“May the Gods walk with you as well, Captain.”
16:00 March 1, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Shuttle Landing Bay
Mira Solace eyed the camera team she’d been ordered to allow on her ship more than slightly askance. She understood why the heavily jowled blond President next to her wanted this recorded, but she’d wanted to have her own public relations people do the recording.
The shuttle bay they stood in was hardly a classified portion of the battlecruiser, but she still didn’t trust the news people not to screw up something.
But President Ingolfson had wanted this recorded and broadcast to all of Alizon, and Admiral Alstairs had signed off on it. Which left Captain Mira Solace standing with those two worthies and Admiral Kojo Larue, waiting for her boyfriend’s shuttle to arrive.
With a band.
As the shuttle drifted slowly in to a safe landing, she wondered what he was making of it. All she’d been allowed to tell him when she’d asked him over was that they were having an in-person staff meeting with the Star Guard’s new Admiral.
Nonetheless, the shuttle door opened as soon as the area had cooled down, and Kyle Roberts’ massive frame was suddenly visible in that exit.
The band struck up as soon as they saw him, the spirited trumpets of “Alizon Triumphant” ringing across the shuttle bay as Kyle slowly stepped forward. He met Mira’s gaze with an arched eyebrow, and she smiled. She suspected his opinion of Alizon’s adulation of him, but he was taking it in stride.
Her opinion was that it had to be directed at either him or Vice Admiral Tobin, and since Tobin was in a jail cell awaiting shipment back to Castle, it landed on Kyle. Both Alizon and the Federation needed him to smile and take it.
Which was exactly what he proceeded to do. Carefully giving the camera crew his best profile, he walked down the carpet Ingolfson’s people had laid on her shuttle bay deck and approached the Admirals and President.
“Ma’am.” He greeted Alstairs with a crisp salute, then turned to the Alizonis. “Sirs.” He saluted again. He gave Mira a firm nod, but she hoped the camera hadn’t caught the softening of his eyes when he met her gaze.
“Captain Roberts,” the Rear Admiral greeted him. “As I suspect you’ve guessed, there is more going on than a staff meeting. I don’t believe you’ve actually met Kenneth Ingolfson, President of the Alizon Republic?”
“I have not,” Kyle confirmed. His expression appeared bemused to Mira, but he shook the President’s offered hand.
“Captain Roberts,” Ingolfson said calmly. “I’m sure you have wondered at the lack of full gratitude from the government of the Alizon Republic. You saved our world, after all.”
“You seemed busy,” the big Captain demurred, and Mira caught at least one choked-off chuckle from the media contingent.
Maybe the reporters weren’t all bad.
“The biggest constraint, Captain, was that we had neither an Admiral of the Star Guard nor a fully reconstituted Congress. In the absence of both, my options were limited as to how we could honor you—and those options did not appear appropriate.
“Now, however,” the President continued, “Admiral Larue has returned to us and been properly promoted as the senior officer of the Alizon Star Guard. Now, with the permission of the current Provisional Government of the Alizon Republic, he has something for you.”
Larue was a big man, matching Kyle in almost every dimension and with skin and hair black as deep space. He seemed more…intense than Kyle too, and Mira found him mildly unnerving.
“Captain Kyle Roberts,” he said formally. “Kneel, please.”
Kyle obeyed, taking a single knee on the carpet runner.
“By the authority vested in me by the people, the Republic and the government of Alizon, as senior officer of the Alizon Star Guard, I hereby bestow upon you the Diamond Nova of Honor.”
Larue produced a gold medal on a black ribbon from a box the President handed him. Mira caught enough of a look to see the supernova carefully inlaid into the front in small diamond chips. In another context, it would probably be gaudy—but it was also Alizon’s highest award for valor.
“Please accept the Nova both on your own behalf and on behalf of your crew and pilots who fought bravely and victoriously to free our system from the Terran occupation.
“While Alizon is free, your deeds will not be forgotten.”
