Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  Two hundred capital ship missiles swarmed toward the strike cruiser, followed by over a thousand fighter missiles.

  Thirty seconds later, a combined salvo of twelve hundred missiles launched into space, and Kyle knew Thoth was doomed. They’d tried to be clever, but a combination of the missed emergence point and the shipyard having even more firepower than they’d allowed for had just doomed von Lambert’s ship.

  The Imperial Captain clearly recognized that, a q-com channel opening to Kyle’s implant a moment later.

  “We can both do the math, Captain Roberts,” the junior man told him, the conversation taking place at the speed of thought. On the screen, Thoth’s missile launchers went to maximum-rate fire, throwing their desperate handful of capital ship missiles back into the salvo’s teeth.

  “We’ll have all of our starfighters clear before the first salvo hits, and I’m ordering nonessential personnel to life pods,” von Lambert continued calmly. “Promise me you’ll get my people home.”

  “I promise, Yann,” Kyle told him. The nature of the implant channel made a mockery of both of their attempts to be calm and cover their fear. They could turn off those channels, but here and now, with the other Captain, they didn’t. “I’ll get them all home.”

  “Right, then,” von Lambert replied. “You’re a reliable man, Roberts. Transfer control of your missiles to my tac department?”

  “Done,” the senior man replied, a few mental commands making the switch. “What are you going to do?”

  “The only thing I can. I’m going to fly right down their throats with every missile and electronic-warfare trick I can muster and blow a giant hole in the outer defenses. You know what you need to do with it.”

  Kyle nodded, knowing the emotion channels would carry his understanding and determination to the other man.

  “It has been an honor, Captain Elector von Lambert,” he sent softly across the link. “Go with the Gods.”

  “To the only place men like us ever end,” von Lambert said levelly. “Into the fire. I’ll see you on the other side, Captain Roberts. It’s been an honor and a privilege.”

  The channel dropped and Kyle’s heart sank as he watched the cruiser accelerate, shedding escape pods as it went. A capital ship could match a starfighter’s acceleration, but not for long.

  Thoth didn’t have very long left.

  #

  Michelle linked into the cameras on the flight deck through her implant, watching and trying not to worry as Kodiak’s deck crews went through the dangerous dance of loading the torpedoes onto her bombers. There should have been robots and machinery to handle this aspect of the job, but those hadn’t been designed for the Gemblade torpedoes yet.

  None of the work required actual human hands, but without the carefully designed custom systems and automation software, it required human eyes. Missiles were being moved with manual forklifts and jacks, loaded into mass-reducing collars and carried by robots designed for weapons a tenth of the size.

  Each of those missiles had enough antimatter in their warhead and fuel tanks to vaporize the entire carrier if they went off in the flight deck. There wasn’t anything the Wing Commander could do to make the process safer except watch and worry.

  “Williams, what’s the status of your reloading?” Roberts suddenly barked in her mental “ear”.

  “Echo One is fully armed and Echo Two’s birds have about two torps apiece,” she reeled off instantly. “Echo Three’s just moving in for rearming now.”

  “Anything that has a torpedo aboard needs to be in space now,” the Captain ordered. “I need every torpedo we can deploy in the next thirty seconds. Go.”

  The Captain knew just how jury-rigged the loading process for the torpedoes was. He had to know how dangerous what he was asking for was…and he was asking for it anyway.

  “Deck officer, abort all loading and clear the decks,” Michelle ordered through her link to the flight deck. “Get Echo One and Echo Two in the launch tubes; we have thirty seconds to be in space. Move.”

  She had faith in the skill of Kodiak’s deck staff, and it was proven justified in spades. Even before her orders had been officially relayed, the lifts with the torpedoes were already swinging back and people were moving away from the starfighters.

  Automated tugs locked into place on her armed bombers within ten seconds of the order’s being given, the ships lurching into motion toward the tubes that would fire them into space.

  With everything in motion, Michelle turned her attention to the main tactical feed to see what in Void was going on—and saw Thoth’s suicide charge begin.

