41

Timing was everything. Saint Augustine’s first missiles would reach Avalon over three minutes before she could range on Triumphant. Even faced with top-of-the-line capital ship missiles, the supercarrier could probably handle thirty missiles.

Saint Augustine’s first missiles concerned him. The second salvo, fired a minute later, worried him a bit more.

The actual problem was that Triumphant had finally fired a missile salvo shortly after Saint Augustine had. Those twenty-four missiles would arrive alongside Augustine’s third salvo. Without starfighters to play the first line of defense, Kyle wasn’t at all sure his ship could take over fifty missiles.

“Hold your course, Commander Pendez,” he ordered softly. “Commander Anderson, I’ll take control of our missiles if you please. Focus on your defenses.”

Kyle’s gamble might still pay off, but that required them to still be alive when they reached positron lance range of Triumphant.

“Lieutenant Carter,” he turned to his communication officer. “Any word from Commodore Tecumseh?”

“No, sir.”

The commander of the Terran Task Group was apparently willing to stand back and watch. To be fair, Tecumseh was probably the smartest Terran officer in the system, which meant he had to be feeling paranoid about the absence of Kyle’s fighters.

“First salvo impact in five minutes,” Anderson reported. “I estimate a thirty-five second engagement window for active defense. Commander Solace,” he turned to the XO on the intercom. “I’m passing control of the inner zone to Secondary Control.”

“We’re locked in here, Commander Anderson,” she replied calmly. “You clean, we’ll sweep.”

Kyle left his subordinates to it. The light positron lances used for anti-fighter and anti-missile defense could start killing missiles at a million kilometers. The laser defense array had more coverage and more beams, but a lot less effective range.

He focused on that third combined salvo. The nine missile salvos that Anderson had launched weren’t going to get through either battleship’s defenses. Kyle had let his Tactical Officer launch them as much in reflex as anything else, but he still had a use for them.

“Impact in one minute, targeting with outer defenses.”

Keeping a quarter of his mind on the immediate threat, Avalon’s Captain directed his missiles carefully. Unlike the drones they could use to watch the battle, missiles didn’t carry Q-Com systems – no one was going to put entangled particle arrays on something designed to be destroyed. An array large enough to be useful would increase the cost of a missile roughly a hundred-fold, leaving a single capital ship missile costing a third of the price of an entire starfighter.

Timing was everything.

Even as his subordinates fought to protect the carrier from the current attack, Kyle studied the enemy missiles, laid in the directions, and programmed his orders. A moment’s thought sent a second salvo of missiles thundering out into space.

“First salvo is clear,” Solace reported, her voice spiky with adrenaline. “Second salvo entering engagement range in twenty seconds. Third salvo in ninety seconds.”

“Lance range in two minutes, thirty seconds,” Anderson reported.

Kyle gave his final orders and returned his attention to the main plot. The inevitable natural ‘jamming’ effect of antimatter explosions was messing with their sensors now, with the cloud of radioactive debris from the first thirty missiles surrounding the big carrier.

“Second salvo entering range.”

In the same instant Saint Augustine’s second set of thirty missiles entered range of Avalon’s defense, her third salvo interpenetrated with the nine missiles the carrier had fired back. The screen flashed with white light as all nine of Kyle’s missiles shot closer to the Commonwealth missiles and detonated.

His subordinates wisely focused on their own work and Kyle studied the results. He’d lucked out – twelve missiles were gone, the Stormwinds not smart enough to avoid proximity kills without some kind of warning.

Even as he watched, though, the missiles spread apart – as did Triumphant’s. His second salvo dove into the heart of Triumphant’s salvo, but the missiles’ simplistic but fast brains had reacted in time.

Only six missiles died this time, and Kyle leaned back in his chair as the remaining forty missiles charged in on his command.

“Second salvo clear,” Solace reported grimly. “Third salvo entering range in thirty seconds. I confirm forty – repeat, four zero, missiles remaining.” She met Kyle’s gaze through the intercom. “We’ll do what we can, sir.”

The statue he’d accepted as his XO in time of stress was gone, and there was something in her eyes as she looked at him. He shook his head gently.

“No, Mira,” he told her. “This is Avalon. We do what no one else can!”

There was a smile and a cheer on his people’s lips as the enemy missiles charged into range.

Kyle was out of tricks now. No missiles left to use as sacrificial lambs. No aggressive suicide charge to shock and awe a second-rate enemy into submitting. No smart Alcubierre tricks to confound and surprise the foe.

Just one hole card he’d already played, and the sheer grit and skill of the crew of the deep space supercarrier Avalon. It would have to do.

Positron beams glittered across his tactical display as Anderson opened fire. Ghosts flickered around them as the Tactical Officer’s subordinates unleashed the carrier’s electronic warfare suite, tempting and tricking missiles away from their targets.

