A holographic image of the galaxy appeared above the conference table, and then rapidly zoomed in on the area around the Castle Federation, some four hundred light years towards the galactic rim from Earth. Once at the level where individual stars could be distinguished, colored carets snapped into view around them: fourteen bright green markers for the Castle Federation itself; twelve dark blue markers for the Coraline Imperium, the next largest member of the Alliance; and thirty-six lighter blue markers for the other Allied systems. The three dimensional image was focused on Castle and their allies, but a dozen red-gold carets marked systems closer to Earth – border systems of the Terran Commonwealth.
“We are currently on route to the Phoenix system,” Blair informed any member of the staff who hadn’t been keeping up with the daily electronic briefings. A pair of stars with a single caret flashed bright purple, marking their current destination. “It will take us about seven days to travel those fourteen light years.”
“This is our final shake-down for this refit,” Blair concluded. “Phoenix’s yards will be able to repair any issues we encounter on the way there, but once we leave Phoenix we won’t be visiting many systems with full shipyards.” A wholly unnecessary gesture on Blair’s part highlighted fifteen more systems in purple. All were single-system star nations on the Commonwealth side of Alliance space.
“Our next destination is Hessian, twenty-one light years from Phoenix,” the Captain continued. “From there, we complete an arc across the Commonwealth border, averaging a bit over one week’s transit between systems. We should return to Castle just before Christmas.”
“I have been informed that barring absolute disaster, we are required to be in Castle for the New Year’s celebrations,” he told everyone. “I am told that we will hold pride of place in the annual Fleet Review.”
Smiles and nods rippled through the conference. Kyle shared a bright grin with his senior subordinate. He would have to have SFG-001 practice their parade formation flying, though with over four months to work with, he’d have lots of time to whip them into a shape that wouldn’t embarrass them.
Blair waited calmly for the commotion to die down.
“That, unfortunately, is accompanied by a piece of bad news,” he warned them. “We will hold pride of place in the Fleet Review on January First – and we will deliver Avalon to the Merlin Yards for decommissioning on January Sixth.”
Dead silence fell over the room.
“I am sure we all suspected that this would be Avalon’s final voyage,” Captain Malcolm Blair informed his people sadly, “but Joint Command has now confirmed that. We will show the flag on the frontier, and then we will bring the Grand Old Lady home to lay her to rest.”
“I would prefer that this information not leave this room,” he said. “We’ve only just got morale aboard this ship up to something I would regard as acceptable. I do want you to consider it in your department planning and – especially – in your personnel reviews. The new Avalon will commission shortly after we deliver the Old Lady to Merlin. They will be looking to us and our crew to man her with personnel that understand the legend of Avalon.”
“Our job over the next four months is to remind the galaxy of that legend,” Blair told them. “When we return to Castle, we will return having shown that Avalon and her crew are still worthy.”
Kyle nodded firmly in response to Blair’s words. Serving on Avalon’s last voyage could be either a waste of time – or a career-making feather in one’s cap.
Which one would depend on how hard they worked.
Chapter 10
Under Alcubierre Drive, Castle Federation Space
14:15 August 8, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Flight Deck
Shouting from the Flight Deck drew Kyle’s attention as he headed towards the flight control center. He stopped, then changed direction towards the commotion. A number of the fighter bays were currently under repairs due to a repeating short, but that shouldn’t have been causing issues.
He reached the edge of Bay 18 and was about to turn the corner towards the commotion when he finally recognized the voices involved.
“This is an absolutely unacceptable state for a warship of the Federation Navy,” Senior Fleet Commander Caroline Kleiner bellowed. “Get this crap stowed away before there’s an accident.”
“Ma’am,” Kyle heard Chief Hammond start, only to be cut off by the XO.
“I’m not interested in excuses, Chief,” she snapped. “Get this crap off the Flight Deck now.”
That was enough.
Kyle stepped around the edge of Bay 18 and surveyed the situation. Bays 19 through 23 had been shut down by an electric short, resulting in a small-scale electromagnetic pulse in Bay 20. Hammond’s crew had moved everything except the starfighters themselves out of the bays to allow them to fix the damage without risking more unshielded hardware.
This had left neat stacks of pallets and several mid-sized pieces of machinery sitting in the middle of the Flight Deck – right where a shuttle would have to land if the carrier weren’t in deep space under Alcubierre drive.
Kleiner stood next to the pile of gear, facing Senior Chief Marshall Hammond down while a dozen technicians who should have been repairing the damage to the fighter bays hovered like lost children pretending not to hear anything.
“Commander Kleiner,” Roberts snapped as he approached. He caught the glance of relief Hammond sent him, but focused his gaze on the XO.
“You’re here,” she sneered. “Now maybe you can get the Chief to do his job.”
“Commander Kleiner,” he repeated, his voice flat. “My office. Now.”
She stared at him in shock. His tone clearly hadn’t registered when he’d first spoken, and now he nodded his head back towards the exit from the Flight Deck. With a firm nod to Senior Chief Hammond, he turned on his heel and left the scene, not checking to see if the XO was following him.
