The eye caught shreds of color scattering away, but Edvard wasn’t entirely sure that wasn’t a trick of the mind. One moment, the ship was surrounded in the ethereal colors of the warp bubble, and the next only by empty space.
It was an awe-inspiring transition, and he never tired of it. Once it was over, sadly, he needed to return to the mundane drudgery of the paperwork he was running through—an assessment of what supplies Bravo Company needed from Chimera’s auto-fabricators. Mostly munitions, though one of his heavy-weapons people had taken a beating sufficient to require both new armor and a new weapon.
The task was unexciting enough, he didn’t even check who was at his office door when the admittance chime sounded, and found himself shooting out of his chair to attention when Brigadier George Hammond stomped into his office.
“At ease, son,” the stocky, balding, commander of the 103rd Brigade said crisply. “You did good work on Morrison; this ain’t a come-to-Jesus meeting.”
“Of course, Brigadier,” Edvard said, slowly lowering himself back into his chair and gesturing for his CO to seat himself. “How can I help you, sir?”
He normally reported to his battalion’s CO, Colonel Silje, or her exec, Major Brahm. Outside of full-brigade officer briefings, he’d met the Brigadier exactly once.
“We’ve arrived in the Alizon system,” Hammond told him briskly. “You’ll be getting a briefing packet on what the Navy has put together as Operation Rising Star. Key point for the moment is that Seventh Fleet is getting into three Battle Groups, and each of those Battle Groups is getting an assault transport.”
“That makes sense, sir,” the Lieutenant Major replied, hoping for some kind of clue as to why he had the Brigadier in his office.
“We’ve been assigned to Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon,” his superior told him. “Force Commander Roberts has invited myself and several senior officers aboard Avalon to discuss our next operation, and explicitly requested that you be included.”
Edvard leaned back, confused for a long moment, until…Avalon.
“Kyle Roberts, sir? The Stellar Fox? Asked for me?”
“You served with him aboard Alamo, as I understand,” Hammond noted. “You were both at Ansem Gulf, which I would call a…formative experience for you both.”
“Makes sense, sir,” Edvard repeated, flashes of memory of the hell that had been the inside of the pirated liner crossing his mind as he tried to conceal his wince.
The Brigadier’s silent pause told Edvard that the older man understood exactly what had just happened. The older man was a mustang, commissioned from the ranks during the last days of the previous war. He’d seen the same kind of mess.
“I tend to bring promising junior officers along on this kind of trip in any case,” Hammond noted. “After your performance on Morrison Hab, you were on my list anyway. We make Alizon orbit in three hours—be ready to transfer over to Avalon then.
“And, son, a piece of advice?”
“Yes, sir?”
“If Roberts is anything like most of the soldiers the media hangs a moniker like ‘Stellar Fox’ on,” Hammond said with the calm of experience, “he hates the nickname.”
15:30 March 4, 2736 EMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
“Have a seat, Major,” Kyle instructed Hansen as the Marine officer entered his office. “Peng Wa sends her regards.”
“How is the gunny?” Hansen asked as he carefully took a seat. He felt unsurprisingly awkward at ending up in the office of the Battle Group commander.
Master Sergeant Peng Wa was the senior Marine noncommissioned officer aboard Avalon. It would fall to the woman to coordinate the inevitable interactions between NCOs of different units required to make the officers’ plans actually work.
She’d also, due to the virtues of experience, ended up effectively in command of the second wave of Marines that had boarded Ansem Gulf, after the first wave, including the Major in command, had been killed.
“I owe her my life a few times more than before,” Kyle observed. “She keeps Avalon’s Marines in check, and I try not to die on her. It’s a solid working partnership.”
Hansen dared a smile, still clearly unsure of what Kyle wanted.
“Avalon is that dangerous a posting, sir?” he asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Kyle replied quietly. He couldn’t say much more than that. The entire affair with what appeared to be a domestically employed assassin organizing a mutiny and attempting to kill him was classified—not least for the political disaster it could birth if it became public knowledge.
Hansen nodded, clearly aware there was more going on, then shrugged and went for the heart of the matter.
“Sir, I have to admit to being unsure why you wanted to speak to me,” he asked.
“A few reasons,” Kyle admitted. “I’ll confess to feeling somewhat…proprietary of the Marines who survived Ansem Gulf. If the media is going to tell me I saved you all, I feel somewhat responsible for you.”
“You did save us all, sir,” Hansen told him. “The second wave didn’t have enough delta-v to break off before entering range of the weapons the pirates had mounted on Ansem Gulf.” The Marine shivered in memory. “Assault shuttles can’t stand up to military mass drivers.”
“I and about sixty other pilots and flight crew saved you,” Avalon’s Captain replied. “But Ansem Gulf was a mess. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, away from the other Marines.”
“Sir?”
“I understand the Morrison Hub operation went very smoothly,” Kyle noted.
“I lost one of my troopers, but yes,” Hansen confirmed with a sigh. The loss of his people clearly bothered him.
