Killed In Action.
The woman on the scene confirmed what the sensors told Kyle—his friend was dead. With two hundred and fifty Terran starfighters still bearing down on his position, there was nothing he could do to mourn either.
Kyle swallowed hard and focused.
“Can you keep pace with the pods?” he asked. The emergency pods had no engines of their own; they’d continue on at the velocity their fighters had had when they’d launched. Fortunately, that vector was towards Goudeshijie, which meant Avalon could recover them if she survived the minutes to come.
“We can,” Wills confirmed.
“You’re out of this fight for now,” Kyle told her. “Keep an eye on our people; we’ll be coming to get them soon enough.”
“Thank you, sir,” she replied. “Make it…make it worth it, sir. I just lost a lot of friends.”
“So did I,” Kyle murmured. “We’ll still be here when the dust settles, Sub-Colonel. I promise you that.”
The undertones that accompanied implant communication gave him the impression of a firm nod, then Wills cut the channel to focus on keeping twenty-four starfighter crews from going mad from grief.
“Battle Group orders,” he said aloud, activating a channel to his captains. “We’re going to see one giant pile of crap land us in about three minutes,” he told them simply. “I want all of us going to maximum-cycle fire on our missile launchers now.”
“We can’t sustain that for long,” Captain Olivier of Courageous pointed out. “We’re down almost half our magazines already.”
“We can sustain it for three minutes and maybe cut a chunk of this fighter strike off before they eat us alive,” he reminded her. “We’ll move to formation Alpha-Foxtrot Two.”
“Sir,” Captain Ainsley of Sledgehammer suggested. “I recommend Sierra-Foxtrot Five instead.”
The two formations were basically identical. Both were staggered formations that put the battleship Sledgehammer and the supercarrier Avalon in front of the battlecruisers, where their more intensive defensives could protect the two Phoenix ships.
The difference was that Alpha-Foxtrot put Avalon in the most exposed position, where Sierra-Foxtrot put Sledgehammer in that position.
“Neither Indomitable nor Courageous can take more than one hit and keep fighting,” Ainsley continued. “And if Avalon takes crippling damage, we may not be able to retrieve our fighters. We all know it’s the battleship’s job to stand in front and take the beating so everyone else doesn’t. Let us do our job, sir.”
Kyle started to object but stopped himself. Ainsley was right. Kyle’s desire to keep everyone else out of harm’s way was a dangerous feeling in a battle group commander. The battleship needed to be in front. Kyle was just afraid to put them there.
For the first time since Alstairs had made him Force Commander, Kyle felt truly out of his depth. He took a deep breath and nodded.
“You’re right,” he admitted. “Sierra-Foxtrot Five, people. Remember—let’s stay alive.”
At the speed Battle Group Seven-Two was moving, a few careful half-second long lapses in acceleration were enough for the battleship and the big modern carrier to drop behind the other ships. A matter of seconds to stabilize their positions and begin sending fifty-seven missile salvos dropping into their wake at the rapidly closing starfighters.
The missiles wouldn’t hit before the starfighters launched their own weapons, but they would hit long before any of the starfighters closed to lance range—pathetically short for the Scimitars’ underpowered weapons.
Stanford’s people had inflicted massive losses along the way. The two hundred and fifty ships still bearing down on him were less than a third of the force they’d started with—but would still manage to put two thousand missiles on target. More capital ship missile salvos had been launched to coincide with their expected arrival—combined with the thousand starfighter missiles in each batch, Kyle’s people were in real danger.
Just past oh three hundred hours Earth Standard Time, the Scimitars finally swept into missile range and promptly fired. Exactly one thousand starfighter missiles blasted into space, a wall of crimson icons bearing far too rapidly down on Battle Group Seven-Two for Kyle’s comfort.
“Maintain missile fire, but use our missiles to support missile defense,” he ordered. “Hammer them, people.”
