Q-Ship Chameleon

by Glynn Stewart

  “Damn,” Trickster said mildly. “I owe your people, but I wish I could contact more of mine. The jamming?”

  “I have two platoons securing the station; they’ll take it down once they find it,” Edvard promised.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Major, Captain Roberts, Glass,” Trickster told them, carefully removing their weight from Roberts. They held out a datastick to Glass. “I believe, Mister Glass, that you can keep this. The payment for your cargo has been rendered in full.”

  #

  Chapter 20

  New Edmonton System

  10:15 May 27, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Chameleon, Ice Belt

  “We have a problem, sir,” Chownyk reported as Kyle finally reentered his bridge.

  Somehow, Kyle was not surprised. Today wouldn’t be complete without more problems.

  “What have we got?” he asked, dropping into the command chair and wincing as he jarred his arm. He hadn’t been badly wounded, just a gouge across the bicep, but the field dressing Hansen’s people had shoved on it had left his arm tender.

  If Trickster had been one iota less paranoid, all three of them would have died in that office.

  “I’ve got what looks like a condottieri carrier heading our way,” his XO explained, flipping Kyle an implant feed and highlighting the ship in question. “She isn’t super-modern or super-large, but she’s at least forty million cubic meters and heading our way at two hundred gravities. I’d be surprised if she has less than a hundred and fifty fighters aboard.”

  “ETA?”

  “Twelve hours, so she isn’t an immediate issue,” Chownyk replied. “Just something you needed to be aware of.”

  “Agreed,” Kyle told him. “Let me check with our friend.”

  With the jamming finally down, Trickster had remained on the station as one of Hansen’s platoons finished sweeping the base for the remaining mutineers. Judecca had had a population of just over eighteen hundred. From the sounds of it, Trickster had less than two hundred people left.

  Kyle pinged Glass first.

  “We have incoming,” he told the spy. “Condottieri warship. She’s still twelve hours out, but I’m guessing they won’t be happy with Trickster.”

  “Periklos put enough of a bounty on Trickster to buy someone a new starship,” Glass said flatly. “God alone knows how he’s going to pay for it, but that’s a good chunk of the annual budget of many of the League’s system governments. Trickster can’t be here when they get here—and neither can we, Roberts.”

  “How much of a favor do we owe them?”

  “Not that big,” the spy replied. “If Trickster wants a ride to another star system and it’s not out of our way, their goodwill is probably still going to be worth something going forward, but…”

  “Understood,” Kyle confirmed. “Let’s see what they say.”

  He linked into the radio channel they were maintaining with Judecca Station.

  “Get me Trickster,” he ordered the pirate who answered the com.

  He was apparently high on the pirate’s list of people they were willing to talk to, as their androgynous voice was on the channel less than ten seconds later.

  “Roberts. Is this you telling me you’re leaving us?”

  “Not yet, but pretty quickly,” Kyle told them. “There’s a condottieri carrier headed this way, and the Gods know Chameleon can’t fight a real warship. And, no offense, I’m not going to try for you.”

  Enough of his people had died because of the pirate as it was.

  “Won’t ask you to,” Trickster confirmed. “In fact…” They paused. “If you come about ninety-three degrees in the ecliptic and angle up twenty-six and wait about ten minutes, I think I can give you some cover for your withdrawal.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Kyle admitted with a sigh.

  “I owe you, Captain Roberts,” the pirate told him. “I’ll find a way to repay you, sooner or later.”

  “I might hold you to that,” he replied.

  “Just don’t rely on it,” Trickster said with a chuckle. “I didn’t earn my name by keeping all my promises, after all. Hit that vector, Captain. And watch for the fireworks.”

  Shaking his head, Kyle cut the channel and flipped the vector to Lau.

  “As soon as Hansen’s people are back aboard, set on this course and prepare our Alcubierre jump. Destination is one light-month short of the Aurelius system.”

