Then the rest of his people joined in. There were eight separate entrances to the facility, and the Spec Ops data package the Alliance had received had told them where all eight were. Each of his two hundred troopers had an entrance tagged as their zone of responsibility—and their fire added to the plasma rifles and miniguns.
It wasn’t entirely one-sided. Like the Castle Marines, the Terrans knew the playbook. They hadn’t known the invaders would know exactly where they would emerge from. Edvard watched his people get thrown back, though even tungsten penetrators weren’t a guaranteed kill against full powered battle armor, and charged forward where the Terrans were breaking out.
He fired on the run, his rifle spitting penetrators even as he activated the auto-tracking micro-missile launchers built into the armored suits’ shoulders. Micro-missiles couldn’t do much—dozens of them were detonating across the battlefield every second, mostly unable to penetrate battle armor—but they helped pause the assault.
He reached the gap, stepping into a hole where several of Bravo Platoon’s troopers had gone down, and joined the firing. The Terrans seemed to keep coming. The only intelligence Edvard didn’t have was how many troops were in the fortress under his feet—and he was starting to think he’d poked a hornet’s nest.
Then he ran out of ammo. Given the weight that an armor suit could carry and the low volume of the tungsten penetrators his battle rifle used, the weapon took stupendously sized magazines—but could run out.
The reload process was simple. He mentally ordered the weapon to eject the empty magazine, ordered his suit to open the panel containing a replacement, and slammed it in. It took barely a second—a second after which he realized he was now staring down the barrel of a Terran Marine’s almost-identical weapon.
Before the Marine could pull the trigger, his entire torso exploded and Edvard’s suit started flashing up a threat warning. Someone, not in the fortress but with a clear line of sight, had a mass-manipulated gauss sniper rifle—and the Alliance hadn’t dropped any of the sniper weapons with their Marines.
Fyr Special Ops had apparently decided not to leave their world’s liberation entirely to the Castle Marines.
More of the characteristic supersonic explosions rippled across the compound, easily a platoon’s worth of snipers on a nearby hilltop backing up his Marines as they faced what had to be an entire brigade trying to break out.
It lasted perhaps two minutes—until all eight entrances were filled with shattered armor and broken bodies.
Then he started picking up an omnidirectional, unencrypted radio transmission.
“This is Lieutenant General Michail Popov to all Terran Commonwealth Marine forces and Castle Marine forces,” the transmission said calmly. “Commonwealth forces—lay down your arms. Alliance forces—we surrender.”
Chapter 22
Frihet System
08:00 March 25, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office
They’d been in the Frihet system for twenty-nine hours, and Kyle had managed to sneak a three-hour catnap at roughly the twenty-four-hour mark. He’d been tied up in some of the coordination with the apparently still-very-intact Frihet government, but he’d intentionally not included his CAG in the conference to let the man rest as he flew back to Avalon.
From the bags under Michael Stanford’s eyes and his general shattered expression, that had been wasted effort. There was no way Avalon’s CAG had slept since the strike had launched yesterday morning. He slumped in the chair across the desk in Kyle’s office like a student called in front of the principal.
“I fucked up, sir,” Stanford said harshly. “Dammit, I should have seen that coming—it made sense.”
“Arguable, yes, and yes,” Kyle replied. “Yes, you should have seen it coming—but what would you have done differently?”
That, thankfully, looked like it scored a hit.
“If you were wondering,” the Force Commander—who had, a long time before, been Stanford’s CAG—continued, “I did see it coming. And the reason I didn’t tell you is because I thought you had as well—because I wouldn’t have been doing anything different. It was a risk you had to take or Zheng He and her sisters were going to end up on the receiving end of that same firepower.”
“There had to have been something I could have done to save Ozolinsh’s ships,” Stanford replied. “Hell, I lost almost two hundred of my own people.”
