Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  DSC-052 Kodiak

  “Unscheduled Alcubierre emergence!”

  The alert slammed into Kyle’s implants like a war horn going off in his ear, instantly waking him from his slumber and jerking him bolt upright.

  “Unscheduled Alcubierre emergence!” Sterling’s voice repeated, the tactical officer’s tone grim as he gave the warning, hesitating before giving the next order, the one he was fully authorized to give as the officer of the watch.

  “Battle stations, all hands to battle stations,” he snapped. “This is not a drill. We have an unscheduled Alcubierre emergence; all hands to battle stations, all flight crew to your fighters.”

  By the time Sterling had finished speaking, Kyle was on his feet and into his shipsuit, long years of practice making it a matter of seconds to get into the garment.

  “Report,” he ordered as he snapped its helmet-concealing collar around his neck. “What have we got?”

  “Not much so far, sir,” Sterling replied gratefully. “One ship emerged from Alcubierre at two light-minutes and lit off a flare of Cherenkov radiation so large, even a blind man could see it.”

  “That big a flare is unusual; any resolution on it?” Kyle asked.

  “Working on it,” the tactical officer told him. “What we’ve got for data marks it as a warship and we didn’t get a notification in advance.”

  Which meant either someone local had a ship they hadn’t known about or the Terrans were there.

  “I’ll be on the bridge in ninety seconds,” the Captain told his subordinate. “Let me know the instant they do anything.”

  Two light-minutes was a long, long way for even a warship…but that was what starfighters and capital ship missiles had been invented for.

  #

  “Your data makes no sense, Commander,” Ivy Trent snapped over the intercom as Kyle charged onto his bridge. “Are you certain there’s no corruption?”

  “I’m certain,” Sterling ground out at the engineer. “CIC is feeding you the raw data, Commander Trent. You’re seeing what we’re seeing.”

  “Then it makes no sense,” the engineer replied.

  “What makes no sense?” Kyle demanded. “Commander Sterling, I have command.”

  “You have command,” the tactical officer confirmed, clearing the command chair for his tactical station.

  “The transition signature makes no sense,” Trent clarified. “It’s a warship signature, no question, but…”

  “But?” Kyle prodded.

  “It’s like they had half of their stabilizers running at double strength and their stabilization fields burned out at emergence. From that Cherenkov flare, they lost the exterior field. No sane engineer would go FTL like that.”

  “If they had a choice,” Kodiak’s Captain murmured. “What have we got on our mysterious guest?”

  “She’s Terran,” Taggart answered, the XO cutting into the conversation from Secondary Control. “Ocean-class strike cruiser, thirty million cubic meters, sixty starfighters, six heavy lances and a dozen missile launchers. Old but not ancient.”

  “So, not our Hercules but still a threat to Istanbul. Or to us or Thoth alone, for that matter,” Kyle concluded. According to the statistics running through his implant, the Ocean class was roughly equivalent to Thoth, in fact, a slightly bigger ship with fewer fighters and primary lances but more anti-fighter defenses and missile launchers.

  “What’s she doing? Has she launched anything?” he asked briskly. The biggest concern now was a long-range missile strike. Song’s people could handle the cruiser’s fighter wing, but if they dumped their missile magazines at the planet and then left, they could cause some serious headaches.

  “Negative,” his XO replied. “She hasn’t even deployed a CSP; it’s like—”

  “It’s like she had a shipwide electrical failure caused by the Stetson stabilizers overloading,” Trent interrupted. “Unless there’s something wrong with our data, that flare would have left her half-crippled. It won’t last, she’ll be back online in under thirty minutes, but somebody over there has had a bad, bad day.”

  “Why the hell would she even be flying with her stabilizers in that state?” Kyle asked. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is: can she go FTL?”

  “Not a chance in Void,” Trent replied. “I don’t know why she was flying like or that, or why she came here, sir, but that ship is not going anywhere.”

