Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  “So I’m assuming,” Edvard snapped. “What’s happened?”

  “It seems Commodore Arkwright found the guy running the Marine defense of the station. He’s, ah, he’s kicking the shit out of the man. Should we intervene?”

  Edvard had to think about that for a longer moment than he was really comfortable with. The pirates they were pretending to be were only somewhat likely to care…but neither the condottieri they were also pretending to be or the Marines they were could really let that stand.

  Even if the Terran Marines’ CO had managed to kill off most of his own people with incompetence.

  “Yes,” he ordered. “Break it up, and see if we can sort out somewhere to throw them both to cool off.”

  “Will do, sir,” the Marine replied.

  The mental image of Arkwright, the calmly collected old man who’d almost refused to surrender at gunpoint, beating up a presumably much younger and likely much healthier man still amused Edvard, enough to keep him smiling until he turned to meet Riley’s gaze and remembered what had been happening when he’d received the message.

  There was an unfamiliar pallor to her face that told him that she’d also triggered the override to flush the alcohol from her brain and the rest of her body. She met his gaze and smiled shyly.

  He shook his head wryly, both acknowledging what had almost happened—they both knew it wouldn’t have ended at a kiss—and warning her that it couldn’t happen.

  “We’re adults, sir,” she said quietly. “We can behave.”

  “So we can,” he agreed with a sigh. “May I walk you to your quarters, Lieutenant Riley?”

  #

  By the time Russell finished his beer and headed back to his quarters, the fatigue of the day had finally caught up with him. The burly pilot wasn’t really having problems, per se, but he was definitely looking forward to his bed.

  Passing the flight lounge, however, he caught a flicker of light. Flickering wasn’t generally a good sign on starship—it usually meant there was a problem with the power feed to an entire section of the ship. Flickering lights often meant that section of the ship wasn’t far away from flickering life support.

  He turned toward the lounge, concern overcoming fatigue for at least a few moments, only to stop as he reached the entrance to the room and realized he was seeing candlelight.

  Candles were discouraged outside the handful of religious shrines aboard Federation warships, but they weren’t exactly forbidden. He paused at the door, outside of sight from most of the room, and looked to see what was happening.

  Cavendish was sitting at a table off to the side of the lounge, a set of lit candles laid out in front of her. Five others that he recognized as flight crew from her black-ops squadron sat around the table with her, each with three candles in front of them.

  One for each of Echo Squadron’s people who’d died today.

  It wasn’t something he was familiar with, but he could also see how a unit that operated as insularly as Cavendish’s had before being assigned to Chameleon would have its own rituals and traditions.

  He stayed in the corner for a moment, watching the black-ops flight crew and their candles. Despite his inability to hear their quiet conversation, he still felt like he was intruding.

  He slowly withdrew, making sure to make his way past the lounge without coming into their view. The candles were a minor fire hazard but not enough to be worth commenting on.

  Everyone had the right to mourn in their own way.

  #

  Chapter 30

  Aurelius System

  12:00 June 6, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Chameleon

  “Watch it! Those are missiles, for Stars’ sake!”

  “Why? It’s not loaded with antimatter yet.”

  “Maybe not,” the Chief agreed with her heckler, “but if you damage the containment fields, when we fill it with antimatter, the whole shebang will explode. And then you don’t get the lunch you’re rushing to, because the whole ship will be gone!”

  Kyle smiled slightly at the perennial sound of senior noncoms explaining their subordinates’ failings to them, watching as another cell of twelve Stormwind capital-ship missiles drifted through the zero gravity connection between the logistics depot and the Q-ship.

  “Our ready magazines are now full,” Chownyk reported crisply, the two men standing in an observation bay watching the loading process. “That’s one hundred and twenty missiles. As a reserve, we’re loading another four hundred and eighty in the cargo holds like that.” The cyborg gestured toward the packaged missiles with one plastic-and-chrome finger. “We can’t transfer them into the magazines quickly, but even a ten-minute load cycle is better than no reloads at all.”

