Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon

by Glynn Stewart

  He’d already sealed the off-duty staff reporting to the Admiral in their quarters. Procedure for the thankfully rare occasions where it was necessary to arrest a flag officer was clear: the entirety of their staff would be restricted to quarters until they could be interrogated and cleared of involvement.

  The only members of Tobin’s staff not so restricted at this point were the twenty-three people on the flag deck with Tobin. That included both his Chief of Staff and Intelligence Officer, and Kyle had to admit he was most concerned about Commander Sanchez.

  Even if Tobin was everything they were afraid of, Sanchez’s dislike for Kyle was going to make this messy.

  “Sir,” a voice sounded in his implant. As soon as they’d finished explaining the situation, he’d sent Senior Fleet Commander Wong and Corporal Kaczka to the Q-Com array. If Tobin was – somehow – the spy, he’d been the only one in control of Avalon’s communication for weeks.

  “We can’t access the buffer stack yet,” Wong informed him. “What I can confirm is that the Admiral has been sending a lot more messages than I would have expected for us being black. Encrypted and encoded messages sealed from normal visibility – even if someone had access to the stack – under his personal code. Um,” the engineer paused and swallowed. “The outbound log was apparently secured against access. It just wiped and hashed itself.”

  “That is secondary,” Kaczka interrupted. “Per your orders, I have accessed the inbound logs. Without an override, I am not able to view the contents of the messages, but there are multiple Alpha One priority messages in the buffer for you, Captain. He has archived them all.”

  Kyle closed his eyes as they reached the corridor outside the flag deck. He was trying to make sense of Tobin being the spy – of the Admiral being the one who’d tried to kill him. It didn’t add up – but there was too much evidence. At this point, he had no choice but to leave it to the court-martial to sort out the truth.

  Two Marines stood guard outside the nerve center of Tobin’s operations. They were in body armor, similar to that worn by the six men and women following Kyle, but were armed only with sidearms. His escort were carrying full-size battle carbines – with electron laser attachments, in the hope that they could get through today without actually killing anyone.

  “Sir,” one Marine saluted. “What’s going on?”

  “Stand down, soldier,” Kyle ordered. “Surrender your weapons to Marshal Barsamian. You’re not in trouble, but I can’t take chances today.”

  Barsamian stepped forward from the back of the pack of soldiers following him, holding her hand out to the two guards. With a visible swallow, the speaker slowly drew his sidearm and passed it to her. A moment later, the other followed suit.

  Kyle paused in front of the doors, steadying himself to do something that would, if his staff were wrong, end his career.

  “With me, then,” he ordered softly and stepped forward.

  For a few moments, no one reacted to the door opening or his entrance. Much like the warship’s main bridge, the flag deck consisted of seats and consoles but most of the work was done via the implant network. Most of the people in the room weren’t paying much attention to what was going on around them.

  Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin and his two staff officers, however, stood next to the big holo-display in the middle of the flag deck – an item completely missing from the bridge, where any necessary data was fed to everyone’s implants – their heads together in discussion.

  The MPs and Marines were in the room before anyone noticed, but by the time Kyle had crossed half the distance to the Admiral, the sudden presence of half a dozen armed soldiers had drawn attention. He watched the realization ripple around the room, techs and junior officers suddenly snapping into reality from their work and turning to look at him.

  “Captain Roberts, what is the meaning of this?” Tobin turned and demanded. The big Admiral seemed surprised.

  “Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin. Under the authority granted to me under Article Ninety-One of the Federation Articles of Military Justice, I am placing you under arrest for treason, conspiracy, and attempted murder.”

  Even without looking, Kyle knew Barsamian’s people had taken up careful positions covering the entire crowd. They were outnumbered by the flag deck staff, but they were also the only armed people in the room.

  “What, wait, why?” Tobin spluttered, staring at Kyle in complete shock.

  “I told you he was having paranoid delusions,” Sanchez snapped, staring at the Captain with oddly calm eyes.

