“You’ve seen the mission brief. We’re going to need to be on the very top of our game if we want to pull off this stunt the old man has signed us up for without losing too many of our people. Remember, people,” Michael said quietly, “while it’s going to be easy enough for us to evade the Terran capital ships, dodging their starfighters is going to be harder. It’s going to be our job to remind the Terrans why they don’t want to catch Alliance starfighters.”
The chorus of growls that responded made him smile coldly.
13:00 March 27, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Mira watched through the scanners as the matched gravitational singularities of Battle Group Seven-Two flared to life, whisking the nine starships away toward Huī Xing.
The rest of Seventh Fleet was setting out a bit more slowly, since their role in Admiral Alstairs’ plan called for them to hit Via Somnia after the Terrans caught up to Kyle. Hanging her boyfriend out as bait rankled more than a little, though it was at least half watching him and Avalon go off into danger without her.
“How are we doing, Commander?” she asked her XO.
Notley shrugged, the older officer’s eyes also fixated on the big display where Avalon and her sisters had vanished.
“Camerone is ready for action,” he said simply. “Wing Commander Volte is…unenthused with the loss of a squadron, but his people understand that Seven-Two needed the help. We’ve replenished our missile stocks and Engineering is in the process of carrying out a full survey of our systems.
“Analysis also confirmed our missiles got in one of the killing blows here, so Engineering is also reportedly trying to find somewhere to paint a Volcano silhouette.”
Mira snorted, amused. It was hard, given the sheer number of munitions flying around, to validate a specific vessel as being responsible for a kill in a fleet action. While the Federation didn’t adhere to the tradition of painting kill silhouettes, enough of the Alliance members did that it was a running joke.
“I thought the traditional place was on a primary zero point cell?” she suggested sweetly. “Where no one will ever see it.”
Notley laughed.
“You think you’re joking,” he pointed out. “That’s exactly where we did paint them on a few ships last time around—where the Captain wouldn’t look.”
“I promise not to look closely at any strange markings I find on the cells when I inspect Engineering next,” Mira told him. “No concerns? Any issues with the Marines aboard?”
They had, after all, crammed an entire thousand-Marine-strong battalion aboard the cruiser.
“None,” he replied crisply. “Colonel Xavier’s people are being very cooperative. I leave the rest of the Fleet to the Admiral’s staff, though.”
“And they are in equivalent shape, if not quite as good as Camerone,” Alstairs said loudly. Mira wasn’t sure quite when the Admiral had slipped onto the bridge, but she’d done it without anyone noticing. The practice of long years in command of the battlecruiser herself, Mira supposed.
“You’ve done a good job with my old ship, captain,” the Admiral noted, “but the rest of the Fleet is almost managing to keep up. We’re almost ready to go.”
“Six hours,” Mira said quietly. “Is that enough time for Frihet?”
The three senior officers were clustered around her command chair. The acoustics of the bridge were carefully designed—loud announcements would carry to the entire room, but quiet conversation wouldn’t.
“No,” Alstairs admitted. “I’ve had to assign more pilots to their cadre from the crews that are supposed to be taking over at Via Somnia than I’d like. We underestimated how quickly the Terrans would hit these systems; we should have been providing full sets of fighter crews, not just training cadre.”
“Did we have them?” Mira asked. Across dozens of systems and billions of souls, there were hundreds of millions of people with the ninety-ninth percentile implant interface capability needed to fly a fighter—but that didn’t mean they had millions of trained fighter crews.
“No,” the Admiral told her. “We didn’t. That’s why we went with this plan in the first place—the security of the systems we were going to liberate was always the Achilles heel of this plan. We need to take out Via Somnia to make Rising Star a success; otherwise, all of this”—she made an encompassing gesture of the bridge—“has been for nothing. I won’t let this much death and blood be for nothing; do you understand me, Captain?”
“I do, ma’am,” Camerone’s Captain said quietly, looking at the operational display and the countdown timer. “I just wonder how much more we’re going to lose before it’s over.”
“We’re fighting a half-awake giant,” Seventh Fleet’s admiral said grimly. “It’s going to take time to bring the Alliance’s systems to full war status—but if the Commonwealth ever does the same, we’re doomed. I don’t know if this is ever going to be ‘over’, Captain Solace. Nor do I know how much we’ll lose.
“All I know is that I plan to fight every step of the damned way,” Alstairs told them. “And that this war can’t be fought entirely on our soil—something it has been to date. Something that changes the instant we leave FTL in Via Somnia.”
28
Deep Space, En Route to Huī Xing System
14:10 March 30, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera
“Move out!” Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen, Bravo Company Commander, 3rd Battalion, 103rd Marine Brigade, ordered his people crisply as they entered what had been Second Battalion’s quarters. “And remember—keep it quiet, keep it low. The Colonel is buying the drinks for the company that performs best.”
With three transports and three battalions, Brigadier Hammond had made the snap decision to split his brigade up as the other Marines moved onto Seventh Fleet’s warships. It reduced their points of failure and also left the Marines rattling around their assault transports like loose change.
