“I’ve never…lost this many people before,” Stanford pointed out.
“There are no charmed ships and no charmed fighter groups,” his captain replied quietly. “Sooner or later, we all run out of luck.”
The CAG shook his head as if trying to clear cobwebs.
“It felt bad enough after Tranquility, but that wasn’t nearly as many,” he said quietly. The fighter group they’d taken into the Battle of Tranquility had had fewer starfighters at the start than SFG-001 had lost in this battle. “What happens now?”
“First, Vice Commodore, you need to remember that you do not need to write those letters yourself,” Kyle pointed out. “The Phoenix flight crews’ families will be informed by their officers. Your own people’s families should be informed by their Wing Commanders. You should be involved, but you are sure as hell not writing one hundred and eighty letters yourself. Understand me?”
“Fair,” Stanford allowed. “Doesn’t make me any less responsible for their deaths.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Avalon’s captain said gently. “But second-guessing yourself won’t change what happened either. Go get some sleep, Michael. You need it.”
“What about you?” the CAG asked, glancing around the office. Kyle was suddenly very aware of the uniform jacket haphazardly tossed over a bookcase, the pile of dirty coffee cups on one corner of his desk, and the very visible packet of stimulant pills on his desk.
“Anderson is asleep right now,” Kyle pointed out. “He’ll be awake in about two hours, then I’m going to go pass out for as long as I can. I have a meeting planetside this evening—I get the impression I don’t want to deal with Frihet’s people while half-asleep.”
18:00 March 25, 2736 ESMDT
Landning City
The shuttle landing pad on the outskirts of Fyr’s capital city was crowded. Kyle watched through his implants as his pilot neatly slotted Avalon’s Shuttle One in next to the pair of shuttles carrying Rear Admiral Alstairs, Captain Solace, and the Admiral’s staff.
Most of the shuttles were local, suborbital craft delivering personnel from around the planet. The fourth Alliance shuttle was from Zheng He, carrying Force Commander Aleppo.
Kyle wasn’t sure when his and Aleppo’s temporary ranks would be canceled, but they were still the titles they’d been invited to the surface under. Alstairs might have brought enough people to justify the second shuttle, but his only companion was Lieutenant Commander Jessica Xue. His XO was in command and his CAG was—thankfully—asleep, so the tactical officer drew the straw of playing Kyle’s “staff” for this affair.
Stepping out of the shuttle onto the surprisingly cool surface of the pad—there had to be some impressive heat exchangers and cooling systems under its surface—Avalon’s commander watched a local ground-car zoom across the landing pad and come to a perfect stop several feet from him.
A dark-haired young woman in a crisply pressed Frihet Defense Force uniform sprang out of the passenger side, quickly opening the rear door for Kyle and his tactical officer.
“Welcome to Fyr and Landning City, Force Commander Roberts, Lieutenant Commander Xue,” she said brightly. “I’m Lieutenant Yvonne Svenson, Frihet Defense Force. I’ve been assigned as your attaché for the duration of your stay on Fyr.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Kyle replied, gesturing Xue into the vehicle as he looked around the pad. “Your people seem… Well, you seem to be back on your feet surprisingly quickly.”
Svenson looked askance for a moment and then shrugged.
“Appearances are everything,” she said quietly. “Most of the government and military managed to go underground before the orbital platforms fell. Now we’re coming back out of hiding, hence”—she gestured at the suborbital shuttles—“we’ll put our best foot forward with the Alliance,” she said brightly. “Shall we?”
The car didn’t, to Kyle’s mild surprise, take them to the big Government Plaza near the center of the city. Instead, Svenson took them to a nondescript office tower, only about sixty stories tall, in Landning City’s main commercial district. Taller towers surrounded the building and nothing about the skyscraper itself stood out.
The street in front of it, however, had been blockaded. A quartet of light tanks sat ominously just outside the main entrance to the tower, their cannon backing up a cordon of Frihet Defense Force troopers manning security checkpoints.
The actual entrance itself was guarded by a squad of Federation Marines and a matching team of what Kyle suspected were Fyr Special Ops troopers—lithe men and women in light powered armor, carrying immense gauss rifles.
“This is one of our emergency continuity centers,” Svenson told them. “We can’t take the car any closer—come with me, please.”
Getting out the car, the big Force Commander took in the defenses with a slightly more cautious eye. Any kind of orbital strike would take out the tower and its defenders with ease, but a ground force would have to get past the Fyr Army infantry, then the tanks, then the Marines and Special Ops troops. Kyle wasn’t a Marine, but he suspected that hypothetical attackers would have a very bad day.
Svenson led them through the defenses at a careful, occasionally hesitant pace. It was clear she was familiar with the plan for how the defenders were going to set up but hadn’t actually been through these defenses.
Like the car and Svenson herself, everything there had clearly been prepared to leap into action as soon as the planet was liberated. Frihet had been taken, but it had clearly not been defeated. They might not have been able to free themselves with Commonwealth warships in orbit, but given their destruction of the fighter platforms, Kyle suspected the Terrans would have had a nasty surprise if they’d pulled their ships out.
