Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  Ten seconds and still fifteen thousand kilometers short of the immense space station, Bogey Alpha’s hundred and twenty missiles caught up with the surviving missiles of the Federation salvo. They blazed through each other in a deadly intercept that incinerated half of the Commonwealth missiles…and left only fourteen of Russell’s missiles to close the final distance.

  The last-ditch defenses flared to life, lasers on the station itself and its inner security platforms opening up—and missing as the missiles’ course went ever so slightly differently from what the defenders had been expecting.

  The Terrans adapted in the seconds they had, and more missiles blasted into vapor…but three made it through, slamming into the massive stabilizer ring at the base of the immense station and obliterating it in a tripled blast of antimatter fire.

  “We hit the stabilizers!” Alvarado announced, his voice shocked. “The station is… Starless Void, the station is spinning.”

  “And destabilized,” Russell said with satisfaction. “And…falling.”

  Slowly. The big station was rotating at a rate that would have it upside down in a little under a minute, and falling at less than a kilometer per second. Russell didn’t have the data to guess its crush depth in the gas giant, but he figured the locals had hours to save it.

  Probably not days.

  “Let them deal with that,” the Wing Commander said calmly. “We have a ride to catch.”

  #

  “First missile intercept in thirty seconds,” Taylor announced grimly, the words cutting through the jubilation on Chameleon’s bridge like ice. They had three waves of missiles out to cover the torpedoes, but with no data on the weapons’ capabilities, they were almost shooting blind.

  The damage to Shipyard Alpha bought them time—it was exactly the distraction Kyle’s people needed to live through today, and achieved with minimum loss of civilian life. While Taylor’s focus was on the missiles bearing down on the Q-ship itself, he was watching the wider scope.

  The battleship had already changed course, accelerating rapidly toward the falling space station. They were still ten minutes away from their zero-zero intercept, but the big warship was the only ship in range that might be able to save the platform.

  Three of the closer formations of starfighters had changed course toward the station as well, though what exactly the relatively tiny spaceships intended to do, Kyle wasn’t sure—cover the swarm of shuttles already starting to evacuate the facility from Rokos’s people, he guessed.

  “Jamming is up,” his tactical officer declared, pulling his attention back to the immediate threat.

  Kyle whistled silently as he studied the power readings they were getting on the ECM emitters the torpedoes mounted.

  “I’ve got chaff and complex electronic warfare running as well,” Taylor said softly. “Sir…without more data, I’m not going to make much of a dent.”

  “Do what you can,” he ordered. “And record everything. We need to get that ‘more data’, Commander.”

  There was no time for acknowledgement as the first salvo of their missiles charged into the incoming torpedoes. Six capital-ship missiles and a dozen fighter missiles sliced in simultaneously. The fighter missiles, lacking the heavier computers and sensors of their big brothers, failed completely, detonating too far away from the incoming weapons to achieve even near-miss kills.

  The six Stormwind capital missiles, however, took out three torpedoes. A fifty-percent kill ratio in defensive mode was impressive—except that they had less than four minutes to impact. Even with the salvos already in the air, Taylor would only have ten more salvos.

  That would leave almost a quarter of the torpedoes for the Q-ship’s close in defenses, and Kyle was grimly certain that would be far too many.

  “Second intercept in fifteen seconds.”

  “XO—collate everything we can pull from the intercepts and dump it to Churchill,” Kyle ordered. Alpha Squadron would interpenetrate with the torpedoes just after the third salvo of missiles intercepted. Every ounce of data they could extract from the earlier intercepts might give the starfighters a better chance of killing missiles.

  And every missile they killed was one fewer to rip into Chameleon.

  Two more series of explosions lit up the neural feeds as the next two intercepts passed, wiped five more incoming torpedoes out of existence. One of those kills, Kyle noted absently, was from the Chameleon-launched Javelins.

  Churchill didn’t waste missiles he was unlikely to hit with. For a few precious seconds, his squadron went to full deceleration, extended the time they were in range of the missiles. Lances and lasers flashed out, targeted by the power of ten starfighters’ radar arrays at point-blank instead of the still-distant Q-ship’s arrays and the minimal scanners of the missiles themselves.

  Explosions flared around the starfighters, and Kyle cringed as one of the starfighters lost all power and spun off into space. The crew were almost certainly dead—but surviving that kind of near miss was what had cost him his own pilot’s wings.

  “Twelve remaining inbound,” Taylor said quietly. “Fourth intercept in fifteen seconds. Torpedo impact two minutes after that.”

  Kyle waited silently. He was out of tricks to influence this. Missiles at this range came down to math, and these torpedoes were new. They didn’t know the math. They didn’t know exactly how much chaff they’d deployed, how much power was in the jammers, what cues would suggest a sensor return was a false image versus a change of course.

  Taylor kept firing missiles into the teeth of the incoming torpedoes, eighteen missiles every thirty seconds, spending the magazines like water.

  It wasn’t enough. Kyle knew it couldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t have been against forty capital ship missiles at this range, and it wasn’t against forty of the torpedoes at this range, not without more of a fighter screen.

