31

---

Triumphant was still an hour away from her destination, but she and the Hercules were rapidly approaching each other. Anderson had managed to sneak one of the Q-Com equipped probes in close to their intercept point, and Kyle watched with interest as the two Commonwealth warships approached.

The battleship was inbound towards the logistics depot at over eight thousand kilometers a second still, and the battlecruiser had reversed her acceleration half an hour ago and was rapidly building velocity towards the depot. They were two hundred thousand kilometers apart, the closing speed shrinking as their speeds came into alignment.

Neither ship had done anything noticeable yet. None of the defending ship’s other twenty starfighters had been launched, and neither had done anything aggressive – though both had their electromagnetic deflectors up. With the battleship-grade positron lances both ships carried, though, they were already in death range.

“What are they doing?” Kyle heard Solace wonder aloud.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, shaking his head. “My guess, though, is that whoever is in command of the battlecruiser is trying to talk Richardson into surrendering. Richardson… either hasn’t made up his mind, or is playing a very dangerous game.”

He flipped feeds to look up Stanford. The lack of visual data from the CAG’s communicator warned him the other man was in his starfighter.

“Vice Commodore, are your fighters prepared to launch?” he asked.

“We are prepared and loaded,” Stanford replied. “I have a Wing prepped to fly escort duty on Norup’s Marines as well.”

“Thanks, Michael,” Kyle said quietly, and then flipped to that worthy.

“Major Norup, are your people ready to go?”

“I’ve got all four companies loaded in the shuttles, with First and Third in full battle armor,” the Marine commander told him crisply. “Get us to the platforms, and we’ll take control.”

Both Kyle’s starfighters and Marine assault shuttles could double Avalon’s acceleration. The carrier herself had just made turnover and was still six hours away. If he launched his small craft, they could hit the depot in just over four hours.

Of course, his starfighters could make an attack pass, on Triumphant or the base, in a little over two – but they’d be moving at over thirty percent of lightspeed. A ‘point three pass’ was doable, but it was also risky and pushed the tiny spacecraft to their maximum capabilities.

Whatever happened over the next few minutes, Kyle was now confident that he could take control of the Alizon system and destroy the Commonwealth forces opposing him.

“The Hercules has launched shuttles, sir!” Anderson reported. “I’m reading… four ships, look like equivalents to our Marine assault craft.” He paused, clearly reviewing data.

“They’re only pulling two hundred and forty gravities, sir,” he concluded. “I’d guess they came to a conclusion.”

Kyle nodded. It seemed Captain Richardson had agreed to face Commonwealth justice. He smiled. It wasn’t quite going to work out that way for the man, though. Given Fleet Admiral Walkingstick’s reputation, all that was going to change was the brand name of the bullet.

“Holy shit!”

Richardson had apparently reached the same conclusion as Kyle.

The assault shuttles had crossed barely half of the distance between the two ships before someone on Triumphant pushed the button. Almost fifty light positron lances, each delivering ninety-kilotons-a-second of antimatter, lashed out into space. Four beams targeted each shuttle – and each of the Hercules’ guardian starfighters.

But those beams were the side-show. At the same instant as the smaller craft died, eight one-megaton-a-second heavy positron lances fired – at a target that wasn’t evading, whose ECM was down, whose bridge crew knew Captain Richardson and Triumphant had surrendered.

Even one hit would have been fatal – and none of them missed.

It was very quiet on Avalon’s bridge. Kyle had taken his crew through two space battles, and they understood, in the bone-deep way only combat veterans could, how vulnerable the massive vessels that carried them were.

Watching seven thousand lives snuffed out in a moment of treachery was a shock to the system regardless.

“Sir,” Anderson began, then coughed to clear his throat. “Sir,” he repeated, “Triumphant has launched missiles at the depot. I’m reading less than twenty minutes to impact.”

“Track their vectors,” Kyle ordered. “Confirm their targets.”

“They’re… the missiles are targeted on the fighter launch platforms,” his Tactical Officer replied quietly. “I think they were launched without warheads… they want to protect the rest of the facility.”

At those speeds, a two ton capital missile would impact with thirty megatons of force – enough to rip through even an armored space station, but not enough to damage the rest of the depot.

