He’d seen more combat action before the war than Michael had—but now, Michael had lost more starfighters and flight crew under his direct command than Roberts had as CAG.
All of Michael’s losses were still Roberts’ losses, though.
“I should have seen a better solution,” the Force Commander said quietly. “I didn’t expect it to go so wrong.”
“You told me yourself: there was no better solution,” Michael pointed out. “We can’t carry every victory without losses. We won’t have a clever trick for every engagement, every clash. I’d rather bring all my people home,” he admitted, “but the only way to do that is not to fight.”
“That’s not what the Federation pays us for,” Roberts agreed. “I just feel I owed them something…more.”
“I know,” the CAG agreed. “Like we should have done better. Our jobs.”
Roberts shook his head, glancing back at the smaller starfighter pilot with a smile.
“Shouldn’t be dumping this on you,” he admitted. “Bad for morale for people to see the Force Commander get all weepy.”
“You may be my boss,” Michael told him, “but you’re also my friend. I heard nothing, saw nothing. Only the Stellar Fox preparing for war.”
Roberts laughed.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied. “I’m no legend. Just lucky.”
“I’ll take that luck, then,” the CAG answered. “I don’t care if you’re lucky or good, Kyle; you’ve brought us this far and I don’t expect that to change. We chose our path when we put on these uniforms. I won’t pretend I like losing good people. I don’t. But…”
“I will not leave these worlds under the heel of Terra,” Roberts promised him. “I won’t sacrifice our people in vain, either, but I will not bow to the Commonwealth’s Unity.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? They believe this is right.” Michael gestured around them. “That the cost of war is worth it, because Unity is better for us.”
“Our Senate and our allies disagree,” the Force Commander told him. “As do I. They’ll choke on their Unity before this is done.”
“I’d drink to that,” Michael agreed, “but I finished my beer in my office.”
“You’ve seen my stash,” Avalon’s captain replied. “My office?”
29
Huī Xing System
12:10 April 2, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Battle Group Avalon erupted into normal space once again, the unavoidable blue corona of the starships’ emergence announcing their presence to any with the eyes to see.
Inevitably, someone had to have those eyes—and the Alliance crews needed to know who.
Kyle waited patiently as Xue and Anderson ran over the data, correlating with the feeds from the other eight ships in the battle group. The logistics freighters’ sensors weren’t worth much, but even they were another pair of data points to feed into the analysis.
“Where exactly are we?” he asked Pendez.
“Where I told you we’d be,” his navigator replied. “Exactly twenty-nine million kilometers away from Xin—roughly one point six light-minutes, as requested. Battle Group is closing positions to formation Alpha-One as previously instructed.”
He nodded his thanks. Alpha-One was a very simple formation—an oblong box with the four warships at the front and the five transports behind.
“What is Xin’s gravity well?” he asked.
“Twenty million kilometers,” Pendez replied crisply. “She’s a big, heavy rock—I’d hate to live there. You want to watch this, though,” she noted, marking a second, larger sphere in Kyle’s implant map. “Goudeshijie”—roughly, “Dog World” in English—“is Huī Xing’s fifth planet, and she’s aligned with Xin right now. Since Goudeshijie is a super-Jupiter with a full astronomical unit of gravity well deep enough to stop us going to Alcubierre, the unsafe zones intersect right now.”
“We’re staying well away from Goudeshijie’s gravity well, right?” he asked.
“You said to stay where we could jump clear, so yes,” she told him. “You just need to be aware that we don’t have the freedom to maneuver we normally would near a habitable world.”
He nodded. Habitable worlds were usually well clear of other gravity wells significant enough to prevent Alcubierre-Stetson drive use. The super-Jupiter barely seven and a half light-minutes away had to be an incredible sight from the surface—assuming you got past the over-half-again Earth gravity long enough to look up, anyway.
“All right, sir,” Anderson addressed him over the link from Secondary Control. Kyle stood and crossed to the tactical section. Presumably, their analysis was done. The pale, redheaded XO met his gaze over Xue’s screen and nodded calmly before continuing.
“We have good news, bad news, and ‘well, shit’ news,” he said bluntly.
“Lay it out, Commander,” Kyle ordered.
“The bad news is that the logistics depot in orbit is intact and clearly in use by the Commonwealth,” Anderson said bluntly. “I’m also reading eight Zion-class platforms intermingled with the storage stations and a pair of Assassin-class battlecruisers.
“The good news is that they didn’t put in heavy fixed defenses because the nodal fleet is supposed to be here. There are fighter bases and the two battlecruisers, but no missile satellites we’re picking up.”
That was good news. Eight Zions and two Assassins was still four hundred and sixty starfighters—a hundred and twenty or so more than his Battle Group carried—but the Assassins were outclassed by his own warships and the Scimitars were outclassed by his starfighters. The defenders were out of their league and almost certainly calling for help right now.
Exactly according to plan.
“What’s the ‘well, shit’ news?” he asked.
