“Given that, I want your take on the Marine part of the ops plan,” he finished. “Where it can go wrong, as much as anything.”
With a purpose finally laid in front of him, Hansen seemed more comfortable. He straightened and took on a thoughtful look—and the slightly glazed eyes of someone consulting implant data.
“The unknowns bother me the most,” he admitted. “We have a pretty good idea of what the surface situation is, but it sounds like we have almost no intel on the orbitals. Surface positions will probably surrender once we’re in orbit, but we have no guarantee of local support like you ended up with on Alizon.
“It also looks like we’re not planning on staying in-system very long,” Hansen continued. “As I read the op plan, we’re only set to be in-system five days. That’s not a lot of time to secure an entire planet with four thousand troops.”
“Or to provide for the long-term security of the system,” Kyle agreed. “My understanding is that once we’ve achieved all of Rising Star’s objectives, Seventh Fleet is to act as a nodal defense force until the region can be secured. Dividing the Fleet up to provide the security for the systems we’re freeing would undermine our ability to maintain the offensive. We’re taking a risk, but Command thinks it’s worth it.”
He carefully didn’t state his own opinion of it. He wanted to see what the Marine made of the plan.
“If the orbitals are easily secured, and Cora preserved intact ground forces the same way Alizon did, we can do it,” Hansen admitted. “If any of the orbitals have heavy security presences or Cora has no ground troops to back us up, this could turn into a month-long slug-fest. It comes down to just how effective the Commonwealth occupation has been.”
“And luck,” Kyle agreed aloud “I hate depending on luck.”
12
Alizon System
20:00 March 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Captain Kyle Roberts—it was taking him to adjust to his temporary rank in his own mind—watched his new Battle Group make its way out of the Alizon system. All told, he was now responsible for six ships—four warships, an assault transport, and a logistics freighter carrying a load of orbital defense platforms—and almost thirty thousand people.
Avalon, built with the newest and best technology in the galaxy, was the largest ship in the group by a significant margin. The freighter Sunshine was the second largest by volume, the key metric for the Stetson stabilization field, falling between the Reserve ships and the supercarrier in age.
“Confirm the safety radii for the Alcubierre jump,” he ordered his Navigator.
Maria Pendez, the curvaceously attractive, dusky-skinned officer who flew Avalon and currently was providing navigation support to the entirety of Battle Group Seven-Two, smiled back at him. Exposure had rendered him mostly immune to the young woman’s charms, but Kyle had no doubts as to why Pendez had no problems getting the male navigators of the other ships to cooperate with her.
“All ships are at ten thousand kilometers separation and on course for the Cora system,” she confirmed. “We are outside all detectable gravitational interferences and prepared to warp space on your command.”
Despite the differences in age and quality of the six ships, all of them had roughly the same Alcubierre drive. Avalon’s Class One mass manipulators were smaller and had better computer support and control than, say, Sledgehammer’s—but they contained the same amount of carefully manufactured and aligned exotic matter.
The smallest warp bubble humanity had ever managed to generate was approximately three thousand kilometers across and required four Class One mass manipulators—exotic matter–based devices that could create, manipulate or remove the types of bosons that gave the universe mass. Those mass manipulators were expensive—Avalon’s were a third of her price tag. Sunshine’s were fully seventy percent of the freighter’s cost.
Keeping a ship alive inside a warp bubble, a compressed section of space that picked up every atom and molecule in its path as it traveled between stars, was an entirely different matter. Stetson stabilization fields were extraordinarily power-intensive and had massive feedback issues as you scaled them up, but the emitters themselves were cheap.
Every time the Stetson fields got a little more advanced, ships got bigger. Since the Alcubierre drive never changed its cost, warships were only ever built in one size: as big as possible.
Since said warships were a significant chunk of a star system’s economy, they stayed in service even as newer, bigger ships were built. Hence the three older ships in BG 7.2 being barely two thirds of Avalon’s size—that was as large as Alliance could build them in the mid-twenty-seven-twenties.
“All ships, report readiness,” Kyle ordered crisply, studying his fleet via his implant to confirm the separation. Being inside each other’s warp bubbles wasn’t fatal—it would just prevent either ship from actually forming the bubble, which would be both time-consuming and embarrassing.
Verbal and text confirmations drifted back from the other five ships and he leaned back in his chair, meeting Pendez’s gaze.
“All ships, warp space at your discretion,” he ordered, and made a “go ahead” gesture to Pendez.
She smiled, and his implant informed her she’d opened a channel to engineering.
“Commander Wong, can you confirm the status of the Class Ones, please?” she asked sweetly.
“We are at one hundred and one point two percent readiness,” Avalon’s chief engineer replied, more than a little self-satisfaction clear in Senior Fleet Commander Alistair Wong’s voice.
Pendez glanced at Kyle, as if expecting him to take over the process, but he simply smiled at her. Given the personnel assessment he’d sent in for the navigator, she was only a few months from finding herself in an executive officer slot somewhere. This was a simple evolution—and good practice for her.
