Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Burning straight up like that, they’re eleven light-seconds away from clear enough space,” Anderson said aloud. “Call it…twenty-eight minutes.”

  “And our range when they jump to FTL is just under one point seven million klicks,” Xue added. “Nobody—not even Zheng He—can hit them with lances at that distance.”

  A ping on the command channel tore Kyle’s attention away from his staff.

  “All ships, target the Commonwealth with capital missiles and open fire,” Alstairs ordered. “Maximum rate of fire, ten salvos.”

  Among the many refits the Reserve ships had undergone before being sent to the front was updated missile launchers. All twelve of the ships in Seventh Fleet had the same twenty-two-second cycle time on their launchers. Another ten salvos would run the ammunition stocks down a lot…but Alizon was a logistics depot. They’d rushed supplies in to replace the Commonwealth missiles they couldn’t safely use.

  There was no guarantee they’d hit—the starfighters the Commonwealth had kept back had made short work of the earlier salvoes—but they’d also arrive after the starfighters had their own opportunity to engage.

  The Terrans had made their turn in perfect time. It was down to the starfighters now—but there were ways to optimize that.

  23:20 February 20, 2736 ESMDT

  SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter

  Michael Stanford could run the same numbers the officers back on the capital ships were running. The starfighter strike could empty their missile magazines as they swept by—but the Terrans were closing up their formation. A lance strike would be…expensive.

  “Adjust vectors,” he finally ordered after several long moments of thought. “Maintain a minimum one-million-kilometer radius. We’re not playing with lances today—not when we’ve got a three-million-klick missile range to play with.”

  If the Admiral wanted him to close to knife-fighting range, she would have told him so. A full missile dump at maximum range was going to give the Terrans a headache either way. And since the mission was to defend Alizon…they’d already won. It was just a question of putting the boot in.

  “Michael, it’s Roberts,” a voice said calmly over a private channel. “We’re launching a full spread of missiles. If you delay your launch to arrive alongside the Fleet’s next salvo, I think that will make an impression.”

  “That’s almost a thirteen-minute delay in launch,” Michael noted. “We could soften them up for you.”

  “We’re not getting them all either way, CAG,” Avalon’s Captain reminded him. “If we hit them with three salvoes of a hundred and fifty capital ship missiles plus twenty-six hundred fighter missiles, that should soften them up for the follow-up salvos.”

  “Admiral on board?” the CAG asked.

  “Just flipped her the numbers,” Roberts replied. A moment later, another voice came on the channel.

  “It makes sense to me, CAG,” Admiral Alstairs told them both. “But it’s down to you at this point; we’re fifteen million kilometers behind you.”

  “I like it, ma’am,” Michael Stanford admitted. “Let’s bleed the bastards.”

  #

  Michael explained the plan to his subordinates. Then explained it again when some of the more inexperienced ones didn’t quite get the value. Just adding the capital ship missiles’ jamming capabilities to the salvo would make their own lighter missiles significantly more effective.

  Once everyone was on board, the Vice Commodore watched the missiles rapidly gaining from behind him. The Terrans had started firing missiles themselves, but the angle was such now that he had no chance to intercept them.

  Demonstrably, however, Seventh Fleet could handle its own defense now. The Vice Commodore’s job now was to see what damage they could do to the Commonwealth before they ran.

  “All starfighters, stand by to fire first salvo on my mark,” he ordered briskly. The computers promptly calculated the numbers for him—given the Fleet’s missiles’ higher base velocity, he needed to launch before they passed him to arrive at the same time.

  “Mark,” he snapped.

  Six hundred and eighty-two starfighters launched missiles as one. Twenty-six hundred and thirty-four missiles blasted into space.

  A minute later, another salvo followed.

  The third salvo was weaker, as the command starfighters scattered through the formation gave up the last missile in each magazine for their more powerful computers and larger Q-Com arrays. It still added over twenty-five hundred missiles to the hundred and forty-seven fired by Seventh Fleet.

