Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  A third and fourth shot fragmented against his cover, and then a loud thud and an exchange of cursing began. That was when Michael realized that Hammond had kept going.

  Finally shocked into motion, the CAG jumped over his cover to find the Master Chief struggling with the gunman. The gun fired twice and Hammond jerked as the bullets sank home, but then the gun was sliding across the floor.

  The assailant went for a knife, but the big Chief got his hands on the other man’s head and there was a sick snapping noise. The knife slid to the ground from boneless hands, and the gunman followed it.

  “Dammit!” Michael swore. He activated his implant com as he ran to his Deck Chief’s side. “Emergency Medical Team to the flight deck, by fighter SFG-One Actual. We have gunfire and men down. Emergency Medical to the flight deck!”

  “Your fighter, sir,” Hammond told him, pressing his arm over his chest to help his shipsuit exert pressure on the wounds. “They were in your ship.”

  “Dammit Marshall, let’s worry about that after you’re okay,” Michael snapped.

  “Fuck you sir – I’ll live, but you make damned sure nobody touches that fighter without a forensics…” The Chief’s words were lost in a fit of coughing, some of which came up bloody.

  “You heard the Chief,” Michael snarled at the techs. “Lock down my bird. Simpson, Aramir – draw arms from the Flight Control weapons locker. You’re on guard until the Ship’s Marshal gets here.”

  He knelt next to the Master Chief and prayed that the Stars would bring the Medical Team fast.

  #

  Captain Roberts and Commander Solace joined Michael on the deck shortly after the Medical Team arrived. Both stood back while the medics did a quick and dirty patch job on Hammond’s wound, then slipped him onto a stretcher for movement to the Main Infirmary.

  Once Hammond and the tech who’d taken a flesh wound from the ricochets had been carried away towards medical attention, Avalon’s other two senior officers approached Michael.

  “What happened?” the Captain asked simply. Glancing around the deck, still lit by starfighter running lights, he added: “Where are the lights?”

  “Give me a second,” Michael replied. Now that he’d done everything he could for Hammond, he could return his attention to the lights. Whatever override code had been used had been de-activated, and he managed to bring up the deck lights again. A moment later, he shut down the running lights on the fighters, and fully focused his gaze on Roberts.

  “We were doing a midnight inspection,” he explained quietly. “Starting with my fighter as an example – but the lights went crazy when we approached the bird. I tried to keep them on, but whoever was screwing with me had an override code that shut me down on my own Void-cursed flight deck.”

  “Commander?” Roberts said questioningly, glancing over at Solace.

  “There’s no record, sir,” she replied, surprise leaking through even her self-control. “I can see where the Vice Commodore was locked out. I can see the commands – but there’s no user record, and there’s no record of the code.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible,” the Captain replied, his own eyes distracted as he accessed the files himself.

  Michael followed suit, and since he hadn’t lost the starfighter pilot’s bandwidth, he confirmed before the Captain finished.

  “But it’s true nonetheless,” he said softly. “Sir, we have a dead tech – one of mine – who was armed with a weapon with no serial number.”

  They’d identified Specialist First Class Oscar O’Madden by the time the medics had arrived. He’d also, unfortunately, been very dead by the time the medics arrived. Spinal injuries were still deadly in the twenty-eighth century.

  “Not from our armory then,” Roberts observed, glancing up as the Ship’s Marshal, Lieutenant Major Sirvard Barsamian entered the deck – followed by both her forensics team and a full platoon of Marines, led by Peng Wa herself.

  “I see we’re waking everybody up,” Michael observed as he spotted the Gunny. It was a relief to see her – he knew the Captain trusted her completely, which meant she was a point of safety in a night that was getting very, very, scary.

  “Someone shot Master Chief Hammond,” Commander Solace observed before the Captain could speak. “And the camera records are also gone, so the only evidence we have is your people’s vague impression of a disappearing person, and whatever was left in that starfighter.” She pointed at his ship as Michael gaped at her.

