Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Around those three are sixteen other systems of various economic weight that don’t have their own interstellar shipping or warships and are dependent on the FTZ shipping lines.” Those systems flashed silver.

  “Traditionally, the FTZ has run about thirty ships, funded by a mix of investment by their governments, private investment, and investment by Castle, Coraline, and the Renaissance Trade Factor,” he noted. “Right now, over half of those ships are missing or confirmed lost. That’s a lot of money and a lot of lives, people.

  “The Antioch government started convoying shipments a month ago. They lost Crusader in that effort, leaving Antioch without any interstellar warships. They’ve been holding ships inside their sublight defense perimeter since. The original intent was to wait for Serengeti’s carrier to arrive, but the timeline on that is… Well, we’ll be there first,” he finished.

  Kyle watched his officers’ faces as the numbers sank home. An Alcubierre-Stetson drive interstellar freighter was, roughly, two percent of the GSP of a prosperous system to build. The only reason the three systems at the core of the Antioch-Serengeti Free Trade Zone had managed to assemble thirty was because the Alliance powers had subsidized their purchases.

  Losing fifteen of those ships could easily be a crippling blow to the Free Trade Zone. Losing more would destroy it and likely undermine the economic and technological advance of the sector by a century.

  “Since the largest concentration of remaining shipping is in Antioch, we are heading there first,” Kyle continued. “From there, Kodiak will proceed to Istanbul, Alexander will proceed to Serengeti, and Thoth will either escort a convoy through the secondary systems or accompany one of the other ships, depending on where people are headed from Antioch.

  “While our first task is the protection of the local ships and systems from the pirates, information gathering is extremely high-priority. We need to know more. We need to know who these pirates are, where they’re based, and whether or not the Commonwealth is supporting them or simply stirring the pot.”

  “Imperial Intelligence is over ninety percent certain the Commonwealth is involved,” von Lambert told them. “But…”

  “But that could simply be them pulling strings in the local governments,” Kyle replied. “I put the odds at no better than fifty percent that there are actually Commonwealth warships out here…but if they’re here, our job will be to put them down.

  “Along with the pirates.”

  #

  Chapter 15

  Salvatore System

  09:00 October 4, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  BC-305 Poseidon

  Whoever had named the habitable planet in the Salvatore system “Neverwinter” had clearly already completed the climate survey, James Tecumseh concluded. The planet sat in the inner portion of its yellow star’s Goldilocks zone and had zero axial tilt.

  The equatorial zone was barely habitable by human standards, but the massive archipelagos farther north and south were basically tropical paradises. The weather was calm, the soil had taken readily to human-compatible crops and there was enough sunshine to allow solar power to be a main source of energy.

  The planet was a paradise by any standard. Now…it was a tourist destination for the rich and wealthy of a dozen star systems. The local economy was surprisingly weak, Neverwinter having acquired a culture of doing just enough to get by—“getting by” in paradise, after all, being better than many people in the galaxy worked for.

  Interstellar tourism was a game for the wealthy from the tourists’ side and a game for scale on the transport companies’ side. A single ticket on an interstellar vacation ship could cost as much as six months’ salary for an average worker—but an Alcubierre-Stetson drive liner carried between fifteen and twenty thousand people.

  Which meant that there were no possible circumstances under which Commodore James Tecumseh of the Terran Commonwealth Navy was going to let “Commodore” Coati anywhere near a tourist liner.

  So, Poseidon and Chariot found themselves in the Salvatore system, cutting a fast ballistic orbit toward the scheduled emergence point of the cruise liner Ocean Dreams.

  “What’s the status of the jamming platforms?” he asked Commodore Sherazi over their implant link.

  “We have eighty-five in space accompanying us on our orbit,” the other man told him. “As soon as they go live, no one in Salvatore is going to see anything but static and IR flares for at least an hour.”

  “It better work,” James murmured. His orders were to avoid detection.

  “It will work,” Sherazi told him. “It will definitely work better than letting those psychopaths loose on a ship full of twenty thousand rich idiots.”

  Planetary populations were large. Finding twenty thousand people rich enough to pay for an interstellar ticket wasn’t easy, exactly, but it was definitely doable…but it made those people a target.

  “Starfighters?” he asked his flag deck staff aloud.

  “Colonel Duke and Colonel Costanzo have their wings ready to deploy,” Lieutenant Amoto told him. “They report all launch tubes are loaded and they can have all their birds in the air in under sixty seconds.”

  James grunted his acceptance, watching the screen.

  He didn’t like commerce raiding, but he saw the value—especially of capturing thousands of rich(and hence visible)tourists. Plus, if his intelligence was correct, Serengeti’s government saw the value as well and…

  “Alcubierre emergence! We have two ships—confirm ID on Ocean Dreams and a second ship.”

  “I need ID on that other ship,” James snapped.

  “Warship, Renaissance Factor design,” Sherazi told him. “Looks like a carrier, I’m going to guess Livingston-class, which would make her Maasai.”

  “There’s only one RTF-built warship out here,” James agreed. “Trigger the jamming platforms and launch the starfighters. We have our customer.”

