Nine seconds after entering range, the Alliance spacecraft flashed through the debris that had been the Terrans’ fighter formation. They were clear, and Michael breathed. He’d survived, but…
“Check in,” he ordered aloud. They had less than three minutes to missile range of the battlecruisers—he had to know what he had left.
The answer rapidly filled his mental screens as each of his Wing Commanders checked in. He winced at the lack of update for Avalon’s Epsilon Wing, reaching out for the answer he knew had to be the case.
Wing Commander Lei Nguyen was gone, her command starfighter debris somewhere behind him and the brave young woman who’d served with him since Avalon commissioned ashes within it.
The rest of his Wing Commanders were still with him—as were a surprising number of their fighters. The second Terran missile salvo had fared even worse than the first, and the shorter lance range of the Scimitars had spared his people the worst of the dogfight.
He’d lost eighty-six ships and an unknown number of people, faces and names that would haunt his dreams—but for now, he had two hundred and fifty seventh-generation starfighters to command and a pair of battlecruisers to kill.
13:37 April 2, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Kyle watched the debris and static fade from the inevitable storm of radiation and jamming that ensued when starfighters clashed. Q-Com links to the command starfighters told him the status of his people—the starfighters lost, the complete destruction of the Terran starfighters.
The Q-probes around the fight also showed the capital ship missiles launched by the two Commonwealth battlecruisers. While the salvos were of a mere twenty-eight missiles each, the cruisers appeared to have emptied their magazines at him. Twenty salvos were still flashing through space, even though ten salvos had smashed themselves on Battle Group Seven-Two’s defenses already.
There was still a chance of a lucky shot, but Captain Ainsley had moved Sledgehammer out in front, putting the battleship’s heavier defenses between the missiles and the biggest target: Avalon. With four capital ships’ defenses firing on the missile salvos of two capital ships, Battle Group Seven-Two seemed safe enough for now.
“Get me a radio channel relayed through the Q-probes at those battlecruisers,” Kyle ordered. A moment later, an icon on his screen informed him they were transmitting—though, of course, whether the Terrans were listening was an entirely different issue.
“Commonwealth warships,” he said calmly, “you are outnumbered and outgunned. We both know what the result of my starfighter strike on your ships will be. I am prepared to accept your surrender and allow your personnel to be interned on Huī Xing.
“This isn’t your system,” he concluded. “Why die defending it?”
He waited.
“They’ve received it,” Xue told him. “No response.”
“Damn,” Kyle said mildly. He glanced at the timer. Michael had less than thirty seconds until the geometry of the engagement put his missiles in range.
“Inform the Vice Commodore the Terrans have refused to surrender. He is to destroy those cruisers by whatever means necessary. Once the starfighters have cleared the way, inform Brigadier Hammond he is to secure the orbitals as soon as possible.
“I want to have those prisoners on their way out of this system yesterday.”
13:39 April 2, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
Michael shook his head as he acknowledged the message from Avalon. Roberts had intimidated one second-rate ship into surrender at the start of the war, and so he thought any outclassed Terran force would consider it?
Avalon’s CAG had many and lengthy opinions of the Terran Commonwealth Navy and the Terran Commonwealth Starfighter Corps—and of the cause they had lent themselves to the service of—but he did not doubt their courage or their determination.
Which was unfortunate since, like his Force Commander, he would have preferred not to kill the ten thousand or so people on the battlecruisers in front of him.
There was no place for regrets in the battle space.
The range dropped below three million kilometers, and his squadrons’ relative velocity to the battlecruisers was over eighteen thousand kilometers a second and rising. They would be in range…now.
“Fire!” he snapped.
The order was probably redundant, and most of their salvo was in space before he’d finished speaking. The battlecruisers had no missiles left now. Their big positron lances would start firing any second, but they had only a limited chance of hitting his starfighters.
The secondary anti-fighter lances would be in range six seconds before his own people were and five seconds before his missiles hit. Even if he could guarantee his missiles would kill the cruisers, he couldn’t pull his people aside at a rate that would keep them out of the range of those seventy-kiloton-a-second guns.
His ships’ deflectors were much weaker than those mounted on the battlecruisers, but the starfighters only needed to deflect the electromagnetically charged positron beams a few dozen meters. The battlecruisers’ deflectors needed to deflect the starfighters’ beams hundreds of meters to guarantee a miss.
It was a question of whether his people could dodge and swerve well enough to survive those six seconds—the deadliest seconds a starfighter could face. As Wills had predicted, the Commonwealth had brought their Q-probes in closer to make sure they weren’t fooled into firing into an area with no starfighters at all.
No tricks left—only the twisted, worming spiral of a starfighter assault.
Michael led his people into it with the grim determination of experience. Too many fights against too many ships, trying to dodge and twist without falling into a pattern a computer—or a gunner with a hunch—would identify.
Seconds ticked by in eternities. Positron lances tore at his fighter wings while defensive laser batteries slashed at his missiles, destroying the one-gigaton weapons by the hundreds.
