She winced.
“When is that?”
“Ninety days or so,” he told her. “We’ll have everybody up by then, though we’re looking at a few stubborn holdouts. The storms are getting worse and the clouds are getting thicker. Ninety days might turn out to be optimistic, but eventually, we won’t be able to safely land shuttles.”
“And then you’re going to drop new terraforming spikes on the planet?”
“I’m leaving that discussion to Sleeps-In-Sunlight and XR-13-9,” he admitted. “I’m merely standing guard with a bunch of warships, just in case.”
“No sign from the Rogues?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I suspect we’re not going to like what they do show up with, which is why I’ve got the recon Matrices sweeping the star systems around us. A pre-emptive strike would buy us a lot of peace of mind, but we have to find the bastards first.”
“If you find the Rogue Construction Matrix, don’t wait to argue with the Cabinet,” Amelie told him. “Hit it with everything you have. That’s our biggest regional threat.”
“We’re assuming ‘everything I have’ will be enough,” he countered. “I’d love to have a Vistan battlecruiser group to back me up on that, but we’re years from that.”
“Soon enough.” Amelie sighed. “I hate that we’re going to be arming people who have barely passed the orbital-space-station level.”
“It’s better than the alternative. Is Emilia going to be on board?”
Amelie chuckled. She understood Isaac’s concern—even if the Senate committed to this crusade, the next Senate and President could be a real problem.
“New Soweto apparently had rabid firebrands as an export product,” she noted. “Emilia’s like you: protect the weak and uplift the downtrodden. She’ll back this mission as Prime Minister and as President.”
“Good. We can’t afford to half-do this, my love.”
“We’ll do all we can, you and I,” Amelie promised. “Exilium will listen to us, even once I’m no longer President. Which is starting to sound more and more relaxing by the day!”
Her husband laughed.
“You’ll be bored and asking President Nyong’o for work within a week,” he predicted.
“Probably not, because I’ll be grabbing the first ship to Hearthfire so I can drag a certain Admiral to bed,” she told him with a wicked grin.
69
Captain Octavio Catalan stared at the series of holographic images floating in front of him, then looked at Commander Das.
“You’re certain,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
“My team and I went over the conclusions three times, then had D go over them,” she told him. “Then I had Siril-ki do the same.”
Siril-ki was one of the few members of Reletan-dai’s AI research team the old Assini hadn’t woken up. She/they had been the youngest of his department heads and focused on the colony ship AIs, with no contact with the military systems.
She/they was now the best expert they had left on Assini Matrices. If she/they agreed with Das’s analysis…they were in trouble. They were in serious trouble.
“Stay right here,” Octavio ordered his tactical officer. Interceptor was less than twenty-four hours from heading back to Exilium, but he wasn’t going to sit on this bombshell.
“Africano,” he said as he activated the com. “Get me the Admiral.”
“Sir?”
“Now, Lieutenant Commander,” Catalan said harshly, letting full Command Voice leak into his tone. “It’s important.”
He didn’t know what lever Torborg Africano pulled, but she had Admiral Lestroud on the call in less than two minutes.
“What is it, Catalan?” Lestroud asked. It looked like they’d interrupted the Admiral’s lunch, given the half-eaten meal on the man’s desk and his frustrated look.
“Sir, we’ve been analyzing the Matrix core intelligence code samples we have and comparing them. We’ve found something…odd.”
The frustration vanished and Lestroud straightened, looking directly at them.
“How odd are we talking about?”
“It’s easier to show you, sir,” Octavio told him. He tapped a command, adding two of the holographic images that Das had been walking him through to the transmission.
“This is a three-dimensional representation of the core intelligence modules of a Matrix,” he explained. “The red splotches you see are missing or damaged code. We have a comparison point of the original code, but we didn’t need to use it for this. Most of the gaps are pretty obvious.”
The red splotches were scattered through the two holograms, each of them intentionally structured to mirror a brain. There was no pattern, no straight lines or curves that could be analyzed by an algorithm.
“The intelligence on the left is D,” Octavio noted. “On the right is a sample from the Rogue Sub-Regional Construction Matrix destroyed here in Hearthfire.
“You can see that they’re damaged in different places, and while there are large areas of damage, those are clearly made up of smaller, overlapping pieces, right?”
“I can make that out now that you’re telling me it’s there, yes,” Lestroud said slowly. “Your point?”
“This is one of the Escort Matrices.”
The new brain had much larger splotches. Massive areas of the core intelligence were warped or damaged by radiation and tachyon punches.
“Am I supposed to be seeing something different, Catalan?” Lestroud asked.
“Das and her team weren’t sure themselves, but they ran a comparison between this code and the Rogue’s,” Octavio replied. A large portion of the red splotches turned orange.
“The orange damage is definitely tachyon punches. We take that out and, well…take a look at what’s left.”
It was subtle, but Octavio knew what to look for. There were curves and lines in the damage now.
“That’s…there’s something in there, isn’t there?” Lestroud asked.