  “Lances and lasers online,” Chownyk reported from CIC. “CIC assuming control of inner defense perimeter. Taylor, handle the missiles. We’ll run the beams.”

  The young woman at the console didn’t even acknowledge, still running her missiles with ice-cold concentration. She was back to fifty percent kills with the Stormwinds, Kyle noted absently—she was as brilliant as Mason had suggested she might be.

  Six missiles hit the inner perimeter, throwing their extra fifty gravities of acceleration into defensive maneuvers the Q-ship’s computers could track but hadn’t expected.

  The inner defense caught four. Taylor fired Javelins into the teeth of the last pair, a desperation move that sent the entire ship lurching as twelve gigatons of antimatter detonated barely two kilometers from the hull.

  Then the entire half-kilometer-wide starship jerked as a final missile slammed home with crippling force. Lights on the bridge flickered as the zero-point cells fuelling the ship’s primary power locked down to prevent catastrophic failure.

  Then it was over. The lights returned to full brightness. The zero-point cells unlocked—most of them, at least.

  “Status report,” Kyle ordered.

  “They hit us right on the weapons array,” Taylor said after a long moment of silence. “All of our missile launchers and a third of our lances are gone. Half my people went with them,” she finished, her voice choked.

  “Engines damaged but functional,” Lau reported. “Eighty gees safe, no more.”

  “That near miss wiped our entire surface sensor array,” Chownyk reported, the CIC link still stable. “One of the primary zero-point cells is in full automatic shutdown. The others are fully online.”

  With the sensors gone, the world outside Chameleon was black. Kyle had no idea what was going on.

  “I thought we had Q-probes out,” he demanded. The FTL com–equipped probes were designed to provide real-time data across the system, but they’d also back up the capital ship now that she had no sensors of her own.

  “We lost power to the Q-Com section when ZPC Four went down,” Chownyk replied. “We’re rebooting, but we h
ave no quantum communications until then—and everything we’d receive a radio message with is melted.”

  “So we’re blind, we’re defenseless, and we can’t even talk to anyone,” Kyle concluded grimly. “Get me my coms back, people. We’re not out of this yet!”

  #

  “Chameleon has been hit hard,” Russell concluded aloud to his people. “We’re going to have to assume she’s still capable of Alcubierre and of picking us up, but it doesn’t look like she’s in position to defend herself.

  “Which means she’s in trouble,” he told them grimly. “Our Delta bogeys are ignoring us and changing course to pursue her—whoever is in command figures we can’t escape without the ship we arrived on…and he’s right.

  “He’s also probably figuring he’s got us outnumbered almost two to one and we’re going to play it safe.” Russell chuckled. “But he doesn’t know who we fly for or who I learned tactics from, or he’d think again!”

  He’d lost five fighters and fifteen people looping Shipyard Alpha, but he didn’t have time to mourn yet. That four-squadron flight of Terran starfighters was already vectoring toward Chameleon. They were still over ten minutes and a million kilometers away, but unless the Q-ship started maneuvering or at least sending out active radar signals sometime soon, she was a sitting duck.

  The angles meant he would close the range on them in under eight minutes, if he was willing to throw twenty-five starfighters at forty. The Commonwealth wing had the same Scimitars he did. Their crews almost certainly didn’t have Navy petty officers running engines and guns.

  But their crews also didn’t have the hardened veterans that made up the rest of his crews.

  “Set your course for intercept,” he ordered. “We’ve still got a dozen missiles apiece, and if we can wipe Delta, everyone else who can intercept Chameleon before she can warp space is busy running for Shipyard Alpha.”

  Assuming, of course, that the Q-ship started moving again sometime soon. Russell stared at the battered warship and caught himself praying under his breath.

  The Eternal Stars weren’t out to change much in this life. They left that to humanity.

  #

  The big holo-display flickered and came alive a moment before Kyle’s neural feed did.

  The quality of the image was lower, closer to what he was used to at long range—a key sign that they were feeding their sensor data from a nearby Q-probe.

  Part of what the probe showed them was the exterior of their own ship, and Kyle hid a wince as he studied Chameleon. Her cheery paint job had been vaporized and a massive crater marred her once nearly spherical hull.

  “Engines functional,” Lau reported. “Orders?”

  “Hold for now,” Kyle said quietly, still studying his ship. “How are we for weapons?”

  “I have one half-megaton lance and twelve secondaries,” Taylor said quietly. “We should be able to target them via the Q-probe, but we will suffer a loss of accuracy—and I’m picking up a four-squadron formation headed our way.”

  “Play dead,” he ordered. “Let’s see if we can lure them in and set them up for Rokos. How’s Churchill?”

  “Seventy seconds from lance range,” Chownyk reported. “Bombers are evading, but they started late. They can’t escape now.”

  A moment later, it became clear that they hadn’t planned to. At a quarter-million kilometers, the bombers flipped back and opened fire—each of the gangly spacecraft blasting four Javelins into space before resuming their course.

  Churchill didn’t even blink. His own salvo was in space a second later and his people continued on course.

  “They were trying to make us think they’d panicked,” Kyle said quietly. “But…they got the timing wrong. Someone tried to be clever.”

