If they couldn’t hide, what did they expect to gain from running?
With their carrier gone, the pirates could only escape by ditching their ships and sneaking out on civilian transit or meeting another ship to pick them up.
That thought echoed in Stanford’s head as he looked at Hessian’s trailing Trojans. It was a denser cluster of asteroids than most, with a high heavy metal content that was making a mess of the Starfighter Group’s long-range sensors. If the pirates made it to the cluster, they could shut down and hide with ease. An entire starship could hide in that mess.
And the pirates needed to leave the system.
“CAG, we have a problem,” Stanford snapped into a channel that linked him directly to Roberts. “They’re not running from us – they’re running to someone. A friend – a friend with a real ship hiding in that cluster of heavy metal rocks.”
There was a long pause on the channel, an unusual one for the Wing Commander, then Kyle responded.
“Damn,” he said softly. “Didn’t even cross my mind. Well done, Michael – I’ll have Avalon pulse them with the shipboard array.”
Avalon’s immense radar arrays were orders of magnitude more powerful than the active sensors on the Falcons. The high powered pulse that followed scrambled Stanford’s sensors for a second as it washed over them.
Then the return rippled back through the squadron. Each individual fighter’s sensors were weak, but networked together the starfighter’s computers could collate and synthesize the data – resolving even small or concealed signatures with a powerful enough pulse to identify them.
It took longer than Avalon’s computers would, but Avalon was light minutes behind them now. Michael waited patiently as the networked squadrons ground through the data.
Then his breath caught in his throat as the computers emotionlessly drew in the smooth oval shape of a Commonwealth battlecruiser.
18
Hessian System
13:05 September 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
SFG-001 Actual – Falcon-C type Command Starfighter
Kyle looked at the shape of the warship with trepidation. He’d thought he’d been chasing twenty mostly obsolete fighters with almost forty super-modern ones. He hadn’t even replenished his ship’s munitions, and his implant computer happily pulled up the data to tell him most of the Falcons had a single four-missile salvo left. Some, like Williams’ Alpha Six or his own command ship with its reduced magazines, were completely empty.
The ship in the asteroid cluster was even bigger than the Resolute he liked to use in exercises. Eleven hundred meters long and sixteen million tons, the warbook was happily informing him it was almost certainly a Hercules-class battlecruiser.
That made their lurker one of the Commonwealth’s newest and most powerful warships, but at least gave Kyle and his people one distinct advantage: the Hercules-class were unabashedly optimized as shipkillers. Their heavy armament, in missile batteries and heavy positron lances, was only somewhat reduced from the last generation of battleships, and their fighter complement and anti-fighter armament was weaker than most carriers or even regular cruisers.
“They know we’re here,” Stanford reported.
Kyle saw what his senior commander meant immediately. The massive radar pulse had been unmistakable, and the battlecruiser’s captain clearly knew what it meant. Zero point cells flared to life throughout the massive hull, and the radiation and boson detectors started to go nuts as the ship’s engines followed.
“Damn,” Kyle said softly. The battlecruiser was more than twice Avalon’s size – and should not have been here.
“Lyla,” he continued calmly, addressing his engineer. “Record for transmission to that cruiser.”
A ping popped in his implant a moment later, letting him know she was ready.
“Commonwealth vessel,” the CAG said flatly. “You are in violation of the sovereign space of the Hessian system and are interfering with the pursuit of identified pirates responsible for the destruction of Hessian Orbital.
“As per the Section One of the Alliance Treaty of Mutual Defense, we will defend the territorial integrity of the Hessian system. Stand down and withdraw, or your presence will be taken as an act of war.”
He swallowed, hard, then sent the transmission from his implant.
“All crews,” he said softly, activating the channel. “We are approaching a Commonwealth battlecruiser. She shouldn’t be here – and our pirates are running to her.”
“I have demanded that they stand down and withdraw,” he paused. “I do not expect them to comply. It looks like we’re about to fire the first shots of a new war.”
“Watch each other’s backs, maintain your random-walks, and stand by for further orders,” Wing Commander Kyle Roberts told his people. “Whatever happens, today will be a date that will live in infamy. Let it be said that we did our duty.”
The channel was silent. Thirty-eight starfighters tore through space, their speed ever-increasing as they closed on the pirates and the unexpected intruder.
“There’s your answer, boss,” Landon suddenly interjected on the fighter’s internal net. “They’re launching!”
The battlecruiser was moving. Engines and mass manipulators flickered to full power, and the massive Terran ship began to move towards SFG-001 at two hundred and thirty gravities.
And as she moved, she fired. Twenty missiles ripped free from the warship’s hull, followed moments later by ten starfighters.
Fifteen seconds later, a second starfighter squadron shot into space. Fifteen seconds after that, a third followed. Thirty starfighters shook out their formation, and then dove for SFG-001 at five hundred gravities.
In front of them, twenty missiles blazed the trail.
Prioritization came first.
The battlecruiser’s second salvo of missiles was launched two minutes after the first, as the first began to close the distance to Kyle’s crew.
