“I have my own communications from Alliance Commander,” she told Rothenberg and everyone else in the room. “As of this evening, Fleet Admiral Rothenberg is now the commanding officer of Seventh Fleet, absorbing both Task Force Midori and convoy X-73’s escort into that formation.”
She saluted him crisply.
Rothenberg shook his head but returned the salute.
“I relieve you, Vice Admiral Conners,” he told the red-headed Trade Factor officer. “Thank you.”
“I stand relieved. Or sit, as the case may be,” Conners concluded with a grin as she retook her seat.
Still shaking his head, Rothenberg faced the crowd.
“It’s not every day you get ambushed like this,” he said dryly. “I should have guessed when I was asked to host this little affair.
“It will take us a few days to sort out the exact chain of command and division of ships and authority,” he continued with a smile.
“I doubt the Alliance has assembled this large a fleet for decorative purposes, but for the moment, our primary purpose is to protect Via Somnia. Many of these ships are supposed to be somewhere else, which means we hope the Commonwealth will underestimate our defenses here.
“If they do, they’re going to get an ugly shock. An even uglier one if they wait a few days.”
Russell leaned forward to hear what the Admiral was suggesting, and he doubted he was the only one.
“The Imperium isn’t the only one to have sent reinforcements. An entire Alliance battle fleet is on its way as well—under Vice Admiral Roberts. My understanding is that the Fox himself won’t be joining Seventh Fleet, which means the Alliance has other work for him.”
Rothenberg grinned evilly.
“I won’t pretend I wouldn’t rather take the offensive myself, but between myself and the Stellar Fox, I don’t think Walkingstick’s going to enjoy the next stage of his plans!”
11
Via Somnia System
12:00 August 21, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-080 Elysium
“EMERGENCE IN FIVE MINUTES,” Captain Novak informed Kyle over the implant network. “Elysium is clean across the board.”
“Thank you, Captain,” he told her. He turned on his flag deck to level a questioning look at Senior Fleet Commander Sterling. “Archie?”
“All ships report green,” his chief of staff replied instantly. “If something has changed since our last update, we’ve got thirteen capital ships ready to kick whoever’s causing trouble all the way back to Earth!”
Kyle smiled.
“That hopefully won’t be required. Last I checked, our update from Via Somnia Control is what…two minutes old?”
“Less,” Sterling said cheerfully. “We’re linked in live. Seventh Fleet is looking big and intimidating.”
“Twenty-six capital ships, fifteen of them Imperial?” Kyle shook his head. “They’d better.”
Once his own convoy, including Forty-First Fleet arrived, Via Somnia would have almost forty capital ships in one place. The largest force Kyle had ever seen before had been twelve—and the most he’d commanded before this convoy had been four.
“Any concerns on Control’s scans?”
“Nothing,” Sterling replied. “Not a peep. If we were hoping for the Commonwealth to stick their nose in this wasps’ nest, I think they’ve chosen to decline.”
“Shame,” Kyle said mildly. “We’ll have to make them reconsider that. Do you have a meeting set up with Rothenberg?”
“Nineteen hundred this evening,” his chief of staff replied instantly. “His chief of staff said they’ve got some of the microbrews the Imperator introduced you to when you visited Coral.”
The Vice Admiral chuckled.
“Somehow, I’m not surprised von Coral passed that tidbit on,” he observed. “What do you think, Archie? Imperial Starburst or no?”
The last battle Kyle had taken Avalon into—while part of Seventh Fleet, in fact—had included his rescuing several hundred thousand prisoners of war, many of them Imperial. In exchange, when he’d passed through Coral on his way Rimward, the Imperator had hung their highest award for valor on him.
“Well, unless I miss my read, this is going to be a knock-down-drag-out fight for which ships go to Forty-First Fleet instead of Seventh,” Sterling noted. “Reminding the Elector that the Imperium owes you isn’t a bad place to start.”
Kyle smiled.
