Neither the star maps nor the status reports on his ships showed him an answer. He hoped High Command had one, but all he could do right now was his job—take the fight to the enemy.
14
Zahn System
23:00 March 13, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Mira caught herself holding her breath as the countdown ticked toward emergence in the Zahn system. Slowly, as quietly as possible, she exhaled—hoping none of her bridge crew caught her nervousness.
Emergence into a friendly system was a calm, stately affair. Information relayed from in-system sensors via Q-Com allowed the incoming ship to place their arrival point clear of the small orbital bodies no system—except perhaps Sol—had perfectly tracked, as well as the many small in-system ships that drove a star system’s economy.
Assaulting a hostile system had none of those luxuries, plus the added danger of enemy warships and defenses. Intel placed three Commonwealth warships in the Zahn system, and while they were probably in orbit of the inhabited planet Zahn IV, they could be anywhere in the system.
And Captain Mira Solace had never commanded a warship through a hostile emergence before. None of the emergences Avalon had gone through with her as executive officer had suffered the slightest issue, but there was always a risk.
Then the star-bow and star-wake surrounding her converged and the warp bubble popped.
Emergence.
“We have entered the Zahn system,” Fleet Commander James Coles reported. “We are approximately forty million kilometers from the planet Zahn and ten million kilometers above the ecliptic plan. Zero-zero ETA assuming no interruptions and Battle Group flank acceleration, two and a half hours.”
“Thank you, Commander Cole,” Mira told her navigator, and glanced around the bridge. As always, her neural implant overlaid the walls with the image of the empty space around them. Dispersing shreds of Cherenkov radiation lit up blue sparks in her vision as the computers dropped icons in to note the other six ships of Battle Group Seven-One, Camerone.
“Commander Rose,” Camerone’s Captain continued, turning to her tactical officer, “do we have a bead on Commonwealth forces yet?”
“Still processing the light from across the system, but I’m not seeing anything,” Fleet Commander Keira Rose replied. “I’m picking up fighter base platforms in orbit of the planet—I’m currently calling it four Zion-class fighter bases. They’d support two hundred starfighters.” As Rose spoke, she threw an image onto the physical main viewscreen so everyone could see it. Zahn IV—most commonly simply called Zahn—was a dry but habitable world, with massive landmasses and oceans that were more brown than blue. Rose added icons in orbit of the planet, first the four two-hundred-meter disks of the launch platforms, then a scattering of smaller red icons amidst the orbital industry.
Zahn had never been a wealthy world, and its sparse orbital platforms showed it. The Terran fighter platforms were the largest stations in orbit, although there were two big civilian space stations that weren’t much smaller.
The hundred and twenty missile launch platforms stood out amidst that lack of orbital clutter. Between them and the fighter platforms, it was a formidable defense, potentially capable of standing off a warship on its own.
A warship. Admiral Alstairs had brought four warships. Not to mention that in the absence of at least sublight guardships if not real warships, there was nothing stopping them from slowly removing the defensive platforms with long-range missile fire. The fighters and missiles would complicate it, but Mira could defeat the visible defenses with Camerone alone, given time.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing, Captain?” Rear Admiral Alstairs asked Mira quietly via her implant.
“We haven’t picked up any true warships, ma’am,” Mira confirmed. “No guardships, either.”
“The Commonwealth likely wouldn’t have brought guardships with them,” Alstairs noted, “but this makes the back of my neck itch.”
A moment later, Alstairs came onto a broader channel linked to all of the Captains, XOs, and Tactical Officers.
“All right, people, it’s looking like Walkingstick has left the door wide open—but I am not prepared to trust that. Let’s get the starfighters into space in a defensive formation and make our course for Zahn. All transports, move to the center of the formation and stay out of the line of fire.
“Let’s get some Q-probes out there, too,” Alstairs ordered. “I want a full sweep of the system ASAP. If they’ve left the door open, I’m happy to kick it down and take over—but if this is a trap, I want to know before they kick us in the ass!”
