Missiles blasted out from his remaining ships, a hundred-plus bird salvo that the battleship had to acknowledge.
“AI, link to all missiles for remote detonation,” Stanford ordered silently as his fighters charged forward behind their missile shield. Now they were close enough that the deflectors were failing to stop any direct hit from the battleship’s positron lances.
“Now,” he snapped, and the computer obeyed.
Scattered across the two hundred thousand kilometers between his Starfighter Group and the Resolute, the ninety-three surviving one-gigaton antimatter warheads detonated. Space descended into a hash of radio waves and radiation, his starfighter computers showing an extrapolation of where the ships would be.
For a battleship, a kilometer long and rated for two hundred gravities of acceleration, that extrapolation could allow hits. For a starfighter, thirty meters long and rated for five hundred gravities, it reduced the hit chance to almost nothing.
“Blast through and hit him!” Stanford snapped over the channel, hoping that the com system’s lasers would get through.
Moments later, his ship blasted clear of enough of the cloud to target the battleship – only one hundred and forty thousand kilometers away!
The little starfighter jerked as the simulated zero point cells opened up their antimatter capacitors. A stream of positrons, skimmed from the quantum froth underlying reality, blasted away from the Falcon at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.
Other beams joined his, ripping into the battleship and turning its mighty armor into explosives that tore themselves apart. The positron lances tore deep into the warship, shredding machinery, systems – and zero point cells.
Moments later, antimatter capacitors ruptured under the barrage and the battleship disappeared in a sharply white explosion.
Nine of SFG-001’s starfighters survived the final round of counter-fire to watch the battleship die. Alpha Actual wasn’t one of them.
New Amazon System, Castle Federation
14:00 August 4, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Group Briefing Room
Roberts watched as all one hundred and forty-odd of Starfighter Group 001’s pilots, gunners and flight engineers filed into the briefing room. Unlike many other aspects of the old carrier, Avalon’s briefing room had been designed to hold the entire fighter group crew when the ship had been laid down.
“All right people,” he said cheerfully. “Today, you killed a battleship. Not bad. Of course, if that had been a real battleship, Flight Commander Stanford and I would have been writing a lot of ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson’ letters tonight, so let’s go over what didn’t go right.”
“You sent us up against a fucking battleship,” a voice snapped from the back. “How the hell was that a fair fight?!”
Kyle’s implant identified the speaker as a Gunner from Zhao’s Charlie Squadron. The loss of their tac-net had shredded that squadron, so he expected some bitterness from them. Enough so that he’d overlook the insubordination. Mostly.
“You’re right,” he agreed cheerfully. “That wasn’t a realistic scenario – Commonwealth doctrine would call for a battleship like the Resolute to be accompanied by a carrier. A hundred or so Scimitars or Darkswords would have rendered the entire strike by our group moot, don’t you think?”
The Scimitar was the Terran Commonwealth’s current front-line fighter, roughly equivalent to the Federation’s Cobras. Darkswords were older, a slightly better starfighter than the Federation’s Tempests. Rumor had it that they had a seventh generation fighter like the Falcon in development, but hadn’t deployed any yet.
“For that matter,” Roberts continued, his smile warmer than his words, “the appropriate counter-tactic to Commander Stanford’s missile shield is to use heavy missiles as area effect weapons against us.”
“Given those two caveats, however, deploying the Group against a battleship is hardly ‘unfair.’ Avalon and her fighter group have thirty-six capital ship kills to our credit. SFG-001 has killed battleships before – and I want us ready to do it again.”
“Nine of forty-eight came home,” Kyle told his people softly. “From the perspective of the Joint Chiefs, thirty-nine starfighters for a battleship is a fair trade. One hundred and twenty lives and eighty billion Stellars of Federation hardware, trade for approximately twenty-five hundred lives and sixty trillion Stellars of starship.”
He let the numbers sink in.
“There is no theoretical reason why a carrier or battleship can’t be built for starfighter accelerations, people,” he reminded them. “The fuel cost would be outrageous, which is why we don’t, but it would be doable. A battleship or cruiser’s positron lances and missiles are vastly more powerful and longer ranged than those on a starfighter.”
“But even the mightiest battleship in the era of antimatter weapons is an eggshell armed with a sledgehammer. And a fifty trillion Stellar warship isn’t expendable.”
“A two billion Stellar starfighter is,” Wing Commander Roberts finished bluntly. “Our role is to be expended, and to protect our carrier in the process.”
“My job is to make sure as few of us are expended as possible. I do not like ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson’ letters. If we ever have to fight a battleship, I want to bring more than twenty-seven of you home!”
“So, given that as a starting point, let’s look at how we did – and what we can do better.”
New Amazon System, Castle Federation
17:00 August 4, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – CAG’s Office
“Have a seat, Michael,” Kyle told his subordinate with a smile as they entered his office. The last four weeks had been too busy to do much to customize the Space Force Standard furniture and decoration, but he had installed a mini-fridge. New Amazon had some amazing breweries, and he pulled a pair of beers from the fridge, sliding one across the table to Stanford.
