7

Dimitri Tobin regarded Alliance Battle Group Seventeen – now also designated Alliance Battle Group Avalon – with an appraising gaze. The immense abbreviated arrowhead of Avalon orbited below and behind the other ships, with the thirteen hundred meter spike of Camerone the only other vessel of the four to approach her length.

The Trade Factor’s warships had originally been retrofitted merchant ships, and the Magellan-class battleship Zheng He showed that legacy in her design. She was a flattened sphere as wide as she was tall and only slightly longer. Only half a kilometer long, she was still three quarters of Avalon’s volume and packed twice the heavy armaments.

Horus was still missing, but the first Imperial contribution, the strike cruiser Gravitas, had already arrived. The Majesty-class strike cruisers were older ships, but still potent. The Imperium had purchased its original warships, a long time ago, from the Commonwealth and their capital ships were built on the same flattened cigar that had evolved into the Commonwealth’s carriers. Gravitas was a kilometer long and a quarter-kilometer wide, with a wing of eighty starfighters and an armament only slightly heavier than the much larger Avalon’s.

Combined with the Federation battle cruiser Camerone, which had another forty-eight starfighters and fell between Gravitas and Zheng He in terms of onboard weapons, Battle Group Seventeen was a powerful combat force, fully a third of the true capital ships in the Castle system.

All of that firepower – to be increased once Horus, an even newer Imperial ship, arrived – now answered to one Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin. It was a sobering thought, and a responsibility he was determined to live up to.

Still wrapped up inside his implant, he considered the people on the shuttle with him. This was only the first load of ‘flag staff’ to come aboard Avalon, and he had fifty people coming with him. With his staff officers, their teams, the flag deck crew and its three shifts and officers to command those shifts, he was bringing over two hundred people aboard Avalon.

Too few of them were his team from Corona. Many of those worthies had died. A lot of others, like Robert Brown, were still in recovery from injuries sustained at Midori.

Most of his new staff and personnel had been put together by his new Chief of Staff based on JD-Personnel recommendations. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Senior Fleet Commander Judy Sanchez, the head of his new team. She’d come highly recommended, but seemed a minor enigma.

This was only her second Staff posting. She’d spent most of her career working as a computer analyst with Navy Intelligence, with the kind of bland performance appraisals he’d have expected from a desk jockey… attached to a rate of promotion he would have expected from an officer in a combat zone. He could only wonder why Kane had sent him an ex-spy.

“Sir,” the blond young woman interrupted his thoughts. “I’m getting traffic on the system defense net. You may want to check in.”

The system defense net? Sanchez wouldn’t have access to that except at the most rudimentary level until they were aboard ship. If she was seeing something via that connection, it was a high level alert.

Closing his eyes, Dimitri logged into the net, and immediately inhaled sharply. The map of the Castle system the defense net fed his implants had a glowing ugly red splotch out near the orbit of the gas giant Gawain – the marker for an unidentified Alcubierre emergence.

“Pilot,” Dimitri linked into the shuttle’s cockpit. “Get in touch with Avalon and let them know you’re going to be coming in hot. I want to be on the deck in five minutes.”

He heard the young man swallow. Junior Lieutenants, however, did not argue with Vice Admirals.

“I’ll make it happen, sir,” he promised.

Dimitri was already focusing his attention back on that red splotch, waiting for the nearby Q-Com equipped probes to let the net know just what had intruded into the Federation’s home system.

The tiny robotic craft were scattered around the perimeter of the system, no more than a light minute or so apart. It took time for light to reach them and be processed and sent back to System Command. More time for System Command to assess the signatures and then update the map.

Then the splotch broke apart, settling into four crimson red icons. Commonwealth capital ships.

There was no time to get his flag staff organized. Dimitri boarded the ship to an appropriate lack of ceremony and charged directly to the bridge.

There, he found Captain Roberts in exactly the right place for the circumstances – directly in the middle of the bridge of his ship, preparing to engage the enemy.

