“Why my ship?” Kyle demanded.
“Because up until the moment you demonstrated that your ship had at least one fully functioning, military-grade fighter launch tube, no one in this system except me and presumably whoever you met on Station Six knew your ship was a Q-ship,” Trickster said flatly. “Which makes her the most valuable prize any pirate can think of.
“Well, except me,” they noted after a moment. “I can think of a more valuable prize: my life and my fleet, which I wouldn’t expect to survive a stupid attempt to seize a properly crewed Q-ship.”
Glass looked vaguely sick, probably realizing that his attempt to have Cavendish contact Trickster quietly had created even more problems than he’d known.
“So, your people are trying to kill us to steal our ship?” the spy asked slowly.
“No,” Trickster replied with a bark of laughter. “They’re trying to kill me today because your ship makes a nice bonus. They’re trying to kill me to take over, since they think Periklos will turn a blind eye to our little operation once I’m dead. Which he won’t.”
The pirate tossed a pair of weapons onto the desk.
“Glass, I know you can shoot. Roberts?”
“I’m no Marine, but I can shoot,” the big Captain said grimly.
“These are Commonwealth Presidential Protection Detail Anti-Armor Carbines,” the pirate noted. “They’re recoilless, so watch the fucking vent, but fire the same tungsten penetrator their Marine battle armor rifles use.”
Kyle took the carbine and studied it carefully, making sure he was clear of the vent that would spew superheated gas while firing. His shipsuit would absorb most of the heat from it, but even with it he suspected firing a battle armor–equivalent weapon was going to get…warm.
“In about a minute, Rainier’s men are going to realize that shutter is made of old-style neutronium armor and nothing they have is getting through it,” the pirate told them. “Unfortunately, the rest of the room is not, so they’re going to come through the walls.”
Trickster kicked over their desk and gestured for them to take cover behind it with them.
“Who’s Rainier?”
“Captain of my best ship, the ungrateful bastard,” Trickster replied. “Also the only one of my people with the spine to even try this.”
“Is his ship here?”
“If it isn’t yet, it will be. I hope your people are ready to fight.”
“They are,” Kyle confirmed. “We were expecting you to betray us.”
Trickster chuckled.
“I won’t deny I thought about it, but the last people who tried to betray ‘Mister Glass’ here ended up with their entire station dropped into a gas giant.”
Kyle glanced over at Glass, who shrugged and then pointed.
“They’re about to come through there,” he said calmly.
The desk was pointed in roughly the right direction, allowing Kyle to train the carbine on the wall the spy had indicated. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew Glass had a higher level of augmentation than he did.
A few seconds later, his faith in the spy was vindicated as the wall exploded, shards of rock, ice, and metal spraying across the room and slamming into the desk. Despite the furniture’s apparent plainness, it clearly had been designed with this exact purpose in mind, as nothing made it through.
“And…now,” Glass snapped.
Kyle rose over the desk and opened fire along with the other two men, filling the still-steaming hole with hypervelocity penetrators. A man in battle armor appeared to be leading the way, but half a dozen rounds punched clean through his armor and he collapsed to his knees, adding to the debris the explosion had created.
Return fire flared in the smoke, bullets ricocheting off of the desk as Kyle dropped behind it again, firing blindly over the top of it.
Bullets flew both ways for a few seconds, until Trickster attached a cylinder they’d removed from the locker to the top of their carbine, lifted it over the desk and triggered it.
Heat washed over Kyle, even more than the venting gas from the anti-armor carbine, and then the entire room shook as something exploded in the tunnel.
Silence followed.
“I only have one more of those,” Trickster said conversationally. “Am I safe in presuming your Marines are going to come rescue you?”
“What would your plan be if they weren’t?” Kyle asked.
“Escape tunnel, one-man shuttle, suicide charge, wait for pickup,” the pirate reeled off instantly. “Since that would involve leaving you and Glass behind and probably destroying your ship, I’m hoping you have an alternative?”
#
“I’ve got Hoplites on the screen!” Alvarado snapped. “No launchers; they’re just opening the hatch and dumping them out.”
“Old-fashioned pirates,” the CAG said grimly. “Please tell me everyone’s in space?”
“Everyone’s in space,” the Lieutenant confirmed.
“All squadrons, listen in,” Russell ordered. “Alpha, Charlie, Delta, jump those fighters before they get themselves sorted out. Bravo, Echo, we’re going after the ship. Launch missiles as soon as you have a clear shot!”
Fitting his actions to his words, he lined the nose of his Cataphract up with the new freighter. He didn’t know how many starfighters the pirates had shoved into her, but every starfighter that was still aboard her when she went up was one they weren’t going to have to fight.
Whoever had jumped her in probably hadn’t been expecting to find the space around Judecca Station swarming with starfighters. As soon as the nose of his bird lined up with the ship, he fired his positron lance, hoping that the ship only had civilian deflectors.
That was clearly not the case, as his antimatter beam was ripped to shreds, its particles scattered around the freighter in a pattern that was almost pretty—but definitely wasn’t lethal.