“That’s what we thought, so Commander Das checked the Assini databanks,” Octavio told his commander. “The Assini did have a sample from one of the Rogue Matrices near their home system. We ran another comparison.”
A fourth “brain” appeared. This one didn’t have nearly as many random splotches…but there were some larger splotches hitting key areas.
“Captain. I’m starting to suspect, but explain, please.”
“There is no way that tachyon-punch degradation or a solar flare can justify the damage done to the core intelligences of the Escort Matrices or the original Regional Construction Matrices,” Octavio said quietly.
“In the Matrices out here, you see truly random damage. In the Matrices from around the Assini home system, you see similar damage, the damage that turned them against their makers…
“But that damage is not random.”
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Preview: Space Carrier Avalon by Glynn Stewart
Enjoyed Refuge? Try the transhumanist military space opera Space Carrier Avalon!
* * *
A bygone legend with a washed-up crew
A crack team gathered for one last tour
A cold war that has simmered to its final hour
When the Castle Federation deployed the first starfighters, they revolutionized war and drove the Terran Commonwealth from their space. The first of the carriers for those deadly strike craft was Avalon, a legend that turned the tide of a dozen battles.
That was decades ago. Now Avalon is obsolete, a backwater posting—but still a legend to the Federation and her allies and enemies alike. Wing Commander Kyle Roberts and a cadre of officers are sent aboard the old carrier to take her on a final tour along the frontier.
Aboard, Roberts finds outdated fighters, broken pilots…and key subord
inates who just might be traitors. He and the others will get Avalon ready for war once more regardless. Show tour or not, the old enemy has been seen near the border and no matter what, when the call comes, Avalon will answer!
1
New Amazon System, Castle Federation
18:00 July 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
On approach to DSC-001 Avalon
* * *
Wing Commander Kyle Roberts did not enjoy being flown by someone else. It was always a struggle for the red-haired pilot to keep his hands and implants away from the controls and overrides when he was a passenger in a shuttle. To make everyone’s lives easier, he normally stayed out of the cockpit.
Today, however, he wasn’t feeling quite so magnanimous, and had unceremoniously shunted the small craft’s normal co-pilot into the bucket seat that was supposed to be reserved for an observer like him. The burly Commander already felt a little bit guilty over that, but that slipped from his mind as the shuttle began its final approach and Avalon came into view.
“There she is, sir,” the pilot told him, her amused tone revealing at least some understanding of her much-senior passenger’s anticipation.
Avalon would not be the first of the Castle Federation’s Deep Space Carriers that Kyle had served on – but she was the first whose starfighter group he’d command in its entirety. Avalon was a legend, the first modern space carrier ever built by anyone, and her SFG-001 had a list of battle honors as long as Kyle’s arm.
The abbreviated arrowhead of the carrier slowly grew in his vision, and he twigged his implants to zoom in on her. The computer in his head happily threw up stats and numbers as he scanned along the length of his new home.
The carrier was small compared to her modern sisters, a mere eight hundred meters from her two hundred meter wide prow to her four hundred meter wide base, angling from a hundred meters thick at the prow to two hundred meters at the base. She was smoother than more recent ships as well, with her weapons and sensors clustered together in the breaks in her now-obsolete neutronium armor.
Several of those clusters were currently open to space, weapons dating back two and three decades, according to his brief, being ripped out for replacement with the super-modern systems delivered by the transport he’d arrived on.
“I never expected to see Avalon fly again,” the co-pilot observed from behind Kyle. “Rumor had it that her assignment as guardship here was just a quiet way of placing her in the Reserve.”
Kyle nodded his silent agreement. He’d heard the same rumors, and he’d seen the rough brief of the work they were doing to make her fit for duty. If nothing else, Avalon was a carrier, and the starfighters she’d carried had been three generations out of date.
That was his job to fix, of course. He’d spent his trip babying six entire squadrons – forty-eight ships – of brand new, barely out of prototype, Falcon-type starfighters. The new ships strapped mass manipulators and engines rated for five hundred gravities to four three-shot launchers firing short-range missiles with gigaton antimatter warheads and a positron lance rated for fifty kilotons per second.
The number of ships told the story of Avalon’s age, though. His last command, the fighter wing aboard the battlecruiser Alamo, had also been forty-eight ships. That ship, however, been almost thirteen hundred meters long, and had carried a broadside of ten half-megaton-per-second positron lances in each of the four sides of her arrowhead shape, plus missile launchers and the seventy-kiloton-per-second lances generally used as anti-fighter guns.
Avalon was less than two thirds the size of modern ships, as the technology behind the Alcubierre-Stetson Drive had advanced significantly in the forty years since she had been built. Past her, he could see the twelve ships of the Castle Federation’s New Amazon Reserve Flotilla – the smallest and oldest of them twenty years newer than Avalon, and a quarter again her size.
“She’s a special case,” Kyle said finally, continuing to eye the old carrier. “The Navy’s Old Lady, gussied up one last time.”
After that, Kyle was silent, considering his new ship and his new command. One last time was true – rumor had it that the tour of the Alliance that they’d been assigned to carry out was Avalon’s last mission. Once they were done, they would deliver the old lady to the shipyards of the Castle system itself, where she would be gently laid to rest.
