“Your wife and Mason would both kill me,” Michael agreed. “Stay alive, people. I hate writing letters home.”
Even front and center wasn’t that much more dangerous for Bravo Wing than anyone else. Most of what Michael was dropping on Rokos’s wing was the lion’s share of the antimissile fire.
Seconds ticked away and the missiles closed. Vice Commodore Michael Stanford, Commanding Office Starfighter Group Zero Zero One, counted the seconds and kilometers in his implant until…
“Weapons free,” he snapped. “Take them down!”
Suiting actions to words, he lined the nose of his own command starfighter up on the probability zone where his computers said a missile would likely be and fired. The eight-thousand-ton spacecraft shivered as the beam flashed into space—and he cheered as he connected, blasting the missile into vapor.
With twelve times as many starfighters as missiles, the first salvo didn’t so much fail as evaporate. Michael’s fighters charged on, cutting into the second salvo with equally deadly efficiency.
Here and there, a missile managed to sneak past the starfighters—Stormwinds, like Jackhammers, were incredibly smart weapons.
A single missile, though—even two, which somehow sneaked past Michael’s people on the seventh salvo—was no danger to Avalon’s defenses. Michael’s fighters ripped two hundred missiles—the best a modern battlecruiser could throw—to pieces in the time it took the missiles to pass the fighters.
Some days, Michael really understood why the Federation Senate had stopped funding battleships. At least cruisers brought some starfighters to the party.
“We are swinging bare-assed in the breeze and still here, sir,” Rokos reported crisply as the tenth salvo died. “What do we do now?”
“Wait and see what our Terran friend does,” Michael replied. “Think he’s going to throw more missiles?”
“No,” Force Commander Roberts replied. “He’s seen that’s pointless—he’s going to close the range, rip you guys apart with his lighter lances, and then blow Avalon to hell with his big guns.”
“Oh. Are we going to let him do that?” Rokos asked, somewhat abashed.
Roberts laughed.
“Wait and see, Wing Commander. Wait and see.”
00:00 March 14, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Midnight.
Avalon and the rest of Seventh Fleet had known the battle was coming; the full crew had been rested and awake when they’d arrived in their target systems.
The Commonwealth ships hadn’t had that luxury. Twenty-three hundred hours was an odd time, too. Most of the “day shift” crew would still be awake, not quite having passed out yet. Without warning, though, the night shift would be the only people fully awake and functional. There was a good chance that the Hercules’ captain had been pulled out of bed.
Nonetheless, Kyle figured someone over there had to be wondering why Avalon was running. At this point, he could easily turn the carrier and her fighters around and go head-to-head with the battlecruiser. It would be a near-run thing, but he figured he could take the Hercules. The Terran captain probably figured she could take Avalon.
“You were wrong,” Xue announced. “They’re launching more missiles.”
“They’re not aimed at Avalon,” Kyle guessed. “They’re going to see if they can strip away our fighter cover—or at least force us to keep SFG One in space and run them out of missiles. Watch this lot,” he ordered. “If they have the sprint mode that Admiral Alstairs saw, they’ll use it on our fighters.”
Again, the missiles blasted into space every twenty-six seconds. He didn’t expect them to stop after ten salvos this time, either. The Hercules had well over a thousand missiles in her magazines, and killing Stanford’s starfighters was her best chance at carrying this battle.
“Flight time is seventeen minutes, almost exactly,” his tactical officer noted. “Passing on our telemetry to Vice Commodore Stanford.”
Kyle nodded acknowledge of Xue’s report, but he was focused on the updates from the Q-probes. The missiles weren’t going to matter.
The twelfth salvo of the new attack blasted into space and then, finally, the Terran battlecruiser crossed the somewhat arbitrary line in space he’d drawn before they’d even arrived in system. Avalon’s ‘flight’ had pulled the battlecruiser past the carrier’s arrival point. The Hercules was far enough away from everything that she could have gone into Alcubierre drive if she’d chosen to.
The battlecruiser’s course hadn’t been perfectly consistent the whole flight out. Even on a roughly straight line, she’d swooped, curved, spiraled, and barrel-rolled to render missile or long-range lance fire more difficult.
But her course had been roughly straight. Straight enough for a message sent twenty minutes ago via Q-Com to have predicted her position now within a ten-thousand-kilometer error.
In a brilliant flash of blue Cherenkov radiation, the battleship Clawhammer and the strike cruiser Courageous dropped out of warped space—barely twenty thousand kilometers from the Terran battlecruiser.
One hundred and sixty-six light positron lances—lighter on Courageous than on Clawhammer—blasted into the Terran starfighters the moment the warships emerged. Their own sensors hadn’t resolved the static radiation from their departure; everything was targeted by data relayed from Avalon’s Q-probes. An extra thirty-six beams cut into space to make certain of the kills, and every Terran starfighter died in two seconds.
Their deaths were a sideshow as Clawhammer took half a second to orient herself and fired her main weapons. A dozen megaton-a-second heavy positron lances hit the Hercules-class battlecruiser amidships and held.
