The last hit the closer carrier a third of the way along its length and detonated, a one-gigaton flash of white light that visibly moved a sixty-million-cubic-meter ship already traveling at two percent of the speed of light.
When the light faded, the Volcano was incredibly still there. A massive gaping wound had opened in the big ship’s side, but she was still accelerating—still running.
“Rose?” Mira said quietly.
“Fifty seconds, ma’am,” her tactical officer replied, her voice equally quiet. “Then it’s my turn.”
“We’ve opened the way for you,” Aleppo told Mira over the channel. “Give ‘em hell.”
“With pleasure, ma’am,” Camerone’s Captain replied, then passed on the sentiment to Rose.
The tactical officer smiled coldly.
“Don’t worry, ma’am—I intend to put Vice Commodore Bachchan out of a target.”
Then both women’s attention was focused on the missiles. While the bandwidth to and from the Q-probes wasn’t sufficient for Rose to send the missiles fully updated telemetry, it was enough for her to feed them new orders—orders the Jackhammers’ AIs tried doggedly to carry out.
Rose expended Battle Group Camerone’s first three salvos exactly the same way Aleppo had, intentionally blasting the missile screen out of the way. Her fourth salvo charged into the teeth of the Volcanos’ defenses, spread wide, then detonated on their own as the carriers’ defenses lashed out.
The fifth dove through that cloud, crossing almost a third of the Volcanos’ defensive range in the cover of their sisters’ deaths, and charged straight at the carriers. Once again, the empty space around the two Commonwealth heavy carriers lit up with fire.
The one hit Zheng He had landed had clearly hurt its victim. The defensive fire was far weaker and sparser than it had been—but Rose had only thirty-four missiles a salvo, not fifty-six.
Her fifth salvo died far closer to the carriers than the Terrans could have liked. Blast waves and radiation swept over the carriers, more defenses and targeting scanners failing—and Battle Group Seven-One’s sixth salvo was right on its heels.
Three missiles made it through everything the Commonwealth ships threw at them, and the damaged carrier vanished in a tripled ball of flame. Cheers echoed around Camerone’s bridge and Mira bared her teeth in excitement, watching as Rose neatly guided their seventh salvo in.
The excitement faded into an awed respect as the big Volcano pirouetted, dodged, drew their missiles in, and lashed out with every weapon at their disposal—and stopped thirty-four missiles. And then, to Mira’s shock, did it again.
“Clever boy,” she heard Rose murmur. “But you’re not clever enough.”
Missiles came apart in balls of fire as Fleet Commander Keira Rose fed new orders to the nanocircuitry brains of her tenth missile salvo. Some were killed by the enemy; some were self-destructed, slamming hammers of fire tracing a swirling path through space all the way to the Terran carrier.
Captain Mira Solace had access to Rose’s consoles, the reporting communications from the missiles, and the Q-probes Rose was transmitting her orders through—and Mira had no idea how many missiles the tactical officer delivered to the target at last.
It was enough. The swirling path of fire intersected the big carrier—and the Volcano came apart in shocking white fire.
“Target destroyed,” Rose announced.
04:25 March 24, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
The destruction of the two Terran carriers barely registered on Michael’s mental radar. He was focused on the fighter formation his two-pronged strike was converging on. Range counters were dropping fast, and a second number representing the range of his formation’s Starfires, given the current relative velocity, was rising.
Those two numbers were about a minute from intersecting. He had the same pair of numbers for Ozolinsh’s starfighters as well—Polar Bear’s CAG had nailed her acceleration window perfectly. All five hundred plus fighters in the two formations would reach missile range effectively simultaneously.
The Terrans had continued on their pursuit course of Battle Group Seven-Three, straight into the teeth of Ozolinsh’s Falcons and without even trying to evade Michael’s Falcons and Templars. Their commander had to have something in mind, but Avalon’s CAG wasn’t seeing it—there was no way the Scimitars would win against almost-even numbers of seventh-generation fighters.
