Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  “Without knowing where they’re carrying on the research, we have no idea how far along they are with the starfighters and their new missiles,” he said grimly. “We need the data at that Tau Ceti R&D facility—they may be hiding the development, but any mass production will be authorized at that station, which means that full data must be there.”

  “What if it isn’t?” Kyle asked, a thought bringing up a map of the galaxy on the wallscreen. “Monroe is forty-two light-years from Tau Ceti. Forty-four from Sol. It’s not exactly convenient to anywhere, so they could have picked somewhere just as inconvenient for their new project site.

  “Why run hardware and schematics through Tau Ceti at all? If the Navy HQ in Sol approves it, they can disperse it via Q-Com.”

  “Navy HQ won’t even look at anything the R&D base at Tau Ceti hasn’t vetted,” Glass replied. “They got burned during the last war when a friend of a member of the Committee got a starfighter design rushed into deployment that proved… Well, it was the Dagger type.”

  Kyle winced. The Dagger type had been one of the first starfighter designs the Commonwealth had deployed—and on at least ten different occasions had blown itself to pieces when firing its positron lance.

  “So TCN has an team of engineers and scientists whose sole job is to make sure everything the Commonwealth puts into full production is actually worth the resources,” Glass continued. “At this point, they’re actually the people who draw up the final manufacturing schematics.

  “If those new ships are anywhere near ready to fly, the schematics are at the Tau Ceti R&D Station. Ostrowski’s data suggests they’ll be delivered in three days.

  “So long as they’re there, we need to steal them.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Kyle noted. “I’m guessing the place is surrounded by no-fly zones and starfighters and warships?”

  “Exactly. Every detail we have is the file I’m flipping you right now,” Glass told him. “The system is busy enough that we can get close, but we’re going to have to board the station by force and defend ourselves while Hansen finds the data we need.

  “We’ll need a distraction. The shipyards make the best target, but they’re all solidly defended.”

  “I’ll go over it with my staff,” Kyle promised. “We have two weeks.”

  “If anyone can work it out, it’s you,” the spy allowed. “This deep a smash-and-grab wasn’t in the original cards.”

  Kyle grinned broadly, a confidence that had grown unfamiliar warming him as he studied the spy’s data.

  “Then you picked the right Captain.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose we actually have Chameleon’s original Christopher Lee IFF codes on file?”

  #

  Morning saw Kyle standing in a mostly clear spot in one of the cargo holds, watching a significant portion of his crew find their seats in the chairs set up amidst the crates of food. One end of the cleared zone was now filled with a set of tables holding an array of the higher-quality foods they’d acquired courtesy of the Terran Commonwealth Navy.

  Aboard a main-line Federation warship, he would be standing next to the stone obelisk, reading off the names of the dead while robots laser-etched the names into the plinth. With no plinth and no robot, they were improvising.

  Castle’s traditional wake informed the traditions of the Federation’s military. They’d managed to improvise the braziers to burn incense, and the traditional paper lanterns drifted above. Most importantly, they still had food.

  “Spacers of the Castle Federation,” Kyle said after he was sure most of the people present were paying attention. “My brothers- and sisters-in-arms.

  “It is never easy to lose friends and comrades. Never easy to say goodbye. This memorial remembers for us, as if we would ever forget.”

  The words were formal, as much part of the tradition as the food and the lantern. Kyle had only heard them once before the lead-up to the war, in the aftermath of the Ansem Gulf incident that had earned him his first Star of Heroism.

  Now he could recite the words from memory without even using his implant.

  “We remember,” he told his people, letting the formal words echo into the silence.

  “We remember Flight Commander Andrea Zitnick,” he began, listing off the dead in decreasing order of rank.

  #

  Edvard stood silently at the edge of the wake. He’d released his company from the training schedule to allow them to attend the ship’s memorial service, another layer of shared relief to salve his company’s painful losses.