“Missiles away,” Alvarado reported calmly. “Clean and running true, flight time…” The man sighed. “Flight time is over two minutes; they’re going to get their birds out, boss.”
“We’ll deal with them” he said grimly. The rest of his two designated squadrons were launching as well. Thirty-two missiles wasn’t much of a salvo, especially when spread out like this. “Bravo, Echo—network in for synchronized launches. Empty the magazines and engage their starfighters with lances.
“Everyone else, missiles free. Take down those Hoplites!”
More of the Sarissa starfighter missiles blazed free of his fighters, filling the space around them with the tiny suns of antimatter fire as eighty more missiles blasted into space.
Ten seconds later, another eighty missiles joined them. The Hoplites had started to launch missiles as well, their inferior numbers made up by the fact they carried twice as many launchers as his people.
“I’m reading twenty-four Hoplites,” his gunner reported. “I’m not seeing any new launches and the freighter is turning to run. She’s got to be armed, right?”
“Not heavily,” Russell murmured. “How much firepower do you need to intimidate merchant ships? Ride the missiles, Guns; I’m taking us after their birds.”
Part of his mind was watching the entire battle. His people had the pirates outnumbered by almost two to one, but the Hoplite was a superior fighter in every sense: more launchers, a more powerful lance, better engines, better ECM…
But his own ships had been upgraded as much as they could without the League-designed upgrade kits they’d come there to buy. They were faster than the pirates were expecting, with better ECM—and his pilots were veterans of the bloody campaign Seventh Fleet had waged against the Commonwealth earlier that year.
Missiles started to explode as his people’s lances and defensive laser suites cut into the incoming fire. The explosions expanded, rippling into secondary explosions that lit up the sky—had the pirates not dispersed their salvo?!
They hadn’t…but there had also been method to their madness. The explosions of the clusters blinded s
ensors, forcing his fighters to cease firing for precious seconds—precious seconds in which the un-clustered missiles closed thousands of kilometers.
He threw his fighter into a ninety-degree turn, building a vector away from where the missiles saw him. It didn’t buy him a lot of time…but it bought enough for his laser suite to blow the missile apart while it was still a dozen kilometers away.
Not all of his people were as lucky.
Alpha Squadron was closest, and those fractions of a second made all of the difference. Three of Churchill’s starfighters disappeared, and the Cataphracts lacked the escape pods the Federation had always built into their craft. Nine of Rokos’s people had just died, their bodies vaporized in antimatter fire.
Their own missiles fell on the pirates at the same time. The first salvo, launched at the pirate freighter, arrived first. The ship did have some defenses—several suites of antimissile laser turrets opened fire as the missiles closed—but not nearly enough.
Over a dozen of that first salvo made it through, obliterating the pirate ship in a massive fireball that rendered about sixty missiles Russell’s people had fired into useless navigational hazards.
There were failsafes for that, though, and he turned his attention back to the Hoplites. Their heavier lances and deflectors meant they outranged his people, but it didn’t look like it was going to matter. His people were integrating their ECM, random-walking illusions of an additional hundred starfighters in the space around them—and they’d still lost three starfighters.
The Hoplite crews weren’t trained in that. Each of them was running their own ECM with integration or coordination, resulting in a hellacious mess…one that the humans guiding the Federation missiles could see the individual spheres of.
It wasn’t quite as simple as guiding the missiles into the center of those spheres, but the lack of coordination cost the Hoplites a massive amount of their effectiveness—and Russell’s people had sent them twelve missiles each.
The remaining pirate salvos killed two more Cataphracts and six more of his people, but not one of the pirate starfighters made it out intact.
#
The Marines made it over halfway through the cargo tunnel before the pirates even realized they were facing a counterattack. If there had been cover, Edvard’s people would have used thrusters and magnet boots to account for the lack of gravity—but since there was no cover to be found, they instead used that lack to launch themselves down the tunnel like miniature spaceships.
Scanners in the battle armor suits fed their data to a carefully linked network, all of it feeding back to the Lieutenants and to Edvard Hansen, who reviewed it in his implant as he charged forward with the rest of his Marines.
“Riley, take your people and hit the left gallery,” he ordered, highlighting a section where a group of pirates were carrying tripod-mounted anti-armor rifles, the most likely man-portable gear to threaten his armored Marines.
“Tan, hit the armor contingent, grenades, full auto, sweep them out,” he instructed his Alpha platoon commander, highlighting the middle of Judecca Station’s cargo bay, where the platoon’s worth or so of pirates with actual battle armor had gathered.
“Daniels, clean up in between, prioritize anyone who looks to have anti-armor gear.
“HQ Section, follow me,” he finished grimly. “We’re punching straight through into the station.”
“Do we know where we’re going?” someone asked.
“I’ve got coordinates for the Captain’s last known location,” Edvard replied. “I figure we start there and shoot our way out. Now go!”
The shooting had already started. The pirates clearly hadn’t been expecting Marines, as a number of even their battle armored soldiers carried lower-velocity weapons lacking the penetration to threaten his people.
Enough had real guns that the trip through the cargo tunnel couldn’t be fast enough for all of his people to survive. Suppressing fire hammered their destination, shattering cargo containers, armor and pirates alike, but their return fire was equally intense and the Marines had no cover.