  “Your command codes were used to manufacture the drone that attempted to murder me,” Kyle replied. “While I personally find it hard to believe you would betray the Federation after your years of service, I have no choice but to act to protect this ship. You are under arrest. Your staff will be placed in preventative custody until we can complete interrogations.”

  A strange glaze seemed to settle over the Admiral’s eyes as he glared at Kyle.

  “You can’t!” he snapped. “We need to complete the mission – we have to stop Triumphant!”

  “That is apparently something I need to discuss with the Joint Chiefs,” Kyle pointed out. “Apparently they’ve been trying to get ahold of me.”

  “No!” the Admiral bellowed. He turned abruptly in place. “Sanchez, do something!”

  “Oh, thank you, sir,” the Chief of Staff said with a vicious thin little smile. “All hands,” she continued calmly, somehow completely overriding Kyle’s lockdown to transmit to the whole ship, “Bad Penny. I repeat, Bad Penny.”

  A moment later, a tiny pistol appeared in her hand and she opened fire. Kyle dove for cover as his Marines returned fire.

  Weapons appeared around him, crude-looking submachine guns yanked from beneath consoles as his people were distracted. He rolled behind a console, firing his sidearm wildly. One of Sanchez’s sensor operators went down – possibly his bullet, possibly one of the MPs.

  He rose above the console, aiming towards Sanchez. She wasn’t there, and then a cold metal feeling sank into the back of his head.

  “Unless you want the dear Captain to have a new breathing hole, I suggest you cease fire,” Sanchez snapped, and he realized there was a gun at the base of his skull.

  “I suggest you drop the pistol, Captain,” she hissed in his ear. “I’d hate to… slip.”

  07:40 January 20, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Flight Control

  “Bad Penny. I repeat, Bad Penny.”

  The words echoing across the shipwide speakers in Sanchez’s voice didn’t meant anything to Michael in and of themselves – but he could guess.

  “Guinevere,” he sent on the special net they’d set up. “Guinevere, Guinevere, Guinevere – Sanchez is moving!”

  He was grabbing for his sidearm when he found himself facing down the end of a crude-looking barrel. On the other end was Specialist Second Class John MacCarl – not a man he knew well, a fighter missile tech from Castle who’d been a new addition.

  “Just stay still, CAG,” MacCarl told him, his voice nervous. “Orders from the Admiral – we’re taking control of the ship.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Michael demanded. “The Admiral doesn’t have the authority to order a Voids-cursed mutiny, MacCarl.”

  “Bad Penny’s just a precaution, not a mutiny,” the Specialist told him. For all the man’s apparent nervousness, the gun he held – product of an auto-fabricator, Michael guessed – stayed steadily trained on the CAG. “Means the Admiral’s relieving Roberts. So we want to be sure no one does anything stupid.”

  There had only been six people in Flight Control with Michael. Another had produced a weapon at the same time as MacCarl and was keeping the others covered.

  “Sorry, boss, but the Commander figured you’d be most likely to be a problem.”

  “Senior Commander Sanchez, I take it?” Michael asked, looking down the gun. “You do realize, MacCarl, that even if the Admiral has relieved Captain Roberts, what you’r
e doing is still mutiny. The Admiral can’t protect you from that. Even if everything you say is true, you’re still going to hang if you don’t stop this and hand me that Voids-cursed gun.”

  There might have been a moment of hesitation, but then MacCarl steadied his grip and gestured towards the door with the gun.

  “Following orders, sir,” he said bluntly. “Keep your hands where I can see them, we’re going to…”

  The big man spasmed, the gun spraying a burst of bullets into the wall where MacCarl had gestured as a Navy electron laser stungun hit him in the back and submachine gun slipped from nerveless fingers. The other mutineer went down at the same time, the need to cover four people keeping his weapon from pointing directly at any of them.

  “Finally,” Wing Commander Rokos grumbled as he stepped out from behind the door. “Took long enough for the idiot to point the gun somewhere else.”

  Michael’s heart started beating again as he looked down at the collapsed, still slightly twitching, form of the Specialist.