“Give me an update, Captain,” the Vice Admiral snapped. “What does System Command know?”

“Four Terran capital ships,” Roberts replied promptly. “It’s a somewhat unusual split for them – three cruisers and a carrier.”

Dimitri nodded, considered Roberts’ point. The Commonwealth regarded starfighters as a defensive measure, used to keep other people’s starfighters away from the battleships that did the actual destroying. They tended to deploy in pairs of cruisers or sent a carrier to escort a battleship.

“Any idea of their objective?” Dimitri asked. “They dropped out of FTL way too far out to attack Castle itself, and they’re outnumbered over three to one by the forces in-system.”

“System Command is debating, but they’re close to Gawain,” Roberts noted. “That only leaves two real targets.”

“Walkingstick isn’t going for the cloudscoops,” Dimitri said grimly, remembering his briefing from Kane when he’d accepted the command. “He’s going for the Reserve Fleet.”

“Agreed,” his Flag Captain said instantly. “Home Fleet is preparing to move, but…”

“But, what, Captain?” the Vice Admiral demanded.

“I can’t help but remember Puppeteer, sir,” the younger man said calmly. “Walkingstick isn’t above tricking us into pulling ships out of position. The Reserve Flotilla guardships aren’t up to this fight, but…”

“Agreed,” Dimitri said sharply. “Coms – get me a link to Admiral Blake.”

Normally, he’d try to remember the officer’s name, but he didn’t have time. Nonetheless, the pitch black-skinned young woman running Avalon’s communicators got the channel for him in an admirably short time.

“Meredith, hold Home Fleet in place – our old friend Walkingstick may be playing games,” he told her.

“We only have two ships and two hundred Cobras guarding the Flotilla, Dimitri,” the old Admiral snapped. “Someone has to go.”

“BG Seventeen’s ships average newer and faster than Home Fleet, ma’am,” Dimitri replied. “We’ve got that task group matched for ships and outmassed four to three. None of us can get there in time to save the Flotilla guard force, Meredith,” he said quietly. “Let’s not risk Castle as well.”

The geometry had screwed them, badly. Of the thirteen warships in the Castle system, most were in orbit of Castle itself – two light hours away from Gawain and its dozen half-unmothballed ships. He ran the numbers in his head. Seventeen hours for Battle Group Seventeen, whose slowest ship could pull two hundred and thirty gravities. Home Fleet, with a maximum speed of two hundred gravities, would take over eighteen hours.

While the Commonwealth task group was still four hours from being able to attack the reserve ships, they’d still have fourteen hours to destroy an entire fleet’s worth of ships, likely drop a few dozen missiles into the cloudscoops anyway and run.

“Sir, we may be able to make it,” a soft feminine voice interrupted his thoughts. Tobin’s gaze snapped up, glancing first at Roberts, and then at the softly attractive form of Avalon’s Navigator.

“Finish your thought, Commander,” Roberts ordered, his voice soft.

“The direct route is seventeen hours for the battle group,” she said, confirming his math. “But that’s staying in conventional space the whole way.”

“The star is between us and Gawain, Commander,” Dimitri pointed out, but his Flag Captain forestalled him with a raised hand. He fumed internally, but gestured for the Commander to finish.

“That’s what they’re counting on, sir,” she told him, “but everyone’s thinking in straight lines.”

She threw a course up on the screen. It took them in the completely wrong direction for two and a half hours, and Dimitri was about to ask just what she was thinking, when the total flight time to Gawain came up. He shut up fast.

Two and a half hours to clear Castle’s planetary gravity well to reach a space flat enough to engage the Alcubierre-Stetson drive.

But then an hour and a half to wrap an arcing course around the outside of the system that would drop them back into regular space on the other side of the Flotilla Station, heading straight for the Commonwealth task group with every centimeter of the velocity they built up before warping space.

