Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Read online

  He took the paper and carefully folded it, placing it in the inside pocket of his jacket as he shook his head at Mira, a moment of seriousness lowering the levity.

  “I never would,” he said softly. He’d missed the first ten years of his son’s life, having fled town and joined the Navy when he got his high school girlfriend pregnant, but he was learning how to be a father.

  If the war ever let him.

  “Come on, big guy,” Mira said after a couple of seconds’ hesitation. “There’s an aircar on the way for me. Let’s get going.”

  #

  His possessions, including his son’s drawing, stored in a Navy locker, Captain Kyle Roberts made his way through the busy halls of the Castle Federation Joint Command Center. While three hundred-story skyscrapers adorned the surface of the Center, tucked away in the mountains ten kilometers outside one of Castle’s largest cities, the vast majority of the facility was underground.

  From these underground caverns, the Joint Chiefs ran a military of over a hundred FTL starships, twenty thousand starfighters and almost forty million people. Kyle’s implant was informing him of the presence of no less than ten wireless networks it could link into, each with different levels of security and authorizations.

  Around him, the senior noncoms and junior officers who worked in the back offices that kept the Federation’s military machine running moved at a carefully fast but not hurried pace. Kyle’s size and the barely smaller Marine looming at his right shoulder bought him a degree of space, but the hallways and transit pods that delivered him to Admiral Mohammed Kane’s office were packed.

  Once into the main offices of the Joint Department of Personnel, however, the crowd eased. A pair of Marines stood just inside the door and one of them waved him to a halt.

  “Implant ID, please,” she ordered him.

  He opened a channel from his implant, allowing her to access the specific vault in his mental databanks that contained his Navy identification.

  The Marine nodded and smiled but also produced a small device that she ran over his arm. It flashed a green light as it verified his DNA against his Navy file, and she stepped back and saluted.

  “Thank you for your patience, Captain Roberts,” she told him. “Admiral Kane has a visitor, but I was instructed to send you directly to his office.”

  “Thank you, Corporal.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” she told him. “It’s an honor.”

  He returned her salute and followed the route she’d transferred to his implant. He knew the way to Kane’s office, but leaving the assigned path in the secure sections of the Command Center was unwise.

  The path led him and his bodyguard through to a second set of security, but these Marines had known he was coming and waved him through. Their job was to make sure that only people who were supposed to be in “the bubble” made it in, where the front door guards’ job was to make sure that people were who they said they were.

  A blonde Senior Lieutenant who was probably gorgeous when she wasn’t actively projecting grimness to maintain the authority of her role as the Admiral’s secretary waved Kyle forward.

  “The Admiral is meeting with a guest right now,” she told him. “My understanding is that Mister Kellers will be participating in your meeting as well, but the Admiral asked me to wait until your appointment to send you in.”

  “Understood, Lieutenant,” Kyle replied, recognizing the name of his local Member of the Federation Assembly and wondering what the politician was doing here. “Five minutes, as I understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Would you like a coffee or water?”

  #

  Exactly on time for his eleven hundred Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time appointment, the Lieutenant started doing the odd rapid blink any citizen of the implant generation recognized as a sign of someone having a conversation via neural implant.

  “Admiral Kane is ready for you, Captain Roberts,” she told him. “Go right on in.”

  There was nothing distinguishing Admiral Mohammed Kane’s plain office door from the hundreds of other metal-reinforced wooden doors in the Command Center except for a small name plate.

  The plate, Kyle noted, hadn’t been updated for Kane’s new rank—but the associated data tag that his implant picked up had been. The software was always faster to pick up new data than the hardware.

  “Come in, Captain Roberts. Have a seat,” Kane instructed. The Admiral responsible for the fragile edifice of the Federation’s manning and personnel requirements was a tall man, his face visibly aged from the last time Kyle had seen him. He’d lost weight, growing even more gaunt with time, and his black turban didn’t fully conceal his rapidly graying hair.

