A Question of Faith: A Castle Federation Novella

by Glynn Stewart

  “The Federation does not break its promises, Your Highness,” Darius told her. Not lightly or without reason, anyway. “My current ETA is just over four days. You’ll forgive me if I keep the magnitude of my force to myself for the moment in case there are leaks along the way of our communications channel.”

  Stars knew there was no way Burgundy was alone, whatever she was presenting on the call. Darius was comfortable with the security on his coms until they reached the Boudicca System, but he could be polite and suggest there could be problems anywhere along the way.

  “I hope your force is significant, then,” she told him. “A guardship squadron will reach Defiant’s position today, but without the A-S drive, reaching the outer asteroid belts is a time-consuming endeavor.”

  The reports told Darius that Defiant had been over a light-day out from Iceni, Boudicca’s inhabited planet. Getting sublight guardships that far in four days was impressive. They would only be capable of the same hundred and twenty gravities as his battleships at most and had far more limited fuel, after all.

  “I am comfortable in the ability of my force to engage any threat to your system,” Darius told her mildly. “Do you have any more data on just what kind of threat we’re looking at?”

  “The scans suggest a minimum of two vessels, but unless the guardships can retrieve datacores from Defiant’s wreckage, we’re unlikely to learn much more.”

  “I’ll need the complete telemetry from your guardship sweep,” Darius said. “Even the damage pattern can help my people decipher what we’re looking at, Your Highness. A sublight guardship has a far different weapons fit than a battleship.”

  Even the largest guardship was unlikely to have more than a hundred-and-fifty-meter mass driver. The physical dimensions of the smaller sublight ships didn’t allow for them. Without antimatter missiles or a positron lance, they would have had to badly surprise Defiant to be a threat.

  Which, again, brought Darius back to battleships. Which meant Coraline or Terra, really.

  “We should be able to arrange that,” she allowed. “We are currently relaying a q-com link from the squadron via Castle. I’ll have the CO forward you the information as well.”

  He smiled thinly. It was a near-certainty that Burgundy had either had or was planning to have the same conversation with Admiral von Santiago. It was even possible that her father, King Wessex III, was having that conversation with the Imperial officer right now.

  “I would appreciate it, Your Highness,” he said. “The better we work together, the more likely we are to be able to find the people who killed Defiant and avenge her.” He paused. “Why guardships, though? Wouldn’t there have been civilian vessels closer to the wreck able to retrieve survivors?”

  “A few, but none were willing to take the risk for the rewards we could offer,” Burgundy said levelly. “Without knowing our enemy, my father and I were hesitant to send unarmed ships into a battle zone. The civilians might have been able to save some lives that have now been lost…but we could also have simply managed to get more people killed.

  “The life-support craft and safety bunkers aboard Defiant are rated for thirty days without central power or life support,” she concluded. “Anyone who survived the initial attack should still be alive.”

  Darius nodded. She wasn’t wrong but he suspected at least one captain had named a price they’d go out for…and he’d have paid it, no matter how egregious. The Burgundies owed their people that.

  “We’ll see what your guardships discover,” he told her. “We can certainly drop out of warped space and study the wreckage ourselves, if that would be helpful.”

  “Absolutely not,” Burgundy snapped. “Once we have finished sweeping for survivors, Defiant becomes a war grave under Boudiccan law. Further prodding of the dead is disrespectful and unnecessary.”

  “I see,” Darius allowed. He doubted Burgundy knew what he saw—but the theory that this was a local faction had just cut to zero. Burgundy didn’t know who’d killed the battleship but she suspected…and the suspicion terrified her.

  “I look forward to your arrival at Iceni, Admiral,” the Princess told him. “Once you have arrived, my father and I would be delighted to host you and one of your senior officers for dinner. I presume you wouldn’t want to remove more than one officer from your ships, given the unknown threat.”

