Q-Ship Chameleon (Castle Federation Book 4) Read online

  As the zero-point energy cell fed antimatter to the thrusters, a suite of mass manipulators flared to life. Several created a gravity field that exactly countered the acceleration. Others decreased the mass of the shuttle, while still others increased the mass of the thrust blasting out the thruster nozzles.

  Once at full power, the shuttle accelerated toward the two-light-hour-distant gas giant at a tad under five hundred gravities. He checked the course was clear out to the limits of the small craft’s radar and passive thermal scans, and then leaned back in his chair, reducing his link to the ship to a background data update.

  “ETA is just after twenty hundred hours,” he told Glass.

  The other man had his eyes closed but opened them slowly as Kyle spoke.

  “Good,” he announced. “They’ll be expecting us. I’m going to grab a coffee—the galley is fully stocked. Want anything?”

  “More details on what I’ve signed up for?” Kyle asked.

  “Be patient, Captain,” Glass replied. “I’ll brief you before we arrive; I just want some more empty space between us and anyone who might get curious.”

  The spy disappeared, leaving the Captain shaking his head at the controls as he studied the network of space stations he was still flying through.

  Castle wasn’t the single wealthiest world in the Alliance of Free Stars; that distinction went to Phoenix, the largest of the three habitable planets in the system of the same name, and capital of the Star Kingdom of Phoenix. It was still the second wealthiest, and the smelters, habitats and microgravity factories formed an immense, entirely artificial ring around the world.

  Ten warships, over a tenth of the Federation’s peacetime fleet and a massive commitment even with the Reserve deployed, stood guard over that ring, backed by an additional five thousand starfighters based in orbiting platforms.

  Once they were clear of the densest core of the orbital infrastructure, the flight quieted down, but it was still a busy region of space, with hundreds of sublight ships arriving or leaving in any given minute. While Kyle didn’t need to have his hands on the controls at every moment, he also couldn’t leave the cockpit or ignore the data feeding to his implant.

  At five hundred gravities, however, they eventually left everything else behind. While there was other traffic moving to and from Gawain along the direct path, the rest of the traffic was big tanker ships, mostly automated vessels moving at fifty gravities. Fifty gravities was Tier One acceleration, the first “plateau” in the efficiency of the combination of antimatter engines and mass manipulators. Tier One was immensely efficient, if too slow for most military needs.

  Kyle checked the course he’d laid in and made sure it was clear of the corridor used by the tankers, then went to join Glass in the galley.

  “We’re clear of Castle’s orbital traffic,” he told the spy as he grabbed a coffee cup of his own from the galley’s automated systems. “ETA’s unchanged.”

  “And sensors show the nearest ship is over two light-seconds away,” Glass confirmed. “I just deployed a drone to orbit us and sweep for stray radio signals. It won’t help if someone has snuck a Q-Com-equipped bug aboard, but those are sizable and we swept this ship barely an hour before launch.”

  “That’s…a little paranoid, isn’t it?” Kyle asked slowly. The smallest Q-Com he’d ever seen had contained its quantum-entangled particles in a box roughly the size of a briefcase. He didn’t think they came small enough to be use as an eavesdropping device.

  “It is,” Glass agreed, “but we absolutely cannot afford for any information on this operation to leak back to the Commonwealth; do you understand me, Captain Roberts?”

  Kyle nodded slowly. The Terran Commonwealth was the largest and most powerful human nation in history. He had no illusions about how deeply they had probably infiltrated the central world of the Alliance’s most powerful member.

  “If they don’t know it was us, Operation Blue Sunbeam could change the course of the war,” the spy noted. “If they learn it was us, it’ll have been a giant waste of everyone’s time.”

  “Blue Sunbeam?”

  “We randomly generate operational code names,” Glass explained with a pained smile. “It doesn’t result in particularly impressive names, but it means that the names don’t give any clues to our objective.”

  “Which is?”

  Glass sighed and nodded.

