“Hold the satellites and the Stormwinds,” Kyle ordered. “Start salvoing everything our starships have left at those missiles. Hold nothing back—Ness wants to court a lance duel. Let him think he’ll have one.”
“Opening fire,” Xue confirmed.
“I’ll be on the bridge in twenty minutes,” he told her. That would still be ten minutes before the missiles were in range. A shower might help him wake up. He had a feeling that he wouldn’t be getting any more sleep before it was over one way or another.
#
Kyle watched Battle Group Seven-Two’s missiles intercept the enemy weapons as he dressed with the quickly precise movements of years of practice.
His people had sent ten salvos of twenty-four missiles and ten more salvoes of four against the incoming fire—a total of two hundred and eighty defending weapons against two hundred and seventy attacking. If each of his missiles would score a clean kill, the whole affair would have been much easier.
Instead, the math was far less even. By the time he stepped onto his bridge, the ten big salvos had struck—and wiped away about a hundred of the incoming weapons. He didn’t expect much from the remaining salvos—but those missiles were more useful now than they would be against the Terrans’ entire fleet later.
“Starfires firing,” Xue reported aloud, glancing over at him as he stepped into his command chair. “Still over one hundred fifty bogies inbound.”
He gestured for her to carry on. She was linked into everything. Micromanaging the battle group’s defense was tempting but unnecessary. Lieutenant Commander Jessica Xue, like most of Avalon’s junior-for-their-roles bridge staff, had a promotion waiting for her in his recommendations.
Whether the recommendations of a man who lost a quarter of his command and got the rest crippled would carry much weight, well, he wasn’t entirely sure. But he’d do what he could for the people who’d served him well.
The last nine hundred-plus Starfires blasted forward. With the losses the capital ship missiles had inflicted, that was probably overkill—but the last thing Kyle could afford was to lose even a single Atlatl platform or fighter, let alone one of his starships.
Multi-gigaton explosions lit up the sky around Avalon and his implants automatically dampened his feeds to avoid blinding him. The link might be directly to his nerves and hence impervious to flash-blindness, but psychosomatic symptoms could still occur from very bright light.
“We have leakers!” Xue announced. “Wills, do you see them?”
“On them,” the starfighter pilot announced.
Kyle held his breath as a handful of missiles burst through the wave of fire the defensive missiles had wrought, and charged towards his ships.
Sub-Colonel Wills and Avalon’s fighters were there. The survivors of Battle Group Seven-Two’s fighter wings were a mixed bag of crews, with some of even the individual flight crews having both Star Kingdom and Federation personnel, but they were also the survivors of everything the Commonwealth had thrown at Kyle’s people.
Five missiles were nothing to those hard-forged veterans, and the last died twenty thousand kilometers clear of Kyle’s ships.
He exhaled his held breath in relief. There’d been moments when he’d been afraid they wouldn’t make it. The Commonwealth’s Twenty-Third Fleet had thrown an astonishing amount of firepower at his battle group. If they hadn’t thought to use their excess starfighter missiles as counter-missiles, his people would be floating debris in Xin orbit now.
“Sir, they’re moving,” Xue reported quietly. “Force Bravo just warped space.”
“They’re consolidating their force,” Kyle replied. “They’ve got a big enough acceleration edge that we can’t actually outrun them, but they’ll need all eight ships’ defenses to stand off the missiles we have left.” He shook his head.
“This is it,” he told his people loudly. “Wake everybody up; get everything online. The Terrans are going to come visiting.”
As his people leapt back into activity around him, Kyle glared at the timers. Depending on just what Vice Admiral Kaj Ness decided to do, it could easily be too soon. Seventh Fleet was still three hours out.
#
Fifteen minutes later, Force Bravo emerged from warped space a million kilometers from Force Alpha. The two halves of Twenty-Third Fleet slowly began maneuvering toward each other, acting like they had all the time in the world.
