Space Carrier Avalon Read online

  Even with the gravity of Avalon’s Flight Deck under extremely careful control, the slightest error or misjudgment could result in damage to the ships, even the complete destruction of the eighty billion Federation Stellars worth of starfighters – or worse, injury or death to his people.

  This was the sixth and last pack of fighters, however, and his deck crews had handled each with aplomb and confidence. They’d taken a bit longer than he’d expected, but they’d managed the job without injuries or more than a handful of scratches on the Falcons.

  The chime for his door sounded a couple of minutes after the hour rolled around, and he checked the status of his Petty Officers on his implant. Chief Petty Officer Harvey Carlisle, the most senior of his non-Senior Chiefs, had the deck, which meant Hammond, Ambrose and Miller were free.

  “Enter,” he instructed.

  The doors slid open and the three most senior non-commissioned Castle Federation Space Force personnel aboard Avalon entered in a pack. Kyle gestured them to the three chairs in front of his desk while he continued to watch the Flight Deck through the window.

  “Any issues with the loading?” he asked the men and woman behind him.

  “None,” Hammond replied tersely. “We’ll see if they picked up any issues in transit over the next few days as we test them out and let the flyboys stretch their wings, but the Falcons are supposed to be solid birds.”

  Kyle nodded and ordered the screen over the window to the Flight Deck to close. After a moment, the room dimmed slightly as the stark lighting of the Deck faded, and he turned to face his Senior Chief Petty Officers.

  Marshall Hammond was as much a known quantity as Kyle had on the ship. The grizzled older man looked perfectly relaxed; leaning back in the chair he’d been offered.

  Harj Ambrose was a dark-skinned man of medium height with close-cropped black hair and sharp black eyes. He’d settled into the offered chair with his hands crossed in his lap, eyeing his new boss pensively.

  Petitia Miller was the last of his Senior Chiefs, a frail-boned woman with ice-blue eyes that contrasted sharply with her darker skin and hair. She was perched on the edge of her seat, but her body language suggested a greater willingness to attack than to flee.

  “Chiefs, thank you for meeting with me,” Kyle said quietly. “We don’t know each other well yet, though I know that will have to change. Hammond here comes highly recommended by an old friend, and he recommends you two. I hope to trust you, because we have a problem.”

  “I know the Captain broke a Euphoria chip smuggling ring aboard this hip,” he continued grimly. “This is a punishment station; I know there are drugs and alcohol being smuggled aboard. In the end, if that stops, I do not care,” he finished bluntly. “If someone’s drug or alcohol habit is a problem, I expect you and the Flight Commanders to make sure it stops being a problem before I learn about it.”

  He met their gazes and all three nodded slowly as the message sank home. The informal discipline that would stop problems before the Wing Commander brought the hammer down came from the Chiefs and Senior Chiefs – often even when dealing with junior officers.

  “Those things I can ignore,” he repeated, “but there are offenses which are crash and burn in the Force. I know some of those were going on here too. Abuse. Intimidation. Theft. I don’t trust any of the paperwork,” he finished, gesturing to his desk.

  “Most of the Force crew are good people,” Ambrose said softly, but Hammond interrupted, shaking his head.

  “That and fifty Stellars will buy you an expensive latte,” he said bluntly. “We all know there’re some real bad apples on this ship.”

  “There are,” Kyle accepted softly. “And I want them off. Understand me, Chiefs – I can and will transfer crew and pilots to SFG-279 on the word of three Senior Chiefs. I’ll settle for getting them off of our ship.”

  “If you want me to hand someone over to JAG, I need evidence. Something we can take to a court martial.”

  The three chiefs exchanged looks, and then Miller shrugged.

  “The Captain got the worst of the drugs,” she said quietly. “There’re some bullies and abusers – nothing criminal, but getting them off of the ship is all we really need.”

  “You three can give me names?” Kyle asked. “I’ll also take recommendations for replacements from Two-Seventy-Nine. We’re not planning on giving Larson much choice in these transfers. Nothing worse?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Ambrose admitted with a sigh, and looked to Hammond. “Tell him about Randall.”

  The Senior Chief hesitated, and looked over to Miller. The frail-looking woman nodded firmly, and Hammond sighed and met Kyle’s eyes.

  “Flight Commander Randall is my most senior officer,” Kyle said quietly. “Technically, if not for Larson busy-bodying around, he commanded SFG-001 until I arrived. He’s an ass-kisser, but I didn’t suspect more.”

  “Flight Commander Randall,” Hammond replied, “is a bully, and a thug. You’ve seen him abuse Stanford, dump work on him?”

  The Wing Commander nodded.

  “That’s only the start. He does that for everything,” the Senior Chief told him. “You can always tell when something fishy is going on, because Randall hasn’t delegated it to someone else.”

  “What kind of fishy?”

  “Nothing we can prove,” Miller said softly. “I run the parts inventories – I know stuff has gone missing, but I can’t track the thefts.”

  “Randall might be the only one I can’t even transfer without some kind of crime to hang on him,” Kyle said. “Abuse and over-delegation don’t count.”

