Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  “That’s…a hundred and sixty light-years from here,” Kyle noted. Ten days for them to accelerate up to their maximum ten-light-years-per-day pseudo-velocity, ten days to decelerate and six days at maximum speed. Long trip. We have the supplies for it, don’t we?”

  “We do,” Kyle admitted. Supplies weren’t the main concern for a long trip. Zero point cells would pump out energy forever, so far as humanity could tell, and the Alcubierre-Stetson drive didn’t require fuel, just power. Food, water and air were the issues, and the recycling capabilities of a warship were…disturbing in their efficiency.

  Chameleon had those same recyclers and was better stocked than most warships. It would be ninety days—almost three months—before they had to go to the recycled protein bars that inevitably reduced crew morale.

  “We’ll set the course,” he promised. “I’m not sure a Federation starship has ever taken that long a voyage in a single jump.”

  Their course would take them through thirty light-years of space belonging to the Alliance of Free Stars and then a hundred and ten light-years of the Commonwealth before entering the Stellar League.

  “Few ships have,” Glass admitted. “But there is more to this mission than meets the eye, Captain. Testing our strike distance…that’s another, if small, part of it.”

  Dropping the mental channel, Kyle turned his attention back to Lau.

  “Set your course for the New Edmonton System,” he ordered the Lieutenant Commander. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

  “Shouldn’t be,” Lau said quietly, their eyes glazing slightly as they dove back into their systems. Running the calculations for a one-point-five-quadrillion-kilometer jump wasn’t exactly straightforward, and Kyle left the navigator to it as they checked in on the gravity fields.

  Minutes ticked by as the Q-ship accelerated farther and farther from Castle and Gawain. Finally, Lau turned to check back in with Kyle.

  “Course for New Edmonton complete,” they noted. “We are outside all detectable gravitational interferences and prepared to warp space on your command.”

  “Carry on at your discretion, Commander,” Kyle ordered.

  He was linked into the neural net and noted that Lau confirmed the readiness of the ship’s class one mass manipulators—the massive exotic-matter devices that created the Alcubierre effect and made up half of the ship’s cost—with engineering via implant instead of aloud.

  “Interior Stetson online,” Lau announced softly.

  The image of the world outside in Kyle’s implant faded behind a strange glaze, an energy field taking form that would protect the ship from the terrific energies contained inside the Alcubierre bubble.

  “Exterior online. Singularities forming.”

  The navigator’s voice was clipped and quiet, and Kyle was used to longer reports on the process—though Lau’s certainly contained all of the information he required.

  A second haze appeared farther out from the ship, protecting the Castle system from the immense force of the four singularities Chameleon’s mass manipulators had forced into existence. They twisted his view of space, slowly warping space-time to create the bubble predicted so many years before.

  Then reality vanished, an almost-instantaneous flicker before a computer-generated image dropped into its place. The view from a ship under Alcubierre-Stetson drive wasn’t particularly useful, so the computers assessed what a human eye would theoretically see at their pseudo-velocity in the absence of relativistic distortion and put that on screen.

  “We are underway. Running clean.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” Kyle told Lau, glancing around the bridge. “You have the watch, Commander Lau. Let me know if we have any problems.”

  #

  Rank hath its privileges. In the case where two significant others were both capital-ship commanders in the Castle Federation Space Navy, those privileges included being able to co-opt a few of their respective ships’ Q-Com links to talk to each other.

  Everything Kyle or Captain Mira Solace said was encoded and fed into a subsection of the block of quantum-entangled particles at the heart of each ship’s communications array. A matching section in a station back in orbit of Castle changed simultaneously, and then the switchboard station’s routing computers connected it to the particles linked to the other ship.

  The quantum entanglement communicators and their associated switchboard stations represented mankind’s mastery of one of the great mysteries of the universe—and unlike many of its other uses, Kyle didn’t regard using it to talk to Mira as an abuse of said mastery.

  “We’re on our way,” he told her. “I can’t say much more than that, obviously, but everything is moving according to plan.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” Mira replied. The elegantly tall black woman looked tired. “The reinforcements the Terrans have rushed in aren’t enough to take on Seventh Fleet, but they are enough to keep us watching over our shoulders and making showy appearances to keep the locals happy. The Admiral has a plan, but, well, I’m pretty sure Walkingstick does too.”

  “And no plan survives contact with the enemy,” Kyle agreed. “How’s Camerone?”

  Camerone was the flagship of Seventh Fleet and the battlecruiser his then-executive officer had inherited when Miriam Alstairs had been promoted to command the Fleet. Both of them had done a decent job of ignoring their attraction until she’d no longer been under his command.

  They’d made up for as much time as they could until the war dragged Kyle home and left Mira at the front.

  “Solid,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Getting a bit worn, for reasons that, well, I can’t really say.”

  There were probably no censors listening in on their conversation—but that was because it was a safe assumption that two capital ship commanders could censor themselves. Given the nature of both of their missions, the conversation was still recorded and could be reviewed if there were questions later.