Courageous’s dozen six-hundred-kiloton-a-second beams arrived fractions of a second later—and hit only vaporized metal.
Chapter 15
Cora System
00:10 March 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four
Fully encased in the two-hundred-plus kilograms of carbon filament armor and servomotors that made up his combat armor, strapped into an assault shuttle locked into a launch tube of an assault transport “threading the needle” of the effect of a planet’s gravity on the Alcubierre field, there was no way for Edvard to appreciate emergence as he preferred.
Fortunately, the armor also had the ability to block external sounds. Marine combat drops came in two varieties—emerging a long way away from the target and sending the shuttles in alone, often on long ballistic courses, to try to achieve stealth, or pushing the limit of how close a ship could emerge to a planet, to try to achieve surprise.
Edvard was familiar with the horrifying keening noise aboard a ship threading the needle. His command network told him a lot about his men’s suits, and he could tell which of his men had the same experience by who had turned off their exterior audio pickups as soon as the announcement came down.
By now, five seconds into the hell-ride, no one in his company still had their exterior pickups turned on. The Lieutenant Major made a quick note in his computer system to make sure everyone had the pickups back on before they boarded their target.
The Bridge network was feeding the company commanders a full tactical plot of the Battle of Cora. It looked like the ambush had gone off perfectly and, as expected, the Commonwealth Navy freighter was making a run for it.
Whoever was in command of the logistics ship had done the math and set her course in the exact opposite direction of the Alliance warships. It was arguably the safest direction—certainly the only one where a freighter capable of accelerating at two hundred gravities could escape starfighters chasing her at five hundred gravities.
Sadly for the Terrans, it was also the most predictable.
“Emergence in ten,” Brigadier Hammond’s voice echoed through the command network. “No one has a clue how close we’re actually going to be. Good luck.”
Even without the audio pickups running, there were a thousand
unpleasant sensations associated with the gravity harmonics from sustaining a warp field this close to a planet. None of Edvard’s people were showing the symptoms, but previous experience told him roughly two to three percent of the people aboard Chimera were going to be nonfunctional.
Suddenly, all of those sensations ceased, and he knew they’d emerged even before the network updated.
“Go! Go! Go!” he snapped at the pilot, even knowing the order was redundant. His company’s assault shuttle was fired into space before he’d finished speaking.
“We came out sixty thousand kay ahead of her,” his pilot announced to the company after a moment. “Going full burn right for her; this is going to be a rough contact. Forty-five seconds to update your wills and insurance!”
Edvard’s implant happily informed they would be impacting the freighter at over fifteen hundred kilometers per second—exceeding the official rated survivability of the assault shuttle by approximately fifty percent.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he murmured to the pilot.
“We’re damned either way, El-Maj—so I’ll see you in Hell!”
“Bravo Company!” Edvard bellowed across his company network. “Power your suits, set for maximum impact absorption. This is gonna hurt—but the Terrans don’t stand a chance. Because we’re Castle’s damned Marines!”
The company network dissolved into a series of wolf howls, joined after a fraction of a second by a voice Edvard recognized as the pilot. Unlike most of the company, Edvard knew exactly what the pilot was doing at that second—and he’d have been screaming too!
Then the engines cut out and gravity shut off as every mass manipulator in the shuttle focused its energy on somehow allowing his two hundred Marines to survive the fist of God of a fifteen-hundred-kilometer-per-second impact.
#
A hiss and a warm sensation rushing through his body told Edvard his suit’s medical suite had assessed the situation versus the priorities he’d loaded in as part of the mission—and proceeded to inject stimulants to wake him up from the acceleration-induced blackout.
“Bravo Company,” he coughed out, then swallowed against his dry mouth and tried again. “Bravo Company—sound off!”
His platoon Lieutenants and squad Sergeants responded over the next several seconds, implants allowing them to check in on their people and reply at the speed of thought.
Even as his subordinates checked on their subordinates, Edvard brought up a mental display that updated him on the status of his entire company. Over eighty percent of his people had been injected with stimulants, but everyone was now on their feet.
Every second they lingered in the assault shuttle was a second the freighter’s defenders had to get ready.
“Move, people!” he barked. “We’ve got a freighter full of goodies to take. Move! Move! Move!”
As his first squad piled out of the shuttle into the shattered corridor they’d connected with, the Lieutenant Major checked the command network. Third Battalion had made their landing perfectly, all five assault shuttles quite literally embedded in the big freighter as it continued to attempt to flee the system.
The other three battalions of the 103rd Brigade continued on their course for the planet. Fourth Battalion would hit the Zions and the missile platforms, while Second seized the major civilian space infrastructure.
First Battalion, as always, got the sharp end of the stick. Those Marines were headed for Trudeau City to take control of the planetary capital away from whatever Terrans were guarding it.
A flashing mental icon informed him that the Colonel was contacting him moments before her command override dropped Amanda Silje’s voice into his head.
“Hansen, Bravo Company hit closest to the main engineering bay,” she told him crisply. “So, that’s your objective. I do not want this ship jumping to FTL with us aboard, do you read me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed. “We are moving out.”
