Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Michael nodded, sending out mental notes for his starfighters to spread out, their high power-to-weight ratios making their antimatter engines the most visible despite their small size. Enough movement and bright lights on his people’s part would be very flashy—and also help disguise that he was missing an entire wing of starfighters.

  23:45 April 4, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Kyle honestly hadn’t expected to make it this far. In two hours and forty-five minutes, the Battle Group had crossed seventy-two million kilometers and was still almost eighty million kilometers away from Twenty-Third Fleet.

  Vice Admiral Ness had clearly decided that this was Kyle’s push and concentrated his two forces. With ten capital ships and eight hundred starfighters, there was no question what would happen when Battle Group Seven-Two slammed into the Terran fleet. Twenty-Third Fleet wouldn’t come away unscathed, but Kyle’s battle group would be obliterated.

  No one was going to question if he broke off, but given that on one memorable occasion, Kyle had rammed a battleship—entirely by accident, to be fair—he suspected that Ness was starting to believe Battle Group Avalon might carry through the attack.

  “Wait, I’m getting activity in the fleet,” Xue reported. “Lots of movement suddenly—and damn.”

  One of the ten icons on Kyle’s display disappeared, a notation warning him the ship had warped space.

  “Which one was that and where did they go?” he demanded.

  “Bogey Eight is an Assassin,” Xue replied quickly. “She moved back on a reciprocal course—she’s got to be headed to block the transports. Didn’t even take her fighters with her—just the one battlecruiser.”

  “Gods curse it,” Kyle swore, checking his own screens. “Keep the ECM up and warn Rokos,” he ordered.

  His mental screens split into two: one showed his own Battle Group, with all five of Avalon’s one-hundred-thousand-ton space tugs adjusting their mass manipulators to match the fuel burn of the much bigger transports. The other showed the five transports on the opposite of Goudeshijie, using the gas giant’s heat to help hide their own energy signatures as they burned directly away from the now-concentrated Terran fleet.

  “If they keep following the same course that Force Bravo used to join Force Alpha, Bogey Eight will be in position to intercept the transports fifteen minutes before they exit the gravity well,” Xue told him grimly. “They can no longer break off.”

  “Are we sure they saw through us?” Kyle asked.

  “They could be responding to a blip the Q-probes picked up,” his tactical officer allowed. “They’ve got a blind spot the transports are flying right down the middle of, but ‘blind’ is relative.”

  “Hold the ECM on the tugs until Bogey Eight arrives on target,” he ordered after a moment’s thought. “As for us…” He sighed.

  “Orders to the Battle Group,” he said formally. “Flip and burn—take us to two hundred and fifty gravities on everything, including the tugs, on a zero-zero course to return to Goudeshijie orbit.”

  “What if Ness takes that an excuse to send more of his ships after the transports?” Anderson asked from his battle station halfway down the ship from the bridge.

  “Then we flip again and see if we can make the bastard sweat,” Kyle replied. “For now, let’s make damned sure we stay out of lance range of the rest of his warships.”

  “What about the transports?” Xue asked.

  “That’s down to Wing Commander Rokos now,” Avalon’s Captain said grimly. “He and I have played battlecruiser versus fighter wing before. I hope he has better luck with the game than I did.”

  His fingers twitched as he resisted the urge to rub his temples—specifically, the spot where he still got headaches from the remnants of his old implants. The ones that had been burnt out when Kyle Roberts had nearly died leading a single wing of starfighters against a Commonwealth battlecruiser.

  From almost ten light-minutes away, however, there was nothing he could do for Bravo Wing’s commander but wish him luck—and make sure no more capital ships got in his way.

  #

  The wonders of modern technology had given Kyle Roberts a front-row seat to the death ride of the navy of an entire star system before…twice. Watching the transports continue to flee the system knowing that a Commonwealth battlecruiser was about to appear in their path felt similar—if nothing else, there were more people aboard those five freighters than there had been in either of those fleets.