  “Everything checks out as clean as I can be certain of,” he told Kyle. “Our objective, Captain Roberts, is to attempt to turn the tide of the war with a deep raid into Terran space, attacking their core shipbuilding complex and attempting to blame someone else for it.”

  Kyle looked at him in shock.

  “You’re a smart man, Captain Roberts,” the spy noted. “You’ve done the math: The Terran Commonwealth has over three hundred star systems. The Alliance has less than a hundred. On a functionally peacetime footing, the Commonwealth produces more warships a year than we do. Our crews are more experienced, our training is better, we currently have a slight but clear tech edge…but if the Commonwealth ever truly went to war, they could provide Walkingstick with the ships to swamp us with sheer numbers.”

  Fleet Admiral James Calvin Walkingstick was the current bogey man of the Alliance, charged as Marshal of the Rimward Marches by the Commonwealth—a charge that meant he was expected to bring those systems into the Commonwealth. Systems that happened to coincide with the Castle Federation and its allies.

  “We can win battles and push them back. We’ve held our own so far in this seesawing disaster of a war. But we can’t win. Our best hope is a peace treaty that returns us to status quo—and all the last one of those bought us was time to raise another generation in the shadow of conquest.”

  Kyle sighed and took a gulp of coffee.

  “I see the appeal,” he admitted. His own father had survived the last war only to eventually commit suicide from PTSD so extreme, even twenty-eighth-century medicine couldn’t help. Two generations of Castle’s young men and women had gone to war to stay free from Terra. Ending the war with an outright victory could prevent that from happening—even if Kyle couldn’t see a way that would be even remotely possible.

  “They’ll identify any ship we take on a deep raid, though,” he pointed out after a moment. “Even our starfighters would be enough of a hint. All us attacking a core world would achieve would be to put them on a true total war footing.”

  “Before Seventh Fleet’s Marines joined you in Alizon, they stopped in the Kaber system to deal with a pirate attack,” Glass explained. “Any record outside those Marines’ heads shows that there were two pirate ships, both glorified freighters with strapped-on mass drivers and some junk second-generation starfighters.

  “The third ship was erased from every record Federation Intelligence could find. She was a Commonwealth Q-ship, a Blackbeard-class like the vessel you took out in the Hessian System. Thanks to Brigadier Hammond, we took her intact. We don’t know how she ended up in pirate hands…but we suspect the Commonwealth knows she did.

  “And, so far as Alliance Joint Intelligence can tell, they don’t know we captured her,” he concluded. “We’ve assembled a fighter group of Stellar League sixth-generation starfighters and have a plan to acquire munitions and supplies to make the Commonwealth think the League is backing us.

  “The Stellar League is in an unusually unified state at the moment, and a Commonwealth punitive expedition could kick off a bigger war than Terra may think,” Glass said. “We need that distraction, Captain Roberts.”

  The Stellar League was the second-largest polity in human space, but it was also notoriously disorganized. The overarching government of the League was politely described as “anemic” and its member systems acted as independent states as often as not—and seemed to make a hobby out of minor wars with each other. Wars that often either spilled directly into Commonwealth space or whose losers turned pirate in Commonwealth space.

  If they could make the Commonwealth think
their attack was yet another raid by League mercenaries, the so-called condottieri, then the Terrans might well engage in one of the semi-regular expeditions to burn out the source of pirates in League space. They couldn’t conquer the League—its systems were too advanced and too numerous for an easy war—but it was disorganized enough normally that they could eliminate a specific pirate base and punish the home system without too much trouble.

  But the League’s weak central government had been taken over recently by a condottieri Admiral, Kaleb Periklos, who now styled himself “Dictator of the Stellar League.” He would see a Commonwealth expedition as a challenge to his authority. If the League pushed back, they might push the Commonwealth into a two-front war—and that would finally be something resembling an even match.

  “And I’m to command this Q-ship,” Kyle concluded.

