“Get in the compartments and get those set up,” Edvard hissed. “Hold them for my order.”
Ten seconds. There was no hesitation on the part of Ramirez and his mules as they bolted into the hidden compartments and sealed them. The Terrans were still fifty kilometers clear, the Q-ship’s own hull sufficient to conceal the suits at that range.
A wash of plasma slammed into the armored exterior of the docking bay as the assault shuttle desperately shed kilometers per second of relative velocity. She still slammed into the docking port at several hundred meters a second, a speed the shuttle was better designed to handle than the theoretically civilian port was.
Edvard heard the metal crunch under the impact, but a quick implant interrogation of the systems showed the port was still fully functional. His momentary impulse to lock it down and claim it was jammed was rendered moot a second later as a series of override codes hit the Terran-built lock and forced it to open instantly.
A four-man fire team swept into Chameleon immediately, weapons sweeping the space as the Marines advanced. The Terrans wore light body armor but not the heavy battle armor he’d been afraid of. One of them kept Edvard and Poulson covered as the others moved forward.
After about five seconds, a second wave of Marines entered. A fire team in battle armor escorted a hatchet-faced woman in the green-lapelled black uniform of the Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps into the ship.
“You are not Captain Sheridan,” she snapped. “Where is he?”
“I am Commander Hansen,” Edvard replied, intentionally dragging out his speech to buy precious seconds. “Captain Sheridan is dealing with the engine failure; he asked me to meet with you. What do you need, ma’am?”
“My teams will examine your engines and bridge,” she said bluntly, gesturing more people—these in the plain black utility shipsuits of Navy ratings—off the shuttle. “Any resistance will be met with lethal force. Step aside.”
“I can escort your people to the bridge,” Edvard offered. Suddenly the guns were focused directly on him, the muzzles suddenly very large.
“I am not fooled, ‘Hansen’,” the Marine said. “Your ship arrives without proper orders at the same time as these pirates? You are working together. I will find out how and stop you.”
Forty seconds to lance range. Edvard was running out of time.
“I’d like to assure you that nothing is further from the truth,” he told her while ordering Ramirez to jam transmissions. It would take more than thirty seconds for the shuttle to realize something was wrong—and that would be too late, quantum communicators or no.
“Of course, I can’t,” Edvard admitted with a mirthless smile as every non-quantum communicator inside a thousand kilometers ground to a halt in a blaze of static. The access to the shuttle slammed shut in a faked malfunction, and the dozen Terrans found themselves staring down the weapons of fifty battle armored Federation Marines.
“Vae victis,” he told the Terran Marine—‘Woe to the conquered’, the unofficial motto of League condottieri who turned pirate. “Lay down your arms or die.”
“A half-dozen fighters can’t defeat these defenses!” she snapped at him. “You should be surrendering, not me!”
Zero seconds, and the Terran officer’s face went white as she recognized the distinct, hair-tingling sensation of a powerful positron lance firing nearby.
#
Kyle felt the Q-ship vibrate under him as the shuttle made contact with brutal force. That couldn’t have been pleasant for the people aboard, and it was telling about the level of suspicion at least some people were applying to “Historic Ideal”. If the Marines were buying his spiel, it would have been far easier on everyone for them to match velocities and board as Chameleon passed the station.
“Hundred seconds to range,” Taylor said softly. “Sir, they’ve trained one of the big lance satellites on us. We have stronger deflectors than they do, but that’s a megaton-range beam. It will cut right through us.”
“Target it with the secondary beams,” he ordered. “Those satellites don’t have any deflectors. In fact, target every defensive satellite you can without sacrificing your line on the Zions.”
“That won’t be many,” she warned. “We’re only going to have two Zions in our sights at a time, boss—the sequence is only going to take about three seconds to complete, but that’s three seconds for someone to hit a button and ruin our day.”
While the four main positron lances had some flexibility in their emitter angle, it wasn’t nearly enough for them to hit all four stations in one salvo. It was enough for a three-second rotation to bring all four Zions under Chameleon’s guns.
“Hit every one you can,” he ordered grimly, checking the time and distance. Thirty seconds. “Charge the lances, stand by the missiles. Clear the hatches at t-minus ten seconds.”
His tactical officer nodded absently, her mind and attention now completely locked into her system.
“Lau, as soon as we fire, bring up the engines at maximum deceleration,” he ordered. “We need to launch Hansen’s shuttles with as little relative velocity as possible.
“Chownyk, watch those satellites,” he concluded, glancing at the image of his XO in the Q-ship’s CIC. “Flag the ones most likely to hit us for Taylor.”
“On it,” the XO replied. His attention snapped back to the CIC main hologram as he spoke though, and then he continued in a more urgent tone. “We have fighter launch! I’ve got another ten Katanas clearing Zion Three.”
“Too late,” Kyle snapped. “Taylor, take the targets from CIC, drop your missiles on them.”
Ten seconds.
“Clearing the hatches,” she announced. “Retargeting missiles…”
Several seconds of silence followed, everyone on both the bridge and CIC immersed in the tactical network. This was the window of vulnerability: if someone spotted the weapon hatches opening and made the call to sacrifice their Marines, everyone aboard Chameleon would die today.
