“That is going to be so nice,” the XO murmured. “Something about not suicidally charging into the teeth of the enemy is going to feel so relaxing.”
“Are the missiles set up?” Kyle asked Xue.
“Ready to go,” she confirmed. “Roughly nine minutes from engine activation to mass impact.”
“Good. Fire at the best timing—use your judgment,” he ordered.
“Wait!” she short-stopped him. “Aspect change—hold on a moment.”
The tactical officer blanked out, focusing on her implants as she studied the new data from her Q-probes.
“Three ships just went to Alcubierre,” she finally reported. “Looks like the Hercules and two Assassins—on their way to take up the old blocking position. They left their starfighters behind, though.”
“That helps,” Kyle replied with a smile. The starfighters were the single biggest obstacle to landing hits with the salvo they’d prepared, but removing three capital ships from the defensive suite definitely made an impact. “Are we still in the zone for time-on-target?”
“Yes, sir,” Xue told him instantly. “Forty-five seconds till optimal activation.”
“Good. Fire at will.”
Seconds later, ever so infinitesimally, Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, stopped moving toward the Commonwealth Twenty-Third Fleet and started moving away from it.
“I have starfighter movement!” Xue announced. “Damn—every one of those starfighters is coming right at us!”
A quick study of Kyle’s data feeds confirmed the tactical officer’s assessment—all eight hundred of the starfighters from Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships were now chasing after Kyle’s Battle Group at four hundred and fifty gravities.
That was only a two-hundred-gravity edge over the fuel-wasting pace that Seven-Two was maintaining—but that was a pace Kyle hadn’t planned on keeping up.
“I guess we’re staying at two hundred and fifty gees,” he noted aloud. There was no way he could slow down now, not with enough fighters to eat his command and spit out the pieces trailing in his wake. “Commander?”
“Missiles activating now,” she said flatly.
“Keep me in the loop,” Kyle ordered, then flipped his attention to his CAG. “Michael, we have a fucking swarm of Scimitars heading our way. I hope you have some kind of clever idea.”
“I don’t have much except smashing right into them and holding them in the gap between our lance range and theirs until one of us is dead,” Stanford admitted. “We’re moving out. See you on the other side, Kyle.”
Avalon’s Captain swallowed. He’d been a CAG once—he knew what kind of fight Stanford and his people were charging into—a close-range mutual suicide duel. But Stanford was right—it was the only hope Avalon and her battle group had.
And starfighters existed to die so starships didn’t. They could lose their entire fighter strength and lose fewer people and resources than if they lost a single one of their four starships.
Kyle didn’t have to like it.
“Missiles in range of their fighters,” Xue reported, interrupting his thoughts. “They’re engaging.”
His attention turned back to his attempt to poke the Terrans. Five hundred and seventy Jackhammer capital ship missiles flashed through the same space occupied by the Scimitar attack formation, allowing the eight hundred starfighters to lash out at them with positron lances and lasers.
Part of him wished he’d set those missiles to target the fighters—he wouldn’t have taken out many of them, but every fighter that died before they clashed with Stanford increased the chance for his people to live.
Instead, the missiles took out a dozen starfighters, almost by accident, and the starfighters took out over three hundred missiles in turn. Two hundred and sixty-three weapons charged into terminal mode on the Commonwealth Twenty-Third Fleet, and Kyle felt his hands clench into fists.
Six ships remained in the blocking force closest to him—a single Assassin battlecruiser, the Saint battleship, a Volcano carrier and the three Lexingtons. Their combined defenses were formidable, but his missiles were coming in with a high base velocity and their ECM running at full power.
The Saint swung forward, the big battleship putting her massive defenses and armor between the missiles and her more vulnerable sisters. The missiles swooped in, detonating in their dozens as the Terran defenses took their toll of shattered weapons and shining white antimatter explosions.
A near miss rocked the massive battleship, and a muttered curse of hope escaped Kyle’s lips. As the light faded, it was clear the ship had survived, her weapons shattering the missiles that made it past her.
The networked intelligence of capital ship missiles was astonishingly smart and amazingly suicidal. Nine missiles somehow made it through everything and passed the battleship toward their programmed targets. Their networked mind concluded that it couldn’t get any of the missiles through as it was—and self-detonated eight of the warheads in a rapid sequence.
The ninth warhead slammed dead center into the single Assassin left on this side of Goudeshijie—and vaporized the older, lightly armored warship in a blaze of annihilating matter.
02:40 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
Michael watched the oncoming swarm of starfighters and capital ship missiles with a calm that surprised him. His implant had run the numbers on the missiles Twenty-Third Fleet had fired as his fighters maneuvered to set up their position—the Terrans had launched five salvos and the first would reach his starfighters about thirty seconds before they could launch their missiles on the Scimitars.
The Terrans clearly saw their fighter strike as the best chance to knock Battle Group Seven-Two out of the fight and were doubling down. The Saint and Volcano were the only units in the current battle group with missile launchers, but they were also big ships with magazines to spend. Two hundred and ten capital ship missiles were going to hit Michael’s starfighters while his people were engaged with the Terran ships.