An hour later, the Q-probes were sixty million kilometers away, continuing to transmit in real time, and Battle Group Camerone had a solid idea what was in that radius. The answer was: not much.
No warships in hiding. No guardships patrolling and keeping an eye on the civilian shipping in the system. Two squadrons’ worth of starfighters scattered around the civilian spaceships in penny packets, now burning hard for Zahn orbit, and the defensive platforms slowly concentrating themselves on the side of the planet facing Camerone.
“All right,” Alstairs said finally. “I’m still feeling paranoid, but it’s looking like that’s all it is. Vice Commodore Bachchan!”
“Yes, ma’am,” that worthy replied. Vice Commodore Gopinatha Bachchan commanded the one hundred and twenty-eight Falcons aboard the Ursine-class deep space carrier Grizzly—making her the senior starfighter officer in BG 7.1 and therefore the battle group CAG.
“Hold two wings back—one each of Arrows and Falcons—as CSP and then take the rest of your ships forward,” the Admiral ordered. “We’ll be launching missiles momentarily as a first sweep, but the lion’s share will fall on your people. Clear Zahn’s skies for me, Vice Commodore.”
“With pleasure,” Bachchan confirmed. “I’ll hold Grizzly’s Wing Three and Gravitas’s Wing Two in reserve. We’ll be underway in two minutes.”
No one objected—it was, after all, Bachchan’s call. Grizzly’s Wing Three was a third understrength—an oddity of the Ursine-class carriers’ design, and Gravitas’s smaller fighter wing meant both of her wings fielded only five squadrons.
That would leave nine squadrons—seventy-two starfighters—to back up the capital ships and protect the transports, while the majority of the ships—twelve squadrons from Grizzly, five from Gravitas, eight from Horus and six from Camerone for a total of almost two hundred and fifty seventh-generation starfighters—headed for Zahn.
“All capital ships,” Alstairs continued, “target missile platforms one through seventeen and coordinate your salvos. Launch in sixty seconds.”
Seventeen was not picked at random, Mira noted as she gestured for Rose to set up the strike. That would put two capital ship missiles on each platform. It was a test as much as anything else. Two missiles—even Jackhammers—probably wouldn’t penetrate the platforms’ defenses.
But they might. And every platform they blew up was one that wasn’t firing back.
“Ma’am,” Rose responded quietly. “They seem to be done waiting as well. I have missile launch from the orbital platforms. Scanners mark as three hundred sixty inbound. Estimated time to impact, twenty-seven minutes.”
“Our missile flight time?” Mira asked quietly.
“Twenty-nine minutes, ma’am. We are accelerating toward them, which gives them an edge.”
“Do we know what launchers or magazines they have?”
“Negative,” Rose told her. “Best guess? Sixty-second cycle, thirty missile magazines. They can empty those platforms before we hit them back.”
Alstairs had clearly either been running the same analysis or listening to Rose—probably listening to Rose.
“All ships, change target priorities,” she said calmly. “The missile platforms will shoot themselves dry, but those fighter platforms have anti-fighter lances. Target Zion One and fire when ready.”
All of the
warships in Battle Group Seven-One had been designed to engage on approach to the enemy, especially with missiles. Grizzly and Camerone were Castle Federation designs, arrowheads in space with the vast majority of their weaponry pointed forward. The two Imperial warships were more of a flattened cigar, but had built even more flexibility into their launchers’ firing angle, allowing all of their missiles to fire forward as well.
Once the order was given, all four ships fired simultaneously, launching thirty-four Jackhammer capital ship missiles into space. Twenty-four seconds later, a second salvo followed. Then a third.
The fourth targeted the second Zion platform. Two more followed at that launch base, then the target shifted again.
In a little under five minutes, Battle Group Camerone fired twelve salvos of thirty-four missiles apiece. Then they suspended fire, waiting and watching as the missile salvos and starfighters lunged towards each other.
