to date, but it made him the only squadron commander not already on the ship.
“It’s a party,” Cartman said brightly. “Should I be planning on booking a room for an actual party, sir?”
Kira gave her second a cautioning glance. It had been at a party of that style where she’d ended up confessing her feelings for the former commander of the Darkwings—a man who was now dead.
“We don’t know how long we have until we ship out,” she warned everyone. “We play it carefully. Sims and real-space exercises until we’re certain we can go against people just as experienced as us…and with better nova fighters.”
That earned her several grimaces.
“Do I want to know what’s going on?” Navratil asked.
“I’ll brief you on some of it later,” Kira promised. “For now, I think I need to actually make some announcements.
“Hey, everybody!” she shouted.
She might be one of the shortest people in the room and was almost certainly one of the lightest, but she had a lot of practice at making herself heard. The conversations outside the small circle of Apollons and senior officers died down.
“Clear a circle, people,” Kira ordered. “Everybody get over here!”
She wasn’t at all surprised to realize she now had seventeen pilots on the flight deck and gathering around her. Only nine had arrived, but the existing pilots she hadn’t sent back to Conviction had trickled out of the woodwork while she’d been talking to her friends.
That had been part of the point in having those conversations, after all.
Looking around, she identified the missing pilots and grinned.
“All right, so I know Purlwise is MIA getting laid, but what happened to Galavant?” she asked.
“She had a date last night,” Cartman told Kira. “Headed onto the station when you went over to Conviction.”
“So, am I sending search parties or congratulations cards?” Kira asked.
“She has leave and she warned me she might not be coming home, so I’m guessing she’s also MIA getting laid,” Cartman replied. Annmarie “Galavant” Banderas had been a PNC-115 copilot Kira had co-opted to fly a Hoplite before she’d had her full squadron.
She’d earned both her spot in one of the Hoplite squadrons and the right to stay overnight on the station with a date. Assuming she checked in, which it sounded like she had.
“All right, so that leaves me just you lot!” Kira looked over the crowd with a grin. “You all know some of what’s going on. We moved everyone we thought needed more experience before being thrown into the fire back to Conviction.
“Captain Estanza has put the old girl in dry dock for upgrades. That means her nova group gets to spend the next few months doing exercises and training with Redward’s new nova squadrons.
“Everybody needs that time, but somebody’s got to do the real work, so you’re all here. With me.” She grinned. “All of you have seen enough of my training regimens to know that you’re not winning that exchange.”
“What do we exercise against this week? SolFed?” Shun “Swordheart” Asjes asked. Asjes was one of Kira’s pilots, the other copilot who’d been recruited alongside Banderas.
“If I had sim files for SolFed, you know I would put you up against them,” Kira warned.
The Solar Federation was one of the few multi-stellar nations in existence, consisting of Sol and about half the star systems in the Core—the space within a hundred light-years of the home system. It was the most technologically advanced society known, to a nearly legendary level from this far away.
The nearest SolFed system was fourteen hundred light-years away, after all.
“As it happens, I may have picked up some sim files from the Fringe,” she continued. “Sold under the table from the Breslau Principality’s system security forces, as I understand it, then illegally copied a few dozen times.
“But hey, the files are only ten years old and have the Principality’s best simulations of their own ships and a decent guess at the Star Kingdom of Griffon’s!”
Everyone groaned at that. Griffon Sector might be where John Estanza had made his legend—but it was also a Fringe sector six hundred light-years closer to Sol and almost seven hundred light-years’ actual distance from the Syntactic Cluster.
Their fighters were a lot better than her people’s gear, which was some of the best they could steal from Apollo or Brisingr.