“Taking the platforms intact means they took prisoners here,” Xue answered for the tactical department. “Their victories across the sector meant they’ve taken a lot of prisoners, and we haven’t seen many on the worlds we’ve taken so far…
“But there’s a cluster of ten storage platforms in a polar orbit flashing a Tau Ceti Accords prisoner-of-war camp identifier code. They’re Commonwealth stations, added to the logistics depot after the system fell,” she noted. “Assuming they’re complying with the Accords, they probably have about ten thousand prisoners on each platform.”
The Tau Ceti Accords were the modern “rules of war,” a replacement for the Geneva Conventions heavily supported by the Commonwealth. It would be…very out of character for Terrans to break those rules.
Potentially a hundred thousand prisoners of war. The crews of twenty starships. Thirty thousand starfighters. A dozen logistics depots like the one the Alliance had set up here at Huī Xing.
A hundred thousand people captured and imprisoned by Terra, in need of rescue. Deep inside a gravity well that his entering could put his entire battle group in danger.
“Well, shit.”
“Take us onto our planned course,” Kyle ordered Pendez. “Let’s see if we can lure those cruisers out.”
He also needed time to think, and the long, arcing course around Xin would buy him that. They were inside capital missile range, but it would be literally days before even the Terran starfighters could bring Seven-Two into range unless Kyle maneuvered to meet them.
Doing so would risk bringing him into the gravity well, entirely against his orders.
On the other hand, his three-day timer didn’t start until the Terrans’ nodal fleet had arrived. Allowing the two battlecruisers still in Xin orbit to meet up with the other eight warships swanning around somewhere was dangerous, both for Kyle and for Seventh Fleet’s plan to lure the Terrans into a trap.
“Xue.” He called his tactical officer over. “I want you to set up a three-salvo time-on-target strike on those battlecruisers. They’ll see it coming, but I want them jumpy. I need them to come out after us.”
Running the numbers in his implant, he co
uld tell that it would take two thirds of the Jackhammer missiles’ hour-long flight endurance to reach the Terran ships. The hundred and eleven missiles he was planning on hitting them with would be a serious threat to the two cruisers—except that the Zions’ fighters would make short work of them.
The point was to force the cruisers to come out with the starfighters. If they remained in orbit, he could throw ever-heavier salvos until either Seven-Two ran out of ammunition or the Terrans ran out of starfighters.
Since both he and the Terran commander knew the latter would probably happen first, the only way the Commonwealth ships had a chance of surviving this encounter was to close with Seven-Two. If they eliminated Sledgehammer with missiles or starfighters, the two battlecruisers would at least have a chance of getting into their own positron lance range of Kyle’s ships.
In roughly four days, if he didn’t turn to face them.
He watched the missiles blast into space, the accelerations of the first two salvos adjusted ever so slightly to account for their longer flight times. The cruisers were still waiting in orbit, but the fighters were starting to deploy as their Q-probes drew closer, compressing the time delay before Kyle saw their actions.
“Anderson,” he said softly over the channel to secondary control. “Do we have any data on where their fleet is?”
Presumably, the nodal fleet had been notified by Q-Com now. How quickly they could get to him—how large his safety margin was—depended on where they were right now.
“They left Zahn on the twenty-seventh,” his XO replied. “About twelve hours before we left Frihet. All we can say for sure is we know that they didn’t go to Hammerveldt—they’d be there by now.” He paused. “Best guess is they headed for Cora,” he said grimly. “They would only have just known we’d taken Frihet, and may well have known Cora was the most heavily defended.”
Kyle nodded. If nothing else, they would know that he had taken the logistics ship somewhat intact. The Captain would have informed them via Q-Com that he was being boarded. It would be a safe assumption that a significant portion of the defenses aboard the ship now defended Cora—though the Terrans probably wouldn’t know that his Marines had irreparably broken the Alcubierre drive taking the ship.
“What’s intel’s opinion on that?” he asked, his gaze back on the icons of the prisoner of war stations.
“That’s their guess,” his executive officer told him dryly. “After the cluster that was their original estimates, they’re giving us probabilities now. They figure a sixty percent chance the Terrans are on their way to Cora, a thirty-five percent they’re headed to Frihet, and a five percent chance they are heading to Hammerveldt and either dropped out early or stepped down their acceleration for some reason we don’t know.”
“So, no matter what, the closest intel thinks they are is nine days behind us?” Kyle murmured, a smile settling onto his face.
“I’m told there is no logical reason for them to do anything except complete their retaliation sweep in one pass,” Anderson replied.
“It’s what I would do,” the Force Commander noted cheerfully, “but I have a reputation for mindless aggression and shock-and-awe tactics to maintain.”
Anderson eyed him askance from the image fed to Kyle’s implant.
“Why do I get the feeling we’re about to add to that reputation?” he asked.
“Because, Fleet Commander Anderson, like any good XO, you’re learning to anticipate your Captain,” Kyle told him. “If we have nine days, we have time. Tell me: the platforms they’ve used for the prisoner camps—can our logistics ships hold them?”
Anderson ran the numbers, his eyes acquiring the slightly glazed look of a man consulting his implants, before he blinked and met his Force Commander’s eyes.
“They’re bigger than the fighter platforms,” he said carefully, “but yes. Without having them to hand to test, I can’t be certain, but I think we can fit four in each transport—if we abandon the fighter platforms and missile satellites.”
