He hit a command.
“Wong, I have a question for you,” Kyle said calmly.
“No, I can’t make her go faster,” the engineer said dryly. “Next, Captain?”
“If we push it – if we’re willing to risk the ship – how close in can we emerge from Alcubierre?”
There was silence on the line, and Kyle brought up a video screen to be sure he hadn’t lost the connection somewhere. The shaven-headed engineer was looking at him with unreadable dark eyes.
“You’re serious,” he finally concluded.
“As death,” the Acting Captain told him. “How close?”
“It depends,” Wong said slowly. “On how good a navigator we’ve got…”
“Someone’s going to need to put me in my chair,” a tired voice said from beside Kyle, “but I’m good enough for this.”
Lieutenant-Commander Maria Pendez may have been in a wheelchair and may have had Lieutenant Angela Alverez managing to both push said wheelchair and hover, but her eyes were level and her face was determined.
“I should send you right back to the infirmary,” Kyle told her.
“Yes, but there’s no way my assistant can thread the needle for you,” she replied, her voice sharp and fiery. “It can be done, Skipper. How close do you want?”
“Wong?” Kyle asked, turning back to the video.
The engineer shook his head, but when he looked up to meet Kyle’s gaze he had a determined smile on his face.
“If she’s mad enough to fly it, I’m mad enough to try and hold the manipulators together. How close boils down to one question, skipper,” the Engineer said calmly. “Do you care if this ship can fly FTL again afterwards?”
“Commander Wong,” Kyle said flatly, “if you can give me emergence within weapons range of those ships, I don’t care if I have to carry Avalon home.”
Wong glanced through the video screen at Pendez.
“If you can thread it that fine, Lieutenant-Commander, I think I can hold us together. You game?”
Pendez glanced past Kyle to the screen where the last warships of the Tranquility Space Fleet were making a hopeless last stand, praying for a rescue that even this trick wouldn’t be able to bring there in time.
“Let’s kill these sons of bitches.”
Deep Space
08:00 September 19, 2735 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual – Falcon-C type command starfighter
Stanford’s flight crew had helped him get into the command chair in the cockpit of his starfighter, and then strapped him in tightly. He’d wanted to object to their mothering, but one level look from Rokos as he started to open his mouth and he’d meekly gone along with it.
Once he was linked into the ship, however, his body and its infirmities faded away. He was the little starfighter, and he quickly ran through the mental checklist to be sure everything was ready.
“All hands, all hands, this is the Captain,” a voice cut in.
“We will not be emerging in Tranquility on schedule,” Roberts announced, his voice calm. “Instead, we are going to attempt a late emergence. If everything goes as planned, we will arrive on top of the Commonwealth battlegroup.”
“There will be no time for central control. We will launch all fighters as soon as we emerge and release all weapons to independent control. The Tranquility Space Fleet is gone,” he continued grimly, “so if it crosses your sights and it isn’t a Falcon or Avalon herself, kill it.”
Roberts was silent for a moment.
“Good luck,” he said finally. “From what I’m being told about this process, you’ll want to strap yourself in if you can. It’s going to get rough.”
“Well, shit,” Michael said aloud.
“Sir?”
“I doubt anyone else on this ship has ever threaded the needle before,” he told his flight crew calmly. “I, on the other hand, have apparently had more than one lunatic captain. Strap in,” he ordered. “‘Rough’ is an understatement.”
Barely aware of his body as he was, he braced himself for what he knew was coming.
This was going to suck.
Deep Space
08:05 September 19, 2735 ESMDT
DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control
At eight hundred meters long and four hundred wide at the base, Avalon was shorter and squatter than more modern ships. With her heavy neutronium armor, however, only the latest and most massive battleships and super-carriers had eclipsed her immense mass.
Combined with dozens of mass manipulators of various sizes located throughout her hull serving so many different purposes, it took a mighty blow to make the old warship even shiver.
Acting Captain Kyle Roberts’ orders were making her scream.
He held onto the arms of his command chair as the entire ship bucked like a drunken donkey, the air itself splitting and tearing to create the most godawful noise.
Pendez sat at her console, blank-eyed and completely linked into the ship’s systems, riding the fine line between collapsing the warp bubble and ripping the ship apart from gravitic shear – ‘threading the needle’.
In Engineering, Kyle knew that Wong and six of his engineers were linked in as well. They were manually managing the Stetson stabilizers and mass manipulators, desperately trying to keep the warp bubble a little bit more stable, to give Pendez that little bit more flexibility to keep them all alive.
And all the man who’d ordered all of their lives placed in the hands of that tiny handful of individuals could do was watch. Numbers and patterns flashed across his screen, an emergency klaxon began to ring, and still the air around him shrieked like a dying angel.
It seemed to last an eternity, even though he could do the math that told him they would cross the extra distance in less than ten minutes.
It ended with a sudden shock, and the viewscreen in front of them lit up with the sight of Tranquility.
And between them and Tranquility, directly ahead, was the surviving Commonwealth battleship.