Both waves of capital missiles were going to pass by SFG-001 before the Commonwealth fighters entered missile range of the Federation starfighters. If they kept up the ‘slow and steady’ rate of fire, a third wave would arrive as the two fighter wings exchanged fire.
Kyle’s implant database suggested that the Commonwealth’s heavy capital ship missiles were similar to the Federation’s. These would accelerate at a thousand gravities for three hours. Since Avalon was tens of millions of kilometers behind his ships, the missiles would have to go ballistic in the middle.
If they were half as smart as the Jackhammers the Federation used, that meant that any of them that made it past his fighters would only be visible to Avalon in their terminal attack mode. If SFG-001 didn’t stop the missiles, Avalon was in danger.
“Track those missiles, target them with your lances,” he ordered calmly. “Hold your Starfires until I give the order – be ready to use them on those starfighters.”
“What about the battlecruiser?” Lancet demanded. “We need our missiles for her!”
“The battlecruiser won’t matter if those starfighters kill us,” Kyle told her grimly. “They’ll expect us to think that – so I want a mass salvo, straight down their throats as they close.
“We’ll have to take the cruiser with lances,” he continued. “We’re way out of range for Avalon to provide fire support, but we’re also closing damn quickly. Rip her in half, but try and leave big enough pieces for Intel to pick over.
“I want to know why she’s here,” Kyle concluded grimly. “And at a quarter cee closing? It’s a risk we can afford.”
After four hours of accelerating at full power, his ships were rapidly creeping up on twenty-five percent of the speed of light, their theoretical maximum safe velocity. At that speed, it was only going to take them twenty minutes to close the range with the cruiser.
His squadron commanders passed on his orders, and the Federation starfighters spread out, opening up more vectors for lances and sensors on the missiles. His implant start
ed to throw up timers in his head – time to the first missile salvo. Time to the second missile salvo. Time to missile range of the fighters, and time to the third salvo.
He tried to stretch to release tension, only to smash his fingers against the shielding in the cockpit and curse. Losing himself in his implants had helped distract him from the cocoon he was wrapped in, but he knew he was going to regret the time spent locked into it later.
“There goes their ECM,” Landon murmured over the net, and Kyle watched as the battlespace disintegrated into hash as the missiles came closer to his starfighters.
The CAG smiled grimly, adjusting his own course to sweep the nose of the fighter with its fifty-kiloton-a-second positron emitter across the region of space he knew contained the missiles. Pulses of pure antimatter blasted into space, and electronic-counter-counter-measures strove to resolve their targets.
The Falcon’s ECCM gear, the newest the Federation had, won the electronic duel. Not every missile appeared at once, but as each one appeared, it was blasted into oblivion by watching starfighters. Unlike starships or even starfighters, the weapons had no electromagnetic deflectors to reduce positron lance range – their only defense was not to be targeted at all.
The first salvo died well short of SFG-001, but the second set of twenty missiles was right on its heels, and the battlespace was filled with radiation from the first salvo.
The last missile of the second salvo died in the middle of Kyle’s formation, thankfully still hundreds of kilometers away from any of the Federation starfighters.
Kyle watched the distance to the Commonwealth starfighter wing carefully. Now they were closer, his warbook happily identified them for him – Scimitar class ships, the Commonwealth’s latest sixth generation ship. They were narrow cylinders, quite unlike the wedge shape of the Falcons, and carried multiple smaller positron lances against the Falcon’s single lance.
The Scimitar was the offset to the Hercules-class battlecruiser – unquestionably optimized to kill starfighters. Commonwealth doctrine only saw the starfighter as a defensive unit, used to hold off Alliance starfighters while capital ships made the kill.
Kyle grinned coldly as the timer ticked down.
It was time to show them the flaws in their doctrine.
“Full jamming, full ECM, full missile salvo – now!”
Hessian System
13:25 September 5, 2735 ESMDT
SFG-001 Alpha Six – Falcon-type Starfighter
All around Michelle’s starfighter, the other starfighters of SFG-001 launched their missiles. A handful of the fighters from Rokos’ Echo Squadron were as empty on missiles as she was, but the Federation starfighters still threw over a hundred Starfire missiles into space.
She ignored the missiles, knowing that Deveraux would take care of adding their ECM to the wave of jamming and chaos helping shield the missile strike. Her focus was on the heavy capital ship missiles fired by the Commonwealth battlecruiser.
The latest salvo of those missiles passed through their own fighters at the same time as they fired their own missiles. The battlecruiser’s missiles were closing far faster and were the immediate threat.
The Federation missiles were still thirty seconds away from impact, and the Commonwealth fighter missiles thirty seconds behind that, when Michelle drew a bead on the first capital ship missile and fired. She missed, the missile’s heavy ECM fooling her targeting sensors, but swept the positron beam across space to catch it a second later.
Without the CAG’s ridiculous implant bandwidth compatibility, Michelle could only focus on so many things going on in space at once. With no missiles of her own in the offensive salvo, she focused on shooting down the capital ship missiles.
A second blew apart under her fire, then a third.