  “You presume correctly,” he agreed. A dinner sounded like a solid opportunity to try and sort out the Burgundies’ thoughts on what was going on. He knew they hadn’t told the Castle Federation everything, but it sounded like there was more going on under the surface.

  “I would be delighted to join you and your father for dinner when we arrive,” he told her. “I look forward to seeing the sensor data on Defiant. Is there anything we can provide prior to our arrival?”

  “What assistance can be provided without a physical presence has already been offered by your government,” she demurred. “We’ll speak more in person, Admiral. Four days, you said?”

  “Four days, one hour and thirty-two minutes,” he told her, pulling the data from his implant. His fleet would be making turnover in that hour and thirty-two minutes, reversing the one light-year per day per day acceleration that flung them across the stars.

  “Hopefully, we’ll all be here to greet you,” Burgundy said grimly. “The lack of activity from Defiant’s killers is worrying me, Admiral.”

  “You have a significant sublight defense fleet, Admiral,” he reminded her. “I’m certain you will be fine.”

  He had to say it, after all, even if he didn’t believe it. Boudicca was going to be fine, after all—at least until he and von Santiago arrived.

  Whoever was playing this game wouldn’t want to damage their bait, after all.

  “That was not sublight gunships.”

  Fleet Commander Rhianna Diamond was Darius’s logistics officer, the black woman in charge of making sure that every one of his six battlewagons was fully equipped and prepared for any task the Admiral put before them.

  Most relevantly in the staff meeting reviewing the data from the guardships surveying Defiant, she was the person in his staff with the most engineering experience.

  Darius had made the same assessment of the damage pattern they could see on the shattered battleship, but he made a go-ahead gesture to the logistics officer. There were few opportunities for the fleet’s logistic officer to shine in front of her colleagues. He needed to give her this one.

  “Explain, please,” Captain Michaud asked. “I see a wrecked battleship and fifteen hundred dead. I’m not sure what’s ruling out gunships.”

  The gunships had still been sweeping for survivors and escape pods when Darius had called the meeting, but he doubted they were going to find enough survivors to change Michaud’s math. Six hundred and eighteen people had been pulled from the wreck—all too junior or in the wrong roles to have had access to the ship’s sensors.

  Defiant had been overstrength for her crew, a normal consequence of a generally undertrained and underequipped single-system military. The Boudicca fleet’s data said that she’d had twenty-one hundred and seven souls aboard.

  “You haven’t seen a wrecked battleship before, Captain,” Darius pointed out softly. “I have. So has Commander Diamond. Rhianna?”

  “The impact points are the key,” the logistics officer told them all. “Look here and here.” Chunks of the wreck highlighted. “Those are single-impact fractures of the neutronium matrix. Usually, if the neutronium lattice breaks, it’s from multiple impacts.”

  The “neutronium” in the ship’s armor wasn’t really true neutronium, but it was so compressed that it made no real difference. It was also expensive enough and hard enough to make that even battleships had only so much to armor themselves with. A single thin layer of the near-impenetrable material coated a modern battleship—and made up multiple megatons of the ship’s mass, thin as the layer was—but it was suspended in a shock-absorbing matrix and reinforced with simpler armo
rs.

  “To overwhelm the armor and break it with a gunship’s three-hundred-meter mass driver takes multiple hits in a small area,” Diamond continued. “You overwhelm the support matrix and force a crack in the neutronium layer, then shatter it with the final hit. It’s a question of probabilities and sustained fire—usually, you’re looking at twenty or more hits inside a hundred square meters.”

  She gestured at the highlighted chunks.

  “The armor broke here to a single high-power hit,” she repeated. “A battleship’s main guns will do that one time in ten. No guardship mass driver is going to do it.”

  Darius had drawn the same conclusion. Now he watched it dawn on a group of officers—Barre, Michaud, and the other half-dozen members of his flag staff—who’d never seen real capital-ship-on-capital-ship action.

