Call to Arms: Blood on the Stars II

by Jay Allan

  “Yellows, stay focused. And check your own lasers too. Remember, you’ve got a bunch of bombers right behind you, heading for Dauntless. Your job is to keep the Blues from blowing your strike force to bits. These guys are protecting their ship, the only place in the system they can land…so as much as they’d love to chase you all around and rack up kills, they’ll blow past you if you let them. It’s the bombers that threaten Dauntless, and they know that.”

  Well, some of them know that. Hopefully all of them will after this…

  Stockton angled his thruster, bringing his ship around to a spot between the two converging forces. He had been Dauntless’s Blue leader for over a year now, but he’d set that hat aside for the moment and named one of his veterans as acting squadron commander. He was a teacher now, and an arbiter…roles he knew he was comically unsuited to perform. But he also realized these garrison pilots needed some hard lessons, and fast. Or he’d get to watch them all die when Dauntless reached the front. So, suited for the job or not, he was determined to teach them something.

  He tapped his comm unit, flipping off the Blue channel and leaving the Yellow open. “All right, Yellows, you see the formation the Blues are in. Remember, you’re the attackers. Your one advantage is initiative. The Blues are glued to Dauntless, they have to stay positioned to defend. But you can approach from any angle. Just remember, you have to coordinate with the bombers behind you, and the birds fitted out for anti-ship strikes are slower and less maneuverable.” There were no real bombers, not right now, at least. Just a hypothetical wave of them behind the Yellows’ protective umbrella.

  “There are a few ways you can go. Start off by testing your enemy. Change your course and see if they react to you, or if they stay focused on the bombers. Remember, your goal isn’t killing enemy interceptors. It’s getting that strike in so it can do maximum damage to the mothership. Kills are all well and good, but nothing more than a means to an end here. So, if you can get those fighters to follow you away from the bombers, that’s getting your job done before you fire a…”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, Ensign?” Stockton was annoyed at the interruption, but he was also impressed than one of the garrison pilots had the guts to do it.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m picking something up on my scanner.” The pilot was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “I think it’s coming from the transwarp link, sir. The one to Arcturon.”

  Stockton’s eyes darted down to his own display. Nothing. “Transmit your readings to me, Ensign.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It took a few extra seconds for the data to come in. Stockton hadn’t expected the ensign to be as quick on his controls as his veterans, but he was still seething with impatience when his display finally lit up with symbols and figures.

  The kid was right…

  There was something going on at the transwarp point.

  Maybe that’s the courier ship that’s supposed to meet us.

  It made sense, but something felt wrong. The courier was supposed to be in Corpus waiting for Dauntless, not arriving after the battleship had entered the system.

  “Talon, you’re with me. Cover my wing. Blue and Yellow squadrons, return to Dauntless. Now.”

  “Roger that, Raptor.” Corinne “Talon” Steele was one of his oldest veterans.

  Maybe the courier was just running behind…

  Arcturon was a Confederation system, so the ship coming through the transit point was likely friendly, even if it wasn’t the missing courier. But Stockton’s instincts were on fire. Whatever was out there, he had to check it out, and he didn’t want to have to worry about a bunch of rookie pilots who didn’t have a single live missile and who’d burned half their fuel running wargame exercises.

  He pulled back on the throttle, kicking in his thrusters. After a few seconds, his own scanners began to pick up the readings. The data was sparse at this range, just vague energy readings indicating a transit. He held his thrust, accelerating toward the transit point. His eye darted to his readouts. His fuel status wasn’t great, certainly not what he wanted for a scouting mission halfway across the system. But he had the fuel to get close enough for decent scanner readings, and that was his focus now.

  He glanced down at his display to confirm that the others were obeying his order to return to base. His mind told him logically the contact had to be the expected courier vessel, but his gut was screaming something different. His instincts had served him well in combat, and he wasn’t about to ignore them, however unlikely their alarm.

  He cut his thrust, breathing deeply as the crushing pressure disappeared. He would have liked to get his velocity a little higher, but he didn’t have the fuel for that. Not if he wanted to be able to decelerate and turn back toward Dauntless.

  He watched his scanners as he approached the transwarp point. He passed close by planet four, a cold rocky world, possibly inhabited by a few tramp miners, but of no other value. The whole Corpus system, including the more inhabited third planet, was nothing to get excited about. Its main value was that it lay along one of the two routes to the Rim.

  Not that the Rim is any compelling destination…

  Stockton knew the Rim as well as he cared to…whether it was Archellia in all its provincial glory or Santis, where his people had won their status as veterans.

  His thoughts stopped short as mass readings began to come in. The thing was big. Three point one million tons. Energy readouts…

  His gaze froze on the screen. It was no courier ship coming into the system. It was a battleship.

  What would one of our battleships be doing in Corpus?

  His eyes moved across the incoming data, analyzing it as quickly as he could. His fighter’s AI beat him to the conclusion.

  “Contact is a Union Faucon-class capital ship.”

