Finally, he managed to snag a second piece of cake for himself and find a relatively quiet corner—to find Roberts waiting there for him. With, almost inevitably, a beer.
“How do you always have beer?” he asked as he gratefully grabbed the—still cold! —bottle from his superior.
“Because I always stock up when we hit a planet,” Roberts replied cheerfully. “This is from a microbrewery just outside Trudeau City. I was impressed, so I grabbed a few cases.”
“Cases,” Michael repeated. “How much of your mass allowance is beer, boss?”
“Thirty percent or so?” the Force Commander guessed. “The refrigeration units take up a bunch too. I don’t have that much stuff, Michael—I’ve lived shipboard for eight years at this point.”
Avalon’s CAG studied the party, a warm feeling settling into his chest at the sheer amount of work his people had put into it.
“Last time I checked,” he noted, “my subordinates don’t have easy access to my birthday. Someone more senior than Rokos had to provide that.”
“That was me,” his boss confirmed cheerfully. “Though I will note that your people came to me. It seems Hammond knew your birthday and set all this in motion before he got med-evaced. Rokos didn’t know the exact date, but he knew it had to be soon.”
There was nothing Michael could really say to that. Master Chief Petty Officer Marshal Hammond, Avalon’s former deck chief, had been badly wounded in the attempt to kill Michael himself. As the CAG—who had lost his legs just above the knees in the Battle of Tranquility—knew, there wasn’t much that required someone to be shipped planetside for medical treatment.
Hammond had spent his last few weeks aboard Avalon in a wheelchair, wrapped in a “cast” that had effectively replaced the functions of several of his organs. The kind of internal reconstruction the Chief had required wasn’t possible out of even the big carrier’s resources, and he’d been shipped all the way back to Castle to get the best care possible.
“How’s he doing?” Roberts asked, clearly following Michael’s thoughts.
“It’s Marshal, sir,” Michael replied with a chuckle. “From the last communication I had from him, he’s spending half of his day in a tank full of nanites, and the other half complaining that the nanites make him itch.”
“Do they?” the Force Commander asked.
“In my experience? Like Void, sir. Like Starless Void,” Michael confirmed, shivering. “Was worth it to walk again for me—and without proper regen therapy, Hammond was looking at that life support chair for the rest of his life—but Void, did it itch.”
“I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m facing dramatic, life-threatening injury,” Roberts replied cheerfully.
23:00 March 17, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Quarters
Like a carrier’s Captain, a carrier’s Commander, Air Group wasn’t attached to any of the ship’s three shifts. Michael’s sleep schedule was variable at the best of times, but he was usually asleep by twenty-three hundred hours Standard.
When he finally managed to make it into his quarters, though, his implant happily informed him that he had a private Q-Com message waiting for him. His mother’s birthday message had arrived that morning, which left only one likely candidate.
Tired as he was, he couldn’t stop a silly smile as Kelly Mason’s image appeared in his mind. With a thought, he transferred the message to his quarters’ wallscreen and dropped down on the side of his bed to watch her message.
“Hey, lover,” she greeted him. She looked tired—she’d only sent the message an hour before and her uniform was rumpled from long wear. “Happy birthday. Interstellar shipping is a bitch, so you’ll get your present when you come home.”
The voluptuous blond woman smiled, sending a shiver running through Michael’s heart.
“That gives me time to think of what to get you,” she added wickedly. “It’s been a hectic month,” she admitted. “After the attack when you guys left, they’ve got Home Fleet pulling system-wide patrols, making sure nobody sneaks up on the Yards. At least we don’t have to worry about the Reserve anymore.”
She didn’t elaborate—Q-Com transmissions might be the most secure communication known to man, with zero chance of interception, but that didn’t invalidate operational security—but Michael had seen the same reports. With the first wave of the Reserve deployed, the Castle System Reserve was in the yards now. Twenty ships at a time, four months to commission each wave—it would take almost another year to get the Alliance’s eighty reserve starships deployed.
