Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Wouldn’t be smart in a normal fight, but it’ll work here,” Michelle agreed. “But…”

  She studied her ship’s systems for a few seconds, then grinned wickedly.

  “We may not have a Falcon’s ECM systems, but the Vulture’s are nothing to sneer at,” she told her boss. “But since Altena knows the Falcons’ systems are better… I have an idea.”

  #

  Kodiak’s starfighter group swirled in a pattern that caused even Michelle to lose track of individual fighters for a moment, and then split in two. Alpha, Delta and Echo “dove”, adding a fifteen-degree vector away from their straight-line approach to Alexander, while Bravo and Charlie went up, adding a fifteen-degree vector in the opposite direction.

  At five hundred gravities, that thirty-degree difference meant that their velocities were suddenly adding a component away from each other at over six kilometers per second squared. Across the multi-million-kilometer distance between them and Alexander, they were going to add enough distance that Altena couldn’t engage both forces simultaneously.

  There were eight squadrons in each sub-group, and Alexander’s flight group outnumbered either one. For at least a minute, however, Vice Commodore Altena and her fighters continued down the center, and Michelle smiled grimly.

  Her Wing’s three squadrons of bombers were currently pretending to be Falcons, and three squadrons of Bravo Wing were pretending to be Vultures…that were pretending to be Falcons and failing.

  Michelle caught herself holding her breath. If Altena took the bait, she’d run seventy-two Falcons into sixty-four, better odds than Alexander’s group had faced before—but the bombers would be clear all the way to launch range, which left the battlecruiser doomed.

  “There they go, ma’am,” Ivan Vasil reported, the younger man flexing his tattooed muscles unconsciously as he highlighted the data for her. “They’re breaking for Group Two. Poor bastards.”

  Vasil was right. The entirety of Alexander’s flight group was breaking “up”, heading to intercept Bravo and Charlie Wings. They’d all have to vector toward the battlecruiser in the end, so Altena was likely expecting to kill the bombers and then sweep back to clean up the rest of Kodiak’s fighters before they reached Alexander.

  It wasn’t going to work out that way. The whole plan was a sacrifice gambit, one Michelle wouldn’t have been comfortable suggesting in a real fight unless desperate, but it also gave them a real chance at taking out Alexander…which also meant that Group Two didn’t need to save any of their missiles for the battlecruiser.

  The game was up the moment the two closing fighter groups reached missile range of each other. Bravo Wing dropped their ECM, and seventy-two Falcons went to rapid fire on all of their missile launchers, dumping over a thousand virtual missiles into space in under fifteen seconds. Michelle’s Vultures would have launched half again as many missiles as the Falcons that were pretending to be them, so the deception was no longer necessary.

  Altena’s people had to keep some missiles back if they were to have a chance at Group One, but Kodiak’s fighters were leaving the cruiser to the bombers. They threw everything at the closing starfighters, then broke off, their engines blazing a new vector that would keep them out of the cruiser’s positron lance range.

  It wasn’t enough to save them all, but over half of them managed to break free—and their missile salvo took out over forty of Altena’s Falcons. A better exchange than they had any right to expect…and one that was entirely irrelevant to the outcome of the battle.

  “Torpedo range in ten seconds,” Vasil reported calmly. “Birds one through four report green; I have the target loaded in.”

  “Flight Commanders, reports,” Michelle ordered.

  “Echo One Actual: all ships are go, all torps are green.”

  “Echo Two Actual: we have one torp on yellow but should be go for full launch.”

  “Echo Three Actual: all green. Good to launch.”

  A mental clock ticked downward and the Wing Commander smiled grimly.

  “Fire.”

  The torpedo Echo Two-Six’s systems had warned as yellow—a random chance on any missile in the sim, higher for the not-quite-prototype torpedoes than most missiles—blew itself apart barely a light-second away from its mothership.