One of the battlecruisers was a few kilometers ahead of the other, a miniscule difference in space, fractions of a second to the missiles’ flight time—fractions of a second that the defenses didn’t have. At least a dozen Starfires slammed into that battlecruiser, vaporizing it in a single burst of fury.
The second cruiser had those fractions of a second more. One, maybe two, missiles impacted. A damaging blow—probably crippling, possibly fatal to any but the most armored of ships.
It didn’t matter. Michael Stanford’s fighters swept over the surviving battlecruiser and hundreds of fifty-kiloton-a-second lance strikes ripped the ship to pieces.
Chapter 29
Huī Xing System
18:00 April 2, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four
“This is Force Commander Kyle Roberts aboard Avalon, commanding Alliance Battle Group Seven-Two, to the Commonwealth forces in the Huī Xing system. This system is now in Alliance control. It is within my capacity to destroy your positions from orbit and vaporize the space stations that remain from beyond your range. I call on you to surrender to prevent further loss of life.”
Edvard Hansen listened to the Force Commander’s voice through his implants and shrugged at the Gunny.
“Think anyone will actually surrender?” he asked Ramirez quietly. It would, if nothing else, make Bravo Company’s upcoming assault on one of the prisoner-of-war holding stations easier if they didn’t have to assault it.
“Doubt it,” his senior NCO told him. “They know their fleet is on its way. I’d try and hold ’til it got here.”
“Yeah,” Edvard agreed. “Me too. A man can hope, though.”
His implant showed him the five assault shuttles carrying Third Battalion arrayed around Chimera itself. This wasn’t a high-speed assault, the shuttles screaming ahead of the assault transport at five hundred gravities.
The space around the prisoner-of-war holding stations had been seede
d with short-range defensive satellites. Designed to shoot down missiles and debris, they were normally a commitment to the protection of the prisoners, but they’d also do a solid number on assault shuttles.
Chimera and Manticore, on the other hand, had the meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic of warships. They led the way into the defensive satellites, their armor shrugging aside the lasers even as their lasers and light positron lances swept the satellites away.
Ten assault shuttles—one per holding station—followed them. Edvard, like the other company commanders, kept a careful eye on the assault transports’ computers’ assessment of the safety of the zone around the holding camps.
None of the shuttles waited for the area to be perfectly clear. As soon as the threat level dropped below an estimated forty percent chance of a hit, all ten ships lunged to the attack simultaneously.
“Let’s go get our people,” Edvard told his company as the shuttle engines blazed to life beneath him.
The howled response vibrated the shuttle as much as her rockets did.
#
Assault Shuttle Chimera-Four was one of the unlucky ones. Edvard found himself locking his armor’s magnetics to the side of the little ship as she rocked under repeated laser hits.
The assault shuttle wasn’t unarmored, per se. Her defenses paled into insignificance against her mothership but were more than capable of standing off a few laser strikes. Flying into an unreduced set of defensive laser satellites would have seen her ripped to shreds by hundreds or even thousands of hits.
The remaining satellites simply made the ride a little more jarring. The shuttle shed the handful of strikes, then slammed Bravo Company into the prisoner holding station the Brigadier’s staff had designated “Target Seven.”
“They’ll be waiting for us,” Edvard snapped to his people. “Move!”
This time, Delta Platoon had the point of the spear. Armored Federation Marines hit the hole the shuttle had blown through the side of the station with commendable speed, spreading out to cover their brand-new entrance before the Terran Marines responded.
Unfortunately, they weren’t the only Marines reacting with commendable speed. Charlie Platoon had only barely begun to move into the corridors of the station when Delta came under fire. Suit-carried battle rifles spat tungsten penetrator rounds both ways down the corridor as the Terrans responded to the intrusion.
Edvard regarded the feeds from his Marines for a fraction of a second before making a decision he hated.
“Grenades and advance!” he snapped. “We need a hole, people; push them!”
He had to hope that any prisoners were deeper into the station, outside the effective range of the hyper-velocity fragmentation grenades. Certainly, the interior bulkheads didn’t have the strength to withstand the weapons.
Delta’s men were linked to each other through their implants, running a live tactical net that allowed them to see what the others saw and practically read each other’s thoughts. Fighting with it was a learned skill, a hard skill—but it also meant that when Delta’s lieutenant interpreted Edvard’s orders as “one man in five grenades the Terrans,” there was no confusion as to which Marines got to play with explosives.
The Terrans were coming at them from both sides of the corridors, and Delta Platoon sent five grenades flying at each position. Fired from shoulder-mounted launchers, the weapons went farther and faster than they could be thrown—and detonated in the air based on sensors scanning the area around them.
It was hard to be sure how many of the Terrans went down from the grenades, but the weapons opened up enough of a gap—a moment of shock on the part of the Commonwealth Marines, if nothing else—for Delta to charge.