“Outside of you and the Brigadier, no one in the One Oh Third has really seen how bad a boarding operation can get,” Kyle reminded the Marine quietly. “They haven’t seen the aftermath the way you and I have.”
The whole conversation was bringing up unpleasant memories for them both, but Kyle did have a purpose here. He forged on.
“Given that, I want your take on the Marine part of the ops plan,” he finished. “Where it can go wrong, as much as anything.”
With a purpose finally laid in front of him, Hansen seemed more comfortable. He straightened and took on a thoughtful look—and the slightly glazed eyes of someone consulting implant data.
“The unknowns bother me the most,” he admitted. “We have a pretty good idea of what the surface situation is, but it sounds like we have almost no intel on the orbitals. Surface positions will probably surrender once we’re in orbit, but we have no guarantee of local support like you ended up with on Alizon.
“It also looks like we’re not planning on staying in-system very long,” Hansen continued. “As I read the op plan, we’re only set to be in-system five days. That’s not a lot of time to secure an entire planet with four thousand troops.”
“Or to provide for the long-term security of the system,” Kyle agreed. “My understanding is that once we’ve achieved all of Rising Star’s objectives, Seventh Fleet is to act as a nodal defense force until the region can be secured. Dividing the Fleet up to provide the security for the systems we’re freeing would undermine our ability to maintain the offensive. We’re taking a risk, but Command thinks it’s worth it.”
He carefully didn’t state his own opinion of it. He wanted to see what the Marine made of the plan.
“If the orbitals are easily secured, and Cora preserved intact ground forces the same way Alizon did, we can do it,” Hansen admitted. “If any of the orbitals have heavy security presences or Cora has no ground troops to back us up, this could turn into a month-long slug-fest. It comes down to just how effective the Commonwealth occupation has been.”
“And luck,” Kyle agreed aloud “I hate depending on luck.”
Chapter 11
Alizon System
20:00 March 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Captain Ky
le Roberts—it was taking him to adjust to his temporary rank in his own mind—watched his new Battle Group make its way out of the Alizon system. All told, he was now responsible for six ships—four warships, an assault transport, and a logistics freighter carrying a load of orbital defense platforms—and almost thirty thousand people.
Avalon, built with the newest and best technology in the galaxy, was the largest ship in the group by a significant margin. The freighter Sunshine was the second largest by volume, the key metric for the Stetson stabilization field, falling between the Reserve ships and the supercarrier in age.
“Confirm the safety radii for the Alcubierre jump,” he ordered his Navigator.
Maria Pendez, the curvaceously attractive, dusky-skinned officer who flew Avalon and currently was providing navigation support to the entirety of Battle Group Seven-Two, smiled back at him. Exposure had rendered him mostly immune to the young woman’s charms, but Kyle had no doubts as to why Pendez had no problems getting the male navigators of the other ships to cooperate with her.
“All ships are at ten thousand kilometers separation and on course for the Cora system,” she confirmed. “We are outside all detectable gravitational interferences and prepared to warp space on your command.”
Despite the differences in age and quality of the six ships, all of them had roughly the same Alcubierre drive. Avalon’s Class One mass manipulators were smaller and had better computer support and control than, say, Sledgehammer’s—but they contained the same amount of carefully manufactured and aligned exotic matter.
The smallest warp bubble humanity had ever managed to generate was approximately three thousand kilometers across and required four Class One mass manipulators—exotic matter–based devices that could create, manipulate or remove the types of bosons that gave the universe mass. Those mass manipulators were expensive—Avalon’s were a third of her price tag. Sunshine’s were fully seventy percent of the freighter’s cost.
Keeping a ship alive inside a warp bubble, a compressed section of space that picked up every atom and molecule in its path as it traveled between stars, was an entirely different matter. Stetson stabilization fields were extraordinarily power-intensive and had massive feedback issues as you scaled them up, but the emitters themselves were cheap.
Every time the Stetson fields got a little more advanced, ships got bigger. Since the Alcubierre drive never changed its cost, warships were only ever built in one size: as big as possible.
Since said warships were a significant chunk of a star system’s economy, they stayed in service even as newer, bigger ships were built. Hence the three older ships in BG 7.2 being barely two thirds of Avalon’s size—that was as large as Alliance could build them in the mid-twenty-seven-twenties.
“All ships, report readiness,” Kyle ordered crisply, studying his fleet via his implant to confirm the separation. Being inside each other’s warp bubbles wasn’t fatal—it would just prevent either ship from actually forming the bubble, which would be both time-consuming and embarrassing.
Verbal and text confirmations drifted back from the other five ships and he leaned back in his chair, meeting Pendez’s gaze.
“All ships, warp space at your discretion,” he ordered, and made a “go ahead” gesture to Pendez.
She smiled, and his implant informed her she’d opened a channel to engineering.
“Commander Wong, can you confirm the status of the Class Ones, please?” she asked sweetly.
“We are at one hundred and one point two percent readiness,” Avalon’s chief engineer replied, more than a little self-satisfaction clear in Senior Fleet Commander Alistair Wong’s voice.
