Space Carrier Avalon Read online

  “Have a seat – and lose the jacket,” the Captain continued, gesturing at the chair in front of his desk. “I thought I told you to lose that already?”

  “I haven’t been by my quarters yet,” Kyle admitted as he sat down in the chair. The seat quickly contoured to him as he glanced around the room, taking in the semi-spartan appearance of the office. The desk was Castle Federation Space Navy standard, a hunk of plastic and metal familiar to any officer in uniform. Behind the desk was Avalon’s commissioning seal – a gold circle around a hand rising from waves, with the hull number DSC-001 at the top and the ship’s name at the bottom. On the left wall, some long ago artist had painted a mural of the Battle of Trinity – the arrowhead of Avalon flanked by two Alliance battleships as the Commonwealth shipyards burned behind her. The mural was worn, but the artist’s skill still showed the fire of one the greatest battles of the last war.

  “I didn’t intend to invoke Captain’s priority,” Blair observed. “We are, after all, in a holding orbit with giant holes in my hull where I should have guns.”

  “When the Captain says ‘stop by my office,’ you stop by,” Kyle replied with a small smile.

  “It is good to see some alacrity around here, I’ll admit,” the Captain answered. “Welcome aboard Avalon,” he continued. “How’s the Flight Deck?”

  “Lacking in anything resembling modern starfighters, but clear, clean and ready to receive the new birds,” Kyle answered. More than that would take time.

  “Any impressions of your crew yet?” the Captain asked. “First thoughts, I suppose.”

  Kyle shook his head. “Nothing concrete, sir.”

  Blair nodded, as if that was the answer he expected, and then stood and crossed to stand in front of the mural of Avalon’s greatest victory, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said calmly. “I prefer not to interfere in the operations of the Space Force personnel aboard my ships, but it became necessary for myself and the Ship’s Marshal to arrest several of your people. I’ve arranged for them to be replaced from the Reserve Flotilla Defense Group, but it will have an impact on the morale of your people.”

  “What were the charges?” Blair didn’t strike Kyle as a martinet, but if he’d been arresting Flight Group officers and crew before the new CAG was even aboard, there’d better have been a good reason!

  “This ship had a problem with things leaving and arriving that shouldn’t,” Blair said. “Flotilla guardship is a punishment detail, so there’s a lot of it I was willing to ignore – but one group was smuggling parts off the ship. And another was smuggling Euphoria chips on.”

  Kyle’s fists clenched involuntarily at the mention of Euphoria chips. One of the pilots aboard Alamo had ended up addicted to the better-than-reality virtual sims – which were ten times more addictive for someone with a starfighter pilot’s additional implants – and had committed suicide when Kyle had tried to force him to go off the habit.

  “You had evidence.” It wasn’t a question. “How many?”

  “Eight of your people,” Blair said quietly. “Between that and a few other things we’ve dug up, I’ve also arrested over fifty Navy crew and officers.”

  “I’ll deal with the morale issues,” the Wing Commander said grimly. “Better that than Euphoria amidst my pilots.”

  “I’d hoped that would be your opinion,” the Captain told him, continuing to gaze at the mural. “It’s only a symptom though, Wing Commander.

  “The whole ship is like this mural,” he explained. “A faded memory of past glory. The name Avalon conjures prestige, honor, history – but everyone important knew she was half-way into the Reserve. Captain Riddle hadn’t even so much as tested the engines in two years.

  “SFG-001 and SFG-279 were so intermingled, I’m not even sure Vice Commodore Larson knew which one he was supposed to be commanding before I turfed him off of my ship,” Blair continued.

  Oscar Larson was the Vice Commodore in charge of SFG-279, the Starfighter Group assigned to defend the New Amazon Reserve Flotilla.

  “There is rot through the entire ship,” he concluded. “Some of it is drugs, alcohol, and misbehavior fueled by being stuck on a punishment detail – that I think we can ignore if it stops.