  “I see,” Kyle murmured. “Get me Captain von Lambert,” he ordered. “If they’re not leaving and not heading inward, I think we should go ask why they’re in Sultan Osman’s system.”

  #

  SC-153 Chariot

  James blinked against the unexpected darkness that suddenly filled his bridge. Every light had gone out simultaneously. Every screen, every feed, every computer link… and the gravity had gone with them. Most of the bridge was strapped in and no one had been trying to move, so everyone was staying put.

  For now.

  Emergency lighting finally began to flicker on, at least twenty seconds later than it should have, and James swallowed a sigh of relief as he saw that, whatever had happened, none of Chariot’s bridge crew were injured.

  “Captain Modesitt?” he asked aloud, checking to see where the woman was.

  Chariot had never been intended to act as a flagship. The Ocean-class had been designed to either operate independently or in concert with carriers or battleships that would have flag decks.

  That left him in an observer chair at the back of Modesitt’s bridge, watching to see what had happened…and with very little information when the bridge wasn’t projecting its standard data feeds.

  “We’ve lost power,” she told him shortly. “Trying to get in touch with Arsenault, see what the hell happened.”

  As she spoke, a channel pinged James’s implants, a direct com channel from the engineer to him and the Captain.

  “Arsenault,” Modesitt said dangerously, “what did you do to my ship?”

  “I warned you we were running drastically under strength for the stabilizers,” he noted. “Apparently, even I underestimated how badly we were straining them. The stabilization fields failed at shutdown. Even ten minutes earlier, and there’d have been enough energy in play to vaporize Chariot.

  “As it is, we backloaded much of it into Chariot’s electrical systems and blew the primary busses.”

  “This ship has six primary power busses,” Modesitt pointed out.

  “And we blew all six of them,” Arsenault said calmly. “Plus two thirds of the secondaries. We’re dead in the water, sir, ma’am.”

  “Is it fixable?” James demanded.

  “Give me time, and I have the parts and supplies to rebuild our entire power distribution net,” the engineer replied. “But right now, I have barely enough power transfer systems in place to keep life support online. I suggest getting everyone to mag-boots. I can’t prioritize gravity.”

  “We needs coms, Commander,” the Commodore pointed out. “If we can’t talk to the Alliance, they may well blow us away before we can.”

  Arsenault shrugged helplessly.

  “I’ll prioritize,” he promised, “but right now, we can’t even open the damn flight deck. What do you want first?”

  “Flight deck,” Modesitt ordered.

  “Coms,” James replied simultaneously, then sighed.

  “Your ship, Captain,” he conceded. “If we get the flight deck open, I want a shuttle with long-range radio capability in space as soon as possible.”

  “Can we run?” Chariot’s Captain asked.

  “This was going to be a one-way trip either way if the locals won’t let us fix up,” the engineer admitted. “Now…now it’s just a lot more bloody obvious to everybody. The flare when the fields collapsed? Their engineer could read that from the other side of the system.

  “We’re helpless, sir, ma’am—and the Alliance knows it.”

  “Right,” Modesitt said slowly, looking across the dimly lit bridge
to meet James’s gaze. “You win, Commodore. Communications it is, Commander.”

  #

  DSC-052 Kodiak

  “Bogey is still motionless,” Sterling reported. “We could launch missiles and take her out…”

  Kyle was tempted. However the Terran had screwed up, they’d screwed up badly. The strike cruiser was crippled, drifting. No major energy signatures, nothing. A single missile salvo would wipe a Commonwealth capital ship out of existence and turn the odds in his favor.

  “No,” he told Sterling with a sigh. “If she’s in that bad a shape, we should have a decent chance of capturing her, which could tell us where Coati is based. Keep a salvo in the launchers, but hold for now.

  “What about us?” Song asked, her image relaying from her command starfighter.

  “Get Major Gonzalez on the line,” Kyle ordered. The commander of Kodiak’s short Marine battalion linked into the channel instantly. She’d clearly been waiting for the call and was already in power armor.

