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

by Glynn Stewart

  They died. None of the missiles in that salvo had been targeted on starfighters, but the AIs in the Jackhammers recognized the threat—and delegated the lesser Starfire missiles to deal with it. The Scimitars ripped a hole in the center of the first salvo—and none of them ever made it out.

  But their sacrifice served its purpose. Less than a thousand missiles of the first salvo made it through, and they collided with the interlocked defenses of eight capital ships—spearheaded by the massive laser arrays of two of the Commonwealth’s Saint-class battleships.

  None of those missiles made it within a hundred thousand kilometers of the Commonwealth ships—but the second salvo had no starfighters to blunt it and was less than thirty seconds behind.

  The explosions started almost half a million kilometers out, the lasers and positron lances reaching out at weapons whose only defenses were jamming and maneuverability. With almost a hundred and fifty capital ship missiles feeding the jamming and confusion, even the Saints’ defenses were less effective than they could have been.

  Missiles died in their hundreds, but hundreds more survived. A desperate salvo of their own missiles, fired at the last second, gutted much of the remaining salvo—but not enough.

  Michael cheered in his starfighter’s cockpit as missiles slammed home. The Saints were in the rear, and the massive twenty-million-ton battleships lurched as they took hits—but somehow, the monsters kept flying, kept firing.

  Only a handful of missiles snuck past the two battleships. Two of the cruisers were hit, spinning and venting atmosphere—but still managing, incredibly, to keep pulling their emergency acceleration.

  Then the third massive salvo arrived. The Saints, already damaged, already struggling to maintain their acceleration, couldn’t stop them all. Michael knew they couldn’t stop them all, and watched with bated breath.

  Then the engines on one of the Saints blew. The damage and the strain were too much, and an antimatter reactor overloaded, gouging the ship and bringing its acceleration to a sharp halt.

  Its ECM down, its defenses shattered, it was easy prey—and the missiles leapt on it. Even Michael, with telemetry feeds back from the missiles, couldn’t be sure how many missiles had hit the monster warship. Even half a dozen would have been too many—and it was dozens.

  Blinded by the battleship’s death, not many missiles made it past her—and the remaining ships defended themselves with a will. Some might have hit home—it was hard to say in the chaos of the explosions—but none of the ships fell out of formation.

  The rest of the salvos were smaller. Even made up entirely of Jackhammers, Michael had very little hope. Missiles died in their hundreds, each salvo creeping closer and closer, but none quite closing.

  Until another engine blew. The Lexington-class carrier was the oldest ship in the task force, almost a pure carrier with a medium lance armament and no missiles. At the front of the formation, she’d avoided any damage at all.

  But her engines couldn’t take the strain. She’d been designed with a safety margin, but the ship was twelve years old. Maybe corners had been skipped along the way; maybe they had never figured they’d have to push her that hard for that long when they’d designed her safety margin.

  It was irrelevant. As the final salvo closed in, two of the massive antimatter thruster nozzles accelerating her failed and fed reaction mass back into the positron capacitors. Untouched by the Alliance, the twelve-megaton carrier simply…came apart.

  One of the Assassins ran headlong into the debris field. For a moment, that ship stopped accelerating—and the remaining missiles lunged at it.

  The Commonwealth spacers stopped almost all of them. A single Jackhammer made it through—and collided with the older battlecruiser at almost ten percent of the speed of light. Half of the ship continued forward, spinning end over end through space. The back half simply…vanished.

  “That was our last salvo,” Arnolds said slowly. “Sir, they’re evacuating the last cruiser—do we intervene?”

  Before Michael could even reply, Admiral Alstairs came over an all-hands channel.

  “Let them go,” she ordered briskly. “The only thing any of us can do at this point is shoot lifeboats…and that is not a line I’m prepared to cross.

  “Let them go.”

  6

  Alizon System

  11:00 February 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room

  With the holoconferencing system engaged, the tiny breakout conference room attached to Kyle Roberts’ office looked huge. He and Stanford sat at the physical table in the room, and the hologram tank slid out of the wall and showed the “virtual conference room” with all twelve Captains and nine CAGs of Seventh Fleet—plus Rear Admiral Miriam Alstairs and her Chief of Staff Luiz Fernandez.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, herms,” she greeted her senior officers.

  The addition made Kyle blink and check—hermaphrodites were a relatively small minority in the Castle Federation, though larger in some other Alliance members. Captain Eden Mauve of the Clawhammer was apparently a herm—as, to his surprise, was Lord Captain Benn of the Horus. Mauve was a tall, androgynous officer, much the stereotype of the odd gender. Benn was the Imperial stereotype of the stocky blond warrior chieftain, which was admittedly less gender-specific than many of its members liked to present it.

  “I’ve spent most of the morning conferring with Alliance High Command,” Alstairs told them all. “Their conclusion is that Commonwealth Intelligence misestimated the arrival time of our reinforcements. We’ve apparently been playing games with information in our own systems, and Command’s conclusion is that, pretty much Alliance-wide, our civilian sectors leak like a sieve.”

  She shook her head grimly.