  The other ninety-five torpedoes flashed across the eight-million-kilometer range to Alexander, Altena’s fighters desperately trying to get into position to intercept for the entire ten-minute journey…but failing.

  The battlecruiser’s defenses were designed to stand off about thirty capital ship missiles or three hundred starfighter missiles, a number easily tripled or quadrupled by appropriate use of her starfighters to protect her.

  The torpedoes came in with the same penetration aids and electronic warfare as capital ship missiles, and Vice Commodore Altena and her people were too far out. Fifty simulated missiles struck home, and the simulation calmly concluded as the virtual presentation of the Federation battlecruiser Alexander vanished in a ball of thankfully simulated flame.

  #

  Michelle stepped out of her bomber to discover that Song had beaten her out onto the flight deck, the Vice Commodore applauding gently as the junior woman dropped to the metal flooring.

  “Well done, Wing Commander,” Song told her. “That was very clever, and now Vice Commodore Altena owes me a drink.”

  “We all did our part, ma’am,” Michelle replied, glancing around at the flight crews exiting their craft around her. “I was impressed by Bravo and Charlie,” she continued. “I thought we were going to lose them all; I’m not sure I could have made the suggestion without it being a sim.”

  “It was your plan,” her superior replied. “And it was a good one. It would have been the right call in a real fight, even if we had lost Bravo and Charlie,” Song noted grimly. “Two wings for a battlecruiser? It hurts for us, but that’s a trade I can’t argue with.”

  “We exist to be expended so the capital ships live,” Michael agreed in a murmur. It wasn’t a sentiment Castle Federation Space Force officers liked, but it was certainly one they understood.

  Song glanced past Michelle’s shoulder, and the younger woman could have sworn she saw a ghost of a soft smile drift over the Vice Commodore’s face.

  “That said, we will have a full debrief and see if it’s a tactic we’ll want to repeat,” she told Michelle. “Twenty hundred hours, make sure you and your squadron heads are there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Michelle replied, saluting as her superior swept past her. She turned to follow Song’s path almost unconsciously, watching as Kodiak’s CAG crossed the flight deck to where Commander Taggart was waiting for her.

  The two spoke for a moment, then stepped out of the flight deck and out of sight.

  Strange that the XO hadn’t waited for them to finish the cool-down from the exercise before stealing the CAG away, though Michelle’s implant pinged with the information on the debrief as the thought ran through her head.

  “I see you’ve been paying too much attention to me,” a familiar voice interrupted her contemplation of her superior’s not-quite-inappropriate disappearing act, and she glanced up to see Captain Roberts leaning on the torpedo pylon of her bomber, the big red-haired man grinning at her.

  “That stunt looked like something I’d try,” he continued. “In fact, I’ve added it to my mental file of ‘crazy enough to work’. Well done.”

  “You were watching, sir?” she asked.

  “This ship’s main weapon is its fighter wing, Wing Commander,” Roberts reminded her. “I need to know the temper of my sword.”

  He glanced around. “Kodiak tells me your official debrief is in two hours. If you don’t mind, I’d like to pick your brain on the bombers before then. I’ve seen them from the wrong side,” he told her, “and I’d like to know what they look like from yours.”

  “You’re the Captain, sir.”

  #

  A relatively quick debrief of her own squadrons later, whic
h Michelle only barely managed to keep from devolving into a pure backslapping session, she arrived at the Captain’s office with an hour to spare before she had to meet with the rest of the flight group.

  “Enter,” Roberts ordered, the door instantly obeying the command and allowing her into the office.

  It was still strange to Michelle to see Roberts working on paperwork on a screen. Space Force officers were selected for having an exceptionally high level of neural interface compatibility, allowing them to handle far more data through their implants than most people.

  Space Force officers did almost all of their work via their implants, and Roberts had been unusually capable even in those ranks, able to process the contents of entire reports before most people could even access them.