Hopefully by then, there’d be new-wave construction to deploy as well. Avalon, for example, was over twice the volume of the Reserve ships sent out to reinforce her. There was supposed to be an entire generation of warships to match her, but only a handful of the Sanctuaries had been completed before the war started.
“I’d be okay with the patrols,” Mason continued, “if they didn’t also insist on inspections to keep the Home Fleet to the ‘standard expected of the Federation’s last line of defense’. I’ll never object to engineers checking over my ship’s tech, but inspectors going over my people’s uniforms and corridor cleanliness?”
She shuddered, and Michael doubted it was feigned. The Federation’s Home Fleet was notorious for its spit and shine—suddenly, being on the front didn’t sound so bad!
“Spent yesterday cleaning the ship from top to bottom and today playing nursemaid to a pair of idiots who might fall into a fusion reactor or something if left alone,” she concluded. “And that was if they didn’t irritate anyone enough to help them fall, for Christ’s sake.”
His smile tried to split his face. His girlfriend’s concerns were very real—and very much the concerns of a fleet attached to an unlikely target. Walkingstick’s people had launched one attack on the system, but the logistics of that kind of operation were a mess. If nothing else, once your Alcubierre speed crossed the ten-light-year-per-day mark, ships started to have a real chance of just, well, disappearing.
Compared to the fear of losing his people when they hit Frihet, they were seemingly minor. Roberts’s tricks had got them through Cora without fighter losses, but that couldn’t continue. Starfighters, after all, existed to die so starships didn’t.
Mason reached out toward the camera as if to touch his face. “I miss you,” she said quietly. “I did, for your information, manage to make time to have supper with your mother. We ended up talking grandkids.”
Michael’s girlfriend, the executive officer of a strike cruiser, chuckled—and then sighed wistfully.
“She actually volunteered to take care of them while we were on duty if we wanted to do an in vitro pregnancy,” Kelly told him. “I’m… Honestly, Michael, I’m tempted. I don’t think I’d be okay with leaving our child with even your mother, but the thought of a child…”
She shrugged, and Michael was surprised at his own reaction. A year ago, the thought of having a child with anyone would have sent him running for the hills. Now…
Like Kelly said, he was tempted. But he agreed that he’d want one of them to raise the kid, and, well…regardless of any specific terms or contracts, he knew they were both in for the duration.
“Too many issues, I think,” she finally declared. “Something for us to think about, though—as an us.”
Her smile suddenly turned wicked and her hands slid to the zipper of her uniform.
“Now that I’ve gone all mopey and maternal on you, I think I need to give you what birthday present I can,” she told him with a lascivious wink.
Chapter 19
Deep Space, En Route to Frihet System
03:00 March 20, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Most people aboard a starship who couldn’t sleep and wanted to see the strange light effects of a warp bubble would go to one of the observation bubbles every ship had. Most people had no interest in seeing the warped void of the gap between star-bow and star-w
ake, as it was mildly unnerving on first exposure.
As the Captain of one of the Castle Federation’s most modern supercarriers, however, Kyle Roberts could drop himself down in the command chair on the bridge and keep one eye on his Charlie shift while watching the twisted space surrounding his ship.
The only threat in FTL was the nature of the bubble itself. Every particle in the path of the warships was picked up by the warp in space—and often hyper-energized as well. An Alcubierre bubble was a very hostile place, the stabilization fields a fragile shield against radiation levels that would slag the carrier’s hull and kill her crew.
An ability to track or engage ships under Alcubierre drive would be the kind of superweapon that could change the course of a war. Until reaching Frihet, Avalon’s crew was safe. They would drill, they would prepare, and when they arrived at their destination they would go to war.
A thought changed the images being fed directly to Kyle’s optic nerve from the strange lights of the warp bubble to a tactical plot of the Frihet system.
