Nothing.
He reached out to the ship’s network to call for help and found…nothing.
“We’re being jammed,” he said aloud, a sudden chill sinking in.
“What?” Alvarado asked.
“Try and link to the ship,” Russell ordered. “I can’t find the network.”
The gaunt gunner paled.
“I can’t even link to the fighter,” he reported.
“Jammed,” Russell confirmed. “Help me with this panel; there’s an emergency physical lever to force the door open.”
Now that he was paying attention, the air was starting to seem stale. The air circulators should have been switching it out, but the room was far quieter than it should have been. Linked into the full immersion net, he wouldn’t have noticed them turning off—there were supposed to be alarms for that.
With Alvarado’s aid, he ripped the emergency panel off to find the door lever. Somehow, he was unsurprised to find that someone had used a cutting laser to remove it, leaving a sliced-off stump—a stump that had been welded into place.
He tried to link back into the fighter’s systems—how long they’d been without air was important; the cockpit should contain enough for several hours, but if the circulation had been cut off during the exercises, they could be running short. He couldn’t even form the connection.
“The jammer is probably mounted on the outside of the hull,” Alvarado said, his voice high-pitched with fear. “We can’t link to anything at all.” The gunner swallowed. “My implant just triggered an air quality alert. I don’t think we have much time.”
Russell’s in-head computer pinged the same warning. Low oxygen. High carbon dioxide. He was already starting to feel sleepy, something he’d put up to a long stressful day before.
“We can’t link to anything by radio,” he told Alvarado as the man started to hyperventilate. “Check your damn console, Rauol!”
That only got them so far. At some point after Russell ordering the end of the exercise, something had cut off power to the consoles. No touch screens, no implant controls, nothing to do except hope someone realized they’d been trapped before they suffocated.
“Help me take this off,” Russell ordered as he stepped over to another panel, near the door but not part of its systems. Most of the repair work aboard the starfighter would be done by nanites and drones directed by the flight engineer—and the fact that Cavalcante hadn’t fixed this already said something was very wrong—but the provision was made for some manual repair.
Ripping off the panel exposed a collection of wiring, including the dense crystalline cording that carried the data streams of the ship’s computer network. And, tucked away in the corner of the panel, an emergency item almost never used anymore—a narrow cable with a connector designed to link into a tablet.
“You have a tablet?” Alvarado asked.
“No,” the Wing Commander admitted, pulling the cable out. “But I’m going to owe my grandfather an apology.”
While most of the Wing Commander’s hair was buzz-cut to fit under his shipsuit’s helmet, he had a small patch behind each ear that he grew out a bit longer. Pulling aside the hair behind his right ear, he exposed an old-fashioned physical data port for his implant.
It had been decades since implants installed in the Federation came with the physical port as default, but the eldest living Rokos was alive because he’d had that port one day when everything else had gone wrong on his ship—and he’d insisted on paying for it to be added to his grandchildren’s implants.
Russell had never used it until today, but he slid the emergency connector into the port and inhaled in a moment of almost-pain as the unfamiliar link formed.
“Cavalcante, report!” he barked over the network. Even as he was trying to reach her, he was confirming that the door was completely nonfunctional. All of the machinery around it was slagged.
Silence was his only answer and he slammed a command override into the system, taking control of the ship’s self-repair system and flagging the cockpit as emergency priority.
“Cavalcante’s not answering,” he told Alvarado. “I have everything swarming the door; get ready to grab it open on my command.”
He was running through menus on the repair remotes, checking their capabilities—he was trained on the Federation’s version, and the Terran one was noticeably different, even including…
“Never mind, get back from the door,” he ordered, pulling the cable from behind his ear so he could move.
“What?”
“Do it!”
Russell yanked Alvarado away from the door and behind the crash couches as the three remotes he’d set to suicide hammered into the other side, each destabilizing and detonating its high-density battery as a shaped charge in sequence.
Any cockpit door, even aboard a starfighter, was an armored monstrosity. The explosions weren’t enough to destroy the door—but they did punch a head-sized hole through the door and spray shrapnel across the cockpit.
Russell felt something hit the crash couch he was hiding behind and fail to penetrate—and could almost immediately feel the change in the air as fresher atmosphere poured in.
“Come on,” he told Alvarado, moving back to the half-wrecked door. “Grab the top… On three. One. Two. THREE.”
They pulled and the door ever so slightly slid open. Two more solid attempts and it was open enough for Alvarado to squeeze through and find the manual override lever on the other side, pulling the door open for Russell.
“Still nothing on the network,” the gunner said worriedly.
“I know,” Russell agreed. “Even the starfighter couldn’t talk to anyone.”
He stopped in the corridor, flipping open a panel he never thought he’d use on any starfighter and typing in his override code. The panel popped open, revealing the starfighter’s weapons locker.
He passed a harness with a pistol and carbine on it to Alvarado, who looked at him like he was crazy.
“Sir?”
“Someone just tried to kill us, Rauol,” Russell pointed out grimly. “I don’t plan on letting them succeed.
