“I don’t suppose we snuck any upgrades into these?” he asked plaintively, studying the ships.
“Some,” his newest headache, Flight Commander Laura Cavendish, replied. The black-ops squadron leader studied the starfighters without any more positive of an eye. “Only what Intel said we could justify pirates having, though. Engines and mass manipulators got rated for modern third-tier acceleration, so closer to five hundred gees, not four-fifty. Deflectors are tougher than we could honestly justify, stacked up to the Falcon’s standard.”
“Weapons?” he asked hopefully.
“Same lance,” she admitted. “Our targeting package, which helps more than you’d think. The launchers are a type you won’t find on our birds, though. Better in a lot of ways.”
“Oh?” Russell asked. There wasn’t much he’d expect the League to have done better than the Federation.
“Cycles slower, but the magazine and the launchers can take anything,” Cavendish told him. The dark-haired woman eyed the fighters with a cold smile. “The guys we got the sample from had them all intermixed in the magazines—the performance parameters are close, but if you’ve got one of our Starfires in one launcher and a League Sarissa in the other…” She chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I don’t recommend it.”
“But they let us use whatever ammunition we can get our hands on and break the security codes on,” Russell said. That would come in handy.
“Exactly.”
The Wing Commander studied his deck carefully. Thirty-two of the starfighters were painted in the standard dark gray the Commonwealth used for all of their small craft. Eight, however, had been coated in a shimmering black material.
“I’m guessing the black ships are yours?” he asked Cavendish.
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “The coating is radar-absorbent and we built cold-gas thrusters into ours. They’re not particularly stealthy, but it can give us a nice surprise every now and then.”
From Cavendish’s comments, Russell suspected that the stolen pirate fighters weren’t nearly as new to her pilots and crews as they were to his people.
Just what had they been up to before they were assigned to Chameleon?
#
Lieutenant Major Edvard Hanson didn’t exactly mind flying. The lanky, dark-haired Marine spent the vast majority of his time aboard spaceships of one stripe or another, but…somehow, shuttle flights were different.
Assault landings and so forth were one thing, but a twelve-hour flight trapped in a barely armored tin can left the Marine very aware of the emptiness of the void outside. He was ecstatic to finally reach Redoubt and board Chameleon—actual ships had internal bulkheads, armored baffles, and emergency airlocks in the case of a breach. Shuttles didn’t.
By the time he carried his duffel into the barracks aboard Chameleon—hidden away in the extremely utilitarian portion of the ship not meant to be seen by inspectors—he was in a spectacularly foul mood.
“Who’s the new guy?” someone bellowed as he entered the central area and glanced around.
The Commonwealth used much the same structure for the Marine bays as the Federation did, with a central mess hall cum gym cum gathering area with multiple “wings” of rooms heading off, one for each platoon’s berths and one for the officers’ quarters.
The original bellower stood up, drawing attention to himself amidst the gathered collection of Marines. Edvard’s practiced eye picked out the different collections of people, almost but not quite breaking down by platoon.
One platoon had come from Avalon. They recognized him and were leaning back to watch the show. A second was the Intel black-ops people, their shipsuit uniform bases lacking the green piping of the rest of the men and women in the room. They might not have recognized Edvard, but they saw that Avalon’s platoon had.
The last platoon, according to his files, was a collection of squads cut free from various Home Fleet units—and he knew damned well they wouldn’t have sent the best.
“Well?” the big thug demanded, closing with him. Edvard realized his duffel was covering his rank insignia and made the instant decision to leave it there. “Who are you, new guy? A Marine? Or did somebody mess up and send us a stripper? You’re too pretty to be a Marine.”
“And who are you?” Edvard asked calmly. The other man had half a dozen centimeters on his own height and, unlike the officer, was not built like a beanpole.
“I’m Sergeant Rothwell,” the brick wall replied. “A name you should remember, new guy. Nobody messes with Rothwell, lesson you should learn fast.”
“Is it?” the officer said slowly, glancing around the room. “And if I suggest that perhaps you should tone down your welcome to newcomers, Sergeant, what happens then?”
That clearly hadn’t been what Rothwell was expecting, and his face flashed white with anger. Edvard ran through his mental checklist and wondered how this bully had ever made Sergeant.
He went to drop his duffel bag and end the game, but Rothwell was already moving. For a big guy, he was fast—but not fast enough.
Before the Sergeant managed to reach Edvard, however, there was a blur of motion. A petite young woman with short-cropped copper hair had been sitting at one of the tables next to where the confrontation had been taking place—and she was up and in Rothwell’s way in a burst of impossible speed.
The next thing anyone knew, Rothwell was on the ground and the woman in the unmarked shipsuit was saluting Edvard.
“Welcome aboard Chameleon, Lieutenant Major,” she said crisply.
He didn’t need his implants to identify her. While every Marine had a degree of chemical and cybernetic enhancement in addition to the neural implants every citizen and soldier had, only the heavily augmented black-ops troopers could move that fast.
