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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Understood, sir.” Avalon’s Captain eyed the feed, studying the position of the ships and the depot. “The joker in the deck is still the question of what, if anything, is hiding behind the moon,” he admitted. “I intend to keep Stanford’s fighters aboard until we see how the depot responds to Triumphant.”

  He turned to Anderson.

  “I want Q-probes on route to the depot and on an intercept course for Triumphant,” Kyle ordered. “Do everything you can to keep them undetected – but we need to know what’s going on now, not what was happening half an hour ago.”

  Tobin’s face was calm, not giving any hints as to what the Vice Admiral was thinking when Kyle turned back to him.

  “We’ll get him, sir,” the Captain told him.

  07:00 January 14, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Flight Control Center

  There was a feed from the carrier’s sensors running in the Flight Control Center attached to the main flight deck. When Michael entered the room, every eye was focused on it, even though it didn’t show anything exciting.

  Triumphant continued her course towards the depot. No one at the base had taken any action beyond pulling the fighter patrols in and placing those twenty fighters between the orbiting platforms and the battleship.

  With confirmation that his fighters wouldn’t be called for immediately, Stanford had stepped out to get coffee and a shower. Reviewing the updates of the last half-hour, it had been a better use of time than waiting.

  “How are we looking, Chief?” he asked Kalers quietly, stepping up next to his Acting Deck Chief.

  “All the birds are locked and loaded,” the older woman replied. “Avignon has his people in their birds. Rokos’ are up next in an hour, barring the Captain ordering us into space.”

  “Let’s keep an eye on everything,” Michael replied. “By the time the Captain orders us into space, I want everybody already in their starfighters.” He studied his implant feed for a moment. “Barring any change in affairs, let’s assume we’re taking the Group to Readiness Alpha in… three hours.”

  That would put the carrier six hours short of the depot, and the Triumphant two hours short. By then, some kind of reaction would have been seen from the depot – even no reaction would suggest that the base and the battleship had reached some agreement.

  “What sort of operation are we anticipating, sir?” the Chief asked, pitching her voice so the rest of the Center couldn’t hear her.

  “Anti-shipping and boarding party cover,” Michael replied. “We’re going to go after Triumphant, and if they’re playing nice with each other, whoever’s behind that moon.” He paused, then waved at one of the other figures in the room.

  “Rokos, over here.”

  His Bravo Wing commander joined them in a moment.

  “Since things aren’t exciting right now, I’m guessing you’re planning how to make my life exciting later?” the broad-shouldered officer asked.

  “Exactly,” Michael promised. “I’m tasking Bravo Wing for boarding party security,” he told the Wing Commander. “One way or another, Major Norup’s people will be hitting that facility. I want you to make sure they all get there. Chew on that, and let Chief Kalers know if you need any gear or munitions switched.”

  Without a very specific mission profile, it was rare for any of the Federation’s starfighters to launch with anything other than Starfire missiles – the short-range missiles with their one-gigaton warheads being the weapon of choice for both anti-fighter and anti-shipping strikes. There were, however, more specialized munitions in Avalon’s magazines.

  “I will definitely want some Banshees,” Rokos replied immediately. He glanced at Kalers. “I’ll let you know how many in… fifteen minutes? Will that give you enough time?”

  “I can’t see the Marines launching in less than an hour,” the Acting Chief replied. “I’ll need forty-five minutes for the switchover, but, strangely, I already had a few dozen pallets of Banshees up for ease of loading.”

  The Banshee Seven was one of the most specialized munitions a starfighter could carry. It was the same size as a Starfire, but it was a MIRVed weapon with no less than eighty sub-munitions. While significantly shorter ranged than the anti-fighter missile, the Banshee’s sub-munitions were smart anti-radiation weapons. Once deployed, each would seek a radar installation – such as those on the close-in defenses intended to shoot down boarding shuttles – and impact with the force of a half-ton or so of TNT.

