For himself, he’d closed a full light-minute towards Ferelden and would shortly cross the two light-minute line where it would be no longer wise to enter Alcubierre drive.
He smiled.
“Let’s give it another ten minutes,” he observed calmly. “Then pass this course to the fleet.”
Sterling looked at the numbers he’d sent him, then stared at him levelly.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re insane?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kyle admitted. “Why? Don’t you think our navigators are up to it?”
His chief of staff shook his head.
“They’ll be up for it,” Sterling replied grimly. “Because if any of them didn’t start practicing this bullshit after they learned you were in command, they haven’t been paying attention!”
TEN MINUTES LATER, Force Bravo’s starfighters were a long way away from their motherships and base stations. The Ocean-class strike cruisers had been denied a role in the fight the moment Forty-First Fleet had turned away from Kirkwall and remained in the gas giant’s orbit, sheepdogs above the cloudscoops and defense stations.
Force Alpha was now accelerating out to meet the Alliance, their course clearly carefully calibrated to reduce the engagement time before Bravo’s fighters arrived.
It was all a very clever setup, making the best of the Commonwealth’s limited resources and taking advantage of Kyle’s swing from attacking Kirkwall to moving against the weaker force above Ferelden.
What they’d missed, however, was that Kyle’s swing had left his fleet moving through space where they could still bring up their Alcubierre-Stetson drives. With less than five minutes to spare before they moved too close to Ferelden to do so, all thirteen Alliance ships brought up their FTL drives and charged for Kirkwall.
The logistics freighters swung wide, their course taking them well clear of the battlespace, where they’d be safe while the warships secured the system.
The warships went straight for the gas giant. For two minutes, they moved through space that was flat enough for A-S drive…and then they hit Kirkwall’s gravity.
“Threading the needle”, it was called. Riding the thin line between a warp bubble collapsing and dropping the ship back into normal space unexpectedly and the warp bubble shredding its contents.
Few people were insane enough to do with one ship, let alone ten.
The very air in Elysium’s flag bridge seemed to scream as a thousand tiny gravity vortexes tore through the ship, and the massive warship jerked around her crew as she charged deep into the gas giant’s gravity.
The “needle” only lasted two minutes. It felt like two years…and then Forty-First Fleet erupted back into reality, the gravity warp dissolving as the Alliance warships emerged barely a million kilometers from the Ocean-class strike cruisers and the defense platforms.
Genghis Khan and Righteous Sword had fallen off the needle, the battlecruiser and carrier emerging twelve million kilometers behind the rest of the fleet.
It didn’t matter. None of the carriers or cruisers mattered.
What mattered was that Kyle’s crazy trick had delivered Kronos and Gaia to well within the range of their massive, megaton-and-a-half-a-second positron lances.
Even Magellan’s one-point-two megaton lances were redundant. Ten seconds after Forty-First Fleet emerged from Alcubierre-Stetson drive, every Commonwealth warship and military installation in Kirkwall orbit was fire and debris.
“Bring us about,” Kyle ordered grimly. “Get me a status on Force Alpha and Force Bravo’s starfighters.”
He smiled thinly.
“And then get me a radio relay.”
THE TWO COMMONWEALTH forces were maneuvering to rendezvous, combining all of the starfighters into a single force with the Assassins for fire support. With Kyle in control of Kirkwall orbital space, however, they now had to choose if they were going to come to him or let him continue to control the pace of the engagement.
For now, however, it was time to talk.
He leaned casually back in his chair and smiled at the pickup as they started recording.
“Commonwealth forces, this is Vice Admiral Kyle Roberts of the Alliance Forty-First Fleet,” he told them. “I won’t deny your courage, but I think enough people have already died here today.
“I am going to take the Starkhaven System,” he continued. “I would prefer to do so with you as prisoners, but make no mistake, I will take this star system.
“I am prepared to discuss the terms of your surrender,” he said gently. “I think you will find I am prepared to be quite reasonable.”
He sent the message, then turned his attention back to the sensor feed, considering his next moves.
“Think they’ll take you up on it?” Sterling asked.
“No,” he admitted. “They’re going to throw every one of those starfighters at us. The question”—he tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair—“is the battlecruisers.”
“The cruisers, sir?”
“If they’re smart, they know this is a lost cause,” Kyle explained. “Walkingstick himself might order them out of the system. It’s not the most…politically expedient decision, but it makes a lot of sense from a pure military perspective.”
“Won’t change much, will it?” his chief of staff asked.
“Not today,” Kyle agreed. “Even if they take their starfighters with them, they can’t take the Zions’ birds or the Oceans’. That’s still almost eight hundred starfighters and bombers they’d leave behind.”
Twelve Zions between the two planets. Three strike cruisers. Two battle cruisers. The Assassins could only carry sixty starfighters—and there were eight hundred and forty Commonwealth fighters and bombers in the star system.
“So, what do we do?”
“We take the system. Do we have damage reports for Khan and Sword?”
