Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  “They’re there to be used,” he reminded her. “XO, let’s see if we can get the hornet’s nest we’ve kicked over to calm down. I don’t supposed Lafferty is still around?”

  “He was based on one of the Zions,” Chownyk noted after a moment’s analysis. “He might be alive, but he doesn’t have access to a Q-Com anymore.”

  “That would have too easy,” Kyle said cheerfully, studying the screen as the shuttles made their approach to the central station. He was taken aback for a moment to note the Terran shuttle returning with his people, but it turned out he had a message from Hansen explaining that.

  Shaking his head, he grinned broadly.

  “All right,” he said loudly, taking the Terran Merchant Marine cap off and hanging it off his chair at a hopefully rakish angle. “Get me a wide-band, wide-angle transmission at the station.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Aurelius Station,” he greeted his audience in the lazy affected drawl of a condottieri captain. “This is Captain Sheridan of Historic Ideal. As you may have guessed by now, we are not what we appear to be. Given your pathetic lack of defenses, I now claim this system as my own. You will stand down and cooperate with my soldiers, or there will be hell to pay.

  “You know the rules of the game: you lose, and vae victis!”

  He made a cutoff gesture and smiled.

  “Let me know if anyone responds. I presume we made sure their starfighters got that?”

  “Everybody in the system will get it, dependent on the speed of light,” Chownyk promised. “Can’t promise anyone is going to listen.”

  “I can hope,” Kyle said, a moment of seriousness slipping through his usual façade. “We just killed almost three thousand people. I’d rather not add to the list if I don’t have to.”

  “Incoming response!”

  “Link it to me,” Kyle ordered.

  A new image appeared on his screen, an older man with gaunt cheeks and graying black hair. Unlike Lafferty, he clearly hadn’t bothered to put his full uniform on and was only wearing the black shipsuit—with a single red fake lapel—of the Terran Commonwealth Navy, with the single star of a Commodore.

  The Federation had bumped Captain to be the equivalent rank and slipped in Senior Fleet Commander, justifying that an interstellar starship with five thousand people aboard needed an O-7 in command.

  “I am Commodore Arkwright, commanding officer of the Aurelius base,” he said with a surprisingly amount of calm disdain. “Am I speaking to the pirate Sheridan?”

  “Pirate?” Kyle asked in an offended tone. “Is that any way to speak to the man offering you your life?!”

  “You may have destroyed our defenders, but your flying junk heaps are no match for the Commonwealth’s best,” Arkwright told him. “I assure you, ‘Captain’ Sheridan, you are in no position to threaten my life.”

  “Your fighters are shiny but your pilots are crap,” Kyle replied conversationally. “Mine are veterans of a dozen battles apiece; your glorified rookies stand no chance. Spare their lives, Commodore. Yield.”

  For a moment, Arkwright looked hesitant, something breaking through the contempt on his face. But it was only a moment, and then the sneer returned in full force as he gazed down his long aristocratic nose at Kyle.

  “The Commonwealth has never surrendered to pirates,” he snapped. “It will not start today.”

  “Well, then,” Kyle replied, concealing his own moment of hope between an equally contemptuous sneer, “give my regards to my boarding troops. You’ll be seeing them before I do.”

  #

  “We are hitting heavy resistance,” Riley reported as Edvard’s commandeered shuttle blasted toward the station. “Disorganized so far, but they’ve got at least a company of Marines and they were paying attention to our approach vectors. We haven’t hit armor yet, but the bastards have anti-armor gear.”

  “Send me everything you’ve got,” the Lieutenant Major ordered. “We might be able to get in behind them.”

  Only one of Bravo platoon’s squads had fit in the shuttle, but twenty men in battle armor could put on an impressive show.

  “Sending you our locations and every one of the Terrans we’ve bounced off,” the black-ops officer replied. “We’re pushing them back so far, but they’ve got a lot of station to play with. I think we pulled decent schematics before they shut down the network in our area.”

