Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  The ships from what had been Alexander’s convoy weren’t as good at their station-keeping as the ones who’d flown with him. The seven freighters had been supposed to emerge separate from Kodiak, leaving an intentional vulnerability for the Terrans to try and exploit.

  “Well, we definitely have a gap for our friends,” Kyle said cheerfully, studying the bedraggled string of star freighters trailing behind his carrier. “CAG, feel free to launch a couple of extra squadrons and send them back to round up our loose sheep. I don’t think anyone is going to question that today!”

  “Understood. Alpha One through Alpha Three are launching,” she replied. “Sending Two and Three back on lost-sheep duty.”

  Twenty-four new icons lit up on his tactical feed, the Falcon starfighters dropping back from the carrier as Kodiak began to accelerate toward Neverwinter. The sixty gravities the freighters could maintain was a casual lope for the old carrier, but it was enough that simply not accelerating allowed the fighters to close with the freighters.

  “Thoth reports clear sailing,” Jamison told him. “They’ve ceased acceleration and are waiting for us to catch up. Q-probe reports are clean throughout the system.”

  “And our blind spot?”

  “Narrowing by the second,” Sterling replied. “If they’re here, they’re ballistic and on a very specific line. Sixty seconds and I’ll know, one way or another.”

  Kyle nodded silently, studying the feed.

  Sixty seconds and they could be sure they were alone. But their blind spot would only be two million kilometers away from Kodiak at that point. A Hercules was a serious threat at that range.

  Of course, the bombers would only be one point five million kilometers from the blind spot.

  “Commander Trent,” he pinged his engineer. “Do you have that special targeting package I asked for?”

  “Ready to drop into any of the missiles Sterling wants,” she confirmed. “It won’t work perfectly, but you’ve got fifty-fifty odds that the missile will be able to identify the vulnerable side of the modular ship and adjust courses appropriately.”

  “Well done, Commander.”

  He waited, watching the feeds. The blind spot was now marked as a blinking red ovoid, shrinking as Kodiak’s probes shot out into space and the warship herself twisted to clear her own powerful sensor arrays.

  “Got them!” Sterling declared, and the blind spot vanished, replaced by a set of flashing red icons. “No battlecruiser but… Starless Void!”

  Kyle had been expecting the Hercules and the fifteen surviving raiders from Alexander’s encounter. They could take that, but it would be a fight. Without the Terran battlecruiser, he’d been confident they could take fifteen of the corsairs.

  Instead, twenty-eight icons filled his feed as the pirates finally lit off their engines and charged for Kodiak, launching missiles as they accelerated.

  “Target-rich environment, people,” he barked cheerfully. “The order is go, get the bombers in space, full-deck launch. Close the trap, people.

  “It isn’t going to matter how much they’ve shoved in it.”

  #

  “Designate targets one through twenty-eight,” Michelle said as calmly as she could into her wing’s tactical net. The plan had called for her throwing the payload of twenty-four bombers at one battlecruiser and leaving the raiders for the regular Falcons.

  Given that the raiders had already put over a hundred missiles into space heading for Kodiak, that plan was now void and debris. She could throw the responsibility back up the ladder, but that wasn’t what the Castle Federation Space Force expected of its Wing Commanders.

  “Echo One, you’ve got one through eight. Echo Two, nine through sixteen. Echo three, seventeen through twenty-four. Dump your torps as soon as you’re clear of your merchant ship, prep your Starfires for their fighters—because, believe me, we are going to have fighters coming our way.”

  The chorus of acknowledgements sounded nervous, but that was to be expected. Her pilots had never flown their bombers in action before, which made this the Federation—Void, the Alliance’s first combat action for the new ships.

  One bomber, one gunship sounded great in theory, but if they were more protected than Michelle thought, she was about to waste her wing’s single punch.

  “And…go!”

  The structure attaching her bomber to the Satie Dun had taken fifteen minutes to set up and carefully assemble around both the starfighter and the freighter. It came apart in under five seconds as a series of explosive bolts detonated throughout its housing, blasting the Vulture away from the freighter with shocking force.

