Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (21 page)

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!
”

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 shooting 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.”

“Ninety minutes from a Commonwealth-held system, Adrian,” Kyle said quietly.

“Right. So I’m immobilizing your shoulder,” Cunningham said bluntly, pulling an uncomfortable looking clamshell cast out from a cupboard.

“Hold
very
still.”

Solace was waiting for Kyle when he returned to the bridge. His exec looked tense, as if ready to spring into action or escape some kind of trap. When she saw him, some of that tension released – only for her face to freeze up when she saw the shoulder brace.

“Are you okay?” she demanded.

“I’ll be fine,” he told her, carefully loud enough for the rest of the bridge crew to hear him. “Adrian was just being very pointed about the fact I shouldn’t move my shoulder.”

“Sorry I couldn’t check in on you,” Solace said quietly, so the rest of the bridge crew couldn’t hear her. “Someone had to be on the bridge.”

“Agreed. You did the right thing,” he reassured her, though the thought that she had
wanted
to check on him gave him a warm feeling he carefully did not examine closely.

“I’ll need you down in Secondary Control,” he continued. “We have no idea what’s going to happen in Alizon, and I want to be sure someone I can trust is in position to take command.”

Solace nodded, stepping out of the command chair.

“Are we expecting it to be that bad?” she asked softly. She was closer to him than usual, and something to do with almost dying made him more aware of that he expected.

“More than anything, every attack our assassin has launched has been more and more blatant,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t put it past our spy to manage to somehow blow up the bridge in the middle of a battle. No matter what, Mira – I want our people safe, and I want the mission complete.”

“Understood,” Solace replied crisply, stepping back as if she realized she’d done something wrong. “I’ll plan to not be needed then, sir,” she continued with a wink.

“If I find footstools and fruity drinks in Secondary Control later, there will be hell to pay,” he told her loudly, startling chuckles from several members of the bridge crew. “Be on your way, Commander. We’re running low on time.”

He traded salutes with his XO and dropped into the command chair. The shoulder brace didn’t,
quite
, hurt – but he was pretty sure Cunningham had dug up the most uncomfortable way possible to immobilize his injured limb.

“Admiral,” he greeted Tobin as he linked into the flag deck. “I have us emerging from Alcubierre in ten minutes. Any updates?”

“Negative, Captain, we proceed as planned,” the Vice Admiral replied. “Are you all right?”

“I’ve never been stabbed before,” Kyle observed. “Blown up, yes. Irradiated basically to death, yes. Stabbed is a new one. I’ll live.”

The big man on the other end of the channel shook his head.

“Someday, Captain, your sense of humor is going to be what kills you.”

“I look forward to it, sir,” he replied. “If my sense of humor kills me, our assassin friend and the Commonwealth have failed.

“We will arrive in Alizon roughly two hours prior to our ETA for
Triumphant
,” Kyle continued. “If everything goes well, they won’t even know we’re there until it’s too late.”

“It’s always possible they’ve dropped a probe on the other side of the gas giant to stop someone doing just this, sir,” Pendez warned from her station.

The Alizon system had an absolutely
giant
, barely sub-stellar, gas giant in its outer system. The massive planet had swept everything outside the third planet’s orbit into its own orbit and Trojans, which had left the second planet – the habitable one – almost completely lacking in the normal array of impact craters.

It also meant that emerging with the gas giant between
Avalon
and Alizon gave them a decent chance of evading detection. It also, unfortunately, meant they would have almost a full light hour to fly.
Triumphant
would arrive two hours after the, but it would take
Avalon
a full twelve to make a zero distance, zero velocity rendezvous with the planet.

Of course, one of the best ways to avoid detection in space was to hide your acceleration in the signature of something large and highly energetic – like a barely sub-stellar gas giant.

“We’ll have to see,” Kyle warned Tobin. “This could be very sneaky – or we could end up looking very silly.

“Either way, we’ll know if the Commonwealth’s force in Alizon is more than we can handle long before we’re past our final point of no return.”

#

Emergence.

One moment, all of
Avalon’s
screens and implant feeds were showing either the strange, super blue- and red-shifted view of the inside of her warp bubble or a computer simulation of the world around them.

The next, the screens were rapidly updated with the reality outside. Alizon IV filled the main screen, its surrounding cloud of collected debris a navigation hazard. Radiation pulsed out from the gas giant, rendering any attempt to see directly past it hopeless.

“Scanning for artificial objects,” Anderson announced immediately. “I’m not seeing anything. No probes, no sensor stations – if there’s anything out here that has picked us up, it’s being damned sneaky.”

Which was, Kyle reflected, entirely possible. Active sensors weren’t needed to pick up an Alcubierre emergence, and no sensor in the world could detect the quantum entanglement link that allowed a Q-Com to work at any significant distance. Alizon IV’s debris field would do handily for hiding a passive-only probe.

“We’ll deal with that if it’s the case,” he said calmly. “Commander Pendez, set your course. Coordinate with Commander Anderson and watch your angles – we need to keep the gas giant behind us at all times.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, with exaggerated patience. “I’ll also make sure there’s fuel in the engines before I fire them, and that the mass manipulators are on.”

He laughed aloud.

“All right, I deserved that,” he admitted. “We don’t sneak very often in a twenty million ton starship – I’m a little out of practice.”

Kyle leaned back in his command chair, allowing the information on the status of his ship to flow through him as Pendez expertly maneuvered
Avalon
into the orbit that would take her around Alizon IV without being seen.