  “Indeed,” Glass confirmed. “If you back out now, Captain, well…we’ll need to keep you out of communication until the operation actually goes off. We trust you, but that’s a risk we can’t take.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Kyle told him calmly. “Though I do want to see this ship.”

  #

  Chapter 5

  Castle System

  20:00 April 26, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Secret Castle Federation Intelligence Shipyard Facility Redoubt, Gawain Orbit

  For ease of supply, security, and mutual support, the cloudscoops that extracted hydrogen from Gawain’s upper atmosphere were clustered together into an area roughly the size of a normal habitable world. The Castle Reserve Flotilla station was in a trailing orbit, but one that generally kept it aligned with the extraction infrastructure for everyone’s convenience.

  The final coordinates Glass gave Kyle were on the opposite side of the massive gas giant from all of that activity, and the Captain saw nothing on his sensors as he brought the shuttle closer to the coordinates.

  “There’s nothing here,” he pointed out aloud.

  “Check your elevation,” Glass replied. “We’re still about a thousand kilometers too high.”

  “That puts us in the atmosphere,” Kyle objected.

  “Yes,” the spy agreed. “Hides the facility from prying eyes. There is a beacon, though. You should be picking it up about now.”

  It was almost two minutes later, sweeping across the planet at several dozen kilometers a second, before Kyle actually picked up the beacon. It wasn’t transmitting any warnings or information, simply a six-digit number on repeat.

  Shaking his head at the intelligence agency’s paranoia, he dove the shuttle into Gawain’s upper atmosphere under the beacon. The upper layers of the massive planet weren’t too dangerous, but they did reduce his sensor visibility to a hundred kilometers at most.

  He’d made it halfway down to the coordinates when something ripped into that limited visibility, rapidly resolving into a Falcon starfighter that trained its main weapon—the positron lance that fired a beam of pure antimatter from a modified zero-point cell—on the suddenly fragile-feeling shuttle.

  “Unidentified shuttlecraft, this is a secured no-fly zone,” the fighter transmitted. “Flying down here is also bloody stupid, so I assume you have a reason to be here. Transmit authentication codes or head back to the surface now.”

  Glass needed forward across the console and tapped a command.

  “Redoubt Security Flight, authentication is Gamma Kappa One Charlie Zulu Seven Seven Niner. Countersign: Excelsior. Confirm authenticate.”

  “We confirm authentication, Agent,” the fighter’s crew replied immediately. “Lights are on for the scenic tour. Captain Rondell says, and I quote, ‘Don’t rush on my account; let Roberts see his new toy.’”

  Their escort’s voice shifted into a quavering imitation of an old man for the last bit.

  “Received and understood, Redoubt flight,” Glass told them. “We’re continuing on down.”

  The starfighter flipped away and disappeared into the clouds. Unlike Kyle, the other pilot was clearly very comfortable flying in the gas giant’s atmosphere.

  “There are carefully calibrated sensor buoys scattered through the atmosphere here,” Glass explained at Kyle’s surprised look. “Flight Commander Macready has a lot better visibility than you do—its not just that he’s more familiar with this pea soup.

  “And here we are,” he concluded, gesturing toward the sensor display, now showing a large artificial structure orbiting inside Gawain’s atmosphere. As they grew closer and Kyle slowed the shuttle’s velocity more, they entered a region of clearly artificial lower-density atmosphere, allowing a clearer view of the station.

  The Redoubt was built around a single construction and refit slip. The slip itself was a collection of girders and scaffolding five hundred meters across and a kilometer long, not quite large enough to contain a modern warship but large enough for most needs. A quarter-kilometer disk of a space station capped one end, presumably home to the Redoubt’s staff and starfighters. A scattering of smaller platforms that Kyle recognized as automated lance and missile batteries traced circles around the entire complex, as did a trio of Falcon starfighters.

  They’d clearly passed whatever security checks they needed to get this far, as none of the defenses reacted to them, but as they drew closer to the slip, a series of immense floodlights switched on and highlighted the ship resting in the middle of the slip.