  “As I’m sure our new ship captains are aware, but I wasn’t until this morning”—she nodded to the commanders of the reinforcements— “all of their departure messages to family and friends were delayed seventy-two hours.

  “This meant that the Commonwealth commander thought you were three days later than you were, and was planning to defeat us in detail.”

  Kyle chuckled evilly, and he wasn’t the only one. Walkingstick had sent enough ships to deal with either component of what was now Seventh Fleet, but he’d rolled the dice on catching them separately—and failed.

  The real mistake had been the Terran commander on the scene not withdrawing, immediately, of course. A mistake that Walkingstick was probably explaining the cost of right now—assuming the officer in question had lived.

  “That said, we also don’t believe we’re likely to see a new offensive against Alizon anytime soon,” the Admiral told them. “We are clear to commence Operation Rising Star as soon as practically possible.”

  “Does that mean we can finish getting our deflectors upgraded?” Captain Mauve asked. “My Clawhammer will go toe-to-toe with anything you point us at, ma’am, but I’d like to at least have the same range as my enemies!”

  “That’s our first priority, yes,” Alstairs confirmed. “It looks like you’ll have even longer than expected—Command had asked us to remain in place until Suncat returns home. That should be a week.”

  “What about landing forces?” Lord Captain Anders of Gravitas asked. Kyle didn’t like the man, but he definitely had a point—if they were expecting to liberate planets, they were going to need more troops than the Marines aboard their ships.

  “That may be our biggest delay,” the Admiral admitted. “We still expect to receive three Federation Marine Corps assault transports, but they appear to have been delayed…”

  Kaber System

  11:00 February 21, 2736 ESMDT

  AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four

  Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen watched the tactical plot feeding into his neural implant in silence. Morrison Hab was monstrous, a twenty-kilometer-long O’Neill cylinder built by people who figured mass manipulators were too expensive for their space hab
itat.

  When the pirates had shown up, they’d seized the main power facility at one end of the cylinder as their first step, then moved throughout. A new version of a very old dark side of humanity—most modern pirates kept the rape and murder to a minimum, but cleaning out several million people could make you very rich.

  If no one caught you.

  Unfortunately for the bastards who pulled the plan together—and fortunately for the citizens of Morrison Hab—the assault transports pulled together for the new Fleet the Alliance was assembling had just rendezvoused in a nearby system when the news came down.

  The order to go free Morrison Hab had followed that news by minutes.

  A Navy—Imperial, not Federation, sadly—cruiser had beat them here. The pirates had responded by setting charges in the power facility and warning they would blow the entire Hab—and its million-odd residents—to pieces if the Navy got any closer. The assault transports had snuck in on the other side of the star, and now hundreds of assault shuttles were making a ballistic approach to the big hab.

  Kaber was a sparsely populated system—Morrison and the eight other habs like it were the only homes for humans in a system with no habitable worlds—so at least they didn’t need to worry about local traffic. Just hitting each other.

  Hansen checked the plot again. The lanky, raven-haired officer’s unit—Bravo Company, Third Battalion, One Hundred Third Castle Federation Space Marine Bridge—was in the first wave, heading straight for the power facility. If they carried the day, a million people would live.

  If they messed up, three entire brigades of Marines—twelve thousand or so soldiers, give or take—would die with those million people.

  Lieutenant Major Hansen had been one of the Marines who’d boarded Ansem Gulf before the war, back when the Stellar Fox had just been a starfighter squadron commander—a squadron commander who’d saved Hansen’s life and those of his brothers. He’d been one of the Marines who’d survived to board the pirated liner, and one of the people who’d cleaned up the bodies. He’d risk his own life—and every one of those twelve thousand of his siblings-in-arms—to prevent that happening on an even larger scale.

  “Just look at those ships, sir,” his senior NCO told him under his breath, bringing his mind back to the tactical plot. “Those two are just regular wrecks, but what is that?”

  “That” looked like a regular merchant ship, except that they weren’t concealing their energy signature and the signature looked more like a cruiser than a freighter.

  “Intel says it’s a Commonwealth Q-ship,” Hansen told the Gunnery Sergeant. “They want it intact.”

  His man whistled.

  “That’s gonna be a tight one, sir.”

  “That’s the Brigadier’s problem,” Bravo Company’s commander replied. The 103rd Brigade had drawn that straw—and Brigadier George Hammond was leading his entire First Battalion on that strike himself. “Our problem is to make sure that we take that facility, or we all get to visit Heaven tonight.”

  The sergeant chuckled.

  “You know what they say, sir… ‘If the Navy and the Space Force…’” He started to trail off, but Hansen took up the poem himself—loudly enough for everyone in the shuttle to hear and join in.

  “…ever look on Heaven’s scenes, they’ll find the streets are guarded, by Castle’s damned Marines!”

  The entire company had joined in by the last line, the men trapped in the suits of armor that were unpowered until they hit assault mode. As they wrapped up the poem, Hansen howled—the keening wolf howl of a Castle Federation Marine about to go to war.

  The shuttle echoed as his men joined in, and he smiled broadly as the pilot joined in—and then hit the thrusters.

  As howls rang through the shuttle, the spacecraft lit up with a massive spike of energy and blasted forward at a thousand gravities.