Nine seconds before the starfighters could launch their second salvo, the Alliance missiles arrived. Against the full force, fifty-seven missiles wouldn’t have been much of a threat. Against the much-reduced remnant he currently faced, many of whom had lost sensors and laser clusters to near misses, they took out a full dozen starfighters.
That left the second salvo from the starfighters at a “mere” nine hundred and fifty-two weapons.
His missile salvos continued to strike home as Kyle watched their tsunami come crashing towards his command. Six salvos were in space, and five slammed home before the fighter missiles reached his ships. Even the secondary lances aboard Avalon and Sledgehammer, though not the Phoenix cruisers, reached the starfighters before their missiles reached his people.
The Terran ships started to go up like moths, dying in their dozens as they closed with his ships—but the deaths of the starfighters that launched them didn’t slow the missiles already in space.
ECM sang songs of confusion and lies to lure missiles aside, and starfighter missiles were dumb. Lasers flashed out in deadly sequence, and the armor on starfighter missiles was nonexistent. Massive capital ships maneuvered to throw targeting solutions off, and threw their every defense into the missiles’ teeth.
The Alliance’s defensive missiles killed hundreds. Hundreds more went astray and hundreds more again died to the lasers. Kyle found himself holding his breath as the missiles came crashing down.
Of the thousand missiles in the first salvo, one got through—slamming dead center into Sledgehammer, the gigaton-plus blow sending the battleship lurching away.
“Report!” Kyle snapped.
“Still here,” Ainsley replied instantly, Sledgehammer’s Captain’s voice strained. “We’ll stick it out!”
The second salvo followed only a few seconds after he’d finished speaking. These missiles had been launched that much closer with that much more base velocity. Again, missiles went astray by the hundreds, and died by the hundreds more—but the interceptions had started later, and this time, the starfighters were right on their heels.
Another missile hit Sledgehammer, near the stern. The battleship lurched—and then stopped accelerating as her engines failed.
Like sharks scenting blood, the missiles swarmed the old battleship even as her every weapon strained to defend herself.
It wasn’t enough.
Even as the starfighters came swarming through the haze of explosions and death to bring their lances into range, the missiles that had come before slammed into Sledgehammer again and again. Hammer-class battleships were tough—but no armor known or defense built could withstand that many hits from antimatter warheads.
Sledgehammer died—but she took the last of the missiles with her. Kyle had a moment of hope that Captain Ainsley’s sacrifice had saved the battle group.
Then the last hundred Scimitars came bursting through the debris field of Sledgehammer’s death, finally in the lance range they’d bled so hard to reach.
At this range, the secondary lances of the three capital ships could barely miss the starfighters if they tried, but the Scimitars’ lances fired back. Avalon bucked under Kyle’s feet, her immense size no defense against the beams of pure antimatter that flayed her hull. Lances and missile launchers exploded, automatic failsafes blasting failing zero point cells and antimatter capacitors free of the big ship’s hull.
Linked in through his implants, Kyle felt every wound his ship took as his own, and turned her remaining weapons on her tormentors. Secondary positron lances, primary positron lances, close-range missiles and even anti-missile lasers blazed after the Terran ships
.
The Scimitars were in range for barely four seconds. Three survived to run.
The flashing red on his implant displays and the pseudo-pain Kyle felt told him all he needed to know. The Terran strike hadn’t killed Battle Group Seven-Two—but it was entirely possible they’d crippled it.
38
Huī Xing System
03:10 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
As the pseudo-pain his implant fed him to warn him about damage to the ship faded, Kyle became aware of very real pain. Between cascade failures forcing the mass manipulators to hand gravity generation around and the impacts themselves, the bridge crew had been thrown around emphatically.
His shoulder hurt where his safety straps had held him in, and his neck felt…sprained. Interrogating his implants, they promptly informed him he’d partly dislocated his left shoulder and had moderate soft tissue damage in his neck.
The latter his own nanites could deal with. The former was going to need about thirty seconds of a medic’s time at some point.