The Fyr Lieutenant’s presence alone cleared them through all of the checkpoints up to the front door. There, however, one of the Spec Ops troopers suddenly materialized in front of them.
“I need to scan your implant IDs,” she said sharply. “No one enters the Center without full identification validation.”
Kyle glanced over at the Federation Marines standing by the door. It was hard to tell, as the troopers all had their helmets on, but he sensed a degree of discomfort in their body language—but they weren’t objecting.
He sighed and opened a very secured section of his implant memory containing only his ID to prevent the Spec Ops trooper from accessing any of the confidential data locked up in his silicon. Opening a channel, he flipped that piece of data to the Fyr soldier.
The entire process was contained entirely in everyone’s implants with no verbalization. To anyone else, Kyle, Xue, and the Fyr woman just stood there blinking at each other for a moment before she nodded and stepped back.
“Validated. Thank you Force Commander, Lieutenant Commander. Welcome to Continuity Center Bravo. You’re expected.”
Svenson led them into an elevator that swept them up to the top floor of the building with alacrity. The elevator opened onto a lobby and conference room setup that wouldn’t have looked out of place as the main meeting area of a mid-sized planetary corporation, except for the presence of more Frihet Defense Force troopers providing security, including a set of half a dozen in full powered battle armor.
Admiral Alstairs and the other Federation officers, including Mira, were waiting in the lobby, the Rear Admiral imperiously gesturing for Kyle to join her as she spotted him.
“Carry on, Force Commander,” Svenson told him. “You’re in conference room seven, over there”—she pointed—“when your Admiral is ready.”
Kyle joined Alstairs as instructed, nodding to Force Commander Aleppo and the two XOs while exchanging smiles with Mira.
“We’re waiting on the Brigadiers,” the Admiral told Kyle as he and Xue joined the cluster of officers. “Hammond and the others will be arriving shortly; they’ve been directly coordinating with the commander of Fyr Special Ops.” She glanced around the room with its uniformed security and power-armored soldiers and lowered her voice.
“They’re playing a game of perceptions, more for their people than us, but don’t be fooled,” she told Kyle quietly. “These people are really FDF, but they’ve got basically everyone in uniform out in the streets of Landning right now, being visible on the news and to the people of the planet’s largest city. My best guess is that they’ve got the Spec Ops forces and maybe a division of regular troops. Most of the rest…” She shrugged. “I’d bet they have means to track down everyone who survived, but I doubt their continuity plans called for everyone to disappear.”
“They want to convince everyone that things are okay and the government is in control,” Kyle said aloud.
“Exactly,” Alstairs agreed. “Brigadiers!” she loudly greeted the two men and a woman who exited the elevator in perfect step with each other. “Good, we’re all here. Let’s go,” she ordered.
The Castle Federation Admiral led her people to the conference room Svenson had pointed out to Kyle upon arriving, where she paused for a moment to allow the security guard to announce they were coming in.
Then the Alliance officers entered the conference room. Like the lobby outside, it looked like any large conference room in a midsized corporate headquarters, but in here, at least, the décor was a bit clearer on just what the space actually was.
Stands in each corner held the blue-on-white sun flag of Fyr, while the back wall had been painted with a three-meter-wide version of the flag above the words, in a decorative script, Fyr Government Continuity Center Bravo
A dozen men and women in Frihet Defense Force uniforms filled part of the conference table, while another dozen in the plain suits that were practically the uniform of governments the galaxy over occupied the far third.
The closest third of the table was empty, and the Alliance officers quickly found chairs and waited by them for a moment as the woman at the far end of the table slowly rose to her feet. The woman was old and had been badly injured in some previous conflict—probably the last war with the Commonwealth. Both of her eyes and her right arm were obvious, if very functional, cybernetic prosthetics.
Age and injury might have slowed her, but her voice was calm and collected when she spoke.
“Admiral Alstairs, you and Seventh Fleet’s officers are most welcome here,” she told them. “I am Premier Rosalyn Ahlgren, the elected head of Fyr’s government.”
As soon as he heard the name, Kyle recognized her. Captain ‘Rosie’ Ahlgren had earned those cybernetics the hard way—having her ship shot to pieces around her while she held a Commonwealth formation in place long enough for reinforcements to arrive. She’d saved the Zahn system from invasion and lost an arm and both eyes doing it.
She was one of the entire Alliance’s heroes from the last war. Kyle wasn’t surprised she had ended up in charge of her planet.
“Please, all of you, sit,” Ahlgren told them. “It’s been a busy twenty-four hours for all of us. Our own plans, as ably executed by General Andrews”—she gestured to one of the uniformed women—“were predicated on us acting once the carriers withdrew in another week or so and the orbital defenses were the only Commonwealth forces in system. The good General, as we all saw, adapted to the new circumstances.”
“I must,” Andrews—a smallish woman with a shaven head—said, “thank you for your timely intervention. Without your ships and Marines…” She shrugged. “I gave us no more than a fifty percent chance of success. A risk we were willing to take, of course, but…”
“The bigger risk we faced was that the Commonwealth would retake our system,” one of the suited, unidentified, politicians added. “With the size of your force, Admiral, I believe that will not be an immediate concern.”
