“Thank you, Commander,” Kyle told him. “Now, I believe you have a shuttle?”
“Determined to die alone, huh?”
“‘Duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather’,” Kyle quoted. “We didn’t come far this far to fail.”
“You’re nuts,” Wong replied. “It’s been an honor, Captain.”
“Likewise,” Kyle answered.
The channel went silent, and Kyle turned his gaze back to the main display. The icons of shuttles and escape pods littered the space behind Avalon as the tiny vessels carrying his crew set their course for Tranquility.
He was alone in Secondary Control now. Soon, he would be alone on Avalon. If he was right, it wouldn’t matter. If he was wrong… Tranquility would still be saved.
He hated the old quote from the Japanese Imperial Rescript. He preferred the one about ‘making the other bastard die for his country’.
So far as he could tell, the Commonwealth ship didn’t have any Q-com equipped drones watching Avalon, meaning she would only see his people abandoning ship when the light reached them and their computers drew the conclusions.
Right about now.
Kyle did have Q-com equipped drones near the Commonwealth carrier, so he saw when they recognized his intent. The ship rotated ninety degrees ‘up’ relative to Tranquility’s ecliptic plane and went to fifty-three gravities.
With a grim smile, Kyle adjusted his course. Without real-time information on him, and with a hundred and fifty gravity acceleration disadvantage, there was no chance for the carrier to escape.
Right now, they were three light minutes apart, and the distance was dropping rapidly as Avalon piled two kilometers a second onto her forty thousand KPS velocity.
Avalon’s computer helpfully dropped a timer onto his screen. Twenty-two minutes to impact. If the carrier had missiles, she would be launching them shortly.
Kyle waited. It was funny, he realized, watching his own death grow in the screen. He wasn’t afraid of dying. What bothered him was that if he died, he wouldn’t be able to take Michael up on his offer of support when he went back to talk to Lisa.
But that wasn’t quite it either, he realized.
It was simpler than that.
If he died, he would never be able to apologize to Lisa. And that, he realized, was even scarier to him than the thought of apologizing to her.
Of course, he was apparently less scared of ramming another ship than he was of talking to the mother of his child.
Kyle shook his head at his own foolishness, and checked the scanners.
The carrier hadn’t launched any missiles. If he’d had any of his own, his current suicide course would be unnecessary.
Again, and again, and again, the carrier shifted course. Five decoys fired into space, each mimicking the electronic and infrared signatures of the carrier.
Unfortunately for the Commonwealth, his drones were close enough to pick them up as they launched and keep his course on the right track.
Ten minutes to impact. The Commonwealth starfighters had broken off their pursuit of SFG-001, but they couldn’t possibly get back in time to prevent Kyle ramming Avalon into his enemy.
The question, he supposed, wasn’t what he could do.
It was what his enemy would do when he realized he was doomed.
At forty light seconds, five minutes to impact, he received the first message.
“This is Captain Maria Jung of the Commonwealth warship Majesty,” a crisply dressed woman with porcelain-white skin and jet-black hair in the Commonwealth Navy’s red and black uniform informed him.
“As an alternative to this madness, I am prepared to accept the honorable surrender of your ship and starfighters,” she continued. “I will personally guarantee your fair treatment and repatriation to your home nations.”
It was a step in the right direction, but not what Kyle needed. He adjusted his course slightly, adding enough of a random spiral to throw off positron lances. Four minutes to impact. Three.
Captain Jung’s skin was even paler when the second message arrived.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I am prepared to negotiate the withdrawal of my forces from this system! Break off your course and I will pick up my fighters and leave!”
Kyle considered it. The problem here wasn’t the offer – if the Commonwealth withdrew, he won.
The problem was that he couldn’t trust her. Once she had the chance to retrieve her fighters, there was nothing stopping Captain Jung from sending them straight at Avalon. Right now he posed the only threat he could ever pose.
Two minutes to impact. Transmission time was down to sixteen seconds, and he still hadn’t replied to any of Jung’s transmissions. It was an open question in Kyle’s mind whether or not the woman would crack – or if someone around her would crack.
Ninety seconds. Kyle could probably avoid impact with even seconds of notice, but he was starting to get nervous now. Eighty seconds. Seventy.
“This is Jung,” the transmission finally said, her voice suddenly very small and afraid. The bridge behind her was a chaotic mess. Jung was bleeding from what looked like a bullet graze on her shoulder and was leaning on her command chair. Kyle’s Q-com drones were now showing escape pods starting to fire off from her ship.
“To avoid further loss of life, I offer the unconditional surrender of all Commonwealth forces under my command. Please respond. Please.”
Kyle smiled coldly. If he’d been a betting man, he’d have just owed himself twenty bucks.
“Captain Jung, this is Captain Roberts,” he said calmly into the recorder. “You will stand down all zero point cells aboard your ship. Your starfighter crews will eject. If you do this, your surrender will be accepted.” He checked the clock. “You have thirty seconds from receipt of this message to comply.”