  The Terrans had tried to take Churchill by surprise, but the same geometry that had caused the veteran squadron commander not to bother launching his own missiles meant their missile salvo couldn’t save them.

  The Javelins were almost thirty seconds away from impact when Alpha Squadron reached lance range of the bombers, and the Katana had been built to do one thing very, very well: kill starfighters.

  Ten sixty-kiloton-per-second positron lances sliced into space and the bombers never stood a chance. Without their own starfighters to protect them, they were sitting ducks for enemy starfighters.

  Without the launching starfighters to trigger the ECM, their missiles were no luckier. Churchill’s counter-salvo gutted the attack and not one of the survivors connected as the Katanas began to decelerate, looping around the Central Research Station toward Chameleon.

  “If Rokos can stop the outsystem patrol, we are clear all the way out,” Taylor reported.

  “Lau, bring up the engines at whatever they’ll take,” Kyle ordered. “Link in to everyone’s Q-Coms; let them know our status. Can we retrieve starfighters?”

  With the more immediate threats, he’d barely checked the status of the flight deck.

  “We will be able to retrieve but not launch,” Chownyk reported. “Half the launch tubes are just…gone. The other half are warped beyond safe use. The flight deck itself is intact, though I understand the doors are currently flash-welded shut. Hanz is working on that.”

  “Tell her she’s authorized to blow them off,” Kyle said grimly.

  “I…believe that to be her plan at this point, yes,” the XO confirmed.

  “It won’t be a first for me,” Kyle told him. “Warn Rokos we aren’t able to provide fire support—and see if we can get an update from Hansen.

  “This whole damn affair is a half-pointless sideshow if the Marines haven’t found that data yet.”

  #

  Chapter 43

  Tau Ceti System

  20:10 June 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Terran Commonwealth Navy Central Research Station

  “Down!”

  One of the troopers unceremoniously grabbed Edvard by the shoulder, yanking him out of the path of a spray of bullets and calmly returning fire. There was a scream of pain and the shooting stopped.

  “Thanks,” the Marine told the other man. “Didn’t see him.”

  “These are not clear fields of fire, sir,” his rescuer replied.

  They had finally reached the data center for the fighter research section of the station, only to find their communications completely jammed and an entire company of Terran Marines trying to corral them in. Unfortunately for both sides, the area around the data center was a mess of cubicles, private offices, and winding corridors of the kind only the people regularly there could find their way around.

  And the data center itself was, quite sensibly, in security lockdown. Massive metal shutters had closed over the accesses and Riley’s people were busy hacking security instead of hacking the data center’s storage drives.

  The molecular-circuitry computers that filled a center like that were tough, but blasting the door open would still risk damaging or destroying them. Worse, if they even damaged one, it would make their attempt to find the right data even more difficult.

  “Here they come again!”

  Wishing that they’d brought battle armor with them—not for the first time since this had become a defensive fight—Edvard swept the area with his anti-armor carbine, watching for the next wave.

  One squad came down the corridor most of the assaults had arrived down, but something tickled at Edvard’s paranoia as he opened fire. The carbine fired the same penetrators as his main battle rifle, though its recoil management systems were getting uncomfortably warm even through his armored shipsuit.

  The Terrans knew that his people had enough anti-armor weaponry to make a direct assault suicide, and it wasn’t in the Terran Marines’ lexicon to try and run his people out of bullets with bodies, which meant…

  “Danger left!” he bellowed, pivoting in his cover to target the nearest visible section of clear metal wall. Even as he did so, the wall disintegrated as another squad, this one in heavy boarding armor
, burst through the wall at what was supposed to be his exposed flank.

  The lead Marine took a three-round burst from his carbine and went down in a massive heap. The cyborg who’d rescued Edvard a moment before joined him in covering the new angle, and two more Marines went down.

  Now their fire responded and the black-ops trooper next to Edvard grunted and fell backward as a heavy round crashed through his chest. Another trooper charged into his place with a grenade launcher, spraying down the new opening with anti-armor grenades.

  At least two more Marines went down, and then the shooting stopped again, for the moment.

  “Are we through the door yet?” Edvard asked Riley grimly. “We are completely pinned down.”

  “Yes!” Kismet announced as the specialists’ hack module made an audible beeping noise. One set of shutters slid up, revealing a door the black-ops trooper calmly kicked open without even taking a breath.

  “Fall back into the center,” Edvard ordered. “It’s got better cover than these damn offices!”

  The data specialists went first, then Edvard and Riley—no one was going to let the company commander hold down the last line—and then the remaining troopers. They’d lost over half of the two squads they’d started with, and without the ability to contact the shuttle by radio to use its Q-Com, they couldn’t relay the data home.

  “Download everything,” he ordered the hackers. “Don’t bother decrypting it, just…download everything. We have the storage, right?”

  Kismet and the other techs were already on it, hooking their hacking modules up to the data center’s computers with direct cables and getting to work.

  “These,” Kismet told him, gesturing around, “are mostly for processing and backup. But…we don’t have enough storage. We’ll have to steal theirs.”

  “Do it,” he ordered. “We can’t contact our backup and we’re running out of time!”