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

by Glynn Stewart

  Fortunately, the armor also had the ability to block external sounds. Marine combat drops came in two varieties—emerging a long way away from the target and sending the shuttles in alone, often on long ballistic courses, to try to achieve stealth, or pushing the limit of how close a ship could emerge to a planet, to try to achieve surprise.

  Edvard was familiar with the horrifying keening noise aboard a ship threading the needle. His command network told him a lot about his men’s suits, and he could tell which of his men had the same experience by who had turned off their exterior audio pickups as soon as the announcement came down.

  By now, five seconds into the hell-ride, no one in his company still had their exterior pickups turned on. The Lieutenant Major made a quick note in his computer system to make sure everyone had the pickups back on before they boarded their target.

  The Bridge network was feeding the company commanders a full tactical plot of the Battle of Cora. It looked like the ambush had gone off perfectly and, as expected, the Commonwealth Navy freighter was making a run for it.

  Whoever was in command of the logistics ship had done the math and set her course in the exact opposite direction of the Alliance warships. It was arguably the safest direction—certainly the only one where a freighter capable of accelerating at two hundred gravities could escape starfighters chasing her at five hundred gravities.

  Sadly for the Terrans, it was also the most predictable.

  “Emergence in ten,” Brigadier Hammond’s voice echoed through the command network. “No one has a clue how close we’re actually going to be. Good luck.”

  Even without the audio pickups running, there were a thousand unpleasant sensations associated with the gravity harmonics from sustaining a warp field this close to a planet. None of Edvard’s people were showing the symptoms, but previous experience told him roughly two to three percent of the people aboard Chimera were going to be nonfunctional.

  Suddenly, all of those sensations ceased, and he knew they’d emerged even before the network updated.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he snapped at the pilot, even knowing the order was redundant. His company’s assault shuttle was fired into space before he’d finished speaking.

  “We came out sixty thousand kay ahead of her,” his pilot announced to the company after a moment. “Going full burn right for her; this is going to be a rough contact. Forty-five seconds to update your wills and insurance!”

  Edvard’s implant happily informed they would be impacting the freighter at over fifteen hundred kilometers per second—exceeding the official rated survivability of the assault shuttle by approximately fifty percent.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he murmured to the pilot.

  “We’re damned either way, El-Maj—so I’ll see you in Hell!”

  “Bravo Company!” Edvard bellowed across his company network. “Power your suits, set for maximum impact absorption. This is gonna hurt—but the Terrans don’t stand a chance. Because we’re Castle’s damned Marines!”

  The company network dissolved into a series of wolf howls, joined after a fraction of a second by a voice Edvard recognized as the pilot. Unlike most of the company, Edvard knew exactly what the pilot was doing at that second—and he’d have been screaming too!

  Then the engines cut out and gravity shut off as every mass manipulator in the shuttle focused its energy on somehow allowing his two hundred Marines to survive the fist of God of a fifteen-hundred-kilometer-per-second impact.

  A hiss and a warm sensation rushing through his body told Edvard his suit’s medical suite had assessed the situation versus the priorities he’d loaded in as part of the mission—and proceeded to inject stimulants to wake him up from the acceleration-induced blackout.

  “Bravo Company,” he coughed out, then swallowed against his dry mouth and tried again. “Bravo Company—sound off!”

  His platoon Lieutenants and squad Sergeants responded over the next several seconds, implants allowing them to check in on their people and reply at the speed of thought.

  Even as his subordinates checked on their subordinates, Edvard brought up a mental display that updated him on the status of his entire company. Over eighty percent of his people had been injected with stimulants, but everyone was now on their feet.

  Every second they lingered in the assault shuttle was a second the freighter’s defenders had to get ready.

  “Move, people!” he barked. “We’ve got a freighter full of goodies to take. Move! Move! Move!”

  As his first squad piled out of the shuttle into the shattered corridor they’d connected with, the Lieutenant Major checked the command network. Third Battalion had made their landing perfectly, all five assault shuttles quite literally embedded in the big freighter as it continued to attempt to flee the system.

  The other three battalions of the 103rd Brigade continued on their course for the planet. Fourth Battalion would hit the Zions and the missile platforms, while Second seized the major civilian space infrastructure.

  First Battalion, as always, got the sharp end of the stick. Those Marines were headed for Trudeau City to take control of the planetary capital away from whatever Terrans were guarding it.

  A flashing mental icon informed him that the Colonel was contacting him moments before her command override dropped Amanda Silje’s voice into his head.

  “Hansen, Bravo Company hit closest to the main engineering bay,” she told him crisply. “So, that’s your objective. I do not want this ship jumping to FTL with us aboard, do you read me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed. “We are moving out.”

  With a thought, his implant brought up the detailed floor plans of the freighter. They didn’t know her name, but they recognized her type. Her builder was notorious for using the same plans for every ship—a small savings versus the cost of the ship itself, but he guessed pennies counted when you ran a civilian ship-builder in the Commonwealth.

  He highlighted the engineering bays—sixty meters back of their contact point and three decks down—and flipped the plans to his entire company.