  Unlike those death rides, however, the odds were a lot more even this time. Given the chance to hit the battlecruiser without any supporting starfighters getting in the way, Rokos’s forty-eight starfighters were about an even match for the bigger ship in terms of firepower, if not endurance or survivability.

  With the starfighters tucked in tight to the five starships and matching their acceleration to the bigger vessels’ maneuvers, it was possible—even likely—that the Terrans hadn’t picked up Bravo Wing. If they had, Bogey Eight would have brought her own starfighters with her.

  “I don’t think they see us, Force Commander,” Rokos said over the Q-Com, mirroring Kyle’s own thoughts. “Can someone double-check my math? I make it that if we do nothing until the cruiser emerges from A-S, there is no way anyone else can intercept us.”

  “I have the same, Wing Commander,” Kyle told him. “There’s only about ten more minutes in which anyone else can intercept you. I don’t like to micromanage, but if you could stay hidden under the Marines’ skirts for at least that long, I think everyone can appreciate it.”

  Rokos laughed.

  “Just for admitting Marines wear skirts, sir, I think I can do that,” he replied cheerfully. “I’ll get them home—skirts and all.”

  “Good luck, Wing Commander,” Kyle told him softly.

  Avalon’s bridge was silent as the minutes continued to tick by. Their own headlong rush toward the edge of the gravity well was slowing, their engines laboring to bring their speed down by almost two and a half kilometers a second every second.

  A word of command could flip that acceleration around and send them driving for the Commonwealth’s Twenty-Third Fleet. It would be a suicide run—but one that could buy the transports time to escape. With less than thirty thousand people on his four warships and one hundred and twenty thousand on the freighters, it was an order Kyle was prepared to give.

  Not one he intended to give or wanted to. But an order he was prepared to give—if only because every minute he accelerated away from Vice Admiral Ness was a minute he could accelerate at Vice Admiral Ness without actually committing to the suicide run.

  “Five minutes to Bogey Eight emergence,” Xue told him quietly. “Transports are now twenty minutes from exiting Goudeshijie’s gravity well. It is no longer possible for any more of Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships to intercept the freighters.”

  “All right,” he said brightly. “Let’s show Admiral Ness the game. Drop the ECM, have the tugs go to regular power and reboard Avalon.”

  The icons displayed in his implant data streams changed. The ECM that had been pretending that the hundred-thousand-ton service tugs were sixty-million-cubic-meter freighters vanished like a popped soap bubble. The energy signatures blazing from the tugs suddenly toned down, no longer wantonly wasting fuel pretending to be bigger ships.

  “Tug pilots report they’ll be aboard in ten minutes,” his com officer reported. “No expected issues.”

  “Any reaction from our Terran friend?”

  “No missiles so far,” Anderson said dryly. “Some shuffling of ships—but it looks he can do the math on intercepting the transports as well as we can. I bet fifty stellars he’s going to wait and see how Bogey Eight does before he decides.”

  “If we’re betting on our chances of incipient death, can the stakes be higher than an expensive coffee?” Kyle asked cheerfully.

  “I would tend to think they are by default,” Xue pointed out, her voice level enough that it took even
Kyle a moment to realize she was joining in the banter.

  He eyed the bridge crew out of the corner of his eye. There were smiles and concealed chuckles at their senior officer’s antics, which was exactly what he was aiming for.

  “So, it’s down to Rokos,” he said more seriously. “Let’s see what happens.”

  #

  Exactly on schedule, Bogey Eight erupted back into normal space. The warped space bubble dispersed in a blast of radiation, lacking much of the normal blue sheen of Cherenkov radiation, as they’d only barely broken the speed of light on their trip around the gas giant.

  They’d nailed their jump perfectly. Regardless of how accurate their data on the transports’ course had been, they had emerged exactly in the escapees’ path.

  As soon as Bogey Eight was back in regular space and locatable, Bravo Wing sprang into action. In one pre-coordinated movement, the transports flipped and started accelerating away from the battlecruiser—buying the starfighters time to deal with it—and Rokos’s wing lunged for the battlecruiser at five hundred gravities.

