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

by Glynn Stewart

  No star or other source of the light was visible. All of the universe was lost in the starship’s speed and the incalculable gravitational distortion that forged the warp bubble in the first place, smeared into a single color of light.

  Ripples of other colors were barely visible in that light, made of the deadly radiation trapped between the two layers of the ship’s Stetson stabilizers. The purple faded towards a deep blue as you looked towards the side of the ship, but even there the warp bubble itself garbled any light from outside.

  Behind them, the blue faded in a deep red reminiscent of blood. Smears of that red reached forward along the ship, and smears of the blues and purple reached backwards as well. The human brain couldn’t process the impact of the red and blue shift of this velocity very well.

  For a lot of people, just looking at the distorted bubble gave them a headache in seconds, or at least left them very uncomfortable. Michael simply sat cross-legged on a bench under the open observatory and watched it, drinking in the unfathomable energy of creation.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” a voice said softly behind him. “A bit out of the way, aren’t you?” Kelly Mason asked as she stepped up next to the bench.

  “I’m as off-duty as the CAG gets,” Michael reminded her. He found his heart racing at her presence, and ordered it to slow down. “Not many people are going to be looking for me at ship’s midnight.”

  “The Captain re-arranged the bridge shifts,” Kelly told him, answering the unanswered question of why she wasn’t on duty. “We wanted to keep Antonio busy enough to forget that someone was pointing a gun at him – and get him off the same shift as Pendez.”

  “How are they doing?” Michael asked softly. He’d been impressed by Kyle’s handling of the situation. He hadn’t met Senior Lieutenant Marcus Antonio at any point, but he quite liked what he’d seen of the ship’s Navigator. Somehow, despite both of their tendencies, they’d never managed to get into trouble with each other.

  “Pendez is… shaken up, but handling it pretty well,” Mason said quietly. “Antonio… is more shocked that she kicked his overly pretty ass to the curb than anything else, I think. Splitting the two up kept them from causing issues.”

  Michael looked away from the glowing universe outside the ship to look at her. Kelly’s gaze was locked on him.

  “That’s what I wanted to avoid with us,” he admitted, acknowledging the point she was making.

  “Did it work for you?” she asked bluntly. “Because it sure as fuck didn’t work for me, Michael. You wanted to avoid being emotionally compromised? Well, breaking up on the eve of a fucking war sure as hell emotionally compromised us, didn’t it?”

  “Kelly, my job is to be expendable,” he told her after a long, long pause. “The Federation can replace starfighters – and starfighter pilots – by the thousand for the cost of a single battleship or carrier. Our job – my job – is to fight and die at distances that keep everyone aboard the carrier alive.”

  “So? I hate to break it to you Michael, but whether or not I want to live with that risk is my choice, not yours,” she replied. “Whether or not we’re sleeping together isn’t going to stop me worrying about you flying out there in a tinderbox with a gun strapped to it!”

  Michael had to admit she had a point. He also had to admit, at least in the privacy of his own mind, that he’d been more scared for himself than anything else.

  Kelly read his mind far more clearly than he wanted:

  “What are you afraid of, Michael?” she asked. She slid onto the bench next to him and took his hands, unresistingly, into her own. “You weren’t at all what I expected,” she admitted, “and I was starting to think we really had something.”

  “So did I,” he admitted aloud. “That’s what I’m scared of. The last time I really fell for someone…” he shrugged. “Let’s just say she got the posting we were competing for, and I got left in her dust. The only time since then I even came close,” he smiled with bittersweet memory, “I wasn’t doing so well at making my mind up between them, and, well, we all got ourselves in trouble. Hence, Avalon.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Kelly said slowly. “You’re worried I’m either going to use you for professional advancement; or steal a space shuttle with you to get you exiled again?”

  He couldn’t help himself. Her summary made him sound ridiculous, and he laughed aloud.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, and suddenly she was right next to him. Their hands were clasped, and she was inches away from him.

  When they came up for air a minute later, he shook his head slowly.

  “Okay, I can see when I’m out-maneuvered, out-logicked, and beat,” he told her. “I concede.”

  “Oh good,” she replied with a wicked grin. “Because it looks like we’re both off-shift, and I think the bunk in my quarters is getting cold.”

  Once through the tiny door cut in the armor to allow access to the observatory, access to the remainder of the ship was by one of the long corridors that crossed each deck at regular intervals throughout the ship’s length.

  The observatory was on the same level, Deck Eight, as Kelly’s quarters, and Michael found himself following the woman down the hall with far less hesitance than before. She was right, he knew. They were no less ‘emotionally compromised’ if they were together than if they’d separated, so they as may well get the benefit of the situation as well.

  They were about fifteen meters in when the lights went out, followed a fraction of a second later by the artificial gravity.

  Driven by the same mass manipulators that prevented the starship’s acceleration from smashing the crew into mush and that drove her through space at faster than light speeds, the gravity should never fail.

  Michael had his implant linked into the ship’s emergency network before his feet had even left the ground. With a fighter pilots implants and bandwidth, he knew what was going on as soon as he was linked, the entire status report dumped into his brain in fractions of a second.

