Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon

by Glynn Stewart

  She’d been designed so that no matter where his squadron approached from, they’d be facing roughly half of the battleship’s guns – easily thirty ninety-kiloton-per-second anti-starfighter guns backing up the nine megaton-per-second positron lances of her main battery.

  The ship’s deflectors were also much more powerful than his Falcons, which meant that Wing Commander Roberts could start picking them off from almost twice the range at which their own main guns could hit the starship’s hull.

  If Avalon had been present in the scenario, the battleship could likely have ended the entire battle in a single salvo of her main guns – though the old carrier’s new arsenal would probably have put enough antimatter and missiles in space to ruin the Commonwealth commander’s day.

  Missiles. Even as Stanford finished his first gasp of shock at the presence of the battleship, a plan popped into his head.

  “All right everyone, you see the big boy,” he told the Group over the radio. “Wedge formation, Echo Squadron on point. All ships, fire a full missile salvo on the battleship. Interface your AIs, get me maximum vector dispersals – I want a shield, people, not a spear.”

  Of the other four squadron commanders, Stanford knew at least two would have objected to his order putting them in the brunt of the fire. Rokos simply grunted as the starfighters sprang into action around Stanford. Every one of the forty-eight ships fired four Starfire XI missiles. Even as the Falcons began to blaze forward at five hundred gravities, the missiles shot forward at just over a thousand.

  “Echo Squadron, Foxtrot Squadron,” Stanford continued as the assault began. “You’re the ECM shield. Keep their sensors distracted – and as you’re doing it, keep throwing missiles at them.”

  “Once Echo and Foxtrot are bingo on missiles, Charlie and Delta will move up to cover us all,” he ordered. “Once you’re bingo, Alpha and Bravo will move up – that should get us to one fifty kilos.”

  The warbook in his computer insisted that at one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, the Falcon’s fifty kiloton-per-second positron lances would burn through the Resolute’s magnetic deflectors. He hoped they were right, because he wasn’t sure how many ships he’d have left by that point.

  “Go,” he murmured softly, knowing the computers would carry his words to everyone in SFG-001’s tactical net.

  They’d been en-route for sixty seconds, and barely begun to close the range even at five kilometers per second squared, when the first positron beams started to flicker out from the battleship. Between the electronic counter-measures being thrown out by the missiles themselves, plus Rokos’ squadron’s support, all of the missiles and fighters survived.

  That, Stanford knew, wouldn’t last.

  “Random-walk, people,” he ordered. “Keep them guessing!”

  Roberts had to be using AI routines to run most of the battleship’s weapons, even in a simulated environment. That meant a little human randomness would throw them off, possibly carry a few more of them through.

  By ninety seconds in, the Resolute had shredded more than fifty missiles. Echo and Foxtrot squadron fired again, adding another sixty to the shield bearing down on the battleship – a threat the warship’s defenses could handle, but also one it had to respect.

  Eighty second later, the first ships died as more missiles fell – and positron lances began to smash into the front wave fighters. Echo and Foxtrot held under fire for another ten seconds, salvoing more missiles to continue covering the Group’s advance, and then fell back as Charlie and Delta swept forward. For a moment four squadrons worth of counter-measures filled the space around SFG-001 and even Stanford couldn’t make out his ships.

  When the chaff cleared, the exchange was over – two fresh squadrons spearheaded the charge, and the eleven surviving fighters of Echo and Foxtrot’s sixteen fell back inside the cone held by Alpha and Bravo.

  Charlie and Delta weren’t as lucky. Stanford watched, as calmly as he could, as Lancet and Zhao’s squadrons writhed in the battleship’s defensive fire. Their deflectors brushed away most of the light positron lances – but enough hit home to wipe away half of both squadrons by the time they were running out of missiles.

  Then a lucky hit from the main guns took out Lancet’s ship, and Charlie squadron’s tactical network collapsed. It took precious seconds to restore – seconds that Wing Commander Roberts didn’t give his people.