  Kyle was quite certain that Camerone—and the rest of Seventh Fleet, for that matter—had been running around from system to system in the area they’d liberated from the Commonwealth, seeing off any intrusion before it became a real threat. It would be exhausting, emotionally draining work with no clear end point—and Mira could no more tell him that was what was going on than she could tell him which system Camerone was currently in.

  He hadn’t even been able to tell her the name of his own ship. The gaps in their conversation were almost more noticeable than what they could talk about.

  “Did you manage to see your son while you were in Castle?” Mira asked.

  “This op came up so fast, I didn’t even set foot on the planet, let alone see Lisa or Jake,” he admitted. Jacob Kerensky was his son, not quite twelve years old, with his high-school sweetheart Lisa. Jacob had been an accident he had responded to in the worst way possible, and he hadn’t spoken to either of them for the first eleven years of Jacob’s life—for all that the pair had lived with Kyle’s mother and received the highest child support the Federation’s military would let him pay.

  “His birthday’s coming up in six weeks,” he continued with a sigh. “I guess after the last eleven, my absence won’t be strange, but…still would rather have made it.”

  “I look forward to meeting him someday,” Mira told him with a smile. “I’m sure he’ll understand, Kyle.”

  “He understands my being away in the military better than he understands why I was gone for so long before,” Kyle admitted. A twelve-year-old, after all, couldn’t be expected to understand that he had one of the worst fathers in the Federation.

  “Give it time,” she replied.

  “Lisa gets it,” he said thankfully. “Don’t know how she ever forgave me, but she seems to have. But Jake… The only way to really fix that is to be there. And I can’t do that until the war is over.”

  Though he supposed, now that it was too late to impact his decision, that the ability to spend time with his son should have bee
n a selling point to the desk job Kane had offered him.

  “This mission is going to be long,” he admitted. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. You need to be careful,” he admonished Mira. “No fighting like me. No one should fight like me. Not after Huī Xing.”

  “Nobody in the Alliance thinks you messed up at Huī Xing except you, Kyle,” Mira told him. “Everyone else is too busy being stunned at one of the largest POW rescues of the last couple centuries. The Terrans won’t know what hit them once we’re done with them!”

  Kyle returned her predatory grin.

  “No,” he agreed. “They won’t.”

  #

  Chapter 10

  Deep Space

  09:00 May 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Chameleon

  Russell Rokos had a headache, and approximately sixty percent of it was due to the normally-cheerful young man sitting on the other side of his desk. Flight Commander Zhong Li, despite his name, had the darkest skin color Russell had ever seen on a human, with the epicanthic-folded eyes of his Chinese family.

  So far in the week Russell had known him, the squadron leader’s teeth were usually flashing startling white in a wide smile as he told some joke or another, or simply in a brilliant grin at the general absurdity and wonder of life.

  Right now, however, Li’s lips were pursed tightly enough to visibly pale as the younger officer considered his words carefully.

  “Well?” Russell asked gruffly. “You asked to see me, Flight Commander. And you seem pissed, so perhaps you can tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s the black-ops squadron,” Li finally admitted. “They’re…” He sighed. “Throwing their weight around? I’m not sure how to describe it, sir. One of them yanked two maintenance crews off one of my birds to have them refinish a scratch in their anti-radar coating.

  “My pilot was standing right there,” he noted. “They didn’t quite threaten her when she objected—but they were pretty damned close to the line.”

  The Wing Commander sighed. He’d been afraid of that. The black-ops squadron had clearly been doing something on their own, without having to interact with regular Space Force crews, before being assigned to Chameleon. Whatever that something was, it led Russell to doubt the supposed lack of other Q-ships in the Federation’s service.

  “Anything else?” he asked carefully. “I can only drop so many bricks on them for that.”

  “It’s a lot of little…shit, sir,” Li snapped. “They’re constantly harassing my people. Nothing significant, just ‘joking’ and the like. I’m not sure my people are going to take it for much longer, and if someone takes a swing…”

  “We’ll have a much bigger problem,” Russell confirmed. “What about the Chiefs?” he asked. His Chief and Senior Chief Petty Officers should know better than to let this kind of crap continue.

  “They either grab the teams without a Chief or lean on the couple who either worked with them before or are scared of them,” the junior man replied. “It doesn’t feel like they’re being careful, but…”

  “But these are the kind of guys who end up in black-ops squadrons,” the Wing Commander said flatly. “The next time you see something, Li, ping me—immediately. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Technically, Li was on par with Flight Commander Cavendish, but in practice…on an Intelligence ship, the black-ops Flight Commander was more equal than others.

  But no matter what she thought, she reported to Russell and was part of his Wing.

  He might need to remind her of that.

  #

  In the end, Li didn’t need to ping Russell at all. His own first squadron leader had insisted that all of the flight crews be thoroughly familiar with and review the maintenance of their starfighters. Russell had taken it a bit further than most since he enjoyed occasionally getting his hands dirty by directly helping with the maintenance of his ship.

  That meant he was unidentifiable, head and shoulders inside the access panel to his Cataphract’s electronic warfare systems, rearranging blocks of molecular circuitry to see whether he could squeeze in another tower, when Cavendish loudly interrupted the team working on the starfighter next to his.