Already outnumbered almost four-to-one, Vice Commodore Michael Stanford was forced to the conclusion that there was no way he could actually stop the Terran fighter strike. His people could hurt it—possibly even cripple it—but he couldn’t stop at least some of those ships from reaching the Battle Group.
“All starfighters,” he said calmly, activating a channel that reached out to all two hundred and two of the Falcons and Templars currently accelerating away from the Terrans, reducing their closing velocity to give them as much time outside the enemy lance range as possible.
“You know what we’re facing,” he told them. “You know the mission, you’ve received your formation slots, and you know what we have to do.
“But I remind you that these people are coming to kill us. They’re coming to kill our friends. Perhaps most importantly, they’re coming to kill our carriers, so if you like your bunk, I suggest we stop them,” he continued with a chuckle.
A timer continued to tick down. The first missiles would hit his people in less than two minutes. Shortly after that, roughly eighty-four minutes after the starfighters had left the Battle Group behind, his people would be launching the first of their own missiles.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to command you all,” Michael finally finished after a long pause. “Today, we will do the Alliance proud. When this is over, the drinks are on me.”
When this was over, many—if not most—of his people were going to be dead.
The missiles came first, a harbinger of the destruction following them. Forty-two of the massive weapons came crashing in on the Alliance starfighters with relative velocities well over ten percent of lightspeed. Michael coordinated the defense as best as he could, running four different assistant AIs as he assigned single missiles as targets for an entire squadron’s worth of defensive lasers and positron lances.
The first wave died easily, the sole focus of twenty-five fighter squadrons’ firepower. But then their att
ention needed to be split—Michael handed off control of the defensive suite to his starfighter’s engineer while he and Arnolds started setting up the first mass missile strike.
Unlike the Terrans, he didn’t need to preserve missiles to attack the starships. Unfortunately, the Templars only had three launchers to the Scimitars’ or his Falcons’ four, and his two hundred and two starfighters would only launch seven hundred and sixty-four missiles. Worse, in many ways, the Terran ships had one more missile per launcher than any of his ships.
But the Stormwinds had been meant to reduce his numbers before his people launched—and they’d failed.
Still over a million kilometers away from the Terran starfighters, Michael gave the mental command—and his ship shuddered as all four of her missile launchers fired.
A new timer popped up into his implants—the fighter’s computers informing him how long it was going to take to rearm the launchers. Another timer told him that the next capital ship salvo was going to hit before his people could launch their next salvo.
This time, he had to leave it in the hands of the starfighters’ flight engineers. A high-level set of eyes helped, and even with Q-Coms, the carrier’s staff were too far away, but the engineers could do the job no matter what.
The clean sweep the first time had been a combination of luck, skill, and a lack of distractions. Now the fighter gunners were concerned with defensive ECM against both the capital ship missiles and the Scimitars’ missiles. The pilots were in defensive mode against everything, focused on dodging more than bringing lances to bear against the heavy missiles. The engineers, tasked with running the defensive lasers, were also focused on balancing the power requirements of the starfighters’ dozens of systems as they closed into combat range.
This time, explosions pocked the space amidst Michael’s fighters. Most of the missiles still died well short of his fighters, but two were close enough near misses that starfighters spun out of formation, both ships spinning helplessly for a moment before ejecting their emergency pods and self-destructing.
Their crews could be retrieved later, but the starfighters were entirely out of the fight. Two down, and Michael was grimly certain they wouldn’t be the last.
His starfighter shuddered again as the second salvo blasted into space. The command starfighter itself didn’t have the munitions for a fourth salvo—each of his Wing Commanders flew similar ships, which would rob his last salvo of another dozen missiles.
The third missile salvo from the capital ships robbed it of more. Again, most of the missiles died clear of the starfighters, but two more ships drifted away, disabled by from near misses—and three missiles made it through everything the fighters could throw at them to hit their targets, annihilating starfighters in one-gigaton balls of antimatter fire.
Seven fighters down before his people had even reached lance range, and Michael watched the distances drop rapidly. Once his ships were in lance range, they’d have to cease accelerating away from the Terran ships and turn to face them.
His people would have less than twenty seconds to kill as many of the Scimitars as possible. Once they were in the range of the Terran fighters’ dual twenty-five-kiloton-a-second positron lances, the balance of the engagement was going to swing dramatically in the Scimitars’ favor.
His final missile salvo had no response from the Terrans. The Scimitars were preserving their missiles to kill Battle Group Seven-Two’s carriers. They’d already thrown two salvos of over three thousand Javelin fighter missiles apiece at him. The geometry meant they’d been launched later and were arriving more slowly, but clearly, whoever was leading the Commonwealth fighter strike thought the sheer numbers would be enough.
Despite everything, every so often, Michael ran into a Terran starfighter commander who just didn’t seem to learn the lessons the Alliance’s seventh-generation starfighters kept teaching the Terrans’ sixth-generation ships.
Along the way, his people had been slowly assuming the donut formation that Rokos had suggested earlier in the same star system. His sensors suggested that none of the Q-probes were close enough to pick out the ECM drones.
