“The plan for Rising Star calls for three battle groups of four ships each,” Alstairs continued, as if listening to his thoughts. “We’ve all run through scenarios of which ships should go where, and we all know the intel on our target systems inside and out. We’re down to details and assignments, and I’ve been buried in discussions with Alliance High Command on those assignments for the last two days.”
With a wholly unnecessary gesture, Alstairs brought up an image of all twelve ships of Seventh Fleet in the holoprojection above her head.
“The biggest issue is that we have no O-Eight officers in Seventh Fleet except myself,” she said bluntly. “Most of our captains, especially those in our latest reinforcements, are extremely junior. If we’d been organized properly, a force of this size would have an O-Nine in command, with at least two Rear Admirals for subordinate commands.
“But with the current rush of ships and flotillas across the Alliance, it seems no one had any Admirals to send us,” Alstairs continued dryly. “Operation Peacock, Fourth Fleet’s mission to liberate the systems the Commonwealth took in January, is currently being commanded by an Imperial Vice Admiral. Our highest flag officers are commanding the largest deployments—defensive formations, one and all.
“Which leaves us in a quandary I intend to solve in the finest of Federation traditions: by breveting people to ranks that don’t exist,” she told them with a chuckle. “Captain Roberts, Captain Aleppo: get up.”
Kyle obeyed, eyeing the small woman with the pale skin and the shaved head who rose as well. Lora Aleppo was generally quiet, but when she spoke, the battleship captain was worth listening to.
“I am breveting you both to Force Commander,” the Rear Admiral told them briskly. “And yes, before you ask, Lora, I’m aware the Trade Security Force has no such rank. It’s not like it comes with a pay raise.”
Kyle didn’t even need to look around to know that he was getting a death glare from Lord Captain Anders. The Imperial Captain was senior to him by two years, and Ingolf Benn, the other Imperial Lord Captain, was a year senior to Kyle—the only one of the new ship captains senior to him.
The other seven captains, O-7s all, had been promoted since October of the previous year—making them all junior to Kyle despite his five months as Captain. Since Mira had been promoted to command Camerone only at the end of January, Aleppo and the two Imperial captains were the only captains actually senior to him.
“Ma’am, I feel it necessary to point out that there are several Captains here senior to Captain Roberts,” Anders noted aloud, his Coraline drawl grating on Kyle’s ears.
“And none commanding as powerful a warship,” Alstairs told him. “Avalon will be the keystone of Battle Group Seven-Two. Neither Gravitas nor Horus is capable of fulfilling the same role.”
With another gesture, she split the twelve ships into three groups of four.
“I will command Battle Group Seven-One, Camerone,” she continued. “Seven-One will consist of Camerone herself, Horus and Gravitas, and Grizzly.”
Kyle nodded to himself. Grizzly would provide the core of BG7.1’s long-range striking power, with the three battlecruisers augmenting the older carrier’s fighter group and providing the direct smashing power that Grizzly lacked. Assigning both of the Imperial ships to her own group also kept the problematic Captain Anders under the Admiral’s own eye.
“Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, will be under Force Commander Roberts,” Alstairs announced. “Sledgehammer, Courageous and Indomitable will support Avalon.”
That gave Kyle a lot more direct firepower than he was used to, with the Phoenix ships augmenting Avalon’s own starfighter wings. Once they picked up their assault transport, Battle Group Avalon would be able to complete any mission they were given.
“Battle Group Seven-Three, Zheng He will be under Force Commander Aleppo,” the Admiral finished. “Backing up Zheng He will be Polar Bear, Clawhammer and Culloden.”
7.3 was a hammer to Kyle’s mind. Two battleships, a carrier and a Last Stand-class battlecruiser? Less fighter strength than either of the other two groups, but Zheng He had the most powerful positron lances in Seventh Fleet. Commonwealth tactics called to close with Alliance forces, but anyone closing with Battle Group 7.3 was going to feel the pain.