With a thought, his implant brought up the detailed floor plans of the freighter. They didn’t know her name, but they recognized her type. Her builder was notorious for using the same plans for every ship—a small savings versus the cost of the ship itself, but he guessed pennies counted when you ran a civilian ship-builder in the Commonwealth.
He highlighted the engineering bays—sixty meters back of their contact point and three decks down—and flipped the plans to his entire company.
“This is the target, people,” he told them. “And it’s one the Terrans will know to defend—and we knocked on the door pretty loudly on the way in. If they’ve got Marines, we’re going to see them.”
Edvard and his headquarters followed his Second Platoon out, with the last sixty Marines trailing them. Gunnery Sergeant Jonas Ramirez was waiting for the company commander, standing next to the clear path the Marines had cut through the debris.
“They’re going to have Marines, sir,” he said quietly over a direct channel. “We’re not talking pirates, sir. Terran Marines will have armor, entrenched positions… This could hurt, sir.”
“There’s a limited number of ways into engineering, Gunny,” Edvard pointed out. The ship had been built as a fast transport instead of a naval auxiliary—hence the lack of weapons, which had made the landing somewhat easier—but security of the key components had still been in the designers’ mind. There were two corridors that connected to Engineering. They connected on different levels and had twenty-meter clear stretches with no side corridors right where they entered the bay.
Ramirez was right. The Federation Marines were moving—and moving fast—but Edvard’s best estimate put them three to five minutes from hitting the nearer of those corridors. Unless the defending Marines were incompetent—and the Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps had a reputation as anything but—those corridors were going to be deathtraps.
“You’re thinking like we want this ship intact,” his senior noncom pointed out. “So are they—but I thought we only wanted the cargo?”
Bravo Company’s commander stopped in his tracks, physically looking at the faceless shell of carbon filament ceramics encasing the gunny.
“You have a suggestion, I take it?”
#
In the end, Edvard sent Third Platoon down those three decks, with orders to engage but to take no unnecessary risks. They rapidly ran into stiff resistance—even the single platoon playing decoy outnumbered the defenders, but the two ten-man squads of Terran Marines had been given the time to set up serious defenses.
Most Marine security teams had access to carbon-filament ceramic barricades that were semi-mobile. The Terrans had set up four of them in a leapfrogged pattern in the hall, covering them from most non-heavy weapons fire.
Even Third Platoon’s heavy weapon section could have cleared the hall, but the cost would have been high. To take down twenty Marines could easily cost Edvard thirty or more—a price he’d been depressingly resigned to paying until Ramirez had made his suggestion.
“We ready?” he asked First Platoon’s heavy weapons Sergeant.
“Yes, sir,” that worthy, who doubled as a demolitions expert, replied. “Ready to rock and hole?”
“Fire in the hole, Sergeant,” Edvard ordered.
A moment later, thunder echoed through the empty corridor of the freighter as the charges detonated around them, cutting a thirty-meter diameter circle free of the floor—and dropping it right into the center of engineering.
Edvard rode the loose plate down with his First Platoon. His implant coordinated with his suit computer, identifying armed targets and flagging them for his attention. A flashing warning drew his attention to the half-dozen armored Marines actually in the engineering bay, presumably the defenders’ reserve.
He brought his rifle up, the high-powered smart weapon identifying the target, classifying the target and selecting the appropriate munition from its multiple magazines, and firing when he pressed the mental trigger.
A three-round burst of heavy tungsten pe
netrators flashed across the room, connecting and punching through the armor before detonating their explosive charges. Armored troops took a lot of killing, but that usually did the trick.
In the less than two seconds it had taken the Marines to fall the full fifteen-meter height of the freighter’s engineering bay, all six of the Terran Marines died—as did the half-dozen techs carrying weapons as a support.
“Drop your weapons,” Edvard boomed through his suit’s speakers. “Drop your weapons and surrender!”
First Platoon was moving fast. Surrendering techs were rapidly cuffed and Marines moved to trap the defending squads against the anvil of Third Platoon’s decoy. Gunfire echoed in the chamber, accompanied by the distinctive crack-crack of penetrators going off inside armor.
“Hold fire,” a suit-amplified voice bellowed as his Second Platoon and HQ section came crashing down behind him. “We’re laying down arms; we surrender.”
The Terrans had sent a thirty-man half-platoon to defend Engineering. Sixteen lived long enough to lay down their arms. Forty-five techs had surrendered, eight had died—and the Alliance now controlled the freighter’s engineering bay.
“Shut down the engines,” Edvard ordered. “Sublight, FTL, everything. This ship isn’t going anywhere we don’t let it.”
Watching his people get to work cuffing the crew and pulling the Terran Marines from their armor, Edvard shared a cold, satisfied smile with his Gunny.
Bravo Company hadn’t lost a single trooper.
Chapter 16
Cora System
08:00 March 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, was now in complete control of the Cora system. Brigadier Hammond’s Marines had taken the Zions and their attendant missile platforms without losses—the launch platforms, which also functioned as the control centers for the missile satellites, hadn’t been manned yet.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 11