“Unfortunately, mister…” Alstairs trailed off.
“Lund,” he replied shortly. “Matteus Lund—Minister of Security.”
“Unfortunately, Minister Lund,” the Admiral repeated, “Seventh Fleet’s liberation of Frihet is part of a larger operation. We will not be able to remain in the system for long before it will be necessary for us to launch further offenses.”
“But without your fleet, we are defenseless!” Lund squeaked. “We need you—we signed with the Alliance because we were to be protected!”
“And we understood the necessity of war meant that sometimes that protection would be longer-term,” Ahlgren said, cutting him off. “We do have certain resources that were preserved under the continuity-of-government plans, Admiral Alstairs, but Matteus is functionally correct. None of the resources available to us would suffice to stand off even a mildly determined attack.”
“I did not,” Alstairs said sharply as the Premier finished speaking, “say we would be leaving you defenseless. Our logistics ships are carrying a full set of orbital defense platforms earmarked for the Frihet system, as well as starfighters and a training cadre for the platforms and fighters. If you have personnel to man the stations, we can have them operational inside forty-eight hours.”
In truth, the platforms designated for Frihet had been aboard the transport lost at Zahn. Since Kyle had set up captured Commonwealth platforms to defend Cora, however, they were only short four platforms instead of eight.
Each of the four logistics ships they’d started with had contained eight Citadel-class fighter launch and missile control platforms, the seven hundred and sixty-eight Falcons to fill the Citadels’ bays, another hundred or so Falcons as spares for Seventh Fleet, and four hundred Atlatl-VI missile satellites.
With one ship lost and two ships having offloaded half their cargo, they still had the platforms for four standard system-defense suites. The problem was that Operation Rising star called for three of those suites to be deployed in Via Somnia, and they would also need to see to the Huī Xing system’s security.
“That suite consists of four fighter platforms, just under four hundred starfighters to go in them, and two hundred missile satellites. I intend to have the full suite emplaced in Fyr orbit by this time tomorrow,” Alstairs noted. “Actual operational status will depend on your personnel availability.”
“We have people we can deploy,” Ahlgren said calmly. “We can also support them with our flotilla of sublight missile boats—they should be receiving the orders to leave their hiding place in the gas giant shortly. They’re out of missiles, but if you can provide us reloads from those freighters…”
There was a long untold story there from the sounds of it, and Kyle was curious—it was rare for sublight guardships like the missile boats Ahlgren was describing to survive the fall of a system. Preserving that flotilla was impressive. So, for that matter, was managing to hide inside a gas giant.
“We have more than enough munitions to do so,” Alstairs promised. “We will need to be on our way inside three days, Premier Ahlgren, but we will do all that we can first.”
24
Frihet System
22:00 March 25, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Landning City, Capital Star Hotel
The Alliance officers eventually reconvened in a private meeting room on the eightieth floor of Landning City’s best hotel. Mira had arranged security by the simple expedient of booking the top five floors of the massive hotel and telling the management to lock the elevator down at the eightieth floor.
Now that floor swarmed with Marines and was being rapidly, if temporarily, converted into a planetary command center. There were still plenty of rooms in the four floors above them—far more, to be honest, then the Alliance presence required, even with the Marines.
“Your impressions, people,” Alstairs asked as they settled in at the table in the genteel conference room. The table was a local wood, as were the comfortable chairs. One wall of the room was windows looking out over the city, and the others were painted in calm forest greens.
“They had a solid continuity plan and kept their government together,” Kyle rumbled. “But they’re still damned short on resources after a multiple-month occupation.”
“They’re putting on a good fac
e,” Mira agreed with her paramour. “But their reaction when we told them we couldn’t stay says everything—they need our help.”
“And we really can’t stay,” the Admiral confirmed grimly. “None of the systems we’ve liberated are in great shape. They all need our help—but the best thing we can do for them is neutralize Via Somnia. Once the naval base there is down, these systems will be safer than they were before the war started.”
“There’s still some kind of fleet around here,” Mira pointed out to her admiral. “They weren’t here, which means there is a ten-starship formation either in Via Somnia or Huī Xing. If we run into that on top of the defenses we know are already at Somnia, our next operation could go very bad.”
“Liberating Huī Xing and taking Via Somnia are the only remaining original objectives of Operation Rising Star,” Alstairs noted. “To maintain the security of these systems, the neutralization of the nodal fleet is also a requirement, one I’m now including as an operational objective of Rising Star.
“The question, ladies, gentlemen”—she glanced around at her flag captain and Force Commanders—“is how to best achieve those three objectives. I don’t expect answers right now,” she continued. “We’ve been going nonstop since we arrived in-system. I suggest we all get some rest and discuss in the morning. Captain Solace has arranged these ground-side facilities for us; I suggest we make use of them.”
As the officers filtered out, Mira met Kyle’s gaze and smiled at him, indicating for the big Force Commander to follow her.
“I may,” she told him as they detached from the other officers, “have forgotten to book you a room. I’m afraid you’re going to have to bunk with me, Force Commander Roberts.”
He sighed and shook his head at her.
“The sacrifices we make to save funds in the Alliance’s service,” he replied virtuously.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 82