“I want to make Vice Admiral Ness spend his missiles carefully and completely before he comes after us, people. Remember that above all else, we need to buy time.”
40
Huī Xing System
08:00 April 6, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Whatever else Vice Admiral Kaj Ness was, he was methodical and thorough. His blocking forces had rushed to make sure that Battle Group Seven-Two was still contained at Xin—but the two warships deep in Goudeshijie’s gravity well had taken an extra hour of slow acceleration to locate and destroy the drones they’d left behind – the best way to confirm that was truly all they were.
Then, once the battlecruiser and battleship had finally made their escape from the gas giant’s gravity and reached Xin under Alcubierre-Stetson drive, Twenty-Third Fleet had proceeded to saturate the planet’s local space with Q-probes.
By now, Kyle figured his people had killed somewhere around two hundred of the mind-bogglingly expensive tools, each of which contained a block of entangled particles that had been brought all the way from the Commonwealth’s core worlds. For every probe they’d killed, at least two had made close passes successfully or settled into stealthed positions far enough way that they couldn’t locate them.
The Terrans knew exactly where his ships were, though they were moving enough to be reasonably safe. They knew where his missile satellites were, which was risky for Kyle…but they also knew that he’d deployed ten thousand missiles in defensive arrays around his ships and Atlatls.
Kyle wasn’t trying to read Ness’s mind—but the surprise value of the stunt he’d pulled had bought him an entire day. A day to make repairs, to rest, to give his people time to grieve.
“We have movement,” Xue reported.
He linked into her display, assessing what she saw. Twenty-Third Fleet had, once again, assembled into Force Alpha and Force Bravo, opposite each other across Xin’s gravity well and able to cut him off wherever he tried to run.
Now, all of the ships in both task forces were changing position, moving the Lexingtons back and lining up everyone else…
“They’re clearing the launchers on the ships with missiles,” his tactical officer concluded before he could speak. “And…here they come.”
Force Alpha had the Saint and the Volcano along with its three missile-launcher-lacking Lexingtons. They launched forty-two missiles.
Force Bravo had seen the Hercules rejoin the two older Assassins. They were the smaller force, but without the carriers, they had more launchers. They sent forty-eight missiles dropping into the gravity well for a total of ninety weapons closing from either side of the planet.
Kyle let Avalon’s computers run the numbers on them and studied the missiles carefully. The two task forces had arranged themselves perfectly, both exactly eighteen million kilometers away from his own fleet. They were technically inside the gravity well, but that was a vague line at the best of times…
Either way, both missile salvos had a thirty-two-minute flight time.
“Inform Sub-Colonel Wills,” he told Xue. With a half-hour flight time for missiles and an almost two-hour trip for the Commonwealth ships, he’d seen no reason to keep his starfighters in space. Now, however, he needed them.
Twenty-four starfighters were a frail shield against the vise he’d trapped his battle group in, but every piece was going to count today.
“And, Commander Xue?” he said after a moment.
“Yes, sir?”
“Show our displeasure with the good Admiral. I want a full salvo from the Atlatls.”
The black-haired young woman flashed him a bright smile and gave a command through her implants. A few moments later, six hundred green arrows flashed into existence on Kyle’s implant feeds—an impressive response to the mere ninety the Terrans had thrown at him.
Of course, he could only do that four times. The Terrans could repeat their performance almost thirty.
“Any follow-up salvos?”
“Nothing so far,” the Lieutenant Commander reported. “Ninety seconds and counting.”
“They’re testing us,” Kyle assessed. There was no way the Commonwealth commanders thought ninety missiles would get through what he’d set up around Xin. His response had a chance of doing damage, though not as much as he’d like.
“Looks like it, sir,” she agreed. “What do we do?”
“Fire off four Starfires per missile once they’re in range, and then go to standard missile defense procedure,” he ordered calmly. They’d discussed all this, but repetition was a habit for any military.
There wasn’t much more he could do for his own missiles. They were targeted on Force Bravo, the smaller of the two forces. It would be…interesting to see what they did.
Launched first, the Terran missiles arrived well before the Alliance weapons came near Force Bravo. They passed the three-million-kilometer mark closing at seventeen thousand kilometers a second—and a few seconds later, three hundred and sixty of the thousands of fighter missiles in orbit lit off their drives and charged to meet them.
Sub-Colonel Wills and her fighters were behind them, moving far more slowly but still interposed between the three crippled starships and the missiles sent to kill them.
With Q-probes, starfighters, and starships all around them to provide the vectors, the Starfires made surprisingly effective countermeasures. Two and a half minutes later, the two salvos intersected in a rapidly spreading sequence of antimatter explosions.
This time, the fighters were almost redundant. A single missile escaped the wall of fire the starfighter missiles had built, and one of the pilots nailed it with her defensive lasers while it was still a hundred thousand kilometers from the starships.
Farther out in deep space, their own missiles closed on Force Bravo. The Commonwealth warships defended themselves with skill and vigor, lasers and positron lances blasting missiles to pieces by the dozens—then by the hundreds.
