Space Carrier Avalon Read online

“That’s just programming, isn’t it?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “That’s what I would have thought, until Chief Ambrose nearly blew one up,” the Deck Chief replied. “We’ll have the simulators running by the end of the day Kovalchick,” he promised. “Try reading the tech specs on the Falcons – they’re enough different from the Badger you’ll need the review!”

  “That’s not a bad suggestion,” Kyle told Kovalchick, joining the conversation. The dark-haired youth almost leapt out of his skin at realizing his commander was listening in. “I’ll need to review the tech manuals before I jack into one of the Falcons,” he continued, “I flew a Cobra aboard Alamo. The Chief’ll have the simulators up soon, right?” he glanced at Hammond.

  “Like I said, Ambrose is working on it,” the Deck Chief confirmed. “I think our simulators are older than the software was coded for, so we’ll need to build in a work-around.”

  “Of course, sir, chief,” Kovalchick stammered. He flushed darkly as he threw a quick salute and evaporated from the Flight Deck.

  Kyle turned his gaze on Hammond, who was quietly chuckling.

  “Something funny, Chief?” he asked.

  “Just that Kovalchick is off-duty,” the Chief replied. “He’s bothering me to make it possible for him to do more work. He’s a good kid.”

  “Situational awareness needs work,” Kyle observed cheerfully. “Otherwise, sounds promising. Do you have a few minutes for me, Chief?”

  “From the moment you read that parchment yesterday until one of us dies, quits, or is promoted off Avalon, you own my life, sir,” Hammond told him. “Plus, the new birds don’t start coming aboard for another two hours, so all I have to do is bark at kids to make sure we don’t hook a fifteen year old adaptor up to a brand new starfighter.”

  Kyle glanced around the Deck, and then gestured to the Deck Control Office behind Hammond. From there, they could see the entire Deck and control most things from the consoles, but no-one would be able to hear them. The same soundproofing designed to allow someone to control the Deck from the office also made it impossible to hear anything inside the office unless the intercom was turned on.

  Hammond led the way in and shut the door behind them. “Coffee, sir?” he asked, offering Kyle a cup. Once the Wing Commander had taken it, the Senior Chief met his gaze. “What’s up, sir?”

  “Trying to get a sense of my most senior Chief, Chief,” Kyle told him quietly. “You served aboard Thermopylae¸ right? Why were you transferred here?”

  “You saw the record,” Hammond said flatly. It wasn’t a question. “Insubordination, disobedience to orders. If the CAG had pushed it to a Board, he might have been able to kick me out, so the Captain put a black mark in my file and hustled me off to a backwater posting to soothe the man’s ego.”

  “What did you do?” Kyle asked.

  “We were responsible for security for a Senatorial visit to Phoenix,” Hammond began, waiting for Kyle to nod understanding.

  Phoenix was the largest and most important of the single-system polities that made up about a third of the Alliance of Free Stars, a binary star system with three worlds and twelve billion souls. That made her, after the Coraline Imperium and the Castle Federation itself, the third-most important member of the Alliance, and the source of the third largest fleet. The Federation would send any high level government mission on a warship, and that ship had to keep in perfect trim.

  “We had six two-ship flights out at all times, flying Area Space Patrol,” Hammond continued. “But Oshawa forgot to build an allowance for escorting the Senators to and from their meeting – with those trips, we had no safety margin. We had to send out new birds as soon as the current flight came aboard.

  “Three of our starfighters had picked up defective parts somewhere along the line, and were showing a frequency mis-harmonic in the mass manipulators,” the Chief continued. “It was within tolerances, but it was a constructive interference – my judgment was that it would progress to being actively dangerous to the ships in under an hour of flight time.”

  Kyle shivered. Mass manipulators in close proximity to each other had major issues with frequency interference. It took careful balancing to keep a fighter operating efficiently and safely. A growing mis-harmonic like the one Chief was suggesting would at best leave the fighter stranded without fuel as the manipulators became unable to reduce the ship’s weight to reduce its fuel use. At worst, the mass manipulators would fail to compensate for the starfighters acceleration – a result that was scientifically referred to as ‘spaghettification.’

