“You shouldn’t be here!” Angela hissed when she spotted Michelle. The nurse was smiling however, and quickly surrendered to a hug and kiss. She then held Michelle back at arm’s length for a moment, studying her.
“What’s wrong?” Angela asked. “You look like death.”
“We’re going to be too late,” Michelle whispered. The news wasn’t spread through the entire ship yet, but Flight Commander Rokos had warned the pilots. “The Commonwealth attack arrived early – unless the TSF does a lot more damage than we expect, we may have to run without a fight. If we do fight, it’s going to be nasty.”
The pilot shrugged helplessly. “I wanted to say goodbye, just in case.”
Angela pulled her close again and held her for a long moment, and then a familiar voice cleared his throat behind them.
“I really do hate to interrupt,” Michael Stanford told them softly. “But it seems that news isn’t making it to the injured. What happened?”
Michelle turned to look at the CAG. The Wing Commander was in a wheelchair with a blanket covering the stumps of his legs. He wore a gown instead of a uniform, but his eyes were bright and alert as his gaze bore into her.
“The Commonwealth battle group arrived early,” she repeated. She was relatively sure she shouldn’t tell Stanford that, but he was her commanding officer, invalid or no. “They’ll be engaging the Tranquility Space Fleet in about thirty minutes.”
“Well, shit,” a second, more feminine voice added as Lieutenant-Commander Pendez slipped out from behind the curtains of her cubicle. Like Stanford, she was in a wheelchair. The level of radiation poisoning the Navigator had taken left her unable to move without rapid exhaustion.
“Lieutenant Alverez, could you get me a uniform please?” Stanford asked calmly.
Michelle traded helpless looks with her lover. This was Angela’s fight, not hers, and she stepped back out of way.
“You, Commander, aren’t fit to be going anywhere,” the nurse objected. “Except back to bed.”
“You’re not winning this fight, my dear,” Pendez interjected from her own wheelchair. “All hell is going to break loose, and I don’t know about the Wing Commander, but I have no interest in dying in bed because the ship blew up around me.”
“You,” Angela replied sharply, “are definitely not going anywhere. You can barely stand! And Stanford has no legs.”
“I don’t need legs to fly once I’m jacked in,” Stanford pointed out with a small smile. “But you’re right about Maria – she shouldn’t do more than thinking, so you should accompany her to Secondary Control. Miss Williams is perfectly capable of escorting me to the Flight Deck.”
Angela looked around, probably hoping for backup, but none of the doctors were paying attention to the long term care section. They were busy preparing for the influx of casualties when the battle started.
“We may not survive the next twenty-four hours, love,” Michelle said quietly. “I think we’d all rather die on our feet, don’t you?”
Deep Space
06:55 September 19, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Main Flight Deck
Stanford was aware that his ‘functional’ status was entirely based on the fact that his nanites were cutting off all of the nerve signals from the severed stumps of his legs. Unlike chemical painkillers, though, that process left him fully aware and cognizant of what was going on.
He changed into his uniform on his own and hustled Michelle to push his wheelchair down to the Flight Deck. Pendez, he knew, would take longer to be ready to move. In many ways, radiation poisoning at her level was a worse injury than his own gross physical trauma. Regenerating a lost limb was a late twenty-first century technology. Repairing pervasive cellular-level damage was a far younger science.
The Flight Deck was the chaotic storm he was expecting, and he gloried in it as Michelle pushed him towards the control officer.
“Hammond, Rokos,” he bellowed when he spotted those two worthy souls. “Get over here!”
He gestured for Michelle to get to her ship, and the Flight Lieutenant promptly made herself scarce as the senior Space Force NCO and the acting CAG approached.
“What’s our status?” Michael asked.
“All starfighters are fuelled and armed,” Hammond replied crisply. “Crews aren’t aboard yet, but we’re still an hour from emergence.”
“Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?” Rokos demanded bluntly. “You are missing both of your legs, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I don’t need legs to fly,” the CAG said calmly. “We’re going to need every starfighter out there we can get. I assume command, Flight Commander Rokos.”
The stocky Commander grinned and saluted. “I stand relieved, sir. The last plan I had was to co-ordinate with TSF Command. Do we have an updated one?”
“Not yet,” Michael admitted. “But I have some thoughts. Hammond!”
“Sir?” the Senior Chief Petty Officer replied.
“Is everything clear for a full deck launch?”
“Somehow, I knew you were going to ask that,” Hammond replied. “Yes, sir. We can have the birds prepped and the deck clear in sixty seconds once the pilots are aboard, but I’ll be happier with ten minutes!”
“You’ll get it,” Michael promised. He glanced around, realizing that a growing knot of quiet people had been gathering around him. He smiled grimly.
“I was going to ask someone to fetch you all,” he said loudly, projecting across the crowd. By the time he was finished speaking, he was sure he had every pilot and most of the flight crews.
“By now, you know that the Commonwealth has beaten us to Tranquility,” he told them. “And things don’t look good for the Tranquility Space Fleet – we cannot get there in time to change the tide of that battle.”