  “Some, like stealing parts and smuggling dangerous drugs, we can’t,” Blair said flatly. “The Marshal hasn’t had a chance to solidly investigate the Flight Deck – I’m leaving that to you.”

  “That isn’t going to help me improve morale,” Kyle observed, considering the task before him. The last thing he wanted to start off his new command with was a witch hunt.

  “There is a real core of good people on this ship,” the Captain replied. “Some are incompetents with too much political influence to keep out of uniform, so they stuck them here to make it look good. Some pissed off the wrong person, and we need to salvage them.

  “And some need to crash and burn, or we can’t risk taking this ship into battle. Are you a family man, Wing Commander?” Blair asked.

  Kyle shifted uncomfortably.

  “Not in the sense you mean it, sir,” he said simply. “I have a son, but I haven’t seen him in years.”

  The Captain turned to facing Kyle, shaking his head.

  “You should,” he said strictly. “But that’s not the point,” he shrugged. “This ship’s crew is like a child – massive potential, but they’ve gone a little astray.

  “For good or ill, the Joint Chiefs have put us in charge of them. We need to find the problems that need to be removed, and remove them. Others, we can ignore if they fix themselves. Do you understand me?”

  “Sir,” Kyle said flatly. “I will run my Flight Deck as I see fit.” And his own life as he saw fit, as well. His job was to deliver Blair a combat-ready starfighter group when it was needed, and tradition said that how he did his job was his own concern.

  “Of course,” the Captain agreed. “I want to make sure we are on the same page, that’s all,” he added quickly. “I have reason to believe there are problems in the Flight Group that haven’t been revealed yet. I think Larson was covering up more than just parts and drug smuggling, and it’s as important to you as to me if he was!”

  The Wing Commander relaxed slightly. His over-reaction had been as much about the Captain’s comment on his son as anything else; that situation wasn’t anyone’s business.

  “Do we have any idea what he was hiding?” he asked.

  “If I knew, I’d have more guidance to give you,” Blair replied, his voice frustrated. “I know that I haven’t been able to confirm how many fighters they moved over to the Flotilla Defense Station. Even on this crap a detail, though, I can’t imagine he was selling his starfighters.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open, sir,” Kyle promised. “If I need support…”

  “Any requests you have of SFG-279, the Flotilla Defense Station, my people, or of JAG will have my full support unless I know you’re wrong,” Blair promised in turn. “I’ve arranged so that you have the records of the flight crews Larson took with him as well. If you want to switch some of those he left behind with those he kept, I’ll sign off on the orders.”

  “Understood,” Kyle accepted. He stood and started to leave, but turned back to meet his new Captain’s eyes. “Sir, this is Avalon,” he said quietly. “Is it really this bad?”

  For the first time, he realized how tired Blair looked. Bags hung under the Captain’s eyes and it looked as though new lines had cut their way into his face.

  “It might be worse,” the Captain said bluntly. “But however bad it is, CAG, it’s our job to turn this ship back into a warship of the Castle Federation Space Navy!”

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  00:10, July 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Group Commander’s Office

  Kyle was, like the vast majority of military officers throughout history, not a fan of paperwork. Actual paper was rarely involved anymore, for
mal command orders being one of the few exceptions, but the various branches of the Castle Federation’s military forces required their officers to fill in a vast quantity of forms and reports. Once complete, those forms and reports were transmitted via quantum entanglement to Joint Command on Castle – a flagrant abuse, in Kyle’s opinion, of mankind’s mastery of one of the great mysteries of creation.

  He preferred, of course, to know how many munitions he had for his starfighters, how many starfighters he had, and how reliably he could repair said starfighters. That required detailed inventories, logs – and forms and reports. He’d made his peace with paperwork a long time ago and learned to use the summaries the ship’s computers could prepare for him as a tool.

  Two hours into reviewing those summaries for Avalon, he’d sent a request over the Q-com to Joint Command for a number of records. Comparing them was… illuminating.