“We do. Both erred on the side of dropping out rather than taking damage; they’re a little fried around the edges but otherwise fine. Kronos, on the other hand, rode it too hard,” Sterling reported. “She’ll be fine in the long run, but her Class One Mass Manipulators are badly misaligned.”
“So, she can fight, but she can’t run,” Kyle concluded. The Class Ones were the largest and most powerful of the mass manipulators that served a thousand different functions aboard a starship. They were the only ones that could generate the miniature black holes necessary to establish an Alcubierre bubble.
If Kronos’s Class Ones were misaligned, she wouldn’t be able to go FTL until they were fixed.
“Estimated repair time?” he asked.
“Twenty-four hours,” Sterling said instantly. “Can’t do it while under fire, though.”
“Of course not,” Kyle allowed. “Fortunately for Captain Blue, I have no intention of leaving this system that quickly.
“Aurangzeb.” He turned to the ops officer. “Pass the order to the Fleet: formation Mu, deploy all starfighters.
“No more games, people,” he continued to his staff. “We head straight for Ferelden and see how much spine the Terrans have today!”
21
Starkhaven System
17:00 September 16, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
“GO! GO! GO!”
The words echoed in the cramped cockpit of Michelle’s starfighter, moments before a moderately grumpy god sat on her chest.
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 adjusting 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 Elysium’s launch tubes 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 the massive railgun surrounding Michelle fired.
Ten gravities slammed Michelle Williams-Alvarez and the rest of her crews into the back of their chairs, but the launch was over in fractions of a second, allowing her to breathe again.
“Form up, form up,” she barked over the tactical net. “Clear the tube launch paths; everyone else is coming out after us!”
Every carrier in Forty-First Fleet had been built around a sixty-second standard launch. In the space of one minute, the Fleet went from ten capital ships maneuvering to match velocities toward Ferelden on their own to having over eleven hundred starfighters and bombers in space around them.
“Defensive formations,” Lakatos ordered. “We stick with the fleet for now, hold acceleration to match the capital ships.”
Nothing truly stopped a capital ship from pulling the same acceleration as a starfighter. There were several plateaus or “tiers” in the efficiency curve of the mix between mass manipulators and antimatter engines. Starfighters rode Tier Three, around five hundred gravities, where warships usually rode Tier Two, around two hundred gravities.
The difference in fuel efficiency was roughly four orders of magnitude. A starship could accelerate at Tier Three—but it cost them over ninety-nine percent of their delta-V.
It was much cheaper for starfighters to do it—but it also saved fuel when the smaller ships kept pace with their parent vessels.
“We’ll see what the Terrans do next,” Michelle murmured, studying the formation around her. The Alliance fighters would crush their Commonwealth equivalents, the numbers alone guaranteed that—but eight hundred Katanas would take their toll of Alliance fighters along the way.
FORTY-FIRST FLEET MOVED AWAY from Kirkwall, leaving the wreckage of the first set of defenders they’d clashed with behind them as the Alliance force headed toward Ferelden. With the starfighters spreading out around them, their engines formed a glittering wall in space.
“Incoming transmission from the planet,” Aurangzeb reported. “Looks like the Governor.”
“Hopefully, this one is smarter than the last,” Kyle said. “Play it.”
The woman who appeared on his screen was one of the tiniest adults he’d ever seen. She made it work, somehow, with an outfit that accentuated a clearly adult figure and a hairstyle that stacked her dark red hair up high enough to bring her to perhaps a hundred and fifty centimeters tall.
“I am Miriam Chae-Won,” she introduced herself. No title or rank, but Kyle’s implant quickly confirmed that she was the Governor of Ferelden, in the middle of her third term.
“It is not within my mandate to order the surrender of the Commonwealth forces in this system,” the tiny woman told them. “I am prepared to offer a compromise: we will not intervene with the evacuation or destruction of the military cloudscoops around Kirkwall, and you will withdraw with no further interference.
“If you approach this planet, however, the forces assembled around us will defend my people to their utmost. I can accept what I must, Admiral Roberts, but I also must do my duty.”
The message ended and Kyle sighed.
“Well, she’s smarter than the last one,” he admitted. “Possibly even more stubborn.”
He shook his head. He could respect where she was coming from, but it didn’t leave him a lot of choice.
“No response,” he told Sterling. “Keep the fleet on course. How long until we engage the enemy?”
“A little over two hours to turnover,” his chief of staff replied. “We’ll enter Ferelden orbit in four hours, seven minutes.
“Assuming they don’t come out to meet us, we’ll make torpedo range thirty-five minutes before that. Starfighter missile range twenty-five minutes afterwards. Heavy lance range somewhere in between.”
“And when the starfighters come to meet us?” Kyle asked.
Sterling shrugged.
“About seventy-five minutes earlier for all of those if they leave the starships behind.”
“They’ll leave them behind,” Kyle concluded. “I bet you a hundred stellars the cruisers are gone by then.”