  “We are clear!” her engineer snapped, the bomber’s engines coming live as soon as they were pointed away from the freighter that had carried them there.

  “Target One is at one point two million kilometers,” her gunner, Vasil, chanted. “Fifteen thousand KPS relative velocity. Gemblades away, Gemblades away!”

  The Vulture trembled as the four Gemblade torpedoes blasted free, their own engines lighting up at over a thousand gravities of acceleration as they happily charged toward immolation.

  Twenty-three other sets of torpedoes joined them, ninety-eight brand-new weapons lighting up the empty space as they closed on the pirates.

  “Seventy-seven-second flight time,” Vasil announced.

  “And there go their fighters,” Michelle noted, watching as each of the raider ships launched ten Cobras into space. “Where the hell did they get that many of our fighters?”

  “I don’t know, but they just sent fifty of them our way,” her engineer replied. “We got a plan for those?”

  “That’s why we have fighter missiles as well,” Michelle pointed out. “And why there’s three squadrons of Falcons also heading our way.”

  She was already setting up the salvos, leaving the torpedoes to her gunner as she laid in targeting parameters for the bomber’s six fighter missile launchers. The pirate Cobras launched first, but only by a handful of seconds.

  Three groups of starfighters were now closing on each other, the space between them rapidly filling with missiles as Falcons, Cobras and Vultures all launched—and in the middle of the chaotic mess, the torpedoes continued closing with the pirate gunships.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Michelle ordered. “All bombers, vector for Kodiak; our role in this mess is done, so let’s try to stay alive!”

  “Impact in ten seconds,” Vasil announced. “Gemblades going to full terminal ECM mode.”

  Entire sections of her feed disappeared into jamming as the torpedoes’ jammers went to full strength, hashing their victims’ sensors and defenses as they hit their final approach.

  At the same time, the Starfires Michelle and her squadrons had launched collided with the Javelins the pirates had fired—and detonated, filling space with radiation and fire as her bombers made a hard vector change away from the fight.

  For a few precious seconds, the entire battlespace was incomprehensible. Even the q-probes outside the zone couldn’t make sense of the mess, and the Vultures blasted clear of the danger zone for the incoming fighter’s positron lances.

  “We’re clear, their salvo is down and they’re not going to be as lucky with Alpha Wing’s missiles,” Michelle’s engineer reported.

  “And the motherships?” Michelle asked. “How’d we do?”

  Her gunner was silent for a moment.

  “Did we get them?” she insisted, refocusing her own feed on their targets.

  “Twenty-two of twenty-four,” her subordinate said softly. “Eternal Stars, that was a fucking massacre.”

  #

  “My God,” Sterling breathed. “Ninety percent kills? The bastards weren’t expecting capital-grade jammers, that’s for sure.”

  “We might not run into quite as unprepared an opponent in the future,” Kyle agreed, “but I think Commander Williams just handily demonstrated the bomber concept. CAG?”

  “Alpha Wing is sweeping in to cover Echo,” Song responde
d immediately. “Twenty-four of mine against fifty of these idiots? I’m not exactly worried.

  “The rest of the group is closing on the remaining gunships. Some covering fire would be nice, sir.”

  “Understood. Sterling?”

  “Missiles already on their way,” the tactical officer reported.

  “You’re still outnumbered,” Kyle warned Song. “Two hundred and thirty Cobras and six of those gunships against eighty Falcons?”

  “Like I said, sir, covering fire would be great.”

  “Thoth is launching long-range salvos as well,” Jamison reported. “ETI is almost twelve minutes, though.”

  “Wait, what are the raiders doing?” Kyle asked, watching his feed. The vectors for the six surviving gunships had suddenly twisted.

  “Ninety-degree vector shift, jumped to Tier Three acceleration,” Sterling responded after a moment. “They’ll sweep by well clear of our lance range and likely dodge the fighter lances, too. They’re running, sir.”