  “That’s it,” Arnolds said quietly. “I’m relaying what telemetry we can send from the Q-probes, but now it’s down to luck and how good their defenses are.”

  “Do what you can,” he ordered her. “You won’t be the only one.”

  Even as he watched the missiles go in, he gently adjusted his starfighter’s course, curving the eight-thousand-ton spacecraft farther away from the fleeing Commonwealth ships.

  “Burn, you sons of bitches,” he snarled under his breath. He might know that the Commonwealth hadn’t ordered the bombing of the Alliance world Kematian—hell, a Commonwealth warship had stood aside when Avalon had caught up with the ship that had bombed Kematian—but he could still blame them for starting the battle that had made him watch a world burn.

  The Terran starfighters had fallen back to this side of the capital ships. They had to know their survival chances were slim, but defending the starships was their job. The purpose of a starfighter was, in the cold equations of war, to die so that the million-times-more-expensive starships lived.

  And die those starfighters did.

  Michael Stanford was well aware he hated the Commonwealth now, more than he ever had before. The massacre at Kematian had sunk into his soul over time and only made him angrier.

  He still found himself mentally saluting as the Terran Carrier Space Patrol lunged out at the first, almost twenty-eight-hundred-strong missile salvo, launching their own missiles as they went. Ninety starfighters put three hundred and sixty missiles into space—four times in a single minute—and then opened fire with lasers and positron lances.

  They died. None of the missiles in that salvo had been targeted on starfighters, but the AIs in the Jackhammers recognized the threat—and delegated the lesser Starfire missiles to deal with it. The Scimitars ripped a hole in the center of the first salvo—and none of them ever made it out.

  But their sacrifice served its purpose. Less than a thousand missiles of the first salvo made it through, and they collided with the interlocked defenses of eight capital ships—spearheaded by the massive laser arrays of two of the Commonwealth’s Saint-class battleships.

  None of those missiles made it within a hundred thousand kilometers of the Commonwealth ships—but the second salvo had no starfighters to blunt it and was less than thirty seconds behind.

  The explosions started almost half a million kilometers out, the lasers and positron lances reaching out at weapons whose only defenses were jamming and maneuverability. With almost a hundred and fifty capital ship missiles feeding the jamming and confusion, even the Saints’ defenses were less effective than they could have been.

  Missiles died in their hundreds, but hundreds more survived. A desperate salvo of their own missiles, fired at the last second, gutted much of the remaining salvo—but not enough.

  Michael cheered in his starfighter’s cockpit as missiles slammed home. The Saints were in the rear, and the massive twenty-million-ton battleships lurched as they took hits—but somehow, the monsters kept flying, kept firing.

  Only a handful of missiles snuck past the two battleships. Two of the cruisers were hit, spinning and venting atmosphere—but still managing, incredibly, to keep pulling their emergency acceleration.

  Then the third massive salvo arrived. The Saints, already damaged, already struggling to maintain their acceleration, couldn’t stop them all. Michael knew they couldn’t stop them all, and watched with
bated breath.

  Then the engines on one of the Saints blew. The damage and the strain were too much, and an antimatter reactor overloaded, gouging the ship and bringing its acceleration to a sharp halt.

  Its ECM down, its defenses shattered, it was easy prey—and the missiles leapt on it. Even Michael, with telemetry feeds back from the missiles, couldn’t be sure how many missiles had hit the monster warship. Even half a dozen would have been too many—and it was dozens.

  Blinded by the battleship’s death, not many missiles made it past her—and the remaining ships defended themselves with a will. Some might have hit home—it was hard to say in the chaos of the explosions—but none of the ships fell out of formation.

  The rest of the salvos were smaller. Even made up entirely of Jackhammers, Michael had very little hope. Missiles died in their hundreds, each salvo creeping closer and closer, but none quite closing.