“What do we do, sir?” Anderson asked.

“We wait,” Kyle ordered harshly. “Remember that this is our system, and that depot is supporting the occupation on the surface. Every starfighter destroyed, every missile expended, makes our job easier.

“This kind of betrayal isn’t something we want to watch,” he said softly, making sure all of his people could hear him, “but our mission here is to take out Triumphant and liberate Alizon – and if the Commonwealth wants to shoot each other, I say we let them.”

“Depot has picked up their launch and is returning fire,” Anderson reported. “I’m not picking up any fighter launches though.”

“They’ll put everything into space they can,” Stanford interjected. “But… if they didn’t have everybody up, suited, and ready to go… a launch from a cold start can easily be thirty minutes.”

“They don’t have thirty minutes, CAG,” the redheaded officer pointed out.

“If they weren’t ready to launch, a lot of people are about to die,” Kyle agreed. “And if they weren’t, whoever was in command made a dangerous mistake.”

His bridge crew seemed to accept that, slowly settling back into their tasks and tracking the two sets of missiles.

The depot really had depended on its starfighters and defending starships, he noted. Triumphant had fired twenty-four Stormwind capital ship missiles at the depot – and the stations had only fired sixteen back. Given that the Commonwealth generally designed their capital ships to handle at least half again their own missile strength, the depot’s defenses weren’t going to do much to the battleship.

“Captain Roberts,” Tobin addressed him over a private link. “I really do hate to jog your shoulders in the middle of a fight, but what is your plan?”

“Triumphant’s salvo will almost certainly remove the depot’s starfighters as a factor,” Kyle replied. “Once Triumphant is the only real threat on the board, I’ll deploy Stanford’s fighters. We’ll need them to build up extra velocity to make sure they can catch her if she tries to run.

“There’s a risk of detection,” he admitted, “which is why I want to hold off on launching until after Triumphant has neutralized the defenses. I’m not sure how Richardson will react once he sees us, but I’d rather not fight both a battleship and a depot defense fighter group if I can avoid it.”

Tobin nodded slowly.

“What if he runs, Captain?” he asked. “I am not prepared to lose our prey again.”

“We only have so long before they’re going to see us, sir,” Kyle told him. “I’m surprised we haven’t been detected yet, to be honest. Once the depot defenses are down, we will launch at Triumphant. If Richardson escapes…” he shrugged. “We still have a speed advantage. We can liberate Alizon today and bring him down tomorrow. It’s worth the risk in my opinion.”

The Vice Admiral looked like he was going to argue for a moment, but finally seemed to control himself and nodded again.

“Fight your ship, Captain,” he ordered.

Triumphant’s missiles struck home. There had never really been any doubt in Kyle’s mind that they would, but it was still nerve-wracking to watch them hit. Anderson’s assessment that the battleship hadn’t loaded their warheads bore out, as while the explosions ripped through and gutted the six fighter launch platforms the impacts lacked gigaton-range antimatter reactions.

The depot had shot down twelve missiles, but that had still left two for each platform – and Stormwinds, like the Alliance’s Jackhammers, linked together in a networked intelligence perfectly capable of making last minute target allocations.

Whoever had been in charge of the starfighters either had never taken them to full readiness status, or had stood them down after it appeared Triumphant was going to surrender. Across six stations, the defenders had only put another four squadrons worth of fighters into space in almost twenty minutes.

Sixty Scimitar fighters wasn’t going to be enough to take down Triumphant – not unless they were well-trained, rigorously drilled, squadrons operating with comrades they knew and were well-prepared for the fight.

Kyle would have stacked any one of his Wings of forty-eight Falcons against Triumphant without hesitation, though the losses would be awful. The remaining defenders of Alizon’s new logistics depot didn’t stand a chance.

Triumphant herself had vanished into a ball of jamming as the defender’s missiles closed, and even with the drones far closer than Avalon they couldn’t pick out the moment the last missile died. There was a cascade of explosions as lasers and positron lances slashed the big missiles apart.

And in the middle of that cascade, the drone feed suddenly out. Then the second drone feed vanished.

