The missile platforms made the section of the display showing the Naval base look diseased. Hundreds—possibly thousands—of the miniscule three-launcher, twelve-missile automated platforms were scattered through the space around the repair and logistics stations.
The last piece of the cake was the fighter platforms. Rose and the other tactical officers were still narrowing down the split between fighter bases and the stations making up the base itself—but they’d already confirmed twenty Zion-class platforms—over twice as many starfighters as Seventh Fleet had brought with them.
The fixed defenses of the Via Somnia Naval Base had Seventh Fleet well and truly matched—if not outgunned.
“Oh, Starless Void.”
#
“Options, people,” Rear Admiral Miriam Alstairs snapped.
All eight ship captains and the two carrier CAGs were linked in to a holoconference. While they conferred, Seventh Fleet orbited outside the gravity well of Via Somnia III, looking intimidating but not really doing much.
“We can take them,” Mira said slowly. “We can carry out long-range missile bombardment from here—that’ll force them to launch the satellites’ missiles while they’re least effective. We’ll still have to take on their starfighters, and those lance platforms are going to be a Void-accursed nightmare.”
“We can’t protect the fleet from a thousand starfighters,” Vice Commodore Ozolinsh told them bluntly. “We’ll cut them down, hard, but you’ll still have several hundred starfighters close enough to launch missiles.”
“We can take that,” Lord Captain Anders reminded the CAG flatly. “We can take that,” he repeated, “but we’ll lose ships. Take damage. As Captain Solace says, though, we can take this system.”
“And will what’s left of Seventh Fleet afterward be able to engage the Terrans’ Twenty-Third Fleet when they come after us?” Lora Aleppo asked, the Trade Factor officer glaring at Anders.
“That would depend on how much damage Force Commander Roberts was able to do,” Anders pointed out.
“Much as I dislike the cost involved, Roberts is more than capable of hammering Vice Admiral Ness’s fleet down to a manageable size,” Alstairs replied. “The mission objective remains Via Somnia…”
Anders held up a hand, forestalling the Admiral.
“What is it, Lord Captain?”
“Ma’am, Captain Solace is trying very hard not to be biased in her paramour’s favor,” the Coraline Lord Captain said flatly.
Mira flushed and started to glare at the man—he wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t polite to point it out. Yes, she and Kyle were lovers, but she wasn’t letting it influence her recommendation—otherwise, she’d be taking them to Huī Xing at maximum speed!
“This is leading her to make a mistake,” Anders continued, and Mira stopped glaring, wondering where the Imperial officer was going. “Force Commander Roberts and I are not friends. Most of the rest of you are on far better terms with our ‘hero’ than I am, and you are all bending over backward to not allow that to influence your decision.
“And so you are all wrong,” he snapped. “As Walkingstick has shown us again and again in this war, there is no true target but the enemy fleet. If we neutralize Twenty-Third Fleet, Via Somnia is ours to take. If we sacrifice Captain Roberts and his ships to capture this system, we will have thrown away a third of this fleet for nothing.”
To say that Kyle and Anders were not friends was an understatement, Mira considered. Kyle had forced the man to replace a CAG who’d screwed up badly—but had also been a longstanding friend and protégé of Anders’s.
“The Fleet Base is irrelevant without a fleet to support and is sufficiently defended to make taking it expensive,” Anders noted. “I must recommend that we immediately proceed to the Huī Xing system and engage Twenty-Third Fleet in combination with Battle Group Seven-Two. Anything else risks leaving a significant Commonwealth strike force operating in this area—one we are unlikely to be able to neutralize if we take losses securing Via Somnia.”
Mira found herself staring at Anders in shock, and she wasn’t the only one. He was right—it hadn’t just been her assuming she wanted to rescue Kyle only because he was her lover. Everyone else had tried to put their feelings aside—and missed the blatant strategic point.
Walkingstick had spent the entire war to date trying to grind down the Alliance’s fleet strength, making neutralizing capital ships a priority over taking or even holding systems. Twenty-Third Fleet was the only real target on the board.
The conference was silent for a long moment, and then Alstairs broke the silence.
“Thank you, Lord Captain Anders,” she said formally. “I believe you are correct that we had all missed that perspective. An additional point that has not been made is that the addition of Avalon’s battle group to our own order of battle would make taking this system significantly easier.
“However, from Force Commander Roberts’ last set of transmissions, it appears that Vice Admiral Ness is under orders to avoid risking his fleet by entering the gravity well. If he remains outside the gravity well, he may be able to escape before we can destroy his fleet.”
Mira chuckled, then smiled when everyone looked at her.
“The answer is also in Kyle’s transmissions,” she pointed out. “We have a stockpile of ECM drones—for that matter, our logistics freighters have piles of missile satellites.
“We can set them all up, attached to a few shuttles or tugs on autopilot, and give the appearance of our fleet hanging out back here, maintaining a long-term missile bombardment. With no humans in the loop, the accuracy will suck, but it will give the Commonwealth every sign they need to think we’re settling in for a siege of Via Somnia.”
