Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  Sarka saluted with her left hand, leaving the metal block of her right arm hanging, as she passed through the honor guard of Marines and reached Kyle.

  “Captain Sarka, welcome aboard Kodiak,” he greeted her as he returned the salute. “Don’t push yourself,” he warned. “Between your doctor and my doctor, I’m not sure I’d survive letting you overexert yourself.”

  She chuckled. “Believe me, sir, that was made very clear to me.”

  “Shall we, Captain?” Kyle suggested, gesturing out of the deck. “After the week you’ve had, I don’t think I should keep you standing!”

  #

  She’d put on a good face, but Kyle heard Sarka’s sigh of relief as she dropped into the chair in his office. He’d even turned on the smart-adjust feature of the piece of furniture he normally ignored, allowing it to adjust to properly support her injured leg and replacement arm.

  He had a coffee on the desk in front of her before she even asked, and slid into his own chair to wait while she sipped.

  “Thank you, sir,” Sarka told him. “It’s been… a hell of a couple of weeks.”

  “You got yourselves and your convoy out of a very well-set-up trap,” he pointed out. “That was well done.”

  “Not much of a shield against the letters to the families,” she said softly. “Too damn many of my people aren’t coming home.”

  “One is too damn many, Captain,” Kyle replied. “But it’s our job to make sure they don’t die in vain, and you did that with flair.”

  She shook her head.

  “I ran, Captain Roberts,” she admitted. “We had that Hercules outgunned and outclassed, but I ran.”

  “Alexander versus one Hercules is an uneven but not entirely unfair fight,” Kyle pointed out. “Throw in sixteen of those damn pirate ships, whose abilities we’re still not entirely certain of, and the odds weren’t nearly as in your favor…and that was before you took a missile hit.

  “You made the right call, Captain, and my own report reflects that,” he concluded. “If you’d lost your ship, there’d be a Board. But you didn’t, and even a damaged Alexander is still your ship.

  “You’re still here, Captain Sarka, and so is your ship. Your mission wasn’t to kill Terrans or even pirates; it was to get those freighters out safely.”

  “Yes, sir. I know, sir,” she admitted.

  “Good. It’s not going to make the rest of this conversation any more pleasant,” he warned her, “but you did well.”

  “You’re sending us home, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t have a choice, Captain Sarka,” Kyle told her. “Alexander may still have functioning weapons, but she doesn’t have fully functioning deflectors, intact armor, or even all of her damn engines. You’re not combat-capable, and you need a shipyard to fix that.”

  He slid a chip across the table.

  “Those are your formal orders, already countersigned by the Joint Chiefs,” he continued. “You’re to take Alexander back to the Castle system and report to the Merlin Yards. Depending on the repair estimate, you may be held to resume command, or transferred to another ship.”

  “Or a desk job,” she replied.

  “Or a desk job,” he agreed unflinchingly. That was what had happened to him when Avalon had gone in for repairs. He’d taken a black ops command instead, but that was unlikely to be an option for Sarka.

  “But I doubt it,” he continued. “You didn’t screw up and you have a surprising shortage of political enemies. If they send you to an Academy stint, it will be to hold you in place to resume command of Alexander once she’s repaired.”

  “I can hope.”

  “You can,” he confirmed. “Now. This Terran ship. How good were your scans of her?”

  “You got everything we got,” she told him. “We couldn’t ID her, though there are only twenty-six Herculeses left in existence.”

  The Commonwealth, Kyle noted with a smile, had built forty. He was responsible for a significant chunk of that reduction in numbers himself.

  “Was there any evidence of a second Terran ship?” he asked. “I’m assuming there’s something backing up the battlecruiser; they’re unlikely to have sent only one ship this far out.”

  “No direct evidence, though…” Sarka trailed off thoughtfully. “The pirates were firing top-line Stormwinds, the Fives with their extra fifty gravities of acceleration. A Hercules doesn’t have heavy-enough magazines or parts storage for them to have stripped her supplies to arm pirates. There’s got to be a logistics ship somewhere.”

