“I know,” his Admiral told him. “I judge that you have that steel, Kyle. But I don’t want you to fight them, not unless you have to. Keep them guessing, keep them dancing. Outside the gravity well, you can play Alcubierre cat and mouse with them.
“But I need seven days, Force Commander, whatever the cost.”
“Then I guess I will need to hold the Terrans for you,” Kyle said simply.
Chapter 26
Frihet System
11:00 March 27, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Force Commander Kyle Roberts watched Frihet and the rest of Seventh Fleet disappear behind him with mixed feelings. Battle Group Seven-Two’s “reinforcements” were a giant bluff, which left him with the same four warships and one understrength Marine brigade to play matador to a fleet of over twice his strength.
His introspection didn’t leak out to his crew. He was sprawled in his command chair with a giant grin on his face, projecting a confidence he mostly did feel. If Avalon was being sent to fight the Commonwealth’s local fleet, it would be a suicide mission. But since his job was to simply keep them in one place, he figured he could do it.
“What’s our ETA to Alcubierre distance, Commander?” he asked Pendez.
“Two hours, Force Commander,” she told him. “Then six days, one hour, thirty-five minutes to Huī Xing. We will arrive approximately twelve hundred thirty hours on April second.”
“Any commentary from the other navigators?” Kyle said. With three more ships tacked onto his order of battle, even if none of them were actual warships, he was now asking the Fleet Commander to coordinate courses for nine starships.
It was a task well outside of her normal responsibilities—and one to which she was rising with an aplomb he was carefully noting for his personnel evaluation on Fleet Commander Maria Pendez. The evaluation in which he intended to recommend she get the third gold circle of a Senior Fleet Commander and move to an XO role somewhere.
“Commentary?” she replied. “Yeah, we got commentary. Useful or meaningful feedback? Not a drop.”
“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “Any concerns of your own?”
“We’re not pushing the engines or doing anything twisty,” Pendez told him. “It’s a pretty straightforward trip: accelerate, flip, decelerate and drop in well outside the limit. I could plot this course in my sleep.”
“Please don’t,” Kyle told her. “I’m going to check in with the flagship. Prod my implant if you see anything.”
With that, he was effectively surrendering the watch to her. As the carrier’s navigator, Pendez stood only a few of the formal watches—a gap in her experience he was quietly making up to allow for the XO slot she didn’t know was in her future.
“Have fun, sir,” his navigator told him with a meaningful wink.
A mental command dropped a privacy screen around his command chair, blocking off sound from the rest of the bridge. His implant was still open to accept messages, but his people couldn’t overhear his conversations now.
Kyle opened a channel to Camerone. He didn’t even have to ask for Mira, as the Captain had obviously been waiting for him to reach out.
“We’re on our way,” he told her with a smile. “Arrival on the second, a little after twelve hundred hours.”
The flagship’s captain nodded.
“I’ll pass the timing on to the Admiral,” she replied. “Any concerns I should pass on as well?”
“She and I went over everything last night,” Kyle said. “I know what needs to be done.”
There was silence on the transmission for a moment, the professional part of the conversation over but neither quite willing to leave it at that.
“Be careful,” she finally said. “It looks like a suicide mission to me.”
“It isn’t,” he reassured her. “I don’t think the Admiral is any more interested in sending my people to their deaths than I am. The plan is solid. It’s not risk-free,” he admitted with a chuckle, “but I’m hardly charging their fleet, all guns blazing.”
“I’m not sure I put charging them, guns blazing, past you, Kyle,” his girlfriend noted. “Be careful.”
“I’d only charge them if it would serve a purpose,” he replied. “I will be careful, Mira. I promise. You be careful. Via Somnia is an important naval base, a launching point for this entire invasion. It won’t be a pushover.”
“We’re not expecting it to be,” she replied. “That’s why most of the fleet is going there and not to Huī Xing. We’ll be fine.”
“So will we,” Kyle told her cheerfully. “I’ve got Michael and all his people to keep me safe. We’ll toast to victory in Via Somnia—I will see you there.”
“You’re ever the optimist,” Solace replied with a chuckle of her own. “As you say, then—we’ll toast Seventh Fleet in the ruins of Terra’s dreams of conquest!”
12:00 March 27, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Office
Michael’s office was crowded with all five of his Wing Commanders gathered in it, but sometimes that was a necessary price to pay. Rokos had produced a bottle of expensive Castle-made whiskey from somewhere and was passing around small glasses.
“To Flight Commander Antonio Zupan,” the CAG told his officers as he raised his own glass. “May he ever fly amidst the Eternal Stars.”
Michael himself was Christian—Third Reformation Anglican—but the Stellar Spiritualists were the majority aboard Avalon, as they were in the Castle Federation itself. Zupan himself had been as devout a follower as that semi-agnostic religion had.
“May he ever fly,” his Wing Commanders chorused back, and Michael drank. The alcohol burned its way down his throat with a surprisingly smooth fire. It was apparently worth whatever Rokos had paid for it.
The room was silent for a moment in memory. Even in peacetime, the starfighter corps lost people. That was what happened when you flew the most fragile armed spacecraft in the galaxy. At war, though, the Castle Federation Space Force had already grown very used to the loss of men and women they’d served alongside.
