The new salvos would start hitting roughly fifteen minutes after the original salvo intercepted the fighters, four minutes before the two starfighter formations ranged on each other. His squadrons would be launching, in fact, just as the last fifty-seven missile salvo from Battle Group Seven-Two struck home.
He opened a channel to his Wing Commanders, pulling in the two Phoenix Sub-Colonels as well.
“I’m not seeing a lot of clever options beyond riding the Navy’s fire straight down the bastards’ throats,” he told them. “I’m open to ideas to keep us alive past the next, oh, twenty-five minutes.”
“I had a thought,” Wing Commander Rokos replied after a long moment. “I don’t know if it’s a clever thought,” the big pilot continued, “but…we have all of this ECM. We can fool their missiles, lure them away, confuse the hell out of them. So, why don’t we just, well, make a hole and lead the missiles into it?”
Michael thought about it.
“It’s not a trick we could do twice,” Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills said slowly. “They’ll angle Q-probes in for closer looks in the future.”
“But the nearest Q-probes right now are half a million klicks away,” Wing Commander Nguyen pointed out. “If we start gaming the ECM now and open that hole…”
“Worst-case scenario, it doesn’t help,” Wills noted. “We couldn’t spread out enough to remove mutual support or it won’t look realistic to them.”
“All right, Russell,” Michael finally answered. “Let’s try your donut hole. You have about six minutes to run your numbers by me.”
That gave the Wing Commander until the first missile salvo hit to have an actual plan.
It took Rokos less than three minutes to have the numbers together—and the numbers looked good.
By reducing the safety distances between the starfighters by roughly five percent, the Wing Commander’s design opened up a five-thousand-kilometer-wide hole through the heart of the Alliance fighter formation. Using the ECM drones and projectors available to the Alliance, they promptly filled that gap with phantoms—what appeared to be starfighters but were, at most, expendable remotes.
And then a careful tuning of the jammers and projectors across the formation would make those remotes ever so slightly an easier target than the rest of the formation. That was where the art versus the science of electronic warfare came into play—too much easier a target, and the humans in the loop on the other side would realize something was strange. Not enough easier a target, and the effort would be wasted.
Studying the plan, Michael wasn’t surprised to see that Rokos appeared to have got it just right. The Wing Commander had always seemed to have just the right touch with the Falcons’ ECM systems. Even knowing what they’d set out to do, Michael was barely able to pick out the gap they were trying to lure the Commonwealth missiles into.
Only time would tell, though—and that was passing quickly.
“Flip it to everyone,” he ordered the Wing Commander. “Execute immediately—let’s pull a curtain over ourselves.”
For a moment, even his screens dissolved into static as the squadrons around him brought their jamming online. Then the datalinks from the starfighters reconnected, feeding him the locations of his own ships. The networked computers of his squadrons and their motherships resolved the locations of the starfighters and the drones, showing the ships falling into their designated locations in Rokos’s plan.
No starfighter was ever on a constant course; even this far away from the enemy, their formation was a chaotic swirl of spirals and side-jets, designed to throw off missiles and beams at long ranges. The main positron lances of a battlecruiser like the Assassin, after all, could punch through a Falcon’s deflectors at six light-seconds.
They couldn’t hit a starfighter at that range—unless the starfighters were being fat and lazy. So, pilots didn’t ever let themselves get complacent.
As the Alliance missiles came crashing down on the Terran formation, it was promptly clear that those pilots had learned the same lessons as Michael’s people. All the Scimitars were moving, dodging around the missiles’ paths and producing firing angles for their positron lances and defense lasers.
Against a similar number of fighter missiles, it would have been more than enough—but capital ship missiles were smart. The Jackhammers threw out decoys of their own, filled the area around themselves with jamming—and waited until the last possible moment to redirect from being targeted on the two battlecruisers to targeting the starfighters.
Smart and tricky missiles or not, the Terrans did a good job of protecting themselves, but capital ship missiles saw through the Scimitars’ ECM with ease and drove straight for the starfighters. Only active defenses meant anything—and the Jackhammers had ECM of their own.
Twenty starfighters—two entire squadrons, as the Terrans organized their ships—vanished in balls of antimatter fire. The remaining starfighters were haloed for thirty or forty seconds in the radioactive debris cloud from the deaths of a hundred-plus missiles and twenty starfighters, and then space was calm again.
That was worse than Michael had hoped—and suggested that the ten salvos of fifty-seven missiles apiece now fifteen minutes away from the Terrans might be even less effective than expected.
The next missile salvo lived down to Michael’s expectations. This time, the Terrans were expecting it to go for the starfighters, and it showed—the Scimitars opened up on the missiles from slightly farther out, accepting lower hit probabilities to allow a greater number of shots per target.
With more than ten starfighters firing on each missile, the odds were against the Alliance Jackhammers. The missiles barely survived long enough to cut the firing window on the second salvo by a few precious seconds.
The second salvo also died well clear of the starfighters but cut a few more seconds off the response time to the third salvo. Those missiles got close enough that the explosions of their deaths helped cover the arrival of the fourth salvo until it was almost too late.