  “Chief Peyton,” she snapped loudly. “I need your team to check over my bird. I’m seeing a drift in the targeting radar alignment.”

  “We’re in the middle of a diagnostic run on Flight Lieutenant Petrov’s mass manipulators,” Russell heard Chief Petty Officer Lyle Peyton object.

  “I’m sorry, Chief, I thought I was giving you an order,” Cavendish replied. “Shut it down and get to my bird now.”

  With a sigh, Russell dropped back out of his starfighter and ducked under the nine-meter-tall spacecraft.

  “Commander Cavendish,” he greeted her politely. “What is going on here?”

  The woman looked at him in surprise.

  “As soon as Peyton is done being insubordinate, he’s going to be checking into my starfighter. Why?”

  “Given that Flight Lieutenant Petrov’s starfighter is on the maintenance schedule for Peyton’s team for today and yours is not, that was my question for you,” Russell said mildly. “Does your starfighter have an antimatter leak? Has one of our zero-point cells somehow turned on in storage and the security of the ship is threatened?”

  “No,” Cavendish said slowly.

  “Then you don’t have an emergency worth disrupting the schedule that the Chiefs carefully put together, Commander,” he told her mildly. “Carry on, Chief Peyton.”

  “What in Endless Void are you smoking?” Cavendish hissed. “You want him to waste his time on one of your second-tier pilots’ ships? My squadron has priority for repairs on this deck!”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Russell replied. “Certainly, I didn’t sign off on you having special priority.”

  “We both know my squadron will bear the brunt of the real work,” she told him. “My people could run rings around any of the other squads.”

  He hadn’t been planning on having this out in the middle of the flight deck, especially not with Chief Peyton and his maintenance team right there trying to be invisible.

  “Two of those squadrons have been in action with me since the beginning of the war,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen them fly, I’ve seen them fight. I trust them. I don’t trust your people’s skills, and your current attitude is aggravating that situation.

  “This is my flight deck, Commander Cavendish,” he reminded her. “I signed off on the maintenance schedule. There is no special priority in it for anyone, and there will never be.

  “Now apologize to Chief Peyton for your unjustified accusation of insubordination.”

  She stared at him for a long moment.

  “By the Stars, you’re serious,” she snapped. “Are you mad?”

  “I am the commanding officer of this fighter wing and you answer to me,” Russell said, the control on his temper slipping slightly. “You’ve interfered with Chief Peyton’s work and falsely accused him.”

  “I don’t answer to you. I answer to Glass,” Cavendish told him, “And trust me, he will hear about this!”

  “You answer to Glass?” the Wing Commander ground out. That was not how the chain of command on this ship was supposed to work—and if it was, he wanted off! He knew damn well what Roberts would think of that theory.

  He held out his hand.

  “Insignia, please,” he said flatly.

  “What?!”

  “Glass is a civilian. If you answer to him, you are a civilian, and impersonating an officer is a criminal offense,” Russell told her calmly, twisting his anger into a flicker of a righteous smile. “You have two choices: either you are Commander Cavendish, and you answer to me, or you are Miss Cavendish, and you are not flying a starfighter from my deck.

  “Choose.” His hand was still outstretched and her gaze focused on it. He was quite proud that there was no waver in his palm. “Now.”

  There was a long moment wher
e he truly wasn’t sure what the dark-haired woman in the unpiped uniform was going to do, then she inhaled sharply and nodded.

  “Chief Peyton, I apologize for my hasty comments,” she ground out slowly. “I will…make sure my request is added to the maintenance schedule for before we arrive in New Edmonton.”

  “Was that so hard?” Russell asked, knowing it was probably too much of a twist as he said it.

  “Eternal Stars, Rokos, you win,” she snapped. “I’ll talk to my people; we’ll respect your damn schedule. Just…let it go.”

  “Carry on, Commander Cavendish.”

  #

  After the first week, Kyle had settled into a routine of having dinner each evening with Chownyk and Taylor. Both were junior for their roles, and it let them bring up their concerns in a less formal setting than his office.

  Tonight was the second time Glass had joined them, and Kyle noted that the spy’s presence put both of his junior officers on edge—though he would admit it could also be the food. As a matter of principle, he never ate anything different from what was being prepared in the regular officers’ mess. This time, they were trying for Tau Ceti cuisine—described as the result of a French father and Indian mother arguing over what to feed the children—and the cooks hadn’t got it quite right.

  “My biggest concern remains our magazine levels,” Taylor told him as they finally gave up on their meals, a mix of flavors that might have worked in different proportions, and Kyle gestured for the stewards to bring in dessert. “We only have three missiles for each of the Javelin launchers, and a grand total of six for the capital ship launchers.”

  “The pirates who stole her from the Terrans sold everything that wasn’t nailed down,” Glass admitted. “We couldn’t risk using missiles from our own stockpiles—even a single dud could be traced back to having been in our possession by Commonwealth Intelligence after the fact and undermine the entire operation.”

  “I hope we have a plan for that?” she asked, somewhat acidly. Were Glass a superior officer, Kyle would have yanked her up short—but he was a civilian, and one that was playing his cards too close to his chest for Kyle’s liking.