The plan called for the three Battle Groups to arrive simultaneously, evenly spaced around the “north” half of the system. After that, it devolved into branching flowcharts, depending on what Commonwealth forces were present and how they responded.
Much like his plan at Cora, there were cutouts and backup plans. Seventh Fleet would remain outside the gravity well of the planet until they were certain of the Commonwealth’s strength. Using their Alcubierre drives to concentrate their force—or even to flee, if necessary—was an option until they drove farther in-system.
Rising Star was going well. Its sister operation deeper into Alliance space, retaking the systems the Commonwealth had seized in their second offensive, was reporting success as well. Those battles were harder-fought from the reports he had seen, but Fourth Fleet was twice Seventh Fleet’s size—and with more modern ships as well.
For the first time since the war had kicked off the previous September, the Alliance finally seemed to have turned the balance. With the boost of the ships deployed from the Reserve, it looked like they were pushing the Commonwealth back on all fronts.
His tactical plot dissolved into a strategic map, the Captain studying the three-dimensional chart of stars. If Rising Star and Peacock succeeded, the Commonwealth would have been kicked back to their original borders.
Ship numbers started attaching themselves to battles and he sighed. Even one of Seventh Fleet’s Battle Group commanders wasn’t getting enough data to be sure of losses, but his impression from the reports he’d read was that Peacock was being expensive. The Alliance’s best were hammering headlong into the Commonwealth’s best with attendant losses on both sides—losses the Commonwealth could afford better.
James Calvin Walkingstick had volunteered to be Marshal of the Rimward Marches, charged with annexing the Federation and its allies. Kyle doubted he’d done so without a plan—and he doubted the Alliance had thrown any significant wrenches into his engines.
So, every day it looked like they were winning, Kyle was going to keep looking for the sucker punch.
He just wished he could guess what it was going to be.
09:00 March 20, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Captain’s Office
“Morning reports, ma’am.”
Mira nodded to Bruce Notley, her executive officer, and gestured the sparse, white-haired man to the chair opposite her. She hadn’t looked up just how old Notley was, but she did know that he’d joined the Castle Federation Space Navy as a junior enlisted rating in the middle of the last war, worked his way up to Senior Chief, and then been talked into taking a commission.
His tour as XO on Camerone was the final checkmark in his file before they gave the old warhorse his own cruiser. Alstairs had been lucky to have him—and Mira, as a first-time Captain, regarded herself as about ten times as lucky.
“Anything I need to be aware of?” she asked, gestured at the datapad he’d dropped on her desk. The reports could be—and actually were—directly transmitted to her neural implant. But Notley and Alstairs had built this tradition when she was Captain, and in the very first of these meetings Notley had sprung on her, he’d drawn her attention to a gambling ring about to explode in Engineering.
It hadn’t been in anyone’s reports. Gambling was allowed aboard Federation ships so long as they followed rules, after all. In this case, however, the ring had basically set up a roving casino in her ship—and in a casino, the house always wins.
Notley had brought it to her attention, and she’d made sure the bosun and chief engineer were aware of it. The Captain was a level of artillery not regularly brought to the party, which got the ring quickly dealt with—which had probably saved at least one of its members’ lives, as ill feelings had been growing.
“Nothing too major this time,” her XO admitted. “Launcher Six is still down. Engineering assures me we’ll have it back online by tomorrow, well before we reach Frihet. Otherwise, Camerone is prepared for action in all respects.”
Those were the words any warship captain wanted to hear, and Mira leaned back, smiling.
“So far, so good, huh, Bruce?” she asked rhetorically. “Any thoughts on what to expect at Frihet?”
“Not sure, ma’am,” he admitted. “I have to admit, I’m nervous. It’s unusual for Intelligence to be as wrong as they were about the last three systems. I guess it’s possible we’ll run into all of the missing ships at Frihet.”
“We can take them in that case,” Mira pointed out. “We’ll have twelve ships to their nine, and I’m betting their defensive ships are older, too.”
