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

by Glynn Stewart

  “And guarantee a hundred and thirty thousand lives,” Kyle replied.

  “If you can trust him.”

  “I think we can trust him.”

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “Do you really have it in you to surrender without a fight?” Anderson asked flatly.

  Force Commander Kyle Roberts, the “Stellar Fox”, captain of the supercarrier Avalon and commander of Battle Group Seven-Two, laughed aloud. His bridge crew looked at him, and suddenly, they were meeting his eyes—and their gazes were determined.

  “Record for transmission,” Kyle ordered, then leaned into the camera.

  “Vice Admiral Ness,” he said flatly. “You threaten the men and women I have rescued from your prisons to force my surrender. You blithely expect that I will yield to you without a fight—that I will yield Avalon to you without a fight!

  “You know who I am, Admiral. Remember it—so when you reach the River Styx, you can tell Charon who sent you!”

  He paused and gestured for it to be sent.

  “Now, while he chews on that,” Kyle told his bridge crew, “let’s see if we can get our transports out of this system.”

  35

  Huī Xing System

  21:00 April 4, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Kyle tossed the tiny black pill into his mouth far more casually than the overpowered amphetamine deserved, washing it down with a mouthful of water. He’d ordered the Battle Group to stand down from general quarters, letting at least some of the crew rest while he plotted.

  They’d have hours to respond to anything Admiral Ness did in response to Kyle’s rejection of his offer. His people could get some sleep—even if he wasn’t going anywhere.

  He’d been running scenarios on his implant and command chair computers for an hour, though, and he wasn’t coming up with any clean solutions. The two Terran task forces could cover any path he took to escape Goudeshijie’s gravity well, though there were routes he could take to force them to use their Alcubierre drives to intercept him.

  Once in warped space, they’d have a lot fewer options to change course, but that didn’t help him much. Either of those forces could destroy the freighters single-handedly and would have better-than-even odds of taking on the entire Battle Group.

  Though…in Ness’s position, Kyle would concentrate his forces in the face of a breakout attempt. Once Battle Group Seven-Two had built up enough of a vector toward a given side of the well, he could risk uncovering part of the well to concentrate his forces and reduce his losses.

  A single ship left behind could take out all seven freighters in a single salvo, though. Unless…

  Kyle activated a ping on his two main subordinates’ implants. “Anderson, Stanford, I need you both on a private channel now.”

  “Here,” Stanford replied immediately. Apparently, his CAG was still aboard his starfighter, probably taking the same pills Kyle was.

  “Give me a moment,” Anderson replied. A few seconds passed, then the XO was back on the line, sounding slightly more awake. “If you send me to sleep, you could give me more than an hour,” he pointed out grouchily.

  “You can sleep for a week once we’re out of here,” Kyle told him. “Gentlemen, I need ideas, options, plans—we need a way to make Admiral Ness think we have the freighters with us while leaving them behind.”

  “Why?” Anderson asked.

  “I think I see,” Stanford interrupted. “They’ll still have a four-hour flight out, sir.”

  “Three and a half,” the XO corrected in a distracted tone.

  “Which is plenty of time to turn around if it looks like Ness is throwing too much in their way,” Kyle pointed out. “The logistics transports also have the capacity to retrieve starfighters—they can’t launch them quickly, but they can pick up everybody and take them with them if we send a wing out to escort them.

  “And I’ll stack any of your wings up against an Assassin any day of the week,” he told Stanford. “But the key is to make Ness think we’re going for a full breakout with the transports in our wake—and the bastard has Q-probes stuck to us like burrs.”

  “Okay…” Anderson said slowly. “I’m not saying that’s impossible, boss, only that it’s spectacularly difficult.”

  “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t need Avalon,” Kyle replied. “I’m well aware I’m asking for minor miracles, but there are a hundred thousand lives on the line.”

  “Can I add ‘miracle-worker’ to my business bio, then?” the XO asked, his voice suddenly awake and excited. “Because I have an idea.”