  “Cuff them,” he ordered the men who hadn’t joined the mutineers. Turning back to Rokos, he realized the other shooter had been Kalers.

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “Nothing,” Rokos replied. “Flight deck is secure,” he reported crisply. “Seven mutineers including this pair.” He paused, glancing at his fingernails as if pretending to be modest. “All taken alive, sir.”

  “Well done, Commander Rokos,” Michael told him. “We have a team?”

  “We have a team,” his subordinate replied. “What’s the plan, sir?”

  Michael tried to reach Kyle for just that question. No response.

  “The Captain appears to be jammed,” he said quietly.

  “Isn’t just him,” Kalers told him grimly. “Sanchez’s announcement went out, then I got about half of yours and Commander Solace’s ‘Guinevere’ announcement and everything cut out. Jamming field in effect across the whole ship.”

  “So we need to make sure everything’s intact in person,” Michael concluded aloud. “Rokos – keep half a dozen of our people, guard the flight deck. About the only thing someone could do with a starfighter right now is kill us all – but you know, I’m okay taking precautions against that.”

  He turned to Kalers.

  “Chief, take another half dozen of our people and head down to engineering,” he ordered. “Wong has a bunch of big guys and an actual Marine guard section but… let’s be certain.”

  “Including us three, we’ve got twenty awake and present,” Kalers told him.

  “Twenty-four, sir,” one of the Specialists who’d been manning Flight Control informed them. The others nodded as she spoke. “Not sure what the hell is going on, but we’re with you.”

  “All right, you’re with me,” Michael told them and ordered the Flight Control arms locker to open. “We’re heading to Secondary Control – if the Captain is out of communication, I need to find Commander Solace.”

  08:00 January 20, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Secondary Control

  Michael’s approach to Secondary Control came to a halt when the sound of gunfire came echoing down the corridor. He gestured his collection of techs with guns to hold still as he crept forward, trying to get a feel for what was going on.

  It wasn’t pretty. There had been a pair of Marines guarding the entrance. Both were now dead, but they hadn’t died alone. The mutineers had tried to rush the security door to take them out, and there were easily ten bodies scattered along the corridor.

  The security door had been overridden half open, and the remaining quartet of mutineers were using it as cover to take pot-shots into the control room. Gunfire and electron laser beams replied, so presumably the crew inside had enough cover to keep it a stalemate.

  “On my mark,” Michael told his people, “stun them all. Though this lot may not feel it a mercy,” he noted grimly. The dead Marines, if nothing else, would probably hang any survivors from this team.

  “Mark.”

  He led the way, targeting the mutineer with the biggest-looking gun and firing into his back. The Navy-issue stun weapons weren’t perfect, but a single blast of electricity was enough to put down most people.

  None of the mutineers were from the small section of people a standard electron beam couldn’t disable, and all four went down in spasming heaps. Michael approached the half-opened door carefully.

  “It’s Stanford,” he shouted before exposing himself. “Is Solace there?”

  “I’m here, CAG,” the exec responded. “We’ve got injured – I don’t suppose you have a medic with you?”

  “Sadly not,” he replied. “Fernandez – get your ass down to the Infirmary and get some people from Cunningham,” he ordered one of his people. “If these assholes have picked a fight there, get back here and find help.”

  He stepped over the half-retracted door and into Secondary Control. The carrier’s auxiliary command center was a mess. Consoles and screens were worse the wear for being used as cover, and too many people were injured. Now the shooting had stopped, one of the junior officers had grabbed a first aid kit and was seeing to the wounded as best she could.

  “Do you have coms with anyone else?” he asked Solace as the tall black officer, looking much less elegant with a still-bleeding cut across her face and a security shotgun in her arms, unfolded from behind the command chair.

  “We’re hard-linked to the bridge and engineering,” she told him. “Should be hard-linked to Flight Control and the flag deck, but those links seem to have been disabled.”

  “We’re in control down in Flight,” he replied. “We had no coms with anybody.”