  “Alpha and Bravo, moved forward to pick up the slack,” Stanford ordered sharply. “Echo and Foxtrot, support us with countermeasures. Full missile salvo – everything we’ve got left!”

  Not a single ship of Charlie squadron remained as twenty-seven other starfighters surged forward. Only two of Delta’s eight starfighters remained, and Stanford watched grimly as the intimidating bulk of the battleship lunged towards them.

  Missiles blasted out from his remaining ships, a hundred-plus bird salvo that the battleship had to acknowledge.

  “AI, link to all missiles for remote detonation,” Stanford ordered silently as his fighters charged forward behind their missile shield. Now they were close enough that the deflectors were failing to stop any direct hit from the battleship’s positron lances.

  “Now,” he snapped, and the computer obeyed.

  Scattered across the two hundred thousand kilometers between his Starfighter Group and the Resolute, the ninety-three surviving one-gigaton antimatter warheads detonated. Space descended into a hash of radio waves and radiation, his starfighter computers showing an extrapolation of where the ships would be.

  For a battleship, a kilometer long and rated for two hundred gravities of acceleration, that extrapolation could allow hits. For a starfighter, thirty meters long and rated for five hundred gravities, it reduced the hit chance to almost nothing.

  “Blast through and hit him!” Stanford snapped over the channel, hoping that the com system’s lasers would get through.

  Moments later, his ship blasted clear of enough of the cloud to target the battleship – only one hundred and forty thousand kilometers away!

  The little starfighter jerked as the simulated zero point cells opened up their antimatter capacitors. A stream of positrons, skimmed from the quantum froth underlying reality, blasted away from the Falcon at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.

  Other beams joined his, ripping into the battleship and turning its mighty armor into explosives that tore themselves apart. The positron lances tore deep into the warship, shredding machinery, systems – and zero point cells.

  Moments later, antimatter capacitors ruptured under the barrage and the battleship disappeared in a sharply white explosion.

  Nine of SFG-001’s starfighters survived the final round of counter-fire to watch the battleship die. Alpha Actual wasn’t one of them.

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  14:00 August 4, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Group Briefing Room

  Roberts watched as all one hundred and forty-odd of Starfighter Group 001’s pilots, gunners and flight engineers filed into the briefing room. Unlike many other aspects of the old carrier, Avalon’s briefing room had been designed to hold the entire fighter group crew when the ship had been laid down.

  “All right people,” he said cheerfully. “Today, you killed a battleship. Not bad. Of course, if that had been a real battleship, Flight Commander Stanford and I would have been writing a lot of ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson’ letters tonight, so let’s go over what didn’t go right.”

  “You sent us up against a fucking battleship,” a voice snapped from the back. “How the hell was that a fair fight?!”

  Kyle’s implant identified the speaker as a Gunner from Zhao’s Charlie Squadron. The loss of their tac-net had shredded that squadron, so he expected some bitterness from them. Enough so that he’d overlook the insubordination. Mostly.

  “You’re right,” he agreed cheerfully. “That wasn’t a realistic scenario – Commonwealth doctrine would call for a battleship like the Resolute to be accompanied
by a carrier. A hundred or so Scimitars or Darkswords would have rendered the entire strike by our group moot, don’t you think?”

  The Scimitar was the Terran Commonwealth’s current front-line fighter, roughly equivalent to the Federation’s Cobras. Darkswords were older, a slightly better starfighter than the Federation’s Tempests. Rumor had it that they had a seventh generation fighter like the Falcon in development, but hadn’t deployed any yet.

  “For that matter,” Roberts continued, his smile warmer than his words, “the appropriate counter-tactic to Commander Stanford’s missile shield is to use heavy missiles as area effect weapons against us.”

  “Given those two caveats, however, deploying the Group against a battleship is hardly ‘unfair.’ Avalon and her fighter group have thirty-six capital ship kills to our credit. SFG-001 has killed battleships before – and I want us ready to do it again.”