  Until another engine blew. The Lexington-class carrier was the oldest ship in the task force, almost a pure carrier with a medium lance armament and no missiles. At the front of the formation, she’d avoided any damage at all.

  But her engines couldn’t take the strain. She’d been designed with a safety margin, but the ship was twelve years old. Maybe corners had been skipped along the way; maybe they had never figured they’d have to push her that hard for that long when they’d designed her safety margin.

  It was irrelevant. As the final salvo closed in, two of the massive antimatter thruster nozzles accelerating her failed and fed reaction mass back into the positron capacitors. Untouched by the Alliance, the twelve-megaton carrier simply…came apart.

  One of the Assassins ran headlong into the debris field. For a moment, that ship stopped accelerating—and the remaining missiles lunged at it.

  The Commonwealth spacers stopped almost all of them. A single Jackhammer made it through—and collided with the older battlecruiser at almost ten percent of the speed of light. Half of the ship continued forward, spinning end over end through space. The back half simply…vanished.

  “That was our last salvo,” Arnolds said slowly. “Sir, they’re evacuating the last cruiser—do we intervene?”

  Before Michael could even reply, Admiral Alstairs came over an all-hands channel.

  “Let them go,” she ordered briskly. “The only thing any of us can do at this point is shoot lifeboats…and that is not a line I’m prepared to cross.

  “Let them go.”

  Chapter 5

  Alizon System

  11:00 February 21, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room

  With the holoconferencing system engaged, the tiny breakout conference room attached to Kyle Roberts’ office looked huge. He and Stanford sat at the physical table in the room, and the hologram tank slid out of the wall and showed the “virtual conference room” with all twelve Captains and nine CAGs of Seventh Fleet—plus Rear Admiral Miriam Alstairs and her Chief of Staff Luiz Fernandez.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, herms,” she greeted her senior officers.

  The addition made Kyle blink and check—hermaphrodites were a relatively small minority in the Castle Federation, though larger in some other Alliance members. Captain Eden Mauve of the Clawhammer was apparently a herm—as, to his surprise, was Lord Captain Benn of the Horus. Mauve was a tall, androgynous officer, much the stereotype of the odd gender. Benn was the Imperial stereotype of the stocky blond warrior chieftain, which was admittedly less gender-specific than many of its members liked to present it.

  “I’ve spent most of the morning conferring with Alliance High Command,” Alstairs told them all. “Their conclusion is that Commonwealth Intelligence misestimated the arrival time of our reinforcements. We’ve apparently been playing games with information in our own systems, and Command’s conclusion is that, pretty much Alliance-wide, our civilian sectors leak like a sieve.”

  She shook her head grimly.

  “As I’m sure our new ship captains are aware, but I wasn’t until this morning”—she nodded to the commanders of the reinforcements— “all of their departure messages to family and friends were delayed seventy-two hours.

  “This meant that the Commonwealth commander thought you were three days later than you were, and was planning to defeat us in detail.”

  Kyle chuckled evilly, and he wasn’t the only one. Walkingstick had sent enough ships to deal with either component of what was now Seventh Fleet, but he’d rolled the dice on catching them separately—and failed.

  The real mistake had been the Terran commander on the scene not withdrawing, immediately, of course. A mistake that Walkingstick was probably explaining the cost of right now—assuming the officer in question had lived.

  “That said, we also don’t believe we’re likely to see a new offensive against Alizon anytime soon,” the Admiral told them. “We are clear to commence Operation Rising Star as soon as practically possible.”

  “Does that mean we can finish getting our deflectors upgraded?” Captain Mauve asked. “My Clawhammer will go toe-to-toe with anything you point us at, ma’am, but I’d like to at least have the same range as my enemies!”

  “That’s our first priority, yes,” Alstairs confirmed. “It looks like you’ll have even longer than expected—Command had asked us to remain in place until Suncat returns home. That should be a week.”