Then the ship shivered slightly as they crossed an invisible line in space and Taylor opened fire. Four half-megaton-a-second positron lances lit up Kyle’s tactical plot, the computer happily drawing them in as white lines for the three quarters of a second they were on target.
It was more than enough. The Zions were at combat readiness, with their deflectors at full power—but they hadn’t actually been expecting an attack. And certainly not from Chameleon.
Two beams of pure antimatter struck each fighter launch station, the deflectors pushing the beams away from the center of the station but not far enough to force a miss. Where the streams of positrons hit, they annihilated regular matter, ripping massive tears through the armor and hull.
One of the beams on the first station hit one of the primary zero-point cells, ripping apart the carefully balanced magnetic tubes that pulled the positrons safely into storage chambers. The stream of positrons was weaker than Chameleon’s weapon—but it was starting inside the station and didn’t cut off after less than a second.
By the time the zero-point cell itself came apart, the station was gone.
The second station was luckier. There was no single critical hit to incinerate the entire structure, “just” two beams of pure antimatter that ripped through the station, shattering armor, corridors, weapons and systems. It came apart in large enough pieces that there would be survivors—but it came apart in useless pieces nonetheless.
As the Q-ship slewed in space, maneuvering thrusters firing at full power to spin the four-hundred-meter sphere like a child’s toy, the secondary lances opened fire. They were weak compared to those a true warship would carry, but they were still fifty-kiloton-a-second beams—beams that ripped into starfighters and satellites alike with deadly force.
The turn took a fraction under two seconds, and then Chameleon’s lances lashed out again. The second pair of Zions was no luckier than the first, both coming apart under the sustained pounding of the Q-ship’s main guns.
“Missiles in t
he air, sweeping the remaining stations with the lances,” Taylor reported. “We have incoming starfighters!”
“Rokos!” Kyle snapped. “Alpha strike, go!”
#
Chapter 26
Aurelius System
14:05 June 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
Acceleration slammed Russell back into the seat of his command starfighter with crushing force as Chameleon flung the first wave of his ships into space. Ignoring the force as best as he could, he surveyed the situation.
Ten seconds earlier, four Zion-class defensive platforms, ten Katana-class starfighters, and sixty defensive platforms had been orbiting above the Aurelius Logistics Depot. In ten seconds, Taylor’s surprise attack had shredded all four Zions and four of the Katanas.
“Katanas are launching,” Alvarado reported. “Twenty-four missiles launched on Chameleon.” He paused. “Five of the satellites have also launched, presumably under the Katanas’ control. Thirty capital missiles incoming.”
“All fighters, target the Katanas and launch two salvos,” Rokos ordered. “Alpha, Bravo—stop the fighter missiles. Charlie, Delta—take the satellites’ missiles.”
He had Alpha Squadron and half of Bravo in space already, forming up around him as he led ten fighters after six. He left the missiles to Alvarado and the other gunners, trusting them to do their jobs, while he brought up the Cataphract’s upgraded positron lance and started tracking missiles.
The Katanas clearly hadn’t been expecting a fighter screen, their missiles pushing toward the Q-ship in a close echelon that concentrated the limited electronic warfare capabilities of the smaller missiles and protected them from a starship’s defenses—but left them vulnerable to the starfighters that could get in close and generate multiple approach angles.
His own people’s missiles began to fill space as well, starting with twenty from his first launch, followed by forty more as his second wave of starfighters deployed in time to join in. With ten missiles in space for each Terran starfighter, he dismissed the Katanas and focused on their missiles—they too had a second salvo in space.
“Taylor got the missile satellites before they launched again,” Alvarado told him. “Charlie is sweeping after those birds and Delta will follow as they launch.”
The whole thing was a close-range mess, with Chameleon’s lasers and lances flashing past his ships as they closed on the incoming Javelins. Missile flight times were barely a minute with the velocity Chameleon had imparted to them, and just to add to the mess, he could see the assault shuttles blasting away from the Q-ship behind him.
He tracked across space, firing the lance in tenth-second bursts as he crossed the likely zones for the incoming missiles. Thirteen more of his starfighters did the same—and the six Katanas did the same against his missiles.
Space started to get messy as missiles began to explode. First a handful, and then more and more as the two groups of fighters closed.
The Katana crews weren’t the disorganized pirates they’d faced in New Edmonton. Their ECM linked together, defensive and offensive systems alike combining to make a hash of the scanners Russell was using to track their missiles.
The explosions didn’t help. Each missile killed erupted in a gigaton-plus explosion as both their warheads and antimatter fuel ignited, filling the space around them with high-velocity debris and hard rads. Each explosion added its own sphere of natural jamming to the chaos, helping cover their sisters as they closed.
Russell’s people were expecting it, accounting for it and generating different sensor angles to see past and through the fireballs. The Katana pilots…were not. They were probably trained for it—their training was good—but training was no substitute for the harsh mistress of battle.
The last of the first salvo of incoming fighter missiles came apart well over fifty thousand kilometers short of Chameleon, nailed by Alpha Four’s defensive laser clusters. Their own first salvo struck home, blasting half of the remaining Katanas apart.