“Mostly, I just want his Federation supercarrier and battleship,” he observed. “But you’re not wrong. I might as well get some use out of the Starburst. I keep having to feed the thing, after all.”
The native coral of the Coraline Imperium’s capital planet had a great deal of symbolic meaning to the Imperials, which meant that, among other things, the platinum-and-coral Imperial Starburst was actually still alive.
Fortunately for it, the Imperator had given Kyle easy-to-follow instructions for taking care of it. They apparently didn’t expect officers to be able to baby their living jewelry, after all.
“I’ll have Lionel lay out my dress uniform with decorations, then,” he admitted with a sigh. “If we’re lucky, this will be the hardest fight of this campaign.”
Somehow, Kyle doubted that was going to be the case.
RIGHTEOUS FIRE WAS ONLY SLIGHTLY MORE than half Elysium’s size, but there were no shortcomings in her crew. Kyle was met by a perfectly turned-out honor guard of Imperial Marines with Admiral Rothenberg waiting beyond them with his chief of staff and Righteous Fire’s commander.
Lord Captain Dietlinde Kistner was a stoutly-built woman with shockingly pale skin and hair, edging almost into full albinism. From her quick, careful, looks around the flight deck as Kyle passed between the honor guard, anyone who embarrassed her in front of the Federation Admiral was going to get an earful.
From the looks of the crew confidently going about their business away from the landed shuttle, that wasn’t going to be much of a worry.
Kyle offered Rothenberg his hand as the Imperial closed the distance with a brisk step.
“Welcome aboard Righteous Fire, Admiral Roberts.”
“Thank you for having me, Admiral Rothenberg,” Kyle told him. “I’ve never been aboard one of your Righteous-class ships.”
Rothenberg smiled.
“I’m sure Captain Kistner would be happy to give you a tour,” he replied. “I know they’re no match for your Sanctuaries, but not much in the galaxy is.”
“You’ll have the Armada designs soon enough,” Kyle murmured. “The Istomins make even the Sanctuaries look slow and lightly armed.”
Project Armada had taken the best technology from all of the Alliance powers, resulting in a carrier that was slightly smaller than a Sanctuary that carried almost a hundred more starfighters, a third again as many missile launchers, and fewer but heavier positron lances.
The Istomin-class supercarrier wasn’t quite as well defended as a Sanctuary, but with over three hundred starfighters and bombers aboard, if someone was actually close enough to shoot at her, they’d done something wrong!
“Three years,” Rothenberg replied, equally softly. “We’ll have the new fighters and bombers first, though I don’t know if they’ll be that large an advantage.”
“We’ll see. I’ve only seen the specs for our eighth-gen starfighter, not the second-generation bombers,” Kyle admitted. “The Reaper is a terrifying piece of hardware. But…” He shrugged. “Months before we’ve produced enough of them to be worth deploying.”
“You go to war with the ships you have, not the ships you’d want,” Rothenberg agreed. “Which, as I understand, is what you and I need to discuss.”
Kyle smiled brightly and buffed the Imperial Starburst.
“Indeed, Admiral. Shall we?”
ROTHENBERG’S OFFICE showed the signs of a room the occupant had lived in for some time. A picture of an older woman accompanied by three children of ages varying from “junior officer” to “barely not toddler”
hung on one wall, the familial resemblance to the Admiral clear in the children.
The only other picture was a painting of the planet Coral from space. The artist had managed to capture the rings of industrial plants and fortifications in a glittering spray of light that turned mechanical necessity into a stark beauty.
The reason for the lack of pictures, however, was that the Imperial Admiral had installed bookshelves in every space he could squeeze them into. They were quality shelves, too, built from a dark real wood Kyle presumed to be native to Coral.
Those shelves were double-stacked with paper books, about forty percent fiction and the rest physics, sociology and military history texts. Kyle was familiar with many of the reference texts, though he’d read them via implant download back when his implant capacity had been greater.
“My hobby,” Rothenberg explained, gesturing at the shelves as he took his desk. “I don’t have as much implant bandwidth as most, so I find paper easier to intake than a straight datastream.”