  No one looking at her would have thought she was a warship. Warships were usually long lines and sharp edges, designed to both provide a reduced target when approaching an enemy and to focus vast quantities of firepower on specific points.

  This ship was the almost-perfect sphere of a civilian ship, a little over four hundred meters in diameter and painted in soothing tones of blue. This close, with the shuttle’s sensors to hand and knowing what he was looking at, Kyle could pick out the panels that concealed lasers and positron lances. The bands of differing colors were well designed to help conceal the panels from a visual inspection.

  The last time he’d encountered a Commonwealth Q-ship, it had blown a space station occupied by over forty thousand souls to pieces. Calm and innocent as this one looked, he couldn’t help but shiver looking at her while knowing what she was.

  “What’s her name?” he asked aloud.

  “She has the ability to change transponders and the name on the hull with ease,” Glass said quietly. “She was Christopher Lee in Commonwealth service. Once we fully recommissioned her in our service, we decided to rename her Chameleon.”

  #

  Exiting the shuttle, Kyle and Glass were met by a squat, heavily overweight man with stark-white hair. He wore the blue-piped black jacket-and-shipsuit uniform of a Castle Federation Space Navy officer with the golden planet of a full Captain.

  “Welcome to the Redoubt, Captain Roberts, Agent Glass,” he greeted them in a quavering voice. “I am Captain Isaac Rondell and I lead the Navy staff that run this installation.”

  Age, weight, and war wounds had clearly taken their impact on Captain Rondell, but he moved with confidence if not speed or power as he gestured for them to follow him.

  “We’ve been working on Chameleon since she was dragged in from Kaber two months ago,” he continued as he led the way down the sterile corridors of the station. “The Commonwealth built her class well, but the pirates who’d been flying her had no clue how to maintain her equipment.”

  “Is her armament intact?” Kyle asked. “I had the misfortune of seeing one of these at close range in Hessian.”

  “Ian Fleming, our intelligence suggests,” Rondell agreed. “Chameleon is a later ship and the Blackbeards were each custom-built, from what we can tell. Fleming had no capital missile launchers, but Chameleon has six. The other armament is much the same: four half-megaton-per-second positron lances, a dozen fighter missile launchers and a suite of defensive lances and lasers.”

  “It’s not much, but I’ve seen what it can do,” Kyle said softly, memories of a disintegrating spa
ce station fresh in his mind. “Curious, though—is she more obviously a warship on the inside?”

  “In places,” the man charged with recommissioning the ship replied. “She has a complete false interior that looks like her original merchant-ship class. Her weapons and military systems are hidden in what would have been the cargo hold. She still has much of that merchant-ship’s cargo capacity, allowing you to haul a lot of missiles if you can find them, but the inefficiencies inherent in her design reduce it significantly.”

  “What about crew?”

  “We’ve been quietly recruiting personnel from Home Fleet since the ship arrived,” Rondell answered. “There are a few slots open where we’ll want to lean on your contacts and knowledge as well. Your new exec has been helping us put everything together; she should be able to fill you in momentarily. Ah, here we are.”

  “Here” turned out to be a hatch off the corridor that looked identical to every other hatch Kyle had seen on Federation space stations, though this one had a small plaque stating it was a conference room.

  Rondell opened the door and led them into the room, which was currently occupied by a single, familiar-looking, woman with dark hair and skin. She wore the same uniform as Kyle or Rondell, though her collar carried the three gold circles of a Senior Fleet Commander.

  Kyle was still trying to place why she was familiar when she met his gaze frankly.

  “You!” she half-snarled. Her glare switched to Glass instantly. “Sir, I’m afraid I must resign from my involvement in this project. I refuse to work under Captain Roberts’s command.”

  The room was silent.

  “Commander Sanchez, I don’t understand,” Glass admitted. “You are aware that resigning from Operation Blue Sunbeam at this point will require you to enter communication isolation for at least six months, yes?”