  Lau nodded silently, but Kyle was already raising Hansen.

  “El-Maj, pull your people off the station,” he told the Marine. “We are leaving New Edmonton.”

  “Understood,” Hansen replied. “Should be good to go. Give me five minutes.”

  “You have three. I don’t think the station’s going to be here in ten.”

  “On our way.”

  #

  Hansen’s people didn’t make Kyle’s three-minute deadline but were still out before the five minutes were up, their shuttle chasing after Chameleon as the Q-ship accelerated away on the course Trickster had given them.

  With several hundred gravities’ more acceleration than its mothership, the shuttle had almost caught up by the time Trickster’s ten-minute limit had passed. Kyle turned his attention to Judecca Station, expecting a show.

  For a few moments, there was nothing. The shuttle grew nearer. The far-off condottieri carrier continued to approach. The ice-wrapped station continued in its orbit, its exterior unmarred by the violence that had swept its interior.

  Kyle was watching carefully, so he saw the blip as something happened…and then the station broke apart. Five major pieces drifted apart, chunks of metal and ice severed apart by clearly prepositioned explosions.

  “Jump?” Lau asked.

  “No,” he said softly. “Prep the Stetson fields, though. Bring them up as soon as the Marines are aboard.”

  Seconds ticked by and the assault shuttle charged into the cover of the big starship.

  “Marine shuttle inside the safety zone,” Chownyk reported.

  “Fields up. Singularities on standby,” the navigator reported crisply.

  “Shouldn’t there be some kind of light show?” Kyle’s XO asked.

  “And…now,” Kyle replied with a grin. On the screen in front of him, strings of antimatter bomblets that had been strung between the chunks of the station lit up, dozens of multi-megaton annihilations lighting up space.

  “Go!” he ordered.

  The first chunk of station went up in a fifty-gigaton antimatter explosion, and then the New Edmonton system disappeared in the distinctive twist of reality warped beyond tolerance.

  A few moments later, the standard computer-generated image of the stars replaced the incomprehensible mess of light the Alcubierre Drive left them with. For obvious reasons, it lacked any updated presentation of Judecca Station.

  “We were watching closely,” Kyle said softly. “Did we pick up Trickster’s ship leaving?”

  “There was a ship?” Chownyk asked.

  “They weren’t going to go up with their space station,” the Captain pointed out. “Commander Taylor—did we get anything?”

  “Smallest FTL ship I ever saw,” she said after a moment. “The chunk closest to us was ice wrapped around a starship about two hundred meters long. Her Alcubierre-Stetson drive lit off with the first explosions. We were less than a light-second away and we barely picked her out.”

  “So, as far as Dictator Periklos’s people are concerned, Trickster’s probably dead,” Kyle noted. “Probably for the best, for now.”

  He glanced around his bridge.

  “Good work, everyone,” he rumbled loudly. “I have to admit to an extra appreciation for your efforts to pull my own personal ass out of the fire.”

  Chuckles responded, but he continued more somberly.

  “We’ll sort out a memorial for the Marines and flight crew we lost today before we’re too far on our way,” he reminded them. “We have a mission to complete, but we won’t forget
our fallen, either.”

  #

  Two hours after a combat engagement, the flight deck was a hive of activity. Maintenance teams swept over each fighter in sequence, running system tests, cleaning vents, opening panels, and going through every step of the massive checklists required to be one hundred and ten percent certain no part of the deadly spacecraft had been damaged or misaligned.

  While the maintenance crews did their magic, Russell’s flight crews were either asleep, recovering from the inevitable adrenaline crash, or getting very drunk. Alcohol was rarely to his taste, and sleep would be a long time coming.

  There was, after all, a very quiet section of the hangar that had held half of Alpha Squadron’s fighters this morning. If there was anything the maintenance staff needed from those four hangars, they were finding it somewhere else and leaving the CAG alone with his thoughts.

