He was stepping forward to investigate when Wong came out from behind the cell.
“What the hell?” he demanded. Spotting Kyle’s motion, he slammed a heavy hand on his Captain’s shoulder and yanked Kyle back. “That should not be there,” he snapped.
“It’s just a work-cart,” Kyle pointed out.
Before Wong even finished opening his mouth, the cart exploded. Kyle instinctively used the momentum from the Engineer’s pull to charge backwards, slamming into the other man and bringing them both to the ground.
A moment later, what he thought was a wrench ricocheted off the extremely powerful reactor next to him, centimeters above his head.
Silence reigned for a long moment. Then the screaming started.
16:00 January 5, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Break-out Room
“What the FUCK is going on?” the Admiral demanded from the head of the table.
Arguably, internal security of the ship was Kyle’s problem, but having just had someone try to assassinate him, he was a little less willing to argue than usual. This time, at least, Sanchez was busy somewhere else and Tobin had only inserted himself into the meeting.
“Someone appears to be attempting to assassinate key senior officers aboard this ship,” Barsamian told the Admiral calmly. “First the CAG, now the Captain. We were lucky today – the bomb was next to a major positron cell, and those are armored to withstand anything. We have four injured people, but no significant damage to engineering itself.
“Whoever this is, they are extremely professional with a full suite of modern intelligence tools,” she continued. “We pulled the camera from the engineering bay. The footage is all there. That work-cart isn’t.”
“That’s not possible,” Wong objected. “That would require…”
“Some sort of program or macro actively editing in real-time, most likely,” she agreed.
“Another virus, then,” Tobin rumbled.
“There is no sign of a virus,” Barsamian told him. “After the prior incident, it was the first thing we checked for. So far as we can tell, there are no signs of any kind of intrusion, back door use, or viral infection in the computer systems in engineering.
“It appears that someone with full authority to edit that footage loaded a semi-intelligent macro that followed a specific item of some kind and removed any object that item was attached to. From the moment the object – whatever it was – was attached to the work-cart, that cart was invisible.”
She shook her head. “We tried to validate when it disappeared, but it appears to have been at some point while the unit was in storage with several dozen other carts. Given that we can’t detect the exact moment of it disappearing from our systems, we suspect it was obscured from the camera – and that is likely why that specific cart was chosen.”
“There’s only so many people with that authority, Major,” Kyle pointed out. “Does that help us restrict down our list of suspects?”
“Sir, nobody with that authority is aboard this ship,” the Marshal said flatly. “Shipboard surveillance is coded as read only, it should not be editable, and there is a physical, uneditable backup.”
“Like I said, it’s not possible,” Wong pointed out. “They’re intended to provide an unquestionable record of events for inquiries, reviews and courts martial.”
“Nonetheless, the soft versions have been edited,” Barsamian said quietly. “The hard backup is corrupt. The last three days’ worth of footage in the disks is gone. We didn’t notice because we normally use the soft copies, and the failsafe to inform us the data was corrupting had been disabled.”
“By who?” Tobin demanded.
“That footage is gone,” she admitted. “I understand this does not look good on my department, but, again, we are clearly dealing with an extremely well equipped professional.
“In theory, you could use high enough level access to create a root account on the ship’s systems that would allow you to pull this off and look like a legitimate user,” she concluded.
“How high, Major?” Kyle asked. He was tired, his shoulder hurt where Cunningham had extracted shrapnel, and he figured he could guess what the answer was.
“Yourself or the Vice Admiral,” Barsamian said flatly. “You were the target, and, well, to be blunt sirs, neither of you have the technical skill to pull this off.”
“I’d feel insulted, but since your judgment is that I didn’t commit treason, I’ll live with it,” Tobin grumbled. “But you’re telling me that we have no idea who has now tried to assassinate two officers on this ship?”
“That is correct, sir,” the Marshal sighed. “I wish we were having more success, but to be honest, my people’s skillset is closer to small town cops than counterintelligence operatives.”
“Sir,” Kyle said quietly, “Unless you object, I intend to take the ship to CI Level Two.”
Counter Intelligence Level Two meant no personal messages left the ship. Even the more non-essential portions of the ship’s communication with the Navy were suspended. It also involved personnel on Castle filtering and reviewing even those messages.
Level Two was an active presumption that the ship was compromised.
“Very well, Captain,” the Admiral said softly. “Take us dark.”
24
Deep Space, En route to KG-779
17:00 January 6, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Flight Country Mess
The sound of crashing furniture from the main officer mess in Flight Country wasn’t really a surprise to Michael. The only real question was who was fighting whom.
“What is going on here?” he bellowed, channeling as much of Roberts’ energy and volume as he could as he burst into the mess hall. It had a gratifying quieting effect on the occupants of the room, two of whom froze in the act of trying to put each other through the remnants of the table they’d already snapped in half.
Michael surveyed the frozen scene, trying to put enough disdain into his movements to make clear how badly his people had screwed up. The mess hall wasn’t an overly decorative portion of the ship – that was reserved for the ship’s three carefully maintained ‘Officers’ Lounges’ – and the long tables and uncomfortable chairs were cheap plastic.