  21:30 April 4, 2736 ESMDT

  SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter

  There was a program, inside the tactical network interface that allowed Vice Commodore Michael Stanford to command the three-hundred-plus starfighters they’d started with, that simulated drawing straws. A group of individuals—in this case, the two Phoenix CAGs and all five of Michael’s Wing Commanders—were entered, and the program presented each of them with a virtual straw.

  “Why is it always me?” Rokos demanded after the selection ended, Bravo Wing’s burly commander looking at the other wing leaders grumpily.

  “Normally, it’s because I pick you,” Michael pointed out. “Apparently, the computer noticed a pattern.” He shook his head at the grumpy officer. “Yours is the most important job,” he continued. “If everything else goes wrong, you’ll be the only chance those freighters have of getting out alive.”

  “Right, so we’re the meat shield.”

  “I don’t care what name you stick on it,” the Vice Commodore told him. “You draw the short straw, you get the escort duty. Everyone else—sorry, you’re giving up starfighters to bring Bravo Wing up to full strength. You’ve got thirty seconds to identify them.

  “Keep those people alive, Russell,” he finished, a bit more seriously as his other Wing Commanders assigned crews and fighters to bring Bravo Wing up to a full forty-eight-fighter strength. “I’m trusting you.”

  “We’ll make it happen,” Rokos promised. “Bravo Wing, breaking formation.”

  Michael’s implants showed him the world around him as if he was his starfighter, and then overlaid icons and data to track the two hundred and fifty starfighters, four capital ships, three assault transports, and two logistics freighters of Battle Group Seven-Two.

  Forty-eight of the starfighter icons now dropped away from the main formation, cutting a carefully calculated course that dropped them behind Goudeshijie’s moon. There was a blip on his scanners, even his computers thinking that the assault transports and logistics freighters were duplicated for a moment.

  “Seven-Two starfighter wings, form on me,” he ordered. Turning his own fighter, he aligned it with the Saint and its attendant task force orbiting Goudeshijie a full astronomical unit away. A few moments later, his implants confirmed that the remaining two hundred and two starfighters of Seven-Two’s fighter strength were aligned on him.

  “Force Commander,” he sent to Roberts. “Starfighters are prepared to move.”

  “Carry on, CAG,” Roberts ordered. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  “Seven-Two starfighters,” Stanford addressed his people. “Two hundred gees for ten minutes, then drop to one hundred until we’ve matched velocity with the battle group. Engage in t minus ten seconds.”

  Seconds later, his entire force leapt forward into space, charging directly at the largest ship in the enemy fleet. If that wasn’t enough to make Admiral Ness blink, moments after that, all four capital ships moved out, followed by the five transports a few moments later at one hundred and fifty gravities. A slow acceleration, one that conserved fuel and looked like blood in the water to the enemy.

  Adjusting accelerations would align them all in a neat formation with the transports protected well before they reached any range at which Twenty-Third Fleet could engage them. The fighters led the way but were still in range of the we
apons of the capital ships. It combined all of Battle Group Seven-Two into a single hammer, designed to blast its way through Force Alpha and cover the escape of the transports behind it.

  “Just don’t look behind the moon, Mister Ness,” Michael muttered.

  Once the Battle Group had assumed its final formation, Michael started to feel like they were almost walking. It was an exaggeration: one hundred and fifty gravities was over double what any civilian ship could accelerate at, but it was a gentle acceleration for the starships, let alone the fighters that normally ran at five hundred gravities.

  “So, boss,” Arnolds asked quietly, “what happens if Force Bravo doesn’t take the bait?”

  “Most likely?” Michael considered his gunner’s question. “Most likely we hit Force Alpha with the hammer we’re waving under Admiral Ness’s nose, punch our way through, and go back to the original plan of dancing around the outer system with, well, whatever’s left of the Battle Group.”

  “That seems…dangerous.”

