Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon

by Glynn Stewart

  “The station,” Kyle remembered with a flinch.

  “Between the station, the freighter and Jäger, the Hessians are estimating over fifty thousand dead,” she told him, and he flinched back from her.

  “How long was I out?” he asked. “My implant is disabled.”

  Pinochet shook her head. “A little over two days,” she said quietly. “And I’m afraid that Miss Alverez engaged in a little white lie.”

  Kyle met her gaze calmly. Somehow, he could guess what was coming.

  “We didn’t disable your implant, Commander,” the doctor said softly. “It was too badly damaged – we removed it.”

  “I can’t remember anything without it,” Kyle admittedly softly, swallowing hard against the burn of fear inside his chest. “I can’t remember Alverez’s name.”

  “Your first implant was installed when you were four, Commander,” Pinochet reminded him. “You’ve had a military grade implant since you were eighteen. Your organic memory is badly atrophied.”

  “Can you… put it back?” he asked, hating how much his voice sounded like he was begging.

  “As soon as the physical damage from the radiation is fully repaired,” she assured him quickly. “You have a full backup on file from before you launched, so we’ll probably be able to run the builder nanites tonight. You should have your implant back by tomorrow morning.”

  Something in her tone caught his ear, and he looked the doctor directly in the eye.

  “What’s the catch, Alison?” he asked, very, very softly.

  “NSIID,” she answered bluntly, and the ground fell out from underneath Kyle.

  Neural Scarification Induced Interface Degradation. He somehow still remembered that. Nanotech could rebuild the molecular circuitry inside his skull, but damaged neurons still healed in their own way and at their own pace. If the damage to his implant had hit the wrong way, his ability to interface with an implant could be damaged – even completely destroyed.

  “How bad?”

  “I won’t know until we start hooking you up again,” the doctor replied. “But your implant was completely overloaded by radiation and EMP. You could be looking at a complete loss of bandwidth.”

  Kyle had an unusually high level of compatibility with the brain implant technology. That was why, twelve years before, the Federation Space Force had drafted a much younger Spaceman Recruit Kyle Roberts out of a Federation Space Navy recruitment class.

  To even be a pilot, you had to be in the ninety-ninth percentile of the human race with regards to implant bandwidth. Kyle was in the ninetieth percentile of that ninety-ninth percentile. But NSIID could render even him unable to fly.

  And twenty-four of his people had just died in the first battle of a war that could easily consume his home.

  Hessian System

  17:00 September 8, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Country

  Angela slipped into Michelle’s quarters with a noticeable grin on her face. Despite being busy setting up candles on the desk she’d detached from the wall to serve as a table, the Lieutenant couldn’t not notice.

  “What canary did you eat on the way down?”

  “It seems I’m not the only one sneaking around Flight Country tonight,” the nurse told her. “I almost physically ran into Commander Mason slipping into Commander Stanford’s quarters.”

  “Oh gods,” Michelle replied, with a choked giggle. “What did she say?”

  “Shh!” Angela quoted, putting a finger to her lips. She looked over the ‘table’ with its candles and covered plates. “Where’d you get all of this?”

  “One of the mess ratings owed me a favor,” Michelle explained, setting a small ‘smoke control’ box on the end of the desk to keep the candle flame from setting off alerts. “Seemed a good time for it.”

  “But seriously,” she continued, “Michael and Kelly? Damn.”

  “You didn’t know?” Angela asked. “Their relationship is only a slightly better kept secret than ours.”

  A warm flutter ran through Michelle at Angela’s description of them as a ‘relationship.’

  “Why keep it a secret?” she asked quietly. “There’s no chain of command issues.” For that matter, she and Angela weren’t keeping theirs a secret.

  “Yeah, but if Stanford ends up CAG, it looks bad,” Angela pointed out.

  “That won’t happen, right?” Michelle asked hopefully, her voice small. “We got the CAG back.”