  “You’re right,” Kyle said. “Two warships and a logistics support vessel. I can’t see them sending anything less this far out into functionally hostile territory.”

  “Though if they have local support…from, say, Istanbul,” she pointed out.

  “That’s an ugly thought,” he said grimly. “And my problem now, not yours.

  “I’ll need you to offload your spare fighter parts and missiles before you go,” he continued. “We’ll coordinate with the Serengetis, but I’m thinking we’ll use your supplies to set up a temporary logistics facility here.”

  “Someone is going to have to go pick up my starfighters,” Sarka pointed out. “They should have made Reinhardt safely, and while they don’t have any FTL warships, I wouldn’t want to tangle with their system defenses.”

  “We’ll get them,” Kyle promised. “No one gets left behind, Captain Sarka.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank me by getting your ship home and fixed up,” he ordered. “We’ll deal with the Terrans here, Captain. They do not know what hornets’ nest they’ve poked.”

  #

  “Sir, we have Serengeti Fleet Command hailing. They’re looking for you,” Jamison told Kyle over his implant. He’d only barely seen Sarka back to her shuttle and had been heading for lunch, but…

  “Understood,” he told her. “I’ll take it in my office.”

  Fortunately, while he didn’t generally make use of the privilege, he did have a steward who could bring him lunch. The man was more efficient than Kyle gave him credit for as well, which meant that a steaming grilled sandwich was waiting on his desk as he sat down to take the call.

  “This is Captain Kyle Roberts aboard Kodiak,” he greeted the image that appeared on his wall. “How can I assist you?”

  “Captain Roberts, I was more hoping I would be able to assist you,” the albino-pale but green-eyed woman wearing a navy blue uniform on his screen told him. “I am Admiral Jale Szwarc, the commanding officer of the Serengeti Fleet. I am also, with the destruction of Maasai with Admiral Tesarik aboard, our only remaining Admiral.

  “Your mission is my mission,” she concluded, “but I now lack the capacity to project power beyond my own star system. Our First Minister has ordered me to provide any and all assistance that I can to your task group.”

  “We appreciate the willingness to assist, Admiral,” Kyle told her. “Your welcome of Alexander was a desperately needed helping hand. We have discovered our true enemy, but that…well, that’s not exactly reassuring.”

  “Indeed,” Szwarc agreed. “The presence of actual Terran warships in this sector is an aggression we cannot afford—but also, unfortunately, one we cannot prevent. The core trio of the Free Trade Zone once possessed five Alcubierre warships.

  “Now we have none,” she said grimly. “I was confident in the ability of my local forces to defend the Serengeti system, but the presence of a modern Terran warship working with the pirates… I am no longer so certain.”

  “We came here to deal with pirates, Admiral,” Kyle said. “But we half-expected to find Terrans here, so we are prepared. There are a few arrows in my quiver they’re not expecting, though I’m working through the best options for deploying them.”

  “I doubt our supplies of munitions are necessarily of use to you, but if you need fuel or food or any replacement parts we can provide, they are yours for the asking,” she offered. “My analysts have prepared a summary of our intel
ligence on these pirates that I will forward to you. I doubt we know much that you don’t, but I can at least put a name to your enemy.”

  “Not, I am presuming, the Terran commander?” Kyle asked.

  “No. But I know who commands the pirates they’ve allied themselves with,” Szwarc replied. “Commodore Antonio Coati was once one of mine, commander of a deployed detachment in one of the Free Trade Zone systems.”

  Her tone was leaden, but she carried on with grim determination.

  “He apparently used the gunships he’d been assigned to pirate ships in that system, doing exactly the opposite of what he was there for, and then… Well, to be honest, I don’t know how he went from a squadron of sublight gunships and a stolen Alcubierre freighter to a fleet of unique warships with Terran allies, but he’s been building to this for fifteen years.”