  “Good,” Michael told them with a smile. “Unless there’s something real nasty behind that moon, we are not leaving this system in Terran hands.”

  08:00 January 14, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  “Well, hello there.”

  Kyle waited for several seconds, then cleared his throat and glared at his Tactical Officer.

  “Would you care to share with the class, James?”

  The redheaded officer’s pale skin showed an embarrassed flush very clearly, as it turned out, and he quickly turned his attention to his Captain.

  “Running the feed from Q-Probe Three,” he said quickly. “I was angling Three around a bit to try to see around the moon, so it saw her first. Not too much of a difference though.”

  Kyle was about to ask him for more details when the feed from Q-Probe Three hit his implant. The familiar elongated egg shape of a Commonwealth warship was emerging from behind the moon. A single Terran squadron of ten Scimitar starfighters flew a high – low escort pattern as the ship set an intercept course for Triumphant.

  “Well, I’d say our Captain Richardson wasn’t being clear enough about his peaceful intentions for his friends,” he said aloud. “What have we got on our newcomer?”

  “Thousand meters long, twenty million tons, starfighter escort,” his Tactical Officer reeled off in an instant. “Wrong shape to be a carrier, so unless the starfighters are from the base, that’s a Hercules sir.”

  Avalon’s Captain thought a command at his implant and zoomed in on the image.

  “Definitely a Hercules, Commander Anderson,” he said quietly. “You can’t make out the details of her armament from this distance, but note the hull bulge pattern. Those are the blisters for her main guns – she’s got a single set of three blisters around the middle, but a Saint has two sets of blisters, each a hundred meters from the center.”

  The junior officer blinked. “Of course. Why didn’t I see that?” he asked.

  “We got jumped by a Hercules at Hessian,” Kyle pointed out. “The image, ah, stuck in my mind.”

  It was one of the very few images from that day he really remembered. The loss of his implant in that battle had cost him almost all of his memories from that day – his personal backup couldn’t update from his starfighter.

  “The question, I suppose, is just what our friend Hercules is planning on doing about Triumphant?” Tobin asked. The Admiral was watching the same feed as everyone else.

  “I think he isn’t certain himself,” Solace observed. “If he was certain, he’d have all thirty of his fighters out and pulling a high speed attack run with his missiles right ahead of them. Instead, that looks like an intercept course – hard to say yet, but I think he’s planning on pulling alongside.”

  That raised an interesting thought, and Kyle turned his gaze to the Vice Admiral.

  “Sir, what do we do if the Commonwealth has arrested Richardson?”

  “We are in position to retake the Alizon system,” Tobin pointed out. “Unless they pick Richardson up and run straight for FTL, I think Richardson is going to end up in our custody anyway, don’t you?”

  After a moment’s thought, Kyle returned his Admiral’s grin coldly.

  31

  Alizon System

  10:00 January 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Triumphant was still an hour away from her destination, but she and the Hercules were rapidly approaching each other. Anderson had managed to sneak one
of the Q-Com equipped probes in close to their intercept point, and Kyle watched with interest as the two Commonwealth warships approached.

  The battleship was inbound towards the logistics depot at over eight thousand kilometers a second still, and the battlecruiser had reversed her acceleration half an hour ago and was rapidly building velocity towards the depot. They were two hundred thousand kilometers apart, the closing speed shrinking as their speeds came into alignment.

  Neither ship had done anything noticeable yet. None of the defending ship’s other twenty starfighters had been launched, and neither had done anything aggressive – though both had their electromagnetic deflectors up. With the battleship-grade positron lances both ships carried, though, they were already in death range.

  “What are they doing?” Kyle heard Solace wonder aloud.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, shaking his head. “My guess, though, is that whoever is in command of the battlecruiser is trying to talk Richardson into surrendering. Richardson… either hasn’t made up his mind, or is playing a very dangerous game.”

  He flipped feeds to look up Stanford. The lack of visual data from the CAG’s communicator warned him the other man was in his starfighter.

