The new Avalon’s atrium was smaller than some he’d seen, but was still a forty meter wide, ten meter tall, and hundred meter long green space in the heart of the warship. Most of the maintenance was done by the crew on a volunteer basis, which had never stopped the atrium on any ship he’d served on being perfectly arranged and maintained.
He took a moment to take a deep breath of the air. Surrounded by trees and greenery, there was definitely something fresher about the air in the atrium. He was probably going to need the energy.
Peng had asked to meet him here, near the small, tree-shrouded, shrine tucked away in one corner for the crew’s Stellar Spiritualists. The single largest ‘religion’ both on Castle and in the Federation, despite its lack of formal structure, always had a similar shrine Federation warships.
While the Navy followed a policy of almost always approving requests for space for worship, most of the Federation’s largest religious groups tended to setup shrines in the atriums. The volunteers shaped the trees and greenery to conceal them from the main open areas, but everyone always knew where to find the Spiritualists, the Wiccans, the Christians or the Buddhists. Smaller groups might have spaces as well, but those four were almost always present on a Federation warship.
“Captain,” Wa greeted him, the Master Sergeant materializing out of the bushes with a suddenness that shocked him. “Thank you for coming.”
“What’s this about?” he asked, but she shook her head and gestured for him to follow her.
Hidden behind the trees was a small auditorium, assembled from Navy-issue furniture and a few specific pieces brought in by the Spiritualists themselves. At the center was a slowly rotating hologram of the galaxy, a view onto the stars the Spiritualists venerated. They didn’t, as he understood it, worship the stars. They just recognized the stars as both the natural beginning and the natural end of all life.
Kyle didn’t pretend to understand it. What he did recognize was that the dozen non-coms and junior officers waiting in the auditorium had all served aboard the battlecruiser Thermopylae.
Waiting at the front was Chief Hammond, in a wheelchair and wrapped in a full-torso medical cast. He nodded slightly to Peng and turned his ever-stolid gaze on his Captain.
“With the com restrictions, there isn’t much reliable news making it through the ship,” he said hoarsely. “But rumors spread regardless, and I guess we needed to hear it from you, Captain. Thermopylae… was she lost?”
“I’ll have to talk to the department heads,” Kyle noted, trying to marshal his thoughts and emotions. “News should be getting through – especially to the senior NCOs.”
He sighed and took one of the nearest seats. From the expressions around him, they all guessed what he had to say now.
“The Commonwealth raided Midori,” he told them gently. “Another one of Walkingstick’s attritional attacks, though on a larger scale than the rest. The Alliance lost four ships – and yes, Thermopylae was one of them.
“There were survivors,” he continued. “I will make certain that the list is propagated.” He shook his head.
“I hadn’t considered that impact of the coms restrictions,” Kyle admitted. “I’ll make arrangements – news will make it out.”
“It’s an intentional part of Level Two restrictions, boss,” Hammond pointed out. “Information that doesn’t make it onto Avalon can’t be betrayed by someone on Avalon.”
“I know,” the Captain agreed. “But while we may need delays or to limit information, data that is reaching us should be distributed. I’m sorry,” he told them. “I can’t tell you if your friends aboard Thermopylae are among the survivors, but I will make sure you can find out as soon as possible.”
“Thank you, sir,” Peng said softly. Her gaze went to the series of candles around the hologram of the galaxy. “We suspected. But with the lives of friends… we wanted to know. We will light a candle for the fallen.”
Kyle bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement. He’d put word in a few ears himself. The Stellar Spiritualists weren’t the only ones with lost friends, and there’d be more than one candle lit once the news spread.
21:00 January 9, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Executive Officer’s Office
“In short, sir, ma’am, we have completely failed to find any evidence of the spy,” Barsamian reported calmly. The young Lieutenant Major sat at attention in the chair in Solace’s office, and Kyle watched her with some amusement.
The focus of the Major’s attention was mostly on him, as the recipient of the report, but her gaze kept drifting to Solace. It was a nervous twitch he normally saw in inexperienced male officers… usually dealing with Commander Pendez, who tended to disable young male brains.
“I have to admit,” he said after a moment, focusing his attention on the matter on hand, “that having someone who’s tried to kill both myself and Stanford aboard and not having the slightest clue who they are makes me… twitchy.”
“I’d suggest we could upgrade the security on your quarters, sir, but…” the dark-skinned Ship’s Marshal shrugged. “Your quarters, the Admiral’s, the CAG’s and the XOs are the most secure on the ship. Unless you want me to provide guards on your quarters and a twenty-four-hour MP escort, I’m not sure what else we can do, sir.”
Kyle grimaced. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the level of distance a Captain required as it was – adding an armed guard to that did not sound appealing.
“I doubt we’re likely to see armed assassins in the corridors,” he said mildly. “We’ll pass on the guards for now. Let me know if anything breaks, Major.”
“I will, sir. With your permission?”
“Of course, be on your way,” Kyle ordered cheerfully.
With a nod to Kyle and a nod that was almost a slight bow to Solace, the Ship’s Marshal bowed out of Solace’s office.