  “The cameras missed it?” he demanded.

  “No, the cameras were shut down by an invisible override code, the same as the lights,” the XO told him grimly. “Major Barsamian,” she greeted the dark-eyed young woman leading the Marines. “I think this is now your area.”

  “Indeed,” she observed calmly. “The combat area clearly was contaminated to allow medical rescue. We can work with that,” she stated, “but if everyone would please move away from the immediate area, I would appreciate it.”

  Michael and the other senior officers got her hint and started shuffling everyone else away from the corner of the flight deck where everything had gone to Starless Void.

  “Has anyone entered the starfighter?” she asked Michael as the space began to clear for her people to work.

  “Simpson and Aramir have been guarding the door since this all went down, and I’ve locked it down to my implant codes,” he told her.

  “Please open it up for my forensics team,” Barsamian replied. “Everything here is now being recorded by lapel-cams. Nothing is going to happen without record – and we will find out what happened.”

  12:00 December 29, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Break-out Room

  The last few hours had passed without sleep for Kyle and his senior officers. They’d pulled Tobin and Sanchez in at the end, and now the five of them were sprawled around his break-out room in various stages of exhaustion and concern as Barsamian, looking completely unbothered by her midnight wake-up, faced them calmly.

  “Firstly,” Kyle told everyone as he glanced around the room, “I’ve heard from Surgeon-Commander Cunningham. It was touch and go for a while, but it looks like Hammond will live. He is going to require significant internal reconstruction, and Cunningham’s recommendation is that we transfer him to a base or groundside facility as soon as possible. The procedure will take months.

  “Sorry, Michael, but it looks like you’re out your Deck Chief – but he’ll live.”

  “Stars know that’s a trade I’m perfectly happy to make,” the CAG replied, his eyes bloodshot and weary after the shock of the night’s events.

  “I think we can all agree on that,” Solace chimed in. As usual, Kyle’s XO was perfectly turned out, showing barely a tremor from the long night.

  “As for why and what,” Kyle continued, “I leave that to Lieutenant Major Barsamian.”

  Barsamian nodded at his words and faced Avalon’s leadership.

  “We don’t have a lot to go on,” she admitted. “O’Madden is dead. We are reviewing his movements since coming aboard, but during the most useful period, last night, vast swathes of the ship’s cameras were disabled.

  “The reason that no one was able to identify the override code used is that there wasn’t one,” she continued. “All of the apparent ‘overrides’ were actually a remotely directed, self-modifying, eventually self-deleting, computer program. A tailored virus, if you will.”

  “Is that even possible?” Kyle demanded. A virus capable of seriously impacting the ship was a deadly threat.

  “Yes, but only for secondary systems like cameras and lights,” the Marshal explained. “The ship’s computers have highly capable defensive routines designed to prevent just this, but to help protect their code their use is restricted to high security systems.

  “Similar viruses, I am told, are in the hands of Alliance Special Operations,” she continued. “It is very definitely a tool of espionage, and one that has rendered us entirely unable to identify
who O’Madden’s accomplice was.”

  “Surely we can identify who came in and out of the blackout zone,” Sanchez objected. “It would at least give us a place to start.”

  “The virus shutdown cameras on the entirety of the two decks the flight deck links to,” Barsamian replied calmly. “It also shutdown cameras in randomly selected chunks of the ship, across what could have been seven separate continuous paths. I ran an analysis, Senior Fleet Commander. Of Avalon’s six thousand crew members, four thousand, seven hundred, and eighty five could have been on the flight deck during the attack without us knowing.”

  The petite woman looked around her seniors.

  “That number includes everyone in this room,” she finished calmly. “Though, of course, we know for certain where Vice Commodore Stanford was.”

  “What about implant downloads?” Tobin asked. The big Vice Admiral sounded strained – fatigue and stress, Kyle presumed.

