“It will take four days for us to relieve you, Kyle,” Mira said quietly. “You won’t have time to realize if things are going downhill.”
“That’s the risk we have to take,” he replied. “This sector isn’t safe unless Via Somnia falls. The bastards already jumped us with two more modern warships than we expected. If you neutralize the naval base, this Twenty-Third Fleet has to fall back—I can get the prisoners to safety and we can catch the bastards between your ships and mine at Via Somnia.”
“And if they believe Via Somnia can hold and press you harder?” Alstairs asked. “Or if they decide to destroy you and then come after us?”
“Then I will give the bastards a fight they won’t soon forget,” Kyle told them grimly. “I don’t plan on dying here, Admiral. They’ll make a mistake sooner or later.”
“Very well, Force Commander,” the Admiral replied. “We will proceed as originally planned.”
Alstairs dropped out of the channel, leaving Mira and Kyle looking at each other’s virtual avatars.
“Do not die on me,” she told him fiercely.
“I’ll be fine,” he said breezily. “They have to catch me first, and I’ve got an entire gas giant’s gravity well to play in.”
Mira shook her head slowly. “Give them hell,” she told him.
34
Huī Xing System
18:00 April 4, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Avalon settled into the rings of Goudeshijie with careful precision. The Battle Group had slowed, but not to a velocity where the gas giant could actually hold them in orbit. An orbit was too predictable, a path that would allow the Terran ships still drifting outside the gravity well to fire missile salvos.
“I’m surprised we made it this far without them shooting at us,” Xue said quietly. “Or sending fighters in, for that matter.”
“With our fighters out, they know they couldn’t get any birds through our defenses,” Kyle pointed out. “Long-range missile fire also makes accurate targeting a problem—they’d risk hitting the transports carrying the prisoners, and it appears that our Terran friends don’t want to risk that.”
“So, what, they’re just going to orbit out there until we run out of food and have to surrender?” his tactical officer asked.
“Given that we barely have enough food aboard the transports to make it to Alizon as it is, it’s not the worst plan they could have,” Kyle replied. “The platforms had a thirty-four day stock of food. Removing the guards from the calculation doesn’t add that much extra to the allowance. Keep us trapped for a few days and the options for the transports start shrinking fast. Keep us trapped for a few weeks and our food supplies start being a problem.”
The warships could recycle a lot of things. Food was…technically one of them, but the efficiency was low, and once they started on the ship-produced nutrient bars, everyone knew what they were eating. The transports full of rescued prisoners would run out of food much faster than the Battle Group’s warships—but the Battle Group would go onto nutrient bars before the transports ran out of real food.
Morale would suffer. Demoralized crews would be less efficient. Right now, if Kyle didn’t have the transports to protect, shooting his way through one of the Terran task forces would be a reasonable option—he wouldn’t get everyone out, but he’d probably get at least two of his four warships clear. A demoralized Battle Group’s odds would go down—not from any active desire on the part of his people not to escape, but from the inevitably slowed reactions of terrified, underfed spacers.
He wasn’t that desperate yet. For now, all he needed to do was bide his time—if Alstairs and Mira could take Via Somnia, the enemy would be forced to withdraw. He could achieve his mission without firing a shot.
“Sir, we’re receiving a wide-beam transmission from the Commonwealth forces,” his com officer told him. “It’s addressed to you—personally.”
“We didn’t exactly hide who was in command,” Kyle reminded his XO. “Put it through.”
It popped up on the screens of his command chair, and Kyle found himself looking at a recording of the flag bridge of a Commonwealth warship.
He couldn’t actually guess which ship it was—like the Federation, the Commonwealth standardized both the command and flag bridges of warships. It was one of the three modern ships—one each, apparently, of the Saint, Volcano and Hercules classes—but he couldn’t narrow it down more than that.
In the center of the recording, with the screens around him blocked out by automatic censoring software, sat a slim pale-skinned blond man in the black-and-red sashed uniform of the Commonwealth Navy, three gold stars at his neck marking him as a Vice Admiral. This had to be the commander of the fleet trapping him.
“Force Commander Kyle Roberts, I am Vice Admiral Kaj Ness of the Terran Commonwealth Navy’s Twenty-Third Fleet, charged with the security of Sector Charlie of the Rimward Marches. A Sector, I hardly need to tell you, that you have rampaged through, destroying ships and killing men and women I have served with for longer than you have been alive.”
Ness inhaled sharply, bringing his hands together and then releasing them as he exhaled.
“Nonetheless, Force Commander, I am prepared to be merciful. You can hide like a rabbit in the rocks if you wish, but we both know you only delay the inevitable. Surrender, and I promise that you and your people will be treated gently.
“If this comes to a battle, you will not win. You will only die and take all of those under your command with you.”
The message ended and Kyle smiled.
“Record for response,” he ordered, then leaned back to face the camera in his chair.
“Vice Admiral Ness, I appreciate the kind offer you have extended, but I must decline,” he told the Terran calmly. “I am a soldier of the Federation, sir, and I have not yet begun to fight.” A mental command ended the recorded and transmitted the message.
