Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Seven fighters down before his people had even reached lance range, and Michael watched the distances drop rapidly. Once his ships were in lance range, they’d have to cease accelerating away from the Terran ships and turn to face them.

  His people would have less than twenty seconds to kill as many of the Scimitars as possible. Once they were in the range of the Terran fighters’ dual twenty-five-kiloton-a-second positron lances, the balance of the engagement was going to swing dramatically in the Scimitars’ favor.

  His final missile salvo had no response from the Terrans. The Scimitars were preserving their missiles to kill Battle Group Seven-Two’s carriers. They’d already thrown two salvos of over three thousand Javelin fighter missiles apiece at him. The geometry meant they’d been launched later and were arriving more slowly, but clearly, whoever was leading the Commonwealth fighter strike thought the sheer numbers would be enough.

  Despite everything, every so often, Michael ran into a Terran starfighter commander who just didn’t seem to learn the lessons the Alliance’s seventh-generation starfighters kept teaching the Terrans’ sixth-generation ships.

  Along the way, his people had been slowly assuming the donut formation that Rokos had suggested earlier in the same star system. His sensors suggested that none of the Q-probes were close enough to pick out the ECM drones.

  The dispersal of the starfighters hadn’t been enough to fool the capital ship missiles, but against fighter missiles, it had already proven effective. Massive waves of ECM, jamming, and false images were already rippling off Michael’s command as the Terran fighters slowly overhauled his own formation.

  The Terran missiles would reach his ships nine seconds after his people were in lance range. That all on its own limited the effect those thousands of weapons would have on this clash.

  His own two thousand-plus missiles would arrive in rapidly shortening intervals, but even as he studied their salvos, his first salvo entered range of the Terran ships. Defensive lasers, electronic countermeasures, and positron lances lashed out into space, eight hundred starfighters’ defenses lashing out at a mere seven-hundred-odd missiles.

  Those missiles’ motherships were right behind them, and their jamming reached out at the speed of light. The Falcons’ and Templars’ ECM suites were vastly more powerful than the Scimitars’ defenses—and overwhelmed them even from two hundred thousand kilometers away.

  And then, just as the missiles hit terminal acquisition, the starfighters reached lance range. Hundreds of positron lances flashed across space, beams of pure antimatter seeking out the Terran starfighters.

  Staying on a single course was anathema to a starfighter pilot, the randomness necessary to reduce hit probabilities drilled into them until it was second nature. Many of the positron lances missed, second-long flashes of white energy in the empty void around Goudeshijie.

  Others hit. Dozens of the Terran starfighters went up in flames, emergency pods ejecting as the positron beams ripped the ships to shreds.

  In the wake of the positron lances, the first missile salvo struck home. The Terran defense had gutted the salvo, a mere tithe of the original thousand-plus missiles surviving to claim victims.

  More lance fire followed. Michael spun his own starfighter through a deadly pirouetting spiral that tracked the nose of the ship—and its deadly positron lance—across a field of the Terran starfighters. As the computer-predicted future positions of starfighters crossed the beam’s path, the weapon fired. Again and again, he and his people fired.

  Then the Terran missiles arrived. Only the defensive laser suites were available to protect the Alliance ships—the lances had to kill starfighters or the whole fight was for nothing.

  The donut hole, with the vast amounts of ECM poured into the fake center of their formation, absorbed over fifteen hundred of the Javelins. That still left over sixteen hundred missiles charging at Michael’s people—a vast amount of overkill, compared to the salvo they’d leveled at the larger Terran force.

  Michael focused on his task. There was little he could do to turn the tide of the grander battle beyond surviving and killing starfighters. His implant kept him informed of the defensive sweep and of the total kills inflicted on the Terran fleet.

  He felt the failure of his peoples’ defenses like a punch to the gut. In a single series of fiery bootsteps through his formation, the Javelins blew seventy of his starfighters to pieces. Over a third of his remaining strength disappeared in a single instant.