  “This is the target, people,” he told them. “And it’s one the Terrans will know to defend—and we knocked on the door pretty loudly on the way in. If they’ve got Marines, we’re going to see them.”

  Edvard and his headquarters followed his Second Platoon out, with the last sixty Marines trailing them. Gunnery Sergeant Jonas Ramirez was waiting for the company commander, standing next to the clear path the Marines had cut through the debris.

  “They’re going to have Marines, sir,” he said quietly over a direct channel. “We’re not talking pirates, sir. Terran Marines will have armor, entrenched positions… This could hurt, sir.”

  “There’s a limited number of ways into engineering, Gunny,” Edvard pointed out. The ship had been built as a fast transport instead of a naval auxiliary—hence the lack of weapons, which had made the landing somewhat easier—but security of the key components had still been in the designers’ mind. There were two corridors that connected to Engineering. They connected on different levels and had twenty-meter clear stretches with no side corridors right where they entered the bay.

  Ramirez was right. The Federation Marines were moving—and moving fast—but Edvard’s best estimate put them three to five minutes from hitting the nearer of those corridors. Unless the defending Marines were incompetent—and the Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps had a reputation as anything but—those corridors were going to be deathtraps.

  “You’re thinking like we want this ship intact,” his senior noncom pointed out. “So are they—but I thought we only wanted the cargo?”

  Bravo Company’s commander stopped in his tracks, physically looking at the faceless shell of carbon filament ceramics encasing the gunny.

  “You have a suggestion, I take it?”

  In the end, Edvard sent Third Platoon down those three decks, with orders to engage but to take no unnecessary risks. They rapidly ran into stiff resistance
—even the single platoon playing decoy outnumbered the defenders, but the two ten-man squads of Terran Marines had been given the time to set up serious defenses.

  Most Marine security teams had access to carbon-filament ceramic barricades that were semi-mobile. The Terrans had set up four of them in a leapfrogged pattern in the hall, covering them from most non-heavy weapons fire.

  Even Third Platoon’s heavy weapon section could have cleared the hall, but the cost would have been high. To take down twenty Marines could easily cost Edvard thirty or more—a price he’d been depressingly resigned to paying until Ramirez had made his suggestion.

  “We ready?” he asked First Platoon’s heavy weapons Sergeant.

  “Yes, sir,” that worthy, who doubled as a demolitions expert, replied. “Ready to rock and hole?”

  “Fire in the hole, Sergeant,” Edvard ordered.

  A moment later, thunder echoed through the empty corridor of the freighter as the charges detonated around them, cutting a thirty-meter diameter circle free of the floor—and dropping it right into the center of engineering.

  Edvard rode the loose plate down with his First Platoon. His implant coordinated with his suit computer, identifying armed targets and flagging them for his attention. A flashing warning drew his attention to the half-dozen armored Marines actually in the engineering bay, presumably the defenders’ reserve.

  He brought his rifle up, the high-powered smart weapon identifying the target, classifying the target and selecting the appropriate munition from its multiple magazines, and firing when he pressed the mental trigger.

  A three-round burst of heavy tungsten penetrators flashed across the room, connecting and punching through the armor before detonating their explosive charges. Armored troops took a lot of killing, but that usually did the trick.

  In the less than two seconds it had taken the Marines to fall the full fifteen-meter height of the freighter’s engineering bay, all six of the Terran Marines died—as did the half-dozen techs carrying weapons as a support.

  “Drop your weapons,” Edvard boomed through his suit’s speakers. “Drop your weapons and surrender!”

  First Platoon was moving fast. Surrendering techs were rapidly cuffed and Marines moved to trap the defending squads against the anvil of Third Platoon’s decoy. Gunfire echoed in the chamber, accompanied by the distinctive crack-crack of penetrators going off inside armor.

  “Hold fire,” a suit-amplified voice bellowed as his Second Platoon and HQ section came crashing down behind him. “We’re laying down arms; we surrender.”

  The Terrans had sent a thirty-man half-platoon to defend Engineering. Sixteen lived long enough to lay down their arms. Forty-five techs had surrendered, eight had died—and the Alliance now controlled the freighter’s engineering bay.

  “Shut down the engines,” Edvard ordered. “Sublight, FTL, everything. This ship isn’t going anywhere we don’t let it.”

  Watching his people get to work cuffing the crew and pulling the Terran Marines from their armor, Edvard shared a cold, satisfied smile with his Gunny.

  Bravo Company hadn’t lost a single trooper.

  17

  Cora System

  08:00 March 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office

  Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, was now in complete control of the Cora system. Brigadier Hammond’s Marines had taken the Zions and their attendant missile platforms without losses—the launch platforms, which also functioned as the control centers for the missile satellites, hadn’t been manned yet.

  Since the freighter Lougheed had been taken intact by Hammond’s Marines as well, Kyle was now in possession of another eight fighter platforms, over three hundred missile satellites, and the five hundred Scimitars for the Zions. Lougheed had also carried the necessary munitions for the satellites and starfighters, and even the crews for the platforms.

  Those crews were going to be a problem. Lougheed herself only had a crew of five hundred, but adding in the starfighter crews and the launch platform personnel, she’d been carrying over three thousand people. Kyle had nowhere to put them—he was hoping Cora did.