Chapter 36
Huī Xing System
01:25 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Help was on the way.
Said help was four days away, but it was coming—and that meant Force Commander Kyle Roberts’ people had been spared from what had been appearing to be an inevitable death. He wouldn’t have told any of his people that he didn’t think they could win, but he’d used up the only tricks he had to get the rescued prisoners out.
The only thing he’d had left was to drag things out and see how many of Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships he could make Vice Admiral Ness spend to kill them.
With the rest of Seventh Fleet on the way, however, his main task had become to keep his people alive. It would be helpful if he could lure Twenty-Third Fleet into the gravity well—though he’d rather do so closer to Admiral Alstairs’ arrival if he had the choice—but not a necessity.
“We are approaching zero velocity,” Pendez reported. “We’ll start building our vector away from our lovely Terran friends in about a minute.”
“That is going to be so nice,” the XO murmured. “Something about not suicidally charging into the teeth of the enemy is going to feel so relaxing.”
“Are the missiles set up?” Kyle asked Xue.
“Ready to go,” she confirmed. “Roughly nine minutes from engine activation to mass impact.”
“Good. Fire at the best timing—use your judgment,” he ordered.
“Wait!” she short-stopped him. “Aspect change—hold on a moment.”
The tactical officer blanked out, focusing on her implants as she studied the new data from her Q-probes.
“Three ships just went to Alcubierre,” she finally reported. “Looks like the Hercules and two Assassins—on their way to take up the old blocking position. They left their starfighters behind, though.”
“That helps,” Kyle replied with a smile. The starfighters were the single biggest obstacle to landing hits with the salvo they’d prepared, but removing three capital ships from the defensive suite definitely made an impact. “Are we still in the zone for time-on-target?”
“Yes, sir,” Xue told him instantly. “Forty-five seconds till optimal activation.”
“
Good. Fire at will.”
Seconds later, ever so infinitesimally, Battle Group Seven-Two, Avalon, stopped moving toward the Commonwealth Twenty-Third Fleet and started moving away from it.
“I have starfighter movement!” Xue announced. “Damn—every one of those starfighters is coming right at us!”
A quick study of Kyle’s data feeds confirmed the tactical officer’s assessment—all eight hundred of the starfighters from Twenty-Third Fleet’s ships were now chasing after Kyle’s Battle Group at four hundred and fifty gravities.
That was only a two-hundred-gravity edge over the fuel-wasting pace that Seven-Two was maintaining—but that was a pace Kyle hadn’t planned on keeping up.
“I guess we’re staying at two hundred and fifty gees,” he noted aloud. There was no way he could slow down now, not with enough fighters to eat his command and spit out the pieces trailing in his wake. “Commander?”
“Missiles activating now,” she said flatly.
“Keep me in the loop,” Kyle ordered, then flipped his attention to his CAG. “Michael, we have a fucking swarm of Scimitars heading our way. I hope you have some kind of clever idea.”
“I don’t have much except smashing right into them and holding them in the gap between our lance range and theirs until one of us is dead,” Stanford admitted. “We’re moving out. See you on the other side, Kyle.”
Avalon’s Captain swallowed. He’d been a CAG once—he knew what kind of fight Stanford and his people were charging into—a close-range mutual suicide duel. But Stanford was right—it was the only hope Avalon and her battle group had.
And starfighters existed to die so starships didn’t. They could lose their entire fighter strength and lose fewer people and resources than if they lost a single one of their four starships.
Kyle didn’t have to like it.
“Missiles in range of their fighters,” Xue reported, interrupting his thoughts. “They’re engaging.”
His attention turned back to his attempt to poke the Terrans. Five hundred and seventy Jackhammer capital ship missiles flashed through the same space occupied by the Scimitar attack formation, allowing the eight hundred starfighters to lash out at them with positron lances and lasers.
Part of him wished he’d set those missiles to target the fighters—he wouldn’t have taken out many of them, but every fighter that died before they clashed with Stanford increased the chance for his people to live.
Instead, the missiles took out a dozen starfighters, almost by accident, and the starfighters took out over three hundred missiles in turn. Two hundred and sixty-three weapons charged into terminal mode on the Commonwealth Twenty-Third Fleet, and Kyle felt his hands clench into fists.
Six ships remained in the blocking force closest to him—a single Assassin battlecruiser, the Saint battleship, a Volcano carrier and the three Lexingtons. Their combined defenses were formidable, but his missiles were coming in with a high base velocity and their ECM running at full power.
The Saint swung forward, the big battleship putting her massive defenses and armor between the missiles and her more vulnerable sisters. The missiles swooped in, detonating in their dozens as the Terran defenses took their toll of shattered weapons and shining white antimatter explosions.
A near miss rocked the massive battleship, and a muttered curse of hope escaped Kyle’s lips. As the light faded, it was clear the ship had survived, her weapons shattering the missiles that made it past her.