Six had failed to stop twenty missiles. Three stood no chance against forty, and Russell turned his own starfighter back to hunt the remaining missiles heading for Chameleon.
“Damn it! They got through!” The panicked voice of Charlie Squadron’s commander suddenly echoed in his mental link as a new icon popped up onto the screen: a trio of capital-ship missiles that hadn’t been there a moment before and were now in a final lunge toward the Q-ship. “They told them to play dead and let the radiation cloud cover them.”
It was a trick Captain Roberts had taught his own people, and Russell had seen used half a dozen times—and at this range, it was devastatingly effective. None of his starfighters could attempt to intercept those missiles without endangering Chameleon themselves.
It was down to the Q-ship’s own defenses, the big ship spinning away from the incoming missiles as she began the terrifying defensive pirouette of a warship in the antimatter age. Lasers and positron lances flashed out in a desperate defense.
Two missiles went down almost simultaneously, Taylor skillfully picking them off moments after they appeared—but creating new radiation clouds that hid the last missile as it dove across the last ten thousand kilometers.
Chameleon vanished behind the explosion as the warhead closed the final distance…and then reappeared as the radiation faded.
“Chameleon, what’s your status?” Russell demanded.
“Nailed it three hundred meters from the hull,” Taylor responded after a moment. “We’re shaken…but we’re okay.”
“Rokos, those other two squadrons are still hunting Echo,” Roberts interrupted. “We’ve got the station; you know your mission.”
“I do,” the CAG confirmed grimly.
Search and destroy—and hope like Void they made it to Echo Squadron in time.
#
Edvard had many unkind words to say about Terran Marines. That they lacked courage was not among them.
The hum of the positron lances firing wasn’t much of a distraction, but they tried to use it anyway. The battle-armored Marines opened fire on the squads flanking them as the officer and her first fire team charged at Edvard and Chief Poulson.
He was moving in the same instant they were, shoving the Navy NCO out of the line of fire as he scrambled backward. He didn’t even try and draw his own weapon, trusting to his men to put the Terrans down.
Even the four in battle armor weren’t carrying anti-armor weapons. Their fire ricocheted off Bravo Platoon’s armor—and drew a response from troopers who were carrying such weapons.
All eight of the Marines were down by the time their CO reached Edvard, his people realizing that he might want her alive.
She was clearly planning to take him hostage, training her sidearm on his unarmored head and opening her mouth to shout a demand for his people to stand down.
If it hadn’t already been obvious that, determined as the Terran officer was, she was no veteran, that would have been enough. Edvard’s bladed hand caught the pistol barrel, yanking it down as she fired into the floor.
The Terran officer followed her gun downward and slammed full-force into his suddenly rising knee. He felt a rib crack over his knee as she rotated around him and hit the ground, her suddenly broken arm trapped behind her as he pinned her to the floor.
“Congratulations, you just killed your men,” he hissed in her ear, giving orders over his implant for Ramirez and Bravo Platoon to seize the shuttle. “A lot of people are going to die today; you didn’t need to add to the list.”
“Shuttle crew surrendered,” Ramirez reported. “Whaddya want us to do with them, boss?”
“Is the shuttle still flyable?” Edvard asked, glancing over at Poulson.
“They didn’t lock the controls. I guess they didn’t want to lose fingers while I made them unlock them,” the Gunny replied.
Edvard pinged Poulson by implant, making sure the Terrans—who had to think they were disorganized pirates—didn’t hear
him.
“Can you fly it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Poulson, get going with Ramirez,” he ordered aloud, accepting her claim at face value. “Leave Morris with the prisoners; I’m not letting the others get all of the loot!”
Sergeant Morris commanded Bravo Platoon’s fourth squad. He was moving the Marines, techs and flight crew who’d surrendered off the shuttle before Edvard had even finished speaking.
Ramirez handed Edvard a pair of restraints he used to tie up the wounded Marine.
“You get to live today, miss,” he told her.
With that final barb landed, he turned to board their newly stolen shuttle. Despite the act he’d put on—the act that made leaving the Marine officer alive necessary, regardless of any disgust at shooting prisoners or idiots—he wasn’t worried about the other two platoons stealing all of the loot.
He was worried about sending two platoons against an entire space station.
#
The near miss had left Chameleon feeling more than a little crispy to Kyle’s senses. A good portion of the emitters and receivers for their long-range scanners and electronic warfare suite had been vaporized. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, given an average-size nickel-iron asteroid and about thirty-six hours, but enough to make him feel a touch more blind than he preferred.
“Drop a Q-probe to back up our scanners,” he ordered Taylor. “With the fighters heading out to pull Echo out of the fire, we need to be seeing clearly.”
“That will only leave us eight League-linked probes,” she noted. All quantum communicators linked through a switchboard station somewhere to offset the inherently point-to-point nature of the entanglement used. While Chameleon had some Castle-linked Q-Com probes in her storage bays, those would be far too easily traced back to the Federation.
Given that a normal deployment could easily see twenty or thirty of the sensor drones scattered around a star system, only having nine—eight, after this—of them available made Kyle as twitchy as it did Taylor.
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 17