They’d meet the Commonwealth ships with a combined velocity over ten percent of lightspeed – and they’d do it before the bastards reached the Reserve Flotilla.

“We’re cutting the margins very tight,” he rumbled softly, considering. “Can you do it?”

“I don’t know about the rest of the Battle Group,” Roberts told him, “but Commander Pendez can do it. She’s the one that rode the needle all the way into Tranquility.”

Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin gave the crimson icons on his screen a predatory smile. He’d hoped he’d be lucky enough to get the Navigator that had taken Roberts into planetary orbit at Tranquility. He’d have to buy Kane a drink when he got back.

“Feed your calculations to them if you have to, Commander Pendez,” he told her gently. “And let’s get this Battle Group underway.”

Kyle was getting sick of watching battles he couldn’t influence. The delays on route to Tranquility had left him watching that system’s entire fleet get blown away by a Commonwealth battle group, and it felt like he was watching a repeat as the two guardships of the Gawain Reserve Flotilla charged out to meet the attack.

The two older battleships defending the Reserve Flotilla, plus the two hundred fighters launched from the Flotilla station itself, deployed as soon as the presence and location of the enemy could be resolved. While BG17 was on its way, the Terran ships would be clear to launch missiles at the Reserve well before they emerged from Alcubierre.

“Sir, we’ve cleared all detectable gravity zones,” Pendez reported. “Current gravitational force is beneath one pico-meter per second squared. We are prepared to warp space on your command.”

“Admiral?” Kyle asked, glancing over at where Dimitri Tobin loomed in one of the observer seats at the back of the bridge.

“The rest of the Battle Group is following Commander Pendez’s lead,” the Admiral rumbled. “Carry on.”

“How are our Class Ones looking?” Kyle asked his engineering officer. Avalon’s five Class One mass manipulators were a good forty percent of the warship’s price tag, and the only things capable of generating the singularities necessary for Alcubierre drive.

“We are clear and green,” Wong reported over the ship’s communicator.

“All right – Commander Pendez, initiate interior Stetson fields at your discretion,” the Captain ordered.

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,” Commander Pendez reported. “Exterior field on standby, mass manipulators on standby.”

“How’s the rest of the Group?” Kyle asked his new Tactical Officer, Commander James Anderson.

“I’m showing Stetson fields active on all ships, Captain,” the pale redheaded man replied.

“All right,” Kyle acknowledged. He spared one final glance at the seemingly impassive Vice Admiral, then turned to Pendez. “Commander, you may warp space at your discretion.”

He felt the big ship hum as power fed to the Class Ones, and spotted the distinctive fuzz in the viewscreen of the A-S Drive’s singularities.

On the tactical display his implant was overlaying on part of his vision, white stars marked the formation of the same singularities around the other ships. The distortions wavered, and then vanished in flashes of bright blue Cherenkov radiation.

“Warp bubble initiated,” Pendez told him. “We are on route, ETA ninety-two minutes.”

Kyle checked another set of numbers. His Q-Com-relayed display of the battle showed the Federation defenders already in missile range of the Terran ships, but still twenty minutes from positron lance range. Both sides were keeping their starfighters close as a handful of missiles probed each other’s defenses.

By the time Battle Group Seventeen arrived, the two forces would have passed through each other, and the Terrans would be approaching weapons range of the Flotilla itself. Given the distance between BG17’s initial space warp and their emergence, they wouldn’t even know they’d gone FTL until the Allied battle group jumped them.

That would probably be enough to save the Flotilla, but everyone in the system already knew it wouldn’t save the two Indomitable-class battleships charging out.

Even as Kyle watched, the Commonwealth starfighters charged out, followed by a swarm of missiles as the Terran starships fully opened fired.

He was taking mental notes and made sure Stanford was also receiving the footage. Coordination between the missiles and the fighters was poor. The missiles had twice the starfighters’ acceleration, but their acceleration could be stepped down or up at will. It was an ability Kyle had used before to combine starfighter and missile attacks.