“Lieutenant Sandra Riley,” he greeted the commander of his black-ops platoon. “Thanks for the assist.”
Giving her a nod, he stepped over to Sergeant Rothwell and slung his duffel onto the floor, unveiling his insignia at last.
“Caleb Rothwell,” he said harshly, pulling the man’s name from his implant files on the entire company. “ATTEN-HUT!”
The big man struggled to his feet and saluted carefully.
“Sir! Apologies, sir! Didn’t recognize you.”
“Striking an officer is a capital offense, regardless of whether or not you recognized him,” Riley put in from behind Edvard, and he concealed a smile as the black-ops officer dropped instantly into bad cop.
“That would require him to have actually reached me, Lieutenant Riley,” Edvard pointed out. “Or to have struck me, which, frankly, I don’t believe Mister Rothwell would have managed in any case. I think we can skip the firing squad, don’t you, Sergeant?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” the noncom said desperately.
“Of course, you did attempt to strike me,” Edvard continued calmly. “And your attempt at hazing would have been unacceptable regardless. Your stripes, please.”
Rothwell swallowed hard and hesitated.
“Your stripes, Private First Class Rothwell,” the company commander snapped.
Hesitation had just cost the man another rank, something he seemed to realize as he removed his Sergeant’s stripes and held them out to Edvard.
“Prove you gave me a bad first impression and you’ll get these back by the time we’re home,” Edvard told him. “Prove my first impression was right and I’ll drum you out of the service. Are we understood, Mister Rothwell?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” the big man barked, but Edvard recognized the look in the man’s eyes.
He’d locked in his command of the company—but he couldn’t expect the demoted Rothwell to forget how anytime soon.
#
Chapter 8
Castle System
12:00 April 29, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
The “merchant ship” component of Chameleon was fully functional in most ways, and though most of her actual working spaces were
concealed outside that false front, the best conference room space aboard the ship was inside.
Kyle stood at the center of the semicircular room, watching Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen, the lanky commander of Chameleon’s single company of Marines, chivy the last straggler into the room before sealing the door.
With the exception of Glass, standing next to him at the podium, the men and women in the room were now under his command—and he knew far too few of them. Rokos sat at the back with his four Space Force Flight Commanders. A fifth Flight Commander sat with the rest of the black-ops contingent near the front: Glass had assigned a platoon of ground forces and a squadron of starfighter crews from Intelligence’s Special Forces teams to the mission.
Kyle knew none of the black-ops people, and they made him uncomfortable. Nonetheless, it was Glass’s mission in many ways, so he’d let it stand. With Rokos and Hansen in command of the two groups, he was confident they couldn’t cause too much trouble.
His new executive officer sat in the middle at the front, looking like he was ready to spring into action, fight-or-flight reflex engaged. Chownyk had apparently partially rejected regeneration treatments and both of his legs and an arm were now artificial, but the surgeons had done a good job, and even knowing, Kyle couldn’t tell.
Next to the shaven-headed Senior Fleet Commander sat newly promoted Fleet Commander Jennifer Taylor. Unlike Chownyk, the woman with the shoulder-length blond braid sat perfectly still, almost creepily so.
His navigator and chief engineer had been selected by Rondell. Lieutenant Commander Tai Lau was an androgynous officer with dark skin and a pronounced epicanthic fold. Silver highlights on their forehead marked contact points for implants beyond the standard neural network—Lau’s record noted them as a semi-augmented hermaphrodite, one of the Federation’s pseudo-transhuman minority.
His chief engineer was a small sandy-haired man who seemed content to let everyone else do the talking. If Kyle hadn’t known better, he’d have guessed the man as a nonentity—except that Kyle knew that Javed Ajam had been the lead engineer on converting Chameleon to Castle’s service.
“All right, people,” Kyle declared, drawing everyone’s attention to him. A scattering of junior officers around each of the seniors filled up the room, though he still only had about a third of Chameleon’s officers present.
“First, I want to thank all of you for volunteering for this operation,” he told them. “None of you have more than the vaguest of what we’re about, and you’ve signed on trusting the officers who asked you. We appreciate it.
“That said, Mister Glass is about to brief you on the high level of Operation Blue Sunbeam,” Kyle continued. “Once that briefing is complete, you will have one final opportunity to back out. Unfortunately, that will come with significant communication restrictions until the operation is complete. If there’s anyone you want to talk to in the next six months without it going through censors, I suggest you leave now.”
He was unsurprised when none took him up on that, and stepped back, gesturing for Glass to take over the briefing.
The old spy stepped up to the podium and eyed the crowd.
“As I’m sure you’ve all realized, Chameleon is an unusual vessel,” he said. “For those of you who don’t recognize her, she’s a Commonwealth-built Blackbeard-class Q-ship, built on a Troubadour-J freighter hull. The various iterations of the Troubadour design are common even in Alliance space, and are extremely common in Commonwealth space.
“This means she’s a ship that can go deep into Terran space without being noticed,” Glass continued. “She has a suite of civilian and paramilitary ID codes, though using any of them around Terran intelligence could potentially blow our cover.