  “Nine of forty-eight came home,” Kyle told his people softly. “From the perspective of the Joint Chiefs, thirty-nine starfighters for a battleship is a fair trade. One hundred and twenty lives and eighty billion Stellars of Federation hardware, trade for approximately twenty-five hundred lives and sixty trillion Stellars of starship.”

  He let the numbers sink in.

  “There is no theoretical reason why a carrier or battleship can’t be built for starfighter accelerations, people,” he reminded them. “The fuel cost would be outrageous, which is why we don’t, but it would be doable. A battleship or cruiser’s positron lances and missiles are vastly more powerful and longer ranged than those on a starfighter.”

  “But even the mightiest battleship in the era of antimatter weapons is an eggshell armed with a sledgehammer. And a fifty trillion Stellar warship isn’t expendable.”

  “A two billion Stellar starfighter is,” Wing Commander Roberts finished bluntly. “Our role is to be expended, and to protect our carrier in the process.”

  “My job is to make sure as few of us are expended as possible. I do not like ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson’ letters. If we ever have to fight a battleship, I want to bring more than twenty-seven of you home!”

  “So, given that as a starting point, let’s look at how we did – and what we can do better.”

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  17:00 August 4, 2735 ESMDT

  DSC-001 Avalon – CAG’s Office

  “Have a seat, Michael,” Kyle told his subordinate with a smile as they entered his office. The last four weeks had been too busy to do much to customize the Space Force Standard furniture and decoration, but he had installed a mini-fridge. New Amazon had some amazing breweries, and he pulled a pair of beers from the fridge, sliding one across the table to Stanford.

  The Flight Commander grabbed the bottle carefully, and gave his Wing Commander a dark look.

  “A beer is supposed to make up for that three hour grilling you just gave me?” he asked.

  “Ha, no,” Roberts replied. “If I’d spent three hours grilling you, you probably wouldn’t be getting the beer. Only about forty minutes of that was on your performance.”

  “Point,” Stanford accepted, cracking open the bottle. “We are still on duty,” he observed.

  “My Deck, my rules,” Kyle ordered. “For not expecting me to dump wing command in your lap and probably expecting a more generous scenario – like some of our pilots – I’m actually impressed you manage to take down the Resolute.”

  “Would have been nice had I lived,” Stanford pointed out mildly. “You’d have been writing ‘Dear Mrs. Stanford’ to my mother.”

  Kyle shivered, and it wasn’t entirely feigned.

  “Mothers suck,” he admitted softly. “None of those letters are fun, but telling my pilots’ moms they aren’t coming home is second only to telling their kids.”

  He knew from Stanford’s record that the junior man had never had to write the family of a fallen officer. Not many officers in the peacetime Federation had.

  “Gulf?” Stanford asked quietly.

  “The Gulf and a few suicides,” Kyle confirmed softly. He’d been promoted to Wing Commander after leading the strike on the Ansem Gulf – a passenger liner boarded and captured by pirates. The pirates had waited for the Castle Federation Marines to board, and then revealed they’d used the two weeks it had taken the Navy to catch them to arm the civilian starship.

  Of the Alamo’s forty-eight starfighters, seven had died in the first salvo – including Wing Commander Rani Desai. By the time Kyle had managed to re-organize the fighter group and disable the weapons mounts, fifteen starfighters – and forty five crew-men and -women – were gone, along with a third of Peng Wa’s Marines.

  Most of the Navy and the Space Force figured that most other commanders would have fallen back – potentially saving more of the squadron, but abandoning six hundred Marines and fifteen thousand civilians. Kyle had counter-attacked.

  The promotion, accolades, and the knowledge of fifteen thousand saved lives had been a frail shield against those forty-five letters.

  “Hence kicking the shit out of the squadron in sims?” Stanford asked timidly after a moment.

  Kyle shook himself and nodded. “I figure the more I kill our people in simulations, the less likely it is some coked up pirate with a sixty year old mass driver or, God forbid, an actual Commonwealth attack, will kill them.”