  First, and perhaps most terrifying, was that SFG-001’s squadrons shouldn’t have been flying Badgers. There was no record at Joint Command of the switch Randall had described. Central’s records had been the source of his understanding that the ship’s squadrons were equipped with Typhoons – and those records hadn’t changed since then.

  It was possible the starfighters had been switched with SFG-279’s squadrons aboard the Flotilla station, but he couldn’t tell. The station’s computers had bounced him when he’d queried them for the status of the squadrons aboard. It was certainly within Vice Commodore Larson’s authority to restrict that information – if nothing else, he was senior to Kyle in rank – but it was odd.

  Missing starfighters were the most glaring concern, but not the only one the records contained. So far, he’d only skimmed the files on his squadron commanders, and they were everything Blair had warned him. Randall was the nephew of a Federal Senator, but his command evaluations suggested he shouldn’t have been given a single fighter, let alone a squadron. Stanford, on the other hand, had a sterling command record with glowing reviews – and a black mark involving a ‘borrowed’ shuttle and the daughters of two separate admirals that had brought his career to a complete halt.

  Rokos’ record seemed as solid as the man himself, but all of his previous postings had been to planetary and reserve flotilla defense groups. A fluke of the Space Force that would still leave any commander wondering why he’d never served aboard a carrier.

  Lancet’s record was the cleanest of all four of the Flight Commanders leading his new squadrons, with no clear reason why she was aboard Avalon – except that Kyle knew the reputation of the Admiral whose flag her last carrier had flown, and could read between the lines.

  Two of his officers were definitely solid. The other two he wasn’t sure of their competence or judgment, but he would reserve his opinion until he’d run training exercises. Zhao and Mendez he knew well and could lean on, but he knew that favoritism would only weaken the weapon he needed to forge.

  It was hard to put his finger on what worried him. The replaced starfighters were a big deal, but the general level of completeness of the paperwork was off too. He expected a certain degree of missing paperwork, or of pieces that weren’t filled out right. All of the Group’s paperwork was marked as in and complete – Larson either had never sent anything back to his Commanders and Chiefs, or had simply signed off on everything.

  The answer to most of his questions, Kyle knew, would be with the Chiefs themselves. He pulled up the first of their records – Senior Chief Petty Officer Marshall Hammond of the Castle Federation Space Force. He wasn’t surprised to realize that the man on Deck duty when the new Commander, Flight Group, came aboard had been the most senior Space Force NCO on the ship.

  Hammond had come to Avalon some years back from the battlecruiser Thermopylae, accompanied by one of the worst reviews Kyle had seen that wasn’t attached to a demotion. It looked like the Chief had barely dodged being cashiered for disobeying orders and insubordination to Thermopylae’s CAG.

  Thermopylae was a ship that Kyle knew, though. She was the first ship of the Last Stand class, a sister ship to his old Alamo – and the Marine Gunnery Sergeant assigned to Flight Deck security aboard Alamo had come to her from the older ship. She had in fact, unless Kyle had the dates wrong, served aboard at the same time as Chief Hammond.

  He checked the date. Unless the schedule had changed in the last week since he’d left, Gunnery Sergeant Peng Wa would have the night duty. Kyle tapped a series of commands on the flat screen that served as his desktop and computer screen.

  “Duty officer,” he said calmly as the junior officer holding down the carrier’s communications center in the middle of the midnight shift appeared on his screen. “I need a Q-com link to Alamo, attention Gunnery Sergeant Peng Wa. She should be on duty.”

  “Of course, sir,” the very young-looking Ensign replied. As CAG, Kyle was one of the three officers with full authority for use of the quantum entanglement communications array. “Please hold on one moment.”

  Deep in the bowels of the ship, a number of tiny bits were carefully changed. Their entangled pairs, light years away in the Castle system, changed in turn. A routing code told the computers on that end to connect to Alamo, and the data transmitted from Avalon was dutifully and automatically loaded onto the tiny bits in the relay station that linked to Alamo. A re-invention of the ancient concept of the ‘switchboard’ allowed what was, unavoidably, a two-point communications network to reach anywhere and anyone in the Federation.

