The icons displayed in his implant data streams changed. The ECM that had been pretending that the hundred-thousand-ton service tugs were sixty-million-cubic-meter freighters vanished like a popped soap bubble. The energy signatures blazing from the tugs suddenly toned down, no longer wantonly wasting fuel pretending to be bigger ships.
“Tug pilots report they’ll be aboard in ten minutes,” his com officer reported. “No expected issues.”
“Any reaction from our Terran friend?”
“No missiles so far,” Anderson said dryly. “Some shuffling of ships—but it looks he can do the math on intercepting the transports as well as we can. I bet fifty stellars he’s going to wait and see how Bogey Eight does before he decides.”
“If we’re betting on our chances of incipient death, can the stakes be higher than an expensive coffee?” Kyle asked cheerfully.
“I would tend to think they are by default,” Xue pointed out, her voice level enough that it took even Kyle a moment to realize she was joining in the banter.
He eyed the bridge crew out of the corner of his eye. There were smiles and concealed chuckles at their senior officer’s antics, which was exactly what he was aiming for.
“So, it’s down to Rokos,” he said more seriously. “Let’s see what happens.”
Exactly on schedule, Bogey Eight erupted back into normal space. The warped space bubble dispersed in a blast of radiation, lacking much of the normal blue sheen of Cherenkov radiation, as they’d only barely broken the speed of light on their trip around the gas giant.
They’d nailed their jump perfectly. Regardless of how accurate their data on the transports’ course had been, they had emerged exactly in the escapees’ path.
As soon as Bogey Eight was back in regular space and locatable, Bravo Wing sprang into action. In one pre-coordinated movement, the transports flipped and started accelerating away from the battlecruiser—buying the starfighters time to deal with it—and Rokos’s wing lunged for the battlecruiser at five hundred gravities.
Bogey Eight’s captain didn’t even flinch. The battlecruiser turned into the teeth of the starfighters and charged at the freighters. Seconds ticked by and neither side flinched, then missiles started to blast away from the cruiser.
Kyle found himself muttering blessings in Greek under his breath, imploring the old gods to let the transports be able to handle those missiles.
They should—the three assault transports were well protected and they had range to play with this time—but there was no way Rokos’s people could take more than a passing tithe of the weapons. It would mostly be down to the Marine ships to defend the freighters.
Then the missiles reached Rokos’s fighters and Kyle realized they hadn’t been aimed at the transports at all. That would, after all, have been a war crime, and Ness still didn’t strike him as the type.
The weapons charged into the fighter wing, dodging and weaving as lasers and positron lances took out their sisters. Kyle realized he was holding his breath, watching the starfighters—and the men and women he commanded—die.
Four capital ship missile salvos slammed home before Bravo Wing reached their own missile range of the cruiser. Fifteen of the Falcons died in balls of white antimatter fire, but thirty-three survived to open fire themselves.
A hundred and thirty-two Starfires blasted into space, a tsunami of fire versus the salvos of fourteen missiles still closing on Bravo Wing.
More capital ship missiles slammed home, and only a hundred and twenty missiles launched in the second salvo. The third was barely a hundred as the battlecruiser’s positron lances began to rip holes in Bravo Wing’s formation.
As the first salvo struck home, Rokos led his last twenty-two starfighters spiralling into their own lance range of the Assassin. Antimatter fire flared, positron beams flashed in both directions—and seventeen starfighters exited the inferno they’d created.
The twelve-million-ton battlecruiser didn’t.
“Rokos, report,” Kyle snapped. Silence responded. The Q-probes’ resolution wasn’t good enough to tell him which seventeen fighters had survived. He waited a long moment.
“Bravo Wing, report,” he ordered.
“This is Rokos,” the Wing Commander finally replied. “Sorry, we were putting out a fire. Literally. My bird took a near miss.