“Anderson,” Kyle snapped. “What happened to our drones?”

“They’re gone, sir,” the officer replied. “Give me a moment.” He paused, reviewing data. “Void. Probe Three got confused by their ECM and misdirected their heat venting,” he admitted softly. “They saw her, sir – and then picked up Probe Two on their active sweep. They know they’re being watched.”

The Q-probes were the stealthiest items in any Navy’s inventory, but ninety-plus percent of that stealth boiled down to carefully directing their engines and heat venting away from their enemies. Once that had failed, they fell back on powerful ECM to stay alive in combat environments – but that ECM also made their presence, if not their location, obvious.

Anderson’s Q-probes had died before they could bring their defense routines up, and without the probes in place, Avalon was now seeing everything as it was twenty-six minutes ago. They had no idea what Triumphant was doing in response to discovering their watchers.

“Can we say when they’ll detect us?” Kyle demanded.

“No idea, sir,” Anderson admitted. “They’ll probably guess we’re doing exactly what we’re doing, and we are throwing off a lot of energy. If they take a close look, we’ll be pretty obvious, sir. I’d guess they know by now.”

“Understood,” Kyle acknowledged. Well, he’d known the stealth trick wasn’t going to work forever. Avalon was still almost half a billion kilometers from the depot – five and a half hours of careful deceleration for a zero-zero intercept.

“Stanford, Norup,” he barked, opening channels to the two men. “Launch now. Don’t worry about stealth – they know we’re here.

“It looks like most of the defenses are down, but, Stanford, make sure Norup is covered all the way in. Those starfighters may still want to play.”

“Rokos and his Wing are on the depot,” the CAG replied. “I’ll send Nguyen and Epsilon to back him up with those starfighters. The rest of us are going after the battleship.”

“We’re firing new probes now,” Kyle told Stanford, with a commanding glance over at Anderson, “we’ll relay data as we have it, but they won’t be very far ahead of you for a while.”

“I know the rodeo, Captain,” Stanford replied. “We’ll bring the bastard down.”

“Good luck, CAG,” Kyle said softly. “Seems we’ll need more than I hoped!”

---

---

It was good to be back in space. There was little Michael found more frustrating than sitting on the carrier, watching other people make the decisions that would decide whether or not he and his people lived and died.

With all of his starfighters out and moving, however, he had a lot more control over how things would end.

“All right people,” he told his flight crews. “Everybody but Bravo and Epsilon, set your course for Triumphant. Rokos, Nguyen – the Marines are in your tender hands. Try to get them to target in one piece?”

“I make no guarantees,” Rokos intoned ominously. “Though I’ll note that Major Norup owes me a beer.”

“Then you’ll want to be sure I survive to make good,” the Marine commander replied. “We’ll be fine, CAG. Go get Triumphant.”

“Good luck, Major.”

“I’m not the one charging a battleship in a tin can,” Norup pointed out.

Michael really had no response to that, so he let the channel drop as the two groups of small craft separated. ‘Tin can’ was a more accurate description of his starfighter than he figured the Marine commander knew – tiny as the thirty-meter wedges of his ships were by the standard of modern spacecraft, they still massed about as much as the old wet navy destroyers that had first carried the nickname.

Depending on how Triumphant reacted, this could be a very short flight or long one. If the battleship set her course to engage Avalon, they’d be engaging in an hour and a half at almost a third of lightspeed. If the battleship ran, they’d bring her down in about three.

It would be ten minutes before they knew for sure, though the time delay would drop as they closed – and perhaps more importantly, as the Q-Com-equipped probes fired ahead of them at a thousand gravities closed.

And… there were the Q-probes dying. What he was seeing on his scanners was still twenty-five minutes old, but it was now more recent than the last data from the dead probes. Triumphant continued on her course for a few minutes, though Michael winced as he saw the power readings from the scans she was sweeping space with.

Even at twenty-five light minutes, that was going to get a readable return off of Avalon. One way or another, the rogue battleship would know she was being hunted by the time the signal got back.

“What are they doing?” Kayla Arnolds, his gunner asked softly. “Are they… spinning?”

He was right, Michael realized as he reviewed the footage. Triumphant had ceased to accelerate, turned so her longest side was facing Avalon, and begun slowly rotating.