  “I believe you know Mr. Daniel Kellers?” the Admiral continued, gesturing toward the other man in the room. Kellers was a heavyset man of Kyle’s own age with a ruddy face already marked with laugh lines, and-pitch black hair.

  He was also the boyfriend of the mother of Kyle’s son, a status that had made most of Kyle’s meetings with the man awkward, though much less so than he suspected they both had feared.

  It helped that Jacob absolutely adored both older men, and that Kellers hadn’t entered the boy’s life until after Kyle had reentered it.

  “Daniel and I are acquainted,” Kyle allowed with a cheerful smile. “Though I’ll confess I’m not certain why he’s here.”

  “That’s fair,” Kellers allowed. “Normally, the role I’m playing today would be filled by one of the Senators, but…” He shrugged. “With the war and the Alliance, some items have been dropped to the bottom of the priority list, and some Assembly Committees that should be headed by Senators…aren’t.”

  Kyle nodded his understanding, though it didn’t fully answer his question.

  “I apologize for not filling you in on our plans for you earlier, Captain,” Kane told him gruffly, “but to be perfectly honest, we weren’t entirely certain what role you would be playing until yesterday.”

  The Member of the Federation Assembly coughed gently and shook his head at Kane.

  “You may as well tell him, Admiral,” Kellers replied. “Lisa and I were planning a damned party until the rug got yanked out. I don’t think Jacob picked up on it, but if he did, let’s not expect a twelve-year-old to keep the secret for us.”

  The Admiral sighed.

  “Captain, you are aware that the list for flag promotions came out this morning?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Congratulations are in order, I have to add.”

  “Thank you,” Kane said, a fleeting but real smile crossing his face. “It’s not news, I imagine, to a capital ship commander of the Navy that there are more politics involved in flag promotions than there should be.

  “Every flag officer promotion is approved by both the Assembly and the Senate, though as often as not, both bodies simply sign off on the list the Joint Chiefs send them,” he continued. “In this case, the Assembly approved it, but the Senate stripped several names out at the last minute.”

  Kyle leaned back in his chair, studying the two other men. They couldn’t possibly be suggesting…

  “It was an out-of-the-zone promotion,” Kellers told him, “so the Chiefs highlighted it in the list, but the Assembly gladly signed off on your promotion to Rear Admiral. Technically, that list is confidential and I shouldn’t even have shared it with Lisa, but I knew what your schedule was like.”

  Doctor Lisa Kerensky was Keller’s girlfriend and Kyle’s ex. Until quite recently, she and their son had still lived with Kyle’s mother, but she’d bought her own house now that she was actually working—as a junior neurosurgeon at one of the planet’s most prestigious hospitals.

  Kyle realized he was focusing on that to distract himself. They’d promoted him to Rear Admiral? But…

  “Senator Randall killed it,” Kane said flatly, and Kyle finally nodded in understanding.

  Technically, the thirteen-person executive that ran the Castle Federation rotated its members among the Federation’s f
ourteen full member systems, and those members were all equal members. In practice, the Castle System was never rotated off the Council, and the Senator for Castle was more equal than others.

  And one Kyle Roberts had been responsible for Senator Joseph Randall’s son going to jail for treason.

  Kane shook his head.

  “There aren’t many people fully briefed on Blue Sunbeam who don’t think you earned the damned star,” he told Kyle. “But the Senate debated for two days, and it was eventually decided for us to pull your name from the list to get the rest of the promotions through without further acrimony.”

  “I…” Kyle swallowed, then nodded firmly. “I appreciate the vote of confidence putting my name forward represents on the part of the Joint Chiefs,” he told Kane. “Had the vote gone in our favor, I would have done my best to live up to the responsibilities. But I am very junior to be looking at an Admiral’s star, and I’m not bothered by the delay.”

  Kane chuckled.