“We are clear. Target destroyed and the Marines are launching assault shuttles for pod pickup. I have fifteen of our emergency pods and two hundred and ten Terran escape pods on my scopes; we should have everyone picked up and aboard the freighters before they’re far enough out to go FTL.”
“Thank you, Wing Commander,” Kyle replied. He wasn’t just thanking him for the report, and everyone knew it.
“All in a day’s work, Force Commander,” Rokos told him. “Transports will be clear of Huī Xing en route to Alizon in ten minutes. Sorry to be leaving you behind, sir.”
“All in a day’s work, Wing Commander,” Kyle repeated back to him. “We’ll deal with Vice Admiral Ness. Get out of here, Rokos, and take those people with you.”
“Yes, sir,” the Wing Commander replied crisply. “Good luck, sir.”
36
Huī Xing System
00:15 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
“What are they doing?” Kyle asked aloud, watching the Terrans’ Twenty-Third Fleet simply sit and wait.
A quick calculation in his head confirmed that they would come to zero velocity and start heading away from the Terrans over thirty-four million kilometers inside the gravity well—and about the same distance from the Commonwealth fleet.
But even with the destruction of Bogey Eight and the escape of the transports, the Terrans seemed content to simply sit and watch him decelerate. He’d expected missiles, a fighter swarm—for that matter, if Vice Admiral Ness wanted to bring his battleship into play, now was the best time he’d have. Right now, Battle Group Seven-Two’s velocity was toward the Terran Fleet. The Battle Group was burning fuel wildly to reduce that velocity, but until they were building velocity away the Terrans, it would far easier for the Terrans to force a starship engagement they’d handily win.
“Remember that expensive coffee?” Anderson replied. “I’d bet it that Ness is under hard orders from Walkingstick not to risk his fleet—he won’t enter the gravity well himself until he knows where the rest of Seventh Fleet is.”
“Which leaves him able to go after the Admiral once he does,” Kyle said grimly. “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Ness really doesn’t like me right now. Xue.” He turned to the tactical officer. “Have everyone quietly start deploying missiles. I want a ten-salvo, cascade-activated, time-on-target attack ready to go as soon as we hit zero velocity relative to the Commonwealth ships.”
That was a quarter of the Phoenix ships’ remaining magazines. A fifth of Sledgehammer’s. Avalon had the missiles to spend, but her nine launchers weren’t going to stack enough of a salvo to yank Vice Admiral Ness’s nonexistent beard.
Five hundred and seventy missiles, ten stacked salvos from every ship in Battle Group Seven-Two, had a decent chance of doing real damage. With eight hundred starfighters flying escort on Ness’s remaining nine warships, Kyle put his odds of actually taking a starship out at only thirty percent or so. Ten salvos was the most their fire control could handle, however, and they’d take out starfighters if nothing else.
Kyle would back Stanford’s starfighter pilots against any the Commonwealth had one to one, and their Falcon and Templar starfighters were worth half again their numbers in the Terran Scimitars. Sadly, Twenty-Third Fleet had almost four times the number of starfighters Battle Group Seven-Two had left—eight hundred to barely more than two hundred.
Sending Bravo Wing to escort the freighters had turned the balance of starfighter power even further in the Terrans’ favor—but it had also got the transports out, which was worth it.
“Once we hit zero-v,” Kyle told Xue, “I want to sho
ve those missiles down the Terrans’ throats and run for Goudeshijie as fast as we can. Let’s see if we can make this jackass chase us.”
His tactical officer nodded, surprisingly calm for just having been asked to poke a much larger fleet in the eye.
“We’ll hit him, sir,” she promised. “But what he’ll do…”
“We can’t predict that,” Kyle agreed. “All we can do is poke him and see what happens.”
Via Somnia System
01:15 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
“Emergence from warped space in ten. Nine. Eight.”
Fleet Commander James Coles’ countdown echoed through Camerone’s bridge while Mira waited impatiently to see what waited for them at Via Somnia. They’d picked up a lot of data waiting a light-month away from the system, but resolving, for example, whether a specific space station was a transfer station or a fighter base was all but impossible at that range.