The bridge was very quiet, and Kyle looked at the channel from secondary control to see Anderson watching him.
“So, what happens now, sir?” his XO asked quietly.
“We wait,” Kyle replied. “We see what our Admiral Ness does once he knows Via Somnia is under attack.” He paused, considering. “Oh, he’ll also probably fire missiles relatively quickly. They’ll take over an hour and a half to get to us, but they’re going to do something.”
“Missile launch, sir,” Xue reported about five minutes later. “You were right.”
Kyle sighed. He’d hoped he wouldn’t be—long-range missile fire was notoriously inaccurate, putting the transports packed full of rescued prisoners at risk.
“What do we have?” he asked.
“Looks like two salvos from each task force,” she told him. “They also seem to be moving their Q-probes in closer to refine their targeting—I don’t have clear hits, but the ghost zones are getting smaller.”
Like Battle Group Seven-Two, Twenty-Third Fleet had Q-probes in close to provide near-real-time data back to Admiral Ness on their enemy’s actions. The quantum entanglement com–equipped probes were the stealthiest things in anyone’s arsenal—as much as anything with an antimatter rocket capable of a thousand gravities could be stealthy.
Their sensors and computers could tell Xue and Kyle that there were Q-probes out there. They could even make a guess at how many—but they couldn’t tell them the exact location or velocity. Only an area where the probe could be—hence “ghost zones’.” Speed and engine size decreased the size of the ghost zone rapidly, rendering the technology useless for just about any other purpose, but it let both Ness and Kyle have eyes on the other that were less than a second out of date as opposed to over eight minutes.
Speaking of the Q-probes…
“Do we have probes detached to follow the missiles?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Kyle nodded and leaned back in his chair, studying the two salvos. Both salvos were roughly sixty missiles, which ma
tched up with what the Q-probes were telling him. Admiral Ness had to be cursing whichever Terran Navy bean-counter had assigned his fleet so many of the Lexington-class carriers.
The Lexington was a last-generation ship with a hundred and fifty starfighters aboard, a perfect unit for a nodal force defending multiple systems—but it had no missile launchers. Admiral Ness had three of them, two with his Saint flagship and one with the other task force.
He also had three modern ships and four last-generation battlecruisers, which made up much of the difference. There were a lot of games Kyle could play with eight light-minutes of maneuvering room to prevent Ness’s people from consolidating their fighter strength, but fewer he could with missiles.
“Inform Vice Commodore Stanford we will have missiles inbound in one hundred minutes,” he said aloud. “Keep everyone in the Battle Group informed on the status of the salvos. I presume we’re looking at time-on-target impacts?”
“I can’t be certain yet,” Xue warned, “but it appears so. I believe we’ll have all two hundred and thirty-six missiles arriving simultaneously on two vectors.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Kyle told her. “Keep me informed.”
There wasn’t much to do now but wait and watch. The missiles simply added a new timer to the series of countdowns running in his implant. How long until Seventh Fleet arrived in Via Somnia. The estimated time for Seventh Fleet to destroy Via Somnia’s defenses and plant the defenses they’d brought with them.
The estimate for how long until the ships under his command ran out of food.
The timer for incoming missiles was in appropriate company.
Both salvos cut their engines roughly eighty-eight million kilometers away from Battle Group Seven-Two, doing just over ten percent of lightspeed. The Q-probes kept pace with the missiles, allowing Kyle’s people to dial them in for long-range defensive fire—but nothing in their arsenal except their own missiles reached that far.
“Should we at least fire back?” Anderson asked over the intercom, the XO clearly perturbed by simply waiting for the missiles to arrive.
“No, I want to hang on to our missiles,” Kyle replied. “That said, now that they’re flying dumb, it’s time for us to do something. Transmit these course directions to the Battle Group.”
He’d spent the hour the missiles were accelerating toward him preparing his plan. The freighters now lunged away from the capital ships at two hundred gravities, tucking toward Goudeshijie’s largest moon. In the forty minutes the missiles were ballistic, they’d be able to put the midsized lifeless rock between them and the weapons.
The capital ships went one way, turning to close the distance with the sixty-missile salvo inbound from one task force, while most of Stanford’s starfighters went the other. With pure ballistic courses, many of their weapons could start killing missiles at about ten light-seconds—about twenty-five seconds before the missiles would bring up their drives for their terminal attack.
Moving after they went ballistic wouldn’t confuse the missiles necessarily—they were smart weapons, being fed data from their motherships with plenty of time to adapt, but it opened up Kyle’s options and narrowed the missiles’.
Minutes ticked by, with the timer to impact in Kyle’s implants seemingly running down slower and slower as he tried not to hold his breath.
Finally, his ships reached their range of the missiles and opened fire. Defensive lasers and positron lances slashed across space, hundreds of invisible beams drawn onto the displays by the computers to allow humans to follow them.
Of the hundred and twenty missiles charging at his ships, only seventy-three lived long enough to bring up their drives for their terminal assault. His starfighters, facing fewer missiles but with fewer weapons truly designed for the task, still faced eighty.