Thankfully, she did. From the way she moved, though, he was certain that she would have slammed the door to his office if the automatically sliding portal would have allowed it.
“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded as he took a seat at his desk and turned to face her. “Where do you get off undercutting me in front of your people like that?!”
“Because they are my people, Commander Kleiner, not yours,” Roberts told her flatly. “And because you were making a fool of yourself.”
“You seem to have forgotten,” he continued, cutting off her angry sputtering, “that you are not part of Senior Chief Hammond or his people’s chain of command. You, in fact, have no authority on the Flight Deck of this ship except that provided by the respect due to your rank – a respect you were happily pissing away.”
She opened her mouth again, and he raised his hand. “If you have an issue with the Flight Deck, Senior Fleet Commander, you bring it to me. That way, I can do things like tell you that five fighter bays have been downchecked for a wiring short, and that I explicitly authorized them to remove the contents of those bays to expedite repairs.”
“It was a bloody safety hazard,” Kleiner finally snapped.
“Yes,” Kyle allowed. “One that my Senior Chiefs and I had carefully considered and decided was worth it to enable us to get five fighter bays working without risking the loss of several dozen million Stellars worth of equipment.”
“Your Chief was actively insubordinate,” she replied. “I demand that he be disciplined!”
“No,” Kyle said simply. “You do not berate my Senior Chiefs on my Deck,” he snapped. “I will not permit it, do I make myself clear?”
Avalon’s Executive Officer stared at him in plain shock. She had no authority over Kyle – or his people – and had just tried to use that nonexistent authority to interfere with the workings of his Deck. His sympathy was minimal.
“Where was this paternal instinct when you had a son?” she snapped.
She knew the words were a mistake as soon as they
left her mouth. Kyle could see it in her eyes, even as he slammed his fist into his desk and rose to his feet. The normally cheerful Wing Commander said nothing, didn’t even lean towards her, but looked down on her from his six inch height advantage.
“Get. Off. My. Deck,” he ground out. “Now.”
That, she finally listened to.
Under Alcubierre Drive, Castle Federation Space
17:05 August 8, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – CAG’s quarters
Kyle cursed under his breath as the asteroid next to his fighter flight’s patrol route suddenly disintegrated. Obviously pre-placed explosions shattered the rock into a dozen pieces, and four Commonwealth Scimitar fighters erupted from behind it, missiles blasting towards the three ships accompanying his own Falcon.
The range was barely fifty thousand kilometers – knife fighting range, even for starfighters – and the Commonwealth went for lighter, faster, missiles than the Federation. Two of his wingmen died in balls of antimatter fire before they could even bring their ECM online.
Kyle’s own ECM was online seconds before the simulation computer judged any of his wingmen to have activated theirs, and the missiles aimed at him and the fighter closest to him went astray, detonating against illusions their onboard computers insisted were real.
“Keep them busy,” he ordered, “full salvo, straight into the pack.” Eight missiles erupted into space, four from each of the surviving Federation fighters. Even as the missiles launched, Kyle started random-walking his starfighter, blasts of matter-antimatter annihilation twisting his course into an unpredictable corkscrew.
Moments later, the nose of his fighter aligned with one of the Scimitars for less than half a second. A thought took even less than that, and a blast of antimatter flashed out from the positron lance in the nose of his ship.
It connected for barely a tenth of a second, but that turned the side armor of the starfighter into a five kiloton bomb. The Scimitar flashed into nothingness, and its compatriots began to return fire.
Six lances, each much weaker than the single weapon on the Falcons, blasted out into space. The Commonwealth ships were co-ordinating their fire, sweeping entire regions of space that the two Federation starfighters might random-walk into.
A lance passed within meters of Kyle’s starfighter as he jinked it up and to the left. Even as he started to react to that and return fire, though, the co-ordinated pattern saw fruit – his last remaining wingman came apart in a ball of fire as a beam cut into his hull and detonated the ship in a flash of matter-antimatter annihilation.
Continuing to random-walk the starfighter, Kyle did something he would never have done with a live crew, and took control of the seven surviving missiles away from his starfighter’s gunner. Even most starfighter pilots couldn’t have handled that data bandwidth, but Kyle had been pulled out of a class of Navy enlistees for the Space Force due to his high neural bandwidth capacity.
The Commonwealth ECM was good enough that the missiles were starting to drop out – he lost two even as he assumed control of the salvo – and he didn’t think he was going to get direct hits. With the one-gigaton warhead of a Federation missile, though, he didn’t need them.
He mass-detonated the four surviving missiles in the middle of the Commonwealth formation. The closest fighter was barely two kilometers away, and was completely destroyed by the blast wave. A second fighter, five kilometers away, would have survived if it hadn’t had to reset systems from the radiation wave – a pause in their random-walking that allowed Kyle to line them up for his positron lance.
The last fighter was clear of the explosion and salvoing his own missiles at Kyle, using them to try and herd the Federation ship into the line of his positron lances. The Wing Commander smiled grimly and launched his own missiles, ready to try and turn the game around.