  The Federation had fought roughly fourteen of those in the last century—a time period that roughly coincided with Darius’s own career. He’d served in or commanded eleven of those actions. Diamond had been in the engineering teams cleaning up after the last one.

  “Those ratios are included in our engagement parameters,” Barre noted. “I never thought about them in the sense of the damage left afterwards, though.”

  “We need to,” Darius replied. “Sometimes, what happened is almost as important as what we need to do about it. This mess”—he indicated the ship—“is worse than you’re thinking, too.”

  He had everyone’s attention now and he smiled thinly as he highlighted more impact points.

  “These four points are potential single-impact fractures as well,” he told them. “Hard to say, as the ship broke apart in these locations, but look at the angles.”

  Michaud saw it first, the Captain swallowing audible as it sank in.

  “That’s at least three different attack vectors,” she noted.

  “With battleship guns,” he agreed. “The Boudiccans’ data already suggested that Defiant was jumped by multiple enemy vessels, but we all assumed that meant multiple gunships. My assessment is that she was attacked by at least three battleships.

  “Given that we can only really confirm three attack vectors, three ships is probably lowballing it, too,” he continued. “It’s possible that three ships came in from three different angles with minimal mutual support. It’s more likely that they had support.”

  “Six battleships, sir?” Barre asked. “Defiant wasn’t worth that.”

  “She was if you needed her to die and die hard without telling anyone who hit her,” Darius told his people. “Defiant was the bait. The Boudicca System is the trap. What I don’t know is whose trap or what the mechanism of the trap is.”

  “It has to be the Imperium, doesn’t it?” Michaud asked. “There’s no one else out here with six battleships.”

  “Both the Renaissance Trade Factor and the Star Kingdom of Phoenix field fleets of approximately twenty A-S battleships,” Darius pointed out. “We and the Imperium are both hovering around fifty. The Terran Commonwealth, on the other hand, fields a fleet of approximately six hundred.

  “There are also a number of single-star nations in the region that have fleets of between three and five battlewagons. An alliance of several of them could also assemble a six-ship fleet.”

  Darius shook his head.

  “The likelihood of most of these scenarios is low,” he conceded before any of his staff pointed it out. “Most likely, we are looking at a Coraline Imperium operation. Which raises a distinct problem, people.”

  “We know von Santiago’s battleships were still at their anchorage when Defiant was attacked,” Barre interjected. “Intelligence has now verified her strength at eight capital ships, all modern battleships.

  “So, if this is an Imperial operation, we are likely looking at fourteen battleships.” His smile thinned to a pale white line. “I believe that we can face those odds, with the aid of Vagabond’s weaponry and the traditions and skill of our officers and crew.

  “But we need to realize that those are the odds we face and prepare ourselves for them. It may be necessary for us to abandon the Boudicca System to the enemy—but if we do so, people, we will do so officially at war with the Coraline Imperium!”

  6

  Boudicca System

  June 14, 2706 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Looking at the Boudicca System, Darius could see at a glance what it had to offer its trade partners. Trade between the stars wasn’t easy, but the nature of A-S ships—immense and expensive—meant that most things that were traded were both expensive and available in large quantities.

  The sheer amount of radiation boiling off the systems’ two immense asteroid belts provided a clue. Radioactive fissionables could be found in any star system, but readily available and easily refined radioactives allowed for an excess that could be exported for less than many systems could extract and refine their own resources for.

  The planet probably also had the usual half-dozen refined products that their neighbors thought they made best and bought in bulk, but the asteroid belts gave them a reliable fallback.

  They also meant that someone could actually be hiding an entire battle squadron in the system without anyone being any wiser. The presence of two asteroid belts radioactive enough to hide starships left an icy chill crawling up Darius Moonblood’s neck as he sat at the center of Vagabond’s flag deck.

  “All ships have completed emergence, Cherenkov flares are dissipating,” Barre reported. “We have both direct and q-com links with all units.”

  “Good,” Darius said distractedly, studying the star system chart and checking the astrographic map in his neural implant. “ETA to Iceni orbit?”

