“Missile intercept…now.”
The sky lit up with explosions, dozens of antimatter warheads going off simultaneously as their happily suicidal brains drove them to collisions and near misses that wiped missile after missile from reality. Russell had sacrificed his own heaviest shot to gut the Terrans’ only shot, and over half of their salvo vanished in the eye-searing blast wave.
That still left a missile per Federation fighter and then some, and Russell turned his attention to the deadly dance of maneuver, lance, and laser that would decide if he lived through the next ninety seconds.
Each blip of a potential missile earned a pulse of positrons. Only a handful of the pulses triggered the massive explosion marking an actual hit, but he wove his starfighter through a series of tight spirals, enough to throw off the targeting systems of any incoming missile.
A final crescendo of explosions swept over his starfighters and it was over. Three more of his starfighters—and twelve of Russell’s people, including his Charlie Squadron commander—were gone.
The Terrans, however, had shot their bolt. Now they were turning back toward Russell’s squadrons, trying to close to lance range. Their lances were heavier than his, and if they made it to range, they could rip his fighters apart with impunity before his people closed the range.
Sixty seconds after their missiles blew apart around him, though, Echo Squadron’s salvo slammed home. Twelve missiles rose out of the depths of the gas giant, screaming in on the Katanas at a thousand gravities.
With twenty starfighters, the Terrans took them all down—but only at the cost of focusing their defenses toward the gas giant. Ten seconds later, over thirty missiles came screaming down on them from Russell’s force—and twelve more rose up from Echo.
They tried, but it was in moments of stress like these where experience made all of the difference. The combat experience most of the Terran pilots didn’t have.
Russell’s face was harsh as the explosions worked their way through the Katanas, shredding starfighter after starfighter—and leaving their broken formation vulnerable as Echo’s third and final salvo arrived.
#
Chapter 28
Aurelius System
16:00 June 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
TCN Logistics Depot Aurelius
Lieutenant Major Hansen met Kyle and Glass in the landing bay as the third wave of shuttles disgorged more of Federation Intelligence’s professional looters. With over a quarter of Chameleon’s crew tearing apart the entire depot, the whole affair was making him nervous.
“Are we sure we have the entire crew contained?” he asked the Marine CO.
“No,” Hansen admitted. “We do have the Marines and MPs accounted for, as well as all of the armories. We’ve killed surveillance throughout the station, and my troops are accompanying our search parties.
“The main threat at this point is discovery, not a holed-up sensor tech with a pistol,” the Marine noted. “There’s no way they didn’t call for help.”
“And the nearest warship is four days away,” Glass reminded them both, the old man glancing around the shuttle bay as crates of something were loaded onto the shuttle. “We can fill our holds before then, so long as we’re efficient and choose what we steal carefully.”
“Munitions first,” Kyle said firmly. “The next time we go up against the TCN, I want to have more than one salvo of capital-ship missiles.”
“Our computer techs are ripping into their systems as we speak,” Hansen promised. “They expect to have at least a basic inventory of the external cargo containers by twenty hundred hours.”
“Those are where we’ll find the real prizes,” Glass said. “There’ll be some munitions and so forth in ready transfer bays on the main station, but it’s the cargo containers that will have the main stockpiles.”
“I also understand there’s a vault in this station?” Kyle asked.
“We’ve located seven so far, actually,” Hansen reported. “Not entirely sure what’s going to be in them beyond high-value, low-volume stuff. I’m hesitant to blast them open.’
“Cut them out and bring them with us,” Kyle suggested. “That will give us time to work over their systems and get into them at our leisure. We get the value and we don’t distract ourselves inside our timeline.”
Hansen nodded slowly.
“We can do that,” he confirmed. “We’ll probably want to run secondary power lines, make sure their emergency systems don’t destroy whatever’s in them. Still a lot of work.”
“Missiles and munitions are handy, but no one should turn down loot, either,” Kyle told him. The surveillance might be shut down, but he still didn’t want to get too explicit while aboard the station.
The pirates they were pretending to be wouldn’t leave the vaults, so they wouldn’t. Anything of value would be turned over to the Federation, but the crew would split about a five-percent chunk of that value between them. Across some four thousand people, it wasn’t likely to add up to much, but it would still likely be a nice bonus for the people he’d dragged hundreds of light-years from home.
“What have we done with the prisoners?” he asked.
“Shoved them in a hold half-full of food and followed them with enough bedrolls and portable toilets for everyone,” Hansen replied. “We’re watching them carefully, but Arkwright got them sorted out surprisingly quickly.”
“That is one terrifying old man,” Kyle observed. “Watch him.”
“Like a hawk, Captain,” the Marine promised. “Like a fucking hawk.”
#
“What am I looking at?” Edvard demanded, ducking past a door that had miraculously acquired a pair of Marine guards—both dressed in a haphazard mix of gear and armor that belied the precision of their stance.
“You’ll see,” Ramirez promised, leading the officer past a chattering swarm of Navy techs. “When the hacker boys opened up the files, they found something I figured we wanted to bounce all the way up the chain ASAP.”
