Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

#

  It was over an hour later when Kyle was awakened from his nap on the couch in his office by an implant alert.

  “Sir, we’ve definitely been pinged by the Q-probes,” the junior tactical officer told him. “Looks like we stirred up a hornet’s nest out there.”

  “Show me the feed,” Kyle ordered as he sat up on the couch, focusing on the tactical plot dropping in through his implant datalink. The Lieutenant Commander had the plot updated by the time Kyle had finished asking.

  The two capital ships heading in toward Goudeshijie hadn’t changed their course—they were past turnover; the fastest route for them to exit the gravity well now was right back the way they’d come. Both of them had changed vectors a little bit—their courses had been to rendezvous with each other, so the course each was now on was a slightly faster route out of the gravity well.

  The real sign they’d been detected, though, was that the two blocking forces the Twenty-Third Fleet had left outside the gravity well were now blasting after Kyle’s people, paralleling their course as best they could while following the arc of the well. They didn’t appear to be on a true intercept course, just making sure that there was no way Kyle’s three limping warships could escape them.

  “Can any of them intercept us before we reach Xin?” he asked.

  “They could,” the younger man replied after a moment. “But they couldn’t coordinate it, and it would be at a very high relative velocity.”

  Kyle nodded. A high relative velocity would be to his advantage at this point—Battle Group Avalon’s biggest vulnerability at this point was that the heavy lances on the Hercules and the Saint outranged anything his people had left. If the Terrans came whipping past at sixty or a hundred thousand kilometers a second, they’d cross that range advantage in seconds.

  “If any of them look like they are vectoring to intercept, wake me up immediately,” he told the younger man. “If not, my implant will wake me when we reach Xin orbit.”

  “We may be clear the whole way, sir,” the junior tactical officer told him.

  Kyle nodded and dropped the channel. Clear all the way to Xin helped. Surviving three and a half days once they were there…that was an entirely different headache.

  12:00 April 5, 2736 ESMDT

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Breakout Room

  Settled into Xin’s orbit under the protective umbrella of two hundred Atlatl-VI missile satellites, Kyle called a meeting of his chief subordinates. With Wong, Anderson and Wills joining him in his breakout room, he had Captains Olivier and Albert linked via radio—and Captain Sansone Costa of Renaissance Trade Factor Intelligence linked in via Q-Com.

  “There’s not a lot I can tell you about Vice Admiral Kaj Ness,” Costa told them once they’d gathered. “I’ve forwarded what files we have on him and his senior officers. It’s slim reading—he commanded part of Walkingstick’s main strike force when they hit the fleet at Midori. From what we can tell, he followed the Marshal from the Coreward frontier after his last campaigns there.

  “You already have our files on the capability of his ships,” the intelligence officer shrugged. “If anything else comes to mind, I’ll pass it on. Is there anything else I can do to help?”

  “We’re sitting on top of a Commonwealth logistics depot packed full of Stormwinds,” Olivier noted. “The things won’t fit in our launchers, but we could set them up as temporary mines if we could commandeer them. Do you have any codes or software hacks for that?”

  That was actually a good idea, Kyle noted. Not a normally useful one, as it would be difficult to drop the missiles into stable orbits, and nobody wanted to risk a gigaton-range antimatter warhead plus fuel falling into their atmosphere. In this case though, it could be handy—except…

  Costa shook his head with a chuckle.

  “I wish, Captain Olivier,” he noted. “Remember, the ability to override a missile in flight is a holy grail of intelligence work. The secure encryption on those computer cores is insane. You could swap out the cores, I suppose, but I’m not sure how much work that would be.”

  “Wong?” Kyle asked, glancing over at his engineer.

  “Not…easy,” the Senior Fleet Commander noted. “We have the parts to fabricate several thousand missile computer cores, but the Stormwind has a significantly different internal layout than our Jackhammer. We’d have to custom-build the template… We might, if we work at it, manage to get a hundred or so missiles converted a day.”