The networked intelligence of capital ship missiles was astonishingly smart and amazingly suicidal. Nine missiles somehow made it through everything and passed the battleship toward their programmed targets. Their networked mind concluded that it couldn’t get any of the missiles through as it was—and self-detonated eight of the warheads in a rapid sequence.
The ninth warhead slammed dead center into the single Assassin left on this side of Goudeshijie—and vaporized the older, lightly armored warship in a blaze of annihilating matter.
02:40 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
SFG-001 Actual—Falcon-C type command starfighter
Michael watched the oncoming swarm of starfighters and capital ship missiles with a calm that surprised him. His implant had run the numbers on the missiles Twenty-Third Fleet had fired as his fighters maneuvered to set up their position—the Terrans had launched five salvos and the first would reach his starfighters about thirty seconds before they could launch their missiles on the Scimitars.
The Terrans clearly saw their fighter strike as the best chance to knock Battle Group Seven-Two out of the fight and were doubling down. The Saint and Volcano were the only units in the current battle group with missile launchers, but they were also big ships with magazines to spend. Two hundred and ten capital ship missiles were going to hit Michael’s starfighters while his people were engaged with the Terran ships.
Already outnumbered almost four-to-one, Vice Commodore Michael Stanford was forced to the conclusion that there was no way he could actually stop the Terran fighter strike. His people could hurt it—possibly even cripple it—but he couldn’t stop at least some of those ships from reaching the Battle Group.
“All starfighters,” he said calmly, activating a channel that reached out to all two hundred and two of the Falcons and Templars currently accelerating away from the Terrans, reducing their closing velocity to give them as much time outside the enemy lance range as possible.
“You know what we’re facing,” he told them. “You know the mission, you’ve received your formation slots, and you what we have to do.
“But I remind you that these people are coming to kill us. They’re coming to kill our friends. Perhaps most importantly, they’re coming to kill our carriers, so if you like your bunk, I suggest we stop them,” he continued with a chuckle.
A timer continued to tick down. The first missiles would hit his people in less than two minutes. Shortly after that, roughly eighty-four minutes after the starfighters had left the Battle Group behind, his people would be launching the first of their own missiles.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to command you all,” Michael finally finished after a long pause. “Today, we will do the Alliance proud. When this is over, the drinks are on me.”
When this was over, many—if not most—of his people were going to be dead.
#
The missiles came first, a harbinger of the destruction following them. Forty-two of the massive weapons came crashing in on the Alliance starfighters with relative velocities well over ten percent of lightspeed. Michael coordinated the defense as best as he could, running four different assistant AIs as he assigned single missiles as targets for an entire squadron’s worth of defensive lasers and positron lances.
The first wave died easily, the sole focus of twenty-five fighter squadrons’ firepower. But then their attention needed to be split—Michael handed off control of the defensive suite to his starfighter’s engineer while he and Arnolds started setting up the first mass missile strike.
Unlike the Terrans, he didn’t need to preserve missiles to attack the starships. Unfortunately, the Templars only had three launchers to the Scimitars’ or his Falcons’ four, and his two hundred and two starfighters would only launch seven hundred and sixty-four missiles. Worse, in many ways, the Terran ships had one more missile per launcher than any of his ships.
But the Stormwinds had been meant to reduce his numbers before his people launched—and they’d failed.
Still over a million kilometers away from the Terran starfighters, Michael gave the mental command—and his ship shuddered as all four of her missile launchers fired.
A new timer popped up into his implants—the fighter’s computers informing him how long it was going to take to rearm the launchers. Another timer told him that the next capital ship salvo was going to hit before his people could launch their next salvo.
This time, he had to leave it in the hands of the starfighters’ flight engineers. A high-level set of eyes helped, and even with Q
-Coms, the carrier’s staff were too far away, but the engineers could do the job no matter what.
The clean sweep the first time had been a combination of luck, skill, and a lack of distractions. Now the fighter gunners were concerned with defensive ECM against both the capital ship missiles and the Scimitars’ missiles. The pilots were in defensive mode against everything, focused on dodging more than bringing lances to bear against the heavy missiles. The engineers, tasked with running the defensive lasers, were also focused on balancing the power requirements of the starfighters’ dozens of systems as they closed into combat range.
This time, explosions pocked the space amidst Michael’s fighters. Most of the missiles still died well short of his fighters, but two were close enough near misses that starfighters spun out of formation, both ships spinning helplessly for a moment before ejecting their emergency pods and self-destructing.
Their crews could be retrieved later, but the starfighters were entirely out of the fight. Two down, and Michael was grimly certain they wouldn’t be the last.
His starfighter shuddered again as the second salvo blasted into space. The command starfighter itself didn’t have the munitions for a fourth salvo—each of his Wing Commanders flew similar ships, which would rob his last salvo of another dozen missiles.
The third missile salvo from the capital ships robbed it of more. Again, most of the missiles died clear of the starfighters, but two more ships drifted away, disabled by from near misses—and three missiles made it through everything the fighters could throw at them to hit their targets, annihilating starfighters in one-gigaton balls of antimatter fire.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 30