  “It’s a head-on suicide charge, a true ship-to-ship action,” the CAG agreed. “But it actually offers us the best chance of getting some of the Battle Group out—but you’re right. We wouldn’t get everyone out.”

  The gunner swallowed.

  “But we’d probably reduce Force Alpha to debris and cripples,” Michael continued after a moment of silence. “They have the edge in hulls, but we have better starfighters—and we have the Stellar Fox. The Terrans will blink.”

  “Think they’re that scared of the old man?” she half-whispered.

  “I would be,” Michael replied. “If there’s any officer in this galaxy I’d believe was actually about to ram this hammer of starships and fighters down Admiral Ness’s throat, it would be Kyle Roberts. It might not be the smartest thing to do, and it would expensive as all hell, but it would work.”

  He smiled as an icon on his implants flashed and vanished—the Q-probes watching Force Bravo reporting that the second Terran Task Force had brought up their Alcubierre drives and disappeared into warped space.

  “And there we go,” he concluded. “There’s the blink.”

  The warped space bubble that the Terrans had entered wasn’t automatically faster than light. It had to accelerate up to that at its mind-boggling light-year-a-day squared acceleration. Bound to, roughly, straight lines that couldn’t cross Goudeshijie’s gravity well, the flight would take a full half-hour.

  Not a big deal when it came to intercepting Battle Group Seven-Two. Force Bravo might be blind in their bubbles of warped space, but Force Alpha and the Q-probes would keep them readily updated on the Alliance force’s position.

  “Q-probes are moving for clearer lines of sight on us,” Xue reported, Avalon’s tactical officer updating the CAG along with all of the ship captains. “The ghost zones are moving around Goudeshijie toward us. They haven’t opened much of a blind spot, but it is there. Let’s keep it flashy and keep the eyes on us, people.”

  Michael nodded, sending out mental notes for his starfighters to spread out, their high power-to-weight ratios making their antimatter engines the most visible despite their small size. Enough movement and bright lights on his people’s part would be very flashy—and also help disguise that he was missing an entire wing of starfighters.

  23:45 April 4, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Kyle honestly hadn’t expected to make it this far. In two hours and forty-five minutes, the Battle Group had crossed seventy-two million kilometers and was still almost eighty million kilometers away from Twenty-Third Fleet.

  Vice Admiral Ness had clearly decided that this was Kyle’s push and concentrated his two forces. With ten capital ships and eight hundred starfighters, there was no question what would happen when Battle Group Seven-Two slammed into the Terran fleet. Twenty-Third Fleet wouldn’t come away unscathed, but Kyle’s battle group would be obliterated.

  No one was going to question if he broke off, but given that on one memorable occasion, Kyle had rammed a battleship—entirely by accident, to be fair—he suspected that Ness was starting to believe Battle Group Avalon might carry through the attack.

  “Wait, I’m getting activity in the fleet,” Xue reported. “Lots of movement suddenly—and damn.”

  One of the ten icons on Kyle’s display disappeared, a notation warning him the ship had warped space.

  “Which one was that and where did they go?” he demanded.

  “Bogey Eight is an Assassin,” Xue replied quickly. “She moved back on a reciprocal course—she’s got to be headed to block the transports. Didn’t even take her fighters with her—just the one battlecruiser.”

  “Gods curse it,” Kyle swore, checking his own screens. “Keep the ECM up and warn Rokos,” he ordered.

  His mental screens split into two: one showed his own Battle Group, with all five of Avalon’s one-hundred-thousand-ton space tugs adjusting their mass manipulators to match the fuel burn of the much bigger transports. The other showed the five transports on the opposite of Goudeshijie, using the gas giant’s heat to help hide their own energy signatures as they burned directly away from the now-concentrated Terran fleet.

  “If they keep following the same course that Force Bravo used to join Force Alpha, Bogey Eight will be in position to intercept the transports fifteen minutes before they exit the gravity well,” Xue told him grimly. “They can no longer break off.”

  “Are we sure they saw through us?” Kyle asked.