  “You knew him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “He was my first squadron commander,” Szwarc confirmed. “Knew him? Hell, I almost married him. Though, to be honest, he was a prick then. He was just an exotically pretty asshole.”

  “And now he’s an exotically pretty pirate warlord,” Kyle concluded. “With a unique type of ship I’ve never seen before that is sadly perfect for piracy.”

  “And I have no idea where he got them from,” the Serengeti officer replied. “Everything we know will be forwarded. Is there any other way we can assist?”

  “Several, actually,” Kyle realized aloud. “First, we’ll be offloading a quantity of supplies—munitions, starfighter parts and so forth—from Alexander before she ships home. If you have a secure storage facility we could put them in, that would be very useful.”

  “We have several orbital facilities inside the planetary fortifications that could serve,” she told him. “We’d be delighted to put them at your disposal. Anything else?”

  “Your intelligence network has to be more capable out here than ours,” he said. “The pirates seem to know too much about the convoys. There’s a leak, probably several.”

  “I agree. We’ve identified several possibilities, but not with enough certainty to act yet.”

  “I don’t need them removed,” Kyle told her with a wide grin. “I need them leaked to.”

  #

  “I got it!”

  Kyle looked up, blinking in surprise at the unexpected opening of his office door, to see his chief engineer standing in the middle of the room with a datapad in her hand, her hair a tangled, unkempt mess, her uniform jacket askew, and an expression of pure triumph on her face.

  “Got what, Commander?” he asked Trent carefully. Taggart hadn’t reported any further issues in Engineering, so he’d presumed that Trent had taken their earlier conversation to heart. Her current state, however…

  “How the bastards built the modular ships,” she replied, dropping the datapad on his desk. “It’s not supposed to be possible, but once you know it is, it’s just a question of math and engineering.”

  “I don’t follow,” Kyle admitted.

  “The position of the Class One mass manipulators and Stetson stabilizers on a ship is a matter of detailed calculation, down the micrometer,” she insisted. “You can lose some stabilizer emitters, or spread the power over more Class Ones, but the positioning of everything has to be perfect.

  “You can’t do that with modular ships, not unless you’re always having the exact same ships linking together in the exact same ways. Except…”

  “Except?” he prompted.

  “Except if you set up just enough extra stabilizers, at the right frequencies and positions, you can use them as a reinforcing network and cancel out the inherent instability of the warp bubble you create by not having exact positions for everything. It’s genius, sir.”

  “I…am not going to pretend I followed that entirely,” Kyle admitted. “But…that’s a complete change in how A-S drives work, isn’t it?”

  “It’s revolutionary, Captain,” she told him. “If I’ve run my calculations correctly, by increasing the materials cost by three percent, we could cut assembly time of an A-S drive by over sixteen percent. That’s a major difference in construction time and costs.”

  “Package it up and send it back to Joint Command,” he ordered. “That’s valuable, Ivy, I agree, but it doesn’t help us today—unless you’ve worked out some way to magically make any ship built like that disappear.”

  The engineer paused with her mouth half-open, whatever she was about to say forgotten in a flash of inspiration.

  “It would be even more vulnerable to interior shear interference,” she said slowly.

  Kyle sighed. He was a long way from stupid, but Trent was losing him again.

  “Explain for the people with only one university degree?” he asked gently.

  “They couldn’t have planar gravitic or electromagnetic fields inside the bubble,” she told him. “Like deflectors. They couldn’t even have zero-point cells outside a certain distance from the sections of hull with the stabilizers.”

  He stared at her.

  “You’re saying there’s an entire side of their ship that can’t have weapons or defenses?” he asked carefully.

  “Exactly. The shear interference risk for the combined FTL would be too high. They’d risk losing all of the ships.”

  “Damn,” Kyle murmured. “Now, that, Commander Trent, is useful. Anything else I should know?”