39
Tranquility System
08:15 September 19, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
SFG-001 Actual – Falcon-C type command starfighter
For a moment as his forty-two starfighters were blasted out of Avalon’s main flight deck, Stanford thought they were going to ram straight into the battleship in their path. Engines flicked on by mental control, twisting their courses away from the kilometer long warship, and Michael spared half of a second for a sigh of deep relief.
“Alpha, Bravo, Charlie Squadrons,” he snapped over the net, his orders flying out at the speed of thought. “You’re with Rokos, go right and kill me a carrier. Delta, Foxtrot, you’re on me – we’re going left and finding the other one!”
The squadrons split apart smoothly, hours upon hours of both simulated and real practice and combat experience showing.
“What about that battleship?” Rokos demanded on a private line.
Michael sighed and shook his head.
“Like it or not, Russell, she’s Avalon’s problem,” the CAG said softly.
There was no response from his senior squadron commander, and Michael focused on the here and now. Sixteen starfighters followed his as they vectored right, engines flaring antimatter into space as he tracked ‘left’ from Avalon’s launch bay.
“Oh shit,” he cursed under his breath. The carrier must have been moving in to do search and rescue on the damaged battleship – she was right there, less than ten thousand kilometers away.
“Take her,” Michael snapped, suiting actions to words as he triggered his Falcon’s positron lance.
The carrier’s engines were barely starting to flare to life, the ship rotating to presumably present a less damaged broadside with more weapons.
She never completed the rotation. Seventeen fifty-kiloton-a-second positron lances ripped into her, and the rotation made the damage worse. Massive gaps opened in the carrier’s hull as her own armor became an explosion of matter-antimatter annihilation.
Then one of the positron lances ripped open the antimatter capacitors in the ship’s engineering bay, and the cigar-shaped, kilometer and a half long, warship vanished in a newborn sun.
Tranquility System
08:15 September 19, 2735 ESMDT
SFG-001 Alpha Six – Falcon-type starfighter
Michelle missed the battleship by less than a kilometer, close enough to feel the massive ship’s electromagnetic deflectors try to shove her away. Focusing hard, she used that tiny bit of extra impetus to bounce her ship away from the Commonwealth warship and follow Rokos around towards the second carrier.
This one had been hanging back, potentially providing cover for the repairs of the other two, which bought the vessel time to react. By the time the Federation fighter squadrons crossed the fifty thousand kilometer mark, the carrier’s weapons were active.
“Random-walk everybody,” Rokos ordered. “Prep a Starfire salvo on my mark.”
At a closing velocity of over five hundred kilometers a second, random-walking was complicated. Michelle threw her ship into a corkscrew, firing her positron lance as she did. The carrier was beginning its own evasive maneuvers – whoever was over there had reflexes like a cat.
A beam just missed her, the Commonwealth warship returning fire with its own positron lances, and a warning flashed up on her mental Heads Up Display as the carrier fired Javelin anti-fighter missiles.
“Missiles now,” Rokos barked, and Michelle’s gunner obeyed without her relaying the command. Twenty-four starfighters salvoed ninety-six missiles, flashing at the carrier at over a thousand gravities and interpenetrating the Commonwealth missiles coming the other way.
Michelle’s computer calmly informed her that four of the missiles had been targeted on her, and she dismissed the Federation salvo from her thoughts as she focused on surviving.
Her positron lance cut through space in a spiraling pattern that caught the first missile, but the surviving three scattered – their networked intelligence smart enough to at least try to evade. It wasn’t smart enough to come up with a pattern her starfighter’s more capable computer couldn’t crack, however, and she nabbed two more as they closed in.
At the last second, she fired one of the Falcon’s few precious decoys, cut her acceleration to a hundred gravities, and threw her ECM into overdrive.
The missile, confused by the high powered jamming, went for the target where its electronic brain said she should be – the decoy.
The bright light of the missile’s explosion caused her mental screens to darken – and then they darkened again.
The officer on duty aboard the carrier had reacted immediately, and done everything right. The missile defenses had stopped dozens of the Starfires.
Dozens more had made it through, and Michelle’s visual input darkened to pure black as over thirty one-gigaton explosions ripped the Commonwealth warship apart.
“Check in,” Rokos ordered. “Who did we lose?”
The mental check-ins went by in a blink, and Michelle was stunned. Somehow, they hadn’t lost anybody. Her scans showed all twenty-four starfighters still present.
Then she expanded the range of her scans and inhaled sharply.
Where was Avalon?
Tranquility System
08:15 September 19, 2735 ESMDT
DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control
“Our God in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy work be…”
“Shut up and fire!” Kelly snapped, shoving her senior assistant out of the way and grabbing the tactical console. “All weapons, target the battleship and fire,” she snapped into the microphone.
Kyle watched in horror as the twenty million ton mass of the battleship grew in the screen. They couldn’t possibly hit it – automated evasion sequences would activate on both ships, engaging random vectors to avoid collision.
His link to Avalon’s systems told him they were evading, twisting ‘up’ to avoid the Commonwealth warship. Their prow cleared the other ship, and the starfighters blasted into space in the momentary clear space in front of the carrier.