“However, the Commonwealth does not realize we captured her. We have assets that have dug into this, and they believe she’s still in pirate hands. We are not,” he admitted, “entirely sure how she ended up in pirate hands, but no one knows we have her.
“We have a line on munitions and intelligence from a contact in the Stellar League,” Glass noted. “Blue Sunbeam will take us into the League, from where we will a strike into the heart of the Commonwealth: the core worlds that fuel their industry and military machine.
“I will explain more details as they become relevant,” the spy concluded, “but the key objective of Operation Blue Sunbeam is to trigger a Commonwealth punitive expedition into the Stellar League—an expedition the League’s new Dictator will be forced to respond to.
“Our mission is nothing less than to force the Commonwealth into a two-front war.”
#
Kyle’s office aboard Chameleon was outside the false front and suffered noticeably for it. There was no decoration, the chairs were uncomfortable and the walls were plain metal—but the communications system and wallscreens worked, so he could live with it.
Especially once his beer fridge was installed in the corner.
He slid a beer across the desk to Glass and considered the spy for a long moment.
“If you’re planning on dealing out the details in penny packets, I’m assuming you’re planning on coming with us?” he asked carefully. The concept of having each piece of the mission doled on a bit-by-bit basis wasn’t appealing, but it was a covert mission.
“I am,” Glass confirmed. “There’s a lot of moving parts to this, and a lot of details are classified at the highest levels. I’m the only one who knows everything, and I don’t plan on changing that. No offense, Captain, but I’ve been building this op and the contacts for it as a potential plan for ten years. I need to see it go off.”
“We weren’t at war ten years ago,” Kyle pointed out.
“We knew it was coming,” the spy countered. “Everybody knew it was coming. The Commonwealth believes humanity must be reunified under Terran guidance—so long as that principle of their culture is unbroken, Terra will attack anyone who does not kneel.”
“And I don’t think we’ve ever known how to kneel,” the Captain admitted. “My understanding was that I would be in command.”
“You are,” Glass told him. “I run the op. You command Chameleon. I’m not qualified to command a capital ship.”
“Then I damn well better be in command,” Kyle told the older man bluntly. When he’d commanded Avalon and Vice Admiral Tobin had taken them out as a one-ship battle group, there’d been problems.
“You give the briefings and the objectives, but I decide how we carry them out,” he continued. “We can’t have a divided chain of command in combat, do you understand?”
“Completely, Captain,” Glass agreed. “I will keep you informed as it becomes necessary, but understand that much of the information that enabled this mission could get our agents in the Commonwealth identified and killed if the Terrans knew we had it. My obligation to them is to hold the data close to my chest. I trust you as much as I trust anyone, Captain, but I’m afraid you must allow me my paranoia.”
Glass’s tone made the words an order. He clearly intended to cooperate—but his way.
“All right, Mister Glass,” Kyle allowed. If nothing else, he’d confirmed that Hansen’s Marines had all come from Avalon. If the spy went too far out of line, well, that gave him options.
He raised the beer.
“To the Alliance, then,” he toasted.
“And damnation to our enemies.”
#
Chapter 9
Under Alcubierre Drive outside Castle System
15:00 April 30, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
It was a point of pride among many Navy officers that they didn’t actually need the consoles and displays that made up a warship’s bridge. The vast majority of their work took place in cyberspace via their neural implants and the ship’s computers. The displays were an augmentation to that, handy to have but not a necessity.
Kyle and the bridge crew of Chameleon were getting to test that theory. The ship’s Terran designers had considered the poss
ibility of needing to fool boarders, so the public areas of the ship were an exact clone of the Troubadour-type freighter she been built to resemble. This meant her bridge was very much a civilian one. One big display, not dozens of little ones. Seats enough for the core officers, but no space for the immediate department sections they’d have around them on a warship.
Those department sections still existed, but Chameleon’s design had relegated them to a support bridge in the hidden sections of the ship. In theory, they were just as linked into the network as they would be in their usual location, but only time would tell if there was a reduction in efficiency from it.
Kyle personally suspected that the designers were correct when they said there was no change in communication time or efficiency from the technology side. He also suspected that they’d see a reduction in efficiency regardless, just from the teams not being able to see their officers’ faces.
“Commander Lau,” he said aloud to his new Navigator. “How are we bearing?”
“Running clean, sir,” the officer replied quietly. “Ten minutes to Alcubierre safe zone. Destination?”
“Good question,” Kyle told them with a broad grin. Lau responded with the tiniest hint of a smile, but there was a sign of hope there. “Let me ask Mister Glass.”
Opening a channel through his implant he pinged the spy.
“Glass.”
“We’re ten minutes from FTL,” Kyle thought at the man. “Is this the appropriate time to tell us where we’re going, or do you still want to wait?”
Glass’s chuckle came across the link clearly.
“Our destination is the New Edmonton System,” he replied. “Though I’m sure it’s irrelevant at the moment, we’ll be dropping out in the outer system, at McMurray’s trailing Trojans.”
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 5