  That had been then. Before an errant shot by one Michelle Williams had detonated an antimatter missile less than a kilometer from his starfighter and the radiation had burnt out his original implant. The replacement was just as capable, but the scarring in the Captain’s mind had left him with a barely above-average interface capacity.

  And invalided him out of the Space Force, a fate that had saved at least two star systems and a hundred thousand prisoners of war by Michelle’s count.

  That didn’t stop the flash of guilt she felt as she saw Roberts working on a set of datapads and a wallscreen to get through his daily paperwork. He looked far older now, more than the year since they’d last served together should have aged him.

  The massive grin on his face, though, was familiar. The big Captain rose and pulled a pair of beers from the minifridge underneath Kodiak’s commissioning seal of a rifle-armed bear in a gold circle.

  “Have a drink, Wing Commander,” he told her, using the base of his beer to push a datapad out of the way so he could slide the second over to her.

  “I am on duty, sir,” she pointed out carefully.

  “My ship, my rules,” he replied, the grin growing even larger. “And my rules say you can have a beer in the Captain’s cabin, especially when you just turned every member of our little task group into believers in the bomber concept.”

  “I don’t know if I was that successful, sir,” Michelle said, but she took the beer and sipped it. She was unsurprised that it was good—she doubted the Captain would have anything less in a fridge in his office.

  “Without Kodiak, that simulation should have been an open-and-shut case,” the Captain told her. “Splitting the fighter group to draw Altena’s people out of position was a good plan in any case, but it wouldn’t have been enough if you’d been taking Falcons in.”

  She nodded.

  “It’s almost back to the original pylon-based fighters,” she said quietly. “We could easily see the bomber replacing the starfighter entirely.”

  “Different roles, I think,” Roberts pointed out. “Sometimes you need a positron lance, after all. And a bomber is a one-shot weapon—once your torpedoes are in space, you’re a reduced threat. You’re also inferior anti-missile platforms, where a starfighter is a key part of our defensive doctrine.”

  “It sounds like a Commonwealth system, sir,” Michelle pointed out carefully. “Starfighter as a purely defensive platform mated with a new offensive weapon.”

  The Captain paused, the grin fading for a moment, then he chuckled.

  “You’re too clever for your own good,” he pointed out. “I’ll neither confirm nor deny your suggestion, Wing Commander. But yes, the Commonwealth does have the same system.”

  “You said you saw them from the other side,” Michelle reminded him. There was no way he’d done that in exercises; she knew exactly who everyone she’d flown against as an opposing force had been. “There’s no other way unless they were Terran.”

  “My big mouth,” Roberts admitted. “Yes, I’ve commanded against Terran bombers. I can’t tell you where or why, but I can tell you they almost killed us. If the Commonwealth had deployed bombers without us knowing they were coming…” He shook his head. “It would have been a massacre.”

  Michelle considered it herself and the image that came to mind was terrifying: Alexander blowing up because Altena had misjudged where her bombers were…except without the Alliance crews even knowing the bombers existed. Fourth Fleet probably would have taken the brunt of it…

  “It would have been bad,” she agreed. “We’d have lost the forward fleets at least.”

  She and Roberts shivered simultaneously and she considered him for a moment.

  “You have someone with them?” she asked after a moment, wondering if she was getting too personal.

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “Captain Solace aboard Camerone, with Seventh Fleet. You? Alvarez?”

  Michelle was a little surprised that the Captain even remembered her girlfriend from the old Avalon, but she’d do the same for any of her ex-subordinates, so…

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “She got bumped to Nurse-Commander and is serving aboard Blacksmith. She’s one of the Reserve ships. Half of her main lances weren’t working when they reactivated her, so she’s being used as a hospital ship.

  “Alvarez runs the nursing team for one of their main clinics,” Michelle told her boss with no small amount of pride. “We don’t get to see each other much anymore, but…she’s doing well.”