“Emergence,” Coles announced.
Camerone erupted into open space, surrounded by her sister ships. Eight Alliance capital ships arrived in the Via Somnia system, their arrival heralded by bursts of blue Cherenkov radiation.
The main target in the system was the Via Somnia Commonwealth Navy Base, a massive complex orbiting the third planet of the system—a dead rock three times the size of Earth with a gravity well that impeded Alcubierre drives for two light-minutes.
Mira waited patiently for her tactical officer and Alstairs’ staff to grind the data, comparing what they were seeing now to what they’d picked from a light-month out and what Alliance Intelligence had predicted.
“I’m not seeing any capital ships in the system,” Fleet Commander Rose, her tactical officer, reported after a few moments. “I do see four logistics freighters docked with the naval base, but no warships at all.”
“Anything here has been sent to Huī Xing,” Notley told Mira grimly. “That’s worrying, ma’am.”
“Other than giving our friend Ness the forces to keep Kyle pinned, why?” she asked, eyeing the screens.
“Because it means that the Terrans weren’t worried about leaving the naval base—which represents a cool ten trillion Commonwealth dollars, the price of a couple of warships—with no warship defenders,” her XO reminded her, and she remembered—once again—that Notley had more time in combat than the rest of her bridge crew combined.
“Void,” she cursed softly. “Xue, what are you seeing?” she demanded.
“Not good,” the tactical officer replied. “We’re still validating, but I’m throwing our certainties on screen as they firm up. Big icons are fighter bases. Small icons are missile satellites. Middle icons are positron lance platforms.”
The red icons started dropping onto the main screen and Mira’s implants. The lance platforms were a new wrinkle on Mira, though she was familiar with the concept—fixed platforms with the big versions of the modified zero point cells used as main capital ship weapons, usually megaton-range beams. An outer shell of at least two hundred of the things covered the approaches to the naval base.
The missile platforms made the section of the display showing the Naval base look diseased. Hundreds—possibly thousands—of the miniscule three-launcher, twelve-missile automated platforms were scattered through the space around the repair and logistics stations.
The last piece of the cake was the fighter platforms. Rose and the other tactical officers were still narrowing down the split between fighter bases and the stations making up the base itself—but they’d already confirmed twenty Zion-class platforms—over twice as many starfighters as Seventh Fleet had brought with them.
The fixed defenses of the Via Somnia Naval Base had Seventh Fleet well and truly matched—if not outgunned.
“Oh, Starless Void.”
“Options, people,” Rear Admiral Miriam Alstairs snapped.
All eight ship captains and the two carrier CAGs were linked in to a holoconference. While they conferred, Seventh Fleet orbited outside the gravity well of Via Somnia III, looking intimidating but not really doing much.
“We can take them,” Mira said slowly. “We can carry out long-range missile bombardment from here—that’ll force them to launch the satellites’ missiles while they’re least effective. We’ll still have to take on their starfighters, and those lance platforms are going to be a Void-accursed nightmare.”
“We can’t protect the fleet from a thousand starfighters,” Vice Commodore Ozolinsh told them bluntly. “We’ll cut them down, hard, but you’ll still have several hundred starfighters close enough to launch missiles.”
“We can take that,” Lord Captain Anders reminded the CAG flatly. “We can take that,” he repeated, “but we’ll lose ships. Take damage. As Captain Solace says, though, we can take this system.”
“And will what’s left of Seventh Fleet afterward be able to engage the Terrans’ Twenty-Third Fleet when they come after us?” Lora Aleppo asked, the Trade Factor officer glaring at Anders.
“That would depend on how much damage Force Commander Roberts was able to do,” Anders pointed out.
“Much as I dislike the cost involved, Roberts is more than capable of hammering Vice Admiral Ness’s fleet down to a manageable size,” Alstairs replied. “The mission objective remains Via Somnia…”
Anders held up a hand, forestalling the Admiral.