  “Agreed,” Kyle confirmed. “The starfighter missiles?”

  “A twentieth the size, so the numbers are bigger but the story’s the same,” his XO replied. “When the Terrans designed her, they gave us twenty-missile magazines for each Stormwind launcher—and eighty-missile magazines for the Javelin launchers. We’ve loaded the best part of a thousand missiles into the magazines, and since the Scimitars need them as well, we’re stacking ten thousand spares into one of the holds.”

  “That must have made Rokos happy.”

  “Like a kid at Christmas,” Chownyk agreed. “We’ve also loaded in an entire company’s worth of battle armor and weapons for the Marines, plus enough munitions to fight a good-sized war.” He shrugged. “We can manufacture most of that, given time, but it seems handy to have around.

  “I did make the call to leave behind the combat vehicles, though,” the XO told Kyle. “While I’m sure imaginative-enough officers could find a use for a main battle tank aboard a space station, carrying them didn’t seem…cost-effective.”

  “Did Hansen even complain?” Kyle asked.

  “I’m not sure the Lieutenant Major even noticed the tanks were an option. Or cared. He was busy gloating over the container of anti-armor carbines we found.”

  “The starfighters?”

  “We’re moving the Cataphracts into the cargo hold with the Katanas we brought over,” Chownyk noted. “Once that’s done, we’ll begin moving the Scimitars into the main flight deck. Rokos has two squadrons flying combat space patrol until the transfer is complete.

  “My understanding is that the software work is already done and Rokos’s people will be able to fly the birds as soon as they’re fuelled and armed.”

  “Good work, Chownyk,” Kyle concluded. “Anything else going on I need to be aware of?”

  “Something is going to break,” his XO pointed out pessimistically. “I expected it to be with the missiles, but the catastrophic failure point now is the starfighter loading. For about six hours, those twelve birds Rokos has up are it for our defenses. We’re attached to the station, and the rest of the Cataphracts are in cold storage.”

  Kyle had signed off on the plan recognizing the risk. That was why they had the CSP, but he understood his XO’s concern. This was the most vulnerable stage of the whole operation.

  #

  Russell watched uncomfortably as the last of his undeployed Cataphracts slotted neatly into the frameworks that carried them through deep space. While there were connections between the cargo bays and the flight deck, they weren’t large enough—aboard Chameleon, at least—to move the starfighters themselves.

  So he was going to have most of his remaining fighters moved out of the flight deck and into the cargo bay, a relatively straightforward process that would unfortunately tell anyone watching that he didn’t currently have any more starfighters to deploy.

  Then they would move the Scimitars in in similar frameworks, break them down, adjust the hangars to fit the completely different style of spacecraft, check that the systems were all working as Glass had promised…and only then fuel them and load them with missiles.

  Six hours, Hanz told him. He hated to call his Deck Chief a liar, but he doubted they’d do it in less than twelve. He had
Echo and Bravo squadrons, his most intact formations at this point with six fighters apiece, flying CSP.

  “That’s it,” Hanz said sharply from behind him. “We’ll move them out and have the new birds in here in a jiffy, boss.”

  “Should have done this in deep space,” Rokos told her. “We could have waited.”

  “Could we?” she asked. “I’m not in the operations briefings, CAG. Are we going to have six hours to stop in deep space and make the switch like this?”

  He snorted. The plan was to head straight to Tau Ceti.

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “It just makes me twitchy.”

  “You’re just grouchy you couldn’t justify flying the CSP yourself.”

  “Fair,” he agreed. “But if you’ll excuse me, Chief Hanz, I’m going to go baby the tactical plot in PriFly until this is over.”

  #

  The fighter frames were making their final ungainly way back into Chameleon as Russell entered the Q-Ship’s primary flight control center. With as much local traffic as there was, the room was a hub of activity, with the techs providing safe courses and corrections to the twelve starfighters and almost sixty assorted other small craft swarming around Chameleon and the depot.