The greater acceleration of the Alliance fighters gave the Terrans the edge in range by a few seconds—and in the moment that they fired, Michael finally saw what the battle-hardened Terran commander had seen from the beginning.
Six hundred Scimitars put twenty-four hundred Javelin fighter missiles into space—and every single one of them was targeted on Ozolinsh’s formation. The hundred and seventy-six starfighters from Polar Bear and Culloden couldn’t survive a salvo of that magnitude.
They could have survived the half-salvo or the proportionate-to-their-numbers salvo that Michael had been expecting. But he barely had time to register his mistake before his own ships had to launch.
Over twelve hundred missiles launched from his own formation and seven hundred from Ozolinsh’s, a total of over nineteen hundred weapons targeted on six hundred targets. He wasn’t going to get a clean sweep with that number, but he was going to gut their formation, leave them vulnerable for the follow-up salvos.
“Stanford,” Ozolinsh cut into his channel, her voice harsh. “I’m launching my follow-up salvos, then I am ordering my people to ditch their ships. Sixty seconds should get us clear of the blast zone, but we cannot stop that salvo—maybe if your missiles could intercept, but they can’t.
“We’re handing off telemetry control to your gunners,” she continued. “Get me a list of people. I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s the right call, Gabrielle. Do it,” Michael ordered.
As they were speaking, the Terrans launched a second salvo—still at Ozolinsh’s people. They weren’t leaving any chance of those starfighters surviving. Her plan should save most of her people, but Michael still felt his guts twist as he looked at the tsunami that was going to wipe a fifth of Seventh Fleet’s starfighter strength from the universe.
It took him fractions of a second to pull a list of the three hundred plus gunners in Seven-Two’s fighters, sort it by their official skill ratings in their last formal test, and then send Ozolinsh the top hundred and seventy-six names.
In the same instant, his starfighters fired again, another nineteen hundred missiles blasting into space, heading for the Scimitars.
Forty-five seconds after that, the third Terran salvo launched into space—and this time, the Terrans were targeting Michael’s people. He had almost twice as many starfighters as Ozolinsh—what was a smart action on her part could easily be called cowardice on his.
“All squadrons,” he said aloud, his voice surprisingly calm. “Use your final missile salvo for missile defense. We’re going to make it through this.”
Even as he spoke, he watched the telemetry from Battle Group Seven-Three’s fighters—as the emergency pods blasted free of their spacecraft, engines blasting them away from their motherships at four hundred gravities. They’d be clear of the blast zones, barely.
The first salvos arrived before a fourth salvo could be launched. Michael’s gaze was fixed on Ozolinsh’s starfighters. Without a human aboard, the computers could only do so much—Federation AI was smart, but it wasn’t intuitive. It couldn’t be random.
It couldn’t make guesses. That was why there were humans aboard a starfighter.
And why without humans aboard, Polar Bear and Culloden’s fighters were doomed.
They did better than he expected. Eighty to ninety percent of missile defense was effectively done by the computers regardless. The networked AIs coolly assessed the incoming salvo, allocated lasers and positron lances, and maneuvered the fighters with mechanical precision for the shots they needed to take.
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The computers took out over a thousand missiles—and almost fourteen hundred made it through. Some starfighters were hit by single missiles, others by as many as fifteen. It didn’t matter—in one Void-cursed sequence of explosions, all one hundred and seventy-six starfighters ceased to exist.
The Scimitars had more fighters, with gunners backing the computers and engineers running the ECM. They also, however, had over three hundred modern fighters slamming their ECM into the teeth of their scanners and defenses, the Falcons’ and Templars’ mind-bogglingly powerful transmitters making hash of scanners now less than a hundred thousand kilometers distant.
Michael’s starfighters followed their missiles in, the time lapse between salvo launches eaten by the rapidly shrinking distance. Lances targeted Terran missiles and Terran starfighters indiscriminately in a point-blank cataclysm of fire the Templars’ and Falcons’ heavier lances ripped open from twice the Scimitars’ range.