Kyle really hoped they thought that had all the time in the world. A few hours of sorting out formations and lines of fire would be perfect in his books.
“Sir, we’re receiving a transmission for you.”
“Put it through,” Kyle ordered, linking his feed to the communications network to see what Vice Admiral Ness had to say now.
“Force Commander Roberts,” Ness greeted him. Unlike Kyle, the Terran Vice Admiral had clearly been resting on a regular schedule for the last three days. He was perfectly turned out and looked wide awake.
“This has gone on far too long. My orders are now clear: you will leave this system a prisoner of the Commonwealth or not at all.
“I am aware that you retain a significant quantity of missiles, but you no longer have the firepower to overwhelm the defenses of my entire fleet, nor the acceleration to escape. I respect your courage and your tenacity, but even you must see this battle is lost.
“If you force me to come dig you out of your hole, thousands of both our people will die,” Ness concluded. “Please, Kyle,” he pleaded. “Surrender. You can run the numbers on this war as well as this battle; you know how this will end. Unity is inevitable.
“Why die standing in the way of history?”
Kyle was silent for several minutes, letting the activity of his bridge wash over him. He considered lying—a carefully constructed deception could buy him the time he needed for Seventh Fleet to arrive—but rejected it. Kaj Ness was his enemy, but he had fought an honorable battle.
It was hardly Ness’s fault that his nation was utterly convinced that it was their destiny to unify all mankind. To a man raised on Terra itself, both that that unification would occur and that it would be under Terra’s banner would truly seem inevitable and good.
Kyle Roberts, however, was sworn to defend the Castle Federation—a nation that would have to fall for the Commonwealth’s unification to come to pass. Even if that placed him in the path of history and inevitability, he would not dishonor that oath.
He activated the recorder in his command chair and faced the camera, intentionally relaxing his pose and putting his best cheery grin on his face.
“Vice Admiral Ness, you may believe your victory is inevitable, but I still have tricks you haven’t seen,” he promised the other man. “Unlike so many of even your peers, you have walked Terra’s soil. You’re more familiar with foxes than most—and you should know that they’re most dangerous when cornered!
“If you want to drag me before your Marshal in chains, to hand him Avalon and the Stellar Fox as trophies, then by all the Gods, you can come and get me!”
01:00 April 9, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
Mouthing off at the Vice Admiral probably hadn’t bought them any more time, but it had felt good. Kyle had remained on the bridge since the transmission, checking over every preparation and half-praying that the Terrans would give them enough time.
An hour after the exchange with Ness, he learned the final answer.
Assembled into a single force in a rough wall formation, all eight Terran starships turned as one for Xin orbit and brought their engines online. Two hundred gravities—a fifty-gravity edge over anything Battle Group Seven-Two could achieve and still thirty gravities less than the modern battleship and battlecruiser at the heart of their formation.
The Lexingtons, the Volcano, even the Assassins were only there to thicken the missile defenses against the salvo that Ness knew Kyle was holding in reserve. It was the Saint and the Hercules that were going to kill his fleet.
Seventh Fleet would a
rrive before the Commonwealth ships reached Battle Group Avalon. They would emerge at the edge of the gravity well, a light-minute behind the Terrans, fifteen minutes before those eight warships reached lance range.
Since missile flight time for Seventh Fleet would be over thirty minutes, Twenty-Third Fleet had moved fifteen minutes too soon for Kyle’s people to survive this. The Terrans wouldn’t make it out—not with an entire fleet’s worth of missiles and starfighters chasing them across the system, even if Battle Group Seven-Two did no damage to them all—but they’d destroy Kyle’s people first.
He’d failed.
01:15 April 9, 2736 ESMDT
BC-129 Camerone, Bridge
Mira finished running the numbers herself and looked at her link to Admiral Alstairs’ flag bridge helplessly. They would arrive fifteen minutes before Kyle came under attack—and fifteen minutes too late to do anything.