  The armor helmets slammed down, cutting off the noise, and Hansen’s armor powered up.

  The pirates were doomed.

  Alizon System

  11:10 February 21, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room

  “My understanding,” Admiral Alstairs noted, “is that transports should be back on their way by tomorrow morning. From our perspective, the pirates couldn’t have picked a better time to try and attack the Kaber system. We don’t normally have much in place to protect them.

  “Once the Marines have arrived, we are expected to launch Rising Star almost immediately,” she concluded. “That still gives us a week and a half at minimum to get everything sorted on our side. Is that sufficient for everyone to get their deflectors up to full strength?”

  The only response was nods from all of the new captains. Kyle was checking logistics as they were nodding. Alizon had enough missiles and other munitions to completely replenish Seventh Fleet, though not a lot more. Logistics this far away from the core Castle Federation and Coraline Imperium territories were more difficult than anyone liked.

  There were enough replacement starfighters to get the fighter groups back up to strength, though he made a mental note to have Stanford touch base with the Imperial CAGs. Several of their starfighters had been destroyed stopping the final missile salvos, and not all of the escape pods had made it out. Alizon should be able to provide replacement crews…if the Imperials were willing to take them.

  “We’re going to be out on the end of a long supply line,” Alstairs reminded everyone, as if reading his mind. “We can replenish fuel and missiles if we have time, but the demands of the offensive may not allow that. Watch your munitions use—positrons are cheaper than missile chassis.”

  Most of the capital ships would have the ability to manufacture replacement munitions, so long as they could extract raw resources from somewhere. Even reaction mass could be drained from an available gas giant. Food was harder, often the biggest limitation on the ships’ endurance.

  “If no one has further questions?” Alstairs glanced around the holographic “‘room’..” “If not, we have a lot of details to sort out, even if the Marines seem to be giving us a bit more time.”

  7

  Kaber System

  21:00 February 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Morrison Hab Main Power Facility

  Edvard Hansen leaned against the wall in what had been the main control center for the power facility, the helmet of his powered battle armor in his hands as he regarded Major Brahm, Third Battalion’s XO, levelly.

  “We’re pulling out already?” he asked in disbelief. “Last download I had still showed pockets of resistance in the hab itself.”

  “We’re Federation Marines, Edvard,” Brahm replied calmly. “And Kaber is an Imperial protectorate, not a Federation one. While the Coraline Imperium is grateful for our assistance etcetera, etcetera—and don’t get me wrong, Lord Captain Amelia Hermann was very grateful—Renown’s Imperial Marines should be able to take it from here. And we, as I doubt I need to remind you, Lieutenant Major, have somewhere else to be.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Edvard chorused flatly. “One of my men died to retake this plant. I’m not sure my company is going to be entirely happy to just…leave.”

  “We lost twenty-six people all told, son,” the shaven-headed Major told him bluntly. “In trade, we saved one million, one hundred and twelve thousand, four hundred and ninety-two civilians and took just over four thousand pirates out of circulation. I’d hope your people would regard that as a win.”

  “They will, sir,” Bravo Company’s commander replied. “Eventually. But if we’re on-station for less than twelve hours, it’s hard for that to sink in.”

  “I know,” Brahm admitted. “Once we’re out of here and into Alcubierre, however, you are cleared to brief them on Rising Star. I suspect realizing we’re going to be taking back the systems the Commonwealth invaded will help morale.”

  “It might,” Edvard admitted. The fight for the power plant had been anticlimactic. Most of the pirates hadn’t even had a
chance to realize the Marines were coming, and the remainder had lacked weaponry able to penetrate the Marines’ armor. His one trooper had died to a pirate shooting a power conduit instead of her.

  Brahm sighed, looking at him levelly. Both of them still wore their armored suits and carried their helmets. Edvard was suddenly very aware of the smell of aging blood that filled the room—the original control team had died at their stations when the pirates had boarded, and the pirates had joined them not long ago.

  “Never lost a man before, have you?” he asked. “But you were at the Gulf?”

  “Not under my command,” Edvard admitted. “We were…the lucky ones at Ansem Gulf. The second wave. Once Roberts had blasted the defenses clear, we had it easy.”

  The Major grunted, looking around the room as if to make sure they were alone.

  “Right reaction,” Brahm said slowly. “Right place, even. Never show it in front of the men. It hurts, son. And it should. But you can’t let it get in the way of doing your damned job; do you get me, Lieutenant Major?”

  “Yes, sir,” Edvard replied. There was a little more conviction in his voice now, but not much more in his heart.

  “We’re at war now, Hansen,” the XO reminded him. “We’re about to be on the front lines, the very tip of the spear. That’s where they send Marines.”

  “That’s where they send Castle’s damned Marines, sir,” the younger man replied crisply. He wanted to be on those front lines. He’d had a cousin on Cora, an exchange student. So far as he knew, the girl was dead.

  Brahm chuckled.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “We share enough tech that most of the Alliance has the same gear we do. The Imperium and the Star Kingdom train as hard as we do. But they don’t have our heart. Federation Marines are the tip for a reason. We earned it—but we also asked for it.”