  “What about landing forces?” Lord Captain Anders of Gravitas asked. Kyle didn’t like the man, but he definitely had a point—if they were expecting to liberate planets, they were going to need more troops than the Marines aboard their ships.

  “That may be our biggest delay,” the Admiral admitted. “We still expect to receive three Federation Marine Corps assault transports, but they appear to have been delayed…”

  Kaber System

  11:00 February 21, 2736 ESMDT

  AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four

  Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen watched the tactical plot feeding into his neural implant in silence. Morrison Hab was monstrous, a twenty-kilometer-long O’Neill cylinder built by people who figured mass manipulators were too expensive for their space habitat.

  When the pirates had shown up, they’d seized the main power facility at one end of the cylinder as their first step, then moved throughout. A new version of a very old dark side of humanity—most modern pirates kept the rape and murder to a minimum, but cleaning out several million people could make you very rich.

  If no one caught you.

  Unfortunately for the bastards who pulled the plan together—and fortunately for the citizens of Morrison Hab—the assault transports pulled together for the new Fleet the Alliance was assembling had just rendezvoused in a nearby system when the news came down.

  The order to go free Morrison Hab had followed that news by minutes.

  A Navy—Imperial, not Federation, sadly—cruiser had beat them here. The pirates had responded by setting charges in the power facility and warning they would blow the entire Hab—and its million-odd residents—to pieces if the Navy got any closer. The assault transports had snuck in on the other side of the star, and now hundreds of assault shuttles were making a ballistic approach to the big hab.

  Kaber was a sparsely populated system—Morrison and the eight other habs like it were the only homes for humans in a system with no habitable worlds—so at least they didn’t need to worry about local traffic. Just hitting each other.

  Hansen checked the plot again. The lanky, raven-haired officer’s unit—Bravo Company, Third Battalion, One Hundred Third Castle Federation Space Marine Bridge—was in the first wave, heading straight for the power facility. If they carried the day, a million people would live.

  If they messed up, three entire brigades of Marines—twelve thousand or so soldiers, give or take—would die with those million people.

  Lieutenant Major Hansen had been one of the Marines who’d boarded Ansem Gulf before the war, back when the Stellar Fox had just been a s
tarfighter squadron commander—a squadron commander who’d saved Hansen’s life and those of his brothers. He’d been one of the Marines who’d survived to board the pirated liner, and one of the people who’d cleaned up the bodies. He’d risk his own life—and every one of those twelve thousand of his siblings-in-arms—to prevent that happening on an even larger scale.

  “Just look at those ships, sir,” his senior NCO told him under his breath, bringing his mind back to the tactical plot. “Those two are just regular wrecks, but what is that?”

  “That” looked like a regular merchant ship, except that they weren’t concealing their energy signature and the signature looked more like a cruiser than a freighter.

  “Intel says it’s a Commonwealth Q-ship,” Hansen told the Gunnery Sergeant. “They want it intact.”

  His man whistled.

  “That’s gonna be a tight one, sir.”

  “That’s the Brigadier’s problem,” Bravo Company’s commander replied. The 103rd Brigade had drawn that straw—and Brigadier George Hammond was leading his entire First Battalion on that strike himself. “Our problem is to make sure that we take that facility, or we all get to visit Heaven tonight.”

  The sergeant chuckled.

  “You know what they say, sir… ‘If the Navy and the Space Force…’” He started to trail off, but Hansen took up the poem himself—loudly enough for everyone in the shuttle to hear and join in.

  “…ever look on Heaven’s scenes, they’ll find the streets are guarded, by Castle’s damned Marines!”

  The entire company had joined in by the last line, the men trapped in the suits of armor that were unpowered until they hit assault mode. As they wrapped up the poem, Hansen howled—the keening wolf howl of a Castle Federation Marine about to go to war.

  The shuttle echoed as his men joined in, and he smiled broadly as the pilot joined in—and then hit the thrusters.