  Edvard nodded absently, forgetting that Riley couldn’t see him, as he reviewed the schematics. His first two platoons had hit both of the stations’ docking bays, as those were the easiest place to land seven shuttles’ worth of Marines.

  The resistance they’d run into so far had been unfocused, station security and Marines hitting the attackers from whatever angle they were coming from with whatever gear they had—but the defenders had only learned they were under attack at all a few minutes earlier.

  Resistance would stiffen sharply on the routes toward the command center and engineering. In the Terrans’ place, he would have let the attackers board and penetrate toward those targets while he got his people into armor.

  Even with anti-armor weapons, the Terrans had barely slowed his people down and had thrown away over a hundred lives.

  “Tighten up your strikes,” he ordered. “We’re supposed to be condottieri, not thugs. Let’s look the part—and it’ll focus your firepower when they start throwing armor roadblocks in your way in about three minutes.”

  “Teach your grandmother to knit,” Riley told him genteelly. “Got a plan, boss?”

  “There’s a lovely little promenade gallery about halfway between your current location and the command center,” he noted as he studied the schematics. “Great place for an ambush, but closer to the hull than the command center is.”

  “If I’m walking into an ambush, I wouldn’t mind a counter-trap,” she replied.

  Edvard smiled and flipped his target coordinates to Poulson.

  “One surprise, coming right up.”

  #

  “Hang on!”

  In hindsight, Edvard realized that he should have, if nothing else, been watching his shuttle’s velocity as Poulson flew them at the space station. He realized her intention less than five seconds before the Navy Chief rammed the shuttle into the station, still traveling at almost a thousand kilometers a second.

  She threw every mass manipulator to offsetting their deceleration, but an equivalent hundred thousand gravities could only be reduced so much. Poulson was wrapped in an emergency acceleration pod and the Marines had their battle armor—and Edvard still felt like an angry giant had stepped on him.

  “Delivered. To. Target,” Poulson gasped, heaving deep breaths between words. “Twenty meters that way.” She gestured forwards. “Lasers firing…now.”

  Before Edvard could ask just what that meant, the assault shuttle’s forward lasers opened fire. Multipurpose weapons, primarily intended to defend against missiles but quite capable of taking down atmospheric fighters or other small spacecraft, tore through the structure of the station like superheated wrecking balls.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he ordered, suiting actions to words as the shuttle bay doors slammed open into the slagged mess that had been the corridors and rooms between the shuttle and the promenade he’d marked as his destination.

  Ramirez grabbed his shoulder, armored gauntlets holding the officer’s battle armor in check.

  “Pretending to be League or not, you don’t lead from the front, sir,” he said gently as two fire teams swept past, rifles tracking across the debris and the gallery, looking for targets.

  Targets that weren’t there.

  “Riley, report,” Edvard snapped as he entered the promenade he’d expected to find the Terrans in. “Watch for incoming; they’re not in the gallery.”

  “If they’re not setting up an ambush there…everybody halt! Prep for ambush close!”

  Things were silent on both Edvard’s end and hers for several seconds. Then the shooting started and Riley curs
ed.

  “Fuckers. Just in time, sir,” she told him. “First squad, suppressive fire. Second squad, pull back and join the line.”

  Edvard waited patiently for her to have time for him again.

  “They had ambushes prepped in the side corridors, but somebody panicked when we halted,” she told him. “No losses, but I’m pulling my horns in to cover our asses. Not sure, but we could be facing half a company or more. We’re not advancing, sir.”

  “We can swing around and take them from the rear,” Edvard offered, studying the map. He could, but…

  “We’ll be fine,” Riley replied. “I know I have a cute ass, but I don’t need it hauled out of the fire today, boss. Make your call.”

  “Behave, Lieutenant,” the Lieutenant Major said absently as he drew lines on the map in his implant. “We’re going for the command center. Don’t die on me.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said breathlessly, a moment before gunfire echoed at a volume that had to be her shooting at somebody.