  Chalk up one more for the gut…

  He could hear his heart pounding in his ears. He’d known Dauntless was heading toward the front, but no one had expected a fight here in Corpus. The fleet was gathering in Arcturon. How could a Union ship have transited from there? His mind filled with possible answers to that question, but he pushed them aside. He wasn’t ready to deal with the realities behind any of them.

  “Warbook stats on contact?”

  “Union Faucon-class capital ship,” the AI replied, “three million, one hundred fourteen thousand, two hundred eleven tons. Main armament, dual bomb-pumped x-ray lasers. Secondary armament, twenty-four high-powered laser cannons, maximum output one point one gigawatts. In the most common configuration, Faucon-class vessels carry four squadrons of twelve fighters each. Point def…”

  “Enough.” Stockton slammed his hand down on the comm unit. “Dauntless, this is Blue Leader.” He paused for an instant, a fleeting impulse to wait for a response. But the ship was light minutes away from his current position. They wouldn’t even hear his transmission for almost a quarter of an hour. “Contact entering from Arcturon transit point, Union battleship, Faucon-class. Repeat, contact at transit point, Union Faucon-class battleship.”

  His eyes were still fixed on the display when new contacts appeared. Smaller dots this time, almost in a cloud.

  Fighters.

  “Union vessel is launching fighters. Repeat, Dauntless, enemy ship is launching fighters.”

  He watched as the range readings declined. His own fighter was racing toward the enemy ship, and the clouds of tiny dots were heading right at him.

  “Talon, let’s get the hell back to Dauntless. Fast.”

  “I’m with you, Raptor.” There was a short pause, then: “You bet your ass, I’m with you.”

  Stockton tapped his positioning thrusters, spinning his ship and positioning the engines opposite his current vector. Then he pulled back on the throttle and blasted toward Dauntless.

  I knew we were heading into another fight, but not this soon…

  His new pilots weren’t ready. He’d done his best, but there hadn’t been time. They would pay the pr
ice…and some of the veterans would too, when their new wingmen and comrades let them down.

  * * *

  “Scanners confirm Lieutenant Stockton’s report, Captain. It’s definitely a Faucon-class battleship.” Travis was sitting at her station, her eyes glued to the screen in front of her.

  “Very well, Commander.” Barron appreciated the confirmation from his first officer, but he hadn’t doubted Stockton’s reports. “Raptor” Stockton was a hotshot pilot by anyone’s standards, often reckless with his own safety—and one of the members of the crew most likely to get into some kind of trouble on shore leave—but Barron had seen the pilot looking after his squadron in battle. Stockton didn’t seem like the reliable sort at first glance, but there was no one on Dauntless Barron would rather have at his side in a fight than his ace pilot.

  The battlestations lamps bathed the bridge in an eerie red glow. Barron had wasted no time in bringing his ship to general quarters. He hadn’t expected to encounter any enemies in Corpus, but that didn’t change the reality that he had…or delay his response. Dauntless wasn’t quite as fully-repaired as he would have liked, and he knew Fritz’s people had still been crawling all over the ship, finishing the last bits of work to bring the vessel back from the near-wreck it had been when Barron and his people had limped back to Archellia.

  Was that really less than five months ago?

  Barron wished his engineers had gotten more rest during the voyage to Corpus, instead of an endless series of double shifts under the cracking whip of Anya Fritz, but that wasn’t his biggest concern. Fritz’s team was the best in the fleet, a designation he’d defend against any other captain, and in the most unofficer-like and ungentlemanly manner if need be. He’d seen them in action before, and he still credited them, as much as anyone on Dauntless, including himself, for the victory over Invictus.

  No, it wasn’t the engineers that had him worried. It was the fighter squadrons. He was grateful for Stockton’s quick thinking in sending his people back to the ship to refuel and rearm. But they had just landed, and now he had to decide whether to launch Olya Federov and her Reds, along with the raw Greens, or to wait until the just-returned squadrons were refit and ready.

  He hated the idea of sending his fighters out piecemeal, but the enemy wings were already on his scanners. It was too early to tell how many were outfitted as bombers and how many as interceptors, but if he waited to launch a full flight, there’d be damned little time for his squadrons to hit the enemy before they were in range.

  In the end, it came down to the same brutal calculus it always did. Dauntless came first, and if it was necessary to preserve the mothership, every fighter she carried was expendable. No one knew that better than the pilots themselves, who, he suspected, struggled less with the idea than he did.

  “Commander, issue launch order for Red and Green squadrons. Commander Jamison is to wait and launch with Blue and Yellow squadrons.” He knew his strike force commander would hate that order, but he also knew he’d follow it. Barron was sure it was the right move. “Lynx” Federov was a skilled pilot and squadron leader, more than capable of commanding the first wave…and there was no way Jake Stockton would be back in time to refit and relaunch. That meant the Blues wouldn’t have their commander with them, and the Yellows were still adjusting to their new leader. Barron had complete confidence in Rick Turner’s skill and capability, but he also knew the pilot was still getting used to squadron command, and his people were still dealing with the loss of their beloved former leader. Both squadrons would benefit from Jamison’s presence.

  “Order confirmed. Both bays report launch in progress.”