  The Stetson stabilizers were failing. Failsafes had re-directed all power aboard the ship to maintaining the fields that stopped their warp bubble’s radiation from killing everyone aboard Avalon, but the ship’s computer calmly informed Michael that even with the extra power, the field would fail in four seconds.

  With his implant at full speed, there was a lot Michael would think in four seconds – but not a lot he could do.

  They were five meters from an emergency airlock door. With power re-directed, the doors wouldn’t close in time to save them even if they made it through.

  Avalon helpfully informed him that he was floating right next to the manual override lever. It would take two point five seconds to cycle the lock, and the radiation would not reach lethal levels for just under a second after the stabilizers failed.

  All of this passed through his mind and implants in a quarter of a second, and it took even less time for him to make a decision.

  Kelly had a Navy officer’s implants and bandwidth – above average, but not the literally inhuman speed of a fighter pilot. Her eyes were starting to widen in horror at the status report as Michael issued an override command to his internal medical nanites.

  He wasn’t even supposed to know that command existed, but there were advantages to his misspent adulthood. Every muscle in his body was suddenly hit with the equivalent of a direct injection of adrenaline, and the pilot moved.

  Michael grabbed Kelly, faster than she could react to without any warning, secured himself to the wall, and threw her. With no gravity to slow her or bring her to the ground, she cut a straight line towards the airlock door.

  He spent the time. A quarter of a second. Half a second. It took a full second, but she passed the airlock and he yanked on the lever the ship’s computer had directed him to. It resisted, but clicked into place as he threw every gram of his adrenaline-fueled body into the motion.

  Emergency capacitors fired, and the airlock began to slide closed as he
launched himself off. Time ticked off in fractions of a second as he hurtled through the air towards the lock. The door was moving quickly – but was it fast enough to save them?

  The Stetson stabilizers failed as he passed through the airlock, entire sections of the ship flashing red as deadly radiation flooded the hull – but he was in the door! He was safe!

  Then time crashed back to normal in a crescendo of pain as the airlock doors slammed shut just above his knees.

  Deep Space

  00:03 September 16, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-001 Avalon – Executive Officer’s Quarters

  The alarm ringing inside Kyle’s skull clawed him awake in the middle of the night. His surprised motion launched him into the air, drifting away from his bunk along with the blankets in a complete lack of gravity.

  That woke him the rest of the way up, and he finally requested a status update from the ship.

  There was no response.

  Blinking, concerned for his implant again, Kyle ran a quick self-test on the hardware. Everything inside his head checked out, and the internal log informed him that Avalon had transmitted an emergency alarm to all department heads and above for five point two seconds, after which it had terminated.

  He pinged the emergency network, and inhaled sharply at the repeated lack of response. The momentum from that flung him into the wall.

  Grabbing a hold of the frame of his bunk, Kyle considered the situation while he stabilized himself. If even the emergency network was down, Avalon had no power. At all.

  He made his way, slowly and carefully, across his quarters to the emergency locker. Inputting a command code, he reviewed its contents, then removed two items – a pair of magnetic boots, and a standard seven millimeter Navy sidearm.

  Once he had the mag-boots on, he could make at least an approximation of standing. Belting the pistol on carefully, he opened his implant up and sent out a general pulse on the officers’ channel.

  “Anyone on this channel, please respond.”

  It wouldn’t go far – there was enough metal in even Avalon’s internal hull to seriously mess with transmission if the optical network was down – but it should reach someone.

  “This is Wong,” the Chief Engineer replied. “Thank God you’re up, Kyle.”

  “What the hell is happening?” Kyle demanded.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I do,” Wong told him. “All I know is that we’re out of FTL and we have no power. I can’t raise the bridge, I can’t raise the Captain… you’re the first senior officer on the channel.”

  “Can you get power back?”

  “I’m on my way to Engineering now,” the other man replied. “Unless Engineering is gone, I should be able to boot the secondary antimatter plants from the positron capacitors.”

  “Right now, we need power before anything else,” Kyle admitted aloud. “How can I help?”

  “I need someone on either the bridge or Secondary Control to provide override confirmations on the safeties I’m going to have to bypass if we want power fast,” Wong told him. “I can just rip them out, but overrides are faster.”

  “I’m only a minute from Secondary Control,” the XO answered. “Probably longer in mag-boots. I’ll raise you again when I’m there.”

  “I’ll be in Engineering by then,” Wong promised. “Let’s be about it, boss.”

  With a firm nod, entirely to reassure himself as Wong couldn’t see him, Kyle carefully tested his balance on the mag-boots and then took off down the corridor.

  31

  Deep Space

  00:07 September 16, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control

  Avalon needed better emergency lighting.

  Kyle had always been intellectually aware that the carrier had been a prototype, the first of her kind and never really intended to see action until all hell had broken loose on the frontier. That had never sunk in quite as clearly as it did while he made his way through the corridor to Secondary Control, dodging between the dim pools of light shed by the battery-powered emergency lighting.

  Secondary Control, despite the emergency lighting, was a shadow filled nightmare house. Thankfully, it wasn’t an unoccupied nightmare house, though the Ensign and two Petty Officers who’d been holding down the night shift looked utterly terrified.