  “Good luck,” he told her, gesturing Ramirez and the squad Sergeant over to him. “We’re heading for the command center; I’m flipping you a map. Let’s move.”

  “I can see at least one point where they’re going to make trouble for us,” the Gunny told him, highlighting the choke point in front of the command center.

  “The command center is going to be fortified,” Edvard agreed. “Let’s just be glad it’s not surrounded by vacuum this time, shall we?”

  The last Terran space station Edvard had assaulted had been a prison, with a hundred-meter “moat” of hard vacuum to secure the prison component. Since they’d had such a nice security barrier, they’d used it to protect one side of their command center.

  Carefully keeping himself in the middle of the squad, Edvard watched his Marines follow his carefully laid-out path through the station, running into surprisingly little in the way of resistance. No Marines, no sealed internal bulkheads, nothing.

  Until they reached the chokepoint outside the bridge, where the point fire teams rounded a corner—and then immediately dove back for cover.

  “Security bulkhead is closed and auto-turrets are active,” the Lance Corporal reported. “No Marines, though. Just automatic defenses.”

  “How long to hack them?” he asked.

  Ramirez shrugged.

  “Bravo’s EW expert is with Third Squad,” he noted. “Unless we want Poulson to extract the shuttle and ram another hole in the station to pick up Alpha or Charlie Platoon’s EW guys?”

  “…I don’t think that shuttle is flying anywhere ever again,” Edvard replied. “But if it’s just auto-turrets…grenades on the bounce, people; download the point team’s visuals and blow those turrets to hell in five!”

  Moments later, twenty high-explosive grenades went around the corner with carefully calculated bounces. They didn’t hit together, tiny differences in response time between different Marines spreading the attack over about half a second, but they turned the antechamber of the station’s command center into a concentrated inferno.

  “On the bounce, MOVE!” Ramirez bellowed, the Gunny leading the point teams back around the corner.

  One auto-turret was still active, spitting high-velocity penetrators at the Marines. One of the point team Marines took a round to the leg, going down in a crashing heap of ceramic and alloy as his comrades took out the turret.

  “I’m fine,” she ground out a moment later. “Suit sealed the wound. Not walking anywhere.”

  “Move her into cover. Demo team, blow the bulkhead,” Edvard ordered.

  The wounded out of the way, the rest of the platoon followed as the two demolition troops set charges.

  “With me, on the blast,” Edvard ordered. “Remember—we need them to surrender. No one dies who doesn’t pull a gun!”

  Affirmatives responded—and then the explosives blew and they were moving. The suits had built-in stunners for circumstances just like this, and Edvard armed them as he charged through the debris.

  There were two Marines in the control room, neither in battle armor but both behind bipod-mounted anti-armor rifles. They were expecting an attack, but his people had the advantage regardless. Electron lasers pulsed in the smoke and both men went down before they could fire.

  Edvard ignored them, striding forward and hunting the man he knew had to be there—the older man in the Navy uniform at the center of the room.

  “Commodore Arkwright,” he said flatly, leveling his rifle at the unarmored man. “The time for games is up. Order your people to stand down.”

  “And if I refuse?” the Terran replied contemptuously, staring down the barrel of the gun. He certainly had fortitude, for all that Edvard wanted to hate the old man’s guts.

  “You die and I find someone who is willing to order them to surrender,” the Marine said coldly. “Vae victis, Commodore. You are defeated.”

  #

  Chapter 27

  Aurelius System

  14:10 June 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Cataphract-D Command Starfighter

  The two gas giants exchanged atmosphere in an immense funnel cloud linking the two worlds, creating one of the single largest natural obstacles Russell had ever seen in his years as a pilot. The chaotic mess of the Aurelius Pair meant that none of the starfighters could safely accelerate at their full capability.