If the Admiral’s implant bandwidth was below average, it was impressive that he’d had a military career at all, let alone risen as high as he had with the reputation he’d earned along the way.
“When I lost my bandwidth, I was carrying a data tablet for months,” Kyle replied. “It was easier to read things on a screen than to deal with the limits of my implant. That was mostly an adjustment, though.”
A near miss from an antimatter missile had destroyed Kyle’s original implant. The damage had scarred portions of his brain, meaning he could not longer link into an implant to nearly the same capacity he’d had before.
Neural Scarification Induced Implant Degradation. NSIID. A plain acronym for a disorder that had taken Kyle out of a starfighter cockpit and put him on the bridge of a starship.
“I’ve read your file,” Rothenberg said. “From everything I saw, you were lucky to live at all!”
“I owe that to Williams. Who is now CAG aboard my flagship, so I think we all did well out of that,” Kyle noted with a chuckle.
“The Alliance did well out of you living,” the Imperial said. “No one is going to say you singlehandedly turned the tide of the war or anything, but you’ve done well by us.”
“I try,” the younger man said cheerfully. “And now, it seems, you and I get to arm-wrestle over how many ships I get to try my next stunt with.”
Rothenberg laughed.
“Am I cleared to even know what your ‘next stunt’ is?”
“Yes, actually,” Kyle told him. “You’re just not cleared to know what you’re doing with the ships I leave you!”
The senior Admiral shook his head, still laughing.
“That is strange, you have to admit.”
“My mission kicks off now,” Kyle said. “Yours… Well, I can’t say more without telling you things that might cost me my commission.”
“Fair,” Rothenberg allowed. “So, what is your mission, then?”
“To cause bloody havoc along the frontier,” Kyle explained. “I need to interrupt Walkingstick’s offensive by making the systems along the border scream for help. Most of our offensives so far have been specific and directed, targeting Commonwealth fleet bases or retaking systems we lost.
“This will be neither of those things,” he said grimly. “I’m going to bounce from system to system along the frontier, smashing local defense forces and forcing them to evacuate, and shred orbital industry.”
There’d be a fine line to walk there. Destroying industry was one thing. Doing so without evacuating people was an atrocity—one even the Commonwealth generally avoided except when their fanatics got stupid.
He had no intention of causing a single civilian casualty he didn’t have to. That might mean he’d have to leave some system’s industry mostly intact to evade Commonwealth retaliation—but given that his purpose was to pull those ships away from attacking the Alliance, that was fine by him.
“That’s overdue,” Rothenberg noted. “Damn. They’re not going to see it coming, are they?”
“Even in the last war, we fought mostly defensively,” Kyle agreed. “No inhabited Commonwealth system has been taken, even temporarily, by an enemy—ever.” His smile was cheerful. “I figure we can wreck, oh, somewhere between four and six before Walkingstick catches up.”
Some of those systems were critical to Walkingstick’s logistics, but only some of them would be. He had enough intelligence to target just the important systems, but he didn’t want to be obvious about having it.
“So, you want, what, everything?” the Imperial asked.
Kyle grinned.
“Nah. That would be overkill—and you’re going to need them. What can you give me?” he asked.
“I’ve already been told I won’t keep Avalon or Kronos,” Rothenberg replied. “That gives you at least three ships, two supercarriers and a superbattleship. Out of what you brought, what was already marked for Forty-First Fleet?”
“Elysium, Gaia and Carolus Rex,” Kyle reeled off. “That gives me five. I want Genghis Khan, Admiral.”
“That leaves me with just Napoleon for modern ships,” the Imperial objected.
“And if I thought you’d give her to me, I’d ask for Napoleon,” Kyle pointed out. “Instead, I’m open for suggestions. I need a minimum of ten ships, Admiral, and as big and as ugly as I can get.”
Rothenberg shook his head, but he was grinning.