  “Vice Commodore, are your fighters prepared to launch?” he asked.

  “We are prepared and loaded,” Stanford replied. “I have a Wing prepped to fly escort duty on Norup’s Marines as well.”

  “Thanks, Michael,” Kyle said quietly, and then flipped to that worthy.

  “Major Norup, are your people ready to go?”

  “I’ve got all four companies loaded in the shuttles, with First and Third in full battle armor,” the Marine commander told him crisply. “Get us to the platforms, and we’ll take control.”

  Both Kyle’s starfighters and Marine assault shuttles could double Avalon’s acceleration. The carrier herself had just made turnover and was still six hours away. If he launched his small craft, they could hit the depot in just over four hours.

  Of course, his starfighters could make an attack pass, on Triumphant or the base, in a little over two – but they’d be moving at over thirty percent of lightspeed. A ‘point three pass’ was doable, but it was also risky and pushed the tiny spacecraft to their maximum capabilities.

  Whatever happened over the next few minutes, Kyle was now confident that he could take control of the Alizon system and destroy the Commonwealth forces opposing him.

  “The Hercules has launched shuttles, sir!” Anderson reported. “I’m reading… four ships, look like equivalents to our Marine assault craft.” He paused, clearly reviewing data.

  “They’re only pulling two hundred and forty gravities, sir,” he concluded. “I’d guess they came to a conclusion.”

  Kyle nodded. It seemed Captain Richardson had agreed to face Commonwealth justice. He smiled. It wasn’t quite going to work out that way for the man, though. Given Fleet Admiral Walkingstick’s reputation, all that was going to change was the brand name of the bullet.

  “Holy shit!”

  Richardson had apparently reached the same conclusion as Kyle.

  The assault shuttles had crossed barely half of the distance between the two ships before someone on Triumphant pushed the button. Almost fifty light positron lances, each delivering ninety-kilotons-a-second of antimatter, lashed out into space. Four beams targeted each shuttle – and each of the Hercules’ guardian starfighters.

  But those beams were the side-show. At the same instant as the smaller craft died, eight one-megaton-a-second heavy positron lances fired – at a target that wasn’t evading, whose ECM was down, whose bridge crew knew Captain Richardson and Triumphant had surrendered.

  Even one hit would have been fatal – and none of them missed.

  It was very quiet on Avalon’s bridge. Kyle had taken his crew through two space battles, and they understood, in the bone-deep way only combat veterans could, how vulnerable the massive vessels that carried them were.

  Watching seven thousand lives snuffed out in a moment of treachery was a shock to the system regardless.

  “Sir,” Anderson began, then coughed to clear his throat. “Sir,” he repeated, “Triumphant has launched missiles at the depot. I’m reading less than twenty minutes to impact.”

  “Track their vectors,” Kyle ordered. “Confirm their targets.”

  “They’re… the missiles are targeted on the fighter launch platforms,” his Tactical Officer replied quietly. “I think they were launched without warheads… they want to protect the rest of the facility.”

  At those speeds, a two ton capital missile would impact with thirty megatons of force – enough to rip through even an armored space station, but not enough to damage the rest of the depot.

  “What do we do, sir?” Anderson asked.

  “We wait,” Kyle ordered harshly. “Remember that this is our system, and that depot is supporting the occupation on the surface. Every starfighter destroyed, every missile expended, makes our job easier.

  “This kind of betrayal isn’t something we want to watch,” he said softly, making sure all of his people could hear him, “but our mission here is to take out Triumphant and liberate Alizon – and if the Commonwealth wants to shoot each other, I say we let them.”

  “Depot has picked up their launch and is returning fire,” Anderson reported. “I’m not picking up any fighter launches though.”

  “They’ll put everything into space they can,” Stanford interjected. “But… if they didn’t have everybody up, suited, and ready to go… a launch from a cold start can easily be thirty minutes.”

  “They don’t have thirty minutes, CAG,” the redheaded officer pointed out.