Seconds ticked by before the near-lightspeed weapons hit their targets. Missiles began to die. Avalon’s forward broadsides mounted one hundred seventy-kiloton-per-second lances, and those weapons tore into the Terran missiles.

But those missiles had their own ECM. Ghosts flickered and appeared around the missiles, and the missiles themselves jerked and spiraled, throwing off Anderson’s targeting programs and forcing misses.

A dozen missiles died. Then another dozen. Then sixteen missiles tore into the inner defense zone and the hundreds of small lasers mounted along Avalon’s arrowhead hull opened fire.

Kyle held his breath. He wasn’t the only one, and seconds passed in dead silence as Avalon’s crew guided their ship from inside their implants. Missiles died, first in singles, then in pairs – a full dozen of the deadly weapons flashing apart in antimatter fire as Solace took them out with deadly precision.

Four made it through. Out of over a hundred capital ship missiles, costing millions of Commonwealth dollars apiece, four penetrated every active defense the supercarrier could throw at them.

They made it through every defense… and missed.

The carrier lurched as the missiles, fooled by ECM and the radiation clouds of their dead sisters, detonated well clear of her hull, waves of energy hammering into the warship’s meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic armor. The lights flickered, dimmed, and came back up.

The tactical feed didn’t. A moment later, a fuzzy, mixed image appeared in Kyle’s brain.

“Wong?” he snapped. “Where’s our feed?”

“You’re getting all you’re getting,” the Engineer replied bluntly. “Those blasts just melted every sensor array on our hull.”

“We need those sensors to target the guns,” Anderson said grimly. “Q-Com relay from the drones won’t cut it – the bandwidth is enough for keeping an eye on people, but not for attack telemetry. Our drones are moving fast – we’ve got significant relativity impacts. The computers can adjust… but not fast enough to hit an evading target at two million kilometers.”

“Damn,” Kyle said mildly. “Prepare for random fire then,” he told Anderson. “We may not hit them, but by the gods let’s keep their eyes on…”

“Wait!” Anderson snapped. “Augustine just flipped and went to emergency decal. Anthony flipped as well – they’re inbound. What the Void?!”

Captain Kyle Roberts glanced at the tactical display and ran the angles in his mind. A cold, savage smile grew on his face.

“It seems Commodore Tecumseh is almost paranoid enough,” he said aloud. “He just spotted Stanford.”

It was almost a relief when the Commonwealth starships finally reacted to the starfighter group.

The expanding radiation cloud from Avalon’s burst of emergency acceleration had covered and concealed Michael’s people on their approach, but he’d known it couldn’t last forever. Even if his gunner was estimating the antimatter left behind would keep annihilating itself for another twenty to thirty minutes, the further they got from the initial point, the more and more likely it was that almost two hundred antimatter drives would be picked up.

As they’d grown closer and closer, Michael had started to suspect that the two battleships he was targeting had to have seen him, and the whole thing was a trap, waiting to lure the starfighters in and annihilate them at a range where the starships could hit them and they couldn’t return the favor.

Instead, they were almost on top of Triumphant, and only half a million kilometers from Saint Augustine, flying straight between the two starships at almost five percent of the speed of light. This was insane.

“All fighters,” he snapped. “Random-walk to avoid fire, full missile salvo on Augustine. Close with Triumphant and finish the son of a bitch!”

Fitting actions to words, he twisted his starfighter into a spiral, narrowly dodging the first beam of the day as Triumphant finally realized the danger. Saint Augustine was trying to put distance between her and the starfighters, but with eight hundred Starfire missiles barrelling down on her, all she was doing was buying time.

Spiraling in towards Triumphant, Michael left the missiles to his gunner and spun up the positron lance. The six thousand ton starfighter vibrated gently as the zero point cell feeding the weapon fired up, pulsing power back into the fighter’s grid and positrons into the capacitor banks for the weapon.

Now!

One hundred and ninety-two Falcon starfighters spun in space, dancing a pirouette of survival around the deadly beams of antimatter – and then fired their own lances.

Many missed. Some only contacted for fractions of a second. A handful struck and held, the beams burning clean through the battleship as they converted her own mass into devastatingly powerful explosives.

It took Michael Stanford’s starfighters a mere eight seconds to cross their range envelope of Triumphant. When they left it, there was nothing left of the fifteen million ton battleship but radiation and debris.

Kematian was avenged.

Michael had fractions of a second to process Triumphant’s destruction. Even as their missiles struck home and his starfighters flashed by, Saint Augustine was firing on them. Her anti-fighter lances were targeting the swarm of missiles blasting in on her, but the battleship’s main guns could not target missiles.

They were simply inefficient at targeting starfighters. Michael winced as he saw ships simply disappear as the massive, megaton-a-second, lances struck home on starfighters barely able to withstand laser hits.