  Bogey Eight’s captain didn’t even flinch. The battlecruiser turned into the teeth of the starfighters and charged at the freighters. Seconds ticked by and neither side flinched, then missiles started to blast away from the cruiser.

  Kyle found himself muttering blessings in Greek under his breath, imploring the old gods to let the transports be able to handle those missiles.

  They should—the three assault transports were well protected and they had range to play with this time—but there was no way Rokos’s people could take more than a passing tithe of the weapons. It would mostly be down to the Marine ships to defend the freighters.

  Then the missiles reached Rokos’s fighters and Kyle realized they hadn’t been aimed at the transports at all. That would, after all, have been a war crime, and Ness still didn’t strike him as the type.

  The weapons charged into the fighter wing, dodging and weaving as lasers and positron lances took out their sisters. Kyle realized he was holding his breath, watching the starfighters—and the men and women he commanded—die.

  Four capital ship missile salvos slammed home before Bravo Wing reached their own missile range of the cruiser. Fifteen of the Falcons died in balls of white antimatter fire, but thirty-three survived to open fire themselves.

  A hundred and thirty-two Starfires blasted into space, a tsunami of fire versus the salvos of fourteen missiles still closing on Bravo Wing.

  More capital ship missiles slammed home, and only a hundred and twenty missiles launched in the second salvo. The third was barely a hundred as the battlecruiser’s positron lances began to rip holes in Bravo Wing’s formation.

  As the first salvo struck home, Rokos led his last twenty-two starfighters spiralling into their own lance range of the Assassin. Antimatter fire flared, positron beams flashed in both directions—and seventeen starfighters exited the inferno they’d created.

  The twelve-million-ton battlecruiser didn’t.

  “Rokos, report,” Kyle snapped. Silence responded. The Q-probes’ resolution wasn’t good enough to tell him which seventeen fighters had survived. He waited a long moment.

  “Bravo Wing, report,” he ordered.

  “This is Rokos,” the Wing Commander finally replied. “Sorry, we were putting out a fire. Literally. My bird took a near miss.

  “We are clear. Target destroyed and the Marines are launching assault shuttles for pod pickup. I have fifteen of our emergency pods and two hundred and ten Terran escape pods on my scopes; we should have everyone picked up and aboard the freighters before they’re far enough out to go FTL.”

  “Thank you, Wing Commander,” Kyle replied. He wasn’t just thanking him for the report, and everyone knew it.

  “All in a day’s work, Force Commander,” Rokos told him. “Transports will be clear of Huī Xing en route to Alizon in ten minutes. Sorry to be leaving you behind, sir.”

  “All in a day’s work, Wing Commander,” Kyle repeated back to him. “We’ll deal with Vice Admiral Ness. Get out of here, Rokos, and take those people with you.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Wing Commander replied crisply. “Good luck, sir.”

  Chapter 35

  Huī Xing System

  00:15 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  “What are they doing?” Kyle asked aloud, watching the Terrans’ Twenty-Third Fleet simply sit and wait.

  A quick calculation in his head confirmed that they would come to zero velocity and start heading away from the Terrans over thirty-four million kilometers inside the gravity well—and about the same distance from the Commonwealth fleet.

  But even with the destruction of Bogey Eight and the escape of the transports, the Terrans seemed content to simply sit and watch him decelerate. He’d expected missiles, a fighter swarm—for that matter, if Vice Admiral Ness wanted to bring his battleship into play, now was the best time he’d have. Right now, Battle Group Seven-Two’s velocity was toward the Terran Fleet. The Battle Group was burning fuel wildly to reduce that velocity, but until they were building velocity away the Terrans, it would far easier for the Terrans to force a starship engagement they’d handily win.

  “Remember that expensive coffee?” Anderson replied. “I’d bet it that Ness is under hard orders from Walkingstick not to risk his fleet—he won’t enter the gravity well himself until he knows where the rest of Seventh Fleet is.”

  “Which leaves him able to go after the Admiral once he does,” Kyle said grimly. “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Ness really doesn’t like me right now. Xue.” He turned to the tactical officer. “Have everyone quietly start deploying missiles. I want a ten-salvo, cascade-activated, time-on-target attack ready to go as soon as we hit zero velocity relative to the Commonwealth ships.”