A point that would need to be later. All three ships left in his battle group had dropped to one hundred and fifty gravities—an almost automatic safety measure after taking this level of damage. His starfighters and the emergency pods from their dead comrades continued to hurtle towards Goudeshijie at thousands of kilometers a second.
There was work to do.
“Wong, report,” Kyle ordered, opening a channel to his chief engineer. “What’s our status?”
“Extra crispy,” Senior Fleet Commander Alistair Wong replied flatly. “Sending in survey crews now, but the good news is that the core power modules are fine. We have main power; we have main engines. What we don’t have is full mass manipulator capacity. I wouldn’t suggest pushing her past two hundred gees.”
“Can we retrieve fighters?”
“Yes,” Wong confirmed. “Kalers says the deck is undamaged. What we don’t have anymore are half our launch tubes. The starboard broadside is gone, Kyle. No lances. No missiles. No fighter launch tubes.”
Casualty reports were already filtering into Kyle’s implants. Not even counting the loss of fighter crews, it was looking at over five hundred wounded or dead. Avalon had been hit hard.
“Keep me informed,” Kyle told Wong. He flipped open another channel. “Kalers, can we deploy retrieval ships?”
Keeping himself busy kept him focused. He had every intent of applying the same methodology to his crew.
“We can,” his deck chief replied after a moment. “They’re defenseless if the Terrans start shooting, though.”
“We have to take the risk,” he told her grimly. “I don’t think they’ll shoot at search-and-rescue ships, but we need to catch our pods before they fly past—or into—Goudeshijie and are lost.”
“Understood, sir,” she confirmed. “I’ll have them in space shortly.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
Kyle checked his channel to Anderson, making sure that his XO was tied into all of his communications. If something happened to the bridge, James Anderson would have to fight Avalon from secondary control.
“Anything to add, XO?” he asked the Fleet Commander.
“I’m coordinating damage control with Wong and Surgeon-Commander Cunningham,” Anderson told him. “If anything, he’s understating how bad the upper and lower starboard chunks of the ship are looking. The outer hull is just…gone, Kyle. We’ll need hours to replace Stetson emitters before we can go FTL, and that’s all we’re going to manage without a shipyard.”
“But our port weapons are intact?”
“For the good it will do us with only twenty-four starfighters, yeah.”
“Twelve seven-hundred-kiloton lances and four launchers will do us some good, at least,” Kyle noted. “I’m pulling the captains in for a conference. Don’t need you to contribute, but stay on the channel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dropping Anderson to a secondary channel, Kyle activated his privacy screen and opened up a conference link via the Q-Com to bring in the captains of the other two surviving ships of Battle Group Seven-Two. As Gervaise Albert and Christine Olivier appeared in his mental interface, he felt the twist of a mental knife at the absences of Michael Stanford and Urien Ainsley.
Both men had died to keep the rest of the battle group safe, and thousands of their subordinates had died with them. Kyle’s body count there in Huī Xing was getting far higher than he liked.
“Avalon is badly damaged but combat-capable,” he told them without preamble. “We can retrieve and launch fighters, but we’re down both starboard broadsides and cannot maintain an acceleration above two hundred gravities.”
The two Phoenix women looked at each other, then Albert sighed and spoke.
“Indomitable is no longer capable of retrieving starfighters,” she admitted. She flashed a damage control report to the conference, and Kyle sucked in a breath as he saw the extent of the damage. A Fearless-class battle cruiser was a fourteen-hundred-meter-long even-sided diamond, with her carrier launch deck and most of her weapons on the front half of the diamond.
The forward two hundred meters of Indomitable were simply gone. Deep chasms of red cut deeper into the battlecruiser’s hull where positron beams had ripped through external armor and just kept going.
“We’re barely holding together at one-fifty gravities and have lost the forward Class One Manipulator,” Albert continued. “Indomitable is not capable of entering Alcubierre drive. My forward positron lances are gone or nonfunctional, but we maintain seventy-five percent of our missile launchers.”