“Then we should be bouncing it, not playing twenty questions,” the Lieutenant Major pointed out. “Why the mystery?”
“Take a look,” his Gunny replied, switching the lights in one of the ready cargo bays—the bays on the exterior of the station designed to be linked up with the equivalent bays on warship and have their entire contents transferred over.
The lights flickered up on rows upon rows of starfighters. Sets of five ships had been locked together with girders for ease of transport, cables linking from emergency ports to the carrying cases showing how the thrusters and mass manipulators were sent up to run in tandem.
The Terran Commonwealth Starfighter Corps organized its ships into ten-fighter squadrons. Unless Edvard missed his count, he was looking at a minimum of six such squadrons, neatly boxed for transport—about the only state in which Alliance hackers had a snowball’s chance of taking control of them.
#
“So, we have munitions of every type we could possibly desire, parts to manufacture more munitions if we get the other raw materials, and a pile of vaults and high-value goods that will make the crew very happy when we get home.” Kyle summarized the essence of the presentation Glass’s people had just given on the contents of the inventory files.
“What’s our transfer timeline look like?” he asked, glancing at Chownyk.
“Assuming the inventory records are correct, I want to prioritize hard munitions over anything else,” the XO said. “We should have our Stormwind magazines full by oh nine hundred hours tomorrow, at which point we can move on to starfighter missiles, general supplies, and the high-value items.
“Complete loading should take no more than forty-eight hours,” Chownyk concluded. “At any point after nine hundred hours, we should be sufficiently supplied as to carry out the next stage of operations.”
Even aboard Chameleon, surrounded by the officers who would be planning the attack, none of them were quite comfortable talking about attacking Tau Ceti yet
. It was a Commonwealth Core System, after all.
“So, if someone shows up for lunch tomorrow, we can flip them the engines and be out of here without worrying about it,” Kyle said with satisfaction. “I like it.
“I’ve got a wrench, unfortunately,” he continued. “One that’s going to come down on Mister Rokos’s shoulders.”
The CAG hadn’t quite been asleep in the corner, though he’d clearly been feeling the adrenaline and other effects of the earlier battle. At the mention of his name, however, the burly man straightened and started paying more attention.
“Sir?” he said questioningly.
“The hackers found something that wasn’t in the inventory,” Kyle told them. “It seems that they were only partway through the transfer of the Katanas.” He held up a hand to curb any excess of enthusiasm. “There’s good news and bad news here.
“The bad news is that while we’ve found Katanas in the station, all of them have been, quite sensibly, broken free of their transport matrices and restored to full systems security,” he warned them. “I’ll leave it to Glass if those are likely to be useful to us—we’ll be bringing at least two squadrons worth with us as cargo, but if we can actually man and deploy some of them, we will.
“The good news is that someone was being nice and ahead of the ball dealing with their old fighters. Major Edvard’s people found fifty Scimitars in transport matrices, with their systems unlocked for ease of transport.
“Now, this doesn’t give us access to weapons control or their electronic warfare software, but it does give us the ability to overwrite that code. Mister Glass, I don’t suppose we have copies of the software for the Scimitar?”
The spy chuckled.
“As a matter of fact, we do,” he allowed. “It’s not a perfect match, much more generic—and they’ll suffer for the lack of Q-Coms after we gut their Terran Q-blocks—but we can make it up with dirty tricks packages ‘borrowed’ from the League condottieri.”
“The Scimitar, honestly, isn’t really a superior fighter to the Cataphract-D,” Kyle warned Rokos. “But it is a better missile platform, with twice as many launchers—and one that that our Commonwealth friends are going to assume is theirs until it’s too late.”
“We’ll take them,” Rokos said flatly. “That’s an edge I won’t throw away without a damn good reason. What about the Katanas, sir?”
“We don’t have a software suite we can force in over the old code,” Glass admitted. “We’ll need to actually crack open and take control of their existing software. It’ll take time and… Well, it’s not something pirates would be able to do.’
“But it’s not out of the capability of the better condottieri units?” Kyle asked.
“No,” the spy confirmed.
“It doesn’t hurt our cause if we make the Commonwealth think we’re actual League mercs instead of League-based pirates,” Chameleon’s Captain pointed out. “We’ll take them for R&D to rip apart anyway, so if we get any of them set up for our use, Rokos can use them.
“I can see some…sneaky uses for having the same starfighters the Terrans do.”
#
Chapter 29
Aurelius System
23:00 June 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
Once the aftermath, planning and discussions were over, it was late by the ship’s clock.
Kyle found himself pacing his office, unable to even consider sleep. A beer—one of his microbrews from Castle, probably mind-bogglingly expensive at this end of the galaxy—sat on his desk, open but untouched.
In the middle of the battle, he hadn’t had time to doubt himself. When things had gone sideways, he’d done what he’d always done: gone for the throat while making the enemy look somewhere else. Despite his fear, he apparently still was the Stellar Fox.
He sighed.
Tatiana Nazarov, Levon Kevorkian and Norman Costa had died because they’d gone with a different plan. He wasn’t sure about the other pilots they’d lost, and he could convince himself they would have lost the Marines either way, but Nazarov’s flight crew had died because Echo Squadron had been off on their stealthy own.