  “We tried to download O’Madden’s. Something – probably another virus – had corrupted his entire in-head storage. We’d require a warrant to force downloads of everyone else on the list,” the Marshal replied. “While issuing said warrant is within the power of both you and Captain Roberts, the Code of Military Justice requires us to restrict said downloads to cases where we have probable cause.

  “Bluntly, sir, we don’t have probable cause to order five thousand implant downloads, and it would take us two weeks to process the paperwork and downloads anyway.

  “With O’Madden’s death and the virus screwing with our cameras, everything outside Commodore Stanford’s fighter is effectively useless to us.”

  Kyle caught the codicil there, and from the look in his CAG’s eyes, so did Stanford.

  “What did you find in my fighter, Major?” the pilot asked softly.

  “Our initial sweep turned up nothing other than O’Madden’s fingerprints and some evidence to suggest someone with proper gloves was in there,” she admitted. “I… deemed that unlikely, and we commandeered your Flight Engineer and took a second look.

  “We found this.”

  She pulled a small black box, less than six centimeters long, from inside her uniform jacket and dropped it on the conference table.

  “I’m trusting what your Engineer told me,” she continued, “but it agrees with my own review of the schematics. This was placed on the power conduit to the mass manipulators used for inertial compensation. The assessment I was given was that it was designed to do two things: shut off power to those manipulators, and prevent the fail-safes from engaging for at least half a second.”

  The room was silent, and Kyle felt ill. You always knew there were risks to riding fire at five hundred gravities – it wasn’t really a sane man’s game, and few flight crews would pretend it was. You relied on the fail-safes to keep those gravities from crushing you. Your starfighter could lose half of its mass manipulators, and while it would guzzle fuel like water, it would still keep you safe because the failsafes prioritized compensating for acceleration over anything else.

  Half a second of five hundred gravities was, roughly, half a second more than a human would survive.

  “That’s murder,” Tobin said into the silence, the Admiral’s voice a growl. “You’re telling me that someone just tried to assassinate the Battle Group CAG?”

  “My people ripped into its code,” Barsamian said quietly. “It was designed to trigger after a sustained four minute sequence in excess of four hundred and fifty gravities. There would have been no survivors.

  “O’Madden had the skills and knowledge to build this,” she continued. “But… he was a ten year man, a loyal spacer, a loyal citizen of the Federation. There is nothing in his background to suggest he would want to murder Commodore Stanford.”

  “You said there was someone else in the fighter?” Kyle demanded.

  “There was,” she agreed. “And they were a professional. O’Madden’s fingerprints and DNA were everywhere. The person with him… they wore the right type of gloves, they had a DNA-cleaning nano-field, the works. I’m guessing they were the source of our virus, and the instigator of the assassination attempt.

  “Sirs, ma’ams,” the Ship’s Marshal told them all, “I only see one conclusion: we have a Commonwealth spy aboard Avalon.”

  Kyle sighed. He’d drawn the same conclusion himself already, and everything Barsamian had said only confirmed that.

  “All right, Major,” he told her. “I want you to take the ship to Counter Intelligence Level Three. No communication leaves or arrives without your office being aware of it. All classified communiques can be reviewed by the Admiral’s staff,” he nodded towards Sanchez.

  “My intelligence officer will take care of it,” Tobin agreed grimly. “We need to do more, though, Captain – we can’t have a spy on the Battle Group flagship!”

  “We will do what we can, Admiral,” Kyle replied. “Major, I want your people to go through everything O’Madden has done since he reported aboard. You said you could have built the device himself – I want to know if he actually did. I want to know who he spoke to, what he did – I want to know every time he sneezed. Understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” she confirmed.

  Chapter 18

  Deep Space outside the Kematian System

  09:00 December 31, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Flag Deck

  Dimitri Tobin was not happy with the discovery of a Commonwealth spy aboard Avalon. Since this wasn’t an unhappiness he could actually direct at anyone, he was grumpier than usual as he sat on his flag deck drinking his coffee.