  “Speaking of our people, how did Williams do?” he asked, taking a long sip of his own beer. He wasn’t inclined to play favorites, but if anyone in the group deserved a little extra attention, it was the one brave enough to turn down a legitimate Article Seventeen discharge because they wanted to serve.

  “We gave her less than an hour to get to know her new crew,” Stanford replied slowly, considering. “She didn’t survive – but she outlasted me by three quarters of a second.”

  “She’s good, boss, and I’m glad to have her back aboard,” he continued. “That’s our last empty slot filled – with Williams back on active duty, we have a full flight group. Any word on when we ship out?”

  “The last of the holes are patched in the ship,” Kyle told him. “Our Group is a little rustier than I’d like, but we can run sims while under A-S drive. I know the Navy-side was running full power drills on the new main battery while we were debriefing our people, and my implant tells me they fully checked out.”

  The Wing Commander checked his implants for the note he expected to find, and nodded cheerfully as he saw the quick heads up from the Captain.

  “Captain is still checking in with Joint Command,” he told Stanford, “but he’s expecting to ship out at nineteen hundred hours tomorrow. There’ll be a formal notice, but you can pass a quiet word to the Chiefs.”

  “Can do,” the Flight Commander confirmed. “It’ll be good to see the Old Lady move again. It’s been too long for her.”

  “Hell, Commander, it’s been too long for me,” Roberts told his subordinate with a chuckle, “and I’ve only been sitting dead in space for a month!”

  9

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  05:00 August 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – Bridge

  The bridge of a twenty-eighth century warship is an inherently calm, quiet, place. Most of the scurrying and conversations took place either in specialized departments hidden away in Avalon’s hull, or entirely inside the ship’s network.

  An even dozen reclining chairs, easily conformed to a user’s personal taste, formed two semi-circles around the center dais. Each chair had a pair of medium sized screens, adjustable to show whatever the occupant desired, but the real working connection was the cyber-jack at the back of each of the seats.

  Kyle was certain that the wall-screens that wrapped the entire room in a perfect replica of the space outside the carrier were there entirely for the eight observer seats at the back of the bridge. With the carrier about to make her first Alcubierre-Stetson voyage in ten years, he’d expected the seats to be full, but only five had been t
aken.

  Avalon had been under way for ten hours now, having left the New Amazon station behind in a flare of superheated exhaust. The ship’s immense mass manipulators reduced her mass exponentially, allowing immense matter-antimatter thrusters to propel her twelve million tons with a reaction that, at least theoretically, mirrored the rockets mankind had first touched the stars with.

  Now, however, they were clearing the gravitational safety zones around the various planets, stations, asteroid belts and other miscellanea that made up a star system, and about to leap to the stars. It was a sight Kyle never grew tired of.

  “Navigation, please confirm that we have cleared all detectable gravity zones,” Captain Blair requested aloud. For all of the instant data transfer available to the crew, tradition demanded certain orders and requests be spoken aloud.

  Like the bubble of stars surrounding the bridge crew, it was probably for the observer.

  “All identified gravitational objects are beyond effect range,” the navigator reported from her couch. “Current gravitational force is beneath one pico-meter per second squared. We are prepared to warp space on your command.”

  “Engineering, please confirm status of Class One mass manipulators,” Blair ordered.

  The Avalon had dozens of Class Two and Class Three mass manipulators throughout her hull, even discounting those aboard her parasite craft like Roberts’ fighters. Under the power of those devices’ ability to generate and manipulate mass and gravity, she could fly and fight – but it took something more to outspeed light.

  “All five Class One’s are at ninety-nine-plus percent,” the junior engineer on the bridge reported aloud. “Engineering reports prepared to warp space.”

  The Class One mass manipulators were an order of magnitude larger and more powerful than any others of their kind. In some ways they were the simplest, and had been the first built, but their sheer scale made them an immense undertaking. Avalon’s five Class Ones represented over sixty percent of the original cost of her construction. Four were required to warp space, with the fifth standing by in case there was a problem.