The Terrans didn’t bother. The forty missiles of their salvo blasted ahead of their starfighters and, unsupported, ran into the Federation starfighters.

The Gawain Reserve Flotilla Defense Group might have been a secondary posting, but its starfighter flight crews were hardly incompetent. Not a single missile of the first four salvos made it past them.

Then they ran headlong into the Terran ships. Both sides had sixth generation starfighters – the Terran Scimitar versus the Federation Cobra – but the Terrans simply had more. Each of the three Assassin-class battlecruisers fielded thirty starfighters, and the Safari-class heavy carrier anchoring the task group deployed a hundred and eighty.

The last wave of missiles was also, finally, coordinated with the starfighters and was targeted at the Federation starfighters. The Scimitar was heavily optimized towards anti-fighter engagements, with multiple lighter positron lances and light missile launchers.

None of the Federation starfighters survived to interpenetrate. Six hundred men and women were wiped away in a matter of moments, and then the surviving Terran starfighters fell back. Commonwealth doctrine now called for them to act in a missile defense role while the battlecruisers did the killing.

The two Federation battleships had clearly realized they couldn’t get missiles through the remaining hundred and fifty starfighters. They continued to fire them, but they were wide salvos – intended more to fill space with radiation and distort sensors than to kill starships.

Their own defenses shattered missiles by the dozens as they closed. Their heavy beams had a range that left a starfighter pilot like Kyle green with envy, with a chance of hitting their targets from almost a million kilometers away.

They almost reached that range intact. Missile salvo after missile salvo filled the space between the two forces, thoroughly demonstrating why no one regarded even capital ship missiles as ship killers as not a single missile hit.

Until one did. A laser cluster on one of the battleships didn’t track in time. Three missiles slipped past and slammed into the Castle Federation battleship Jackson.

Three one-gigaton warheads flared within a second of each other. The battleship’s massive armor shed some of the impact… but not enough. Jackson reeled, her engines flaring out as her mass manipulators failed and she tried to evade.

Without her sister to help stop missiles, Kennedy couldn’t cover them both. Four more missiles from the next salvo made it through, and Jackson simply ceased to exist – and five thousand souls went with her.

Kennedy sought to avenge her. Moments after Jackson’s death, the battleship reached her range of the Commonwealth ships – a range the cruisers and carrier couldn’t match. Six hundred kiloton-per-second main lances spoke in anger, but at this range it took the lance beams almost three seconds to reach their targets.

That was enough to throw off accuracy, and the Terran Assassin-class battlecruisers had six hundred kiloton lances of their own. Kennedy’s deflectors were stronger, but not enough to reduce the range by much.

Five ships danced in space, pirouetting like dancers as they dodged around beams of deadly antimatter. More missiles slashed in on both sides, and the Terran starfighters grimly stuck to their larger brethren’s sides, picking off the robotic attackers.

Kyle watched in grim silence, convinced that it was all going to be for naught – and then one of the battlecruisers zigged when it should have zagged. Eight heavy positron lances slammed into the warship.

Where they hit, the matter of the ship’s armor collided with the antimatter of the beams and annihilated. The starship’s own armor turned into a devastatingly powerful explosive and ripped open vast gaping holes in her hull. The beams were only connected for half a second – and that was enough.

The battlecruiser came apart into pieces, its interior gutted by the beams of pure destruction that had ripped through her.

Any hope for Kennedy was short-lived. Even as her target died, the old battleship’s defenses proved unable to handle the missile fire that she and her sister had withstood together. Five missiles made it through in a single salvo – and not even the mightiest battleship could stand that kind of fire.

Silence reigned on Avalon’s bridge, and Kyle knew his crew had been watching the battle alongside him.

“Commander Pendez,” he said quietly. “ETA?”

“We will arrive in forty-seven minutes, sir,” she replied.

“Inform Vice Commodore Stanford,” Kyle ordered. “Let’s see if we can give these people a well-deserved shock.”