“What is it, Lord Captain?”
“Ma’am, Captain Solace is trying very hard not to be biased in her paramour’s favor,” the Coraline Lord Captain said flatly.
Mira flushed and started to glare at the man—he wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t polite to point it out. Yes, she and Kyle were lovers, but she wasn’t letting it influence her recommendation—otherwise, she’d be taking them to Huī Xing at maximum speed!
“This is leading her to make a mistake,” Anders continued, and Mira stopped glaring, wondering where the Imperial officer was going. “Force Commander Roberts and I are not friends. Most of the rest of you are on far better terms with our ‘hero’ than I am, and you are all bending over backward to not allow that to influence your decision.
“And so you are all wrong,” he snapped. “As Walkingstick has shown us again and again in this war, there is no true target but the enemy fleet. If we neutralize Twenty-Third Fleet, Via Somnia is ours to take. If we sacrifice Captain Roberts and his ships to capture this system, we will have thrown away a third of this fleet for nothing.”
To say that Kyle and Anders were not friends was an understatement, Mira considered. Kyle had forced the man to replace a CAG who’d screwed up badly—but had also been a longstanding friend and protégé of Anders’s.
“The Fleet Base is irrelevant without a fleet to support and is sufficiently defended to make taking it expensive,” Anders noted. “I must recommend that we immediately proceed to the Huī Xing system and engage Twenty-Third Fleet in combination with Battle Group Seven-Two. Anything else risks leaving a significant Commonwealth strike force operating in this area—one we are unlikely to be able to neutralize if we take losses securing Via Somnia.”
Mira found herself staring at Anders in shock, and she wasn’t the only one. He was right—it hadn’t just been her assuming she wanted to rescue Kyle only because he was her lover. Everyone else had tried to put their feelings aside—and missed the blatant strategic point.
Walkingstick had spent the entire war to date trying to grind down the Alliance’s fleet strength, making neutralizing capital ships a priority over taking or even holding systems. Twenty-Third Fleet was the only real target on the board.
The conference was silent for a long moment, and then Alstairs broke the silence.
“Thank you, Lord Captain Anders,” she said formally. “I believe you are correct that we had all missed that perspective. An additional point that has not been made is that the addition of Avalon’s battle group to our own order of battle would make taking this system significantly easier.
“However, from Force Commander
Roberts’ last set of transmissions, it appears that Vice Admiral Ness is under orders to avoid risking his fleet by entering the gravity well. If he remains outside the gravity well, he may be able to escape before we can destroy his fleet.”
Mira chuckled, then smiled when everyone looked at her.
“The answer is also in Kyle’s transmissions,” she pointed out. “We have a stockpile of ECM drones—for that matter, our logistics freighters have piles of missile satellites.
“We can set them all up, attached to a few shuttles or tugs on autopilot, and give the appearance of our fleet hanging out back here, maintaining a long-term missile bombardment. With no humans in the loop, the accuracy will suck, but it will give the Commonwealth every sign they need to think we’re settling in for a siege of Via Somnia.”
37
Huī Xing System
01:25 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Help was on the way.
Said help was four days away, but it was coming—and that meant Force Commander Kyle Roberts’ people had been spared from what had been appearing to be an inevitable death. He wouldn’t have told any of his people that he didn’t think they could win, but he’d used up the only tricks he had to get the rescued prisoners out.
The only thing he’d had left was to drag things out and see how many of Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships he could make Vice Admiral Ness spend to kill them.
With the rest of Seventh Fleet on the way, however, his main task had become to keep his people alive. It would be helpful if he could lure Twenty-Third Fleet into the gravity well—though he’d rather do so closer to Admiral Alstairs’ arrival if he had the choice—but not a necessity.
“We are approaching zero velocity,” Pendez reported. “We’ll start building our vector away from our lovely Terran friends in about a minute.”
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 93