  They were still six hours outside of Kematian, where the convoy would make their last delivery, and he hadn’t yet received orders for where he was supposed to take Battle Group Seventeen from there. His last communique instructed him to take several days in the system for shore leave and Battle Group level exercises while Alliance High Command apparently sat around debating what to do with their most powerful available mobile formation.

  That High Command didn’t have a mission for his group yet told him that there was a debate going on – and probably a political one. Different elements of the Alliance wanted different things – not just a split between defensive and offensive action, but between different kinds of offensive action.

  There were six Alliance systems currently in Commonwealth hands. Alizon, Cora, Frihet, Hammerveldt, Huī Xīng, and Zahn were all single-system star nations. None had heavy industry, none had built their own starships, and in truth, none were strategically vital. Many officers and politicians felt their liberation should be the priority regardless.

  Dimitri was in agreement with the other faction, one usually spearheaded by the Imperium – the destruction of fleet bases and re-fuelling depots had to be a priority. If the Alliance eliminated or reduced the Commonwealth’s ability to deploy forces in the region they called the Rimward Marches, then the conquered systems could be liberated with ease.

  When an alert popped up on his implant that he was being requested on a Q-Com call, he hoped it was finally news.

  “I’ll be in my office,” he told Lieutenant Commander Lisa Snapes, his Intelligence Officer. “Ping me if anything comes up I need to be aware of.”

  Flag decks had a much less strict transfer of responsibility than the main bridge. In practice, the Senior Lieutenant in charge of the team running the consoles held ‘the watch’ on the flag deck, but most Admirals – Dimitri included – preferred to have one of the senior officers of the Admiral’s staff on the flag deck, just in case.

  Closing the door to his office, he mentally connected the Q-Com channel to the wallscreen. It quickly popped up a series of videos – the central one was Fleet Admiral Meredith Blake of the Castle Federation Space Navy, but there were a lot of secondary channels.

  This definitely wasn’t his orders. This… wasn’t good.

  “Ladies, Gentlemen, we’re waiting on a few more,” Blake said calmly. “A recording of parts of t
his message will be forwarded to your capital ship commanders. Distribution of this information beyond that is at your and your captains’ discretion, but everything is classified Red Two.”

  Dimitri took his seat, suddenly paying a lot more attention. Red classification was the level below Top Secret, and Red Two was the second highest level of it. The entire convoy mission he was currently on was only classified Red Four.

  Another half dozen windows popped up on his screen, and Tobin realized that he was seeing every Alliance Admiral who was currently awake. This was big.

  “We’re still sorting out the details,” Blake told them finally, “but six hours ago a major Commonwealth Task Force, fourteen ships under Walkingstick himself, entered the Midori system.”

  Avalon’s Admiral clenched his fists, his knuckles turning white as he remembered Midori. A lot of friends had died there… if they’d lost the system… he found himself plotting how quickly he could take Battle Group Seventeen there.

  “They exited the system thirty-seven minutes ago,” Blake, who had stepped up from Chief of Staff for the Federation to Chief of Staff for the Alliance, told them.

  Dimitri sighed in relief. A suicide charge probably wouldn’t have saved the system if Walkingstick had taken it – and it could easily have ended his career either way.

  “They lost one battleship and between two and three hundred fighters. We lost the cruisers Horus, Diamond, and Thermopylae, along with the carrier Michelangelo,” she finished grimly, and Dimitri winced.

  That was an Imperial strike cruiser, a Federation battlecruiser, and two Trade Factor ships. A full quarter of the warships left at the big Alliance base in Midori.

  “Reports are coming in from multiple systems of Commonwealth attacks,” Blake warned them. “We have confirmed three other incursions in at least battle group strength. Be advised, we have confirmed at least one of these attacks was accompanied by troop transports.