  Of course, that didn’t mean they couldn’t do so dangerously, and Wing Commander Russell Rokos took his four understrength squadrons into the heart of the storm at five hundred gravities. With ten minutes’ headway, the Katanas were almost a million kilometers ahead of him, around the far side of the gas giant and closing on Echo.

  The Terrans had reduced acceleration to a more sedate three hundred gravities, and his people had brought Chameleon’s almost-two-thousand-kilometer-a-second velocity with them.

  “This is Tomacino,” Echo Squadron’s commander reported in. “We lost Tatiana and her crew, but the rest of us are still here. They fired two full salvos of missiles at us to get her too.

  “We’re looping lower than they’re willing to get, but they’ve got us cut off,” the young man said grimly. “I don’t think these fighters can take going deeper. We’re stuck unless you can relieve us.”

  “Understood,” Russell transmitted back. “Can you launch on them?”

  “That last salvo of theirs got lost on its way down. I’m not sure our missiles will do any better heading up,” the other pilot admitted. “I can engage, but not without coming under fire myself.”

  “Link networks with us through the Q-Com; prep for a time-on-target salvo,” the CAG ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Russell felt as much as saw his fifth squadron link in. With the loss of another of Echo Squadron’s starfighters to the Katanas’ missiles, he was down to thirty-four starfighters from his original forty—and facing the Commonwealth’s best hardware.

  “They’ll launch a full minute before we do, boss,” Alvarado pointed out quietly. With the Terrans accelerating away from him, his missiles had to play catch-up—but their missiles were flying right down his people’s throats.

  “I know,” he said gruffly. “We’ll still launch before they hit us. Have everyone prep for a full-launch cycle. I know Alpha and Bravo only have one launch left, but Charlie and Delta have two. If the Terrans fired twice at Echo, they’ve only got one launch left in the tubes.”

  That “one launch” was still going to be eighty missiles.

  “Designate that entire first launch, except for Echo’s birds, for a defensive intercept,” Russell continued. “These Sarissas aren’t much better at that than our Starfires are, but every bird they take down is one we don’t have to shoot down.”

  “Setting it up,” his gunner confirmed. “Sixty seconds to their range of us, one twenty-five to our range of them. They’re still pulling three hundred gees away from us.”

  Russell grunted acknowledgement. The people he was chasing were
paying more attention to keeping Echo corralled then they were to trying to evade him. They knew as well as he did that they had him as badly outclassed as he had them outnumbered.

  “Should we ask them to surrender?” Alvarado asked softly.

  “That’s the boss’s shtick,” Russell replied. “If they want to live, they can surrender on their own. I’m perfectly willing to send a few more Terrans to the Void than necessary.”

  Neither of his flight crew said anything. He doubted they disagreed; they’d lost as many friends in the last year of declared and undeclared war as he had. The pilots they faced today might be rookies, but they were of the same ilk that had killed thousands of Alliance pilots by now.

  “Katanas are launching missiles.”

  The words were quiet, drawing attention to what the computers were already reporting. All twenty Katanas had flipped for a few fractions of a second and fired. Eighty Javelin fighter attack missiles flashed across space, accelerating toward Russell’s people at a thousand gravities.

  “Prepare counter-salvo,” he said calmly. “Flight Lieutenant Alvarado has the call.”

  In the back of his mind, he was aware of Echo Squadron rising out of the lower depths of the gas giant, carving an arcing course that would carry them into missile range of the Katanas but not lance range.

  “Missiles…launched,” Alvarado announced softly into the silence of the cockpit. Twenty-eight starfighters each launched two missiles, sending fifty-six missiles into the teeth of the Terran salvo. “Second salvo in ten seconds. Coordinating antimissile fire, laser suites active.”

  Russell exhaled slowly, taking over control of the positron lance and studying the sensor sweeps of the mess in front of him carefully. The upper reaches of the gas giant’s atmosphere barely qualified as such, but they certainly made for a denser combat environment than he was used to.