  “That’s not useless,” Kyle observed. “Having an extra few hundred missiles to back up the Atlatls when the Admiral comes in after us could be very handy.”

  “I’ll get my people on it,” Wong promised. “But…we’re probably going to have problems with the Terrans before we have any significant number of missiles out there.”

  “The planet was transmitting a warning about the satellites, so Ness knows we’ve got a stack of defenses with us,” Kyle replied. “He’s going to be cautious—I suspect we’re going to be seeing more missiles coming in, trying to take out the missile satellites. I don’t want to launch from the satellites until we have to.”

  “That’s…what I was hoping to have the Stormwinds to use as counters against,” Olivier noted. “We’re damn short on ammo and we don’t have the defenses to stop ninety-missile salvos without using missiles to thin them out.”

  “And while Twenty-Third Fleet’s Assassins have undersized magazines, the ones that are left have only fired a few rounds,” Anderson added. “All told, Ness has the ammunition left for over twenty-five salvos—and we don’t have the defenses to stop that much firepower!”

  Normally, Avalon’s starfighters would form her first layer of defense against heavy missile salvos. Ninety missiles would be a minor but real threat to his three ships even if they were undamaged, but with three hundred-plus fighters, the ships would have been safe.

  Since they didn’t have those starfighters, though… A thought occurred to Kyle, and he smiled sadly. It was an answer—it was just an answer he wished he didn’t have.

  “Captain Olivier’s idea of pre-deployed missiles is a good one,” he noted. “Though we can’t convert enough Stormwinds for missile defense purposes, I’m not sure we need to. Sub-Colonel Wills—how many Starfire missiles do we have in our magazines?”

  The Phoenix officer was now Battle Group Seven-Two’s CAG since she was senior to Wing Commander Cortez, the commander of Avalon’s Charlie Wing and the only other O-5 survivor still in Huī Xing. She paused to think for a moment before answering.

  “I don’t have that number immediately to hand,” she admitted. “But all three of the ships with fighters aboard carried ten full reloads. We replenished our reloads from the logistics ship before we originally attempted to leave Huī Xing, so we’ve only fired off one full set.

  “Assuming we didn’t lose any to the hits on the cruisers, we should have over eleven thousand Starfires in stock.”

  “Thank you, Sub-Colonel,” Kyle said, still smiling sadly. “We can hold onto ten full reloads for our remaining starfighters and still deploy ten thousand fighter missiles as an anti-missile screen, people.

  “My experience suggests we’ll need a five-to-one ratio to guarantee kills,” he continued, “but if we go to a four-to-one ratio, we’ll still be reasonably assured of over eighty kills on each salvo. Those missiles will eat Twenty-Third Fleet’s long-range firepower.

  “I want to make Vice Admiral Ness spend his missiles carefully and completely before he comes after us, people. Remember that above all else, we need to buy time.”

  Chapter 39

  Huī Xing System

  08:00 April 6, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge

  Whatever else Vice Admiral Kaj Ness was, he was methodical and thorough. His blocking forces had rushed to make sure that Battle Group Seven-Two was still contained at Xin—but the two warships deep in Goudeshijie’s gravity well had taken an extra hour of slow acceleration to locate and destroy
the drones they’d left behind – the best way to confirm that was truly all they were.

  Then, once the battlecruiser and battleship had finally made their escape from the gas giant’s gravity and reached Xin under Alcubierre-Stetson drive, Twenty-Third Fleet had proceeded to saturate the planet’s local space with Q-probes.

  By now, Kyle figured his people had killed somewhere around two hundred of the mind-bogglingly expensive tools, each of which contained a block of entangled particles that had been brought all the way from the Commonwealth’s core worlds. For every probe they’d killed, at least two had made close passes successfully or settled into stealthed positions far enough way that they couldn’t locate them.