“I’m not giving you every modern battlecruiser I’ve got,” he said firmly. “But I do have Magellan, and that kind of raiding operation is probably a better use for battleships than whatever I’m doing.”
Magellan was a Renaissance Trade Factor battleship, roughly three quarters of the size of the two Titan-class ships.
“Three battleships, two battlecruisers, two carriers,” Kyle noted. “Not much of a fleet to play matador to Marshal Walkingstick.”
“I can’t let you go out on this kind of operation without any Imperial contribution,” Rothenberg told him. “Righteous Light, Righteous Sword and Righteous Voice would bring you up to your ten, wouldn’t they?”
Kyle’s grin widened. Three fleet carriers backing up his two supercarriers would make this whole endeavor extraordinarily painful for the Commonwealth.
“That would bring me up to ten indeed,” he confirmed. “They’re each carrying, what, four of your squadrons of Vultures?”
“Forty bombers apiece,” Rothenberg confirmed. “Plus a hundred and twenty Arrow-B types. If that would be acceptable?”
“I don’t know what the Commonwealth is going to think, but I’ll take it,” Kyle agreed. “I was expecting more of a fight, to be honest.”
The Imperial Admiral laughed.
“Seventh Fleet still has twenty-nine starships, Admiral Roberts,” he pointed out. “Even slicing off ten for your Forty-First Fleet, I still have one of the largest fleet commands the Alliance has ever assembled.”
Kyle nodded. What Rothenberg didn’t know was that Seventh Fleet was supposed to receive another tranche of reinforcements—at least four ships each from the Star Kingdom of Phoenix and the Renaissance Trade Factor.
Once they arrived, Rothenberg would command the single largest concentration of force the Alliance had ever put together. Which meant that despite Kyle’s not having been briefed on the target allocation, he knew exactly where Seventh Fleet was going.
“I’ll need time to work them up as a unit,” he noted. “There won’t be any penny-packet deploying this time. We’ve put together a sledgehammer and I don’t want to miss with it.”
“No one wants you to,” the Imperial replied. “I don’t know what your orders are, Admiral Roberts, not in detail. Any assistance Seventh Fleet or Via Somnia can provide, however, we will be glad to give.
“Let me be the first to wish you good luck!”
“I’ll take it, but I hope to not need it,” Kyle told him. “If I have my way, shock and aggression are all I’ll need!”
12
Via Somnia Sy
stem
12:00 August 22, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-062 Normandy
“SOMEBODY’S TRYING TOO HARD,” Russell murmured, watching the enemy starfighters flare out in front of him.
“Sir?” his gunner, Jan Hu, asked. “I don’t get it.”
“They know they’re working for the Fox, so they’re trying to be clever,” he concluded. “And they’re expecting us to try and be clever.”
He thought a sequence of commands at the tactical feed, highlighting what he’d picked up. “Their vectors are designed to swing them around us, stopping us from flanking them and opening up a whole bunch of sensor angles to stop us pulling, say, the Spartacus Protocol on them.”
“I see…” Hu said slowly.
“But they’ve spread themselves thin and only about ten percent of them will have lance range on us if we go straight down the middle,” the CAG said fiercely. “Which means…
“All units, form on SFG-292-Actual,” he snapped over the main net. “I’ve spotted a hole and I’m taking everybody right into it!”
“Follow Rokos,” Ozolinsh immediately confirmed. “I think I see it too. This is risky if they’re playing us, Rokos.”
Russell checked the vectors.
“I could see Roberts doing that,” he admitted to his boss. “But these guys…they’re trying to be clever like they think he’d want, but they didn’t think it all the way through. They’ve committed hard to the counter-flank.”
“And far too obviously,” Ozolinsh agreed. “You’ve got the shot, Rokos. Let’s take it.”
The AI running the simulations was smart. Very smart. It could tell when the humans had made decisions and committed to a course of action and accelerated the apparent “time” in the simulation. “Minutes” flicked by in seconds as the hundreds of thousands of virtual kilometers blinked away.
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 8