“So is most of our fleet,” Notley said quietly. “Even Camerone isn’t our latest—there’s, what, seven Defender-class battlecruisers in the Navy? The Conquerors are a few months from commissioning. The only modern sixty-million-cubic-meter-plus ships in Seventh Fleet are Avalon and Zheng He. With the Reserve, most of our ships are under forty million cubic meters and maybe twelve million tons. If we run into nine Volcanos or Saints, we might have them outnumbered, but they’ll have us outmassed and outgunned.”
Camerone’s captain sighed.
“I know. That’s not what Intelligence thinks we’re facing, but they also thought the Terrans had a lot more ships around here,” she admitted. “Peacock hasn’t run into them—thank God, that’s been a Pyrrhic-enough affair as it is—but they have to be somewhere.”
“Not sure where, though, ma’am,” Notley told her.
“That’s my next meeting with the Admiral,” Mira replied. “I’ll be sure to ask Intel what’s going on.”
11:00 March 20, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Admiral’s Breakout Room
“Bluntly, Admiral, Captains, we have no idea where Walkingstick’s defensive units are based,” Captain Sansone Costa of the Renaissance Trade Security Force’s Intelligence Branch, said flatly. “Our agents in the systems seized by the Commonwealth have limited access to the covert Q-Com arrays available to them, but none of our operatives in Huī Xing or Frihet have any access to orbital scanner arrays or information on ships in-system.”
All twelve of Seventh Fleet’s captains were in on the call, though Mira was the only one physically present in the conference room attached to Admiral Alstairs’ office.
“We do know, from agents in the Commonwealth Navy’s logistics division, that Walkingstick assigned fifteen ships to the security of those five systems,” Costa continued. “Most are last-generation ships, with two Volcanos, a Saint, and a Hercules to stiffen their strength.”
“The Hercules is gone,” Roberts noted. “That reduces the really nasty surprises they can throw at us.”
“So, you’re saying our original briefing was based on taking the number of ship’s Walkingstick’s people have and dividing by five?” Mira asked dryly. “That seems a little…crude.”
“It was an accurate an assumption as we had to work with at the time,” Costa replied calmly. “Without the ability to predict wheth
er or not they were using a nodal force or where that force would be positioned, planning around that assumption would be dangerous.”
“And sending us in assuming they had a maximum of three ships per system wasn’t?” Alstairs demanded. “We are supposed to receive the full intelligence, Captain, not your assumptions presented as facts.”
The hologram of the swarthy Renaissance Trade Factor officer shrugged.
“I did not draft that report,” he said flatly. “You are correct, Rear Admiral. More information should have been given, and a false impression of certainty was provided. Those responsible have been advised of their error and additional layers of review added. The error will not be repeated.”
“It better not,” the Admiral told him. “What can you tell us?”
“We are certain on the number of hulls assigned to this sector,” Costa replied. “Given Commonwealth losses to date, that means you are facing at most twelve capital ships. We have limited information on what has been provided in terms of fixed defenses, but we do not think that you will face anything heavier than Zahn’s defenses outside of Via Somnia itself.”
“Since they clearly have a nodal fleet, do we know where it is?” Mira demanded.
“Via Somnia seems likely,” the intelligence officer said. “If they took the logistics facilities the Alliance assembled at Huī Xing, they could also have based the fleet there. I would say it is at least seventy percent likely that the nodal force will not be waiting for you at Frihet.”
“What about Via Somnia itself?” Alstairs asked.
“We believe the defenses we saw at Zahn, Cora and Hammerveldt were drawn from a set of freighters we had assessed as being sent to Via Somnia,” Costa explained. “Nonetheless, defenses at Via Somnia remain likely in excess of two thousand starfighters and roughly a quarter of that in orbital missile satellites. Neutralizing the local fleet would be wise before engaging the defenses at the naval base.”
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 14
