Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Anderson eyed him askance from the image fed to Kyle’s implant.

  “Why do I get the feeling we’re about to add to that reputation?” he asked.

  “Because, Fleet Commander Anderson, like any good XO, you’re learning to anticipate your Captain,” Kyle told him. “If we have nine days, we have time. Tell me: the platforms they’ve used for the prisoner camps—can our logistics ships hold them?”

  Anderson ran the numbers, his eyes acquiring the slightly glazed look of a man consulting his implants, before he blinked and met his Force Commander’s eyes.

  “They’re bigger than the fighter platforms,” he said carefully, “but yes. Without having them to hand to test, I can’t be certain, but I think we can fit four in each transport—if we abandon the fighter platforms and missile satellites.”

  “And the Marine transports can easily take twenty thousand bodies if we pack them in,” Kyle noted. “Commander, I have no intention of leaving those POWs behind.”

  “Sir, I have to point out that there is the chance that the nodal fleet left Zahn for here,” Anderson told him. “Intel has regarded it as null probability, but that would give us two days at most.”

  “Then we’d better get on it to be safe, hadn’t we?”

  13:00 April 2, 2736 ESMDT

  SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter

  “They’re coming out after us, and I’ve changed my mind about stringing them along,” Roberts’ voice announced brightly in Michael’s ear.

  The CAG sighed. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised that the Force Commander had decided not to stick to the nice, safe plan that avoided combat.

  “We did have a plan, boss,” he pointed out. He didn’t expect it to change anything. He’d seen the Tau Ceti Accords transponders as well. Hell, he wasn’t sure he wanted to change Roberts’ mind.

  “We did,” Roberts acknowledged. “But that plan didn’t call for leaving a hundred thousand Alliance prisoners in a Commonwealth POW camp, did it?”

  “No, it did not,” Michael confirmed. Even as he was “arguing” with his senior officer, he’d been collating information on the status of his wings—all in space, following the battle group along at a sedate one hundred gravities. “What would you like us to do, sir?”

  “Fifteen minutes to missile contact,” the Force Commander noted. “They’ve wrapped enough starfighters around themselves as they’ve come after us that I don’t expect much from that, but it should ablate their starfighter strength. Their missiles will hit you not long after, and they’ll keep throwing them at us until they run out. Twenty-eight missile salvos aren’t much of a threat, but for your own safety, you’ll want to shoot down any that get near you.

  “We’ll be launching new salvos of our own shortly to cover your way in,” Roberts continued. “I want you on your way ASAP—we’ll be right behind you.” He paused. “We’ll be firing ten salvos of missiles, but I can’t risk more than that. Diving in this deep, we face the risk of having to fight our way out, and I don’t know if we’ll have time to replenish our magazines.”

  For every actual missile stored in Battle Group Seven-Two’s magazines, they had the parts they couldn’t manufacture on site—mostly the mass manipulators—for another five. Given access to the average nickel-iron asteroid, Avalon alone could replenish the entire Battle Group’s munitions in about three days.

  “It’s down to the starfighters this time,” Roberts warned him. “I don’t expect our missiles to do more than take out some of their starfighters.”

  “It’s always down to the starfighters,” Michael pointed out. “That’s why we build carriers. A few hundred Scimitars and a pair of last-gen ships? We’ll handle them for you, boss.”

  Avalon’s Captain laughed.

  “The Navy is humble enough that I forget that all starfighter crews are as arrogant as I was,” he replied. “We’re not certain, but it looks like both of those cruisers have had their deflectors upgraded. You’ll have less than half the lance range you used to have against them.”

  “We’ll deal,” Michael replied. Missiles might be the main killer of a starfighter strike, but positron lances…positron lances were the finishers. If the battlecruisers survived his missile salvo and he had to close to sixty thousand kilometers to use his lances, that was going to hurt.

  “We’re turning and opening fire in sixty seconds,” Roberts told him. “Are you ready to deploy?”