“I think our young Lieutenant Major has a bit of a crush on you, Commander Solace,” Kyle told his exec with a brilliant grin.
“Wait, what?” Solace demanded, her cheeks flushing. It was a good look on her dark skin, and Kyle’s smile widened.
“Either that, or she thinks you’re the assassin, and it didn’t seem like that kind of distracted look,” he pointed out.
The flush was even brighter.
“There’s nothing wrong with a crush,” his XO managed to say levelly, “so long as no violation of the chain of command or anything else inappropriate occurs.”
Kyle laughed aloud. Solace’s responding smile was good to see, and it helped loosen some of the tension that filled the office after Barsamian’s briefing.
“She’s married, Mira,” Kyle told her. “Her wife is an accountant on New Bombay, all she’s going to do is look. But she’s definitely looking.”
Solace shook her head repressively at him.
“In less relaxing news, though,” he continued quietly, “I realized we – as in you and I, specifically – missed something when we went to CI Two.”
“Void,” she cursed. “We went through the whole process, sir. What did I miss?”
“I said ‘we,’ Mira,” Kyle pointed out, “and I meant it. As two of our three NCOs pointed out to me today, there’s currently no news getting to the crew about anything going on outside Avalon’s hull.”
“Starless Void,” Solace repeated.
“There is an intentional security factor involved,” he continued, “but we do have an obligation to let our people have some idea what’s going on. Not least,” he concluded sadly, “to let them know about lost ships and fallen friends.”
Solace sighed. That hit her as hard as it had hit him.
“I’m sorry, sir, it didn’t occur to me.”
“It’s my mistake as well, Solace,” Kyle told her. “I’m more concerned about fixing it than laying blame anyways. I want you to sit down with Sanchez and put together a plan for a daily news update to the crew – you and she will review and approve what news we can release considering we may well have a Comm
onwealth spy on board.”
“Delegating dealing with Sanchez, I see?” his XO pointed out.
“The woman is convinced I was promoted to the level of my incompetence,” he told her. “She’s rather more bitter than I would prefer, and since I have such high-quality minions to fob her off on…”
“If she thinks you’re incompetent, she might be the last one left on the ship,” Solace observed.
“She’s not wrong about my inexperience,” Kyle noted. “If I’d spent longer as an XO, I might have realized we had to do something to keep our people informed when we went dark.”
“I have spent longer as an XO,” Solace replied. “I didn’t think of it.
“Don’t worry sir – I’ll deal with it.”
“I’ll consider this one a personal favor, Mira,” he said quietly. “She’s starting to be very uncomfortable to work with.”
“Have you raised it with the Admiral?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But… if she doesn’t shape up, I will. For now we’re a long way away from a replacement Chief of Staff, so I’ll play nice.
“For now.”
28
Deep Space, en route to Alizon System
01:00 January 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Quarters
Kyle awoke with a start.
His room was dark and empty. Avalon had the cubage to allow surprisingly large quarters for her commanding officer, but since he spent most of his time in the office he hadn’t bothered to put much in his rooms. Like, say, lamps.
The back of his neck tingled as if someone was watching him. The last time he’d felt this nervous for no reason, he’d turned out to be flying towards a hidden Commonwealth battlecruiser.
He heard a soft unfamiliar sound, and sat up, looking around his room. There should have been some light in the room, enough that setting his implant to night vision mode would allow him to see, but it was pitch black. His implants couldn’t process light that wasn’t there for his eyes to receive.
Feeling paranoid, he flipped a command to the ship to turn on the lights.
Nothing happened.
That moved the paranoia to spasms of panic. The last time he hadn’t been able to contact the ship’s computer, the old Avalon had suffered a critical Alcubierre failure. He breathed carefully, feeling the vibration of the ship around him.
Avalon was still running normally. He just couldn’t talk to her. It was almost as if…
The realization he was being jammed caused him to leap to his feet, dodging out of his bed moments before something slammed into the space he’d occupied. There was a horrible tearing sound as metal slashed through the sheets and mattress, but he couldn’t see anything.
Kyle didn’t carry a sidearm, but he kept one – and kept it right next to his uniform, in case he’d ever need it. Dodging against the wall, letting memory guide him, he found his uniforms just as a metallic mass slammed into the wall where he’d been standing with a crashing noise.
Just what was in the room with him?
His hand finally fell on the roughened metallic grip of the pistol. That same skittering sound headed towards him, and he dropped to the floor – dragging the pistol with him.
This time, he wasn’t fast enough, and fire seared across his shoulder as some kind of blade sliced through his shipsuit and into his skin.
Rolling away, wincing as the fresh wound hit the floor, he linked his implant into the pistol, checking its ammunition load, charge – and most importantly, light.
The tiny light buried in the tip of the barrel was astonishingly bright for its size, and it lit up his entire bedroom in stark relief. In the middle of the floor was a creation out of someone’s nightmares. It was dog sized, but resembled a mechanical cockroach more than anything else – a metal dome about seventy centimeters across, from which emerged all kinds of legs and blades.
It saw the light and charged him, blades flashing out on the end of long, articulated arms. Rolling aside again, he opened fire.