Chapter 9
Alizon System
18:00 March 1, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BC-129 Camerone, Flag Conference Room
While Alizon’s medal-awarding ceremonies were thankfully brief, by the time the President and his media people were done with Kyle, he felt like a wrung-out dishrag—and then discovered there actually was still an in-person captains’ meeting taking place aboard Camerone.
The advantage to dating the flagship’s captain was that he had somewhere to store the gaudy atrocity the Alizonis had given him and didn’t have to wear the thing into the conference. He’d also stolen a shower and was feeling almost human when he sat down in the big conference room on the battlecruiser’s flag deck.
It was a small gathering, just Rear Admiral Alstairs and her twelve warship captains. The room was big enough that they only occupied the bottom tier of the four-tier amphitheater-style space. Alstairs stood in the center, looking at each of her people in turn as they settled in to see what was going on.
“While part of this meeting was an excuse to get Captain Roberts where President Ingolfson could successfully ambush him,” Alstairs admitted to a muted chorus of chuckles, “I also wanted to get us all together, face-to-face, at least one more time before we kick off Operation Rising Star.”
Tired as he was, that got Kyle to straighten up and pay attention. The high-level plan for Rising Star had been bounced back and forth between the captains and Alstairs’ staff for a while now, so all of the captains knew the plan. More detailed plans were dependent on which ships were assigned to which attacks.
“The plan for Rising Star calls for three battle groups of four ships each,” Alstairs continued, as if listening to his thoughts. “We’ve all run through scenarios of which ships should go where, and we all know the intel on our target systems inside and out. We’re down to details and assignments, and I’ve been buried in discussions with Alliance High Command on those assignments for the last two days.”
With a wholly unnecessary gesture, Alstairs brought up an image of all twelve ships of Seventh Fleet in the holoprojection above her head.
“The biggest issue is that we have no O-Eight officers in Seventh Fleet except myself,” she said bluntly. “Most of our captains, especially those in our latest reinforcements, are extremely junior. If we’d been organized properly, a force of this size would have an O-Nine in command, with at least two Rear Admirals for subordinate commands.
“But with the current rush of ships and flotillas across the Alliance, it seems no one had any Admirals to send us,” Alstairs continued dryly. “Operation Peacock, Fourth Fleet’s mission to liberate the systems the Commonwealth took in January, is currently being commanded by an Imperial Vice Admiral. Our highest flag officers are commanding the largest deployments—defensive formations, one and all.
“Which leaves us in a quandary I intend to solve in the finest of Federation traditions: by breveting people to ranks that don’t exist,” she told them with a chuckle. “Captain Roberts, Captain Aleppo: get up.”
Kyle obeyed, eyeing the small woman with the pale skin and the shaved head who rose as well. Lora Aleppo was generally quiet, but when she spoke, the battleship captain was worth listening to.
“I am breveting you both to Force Commander,” the Rear Admiral told them briskly. “And yes, before you ask, Lora, I’m aware the Trade Security Force has no such rank. It’s not like it comes with a pay raise.”
Kyle didn’t even need to look around to know that he was getting a death glare from Lord Captain Anders. The Imperial Captain was senior to him
by two years, and Ingolf Benn, the other Imperial Lord Captain, was a year senior to Kyle—the only one of the new ship captains senior to him.
The other seven captains, O-7s all, had been promoted since October of the previous year—making them all junior to Kyle despite his five months as Captain. Since Mira had been promoted to command Camerone only at the end of January, Aleppo and the two Imperial captains were the only captains actually senior to him.
“Ma’am, I feel it necessary to point out that there are several Captains here senior to Captain Roberts,” Anders noted aloud, his Coraline drawl grating on Kyle’s ears.
“And none commanding as powerful a warship,” Alstairs told him. “Avalon will be the keystone of Battle Group Seven-Two. Neither Gravitas nor Horus is capable of fulfilling the same role.”
With another gesture, she split the twelve ships into three groups of four.
