By the time those explosions had ceased, a second salvo rippled out of the launcher. These four fragmented into submunitions at a precalculated distance, each rocket delivering five magnetically tipped grapples to the intact wall above the shattered window.
Each grapple then spun out twenty meters of cable, dropping the less than ten meters to the ground where Charlie Platoon’s first squad was waiting.
They swarmed up the ropes and through the massive hole into the control center. There was no gunfire—if anyone had survived the first salvo of rockets, they weren’t crazy enough to get into a fight with the black-ops cyborgs.
“Here,” one of the troopers exiting the shuttle shouted to Edvard before tossing him an anti-armor carbine. “Going up, sir?”
“Yes,” he replied, gesturing for the third squad sergeant to come to him as the second squad went up the ropes. “Alpha and Bravo platoons are two minutes out at top speed,” he told that worthy in command of a squad half made up of black-ops troops and half of Edvard’s headquarters-section Marines. “Hold this launch bay. It’s our main way home.”
“Yes, sir!”
With a firm nod to the man, Edvard joined Riley and scaled the rope after the black-ops squads—only slightly more sedately. He might lack their hardware, but he was still one of Castle’s damned Marines!
“We’re in control,” one of the data specialists told him. Somewhere between killing Armstrong’s guards and arriving there, she’d produced a forearm-mounted slab of circuitry he recognized as a hacking module, and that module was linked into the wreckage of the center’s systems.
“Can you access the station’s systems?”
“Negative,” the hacker replied. “It looks like each research department has their own secured data center, sir.”
“Oh, Void,” Edvard spat. “Find me the fighter research data center, Kismet,” he ordered the Lance Corporal. “Riley!” he shouted, gesturing his platoon commander over. “Get ready for a breakout. We’re going to have to punch through to the data center.”
“Let’s do it,” she agreed with a cold smile. “Bunch of research pukes? Not a problem.”
“Alpha, Bravo,” he barked, linking into his oncoming platoon shuttles. “Charlie is moving on deep assault; we’re leaving one squad to secure the landing bay. Follow in, force a beachhead, and then move out by squads to meet up with us.
“We have to let the door slam shut behind us,” he told them, looking around at the forty people he had to punch through a fortified, secured facility in the heart of enemy space.
“I’m going to need you to kick it open again.”
#
Chapter 41
Tau Ceti System
19:55 June 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
“Rocket, Rocket, Rocket.”
“Damn,” Kyle said mildly, watching the security alert wash across the system. With Q-Coms tying everything together, the various stations and deployments were reacting within moments of each other, but lightspeed delays meant it seemed as if the reaction rippled out from the Central Research Station.
“Incoming transmission!” Glass reported. The spy threw it up on the main display instantly, revealing yet another new face.
“Christopher Lee,” the blond man in the Starfighter Corps uniform drawled, “this is Wing Colonel John Oklahoma. We have a security alert where your shuttle touched down. You will abort your approach to Shipyard Alpha, vectoring ninety degrees to galactic north at your maximum acceleration.
“You will stand by to receive a Marine inspection party and you will provide all possible assistance to that party,” Oklahoma ordered. “If you do not vector as ordered immediately, we will have no choice but to destroy you if you continue on approach to Shipyard Alpha.
“If you are who you say you are,” the officer drawled, “this is an unnecessary precaution—but I am responsible for the security of Shipyard Alpha and I will not put it at risk. You will comply.”
The bridge was silent for a fraction of a second, then Kyle shook his head.
“Wouldn’t buy us enough time, people,” he said aloud. “Besides, look.”
Shipyard Alpha’s immense height was now lit up with dozens—hundreds—of smaller, more intense energy signatures as the stations defenses came online. The orbiting platforms, only semi-somnolent to begin with, now awoke to their full fury.
Rokos was going to fly into a hornet’s nest no matter what Chameleon did.
“Launch Hansen’s shuttles,” Kyle barked. “Churchill—prep your people to deploy. We’re going to keep you in the tubes for a few moments longer, but we’re going to need you. Taylor—get me Q-probe coverage; I don’t care if they see it now.”
His bridge crew leapt into action and Kyle watched the entire system explode into action around him.
Charlie Platoon had landed sixty people in one assault shuttle, but none had been in battle armor. Even understrength, the other two platoons of Marines were in battle armor—half were in the even more massive boarding battle armor, at that—and filled five assault shuttles—shuttles that blasted directly at the Central Research Station at five hundred gravities.
They were going to have rough landings, but that was what assault shuttles and battle armor were built for.
A new transmission from Oklahoma arrived unsurprisingly a moment later.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Adelaide?” the Terran officer demanded. “Recall your shuttles or I have no choice but to shoot them—and you—out of my sky!”
“Taylor?” Kyle asked cheerfully.
“They have nothing in place to intercept the shuttles,” she responded. “They’re clear to the station.”
“Let Mister Oklahoma stew in his own sweat,” the Captain said calmly. “Keep our vector on Shipyard Alpha. Watch that battleship and all approaching fighters; this might get hairy.”
