Space Carrier Avalon

by Glynn Stewart

  Almost unconsciously, Michelle tagged the freighter for the starfighter’s computer to watch. She didn’t expect trouble, but the Stellar League ship was also the only major vessel moving around in orbit. The only other ships she could see were sublight schooners, a hundred thousand tons at most.

  “Kayla, does your crew see anything odd?” she sent to the other starfighter escorting the XO’s shuttle.

  “Not a peep,” Flight Lieutenant Kayla Morgaurd replied. “Hell, this place is missing a bunch of ships that should be here.”

  “This isn’t Castle,” Michelle said quietly, but she had the same feeling. It wasn’t that the system was being quiet, or anyone was hiding – the system was just dirt-poor. Most systems could build better vessels for in-system shipping than the schooners she was watching. At least two of the small ships were using ion thrusters – and had no mass manipulators aboard at all!

  “The Commonwealth took out most of their extra-planetary industry during the war,” Garnet said quietly, interrupting Michelle’s thoughts. “A hundred and forty years of investment and about thirty million people – a war crime, but it’s not like anyone from that battle group ever made it home to be held accountable.”

  Michelle shook her head silently. For all of her dislike of the behemoth that had tried to conquer her home, even she had to admit that the Terran Commonwealth usually fought its wars cleanly. The exceptions, though, tended towards the utterly horrifying.

  “Escort-Alpha, this Avalon Two,” the shuttle hailing her interrupted the depressing conversation. “We are entering approach now and are under Hessian Orbital’s guns. Commander Kleiner says thanks for riding shotgun, and you’re clear to return to CSP.”

  “Pass on my regards to the Commander,” Michelle replied. “Gentle docking.”

  She and Morgaurd slowly decelerated their fighters, curving in an arc that would take them back to Avalon, passing right under the Stellar League ship.

  “Check your vector,” she ordered Morgaurd after glancing over the course plot for the other starfighter. “We don’t want to get that close to the freighter – League ships tend to be uncomfortable around other people’s starfighters.”

  Morgaurd acknowledged with a wordless click, and the vector shifted further away. With the two tiny ships’ scanners stretched to maximum, it wasn’t like they needed to be that close to Avalon to keep an eye on everyone.

  The scanner macro that she had set up on Kleiner’s shuttle informed her that the transport was docked with Hessian Orbital and locked down. According to her brief, the shuttle would remain aboard until Kleiner was done with her meetings.

  For all of the jitters and ‘itchy shoulders’ that seemed to be spreading through Avalon’s crew, Hessian was quiet – dirt-poor, but harmless.

  Then another scanner macro pinged. It took Michelle a good second to realize it was the one she’d set on the Stellar League freighter.

  Her starfighter had just passed ‘behind’ the ship, into the ionized path left behind by the freighter’s station-keeping engines, and the macro was bleeping a higher than expected level of radiation.

  Even linked into her implants, Michelle wasn’t sure what the system was telling her. Elevated levels of radiation at the five hundred eleven kilo-electron-volt level?

  Her implants then happily told her the meaning of that energy level, and her heart stopped as it resolved the separate point sources.

  A hundred zero point cells?

  She hit the Q-com activation sequence.

  “Vampire! Vampire! Vampire!” she snapped. “The League ship is a pirate!”

  Even as the words left her lips, her starfighter’s sensors – now focused on the raider – saw paneling eject away from her hull. Missiles blasted away from the freighter’s hull, targeted on Avalon, followed by dozens of starfighters.

  All of that paled in Michelle’s mind though, as four half-megaton-per-second positron lances ripped out from behind concealed panels. Two hit Jäger, ripping through her unprotected hull and shattering the battlecruiser before she could even move. One hit the Federation freighter, blasting the civilian ship into pieces.

  The last hit Hessian Orbital dead center, ripping its way through the hydrogen fuel tanks in a flash of annihilating matter that tore the station apart in a ball of white flame.