The defending starfighters were coming out to meet Bachchan’s people. They didn’t have much of a choice—velocity was life in a starfighter engagement, and the Alliance craft were looking to whip past the defenses at over five percent of lightspeed.
Seconds turned into minutes and Mira set a series of timers inside her neural implants’ overlay of her vision. The missiles would reach Seven-One’s defensive perimeter first, followed by the starfighters ranging on each other. Then the Battle Group would face a salvo of missiles every minute until the platforms ran out or the starfighters killed them—unless they’d underestimated the platforms’ magazines, about twenty-five minutes either way.
This was the point in the battle where even if someone came up with a clever trick, very little was going to change. Physics dominated the decision now—the fighters could run, but being far too small to mount Alcubierre-Stetson drives, they had nowhere to run to.
“I guess it’s too much to hope that they’ll surrender?” her XO, Bruce Notley, asked quietly. Notley was a solid sort, unassuming, quiet, and very efficient at dealing with the day-to-day demands of a warship.
“They’d have surrendered before they launched,” Mira pointed out to him. “They’ve got enough launchers over there that could make Camerone sweat on her own, but against the battle group? Better spitting in a fire.”
Sadly, determination and a will to push to the last weren’t restricted to the good guys—and that was assuming you could get everyone to agree on who the good guys were! Most Commonwealthers she’d met in peacetime, soldiers or civilians, really did seem to think that bringing all of humanity under one government was a good thing—and hence, the soldiers fighting for it were the “good guys’.”
“We’re coming up on turnover,” Coles reported. “Any update from the flag?”
Mira checked her all-Captains channel.
“Admiral,” she queried. “Any change on turnover plans?”
There was a pause as Alstairs considered. Turnover—flipping the ships to reverse their acceleration—would point the starships’ engines at the defenses, inherently making them more vulnerable. The starfighters were still on their way and missiles were still spitting into space—but the truth was that the Commonwealth forces were utterly outmatched.
“Make turnover on schedule,” the Rear Admiral ordered. “You may maneuver as necessary to protect your ships at your discretion.”
With twelve minutes to go to missile intercept, all six ships flipped and began reducing their velocity towards the planet—and the missiles. Mira’s implant timers shifted, showing that they’d now gained forty-five seconds until the missile salvos started coming in.
That meant the starfighters reached their weapons range first. The Terran ships fired first, two hundred Scimitars launching eight hundred missiles. Moments later, the Alliance ships replied—and the two hundred and forty-eight more advanced craft flung over fifteen hundred missiles back at the Scimitars.
The Scimitars fired a second salvo sixty seconds later. The Alliance fighters didn’t respond—didn’t need to respond. Then the fighters slipped from Mira’s mind as the missiles closed the range on Camerone herself.
“Standby missile defenses,” she ordered crisply. Twenty-seven Commonwealth salvos were in space, and the first was now seven hundred thousand kilometers away and looming. “Engage at will.”
Lasers and positron lances began to fill the space around Camerone. Electronic emitters sang complex songs of temptation and jamming, confusing and beguiling missiles to their deaths. Four warships loosed the full power of their weaponry and computers against the smart—but not that smart—brains of the Stormwinds.
Then the missiles revealed at least part of why Zahn’s defenders thought they stood a chance. At the five-hundred-thousand-kilometer mark, with only a handful of their number destroyed, their acceleration suddenly doubled.
Over three hundred missiles lunged towards Battle Group Seven-One at an acceleration the Alliance targeting computers had never been programmed to handle. What should have been a thirty-second closing period was now ten.
Dozens of missiles died to lasers and positron beams—but it should have been hundreds. Where nothing should have made it through the outer perimeter, over a hundred missiles broke through and charged the Battle Group.