  “And there’s no way they’re going to be able to pick up their fighters,” Song reported. “The hell? Did they just abandon almost three hundred starfighters?!”

  Two hundred and eighty Cobras also meant over eight hundred flight crew. That was cold, though the raiders themselves probably had over five hundred crew apiece.

  “What are the fighters doing?” Kyle demanded.

  “Continuing on course,” Sterling replied. “Like they don’t even realize their bosses just cut and run.”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “Focus missiles on the raiders,” he ordered. “Use Trent’s targeting algorithm; if we smash up the faces where they need to connect, they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “And the fighters?”

  He smiled grimly. “Take us right after Commodore Song, Houshian,” he ordered. “Those are Cobras, people, which means even our secondary lances can take them out a hundred thousand kilometers before they can touch us.

  “They’re not winning this fight.”

  #

  Kodiak slashed through space at two hundred gravities, her screen of starfighters spreading out in front of her at over twice her acceleration. The bombers happily ducked “under” that screen, hiding under the carrier’s skirts as Alpha Wing collided with the starfighters sent after them.

  That fight lasted two missile salvos, costing Alpha Wing two Falcons as they annihilated twice their number of older fighters, but it was a sideshow to the real battle taking place.

  Whoever was in command of the Cobras clearly understood that the only way they were going to get out of this alive was if they took out Kodiak and enabled their motherships to pick them up. They formed the two hundred–plus starfighters they had left into a single massive hammer and threw it directly at the carrier.

  Vice Commodore Song let them come, her own starfighters spreading out to leave the pirates a neat hole to dive into. They saw enough of the trap to lead the way with missiles, launching their Terran-built Javelins in a massive seven-hundred-missile-strong salvo through the opening.

  The sheer scale of the salvos a full fighter force could launch was always intimidating. While the capital ship missiles that Kodiak carried were easily ten times as dangerous, the carrier only had eight launchers.

  Of course, her starfighters had a lot more. Song’s ships launched their own missiles, three hundred and twenty Starfires sweeping in on intercept courses even as Kodiak’s defensive lasers opened up at their maximum range.

  Kodiak might only have eight launchers, and most of those missiles were targeted at the fleeing raiders, but Sterling had spared one. The single missile dove into the heart of the incoming missile swarm and triggered its ECM at full strength. Dozens of starfighter missiles were confused, losing track of their targets and pausing momentarily in their deadly hunt.

  Few of those survived as the defending missiles smashed in. The carrier’s lasers claimed more victims, the antimatter missiles dying in their dozens, hundreds.

  Hundreds more were still coming.

  Kyle watched grimly as they closed. Kodiak was a capable ship, but that was a lot of missiles—and a second, equally large salvo had just been launched from the starfighters. As that salvo launched, however, Song’s fighters were closing in. Lances and missiles flashed in the void, and the pirate starfighters began to die.

  “Lasers cycling,” Sterling announced grimly. “Targets approaching optimal kill zone.”

  “Rededicate our launchers to self-defense,” Kyle ordered. “We’ll deal with Coati’s survivors later. We need to make it through today first.”

  He’d underestimated the number of fighters he’d be facing, and Kodiak might be about to pay for that.

  “Echo Wing is salvoing missiles in counter mode,” Jamison reported.

  Kyle chuckled grimly. He’d ordered the bombers back and had almost forgotten that each of the Vultures had six fighter missile launchers to go along with their torpedoes—and those launchers had four-missile magazines.

  Williams’s people put a hundred perfectly timed Starfires into the heart of the incoming salvo, firing early enough that their missiles had plenty of time to seek out individual targets and late enough that the launching fighters, already distracted by their own imminent demise, couldn’t order their weapons to adjust.

  With Song already having shattered the salvo, and the carrier’s own missile defenses continuing to blow apart missile after missile, it was enough.

  “First salvo down,” Sterling reported, his voice calmer now. “Commander Williams is now linked into our defensive net. Coordinating her missiles with ours, targeting the edges with the lasers. She’ll sweep, we’ll clean.”