  Today, though, he wasn’t joining his Marines in drinking the sorrows away. If nothing else, it was still too early for an official ship function to include alcohol—though he assumed it was out there.

  He had taken a coffee and a plate of food, but today he was watching the crowd. Without an official ship’s marshal or MP detachment, Chameleon’s law-enforcement needs ran through him. So far, the pressure of being this far out and being under the command of the Stellar Fox himself had kept those needs to a slow burn, on the low end for the number of crew they had aboard.

  The shock of their losses at New Edmonton and Aurelius could easily change that. He was more concerned about his own people than anything else, but they’d also lost Navy personnel when the near miss had washed over Chameleon.

  The Space Force losses had been even worse than his own. The black-ops squadron was basically gone, and the others were all down a flight crew or two. From forty crews, he understood Rokos’s wing to be down to twenty-six, with almost fifty dead along the way due to the Cataphracts’ lack of escape pods.

  Chameleon’s crew had been hammered and they were a long way from home. They’d been buried in work in Aurelius, but he’d already had three fights reported this morning. The tension aboard the ship was starting to ratchet up.

  So far, he had no evidence—other than Riley’s concern over her “friend”—that anything serious was being planned. Fistfights weren’t even worth bothering the Captain with, but if someone was planning real violence, it would be stopped.

  Which left Edvard Hansen standing on the edge of the party, watching his fellow crewmates, and wondering if any of them were close enough to cracking to be a problem.

  Today, he hated his job.

  #

  Chapter 33

  Deep Space, Under Alcubierre Drive

  10:00 June 9, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Chameleon

  Russell looked around his remaining squadron commanders’ faces with a heavy feeling in his chest. With Cavendish grounded and only one flight crew left of the entire squadron, he’d dissolved Echo Squadron. Flight Lieutenant Vogel and his crew were now part of Alpha Squadron.

  That left only four faces in the room. Four faces who represented only twenty-six flight crew, few enough that he could easily have reorganized into three squadrons.

  “All right, people,” he told them. “We’ve had a full day in deep space to start sorting out our teething difficulties and get the squadrons in order. Where are we at?”

  Flight Commander Churchill, CO of Alpha Squadron, shook his head.

  “We’re flying enemy fighters with shit for guns two hundred light-years from home on a suicide mission, and we’re down almost half the damn wing,” he said flatly. “I mean, my people have spines and they’re up for it, but we’re a ways past ‘teething difficulties’, CAG.”

  Russell grunted.

  “Fair,” he allowed. “Your people are up for it. Are you?”

  Churchill straightened in his chair and glared back at him.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone still flat. “But damn it, CAG, we can’t fly into a Core System with twenty-six starfighters and expect to live.”

  “The Captain has a plan,” Russell told him, hoping that was true. He had to get said plan out of Roberts shortly. If it didn’t exist, they’d need to make it. “Lucky for you, Churchill, you’re going to get to hand those Scimitars back.

  “Wait, what
?” his Alpha leader asked, finally losing the stone in his voice.

  “Glass’s people have cracked the security on two of the Katanas,” Rokos told his people. “They’re prepared to guarantee us an eight-ship squadron by the thirteenth. That gives Alpha Squadron a week to get used to the birds, which is the minimum I’m willing to see anyone go into combat with a new starfighter with.”

  “Okay, so eight of our crews—meaning I’m poaching people from one of these guys”—Churchill gestured at the other squadron commanders—“have fighters worth the antimatter to blow them away. It’ll take a few more seconds for us all to die.”

  “I have no intention of dying at Tau Ceti,” Russell replied. “If that’s where the Void takes me, fine, but I’m sure as Stars not planning on it. I don’t think the Captain is planning on dying there either, or on spending us with no chance of survival.

  “But you’re right,” he conceded. “So long as we’re down to barely three squadrons, the odds are worse than they are with five.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure three squadrons versus five makes that much difference,” Churchill said slowly. “It’s going to be a game of smoke and mirrors anyway.”

