“Katanas have fired, I read one sixty, repeat one six zero, Javelin missiles inbound at one zero five zero gravities.”
“Understood,” Michelle snapped back. Where the hell was Rodriguez? “Flight Commander Rodriguez, report! We need our cover!”
“Launch delay,” the other senior officer for the test flight responded grimly. “We are one hundred seconds out of range, launching Starfires in intercept mode, but…”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Starfires were fighter missiles, designed to kill starfighters in small groups or capital ships in massed salvos. They sucked at shooting down other missiles. She’d missed the launch delay on her backup when they’d booted the sim, and it was going to hurt.
“All bombers,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm. “Break formation, go full evasive. We’ve lost our cover but someone has to get close enough to launch torpedoes.”
She paused.
“And if someone actually kills that carrier, I’m buying the drinks tonight!”
#
For a starfighter squadron commander, any broad focus tended to be lost once the battle was joined. Squadron leaders were also their own pilots, and while the AI and neural interface systems they used allowed for an amazing amount of multitasking, just surviving in the maelstrom demanded all of their attention.
Michelle had found it wasn’t as bad with bomber command, but with her bombers uncovered by their fighter escorts—a situation she should have noticed and kicked herself for now—the only way they were going to survive to launch was by their own skill.
And she might have been flying a bomber for two months at this point, but Michelle Williams knew she was one of the better pilots the Alliance had. The Vulture bomber was just as maneuverable as the Falcons charging to her rescue; it just normally engaged from far enough away that they weren’t used to needing that capability.
With over half a dozen missiles targeted on each of her bombers, they were going to need every advantage they could get.
“Jamming fields up,” her engineer reported calmly. “Spinning up defensive lasers.”
“Vasil, stay on target,” she told her gunner. “I want those torps launched the moment we have a full solution.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Michelle smiled as the timers began to tick down and the sensor jamming began to threaten the integrity of her tactical displays. Three squadrons of bombers, twenty-four ships, blazed through space. Their locations were relayed to her by the q-com blocks aboard each spacecraft. Everything else in Gawain orbital space, however, she was starting to lose track of.
In real life, this would have just become a suicide mission. Since it was a sim, she could deal with that. All she had to do to win, after all, was kill the Terran carrier that had launched the Katanas at her.
“Torpedo launch in twenty seconds,” Vasil reported. “Enemy missiles at ten seconds and closing.”
Rodriguez’s missiles had done some good, she noted. There were still far too many missiles closing in for all of her bombers to survive, but some of them might survive long enough.
She sank into the neural link, focusing her entire attention on the age-old dance of the fighter pilot. She threw her bomber all over the sky while her engineer filled the space around them with jamming and anti-missile lasers.
Linked into the neural network, she felt her crews begin to die. Each sparkling fireball would have been three dead in the real world, though today they just represented another spacecraft dropped out of the sim.
Every loss was a spasm of self-flagellation, though, one that undermined her ability to fly and dodge. Somehow, though, she managed to twist the bomber through the first wave of missiles, their momentum carrying them off safely into deep space.
“Range!” Vasil snapped. “Torpedoes away.”
Four of her ships had survived and sixteen torpedoes jumped into space, lunging toward the distant carrier—and then the second wave of missiles from the closing Terran starfighters struck home.
#
Blinking at the sudden cessation of the full neural link, Michelle rose from the chair in the cockpit of her bomber—still sitting safely in its docking cradle aboard the Weapons Development Station in orbit of the Castle System’s largest gas giant.
“Well, that sucked,” Ivan Vasil said flatly, her swarthy gunner looking disgruntled as he stretched without leaving his own chair. “What was Rodriguez playing at?”
“The sim threw us a wrinkle,” Michelle replied. “Wasn’t his fault.”
She skimmed the observer feed on the simulation from her neural feed as she spoke, and smiled.
“That said, we got the carrier,” she pointed out. Three torps had made it through and the computer had ruled the Terran ship was crippled, allowing Rodriguez’s wing of forty-eight Falcons to easily finish the job.
“I guess we’re holding you to that beer,” Vasil replied. “But we lost the entire bomber wing doing it.”
Michelle nodded wordlessly, not even needing to say the words that came to mind. Twenty-four bombers and a dozen or so of Rodriguez’s fighters lost would have barely totalled over a hundred casualties—to destroy a ship that had a crew of seven thousand and took fourteen months to build.
“If I survive the debrief with the Vice, I’ll buy those beers,” she concluded as her implant pinged her with an alert. “But it looks like I’m first on the carpet, so we’ll see how much of me he leaves.”
#
Vice Commodore Terry Mixon was a graying officer of middling height, and the man in charge of the Starfighter Projects Section of the Joint Department of Technology’s Weapons Development Station.
He was sitting behind his desk when Michelle entered his office and returned her salute crisply, gesturing her to a seat while the screen on the wall ran through the simulated exercise at ten-to-one time compression.