  “Six hours, unless we have a reason to push?” the operations officer asked.

  There was nothing, theoretically, stopping Vagabond or the rest of the ships in the Counter-Clockward Fleet accelerating at hundreds or even thousands of gravities. Her engines and inertial compensators played a terrifying precise game with Newton and Einstein, however, which had distinct plateaus in its efficiency.

  At the first of those plateaus, a properly built ship could accelerate for months on relatively limited fuel. That only gave them a “mere” thirty to forty gravities. The second plateau, known by the imaginative label of “Tier Two Acceleration,” allowed a modern warship to achieve a hundred and twenty gravities.

  Tier Three acceleration allowed around four hundred gravities but would empty the battleships’ fuel tanks in hours instead of weeks. A fourth tier was being studied but would empty a warship’s fuel tanks in seconds.

  The theoretically secret antimatter missiles tucked away in Darius’s magazines had Tier Three engines. His ships could push to the same thrust if they needed to—but he wasn’t that certain he could refill his antimatter and hydrogen fuel supplies there.

  “My math says that von Santiago will arrive between six and eight hours from now,” Darius told Barre. “I would prefer to be in orbit already when she does so, but beyond that, no. There’s no need for a rush.”

  Boudicca couldn’t stand off his fleet or von Santiago’s, but the fortress and guardships could easily tilt the thin line of balance between their fleets. In orbit of Iceni, all of those weapons were available to back Darius up if von Santiago did something stupid.

  Hopefully, that would be enough to keep everything aboveboard—but that was assuming there wasn’t a hidden Imperial squadron in the asteroid belts.

  “We can do that,” Barre confirmed. “Anything else I should set up?”

  “I’m supposed to meet the King and Crown Princess for dinner on arrival,” Darius replied. “Get in touch with the locals and get that organized.”

  His gaze rested on the closest approach of the asteroid belt to Iceni. Four light-minutes was probably a safe distance if someone was hiding there, but the warning signs on his displays still made him uncomfortable.

  Defiant had been ambushed by at least three modern battleships, and those ships hadn’t been seen since. Som
ewhere in this star system, someone was watching him. Waiting. Deciding on their next move…and he wasn’t even certain who they were.

  “You’ll be meeting with King Wessex III and Crown Princess Alexa Burgundy, as you expected,” Barre told Darius as the two of them made their way through Vagabond’s corridors toward the shuttle bay.

  Both of them had shed the single-piece shipsuit that mimicked slacks and a collared shirt in favor of their dress uniforms. Those were black slacks with a white dress shirt and black jacket, with both the slacks and jacket piped in gold to mark their service as the Castle Federation Space Navy instead of the Castel Federation Marine Corps.

  “Just the two of them?” Darius asked. “They invited us both. I was expecting a larger affair.”

  “The diplomatic files suggest that the Princess acts as Minister of Defense as well as the third-ranked officer of their Fleet,” the ops officer told him. “They haven’t sent us a guest list, but nothing in my communications suggested that the dinner was going to include anyone else.”

  “I wonder if they were hoping to include von Santiago and get us to play nice,” Darius murmured. It’s what he would have done if the two local heavyweights had both sent real fleets to his system. “On the other hand, she’s late.”

  Her earliest arrival time would have been just as his ships entered Iceni orbit half an hour before. He had expected her to arrive exactly as early as she could without obviously having known something was coming.

  Instead, it looked like she’d left the Imperium over an hour later than he’d left Aballava. With the extra travel time, she’d be there…shortly. But not soon enough to join anyone for dinner.

  “Works to our advantage either way, sir,” Barre told him. “I would have expected the Imperium to have factored that into their plans when they set this up.”

  “Never underestimate luring your enemy into a false sense of security,” Darius warned. “Michaud and the others will be keeping the ships at Status One. They’ll be at battle stations before we’re off the ground, let alone in orbit.”