The dispersal of the starfighters hadn’t been enough to fool the capital ship missiles, but against fighter missiles, it had already proven effective. Massive waves of ECM, jamming, and false images were already rippling off Michael’s command as the Terran fighters slowly overhauled his own formation.
The Terran missiles would reach his ships nine seconds after his people were in lance range. That all on its own limited the effect those thousands of weapons would have on this clash.
His own two thousand-plus missiles would arrive in rapidly shortening intervals, but even as he studied their salvos, his first salvo entered range of the Terran ships. Defensive lasers, electronic countermeasures, and positron lances lashed out into space, eight hundred starfighters’ defenses lashing out at a mere seven-hundred-odd missiles.
Those missiles’ motherships were right behind them, and their jamming reached out at the speed of light. The Falcons’ and Templars’ ECM suites were vastly more powerful than the Scimitars’ defenses—and overwhelmed them even from two hundred thousand kilometers away.
And then, just as the missiles hit terminal acquisition, the starfighters reached lance range. Hundreds of positron lances flashed across space, beams of pure antimatter seeking out the Terran starfighters.
Staying on a single course was anathema to a starfighter pilot, the randomness necessary to reduce hit probabilities drilled into them until it was second nature. Many of the positron lances missed, second-long flashes of white energy in the empty void around Goudeshijie.
Others hit. Dozens of the Terran starfighters went up in flames, emergency pods ejecting as the positron beams ripped the ships to shreds.
In the wake of the positron lances, the first missile salvo struck home. The Terran defense had gutted the salvo, a mere tithe of the original thousand-plus missiles surviving to claim victims.
More lance fire followed. Michael spun his own starfighter through a deadly pirouetting spiral that tracked the nose of the ship—and its deadly positron lance—across a field of the Terran starfighters. As the computer-predicted future positions of starfighters crossed the beam’s path, the weapon fired. Again and again, he and his people fired.
Then the Terran missiles arrived. Only the defensive laser suites were available to protect the Alliance ships—the lances had to kill starfighters or the whole fight was for nothing.
The donut hole, with the vast amounts of ECM poured into the fake center of their formation, absorbed over fifteen hundred of the Javelins. That still left over sixteen hundred missiles charging at Michael’s people—a vast amount of overkill, compared to the salvo they’d leveled at the larger Terran force.
Michael focused on his task. There was little he could do to turn the tide of the grander battle beyond surviving and killing starfighters. His implant kept him informed of the defensive sweep and of the total kills inflicted on the Terran fleet.
He felt the failure of his peoples’ defenses like a punch to the gut. In a single series of fiery bootsteps through his formation, the Javelins blew seventy of his starfighters to pieces. Over a third of his remaining strength disappeared in a single instant.
His own second salvo then returned the favor. Seven hundred and sixty-plus weapons slammed into the Terrans’ defenses, dancing around and through his people’s repeated lance strikes. With the lance fire incoming and their formations ripped to pieces, there was no way the Terrans could stop them all.
Eighty starfighters blew apart in an instant, bringing the Terran losses to well over four hundred. Over half of their force was gone, and Michael finally started to believe his people might make it through.
Then the second Terran salvo arrived. Without their motherships to feed them data, many of them were flying stupid—but a salvo of Stormwinds came with them, their networked intelligence replacing the starfighter controls.
They�
��d adapted for the hole in his formation and hit the top half of the Alliance fighter strike—and when the explosions faded, almost half of Michael’s remaining strength was gone.
Less than a hundred Alliance starfighters survived, plunging toward the Terran formation. Even Michael, linked to his computers and riding the flame of his fighter’s engine, couldn’t keep track of everything. He dodged missiles, he struck, he dodged again as the Terran lances opened fire, and then killed another starfighter. Only the moment mattered—only killing the Scimitars in front of him could save Avalon.
He never saw the positron lance that blew his starfighter to ashes.
02:55 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Kyle stared forward into space, trying and failing to process the information his implant was giving him. Stanford couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t.
But the data feeds coming into his head from Avalon’s computers, a consolidated mix of data from the Q-probes near the battle and the starfighters themselves, refused to magically change. A tiny red notation on the starfighter labeled SFG-001 ACTUAL noted it as destroyed with no escape pod launch detected.
Some of the starfighters had made it through the clash. They were now over a million kilometers behind the Terran ships, not accelerating at all. The tiny handful of surviving ships looked as shell-shocked on the display at Kyle felt.
“Seven-Two starfighters, report,” he ordered. “Whoever is in command, report!”
A few seconds passed, then a female voice with a Phoenix accent answered him.
“This is Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills of Indomitable’s Infernals,” she responded, her voice shaky. “I think I’m the last O-5 left outside the pods. I have…” She paused, then resumed after audibly swallowing. “…twenty-four effectives with no munitions.
“We have between one hundred and one hundred and ten emergency pods on our screens,” Wills continued. “I can confirm that Vice Commodore Stanford’s pod did not deploy. The Battle Group CAG is KIA.”
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 94