  Vice Commodore Michael Stanford was a starfighter pilot, with an implant interface bandwidth capable of piloting a starfighter, coordinating a three-hundred-plus ship formation, and writing fiction simultaneously. He’d spent the entire conversation with Kyle Roberts passing orders and checking over his own ship.

  “We are ready to deploy.”

  #

  It didn’t take the Terrans long to respond to Seven-Two turning toward them. Within a minute of Michael’s fighters launching away from the Battle Group, the Terran starfighters did the same thing. Four hundred plus Scimitars could stop the hundred-missile stacked salvos Avalon and her companions had launched at the battlecruisers, but they wouldn’t suffice against the over twelve hundred missiles the starfighters could launch.

  Coming out to meet him made them the targets of those missiles. The risk on the starfighters went up dramatically, but the risk to the starships went down equally dramatically. It was an exchange every starfighter pilot, gunner, and engineer knew instinctually, one they effectively agreed to when they put on the uniform of any starfighter force in the galaxy.

  Michael mentally saluted their courage and then started assessing times and distances. There were still a little over ten minutes until the first missile salvo would intersect the starfighters—he dropped a mental note to Lieutenant Commander Xue to issue new targeting orders to those missiles. They were unlikely to get past the starfighter screen in the first place, but they could take out a few of the Scimitars if they tried.

  More missiles were flying past his starfighters as they closed with the enemy. At minimum cycle time, it took less than four minutes for the ten salvos Roberts had promised to be launched—and not a lot more time for them to pass the starfighter formation. A Jackhammer capital ship missile had twice the acceleration of a Falcon or Templar.

  The deadliest part of the entire engagement would be when the starfighters reached their own missile range of the Scimitars. The Commonwealth’s Scimitars had inferior positron lances, inferior engines and inferior ECM…but their Javelins were just as deadly as the Alliance’s Starfires, and they would be launching almost five hundred more of them at Michael’s people.

  His fighter groups could probably handle it and come out mostly intact, but he’d be happier if the capital ship missiles took out, oh, half of the Terran ships.

  The new salvos would start hitting roughly fifteen minutes after the original salvo intercepted the fighters, four minutes before the two starfighter formations ranged on each other. His squadrons would be launching, in fact, just as the last fifty-seven missile salvo from Battle Group Seven-Two struck home.

  He opened a channel to his Wing Commanders, pulling in the two Phoenix Sub-Colonels as well.

  “I’m not seeing a lot of clever options beyond riding the Navy’s fire straight down the bastards’ throats,” he told them. “I’m open to ideas to keep us alive past the next, oh, twenty-five minutes.”

  “I had a thought,” Wing Commander Rokos replied after a long moment. “I don’t know if it’s a clever thought,” the big pilot continued, “but…we have all of this ECM. We can fool their missiles, lure them away, confuse the hell out of them. So, why don’t we just, well, make a hole and lead the missiles into it?”

  Michael thought about it.

  “It’s not a trick we could do twice,” Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills said slowly. “They’ll angle Q-probes in for closer looks in the future.”

  “But the nearest Q-probes right now are half a million klicks away,” Wing Commander Nguyen pointed out. “If we start gaming
the ECM now and open that hole…”

  “Worst-case scenario, it doesn’t help,” Wills noted. “We couldn’t spread out enough to remove mutual support or it won’t look realistic to them.”

  “All right, Russell,” Michael finally answered. “Let’s try your donut hole. You have about six minutes to run your numbers by me.”

  That gave the Wing Commander until the first missile salvo hit to have an actual plan.

  #

  It took Rokos less than three minutes to have the numbers together—and the numbers looked good.

  By reducing the safety distances between the starfighters by roughly five percent, the Wing Commander’s design opened up a five-thousand-kilometer-wide hole through the heart of the Alliance fighter formation. Using the ECM drones and projectors available to the Alliance, they promptly filled that gap with phantoms—what appeared to be starfighters but were, at most, expendable remotes.