  “Thank God you’re here, sir!” the Ensign exclaimed. She was a young, dark-skinned woman, whose name was Alison Li according to the service file Kyle’s implant pulled.

  “Ensign Li,” he greeted her, glancing around the room. “Status report, please.”

  “I’m not… entirely sure, sir,” she admitted.

  “Ensign, all I know is that I was woken up by an emergency alert, we’re out of FTL, and we have no power,” Kyle told her dryly. “Anything you can tell me is helpful.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded, clearly trying to find some modicum of calm.

  “We got an alert that the Stetson stabilizers were going into failsafe mode,” she finally said. “Then they went into emergency failsafe mode and re-directed all power to try and sustain the stabilizer fields.”

  “It… didn’t work,” Li concluded, gesturing around. “Everything should have gone back to normal once we dropped out of FTL, but instead the entire network crashed. It’s almost…”

  “It’s almost…?” Kyle repeated questioningly, and the Ensign – who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one – blushed.

  “Sorry, sir, thinking out loud.”

  “Finish the thought, Ensign,” Kyle told her gently.

  “I majored in computer systems, sir,” Li told him. “It’s almost like the main computer core took a direct EMP hit and then failed to reset. But the core is shielded – and it’s right beneath the bridge.”

  A chill ran through Kyle’s chest and he shivered.

  “There are secondary emergency fiber optic links to the bridge and main engineering,” he said slowly. “Have you heard anything from the bridge?”

  “Last thing the Captain said was ‘hold on,’ right after the first failsafe warning came on. Nothing since,” she said quietly.

  A light and a buzzer on the main command console interrupted the conversation. It was the communications link to Engineering, and Kyle took a deep breath.

  “I relieve you, Ensign Li,” he said formally. “Don’t go anywhere,” he added, “I get the feeling I’m going to need every set of hands I can find.”

  He slipped into the central chair and activated the link.

  “Roberts,” he said simply.

  “Roberts, it’s Wong,” the Chief Engineer told him. “Please tell me you’ve got power, an implant, and an override code.”

  “We’re on battery power,” Kyle replied. “Last I checked, this room is rated for forty-eight hours.”

  “Yeah, well, so’s the bridge and I can’t raise them,” Wong said flatly. “I can’t find or raise half my goddamn night shift, either.”

  That hung in the air for a long moment. If the stabilizers had failed before the Alcubierre drive had shut down, large parts of the ship would have been swept with devastating levels of radiation. The exact outer layers, in fact, where Wong’s people would have been doing midnight maintenance work.

  “What do we need to get power back up?” Kyle finally asked.

  “Well, from the fact we’re all still alive, I can confirm the positron capacitor failsafes are holding,” Wong said calmly. “I’m going to manually feed Secondary Antimatter Three with hydrogen and positrons, but I’m going to need a bridge override to open the positron feed.”

  “I’ve been reading up,” Kyle told him, as cheerfully as he could manage sitting in the shadows, “but somehow I didn’t think I’d need to be overriding the safeties on our antimatter stores. You’re going to have to walk me through that.”

  “Hold one,” Wong told him. “Kellers, Anderson – are those feeds hooked up?” he shouted away from the microphone for the com link. Kyle couldn’t hea
r the response, but the engineer ‘hrmed’ satisfiedly.

  Kyle found himself waiting as he heard Wong walk away from the communicator. Every second that passed his fingers clenched harder on the arm of the chair. There was nothing he could do but trust the engineer, and every second they waited was one second less of air the carrier had.

  Finally, Wong came back on the line.

  “Okay, everything is hooked up,” the engineer told him. “I’m flipping the override request to the main command console there. My code is in.”

  The single active screen on the console flickered slowly to full life, a flashing red ‘emergency override request’ occupying it. Slowly, carefully, Kyle typed in the nineteen-digit alphanumeric sequence of his bridge officer override code.

  “Done,” he told Wong.

  “Hold on,” the Chief Engineer replied. “But don’t worry – if we’ve fucked this up, you’ll never know.”

  Kyle found himself literally holding his breath for a long moment, until he heard Wong exhale heavily in relief.

  “There she goes,” he said aloud. “Secondary Three is online, XO. I’ll hook it up to life support first, but we’ll be able to start bringing the zero point cells online in ten minutes or so.”

  “How long to gravity?” Kyle asked.

  “Thirty minutes, maybe more, maybe less,” Wong admitted. “Without knowing what crashed everything, we have to double check as we go. Everything will take longer.”

  “Ensign Li said it looked like a hard computer crash, due to an EMP in the main core,” Kyle told the Engineer.

  Silence answered him for a moment.

  “Yeah, combined with an emergency A-S shutdown, that could do it,” Wong admitted. “It should have auto-reset, but then, the Stetson stabilizers shouldn’t have failed.”

  “The manual reset is in the core, Commander,” he continued. “If you can get there and confirm that’s what happened, I can direct enough power there for you to boot her. That won’t speed up gravity, but it’ll give us a fighting chance to get the rest of the ship online.”