“But we know the Old Man!” The crews laughed and nodded in response to that, and Michael gave them a cold smile. “He was ours before he was Avalon’s – so we know him.”
“He’s going to pull some crazy damned trick out of his hat, and while I don’t know what it’ll be, I do know one thing: the Commonwealth will never see him coming.”
“So get in your ships, and prep for a full deck launch. When Commander Roberts asks us to pull off whatever crazy stunt he has in mind, I want us to be ready. Do you follow?”
“We follow, sir!”
“Then let’s go save Tranquility, shall we?”
Chapter 37
Deep Space
07:20 September 19, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control
Kyle was going to have a front row seat to the death of a star fleet.
They were receiving the full telemetry upload from every ship in the Tranquility Space Fleet, relayed through a Q-com link with a ground station at TSF Command. He could track where each of the TSF’s guardships and starfighters were in real-time, and could even contact First Admiral Wu directly aboard the cruiser Sapanā.
He had no intention of jogging the elbows of a man about to defend his homeworld.
It looked like the TSF was going with a modified version of the original plan. The missile-heavy Abhibhāvaka and Rakṣaka guardships had assembled in a sixteen-ship strong Force Beta, hidden in the ice rings of Tranquility itself.
Sapanā, escorted by two hundred Hurricane starfighters and the lance-armed Śīlḍa guardships, was advancing towards the Commonwealth battle group. There was no finesse to either the defenders’ or attackers’ approach. The Commonwealth had assembled a shield of starfighters in front of their battleships, and pulled the carriers back. They had the firepower to crush the Tranquility Space Fleet, and had assembled it into a giant hammer aimed at Tranquility itself.
The TSF really had no choice – they could defend the planet or surrender.
The starfighters went out first. All told, Tranquility had deployed just over two hundred of the fleet little ships.
The two Commonwealth h
eavy fleet carriers, between them, deployed two hundred and eighty.
As soon as the TSF ships launched forward from their larger brethren, the missile ships using Tranquility’s rings for cover opened fire with the heavy capital ship missiles. Sixteen guardships launched sixty four missiles in a single salvo that made Kyle shiver.
When the missiles passed Sapanā, the cruiser launched her own missiles. Eighteen more missiles joined the salvo, which rapidly caught up to the starfighters – and passed through them, just as the two starfighter wings slammed into each other.
Kyle could see the echoes of the same trick he’d pulled on Achilles, but this time the Commonwealth starfighters had the numbers to split their attention. Eighty starfighters focused on the missiles, while the remainder went head to head with their Tranquility equivalents.
For someone watching through the scanners of other ships, from millions of kilometers away, the chaos that ensued was barely coherent. Fireball after fireball lit up the sky over Tranquility as positron lances and antimatter missiles reaped their deadly harvest.
Ninety-four seconds after the two fighter wings reached each other, a half-dozen Tranquility ships broke through – as much by luck as anything else. Behind them, still on course for Sapanā, one hundred and eighty-seven Commonwealth Scimitars, blasted forward.
Then the second wave of eighty-two missiles arrived – and detonated in a single massive swarm of explosions. They didn’t take out all the Commonwealth fighters, but they opened a gaping hole in the heart of their formation.
The Śīlḍa class guardships followed those missiles in. Distracted by the sky-shattering force of the fighter clash, Kyle had almost forgotten about them. The handful of starfighters that had survived the missile salvo targeted in the center of their formation didn’t stand a chance.
The eight vessels, tiny compared to a true starship, rode their pillars of antimatter flame just as well, just as agilely, as any starfighter – and where a starfighter carried a single positron lance, the guardships carried ten.
They ripped through the remnants of the Commonwealth’s center at top speed, ignoring the hundred-plus starfighters around them even as they annihilated the handful of ships in their path. A third wave of missiles rode their exhaust plumes, and followed them towards the Commonwealth battle group.
In response, the two mighty battleships opened fire. Their beams couldn’t reach Sapanā, but they launched forty missiles between them, all targeted on the cruiser. Their positron lances slashed out into space, targeting the closing guardships and the missiles they were covering with their own hulls.
Kyle watched in horror, guessing without even having seen the revised plan what the guardships were doing. Those half-million ton ships couldn’t take a single hit from even the lighter positron lances the battleships were firing – but they could take the lasers used to stop missiles. And their deflectors could shunt aside the positron lances.
For a while. A while the missiles wouldn’t have survived on their own.
The fourth missile salvo, behind the guardships, ran into a slowing and prepared Commonwealth fighter shield. None of them made it through.
Avalon’s Secondary Control was silent, and Kyle was certain he wasn’t the only saying a silent prayer for the doughty little guardships as they charged forward, dancing a writhing path across space as they tried to guard their charges and survive.
Their fate was inevitable.
The first died moments after the Commonwealth found the range. The battleships’ massive, one-and-a-half-megaton-per-second positron lances could burn through the guardships’ deflectors long before the guardships’ quarter-megaton weapons could return the favor.
Four more ships died without ever reaching the range of their enemies.
The three survivors opened fire. Beams of antimatter flickered across space, with even the mighty kilometer long battleships pirouetting in space to dodge their tormentors. A guardship died. Then another.