  Hammond glanced at Miller and Ambrose, both of whom nodded to him. With a sigh, the big Chief pulled a data chip out of one of his pockets and laid it on Kyle’s desk.

  “There’s a long story here,” he started, “but it begins with a crime we can prove – Flight Commander James Randall raped Flight Lieutenant Michelle Williams, an officer under his command.”

  The words dropped into the quiet of the austere office like anvils.

  “You can prove this,” Kyle stated flatly. Rape was a crash and burn offense. There was no mercy if it could be proven. No excuses. It would be a long time before Randall saw the light of day if it was true.

  “This chip contains all of the details of Flight Commander Stanford’s investigation,” Hammond replied. “Williams was in his Bravo squadron, before she was grounded and transferred to the Reserve Station by Larson.”

  “Stanford buried this?” Kyle demanded in a low, dangerous voice. Anyone who covered for a rape would crash and burn along with the rapist if he had a say – and as the Commanding Officer of Avalon’s Flight Group, he did.

  “I don’t know, sir,” the Chief admitted. “I know he completed his investigation – pulled together witness statements, medical records, enough proof to satisfy a court martial – and reported it to the Vice Commodore. I never heard anything after that, but you won’t find that report in the ship’s computers – and it definitely never made it to JAG. I, um, stole a copy to be sure it was never lost.”

  “I need to review this,” Kyle told them, his eyes on the innocent looking data chip. “Please tell me this is the worst.”

  “It’s the worst we can prove,” Ambrose told him. “We’ll give you names of others, pilots, gunners, engineers and deck crew we need off the ship. If we trade them out for the best of the Two-Seventy-Ninth, we can deliver you a solid crew.”

  “But the rot has to be cut out first,” Wing Commander Kyle Roberts said grimly, and picked up the data chip. “I thank you for trusting me with this, Chiefs. I swear to you, upon the sacred honor of the Space Force, this report will not go astray again.”

  “Justice will be done.”

  Kyle read the report. It took him over an hour, and then he read the report again, to be certain. By the end, a deep weariness and a queasy unease filled him. Stanford’s report was detailed, supported, and complete. The report from the doctor who’d examined Wil
liams was included. Video footage of the examination of the scene was included. Security tracking records showing where both Randall and Williams had been, and that Randall’s tracker had been disabled during the attack.

  There was enough verifiable evidence in Stanford’s report that there’d be no need for further investigation – the Flight Commander had assembled enough evidence to justify charges against – and likely convict – his superior.

  And other than the version he’d been handed on a chip, he could find no trace of the report in the system. Most of the evidence had vanished from the records as well – the only copies were in the report.

  Kyle Roberts was not a perfect man, or even, in his opinion, a particularly good one. He had abandoned his high school girlfriend when she got pregnant and fled to the Navy, and had never gone home. His only contact with his son was through his mother, who had let Kyle’s ex move in and helped take care of them.

  He was pretty sure he was the worst father in the Federation’s fourteen systems, but that was a… petty failure compared to the evil that he was looking at.

  Randall had systematically stalked, cornered, and raped an officer under his command.

  Another officer had proven it, to an extraordinary level.

  And that proof had disappeared.

  There was no trace, anywhere in Avalon’s systems, of Stanford’s report.

  Somewhere between Stanford completing the report and it being delivered to the Federation’s Judge Advocate General, it had disappeared. The Flight Commander had allowed this.

  Kyle couldn’t reconcile the detail and completeness of the report with the willingness to let Randall walk away – and to continue serving under his command.

  The mystery could wait, however. Regardless of what had happened to the report before, he had it now – and his duty was clear.

  He triggered a command in his implant.

  “Blair,” the Captain’s voice replied several moments later as the intercom channel opened.

  “Captain, it’s Roberts,” Kyle told him. The Captain’s implants should have told him that, but Kyle knew his own implants – part of being a fighter pilot – were vastly more powerful than most people’s, and he could miss data sometimes.

  “It’s well after twenty-two hundred ship-time, Wing Commander,” Blair said, a soft chuckle underlying his words. “What was so important it couldn’t wait until morning?”

  “I found one of those problems that need to be removed,” Kyle told him flatly. “I need to meet with you and the Ship’s Marshal immediately.”

  All humor dropped from the Captain’s voice.

  “My office, ten minutes,” Blair ordered. “I’ll page Khadem.”

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  22:40 July 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Captain’s Office

  Blair was waiting when Kyle arrived in his office. From the look of the papers and empty coffee cups shoved off to one corner of the spartan, Navy-Issue, surface, he’d been working when Kyle had paged him. Now, the gaunt man was leaning back in his chair looking at a physical picture frame with his biological eye.

  “What was so important that it couldn’t until tomorrow?” the Captain asked.

  “We should probably wait until the Marshal is here,” Kyle told him.

  “Fair,” Blair agreed. “He’ll be a few minutes, I woke him up. Have a seat,” he continued, gesturing to one of the two chairs in front of the desk in the small office.

  Kyle took a seat, glancing at the painting of the Battle of Trinity on the wall. He spent a moment studying it, looking to see if they showed the Marine transports often forgotten in images of the battle. Like so many others, though, this picture only showed the three capital ships that had spearheaded the strike into Commonwealth space.