“I will command Battle Group Seven-One, Camerone,” she continued. “Seven-One will consist of Camerone herself, Horus and Gravitas, and Grizzly.”
Kyle nodded to himself. Grizzly would provide the core of BG7.1’s long-range striking power, with the three battlecruisers augmenting the older carrier’s fighter group and providing the direct smashing power that Grizzly lacked. Assigning both of the Imperial ships to her own group also kept the problematic Captain Anders under the Admiral’s own eye.
“Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, will be under Force Commander Roberts,” Alstairs announced. “Sledgehammer, Courageous and Indomitable will support Avalon.”
That gave Kyle a lot more direct firepower than he was used to, with the Phoenix ships augmenting Avalon’s own starfighter wings. Once they picked up their assault transport, Battle Group Avalon would be able to complete any mission they were given.
“Battle Group Seven-Three, Zheng He will be under Force Commander Aleppo,” the Admiral finished. “Backing up Zheng He will be Polar Bear, Clawhammer and Culloden.”
7.3 was a hammer to Kyle’s mind. Two battleships, a carrier and a Last Stand-class battlecruiser? Less fighter strength than either of the other two groups, but Zheng He had the most powerful positron lances in Seventh Fleet. Commonwealth tactics called to close with Alliance forces, but anyone closing with Battle Group 7.3 was going to feel the pain.
“These assignments, for those of you wondering”—Alstairs very clearly didn’t look at Anders—“have already been signed off on by High Command. Each Battle Group will pick up one of the three CFMC assault transports en route to Alizon for their ground forces.
“The Marines have provided an updated ETA, and High Command has signed off on the activation date based on that arrival time. As of twenty hundred hours this evening, Operating Rising Star is officially go in ninety-six hours.
“It’s time for payback.”
09:00 March 2, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Main Conference Room
Vice Commodore Michael Stanford had wondered when the name of Indomitable’s Commander, Air Group, had crossed his desk if the Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills commanding the battlecruiser’s starfighters was the woman he knew.
He still wasn’t mentally prepared to see the petite, curvy blond woman walk into the conference room along with the other five Royal Phoenix Navy and Space Force officers invited to the face-to-face meeting Force Commander Roberts had called of the new Battle Group Avalon’s officers.
Wills noticed him and gave him a lascivious wink, followed by a small, almost imperceptible, headshake. She clearly remembered the evening in the Phoenix system where her wing had bought Avalon’s fighter pilots drinks.
And everything that had followed it.
Of course his one-night stand was now one of his subordinates. The Stars’ sense of humor was far too vindictive for anything else to happen. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a copious supply of one-night stands from before when Kelly Mason—currently executive officer of a strike cruiser in the Federation’s Home Fleet—had turned him into something resembling an honest man.
Thankfully, Stanford was sitting beside Kyle, so hopefully Avalon’s Captain hadn’t noticed the interplay. He was going to be in enough trouble with his girlfriend without his Captain knowing what was going on.
“Now we’re all here, let’s get down to business,” Roberts announced, bringing Michael’s attention back to the moment instead of future problems.
“You all know the high parameters of Operation Rising Star,” he continued, “but this briefing is to familiarize you with our portion of it.”
The holotank over the conference table lit up with a three-dimensional model of a star system. It was an F-series star with eleven planets and an asteroid belt. The outer three planets were gas giants, the inner three chunks of rock burnt to a crisp. Planets four and five, as well as the asteroid belt between them, were in the Goldilocks zone. The rest were mostly-useless frozen balls of rock between the habitable worlds and the gas giants.
“The Cora system, people,” Roberts concluded. “Two habitable planets. An asteroid belt with three major dwarf planetoids, easily terraformed given the application of Class One mass manipulators to create gravity. The system was colonized late; being a high-energy F-class star, it was missed in early scouting sweeps. The fifth planet, Montreal, is heavily inhabited, with a secondary colony on New Quebec, but the potential for a system almost as wealthy as Phoenix is there.