“Hairy is right,” Glass said. He’d apparently risen from the com station and was now standing right behind Kyle’s command chair. “Rokos can’t make it to lance range, Roberts,” the spy said. “You know it. You also know he’ll try to complete the mission, but he’ll die and achieve nothing.”
Glass was right. Rokos had about another thirty seconds in which he could abort—he was decelerating toward the station, but if he broke and accelerated away from the station at ninety degrees from his current course, he would pass it at a thousand kilometers a second well over a hundred thousand kilometers clear.
That was inside the station’s range against his ships, but the distance would mean most of his people would survive. If they closed to the forty thousand kilometers necessary for them to precisely target the ships, the defenses would annihilate them.
“We have to destroy the station,” Glass continued. “If they fire all of their missiles, they can take it out. It’s a fleet’s worth of warships, Roberts. A full percent of the Commonwealth’s shipbuilding.”
“Abort Rokos’s strike,” Kyle ordered sharply, ignoring the spy.
“Dammit, Roberts, we can’t let this opportunity pass us by!” the spy snapped, his voice rising in volume now as he realized Kyle wasn’t going to instantly obey. “Yes, there’s civilians aboard, but it’s still a legitimate military target—and forcing them to do search and rescue is the only way this ship is getting out of this system alive!”
Kyle stared at the hologram and, for a moment he would forever regret, almost gave the order.
“No,” he finally said with a deep breath. “We are not the Commonwealth. We will not embrace the slaughter of civilians in a moment of expediency or fanaticism.”
“No one would ever know,” Glass objected. “This is a black op for a reason!”
“They would find out,” Kyle said flatly. “Hypocritical of them or not, they would hunt those who killed their people until the end of time. No deception would last. No lie would hold them off. I will not answer atrocity with atrocity.”
“I order you!” Glass s
houted, every scrap of relationship and rapport they’d built over the last months shattering in the face of what he clearly saw as failure.
“Sergeant at arms!” Kyle bellowed, attracting the attention of the two Marines guarding the bridge door. “Remove Mister Glass to his quarters. He is not permitted to leave until I authorize it!”
“Damn it, Roberts—you’ll doom us all.”
“No,” Captain Kyle Roberts said calmly. “I am the Stellar fucking Fox. I will find another way.”
The argument had cost precious seconds, but thankfully, Rokos had already begun his abort. It couldn’t help but draw attention to him, but the elevated alert level would rapidly involve calling in all fighter squadrons—and if they hadn’t realized yet that they had thirty starfighters who weren’t supposed to be there, they would shortly.
Glass was right about one thing, Kyle knew. The Saint-class battleship was already heading their way. It wasn’t fast—as a capital ship, it was designed for Tier Two accelerations, less than half that of a starfighter—but it would catch Chameleon before she could flee.
Unless that ship was distracted, the best they could hope for was to retrieve the starfighter plans and transmit them by Q-Com before they died.
Destroying the station outright might not even achieve that, he admitted grimly to himself. In the place of the Saint’s Captain, he’d risk missing some civilians by dropping his small craft for search and rescue while he took the battleship after the person who’d killed them.
He needed a job they’d have to use the battleship for. Something where mere starfighters and search-and-rescue spacecraft just wouldn’t cut it…
The sheer scale of Shipyard Alpha tugged at his eye and a cold smile spread across his face.
“Get me a live link to Rokos,” he ordered.
#
“We have a problem,” Taylor announced grimly as Kyle cut the channel to the Wing Commander. “The Research Station just launched starfighters—and they’re like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Show me,” he ordered.
The holographic display zoomed in, providing a surprising quality of detail. One of the Q-probes had to be close to the station, keeping an eye on their assault shuttles.
Ten strange-looking spacecraft had left one of the station’s bays. Their vector wasn’t a pursuit of Chameleon, but they were definitely angling in the direction of Kyle’s ship, and he did not like the look of the ships.
They consisted of a central spike reminiscent of the very first starfighters the Federation had deployed, with scaffolding-like structures extending out on all four sides…and each of those scaffolding-like structures carried a missile half the size of the central hull.
“Those are torpedo bombers,” he said grimly. “Churchill—emergency launch, now! Taylor—full defensive missile launch; I want salvos of everything in the air as counter-fire. If I’m guessing right, at this range, they may as well be capital-ship missiles.”
They were barely three hundred thousand kilometers away from the station, though their two-thousand-plus-kilometer-a-second velocity meant they were well out of range of anything short of capital ship missiles…or, potentially, whatever the Terrans had mounted on their new bombers.
Ten more icons flashed into existence on the screen, Churchill’s Katanas blasting into space to protect the Q-ship. They immediately lit off their engines, accelerating toward the Terran bombers at five hundred gravities.
Moments later, the icons of Chameleon’s missiles appeared as well, as Taylor flushed the launchers. Six Stormwinds and a dozen Javelins lanced out at the bombers.
“Bombers are not accelerating toward us; they are maintaining distance,” Taylor reported. “I have missile launch—four birds per starfighter, total forty inbound.”
“Lau, Taylor, coordinate with Churchill,” Kyle said quietly. “It seems we get to play guinea pig for the new toy we wanted specs for, people. Save everything, track everything.”