  “You were our youngest Captain ever, but you won’t be our youngest Admiral,” he pointed out. “There are no less than three cases on record where officers were Captains for less than three months before receiving their stars. At least one was political bullshit,” he admitted, “but the other two earned it the hard way.”

  “I am content to serve as the Federation requires, sir,” Kyle replied. “I’m guessing you have a ship for me, then?”

  “We do,” Kane said with a nod. “And a mission. I want to warn you from the beginning, however: we’re leaving you in charge of the mission and you were expected to have a flag captain, not command a ship yourself.”

  “We do as we must, sir.”

  “We’re giving you command of Kodiak,” the Admiral told him, and Kyle understood the warning as he nodded slowly. Kodiak was an Ursine-class ship out of the Reserve, an older carrier half the size of his last non-black-ops command.

  That big a step down could easily be seen as an insult, though given that politics had taken Kyle’s last official command away, he would have accepted it with a smile either way.

  “Your XO is one of our best,” Kane continued. “Senior Fleet Commander Cearbhall Taggart is only a few months at most away from his own command. You will also be accompanied by the Conqueror-class battlecruiser Alexander, under Captain Sarka.”

  A Conqueror-class battlecruiser was one of the most modern warships the Castle Federation possessed, only barely edged out in mass and overall effectiveness by the Sanctuary-class supercarriers like Kyle’s old Avalon. Seventy-two starfighters, twenty-four megaton-and-a-half-a-second positron lances… Their fighter wing could take on many older warships on their own, and nothing would survive entering the range of Alexander’s massive beams.

  “That is quite a bit of firepower,” Kyle concluded.

  “Yes,” the Admiral agreed. “Sarka is junior to you by almost a year; she was only promoted two months ago—after Alexander’s original Captain was killed during Fourth Fleet’s offensive. Like you, she commanded well in action after her CO was killed and the decision was made to leave her in command once Alexander had completed her repairs.

  “Nonetheless, both she and her crew need a less strenuous work-up than sending them right into the crucible of the main front, which brings us to your mission and Mr. Kellers’ presence here.”

  The Member of the Federation Assembly smiled thinly, an uncomfortable-looking expression on his cheerful face.

  “I head the Committee for Rimward Foreign Affairs,” he told Kyle. “Like I said earlier, the Committee should be headed by a Senator…but they’re all focused on the war, so I got the job as my own focus is on business and merchant shipping.

  “Depending on which map and whose estimates you’re looking at, there are somewhere between fifty and one hundred and twenty inhabited systems Rimward from the Alliance of Free Stars,” Kellers continued. “Since we’re between those stars and the Commonwealth, they look to us as the center of technology and civilization the same way we look to the Commonwealth when they’re not trying to conquer us.”

  “We’re hardly the only major power here, though,” Kyle noted, and the MFA nodded.

  “Exactly. Before the last war with the Commonwealth, we, the Renaissance Trade Factor, and the Coraline Imperium were all competing for influence and trade deals among the systems that now make up the Alliance…and the systems to the Rim of us.

  “Those nations in the immediate path of the Commonwealth’s advance joined the Alliance and we stopped competing for influence in those systems. Those to Rimward, though…”

  Kellers shrugged.

  “They were too poor and too far away to be of value to the Alliance or under immediate threat from the Commonwealth,” he concluded. “So, they didn’t join the Alliance, and we continued our delicate dance of protection and trade treaties—in the area of immediate concern, in competition with the Coraline Imperium.”

  The Imperium was the second-most powerful state in the Alliance, a constitutional monarchy whose Imperator wielded real and direct power. They were valued allies now, but the fleet the Castle Federation had stopped the Commonwealth with in the previous war had been built to stand off Coraline, not Terra.

  “Our trade with those systems helps maintain the economy and industry that build and arm the Navy,” Kellers told Kyle. “We need those trade routes, but we got a lot of them by promising to protect these systems if they came under attack.”