  The Terrans knew exactly where his ships were, though they were moving enough to be reasonably safe. They knew where his missile satellites were, which was risky for Kyle…but they also knew that he’d deployed ten thousand missiles in defensive arrays around his ships and Atlatls.

  Kyle wasn’t trying to read Ness’s mind—but the surprise value of the stunt he’d pulled had bought him an entire day. A day to make repairs, to rest, to give his people time to grieve.

  “We have movement,” Xue reported.

  He linked into her display, assessing what she saw. Twenty-Third Fleet had, once again, assembled into Force Alpha and Force Bravo, opposite each other across Xin’s gravity well and able to cut him off wherever he tried to run.

  Now, all of the ships in both task forces were changing position, moving the Lexingtons back and lining up everyone else…

  “They’re clearing the launchers on the ships with missiles,” his tactical officer concluded before he could speak. “And…here they come.”

  Force Alpha had the Saint and the Volcano along with its three missile-launcher-lacking Lexingtons. They launched forty-two missiles.

  Force Bravo had seen the Hercules rejoin the two older Assassins. They were the smaller force, but without the carriers, they had more launchers. They sent forty-eight missiles dropping into the gravity well for a total of ninety weapons closing from either side of the planet.

  Kyle let Avalon’s computers run the numbers on them and studied the missiles carefully. The two task forces had arranged themselves perfectly, both exactly eighteen million kilometers away from his own fleet. They were technically inside the gravity well, but that was a vague line at the best of times…

  Either way, both missile salvos had a thirty-two-minute flight time.

  “Inform Sub-Colonel Wills,” he told Xue. With a half-hour flight time for missiles and an almost two-hour trip for the Commonwealth ships, he’d seen no reason to keep his starfighters in space. Now, however, he needed them.

  Twenty-four starfighters were a frail shield against the vise he’d trapped his battle group in, but every piece was going to count today.

  “And, Commander Xue?” he said after a moment.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Show our displeasure with the good Admiral. I want a full salvo from the Atlatls.”

  The black-haired young woman flashed him a bright smile and gave a command through her implants. A few moments later, six hundred green arrows flashed into existence on Kyle’s implant feeds—an impressive response to the mere ninety the Terrans had thrown at him.

  Of course, he could only do that four times. The Terrans could repeat their performance almost thirty.

  “Any follow-up salvos?”

  “Nothing so far,” the Lieutenant Commander reported. “Ninety seconds and counting.”

  “They’re testing us,” Kyle assessed. There was no way the Commonwealth commanders thought ninety missiles would get through what he’d set up around Xin. His response had a chance of doing damage, though not as much as he’d like.

  “Looks like it, sir,” she agreed. “What do we do?”

  “Fire off four Starfires per missile once they’re in range, and then go to standard missile defense procedure,” he ordered calmly. They’d discussed all this, but repetition was a habit for any military.

  There wasn’t much more he could do for his own missiles. They were targeted on Force Bravo, the smaller of the two forces. It would be…interesting to see what they did.

  #

  Launched first, the Terran missiles arrived well before the Alliance weapons came near Force Bravo. They passed the three-million-kilometer mark closing at seventeen thousand kilometers a second—and a few seconds later, three hundred and sixty of the thousands of fighter missiles in orbit lit off their drives and charged to meet them.

  Sub-Colonel Wills and her fighters were behind them, moving far more slowly but still interposed between the three crippled starships and the missiles sent to kill them.

  With Q-probes, starfighters, and starships all around them to provide the vectors, the Starfires made surprisingly effective countermeasures. Two and a half minutes later, the two salvos intersected in a rapidly spreading sequence of antimatter explosions.

  This time, the fighters were almost redundant. A single missile escaped the wall of fire the starfighter missiles had built, and one of the pilots nailed it with her defensive lasers while it was still a hundred thousand kilometers from the starships.

  Farther out in deep space, their own missiles closed on Force Bravo. The Commonwealth warships defended themselves with skill and vigor, lasers and positron lances blasting missiles to pieces by the dozens—then by the hundreds.