  More missiles exploded in the center of the incoming salvo, Jackhammers from Kodiak and Starfires from the bombers. Now the bombers’ lasers joined in the fight as well, the new starfighters less capable in the role than Falcons were, but still a valuable addition to Kodiak’s defenses in the face of the swarming missiles.

  “We have lance range on the lead Cobras,” Sterling reported. “Transferring missile defense to Commander Collinson; engaging starfighters myself.”

  Lieutenant Commander Collinson was Sterling’s second, the junior tactical officer who’d already been helping run the carrier’s defense. Ever so subtly, Kyle slipped into the tactical network himself, making sure the junior officer had everything covered.

  He spent five seconds in the network, ready to leap in to back up Collinson if needed, then pulled back to his high-level tactical feed as the Lieutenant Commander smoothly linked up with Williamson and continued to annihilate the incoming missiles.

  “Any chance we can bring down those raiders?” he asked his crew, confident that the pirate starfighters were handled. More than just the ships were inferior. The Cobra might be older, slower and more lightly armed than the Falcon, but it was still a capable ship. His pilots were veterans of the war against the Commonwealth, though, experienced pilots and combatants.

  The pirate pilots…weren’t.

  “Negative,” Sterling reported after a moment. “They’re well clear and on their way. We can hit them with capital ship missiles, but they can handle the eight of those we can throw.”

  “Jamison,” Kyle turned to his coms officer. “Send a surrender demand to the fighters. Their only way home is running the hell away; there’s no point in them dying for nothing.”

  “Sending,” she confirmed.

  They waited in silence as the lances and starfighters ripped through the surviving pirates, hoping that at least one of them would choose to live. A prisoner would be very useful.

  “Nothing,” the coms officer finally concluded as the last starfighter came apart. “Not a peep. How the hell do you get pirates to fight like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kyle admitted, eyeing the surviving six pirate ships now attempting to merge together to go FTL. “I don’t know,” he repeated, “but by the Gods, we need to find out. Get search and rescue out there. Our people, thei
r people, debris, data cores… I want it all.

  “Anything that can get me some answers.”

  #

  Chapter 32

  Salvatore System

  08:00 November 15, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-052 Kodiak

  The carrier settled into orbit of Neverwinter with a general feeling of relief through the crew. Search-and-rescue craft continued to comb the wreckage of the fight they’d left behind, but the fighters were now converging on Kodiak and Thoth, though Kyle wasn’t entirely sure where they were going to put Alexander’s surviving fighters.

  “We lost six ships,” Song told him from across the briefing room table. “SAR found two of the escape pods, but the crew of the other four are KIA.”

  Twelve lives was a small price to pay to shatter an entire pirate fleet, but that knowledge had never been a strong defense against the letters home for Kyle. From Song’s tired expression, she felt much the same.

  “We have sixty-five surviving fighters from Alexander,” Kyle noted. “How many can we actually fit aboard?”

  “Sixty-five fighters,” Song confirmed, “but Neverwinter Control did search and rescue after the ambush. We have sixty-eight flight crews, and we have enough components aboard to fabricate new starfighters for the five crews, ours and Alexander’s, without ships.

  “That gives us three squadrons of Vultures and twenty-one of Falcons. Kodiak is designed to carry sixteen squadrons…of ships that are smaller than our Falcons,” she continued. “There was heavy refitting done to allow us to carry Falcons in a space that was originally designed for Typhoons, which are two-thirds the size.”

  “I’m guessing Thoth is in the same state?” Kyle asked of von Lambert, glancing at the screen mirroring the equivalent briefing room on the Imperial cruiser. All of the senior officers of both ships, plus Nebula, were present either physically or virtually.

  “The names are different, but the generations and the size differential are roughly the same,” he agreed. “Thoth is much the same vintage as Kodiak, after all. We have no spare hangar space aboard, but…we should be able to spot fighters on the deck as a temporary solution. CAG?”