“Force Commander Roberts,” Ness said calmly. “You have fought bravely—brilliantly, even—but we both know this battle is decided. Goudeshijie’s moons cannot save you. Continuing to fight will only cost lives under your command. Please. Let this end.”
Kyle felt his bridge crew’s eyes on him again, and he looked up at them and shook his head gently.
“The good Vice Admiral wants us to surrender,” he told them gently. “Not yet. Maybe before we’re done. But not yet!”
“Any response, sir?”
Kyle shook his head and turned back to the main screen showing the massive gas giant.
“No.”
Forty minutes later, Vice Admiral Ness’s response to Kyle’s lack of reply became clear.
“They’ll rendezvous about two million klicks out from Goudeshijie, and then swing into the gas giant,” Xue concluded, tracing the course of the Hercules battlecruiser detached from the new Force Bravo and the Saint battleship detached from Force Alpha.
“Left the battlecruisers and carriers guarding the gravity well,” Anderson noted from secondary control. “I guess they figure even a bunch of old carriers with no missile launchers can deal with us in our current state.”
“What do we do now, Roberts?” Captain Olivier asked over the Q-Com link. “We can’t fight them. Two modern capital ships versus three crippled ones? It’s a done deal.”
“If we opened up with missiles as they close, we can drop our entire arsenal on them before they reach us,” Captain Albert noted. “We should be able to take out at least one of them, right?”
“We’re down to twenty-six launchers,” Kyle pointed out. “If we threw everything at them, we can control about four hundred missiles still. We could do that…twice. At any useful range, they’d be able to use stacked salvos of their own missiles as counters, maneuver to evade, and generally do everything to make their defenses as effective as possible.
“We might get one of them—in exchange for being helpless when the other catches up with us,” he said grimly.
“I don’t see any other option, sir,” Xue said quietly. “If we do stack the salvos, we can hammer each of them—we should at least do damage, if not take them out.”
“I’d give a lot right now for those missiles and satellites we left in Xin orbit,” Olivier told them. “Bastard would hesitate if he was staring down two hundred Atlatls and six hundred missile launchers.”
Kyle paused, silent in thought for a moment as he ran the course in his head. The Terran ships would arrive here, then. They had an eighty-gravity advantage over his ships’ current capabilities. It didn’t work. If the Terrans turned to intercept his people, they’d catch them over two hours short of Xin.
If the Terrans made it all the way to Goudeshijie before they realized what he’d done, however…
“Anderson,” he turned to his exec. “How many of those ECM emitter drones do we have left?”
“Maybe twenty?”
“Kalers—the tugs survived just fine, right? And they can run on computer control, right?”
“Yeah,” the deck chief replied. “They’ve only got a day or so of endurance, though, depending on what you need them to do.”
“That’s plenty,” Kyle told her. “I just need them to not fall into Goudeshijie until the Commonwealth gets here.”
Battle Group Seven-Two was forty minutes from Goudeshijie. The two Terran warships were three hours and forty minutes from the gas giant—and if they made a zero-zero intercept with Goudeshijie orbit, they’d be a long way behind him.
“All right, people,” he said aloud, gathering his subordinates’ attention. “This is what we’re going to do.”
Deep Space, en route to Huī Xing System
05:30 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Captain’s Quarters
Mira had forced herself to leave her bridge, but sleep was being elusive. She couldn’t justify harassing Kyle—Avalon might not be in combat at that exact moment, but they remained in a combat zone. Juggling his elbow at that moment would be a bad idea.
They’d left Via Somnia three hours before, three hours out of the four days it would take to reach Huī Xing. The last reports from Avalon made for grim reading—almost their entire fighter strength gone. A battleship lost. All three remaining ships badly damaged.
Offset against that was the escape of the Marine brigade and the rescued prisoners. Whether it was worth it was something she figured pundits would argue over for years.