“In hindsight,” Kyle said quietly, “knowing that the orbital platforms were out of the fight as soon as they launched their starfighters, you could have adjusted your vectors to bring your fighter wing into range at the same time as Battle Group Seven-Three. Adding the starship’s defensive fire to that of Vice Commodore Ozolinsh’s ships might have protected them long enough to drag the Terrans into a lance-range dogfight.
“Might.
“But that would also have allowed those starfighters to fire on Battle Group Seven-Three—and honestly, those salvos would probably have cost us starships as well as starfighters had we taken that risk. Pulling Seven-Three out of the fight wasn’t your call,” Kyle noted. “It was your recommendation—but it was Admiral Alstairs’ call. She made it.”
“The starfighter deployments were my call, though,” Stanford said hoarsely. “Sending Seven-One’s fighters after the carriers was redundant…”
“But still the right call,” Kyle replied. “You couldn’t count on capital ship missile fire taking out the carriers—it’s not something that we see often at that kind of range. Not to mention, they couldn’t have intervened against the fighter strike.
“Damn it, Michael,” he told his subordinate, “the physics only gave you one option. You played it—and you backed Ozolinsh when she saw a way to save her people if not her ships.”
“I still lost so many people.”
“I know,” Kyle admitted. “And it sucks, Michael—we both knew those people. Losing them hurts. That your squadron and wing leaders survived helps keep the Group together as a fighting unit, but losing sixty-seven fighters and a hundred and eighty people is never easy. We tell our people that starfighters exist to die so starships don’t, and it’s true—but the cold calculus of war is no comfort to lost friends and those Gods-damned letters home.”
“I’ve never…lost this many people before,” Stanford pointed out.
“There are no charmed ships and no charmed fighter groups,” his captain replied quietly. “Sooner or later, we all run out of luck.”
The CAG shook his head as if trying to clear cobwebs.
“It felt bad enough after Tranquility, but that wasn’t nearly as many,” he said quietly. The fighter group they’d taken into the Battle of Tranquility had had fewer starfighters at the start than SFG-001 had lost in this battle. “What happens now?”
“First, Vice Commodore, you need to remember that you do not need to write those letters yourself,” Kyle pointed out. “The Phoenix flight crews’ families will be informed by their officers. Your own people’s families should be informed by their Wing Commanders. You should be involved, but you are sure as hell not writing one hundred and eighty letters yourself. Understand me?”
“Fair,” Stanford allowed. “Doesn’t make me any less responsible for their deaths.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Avalon’s captain said gently. “But second-guessing yourself won’t change what happened either. Go get some sleep, Michael. You need it.”
“What about you?” the CAG asked, glancing around the office. Kyle was suddenly very aware of the uniform jacket haphazardly tossed over a bookcase, the pile of dirty coffee cups on one corner of his desk, and the very visible packet of stimulant pills on his desk.
“Anderson is asleep right now,” Kyle pointed out. “He’ll be awake in about two hours, then I’m going to go pass out for as long as I can. I have a meeting planetside this evening—I get the impression I don’t want to deal with Frihet’s people while half-asleep.”
18:00
March 25, 2736 ESMDT
Landning City
The shuttle landing pad on the outskirts of Fyr’s capital city was crowded. Kyle watched through his implants as his pilot neatly slotted Avalon’s Shuttle One in next to the pair of shuttles carrying Rear Admiral Alstairs, Captain Solace, and the Admiral’s staff.
Most of the shuttles were local, suborbital craft delivering personnel from around the planet. The fourth Alliance shuttle was from Zheng He, carrying Force Commander Aleppo.
Kyle wasn’t sure when his and Aleppo’s temporary ranks would be canceled, but they were still the titles they’d been invited to the surface under. Alstairs might have brought enough people to justify the second shuttle, but his only companion was Lieutenant Commander Jessica Xue. His XO was in command and his CAG was—thankfully—asleep, so the tactical officer drew the straw of playing Kyle’s “staff” for this affair.