“That would make sense,” Sterling agreed. “But when has the Commonwealth ever made decisions based on what makes sense?”
“When Walkingstick was in command. And this whole sector is under Walkingstick’s authority.”
“THERE GO THE CRUISERS,” Michelle murmured, watching as the two Assassins broke away from the cluster of starfighters.
“What are they doing?” Eklund asked, the gunner looking over the feed. “Looks like they’re scooping up fighters as they go…”
“They’ve been ordered to pull out,” the Vice-Commodore told him. “They know they can’t hold, so someone with a brain is salvaging what they can.” She studied the sensor feed and shook her head.
“And they’re not scooping up fighters, Lieutenant,” she pointed out. “They’re loading up the bombers. All of them. That’s…going to be cramped, but it looks like they packed all one hundred and twenty bombers aboard.”
That was telling. If nothing else, it meant that Walkingstick was being careful about expending his bombers.
On the other hand, it still left six hundred-plus seventh-generation starfighters coming out to meet Forty-First Fleet. Michelle and her compatriots outnumbered that force almost two to one, but the question wasn’t if the Alliance was going to win.
It was how badly they were going to get hurt—and six hundred Katanas could dish out a lot of hurt.
“Commodore Lakatos. Do we pursue the cruisers?” she asked the Fleet CAG. They could, after all, break free from the Fleet and pursue the Assassins.
“Negative,” Admiral Roberts cut into the channel. “I’m not trading starfighter crews we can’t spare for a pair of obsolete battlecruisers. Hold formation.
“We’ll take this slow and easy, let them come to us, and whittle them down as they do.”
“ANY CLEVER IDEAS, BOSS?” Sterling asked, the older officer watching as the Alliance fleet hurtled towards the defending starfighters.
“Nothing that isn’t more likely to get a battleship killed than anything else,” Kyle admitted. He could see three different ways to catch the cruisers and a few ways to surprise the fighter strike, but all of them were risky—and his opponents would be watching for something clever now.
“Order to the fleet. Target the Zions,” he told Aurangzeb. “Long-range missile fire. If we can take those out, it opens up options.”
“What kind of options?” his chief of staff asked as the missiles began to flare out. It would take most of an hour for the weapons to reach their targets, but they’d do so well before the real clash between the defenders and Forty-First Fleet began.
“I’m not sure yet,” Kyle admitted. They had time, right now, but their options were limited. A few hundred missiles wouldn’t make that big a dent in his ammunition stockpiles, but would make certain the platforms in Ferelden orbit didn’t contribute to the fight.
“Adjust our course,” he ordered after a moment. “Keep us outside the gravity well as long as possible. Let’s see what they do.”
He smiled as a thought struck him. “Force Bravo’s fighters can’t have that much fuel left,” he noted. “Chasing us hither and fro across the star system. The bombers went aboard the cruisers, but…everyone else is still running on their original fuel load.
“Let’s see if we can make them dance.”
Minutes ticked away as Forty-First Fleet arced away from the planet, adjusting their orbit away from the enemy, forcing the starfighters to adjust their courses again. And again. And again.
The missiles flashed past the defending starfighters, at a long-enough range that only a handful fell prey to the Commonwealth crews’ attempts to defend their home base. Then…
“Somebody did the math,” Aurangzeb announced. “The Zions are aban
doning. Escape pods and shuttles across the board.”
“Can you tell if they’re keeping a skeleton crew aboard or stripping them completely?” Kyle asked.
“Not from this range. It won’t matter,” his ops officer continued. “Skeleton crew will be dead in twenty minutes. They can’t stop that salvo.”
“Is there anything else in orbit that can service starfighters?” Kyle said.
His staff pored over the scanner data for several minutes, making sure they had the right answer. They had the time, still.
“A few things,” Sterling finally told him. “Nothing that can do so in bulk, nothing that can rearm them. Just refuel and resupply life support, maybe twenty birds at a time across the entire orbital infrastructure.”
“So, they’re in last-stand territory,” Kyle said softly, watching as the Assassins vanished into Alcubierre drive on the other side of the planet. “They can’t win. They have no second chances. They’ve got one chance to hurt us as much as they can.”
“We could summon them to surrender?” Sterling suggested.
“No, Commander, they won’t surrender,” the Vice Admiral replied. “We wouldn’t, and sadly, I have faith in both their courage and their skill.”
He sighed.
“No. We’ve played this game out as far as we can. Everyone knows where we’re at. If they were going to surrender, they would have.
“Take us in, gentlemen. Have the capital ships stand by for long-range lance engagement.” He grimaced. “We won’t hit many of them with the big beams, but every one of them we take out early is one that isn’t shooting at our people.”
NO STARFIGHTER PILOT was going to turn down going into battle with the big boys in formation, but Michelle had to admit it was a little bit disconcerting. The entire purpose of starfighters, after all, was to go out and mix it up because they were expendable and capital ships weren’t.
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 14