His first shots went wide, hitting the walls and fragmenting exactly as the frangible anti-personnel rounds were supposed to do. He still managed to put two shots on target, but they shattered on the metal shell in the same way.
Dodging another robotic charge, he slammed the manual release panel for his bedroom door. It ignored him, and then came apart in a shower of sparks as a telescoping arm slammed a metal blade into it, barely missing his head.
Then the robot slammed bodily into him, hammering him first into the wall and then onto the ground. He somehow managed to keep hold of the pistol and slammed it into the gap between arms as the thing reared up to strike.
There were seven rounds left in the magazine, and he emptied the gun into the inside of the thing. Spasming, its arms lashed forward again. His uninjured shoulder flared in agony as one of the blades went clean through muscle and bone to slam into the deck… and stop there.
A moment later, pinned to the deck by both the blade and the dead robot’s weight, Kyle’s implant finally linked back into the ship’s network.
“Medical and security to Captain’s quarters,” he ordered. “Medical and security to Captain’s quarters right the fuck now!”
02:30 January 14, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Main Infirmary
Kyle wasn’t even pretending to be a good patient, so when Lieutenant Major Sirvard Barsamian entered the section of the Infirmary where Cunningham was treating him he waved her right over.
“Could you at least hold still?” the doctor hissed. “Yes, this is a very clean, very neat hole – but if you move while I’m working on it, it won’t stay that way!”
The Captain winced at the thought. His right shoulder had only been sliced open and was neatly stitched up, but the Surgeon-Commander had his left shoulder immobilized as he cleaned the wound and ran automatic nano-sutures down into the depths of the cut muscle.
Modern nanotech nerve-blocking, however, made it easy to forget that you were badly injured.
“Please tell me you have something, Sirvard,” he told the Marshal. “I don’t care to repeat tonight’s experience.”
“We don’t have much,” she replied. “But we’re pulling together data. We’re, uh, tearing your quarters apart, sir.”
“That’s fine,” he agreed quickly. “I’ll bunk in my office for now – lock my quarters as long as you need. Besides,” he glanced at the doctor beside him as he checked the time, “we are barely ninety minutes out of Alizon. I’m not going back to sleep.
“What do you know?” he finished.
“No-one exactly distributes assassination drone schematics,” Barsamian told him dryly. “So we can’t be certain of much about the drone. What I can tell you already is that we weren’t supposed to be able to say anything about it – it had a thermite-based self-destruct that would have incinerated the entire thing after you were dead.”
“Why didn’t it destroy itself when it failed then?”
“At a guess, the computer core had to order the self-destruct,” she explained. “You put four bullets through it, so it wasn’t ordering much of anything. Since the only weapon you had to hand shouldn’t have been able to kill it, I guess whoever sent it didn’t expect to fail.”
“Wonderful, I’m luckier than my intended murderer hoped for,” Kyle replied.
“What I can tell you so far is that drone was built aboard Avalon,” Barsamian said grimly. “Probably in one of the auto-fabricators engineering uses for small and mid-sized parts. Suffice to say, the design isn’t in our systems, but one of our people built the damn thing.”
“Our spy is appearing more and more like an assassin every day,” he grumbled. “Anything else?”
“It’s a nasty piece of work,” she allowed. “The shell would resist any small arms fire that isn’t armor piercing. No poisons or anything on the blades, but the blades allow for a silent kill that won’t trigger ship’s sensors – as soon as you started shoo
ting at it, my people were on their way.
“We have no idea how it got into your quarters, and, shock, all of the cameras in your section of the ship were down for the seventy minutes prior to the attack,” she concluded grimly. “The latter is aggravating, since I had an alert added to the system for if we had camera issues… and the cameras happily reported they were working until we checked them.
“I do not like the degree of control this person has over our ship.”
“It’s pissing me off,” Kyle cheerfully admitted. “Unfortunately, right now we’re about to enter a system we know the Commonwealth controls, in hot pursuit of a madman who blew up half a planet. The disgustingly competent spy trying to kill me comes in at, oh, number three or four on my priorities.”
“You’ll forgive me if it’s the top of my list,” the Marshal replied. “We’ll dig into where the drone came from – it’s the best piece of evidence we’ve had so far.”
“Unless someone is actively shooting at us, let me know as soon as you find anything,” Kyle ordered. He paused and then sighed. “Get together with Master Sergeant Wa as well. I want a list from the pair of you of Marines you both completely trust to act as bodyguards. I don’t like it, but it looks like I need to concede on that point.”
“The Gunny already has guards on your office, your quarters, and this Infirmary ward,” Barsamian told him. “She and I will sort it out. And I will catch the son of bitch trying to kill people on my watch.”
“Whatever resources you need are yours, Marshal,” the Captain told her. “I don’t need to be watching my back when we go to war.”
He cringed as a moment of pain flashed through the nerve block, and he looked over at Cunningham.
“Are we done yet, Adrian?” he asked.
The doctor grimaced, and pulled the trigger on one last dose of nanotech filled foam covering the last piece of the wound.
“We’re done,” he confirmed. “Now, what you should do is lie down and not move for about twenty-four hours while the nanites work.”
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 52