Stepping out of the shuttle onto the surprisingly cool surface of the pad—there had to be some impressive heat exchangers and cooling systems under its surface—Avalon’s commander watched a local ground-car zoom across the landing pad and come to a perfect stop several feet from him.
A dark-haired young woman in a crisply pressed Frihet Defense Force uniform sprang out of the passenger side, quickly opening the rear door for Kyle and his tactical officer.
“Welcome to Fyr and Landning City, Force Commander Roberts, Lieutenant Commander Xue,” she said brightly. “I’m Lieutenant Yvonne Svenson, Frihet Defense Force. I’ve been assigned as your attaché for the duration of your stay on Fyr.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Kyle replied, gesturing Xue into the vehicle as he looked around the pad. “Your people seem… Well, you seem to be back on your feet surprisingly quickly.”
Svenson looked askance for a moment and then shrugged.
“Appearances are everything,” she said quietly. “Most of the government and military managed to go underground before the orbital platforms fell. Now we’re coming back out of hiding, hence”—she gestured at the suborbital shuttles—“we’ll put our best foot forward with the Alliance,” she said brightly. “Shall we?”
#
The car didn’t, to Kyle’s mild surprise, take them to the big Government Plaza near the center of the city. Instead, Svenson took them to a nondescript office tower, only about sixty stories tall, in Landning City’s main commercial district. Taller towers surrounded the building and nothing about the skyscraper itself stood out.
The street in front of it, however, had been blockaded. A quartet of light tanks sat ominously just outside the main entrance to the tower, their cannon backing up a cordon of Frihet Defense Force troopers manning security checkpoints.
The actual entrance itself was guarded by a squad of Federation Marines and a matching team of what Kyle suspected were Fyr Special Ops troopers—lithe men and women in light powered armor, carrying immense gauss rifles.
“This is one of our emergency continuity centers,” Svenson told them. “We can’t take the car any closer—come with me, please.”
Getting out the car, the big Force Commander took in the defenses with a slightly more cautious eye. Any kind of orbital strike would take out the tower and its defenders with ease, but a ground force would have to get past the Fyr Army infantry, then the tanks, then the Marines and Special Ops troops. Kyle wasn’t a Marine, but he suspected that hypothetical attackers would have a very bad day.
Svenson led them through the defenses at a careful, occasionally hesitant pace. It was clear she was familiar with the plan for how the defenders were going to set up but hadn’t actually been through these defenses.
Like the car and Svenson herself, everything there had clearly been prepared to leap into action as soon as the planet was liberated. Frihet had been taken, but it had clearly not been defeated. They might not have been able to free themselves with Commonwealth warships in orbit, but given their destruction of the fighter platforms, Kyle suspected the Terrans would have had a nasty surprise if they’d pulled their ships out.
The Fyr Lieutenant’s presence alone cleared them through all of the checkpoints up to the front door. There, however, one of the Spec Ops troopers suddenly materialized in front of them.
“I need to scan your implant IDs,” she said sharply. “No one enters the Center without full identification validation.”
Kyle glanced over at the Federation Marines standing by the door. It was hard to tell, as the troopers all had their helmets on, but he sensed a degree of discomfort in their body language—but they weren’t objecting.
He sighed and opened a very secured section of his implant memory containing only his ID to prevent the Spec Ops trooper from accessing any of the confidential data locked up in his silicon. Opening a channel, he flipped that piece of data to the Fyr soldier.
The entire process was contained entirely in everyone’s implants with no verbalization. To anyone else, Kyle, Xue, and the Fyr woman just stood there blinking at each other for a moment before she nodded and stepped back.
“Validated. Thank you Force Commander, Lieutenant Commander. Welcome to Continuity Center Bravo. You’re expected.”
#
Svenson led them into an elevator that swept them up to the top floor of the building with alacrity. The elevator opened onto a lobby and conference room setup that wouldn’t have looked out of place as the main meeting area of a mid-sized planetary corporation, except for the presence of more Frihet Defense Force troopers providing security, including a set of half a dozen in full powered battle armor.