“The colony is owned and operated by a special-purpose corporate entity originally created on Terra itself but relocated to Montreal prior to the last war to be entirely independent of the Commonwealth. They were a member state of the Alliance but had only local-system defense forces that proved insufficient in the face of the Commonwealth invasion.”
Michael shook his head as he regarded the system. A corporate colony like that, especially in a system with five potentially inhabitable worlds, stood to become fabulously wealthy—and evolve into a system government. The up-front investment was enormous, and Cora’s owners-cum-government had decided not to add real warships to that investment.
Now the Commonwealth owned their investment.
“Current intelligence suggests that the Commonwealth has three ships in Cora,” Roberts noted. “Their best guess is two cruisers and a battleship, but it may be three cruisers, two cruisers and a carrier, or just about any other variation you can think of. We’re going to plan this out—and we’re going to plan it out assuming that they’ve stuck three Volcano carriers in the systems.”
“Force Commander,” Sledgehammer’s Captain Ainsley interjected. “That seems a lot of metal for the Commonwealth to tie up in a system like this. Modern hulls, at that.”
“I agree,” Battle Group 7.2’s commander said promptly. “I suspect we’ll be looking at something more akin to three Assassins or ships of a similar vintage. But if we plan to tangle with Terra’s finest, we’ll be more than prepared to deal with their second rank, won’t we?”
#
Michael wasn’t surprised to find Sub-Colonel Wills waiting for him as the staff meeting dispersed.
“Walk with me,” he half-ordered, half-suggested.
She fell in behind him, walking silently as they put some distance between themselves and the gathering of CAGs, Captains and XOs.
“I wanted to clear the air between us,” she admitted after they were well out of sight. “I’m an incorrigible flirt, and I’ll confess that I never expected to end up serving under you—but I need to be very clear: I don’t sleep with my superior officers.”
Michael couldn’t help himself. Her concern was so very different from his own that it shocked a sharp bark of laughter from him, and he looked over at Wills with a smile.
“Putting aside the long list of regulations that would break,” he said mildly, “it would also piss off both Force Commander Roberts and my girlfriend. Pissing off senior officers and strike cruiser XOs is not conducive to long-term survival.”
He surprised a choke of laughter out of Wills, whose posture relaxed as she continued to walk alon
gside him.
“I don’t chase taken men, either,” she pointed out. “Damn, we were both worried about the wrong thing, weren’t we?”
“Apparently,” he agreed. “Let’s leave the past in the past, shall we?” He offered her his hand.
She shook it with a smile.
“Agreed.”
“Now,” he continued as they approached his office, “tell me about the Templars. I’m going to need to know it inside and out, and the best way to find that out is to interrogate a pilot.”
Chapter 10
Alizon System
12:00 March 4, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera, Bravo Company Commander’s Office
Edvard Hansen loved watching Alcubierre emergences. The lanky, dark-haired Lieutenant Major’s office had a holoprojector, normally used for small-scale briefings, which he’d learned he could set up to project two-dimensional images along all of the walls.
On emergence into the Alizon system, he had the projector set up to show him a slightly compressed version of the view outside the ship. Toward the front of the ship, the universe was red-shifted into oblivion. This close to arrival, the normal star-bow was expanded to cover most of the front half of the warp bubble, but the gravitational anomalies creating the warp bubble reduced the light to an unclear mess of purple and red.
Behind them, the universe faded to a blue so dark as to be nearly black. Smears of blue and red reached across the space between the star-bow and star-wake, a section normally only lit by the captured radiation of an Alcubierre warp bubble.
Then, for an instant only barely perceptible to the human eye and mind, the bow and wake met in the middle. The ship slowed to the same pseudo-velocity it had started with in the Kaber system days before, and the four distinct whorls of the singularities conjured by Chimera’s Class One mass manipulators were suddenly visible—and the whole bubble popped.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 7