“Let’s check on Gianna.”
#
The starfighter didn’t have an engineering section the same way a starship did, but it did have a workspace and console attached to the primary zero-point cell that powered the ship and fueled her engines. In a battle, an engineer would be all over the ship, running the ECM and repair systems through her implant while backing up her remotes with the spark of intuition and insight that the artificial intelligences lacked.
In a simulation, though, Cavalcante spent her time at the console, so that was where she’d died. It looked like a minor system failure had freakishly blown debris across the room and into the back of her skull, but Russell wasn’t buying that for a second.
“What the fuck?!” Alvarado shouted at the sight of her body.
“Someone is very determined to kill us,” Russell said grimly, “but also to make it look like an accident. Everything except the jamming could have been a system malfunction, and if they removed the jammer before anyone came looking for us, no one would ever know it had been there.”
“Why?”
“Probably to kill me,” the CAG said, his voice far calmer than he felt. He even had a good idea who, though he’d expected that pulling her back into the fight would have helped her find some balance.
“I object to that plan, so let’s see if we can short-circuit it. Come on.”
“Shouldn’t we do something for Gianna?” his gunner asked faintly.
“We will,” Russell promised as he headed for the fighter’s exit. “Later. Right now, we need to stay alive, which means getting away from this ship and out of range of that jammer.”
Swallowing hard, the junior officer followed him away from their comrade’s body.
Reaching the exit, Russell gestured the younger man to the other side of the door while he tapped an override code into the control panel.
“Watch yourself,” he ordered, his finger hovering over the last button. “If what I think is going on is, there’ll be a backup plan and it’ll probably involve shooters.”
They’d been trapped for long enough that he was sadly certain the deck had emptied. With a sigh, he hit the last button and triggered the door, the metal panel moving swiftly aside to allow them back onto the flight deck.
The first thing he noticed was that the lights were down. Faint red emergency lighting cast the entire deck in an ominous bloody wash—but the lights on the flight deck shouldn’t have been off.
The color and tone of the emergency lighting was carefully chosen. It was more than enough for anyone with a military-grade implant to see. It wasn’t enough for someone with said implant to see distances, and Russell knew he was in trouble.
He yanked Alvarado back as the junior officer started to exit the starfighter, pulling him behind the hull just in time for a bullet to smash into the floor past where he’d been standing.
“Stay down,” he hissed. He hadn’t heard the shot—he was guessing low-velocity bullets from a suppressed weapon. That didn’t change his guess of who was trying to kill him.
More bullets walked their way across the deck, keeping them trapped in the starfighter. That didn’t make sense…unless!
He threw Alvarado back into the starfighter, the lighter man sprawling across the floor as a second shooter’s bullets sprayed over his own collapse.
Russell, however, had collapsed toward the door with the carbine in his hand. His ground combat training was almost nonexistent, but his kinesthetic sense was off the charts. When the second salvo slammed into the ground where he’d originally landed, he had his attacker dialed in.
Of course, he wasn’t as good a shot without a starfighter. He emptied the entire carbine clip, walking the bullets all over the entire area where he’d located the shooter. If there was any audible response, he couldn’t hear it over the gunfire—but the shooting stopped.
A moment later, the suppressive fire began again, one round skipping off the deck and slicing a burning furrow up the side of his face.
He recoiled, trying to take cover and hoping his emptied clip had bought some notice from the ship’s sensors. Ejecting the empty, he pulled the only spare mag from the harness and tried to load the weapon.
Sweaty with stress, he slipped. The mag went scattering across the floor and skidded to a halt barely two meters away—and was promptly obliterated by a single perfectly placed bullet.
“Alvarado,” he snapped, “pass me your weapon.”
Silence answered him and he contorted to look back at his subordinate. The gunner appeared to still be breathing but had hit his head when Russell had thrown him out of the way of the bullets. He was unconscious, possibly badly injured.
And that left Russell with a pistol as at least one and probably more shooters—almost certainly Cavendish and one or more friends friend, probably also black-ops cyborgs—were starting to close in on his position.
He swallowed, preparing to try and make a move anyway—and then the pistol was blown out of his hand along with at least two fingers as a perfectly placed bullet smashed through him.
Diving back toward Alvarado and the other man’s weapon, he collided with an iron arm that flung him back onto the Q-ship’s flight deck.
Laura Cavendish loomed over him, an ugly black-looking carbine in her hands.
“The plan called for you to choke to death,” she told him. “But this is better. This way, you know why you’re dying, you son of a bitch.”
She jerked away as a gunshot suddenly echoed through the empty void, a single shot from an unsuppressed weapon more powerful than the carbine in the pilot’s hands. Despite her surprise, the weapon remained trained on Russell’s head, and he was deathly certain he wouldn’t survive attempting to knock aside the weapon.
“Let him go, Laura,” a soft female voice said aloud. “Assam is dead. So’s Carlisle. How many more people need to die?”
“Just the son of a bitch who killed my people!”
“The Commonwealth killed your people. And they went willingly, doing their duty. What are you doing?”