  His own second salvo then returned the favor. Seven hundred and sixty-plus weapons slammed into the Terrans’ defenses, dancing around and through his people’s repeated lance strikes. With the lance fire incoming and their formations ripped to pieces, there was no way the Terrans could stop them all.

  Eighty starfighters blew apart in an instant, bringing the Terran losses to well over four hundred. Over half of their force was gone, and Michael finally started to believe his people might make it through.

  Then the second Terran salvo arrived. Without their motherships to feed them data, many of them were flying stupid—but a salvo of Stormwinds came with them, their networked intelligence replacing the starfighter controls.

  They’d adapted for the hole in his formation and hit the top half of the Alliance fighter strike—and when the explosions faded, almost half of Michael’s remaining strength was gone.

  Less than a hundred Alliance starfighters survived, plunging toward the Terran formation. Even Michael, linked to his computers and riding the flame of his fighter’s engine, couldn’t keep track of everything. He dodged missiles, he struck, he dodged again as the Terran lances opened fire, and then killed another starfighter. Only the moment mattered—only killing the Scimitars in front of him could save Avalon.

  He never saw the positron lance that blew his starfighter to ashes.

  02:55 April 5, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Kyle stared forward into space, trying and failing to process the information his implant was giving him. Stanford couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t.

  But the data feeds coming into his head from Avalon’s computers, a consolidated mix of data from the Q-probes near the battle and the starfighters themselves, refused to magically change. A tiny red notation on the starfighter labeled SFG-001 ACTUAL noted it as destroyed with no escape pod launch detected.

  Some of the starfighters had made it through the clash. They were now over a million kilometers behind the Terran ships, not accelerating at all. The tiny handful of surviving ships looked as shell-shocked on the display at Kyle felt.

  “Seven-Two starfighters, report,” he ordered. “Whoever is in command, report!”

  A few seconds passed, then a female voice with a Phoenix accent answered him.

  “This is Sub-Colonel Sherry Wills of Indomitable’s Infernals,” she responded, her voice shaky. “I think I’m the last O-5 left outside the pods. I have…” She paused, then resumed after audibly swallowing. “…twenty-four effectives with no munitions.

  “We have between one hundred and one hundred and ten emergency pods on our screens,” Wills continued. “I can confirm that Vice Commodore Stanford’s pod did not deploy. The Battle Group CAG is KIA.”

  Killed In Action.

  The woman on the scene confirmed what the sensors told Kyle—his friend was dead. With two hundred and fifty Terran starfighters still bearing down on his position, there was nothing he could do to mourn either.

  Kyle swallowed hard and focused.

  “Can you keep pace with the pods?” he asked. The emergency pods had no engines of their own; they’d continue on at the velocity their fighters had had when they’d launched. Fortunately, that vector was towards Goudeshijie, which meant Avalon could recover them if she survived the minutes to come.

  “We can,” Wills confirmed.

  “You’re out of this fight for now,” Kyle told her. “Keep an eye on our people; we’ll be coming to get them soon enough.”

  “Thank y
ou, sir,” she replied. “Make it…make it worth it, sir. I just lost a lot of friends.”

  “So did I,” Kyle murmured. “We’ll still be here when the dust settles, Sub-Colonel. I promise you that.”

  The undertones that accompanied implant communication gave him the impression of a firm nod, then Wills cut the channel to focus on keeping twenty-four starfighter crews from going mad from grief.

  “Battle Group orders,” he said aloud, activating a channel to his captains. “We’re going to see one giant pile of crap land us in about three minutes,” he told them simply. “I want all of us going to maximum-cycle fire on our missile launchers now.”

  “We can’t sustain that for long,” Captain Olivier of Courageous pointed out. “We’re down almost half our magazines already.”

  “We can sustain it for three minutes and maybe cut a chunk of this fighter strike off before they eat us alive,” he reminded her. “We’ll move to formation Alpha-Foxtrot Two.”

  “Sir,” Captain Ainsley of Sledgehammer suggested. “I recommend Sierra-Foxtrot Five instead.”