A clever plan, a sneaky plan…but not the aggressive one he’d conceived of, sitting in that briefing room. It had been a risky plan, but not an all-or-nothing throw of the dice. Until, of course, everything had gone wrong and an all-or-nothing plan had been the only way to win.
To his surprise, a buzz at his door announced the presence of Wing Commander Rokos. His last CAG, Michael Stanford—killed at Huī Xing when Kyle had messed up—had spent many evenings drinking with him, but they’d been friends as well as coworkers. He was too senior to Rokos to have the same relationship, though that required distance could cause problems as well.
“Come in,” he ordered.
Rokos stepped through the door, looking like a train had run over him.
“Couldn’t sleep,” the CAG said gruffly. “System said you were still up, figured I’d check if you needed company.”
“You’re more than welcome,” Kyle said with a grin. “Beer?”
“Sure. Just one,” Rokos insisted. “Still got work to do in the morning.”
“You’re in command, CAG,” the Captain pointed out, pulling a second bottle from the fridge. “When do you ever not?”
“When I’m not aboard ship,” the CAG admitted, taking the beer. “Still have letters to write before I sleep. With Flight Commander Zitnick dead, I’m due the letter to her mother—and the letters for her squadron’s dead.”
“Do you need help?” Kyle asked. That was part of his job, if needed.
“Not with the writing,” Rokos replied. “Just…moral support. This is gonna be worth it, right?”
Kyle sighed.
“You saw Intel’s projections,” he said. It wasn’t a question—Kyle had fought hard to make sure his senior officers had access to that report. “Walkingstick is going to see reinforcements of over a hundred capital ships in the next year. With the Reserve going into commission, we’ll launch fifty.
“The numbers don’t get any better going forward. We need to change the parameters of this war, no matter what the cost.”
“So we drag an innocent nation into a war with the Commonwealth,” Rokos pointed out. “Is that a cost we’re prepared to accept?”
“The truth,” Kyle sighed. “The truth is that if the Commonwealth stops to talk to the League, this whole thing comes apart. We’re counting on them to do what they’ve always done—and on Periklos to respond in a way the League has never responded before.
“There are diplomatic moves in play as well,” he reminded Rokos. “If the League goes to war with the Commonwealth, we’ll offer them an alliance. Starting a second front has value all on its own, but if we can coordinate with the League, suddenly we can face the Commonwealth on something approaching an even footing.
“That’s worth a lot, Rokos.”
“Can’t argue,” the CAG said, shaking his head. “Still seems…dirty.”
“It’s a black op we can never admit we were involved in,” Kyle agreed. “It’s dirty, all right. Using their own starfighters against them? Stolen munitions, stolen birds, Gods—Chameleon was theirs, not that we stole it from them.”
“We didn’t start this war,” Rokos said quietly. “I don’t even like Terrans, sir. But this is a mess.”
“It is. But it’s our job and our mess. Someone was going to do it, Wing Commander. Who better?”
Rokos laughed.
“They might have found a better CAG,” he pointed out, “but they sure as hell couldn’t have found a better Captain. Not sure anyone else would have had the nerve to pull off what you did today. Most would have written Echo off and run.”
“Wasn’t going to happen, Rokos,” Kyle said with a cheerful grin as the other officer’s confidence finished filling a hole he’d barely even realized he’d been struggling with. “Just…was not going to happen.”
#
/> Edvard was drunk. It was a state he generally tried to avoid on deployment, but a second circle of empty chairs at the heart of a second wake in a week was a bit much for him. He’d joined a peacetime military, though everyone had known war was coming. He’d lost more Marines under his command in the last seven days than in the first seven years of his career.
They’d been lucky, too. They’d run up against equal numbers of Terran Marines, and if the Terran commander hadn’t fed them into his people piecemeal, he’d have lost more than the dozen men and women he had.
With thirty-six fatalities, Edvard was down almost a fifth of his company. He’d gone a little too far into a whiskey bottle when that realization had hit—and Riley had gently steered him out of the wake before it became necessary for him to trigger the implant override that would flush the alcohol from his system.
They’d travelled far from the party, not heading anywhere in particular, when he stumbled and fell into her. She tried to catch him, but that only resulted in them both going down in a tangled heap of limbs and uniforms.
Lieutenant Sandra Riley was, quite literally, a killing machine, her body augmented with various systems that made her extremely dangerous despite her slim build. Hearing her giggle was an unexpected pleasure.
Sharing her laughter, Edvard tried to disentangle himself from his subordinate, only to suddenly find them face to face, still sprawled along the floor and with far more of their bodies touching than the Articles would ever find acceptable.
They both froze then; ever so slightly, Riley’s lips parted and she leaned toward him.
And then an emergency alert hit both their implants, causing them to scramble apart as Edvard finally engaged the override that cut the effect of alcohol on his brain.
“Hansen, what’s happening?” he demanded.
“Sir, um…we have a problem,” the Sergeant running the security detail on the Terran prisoners said hesitantly.
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 19