  Blair put the picture he’d been looking at down where Kyle could see it, revealing an image of the Captain, a dark-skinned woman of Blair’s height with a stately grace to her, and two dusky-skinned, blond-haired, girls.

  “My wife and daughters,” the Captain explained. “The girls are ten and twenty – I’m missing the younger’s school theater play tomorrow, or so her latest letter informs me.”

  “They’re back on Castle?” Kyle asked politely.

  “Yeah, they’re in New Cardiff, just outside Joint Command,” Blair confirmed. “It was convenient when I was in Planning, but then Admiral Kane convinced me to take this command. What about your boy?”

  Kyle shifted uncomfortably.

  “His mother and I don’t speak,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen the boy in years.”

  He didn’t like to admit that he’d never seen his son. He wouldn’t pretend to himself that he hadn’t run away from Lisa and Jacob, but his Captain didn’t need to know the details.

  “I’m surprised,” Blair said quietly. “Your file has you paying the highest voluntary child support the Space Force will allow.”

  The Wing Commander twitched. He wasn’t aware that datum was in the file his Captain could see.

  “The Force takes care of most my needs,” he said carefully. “My ex is still in school – she’s studying for a medical specialization in neural augmentation and neurosurgery. She lives with my mom, and I help make sure the boy is taken care of. It’s the least I owe them.”

  “Becoming a father was the happiest moment of my life,” Blair said quietly, his hand on the picture of his daughters. “I can’t imagine missing more than a decade of their lives.”

  Kyle was saved, thankfully, by the arrival of Lieutenant-Major Ahmed Khadem from having to respond to that comment. He gratefully accepted the opportunity to talk about safe topics like a rapist under his command, rather than his family situation.

  “Captain, Wing Commander,” Khadem greeted them as he entered the office. The Lieutenant-Major – roughly equivalent to one of Kyle’s Flight Commanders – was the senior member of the Federation Marines serving as Military Police aboard Avalon. Even once they embarked the short battalion of Marines they were taking on their tour with them, Khadem would still stand apart from those troops as the Ship’s Marshal.

  “I don’t know about you two, but I do actually sleep at night,” the MP, a dark-skinned man with jet-black eyes and hair, told them dryly. “I intended to stop by your office tomorrow to pay my respects, Commander Roberts, but I’m guessing something more urgent came up?”

  “Take a look at this,” Kyle told him, passing the chip Hammond had given him to the MP. “I’ve made sure there are copies of this in the system,” he continued. “It seems to have gone astray the last time it was handed over.”

  “There’s a reason Lieutenant-Major Khadem came aboard with me,” Blair said grimly as he brought up the executive summary of the report. Speed-reading it, the Captain cursed aloud. “And this went missing?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to pin down Stanford about it,” Kyle admitted. “I’d prefer to grill him over it myself before we get official – he drafted this report, after all, and that makes me willing to extend him some credit.”

  “Is there proof of these accusations?” Khadem asked, eyeing the terse text of the summary Blair’s computer was throwing on the wall.

  “The appendices include camera footage locating Randall, security tracker records, and the report of the ship’s doctor on Lieutenant Williams’ injuries,” Kyle said quietly. “All of them checked out as legitimate Navy records. And equivalent time stamps and index numbers are missing from Avalon’s records.”

  “That is almost as terrifying as the allegation that one of our senior officers raped an officer aboard this ship,” Blair said flatly. “Marshal – I want you to look into how this report vanished from our systems in detail, is that clear?”

  “As crystal, sir,” Khadem said flatly.

  “And Randall?” Kyle asked softly.

  “You have the authority to sign his arrest order yourself,” Blair pointed out.

  “He’s my second in command,
” Kyle replied. “I want both of our authorizations on the order. Mine is already in the system,” he told Khadem.

  The Captain nodded, blinking rapidly as he accessed Avalon’s computer, clearly adding his approval before he turned to the ship’s senior Military Policeman.

  “Marshal Khadem, arrest Flight Commander James Randall,” the Captain ordered.

  The Marine grinned and bowed slightly.

  “Insha’Allah,” he said quietly. “With pleasure, sir.”

  #

  Kyle accompanied Khadem and his Military Police to Randall’s quarters. It was tradition that the MPs didn’t enter Flight Country without an escort of a senior Space Force officer, mostly to remind the MPs that in this section of the ship, even the Captain’s authority had to go through the CAG.

  Khadem had called ahead and had a team of three MPs, probably half of the police awake on the ship as it approached midnight, meet them at the entrance to section set aside for the senior Space Force officers aboard. All three were in full uniform, including black shell body armor and stunners.

  This was his territory, and Kyle led the way to Randall’s quarters without hesitation. One of the many advantages of the high-bandwidth neural interfaces used by starfighter flight crews was the ability to download and follow a map without anyone around you being able to tell.

  “Ready?” he asked the MPs as they halted outside the Flight Commander’s door. The Marshal and his men drew their stunners and nodded grimly, and Kyle flipped an override code from his implant to the door lock.