Kyle nodded—that meant that the effectively crippled Indomitable still had three times the launchers Avalon did…and not much else.
“Understood, Captain,” he said quietly. “And Courageous?”
Olivier shook her head.
“We’re in better shape, but not by much,” she admitted. “We took most of our hits to the bottom of the ship. We’re down…well, we’re down our launch deck and half of our weapons, but we still have all of our upper side’s lances and launchers.” She sighed. “Our engines are in about the same state, Force Commander. We do still have all of our Class One Mass Manipulators, though, so once we’ve replaced our Stetson stabilizers, we can make FTL.”
If, of course, Battle Group Seven-Two ever escaped Goudeshijie’s gravity well, something Kyle was no longer counting on.
“Maintain a zero-zero course for the gas giant,” he ordered. “We’ll keep at one hundred and fifty gravities. Remember, people, the cavalry is coming. We just need to stay alive.”
“Hundred and fifty gravities of accel is blood in the water, sir,” Olivier said grimly. “What happens if the Terrans come in after us?”
“Most likely?” Kyle replied. “We run. We keep running. We dance the bastards in circles around Goudeshijie and Xin until either they make a mistake or Seventh Fleet arrives. We just lost thousands of good people. I will run like a scared rabbit if that’s what it takes to keep the rest alive.”
At the speed they’d already been traveling and with their reduced acceleration capacity, turnover—flipping the ships to slow their velocity toward the gas giant—was less than five minutes later. The actual flight into Goudeshijie orbit would take a little under three hours in total from there, but once there, they’d be shielded by the Dog World’s rings and moons.
Kyle studied the gas giant’s orbitals. He could use the rings and the half-dozen moons to help protect his crippled fleet from the Terrans, but all that would really do was buy time. Even long-range missile fire could get around a moon to hit him. If Ness chose to close the range and engage with lance fire, Kyle didn’t have the fighters to stop him. The Terrans’ Saint flagship alone could rip what was left of Kyle’s Battle Group to pieces.
Hiding in Goudeshijie’s rings was a horrible option, one that would buy him at most one of the four days he needed. There were games he could play, but once the Terran
s brought a starship or two down the gravity well, his options would rapidly narrow down to two: fight an overwhelming force with crippled ships, or surrender.
A review of his ships’ ammunition levels didn’t help. Given time, Avalon alone could replenish all three ships to full stocks. Twenty-Third Fleet wouldn’t give them that time, which meant those depleted magazines also narrowed his options. Avalon still had seventy missiles left for each of her four remaining launchers—plus another three hundred-plus in the magazines for the five launchers she’d lost, if they could move them—but the two Phoenix battlecruisers were down to twenty missiles per launcher after moving the weapons.
Time passed, and red markers on his damage control display faded to orange as Wong’s people and robots swarmed over the damage. Eventually, fatigue forced Kyle to take another stimulant. They would do him no favors in the long run, but he couldn’t be away from the bridge now.
Few of the damage markers returned to green. Orange simply meant that the damage was contained, no air leaks or exposed power conduits that would transfer damage to the rest of the ship. His starboard broadsides were going to require yard work—months of yard work.
A slow net of green was expanding around the outside of the ship as Wong’s people replaced Stetson stabilizer emitters. Without them, Avalon couldn’t safely go FTL, even if Kyle managed to find a miracle that would let them.
They were still an hour and a half away from Goudeshijie when the transmission from the Terrans caught up with them. Kyle gestured for the com officer to relay it to him, and the now-familiar blond face of Vice Admiral Kaj Ness appeared in his implant feeds.
The Vice Admiral looked disturbingly calm and cheerful for a man Kyle suspected had been awake as long as he had. If the loss of his ships and starfighters had hit him as hard as Kyle’s losses had, he didn’t show it—but then, Kyle wouldn’t have either, in the other man’s position.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 95