“Understood, sir,” she confirmed. “I’ll have them in space shortly.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
Kyle checked his channel to Anderson, making sure that his XO was tied into all of his communications. If something happened to the bridge, James Anderson would have to fight Avalon from secondary control.
“Anything to add, XO?” he asked the Fleet Commander.
“I’m coordinating damage control with Wong and Surgeon-Commander Cunningham,” Anderson told him. “If anything, he’s understating how bad the upper and lower starboard chunks of the ship are looking. The outer hull is just…gone, Kyle. We’ll need hours to replace Stetson emitters before we can go FTL, and that’s all we’re going to manage without a shipyard.”
“But our port weapons are intact?”
“For the good it will do us with only twenty-four starfighters, yeah.”
“Twelve seven-hundred-kiloton lances and four launchers will do us some good, at least,” Kyle noted. “I’m pulling the captains in for a conference. Don’t need you to contribute, but stay on the channel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dropping Anderson to a secondary channel, Kyle activated his privacy screen and opened up a conference link via the Q-Com to bring in the captains of the other two surviving ships of Battle Group Seven-Two. As Gervaise Albert and Christine Olivier appeared in his mental interface, he felt the twist of a mental knife at the absences of Michael Stanford and Urien Ainsley.
Both men had died to keep the rest of the battle group safe, and thousands of their subordinates had died with them. Kyle’s body count there in Huī Xing was getting far higher than he liked.
“Avalon is badly damaged but combat-capable,” he told them without preamble. “We can retrieve and launch fighters, but we’re down both starboard broadsides and cannot maintain an acceleration above two hundred gravities.”
The two Phoenix women looked at each other, then Albert sighed and spoke.
“Indomitable is no longer capable of retrieving starfighters,” she admitted. She flashed a damage control report to the conference, and Kyle sucked in a breath as he saw the extent of the damage. A Fearless-class battle cruiser was a fourteen-hundred-meter-long even-sided diamond, with her carrier launch deck and most of her weapons on the front half of the diamond.
The forward two hundred meters of Indomitable were simply gone. Deep chasms of red cut deeper into the battlecruiser’s hull where positron beams had ripped through external armor and just kept going.
“We’re barely holding together at one-fifty gravities and have lost the forward Class One Manipulator,” Albert continued. “Indomitable is not capable of entering Alcubierre drive. My forward positron lances are gone or nonfunctional, but we maintain seventy-five percent of our missile launchers.”
Kyle nodded—that meant that the effectively crippled Indomitable still had three times the launchers Avalon did…and not much else.
“Understood, Captain,” he said quietly. “And Courageous?”
Olivier shook her head.
“We’re in better shape, but not by much,” she admitted. “We took most of our hits to the bottom of the ship. We’re down…well, we’re down our launch deck and half of our weapons, but we still have all of our upper side’s lances and launchers.” She sighed. “Our engines are in about the same state, Force Commander. We do still have all of our Class One Mass Manipulators, though, so once we’ve replaced our Stetson stabilizers, we can make FTL.”
If, of course, Battle Group Seven-Two ever escaped Goudeshijie’s gravity well, something Kyle was no longer counting on.
“Maintain a zero-zero course for the gas giant,” he ordered. “We’ll keep at one hundred and fifty gravities. Remember, people, the cavalry is coming. We just need to stay alive.”
“Hundred and fifty gravities of accel is blood in the water, sir,” Olivier said grimly. “What happens if the Terrans come in after us?”
“Most likely?” Kyle replied. “We run. We keep running. We dance the bastards in circles around Goudeshijie and Xin until either they make a mistake or Seventh Fleet arrives. We just lost thousands of good people. I will run like a scared rabbit if that’s what it takes to keep the rest alive.”
#
At the speed they’d already been traveling and with their reduced acceleration capacity, turnover—flipping the ships to slow their velocity toward the gas giant—was less than five minutes later. The actual flight into Goudeshijie orbit would take a little under three hours in total from there, but once there, they’d be shielded by the Dog World’s rings and moons.
Kyle studied the gas giant’s orbitals. He could use the rings and the half-dozen moons to help protect his crippled fleet from the Terrans, but all that would really do was buy time. Even long-range missile fire could get around a moon to hit him. If Ness chose to close the range and engage with lance fire, Kyle didn’t have the fighters to stop him. The Terrans’ Saint flagship alone could rip what was left of Kyle’s Battle Group to pieces.
Hiding in Goudeshijie’s rings was a horrible option, one that would buy him at most one of the four days he needed. There were games he could play, but once the Terrans brought a starship or two down the gravity well, his options would rapidly narrow down to two: fight an overwhelming force with crippled ships, or surrender.
A review of his ships’ ammunition levels didn’t help. Given time, Avalon alone could replenish all three ships to full stocks. Twenty-Third Fleet wouldn’t give them that time, which meant those depleted magazines also narrowed his options. Avalon still had seventy missiles left for each of her four remaining launchers—plus another three hundred-plus in the magazines for the five launchers she’d lost, if they could move them—but the two Phoenix battlecruisers were down to twenty missiles per launcher after moving the weapons.