Russell could now see the slim form of the commander of the black-ops ground troops—Riley, he thought her name was?
“Getting rev—”
Cavendish’s hand and head exploded away as she tried to jerk the trigger on her carbine, heavy fragmenting rounds slamming into her with brutal force.
Riley stepped forward again, kicking the carbine away from Russell and offering her hand.
“Dammit, sir, I’m sorry,” she said quietly, looking into the starfighter and seeing Alvarado’s still form. “I didn’t think she was this far gone.”
“He’s just unconscious,” Russell choked out, putting pressure on his wounded hand. “Need a medic, but we’re jammed.”
“Tourville, check him,” Riley ordered. “Dirkse, find the jammer. She wasn’t just running her people’s implants.”
She turned back to the CAG.
“We’ll sort it out, sir,” she promised.
#
Chapter 36
Deep Space, Under Alcubierre Drive
08:40 June 11, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
Kyle’s head hurt as he leaned back in his chair, studying the collection filling his office. Rokos’s face was half-covered in a bandage, nanites working away beneath it to reknit the flesh. A regeneration cup covered the stumps of two fingers on his right hand, rebuilding bone and flesh in a process Kyle knew was uncomfortable.
Riley sat next to him. She wasn’t injured, but the black-ops Lieutenant looked even more pissed than the Wing Commander did.
Glass looked as imperturbable as always, the bald old man silently sitting at one end of the row of chairs. Hansen and Chownyk held down the other end, giving the impression that Riley and Rokos were surrounded.
“So, now I know what happened,” Kyle said, as calmly as he could, “would someone please explain how the hell it happened?”
“My platoon has worked with Cavendish’s squadron before,” Riley replied. “Staff Sergeant Sabah Assam and Commander Cavendish apparently go even further back, which I was not aware of. He was able to acquire weapons from my armory without anyone else knowing.”
She sighed.
“The weapons used were properly signed out and the system would have alerted myself or Lieutenant Major Hansen if they’d been signed out for more than ten hours. With both simulator and live-fire training going on, we’re not set up to require officer approval on weapon sign-outs. Any E-5 or above, like Assam, can sign out weapons for their squad basically at will.
“I had people keeping an eye on Cavendish, but Staff Sergeant Assam was one of mine,” she concluded quietly. “Junior Lieutenant Carlisle was Flight Lieutenant Vogel’s engineer, the last one left of her squadron.
“Tracing back his steps, he logged a maintenance ticket on Commander Rokos’s starfighter at ten hundred hours this morning. I presume he removed the safety lever then and had the rest of the sabotage as a coded virus in the starfighter’s systems.”
“Carlisle wasn’t supposed to be doing maintenance on my starfighter,” Rokos pointed out.
“The system wouldn’t care, CAG,” Kyle told him. “Not unless we’re at a higher security level than we currently are. It makes it easier when we’re transferring people around, exactly as you’re doing right now.”
“My surveillance tech warned me that Cavendish hadn’t left the flight deck and something weird was going on,” Riley said with a shrug. “We didn’t realize the fighter had been sabotaged, but I pulled a fire team of my guys and came to check.
“We arrived just after Commander Rokos shot Carlisle,” she finished.
And Rokos had already told them all what happened then.
“You had enough suspicion to have someone watch Cavendish,” Kyle noted. “But not, I take it, enough suspicion to info
rm anyone”—he gestured at the row of superior officers surrounding Riley—“of your fears?”
“She told me,” Hansen admitted. “She didn’t tell me who she suspected, but it wasn’t hard to guess. I…” The Lieutenant Major sighed. “I trusted her judgment over whether or not Cavendish was a threat—I figured she would do something to show her hand before it got this far.”
“She guessed she was being watched,” Riley said quietly.
“And because all of your people have built-in jammers, none of this showed up on the ship’s security systems,” Kyle snapped. “And now four more people are dead. Is that about right?”
The room was silent for ten seconds. Fifteen.
“Your actions saved Rokos and Alvarado’s lives,” he finally allowed. “But had you told the rest of us what you suspected, the others—including Cavendish—would still be alive.”
“I didn’t know for sure,” the Lieutenant replied, her emotions vanishing behind the flat mask of a threatened operative now. “And she was my friend, Captain.”
“We all thought that her being restored to flight status would reduce her threat level,” Chownyk said levelly.
“We did,” Kyle admitted, holding Riley’s gaze. “And I doubt any of us actually expected her to try to kill Commander Rokos. We all had our suspicions, and you did more than the rest of us to minimize the damage. It might have been done better, but you did well regardless.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Rokos, most of the fallout from this is going to land on you,” he continued. “How’s your hand?”
“Well, I now know what having fingers shot off feels like, which I could have lived without,” the CAG replied. “It’ll heal. The Wing’s morale did not need this latest kick in the ass, but we’ll recover. I still have ten days to run them ragged and make them forget.
“Churchill’s running them through the scheduled exercises right now,” he added. “We’ll make it work, Captain.”
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 24