  Chapter 16

  Hessian System

  09:26 September 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  SFG-001 Alpha Six – Falcon-type starfighter

  It felt like Michelle stared at the small sun that had been forty thousand human beings for an eternity. Their course had brought them behind the pirate in time to provide mere seconds of warning – hardly enough to save an immobile station from weapons that moved at the speed of light.

  The missiles targeted on Avalon, however, were not moving at the speed of light. They were accelerating at ten kilometers per second squared, rapidly shrinking the distance to the old carrier.

  “Dump our missiles at the pirate,” she ordered Deveraux. “Keep the lance spun up – we’re going after their missiles.”

  With every mass manipulator thrown to full power and the antimatter thrusters opened all the way, the impact of the Falcon rapid-firing all twelve of her missiles at the enemy ship barely rocked the six thousand ton ship.

  “Williams, this is Rokos,” Echo Squadron’s commander broke into her channel. “We’re launching from Avalon now – can you get a bead on those missiles and starfighters?”

  “Garnet?” Michelle asked. “What have you got the Commander?”

  “Twelve missiles, look like Starfires,” the engineer reported. “Their range will suck, but they’re small and easy to hide.”

  “Forty starfighters, mix of origins,” he continued, then paused. “Boss – ten of them are Cobras.”

  “Fuck,” Rokos swore on the channel. “I’ll let the CAG know. Watch those starfighters, but take those missiles from behind – you sweep, we’ll mop up.”

  “Clear, sir,” Michelle replied. A second channel flipped open to Kayla Morgaurd, confirming the other starfighter’s location.

  Morgaurd’s Falcon swung in line with Michelle’s ship, five hundred kilometers off her starboard bow as both of them opened their engines up at full power.

  It didn’t take them long to get a clear shot at the missiles and open fire. Glittering beams of positrons swept through space, tracking the smart weapons, each of which tried to dodge in turn.

  She quickly realized Garnet was right. Real capital ship missiles were much bigger and carried more ECM to fill her targeting systems with static. Even more so, though, real capital ship missiles were smarter.

  Michelle and Morgaurd’s beams swept the missile salvo into an ever-tightening spiral in space – and then Echo Squadron cleared their own weapons. Twelve seconds later, every missile was dust.

  “Yes!” Kayla bellowed over the channel. “Suck that you pira–!”

  For a moment, the other pilot forgot the random-walking that needed to be second-nature to a pilot in a combat zone. A moment was all the closing pirate starfighters needed – and Kayla Morgaurd and her crew died as three thirty-five kiloton positron lances intercepted her fighter at once.

  Michelle was alone in space, with forty pirate fighters behind her, and only the eight friendly ships of Rokos’s Echo Squadron heading towards her.

  Where was the rest of the wing?!

  Hessian System

  09:30 September 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Deck

  Kyle made it onto the Flight Deck just as Rokos’ squadron blasted into space from the launch tubes. He saw Senior Chief Hammond forcing order on the chaos that was reigning across the Deck, directing flight crews to their fighters and getting the next set of fighters moving toward the launch tubes.

  Only half of his attention was on the here and now, however, and he’d linked his implant into the ship’s communications. As he dodged his way across the deck towards his
own starfighter, he was linked into Flight Lieutenant Williams’ comms with Rokos.

  “Cobras?” he demanded as he heard the report.

  “Wait, what?” he heard Stanford shout, and turned more of his attention back to where he stood. The senior Flight Commander had been coming up behind him, heading towards his own ship. “What about Cobras?”

  “We have forty fighters inbound,” Kyle told him shortly. Stanford, like the rest of his pilots, scored very high on the bell curve for implant compatibility, but Kyle scored as much higher than them as they did over the average. Most of his people couldn’t interface while doing other tasks as well as he could. “Ten of them are Cobras.”

  “I can guess their serial numbers,” Stanford replied grimly. “Forty ships versus ten isn’t a winning combination, boss, even if our birds are twice as good.”

  “I know,” the Wing Commander admitted, looking out over the chaos of the Flight Deck. He trusted Rokos to deal with the missiles, but the starfighters were too much for a single squadron.