To Michael’s surprise, the Terrans still stopped every missile in the fourth before any of the starfighters were hit—but some of the missiles were detonating within mere kilometers of their targets. Several of the Scimitars fell out of formation, no longer accelerating—“soft” kills from the radiation.
There was a small but noticeable drop in the intensity of their sensor output as well. Sensor and jammer emitters had been burnt away by the near misses, rendering the remaining fighters less effective.
The Terran missile salvos had arced farther away from Michael’s people, sacrificing flight time to reduce the threat of the starfighters. As opportunities presented themselves, his people were firing on them with lances and lasers, but they were barely taking a tithe of the Terran missiles. Those, Michael concluded grimly, were going to be up to Roberts.
The Alliance’s fifth salvo died a bit farther clear of the Scimitars than the fourth, sparing the Terrans further immediate losses, but the sixth and seventh salvos were another series of near misses, sending starfighters spinning off into space—either their crews or their computers dead.
One missile actually hit from the eighth salvo, a starfighter vanishing in a one-gigaton ball of antimatter fire. The ninth closed on their heels and Michael smiled coldly. They wouldn’t do much—but it was almost time for his people.
“All right people,” Michael said on his all-ships channel. “The Navy is plowing the road for us. Let’s follow it and send these bastards to Hell and Starless Void!”
The last seventy-four missiles slammed into the Scimitars’ teeth, near misses and direct hits knocking another dozen fighters out of the fight. All told, the thirteen salvos of Navy missiles had destroyed or disabled almost fifty starfighters.
That helped even the odds. Michael was perfectly happy to throw his three hundred and thirty-six seventh-generation starfighters against three hundred and eight sixth-generation birds.
The timer hit zero and his people opened fire. Included in Rok
os’s “donut” strategy was a crisscrossing pattern of missile flights, burying the exact origin of the almost thirteen hundred missiles in a confusing blur of jamming and antimatter rocket trails.
The Scimitars launched moments before his people did, the entire sky seeming to disappear in the light of almost sixteen hundred missile trails. Thirty seconds later, both starfighter formations launched again.
That was all Michael could fire—he still needed missiles to engage the battlecruisers. The Terrans apparently had the same logic, as they stopped firing after two salvos as well.
“For what we are about to receive, may the Stars make us forever grateful,” someone prayed on the open channel.
“Save the prayers for later,” Michael ordered. “For now—target those missiles. Stay alive!”
Every stratagem was already in place. Either their attacks and defenses would work to get them to lance range, or they’d all die. There was nothing the Vice Commodore could do at this point to change the fate of his people.
He could only change the fate of his own starfighter.
The defensive lasers were his gunner’s problem. His ECM was his flight engineer’s problem, under the plans and strategies already laid out in Rokos’s donut strategy. As the pilot, he controlled the ship’s position, orientation, and fifty-kiloton-per-second positron lance. The three of them worked together, linked through their neural implants to a level of communication that made them all part of the ship itself.
Michael danced the six-thousand-ton tin can of his starfighter through space, slashing at missiles with his lance—focused in the moment on the survival of his own ship.
Starfighter missiles were orders of magnitude less capable than capital ship missiles—and also orders of magnitude smaller. A Jackhammer or Stormwind was two thirds the size and half the mass of a Falcon. A Starfire or Javelin was a thirtieth. What they gave up in capability was worth it for starfighters to be able to launch them in mass salvos.
Four capital ship missiles per starfighter would be instant death to the entire formation. Four starfighter missiles per ship was merely…difficult.
Between his maneuvers, the lance, and the lasers, Michael’s own command starfighter took out five missiles. Others didn’t do as well. His implant informed him that over seventy percent of the fifteen-hundred-plus missiles fired at his people had been destroyed—but that left over four hundred in terminal mode.
Time ran out and Michael nearly bit his tongue as he watched hundreds of missiles slam into the donut hole in the center of their formation, either destroying easily replaceable drones or flashing clean through into deep space, stuttering into darkness as their engines failed.
Only his implants allowed him to assess the losses in the fractions of a second available to him. Thirty-two of his starfighters were gone—in exchange for over two hundred of the Scimitars.
Then they were in lance range, the second salvo of missiles howling down on both sides as they flashed towards and interpenetrated. Michael twisted his starfighter across the stars, triggering the positron lance as it crossed targets—watching as the smaller Scimitars were ripped apart under the beams of antimatter, and praying that his people were luckier.
Nine seconds after entering range, the Alliance spacecraft flashed through the debris that had been the Terrans’ fighter formation. They were clear, and Michael breathed. He’d survived, but…
“Check in,” he ordered aloud. They had less than three minutes to missile range of the battlecruisers—he had to know what he had left.
The answer rapidly filled his mental screens as each of his Wing Commanders checked in. He winced at the lack of update for Avalon’s Epsilon Wing, reaching out for the answer he knew had to be the case.
Wing Commander Lei Nguyen was gone, her command starfighter debris somewhere behind him and the brave young woman who’d served with him since Avalon commissioned ashes within it.