Kyle had a moment of hope as the missile swarm continued—and then sighed in disappointment as the three Terran ships vanished into Alcubierre drive, the gravity distortion of their engines ripping many of the remaining missiles to shreds and leaving the survivors to fly off into deep space.
The battlecruisers were in warped space for less than a minute, returning to normal space barely a million kilometers from their origin point—still exactly one light-minute from Battle Group Seven-Two, but well out of the ability of the missiles to change course.
“Send the self-destructs to the remaining weapons,” he ordered quietly. There was no point leaving antimatter explosives floating around in deep space as a navigation hazard. The missiles would self-destruct automatically about an hour after they exhausted their fuel, but why allow a risk they didn’t need?
“Still no follow-up salvo?” he asked after watching the missiles vaporize themselves.
“Nothing,” Xue confirmed, sounding confused. “I’m…not sure what the goal is.”
“Wear us down,” Kyle told her. “Grind away the missiles we’ve placed—Vice Admiral Ness knows that if he brought his ships in now, I’d fire ten thousand missiles at him. That’s not something his ships can survive.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We take it,” Force Commander Kyle Roberts said grimly. “We take his best shot, we get him to exhaust his magazines, and we let him take as long as he likes to do it. I’m hoping for three days.”
The Lieutenant Commander looked at him in confusion for a moment, and then he saw the realization dawn in her eyes.
Every hour—every minute Vice Admiral Kaj Ness of the Terran Commonwealth spent battering away their defenses was an hour and a minute closer to Seventh Fleet’s arrival.
41
Huī Xing System
23:00 April 8, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
A sharp alert through his implant woke Kyle from another abo
rtive attempt at sleep. Checking the time, he saw this had been the longest that the Terrans had let him sleep in the last few days—it had been almost four hours since the last time they’d thrown missiles at his command.
The intervals had been completely random, making it impossible for Kyle to give his people any significant rest. They could—and had—cycled flight crews on their handful of starfighters, but there was only so much cycling he could do of the full bridge crews.
The longest interval between salvos before this one had been two and a half hours. The shortest had been fifteen minutes. Some of the salvos had been doubled or tripled up, sending hundreds of missiles swarming into the teeth of his defenses.
Somehow, all of his warships were still there. They’d lost five more starfighters along the way, leaving him with less than twenty of the fleet little ships, but his Battle Group had survived so far.
Seventh Fleet was mere hours away. The clock was ticking in his favor.
Looking at the tactical feed his implant was drawing his attention to though, he realized that Battle Group Seven-Two’s time might have run out.
The Terrans had stacked three salvos on top of each other and hurled two hundred and seventy missiles at him. He’d spent the stockpiled Starfires they’d dropped into orbit freely so far, and now found himself with less than a thousand missiles left to defend his ships.
“Pull the battle group closer together,” he ordered as he fully linked into the tactical net. “Set all remaining Starfires to salvo. Wong, how many of those Stormwinds have you refitted?”
“Three hundred and fifty,” the Engineer replied immediately. If there was anyone on the ship who’d managed less sleep than Kyle, it was the Senior Fleet Commander trying to hold Avalon together and retrofit hundreds of missiles. “We’ll have the components for another fifty in about six hours.”
“They’re not going to give us six hours,” Kyle replied. “Hand over control of whatever you’ve got to tactical.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Xue, Anderson, what’s our ammo status?”
“We’ve got one salvo left in the satellites,” Anderson reported. “Nine hundred and eighty Starfires floating in orbit. The fighters are fully reloaded. We’re down to ten salvos apiece for the cruisers and twenty for Avalon herself.”
The big carrier had a lot of missiles aboard for her relatively small number of launchers. With only four launchers left, Kyle had freely used those munitions to thin out previous salvos. Now he wished he’d held them back.
“Hold the satellites and the Stormwinds,” Kyle ordered. “Start salvoing everything our starships have left at those missiles. Hold nothing back—Ness wants to court a lance duel. Let him think he’ll have one.”
“Opening fire,” Xue confirmed.
“I’ll be on the bridge in twenty minutes,” he told her. That would still be ten minutes before the missiles were in range. A shower might help him wake up. He had a feeling that he wouldn’t be getting any more sleep before it was over one way or another.
Kyle watched Battle Group Seven-Two’s missiles intercept the enemy weapons as he dressed with the quickly precise movements of years of practice.
His people had sent ten salvos of twenty-four missiles and ten more salvoes of four against the incoming fire—a total of two hundred and eighty defending weapons against two hundred and seventy attacking. If each of his missiles would score a clean kill, the whole affair would have been much easier.
Instead, the math was far less even. By the time he stepped onto his bridge, the ten big salvos had struck—and wiped away about a hundred of the incoming weapons. He didn’t expect much from the remaining salvos—but those missiles were more useful now than they would be against the Terrans’ entire fleet later.
“Starfires firing,” Xue reported aloud, glancing over at him as he stepped into his command chair. “Still over one hundred fifty bogies inbound.”