  “All transmissions are jammed, and the ship network is down,” Solace said grimly. “Apparently your team in engineering had even better timing than you did – Wong’s people are all fine, and they’ve got a dozen mutineers in cuffs. He says the Drive is intact, no problems, and he’s locked things down so no one is going to cause any problems with it.

  “As for the bridge, Master Sergeant Wa was apparently worried about it,” the XO said dryly. “Nobody told me she’d assigned an extra Marine to the duty – and had them standing by in a closet down in the corridor in god-damn boarding armor. The bridge is secure.”

  Michael winced. Boarding armor was about two steps up from regular powered battle armor – it wasn’t nearly as maneuverable on a planet, as it was designed for vacuum and shipboard operations. It was also immune to any weapon that wouldn’t breach the hull. There was no way the mutineers had expected it or had had anything capable of injuring a Marine in it.

  “What about the flag deck?” he asked. “That’s where Captain Roberts is, isn’t it?”

  “No contact,” Solace admitted. “At this point, the flag deck is the last serious pressure point – I’d be worried about the armories, but Kyle locked them down before he went to arrest Tobin. I thought he was being paranoid.”

  “Apparently, Sanchez was preparing a fifth column for if Tobin relieved Roberts,” Michael told her. “Now that we know Tobin was involved in everything…”

  “Right. Let me talk to Sergeant Wa,” the XO said quietly. “I need that Marine in the boarding armor.”

  08:30 January 20, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Flag Deck

  Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin looked around his flag deck and wondered where the hell everything had gone so wrong.

  His Flag Captain and four Military Police were in handcuffs against the wall. Half a dozen people – his staff, MPs, Marines – were dead on the ground, and his Chief of Staff seemed to have taken over everything.

  “You won’t get away with this, Commander,” Roberts said, his voice admirably calm for someone in cuffs and being watched by people with guns. “We knew about your mutiny.”

  “You heard the Admiral order it,” she pointed out. “That makes it not a mutiny.”

  “The Admiral has already been relieved,” the Captain replied. “He has no authority.”


  “Oh, don’t worry, Captain,” Sanchez said sweetly. “That little stunt of yours will only help hang you. I’ve been promised that on the highest authority.”

  “Tobin never did any of what his code was used for, did he?” Roberts asked conversationally. “It was you. It was always you. What did the Terrans offer you, Commander?”

  Sanchez laughed, and Tobin looked at her desperately as leaned against the console.

  “Is this true, Commander?” he demanded. “Did you try to kill the Captain?”

  “I don’t work for the Commonwealth, Captain,” his Chief of Staff mocked Roberts. “No, there are those in the Federation who knew you were doomed to screw up. I was placed to make sure the damage was limited. My actions are approved and ordered by members of the Senate itself.”

  “You tried to assassinate the commander of a capital ship in the face of the enemy?” Tobin demanded. Suddenly, even his worry that they might not manage to catch Triumphant seemed small. His Chief of Staff was apparently a viper in their midst. If she wasn’t Commonwealth… if she’d been sent by a Senator…

  “My orders were to remove him before he did serious harm,” Sanchez confirmed. “Utterly destroying his reputation and making his failures of judgement obvious to the public was preferred.”

  The Admiral noted that nobody in the room except Snapes looked remotely surprised by this, and remembered with a chill that Sanchez had picked most of his staff. Backed by the wealth and power commanded by any Senator, she’d easily hidden a private force inside his staff.

  Lieutenant Commander Snapes, on the other hand, looked utterly horrified. The Intelligence Officer was edging towards Sanchez, and Tobin wondered just what she had in mind. He was starting to think he’d made one hell of a mistake by not checking into his new Chief of Staff’s background more closely.

  “Uh-uh,” Sanchez snapped, her gun suddenly flipping around to point directly between Snapes’ eyes. “Don’t try it, Lisa. I know you guessed what I used to do. For every minute of training you’ve got, they gave me an hour. You don’t stand a chance.”