  One screen was showing footage from one of those shuttles, hanging back to provide assistance if something went wrong, watching another shuttle winch in the cables linked to a vault the size of a starfighter. None of the vaults had contents listed in the inventories their hackers had yet accessed, but it was unlikely something with that level of protection wouldn’t be worth the effort to haul it out of the station.

  Bravo Squadron was flying a high overwatch, orbiting above the depot in a position to intercept an approach from any attack. Echo Squadron was doing the opposite, orbiting below the chaotic space of the depot, where the engines and energy of the station helped conceal the already stealthy starfighters.

  The hope was that if someone attacked, Echo’s intervention would come as a surprise. It was a pretty frail hope, in Russell’s opinion—as the man who’d drafted the plan—but the truth was that any surprise was unnecessary. At most, there was a loose patrol of Katanas in the system somewhere. A dozen Cataphracts should be able to deal with that without any games.

  “How are we doing, Flight Commander?” he quietly asked Shine, the Space Force officer running the shift.

  Shine was one of exactly two officers in the Space Force contingent who lacked the necessary implant bandwidth to fly a starfighter—and the black-eyed woman lacked it for the same reason as Kyle Roberts did: neural scarification induced implant degradation.

  Shine, like Captain Roberts, had been just too close to an antimatter warhead going off. She’d lived, but she’d been grounded and offered an Article Seventeen medical discharge. Instead, she’d taken a support role normally assigned to officers who’d pissed off their CAGs.

  Running PriFly was a job she was sharing with Cavendish, for example. Unlike Cavendish, she’d volunteered for it so she could still contribute.

  “It’s a hornet’s nest out there, but it’s our hornet’s nest,” Shine said cheerfully. “Scanners are clear of anything we don’t know about.”

  She pointed at one corner of the holographic plot as she spoke, though. Aurelius 4A was finishing its spin around 4B and approaching the depot. All three were orbiting the shared center of gravity, so at different times, different planets would be closest to the station—more driven by the station’s orbit than the planets’ rotation around each other.

  “Cosner, you said you were going to dig into that sensor blotch you spotted,” she called to one of her techs. “Why is it still showing as an unknown on my plot?”

  “Haven’t seen anything since,” the tech replied. “It could have been an engine flare, but nothing’s shown up since.” He shrugged. “It might be a platform or a Q-probe they had in orbit down there. Or it could be a sensor glitch.”

  “Is there any way to be sure?” Russell asked.

  “We could pulse the entire area with the main radar array,” Cosner said slowly. “We’re using it for local sweeps, but we could do a high-power pulse along the line of the ghost. But it’s just a ghost.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” the CAG told him. “I do believe in sneaky Terrans. Run the radar pulse, Specialist.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  It took a few seconds to redirect the several emitters that made up the main radar array. Russell waited impatiently as the immensely powerful beams of radiation were charged and then unleashed toward Aurelius 4A.

  More seconds ticked by, the speed of light having its own piece to say in the timing of their data, and then the “sensor ghost” lit up again and started to resolve.

  “Damn,” Shine whispered. “Vampire!” she shouted, getting the attention of everyone in the PriFly center. “We have vampires—five Katanas on approach.

  “Come on, people,” she snapped as some of her crew stared at her blankly while others leapt to work. “You know the drill! Check your sectors and responsibilities. Get the shuttles to safe zones and clear attack vectors for the starfighters. We have sixty unarmed ships out there and it’s our job to make sure we don’t lose any!”

  Russell left her to it and stepped up behind Cosner.

  “Get me details, son,” he said quietly.

  “They’re at five hundred thousand kilometers, closing at two thousand kilometers per second,” the scanner tech reported.

  “They’re in missile range,” Russell realized. “Get me Tomacino!”

  “Too late,” the tech whispered, gesturing at the screen.