Then her entire sensor array blacked out in a burst of overwhelming static as her comrades’ missiles struck home. Over a hundred gigatons of antimatter explosions filled space with radiation and the natural jamming of matter-antimatter annihilation.
For a long moment, Michelle couldn’t see anything more than a few hundred meters from her starfighter, and she waited grimly for the chaos to clear. She hadn’t been the only one shooting down missiles, but she knew at least two were left.
The radiation wave slowly began to clear, and her scanners were pushing hard to pick out those last missiles – there.
She spun her fighter in space, acceleration leaking through to press her against the side of her chair as she turned the Falcon ninety degrees in a fraction of a second to track the missile about to pass through the Federation formation at thousands of kilometers a second.
The fighter aligned with where the missile would be for half a second, and Flight Lieutenant Michelle Williams sent a beam of pure antimatter out into space to intercept it.
Then, and only then, did her computer flip up the projected course of the command starfighter that the Falcon’s sensors had just resolved from the radiation.
She watched in horror as her beam ripped through the missile and detonated its one-gigaton payload of antimatter – less than eight hundred meters from Wing Commander Kyle Roberts’ starfighter.
Hessian System
13:28 September 5, 2735 ESMDT
SFG-001 Alpha Actual – Falcon-type Starfighter
“Yes!” Kyle’s exuberant shout echoed over the command channel linking him to Michael Stanford and the other squadron commanders. “That’s gutted them – now clean them up and let’s get ready to— ”
The command channel was silent for a long moment.
“CAG?” Lancet asked. “CAG, what are your orders?”
“I’m not seeing Zero-One-Actual on my scopes,” Zhao replied. “He was…”
“Right next to that last missile,” Rokos said grimly. Even as the Echo Squadron commander spoke aloud over the channel, a blinking text message appeared in the mental viewscreen of Michael’s implant.
You’re senior. Make the call.
He was senior. Randall had been senior before, had actually technically been the commander of SFG-001. With Roberts’ arrival and Randall’s arrest, Stanford had taken over the second in command role along with command of Alpha Squadron.
Running back through the scanners, he could see what Rokos had seen. A one in a million shot in several senses had taken out the last missile, a lucky shot that might easily have saved Avalon – but fluke had put the CAG’s starfighter right there.
The lethal radius of a one-gigaton antimatter warhead against a starfighter was estimated at just over one kilometer. Kyle Roberts was gone, which put one Flight Commander Michael Stanford in command.
If he could hack it.
Roberts’ strategy for taking out the battlecruiser was insane – relying on calculated shock and aggression over normal tactics. Stanford wasn’t sure he had the gumption to carry it all the way through.
On the other hand, he realized with a steadying breath, he also had inherited command of a starfighter group hurtling towards a battlecruiser at a quarter of the speed of light. Not following through on Kyle’s plan wasn’t an option.
“This is Stanford,” he said into the silence of the channel, surprised at how steady his voice is. “We can all read the numbers on that missile. I am declaring Commander Roberts MIA and assuming command of SFG-001.”
“Acknowledged,” Rokos replied immediately. Seconds passed, and Stanford was prayerfully grateful for the near-complete annihilation of the Commonwealth fighters.
The other Commanders slowly acknowledged, even as SFG-001 swept into positron lance range of the handful of remaining Scimitars. The pilots and gunners didn’t need further direction, and the outnumbered Commonwealth ships died in moments, their weaker lances failing to penetrate the Falcons’ deflectors.
“We need that battlecruiser in retrievable chunks,” Stanford told his newly inherited fighter group as calmly as he could with his heart pounding in his chest. “On my mark, begin full deceleration. Target all lances on the engines – l
et’s take enough of the bitch intact to know why they were here.”
He paused. “Let’s do Commander Roberts proud, people.”
Hessian System
13:30 September 5, 2735 ESMDT
SFG-001 Alpha Six – Falcon-type Starfighter
She’d killed the CAG.
The thought echoed in Michelle’s head to the point where she barely heard Stanford’s commands. She’d had her sensors trained on the point in space where the missile had detonated, and even now she was straining to detect the command ship.
Her computer gave her the likely impulse provided by the explosion. It also informed her that the starfighter was likely intact – and she thoroughly ignored the next datum that everyone aboard was already dead of radiation poisoning.
Without thinking, Michelle adjusted her course, ignoring the battle around her as she vectored towards the line her calculations showed the Falcon-C had to have followed.
“All fighters, decelerate on my mark!” Stanford’s voice echoed in her ears, and she ignored him as her mental fingers danced through calculations.
“What are we doing, sir?” Deveraux asked, able to follow the pilot in the system.
“We’re going after the CAG,” Williams whispered softly. “There’s a chance he’s alive.”
“He was too damned close! The rest of the group is decelerating – we can’t break off like this!”
Almost as Deveraux spoke, a direct channel opened up.
“Alpha Six, what the hell are you doing?” Stanford demanded.
“I’m going after the CAG, sir,” Michelle replied firmly. “We’ll hit the battlecruiser as we pass, but if someone doesn’t stay on his vector, we’ll never get them back.”
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 17