The Vice Commodore’s focus was on—could only be on, at this point—his own starfighter’s maneuvers as he danced the Falcon through the deadly maelstrom he and his enemies had conjured.
Three seconds after the first salvos struck home, Michael’s starfighters interpenetrated with the handful of surviving Terran ships, both sides slicing beams of positrons through space with wild abandon.
Nine seconds after that, the Alliance fighters were out of range of the expanding debris cloud that had been six hundred Scimitar-class fighters.
Forty-three Falcons and twenty-four Templars didn’t make it that far.
Michael swallowed, trying to process the sheer chaos of the last minute, then swallowed again as he swept the tactical plot for emergency beacons.
“Everyone slow to zero velocity,” he ordered slowly. “SFG Zero Zero One Actual to Avalon—we need search-and-rescue out here now. For ours and theirs,” he noted finally.
There weren’t many of the latter. Automatic safeties kicked in where they could, but the power of spaceborne weaponry meant there was very little time to do so unless, like Ozolinsh’s people, the crews bailed early.
Say what you like about the Commonwealth—and Michael often did—their soldiers had courage.
22
Frihet System
05:10 March 24, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four
The approach from Chimera to the Zion platforms was nerve-wracking. Intimidating, massive, and tough as modern personal battle armor was, it would do nothing for the Marines if the assault shuttle took a positron-lance hit from the fighter launch bases.
But those bases, damaged as they were, absolutely had to be secured before the starships could enter orbit. If someone was alive and sitting on the control systems for even a handful of the missile satellites, firing them off at point-blank range would be a quick way to destroy a couple hundred trillion stellars of starships.
“We’re heading in for a nice, gentle contact,” Edvard’s pilot informed him. “ETA sixty seconds. Be aware, we have no atmosphere at the contact point, so keep your suits sealed.”
Edvard passed that on to his people with a quick text update. The armor should take care of that on its own—the AIs in the armor suits weren’t geniuses, but they were effective in their limited areas—but it was better to be safe.
“Do we have any update from Seventh Fleet on what they’re seeing in the station, sir?” he asked Major Brahm. Last he’d heard, the Navy had been maneuvering Q-probes in to close range to give them live data on what, if anything, had survived the apparent sabotage.
“We do,” the Battalion XO confirmed. “There are pockets of what appear to be power and atmosphere, but most of the station is a dead hulk. I’m dropping you your objective markers—you’re landing closest to the main command center, which looks like it still has power and atmosphere. One of the blast sites is on your way; we want you to check it out before you hit the command center. We don’t know enough about what happened here.”
“Understood, sir,” Edvard replied. “We’ll play tourist on our way over.”
Brahm made a repressive clucking sound but didn’t directly respond.
“Be careful,” he said after a moment. “Just because the place looks dead doesn’t mean there aren’t Marines playing dead—hell, in that kind of environment, a Navy puke with the right control panel could wipe half your company.”
“Wilco, Major,” Bravo Company’s commander told him. “Making contact now; will report when we reach the blast site.”
Brahm signed off with a click, almost lost in the vibration and thump of the assault shuttle contacting the station.
A flash and a bang announced the application of the shuttle’s breaching system—followed by the access hatch springing open to reveal the gaping hole into the ship.
“Go! Go! Go!” Edvard snapped over the channel, waiting for his Alpha Platoon to enter the station before following them in. Procedure dictated he couldn’t go first, but he’d let the Starless Void eat him before his headquarters section went last.
He drifted across the gap easily, then triggered the electromagnets in his boots—without power feeding to the exotic-matter coils of the station’s mass manipulators, there was insufficient gravity to walk in, and what gravity there was wasn’t aligned with silly things like floors.
“Waypoints on your implants, people,” he told his Alpha Platoon troopers. “Move out!”