“Initiating interior Stetson fields,” she announced. Moments later, the screens that coated all four walls, the floor and the roof of the bridge were covered with a faint haze as the field of electromagnetic and gravitational energy settled around the ship.
“Interior field active,” Pendez reported. “Exterior field on standby. Mass manipulators on standby.”
Glancing back at Kyle again, she threw the virtual switch in her implant and brought up the Class Ones. Four sets of distortion appeared in the haze of the Stetson field, as Avalon generated the singularities necessary for her to outspeed light.
A second layer of haze fell between the carrier and the outside universe as the exterior stabilization field snapped into place. Exponentially weaker than the interior field, the exterior field required vastly more power—as it wrapped itself around the space the warp bubble would form in, protecting the outside universe from the energies Avalon was about to unleash.
“We have singularity formation,” Pendez reported. “Exterior Stetson field is active, no containment issues. Initiating warp bubble…now.”
Avalon’s immense arrays of zero point cells flared to life, and the power feeding to the Class One manipulators increased a thousandfold. The distortions seemed to move, and the space beyond the carrier wavered in their influence for a long second.
Then a bright flash of blue light encapsulated the ship—mirrored by five other flashes that barely made it into their new pocket of reality—as Battle Group Avalon launched into interstellar space.
Operation Rising Star was officially under way.
13
Deep Space, en route to Zahn system
22:30 March 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Captain Mira Solace wasn’t quite alone on the bridge of her battlecruiser. Her Alpha shift had left an hour or so after they’d entered Alcubierre drive, and the Charlie shift was always a half-strength group, even before the reduced shifts generally seen while in FTL.
Camerone’s bridge was currently home to one of her junior tacti
cal officers, a junior navigator, and two experienced petty officers keeping a careful eye on both the larval officers and the battlecruiser’s captain.
Mira was studying a display only she could see, laid over her vision by her neural implant, showing the positions of all of the nineteen ships under Admiral Alstairs authority. BG 7.2 and BG 7.3 both had a single freighter attached alongside their warships and assault transport, but Alstairs had attached two of the massive logistics vessels to her own command.
Only two and a bit hours into their FTL trip, the three groups of vessels were still close together. They had sixteen light-years to go, and would be accelerating at one light-year per day squared halfway there—and then decelerating at the same rate the rest of the way. Four days to each leg, eight days total to cross sixteen light-years.
The exact distances to Cora, Zahn and Hammerveldt varied, but all three were between fifteen and sixteen light-years from Alizon. Adjusting the exact accelerations would allow all three Battle Groups to arrive simultaneously—and quantum-entanglement coms would allow them to be sure all of the ships were in place before attacking.
It was an aggressive plan, one Mira was surprised Alstairs had got Alliance High Command to sign off on. The early setbacks had led to a much more defensive attitude on the part of the Alliance—but perhaps the continued losses to Commonwealth raids had made a difference.
The Alliance was still ramping up its industry and recommissioning the Federation’s Reserve. Mira suspected that there were losses even the flag captain of their second-largest offensive fleet didn’t know about. A continuous acid drip of shattered ships and lost lives, slowly degrading the Alliance’s ability to wage even a defensive war.
Perhaps High Command had realized that if they didn’t turn that momentum around, the Commonwealth would win. Marshal Walkingstick had been charged with the annexation of the Rimward Marches—a region of space that coincided almost perfectly with the Alliance—and she doubted he’d planned to take them all in one sweep.
Mira shook her head. All evidence suggested that James Walkingstick was a superior strategist, but even he couldn’t have planned for the back-and-forth bloodshed and slaughter the war had brought out so far. The Terrans might have taken six systems in the opening strikes of the war, but they’d assaulted nine. The losses at Tranquility alone had been mind-boggling—six starships destroyed when Roberts pulled the stunt that earned him the moniker Stellar Fox.
The attrition so far had been in the Commonwealth’s favor, but not by much. Maybe a solid offensive now could truly turn the tide of the war.
Or maybe all they would do was wake up a half-sleeping giant with four starships for every one the Alliance had.
Deep Space, en route to Cora system
10:00 March 7, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Office
“I can’t tell you too much,” Michael Stanford told the camera in his office as he recorded his message for Kelly Mason. “Just the fact that we’re on delayed coms probably tells you enough—we’re at the front, we’re on an op.” He paused. There really wasn’t much he could tell his girlfriend. As a fellow officer, she’d get it, but it still made it hard to fill even a short vid message with content.
“It’s funny watching Kyle take on a multi-ship command,” he finally continued. “I don’t know how the man does it—if they kept promoting me the way they promote him, I’d be floating debris in one of the systems we’ve left behind us.
“Kyle would be the first to call it luck, though,” Michael noted slowly. “All I know is this operation is right up his alley—and as usual when he gets to call the shots, they’re going to be looking the completely wrong way when we punch them in the side of the head.”
With a smile and a slight shake of his head, he intentionally turned his thoughts from work.