  Foxtrot squadron was about to slide into the launch tubes when Kayla Morgaurd and her crew died, and Kyle made his decision.

  “Hammond,” he barked, linking his words to the other mans’ implant. “Belay loading the launch tubes.”

  “Sir?” the Chief asked, somewhere between confused and horrified. “But Rokos’ squadron…”

  “One more squadron won’t save him or Avalon,” Kyle snapped. “Pull back Foxtrot and clear the center deck.

  “Have all hands stand by for a full deck launch.”

  “We’ve never tested that,” Hammond objected.

  “I know you, Chief,” Kyle told him quietly. “You’ve checked the gear. You know it works. It’s just a question of whether or not the idea works at all – but in three minutes, those Cobras will be in range of Avalon.”

  “You’re insane, boss,” the non-com replied. “Get the hell into your fighter, then. We’ll blow the deck in ninety seconds.”

  #

  “Clear the Main Deck. Full deck launch in thirty seconds.”

  Hammond’s voice echoed across the deck and through the implants of every starfighter pilot, gunner and engineer in SFG-001. Kyle was glad for his implants, as the main cabin of his starfighter was still packed with the shielding cocoon they’d put in for the testing earlier. It had been awkward at first, but once he was linked to the ship he barely noticed.

  “Zero gravity in ten seconds, clear the Deck,” Hammond repeated.

  The seconds ticked by, and Kyle sank deeply into the symbiosis with his starfighter. Every missile checked out. The engines checked out. The zero point cells that provided fuel for the engines and ammunition for the main positron lance checked out.

  “Zero gravity, I repeat, zero gravity. Starfighters assume launch positions.”

  Outside, Rokos’ wing was starting to engage the pirate fighters, and Avalon herself was trading blows with the pirate freighter. Kyle’s implants reported the ship had massively powerful deflectors, reducing the range of Avalon’s secondary weapons well below the current gap between the two ships – and with the planet so close by, Blair wasn’t going to fire up the main battery.

  Time was precious. Every second that passed risked the lives of Kyle’s men and women. But the positions of the starfighters in the deck had to be perfect.

  His starfighter slid upward in the zero gravity, tiny bursts of thrust from the maneuvering thrusters drifting the Falcon-C command fighter into the center of the deck. Around him, the other thirty-seven remaining ships slotted into the positions mandated by a launch plan thirty years old.

  He winced as his implants reported the death of one of Rokos’ ships as the starfighters slotted into position. Then another. Half a dozen of the pirate ships were debris along with them, but he’d lost three fighters already.

  “All ships in position,” Hammond’s voice reported. “Hold on people, this is gonna kick like one hell of a mule.

  “Full deck launch. Now.”

  A Falcon’s mass manipulators were rated to absorb five hundred times the gravity of Earth. That was, however, with other mass manipulators dedicated to manipulating the mass of both the starfighter and its fuel. There was, as with everything else, an efficiency curve. With every mass manipulator set to counter acceleration, the ship could completely absorb two thousand gravities and reduce the next thousand by ninety-nine percent – and would consume every mass manipulator and erg of energy the spacecraft had.

  The mass manipulators in the walls of Avalon’s flight deck left absorbing inertia to the starfighters themselves. They spun up to reduce the mass of everything in the center zone by a factor of roughly fifty thousand. Then a series of massive electromagnets charged up, and turned the core of Avalon’s Main Flight Deck into a giant railgun.

  Ten gravities of acceleration made it through, slamming every member of the starfighters’ flight crews back into their couches like the fist of an angry god.

  Thirty-nine starfighters blasted clear of Avalon’s bay, bearing down on the remaining pirate ships. Kyle bared his teeth in a hunting grin as he switched the Falcon’s systems back to normal, and the little ship shot forward at five hundred gravities.

  “Charlie, Delta, Foxtrot Squadrons,” Kyle snapped, linking to the all-hands channel for the three squadrons as he spoke. “Reinforce Echo, drive those starfighters back. See if you can take a Cobra intact, but keep them off Avalon.”