“A Volcano-class carrier destroyed with its entire complement of fighters in exchange for twenty-four Vultures and sixteen Falcons,” he said calmly. “That’s inarguably an exchange in our favor, except…”
“It should have been cleaner,” Michelle agreed instantly. “I screwed up, sir. Got over-focused on my own section of the mission and didn’t think to check on Rodriguez’s wing.”
“Interesting,” Mixon replied, studying her with unreadable eyes. “Many would point out that Flight Commander Rodriguez didn’t inform you of the delay until you asked him. Especially given your history with the Flight Commander…”
“I have written Santiago Rodriguez up for harassing female members of my squadron three times,” Michelle said flatly. “He’s a sexist pig I wouldn’t trust to watch my parents’ dog, but he’s also a damned fine soldier.
“I suspect he was thrown for as much of a loop as I was by the unexpected delay but assumed that I was paying attention,” she continued. “If I had been paying attention to what was going on, it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to tell me his squadrons were delayed—I should have known already.
“We hadn’t had that kind of wrinkle thrown into an exercise yet, and in a real action, I’d have been notified by Flight Control of the delay,” she noted. “Nonetheless, the responsibility to realize that I had taken my Wing forward without support was mine. I made a mistake, and in the real world, my people would have died for it.”
The Vice Commodore nodded gravely—and approvingly?!
“Good,” he said aloud, his eyes brightening in a smile that didn’t reach his mouth. “I wondered if you’d recognize that—and I suspect that is not a mistake you’ll be repeating.”
“No, sir,” she told him instantly. “I would like to live to see my girlfriend again, sir.”
Which would require her surviving a damned long time, given that her girlfriend, Navy Nurse-Commander Angela Alvarez, was currently running half the hospital aboard a naval support ship with Fourth Fleet.
“Right now, Commander Williams, you are the only fully qualified bomber force commander in the Federation,” M
ixon pointed out. “The Federation would strongly prefer you live long enough to train others.”
“We’re working it all out as we go at this point, sir,” she pointed out. “Most of my people know as much as I do. They’re a good team.”
“They are,” he agreed. “And Command, in their wisdom, has decided that they want to see the bombers and your people in action before they finalize the mass-manufacture design for the Vulture.”
He slid a small velvet case, the kind used for jewelry, across the desk to her.
“I’m glad you took the right lesson away from the exercise,” he noted, “because it would have been damned awkward for me to take these back.”
The case contained two gold circles, the insignia of a Federation O-5—a Space Force Wing Commander.
“Sir, I…” She stared at the insignia. She hadn’t even been a Flight Commander for a year.
“We’re deploying your bomber wing,” Mixon said calmly. “The Space Force doesn’t want any questions of authority or command, which would arise if the wing only had three Flight Commanders. You’ve earned it.”
“Yes, sir,” she said slowly. “Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said brightly. “We’re transferring you and your bombers to Kodiak, one of the old Ursine-class carriers, which is being dispatched Rimward on an anti-piracy mission under Captain Roberts.
“I believe you served under the Stellar Fox before?”
“I was at Tranquility with him, sir,” Michelle admitted, shivering as she remembered the sight of her carrier ramming a Commonwealth battleship after a close-in FTL emergence. “It was…memorable.”
“It doesn’t sound like his career has been quieter since,” Mixon replied. “I understand this should be a straightforward operation, one that will give us an opportunity to test the Vultures in real combat well away from the front.”
“From my understanding, we can use the live data,” she said.
“I agree. Your people and your ships are to report aboard Kodiak by twelve hundred hours tomorrow,” he concluded. “Any questions, Wing Commander?”
Swallowing, Michelle pinned the new insignia to her collar and considered.
“Is Rodriguez coming with us?” she finally asked.
“Rodriguez will be remaining here and continuing to work on bomber-protection tactics,” Mixon told her, his eyes sparkling with that half-hidden smile again. “A detailed file of his notes and tactics so far will be forward to Vice Commodore Song. You won’t be working with him there.”
She smiled thinly but said nothing. There wasn’t anything she could say that wouldn’t be a violation of decorum.
“I should inform my people,” she told him. “I owe them beer as well—I really didn’t expect us to take out the carrier.”
“I’ve told the Joint Chiefs that the bombers appear to be a game-changer, Commander,” Mixon told her. “Prove me right.”
#
Chapter 4
Castle System
10:00 September 12, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Gawain Orbit, DSC-052 Kodiak
Kyle Roberts studied both ships of his new command with a practiced eye as the shuttle carried him toward Kodiak. The two ships had been built twenty years apart, and the evolution of technology in the intervening years was clear just looking at them.
Kodiak was just over a kilometer long, an abbreviated arrowhead one hundred and seventy-five meters wide at the front and three hundred meters wide at the back. She was bigger than his first command, the original deep space carrier Avalon, but less than half the size of his last official command, the new Avalon.
She was also less than half the size of the battlecruiser Alexander, a sixteen-hundred-meter-long spike in space that orbited Gawain just above and behind the carrier. Over double the carrier’s volume and twice its mass, the battlecruiser was a modern ship barely a year old.