She did think it was worth it—but she was surprised to find that she was also very sure that opinion would change if Kyle Roberts didn’t make it out. Mira had never figured their relationship to be a fling, but she was surprised at how fiercely she stared at the icons on her mental display, wishing that Seventh Fleet could go faster.
If they didn’t make it in time, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to live with herself.
39
Huī Xing System
06:00 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
For a few glorious moments, Kyle submerged himself in his implant feed, becoming Avalon as the big supercarrier dove into Goudeshijie. Bright colors flared around him, the sheer friction of the Alliance ships’ entry into the gas giant’s atmosphere creating firestorms that filled his view.
The three ships were sixty kilometers deep into Goudeshijie’s upper atmosphere, low enough that the firestorm forming around them wouldn’t be visible to the Q-probes lurking in orbit. Those probes had their own show to watch—three of Avalon’s tugs were skimming the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere, pretending to be the much bigger, wounded ships.
Kyle knew what was going on and it looked realistic to him when he looked at the feed from their own probes. Even knowing where and what to look for, he couldn’t see his actual ships. They were safe from the Terrans for now, which allowed him to enjoy the incredible sight around the starship.
Safe was relative, of course. All three of his ships had gaping holes in their hulls, covered by whatever material they could throw together to keep the friction of the gas giant from ripping bigger holes. It was risky—but it bought them the chance of getting away from the Commonwealth without being spotted.
At a hundred and fifty gravities, they were submerged in the gas giant for almost ten minutes—and Kyle held the feed and watched the storms around his ships for every second of it.
Finally, they erupted from the gas giant—on the far side from where the Terrans thought they were.
“Any Q-probes on the sensors?” he demanded.
“None, sir,” Xue replied after several seconds—clearly double-checking her own work. “They’ve got enough around that they’ll pick us up eventually, but we’re clear for at least an hour, maybe two.”
“Hope for two, people,” Kyle said quietly. “If we get two, we’re all the way to Xin.”
Behind them, the tugs and their ECM drones continued their more obvious attempts to hide from the incoming ships—doing just well enough to disguise their true nature.
Every minute after the first hour stretched like an eternity. Kyle sent Anderson to go sleep but remained on the bridge himself—the risk his battle group carried was on him and him alone. He couldn’t leave until he knew his people were safe.
He waited, managing to somehow keep himself still and strapped in on the bridge. They were past ninety minutes, into the zone where his people were probably safe, when Surgeon-Commander Adrian Cunningham strode onto the bridge.
“Yes, Commander?” Kyle addressed the ship’s doctor.
The tall blond man who was responsible for the health of everyone aboard the supercarrier looked down at the sitting captain and smiled.
“You are aware, sir, that your implant informs me if you’ve sustained injuries?” he asked sweetly.
Kyle blinked. He’d been immersed in his implants, focusing on conversations and battle displays instead of his dislocated shoulder. With the stims he’d
taken and his immersion in his own head, the injury wasn’t even registering anymore.
“Since you appear incapable of leaving the bridge and all of our major injuries are dealt with, I decided to come make sure the man responsible for keeping us all alive didn’t permanently injure himself,” Cunningham continued. “Get out of that chair and hold still.”
There was only one man on Avalon that even the Captain would usually obey. With a sigh, Kyle unstrapped himself and stood—only to nearly collapse again as his left shoulder spasmed in pain he finally noticed.
“Thought so,” the Surgeon Commander said brightly. He produced a stark white device, split it in half, and placed each half on one side of Kyle’s shoulder. “This will hurt,” he noted, then gave an apparent implant command to the devices.
Kyle gave a loud, wordless grunt as the device jerked against his shoulder. He felt the dislocated joint snap into place—and then pain instantly ceased as the device pumped nanites into his body.
“There you go,” the doctor noted, removing the device and dropping it into a case. “Now, those extra machines will work with your base suite and repair the damage around the shoulder and you won’t, say, pass out from pain in the middle of a battle.”