  The five starfighters had just brought their drives up at full power and were pushing up from the gas giant they’d hidden their acceleration behind. They’d approached from wherever they’d been patrolling in the system and used Aurelius 4A to set up a slingshot maneuver and “sneak” up on the depot with their engines down.

  All five fighters launched, sending twenty missiles blasting toward the collection of shuttles and small transport ships Shine was attempting to coordinate. Only some of them had any kind of antimissile defenses at all, and Chameleon’s defenses couldn’t cover them all.

  “CAG, this is Tomacino,” Echo Squadron’s acting commander’s voice sounded in his ear. “I see them. We are vectoring to intercept the missiles.”

  “Bravo is on their way to reinforce you,” Russell told the younger man, as if that made a difference. Even as they spoke, a second salvo of twenty missiles launched into space. Bravo Squadron would be able to drop missiles on the Terrans, make sure that none of the Katanas survived their suicide strike, but they wouldn’t be able to intervene in the missile strike.

  The only way to save the shuttles was to put Echo Squadron’s six starfighters between them and the missiles—and then use their ECM to lure the missiles to them.

  “We will do our duty, sir,” Tomacino said calmly, far more calmly than Russell would have felt in his place.

  The only way to save the shuttles was to make the missiles try to kill Echo Squadron.

  #

  “Missiles away,” Taylor announced grimly.

  Kyle nodded absently, studying the tactical plot as he tried to see a way out of the situation for the squadron trapped between the oncoming Terrans and the defenseless small craft now swarming to try and hide behind Chameleon.

  The Q-ship was locked to the station but, unlike in New Edmonton, they had missiles to spend this time. Six Stormwinds flashed into space toward the attacking starfighters, and a dozen Javelins followed them.

  More Javelins followed in rapid succession, Taylor putting salvo after salvo of the smaller missiles into space in a counter-missile pattern that would cover the space shuttles…eventually.

  “Their third salvo doesn’t stand a chance,” she told him. “Their second… we’ll only get salvo in space in time to intercept. That’s twelve missiles against twenty.”

  He nodded again, more grimly. On a good day, a Javelin had a thirty percen
t success rate as a counter-missile, which meant most of that second salvo would get through.

  Worse, there was nothing they could do about the first twenty missiles.

  “Bravo Squadron has launched on the Katanas,” Chownyk reported. The XO was on the bridge for once, but had readily taken up his normal role relaying information from the CIC crew. “We’re assessing a zero percent survival chance—those bastards are done.”

  “They knew that going in,” Kyle said quietly. “They were hoping to get to lance range, but they launched as soon as they were seen.”

  He crunched the numbers in his implant, but it didn’t change anything. They’d disabled Aurelius Station’s antimissile defenses to stop any loose Terrans from turning them on the shuttles. Chameleon’s own defenses provided a safe zone that cover many of the unarmed craft, but those first two salvos would reach the ships outside that zone before they could evade.

  “There’s nothing else we can do,” he told his bridge crew, his voice calm and confident. Somehow. “It’s up to Tomacino’s people.”

  #

  Russell wracked his brain as the Terrans closed, trying to find some way that they could intervene from there, but it all boiled down to hard math. The Katanas had launched sixty missiles and Echo Squadron had six starfighters.

  Any missiles from the first two salvos that got through would kill shuttles. About a third of the spacecraft under threat had the same crew as the starfighters—a Navy pilot, copilot, and engineer. The rest…had more. Bigger crews on larger craft. Shuttles with passengers.

  “Cosner,” he snapped. “Keep those arrays on the Terrans. At this range, Chameleon should be able to read the damn serial numbers on the missiles. Feed the data back to Echo.”

  “On it!” the tech replied.

  It was all he could give Flight Lieutenant Tomacino, but it wasn’t nothing. At this range, focusing Chameleon’s main radar arrays would overwhelm any attempt to jam scanners or otherwise obfuscate the missiles’ location.