  “And Oshawa?” he asked in the silence Hammond left for the danger to sink in.

  “If we didn’t launch those three birds, we’d be down two ASP flights, basically,” the Chief replied carefully. “In front of the Phoenix Space Navy, we’d look like we weren’t able to maintain our own squadrons – or that our CAG was incompetent and couldn’t set up an ASP he could maintain while meeting his other mission reqs, which was the truth. The Captain would have ripped him a new one.

  “So he ordered me to remove the grounding and clear the starfighters for action,” Hammond finished, with a shrug. “My response was, well, rude.”

  “He want you to clear starfighters to fly that would have been actively dangerous to their crews,” Kyle repeated, wanting to clarify.

  “That is correct, sir,” Hammond said flatly.

  “Chief, if I ever order you to do that, you have my permission – hell, my order – to be rude in response,” Kyle told his senior non-com softly. Peng’s impression of the man seemed on target – it took a lot of nerve to calmly explain to your new boss why your old boss wanted you off their ship.

  “Don’t need your permission, sir,” the Chief told him. “I will not put kids like Kovalchick in danger to make us look good in front of an ally. If we need the birds to stop a Commonwealth fighter strike from killing the ship? I’ll launch ‘em any day – that’s the cost we all signed on for.”

  “Indeed,” the Wing Commander agreed softly. “Thank you, Chief. I know what I needed to about you now.”

  “And what’s that, sir?”

  “That I can trust you with the lives of the men and women under my command,” Kyle stated flatly. “Now, Chief, I need to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer from you.”

  “Can’t guarantee you’ll like my answers sir, I’m not one for sugar-coating.”

  “Wouldn’t want coating on this, Chief,” Kyle told him. “Ambrose and Miller,” – the other two Space Force Senior Chiefs aboard Avalon – “what’s your opinion of them?”

  Hammond looked down into his coffee cup for a long moment. Finally, he took a sip and looked back up at Kyle.

  “They’re both solid non-coms, good techs,” he said firmly.

  “Good,” Kyle answered. “Would you trust them with the sacred honor of the Force?”

  He watched the flippant response die on Hammond’s tongue as he caught the dead-serious tone. The Chief considered for another long moment, and then drained his coffee cup.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I would. What’s this about, CAG?”

  “The starfighters should all be aboard by twenty-one hundred hours?” Kyle asked. Hammond nodded. “I’m calling a meeting with all three of you then,” he told the Chief. “Make sure all three of you make it.”

  He glanced out at the Flight Deck.

  “This ship deserves the best we can give it,” Kyle said quietly. “If you three work with me, I think we can all be worthy of her.”

  Chapter 3

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  12:00 July 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  SFG-001 Bravo Squadron Leader – Badger-type starfighter

  “Bravo Lead to Avalon Flight Control, my board is green,” Flight Commander Michael Stanford reported into the radio, leaning back and connecting the wires from the old starfighter to the dataport on his neck. With a deep inhalation, he allowed his implants to interface with the s
paceship.

  “Bravo Lead, Avalon Flight,” the Control center replied. “Your flight plan is on file and your fuel tanks show thirty percent. Bravo Squadron is go for launch on your order.”

  Stanford re-ran his mental checks on the starfighter. Everything checked out.

  “Avalon Control. Launch the Squadron,” he ordered.

  A moment later, acceleration slammed him back into his seat. Even with the entirety of the starfighter’s incredible ability to manipulate mass and gravity set to compensate for acceleration, a fraction of a percent of the thousand gravity launch made it through. It lasted mere seconds though, and then Stanford was out in space.

  All eight ships had launched simultaneously, and he passed a quick order for the squadron to form on him, eyeing the obsolete ships on his scanners as they gathered around.

  The Badger was an older design, a forty-five meter long cylinder with four missile pylons mounted equidistantly around her circumference - the Badger had been the last pylon-based design before they’d moved to internally mounted magazines. For this flight, a transfer from Avalon to the Reserve Flotilla Station, the four pylons were empty and the fuel tanks were only partially filled.