“They’re launching,” the CAG said simply. “Find me the missiles, Kayla.”

His command starfighter traded the third missile in each of its magazines for dramatically increased computer support. Linked into the systems via his implant, he almost felt the repeated reviews of the data with various levels of enhancement and different tools. The whole process took seconds.

There were almost certainly twenty-four missiles – a full salvo from the battleship – but they could only confirm fourteen of them. Four of those they only had vague locations on, and as Michael watched the computer downgraded one of them to ‘probable’ from ‘likely’.

Then it blipped up six new missiles as the battleship rotated again – a reload cycle complete on all of her launchers.

“Keep an eye on those birds,” he ordered. “I need an estimate of how many.”

“They’ll have to go live, won’t they?” Arnolds asked. “We’ll see them then.”

“I dislike surprises, Lieutenant,” Michael observed. “Keep them labeled on the feed, watch their course.”

More missiles popped up. Not nearly enough for them to be detecting all of them, but as the minutes passed, Michael was detecting dozens of definite and probable missiles – none of which had fired their engines, and none of which were on a direct course for Avalon.

“What are they doing?” he asked aloud.

As if the universe was listening, the missiles finally activated their drives. His starfighter’s computers dispassionately analyzed their numbers and course and gave him the most likely answer to his question.

Four full salvos, ninety-six missiles, activated their drives in a sequence carefully calculated to turn them into a single massive salvo. Their course arced away from Avalon, but his computers happily told him that they would almost certainly turn back, go ballistic, and make a final approach on the carrier from a direction his fighters could not intercept.

“Oh Starless Void,” he cursed as he grasped the dilemma that Captain Richardson had left him with. If he pursued Triumphant, he could bring the battleship to bay long before they escaped into Alcubierre – but Avalon would have at best a fifty percent chance of stopping that many missiles.

He ran the vectors to be sure and sighed. Triumphant’s commander had chosen his attack arc with care and skill – there was no line on which his fighters could catch the missiles and still have a chance of bringing the battleship to bay.

With two Wings detached to assault the depot, he only had three Wings – one hundred and forty-four fighters – left. He could, maybe, take Triumphant with one Wing, or stop the missiles with only one Wing… but to be certain of either…

“All fighters,” he opened a channel to the ships in his attack force. “New course downloading, setup for missile intercept.”

They could always catch Triumphant later – but if they lost Avalon, none of them got to go home.

---

---

Dimitri listened to the Vice Commodore’s decision with disbelief. He understood the CAG’s dilemma, but their mission was to catch Triumphant. He had to catch Triumphant.

“Captain Roberts,” he snapped. “That salvo will go ballistic before it reaches us. How much danger are we seriously in?”

“Sir, they have enough ECM in play that we can’t localize their vectors before they go ballistic,” Roberts told him grimly. “With a fighter intercept, we’re in no danger – without one, we’ll localize the missiles when they bring their drives back up for terminal maneuvers. We’d have less than a minute to intercept the missiles.

“With that many birds, we’re looking at a fifty percent chance of losing Avalon.”

“If he goes after the missiles, we’ll fail in our mission to catch Triumphant,” Dimitri snarled at the other man.

“We will catch Triumphant,” Roberts replied calmly. “Not today, perhaps, but we have a strategic speed advantage, and we have enough probes scattered around this system now that we’ll know their destination when they jump.

“Given those conditions, the preservation of this ship takes tactical priority over catching Triumphant today,” the Captain said flatly. “Ending our pursuit of Triumphant in mutual destruction has no purpose, Admiral.”

Roberts, Dimitri reflected, wasn’t thinking about their time limit. The Alliance might well pull Avalon back – or order them to hold Alizon! – if they didn’t catch Triumphant today. If they could still pursue Triumphant, though, the Captain wasn’t wrong.

“Damn it, Captain, you’re supposed to be the aggressive wonderboy,” he snapped anyway. “You’re the last man I expected to be a coward in the face of the enemy!”

“Aggression is about risk, sir,” Roberts replied flatly. “It’s about odds and probabilities, and knowing we can catch them later makes me perfectly willing to give up a ninety percent chance of catching Triumphant today to avoid a fifty percent of losing Avalon.