By now, though, Kyle was well practiced at picking out the scars of combat. Fourth Fleet had met and shattered a major Commonwealth offensive earlier in the year, but the price had been high. He could pick out the sections of slightly lighter-colored hull where new ferro-ceramic plating had been installed to replace armor vaporized by near-misses and direct hits.
Carefully studying the battlecruiser, he could see where a positron lance hit from a starfighter had torn clean through the warship, turning armor and hull plating into mind-bogglingly powerful explosives and vaporizing Alexander’s bridge.
He looked forward to meeting Captain Sarka. It seemed they had a great deal in common.
“Loop us around Kodiak again,” he ordered the pilot, turning his attention to his own ship. The Ursine-class might be older and smaller than he’d like, but she still carried sixteen squadrons of starfighters—made up of modern Falcons and experimental Vultures this time around.
The carrier might not be much to look at, but her armament would help stand off any immediate threat while her fighters and bombers annihilated the enemy.
The older ship had none of the scars and discoloration that marked Alexander. She’d served ten years in active duty and then gone into the Reserve, only to be one of the last ships reactivated. Kodiak had never fired a weapon or launched a starfighter in anger in her entire career.
That, Kyle was grimly certain, was going to change.
“Anything in particular you want me to fly over, sir?” the pilot asked.
“No,” he admitted after a moment. “Take us in.”
#
A full formal greeting party was waiting for Kyle when he left his shuttle, double files of Marines forming a clear path across the carrier’s flight deck to the two officers, one male, one female, with the doubled gold circles on their collars of Federation O-6s—one Space Force Vice Commodore and one Space Navy Senior Fleet Commander.
Kyle took the time to study his two most senior subordinates as he approached, amused by the contrast between the pair. Melania Song was a tall, dark-skinned woman with notably slanted black eyes and short-cropped black hair, where Cearbhall Taggart was a squat, broad man with shoulder-length blond hair, bright green eyes and extremely pale skin.
“Vice Commodore, Senior Fleet Commander,” he greeted them once he was within a few meters, returning their crisp salutes.
“Welcome aboard Kodiak, Captain Roberts,” Taggart told him, offering a handshake. “I’ve arranged for the rest of our officers to meet with us at twelve hundred hours, but I presumed you would want to read yourself in and tour the ship first? I can move the officers’ meeting up if you wish.”
“No, that’s fine,” Kyle told his new XO with a smile. Taggart was actually older than he was and presumably knew he was on the short list for his own command, but there was no resentment in the man’s gaze or handshake. A positive starting point.
“Is there anything with regards to Kodiak or the Flight Group I need to be aware of?” he asked as he shook Song’s hand as well.
“We off-loaded three squadrons of Falcons this morning in preparation for the arrival of a new strike wing of Vulture bombers,” Song told him in a soft contralto voice. “I believe we should have all twenty-four Vultures aboard by noon, though I don’t know if their commander will be able to join us for the officers’ meeting.”
“I’ve worked with Wing Commander Williams before,” Kyle replied. “It won’t be a problem if she misses the meeting.”
Williams had also almost killed him once, but it had been an accident and he didn’t hold it against her.
“And Kodiak?” he asked Taggart.
The squat executive officer shrugged.
“We are fully stocked on munitions and expendables,” he reported. “We’re waiting on one last delivery: the torpedoes to go with the bombers, but we should have the torps and the design for our fabricators before the Vultures themselves are aboard.”
“Good,” Kyle told them. “I was on the receiving end of the Terran version of those ships and weapons, people. I look forward to seeing our
pirate soon-to-be-friends dealing with them.
“For now, if you both could escort me to the bridge, Senior Fleet Commander Taggart is correct: I do need to read myself in.”
#
“Kodiak Flight Control, this is Flight…apologies, Wing Commander Michelle Williams, inbound with twenty-four V-types assigned to SFG-122. Requesting docking permissions and vectors; ident authentication attached to transmission.”
Michelle stretched in the pilot’s seat of her bomber, studying the approach paths of her three squadrons. There were a dozen small ways that she could tell the Vulture wasn’t a Federation design, though no one had admitted to her that the base design was a stolen Terran pattern. The layout of the cockpit was different, for one, and significantly more open than the Federation usually built.
Unless she was mistaken, the Vulture had been designed to have the flight engineer up front with the rest of the crew instead of at the damage control station the Federation included near the engines. Given that nanites and drones did all of the actual repair work, she could see the logic both ways. When the Federation had built the current generation of Vultures, however, they’d added the separate DC station but hadn’t reduced the size of the cockpit to account for one fewer person.
No starfighter pilot was a claustrophobe, but she didn’t mind the space to stretch.
“Commander Williams, this is Kodiak Flight Control,” the carrier crew responded. “Identification codes verified for all personnel. Note that your designation is now Echo Wing, Kodiak.”
“Understood, Kodiak,” she replied.
“Echo Leader,” Flight Control continued after a moment, “we are currently clearing the flight deck from the Captain’s side party. Estimate ten minutes before you’re cleared for landing. Any vector concerns?”
She quickly checked her people’s speed and angles.
Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Page 3