  “If they weren’t ready to launch, a lot of people are about to die,” Kyle agreed. “And if they weren’t, whoever was in command made a dangerous mistake.”

  His bridge crew seemed to accept that, slowly settling back into their tasks and tracking the two sets of missiles.

  The depot really had depended on its starfighters and defending starships, he noted. Triumphant had fired twenty-four Stormwind capital ship missiles at the depot – and the stations had only fired sixteen back. Given that the Commonwealth generally designed their capital ships to handle at least half again their own missile strength, the depot’s defenses weren’t going to do much to the battleship.

  “Captain Roberts,” Tobin addressed him over a private link. “I really do hate to jog your shoulders in the middle of a fight, but what is your plan?”

  “Triumphant’s salvo will almost certainly remove the depot’s starfighters as a factor,” Kyle replied. “Once Triumphant is the only real threat on the board, I’ll deploy Stanford’s fighters. We’ll need them to build up extra velocity to make sure they can catch her if she tries to run.

  “There’s a risk of detection,” he admitted, “which is why I want to hold off on launching until after Triumphant has neutralized the defenses. I’m not sure how Richardson will react once he sees us, but I’d rather not fight both a battleship and a depot defense fighter group if I can avoid it.”

  Tobin nodded slowly.

  “What if he runs, Captain?” he asked. “I am not prepared to lose our prey again.”

  “We only have so long before they’re going to see us, sir,” Kyle told him. “I’m surprised we haven’t been detected yet, to be honest. Once the depot defenses are down, we will launch at Triumphant. If Richardson escapes…” he shrugged. “We still have a speed advantage. We can liberate Alizon today and bring him down tomorrow. It’s worth the risk in my opinion.”

  The Vice Admiral looked like he was going to argue for a moment, but finally seemed to control himself and nodded again.

  “Fight your ship, Captain,” he ordered.

  Triumphant’s missiles struck home. There had never really been any doubt in Kyle’s mind that they would, but it was still nerve-wracking to watch them hit. Anderson’s assessment that the battleship hadn’t loaded their warheads bore out, as while the expl
osions ripped through and gutted the six fighter launch platforms the impacts lacked gigaton-range antimatter reactions.

  The depot had shot down twelve missiles, but that had still left two for each platform – and Stormwinds, like the Alliance’s Jackhammers, linked together in a networked intelligence perfectly capable of making last minute target allocations.

  Whoever had been in charge of the starfighters either had never taken them to full readiness status, or had stood them down after it appeared Triumphant was going to surrender. Across six stations, the defenders had only put another four squadrons worth of fighters into space in almost twenty minutes.

  Sixty Scimitar fighters wasn’t going to be enough to take down Triumphant – not unless they were well-trained, rigorously drilled, squadrons operating with comrades they knew and were well-prepared for the fight.

  Kyle would have stacked any one of his Wings of forty-eight Falcons against Triumphant without hesitation, though the losses would be awful. The remaining defenders of Alizon’s new logistics depot didn’t stand a chance.

  Triumphant herself had vanished into a ball of jamming as the defender’s missiles closed, and even with the drones far closer than Avalon they couldn’t pick out the moment the last missile died. There was a cascade of explosions as lasers and positron lances slashed the big missiles apart.

  And in the middle of that cascade, the drone feed suddenly out. Then the second drone feed vanished.

  “Anderson,” Kyle snapped. “What happened to our drones?”

  “They’re gone, sir,” the officer replied. “Give me a moment.” He paused, reviewing data. “Void. Probe Three got confused by their ECM and misdirected their heat venting,” he admitted softly. “They saw her, sir – and then picked up Probe Two on their active sweep. They know they’re being watched.”

  The Q-probes were the stealthiest items in any Navy’s inventory, but ninety-plus percent of that stealth boiled down to carefully directing their engines and heat venting away from their enemies. Once that had failed, they fell back on powerful ECM to stay alive in combat environments – but that ECM also made their presence, if not their location, obvious.