Captain Jung clearly still had a Q-com link to her starfighters. Less than ten seconds after she would have received his message, the one solitary drone with SFG-001 showed escape modules beginning to blast free of the Commonwealth fighters.
In the face of the potential destruction of their only way home, even starfighter pilots knew when the game was lost.
Kyle waited a few, painful, seconds to be sure the distinctive signature of the zero point cells had disappeared from Majesty, and then slammed an override into the computer.
With seventeen and a half seconds to spare, Avalon slewed aside from her suicide course.
44
Castle System
14:00, October 10, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Orbital Dry Dock Merlin Four
Doctor Lisa Kerensky, M.D. and a list of other letters that was shortly scheduled to include ‘Ph. D. Neural Cybernetics’, wasn’t entirely sure the school tour was supposed to going quite this deep into the repair yard sections of Merlin Four.
She had her suspicions about just how the head of Jacob’s expensive and prestigious private academy had wrangled getting the class of thirty eleven-year-olds the rarely granted privilege of a full tour of one of the Federation Navy’s massive space stations. She couldn’t really object, though. Jacob should, after all, get some benefit from having a famous war hero for a father.
More of a benefit than simply watching the man’s face show up in every news cast for the last three days, anyway. Navy Public Relations had apparently wasted no time in getting newly-promoted Captain Kyle Roberts in front of a camera for an interview when the badly damaged Avalon had finally limped into Castle.
Since no matter what she did, Lisa was pretty sure Jacob was going to see it and ask questions, she’d watched it. They’d interlaced Kyle’s matter of fact commentary with video of the battle – including Avalon flying through a Commonwealth warship in a blaze of fire.
Shaking her head to clear her vagaries, Lisa made sure that the collection of chaos makers she was helping chaperone were still mostly together. She concluded after a moment that they were doing better than expected, though the quartet o
f grim-faced Marines playing nursemaid as they walked through the semi-classified areas probably had something to do with it.
They came to a halt by a massive transparent window, and a voluptuous blond woman in a Navy uniform and three gold circles on her neck seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“That’s Avalon, kids,” she said cheerfully. “Most of us didn’t think she was going to make it home, but Fleet Commander Wong did us proud.”
A wheelchair-bound man in the same uniform and insignia, but with blue piping, rolled his chair up to join her.
“She was painted black,” he pointed out to the kids, gesturing to the gray and black-charred hull. “The paint all burnt off though. The gray you see? That’s neutronium. Still intact, despite everything the Captain did to her.”
Lisa found herself off to the side as the two officers and Marines skilfully directed the children’s attention to the unclassified parts of the ship and the repair yard around her. She couldn’t help studying the ship.
At least one of the blackened holes in the surprisingly unmarked gray hull had to be fifty meters deep. The old ship looked like she’d been through hell.
“I’d say you should see the other guy,” a familiar voice said from behind her, “but the truth is that none of them were intact enough to drag home.”
Lisa turned around. The voice was familiar. The face was older, carrying lines she was sure hadn’t been in the last images her landlady – Jacob’s grandmother – had shown her a few months ago. The uniform was different too – gold-piped instead of blue, and with a single gold planet on the collar instead of two gold circles.
“So they didn’t just conjure with the name of a hero to get us aboard then?” she asked.
“Honestly? I had nothing to do with Jacob’s class getting the trip,” Kyle told her. “I did, however, get them this deep into the repair yard.” He shrugged. “Nothing classified about Avalon anymore. She’s due to be decommissioned in two days.”
She’d forgotten how fast Kyle moved for being so large a man. Suddenly he was next to her, just out of reach and looking down at her.
“I wanted to see you,” he said quietly. “And Jacob too, if you’re okay with that.”
“If I’m okay with that?” she asked. “This is your territory, Kyle.”
“And you are his mother,” her old lover replied, his voice still soft. “I… wronged you. Deeply. You owe me nothing, Lisa – and if you want me to walk away from Jacob and never bother either of you again, I will do so. Child support will keep coming. Nothing will change.”
He paused and swallowed.
“I am sorry,” he said continued. “I’m not here to ask for forgiveness. I am simply here to tell you that it was always me. I was afraid, and I wronged you, and I was too afraid for too long to make it right.”
Somehow, Lisa’s occasional dreams – and, honestly, fantasies – about this moment had never included her stomach being full of butterflies or her hands being sweaty. She was so angry with him – almost twelve years of anger – but she’d never really considered the possibility he would truly show up and apologize.
“I won’t pretend I didn’t know where the money that pays for Jacob’s school came from,” she said quietly. “Or that you were paying more child support than you had to. I wouldn’t be where I am without the support you gave, even if you did leave us in the lurch. It helped, no matter how angry I was, to remind that somewhere inside, you cared.”
“It’s not right. Not yet,” Lisa told him. “But…”
“Mommy!” came a twelve year old yell, and both of them turned around to see Jacob round the corner at maximum speed. He came careening up to Lisa – he was already up to her shoulder, looking to rival his father’s height eventually – and stopped dead about four feet away.
He looked Kyle up and down, his face suddenly very mature.