  The two formations were basically identical. Both were staggered formations that put the battleship Sledgehammer and the supercarrier Avalon in front of the battlecruisers, where their more intensive defensives could protect the two Phoenix ships.

  The difference was that Alpha-Foxtrot put Avalon in the most exposed position, where Sierra-Foxtrot put Sledgehammer in that position.

  “Neither Indomitable nor Courageous can take more than one hit and keep fighting,” Ainsley continued. “And if Avalon takes crippling damage, we may not be able to retrieve our fighters. We all know it’s the battleship’s job to stand in front and take the beating so everyone else doesn’t. Let us do our job, sir.”

  Kyle started to object but stopped himself. Ainsley was right. Kyle’s desire to keep everyone else out of harm’s way was a dangerous feeling in a battle group commander. The battleship needed to be in front. Kyle was just afraid to put them there.

  For the first time since Alstairs had made him Force Commander, Kyle felt truly out of his depth. He took a deep breath and nodded.

  “You’re right,” he admitted. “Sierra-Foxtrot Five, people. Remember—let’s stay alive.”

  #

  At the speed Battle Group Seven-Two was moving, a few careful half-second long lapses in acceleration were enough for the battleship and the big modern carrier to drop behind the other ships. A matter of seconds to stabilize their positions and begin sending fifty-seven missile salvos dropping into their wake at the rapidly closing starfighters.

  The missiles wouldn’t hit before the starfighters launched their own weapons, but they would hit long before any of the starfighters closed to lance range—pathetically short for the Scimitars’ underpowered weapons.

  Stanford’s people had inflicted massive losses along the way. The two hundred and fifty ships still bearing down on him were less than a third of the force they’d started with—but would still manage to put two thousand missiles on target. More capital ship missile salvos had been launched to coincide with their expected arrival—combined with the thousand starfighter missiles in each batch, Kyle’s people were in real danger.

  Just past oh three hundred hours Earth Standard Time, the Scimitars finally swept into missile range and promptly fired. Exactly one thousand starfighter missiles blasted into space, a wall of crimson icons bearing far too rapidly down on Battle Group Seven-Two for Kyle’s comfort.

  “Maintain missile fire, but use our missiles to support missile defense,” he ordered. “Hammer them, people.”

  Nine seconds before the starfighters could launch their second salvo, the Alliance missiles arrived. Against the full force, fifty-seven missiles wouldn’t have been much of a threat. Against the much-reduced remnant he currently faced, many of whom had lost sensors and laser clusters to near misses, they took out a full dozen starfighters.

  That left the second salvo from the starfighters at a “mere” nine hundred and fifty-two weapons.

  His missile salvos continued to strike home as Kyle watched their tsunami come crashing towards his command. Six salvos were in space, and five slammed home before the fighter missiles reached his ships. Even the secondary lances aboard Avalon and Sledgehammer, though not the Phoenix cruisers, reached the starfighters before their missiles reached his people.

  The Terran ships started to go up like moths, dying in their dozens as they closed with his ships—but the deaths of the starfighters that launched them didn’t slow the missiles already in space.

  ECM sang songs of confusion and lies to lure missiles aside, and starfighter missiles were dumb. Lasers flashed out in deadly sequence, and the armor on starfighter missiles was nonexistent. Massive capital ships maneuvered to throw targeting solutions off, and threw their every defense into the missiles’ teeth.

  The Alliance’s defensive missiles killed hundreds. Hundreds more went astray and hundreds more again died to the lasers. Kyle found himself holding his breath as the missiles came crashing down.

  Of the thousand missiles in the first salvo, one got through—slamming dead center into Sledgehammer, the gigaton-plus blow sending the battleship lurching away.

  “Report!” Kyle snapped.

  “Still here,” Ainsley replied instantly, Sledgehammer’s Captain’s voice strained. “We’ll stick it out!”