  #

  James mentally saluted Maasai’s commander. A bubble of space two million kilometers across dissolved into static and random heat flares, rendering their sensors almost completely useless at any extended range…and they had starfighters and q-probes in space in seconds.

  “Inform Colonel Duke she has the call,” he instructed Amoto. “Poseidon and Chariot are clear to engage with missiles but are not to approach within one million kilometers of Maasai. Even with this jamming, we cannot risk approaching closer with the capital ships until Maasai is captured or destroyed.”

  And captured was unlikely.

  “What are we looking at for starfighters?” he asked, watching the tactical feed through his neural implant as the ninety starfighters aboard his two cruisers blasted into space. Maasai was an old-enough carrier that she only had ten squadrons aboard, which meant his people outnumbered the Serengeti ships…but if the Serengeti crews had modern ships, they could take a lot more losses than he wanted.

  “Warbook is calling them Typhoons,” the analyst running his data feed told him. “Castle Federation fifth-generation fighter, a pretty standard export product for the Federation. Slower, more lightly armed and more lightly shielded than our Katanas.”

  “And the Serengeti military knows it,” James murmured. “Duke, you getting this?” he asked his senior starfighter officer.

  “Aye, sir,” she replied over the link. Even with the communication taking place at the speed of thought, the starfighter pilot managed to sound distracted. “They’re holding position around Maasai while their probes try and nail us down. They’re not sure what to do with this jamming.”

  “I’d hope not,” James said dryly. For each jamming platform they’d fabricated, they’d used up components intended to manufacture four missiles, and he wasn’t expecting to get them back. The cost of the scheme vastly outweighed its effectiveness…except that it allowed him to go after a ship full of civilians without bringing Coati.

  “They know how old the Typhoon is,” he continued. “Don’t assume they match the war
book.”

  “Agreed,” Duke replied in a tone that suggested that the flag officer shouldn’t be telling her how to do her job. “Most likely modernized the deflectors and upgraded the engines. Q-probes aren’t showing a sufficiently overcharged zero-point cell to feed a more powerful lance, though, which means I have them outranged.”

  She paused.

  “We’ll deal with them, sir. What about the carrier?”

  James closed his eyes, sighing internally and making sure it didn’t carry over the neural link. He didn’t like it, but…they couldn’t demand that the carrier surrender.

  “Take her out,” he ordered flatly. “Leave Ocean Dreams for Barbados. We’ll have missiles leading the way, but I can’t afford to spend many of them.”

  “I wasn’t planning on using any of mine,” Duke told him with a chuckle.

  “Good hunting, Colonel.”

  The pilot dropped the communication channel and James leant back in his command chair, studying the battlespace.

  Sherazi’s engineers had done them proud. The jammers were an extravagant overkill to a complex problem, but they worked. Even Poseidon’s computers, which were running the jamming platforms, were having problems making sense of the hash of radiation and heat signatures the platforms were turning everything into.

  Scattered through the chaos were islands of greater accuracy where the Commonwealth battle group’s q-probes moved. The battlecruiser’s computers were crunching all of the data from the probes and the starfighters, resolving over a hundred separate datapoints into a relatively clear picture.

  The Serengeti crews clearly didn’t have as many q-probes out and didn’t have the advantage of being linked into the jamming platforms themselves. James’s people couldn’t localize the enemy probes, but he could guess at their maximum reach simply because their starfighters remained stubbornly wrapped around Maasai.

  “Starfighters are ten minutes from contact. Fighter missile range in two.”

  “Watch for the Serengetis to launch missiles,” James ordered. “Are our birds in the air?”

  “First salvo firing now,” Sherazi interrupted. “Three salvos from each ship, just under a hundred missiles total. If they haven’t upgraded her…”

  “They’ve upgraded her,” James concluded into the silence his flag captain left. “It’s a question of how much.”

  “We’ll see in sixty seconds,” Poseidon’s CO told him. “They’ll pick them out of the jamming in time for the starfighters to intercept as well. Even this mess won’t hide missiles for long.”

  The missiles were clearly the first thing the defenders picked up. They were still almost a full light-second out when the starfighters finally sortied, sixteen remaining in a tight defensive net around Maasai while the other sixty-four charged out at the missiles.

  They were presumably guessing that the starfighters were coming on the same vector as the missiles.

  “When will they pick out Duke’s people?” James asked.

  “They should have already,” his analyst replied. “Hell, if they don’t pick them up before they hit the missiles, Duke may well get a free shot right at them.”

  They’d see the Terrans before then, James was certain. There was no way his people outclassed the locals that badly. He was certain of that.

  He still found himself watching carefully and feeling like he’d just shoved something helpless into a piranha pond. Maasai’s starfighters were swinging out in a pure anti-missile formation, and they were well inside missile range of Duke’s ships.

  Then their formation finally scrambled, their vectors and patterns dissolving into garbage as they clearly finally spotted Colonel and her ninety starfighters.

  “Too late,” James murmured. “Make a choice.”

  They could take out enough of the missiles to make sure Maasai was safe…but only by flying straight enough that Duke would rip them apart.