Avalon rumbled as her weapons fired in anger, twelve battleship grade positron lances ripping into the armored hull ahead of them… an armored hull that was drifting back into their path.
He closed his eyes, but his link showed him the paths. By pure fluke, two computers had chosen the same vector to dodge along, and the battleship, with its more modern and powerful engines, was going to dodge right back into Avalon’s path.
They had… seconds. He wasn’t as fast as he had once been, but he was still linked into the battleship’s computers, thinking and acting many times faster than an un-linked human.
With a thought, he pulled the missile batteries back into central control. Then he overrode the minimum distance safeties on the missiles’ one-gigaton warheads and fired.
“Pendez,” he bellowed. “Aim for the center! Follow the missiles!”
The Navigator didn’t even hesitate. She saw the same disaster that Kyle did, and followed his missiles. Avalon’s acceleration was a fifth of the missiles, barely two hundred gravities – not enough to avoid the collision now, but enough to control where they hit.
The battleship’s defenses were active, running on automatic control. Four of Kyle’s missiles were shot down, even as the positron lances tore the Commonwealth ship apart.
The last four slammed into the center of the battleship and detonated as one. The equivalent of four billion tons of TNT exploded in a moment, ripping a hole clean through the immense warship and spewing white fire in every direction.
That fire hadn’t even begun to disperse before Pendez, with a precision Kyle couldn’t have matched without his old implant bandwidth, took Avalon’s neutronium-armored bulk into the exact center of that fireball.
Kyle felt as much as saw the power readings go crazy as the old ship redirected every ounce of power into the mass manipulators serving as inertial dampeners. They collided at a combined velocity of eighty kilometers a second, and he felt even Avalon’s mighty armor buckle.
Finally, painfully, they ripped free of the wreckage, trailing fire behind them. For a moment, he breathed a sigh of relief as every system on his panel began to flash red.
And then the power died again.
Secondary Control was dark for fifteen seconds. Twenty.
Kyle was about to ask who was closest to the emergency supply closet when the lights came back on. The air circulation fans began to whir again, consoles slowly began to boot back up and his datapad lit up with the face of his Chief Engineer.
“Sorry about that,” Wong said quickly. “The zero point cells tried to shut down from overload. We managed to keep enough up to reboot, but it took all of our power load for a few seconds.”
“How bad are we?” Kyle asked without preamble.
“Twenty percent power and rising,” the Chief Engineer replied. “I’ll have exterior coms back for you in a few seconds, but we won’t have sensors for at least five minutes.”
“What about weapons?”
“He doesn’t need to worry about powering those,” Kelly interrupted grimly. “We will want to see if we can still vent those areas remotely.”
Kyle turned back to his acting executive officer.
“What?”
“You flew us into an antimatter explosion, boss,” she said calmly. “Best of a list of bad options – hell, it’s not as if I had any ideas, let alone better ones! – but everything on our forward hull that wasn’t covered in neutronium is gone.”
“And we have fires in all of the weapon bays,” she continued. “I’m getting reports,” she tapped the side of her head, “and we’ve got most of our people out. Venting the air is the best option.”
“You heard Mason, Chief?” Kyle asked.
“I got her,” Wong replied. “I’ll get my people on it.” He paused, listening to someone who wasn’t on this channel. “We’ve got coms back,” he added.
“Get
me Stanford,” Kyle ordered Ensign Li, and slowly tried to relax back into his chair. The young Ensign nodded to him after a moment.
“Michael, please tell me you control the battlespace,” Avalon’s Captain asked his CAG. “Because we are well and truly crispy over here.”
“Hell, boss, I’m surprised to hear your voice,” Stanford replied, his voice shakier than Kyle was expecting. “We still can’t pick you out of the debris field from that battleship. We thought Avalon was gone and we were walking home!”
Kyle checked what status reports they had on the Flight Deck. The neutronium shutters had been closed and Hammond’s note said they were ‘welded the fuck shut’, but also that he’d have them open soon.
“No, CAG, you aren’t doing that,” he replied with a soft chuckle. “You’ll have to hang out outside for a bit until Chief Hammond gets your doors open, but the Flight Deck is otherwise fully operational.”
“I hate to repeat myself,” he continued, “but do you have control of the battlespace?”
“Yeah,” Michael replied slowly. “Yeah, we do. Scratch two carriers and a battleship, Kyle – though I would ask that you not take the next battleship out quite so dramatically!”
Kyle breathed a long sigh of relief.
“I’ll take that under advisement, Michael,” he told the other man with a cheer he was actually starting to feel. “Now, I’m going to deal with repairs. Could you and your people do me the small favor of making sure those Commonwealth starfighters don’t interrupt?”
“They outnumber us two to one,” Michael pointed out.
“And?”
“We have missiles and a carrier to go home to. They don’t,” the CAG finished. “I’ll go see if the Terrans wanna play. You make sure we have a ride home.”
“I’ll do that,” Senior Fleet Commander Kyle Roberts, Acting Captain of the Federation Space Carrier Avalon, said cheerfully.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 30