“These assignments, for those of you wondering”—Alstairs very clearly didn’t look at Anders—“have already been signed off on by High Command. Each Battle Group will pick up one of the three CFMC assault transports en route to Alizon for their ground forces.
“The Marines have provided an updated ETA, and High Command has signed off on the activation date based on that arrival time. As of twenty hundred hours this evening, Operating Rising Star is officially go in ninety-six hours.
“It’s time for payback.”
09:00 March 2, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Main Conference Room
Vice Commodore Michael Stanford had wondered when the name of Indomitable’s Commander, Air Group, had crossed his desk if the Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills commanding the battlecruiser’s starfighters was the woman he knew.
He still wasn’t mentally prepared to see the petite, curvy blond woman walk into the conference room along with the other five Royal Phoenix Navy and Space Force officers invited to the face-to-face meeting Force Commander Roberts had called of the new Battle Group Avalon’s officers.
Wills noticed him and gave him a lascivious wink, followed by a small, almost imperceptible, headshake. She clearly remembered the evening in the Phoenix system where her wing had bought Avalon’s fighter pilots drinks.
And everything that had followed it.
Of course his one-night stand was now one of his subordinates. The Stars’ sense of humor was far too vindictive for anything else to happen. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a copious supply of one-night stands from before when Kelly Mason—currently executive officer of a strike cruiser in the Federation’s Home Fleet—had turned him into something resembling an honest man.
Thankfully, Stanford was sitting beside Kyle, so hopefully Avalon’s Captain hadn’t noticed the interplay. He was going to be in enough trouble with his girlfriend without his Captain knowing what was going on.
“Now we’re all here, let’s get down to business,” Roberts announced, bringing Michael’s attention back to the moment instead of future problems.
“You all know the high parameters of Operation Rising Star,” he continued, “but this briefing is to familiarize you with our portion of it.”
The holotank over the conference table lit up with a three-dimensional model of a star system. It was an F-series star with eleven planets and an asteroid belt. The outer three planets were gas giants, the inner three chunks of rock burnt to a crisp. Planets four and five, as well as the asteroid belt between them, were in the Goldilocks zone. The rest were mostly-useless frozen balls of rock between the habitable worlds and the gas giants.
“The Cora system, people,” Roberts concluded. “Two habitable planets. An asteroid belt with three major dwarf planetoids, easily terraformed given the application of Class One mass manipulators to create gravity. The system was colonized late; being a high-energy F-class star, it was missed in early scouting sweeps. The fifth planet, Montreal, is heavily inhabited, with a secondary colony on New Quebec, but the potential for a system almost as wealthy as Phoenix is there.
“The colony is owned and operated by a special-purpose corporate entity originally created on Terra itself but relocated to Montreal prior to the last war to be entirely independent of the Commonwealth. They were a member state of the Alliance but had only local-system defense forces that proved insufficient in the face of the Commonwealth invasion.”
Michael shook his head as he regarded the system. A corporate colony like that, especially in a system with five potentially inhabitable worlds, stood to become fabulously wealthy—and evolve into a system government. The up-front investment was enormous, and Cora’s owners-cum-government had decided not to add
real warships to that investment.
Now the Commonwealth owned their investment.
“Current intelligence suggests that the Commonwealth has three ships in Cora,” Roberts noted. “Their best guess is two cruisers and a battleship, but it may be three cruisers, two cruisers and a carrier, or just about any other variation you can think of. We’re going to plan this out—and we’re going to plan it out assuming that they’ve stuck three Volcano carriers in the systems.”
“Force Commander,” Sledgehammer’s Captain Ainsley interjected. “That seems a lot of metal for the Commonwealth to tie up in a system like this. Modern hulls, at that.”
“I agree,” Battle Group 7.2’s commander said promptly. “I suspect we’ll be looking at something more akin to three Assassins or ships of a similar vintage. But if we plan to tangle with Terra’s finest, we’ll be more than prepared to deal with their second rank, won’t we?”