“I’ve traded a few messages with my mom,” he told Kelly. “She told me to tell you that you have an open invite to dinner at home. With Dad gone and me in the Force, I think she gets a little lonely these days.”
His mother was a specialist automation troubleshooter, sent all around Castle and its star system—and occasionally beyond—fixing the odd problems that arose when you lined up several hundred semi-sentient robots and told them to build things. His father had been a starfighter pilot in the last war, and come home to fly interplanetary transport ships. Their schedules had clearly converged enough for them to get married and have three children before James Stanford’s transport ship had suffered a critical systems failure and been lost with all hands and passengers.
“Since you’re assigned to Home Fleet, I know you can make it home,” he continued. “My mom, however, does not, so if you don’t feel up to meeting her without me, we can beg off. You two did seem to get along, though, and it would probably be good for her. Her work gets her to meet a lot of people, but I’m not sure if she gets to know any of them.
“Let me know,” he finished. “I look forward to hearing from you again. I love you.”
With near-perfect timing, his admittance chime sounded moments after he finished the message. His implant informed him that Wing Commander Russell Rokos was outside.
“Come in, Commander,” he ordered, sending a mental signal to open the door.
“Commodore,” Rokos greeted him, the burly pilot taking the proffered seat. “I’ve been studying the specs on those Templars the Phoenixes brought to the party, and I have some ideas on how we can make the best use of them alongside our own Falcons.”
“I’m listening,” Michael replied, leaning forward. All he’d had on the docket today was routine paperwork, so almost anything was more useful.
“With the heavier lance they’re packing, they’re better at killing starfighters than the Scimitar is,” Rokos pointed out. The Commonwealth’s latest-generation starfighter had been designed as a starfighter-killer, but its multiple lances were lighter weapons. The Scimitar was deadly at close range, but it had to survive to get there. “What I’m thinking is we sneak one of the Group’s Q-probes in as close as we can, and use the missiles to try and pick out squadron leaders and so forth—and then have the Templars hit them as we close. They’ve got almost forty thousand kilometers’ more range against the Scimitars than we do.”
“And shattering their command and control at that point would throw their datanet out completely,” Michael agreed. “On the other hand, picking out command nodes in a combat datanet is hard.”
“I know,” the junior officer acknowledged. “But I had a thought there, too…”
11:00 March 8, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
There was never truly a time when the ship’s captain was off duty. In the age of neural implants and quantum-entanglement coms, Kyle could arguably command his carrier from the other side of the galaxy.
The necessary bandwidth was more than any but the most expensive Q-Com links could handle for even one person, the almost-inconceivable price tag the major barrier between humanity and remote-controlled missiles and starfighters.
Still, sitting in his office away from the quiet but intense activity of the supercarrier’s bridge was as off-duty as the temporary Force Commander could get while conscious. Having never commanded a six-ship formation before, he was stunned by the amount of work inherent in just keeping on top of the status of his ships.
The downside to neural implants and Q-Coms was that he could easily keep track of everything going on on all six ships. It would rapidly drive him insane, but it was theoretically possible.
Fortunately, he’d commanded starfighter groups before he’d commanded a starship. He’d learned there to leave the individual squadrons to his junior officers, watch the high-level reports, and step in when his juniors told him they needed help—or, often enough, when said juniors’ senior noncommissioned officers told him the officers needed help.
The ships’ computers could give him very handy high-level synopses of the ships’ status, and nine times out of ten, th
at was all he needed. His captains were junior enough that they would have issues, and he’d been quietly messaged a few times in the two days of the trip so far, but nothing dramatic had arisen.
FTL trips were quiet, and this one seemed even quieter than usual. There was a sense of anticipation around Avalon that made Kyle nervous—but then, the quiet times of the mission that had ended up liberating Alizon had been marked by attempts to assassinate him.
With a thought and a flick of his hand, he threw the summaries he was viewing on his implant onto the wallscreen of his office. Six ships filled the wall—the abbreviated arrowhead of Avalon, the slightly sharper spike of Sledgehammer, the two diamonds of the Phoenix warships and the spheres of the freighter and assault transport.
The plan for Cora was both tricky and straightforward. If it worked, he could pull the Commonwealth out of position and gut them with few or no losses—and in the worst case, Battle Group Seven-Two would face a straight slugging match with an edge in numbers and firepower.
The plan after they took the system worried him. Rising Star called for Seventh Fleet to leave the systems behind them defended only by the orbital platforms the logistics freighters carried. Until they attacked the naval base at Via Somnia, they would make no major commitment to holding the systems they were liberating.
It made sense—but it also dropped one hell of a risk on the systems they passed through. They could be setting up a situation where Cora could switch hands three or four times in the next few months—each side spending ships and blood to take the system every time, and the system’s infrastructure taking more and more damage with each battle.
Some of the systems near the Commonwealth border had barely recovered from having that happen to them last time. Even a victory in Operation Rising Star could leave the worlds the Alliance had set out to save in even worse shape.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 72