Kyle watched in silence as the missiles closed. At this point, he’d given his orders. All he could do was leave the defense of his ships to the tactical officers and fighter crews.
The advantage to ballistic salvos was that if your target didn’t see them enter ballistic mode, they had no idea where the missiles were. The disadvantage was that if your target had Q-probes on top of the missiles for their entire ballistic component, they knew exactly where your missiles were.
Even a thousand gravities of acceleration couldn’t do much to change the cone of probabilities for a missile moving at over thirty-four thousand kilometers a second. Missiles died in their dozens, Battle Group Seven-Two’s capital ships having them far too dialed in for them to evade.
The last of the salvo they’d charged died over a quarter million kilometers clear of the capital ships, and then the ships turned on the missiles they’d left behind.
Those missiles had waited to turn on their drives, the intelligence that made capital ship missiles so much deadlier than starfighter missiles recognizing that they wouldn’t hit if they activated on schedule. They dove through the starfighter screen trying to stop them, chasing real targets—targets worth their time.
They were twenty-eight seconds into their terminal burn before Kyle realized that they weren’t going for his warships. He doubted it was intentional—Ness has not struck him as the type to intentionally target the transports loaded with unarmed rescued prisoners—but the missiles’ silicon and molecular circuitry brains had fallen victim to the dangers of long-range missile fire.
“Take us at them, full acceleration,” he snapped. “Those missiles cannot get through!”
The fighters turned, chasing after the missiles burning at twice their acceleration. The starships turned, desperately trying to close the distance to save the freighters. The freighters themselves moved, trying to buy precious seconds for the intercept.
Sixty missiles had survived so far. Dozens more died as the weapons of four capital ships were unleashed on them.
Nine, confused by the starfighters’ massive ECM projections, missed the necessary adjustments and slammed into the moon. Between antimatter explosions and kinetic force, the entire unimaginably massive planetoid visibly moved, jumping dozens of kilometers as a gaping crater was ripped into its side.
Eight missiles made it past everything, skipped around the planet, and charged straight for the transports. Three Marine Assault Transports stood in their way—the only ships with real missile defenses and carrying fewer people, the massive assault ships made themselves a target to guard the transports with their forty thousand civilians apiece.
The assault transports had the defenses, if not the weapons, of a battlecruiser. They could stand off eight missiles—given time and space to play with. They had a hundred thousand kilometers and three seconds.
Kyle couldn’t watch. He closed his eyes—only to open them again as his bridge erupted in cheers.
Chimera had nailed the last missile seventeen hundred meters clear of her hull. A blast wave of radiation and heat smashed into the assault transport—but her armor held.
The transports had survived.
It was easily several minutes before anyone on Avalon’s bridge could breathe properly. The warships moved to cover the transports again, and damage reports flowed in.
The Battle Group had survived surprisingly well, Kyle noted. Chimera had lost a chunk of her missile defenses and sensors but was otherwise fully functional. They hadn’t even lost a single starfighter, which was unusual when using them as an antimissile screen.
“Sir, we’re receiving a transmission relayed through the Q-probes from Admiral Ness.”
“Put it on the main screen,” Kyle ordered. “Let everyone see what the man has to say.”
Vice Admiral Kaj Ness looked uncomfortable to Kyle’s eyes, though he wasn’t sure what exactly gave him that impression. Once again, the Admiral sat in the middle of his flag bridge and faced the camera levelly.
“Force Commander Roberts, I apologize for the unnecessary attack on the transports carrying the rescued prisoners of war,” Ness said calmly. “While we both know it was an accident, it was a
lso an inherent risk of long-range missile fire. I take full responsibility and appreciate the efficacy of your people’s defense.”
What Ness didn’t mention was that the Tau Ceti Accords would have made the destruction of a transport with thousands of rescued prisoners aboard a war crime. Kyle suspected that he had a reputation with the Commonwealth where it came to war criminals.
“As long as this standoff continues, that risk continues,” Ness continued flatly. “I can and will keep you trapped in this system until starvation forces you to fight or surrender. You lack the firepower to successfully break out.
“Trapping you here puts those same prisoners at risk, however, so I am prepared to offer a compromise. If you surrender and offer the parole of yourself and all the personnel aboard your ships, and the rescued POWs, that you will not serve against the Commonwealth, I will permit you to transfer your warship personnel to the transports and leave this system unmolested.
“I make this offer out of a desire to avoid unnecessary loss of life on either side and a personal respect for your prior actions,” Ness concluded. “I await your response.”
Avalon’s bridge was silent. Kyle glanced around, but none of his staff would meet his eyes. It was a generous offer—one that would risk Vice Admiral Ness’s career to execute.
It was also one that would require Kyle to either hand Avalon blithely over to the Commonwealth or destroy one of the most powerful and modern warships in the Alliance’s order of battle himself. Either way, it required him to surrender without a fight.
“Well,” he said quietly. “That’s quite the offer.”
The image of Anderson being relayed from the secondary control center acquired a dark blue box in Kyle’s mind, noting that the XO had taken the channel completely private. No one would hear or see what the two men who ran Avalon discussed.
“Accepting would destroy your career, sir,” Anderson murmured.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 91