Colonel Silje had decided to take advantage of the extra space by using an entire battalion’s quarters and exercise area as the “target” for a practice space-borne assault. Having three of said quarters allowed him to set up two company level exercises—and Bravo Company had been assigned to “clear” Second Battalion’s quarters of resistance.
They opened the dance by pushing through with Bravo Platoon leading the way, sweeping the main “lobby” area and checking for ambushes by Delta Company’s troopers.
There was no battle armor for this affair, just light body armor and training lasers. The lasers, unlike their actual weapons, were line-of-sight—but the network of everyone’s implants would calculate whether a battle rifle round would have hit.
Delta chose to concede the main entrance, allowing Edvard’s company to move in and leaving him with choices as to how to proceed. Between the entertainment section with the mess, the training gym with the simulators, and the actual battalion quarters, there were three different spaces, each of which could hold the entirety of Delta Company easily.
But there was also a time component to the game, and splitting up would let them hit all three simultaneously. It was a risky venture, one that could lose him the game if he guessed wrong…but he knew his people were better.
“Split up,” he ordered his platoon lieutenants. “Alpha Platoon, take the mess. Bravo, you get the training sector. Charlie, hit the quarters. Keep linked in, call for the HQ section if you need backup. Go! Hit them hard.”
Without the battle armor suits to absorb the sounds, they couldn’t wolf-howl. His officers fist-bumped instead before splitting off to launch their sweeps.
Only Bravo’s headquarters section was left in the lobby when Delta launched their ambush. All the exits from the lobby area slammed shut to a command override, trapping Edvard’s headquarters section in the open space.
“Cover!” he snapped, diving for one of the handful of couches in the lobby. There wasn’t much cover; Delta had planned it well.
“They
’re coming through the roof!” Ramirez bellowed.
“Aim high, take them as they come,” Edvard replied, suiting actions to words and firing blindly into the air he swept the room for targets.
Lieutenant Major Fenton might be in trouble later, he noted in the back of his mind. Delta had actually cut holes in the roof, accessing the emergency spaces above the quarters. Edvard wasn’t sure how many people they’d crammed up there, but it gave them an element of surprise that should have been enough to take down his command squad.
The moment’s extra notice from the doors slamming shut, however, was enough for him and Ramirez to be looking for the ambush. The Gunnery Sergeant launched the first virtual grenade, but Edvard was only moments behind him—and three of his troopers had the same thought.
A dozen or so Delta troopers made it to the ground. The rest were still in the ceiling when the computers assessed the result of five hypervelocity fragmentation grenades going off in an enclosed space.
None of the rest of the platoon made it down. The dozen on the ground still mostly had surprise, simulated gunfire spraying over Edvard’s people and taking half of his headquarters section down—including Gunny Ramirez.
Twenty seconds after the doors slammed shut, it was over. Delta Company’s Bravo Platoon was out of action, and Bravo Company’s headquarters section was down eleven effectives.
“Watch the ceilings,” he ordered his lieutenants. “Fenton’s down a platoon to that trick, but he might still try it again.”
One of his people got to work on opening the doors, while Edvard’s “dead” carefully started helping Delta Company’s “dead” get safely down from the emergency spaces.
The Lieutenant Major watched with a grin on his face, already plotting how to modify the trick for when it was his turn to defend against Fenton’s company.
It was a sheepish crowd that gathered in Third Battalion’s officers’ briefing room at the close of the day. Edvard was trying not to grin too obnoxiously—Bravo Company had made a clean sweep of its assault, taking down Delta Company with only fifty-two casualties of their own.
His defense hadn’t been quite as clean, turning into a point-blank slug-fest with over a hundred losses in Bravo Company—but had left Fenton’s people retreating with over ninety percent losses. That made his people the only one of the five companies to win on both assault and defense.
Of course, then he’d taken Bravo Company against Alpha Company’s defenses and been reamed. None of the company commanders gathering around Colonel Silje and Major Brahm had won all of their exercises.
“Let’s start with what I hope everyone has realized,” Colonel Amanda Silje informed her officers. “Lieutenant Major Hansen’s Bravo Company gets drinks on me tonight. Not only did they win two out of their three exercises, which Alpha Company also managed, but Lieutenant Major Hansen also carried an assault with under fifty percent casualties.”
She shook her head.
“Out of six exercises, it appears Delta Company carried no victories at all, but we only had two victories by our attackers,” she noted. “Alpha carried their attack on Charlie, but at over seventy percent casualties, I can’t call that a shining example of Marine courage and strategy.
“We have been and will be launching boarding actions in the face of Terran Commonwealth Marines, people,” Silje said sharply. “They are every bit as good, every bit as determined, and every bit as well equipped as we are. To date, we’ve either had orbital bombardment or surprise on our side, or been boarding stations already battered to hell. We can’t rely on that—the day will come when we will be hitting Terran Marines who’ve had ample time to prepare. Marines who’ll know we’re coming.
“If today was any example, we’ll lose over half the battalion when that day comes, and that is not acceptable,” she snapped. “We have two more days before we hit Huī Xing, people. We’re going to run through the same exercises tomorrow. Then the next day, we’re going to run two-company assaults. When we reach the target, I want to know I’m not going to be writing five hundred letters home!”