  “We take what we can get during the war, Wing Commander,” Roberts agreed. “We’d all rather spend time with our families and loved ones, but…our job is to make sure everyone else gets to as well.”

  “Agreed.”

  #

  Chapter 11

  Coraline System

  06:00 September 25, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-052 Kodiak

  “Stetson stabilization fields shut down,” Houshian reported. “Welcome to the Coraline System, everyone. We are exactly on schedule.”

  It was early in the morning by the ship’s schedule, and the daily shift change wasn’t for another two hours, but every one of Kyle’s senior officers and department heads had “somehow” ended up on the night watch when they would enter the home system of the Federation’s largest ally.

  “Our q-com was just pinged by Coraline Traffic Control before we exited FTL,” Lieutenant Commander Teresa Jamison, the communications officer, reported. She was a dumpy woman with a perpetual smile, though Kyle was reasonably certain she was smarter than the befuddled expression made her look.

  She was a junior department head on a capital ship, after all.

  “We’ve confirmed our arrival and authentications,” she continued. “Hold one moment.” Jamison’s eyes took on the slightly glazed tone of someone communing with their implant. “Coraline Traffic Control confirms our orders and has asked us to hold position while they chart us a course. Traffic is apparently busy.”

  “You can say that again,” Sterling noted. The balding tactical officer was embedded in the carrier’s sensor arrays. “Take a look, everyone.”

  The tactical plot feeding into everyone’s implants and showing on the main screen began to fill in as Sterling’s people analyzed the data they were received from sensors. A first layer of rough detail appeared, then updated as the Commander linked into the network of Alliance q-probes—sensor platforms with quantum entanglement communicators—laid throughout the system.

  Coraline was a dense system wrapped around a weak K-class orange dwarf star. In the same distance where Sol had three worlds, Coraline had six. Only one, Coral, was habitable, but the others provided easily accessible resources. Two massive gas giants orbited farther out, along with another half-dozen chunks of rock and ice.

  Human industry had touched every single one of Coraline’s fourteen worlds, from cloudscoops on the gas giants to massive mining operations on the uninhabitable inner worlds to observation posts and fighter bases on the outermost rocks.

  Sublight ships, lacking the immense Class One mass manipulators needed for Alcubierre-Stetson drives, swarmed the space between those worlds. Hundreds of ships cut long, arcing courses through space, fuelin
g and maintaining the heavy industry of the Imperium.

  Kyle’s trained eye, though, picked out the differences from his home system. The cloudscoops were physically bigger, their immense heat signatures warning of inefficiencies in their design made up for with size. There were more ships than there were in Castle, but the ships were smaller, slower.

  For all of the energy and swarming activity in the star system, the informed observer could see why Coraline had a gross system product easily ten percent lower than Castle’s. Different approaches to a thousand things added up to massive differences in freedom and economic prosperity.

  “Captain, CTC is back in contact,” Jamison told him. “They have a course for Houshian, and then they requested that I link you in directly to the Palace.”

  Coraline, of course, was also an Imperium—a constitutional monarchy with a caste-divided multicameral legislature. The Imperator was limited in many ways, but he wielded a direct power to make the Senators who ruled the Castle Federation green with envy.

  “Of course,” Kyle agreed. “Link me in.”

  He activated a privacy system on his implant, taking the call entirely in his head, where the rest of his crew couldn’t see or hear. The image on the channel was of an older woman, with tightly braided white hair and a pristine old-fashioned black and gold uniform.

  “Greetings, Captain Roberts,” she said calmly. “I am Vera Strobel, Seneschal to His Excellency, Imperator John Erasmus von Coral.”

  Kyle’s memory warned him that Strobel was dropping at least three of the Imperator’s names. This was an informal call, it seemed.

  “We appreciate your government and yourself taking the time to visit Coral and meet with His Excellency. The debt owed for the rescue of our people in Huī Xing cannot easily be paid, but His Excellency wishes to acknowledge the existence of the debt, if nothing more.”