Pendez glanced at Kyle, as if expecting him to take over the process, but he simply smiled at her. Given the personnel assessment he’d sent in for the navigator, she was only a few months from finding herself in an executive officer slot somewhere. This was a simple evolution—and good practice for her.
“Initiating interior Stetson fields,” she announced. Moments later, the screens that coated all four walls, the floor and the roof of the bridge were covered with a faint haze as the field of electromagnetic and gravitational energy settled around the ship.
“Interior field active,” Pendez reported. “Exterior field on standby. Mass manipulators on standby.”
Glancing back at Kyle again, she threw the virtual switch in her implant and brought up the Class Ones. Four sets of distortion appeared in the haze of the Stetson field, as Avalon generated the singularities necessary for her to outspeed light.
A second layer of haze fell between the carrier and the outside universe as the exterior stabilization field snapped into place. Exponentially weaker than the interior field, the exterior field required vastly more power—as it wrapped itself around the space the warp bubble would form in, protecting the outside universe from the energies Avalon was about to unleash.
“We have singularity formation,” Pendez reported. “Exterior Stetson field is active, no containment issues. Initiating warp bubble…now.”
Avalon’s immense arrays of zero point cells flared to life, and the power feeding to the Class One manipulators increased a thousandfold. The distortions seemed to move, and the space beyond the carrier wavered in their influence for a long second.
Then a bright flash of blue light encapsulated the ship—mirrored by five other flashes that barely made it into their new pocket of reality—as Battle Group Avalon launched into interstellar space.
Operation Rising Star was officially under way.
Chapter 12
Deep Space, en route to Zahn system
22:30 March 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Captain Mira Solace wasn’t quite alone on the bridge of her battlecruiser. Her Alpha shift had left an hour or so after they’d entered Alcubierre drive, and the Charlie shift was always a half-strength group, even before the reduced shifts generally seen while in FTL.
Camerone’s bridge was currently home to one of her junior tactical officers, a junior navigator, and two experienced petty officers keeping a careful eye on both the larval officers and the battlecruiser’s captain.
Mira was studying a display only she could see, laid over her vision by her neural implant, showing the positions of all of the nineteen ships under Admiral Alstairs authority. BG 7.2 and BG 7.3 both had a single freighter attached alongside their warships and assault transport, but Alstairs had attached two of the massive logistics vessels to her own command.
Only two and a bit hours into their FTL trip, the three groups of vessels were still close together. They had sixteen light-years to go, and would be accelerating at one light-year per day squared halfway there—and then decelerating at the same rate the rest of the way. Four days to each leg, eight days total to cross sixteen light-years.
The exact distances to Cora, Zahn and Hammerveldt varied, but all three were between fifteen and sixteen light-years from Alizon. Adjusting the exact accelerations would allow all three Battle Groups to arrive simultaneously—and quantum-entanglement coms would allow them to be sure all of the ships were in place before attacking.
It was an aggressive plan, one Mira was surprised Alstairs had got Alliance High Command to sign off on. The early setbacks had led to a much more defensive attitude on the part of the Alliance—but perhaps the continued losses to Commonwealth raids had made a difference.
The Alliance was still ramping up its industry and recommissioning the Federation’s Reserve. Mira suspected that there were losses even the flag captain of their second-largest offensive fleet didn’t know about. A continuous acid drip of shattered ships and lost lives, slowly degrading the Alliance’s ability to wage even a defensive war.
Perhaps High Command had realized that if they didn’t turn that momentum around, the Commonwealth would win. Marshal Walkingstick had been charged with the annexation of the Rimward Marches—a region of space that coincided almost perfectly with the Alliance—and she
doubted he’d planned to take them all in one sweep.
Mira shook her head. All evidence suggested that James Walkingstick was a superior strategist, but even he couldn’t have planned for the back-and-forth bloodshed and slaughter the war had brought out so far. The Terrans might have taken six systems in the opening strikes of the war, but they’d assaulted nine. The losses at Tranquility alone had been mind-boggling—six starships destroyed when Roberts pulled the stunt that earned him the moniker Stellar Fox.
The attrition so far had been in the Commonwealth’s favor, but not by much. Maybe a solid offensive now could truly turn the tide of the war.
Or maybe all they would do was wake up a half-sleeping giant with four starships for every one the Alliance had.
Deep Space, en route to Cora system
10:00 March 7, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Office
“I can’t tell you too much,” Michael Stanford told the camera in his office as he recorded his message for Kelly Mason. “Just the fact that we’re on delayed coms probably tells you enough—we’re at the front, we’re on an op.” He paused. There really wasn’t much he could tell his girlfriend. As a fellow officer, she’d get it, but it still made it hard to fill even a short vid message with content.
“It’s funny watching Kyle take on a multi-ship command,” he finally continued. “I don’t know how the man does it—if they kept promoting me the way they promote him, I’d be floating debris in one of the systems we’ve left behind us.
“Kyle would be the first to call it luck, though,” Michael noted slowly. “All I know is this operation is right up his alley—and as usual when he gets to call the shots, they’re going to be looking the completely wrong way when we punch them in the side of the head.”
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 8