  The nurse went silent, looking at the other woman with suddenly sad eyes.

  “I can’t say anything,” she said quietly. “You know that. Already said too much.”

  A chill fell over the cabin, and Michelle found herself looking at the empty second bunk in the room. Kayla Morgaurd’s fighter had not been one of the ones where the survival pods had worked.

  “There’s a lot of empty bunks in Flight Country,” she said quietly, changing the subject if not really improving it. “I didn’t want to be alone tonight.”

  She saw Angela hesitate in indecision, and took the decision into her own hands. The other woman came willingly into her embrace.

  In the end, even the carefully sealed covers weren’t enough to keep the food warm for them.

  Hessian System

  08:00 September 9, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-001 Avalon – Main Infirmary

  Despite knowing his new implant wouldn’t be turned on until Dr. Pinochet was there to check on everything, Kyle tried to access it as soon as he woke up.

  The complete lack of response was no less disconcerting than it had been before, though at least he knew the reason now. His memories remained fuzzy, with only a few clear-ish memories and faces. He recognized Dr. Pinochet, thankfully, and he thought the nurse was Angela Alverez.

  He also remembered his ex and his son – and he remembered enough that the fact he remembered surprised him. Even with most of his memory committed to silicon and currently missing, Lisa Kerensky’s face was still perfectly clear in his mind – as was what he thought was the latest photo his mother had sent of Jacob.

  Kyle was mulling over just what that meant, in the limited context of his currently atrophied memories, when Dr. Pinochet and a dark-skinned blond Senior Surgeon-Lieutenant he really didn’t think he knew came into the room.

  “Good morning, Wing Commander,” Pinochet told him. “This is Doctor Xue Carstairs, our cybernetic specialist. She’ll be helping me with your implant activation.”

  “Everything went okay?” he asked.

  “That is what we are to establish,” Carstairs told him in a clipped voice – not a native Castle accent. Somehow, despite his shattered memory, he placed it as from ‘Anjing’.

  Of course, without his implant, he knew nothing about Anjing.

  “We have scans to complete before activation,” she continued. “Lay back.”

  Once Kyle was on his back, with his head immobile, the cyberneticist placed a U-shaped sensor around his skull. It had no leads or displays from what little he could see, and presumably she was running it from her implant.

  She made a few non-committal sounds and left the sensor in place for five minutes without giving any sign of a further plan.

  “What do you see, Doc?” Kyle eventually asked.

  “The implant growth was smooth,” she replied. “Some synaptic linking issues. Can’t tell the impact until we turn it on.”

  “Does the hat come off?”

  “No. Hold still, activating.”

  That hurt.

  It had been twelve years since the last time Kyle had an implant booted from scratch, and that had been due to a careful upgrade, implemented in stages over two days. There had been no damaged connectors, no neurons that would literally snap at the first attempt to run impulses through the connector.

  Carstairs had clearly been expecting his reaction. The doctor’s hand had been sitting on the end of the sensor, and as she activated his implant she’d moved to place it on his breastbone. As he tried to convu
lse in pain, that delicate long-fingered hand held him down with a grip of iron.

  “We can’t know what links will break until activation,” she said calmly as a fire burned inside Kyle’s head. “It won’t last long.”

  It probably didn’t last more than thirty seconds, but those thirty seconds took a small eternity to pass. When it finally did, Kyle’s head slowly cleared. His memories came clearly now, but slowly.

  He was right – he didn’t know Carstairs. He did know Angela Alverez, the young nurse who’d been taking care of the previous day – and she was dating his Flight Lieutenant Williams.

  And there had been a battle. The battle’s details were still foggy, more than he’d remembered before but more clinical than the rest of the memories from the backup.

  “We assembled a partial memory of the battle from the data you downloaded to Avalon, but the backup was from the night before launch,” Pinochet told him quietly.

  “What happened to me?” he asked. He’d been too uncertain before, too foggy on his thoughts and memories, to ask.