  The Serengeti commander saw the same dichotomy and James mentally saluted them as the formation straightened out—and then every Typhoon launched missiles. They emptied their magazines at Duke while they laid their own beams on the incoming capital ship missiles.

  Explosions tore through space, Duke’s people opening up on the fighter missiles and the defender’s tearing into the capital ship missiles simultaneously. Dozens of gigaton-range fireballs lit up the void, each adding to the chaos the jamming platforms were throwing across the battlespace.

  Poseidon’s computers did their best to resolve the chaos, drawing in positron lance beams as sterile white lines on the tactical display. Where those sterile white lines intercepted the icons of enemy fighters, more explosions lit up the void as the beams of pure antimatter ripped through the spacecraft.

  “First salvo neutralized. Enemy missiles closing on our starfighters.”

  “Duke’s in range,” a second analyst reported. “Targets are minimally evasive, starfighters engaging.”

  More sterile white lines on the display, the computer showing James the dance of death Aimee Duke led her people through with a calm dispassion.

  “Duke reports targets neutralized,” Amoto told James, the comms officer looking up from his console. “If any of them survived, she can’t pick then out of the jamming, but they still have missiles inbound.”

  “She’s clear to do whatever she thinks is necessary to preserve the fighter wing,” James ordered. “Maasai isn’t going anywhere now.”

  Duke, quite sensibly, hadn’t waited for James’s permission. Her formation split apart, each of her starfighters adding new and complex layers of vector as a tight, if random-seeming, formation opened up into a mobile cloud of starfighters.

  It cost her delta-v toward Maasai—a lot of it—but combined with the jamming field it dramatically increased the survivability of the starfighters and opened up dozens of new lines of fire on the incoming missiles.

  “Duke has a clean sweep on the starfighter missiles; our remaining missiles are closing on Maasai.”

  James had to double-check the analyst’s comments to confirm for himself, but they were right. The Terrans had taken ninety starfighters against sixty-four and hadn’t lost a single ship. They’d known they would win, but a clean sweep was better than he’d hoped.

  “Second salvo is fully neutralized but we took out two of their fighters. Last salvo now closing.”

  There were two capital ship missiles in the salvo for every starfighter the Serengeti carrier had left, and the warship went all out to try and save herself. Lasers and positron beams lanced out through the jamming, trying to track the incoming missiles.

  “Damn! They just took out one of their own starfighters!”

  A starfighter had zigged instead of zagged, and a seventy-kiloton-a-second secondary positron lance had taken the Typhoon dead center and incinerated it, creating a momentary gap in the defenses—a gap that lasted too long.

  Three more fighters collided with missiles as they rushed to cover the gap, and two missiles made it past everything the defenders could throw at them. Two bright explosions lit up deep space, and James breathed a sigh of not-quite-relief.

  “Colonel Duke, is Maasai disabled?” he asked aloud.

  “She’s spinning and has ejected at least one major zero-point cell,” the starfighter pilot reported after a moment. “Your orders?”

  Maasai was mission-killed, but…

  “Get at least one squadron into position on her,” James ordered. “If she tries to engage, blow her to hell. If she’s smart, leave her. That carrier is dead whether we vaporize her or not.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get me Barbados,” James told Amoto. “Time for his people to earn their keep.”

  #

  Eight hours later, Ocean Dreams, escorted by the two Commonwealth warships, jumped back to FTL, leaving Maasai drifting crippled in a long ballistic orbit of Salvatore. Neverwinter had enough sublight ships to carry out search and rescue for the warship, though they quite sensibly hadn’t even budged from orbit while t
he jamming platforms were in place.

  “All ships are under Alcubierre-Stetson,” Sherazi reported. “Your orders, Commodore?”

  “Blow the jamming platforms and q-probes we left behind,” James ordered. “No evidence we were there can be allowed.”

  “Done,” the junior Commodore replied instantly. “Holding q-probes to confirm jamming platform destruction…”

  Sherazi paused for a moment, then James got the clear impression of a nod over the neural link.

  “All jamming platforms destroyed, detonating the q-probes. We no longer have live data from the Salvatore system.” He paused. “Do we have a destination?”

  “Drop us one light-year from KDX-6657,” James ordered. “We’ll retrieve the Marines and redirect Ocean Dreams there.”

  “Understood.”

  James breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared they’d made it in and out of Salvatore without being identified. There was a chance that Maasai had acquired clear-enough data to be able to identify the fighters…but it was a small chance, and one he was prepared to accept to not have to murder the survivors of her crew.

  He’d been sent to raid commerce, not commit atrocities, and he had a damn good idea of where the line was drawn. It was the same reason why he had no intention of taking Ocean Dreams into a system Coati controlled.

  “Get Barbados on the line,” he ordered Amoto. He trusted the Marine to tell him if he was still too busy to talk to the Commodore, though since they had control of the ship’s bridge and engineering, the Marine CO shouldn’t be.

  It still took several minutes to get the Colonel on a channel, but the q-com link was to the liner’s extremely luxurious bridge. The Marine sat on the very edge of the captain’s chair, as if concerned the overstuffed, automatically adjusting leather seat would try and eat him.