Michael wasn’t surprised to find Sub-Colonel Wills waiting for him as the staff meeting dispersed.
“Walk with me,” he half-ordered, half-suggested.
She fell in behind him, walking silently as they put some distance between themselves and the gathering of CAGs, Captains and XOs.
“I wanted to clear the air between us,” she admitted after they were well out of sight. “I’m an incorrigible flirt, and I’ll confess that I never expected to end up serving under you—but I need to be very clear: I don’t sleep with my superior officers.”
Michael couldn’t help himself. Her concern was so very different from his own that it shocked a sharp bark of laughter from him, and he looked over at Wills with a smile.
“Putting aside the long list of regulations that would break,” he said mildly, “it would also piss off both Force Commander Roberts and my girlfriend. Pissing off senior officers and strike cruiser XOs is not conducive to long-term survival.”
He surprised a choke of laughter out of Wills, whose posture relaxed as she continued to walk alongside him.
“I don’t chase taken men, either,” she pointed out. “Damn, we were both worried about the wrong thing, weren’t we?”
“Apparently,” he agreed. “Let’s leave the past in the past, shall we?” He offered her his hand.
She shook it with a smile.
“Agreed.”
“Now,” he continued as they approached his office, “tell me about the Templars. I’m going to need to know it inside and out, and the best way to find that out is to interrogate a pilot.”
11
Alizon System
12:00 March 4, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera, Bravo Company Commander’s Office
Edvard Hansen loved watching Alcubierre emergences. The lanky, dark-haired Lieutenant Major’s office had a holoprojector, normally used for small-scale briefings, which he’d learned he could set up to project two-dimensional images along all of the walls.
On emergence into the Alizon system, he had the projector set up to show him a slightly compressed version of the view outside the ship. Toward the front of the ship, the universe was red-shifted into oblivion. This close to arrival, the normal star-bow was expanded to cover most of the front half of the warp bubble, but the gravitational anomalies creating the warp bubble reduced the light to an unclear mess of purple and red.
Behind them, the universe faded to a blue so dark as to be nearly black. Smears of blue and red reached across the space between the star-bow and star-wake, a section normally only lit by the captured radiation of an Alcubierre warp bubble.
Then, for an instant only barely perceptible to the human eye and mind, the bow and wake met in the middle. The ship slowed to the same pseudo-velocity it had started with in the Kaber system days before, and the four distinct whorls of the singularities conjured by Chimera’s Class One mass manipulators were suddenly visible—and the whole bubble popped.
The eye caught shreds of color scattering away, but Edvard wasn’t entirely sure that wasn’t a trick of the mind. One moment, the ship was surrounded in the ethereal colors of the warp bubble, and the next only by empty space.
It was an awe-inspiring transition, and he never tired of it. Once it was over, sadly, he needed to return to the mundane drudgery of the paperwork he was running through—an assessment of what supplies Bravo Company needed from Chimera’s auto-fabricators. Mostly munitions, though one of his heavy-weapons people had taken a beating sufficient to require both new armor and a new weapon.
The task was unexciting enough, he didn’t even check who was at his office door when the admittance chime sounded, and found himself shooting out of his chair to attention when Brigadier George Hammond stomped into his office.
“At ease, son,” the stocky, balding, commander of the 103rd Brigade said crisply. “You did good work on Morrison; this ain’t a come-to-Jesus meeting.”
“Of course, Brigadier,” Edvard said, slowly lowering himself back into his chair and gesturing for his CO to seat himself. “How can I help you, sir?”
He normally reported to his battalion’s CO, Colonel Silje, or her exec, Major Brahm. Outside of full-brigade officer briefings, he’d met the Brigadier exactly once.
“We’ve arrived in the Alizon system,” Hammond told him briskly. “You’ll be getting a briefing packet on what the Navy has put together as Operation Rising Star. Key point for the moment is that Seventh Fleet is getting into three Battle Groups, and each of those Battle Groups is getting an assault transport.”