  It was strange. Russell had lost people under his command before—he’d been a squadron commander at Tranquility when the old Avalon’s fighter group had been gutted along with their carrier home. He’d seen fighter wings absolutely destroyed—the wing he’d escorted the rescue transports out of Huī Xing with had ended up being most of the surviving starfighters from the entire four-starship battle group.

  And yet those four empty fighter stalls and the one over in Echo Squadron’s section of the Flight Deck hit him harder than any of those losses. He might have lost people under his command, but he had never lost people while in command.

  There was no one else to off-load responsibility onto. No one else who could have been smarter, faster. He’d commanded the entire fighter strike, and he’d lost an eighth of his starfighters and fifteen people doing it.

  Intellectually, he knew he’d gone up against starfighters with a terrifying individual superiority at point-blank range with no chance for either side to truly grasp what kind of fight they were getting into. Only losing five fighters against an arguably superior force was a decent job.

  Once they’d finished upgrading his ships, combining the D-mod kits and his own people’s adjustments, they’d easily have added five hundred tons to the starfighters’ mass but almost doubled their lethality. The Hoplites would still have been superior, but not as much.

  The problem was that they’d be fighting Katanas, the Terrans’ new seventh-generation starfighters. Those were going to dance rings around his upgraded Cataphracts, and he didn’t see a solution for that.

  Turning to leave, he spotted Flight Commander Laura Cavendish standing in front of the empty hangar that had held Echo Six. She wore a plain black shipsuit without insignia—by choice, as she had every right to her uniform. She just wasn’t cleared to fly.

  He wasn’t sure what impulse carried him over to her, but he wasn’t nearly stealthy enough to sneak up on her. Cavendish turned as he was approaching her, and her eyes flashed at the sight of him.

  “Are you happy now?” she demanded, gesturing to the empty hangar behind her. “I flew with Carter for five years. Devine and Cole backed her for three. Gone. In an instant. Because you got a stick up your ass!”

  “I didn’t know them,” Russell admitted. “But I knew Flight Lieutenants Norma Boveri and Marius Knudsen and their crews more than in passing. I’d served with Flight Lieutenants Mai Nguyen and Felix Baas since before Tranquility. They were friends. And I’d met Nelly and her people.

  “Do not dare assume that I do not know who they were,” he hissed. “And before you accuse me of causing their deaths, perhaps you should talk to your boss? Because according to the briefing I got, this whole mess was triggered when one of Trickster’s captains realized we were a Q-ship.

  “Something no one in this system was aware of until you flew a starfighter without permission,” he finished flatly. “I’m the CAG, so if you need to blame someone for their deaths, that’s part of my job. But take the time to consider all the causes, Commander.

  “Because that’s part of both our jobs.”

  #

  Chapter 21

  Deep Space, Under Alcubierre Drive

  18:00 May 29, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Chameleon

  Kyle shut down the file on his implant and leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed against the light in his office.

  The butcher’s bill had been far lower than they had any right to expect. The lack of escape pods on the Cataphracts had taken its toll, but Hansen had only lost twenty-six Marines all told while taking a station with almost two thousand residents.

  Tradition put the letter-writing on Hansen and Rokos’s subordinate officers as the direct superiors of the deceased. Tradition also said that the senior officers be available and willing to assist, all the way up to the ship’s Captain.

  Kyle was also determined to know, not merely have in implant storage but know, the names of every man and woman who’d died under his command. The list was already far too long, but unless he resigned his commission today, there was no way to stop it.

  With a sigh, he cracked open another beer and took a long swallow. That was a thought that had rarely crossed his mind before Huī Xing. He couldn’t actually resign, of course. The Federation was at war and everyone was now in for the duration. But…he could request a noncombat posting.

  It would be the end of his career. He’d never see another promotion and would certainly never see a command again—but he wouldn’t have to send more men and women to their deaths. Would know, at least, that his screw-ups hadn’t caused more deaths.