  That was a quarter of the Phoenix ships’ remaining magazines. A fifth of Sledgehammer’s. Avalon had the missiles to spend, but her nine launchers weren’t going to stack enough of a salvo to yank Vice Admiral Ness’s nonexistent beard.

  Five hundred and seventy missiles, ten stacked salvos from every ship in Battle Group Seven-Two, had a decent chance of doing real damage. With eight hundred starfighters flying escort on Ness’s remaining nine warships, Kyle put his odds of actually taking a starship out at only thirty percent or so. Ten salvos was the most their fire control could handle, however, and they’d take out starfighters if nothing else.

  Kyle would back Stanford’s starfighter pilots against any the Commonwealth had one to one, and their Falcon and Templar starfighters were worth half again their numbers in the Terran Scimitars. Sadly, Twenty-Third Fleet had almost four times the number of starfighters Battle Group Seven-Two had left—eight hundred to barely more than two hundred.

  Sending Bravo Wing to escort the freighters had turned the balance of starfighter power even further in the Terrans’ favor—but it had also got the transports out, which was worth it.

  “Once we hit zero-v,” Kyle told Xue, “I want to shove those missiles down the Terrans’ throats and run for Goudeshijie as fast as we can. Let’s see if we can make this jackass chase us.”

  His tactical officer nodded, surprisingly calm for just having been asked to poke a much larger fleet in the eye.

  “We’ll hit him, sir,” she promised. “But what he’ll do…”

  “We can’t predict that,” Kyle agreed. “All we can do is poke him and see what happens.”

  Via Somnia System

  01:15 April 5, 2736 ESMDT

  BC-129 Camerone, Bridge

  “Emergence from warped space in ten. Nine. Eight.”

  Fleet Commander James Coles’ countdown echoed through Camerone’s bridge while Mira waited impatiently to see what waited for them at Via Somnia. They’d picked up a lot of data waiting a light-month away from the system, but resolving, for example, whether a specific space station was a transfer station or a fighter base was all but impossible at that range.


  “Emergence,” Coles announced.

  Camerone erupted into open space, surrounded by her sister ships. Eight Alliance capital ships arrived in the Via Somnia system, their arrival heralded by bursts of blue Cherenkov radiation.

  The main target in the system was the Via Somnia Commonwealth Navy Base, a massive complex orbiting the third planet of the system—a dead rock three times the size of Earth with a gravity well that impeded Alcubierre drives for two light-minutes.

  Mira waited patiently for her tactical officer and Alstairs’ staff to grind the data, comparing what they were seeing now to what they’d picked from a light-month out and what Alliance Intelligence had predicted.

  “I’m not seeing any capital ships in the system,” Fleet Commander Rose, her tactical officer, reported after a few moments. “I do see four logistics freighters docked with the naval base, but no warships at all.”

  “Anything here has been sent to Huī Xing,” Notley told Mira grimly. “That’s worrying, ma’am.”

  “Other than giving our friend Ness the forces to keep Kyle pinned, why?” she asked, eyeing the screens.

  “Because it means that the Terrans weren’t worried about leaving the naval base—which represents a cool ten trillion Commonwealth dollars, the price of a couple of warships—with no warship defenders,” her XO reminded her, and she remembered—once again—that Notley had more time in combat than the rest of her bridge crew combined.

  “Void,” she cursed softly. “Xue, what are you seeing?” she demanded.

  “Not good,” the tactical officer replied. “We’re still validating, but I’m throwing our certainties on screen as they firm up. Big icons are fighter bases. Small icons are missile satellites. Middle icons are positron lance platforms.”

  The red icons started dropping onto the main screen and Mira’s implants. The lance platforms were a new wrinkle on Mira, though she was familiar with the concept—fixed platforms with the big versions of the modified zero point cells used as main capital ship weapons, usually megaton-range beams. An outer shell of at least two hundred of the things covered the approaches to the naval base.