Then the missiles struck home. Starfires were fighter-launched weapons, a tenth the size and even less of the capability of capital ship missiles. The secondary lances and laser arrays took a vicious harvest, and hundreds of missiles detonated, filling the space around Saint Augustine in radiation and debris.

But hundreds remained. At this range, their initial velocity provided most of their kinetic energy – and their antimatter warheads the vast majority of their impact.

The final explosion was over half a teraton… and once that terrible and tremendous star faded, it left nothing behind of the Saint Augustine.

“Captain Roberts, this is Vice Commodore Stanford,” he said calmly, raising Avalon on the Q-Com. “We are adjusting course to rendezvous.” He checked their relative velocity and winced. “It’s… going to take a bit.”

“We copy, CAG,” Roberts replied. “We are vectoring to enable rendezvous. I make thirty-seven minutes to matched velocity.”

Michael checked. It would still take time to bring the two groups of ships together safely once they’d matched velocities, but that would get them close enough to help defend the carrier.

“We lost six starfighters,” he said quietly. “I have three pods on my scope, my Wing Commanders have already detailed retrieval teams.”

“Understood, Vice Commodore.”

“What about that last battleship, Captain?” Michael finally asked. The Saint Anthony was still heading for Avalon, though the vector the carrier was taking to rendezvous with the starfighters was helping keep her away. Unless the Terran ship actually turned away, though, she’d be able to bring Avalon to range before the starfighters would be in a position to assist.

“I’ll let you know,” Roberts replied. “It appears I have a call to make.”

Dropping the channel to Stanford, Kyle took a moment to breathe a sigh of relief. Wong had been overly optimistic in his assessment. Not only were all of their sensors gone, but all of the missile launcher hatches were welded shut, along with half of the emitters for the main guns.

All easy enough to repair out of shipboard resources – Avalon could fix an astonishingly large amount of damage to herself given time – but not in the time they had. With no more starfighters aboard, and Stanford on a vector off to the gods’ back acre, Saint Anthony was going to add a carrier to its kill sheet very quickly.

He smoothed his features, winked at the screen where Solace and the Secondary Control crew were watching, and activated the recorder in his chair.

“Commodore Tecumseh,” he greeted the other man calmly. “I have completed my mission in Barsoom, but I see your vessel is on a course towards mine. Understand that I did not choose to engage Saint Augustine, but your Captain Antioch left me no choice.

“If you continue on this course, Commodore, remember that I retain a full Wing of Falcon starfighters aboard. Starfighters that have just thoroughly demonstrated their ability against a Saint-class battleship.

“I came here to avenge Kematian’s dead. That is done. I have already shed more blood than I desired. Do not make me add yours to the total.

“For the honor of both our navy’s and the safety of both our crews, I offer you this one last chance. Break off, Commodore Tecumseh. Break off, and I will leave the Barsoom system with no further conflict. You have my word as an officer of the Castle Federation Space Navy, and as a fellow starship captain.”

He ended the message and hit transmit.

“Kalers,” he opened a channel to his Acting Deck Chief. “I want you to start running power to the launch tubes and moving ships into them.”

“Sir, we don’t have any ships left.”

“Stick shuttles in them,” Kyle ordered. “No crews, just make it damn clear to, say, a close-range Q-probe that we are preparing to launch ships. They won’t be able to tell what we’re loading unless the probe is inside the damn hangar.”

The Deck Chief looked at him like he was crazy, then shrugged.

“This is why you’re the Captain, Captain,” she said, then cut the channel.

“Do you think he’ll buy it?” Solace asked very softly on an implant-only channel no one else could hear.

“Thirty-seventy,” he admitted. “And only that high because the Commodore didn’t want to fight in the first place.”

They waited. The distance between the two ships was well over a light minute again, even if there was no way Avalon could avoid engagement.

“Sir, Q-probes report Saint Anthony is breaking off her attack run,” Anderson reported loudly.

Kyle had to check for himself. His Tactical Officer was right – the battleship had reversed her course, once again settling for a vector that would keep her between Avalon and the planet with its massive, expensive, terraforming machines.

He breathed a huge, obvious, sigh of relief – and then watched the bridge crew around him disintegrate into wild cheering.

“Message inbound from Tecumseh, sir!” Carter announced.

The now-familiar Amerindian features of the Terran Commodore appeared on the screen.

“I suspect, Captain Roberts, that a single Wing of your starfighters is no match for a fully prepared battleship,” Tecumseh said bluntly. “But you are correct in that Captain Richardson was a stain upon the honor of the Commonwealth. A stain I could not have removed without your aid.

“I will have my vengeance for Captain Antioch, Roberts, have no illusions about that,” the Commodore continued. “But today… today the Commonwealth owes you a debt of honor. Leave this system, Captain Roberts. Today and today only, I will grant you that respect.”

Kyle smiled. He’d done it. Somehow, against all odds, he’d done it.