  And then a careful tuning of the jammers and projectors across the formation would make those remotes ever so slightly an easier target than the rest of the formation. That was where the art versus the science of electronic warfare came into play—too much easier a target, and the humans in the loop on the other side would realize something was strange. Not enough easier a target, and the effort would be wasted.

  Studying the plan, Michael wasn’t surprised to see that Rokos appeared to have got it just right. The Wing Commander had always seemed to have just the right touch with the Falcons’ ECM systems. Even knowing what they’d set out to do, Michael was barely able to pick out the gap they were trying to lure the Commonwealth missiles into.

  Only time would tell, though—and that was passing quickly.

  “Flip it to everyone,” he ordered the Wing Commander. “Execute immediately—let’s pull a curtain over ourselves.”

  For a moment, even his screens dissolved into static as the squadrons around him brought their jamming online. Then the datalinks from the starfighters reconnected, feeding him the locations of his own ships. The networked computers of his squadrons and their motherships resolved the locations of the starfighters and the drones, showing the ships falling into their designated locations in Rokos’s plan.

  No starfighter was ever on a constant course; even this far away from the enemy, their formation was a chaotic swirl of spirals and side-jets, designed to throw off missiles and beams at long ranges. The main positron lances of a battlecruiser like the Assassin, after all, could punch through a Falcon’s deflectors at six light-seconds.

  They couldn’t hit a starfighter at that range—unless the starfighters were being fat and lazy. So, pilots didn’t ever let themselves get complacent.

  As the Alliance missiles came crashing down on the Terran formation, it was promptly clear that those pilots had learned the same lessons as Michael’s people. All the Scimitars were moving, dodging around the missiles’ paths and producing firing angles for their positron lances and defense lasers.

  Against a similar number of fighter missiles, it would have been more than enough—but capital ship missiles were smart. The Jackhammers threw out decoys of their own, filled the area around themselves with jamming—and waited until the last possible moment to redirect from being targeted on the two battlecruisers to targeting the starfighters.

  Smart and tricky missiles or not, the Terrans did a good job of protecting themselves, but capital ship missiles saw through the Scimitars’ ECM with ease and drove straight for the starfighters. Only active defenses meant anything—and the Jackhammers had ECM of their own.

  Twenty starfighters—two entire squadrons, as the Terrans organized their ships—vanished in balls of antimatter fire. The remaining starfighters were haloed for thirty or forty seconds in the radioactive debris cloud from the deaths of a hundred-plus missiles and twenty starfighters, and then space was calm again.

  That was worse than Michael had hoped—and suggested that the ten salvos of fifty-seven missiles apiece now fifteen minutes away from the Terrans might be even less effective than expected.

  #

  The next missile salvo lived down to Michael’s expectations. This time, the Terrans were expecting it to go for the starfighters, and it showed—the Scimitars opened up on the missiles from slightly farther out, accepting lower hit probabilities to allow a greater number of shots per target.

  With more than ten starfighters firing on each missile, the odds were against the Alliance Jackhammers. The missiles barely survived long enough to cut the firing window on the second salvo by a few precious seconds.

  The second salvo also died well clear of the starfighters but cut a few more seconds off the response time to the third salvo. Those missiles got close enough that the explosions of their deaths helped cover the arrival of the fourth salvo until it was almost too late.

  To Michael’s surprise, the Terrans still stopped every missile in the fourth before any of the starfighters were hit—but some of the missiles were detonating within mere kilometers of their targets. Several of the Scimitars fell out of formation, no longer accelerating—“soft” kills from the radiation.

  There was a small but noticeable drop in the intensity of their sensor output as well. Sensor and jammer emitters had been burnt away by the near misses, rendering the remaining fighters less effective.