“That makes sense, sir,” the Lieutenant Major replied, hoping for some kind of clue as to why he had the Brigadier in his office.
“We’ve been assigned to Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon,” his superior told him. “Force Commander Roberts has invited myself and several senior officers aboard Avalon to discuss our next operation, and explicitly requested that you be included.”
Edvard leaned back, confused for a long moment, until…Avalon.
“Kyle Roberts, sir? The Stellar Fox? Asked for me?”
“You served with him aboard Alamo, as I understand,” Hammond noted. “You were both at Ansem Gulf, which I would call a…formative experience for you both.”
“Makes sense, sir,” Edvard repeated, flashes of memory of the hell that had been the inside of the pirated liner crossing his mind as he tried to conceal his wince.
The Brigadier’s silent pause told Edvard that the older man understood exactly what had just happened. The older man was a mustang, commissioned from the ranks during the last days of the previous war. He’d seen the same kind of mess.
“I tend to bring promising junior officers along on this kind of trip in any case,” Hammond noted. “After your performance on Morrison Hab, you were on my list anyway. We make Alizon orbit in three hours—be ready to transfer over to Avalon then.
“And, son, a piece of advice?”
“Yes, sir?”
“If Roberts is anything like most of the soldiers the media hangs a moniker like ‘Stellar Fox’ on,” Hammond said with the calm of experience, “he hates the nickname.”
15:30 March 4, 2736 EMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
“Have a seat, Major,” Kyle instructed Hansen as the Marine officer entered his office. “Peng Wa sends her regards.”
“How is the gunny?” Hansen asked as he carefully took a seat. He felt unsurprisingly awkward at ending up in the office of the Battle Group commander.
Master Sergeant Peng Wa was the senior Marine noncommissioned officer aboard Avalon. It would fall to the woman to coordinate the inevitable interactions between NCOs of different units required to make the officers’ plans actually work.
She’d also, due to the virtues of experience, ended up effectively in command of the second wave of Marines that had boarded Ansem Gulf, after the first wave, including the Major in command, had been killed.
“I owe her my life a few times more than before,” Kyle observed. “She keeps Avalon’s Marines in check, and I try not to d
ie on her. It’s a solid working partnership.”
Hansen dared a smile, still clearly unsure of what Kyle wanted.
“Avalon is that dangerous a posting, sir?” he asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Kyle replied quietly. He couldn’t say much more than that. The entire affair with what appeared to be a domestically employed assassin organizing a mutiny and attempting to kill him was classified—not least for the political disaster it could birth if it became public knowledge.
Hansen nodded, clearly aware there was more going on, then shrugged and went for the heart of the matter.
“Sir, I have to admit to being unsure why you wanted to speak to me,” he asked.
“A few reasons,” Kyle admitted. “I’ll confess to feeling somewhat…proprietary of the Marines who survived Ansem Gulf. If the media is going to tell me I saved you all, I feel somewhat responsible for you.”
“You did save us all, sir,” Hansen told him. “The second wave didn’t have enough delta-v to break off before entering range of the weapons the pirates had mounted on Ansem Gulf.” The Marine shivered in memory. “Assault shuttles can’t stand up to military mass drivers.”
“I and about sixty other pilots and flight crew saved you,” Avalon’s Captain replied. “But Ansem Gulf was a mess. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, away from the other Marines.”
“Sir?”
“I understand the Morrison Hub operation went very smoothly,” Kyle noted.
“I lost one of my troopers, but yes,” Hansen confirmed with a sigh. The loss of his people clearly bothered him.
“Outside of you and the Brigadier, no one in the One Oh Third has really seen how bad a boarding operation can get,” Kyle reminded the Marine quietly. “They haven’t seen the aftermath the way you and I have.”
The whole conversation was bringing up unpleasant memories for them both, but Kyle did have a purpose here. He forged on.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 71