  “Yes, Captain?” she asked.

  “Are your people ready to go?”

  “Three companies, twelve shuttles, six hundred Marines,” she reeled off crisply. “All locked, loaded and waiting for the word!”

  “The word is go,” Kyle told her with a smile. “Keep your eyes open; I want you to break off the instant it looks like she might have defenses online, but launch your strike.

  “Song, she has sixty Katanas and she’s more likely to get them into space than she is to get her defensive lances online,” he continued. “Two wings, twelve squadrons. Cover the assault shuttles.

  “You are authorized to destroy the cruiser to protect the shuttles, but we want her intact if at all possible,” he told the CAG. “She might be the key to this whole mess. Fly safe, ladies.”

  “We’ll get her for you,” Gonzales promised. “We’re Castle’s damned Marines, after all.”

  Kyle could hear the answering wolf howl from behind the Major and shook his head at the woman.

  “I have faith,” he replied. “Go get them.”

  His Marines had been even more ready than Gonzales had implied. All twelve shuttles were drifting clear of Kodiak in under thirty seconds, joining the fighter wings that carefully took up escort formations.

  A few more seconds for all of their computers to link together, and then all hundred-plus small craft took off for the drifting Terran cruiser at five hundred gravities.

  Kodiak and Thoth, accompanied by even more starfighters, followed in their wake.

  #

  SC-153 Chariot

  After almost an hour, the dim lighting on Chariot’s bridge was starting to grow oppressive. The bridge had batteries to keep most of its systems online for twenty-four hours, but it defaulted to emergency lighting to conserve power.

  “Please tell me you have good news,” James told Arsenault as the engineer linked in.

  “I wish,” the junior man replied. “Three of the main busses are just plain gone, sir, ma’am. They’re repairable, but we’re talking complete rebuilding. The other three are fixable, but none of them are set up to easily run power to communications.

  “I can get you the upper primary lances in twenty minutes, but it’s going to take me another hour to get you coms,” he concluded.

  “Commander, they almost certainly launched starfighters within minutes of our arrival,” Modesitt said harshly. “Which means that, right now, they would be barely forty minutes’ flight from a zero-zero intercept.”

  “Probably longer,” James suggested. “But only because they would have had to wait for the Marines to get into their shuttles.

  “They’ll board us, not destroy us. If they were going to kill us, a missile would have already hit us.”

  From Arsenault’s uncomfortable expression, the engineer hadn’t done that math.

  “So, best-case scenario, Commander, you have roughly an hour before Federation Marines start cutting holes in our hull. I’d really like to talk to them before they do that,” James told him. “I’d prefer to be in a position to stop them doing so as well, but I’ll take talking first.”

  “I’ll make it happen,” Arsenault replied. “Fucked if I know how, sir, ma’am, but I’ll make it happen.”

  The engineer dropped off the channel and Modesitt leveled an icy glare on James.

  “Was that really necessary?” she demanded.

  “Yes. Because it’s true. What would you have rather I told him?” he asked.

  Modesitt shook her head.

  “At this point, sir, I’m not sure we’re going to have a choice beyond unconditional surrender,” she admitted softly. “Which will screw Coati, all right, but…”

  “I do not intend to surrender this ship, Captain,” James told her. “I want to work with the Alliance, not be imprisoned by them.”

  “How much choice do you expect to have?” Chariot’s Captain asked bluntly. “Even if Arsenault gets us our communications back, we’ll still be defenseless.”

  “I’m hoping that Captain Roberts will be willing to repay a favor,” the Commodore admitted softly. “But you’re right; that’s about the only hope we have left now.”

  #

  “We got it!” Arsenault announced half an hour later. “You should have coms and scanners coming up right now. We’re focusing on the flight deck next, unless…”

  “Flight deck is your top priority now,” Modesitt agreed without even looking at James.