  “Alpha, Bravo Squadrons,” he continued, switching to the channels for those wings. “You’re on me – we’re picking up Alpha Six – and then we’ve got a pirate to kill!”

  The Starfighter Group split smoothly, fourteen fighters forming on him as Lancet, Zhao, and Wolter – the pilot he’d promoted to command Foxtrot after Randall’s arrest – took their twenty-four to pull Rokos’s chestnuts out of the fire.

  For the first time in over a decade, it was time for Avalon’s fighters to dance.

  Hessian System

  09:31 September 5, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  SFG-001 Alpha Six – Falcon-type Starfighter

  The first salvo of missiles Michelle had loosed at the pirate ‘freighter’ hadn’t done much. It was a truism of modern space combat that even a ship like Avalon, with old-style neutronium armor, couldn’t withstand a single solid hit from an antimatter warhead.

  Whoever had retrofitted the pirate had been very aware of that truism. More hull plating had been blasted away as the missiles approached, revealing a very modern laser missile defense system. Salvos of four missiles apiece were child’s play for a system like that.

  And it wasn’t as if she or Deveraux had the time to babysit the missiles all the way in, either. Caught in the space between two rapidly closing starfighter groups, Michelle spent half of her time random-walking to avoid enemy fire – and the other half trying desperately to keep up with the targeting data Echo Squadron was feeding over encrypted laser-coms to avoid friendly fire!

  She had enough warning to keep dodging their positron lances, but being stuck between the two combatants meant she didn’t have enough time to engage herself.

  “Keep your eyes open, Deveraux,” she ordered. “I’m going to try something, and if you get a bead on any of those bastards, light them the hell up.”

  Deveraux didn’t verbally acknowledge, but Michelle felt the other woman take control of the positron lance through her implants.

  Even as the pilot took a deep breath to steady her nerves and updated her download of Echo Squadron’s firing patterns, another one of Avalon’s starfighters came apart. A lagging missile from a salvo fired by the pirates missed the defensive sweep that caught its compatriots and hit Jean Canard’s fighter head on.

  As the third of Echo Squadron’s ships died, Michelle flipped her Falcon up ninety degrees. Up to now, she’d been focusing on trying to either join up with Echo Squadron or reach Avalon. That was looking more and more like suicide – and the pirate freighter was doing far too good a job of headi
ng away from the carrier.

  She blasted away from the ‘dogfight’ and set her sights on the freighter itself.

  “Take a look at that,” Garnet’s voice suddenly cut into her thoughts. She took half a second to be sure the starfighter continued to random-walk, and then followed the engineer’s mental pointer.

  Avalon had turned. The eight hundred meter long arrowhead of the old carrier now pointed directly at the enemy fighters. The pirates weren’t in range for the anti-fighter guns to penetrate even the weak deflectors the small ships carried, so Michelle wondered for half a moment what was going on.

  Then the electromagnetic and boson detectors on her Falcon went wild, and she watched in awe as five entire squadrons of starfighters blasted into space in a perfect formation.

  The pirates didn’t seem to know what to make of it, and seemed to almost pause in space as three of those squadrons charged directly at them.

  The other fifteen ships began an arc that would bring them swinging by Michelle – on their way to the pirate ship.

  “Hold up your horses for a moment, pilot,” Wing Commander Roberts’ ever-cheerful voice sounded in her starfighter’s cabin. “I don’t know about you, Lieutenant Williams, but I think you need some friends to take on an entire pirate starship!”

  #

  A few minutes of careful maneuvers slotted Michelle’s starfighter into position amidst the two squadrons of ships heading for the pirate carrier. ‘Beneath’ them, the battle between the rest of Avalon’s starfighter group and the pirate ships had begun to take on a less frantic tone with the pirates shifting course to stay out of the radius of the carrier’s anti-fighter guns.

  With the Wing Commander’s command starfighter added to Alpha Squadron, the two squadrons were back at full strength despite Morgaurd’s death – though Michelle was out of missiles, so she wasn’t sure how much value to place on her own ship.