  “They have to have one Class One per ship, no more, no less,” she reeled off. “They can’t generate a warp space bubble with less than four or more than six ships. Significant hull damage will render a ship incapable of helping generate the bubble; the only way a damaged ship could travel would be to completely shut it down and wrap four of its friends around it.”

  “That’s one hell of an operational vulnerability,” Kyle pointed out. “I don’t know if we’ll be seeing these ships in Alliance service on that grounds alone.”

  “It’s brilliantly done,” Trent repeated, “but the principle is better applied to making the construction of proper A-S drives faster.”

  “Make sure your notes make it home,” Kyle reiterated. “And…Commander?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You have about five days to work out how to detect the unprotected side of one of these bastards from missile range.

  “Good luck.”

  #

  Chapter 29

  KDX-6657 System

  19:00 November 8, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  BC-305 Poseidon

  “My dear Commodore, so pleased you can make time for me!” Coati grinned through James’s screen. “Where is your dear Chariot, thought? I expected to see them by now.”

  James smiled thinly. “They’ll be around,” he told the pirate. “A lot of people were asking questions on Amadeus; Captain Modesitt chose to keep her ship well out of sight and send in the prisoners by shuttle. Last I heard, we had a near-complete set of ransoms and the last of the shuttles were heading back out. Carefully.”

  “I am aware of the concept, but damn, it takes so much time,” the pirate replied. “And you seem to have turned a whole new leaf on keeping yourselves hidden!”

  “Captain Modesitt went out on our older orders,” James reminded him. “And there’s no reason to show more of my hand that I have to. Chariot is an older ship; if our dear Fox hasn’t seen her, he will likely assume my consort is more powerful.”

  “Why would he even think you have a second ship at all?” Coati asked.

  “Because Kyle Roberts is not stupid, and likely has figured out that I have three ships, one of them a support vessel,” the Navy officer replied. “It’s the logical force to have sent out this far into hostile territory. He can rely on the locals for resupply. That was not so certain for me.”

  Coati spread his hands wide with a disingenuous grin.

  “Have we not been supportive?” he asked. “Food, weapons, fuel…all that you have asked, we have given. Have we not been proper allies?”

  “You ha
ve,” James allowed. He didn’t trust the pirate warlord, but the man had certainly met their resupply needs. “We could not be certain you would be so willing or so able. We were prepared for the worst.”

  “And instead, you got me!” Coati replied, his grin widening. “We have been lucky, my dear Commodore. My sources in Serengeti have learned where Roberts plans on taking his growing collection of stray merchantmen next: he is heading to Salvatore to enable the deliveries we short-stopped before, and to pick up the fighters they abandoned.

  “You’d think he’d have learned that system was unsafe for his people.”

  “My sources have established his full ship strength,” James pointed out. “Neither a Rameses nor an Ursine are new ships, but both carry significant fighter wings that I am certain have been fully updated. A hundred and ninety seventh-generation starfighters, even assuming that we manage to keep the seventy they left behind out of the fight, is more than I’d want to take on in a straight fight, even with your corsairs.”

  “My intelligence has their emergence loci, their course, everything,” Coati replied. “They’re expecting an ambush, sending in the Imperial strike cruiser first to try and lure us out of position. But, since we know what they’re doing, we can arrange our vector to completely miss the Rameses and just hit the Ursine and the convoy.”

  James sighed. “Show me,” he told the pirate.

  Coati grinned, lighting up part of the screen with the information that he’d acquired. Times, vectors; the pirate really did have everything he’d said he did. The convoy would be leaving Serengeti in a few hours, heading back to Salvatore with two warships and seven freighters now.

  The data even had the arrival sequence. The Imperial cruiser—apparently Thoth—would arrive first, roughly fifteen minutes before everyone else. She would presumably deploy q-probes and starfighters to sweep the area to make certain no one was lurking there, but knowing their arrival vector would let the pirates evade that with a reasonable degree of certainty.