One of those tables had clearly had someone body-slammed onto it, and said cheap plastic had snapped under the impact. Two men, both Flight Lieutenants with, he sighed, pilot’s wings insignia were half-crouched in the middle of the debris field as the rest of the room’s occupants were gathered around.
The situation had not yet degraded into a mass brawl at least, and it didn’t even look like blood had been drawn or bones broken. That opened his options up a lot.
“Well?” he demanded, walking into the room and carefully stepping over the shattered remnants of a chair. “Does someone have an explanation for this mess?”
Flight Lieutenant Ivan Kovalchick was an old Avalon hand. The big blond kid had served under Roberts as Wing Commander before the Captain’s transfer to the navy, and he’d spent most of the last two years under Michael’s command.
The other combatant was Flight Lieutenant Antonio Zupan, a whipcord-thin snake of a man with black eyes, black hair and tanned-dark skin marked with tattoos where his sleeves were rolled up. He had, until a few days ago, served aboard Camerone.
“This lying… jerk,” Michael heard Kovalchick censor himself, “says we’ve got a spy aboard and it’s one of us,” the youth gestured to one side of the room.
The CAG didn’t sigh aloud when he realized the room was clearly split between the original Avalon flight crews and the new squadrons transferred from Camerone.
“And?” he asked patiently.
Kovalchick flushed.
“None of us are traitors!” the youth snapped, directed more at Zupan than his CAG. “More likely this new bunch have a snake in their midst!”
The ex-Camerone pilot started to open his mouth, but Kyle held up a hand.
“Ivan,” he said quietly, “we had a spy aboard before these boys and girls came aboard. We know that. So Mister Zupan is correct in that it’s more likely to be one of the old hands than the new.”
Michael turned to Zupan and leveled a hopefully cold gaze on that pilot.
“On the other hand, I would hope my pilots had enough Voids-cursed sense not to be picking fights,” he snapped. “You were about to say Ivan here swung first?”
Zupan nodded.
“Tell it to the Starless Void. You provoked him, he hit you. Sounds about fair in my books,” Michael told the pilot.
To his surprise, the man laughed, and nodded.
“Can live with it,” he said, and offered Kovalchick a hand.
Hesitantly, the younger man took it. Despite being at most two thirds of the blond’s size, Zupan easily hauled the other to his feet and out of the mess of the table.
Michael nodded to them both and took the immediate issue as settled. He turned back to face the crowd and shook his head. Sixty people in this room, most of them pilots, though he spotted a few gunners and engineers.
All of the ex-Camerone pilots, he noted, but the old hands were a mix from all his wings. Anything he said was going to get back to everyone, and damned fast too.
“Look around you,” he told them. There were a lot of sheepish faces obeying him, but he needed to drive his point home, and hard.
“Everyone around you is starfighter flight crew. That means if we go into real action, between a tenth and a third of the people in this room won’t come home,” he reminded them flatly. “You all took this job because you don’t think it’ll be you.
“But do you really think a Commonwealth spy would be willing to ride fire alongside you?”
The chuckles and denials and headshakes took a moment, but they came. His people were fighters – they knew, in the sort of bone-deep certainty that would deny even obvious evidence, that no spy would fly alongside them. That no spy could do what they did.
“These people will be riding fire beside you when we catch Kematian’s killers,” Michael told them. “You need to trust them – because whether you trust them or not, your life will be in their hands.
“There isn’t a pilot, a gunner, or an engineer in this fighter group I wouldn’t trust behind me in a starfighter. That ought to be good enough for all of you.”
The room was quiet, but he could tell he’d made his point.
All he could do now was hope that the spy really wasn’t one of his.
17:00 January 6, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Vice Admiral Tobin’s Office
Dimitri shook his head as he reviewed the sheaf of reports on the latest datapad Sanchez had given him.
“The first is my assessment of the action in Kematian,” she told him. “I have reviewed the suggestions laid out by Captain Roberts and the others.”
“And?” he asked.
“Had we followed Roberts’ suggestion, the Kematian Navy would have been destroyed, with potentially no difference to the fate of the planet,” Sanchez laid out. “Triumphant could have launched before the fighter group caught them, ending in the same result for the planet. Bluntly, sir, his stratagem would have sacrificed the Kematian Navy for nothing.”
Dimitri laughed and shook his head again.
“You really don’t like him, do you?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“Captain Roberts was right,” he snarled. His self-loathing wanted to believe her, but he knew she was wrong. “Triumphant’s attack was almost certainly a direct response to the destruction of Force One. By the time we engaged, the KN had demonstrated that they were able to drag the fight out for hours – more than long enough for us to neutralize Triumphant and return to Force One.
“We – I – ignored the vulnerability of the planet, and half a billion civilians paid for it,” he said grimly. “I can’t imagine what kind of mental gymnastics it took to try to make Captain Roberts look in the wrong there.”
He tossed the datapad back to her, part of him enjoying her taken aback look. While she’d earned that strip the hard way, he knew he was mostly unleashing his self-hatred at her. It felt disturbingly good.