  He didn’t argue. Chariot was her ship and she was right. She didn’t need him backing her up.

  “What are the sensors showing?” he asked as the systems began to come alive again, data feeds and tactical consoles lighting up with new data.

  “Nothing good,” Modesitt’s tactical officer replied. “I’ve got over a hundred small craft accelerating toward intercept, mostly starfighters but at least some assault shuttles. ETA ten minutes or less.”

  “We have no defenses,” Chariot’s Captain said slowly. “Do we surrender, sir?”

  The tactical feed was coming directly to James’s implant now and he didn’t disagree with anyone’s assessment. Given the circumstances, the only rational option was surrender, except…

  Once before, he and Captain Roberts had been in a position where the rational option was for one of them to surrender…but the honorable option had been something else entirely.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “Get me a radio channel; send it at those starfighters and on to the carrier.”

  #

  DSC-052 Kodiak

  “Aspect change!” Sterling snapped. “Our friend’s sensors just went live and she just pulsed the assault formation.”

  “Does she have them locked in?” Kyle demanded, a sinking feeling latching onto his chest.

  “Pulse was over detection threshold…wait…pulse is not repeating,” the tactical officer told him. “I do not, repeat, do not have recurring pulses. They know Song is there but they do not have a target lock.”

  “Song?” Kyle queried his CAG.

  “Increasing evasive maneuvers,” she confirmed grimly. “ETA is still eight minutes; none of my people are reading charged weapons. Her sensors are live, but I’m not reading any threats.”

  “Maintain approach,” he ordered. “Stand by your lances, just in case. If she charges weapons, try to disable the weapons without destroying her, if possible.”

  “Understood.”

  The distance continued to drop, relative velocities dropping as well as the assault formation decelerated toward the cruiser. This was the most vulnerable part of the approach, when even the best evasive maneuvers didn’t have much to work with in terms of distance or velocity.

  “Captain Roberts,” Song suddenly cut back in. “We’re receiving a radio transmission from the cruiser—it’s tagged for you by name!”

  “Relay it,” he ordered. They knew the Terrans had good intel, but this should be interesting…and then the image of Commodore James Tecumseh appeared on his screen. Apparently, the Earth-b
orn Amerindian officer really was in charge out here—though if he was in charge, what was he doing on a crippled strike cruiser and not the Hercules?”

  “Captain Kyle Roberts, I am Commodore James Tecumseh of the Terran Commonwealth Navy,” Tecumseh greeted him. “We have matters of mutual interest and the security of both our nations and your local allies at stake to discuss.

  “I propose a temporary cease-fire between the forces under our command to allow you and me to discuss this situation in person.”

  Tecumseh paused, allowing the shadows of the bridge he stood on, lit only by emergency lights, to play across his face.

  “I’m sure you are considering the situation and perhaps think a cease-fire would be against your advantage. All I can do in that case is ask you to remember Barsoom.

  “I await your reply, Captain Roberts.”

  The message ended and Kyle stared at the screen for several long seconds.

  “Barsoom, sir?” Taggart asked. “Wasn’t that where…”

  “Where we caught the Butcher of Kematian and blew his ship to hell,” Kyle confirmed. “And where a certain Commonwealth Commodore allowed us to do so, rather than picking a fight I couldn’t have won.”

  “What are your orders, sir?” Song asked. “We’re under five minutes from contact—she might get some defenses online by then, but it’s not looking likely. If we give them more time…”

  “Trent—will she be able to leave the system, given a few hours of repairs?” Kyle asked his engineer.

  “No,” Trent replied with a snort. “She’ll need to build all-new stabilizer emitters, and while that doesn’t need exotic matter like a mass manipulator, she still needs heavy elements she won’t have enough of aboard. She needs to rip apart a bunch of convenient asteroids, at least.”

  “So, our Terran friend is trapped here unless we not only let him go but help him,” Kodiak’s Captain observed.