“Mom,” he said slowly, “is that…?”
“I know you’ve watched that interview, Jacob,” Lisa told him with a smile and a laugh. Suddenly, her heart was at ease for the first time in years.
“Yes, Jacob, this is your father.”
Kyle was suddenly on his knees, and Lisa noted, absently, that her son was as tall as his father like that. It seemed… right.
“Hi Jacob,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
The boy glanced from his father, to his mother, then to the battered spaceship outside the window.
“You were on that,” he whispered.
“I was,” Kyle said gravely.
“Did you… almost not come back?” Jacob asked, and Lisa’s heart dropped out of her chest. Angry as she’d been at Kyle, when she’d heard about the Battle of Tranquility and Avalon’s losses, she’d been terrified for days.
She’d never even thought that Jacob might be just as scared for the father he’d never met.
“I did,” the boy’s father replied, his voice heavy. “I did come back – I had to. I owed you and Lisa that much.”
Lisa found herself blinking back tears as Jacob suddenly threw himself into Kyle’s embrace. The big officer held his son gently, carefully.
Behind him, the wheelchair bound officer corralling the rest of her school tour smiled brightly, and threw Lisa a perfect salute.
Stellar Fox
Castle Federation Book 2
1
Midori System, Castle Federation
15:20 September 30, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BB-155 Corona
Corona was dying.
Even the mightiest of the Castle Federation’s battleships couldn’t take multiple antimatter hits, and she’d been hit five times. Communications were down, and Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin had no idea how the rest of the relief fleet he’d led to Midori was doing.
“Come on, sir!” his Chief of Staff bellowed. “Engineering tells me we have minutes at most until the positron capacitors fail. The entire ship is coming apart.”
Tobin nodded and came to his feet. The immense, dark-haired Castle Federation Admiral met his Chief of Staff’s gaze and nodded calmly.
“Any word?”
“No coms, no reports,” the Fleet Commander told him. “We’ve got nothing – all I can tell you is that nobody is shooting at us anymore.”
“It’s not going to matter for Corona,” Tobin noted calmly. “It’s the fleet I’m concerned about. Let’s go.”
With a clearly audible sigh of relief, Fleet Commander Robert Brown gestured towards the exit from the flag deck. Even to the Admiral’s implants, the room was dead – computers, networks, everything was gone.
“We’re cut off from the shuttle bay,” Brown told Tobin. “Escape pods are this way.”
The Vice Admiral followed the younger officer, coughing as the smoke began to overwhelm the rapidly failing air control units.
They’d barely made it out of the flag deck before the entire warship lurched again, and a safety bulkhead slammed shut behind them. A moment later, the massive bulkhead flashed red as energy pulsed against it.
Tobin stared at the red hot wall for a moment, then sucked in a deep breath as his shipsuit automatically activated its helmet, the transparent shield extending over his head in a single motion. His implants confirmed that air was rapidly leaving the corridor.
“I guess I was wrong about them not shooting at us. We need to move,” Brown sent over their implants. “Follow me.”
Somehow, despite the beating Corona had taken, their deck still had gravity. It seemed everyone except for unusually stubborn old Admirals had evacuated already as the corridors were empty as they made their way to the escape pods.
The next explosion was clearly internal – a set of power conduits that over-loaded as the ship’s network fragmented – and hit as they reached the pods. Brown was thrown backwards as debris hammered across the deck and gravity finally failed.
Tobin managed to catch his Chief of Staff and barely to brace himself against the explosion itself. Brown met his eyes, half of the
officer missing and blood pouring from his torso in impossible quantities.
“It’s all your fault,” his loyal aide told him bluntly. “I shouldn’t have still been here.”
There was, Tobin noted in the back of his mind, no way someone missing that much of their body could speak that clearly.
And Brown had survived the Corona.
Before his mind could process that, the entire ship came apart in a shower of blood and fire, and Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin woke up.
Castle System, Castle Federation
05:00 December 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Local Time
New Cardiff
Dimitri woke up to his wife shaking him gently. Sasha Tobin was upright in bed, looking down at him in the soft light she’d turned on. She smiled softly at her husband as he shook himself.
She started to say something, but he held up a finger as he focused on his therapist’s instructions for the dreams. With a simple command, he told his implant to access its picture-perfect memory of those last terrifying minutes aboard Corona and remembered.
The power conduits had exploded all right – Brown had caught the worst of the blast, losing half a leg and taking shrapnel damage across his body. Tobin’s years-old first aid training had come in handy, as he’d thrown an old-fashioned tourniquet on the man’s leg and dragged his Chief of Staff to an escape pod.
Whatever his subconscious might think, Robert Brown had survived – and survived because one Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin had saved his Chief of Staff’s life.
“The dream again?” Sasha asked as he opened his eyes and returned his attention to her.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is… getting better.” He checked the time and groaned. He wasn’t due at Joint Command for another six hours, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to get back to sleep.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” she asked. After thirty years, he swore his wife could read his thoughts. “You did get an entire starship blown apart around you, Dimitri.”
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 33