  None of the eight ships in his squadron had their full flight crews. Since everyone who flew over to the Station would have to be shuttled back, Stanford had ordered his gunners and flight engineers to remain behind. If some disaster required Bravo Squadron to engage the enemy with their twenty-five kiloton-per-second popguns, the pilots could handle those weapons themselves.

  The New Amazon Reserve Flotilla orbited the massive hydrogen gas giant Rio Grande, forty-seven light minutes away from the blazing F4 furnace of New Amazon. Given the orbits, they were currently over fifty light minutes from Nuevo Salvador, the system’s sole inhabited planet.

  Avalon, technically the Flotilla’s guardship until she left on her new tour of duty, orbited slightly outside and behind the Flotilla, which put her almost four hundred thousand kilometers from the spindly structure of the Flotilla Station. Two battleships, six cruisers and four deep space carriers orbited with the station, an entire navy for a single system star nation – a rich single system.

  These ships were all old, laid down at the end of the war. They’d served dutifully in peace, and then been laid into mothballs, ready for the war that the Federation was afraid would resume at any moment. Four Reserve Flotillas were scattered across the Federation, combined equalling two thirds of the active hulls of the Federation Space Navy, – a security blanket for a nation and its allies all too afraid of the looming behemoth of the Terran Commonwealth.

  Shaking his head to scatter the wool he was gathering, Stanford confirmed his squadron was clear of both the deep space carrier and the massive refit and supply ship Sphinx and Chipmunk that hovered ‘above’ her.

  With a silent command to his pilots, the zero point cells were spun up, positrons drawn off and fed into the engine nacelles. Eight blasts of matter-antimatter annihilation threw the old starfighters towards their final home.

  At the barely four hundred gravities the old Badgers were limited to, it still only took them ten minutes to cross the distance to the massive cross-shaped structure of the Flotilla Station. Four flight decks, each the size of Avalon’s flight deck and capable of storing six eight-fighter squadrons, defined the shape of the station. Habitat modules, repair gantries and storage containers were linked to the flight decks by personnel tubes and more gantries.

  Like any of the Reserve Flotilla Stations, the New Amazon one had been assembled from hundreds of separate pre-fabricated modules, and it showed in the haphazard nature of its construction. The only thing Stanford knew to be certain was that the access to the flight decks was clear.

  As the starfighters approached Station, Stanford inched ahead of his squadron by delaying his deceleration by a fraction of a second.

  “New Amazon Flotilla Station, this is SFG-001 Bravo Lead,” he reported over the radio. “We are on approach to Flight Deck C, requesting clearance to land.”

  “The trap is armed, the deck-center is clear, you have the call Commander,” the Flight Controller replied.

  A mental command flicked the full details of his starfighter’s approach vector to the station. Moments later, a tiny adjustment from the side thrusters had aligned the Badger with the center of Flight Deck C, and a burst of thrust from his main engines sent him drifting forward at a handful of meters per second.

  Passing through the end of the flight deck, his ship trembled beneath him as the gravity trap caught him. Designed for starfighters arriving at emergency combat speeds, the trap smothered his velocity almost instantly. A second later, the ship trembled again as he passed into the carefully contained atmosphere of the Deck.

  “Computer interface engaged,” Flight Control reported, and Stanford disengaged the jack connecting him to the ship. Tiny, perfectly controlled jets from his thrusters delivered the ship into a waiting crane.

  A minute after making the call, his ship was tucked into one of the handful of remaining empty spots on the deck. Stepping out of the craft, he surveyed the neat rows of Badgers. There were empty spots remaining for the rest of his squadron, but then the deck would be full of the obsolete fighters.

  “Your shuttle is waiting at Bay Two,” a familiarly gruff voice told him, and Stanford looked up at the shaven-headed form of Space Force Senior Chief Kawika Liago. Liago was a massive, dark-skinned man with a shaven head – and he was also Vice Commodore Larson’s right hand man.

  “Your flight isn’t for forty minutes,” the Chief continued, “and Commodore Larson wants to speak with you.”