  Kyle had a moment of hope as the missile swarm continued—and then sighed in disappointment as the three Terran ships vanished into Alcubierre drive, the gravity distortion of their engines ripping many of the remaining missiles to shreds and leaving the survivors to fly off into deep space.

  The battlecruisers were in warped space for less than a minute, returning to normal space barely a million kilometers from their origin point—still exactly one light-minute from Battle Group Seven-Two, but well out of the ability of the missiles to change course.

  “Send the self-destructs to the remaining weapons,” he ordered quietly. There was no point leaving antimatter explosives floating around in deep space as a navigation hazard. The missiles would self-destruct automatically about an hour after they exhausted their fuel, but why allow a risk they didn’t need?

  “Still no follow-up salvo?” he asked after watching the missiles vaporize themselves.

  “Nothing,” Xue confirmed, sounding confused. “I’m…not sure what the goal is.”

  “Wear us down,” Kyle told her. “Grind away the missiles we’ve placed—Vice Admiral Ness knows that if he brought his ships in now, I’d fire ten thousand missiles at him. That’s not something his ships can survive.”

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “We take it,” Force Commander Kyle Roberts said grimly. “We take his best shot, we get him to exhaust his magazines, and we let him take as long as he likes to do it. I’m hoping for three days.”

  The Lieutenant Commander looked at him in confusion for a moment, and then he saw the realization dawn in her eyes.

  Every hour—every minute Vice Admiral Kaj Ness of the Terran Commonwealth spent battering away their defenses was an hour and a minute closer to Seventh Fleet’s arrival.

  Chapter 40

  Huī Xing System

  23:00 April 8, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-078 Avalon, Captain’s Office

  A sharp alert through his implant woke Kyle from another abortive attempt at sleep. Checking the time, he saw this had been the longest that the Terrans had let him sleep in the last few days—it had been almost four hours since the last time they’d thrown missiles at his command.

  The intervals had been completely random, making it impossible for Kyle to give his people any significant rest. They could—and had—cycled flight crews on their handful of starfighters, but there was only so much cycling he could do of the full bridge crews.

  The longest interval between salvos before this one had been two and a half hours. The shortest had been fifteen minutes. S
ome of the salvos had been doubled or tripled up, sending hundreds of missiles swarming into the teeth of his defenses.

  Somehow, all of his warships were still there. They’d lost five more starfighters along the way, leaving him with less than twenty of the fleet little ships, but his Battle Group had survived so far.

  Seventh Fleet was mere hours away. The clock was ticking in his favor.

  Looking at the tactical feed his implant was drawing his attention to though, he realized that Battle Group Seven-Two’s time might have run out.

  The Terrans had stacked three salvos on top of each other and hurled two hundred and seventy missiles at him. He’d spent the stockpiled Starfires they’d dropped into orbit freely so far, and now found himself with less than a thousand missiles left to defend his ships.

  “Pull the battle group closer together,” he ordered as he fully linked into the tactical net. “Set all remaining Starfires to salvo. Wong, how many of those Stormwinds have you refitted?”

  “Three hundred and fifty,” the Engineer replied immediately. If there was anyone on the ship who’d managed less sleep than Kyle, it was the Senior Fleet Commander trying to hold Avalon together and retrofit hundreds of missiles. “We’ll have the components for another fifty in about six hours.”

  “They’re not going to give us six hours,” Kyle replied. “Hand over control of whatever you’ve got to tactical.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Xue, Anderson, what’s our ammo status?”

  “We’ve got one salvo left in the satellites,” Anderson reported. “Nine hundred and eighty Starfires floating in orbit. The fighters are fully reloaded. We’re down to ten salvos apiece for the cruisers and twenty for Avalon herself.”

  The big carrier had a lot of missiles aboard for her relatively small number of launchers. With only four launchers left, Kyle had freely used those munitions to thin out previous salvos. Now he wished he’d held them back.