He gestured for her to carry on. She was linked into everything. Micromanaging the battle group’s defense was tempting but unnecessary. Lieutenant Commander Jessica Xue, like most of Avalon’s junior-for-their-roles bridge staff, had a promotion waiting for her in his recommendations.
Whether the recommendations of a man who lost a quarter of his command and got the rest crippled would carry much weight, well, he wasn’t entirely sure. But he’d do what he could for the people who’d served him well.
The last nine hundred-plus Starfires blasted forward. With the losses the capital ship missiles had inflicted, that was probably overkill—but the last thing Kyle could afford was to lose even a single Atlatl platform or fighter, let alone one of his starships.
Multi-gigaton explosions lit up the sky around Avalon and his implants automatically dampened his feeds to avoid blinding him. The link might be directly to his nerves and hence impervious to flash-blindness, but psychosomatic symptoms could still occur from very bright light.
“We have leakers!” Xue announced. “Wills, do you see them?”
“On them,” the starfighter pilot announced.
Kyle held his breath as a handful of missiles burst through the wave of fire the defensive missiles had wrought, and charged towards his ships.
Sub-Colonel Wills and Avalon’s fighters were there. The survivors of Battle Group Seven-Two’s fighter wings were a mixed bag of crews, with some of even the individual flight crews having both Star Kingdom and Federation personnel, but they were also the survivors of everything the Commonwealth had thrown at Kyle’s people.
Five missiles were nothing to those hard-forged veterans, and the last died twenty thousand kilometers clear of Kyle’s ships.
He exhaled his held breath in relief. There’d been moments when he’d been afraid they wouldn’t make it. The Commonwealth’s Twenty-Third Fleet had thrown an astonishing amount of firepower at his battle group. If they hadn’t thought to use their excess starfighter missiles as counter-missiles, his people would be floating debris in Xin orbit now.
“Sir, they’re moving,” Xue reported quietly. “Force Bravo just warped space.”
“They’re consolidating their force,” Kyle replied. “They’ve got a big enough acceleration edge that we can’t actually outrun them, but they’ll need all eight ships’ defenses to stand off the missiles we have left.” He shook his head.
“This is it,” he told his people loudly. “Wake everybody up; get everything online. The Terrans are going to come visiting.”
As his people leapt back into activity around him, Kyle glared at the timers. Depending on just what Vice Admiral Kaj Ness decided to do, it could easily be too soon. Seventh Fleet was still three hours out.
Fifteen minutes later, Force Bravo emerged from warped space a million kilometers from Force Alpha. The two halves of Twenty-Third Fleet slowly began maneuvering toward each other, acting like they had all the time in the world.
Kyle really hoped they thought that they had all the time in the world. A few hours of sorting out formations and lines of fire would be perfect in his books.
“Sir, we’re receiving a transmission for you.”
“Put it through,” Kyle ordered, linking his feed to the communications network to see what Vice Admiral Ness had to say now.
“Force Commander Roberts,” Ness greeted him. Unlike Kyle, the Terran Vice Admiral had clearly been resting on a regular schedule for the last three days. He was perfectly turned out and looked wide awake.
“This has gone on far too long. My orders are now clear: you will leave this system a prisoner of the Commonwealth or not at all.
“I am aware that you retain a significant quantity of missiles, but you no longer have the firepower to overwhelm the defenses of my entire fleet, nor the acceleration to escape. I respect your courage and your tenacity, but even you must see this battle is lost.
“If you force me to come dig you out of your hole, thousands of both our people will die,” Ness concluded. “Please, Kyle,” he pleaded. “Surrender. You can run the numbers on th
is war as well as this battle; you know how this will end. Unity is inevitable.
“Why die standing in the way of history?”
Kyle was silent for several minutes, letting the activity of his bridge wash over him. He considered lying—a carefully constructed deception could buy him the time he needed for Seventh Fleet to arrive—but rejected it. Kaj Ness was his enemy, but he had fought an honorable battle.
It was hardly Ness’s fault that his nation was utterly convinced that it was their destiny to unify all mankind. To a man raised on Terra itself, both that that unification would occur and that it would be under Terra’s banner would truly seem inevitable and good.
Kyle Roberts, however, was sworn to defend the Castle Federation—a nation that would have to fall for the Commonwealth’s unification to come to pass. Even if that placed him in the path of history and inevitability, he would not dishonor that oath.
He activated the recorder in his command chair and faced the camera, intentionally relaxing his pose and putting his best cheery grin on his face.
“Vice Admiral Ness, you may believe your victory is inevitable, but I still have tricks you haven’t seen,” he promised the other man. “Unlike so many of even your peers, you have walked Terra’s soil. You’re more familiar with foxes than most—and you should know that they’re most dangerous when cornered!
“If you want to drag me before your Marshal in chains, to hand him Avalon and the Stellar Fox as trophies, then by all the Gods, you can come and get me!”
01:00 April 9, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Mouthing off at the Vice Admiral probably hadn’t bought them any more time, but it had felt good. Kyle had remained on the bridge since the transmission, checking over every preparation and half-praying that the Terrans would give them enough time.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 97