  “But having five squadrons we can deploy gives us a few more mirrors, doesn’t it?” Russell asked with a grin. “We have the birds. What we don’t have is flight crew. So what I need from all of you is a list of the fourteen gunners and flight engineers with the most simulator and live flight hours.”

  His Flight Commanders looked at him in shock as what he was asking for sank in.

  “We can borrow engineers and gunners from the Navy,” he continued. “They’ll likely be borderline for implant capacity and their skill sets won’t line up perfectly, but if we have people who are close to their wings to fly the damn things, I can live with less efficient repairs and potentially needing to coordinate salvos at the squadron level.

  “Can we do that, people?”

  Russell swept his gaze across his leaders. One was a brevet promotion, bumped to replace Flight Commander Zitnick. He’d have to reinstate Cavendish to flight status to command the fifth squadron, but he figured he could find her a mission that didn’t have her in range of him with gigaton-range weapons.

  “Wilco,” Churchill said after a long moment. “We’ll make it happen.”

  “Good. Because if we don’t, the Commonwealth may just spring a surprise on the Alliance we’re not ready for,” the CAG warned them. “I won’t tell you the entire fate of the war turns on this mission—there will be other chances to turn the tide, I’m sure.

  “But if we pull this together and we carry this off, well.” He smiled grimly. “It’s a shame this will all be classified, because that story would be worth free beer for life!”

  #

  Kyle waited as the steward finished pouring the coffee, watching as his three senior officers settled in at the small table in his dining room. With the Commander Air Group, Executive Officer, and Tactical Officer in the room, everyone with a stake in how Chameleon was run and fought sat around the table with steaming plates of spaghetti in front of them.

  “Sir, I…”

  “Eat, Rokos,” Kyle ordered as the CAG tried to bring up business. “You being here convinced the cooks not to try anything complicated tonight, which I wish I could convince them of every night,” he observed with a chuckle. “There’ll be time for business.”

  The CAG shrugged and dug into the food, following the Captain’s example. Taylor and Chownyk, used to Kyle’s foibles by now, were equally prompt.

  “How’s your wife, CAG?” Kyle asked as the pace of chewing slowed slightly.

  “She managed to get herself promoted again,” Rokos replied after a moment. “If she keeps this up, she’ll be running the precinct by Christmas!”

  The CAG’s wife was a ranking police officer on New Amazon. Kyle wasn’t entirely familiar with her rank or even the rank structure of the municipal police force she worked for, but he was reasonably certain Rokos was exaggerating.

  “She felt she needed to catch up, did she?” he asked. Rokos, like most of the old Avalon’s crew, had been promoted after the Battle of Tranquility. They didn’t stand out as much now, as war was having its usual impact on the Federation’s neat tables of ‘required time in grade’. Kyle himself had been one of the youngest officers the Federation had ever promoted to O-7.

  “She can break me with one hand tied behind her back,” the CAG replied. “I wouldn’t dare imply anything of the sort!

  “How’s Captain Solace?” Rokos continued after a moment. “I heard Seventh Fleet got jumped.”

  “Mira remains as unflappable as usual,” Kyle allowed, remembering her tired video in the aftermath of the battle. “Thanks to our warning about the Katanas, they turned the Commonwealth back.” He laughed softly. “From the sounds of it, she may end up with a star before I do. Reversing our initial problem would be…irritating, if ironic.”

  “That was a shock to the entire crew,” Rokos pointed out. “I don’t think most of us even realized something was a possibility until she was on Camerone and you two were openly together.”

  “Even in wartime, the Articles come down like a ton of bricks on something like that,” Chownyk pointed out. “I saw my first Captain drummed out of the service for it, though reading between the lines, the JAG running the hearing figured he’d been doing more than asking nicely to get his XO into bed.”