A dozen simply…blew up. The upgrade clearly hadn’t been designed into the missiles, it had to be a software kludge the missiles’ hardware couldn’t always handle. It showed in their AI, too. Missiles went off course, lured by ECM, or just plain missed without any apparent effort on the Alliance’s part.
But not all, and even Manticore and the logistics transports’ missile defenses engaged in the last-minute desperate attempt to survive as the starships maneuvered and fighters dived at the closing weapons.
They almost stopped them all.
Gravitas took the first hit, the strike cruiser the biggest ship in the battle group. The Imperial cruiser leapt through space as the gigaton warhead went off bare meters from her hull, her icon flashing bright orange on Mira’s display as her computers tried to assess the damage.
Two more missiles hit starfighters head-on, collisions the tiny ships could not survive.
The last pair collided with the logistics transport Venture and detonated, vaporizing the unarmored transport in a massive blast of antimatter fire that took eighteen hundred souls with it.
“Update the targeting parameters for that sprint,” Mira ordered, trying not to look at the explosion on the screen that had been a ten-million-ton freighter. “You have forty-five seconds,” she said flatly, using her implant override to slice part of the tactical controls over to her own console.
“I’ll take over ECM,” she continued calmly. “Notley, start using our Jackhammers in counter mode.”
Commander Rose ignored them both, her eyes closed as she ran through data in her implant, revising again and again as she adapted the defensive programming to handle a sudden doubling of acceleration. Figures and programs flickered back and forth between the tactical officers on the warships, each contributing their own pieces as the seconds ticked away.
Explosions lit up the space behind the incoming missiles as the starfighters starting lashing out at the missiles targeting them, the chaotic mess of the starfighter battle barely registering as Mira spun Camerone’s ECM emitters up to full strength and wove a dancing song of deception and lies across space.
Then the second wave of missiles hit the defensive perimeter, and they got to see how well the tactical officers had done—with thirty-odd thousand lives still hanging in the balance. Again, at the half-million-kilometer mark, the missiles doubled their acceleration.
Even more self-destructed this time. The thrusters weren’t designed for that kind of throughput; the mass manipulators weren’t designed to cushion the force… The ten-second terminal period burned as much fuel as an entire hour of regular flight.
Even losing a quarter of the missiles to systems failure, it was clearly worth it. Three hundred and sixty missiles, even capital ship missiles, shouldn’t ha
ve even been a challenge to the defenses of four warships. Now Mira desperately tried to lure the missiles aside with jammers and decoys, Rose slashed away with lasers and positron lances that now knew how fast the missiles were accelerating, and Notley guided the capital ship missiles he’d launched onto intercept courses forty seconds before.
This time, the lances claimed over two hundred victims, their explosive deaths marking the advancing front of the missile wave. Many of the others looked like they were going to miss…and then the Jackhammers struck.
There were no direct head-to-head intercepts. Those were difficult to arrange and inefficient. The Jackhammers detonated their one-gigaton warheads between missiles or close to them. Missiles were only lightly shielded—an explosion inside of five kilometers could get a proximity kill.
Seventeen missiles survived—only to careen off into deep space, their speed and Battle Group Camerone’s ECM befuddling their electronic brains.
“We’re dialing them in,” Rose reported. “That was lucky, but the next time won’t need luck.”
Almost as the tactical officer finished speaking, the Q-probes reported the arrival of their missiles in Zahn orbit. The four fighter platforms had been generously equipped with lasers and lances, but not generously enough against thirty-plus capital ship missiles arriving at eight percent of lightspeed.
They were almost enough—Zion One survived—but two near-misses stripped defenses and sensors from the platform. Twenty-four seconds later, a missile from the second salvo struck home, crippling that platform. The third salvo obliterated it.
Even as their launch platforms started to die, the tsunami of missiles from the Alliance starfighters slammed into their Commonwealth opponents. Against eight missiles apiece, the Scimitars didn’t have the defenses or maneuverability to survive. Less than thirty fighters survived—and flew into the teeth of the Falcons’ lances.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 73