Admiral Alstairs and the other Federation officers, including Mira, were waiting in the lobby, the Rear Admiral imperiously gesturing for Kyle to join her as she spotted him.
“Carry on, Force Commander,” Svenson told him. “You’re in conference room seven, over there”—she pointed—“when your Admiral is ready.”
Kyle joined Alstairs as instructed, nodding to Force Commander Aleppo and the two XOs while exchanging smiles with Mira.
“We’re waiting on the Brigadiers,” the Admiral told Kyle as he and Xue joined the cluster of officers. “Hammond and the others will be arriving shortly; they’ve been directly coordinating with the commander of Fyr Special Ops.” She glanced around the room with its uniformed security and power-armored soldiers and lowered her voice.
“They’re playing a game of perceptions, more for their people than us, but don’t be fooled,” she told Kyle quietly. “These people are really FDF, but they’ve got basically everyone in uniform out in the streets of Landning right now, being visible on the news and to the people of the planet’s largest city. My best guess is that they’ve got the Spec Ops forces and maybe a division of regular troops. Most of the rest…” She shrugged. “I’d bet they have means to track down everyone who survived, but I doubt their continuity plans called for everyone to disappear.”
“They want to convince everyone that things are okay and the government is in control,” Kyle said aloud.
“Exactly,” Alstairs agreed. “Brigadiers!” she loudly greeted the two men and a woman who exited the elevator in perfect step with each other. “Good, we’re all here. Let’s go,” she ordered.
The Castle Federation Admiral led her people to the conference room Svenson had pointed out to Kyle upon arriving, where she paused for a moment to allow the security guard to announce they were coming in.
Then the Alliance officers entered the conference room. Like the lobby outside, it looked like any large conference room in a midsized corporate headquarters, but in here, at least, the décor was a bit clearer on just what the space actually was.
Stands in each corner held the blue-on-white sun flag of Fyr, while the back wall had been painted with a three-meter-wide version of the flag above the words, in a decorative script, Fyr Government Continuity Center Bravo
A dozen men and women in Frihet Defense Force uniforms filled part of the conference table, while another dozen in the plain suits that were practically the uniform of go
vernments the galaxy over occupied the far third.
The closest third of the table was empty, and the Alliance officers quickly found chairs and waited by them for a moment as the woman at the far end of the table slowly rose to her feet. The woman was old and had been badly injured in some previous conflict—probably the last war with the Commonwealth. Both of her eyes and her right arm were obvious, if very functional, cybernetic prosthetics.
Age and injury might have slowed her, but her voice was calm and collected when she spoke.
“Admiral Alstairs, you and Seventh Fleet’s officers are most welcome here,” she told them. “I am Premier Rosalyn Ahlgren, the elected head of Fyr’s government.”
As soon as he heard the name, Kyle recognized her. Captain ‘Rosie’ Ahlgren had earned those cybernetics the hard way—having her ship shot to pieces around her while she held a Commonwealth formation in place long enough for reinforcements to arrive. She’d saved the Zahn system from invasion and lost an arm and both eyes doing it.
She was one of the entire Alliance’s heroes from the last war. Kyle wasn’t surprised she had ended up in charge of her planet.
“Please, all of you, sit,” Ahlgren told them. “It’s been a busy twenty-four hours for all of us. Our own plans, as ably executed by General Andrews”—she gestured to one of the uniformed women—“were predicated on us acting once the carriers withdrew in another week or so and the orbital defenses were the only Commonwealth forces in system. The good General, as we all saw, adapted to the new circumstances.”
“I must,” Andrews—a smallish woman with a shaven head—said, “thank you for your timely intervention. Without your ships and Marines…” She shrugged. “I gave us no more than a fifty percent chance of success. A risk we were willing to take, of course, but…”
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 18