“So, like I said, you really don’t like Roberts, do you?” he snapped. “Is it going to be a problem?”
This obviously hadn’t been the response she’d been expecting to her report. Sanchez was gaping at him like a shocked goldfish.
“Sir, he is an inexperienced youth, promoted past his competence or proven capabilities,” she said sharply. “He has no respect for you, your rank or your people!”
“As Commander Solace pointed out to me a while back, Captain Roberts earned his planet the hardest way possible – winning a battle no one else could have,” Dimitri replied harshly. “He may not have experience at sitting in orbit dealing with bored spacers, but he’s one of the most combat-experienced officers we have. The only person on this ship with more combat experience, in fact, is me.”
His Chief of Staff was silent, and he glared at her for a long moment. Finally, she glanced aside, and he continued flatly.
“He has not exerted any privilege with regards to you and the rest of my staff that is not the prerogative of a Captain. I will not stand for you attempting to undermine him with me – and yes, Commander, I know what you’re doing. I came by the gray hairs honestly, and I’ve seen this bullshit before.”
Sanchez looked back up, and her eyes were hard and fierce.
“He won at Tranquility by being reckless,” she snapped. “He is too familiar with his officers, too unthinking in his aggression. That man is dangerous to have in command of a warship of the Federation!”
That rocked Dimitri back in his chair. He hadn’t expected Sanchez to be quite so… vehement in her opinion of Roberts.
“Commander, I’m only going to say this once,” he said, his voice flat, cold, and quiet. She had to lean into hear him, and he met her ice blue eyes calmly. “I do not agree with you on this. Alliance High Command does not agree with you on this.
“If you continue to attempt to undermine my Flag Captain with me, or if I discover that you’re, God-forbid, trying to undermine him with his crew, you will be off my staff and out of the loop so fast you’ll be wondering what planet fell on you.
“Am I clear?”
She dropped her gaze to his desk, but said nothing.
“I said, Commander: Am. I. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she ground out.
25
Deep Space outside the KG-779 System
06:30 January 7, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Flag Deck Conference Room
Kyle held his steaming cup of coffee carefully, warming his hands as he watched his and Tobin’s senior officers enter the briefing room. It was early in the ship’s day, but with barely forty-five minutes until they emerged in KG-779, anyone with complaints was keeping them to themselves.
Once Wong and Anderson trickled in, the last of the ten senior officers aboard the ship to arrive, Kyle rose to get their attention.
“If everyone has their caffeine of choice to wake up, we can begin,” he said crisply. “We’re coming up the KG-779 system. If we’re lucky, we’ll find Triumphant somewhere in system where we can intercept her.
“Unfortunately,” he warned the others, “the likely situation is that the Commonwealth is only using KG as a waypoint. It is possible that Triumphant has already left, and even if she is still in the system, she’s likely to be far enough out that she can initiate Alcubierre before we can bring her to into weapons range.
“While catching Triumphant would be preferable, our objective is to find where she went from here,” Kyle concluded. “We will not be able to sustain the same acceleration advantage that has brought us here so soon after Triumphant going forward. Commander Wong’s assessment,” he nodded to his engineer, “is that we can safely sustain one point zero five light years per days squared. A five percent edge add
s up fast – but a ten percent edge added up faster.
“We will be deploying Q-Com equipped probes as soon as we enter the system, and if necessary, I intend to self-destruct those Q-probes rather than retrieving them,” Kyle concluded. “I do not intend to remain in KG-779 any longer than we have to.”
He looked around the room.
“Any questions?”
When no one responded, he nodded to Tobin’s Intelligence Officer. “Intelligence has, as usual, cut things down to the wire. Commander Snapes received an update on Triumphant less than an hour ago. If you could update us, Commander?”
The Lieutenant Commander, a tall and slim woman with jet-black hair and Asiatic eyes, stood and activated the hologram in the middle of the conference table.
“While we keep at least some information on file on all Commonwealth ships, Triumphant wasn’t deployed anywhere near us six months ago,” she told everyone. “Central Intelligence had to dig deep into their archives, and see what data they could beg, borrow, or steal from our allies.
“In the end, we identified Captain Jonah Richardson as the commanding officer of Triumphant.”
An image appeared in the middle of the table. Richardson was a pudgy man of just below average height, with thinning and faded brown hair. In his Commonwealth Navy file photo, he had a mildly bemused expression.
He looked like somebody’s favorite uncle, not a mass-murdering lunatic.
“Captain Richardson was promoted to O-6 five months ago, and given command of Triumphant when she was transferred to the Rimward Marches,” Snapes continued. “For those who aren’t up to date with Commonwealth policy, they assign starship commands to O-6s instead of the O-7 most Alliance navies feel is necessary.”
Kyle, for all that he had the same title as Captain Richardson, actually outranked the man. The Federation had long ago felt that the scale of a starship’s independence, firepower, and crew numbers meant that the ship needed a senior officer with an experience level older navies would have required of their most junior flag officers.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 50