“I thought the op plan didn’t call for us to be assaulting anything?” Lieutenant Major Fenton, a tall and gangling blond man, asked. “Last I saw was the Battle Group was going to be bouncing around the outside of the system, playing bait—there’s not much out there to land Marines on, ma’am.”
“We are Castle’s damned Marines, son,” Silje told Fenton, the self-applied nickname for the Corps rolling off fiercely. “We do not prepare for the ops plan. We prepare for war. Most importantly, we do not relax because the ops plan doesn’t call for us!”
Fenton looked suitably abashed, though Edvard wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. It was easy to plan for the theory that the Marines wouldn’t be needed and treat the exercises as a game.
“The plan may change,” the Colonel noted. “A battleship could get crippled without being destroyed. A target may present itself outside the gravity well. Any of these things could result in Force Commander Roberts needing the Federation’s Marines. We will not be found wanting when the Federation calls, will we?”
Edvard wasn’t sure who started the wolf howl in reply, but even a handful of Marines could fill the briefing room if they needed to.
22:15 March 31, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Office
It was late in the ship’s day when Michael Stanford dropped into his chair, a summary of the day’s exercises running through his implant as he opened the beer he’d snagged from the mess on the way over.
The new starfighter flight crews were working out better than he’d allowed himself to hope. That he’d been able to poach complete squadrons helped, a lot. He’d merged them under his Epsilon Wing’s Wing Commander Lei Nguyen.
He’d actually had more problems with the reorganized squadrons for his other two hundred crews. Only a handful of his squadrons had lost more than one starfighter at Frihet, but he’d been forced to dissolve most of those more-understrength squadrons to fill in the rest of his formations.
The members of the dissolved squadrons were less than happy, especially as that had left three Flight Commanders leading sections instead of squadrons. He’d personally talked to all three of them, but their discontent was showing in their flying.
It took him a moment to notice the flashing icon of a personal message. His implant was set up to only notify him of those at certain times and places—his office after about twenty hundred hours was on that list.
He hit a mental command, opening the message from Kelly.
“Hey, lover,” she greeted him. “Busy tonight, but I wanted to send you a quick note. Scuttlebutt is drying up hard around Fourth and Seventh Fleet’s ops, which makes me worry. When things are this quiet, I always wonder if it means something’s gone wrong.
“Last time scuttlebutt went silent on Avalon, rumor says an Admiral ended up in a cell,” she said quietly. “I’m hoping things are running a bit smoother this time! Hope to be able to talk to you live soon. Love you!”
With a smile of his own, he leaned back in his chair and activated the tiny camera hidden in his wall for just this person.
“Hi, Kelly,” he greeted her. “You know I can’t tell you anything about Seventh Fleet’s ops. I’m surprised the rumor mill has much of anything about the Alliance’s offensives, though I’ll confess I’ve learned to never underestimate it.
“It’s been…rough,” he admitted. “I think I can say that much. But things are holding together. The Commonwealth knows we’re coming now, though. The next few ops are going to be hard. But…we’ve got Roberts—the Stellar Fox himself—and the Terrans don’t.
“I don’t put much stock in the exaggerations the media sells as news,” he told his girlfriend, “but I watched Kyle earn that name. Things may not go our way, but I’m betting Kyle makes sure they don’t go the Commonwealth’s way, either.
“How can they, after all?” he finished with a grin. “I’m here to execute whatever crazy plan he come
s up with!”
Michael wasn’t entirely surprised to find the flight deck wasn’t empty when he wandered through it, making one final check before he slept. There were always some of his people, often under Olivia Kalers’ own guidance, checking over starfighters and equipment, even in the inviolable sanctuary of warped space.
He was surprised to find it empty other than Force Commander Kyle Roberts.
Avalon’s Captain, a vastly larger man than Michael’s own slight frame, was studying the plaque where the names of the flight crews who’d died aboard this Avalon had been carved. There were other places those names were recorded—notably, they’d been carved onto the obelisk in the atrium that had been transferred from every vessel that had ever born the name Avalon in the Federation’s service—but this was the one the Space Force kept for their own.
There wasn’t much difference between Navy and Space Force uniforms in the Federation’s military. Both wore the same self-sealing shipsuit, a one-piece garment that passed for slacks and a turtleneck at a moderate distance, with a uniform jacket. Roberts’ shipsuit was piped in gold versus Michael’s blue—but the Force Commander had worn the same blue once upon a time.
“Kyle,” Michael announced his arrival. “Wasn’t expecting to find you here.”
“It’s one of the quieter places on the ship at this time of night,” Roberts replied. “Always used to come down and look at the plaque when I was CAG. Old Avalon didn’t have anyone who’d died under my command until I wasn’t CAG anymore. Alamo did.”
Michael nodded. Roberts had first made his reputation salvaging a boarding operation gone very wrong on the pirated transport liner Ansem Gulf. He’d seen half of his Wing shot apart around him before he’d taken command—and lost people after that as well.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 85