Then the last guardship violently blew apart. It hadn’t been hit, its deflectors were still working – the ship simply exploded.
Kyle was shocked, looking stunned at the screen for a moment before it hit him. The intentional detonation of the guardship’s zero point cells had saturated the space around them with an almost impenetrable level of radiation.
And the guardships’ sacrifices had carried twenty missiles to striking distance of the Commonwealth battlegroup. No longer matching pace with the slower guardships, the last missiles of the salvo leapt forward.
Lasers and positron lances filled the air, trying to catch the radiation concealed missiles with blind fire. The programs behind that ‘random’ fire were smart, with nine hundred years of history behind human missiles to feed them. Blind or not, missiles began to die.
Then they emerged from the radiation cloud, and Kyle sucked in a sharp breath as he realized that the missiles were still there – and spreading out. Of the remaining missiles, three were targeting each battleship – and three were targeting each carrier.
There were only seconds between the missiles emerging visibly to Sapanā’s sensors and their becoming lost in a haze of explosions and laser fire.
When the haze cleared, three ships were clearly damaged – near misses that had burnt off missiles, sensors and armor.
The forward battleship, closest to Tranquility, was shattered. A one-gigaton antimatter missile had struck her amidships and vaporized the middle half of the ship. The broke wreck of her stern and bow were rapidly separating, driven apart by the force of the explosion.
Cheers echoed in Avalon’s bridge, but Kyle’s gaze was drawn to Sapanā. The dying blow of that battleship closed in on the Tranquility cruiser, accompanied by the same starfighters that had destroyed every missile salvo the TSF had launched without an escort.
Sapanā was heavily refitted, but she was twenty years older than her enemies. Smaller. Less well armored, and less defended against missiles.
She took thirty-four starfighters with her, but moments after the missiles closed, Avalon lost their link to the old cruiser.
Chapter 38
Deep Space
07:50 September 19, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-001 Avalon – Secondary Control
Secondary Control was silent again, and Kyle looked around his crew. The screens now showed the Commonwealth fighter groups, still a hundred strong, closing in on Tranquility’s rings. The ice rings would render positron lances useless at range, but the starfighters had enough missiles to close in and finish off the Tranquility Space Fleet.
Avalon would emerge while that butchery was occurring, but still three hours away. There was nothing they could do.
“We can’t save them, can we?” Kelly whispered.
“Not the TSF, no,” Kyle said grimly, his eyes on the ringed planet on their screen. “I don’t know if I’m willing to give up on Tranquility, though.”
“By the time we can get to engagement range, they’ll have re-armed their fighters, and repaired any critical damage,” Kelly pointed out. “If we could hit them now – hell, even in the next half hour! – we could clean their clocks.”
Kyle blinked, looking at the screen again and then back at his console. A ship had to enter Alcubierre drive in a zone of effectively zero gravity, or risk ripping apart both themselves and any nearby fragile objects. Like planets.
But with all of the stabilizers and redirectors that Dr. Jessica Stetson had designed so longer ago, did they really have to emerge like that?
He hit a command.
“Wong, I have a question for you,” Kyle said calmly.
“No, I can’t make her go faster,” the engineer said dryly. “Next, Captain?”
“If we push it – if we’re willing to risk the ship – how close in can we emerge from Alcubierre?”
There was silence on the line, and Kyle brought up a video screen to be sure he hadn’t lost the connection somewhere. The shaven-headed engineer was looking at him with u
nreadable dark eyes.
“You’re serious,” he finally concluded.
“As death,” the Acting Captain told him. “How close?”
“It depends,” Wong said slowly. “On how good a navigator we’ve got…”
“Someone’s going to need to put me in my chair,” a tired voice said from beside Kyle, “but I’m good enough for this.”
Lieutenant-Commander Maria Pendez may have been in a wheelchair and may have had Lieutenant Angela Alverez managing to both push said wheelchair and hover, but her eyes were level and her face was determined.
“I should send you right back to the infirmary,” Kyle told her.
“Yes, but there’s no way my assistant can thread the needle for you,” she replied, her voice sharp and fiery. “It can be done, Skipper. How close do you want?”
“Wong?” Kyle asked, turning back to the video.
The engineer shook his head, but when he looked up to meet Kyle’s gaze he had a determined smile on his face.
“If she’s mad enough to fly it, I’m mad enough to try and hold the manipulators together. How close boils down to one question, skipper,” the Engineer said calmly. “Do you care if this ship can fly FTL again afterwards?”
“Commander Wong,” Kyle said flatly, “if you can give me emergence within weapons range of those ships, I don’t care if I have to carry Avalon home.”
Wong glanced through the video screen at Pendez.
“If you can thread it that fine, Lieutenant-Commander, I think I can hold us together. You game?”
Pendez glanced past Kyle to the screen where the last warships of the Tranquility Space Fleet were making a hopeless last stand, praying for a rescue that even this trick wouldn’t be able to bring there in time.
“Let’s kill these sons of bitches.”
Deep Space
Space Carrier Avalon Page 29