  “And I’m guessing they’re under attack,” Kyle replied. “The Commonwealth?”

  “We wish,” Admiral Kane said bluntly. “If it was the Commonwealth, we could send an Alliance task group to fight them. So far as we can tell, however, what they’re facing is ‘simply’ a severe outbreak of homegrown privacy.”

  “There are three systems in the region we’re sending you to that are utterly critical,” Kellers noted. “Antioch, Serengeti, and Istanbul were the organizers of a major trade pact in the region that was helping leverage the best part of twenty systems out of poverty.

  “Now, Antioch, Serengeti and Istanbul were getting the most benefit, but their neighbors weren’t hurting for their involvement in the free trade zone. Those three, however, owned almost all of the ships and were the only ones wealthy enough to buy warships from us and Coraline.”

  “And several of those warships have now been destroyed,” the Admiral explained. “They are desperately calling for help—calling on us to honor our promises and send a fleet to defend them.”

  “We don’t have a fleet to spare,” Kyle said quietly. His last mission had been a do-or-die strike at the heart of the Commonwealth to try and trigger another front in the war, for the simple reason that the Alliance didn’t have the hulls to keep fighting the Commonwealth head-on.

  “But we can spare two ships—two ships, and a mission commander whose name carries as heavy a weight as another carrier,” Kane told him. “They’ll see the Stellar Fox as the aid they were promised, and we’re sending every ship we can spare.”

  All two of them. Kyle might hate the nickname the media had hung on him, but he could see the value in this case, and he nodded confidently.

  “I’ll need a full intel briefing and time to sit down with both Sarka and Taggart,” he concluded. “But unless these pirates have managed to acquire modern warships, I think we can handle the situation.”

  “We’re also giving you the first fruits of Project Vulture,” Kane told him. “You’ll have three squadrons of Vulture-A-type prototype bombers, half a flight group, aboard Kodiak, the first ones built. The name is appropriate, as the first-generation prototypes are basically the Terran design you stole with our control systems bolted on.”

  “I saw the Terran bombers in action at Tau Ceti,” Kyle replied. “I won’t turn down whatever we’ve got.”

  “We want battlefield testing,” the Admiral said. “The intent is that the final Vulture design we put into mass production will be an upgrade over the Terran platform, but simulations will only get
us so far. These pirates represent an opportunity for a lower-threat-environment test of the weapons.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Realize, Captain, that you will be passing beyond Alliance space and speaking for the Federation as a representative of our government,” Kellers told him. “We will be assigning a diplomat to your staff and I strongly recommend you listen to him, but…you will speak for the Federation, not him.”

  “I understand,” Kyle repeated. “I will not fail the Federation, sirs.”

  #

  Chapter 3

  Castle System

  16:00 September 11, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Gawain Orbital Yard Complex

  “Those Katanas are on an intercept vector; their missiles will hit us before we can launch.”

  The report echoed both inside Flight Commander Michelle Williams’s head and audibly in the cramped cockpit of the Vulture-A bomber she was flying. The dark-haired pilot shook her head to clear the implant echo, studying the battlespace as her bombers lunged toward the Commonwealth carrier waiting ahead of them.

  “The Katanas are Rodriguez’s problem,” she told her junior squadron commander. “Set your ECM for full defensive and prep a Starfire salvo to keep them occupied, but focus your attention on your Gemblades.

  “That carrier is our objective,” she told her people firmly. At two percent of lightspeed, her torpedoes had a range of almost twenty light-seconds, but the new generation of starfighter missiles on both sides in this encounter were carrying could still reach a fifth of that—and the fighters were much closer to her bombers.

  Seconds ticked by, the range dropping down as the fighters closed.

  “Starfires away,” her gunner reported, the bomber trembling slightly as four of her lighter fighter missiles launched into space. “Arming Gemblade torpedoes. Launch range in one hundred sixty seconds.”