  Barron didn’t need Travis’s confirmation. The vibrations from the launch catapults were slight, at least all the way up on the bridge, but he knew his own ship well. They’d spent more than a year getting to know each other, and now she felt like an extension of his own body. They’d been to hell and back together, and Dauntless had become part of his soul.

  He looked at the display, watching the stats pour in. He’d launched a full spread of probes, and they were sending back a flood of data. The Union vessel was a capital ship, which meant she was dangerous. But the Faucons were an old class, survivors of the last war, refitted and updated but still well past their primes. And small. Dauntless outmassed her opponent by more than twenty percent, though she was just nearly as old. But after the bow to stern rebuild his sturdy vessel had undergone ten years before, he’d bet it outmatched any of the patch and paint jobs the notoriously sloppy Union shipyards had managed.

  The industrial might of the Iron Belt worlds was often ugly when viewed up close, but those sixteen planets were also the engines that had built the Confederation’s military. The rapacious greed of the staggeringly wealthy industrial families of the Iron Belt was perhaps nothing to be proud of, but they ran a system that vastly outproduced the more numerous facilities of the statist Union.

  There was no doubt Dauntless had the edge in the coming engagement, and by a considerable margin. But there was no room for overconfidence in any fight. He imagined the thoughts that had gone through Katrine Rigellus’s mind, and those of her crew, raised on a steady diet of propaganda about Alliance invincibility. There was no question that Rigellus had run her ship well, like the veteran commander he knew she had been. But his people had won the fight by the slimmest of margins, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that Alliance hubris had been the deciding factor. He’d vowed he would never to make that mistake himself.

  He reached down, flipping his comm unit to Fritz’s channel. “Commander Fritz?”

  “I’m here, Captain.” She sounded out of breath. Barron could only imagine what his chief engineer had been doing to prep Dauntless for combat. He tended to be a bit tireless himself, sleeping no more than three or four hours a night, and often lying long on his bunk, juggling a mental “to-do” list for the day to come. But he’d never seen anything like the relentlessness of his engineer, the sheer driving force contained in her diminutive body…and the ruthlessness with which she expected the same from her staff.

  “Fritzie, I want you to keep a close eye on the primaries.” The pair of massive particle accelerators comprised Dauntless’s most powerful armament, vastly stronger and longer-ranged than anything on the Union Faucon, but the highly-advanced guns were temperamental and prone to breakdown from even the slightest damage.

  “Of course, sir. I always do.”

  “I know you do, Fritzie, but we’ve got to win this battle quickly. We’ve got to get out without taking too much damage…because we may face another fight in Arcturon, and there’s nothing between here and there in the way of repair facilities, save for whatever you and your people have down there.”

  “Well, they’re definitely functional now, sir, and they outrange the enemy primaries by a good seventy thousand kilometers. So, if our fighters can keep theirs off our backs, you’ll definitely get some shots in before they even get a chance to fire back and knock them out.”

  “Yes, Fritzie, but you know as well as I do how tough it is to get every bomber. If a significant portion of that incoming strike is equipped for anti-ship attacks—and you know it is, or they’d be hanging back farther, waiting for our own assault—some of them are going to get through.”

  “I hear you, sir. We’ll do everything possible.”

  “That’s all I can ask, Fritzie.” He slammed his fist down on the comm unit, cutting the line.

  “Red and Green squadrons launched, Captain. Lieutenant Federov reports all units in formation and moving to intercept enemy fighters.”

  “Very well. Do we have a time estimate on Blue and Yellow squadrons?” Barron had almost ordered the Yellows refit as bombers, but he’d decided it would just take too long. And the Blues would have had to wait too, so they could launch alongside the strike force and escort it in.

  He’d been concerned about his lack of bombers in the fight, but now he was happy to have so many interceptors. If the bays could
just turn Blue and Yellow squadrons around and get them launched in time to hit the enemy bombers, then maybe his people could get them all, and spare Dauntless the fighter strike. Then it would be down to a close-ranged struggle. After he’d blasted the enemy with his primaries, he knew his ship had a good chance win the victory before she took too much damage.

  If his people could get the fighters launched in time.

  If.

  Chapter Twelve

  200,000 Kilometers from CFS Dauntless

  Corpus System

  En Route to Arcturon

  308 AC

  “Let’s go, Red squadron…let’s clear a path for the Greens.” Olya Federov leaned forward in her cockpit, staring at the display as she increased her fighter’s thrust. She’d hesitated before ordering the Greens to move forward and attack the enemy bombers. Her Reds were more experienced, more capable than the largely raw pilots of Green squadron. But she’d decided that was all the more reason to do what she’d planned. Dogfighting with the interceptors was a tough game, especially if the enemy pilots were experienced. The bombers were a far easier target, assuming the Reds could blast open a hole through the defensive screen.

  Federov had given her orders, and now she set aside her command hat and returned to being just a fighter pilot. Red squadron was outnumbered, and her people were going to need every hit they could get. Olya Federov had won her ace’s rating and then some out at Santis, racking up seven kills. Now she intended to add to that number.