Time passed, and red markers on his damage control display faded to orange as Wong’s people and robots swarmed over the damage. Eventually, fatigue forced Kyle to take another stimulant. They would do him no favors in the long run, but he couldn’t be away from the bridge now.
Few of the damage markers returned to green. Orange simply meant that the damage was contained, no air leaks or exposed power conduits that would transfer damage to the rest of the ship. His starboard broadsides were going to require yard work—months of yard work.
A slow net of green was expanding around the outside of the ship as Wong’s people replaced Stetson stabilizer emitters. Without them, Avalon couldn’t safely go FTL, even if Kyle managed to find a miracle that would let them.
They were still an hour and a half away from Goudeshijie when the transmission from the Terrans caught up with them. Kyle gestured for the com officer to relay it to him, and the now-familiar blond face of Vice Admiral Kaj Ness appeared in his implant feeds.
The Vice Admiral looked disturbingly calm and cheerful for a man Kyle suspected had been awake as long as he had. If the loss of his ships and starfighters had hit him as hard as Kyle’s losses had, he didn’t show it—but then, Kyle wouldn’t have either, in the other man’s position.
“Force Commander Roberts,” Ness said calmly. “You have fought bravely—brilliantly, even—but we both know this battle is decided. Goudeshijie’s moons cannot save you. Continuing to fight will only cost lives under your command. Please. Let this end.”
Kyle felt his bridge crew’s eyes on him again, and he looked up at them and shook his head gently.
“The good Vice Admiral wants us to surrender,” he told them gently. “Not yet. Maybe before we’re done. But not yet!”
“Any response, sir?”
Kyle shook his head and turned back to the main screen showing the massive gas giant.
“No.”
#
Forty minutes later, Vice Admiral Ness’s response to Kyle’s lack of reply became clear.
“They’ll rendezvous about two million klicks out from Goudeshijie, and then swing into the gas giant,” Xue concluded, tracing the course o
f the Hercules battlecruiser detached from the new Force Bravo and the Saint battleship detached from Force Alpha.
“Left the battlecruisers and carriers guarding the gravity well,” Anderson noted from secondary control. “I guess they figure even a bunch of old carriers with no missile launchers can deal with us in our current state.”
“What do we do now, Roberts?” Captain Olivier asked over the Q-Com link. “We can’t fight them. Two modern capital ships versus three crippled ones? It’s a done deal.”
“If we opened up with missiles as they close, we can drop our entire arsenal on them before they reach us,” Captain Albert noted. “We should be able to take out at least one of them, right?”
“We’re down to twenty-six launchers,” Kyle pointed out. “If we threw everything at them, we can control about four hundred missiles still. We could do that…twice. At any useful range, they’d be able to use stacked salvos of their own missiles as counters, maneuver to evade, and generally do everything to make their defenses as effective as possible.
“We might get one of them—in exchange for being helpless when the other catches up with us,” he said grimly.
“I don’t see any other option, sir,” Xue said quietly. “If we do stack the salvos, we can hammer each of them—we should at least do damage, if not take them out.”
“I’d give a lot right now for those missiles and satellites we left in Xin orbit,” Olivier told them. “Bastard would hesitate if he was staring down two hundred Atlatls and six hundred missile launchers.”
Kyle paused, silent in thought for a moment as he ran the course in his head. The Terran ships would arrive here, then. They had an eighty-gravity advantage over his ships’ current capabilities. It didn’t work. If the Terrans turned to intercept his people, they’d catch them over two hours short of Xin.
If the Terrans made it all the way to Goudeshijie before they realized what he’d done, however…
“Anderson,” he turned to his exec. “How many of those ECM emitter drones do we have left?”
“Maybe twenty?”
“Kalers—the tugs survived just fine, right? And they can run on computer control, right?”
“Yeah,” the deck chief replied. “They’ve only got a day or so of endurance, though, depending on what you need them to do.”
“That’s plenty,” Kyle told her. “I just need them to not fall into Goudeshijie until the Commonwealth gets here.”
Battle Group Seven-Two was forty minutes from Goudeshijie. The two Terran warships were three hours and forty minutes from the gas giant—and if they made a zero-zero intercept with Goudeshijie orbit, they’d be a long way behind him.
“All right, people,” he said aloud, gathering his subordinates’ attention. “This is what we’re going to do.”
Deep Space, en route to Huī Xing System
05:30 April 5, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Captain’s Quarters
Mira had forced herself to leave her bridge, but sleep was being elusive. She couldn’t justify harassing Kyle—Avalon might not be in combat at that exact moment, but they remained in a combat zone. Juggling his elbow at that moment would be a bad idea.
They’d left Via Somnia three hours before, three hours out of the four days it would take to reach Huī Xing. The last reports from Avalon made for grim reading—almost their entire fighter strength gone. A battleship lost. All three remaining ships badly damaged.
Offset against that was the escape of the Marine brigade and the rescued prisoners. Whether it was worth it was something she figured pundits would argue over for years.