The first thing he noted was that the missiles were fast. The interaction between mass manipulators and antimatter engines had “tiers” of efficiency, plateaus where the fuel consumption for a given power-to-weight ratio was predictable and stable. Missiles used the fourth of those tiers, fuel-sucking compared to even the consumption a starfighter could afford, but capable of accelerating at a thousand gravities.
Except these new missiles were pulling a thousand and fifty gravities.
“They’ve cracked the top band of the Tier Four accelerations,” Chownyk said from CIC, echoing Kyle’s thoughts. “Estimated impact in nine minutes. Katanas will reach lance range in sixteen minutes.”
The geometry and Chameleon’s existing velocity meant there was no point in Churchill’s people launching their own missiles—they’d be in lance range well before the birds struck home.
Kyle studied his tactical feed of the system. The bombers were the most immediate threat to the Q-ship, but that was a threat measured in long minutes. Hansen’s people were on a similar time frame, though the assault shuttles would hit home before Rokos made his firing pass on Shipyard Alpha.
Whether or not Chameleon completed her mission was up to Hansen and Rokos.
Kyle’s job now was to make sure there was a way for everyone to go home afterward.
#
Chapter 42
Tau Ceti System
20:00 June 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Scimitar-Type Starfighter “Strike Actual”
“They’ve definitely seen us now,” Alvarado reported.
The gunner was thankfully no worse off, despite having been knocked unconscious in the earlier mess. His nanites and the ship’s doctors had had a rough few hours controlling and repairing a moderately severe concussion, but Russell was glad to have him back.
“I see them,” the Wing Commander agreed aloud, watching the vector change of the fighters around them. There were twelve squadrons—a hundred and twenty starfighters—close enough to intervene in the chaos the “pirates” were causing.
All of them were now accelerating toward his thirty ships. It was an intimidating display of firepower—and that was before one counted the kilometer-long battleship also heading their way.
“Earliest intercept is ninety seconds after the launch point,” the gunner said quietly. “Missiles only; no one will be able to force us to lance range.”
Russell smiled grimly. The routes of in-system patrols like this were designed carefully so a significant chunk of them could always generate an intercept vector on an incoming force—but his strike force was inside that zone, far closer than the people designing those routes had accounted for.
“Launch in twenty seconds,” he said firmly. “Downloading target coordinates to Strike Force.”
A few seconds of silence followed.
“Sir, that’s Shipyard Alpha,” Alvarado said quietly. “It’s…”
“The coordinates are very specific,” Russell said sharply, intentionally sharing his comments with the entire strike force. “Trust me. And trust Roberts.”
He heard Alvarado swallow hard, but he could also see the gunner setting up the salvo.
At the same time, Russell started the carefully random dance of a starfighter near the enemy as the defensive platforms around Shipyard Alpha opened fire. Hundred-kiloton-per-second lance beams sparkled on his neural feed, the computer drawing in the invisible beams for him.
They weren’t quite in range, but a single lucky hit now would save the station from four missiles.
“Missiles away,” Alvarado announced as the icons populated Russell’s display.
Each of their thirty fighters put four Javelins into space, totaling a hundred and twenty missiles charging toward Shipyard Alpha. Russell found himself praying that they’d got the target coordinates right, or he’d just launched the worst atrocity ever committed by Castle Federation forces.
Before he’d even finished the thought, two of his starfighters flashed into vapor, the station’s defende
rs scoring their lucky hits a few seconds too late to make any difference.
“Watch your evasives,” he snapped. “Prep your second salvo, stand by on prior target coordinates and target those incoming starfighters.”
He flashed a highlight on the closest starfighter formation, marking them as the target for his people’s missiles once they entered range—in time to watch all thirty starfighters change course. They had seen his people’s missiles.
“Alpha bogeys are going after the missiles. Bravo, Charlie and Delta are still on an intercept course for us,” Alvarado reported.
That didn’t remove Alpha from the engagement, but it did reduce their threat level. Russell’s people were still outnumbered three to one by the starfighters coming after them, so he agreed completely with the Terran commander’s decision.
“Do we…fire again on those coordinates?” Alvarado asked slowly.
“Negative,” Russell replied. “Hold prior target on standby,” he repeated to the all-ship net. “Set your course for a return to Chameleon and your missile targets will be Bogey Formation Delta.”
“Why Delta?” Alvarado said quietly. Formation Delta was a four-squadron patrol sweeping back in from the outer system. They could reach the strike force, but they were also the enemy they were most likely to evade.
“They’re the only ones who can catch Chameleon,” the CAG said grimly. “Missile status?”
“Thirty seconds to impact.”
Bogey Alpha had launched their Javelins in counter-missile mode. The angle barely allowed them to do so, but it was an awful shot. The defensive platforms’ lasers and lances were taking their toll, with dozens of missiles already destroyed.
Russell watched, half-holding his breath now as the missiles charged toward Shipyard Alpha, their path marked by the antimatter explosions of the ones that didn’t make it.
Q-Ship Chameleon Page 28