  Kyle tried not to visibly shiver at Chownyk’s comment. He’d done a decent job of convincing himself he hadn’t noticed his old XO’s attractiveness, but he could see ways that the intimate but hierarchical relationship between Captain and XO could be abused.

  He’d been celibate the entire time between abandoning his pregnant high-school girlfriend to join the Space Force and reconciling with her after the Battle of Tranquility, so he trusted his restraint—if not necessarily his relationship judgment.

  He hoped that no one would end up in command of a warship without a similar level of restraint, but the fact that the rules existed and had been enforced in the memory of the four officers in the room suggested otherwise.

  “How do you make it work?” Taylor asked. “There was…a pilot aboard Sunset. She and I hit it off, but with the war…” The young Commander shrugged. “Now I’m two ranks senior to her, and one of us could die, and… I just don’t know, sir.”

  “Your last two points are key,” Kyle said quietly. “One of you could die. And you don’t know.” That realization was what had led him to reconcile with his son and the boy’s mother. It was also why, despite the habits of a dozen years, he hadn’t pushed Mira away when she’d, well, jumped him.

  “We might not come back from Tau Ceti. Sunset could be sent to the front. Your friend could be transferred to one of the new ships heading to the front. Gods, Castle could be attacked again.

  “Military personnel since the dawn of time have dealt with long spells apart and not knowing who may or may not come home,” he said gently. “It’s not easy. But…it’s part of the job, and if we can’t take the joke…”

  “We shouldn’t have signed up,” she agreed, smiling slightly. “That…actually helps, sir. Thank you.”

  “Whatever you do,” he warned her, “don’t rely solely on my relationship advice! I just follow Captain Solace’s lead and pretend I have a clue what’s going on!”

  That seemed to break whatever tension Taylor’s question had raised. He gave her a reassuring nod and she returned it, her smile broadening. Hopefully, that had helped—and he suspected a certain pilot aboard Sunset was going to have at least one very good evening when Chameleon made it home.

  If Chameleon made it home.

  “CAG, you had something you wanted to talk to us about?” he asked Rokos. That request was what had triggered this dinner invitation, after all, and everyone was clearly done eating. He could probably allow business to start now.

  Rokos paused, clearly marshaling his thoughts as the steward cleared away the pla
tes and refilled the coffee cups again.

  “We’ve lost thirty-five percent of the fighter wing so far,” he began, his voice low. “Normally, we’d have retrieved at least a third and more likely half of the flight crews aboard those starfighters. Acquiring the Scimitars and Katanas we picked up at Aurelius would allow us to put those crews back into space, and we’d be down less than a single squadron.”

  The dinner table was silent. The lack of escape pods aboard the League starfighters was a disturbing sign of how highly the condottieri carrier commanders regarded the flight crews that actually did the fighting and dying in the League’s semi-formalized internal wars.

  “Having lost every one of those flight crews as KIA, the fighter wing has a lost a lot of capability,” he concluded. “I don’t know what the plan is for Tau Ceti, but I can’t imagine that loss of capability is going to do us any favors.”

  “I have only the barest skeleton of a plan so far,” Kyle admitted. And since his plan depended on Glass coming up with the original TCN IFF codes for the ship, he wasn’t pulling his officers in to build on that skeleton yet. “But I’m guessing you have an idea for making up that capacity?”

  Rokos nodded.

  “I have three gunners and a flight engineer who have completed the sim and live flight hours to qualify for their wings,” he explained. “There’s formalities and procedures, but I can arrange those. Those four I can make pilots without hesitation.

  “I have ten more gunners and engineers who have at least half of the flight hours to qualify,” Rokos continued grimly. “Regs say the Captain has to sign off on my putting them in cockpits.”

  “And that will still leave you short over forty engineers and gunners,” Kyle concluded aloud, thinking. With “only” about three thousand people aboard, the odds were that they didn’t even have forty people with enough implant bandwidth to properly link into the starfighter.