Battle-armored troopers obeyed with a will—the lack of gravity and manipulation of armor thrusters allowing them to progress through the station in massive leaps, their weapons tracking corners and crannies as they moved.
Two hundred meters and two levels passed surprisingly quickly, and Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen arrived at the shattered piece of the station where some kind of explosive had gone off, to find his people already establishing a perimeter—and stringing a line to enable the company to cross the gaping void the blast had left.
“What have we got?” he asked Alpha Platoon’s heavy weapons sergeant.
The demolitions expert shook his head, eyeing the roughly spherical section they were standing on the edge of.
“Radiation count is high but fading fast,” he noted. “Schematics say that one of the main network hubs was there.” The sergeant waved an armored hand in the direction of the upper section of the void. “Sending all of the data back to Chimera for analysis to get a hard answer, but if you want my gut feeling…”
“I asked for a reason, Sergeant,” Edvard pointed out.
“You’re looking at a laser-initiated micro-fusion device,” the sergeant said flatly. “No radioactive materials, no exotic matter coils. Small, easy to conceal, difficult as all hell to manufacture, low yield—but still a nuke. These stations have a lot of internal reinforcing.” He gestured at the hundred-and-fifty-meter void they stood next to. “That was a ten-kiloton charge at least. Could be as high as twenty-five, given that they vaporized an armored network hub.”
Edvard whistled in his helmet, making sure no one could hear him, then reopened the channel.
“That’s damned impressive. Where would they have got those?”
“Fyr Special Ops,” the noncom replied instantly. “Scary, scary, scary fuckers. With nukes.”
“It seems they opened the doors for us,” Edvard agreed. “I’m not complaining. But…yeah. Scary.”
“Chimera’s first-cut analysis confirms Sergeant Sato’s assessment,” Brahm told Edvard. “That one was an MFC. It looks like the saboteurs—personally, I agree that it’s likely they were Fyr Spec Ops—didn’t have very many of those. A few key points on each platform got micro-fusion charges; most of the rest were ‘just’ high-yield chemical explosives.
“We’re finding a lot of bodies,” the Major continued. “You’re on track to get to the command center before anyone else reaches survivors on this station. See if they’re willing to play nice—at this point, I’d honestly rather not have to shoot anybody. They’ve had a bad
-enough day.”
“Roger, Major,” Edvard replied. “Knock first. I’ll be in touch.”
This close to the command center, the station was in an incredible amount of disarray. They hadn’t crossed any more nuke sites, but a lot of smaller charges had been used to cripple internal systems and cut the command center off from the rest of the platform. The floor was impassable as often as not, though thankfully usually either a wall or a roof was available for Bravo Company to traverse.
It took longer to cross the hundred meters from the nuke site to the main command center than it had taken to reach the blast site itself. Eventually, Edvard’s people reached their objective, and he carefully made his way forward to join his Alpha Platoon Lieutenant at the door.
“It’s an emergency airlock,” the Lieutenant told him. “We can blast through, but they’ll lose atmo instantly. Close-range scanners figure between forty and fifty people—probably the command center night shift.”
“We’ve got supplies for just that,” Edvard noted. They’d carried the pieces of an emergency replacement airlock and emergency survival bubbles from the shuttle. “That said, let’s see if they’ll talk. Can we splice me into the local intercom?”
“Give me a minute,” one of his headquarters section replied, the trooper producing a complex-looking electronic toolkit from a panel on her suit. She wired it into the shattered exterior panel and worked on it in silence for a little over two minutes—and then a new icon popped up in Edvard’s implant.
“You’re linked in, sir,” she told him. “Can’t guarantee they’ll listen.”
“That’s my job, Lance-Corporal,” he replied. “Well done.”
Inside his helmet, Edvard sharply shook his head to kick his brain into gear, then thought-clicked the icon.
“Hello? Is anyone in there?”
There was no response for several seconds, then a voice came back—an older male with a distinctly crisp Terran accent.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 80