  “One of the battlecruiser’s missiles detonated seven hundred and fourteen meters from your starfighter,” Pinochet explained as Carstairs continued to poke at the sensor wrapped around his skull.

  “That’s inside the lethal radius,” Kyle replied. “How?!”

  “You were apparently testing circuits prior to the flight and had additional shielding layered around yourself,” the doctor said. “Must have been uncomfortable as hell, but it saved your life.”

  “Landon? Lyla?” Kyle asked.

  “They weren’t as lucky,” she replied grimly. “Flight Lieutenant Williams boarded your fighter and retrieved you and their bodies, but there was nothing she could do for them – she barely saved you!”

  At seven hundred meters, the radiation burst from a one-gigaton antimatter explosion should have killed everyone aboard the starfighter. ‘Lucky’ barely began to cover it.

  “Commander, try to access a database,” Carstairs ordered sharply. “Any of the Navy’s.”

  Shrugging, Kyle told his implant to flip up Carstairs’ service record. The result surprised him – normally, when he queried a database he just knew the data. Technically, he was ‘reading’ it, but at a speed so fast he barely registered the process of learning the information.

  Now… now her record popped up in front of his eyes via the implant, and he had to consciously review it. It felt… clunky. Slow.

  “This isn’t right,” he said slowly.

  “The implant adapts, Commander,” Carstairs told him. “Shows you data the most efficient way.”

  The sensor suddenly moved away. Kyle stretched his neck, trying to get a feeling for the new speed of his implant. It was all wrong. Even as a child, without a military grade implant, he’d been able to access the implant’s internal databases and network links instantly. The knowledge in his databases might as well be in his silicon-enhanced memory for the time it took him to access it.

  Now he had to bring up virtual data screens and effectively read the data. He knew he was still ‘reading’ faster than he could read on a page, but not by much.

  “Dr. Carstairs?” Pinochet asked, her voice gentle.

  “Could be worse,” the junior doctor said bluntly. “Scans rate sixty-fourth percentile. He can function.”

  Kyle’s head spun. Sixty-fourth percentile?

  “Thank you, Dr. Carstairs,” Pinochet replied. Kyle was only vaguely aware of her escorting the junior doctor out and closing the door behind her. He stared at the roof, refusing to ask his implant databases the question his regularly enhanced memory already knew the answer to.

  “I’m sorry, Wing Commander.” Pinochet was suddenly sitting on the bed right next to him, looking down at him with concerned eyes. “You’re still above average for interface capability, but… that’s an eighty-two reduction in your personal bandwidth.”

  “Everything is so slow,” he whispered.

  “Welcome to the world the rest of us live in,” she told him. “I’m only sixty-fifth percentile myself. I honestly have no idea what you’ve lost, so I won’t waste your time with platitudes.”

  “Can I fly?” he asked aloud. He couldn’t help it – he knew the answer. Without consulting databases or the doctor, he knew.

  “No,” Pinochet replied softly. “Above average or not, your current rating is barely a third of the minimum interface bandwidth necessary for starfighter service.”

  “I’m sorry, Kyle,” she repeated. “It’s theoretically possible that your brain will heal over time, and you will eventually get that bandwidth back, but for now…”

  “I’ve placed an indefinite medical ground on your file,” she concluded. “Barring a miracle, you will never fly a starfighter again.”

  21

  Hessian System

  14:00 September 9, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Main Infirmary

  Six hours wasn’t enough time to adjust to the entire foundation of how your brain works being torn out from under you.

  After about two hours, Kyle asked Angela for a datapad. The thin, somewhat flexible, data display devices were utterly ubiquitous in modern life, but he’d never been much of one for them. He could organize data faster and more cleanly in his head, after all.

  He found it easier, though, to link his implant to the datapad and actually physically look at the information than to use the pseudo-visual interface his implant had defaulted to now that it couldn’t rapidly download data into his brain anymore.