  A few minutes passed, presumably as the Ensign spoke to a similarly junior officer on the battlecruiser, and then the youth re-appeared on Kyle’s screen.

  “We have Gunnery Sergeant Peng for you sir,” he reported. “I’m connecting you now.”

  The delicately petite features of the hardest-minded and -bodied woman Kyle had ever met appeared on the screen.

  “CAG, it’s good to hear from you,” she said cheerfully.

  “Gunny, how’s the ship?” Kyle asked. “Remember, I’m not your CAG anymore.”

  “And I’m not your Gunny,” Peng Wa replied. “Alamo is holding together just fine. How’s the Navy’s Old Lady?”

  Kyle considered for a moment and shrugged. “She’s old,” he said bluntly. “Listen Peng, I need a favor.”

  “I still owe you for the Gulf,” she replied. “Shoot.”

  The Wing Commander shook his head. “That was my job,” he observed, “but I’ll abuse your goodwill regardless. Did you know a Chief Marshall Hammond aboard Thermopylae?”

  Peng’s smile actually managed to widen. He wasn’t quite sure how a woman so small could have a smile so board – or how a smile so bright could be so shark-like.

  “Wait, you’ve got Hammond?” she asked.

  “He’s my senior Deck Chief, and there are issues with the Group,” Kyle explained. “I need to know if I can trust him. His last report from Thermopylae was the worst I’ve seen.”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  Kyle blinked at that. He’d never known Peng to need permission. “Granted,” he answered after a moment.

  “Wing Commander Oshawa was an ass,” she explained bluntly. “He ordered Hammond to clear three starfighters he‘d down-checked so they could fly an op, rather than waiting to cycle three birds that had just returned.

  “Hammond refused. He’s no respecter of rank without brains, so he wasn’t exactly polite about it – hence the insubordination.”

  “Was he right?” Kyle asked quietly.

  “I don’t know sir,” Peng admitted. The petite Marine shrugged. “I break heads and shoot pirates, sir, I’m not qualified to judge the flightworthiness of a starfighter.”

  “That’s fair, Gunny,” the pilot agreed. “Thank you.”

  “I will say though, sir,” the Marine told him, “that when we threw Hammond’s farewell party? The flight crews of those three birds picked up the tab for everyone. They felt they owed him something.”

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  08:15, July 6, 2
735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Deck

  With all the starfighters aboard loaded into the launch tubes, Avalon’s Flight Deck was disturbingly empty to Kyle. The old carrier’s Deck wasn’t much bigger than the Flight Deck aboard his old battlecruiser had been, and his instincts said the entire Deck should be a buzzing hive of activity. SFG-279 aboard the New Amazon Reserve Flotilla Station had the patrol duty for the system, though, and the Falcons that had arrived with the new Wing Commander weren’t scheduled to come aboard for another few hours.

  He tracked Hammond down by finding the one part of the two hundred meter long deck that did have activity. A cluster of Spacemen and Petty Officers was gathered around the Deck Control Office, where Hammond was giving directions for final preparations of the deck.

  “MacArthur! I want your team to check berths seventeen through thirty-two – make sure the new adaptors for power and fuel are set up!” the Senior Chief snapped. “Abdul! Your team can take thirty-three through forty-eight.”

  People scattered away from the Chief in clusters, and Hammond turned to a young man who was waiting politely to speak to him. The youth had two silver carets above a set of wings on his collar, marking him as a Junior Space Force Lieutenant, and one of the starfighter pilots.

  “Chief, the simulators in the pilot room are down,” the Lieutenant told Hammond. “When are we going to get someone to look at them?”

  “They’re not down, Lieutenant Kovalchick,” Hammond said patiently. “They’re turned off – there’s a slight difference. There isn’t much point in you boys and girls flying simulators programmed for Typhoons and Cobras when we’re bringing aboard a full group’s worth of Falcons.”