“I did not come this far and cut things this close to watch Force Commander Roberts die,” Alstairs said flatly, loudly enough that everyone on both the bridge and flag bridge heard her.
“Commander Coles,” she continued, her voice sharp. “Have you ever threaded the needle before?”
Mira’s navigator looked at her, then at the intercom screen to the flag bridge as he swallowed hard.
“No, ma’am,” he admitted. “Some of the Marine transports have done it, but they’re all on their way back to Alizon now.”
“Coordinate with the other navigators, then,” the Rear Admiral ordered. “Find someone who has—I want us to drop out right behind these bastards.”
“Ma’am, that’s sixteen million kilometers into the gravity well,” Coles objected. “I don’t know if we can do that.”
“Commander, Pendez dropped Roberts into goddamn orbit at Tranquility,” Alstairs told him flatly. “She’d never done a late Alcubierre emergence at that point either. Make. It. Happen.”
Mira walked over to the Commander after Alstairs turned her attention away, dropping her hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“We know it can be done,” she said quietly.
“Everybody forgets that the old Avalon had neutronium armor,” Coles pointed out. “She could take a lot more of a beating than any of the new ships.”
“Is it going to rip any of the ships in half?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “Not unless we screw up the math or one of the engineering crews misbalances their singularities. This is very tight.”
“Then get the math right,” Mira told him. “And I’ll go step on the engineers. I am not getting to Huī Xing in time to watch Kyle die. Understand, Commander?”
“No pressure, huh?” Coles asked bitterly.
“Do you understand, James?” Mira repeated.
“I get it,” he told her. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to calculate a needle for eight starships to thread.”
Chapter 41
Huī Xing System
01:45 April 9, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Bridge
“Salvo all missiles,” Kyle ordered.
Watching the Terran warships close for a full fifty minutes had been painful, but at this point, the survivability of his own battle group wasn’t the primary concern anymore. Launching earlier would allow the ships Ness didn’t need to kill Avalon to break off and be outside the gravity well once Seventh Fleet arrived.
Now that Twenty-Third Fleet was approaching turnover, there was no way those ships could help protect the fleet from his missiles and escape the gravity well before Seventh Fleet arrived. No one on his bridge or even the other warships had questioned the delay either.
Everyone in Battle Group Avalon had accepted their fate. Their deaths were going to bait the trap that handed the Commonwealth one of their worst defeats of the war. If the ships Ness was bringing to Xin were taken or destroyed, seventeen Terran capital ships would have been destroyed in Operation Rising Star.
That was over a fifth of the strength the Federation had started the war with. Kyle didn’t want to die any more than the next man. He wanted to live. He wanted to see where things went with Mira, to finish rebuilding his relationship with his son, to dance at Lisa Kerensky’s wedding to another man.
But he’d sworn an oath. Like the crew of his ships, he faced his fate unhesitatingly, watching his salvo of nine hundred and fifty missiles charge out at the Commonwealth fleet.
Seconds ticked away, turning into minutes. The Terrans hit turnover, slicing away their velocity by almost two kilometers a second every second.
The Terrans’ defenses opened up a full minute before impact, lasers and positron beams ripping into space from a million kilometers away. At that range, they scored few hits—but every missile that died was one they didn’t need to kill later.
Electronic countermeasures and jamming lit up the space around the Commonwealth fleet to Avalon’s sensors, even as streams of energy tore across the same void. Missiles died, their fiery deaths lighting up Kyle’s view and releasing expanding balls of radiation that added to the jamming.
His view of the battle was starting to disintegrate under the jamming and radiation, even the Q-probes in the middle of the fight barely able to sustain a clear view of the action. At this point, there was little the launching ship’s computers could do for the missiles—it was all down to the networked intelligence of the rapidly shrinking missile host.
“Go go go!” Kyle heard someone whisper on Avalon’s bridge. He grinned. The Captain couldn’t say that, but he could agree with the sentiment.