“I have no intention of dying for revenge today when we can live and have it tomorrow.”

---

---

The entire concept behind a missile strike with a ballistic phase was to use ECM and decoys to render the exact location of the missiles unpredictable. That way, they were almost impossible to destroy before they hit terminal range and brought their drives back up for their final attack runs.

Like most tactics, there was a counter-measure. In this case, using starfighters to intercept the missiles in their ballistic phase. While you couldn’t locate the missiles accurately enough to shoot them down, you could bring starfighters in close enough that they could locate the missiles.

Kyle watched impassively as Stanford’s fighters ripped through the missile swarm. The Stormwinds re-activated their ECM too late – a clear sign that the humans responsible for them weren’t expecting them to survive at this point. A good missile jockey would have followed the starfighters’ path and sent the lightspeed command to bring up the ECM early well before the attackers arrived.

“I show ninety-one missile kills, Captain,” Stanford reported. “Can you confirm?”

Kyle glanced over at Anderson who flashed a thumbs up.

“We have the same, CAG,” he told Stanford. “I’m pretty sure we can deal with five missiles.”

“Want me to take off after Triumphant?”

Avalon’s Captain looked at the geometry to sighed.

“There’s no point,” he admitted. “Your velocity is all wrong at this point, you wouldn’t even get close before they jump. Reinforce the depot strike,” he ordered. “Let’s make sure the Marines get in.”

“Tally-ho, Captain.”

Kyle focused his attention on the depot. They had a new Q-probe in the area, so he had real-time data on the defenders again. Those sixty starfighters continued to orbit, which surprised him. They might be outnumbered, but he refused to fault the Commonwealth Navy’s will to fight.

“Sir, Wing Commander Rokos is on a channel for you.”

“Link him in,” he ordered.

“Captain, I’m receiving a lightspeed transmission from the depot,” the Wing Commander told him. “They’re requesting to speak with our CO, so I’m relaying to you.

“We are one hour from turkey shoot time,” he noted. “Activating relay.”

An image of a pale-skinned man with slightly pink eyes and pure white hair resolved itself on Kyle’s implants. A small icon on the screen noted it was a recorded message, transmitted a little over five minutes beforehand – Rokos’ fighters were still over five light minutes from their target.

“I am Captain John Paris of the Commonwealth Navy,” the albino said calmly. “My people have completed their scans of their starfighters and confirmed what I presumed from the beginning.

“While the officers and men and women under my command are brave, their morale has been shattered by betrayal, and I am willing to admit when we face a superior foe. To avoid further loss of life on this already bloody day, I offer the unconditional surrender of the Alizon Logistics Depot, the shattered remnants of its defenses, and all forces on the surface of Alizon.”

Paris sighed and bowed his head for a long moment before looking back up at the camera.

“I await the response of the Alliance High Commander,” he said quietly.

Kyle checked that Tobin had received the message – for some strange reason, he didn’t have an active link to the Vice Admiral right now – and then opened a link.

“Admiral.”

“Captain.”

From his frosty tone, Tobin hadn’t quite forgotten their earlier argument.

“The depot has offered their surrender,” Kyle said calmly. “How we proceed from here… is a strategic decision, sir.”

Frost or not, that got a quirk that might have been the beginnings of a smile from the old Admiral.

“Then I shall speak to this Captain Paris. Stay on the channel, Captain.”

Kyle watched as Tobin’s people quickly and efficiently setup for the recording, and then the Admiral turned to face the camera, his most intimidating dark scowl settling onto his face.

“Captain Paris, I am Vice Admiral Tobin of the Castle Federation Space Navy,” he rumbled. “Your surrender is accepted. My Marines will arrive in just under eighty minutes from your receipt of this message. Understand that any resistance to their arrival or their boarding will be met with maximum force.

“Enough blood has been shed this day,” the big Vice Admiral told the Commonwealth base commander. “Your wisdom in avoiding further loss is noted. Once my Marines are aboard, you will be escorted to Avalon where my Captain and I will accept your surrender in person.

“Vice Admiral Tobin, out.”