“I want,” Michael told them as the moment faded, “to set up an intense series of exercises over the next few days. We have entire new squadrons to integrate into our tactics and to make sure everyone is comfortable at each other’s backs.”
“And if we work them and us as hard as we can, it’s hard to fall into a funk,” Rokos pointed out. “If we keep running, we don’t stop and think.”
“I wasn’t going to admit that part of my thought process,” the CAG told the others with a laugh. “But Russell’s right. We need to keep busy—and our crews need to keep busy. But we also need to be as sharp as possible.
“You’ve seen the mission brief. We’re going to need to be on the very top of our game if we want to pull off this stunt the old man has signed us up for without losing too many of our people. Remember, people,” Michael said quietly, “while it’s going to be easy enough for us to evade the Terran capital ships, dodging their starfighters is going to be harder. It’s going to be our job to remind the Terrans why they don’t want to catch Alliance starfighters.”
The chorus of growls that responded made him smile coldly.
13:00 March 27, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Mira watched through the scanners as the matched gravitational singularities of Battle Group Seven-Two flared to life, whisking the nine starships away toward Huī Xing.
The rest of Seventh Fleet was setting out a bit more slowly, since their role in Admiral Alstairs’ plan called for them to hit Via Somnia after the Terrans caught up to Kyle. Hanging her boyfriend out as bait rankled more than a little, though it was at least half watching him and Avalon go off into danger without her.
“How are we doing, Commander?” she asked her XO.
Notley shrugged, the older officer’s eyes also fixated on the big display where Avalon and her sisters had vanished.
“Camerone is r
eady for action,” he said simply. “Wing Commander Volte is…unenthused with the loss of a squadron, but his people understand that Seven-Two needed the help. We’ve replenished our missile stocks and Engineering is in the process of carrying out a full survey of our systems.
“Analysis also confirmed our missiles got in one of the killing blows here, so Engineering is also reportedly trying to find somewhere to paint a Volcano silhouette.”
Mira snorted, amused. It was hard, given the sheer number of munitions flying around, to validate a specific vessel as being responsible for a kill in a fleet action. While the Federation didn’t adhere to the tradition of painting kill silhouettes, enough of the Alliance members did that it was a running joke.
“I thought the traditional place was on a primary zero point cell?” she suggested sweetly. “Where no one will ever see it.”
Notley laughed.
“You think you’re joking,” he pointed out. “That’s exactly where we did paint them on a few ships last time around—where the Captain wouldn’t look.”
“I promise not to look closely at any strange markings I find on the cells when I inspect Engineering next,” Mira told him. “No concerns? Any issues with the Marines aboard?”
They had, after all, crammed an entire thousand-Marine-strong battalion aboard the cruiser.
“None,” he replied crisply. “Colonel Xavier’s people are being very cooperative. I leave the rest of the Fleet to the Admiral’s staff, though.”
“And they are in equivalent shape, if not quite as good as Camerone,” Alstairs said loudly. Mira wasn’t sure quite when the Admiral had slipped onto the bridge, but she’d done it without anyone noticing. The practice of long years in command of the battlecruiser herself, Mira supposed.
“You’ve done a good job with my old ship, captain,” the Admiral noted, “but the rest of the Fleet is almost managing to keep up. We’re almost ready to go.”
“Six hours,” Mira said quietly. “Is that enough time for Frihet?”
The three senior officers were clustered around her command chair. The acoustics of the bridge were carefully designed—loud announcements would carry to the entire room, but quiet conversation wouldn’t.
“No,” Alstairs admitted. “I’ve had to assign more pilots to their cadre from the crews that are supposed to be taking over at Via Somnia than I’d like. We underestimated how quickly the Terrans would hit these systems; we should have been providing full sets of fighter crews, not just training cadre.”
“Did we have them?” Mira asked. Across dozens of systems and billions of souls, there were hundreds of millions of people with the ninety-ninth percentile implant interface capability needed to fly a fighter—but that didn’t mean they had millions of trained fighter crews.
“No,” the Admiral told her. “We didn’t. That’s why we went with this plan in the first place—the security of the systems we were going to liberate was always the Achilles heel of this plan. We need to take out Via Somnia to make Rising Star a success; otherwise, all of this”—she made an encompassing gesture of the bridge—“has been for nothing. I won’t let this much death and blood be for nothing; do you understand me, Captain?”
“I do, ma’am,” Camerone’s Captain said quietly, looking at the operational display and the countdown timer. “I just wonder how much more we’re going to lose before it’s over.”
“We’re fighting a half-awake giant,” Seventh Fleet’s admiral said grimly. “It’s going to take time to bring the Alliance’s systems to full war status—but if the Commonwealth ever does the same, we’re doomed. I don’t know if this is ever going to be ‘over’, Captain Solace. Nor do I know how much we’ll lose.
“All I know is that I plan to fight every step of the damned way,” Alstairs told them. “And that this war can’t be fought entirely on our soil—something it has been to date. Something that changes the instant we leave FTL in Via Somnia.”