  “Brigadier,” he greeted Hammond as the balding Marine opened the channel for the meeting he’d requested. “Congratulations on a job well done. I understand your losses were minimal?”

  “Worst down here,” Hammond grunted. The Brigadier had accompanied the battalion assaulting the surface, of course. “You’d think they’d know it was over once the warships were gone.”

  Chimera was designed to, among her other purposes, provide orbital fire support. Twice in the seven hours since Hammond’s people had landed, they’d had to call down fire from heaven. The second time had been when the Brigadier had summoned the Marines to surrender, and their CO had refused.

  The assault transport had localized the source of the refusal and dropped a ground-penetrating bunker-buster from orbit. One of a Marine commander’s favorite weapons, the missile dove nearly five hundred meters below ground before detonating—minimal collateral damage, utter destruction to underground facilities.

  The fact that they’d located the command center had probably been part of the decision of the senior surviving Marine—seventh in the defenders’ chain of command, apparently—to surrender.

  Without someone in orbit to protect them, the Marines on the surface were sitting ducks. Kyle had once had a front-row seat to what happened when the warheads in his own magazines were unleashed on a planet. Even refraining from that scale of devastation, Chimera alone could even the balance between Hammond’s single brigade and the defenders’ multiple divisions.

  “Any contact from the local authorities?”

  “We’ve linked up with the mayor of Trudeau City,” Hammond replied. “The Terrans left the city’s municipal level government intact—in exchange for which Mayor Musil happily handed us the location of their shiny new command center.”

  “Nothing from the planetary government?”

  “It looks like the Cora Development Corp executives are just plain gone,” the Brigadier said bluntly. “At a guess, they cleared off world as soon as the Terrans took out their defenses. Stars know the bastards would have had the money to disappear anywhere in the galaxy.”

  Kyle sighed. Without a functioning local government, he didn’t have a lot of options for dumping thousands of prisoners on the surface.

  “So, the only planetary structure left is the Terran occupation?” he asked.

  “I’m digging, Force Commander,” Hammond said calmly. “It looks like the Commonwealth was using a lot of the municipal- and regional-level structures and governments from the CDC, but…a lot of people are going to be twitchy about collaborators, since those people were working with the Terrans.”

  “I’ll check in with Command, Brigadier,” Kyle told him. “We’re supposed to be moving on in three days. We’ll see what they suggest.”

  “We’re digging up enough local cops and Cora Defense Force troopers that I think we can keep order,” Hammond told him. “But I suspect that the Development Corp might be dead.”

  “Don’t cry too hard, Brigadier,” the Force Commander said dryly. Hammond didn’t sound at all displeased with the fate of the Cora Development Corporation. “It would have made our lives a lot easier to have a functioning government around here.”

  Zahn System

  08:00 March 14, ESMDT

  BC-129 Camerone, Admiral’s Office

  Premier Báirbre Mantovani had the distinct look of a woman who had, not that long before, likely been quite obese—and was now disturbingly skinny. The head of Zahn’s system government looked sick, her skin hanging loosely on her frame and her blond hair streaked with gray. Her suit was clearly borrowed, her office had clearly recently been redecorated with explosives, and the fire in her eyes was bright and unbowed.

  Simply the fact that Premier Mantovani was transmitting from her office in Zahn Governance Tower was the source of much o
f that fire. Battle Group Seven-One’s Marines had hit the ground running, two of the three battalions in-system dropping on Cobra City even as the third collected surrenders in orbit.

  In theory, the surrender of the orbital platforms included the surface command. In practice, the Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps were not used to surrendering.

  By the time Brigadier Yoxall, commander of the 58th Marine Brigade, had taken Governance Tower from the top down and deployed roving units into the streets, Zahn Planetary Army units had started materializing from the damnedest places. Some of those Army units had been in civilian wear with just rifles—but others had appeared with tanks and full suits of powered combat armor.

  Like Alizon, Zahn had apparently listened when Castle and Coraline had helped draft emergency plans for the system falling to the Commonwealth. Mantovani had clearly been living a more austere life than she’d been used to, but when the Alliance had returned, she’d been in a position to be back in charge within the day.

  “Rear Admiral, Captain,” Mantovani greeted them. “There are insufficient words for me to express my planet’s gratitude for your arrival. With the orbital platforms intact, no effort on our part would have sufficed to liberate ourselves.”

  Mira left that for the Admiral to answer, covertly checking on Lord Captain Anders. The senior Imperial officer was linked into the conference as well. He looked…well, he looked as tired as everyone else in the Battle Group.

  “The Alliance promised that we would protect you from the Commonwealth and liberate you if you fell,” Alstairs said calmly. “We came as soon as we were able, though I warn you that we cannot stay long.”

  “I understand,” Mantovani confirmed. “We are already relocating the Terran prisoners to secure island detention facilities. We possess personnel qualified to operate the surviving fighter platforms, though the modifications to fire our missiles will be time-consuming. We are only in possession of a single wing of starfighters, as well. What aid are you able to provide us?”