  The second salvo followed only a few seconds after he’d finished speaking. These missiles had been launched that much closer with that much more base velocity. Again, missiles went astray by the hundreds, and died by the hundreds more—but the interceptions had started later, and this time, the starfighters were right on their heels.

  Another missile hit Sledgehammer, near the stern. The battleship lurched—and then stopped accelerating as her engines failed.

  Like sharks scenting blood, the missiles swarmed the old battleship even as her every weapon strained to defend herself.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Even as the starfighters came swarming through the haze of explosions and death to bring their lances into range, the missiles that had come before slammed into Sledgehammer again and again. Hammer-class battleships were tough—but no armor known or defense built could withstand that many hits from antimatter warheads.

  Sledgehammer died—but she took the last of the missiles with her. Kyle had a moment of hope that Captain Ainsley’s sacrifice had saved the battle group.

  Then the last hundred Scimitars came bursting through the debris field of Sledgehammer’s death, finally in the lance range they’d bled so hard to reach.

  At this range, the secondary lances of the three capital ships could barely miss the starfighters if they tried, but the Scimitars’ lances fired back. Avalon bucked under Kyle’s feet, her immense size no defense against the beams of pure antimatter that flayed her hull. Lances and missile launchers exploded, automatic failsafes blasting failing zero point cells and antimatter capacitors free of the big ship’s hull.

  Linked in through his implants, Kyle felt every wound his ship took as his own, and turned her remaining weapons on her tormentors. Secondary positron lances, primary positron lances, close-range missiles and even anti-missile lasers blazed after the Terran ships.

  The Scimitars were in range for barely four seconds. Three survived to run.

  The flashing red on his implant displays and the pseudo-pain Kyle felt told him all he needed to know. The Terran strike hadn’t killed Battle Group Seven-Two—but it was entirely possible they’d crippled it.

  Chapter 37

  Huī Xing System

  03:10 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  As the pseudo-pain his implant fed him to warn him about damage to the ship faded, Kyle became aware of very real pain. Between cascade failures forcing the mass manipulators to hand gravity generation around and the impacts themselves, the bridge crew had been thrown around emphatically.

  His shoulder hurt w
here his safety straps had held him in, and his neck felt…sprained. Interrogating his implants, they promptly informed him he’d partly dislocated his left shoulder and had moderate soft tissue damage in his neck.

  The latter his own nanites could deal with. The former was going to need about thirty seconds of a medic’s time at some point.

  A point that would need to be later. All three ships left in his battle group had dropped to one hundred and fifty gravities—an almost automatic safety measure after taking this level of damage. His starfighters and the emergency pods from their dead comrades continued to hurtle towards Goudeshijie at thousands of kilometers a second.

  There was work to do.

  “Wong, report,” Kyle ordered, opening a channel to his chief engineer. “What’s our status?”

  “Extra crispy,” Senior Fleet Commander Alistair Wong replied flatly. “Sending in survey crews now, but the good news is that the core power modules are fine. We have main power; we have main engines. What we don’t have is full mass manipulator capacity. I wouldn’t suggest pushing her past two hundred gees.”

  “Can we retrieve fighters?”

  “Yes,” Wong confirmed. “Kalers says the deck is undamaged. What we don’t have anymore are half our launch tubes. The starboard broadside is gone, Kyle. No lances. No missiles. No fighter launch tubes.”

  Casualty reports were already filtering into Kyle’s implants. Not even counting the loss of fighter crews, it was looking at over five hundred wounded or dead. Avalon had been hit hard.

  “Keep me informed,” Kyle told Wong. He flipped open another channel. “Kalers, can we deploy retrieval ships?”

  Keeping himself busy kept him focused. He had every intent of applying the same methodology to his crew.

  “We can,” his deck chief replied after a moment. “They’re defenseless if the Terrans start shooting, though.”

  “We have to take the risk,” he told her grimly. “I don’t think they’ll shoot at search-and-rescue ships, but we need to catch our pods before they fly past—or into—Goudeshijie and are lost.”