  He was working on the letter to Kayla Morgaurd’s family when Captain Blair knocked on the door of his private infirmary room.

  “It’s Blair,” the Captain told him through the door.

  “Come in,” Kyle instructed. He laid the datapad aside as Avalon’s Captain stepped into the room, but he saw the older man’s gaze follow it.

  “The Doc said you still had some interface capability,” he said, questioningly.

  “Yeah, but its running differently than I’m used to,” Kyle replied. “The ‘pad helps.”

  The Captain nodded slowly, pulling a chair up next to Kyle’s bed.

  “How are you holding up? NSIID is a nasty hammer blow.”

  “I’ve known for six hours, skipper,” the pilot said quietly. “I don’t know if it’s even sunk in yet.”

  “I know,” Blair agreed. “And I hate to ask you to make decisions so quickly, but I suspect I’m going to be looking at a tight deadline pretty quickly here.”

  “Not just a social call then, boss?” Kyle asked.

  “I needed to see you were all right with my own eyes,” Blair allowed. “Dr. Pinochet says she’ll probably clear you out of here in the morning, but she wanted twenty four hours of observation.”

  “I hear you made Stanford CAG,” Kyle said quietly. “I’m not even sure where I’ll go when she does clear me out.”

  “It’s a temporary appointment for now,” the Captain told him. “The promotion is permanent though – given that I used the recommendation you wrote to argue for it, I doubt that’s a surprise.”

  “No,” the Wing Commander admitted. “It was time – past time, to tell the truth. Even Admirals should be able to accept that their daughters will do as they please, after all.”

  “That’s true enough,” Blair agreed. “Though I’ll admit to some sympathy.”

  “If I’m grounded, you’ll need to make Stanford’s role permanent,” Kyle told him. “You can’t have an interim CAG, not with a wrecked Commonwealth battlecruiser floating around.”

  “That’s what we need to discuss, isn’t it?” Blair replied. He pulled a datapad out of his uniform jacket packet and laid it down next to Kyle.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your Article Seventeen discharge, if you want it.”

  Kyle looked at the plastic and silicon device as if it was a snake and swallowed. He remembered being on the other side of this conversation with Lieutenant Williams.
It felt like yesterday, for all that it had been weeks ago.

  “NSIID of this caliber qualifies you for a full medical discharge, with pension,” Blair continued into the silence. “Your promotion to Vice Commodore was already in the works, so your discharge promotion would be all the way to Commodore.

  “You retire and get a raise,” the Captain observed dryly. “A lot of people would love that option.”

  “I am a soldier of the Federation,” Kyle said quietly. “My life belongs to the service.”

  “We generally let people go on that one after we fry half their brain, Commander,” Blair snapped.

  “We blew up a Commonwealth warship, Captain. On the eve of war, do you really expect me to walk away?”

  “No,” the Captain admitted with a sad smile. “Though part of me thinks I should make you, make sure your son gets to at least meet his father before the war kills you.”

  Kyle physically flinched. The thought of going home and facing Lisa and Jacob… wasn’t as terrifying now, strangely. But it still wasn’t comfortable.

  “If you stay in the Space Force,” Blair said after a long moment of silence, “I’ll have to leave you in Hessian. A relief convoy is already on its way, they’ll take you home. Then the Force will put you behind a desk – or, more likely, a teacher’s lectern. Eventually you might command a planetary defense group, but barring a miracle, you’ll never fly again.”

  “You’re not exactly presenting the most glorious options here, skipper,” Kyle replied dryly. “Go home in failure to the ex I abandoned or fly a desk for the rest of my life. You’re setting me up for something, aren’t you?”

  “I see your sense of an ambush is still working,” Blair said with a smile. “There is one more option. You no longer qualify for front-line starfighter service, but I’ve checked with the Doctor. What you were left with is more than half the officers in the Navy ever had.”