Then the entire simulation paused as a warning he’d previously set up triggered, informing him he was receiving a message from the Captain.
Kyle took a moment breathing to reduce his adrenaline levels, then removed the sim helmet that was jacked into his implants. Without the physical controls he would use in actual cockpit to augment his mental commands, it wasn’t a complete simulation, but it still served a purpose in keeping his skills sharp.
“Roberts,” he acknowledged over his implant, accepting the call from the Captain.
“Kyle, it’s Malcolm,” Blair told him unnecessarily. “Can I see you in my office please?”
“Yes sir,” the Wing Commander replied with a sigh he filtered out of the transmission. It appeared that his confrontation with Kleiner wasn’t resolved just yet.
Under Alcubierre Drive, Castle Federation Space
17:45 August 8, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Captain’s Office
Kyle wasn’t surprised to find Commander Kleiner in Captain Blair’s office when he arrived. He was surprised by just how tired she looked at even a casual glance. The rigid precision he was used to seeing in the woman had faded away into a slouched posture, only accented by the surprisingly visible redness to her eyes.
“Commander Roberts,” she said quietly, before Blair could even gesture Kyle to a seat, “I owe you an apology.”
That was not what he’d been expecting. He took the seat the Captain gestured him to, as much to allow himself to gather his thoughts as anything else.
“I had some very bad news this morning, and it affected my judgment significantly more than I thought it had,” the XO continued. “I crossed both professional and personal lines that I should not have.”
She met his gaze levelly, and Kyle realized he’d underestimated how red her eyes were. He wasn’t much of a judge of these things, but he was pretty sure she’d been crying. Their clash this morning was more in line with his image of the Commander that this apologetic wreck.
“I won’t say it was nothing,” he said quietly. She’d mashed his personal berserk button pretty hard, and come within millimeters of being physically evicted from his office. Kleiner finally glanced aside, and he noticed that her left hand was missing the plain gold band she’d worn since she came aboard. A horrible suspicion of just what her ‘bad news’ had been hit him, and he forced something akin to a smile.
“I won’t say it was nothing,” he repeated, “but we all have our weak spots that can compromise our judgment, don’t we?”
There was a flash of anger in her pose, then the XO relaxed and took a deep breath.
“I’m not used to it,” she admitted.
Kyle looked at Blair for help. He knew how to counsel men and women younger than him under his command. He wasn’t sure he had any idea how to deal with an older superior who’d just been ‘Dear Jane’d.
The Captain shook his head.
“Can I rely on your both to put this aside as a momentary lapse of good judgment?” he asked calmly. “Or am I going to have to treat you like teenagers and separate you?”
Blair’s tone made it a joke, to which Kleiner mustered a weak smile, but there was a rod of iron down the middle of the words.
“I would ask that you apologize to Senior Chief Hammond,” Kyle told Kleiner. “Your only authority over my Chiefs is moral, and if you don’t apologize after today, you’ll never get that back.”
“He’s not the only one,” she admitted. “Hell of a fucking day.”
“Kyle’s right, Caroline,” Blair told her. “It’s time for you to start digging up.”
Chapter 11
Under Alcubierre Drive, Castle Federation Space
9:00 August 9, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Main Infirmary
Michelle traded shy smiles with the nurse outside Surgeon-Commander Pinochet’s office. She was the same brunette that had been taking care of her when she’d been in the ward, a young lady named Angela.
“Doctor Pinochet is waiting for you,” Angela told Michelle, her smile seeming to widen at the
sight of the Flight Lieutenant. “She said to send you right on in.”
“Thanks, Angela,” Michelle told her, returning the smile. The two women held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, and then Angela glanced aside, flushing slightly as she returned her attention to the patient she was checking in on.
The small incident kept a smile on the Flight Lieutenant’s face as she entered Pinochet’s office. The motherly doctor gestured her to a seat in front of her desk and leaned on her steepled hands, looking her over carefully.
“How are you doing, Michelle?” she asked, her eyes holding Michelle’s.
“Good,” the pilot replied automatically. She met the doctor’s gaze levelly. “Surprisingly good. Getting back in the cockpit has been fantastic.”
“So the note I have from Commander Stanford says,” Pinochet told her, leaning back and relaxing. “He’s extremely pleased to have you back on active duty, though he did question how you managed to sneak so much simulator time in.”
Michelle flushed. She hadn’t been supposed to be spending nearly as much time in the simulator as she had. Pinochet hadn’t quite ordered her not to be working at all, but it had been strongly recommended.
“I’d lost my edge,” she replied honestly. “I needed to get it back if I wanted to get back into the cockpit at all.”
“I don’t argue with results, Lieutenant,” Pinochet told her, looking her up and down. “You look good, and you sound good. How are the nightmares?”
The sudden segue threw Michelle for a moment, then she slowly shook her head. “Not… good,” she admitted. “Better – not every night anymore – but still not good.”
Unlike most of the last year, she now had more than one nightmare – the one about Randall and now a new one about Liago. She’d also picked up one that combined the worst elements of both – the paralysis of Liago’s attack with the violation of Randall’s.
Space Carrier Avalon Page 10