“We’ll clear the debris cloud in forty-five minutes,” she announced. “We will be ballistic at that point in time and for about forty-five minutes after that, then we should be able to bring the drive up at flank acceleration without being detected.”

Nodding silently, Kyle continued to review the status reports from throughout the ship. Everything was reporting fully ready for battle. Positron capacitors were charged to feed the positron lances. The warheads for the starfighter missiles had been charged, and the missiles themselves loaded carefully onto the starfighters. The special capacitors setup to rapid-charge the warheads of the carrier’s own capital ship missiles were fully loaded, and the missiles themselves were in position to be charged and fired.

It was good to see, but also left him feeling nervous. They had a Commonwealth agent of some kind aboard – one who’d tried to assassinate both him and Michael – but that agent didn’t seem to have carried out any other kind of sabotage.

Almost regardless of what
Triumphant
was doing here, they were going to attack Alizon at this point. If there was ever a moment for a saboteur to strike, it was today.

But all he could do was wait. Barsamian was carrying out her investigation even as
Avalon
shaped her course deep into the enemy held system.

Waiting was all he could do for today’s battle as well. With stealth at least the initial priority, he’d ordered no probes or starfighters launched until they were much closer. The smaller craft’s engines were less likely to be detected than
Avalon’s
, but this stunt was risky enough as it was.

The engines cut out, and the big carrier continued her motion now, her course a fast orbit that would bring them around Alizon IV without going too deep into the debris cloud. Unlike the positron lances her electromagnetic deflectors were built to defeat, very little of the debris had any kind of magnetic charge.

Normally, they’d clear their path through this kind of field with lasers and light positron lances, reducing the larger debris to dust and pebbles the ship’s massive ferro-ceramic armor could absorb. This was also
very
detectable, not quite as bad as the engines but close.

He felt his ship shudder as the first of the debris crashed into her armor. They’d run the numbers. They weren’t going deep enough to hit densities that would cause serious damage, but their speed made even small particles dangerous.

It was going to be a bumpy ride.

Dimitri watched his implant feed carefully as
Avalon
swung around the planet, carefully reviewing each piece of information about the system as it came available. He’d also carefully used his authorization codes to setup a heavily secured connection funneling all of the sensor data back to the Alliance.

His codes should suffice to keep the spy from getting any value of the connection, and the Alliance needed to see everything they could about Alizon. If, for whatever reason,
Avalon
wasn’t able to secure the system while dealing with Richardson, the intel she gathered could still allow the Alliance to make plans.

If nothing else,
Avalon’s
presence would draw Commonwealth forces to Alizon, and weaken the defenses at more valuable targets.

Alizon I was visible before its habitable sister. A close-in, star-scorched chunk of rock with no value except for some esoteric science studies, its only recognizable feature was a small science station inhabited by the kind of people for whom unusual rock formations were fascinating.

Apparently, the Commonwealth found said geologists no more worthy of attention than
Avalon’s
Vice Admiral did, as the station was still there and didn’t even have a guardian fighter squadron or other watchdog.

The habitable planet, Alizon itself, was inevitably more protected. As it came into view, everyone on both the flag deck and the bridge focused on what the sensors showed, even if it was an hour out of date.

It looked like the vast majority, if not all, of the civilian orbital infrastructure had survived. There were notable gaps in the orbital tracks, though – places where civilian platforms had been shifted by tugs to clear them out of the path of debris from the orbital battle stations that
hadn’t
survived.

Alizon had a single medium-sized moon, and like most planets with a single significantly size moon, its LaGrange points were clusters of high orbit activity. One of the points had been cleared of civilian stations, however. Instead, a series of recognizable prefabricated Commonwealth platforms occupied the space.

Studying the Commonwealth base, Dimitri realized either he’d underestimated what Snapes had meant by ‘a number of orbital platforms’ or that the Terrans had dramatically expanded their presence since the last Alliance Intelligence sweep of the system.

There were easily eighty or ninety platforms, the smallest a disk a hundred meters across, the largest a series of linked modules and girders almost two kilometers long. Not only were there
definitely
fighter launch platforms in the mix – two of the Commonwealth’s ten ship squadrons were flying a close security patrol – the Terrans had brought in and assembled a complete capital ship repair dock.

“I think that answers the question of what they’re setting up here,” he observed, loudly enough to be sure Snapes, Roberts and Solace all heard him. “That’s a forward repair and logistics base. A cool couple hundred billion Terran dollars.”

“Commander Snapes,” Solace addressed the Intelligence Officer. “I’m seeing at least two squadrons worth of fighters flying escort, but the warbook doesn’t have enough data to pick out the launch platforms. Before we send Vice Commodore Stanford’s starfighters in, can you tell the size of the hornet’s nest?”

“We have some intelligence that isn’t solid enough for the warbook,” Snapes replied. Two of the platforms highlighted in green. An even dozen more highlighted in yellow. “The green are definitely launch platforms, roughly equivalent to one of our Wings – five of their ten ship squadrons.

“The yellow
might
be launch platforms or have squadron bays,” she admitted. “I can’t be certain – but I’d guess we’re looking at about twenty squadrons – two hundred fighters, as the Commonwealth organizes them.”

“Regardless of the launch platforms, I’m betting there’s at least one more factor in play,” Roberts added cheerfully. “That dock may be empty right now, but I doubt the Terrans left her undefended. As the Admiral pointed out, that’s a
lot
of money’s worth of supplies and prefabs. My guess is there’s a starship hiding on the light side of Alizon’s moon – if they’re between the moon and the planet, we wouldn’t see her unless we dropped a probe right into orbit.”