  The Terran missile salvos had arced farther away from Michael’s people, sacrificing flight time to reduce the threat of the starfighters. As opportunities presented themselves, his people were firing on them with lances and lasers, but they were barely taking a tithe of the Terran missiles. Those, Michael concluded grimly, were going to be up to Roberts.

  The Alliance’s fifth salvo died a bit farther clear of the Scimitars than the fourth, sparing the Terrans further immediate losses, but the sixth and seventh salvos were another series of near misses, sending starfighters spinning off into space—either their crews or their computers dead.

  One missile actually hit from the eighth salvo, a starfighter vanishing in a one-gigaton ball of antimatter fire. The ninth closed on their heels and Michael smiled coldly. They wouldn’t do much—but it was almost time for his people.

  “All right people,” Michael said on his all-ships channel. “The Navy is plowing the road for us. Let’s follow it and send these bastards to Hell and Starless Void!”

  The last seventy-four missiles slammed into the Scimitars’ teeth, near misses and direct hits knocking another dozen fighters out of the fight. All told, the thirteen salvos of Navy missiles had destroyed or disabled almost fifty starfighters.

  That helped even the odds. Michael was perfectly happy to throw his three hundred and thirty-six seventh-generation starfighters against three hundred and eight sixth-generation birds.

  The timer hit zero and his people opened fire. Included in Rokos’s “donut” strategy was a crisscrossing pattern of missile flights, burying the exact origin of the almost thirteen hundred missiles in a confusing blur of jamming and antimatter rocket trails.

  The Scimitars launched moments before his people did, the entire sky seeming to disappear in the light of almost sixteen hundred missile trails. Thirty seconds later, both starfighter formations launched again.

  That was all Michael could fire—he still needed missiles to engage the battlecruisers. The Terrans apparently had the same logic, as they stopped firing after two salvos as well.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Stars make us forever grateful,” someone prayed on the open channel.

  “Save the prayers for later,” Michael ordered. “For now—target those missiles. Stay alive!”

  Every stratagem was already in place. Either their attacks and defenses would work to get them to lance range, or they’d all die. There was nothing the Vice Commodore could do at this point to change the fate of his people.

  He could only change the fate of his own starfighter.

  The defensive lasers were his gunner’s problem. His ECM was his flight engineer’s problem, under the plans and strat
egies already laid out in Rokos’s donut strategy. As the pilot, he controlled the ship’s position, orientation, and fifty-kiloton-per-second positron lance. The three of them worked together, linked through their neural implants to a level of communication that made them all part of the ship itself.

  Michael danced the eight-thousand-ton tin can of his starfighter through space, slashing at missiles with his lance—focused in the moment on the survival of his own ship.

  Starfighter missiles were orders of magnitude less capable than capital ship missiles—and also orders of magnitude smaller. A Jackhammer or Stormwind was two thirds the size and half the mass of a Falcon. A Starfire or Javelin was a thirtieth. What they gave up in capability was worth it for starfighters to be able to launch them in mass salvos.

  Four capital ship missiles per starfighter would be instant death to the entire formation. Four starfighter missiles per ship was merely…difficult.

  Between his maneuvers, the lance, and the lasers, Michael’s own command starfighter took out five missiles. Others didn’t do as well. His implant informed him that over seventy percent of the fifteen-hundred-plus missiles fired at his people had been destroyed—but that left over four hundred in terminal mode.

  Time ran out and Michael nearly bit his tongue as he watched hundreds of missiles slam into the donut hole in the center of their formation, either destroying easily replaceable drones or flashing clean through into deep space, stuttering into darkness as their engines failed.

  Only his implants allowed him to assess the losses in the fractions of a second available to him. Thirty-two of his starfighters were gone—in exchange for over two hundred of the Scimitars.

  Then they were in lance range, the second salvo of missiles howling down on both sides as they flashed towards and interpenetrated. Michael twisted his starfighter across the stars, triggering the positron lance as it crossed targets—watching as the smaller Scimitars were ripped apart under the beams of antimatter, and praying that his people were luckier.