“And the Marine transports can easily take twenty thousand bodies if we pack them in,” Kyle noted. “Commander, I have no intention of leaving those POWs behind.”
“Sir, I have to point out that there is the chance that the nodal fleet left Zahn for here,” Anderson told him. “Intel has regarded it as null probability, but that would give us two days at most.”
“Then we’d better get on it to be safe, hadn’t we?”
13:00 April 2, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
“They’re coming out after us, and I’ve changed my mind about stringing them along,” Roberts’ voice announced brightly in Michael’s ear.
The CAG sighed. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised that the Force Commander had decided not to stick to the nice, safe plan that avoided combat.
“We did have a plan, boss,” he pointed out. He didn’t expect it to change anything. He’d seen the Tau Ceti Accords transponders as well. Hell, he wasn’t sure he wanted to change Roberts’ mind.
“We did,” Roberts acknowledged. “But that plan didn’t call for leaving a hundred thousand Alliance prisoners in a Commonwealth POW camp, did it?”
“No, it did not,” Michael confirmed. Even as he was “arguing” with his senior officer, he’d been collating information on the status of his wings—all in space, following the battle group along at a sedate one hundred gravities. “What would you like us to do, sir?”
“Fifteen minutes to missile contact,” the Force Commander noted. “They’ve wrapped enough starfighters around themselves as they’ve come after us that I don’t expect much from that, but it should ablate their starfighter strength. Their missiles will hit you not long after, and they’ll keep throwing them at us until they run out. Twenty-eight missile salvos aren’t much of a threat, but for your own safety, you’ll want to shoot down any that get near you.
“We’ll be launching new salvos of our own shortly to cover your way in,” Roberts continued. “I want you on your way ASAP—we’ll be right behind you.” He paused. “We’ll be firing ten salvos of missiles, but I can’t risk more than that. Diving in this deep, we face the risk of having to fight our way out, and I don’t know if we’ll have time to replenish our magazines.”
For every actual missile stored in Battle Group Seven-Two’s magazines, they had the parts they couldn’t manufacture on site—mostly the mass manipulators—for another five. Given access to the average nickel-iron asteroid, Avalon alone could replenish the entire Battle Group’s munitions in about three days.
“It’s down to the starfighters this time,” Roberts warned him. “I don’t expect our missiles to do more than take out some of their starfighters.”
“It’s always down to the starfighters,” Michael pointed out. “That’s why we build carriers. A few hundred Scimitars and a pair of last-gen ships? We’ll handle them for you, boss.”
Avalon’s Captain laughed.
“The Navy is humble enough that I forget that all starfighter crews are as arrogant as I was,” he replied. “We’re not certain, but it looks like both of those cruisers have had their deflectors upgraded. You’ll have less than half the lance range you used to have against them.”
“We’ll deal,” Michael replied. Missiles might be the main killer of a starfighter strike, but positron lances…positron lances were the finishers. If the battlecruisers survived his missile salvo and he had to close to sixty thousand kilometers to use his lances, that was going to hurt.
“We’re turning and opening fire in sixty seconds,” Roberts told him. “Are you ready to deploy?”
Vice Commodore Michael Stanford was a starfighter pilot, with an implant interface bandwidth capable of piloting a starfighter, coordinating a three-hundred-plus ship formation, and writing fiction simultaneously. He’d spent the entire conversation with Kyle Roberts passing orders and checking over his own ship.
“We are ready to deploy.”
It didn’t take the
Terrans long to respond to Seven-Two turning toward them. Within a minute of Michael’s fighters launching away from the Battle Group, the Terran starfighters did the same thing. Four hundred plus Scimitars could stop the hundred-missile stacked salvos Avalon and her companions had launched at the battlecruisers, but they wouldn’t suffice against the over twelve hundred missiles the starfighters could launch.
Coming out to meet him made them the targets of those missiles. The risk on the starfighters went up dramatically, but the risk to the starships went down equally dramatically. It was an exchange every starfighter pilot, gunner, and engineer knew instinctually, one they effectively agreed to when they put on the uniform of any starfighter force in the galaxy.
Michael mentally saluted their courage and then started assessing times and distances. There were still a little over ten minutes until the first missile salvo would intersect the starfighters—he dropped a mental note to Lieutenant Commander Xue to issue new targeting orders to those missiles. They were unlikely to get past the starfighter screen in the first place, but they could take out a few of the Scimitars if they tried.
More missiles were flying past his starfighters as they closed with the enemy. At minimum cycle time, it took less than four minutes for the ten salvos Roberts had promised to be launched—and not a lot more time for them to pass the starfighter formation. A Jackhammer capital ship missile had twice the acceleration of a Falcon or Templar.
The deadliest part of the entire engagement would be when the starfighters reached their own missile range of the Scimitars. The Commonwealth’s Scimitars had inferior positron lances, inferior engines and inferior ECM…but their Javelins were just as deadly as the Alliance’s Starfires, and they would be launching almost five hundred more of them at Michael’s people.
His fighter groups could probably handle it and come out mostly intact, but he’d be happier if the capital ship missiles took out, oh, half of the Terran ships.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 86