  Nothing he’d done could have changed the course of the fight at Judecca Station, though. They’d walked into a trap and fought their way back out of it mostly because their enemy had underestimated them. Whether or not he’d stayed with Chameleon wouldn’t have changed anything.

  Another sigh accompanied another swallow of beer, and he found himself studying the plaque of medals hung on the wall. Two Federation Stars of Heroism, the second-highest award the Castle Federation had for valor. The Tranquility Golden Crescent, that system’s highest award for valor, awarded for turning back the Commonwealth assault at the start of the war. The Alizon Diamond Nova of Honor, given to him for almost accidentally liberating that system.

  His understanding was that he had more medals waiting for him if he ever returned to the Huī Xing or Frihet systems. The Coraline Imperium, the second-ranked power in the Alliance, had been making noises about the Imperator wanting to hang some chunk of rock on him personally for the rescue in Huī Xing.

  Kyle could remember how many people had died for each of those medals, from Ansem Gulf all the way to the Battle of Huī Xing. And yet…those pretty pieces of metal demonstrated that at least some people figured that he’d done better in those places than someone else would have.

  He finished the beer, his third of the evening, and glared at the medals.

  A ping on his implant interrupted his foul mood, informing him that he’d received a recorded message via Q-Com from Mira Solace.

  That was…odd. Mira commanded a capital ship; she should have been able to activate a live Q-Com link to Chameleon—unless Camerone was in an active combat zone.

  By the time he had that realization, he already had Mira’s message and his lover’s image filled the wall screen. She looked…tired. Her uniform was still perfectly turned out, she didn’t have a hair out of place, but he knew her well enough now to recognize it in the slump of her shoulders and the cast of her eyes.

  “Hi, Kyle,” she said quietly. “You’re getting a recording because Huī Xing is being considered an active combat zone. Would rather see your face, but the rules are what they are…and they’re right in any case.

  “Commonwealth hit us twelve hours ago, trying to take out the ships we captured here before they could be repaired. Four cruisers, two carriers—an entire fleet.”

  She inhaled deeply and then let it go in a long sigh.

  “You’ll see the formal report soon enough, same as everyone else, so I can actually tell you about it,” she said. “I d
on’t know where Command got the intel about the bastards’ new starfighter, but it saved a lot of lives today.

  “They were still flying Scimitars off the cruisers and held back the Katanas to lure us in. With the warning that the Terrans were rushing the new Katanas to Walkingstick’s fleets, the Admiral realized they hadn’t launched the carrier fighters.

  “She guessed what they were up to—and she guessed right,” Mira continued. “They tried to mousetrap our fighters with the Katanas, but we ran them in on a vector they could pull out on. If we hadn’t…” She shuddered. “Our CAGs were expecting to run into Scimitars with even numbers, which is to our benefit. With three quarters of their fighters actually being Katanas, it was bad enough.

  “We drove them off, obviously,” she said quietly. “But…we’ve been used to taking Terran starfighters less than seriously. That’s going to have to change. The Katana is a nasty piece of work, same lance as a Phoenix Templar.” She shivered. “It’s a fighter-killer, and a hell of a lot better at the job than anything else they’ve built.”

  Kyle had reviewed the specifications Glass had forwarded back to the Alliance. The Katana looked deadlier and sleeker than its purely cylindrical predecessor, trading missile capacity and a significantly increased mass for a hugely increased ECM capability and a single extremely powerful positron lance.

  “If we hadn’t been expecting it, we might have lost Huī Xing,” Mira admitted. “As it was, it was a pretty inconclusive slugfest—we took fighter losses and smashed the crap out of their new birds, but nobody lost starships.

  “They were testing the Katanas,” she concluded. “I hate being Walkingstick’s test-bed.”

  With a shake of her head, she smiled at him.

  “I wanted to reach out before the official report started circulating,” she told him. “I’m fine and Huī Xing’s still ours. It could have been a lot worse.”