Flashing alerts appeared on his implant feed, warning him that he was losing people. Edvard’s own rifle jerked with a recoil that could easily have thrown him back down the tunnel, walking high-caliber explosive rounds across the room.
A spray of fire from one of the miniguns the armored pirate troopers carried walked across his armor, the bullets shoving him backward even as they failed to penetrate his armor. His suit computer highlighted the source, and Edvard sent a burst of penetrators back at the pirate.
The heavy rounds punched clean through the armor suit, sending the other man crumpling backward just as Edvard finally reached Judecca Station’s gravity and slammed heavily into the metal flooring.
His neural implant coldly informed him that twenty-three of his people had been wounded or killed in the process of crossing the tunnel, and they’d turned the station’s cargo bay into a scene from hell. At least one of the pods had been a fuel container of some kind, and it had managed to get spread around before it ignited.
The pirates who’d gathered to attack Chameleon would never attack anyone again. If any of them were still alive, they were choosing to pretend to be dead, and Edvard was perfectly willing to let them.
“Tan, secure the cargo bay,” he ordered quietly. “If any of them are still alive…keep them that way.”
“Daniels, sweep the station perimeter—remember, some people on here might still be on our side. Give them a chance to drop their guns before you put them down, but don’t let anyone with anti-armor gear take a shot.
“Riley, you’re with me and the HQ section. Move out!”
#
The station was a mess. Without a guide, Edvard’s strike force was restricted to guessing corridors and occasionally blasting through floors, a process that met with disturbingly little resistance.
Primarily because everyone they came across was dead.
Charging through Judecca Station felt like sweeping a battlefield for survivors. At some point after their arrival, a significant chunk of the people aboard the station had turned on the rest. Being a pirate station, however, everyone had been armed and it had turned into a vicious multi-way melee.
A melee that his Marines had arrived too late to change the course of.
The eerie silence of the station eventually faded into the distant sound of gunfire as they approached Captain Roberts’s last coordinates. The corridors here were narrower, dirtier—intentionally designed to limit an attacker’s approach room.
They were still big enough for battle armor, though, and he pushed on toward the sound of the guns. The platoon’s networked computers assessed distance from the volume and Doppler shifts, and warned them as they reached the point of no return.
“You don’t lead,” Riley told him flatly as he started forward. “You know better.”
He made a small acceding gesture. He hadn’t quite intended to go first…but she was right that he needed to be farther back.
“Go,” he ordered softly.
Two of the armored black-ops troopers moved forward, their armor suddenly much quieter as they engaged a sound-deadening function his Marines’ gear lacked. Cameras in their helmets relayed what they saw back to him and Riley.
Any remnant of the original structure of the space the point men could see was long gone now. Explosives and vibroblades had gutted walls and dug new tunnels through the ice, wrapping around an armored capsule that had clearly been cut open twice—and both entrances collapsed by explosives.
An entire side of the room had now been blasted off, and gunfire echoed into and out of the space. The fire coming from inside was far heavier than Edvard would have expected from three people with hand weapons, and there were enough suits of battle armor among the dead scattered through the debris to suggest the attackers had underestimated Trickster’s armaments supply.
There weren’t many of them left now. From the bodies, they’d started wit
h over a hundred people, a third in battle armor. Now they were down to barely twenty…and Edvard was behind them with over sixty.
“Take them!” he snapped.
More of his people charged out of the tunnels behind the point team. The lead two black-ops troopers opened fire first, carefully targeted bursts cutting down the last few survivors in battle armor and ending any chance the pirates had before the fight truly began.
Gunfire continued to echo out of the capsule once it was over, suppressing fire to keep everyone’s heads down.
Despite everything, the jamming was still up. While Edvard had contact with his strike force by relayed microbeams, he had no communications with his other platoons that were hopefully securing the station.
Instead, he approached as close as he could and brought up the loudspeakers.
“Captain Roberts? It’s Lieutenant Major Hansen. We’ve secured the exterior, if you’d like to stop shooting.”
“How do we know it’s you?” a quavering voice he recognized as belonging to the spy, Glass.
“Tell Roberts he owes me a beer for saving his ass.”
“It’s Hansen,” Roberts proclaimed. “I’ll pay up gladly.”
Stepping around and into the field of view, Edvard marveled at the state of the office. It looked like every piece of furniture had been used as cover for an impromptu fort as the room itself had disintegrated around them—and that every piece of furniture had been built to use as cover.
Glass was leaning on the dented remains of a bookshelf, breathing heavily as he released the two propped carbines he’d been keeping up the suppressive fire with. Behind him, the massive form of Captain Roberts rose from the ground, supporting a masked stranger.
“I will be fine, Captain Roberts,” the stranger said in a voice clearly running through computer modulation. “Lieutenant Major Hansen, are you in contact with any of my people?”
“I left Henry and your cargo team aboard Chameleon,” Edvard told him. “They didn’t have the armor for the fight that was coming. I…haven’t encountered anyone else alive who didn’t shoot as us.”
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 12