The Flight Commander grabbed the bottle carefully, and gave his Wing Commander a dark look.
“A beer is supposed to make up for that three hour grilling you just gave me?” he asked.
“Ha, no,” Roberts replied. “If I’d spent three hours grilling you, you probably wouldn’t be getting the beer. Only about forty minutes of that was on your performance.”
“Point,” Stanford accepted, cracking open the bottle. “We are still on duty,” he observed.
“My Deck, my rules,” Kyle ordered. “For not expecting me to dump wing command in your lap and probably expecting a more generous scenario – like some of our pilots – I’m actually impressed you manage to take down the Resolute.”
“Would have been nice had I lived,” Stanford pointed out mildly. “You’d have been writing ‘Dear Mrs. Stanford’ to my mother.”
Kyle shivered, and it wasn’t entirely feigned.
“Mothers suck,” he admitted softly. “None of those letters are fun, but telling my pilots’ moms they aren’t coming home is second only to telling their kids.”
He knew from Stanford’s record that the junior man had never had to write the family of a fallen officer. Not many officers in the peacetime Federation had.
“Gulf?” Stanford asked quietly.
“The Gulf and a few suicides,” Kyle confirmed softly. He’d been promoted to Wing Commander after leading the strike on the Ansem Gulf – a passenger liner boarded and captured by pirates. The pirates had waited for the Castle Federation Marines to board, and then revealed they’d used the two weeks it had taken the Navy to catch them to arm the civilian starship.
Of the Alamo’s forty-eight starfighters, seven had died in the first salvo – including Wing Commander Rani Desai. By the time Kyle had managed to re-organize the fighter group and disable the weapons mounts, fifteen starfighters – and forty five crew-men and -women – were gone, along with a third of Peng Wa’s Marines.
Most of the Navy and the Space Force figured that most other commanders would have fallen back
– potentially saving more of the squadron, but abandoning six hundred Marines and fifteen thousand civilians. Kyle had counter-attacked.
The promotion, accolades, and the knowledge of fifteen thousand saved lives had been a frail shield against those forty-five letters.
“Hence kicking the shit out of the squadron in sims?” Stanford asked timidly after a moment.
Kyle shook himself and nodded. “I figure the more I kill our people in simulations, the less likely it is some coked up pirate with a sixty year old mass driver or, God forbid, an actual Commonwealth attack, will kill them.”
“Speaking of our people, how did Williams do?” he asked, taking a long sip of his own beer. He wasn’t inclined to play favorites, but if anyone in the group deserved a little extra attention, it was the one brave enough to turn down a legitimate Article Seventeen discharge because they wanted to serve.
“We gave her less than an hour to get to know her new crew,” Stanford replied slowly, considering. “She didn’t survive – but she outlasted me by three quarters of a second.”
“She’s good, boss, and I’m glad to have her back aboard,” he continued. “That’s our last empty slot filled – with Williams back on active duty, we have a full flight group. Any word on when we ship out?”
“The last of the holes are patched in the ship,” Kyle told him. “Our Group is a little rustier than I’d like, but we can run sims while under A-S drive. I know the Navy-side was running full power drills on the new main battery while we were debriefing our people, and my implant tells me they fully checked out.”
The Wing Commander checked his implants for the note he expected to find, and nodded cheerfully as he saw the quick heads up from the Captain.
“Captain is still checking in with Joint Command,” he told Stanford, “but he’s expecting to ship out at nineteen hundred hours tomorrow. There’ll be a formal notice, but you can pass a quiet word to the Chiefs.”
“Can do,” the Flight Commander confirmed. “It’ll be good to see the Old Lady move again. It’s been too long for her.”
“Hell, Commander, it’s been too long for me,” Roberts told his subordinate with a chuckle, “and I’ve only been sitting dead in space for a month!”
Chapter 9
New Amazon System, Castle Federation
05:00 August 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Bridge
The bridge of a twenty-eighth century warship is an inherently calm, quiet, place. Most of the scurrying and conversations took place either in specialized departments hidden away in Avalon’s hull, or entirely inside the ship’s network.
An even dozen reclining chairs, easily conformed to a user’s personal taste, formed two semi-circles around the center dais. Each chair had a pair of medium sized screens, adjustable to show whatever the occupant desired, but the real working connection was the cyber-jack at the back of each of the seats.
Kyle was certain that the wall-screens that wrapped the entire room in a perfect replica of the space outside the carrier were there entirely for the eight observer seats at the back of the bridge. With the carrier about to make her first Alcubierre-Stetson voyage in ten years, he’d expected the seats to be full, but only five had been taken.
Avalon had been under way for ten hours now, having left the New Amazon station behind in a flare of superheated exhaust. The ship’s immense mass manipulators reduced her mass exponentially, allowing immense matter-antimatter thrusters to propel her twelve million tons with a reaction that, at least theoretically, mirrored the rockets mankind had first touched the stars with.