Cunningham studied Kyle’s face for a minute, and he returned the doctor’s look with a questioning glance.
“How many stims?” he asked simply.
“Three,” Kyle replied. “Due for the fourth in an hour.”
“No,” the doctor said flatly. “Even if we’ve messed this up and the Commonwealth can intercept us, they’re still at least two hours away. I am ordering you out of here and into a bed. I don’t care if that ‘bed’ is the couch in your office—you need to sleep or you’re no good to anyone.”
“You’re not allowed to order me around in a combat zone,” Kyle pointed out. He was not leaving his bridge.
“Captain, we are not being fired on. The nearest enemy ship is over a light-minute away now. You have very competent crew, who you have ordered to rest properly, who can wake you up if you’re needed. You’re right that I can’t actually order you, sir, but please—I want to live through this too,” Cunningham pleaded. “We need you at your best.”
The doctor…had a point.
“Fine,” Kyle allowed. He turned to look at Xue’s assistant—he’d sent the tactical officer off to sleep as well. “Let me know the instant they appear to have detected us,” he ordered. “Let’s be honest; I’m probably going back to sleep afterward, but I need to know.”
“Yes, sir!” the young man replied crisply.
“Bed, Captain,” Cunningham said sharply. “Now.”
It was over an hour later when Kyle was awakened from his nap on the couch in his office by an implant alert.
“Sir, we’ve definitely been pinged by the Q-probes,” the junior tactical officer told him. “Looks like we stirred up a hornet’s nest out there.”
“Show me the feed,” Kyle ordered as he sat up on the couch, focusing on the tactical plot dropping in through his implant datalink. The Lieutenant Commander had the plot updated by the time Kyle had finished asking.
The two capital ships heading in toward Goudeshijie hadn’t changed their course—they were past turnover; the fastest route for them to exit the gravity well now was right back the way they’d come. Both of them had changed vectors a little bit—their courses had been to rendezvous with each other, so the course each was now on was a slightly faster route out of the gravity well.
The real sign they’d been detected, though, was that the two blocking forces the Twenty-Third Fleet had left outside the gravity well were now blasting after Kyle’s people, paralleling their course as best they could while following the arc of the well. They didn’t appear to be on a true intercept course, just making sure that there was no way Kyle’s three limping warships could escape them.
“Can any of them intercept us before we reach Xin?” he asked.
“They could,” the younger man replied after a moment. “But they couldn’t coordinate it, and it would be at a very high relative velocity.”
Kyle nodded. A high relative velocity would be to his advantage at this point—Battle Group Avalon’s biggest vulnerability at this point was that the heavy lances on the Hercules and the Saint outranged anything his people had left. If the Terrans came whipping past at sixty or a hundred thousand kilometers a second, they’d cross that range advantage in seconds.
“If any of them look like they are vectoring to intercept, wake me up immediately,” he told the younger man. “If not, my implant will wake me when we reach Xin orbit.”
“We may be clear the whole way, sir,” the junior tactical officer told him.
Kyle nodded and dropped the channel. Clear all the way to Xin helped. Surviving three and a half days once they were there…that was an entirely different headache.
12:00 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room
Settled into Xin’s orbit under the protective umbrella of two hundred Atlatl-VI missile satellites, Kyle called a meeting of his chief subordinates. With Wong, Anderson and Wills joining him in his breakout room, he had Captains Olivier and Albert linked via radio—and Captain Sansone Costa of Renaissance Trade Factor Intelligence linked in via Q-Com.
“There’s not a lot I can tell you about Vice Admiral Kaj Ness,” Costa told them once they’d gathered. “I’ve forwarded what files we have on him and his senior officers. It’s slim reading—he commanded part of Walkingstick’s main strike force when they hit the fleet at Midori. From what we can tell, he followed the Marshal from the Coreward frontier after his last campaigns there.