* * *
New Amazon System, Castle Federation
19:00, July 5, 2735 ESMDT
DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Deck
* * *
Exiting the shuttle, followed closely by the two Flight Commanders he’d brought with him, Kyle found the ship’s Captain waiting. He was a tall, gaunt man with iron-gray hair who looked like he’d gone best out of three with Death – and the Reaper had kept an eye.
Modern prostheses could be almost indistinguishable from the real thing, but Captain Blair’s was an older model, an emergency implant Kyle had most commonly seen on men and women injured in the War who were proud of the plain but extremely functional metal eye.
“Welcome aboard Avalon, Wing Commander Roberts,” the Captain greeted him with an extended hand. Like Kyle, he wore the standard shipsuit that, despite imitating the appearance of slacks and a turtleneck, was a single piece garment capable of sealing against vacuum and sustaining the wearer for at least six hours, underneath his formal uniform jacket – piped with gold in the Captain’s case for Navy, blue for the Space Force in Kyle’s.
“I am Captain Malcolm Blair,” Kyle’s new commanding officer continued. “I wanted to welcome you aboard in person, though your Flight Group is waiting to show you the song and dance.”
Blair gestured slightly behind him, where the four Flight Commanders leading the squadrons currently aboard the carrier stood at rigid attention.
“Thank you for the welcome, Captain,” Kyle replied. “I understand we have our work cut out for us.”
“We do,” Blair confirmed. “Uniform of the day is shipsuits until further notice,” he continued cheerfully with a tug at the gold-banded sleeves of his uniform. “We have enough work going on throughout the ship that an accidental loss of pressure isn’t impossible.”
“Understood, sir,” the Wing Commander replied, glancing past the Captain again to the men and women he would command.
“Allow me to introduce you to your Flight Commanders,” Blair asked, stepping aside and leading Kyle and his two trailing officers forwards to where the Flight Group waited. “Your senior squadron leader is Flight Commander James Randall.”
Randall stepped forward with an Academy-precise salute and inclined his head slightly.
“Welcome aboard, Wing Commander Roberts,” he said smoothly. “May I say that it’s an honor to serve under the hero of Ansem Gulf?”
Kyle shook Randall’s hand calmly, gauging the man with an appraising eye. The Commander was blond, blue-eyed, and easily ten years older than Kyle himself. His uniform jacket was decorated with the neat blue and gold square ribbon of the Space Force Combat Badge, a badge only earned by flying a starfighter under fire. Technically, Kyle’s jacket should have borne the same badge, next to the tiny gold icon of the Federation Star of Heroism, their second highest award for valor, but only dress uniform required even the ribbons.
“Thank you,” Kyle said quietly, and turned to the remaining officers.
“Flight Commander Michael Stanford,” Blair continued after allowing the silence to drag a moment too long. “Flight Commander Russell Rokos. Flight Commander Shannon Lancet.”
Stanford was a short, pale man with a firm grip and watery blue eyes. He met Kyle’s gaze levelly and nodded his silent greetings. Rokos and Lancet each murmured pleasantries, the former a stocky man of Kyle’s own bulk without the height, and the latter a willowy blond woman.
“These are Flight Commander Wang Zhao and Jose Mendez,” Kyle told the assembled officers, introducing the woman and man who had arrived with him. Wang shared Lancet’s height, but was dark-skinned and haired to the
other officer’s fair blondness. Mendez, despite his name, shared every ounce and inch of Kyle’s own imposing height and bulk, with close-cropped blond hair and the brown eyes of his Hispanic ancestors. “Both are recently of SFG-074, aboard Alamo.”
“I will leave you to the formalities of your command,” Blair told Kyle. “Once you’ve read yourself in and the Commanders have given you the tour, please do me the courtesy of stopping by my office.”
“Of course, Captain Blair,” Kyle confirmed. With a firm nod, the gaunt Captain drifted away from the group as Kyle turned to face his command.
The Flight Commanders had managed to gather up all ninety-six of the flight crew for the four squadrons already aboard Avalon, and those officers had been waiting in relatively graceful silence as the Captain had introduced their squadron leaders. Along with Kyle and his two squadron leaders, six more members of the two squadrons he’d arrived with had arrived on the shuttle with him. As they saw Kyle draw up to face the Flight Group, all eight of the new officers quietly moved over to join its ranks.
“Deck Chief, please report,” Kyle said calmly and clearly, projecting his voice across the deck. The projection was unnecessary, as the Senior Chief currently responsible for the Flight Deck had been hovering about ten feet away since he’d stepped off the shuttle.
“Senior Chief Marshal Hammond, sir,” the burly and grizzled non-commissioned officer, a stereotype of any space navy for all that the man wore the blue piping of the Space Force.
“Please record for the log,” Kyle instructed, pulling a sheet of archaic parchment from inside his jacket. Under the parchment was an electronic chip that he would deliver to the Captain when they met later, but for tradition, the parchment was vital.
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