  “Eternal Stars, sir,” she sent Roberts. “What do we do?”

  “We can’t do anything for Thoth,” the Captain replied grimly. “But we’re going to ram every starfighter, every missile and every torpedo through the hole von Lambert’s about to blast for us.”

  “I thought we were taking the shipyard intact.”

  “Not anymore.”

  #

  Quebecois Bien and the rest of the region would benefit from taking Coati’s shipyard intact, but with one ship already crippled and a second about to be destroyed, Kyle was no longer able or willing to pay the price it would take.

  A third of his attention was on the starfighter assault formation Song was rapidly pulling together in the wake of Thoth’s charge, starfighters from both ships assembling into a single hammer of firepower anchored on Williams’s two squadrons of bombers and their half-load of torpedoes.

  Another chunk was on Thoth’s escape pods, their engines already burning hard to clear the battlespace and get away from the shipyard’s defenses. From the sheer number of pods, von Lambert had used an extremely generous definition of “nonessential”—if there were two hundred of the cruiser’s four thousand crew left aboard, Kyle would be surprised.

  The rest of his attention was entirely on Thoth herself and the missiles swarming toward her.

  The third salvo of mixed missiles was the most dangerous, but the lead salvo of capital ship missiles was the next worst. Starfighter missiles relied on speed and numbers to penetrate defenses; capital ship missiles used terrifyingly smart suicidal AIs and incredibly powerful electronic warfare to do the same job.

  None of that, however, was prepared for the strike cruiser to charge into the missile salvo at six hundred gravities of acceleration and rising.

  Thoth was well past Tier Three acceleration and into the inefficiency spike leading to Tier Four, and the missiles simply weren’t programmed for capital ships to accelerate that fast.

  Her own missiles hammered into the center of the salvo, explosions ripping a hole the cruiser slid into, her lasers and lances widening it as she tore through the wall of missiles, somehow making it out the other side unscathed.

  Many of the missiles tried to follow her, twisting and decelerating—but that made them vulnerable to the starfighters following in Thoth’s wake, and Song’s people ripped them to pieces.

  The same trick wouldn’t work on the starfighter missiles. There were just too many of them, and Kyle inhaled sharply as he saw von Lambert’s plan. The Imperial cruiser ignored the missiles as she entered her range of the defenses.

  Heavy and light lances alike tore into the defensive platforms, with Thoth’s own missiles charging in their wake as the cruiser disregarded her own already-forfeit survival to clear a path for the starfighters following her.

  The cruiser’s ECM reached out to the missiles swarming her, beguiling them, luring them in, showing a clear target and creating a point for them all to converge on—Thoth herself.

  Dozens of platforms had died but dozens more remained in the cruiser’s path as the missiles struck home. Weapon after weapon slammed into the ship, lighting up the shipyard and its defenses with brilliant white light as she transformed into a glowing fireball.

  A glowing fireball still charging toward the station at over a thousand kilometers a second.

  Thoth’s remains hammered into the missile s
alvo still charging toward her, shattering the core of the salvo and expanding as more antimatter was added to the inferno. The superheated debris field kept expanding and hammered into the corsairs coming out to meet her. Half of the smaller ships spun away, crippled by the impact.

  The other half simply came apart, their debris adding to the cloud that swept onward and over the station and its defensive platforms. Too diffuse by then to destroy the defense stations, the storm blinded their sensors, stripped away deflector emitters and rendered a small but significant number of them completely helpless.

  “You see the hole, Vice Commodore,” Kyle told Song softly. “You know what it cost. Go!”

  #

  Vulture Bomber Kodiak Echo Actual

  Starfighters swirled in space, closing in the wake of the sacrificial battlecruiser and making sure to cover the life pods.

  Sixteen Vultures shot down the center, Williams straining her people’s scanners to try and get a clean shot for her torpedoes and fighter missiles.