  “They could be responding to a blip the Q-probes picked up,” his tactical officer allowed. “They’ve got a blind spot the transports are flying right down the middle of, but ‘blind’ is relative.”

  “Hold the ECM on the tugs until Bogey Eight arrives on target,” he ordered after a moment’s thought. “As for us…” He sighed.

  “Orders to the Battle Group,” he said formally. “Flip and burn—take us to two hundred and fifty gravities on everything, including the tugs, on a zero-zero course to return to Goudeshijie orbit.”

  “What if Ness takes that an excuse to send more of his ships after the transports?” Anderson asked from his battle station halfway down the ship from the bridge.

  “Then we flip again and see if we can make the bastard sweat,” Kyle replied. “For now, let’s make damned sure we stay out of lance range of the rest of his warships.”

  “What about the transports?” Xue asked.

  “That’s down to Wing Commander Rokos now,” Avalon’s Captain said grimly. “He and I have played battlecruiser versus fighter wing before. I hope he has better luck with the game than I did.”

  His fingers twitched as he resisted the urge to rub his temples—specifically, the spot where he still got headaches from the remnants of his old implants. The ones that had been burnt out when Kyle Roberts had nearly died leading a single wing of starfighters against a Commonwealth battlecruiser.

  From almost ten light-minutes away, however, there was nothing he could do for Bravo Wing’s commander but wish him luck—and make sure no more capital ships got in his way.

  The wonders of modern technology had given Kyle Roberts a front-row seat to the death ride of the navy of an entire star system before…twice. Watching the transports continue to flee the system knowing that a Commonwealth battlecruiser was about to appear in their path felt similar—if nothing else, there were more people aboard those five freighters than there had been in either of those fleets.

  Unlike those death rides, however, the odds were a lot more even this time. Given the chance to hit the battlecruiser without any supporting starfighters getting in the way, Rokos’s forty-eight starfighters were about an even match for the bigger ship in terms of firepower, if not endurance or survivability.

  With the starfighters tucked in tight to the five starships and matching their acceleration to the bigger vessels’ maneuvers, it was possible—even likely—that the Terrans hadn’t picked up Bravo Wing. If they had, Bogey Eight would have brought her own starfighters
with her.

  “I don’t think they see us, Force Commander,” Rokos said over the Q-Com, mirroring Kyle’s own thoughts. “Can someone double-check my math? I make it that if we do nothing until the cruiser emerges from A-S, there is no way anyone else can intercept us.”

  “I have the same, Wing Commander,” Kyle told him. “There’s only about ten more minutes in which anyone else can intercept you. I don’t like to micromanage, but if you could stay hidden under the Marines’ skirts for at least that long, I think everyone can appreciate it.”

  Rokos laughed.

  “Just for admitting Marines wear skirts, sir, I think I can do that,” he replied cheerfully. “I’ll get them home—skirts and all.”

  “Good luck, Wing Commander,” Kyle told him softly.

  Avalon’s bridge was silent as the minutes continued to tick by. Their own headlong rush toward the edge of the gravity well was slowing, their engines laboring to bring their speed down by almost two and a half kilometers a second every second.

  A word of command could flip that acceleration around and send them driving for the Commonwealth’s Twenty-Third Fleet. It would be a suicide run—but one that could buy the transports time to escape. With less than thirty thousand people on his four warships and one hundred and twenty thousand on the freighters, it was an order Kyle was prepared to give.

  Not one he intended to give or wanted to. But an order he was prepared to give—if only because every minute he accelerated away from Vice Admiral Ness was a minute he could accelerate at Vice Admiral Ness without actually committing to the suicide run.

  “Five minutes to Bogey Eight emergence,” Xue told him quietly. “Transports are now twenty minutes from exiting Goudeshijie’s gravity well. It is no longer possible for any more of Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships to intercept the freighters.”

  “All right,” he said brightly. “Let’s show Admiral Ness the game. Drop the ECM, have the tugs go to regular power and reboard Avalon.”