Now, however, they were clearing the gravitational safety zones around the various planets, stations, asteroid belts and other miscellanea that made up a star system, and about to leap to the stars. It was a sight Kyle never grew tired of.
“Navigation, please confirm that we have cleared all detectable gravity zones,” Captain Blair requested aloud. For all of the instant data transfer available to the crew, tradition demanded certain orders and requests be spoken aloud.
Like the bubble of stars surrounding the bridge crew, it was probably for the observer.
“All identified gravitational objects are beyond effect range,” the navigator reported from her couch. “Current gravitational force is beneath one pico-meter per second squared. We are prepared to warp space on your command.”
“Engineering, please confirm status of Class One mass manipulators,” Blair ordered.
The Avalon had dozens of Class Two and Class Three mass manipulators throughout her hull, even discounting those aboard her parasite craft like Roberts’ fighters. Under the power of those devices’ ability to generate and manipulate mass and gravity, she could fly and fight – but it took something more to outspeed light.
“All five Class One’s are at ninety-nine-plus percent,” the junior engineer on the bridge reported aloud. “Engineering reports prepared to warp space.”
The Class One mass manipulators were an order of magnitude larger and more powerful than any others of their kind. In some ways they were the simplest, and had been the first built, but their sheer scale made them an immense undertaking. Avalon’s five Class Ones represented over sixty percent of the original cost of her construction. Four were required to warp space, with the fifth standing by in case there was a problem.
“All hands, prepare for Alcubierre drive,” the Captain ordered. He let several moments pass. “Navigation, please initiate interior Stetson stabilization fields.”
A faint haze settled over the screens surrounding the bridge as hundreds of small emitters across Avalon’s hull woke to life, stretching a field of electromagnetic and gravitational energy around the ship. Useless in any other circumstance, the only purpose of the Stetson field was to protect the ship from the immense forces it was about to unleash.
“Interior Stetson field active,” the Navigator reported. “Exterior field on standby, mass manipulators on standby.”
“Lieutenant-Commander Pendez,” Blair said softly. “You may initiate space warp at your discretion.”
“Yes, sir!” the younger woman agreed enthusiastically. Moments later, the ship shivered slightly, and the bubble showing the space outside the ship distorted.
Kyle’s practiced eye picked out the four sets of distortion, the perfectly scaled singularities Avalon was generating sucking in all light that passed by them.
“We have singularity formation,” Pendez reported. “Exterior Stetson field is active, no containment issues. Initiating warp bubble… now.”
Avalon’s immense arrays of zero point cells flared to life, and the power feeding to the Class One manipulators increased a thousand-fold. The distortions seemed to move, and the space beyond the carrier wavered in their influence for a long second.
Then a bright flash of blue light encapsulated the ship, and the New Amazon system was gone, replaced by a flickering and chaotic glow of Cherenkov radiation.
“Warp bubble established,” Pendez confirmed. “We are under way.”
Kyle exhaled softly. After having hundreds of the Navy’s best people swarming over the carrier for a month, he hadn’t expected any issues, but it had been ten years since Avalon had last gone faster than light.
Before he could get up to leave, his implants picked up a ping from Blair. Softly, so as not to distract the men and women plugged into the starship around him, he approached the central chair.
The Captain blinked and disconnected, turning towards Kyle.
“That went smoothly,” he said quietly so only the Wing Commander could hear. “How’s the fighter group?”
“Solid,” Kyle allowed. “Don’t tell any of them I said that, though,” he warned. “I still have my stick out, and the more they think I think they’re not making the grade, the harder they’ll work.”
Blair chuckled and shook his head. “That only works for so long, Commander,” he replied. “Sooner or later, you have to admit they’re doing okay.”
“We have our final flight plan from Joint Command,” Blair told him, changing the subject. “I’d like to go over it with most of the senior staff. Are you and Stanford free for a staff meeting at ten hundred hours?”
Kyle blinked, checking his and Stanford’s schedule in an instant. By the time he’d finished blinking, he’d confirmed that he was free, and moved a meeting between Stanford and Senior Chief Miller back three hours.
“We are now,” he confirmed.
“All right,” the Captain accepted with another chuckle. “It’s time to walk everyone through what our lords and masters intend for us.”
Under Alcubierre Drive, Castle Federation Space
10:00 August 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Main Conference Room
The back wall of the main conference room on Avalon’s bridge deck was taken up by a screen showing the exterior of the ship – currently a faintly glowing maelstrom of Cherenkov radiation and strange lightning.
The light from the screen mixed with the room’s overhead lighting to cast strange patterns of shadow across the glossy faux marble surface of the bog-standard Navy conference table at the center of the room. The room could hold as many as forty people, but for this staff meeting it held only the carrier’s senior officers.
Roberts and Stanford took seats halfway along the table, almost at the back of the small gathering of people, facing the screen where Kleiner and Blair stood surveying their crew.
“Good morning everyone,” Blair finally announced once the officers were seated. “Now that we are underway and all of our systems fully checked out, Joint Command has provided me the final updated version of our orders.”
Space Carrier Avalon Page 9