Chapter 27
Deep Space, En Route to Huī Xing System
14:10 March 30, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera
“Move out!” Lieutenant Major Edvard Hansen, Bravo Company Commander, 3rd Battalion, 103rd Marine Brigade, ordered his people crisply as they entered what had been Second Battalion’s quarters. “And remember—keep it quiet, keep it low. The Colonel is buying the drinks for the company that performs best.”
With three transports and three battalions, Brigadier Hammond had made the snap decision to split his brigade up as the other Marines moved onto Seventh Fleet’s warships. It reduced their points of failure and also left the Marines rattling around their assault transports like loose change.
Colonel Silje had decided to take advantage of the extra space by using an entire battalion’s quarters and exercise area as the “target” for a practice space-borne assault. Having three of said quarters allowed him to set up two company level exercises—and Bravo Company had been assigned to “clear” Second Battalion’s quarters of resistance.
They opened the dance by pushing through with Bravo Platoon leading the way, sweeping the main “lobby” area and checking for ambushes by Delta Company’s troopers.
There was no battle armor for this affair, just light body armor and training lasers. The lasers, unlike their actual weapons, were line-of-sight—but the network of everyone’s implants would calculate whether a battle rifle round would have hit.
Delta chose to concede the main entrance, allowing Edvard’s company to move in and leaving him with choices as to how to proceed. Between the entertainment section with the mess, the training gym with the simulators, and the actual battalion quarters, there were three different spaces, each of which could hold the entirety of Delta Company easily.
But there was also a time component to the game, and splitting up would let them hit all three simultaneously. It was a risky venture, one that could lose him the game if he guessed wrong…but he knew his people were better.
“Split up,” he ordered his platoon lieutenants. “Alpha Platoon, take the mess. Bravo, you get the training sector. Charlie, hit the quarters. Keep linked in, call for the HQ section if you need backup. Go! Hit them hard.”
Without the battle armor suits to absorb the sounds, they couldn’t wolf-howl. His officers fist-bumped instead before splitting off to launch their sweeps.
Only Bravo’s headquarters section was left in the lobby when Delta launched their ambush. All the exits from the lobby area slammed shut to a command override, trapping Edvard’s headquarters section in the open space.
“Cover!” he snapped, diving for one of the handful of couches in the lobby. There wasn’t much cover; Delta had planned it well.
“They’re coming through the roof!” Ramirez bellowed.
“Aim high, take them as they come,” Edvard replied, suiting actions to words and firing blindly into the air he swept the room for targets.
Lieutenant Major Fenton might be in trouble later, he noted in the back of his mind. Delta had actually cut holes in the roof, accessing the emergency spaces above the quarters. Edvard wasn’t sure how many people they’d crammed up there, but it gave them an element of surprise that should have been enough to take down his command squad.
The moment’s extra notice from the doors slamming shut, however, was enough for him and Ramirez to be looking for the ambush. The Gunnery Sergeant launched the first virtual grenade, but Edvard was only moments behind him—and three of his troopers had the same thought.
A dozen or so Delta troopers made it to the ground. The rest were still in the ceiling when the computers assessed the result of five hypervelocity fragmentation grenades going off in an enclosed space.
None of the rest of the platoon made it down. The dozen on the ground still mostly had surprise, simulated gunfire spraying over Edvard’s people and taking half of his headquarters section down—including Gunny Ramirez.
Twenty seconds after the doors slammed shut, it was over. Delta Company’s Bravo
Platoon was out of action, and Bravo Company’s headquarters section was down eleven effectives.
“Watch the ceilings,” he ordered his lieutenants. “Fenton’s down a platoon to that trick, but he might still try it again.”
One of his people got to work on opening the doors, while Edvard’s “dead” carefully started helping Delta Company’s “dead” get safely down from the emergency spaces.
The Lieutenant Major watched with a grin on his face, already plotting how to modify the trick for when it was his turn to defend against Fenton’s company.
#
It was a sheepish crowd that gathered in Third Battalion’s officers’ briefing room at the close of the day. Edvard was trying not to grin too obnoxiously—Bravo Company had made a clean sweep of its assault, taking down Delta Company with only fifty-two casualties of their own.
His defense hadn’t been quite as clean, turning into a point-blank slug-fest with over a hundred losses in Bravo Company—but had left Fenton’s people retreating with over ninety percent losses. That made his people the only one of the five companies to win on both assault and defense.
Of course, then he’d taken Bravo Company against Alpha Company’s defenses and been reamed. None of the company commanders gathering around Colonel Silje and Major Brahm had won all of their exercises.
“Let’s start with what I hope everyone has realized,” Colonel Amanda Silje informed her officers. “Lieutenant Major Hansen’s Bravo Company gets drinks on me tonight. Not only did they win two out of their three exercises, which Alpha Company also managed, but Lieutenant Major Hansen also carried an assault with under fifty percent casualties.”
She shook her head.
“Out of six exercises, it appears Delta Company carried no victories at all, but we only had two victories by our attackers,” she noted. “Alpha carried their attack on Charlie, but at over seventy percent casualties, I can’t call that a shining example of Marine courage and strategy.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 21