  “Williams, I’m attaching you to Horaček’s command,” Song told her, linking the Imperial Colonel into the channel. “Stick with the Arrows; you’re clear to fire torpedoes on your discretion, but I want you and Horaček to hold your Starfires until you have a clear shot at the yard itself.

  “You’re our Hail Mary punch, and the Falcons will cover you all the way in. That yard is a big damned target and we don’t know where the command center is.” The CAG paused, then sighed. “Only one choice. Spread your fire; vaporize anything big enough to have a transmitter. Won’t leave much for the locals to use afterward, but we have to be sure we get a clean sweep.”

  The Falcons lunged forward, the Vulture bombers and missile-heavy Arrows falling back as the Federation starfighters took the lead, daring the defenses to aim at them.

  The remnants of the last missile salvo aimed at Thoth hammered into them first, lasers and lances filling space as the starfighter formation charged into the cruiser’s radioactive wake. The scattered and half-blinded missiles didn’t stand a chance, but sheer numbers meant some of them hit home.

  Starfighters died, the Falcons throwing themselves into the fire to cover the missile ships following behind. The survivors launched their own weapons, hundreds of missiles lighting up Michelle’s feed as the Falcons opened fire on the defending platforms.

  The radiation from Thoth’s destruction was clearing…and there was the shipyard.

  “All Vultures, Fox Three all,” Michelle snapped. “Hit the central structure, every torp and a full salvo of Starfires!”

  That would leave each of her ships with two salvos of six fighter missiles apiece and give the barely fifty torpedoes additional cover on their flight. Jamming from the Falcons and Arrows helped, but those torpedoes weren’t going to make it all the way on their own, high-powered jammers or not.

  With over a hundred of the lighter missiles to escort them, they had a chance. Enough of one that the defenders recognized them as the main threat, focusing their fire on the incoming torpedoes.

  The missiles from the Falcons swept in at the same time, forcing the defenders to choose: defend the shipyard or protect the defensive platforms themselves. There were clearly multiple controllers, deciding for different platforms…and they didn’t make the same choice.

  There were enough defenses that the space around the shipyard lit up with fire as dozens—hundreds!—of the incoming missiles blew apart. Counter-fire cut through the radiation cloud Thoth’s destruction had left behind, missiles and positron lances alike reaching out to target the incoming starfighters.

  Michelle rode her torpedoes in via her implant and couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment as the last of that salvo died ten thousand kilometers short of the station. The split in the defenses, however, had left the platforms themselves vulnerable to the Falcons’ strike, and the gap Thoth’s suicide run had opened up was widening, clearing a path all the way through.

  “You see it,” Horaček said via her implant. “Let the Falcons burn it wider, hold for my signal, then fire everything you’ve got and break off.”

  “I see it,” she confirmed. The defense web was weakening, but there still wasn’t a hole they could actually slip missiles through. There never would be, not while any of the platforms still existed, but there was a gap between the surviving platforms and it was getting wider.

  “Last salvo,” Song reported. “We’re not going to survive to lance range if we don’t make a bigger hole. Hit ’em hard!”

  The surviving Falcons sent over five hundred missiles blasting forward, and the defenses focused on them…and Michelle and Horaček saw the same moment.

  “Now!” the Colonel snapped.

  Sixty Arrows and twelve Vultures launched over four hundred Starfire missiles. Ten seconds later, another four hundred blazed into space, and then all seventy-two fighters flipped to burn away from the yards.

  Unlike the Vultures, the Arrows at least had a positron lance, but it was weaker than the Falcons’…and the Falcons were pulling the same flip, with capital ship missiles from Kodiak blazing in to help cover their retreat as they broke off. Side vectors began to build, rapidly increasing the starfighters’ closest approach distance, trying to pull them out of reach of the lances of Coati’s station.

  The station and its defending platforms had more immediate concerns as over a thousand starfighter missiles crashed down on them in a single immense wave. Their own missiles slashed out in defensive mode, their numbers vastly reduced by the damage they’d already taken.