“You already have our files on the capability of his ships,” the intelligence officer shrugged. “If anything else comes to mind, I’ll pass it on. Is there anything else I can do to help?”
“We’re sitting on top of a Commonwealth logistics depot packed full of Stormwinds,” Olivier noted. “The things won’t fit in our launchers, but we could set them up as temporary mines if we could commandeer them. Do you have any codes or software hacks for that?”
That was actually a good idea, Kyle noted. Not a normally useful one, as it would be difficult to drop the missiles into stable orbits, and nobody wanted to risk a gigaton-range antimatter warhead plus fuel falling into their atmosphere. In this case though, it could be handy—except…
Costa shook his head with a chuckle.
“I wish, Captain Olivier,” he noted. “Remember, the ability to override a missile in flight is a holy grail of intelligence work. The secure encryption on those computer cores is insane. You could swap out the cores, I suppose, but I’m not sure how much work that would be.”
“Wong?” Kyle asked, glancing over at his engineer.
“Not…easy,” the Senior Fleet Commander noted. “We have the parts to fabricate several thousand missile computer cores, but the Stormwind has a significantly different internal layout than our Jackhammer. We’d have to custom-build the template… We might, if we work at it, manage to get a hundred or so missiles converted a day.”
“That’s not useless,” Kyle observed. “Having an extra few hundred missiles to back up the Atlatls when the Admiral comes in after us could be very handy.”
“I’ll get my people on it,” Wong promised. “But…we’re probably going to have problems with the Terrans before we have any significant number of missiles out there.”
“The planet was transmitting a warning about the satellites, so Ness knows we’ve got a stack of defenses with us,” Kyle replied. “He’s going to be cautious—I suspect we’re going to be seeing more missiles coming in, trying to take out the missile satellites. I don’t want to launch from the satellites until we have to.”
“That’s…what I was hoping to have the Stormwinds to use as counters against,” Olivier noted. “We’re damn short on ammo and we don’t have the defenses to stop ninety-missile salvos without using missiles to thin them out.”
&n
bsp; “And while Twenty-Third Fleet’s Assassins have undersized magazines, the ones that are left have only fired a few rounds,” Anderson added. “All told, Ness has the ammunition left for over twenty-five salvos—and we don’t have the defenses to stop that much firepower!”
Normally, Avalon’s starfighters would form her first layer of defense against heavy missile salvos. Ninety missiles would be a minor but real threat to his three ships even if they were undamaged, but with three hundred-plus fighters, the ships would have been safe.
Since they didn’t have those starfighters, though… A thought occurred to Kyle, and he smiled sadly. It was an answer—it was just an answer he wished he didn’t have.
“Captain Olivier’s idea of pre-deployed missiles is a good one,” he noted. “Though we can’t convert enough Stormwinds for missile defense purposes, I’m not sure we need to. Sub-Colonel Wills—how many Starfire missiles do we have in our magazines?”
The Phoenix officer was now Battle Group Seven-Two’s CAG since she was senior to Wing Commander Cortez, the commander of Avalon’s Charlie Wing and the only other O-5 survivor still in Huī Xing. She paused to think for a moment before answering.
“I don’t have that number immediately to hand,” she admitted. “But all three of the ships with fighters aboard carried ten full reloads. We replenished our reloads from the logistics ship before we originally attempted to leave Huī Xing, so we’ve only fired off one full set.
“Assuming we didn’t lose any to the hits on the cruisers, we should have over eleven thousand Starfires in stock.”
“Thank you, Sub-Colonel,” Kyle said, still smiling sadly. “We can hold onto ten full reloads for our remaining starfighters and still deploy ten thousand fighter missiles as an anti-missile screen, people.
“My experience suggests we’ll need a five-to-one ratio to guarantee kills,” he continued, “but if we go to a four-to-one ratio, we’ll still be reasonably assured of over eighty kills on each salvo. Those missiles will eat Twenty-Third Fleet’s long-range firepower.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 96