She did think it was worth it—but she was surprised to find that she was also very sure that opinion would change if Kyle Roberts didn’t make it out. Mira had never figured their relationship to be a fling, but she was surprised at how fiercely she stared at the icons on her mental display, wishing that Seventh Fleet could go faster.
If they didn’t make it in time, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to live with herself.
Chapter 38
Huī Xing System
06:00 April 5, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
For a few glorious moments, Kyle submerged himself in his implant feed, becoming Avalon as the big supercarrier dove into Goudeshijie. Bright colors flared around him, the sheer friction of the Alliance ships’ entry into the gas giant’s atmosphere creating firestorms that filled his view.
The three ships were sixty kilometers deep into Goudeshijie’s upper atmosphere, low enough that the firestorm forming around them wouldn’t be visible to the Q-probes lurking in orbit. Those probes had their own show to watch—three of Avalon’s tugs were skimming the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere, pretending to be the much bigger, wounded ships.
Kyle knew what was going on and it looked realistic to him when he looked at the feed from their own probes. Even knowing where and what to look for, he couldn’t see his actual ships. They were safe from the Terrans for now, which allowed him to enjoy the incredible sight around the starship.
Safe was relative, of course. All three of his ships had gaping holes in their hulls, covered by whatever material they could throw together to keep the friction of the gas giant from ripping bigger holes. It was risky—but it bought them the chance of getting away from the Commonwealth without being spotted.
At a hundred and fifty gravities, they were submerged in the gas giant for almost ten minutes—and Kyle held the feed and watched the storms around his ships for every second of it.
Finally, they erupted from the gas giant—on the far side from where the Terrans thought they were.
“Any Q-probes on the sensors?” he demanded.
“None, sir,” Xue replied after several seconds—clearly double-checking her own work. “They’ve got enough around that they’ll pick us up eventually, but we’re clear for at least an hour, maybe two.”
“Hope for two, people,” Kyle said quietly. “If we get two, we’re all the way to Xin.”
Behind them, the tugs and their ECM drones continued their more obvious attempts to hide from the incoming ships—doing just well enough to disguise their true nature.
#
Every minute after the first hour stretched like an eternity. Kyle sent Anderson to go sleep but remained on the bridge himself—the risk his battle group carried was on him and him alone. He couldn’t leave until he knew his people were safe.
He waited, managing to somehow keep himself still and strapped in on the bridge. They were past ninety minutes, into the zone where his people were probably safe, when Surgeon-Commander Adrian Cunningham strode onto the bridge.
“Yes, Commander?” Kyle addressed the ship’s doctor.
The tall blond man who was responsible for the health of everyone aboard the supercarrier looked down at the sitting captain and smiled.
“You are aware, sir, that your implant informs me if you’ve sustained injuries?” he asked sweetly.
Kyle blinked. He’d been immersed in his implants, focusing on conversations and battle displays instead of his dislocated shoulder. With the stims he’d taken and his immersion in his own head, the injury wasn’t even registering anymore.
“Since you appear incapable of leaving the bridge and all of our major injuries are dealt with, I decided to come make sure the man responsible for keeping us all alive didn’t permanently injure himself,” Cunningham continued. “Get out of that chair and hold still.”
There was only one man on Avalon that even the Captain would usually obey. With a sigh, Kyle unstrapped himself and stood—only to nearly collapse again as his left shoulder spasmed in pain he finally noticed.
“Thought so,” the Surgeon Commander said brightly. He produced a stark white device, split it in half, and placed each half of one side of Kyle’s shoulder. “This will hurt,” he noted, then gave an apparent implant command to the devices.
Kyle gave a loud, wordless grunt as the device jerked against his shoulde
r. He felt the dislocated joint snap into place—and then pain instantly ceased as the device pumped nanites into his body.
“There you go,” the doctor noted, removing the device and dropping it into a case. “Now, those extra machines will work with your base suite and repair the damage around the shoulder and you won’t, say, pass out from pain in the middle of a battle.”
Cunningham studied Kyle’s face for a minute, and he returned the doctor’s look with a questioning glance.
“How many stims?” he asked simply.
“Three,” Kyle replied. “Due for the fourth in an hour.”
“No,” the doctor said flatly. “Even if we’ve messed this up and the Commonwealth can intercept us, they’re still at least two hours away. I am ordering you out of here and into a bed. I don’t care if that ‘bed’ is the couch in your office—you need to sleep or you’re no good to anyone.”
“You’re not allowed to order me around in a combat zone,” Kyle pointed out. He was not leaving his bridge.
“Captain, we are not being fired on. The nearest enemy ship is over a light-minute away now. You have very competent crew, who you have ordered to rest properly, who can wake you up if you’re needed. You’re right that I can’t actually order you, sir, but please—I want to live through this too,” Cunningham pleaded. “We need you at your best.”
The doctor…had a point.
“Fine,” Kyle allowed. He turned to look at Xue’s assistant—he’d sent the tactical officer off to sleep as well. “Let me know the instant they appear to have detected us,” he ordered. “Let’s be honest; I’m probably going back to sleep afterward, but I need to know.”
“Yes, sir!” the young man replied crisply.
“Bed, Captain,” Cunningham said sharply. “Now.”
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 32