The rest of his Wing Commanders were still with him—as were a surprising number of their fighters. The second Terran missile salvo had fared even worse than the first, and the shorter lance range of the Scimitars had spared his people the worst of the dogfight.
He’d lost eighty-six ships and an unknown number of people, faces and names that would haunt his dreams—but for now, he had two hundred and fifty seventh-generation starfighters to command and a pair of battlecruisers to kill.
13:37 April 2, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Kyle watched the debris and static fade from the inevitable storm of radiation and jamming that ensued when starfighters clashed. Q-Com links to the command starfighters told him the status of his people—the starfighters lost, the complete destruction of the Terran starfighters.
The Q-probes around the fight also showed the capital ship missiles launched by the two Commonwealth battlecruisers. While the salvos were of a mere twenty-eight missiles each, the cruisers appeared to have emptied their magazines at him. Twenty salvos were still flashing through space, even though ten salvos had smashed themselves on Battle Group Seven-Two’s defenses already.
There was still a chance of a lucky shot, but Captain Ainsley had moved Sledgehammer out in front, putting the battleship’s heavier defenses between the missiles and the biggest target: Avalon. With four capital ships’ defenses firing on the missile salvos of two capital ships, Battle Group Seven-Two seemed safe enough for now.
“Get me a radio channel relayed through the Q-probes at those battlecruisers,” Kyle ordered. A moment later, an icon on his screen informed him they were transmitting—though, of course, whether the Terrans were listening was an entirely different issue.
“Commonwealth warships,” he said calmly, “you are outnumbered and outgunned. We both know what the result of my starfighter strike on your ships will be. I am prepared to accept your surrender and allow your personnel to be interned on Huī Xing.
“This isn’t your system,” he concluded. “Why die defending it?”
He waited.
“They’ve received it,” Xue told him. “No response.”
“Damn,” Kyle said mildly. He glanced at the timer. Michael had less than thirty seconds until the geometry of the engagement put his missiles in range.
“Inform the Vice Commodore the Terrans have refused to surrender. He is to destroy those cruisers by whatever means necessary. Once the starfighters have cleared the way, inform Brigadier Hammond he is to secure the orbitals as soon as possible.
“I want to have those prisoners on their way out of this system yesterday.”
13:39 April 2, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
Michael shook his head as he acknowledged the message from Avalon. Roberts had intimidated one second-rate ship into surrender at the start of the war, and so he thought any outclassed Terran force would consider it?
Avalon’s CAG had many and lengthy opinions of the Terran Commonwealth Navy and the Terran Commonwealth Starfighter Corps—and of the cause they had lent themselves to the service of—but he did not doubt their courage or their determination.
Which was unfortunate since, like his Force Commander, he would have preferred not to kill the ten thousand or so people on the battlecruisers in front of him.
There was no place for regrets in the battle space.
The range dropped below three million kilometers, and his squadrons’ relative velocity to the battlecruisers was over eighteen thousand kilometers a second and rising. They would be in range…now.
“Fire!” he snapped.
The order was probably redundant, and most of their salvo was in space before he’d finished speaking. The battlecruisers had no missiles left now. Their big positron lances would start firing any second, but they had only a limited chance of hitting his starfighters.
The secondary anti-fighter lances would be in range six seconds before his own people were and five seconds before his missiles hit. Even if he could guarantee his missiles would kill the cru
isers, he couldn’t pull his people aside at a rate that would keep them out of the range of those seventy-kiloton-a-second guns.
His ships’ deflectors were much weaker than those mounted on the battlecruisers, but the starfighters only needed to deflect the electromagnetically charged positron beams a few dozen meters. The battlecruisers’ deflectors needed to deflect the starfighters’ beams hundreds of meters to guarantee a miss.
It was a question of whether his people could dodge and swerve well enough to survive those six seconds—the deadliest seconds a starfighter could face. As Wills had predicted, the Commonwealth had brought their Q-probes in closer to make sure they weren’t fooled into firing into an area with no starfighters at all.
No tricks left—only the twisted, worming spiral of a starfighter assault.
Michael led his people into it with the grim determination of experience. Too many fights against too many ships, trying to dodge and twist without falling into a pattern a computer—or a gunner with a hunch—would identify.
Seconds ticked by in eternities. Positron lances tore at his fighter wings while defensive laser batteries slashed at his missiles, destroying the one-gigaton weapons by the hundreds.
One of the battlecruisers was a few kilometers ahead of the other, a miniscule difference in space, fractions of a second to the missiles’ flight time—fractions of a second that the defenses didn’t have. At least a dozen Starfires slammed into that battlecruiser, vaporizing it in a single burst of fury.
The second cruiser had those fractions of a second more. One, maybe two, missiles impacted. A damaging blow—probably crippling, possibly fatal to any but the most armored of ships.
It didn’t matter. Michael Stanford’s fighters swept over the surviving battlecruiser and hundreds of fifty-kiloton-a-second lance strikes ripped the ship to pieces.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 87