  The damage wasn’t enough to leave even the bombers’ salvo unopposed, but fewer weapons could angle on them, leaving it almost entirely to the missiles to protect the weak spot.

  It wasn’t enough. Many of the defensive missiles intercepted missiles from the Falcon’s slightly earlier salvo. There were still enough for hundreds of the salvo Horaček and Michelle’s people had launched to die, covering their entire view of the station in fire.

  Hundreds of missiles were destroyed…but there were hundreds of missiles. Some made it through, and the defense finally collapsed under the weight of fire.

  Their second salvo slipped through already-overwhelmed defenses and struck home in a carefully dispersed pattern. Fireballs lit up critical structural components, working stations, the half-complete hulls of two corsairs, and any piece of the station that had looked big enough to be a command center.

  Michelle waited, watching as the radiation cleared and the q-probes swept in for a closer look. Parts of the station had survived, but almost nothing of significant size.

  “Targets destroyed,” Song said softly. “Captain Roberts, Quebecois Bien LaGrange points are secure.”

  #

  Chapter 49

  KDX-6647

  05:00 December 17, 2736 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  SC-153 Chariot

  There was a point in any engagement at which there was nothing left that the flag officer in command could do. Commodore James Tecumseh hated that moment. He sat on Chariot’s bridge and watched the Alliance’s suicide strike run at the shipyard and the starfighters heading his way at the same time, knowing there was nothing he could do change the outcome of either.

  Modesitt’s starfighters were tucked in close to the cruiser, extended less than ten thousand kilometers in the direction of the incoming pirate ship to form a screen to defend against their missiles.

  “Arsenault?” the Captain asked as the range continued to drop. “We’re going to get a close introduction to their missiles in about two minutes. Please tell me I’m going to have something.”

  James’s feeds flickered, a brownout cutting through the bridge, and then new data began to drop onto the feed as systems came back online.

  “All right!” the engineer announced. “You have missiles, lasers and secondary lances on the starboard and upper broadsides. That’s all you’re getting anytime soon,” he finished grimly.

  “It’ll have to do,” Modesitt s
napped. “Guns?”

  “We’re live. Missiles launching.”

  Only half of Chariot’s launchers were online, but six capital ship missiles were more useful than none. They lanced past the defending starfighters, charging out to meet the incoming enemy. A second salvo followed before any of the fighters reached range.

  And then the starfighters reached their own weapons range, the defending Katanas hurling a hundred and sixty missiles out into space. The vectors gave them a few extra seconds of range, enough to get their salvo well into space before the pirates launched.

  James closed his eyes as the tsunami of icons lit up the feed. Seven hundred missiles made a mockery of their own salvos, the two-hundred-fighter strike heading their way enough to threaten even a fully functional modern warship.

  Chariot was neither.

  “Hayden, what the hell are you doing?” Modesitt demanded.

  Even with his eyes closed, the Commodore was still receiving the tactical feed routed directly to his optic nerve. Closing his eyes couldn’t stop him seeing what Colonel Zack Hayden was doing.

  The Katanas were leaving Chariot behind, the neatly organized formation of cruiser and starfighters coming apart as the fighters lunged toward the enemy, their ECM lighting up at full power…and making the starfighters easier to target.

  Hayden didn’t reply, his starfighters making a suicide charge into the teeth of the pirate formation as their ECM sang a suicidal siren song to the enemy missiles. Their own weapons spoke, missile after missile hurtling at an incoming formation that had no idea how to deal with this.

  More experienced gunners and pilots could have compensated, used their own ECM to avoid Hayden’s missiles or to compensate for the starfighters’ determination to lure the missiles away from Chariot.

  The conscripts Coati had shoved into his ships didn’t have the training, didn’t have the experience, didn’t have the skill—and didn’t stand a chance. Seven hundred–plus missiles lunged in at a mere forty targets, confused and deceived systems resulting in dozens of fratricidal collisions.