A cascade of fire and radiation reached across a million kilometers of empty space and crashed down on the Commonwealth ships. Desperate last-ditch defenses wove a shroud of explosions around the Twenty-Third Fleet, and it was easily ten seconds—an eternity to officers living in their implants and tactical nets—before the Commonwealth ships emerged.
Even as the Q-probes scanned the Terrans, studying and analyzing, there was one obvious sign of the effect of their missiles: eight starships had met the missile storm.
Six had left.
Kyle waited patiently for the identities to be established, for the data to be collated.
“We got the Volcano,” Xue reported after a minute. “The Volcano and one of the Assassins. Looks like the other Assassin and the Saint both took hits but are still ticking.”
Avalon’s Captain shook his head in admiration. Modern ships might not have the incredibly dense neutronium armor of pre–positron lance warships, but their meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic armor could take a lot of punishment.
“Estimated time to lance range?” he finally asked.
“They haven’t adjusted their course at all,” Xue told him. “They will range on us in thirty minutes.”
The satellites had shot their bolt. Every missile he’d suspended in orbit was gone. All that he had left were nineteen starfighters and three crippled starships. Xin didn’t even have a moon to hide behind.
“Battle Group orders,” he said calmly. “Assume formation Alpha Foxtrot One.” He paused. This channel only went to the bridges, but he knew whatever he said would rapidly be conveyed throughout all three ships.
“Spacers, fellow soldiers,” he told them. “It has been a privilege and an honor. We aren’t done yet. Let’s…see what happens.”
He watched the Commonwealth ships close, counting down the seconds and minutes. There was nothing he could do—the only trick he had left was a last-minute suicide charge to try to get his own ships’ heavy lances into range. Everything was down to Admiral Alstairs’ desperate throw of the dice.
Then his starfighters started moving. That was not in his plan.
“Wills, what are you doing?” he demanded.
There was no response, and all nineteen of his remaining starfighters were now charging at the Commonwealth fleet. He ran their courses—and was somehow unsurprised to realize they were on kamikaze flights.
“Damn it, Wills, answer me,” he snarled into the comm
unicator, his hands clenched into fists as he watched the last survivors of his fighter wings charge into the face of the enemy. “We have a plan. Please!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Star Kingdom of Phoenix officer replied softly. “If that doesn’t work, we won’t have time. This way…well…this way, if nothing else they’re looking at us.”
“Damn you, Sub-Colonel,” he whispered.
“It’s the job, sir,” she told him. “Starfighters die so our friends live.”
Kyle blinked away tears he wouldn’t—couldn’t—show.
“Gods speed you, Sherry,” he finally told her.
Silence covered Avalon’s bridge as the nineteen tiny ships, less than a thousandth of the size of their enemies, lunged across space. The Terrans recognized the threat instantly, heavy positron lances beginning to flicker out at starfighters they were unlikely to hit.
The secondary lances should be enough against nineteen fighters, but clearly Ness wasn’t willing to take the chance.
Weapons fire flashed across the stars again and Kyle clenched his fists so hard, he suspected he was drawing blood, counting seconds as his people charged to their deaths.
They might make it work. Even if Alstairs’ gamble failed, Wills might manage to save them all. All nineteen fighters survived the heavy lances, dancing around the Terran weapons with the deadly skill of survivors.
And then a massive explosion of Cherenkov radiation blasted out of the space behind Twenty-Third Fleet. A million kilometers behind the Terrans, it wasn’t as close as he knew Alstairs had aimed…
But it was close enough. Zheng He’s immense positron lances might be weaker than those aboard the Hercules, but they were more powerful than anything else in the Terran fleet—and they hit the Hercules-class battlecruiser first.
Even before the blast of bright blue radiation had faded, the Commonwealth battlecruiser had come apart under the Trade Factor battleship’s pounding. The Saint, Vice Admiral Ness’s presumed flagship, survived only seconds more as Clawhammer swung into range of her weaker but still powerful heavy lances.
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation Book 3) Page 34