Edvard could only watch through the tactical network as his people went gun-to-gun and bayonet-to-bayonet with the Terran force trying to contain their intrusion. His headquarters section was behind Charlie Platoon in the queue, and even with Delta expanding the beachhead, only one of Charlie’s squads was in.
As his people pushed the Terrans back, more of his troops filtered in, turning the momentum. Terran and Federation Marines alike went down, stabbed by monofilament bayonets or shot down by tungsten penetrators.
Then, suddenly, it was over. The survivors of the Terran force withdrew in good order, their own grenades taking down half a dozen of Edvard’s troopers who tried to follow.
“They’ve got to have a fallback position,” Ramirez warned the Lieutenant Major. “They probably had platoons spread out through the exterior, but now they can lure us into their main force.”
“I know,” Edvard said shortly. “Get me floor plans,” he snapped. “I want to know where they’ll think they can catch us—and I want another route if you can give it to me!”
#
Edvard looked over the plans his headquarters section’s information specialist had pulled from the station’s computer before the Terrans had locked out this area’s computers. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth hadn’t just thrown the prisoners into cargo containers in a storage or transfer station. The facility he’d boarded was clearly specifically designed for the purpose to which it had now been turned.
It was the standard disk shape of a major space station on the outside, five hundred meters across and three hundred meters thick. The top eighty meters, and thirty meters in from the exterior on all sides, contained the quarters for the guard contingent, the technical support systems, the power generators, and all the general functional systems of a space station.
Then there was a thirty-meter-wide void inside the station, surrounding a one-hundred-and-thirty-meter-thick disk three hundred and eighty meters across. This was the actual prison, accessed only via two heavily armored columns attaching one side of the prison to the main habitation section of the prison.
Edvard’s people were on the far side of the station from those access points, leaving him with the unpleasant option of slogging his way through the series of ambushes and traps the Terrans were even now preparing, to reach either of the ways into the prison.
The command center for the station was in an even more awkward position, in the interior of the station and directly between the two big connectors. Edvard doubted his people could reach the armored capsule at all, let alone without crippling losses.
“This place is set up to make our job hell, boss,” Ramirez muttered. The Gunny was reviewing the same data. “There’s only about four routes we can take to the other side of the station, only the two routes to the prison itself, and the command center looks like it’s a damned fortress.”
“My dear Gunny, I do believe you’re thinking far too linearly,” the Lieutenant Major said dryly.
“Oh? Do you see another solution to this mess?” the Gunny demanded.
“No,” Edvard admitted. And it wasn’t looking pretty—they’d hit each prison facility with a single company, which, it turned out, meant the defenders actually had him outnumbered. On the other hand, the separation of the prison facility meant that the assault transports could hammer the exterior portions of the station with kinetic weapons without worrying about hurting their people.
Except, of course, for potentially killing the air, power, lights and other such minor necessities that kept them alive.
“I do,” another voice interjected, and Edvard looked over at his Delta Platoon commander. Senior Lieutenant Cruz Machado was the second-ranked of his platoon commanders, one of only two Senior Lieutenants in the company. He was also, unlike the Sherwood-born Lieutenant Major Hansen and Castle-born Gunnery Sergeant Ramirez, spacer-born. A child of one of the massive space stations in the Elpída system that fueled that system’s gas-extractor economies, he’d grown up on a platform like this.
“The place was designed by planet-born,” Machado pointed out. “Everybody’s thinking in terms of corridors and defenses and ambushes, but they built the biggest corridor on the station leading straight to the command center.”
Linked into the tactical net, Machado drew a simple curvin
g line—it started with a straight line from their current location to the vacuum “moat” guarding the prison, and then arced its course around the prison—through the gravity-less vacuum—to intersect with the command center.
“Unless they’re idiots, they have defenses in the moat,” the Senior Lieutenant pointed out. “But we can move the whole company to have line of sight on whatever they throw up. We’re vulnerable—but so are they.”
“And if we take the command center, suddenly those two companies of Terran Marines are on the wrong side of the defenses protecting, oh, the consoles that control gravity,” Edvard said aloud, awed at how simple the point was when you thought about it from the right direction—a direction very few of the planet-born would think from.
“If this works, Machado, I’m recommending you for your gold circle,” he told the platoon commander. “You may have just saved a lot of lives.”
#
“Fire in the hole!”
The unnecessarily bellowed warning across the company tactical net cut off what Brigadier Hammond was saying, but the tiny image of the 103rd Brigade’s commanding General simply gestured for Edvard to attend to his own business.
Explosives flashed, the sound rapidly fading to silence as the air blasted out into the vacuum “inside” the space station. Bravo Platoon was out the hole in moments, weapons tracking the empty darkness as they left the station’s artificial gravity field.
“Clear,” a voice reported over the network. “About what we expected—no light, no grav, no bad guys.”
“Use your armor lights,” Edvard ordered. “We’ve got over half a klick to jet, folks; let’s get moving.”
A few moments later, he followed his Marines into the void. It was darker than almost anything he’d ever seen, with even the light of the stars cut off by the bulk of the space station that surrounded them.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 24