  For a moment, Stanford considered refusing. Larson was no longer in his chain of command, and he doubted that the Vice Commodore had anything to say that he wanted to hear. Then Liago’s massive hand descended on his shoulder, and he reflected on the fact that the non-com was capable of breaking him in half with one hand.

  “Lead on, Chief,” he said timidly.

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  12:30 July 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  New Amazon Reserve Flotilla Station, Station Commander’s Office

  Stanford knew he was a small man, and that it was not particularly difficult to be physically intimidating to him. Liago managed it with ease, but the big man was physically imposing and intimidating to almost everyone.

  He could never quite explain why Oscar Larson terrified him.

  The Vice Commodore, the most senior Space Force officer in the system even now, was a tall, lanky whited-haired man who looked like a stiff wind would blow him away. He wasn’t known for sitting still, and was pacing by the display screen taking up the entire back wall of his office when Stanford entered.

  Centered in the display screen was Avalon. Behind her, the twin battleships Judgment and Retribution orbited above Rio Grande, their black bulk an intimidating backdrop to the old carrier. Next to the carrier, the massive cylinder of the Sphinx and Chipmunk refit and supply ship hovered. The extended arms connecting the freighter to the carrier were almost invisible at this distance. The starfighters being carefully transported across the space between the ships were invisible, even eight of the thirty meter ships barely a dot.

  “I’m glad you could take time from your busy day to meet me,” Larson said snidely, returning Stanford’s salute briskly and walking around his desk to stare down at him. “I’m sure ingratiating yourself with your new boss is taking up your time.”

  Stanford didn’t answer, quailing somewhat as he looked up at the Vice Commodore and trying not to show it.

  “Please, Commander, sit, have a drink,” Larson told him, gesturing towards the chair in front of the desk as he walked back to stare at Avalon on the viewscreen.

  Stanford sat, aware that Liago hadn’t left the room. The massive Chief Petty Officer had taken up a stance next to the door, wordlessly suggesting that leaving without permission would be a bad idea.

  “I hear that Rob
erts and Blair are busily turning over stones and arresting chipheads,” the Vice Commodore told Stanford. “It must be getting warm over there.”

  The Flight Commander flushed, with a quick glance back at Liago. He’d known the CPO had been aware of his own alcohol smuggling, but he hadn’t been sure if Larson hadn’t known – or simply hadn’t cared.

  “Suffice to say, I can prove your activities,” Larson continued, stepping from the screen to his desk and swiping a command on the desk. Overlaid on the image of Avalon, a dozen tiny screens appeared, each playing a different video of Stanford.

  “But there’s no need for us to get confrontational,” the Vice Commodore continued, a second swipe clearing the videos. He walked around the desk, to look down at Stanford’s sitting form again.

  “I just want you to remember that I still have friends aboard Avalon,” he said quietly, directly into Stanford’s ear. “And if you’re thinking this pair of martinets are making the right time to bring up old history, I want you to remember that – and remember that Lieutenant Williams is assigned here.”

  The flush was gone now. Stanford knew his face was white, and he did his best to maintain some composure instead of completely cracking under Larson’s pressure.

  The Vice Commodore was suddenly gone, back behind his desk and fiddling with controls.

  “Give my greetings to my old crewmates,” he finished, suddenly cheerful as he began to bring up his paperwork. “Enjoy your flight.”

  Liago didn’t even move, but somehow he was looming heavily over Stanford. He couldn’t get out of the office fast enough.

  Chapter 4

  New Amazon System, Castle Federation

  21:00 July 6, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-001 Avalon – CAG’s Office

  From the window of the Flight Group Commander’s office, Kyle Roberts watched the last ‘eight-pack’ of starfighters slowly maneuver its way onto his Flight Deck. A metallic framework strapped to a set of rockets, the eight-pack carried its payload of starfighters stacked vertically in neat ranks of two – two fighters across, four fighters on top of each other. Given the size and mass of the Falcon, that made for an assembly over sixty meters long, sixty meters wide, and fifteen meters tall that massed well over fifty thousand tons after the framework’s own mass was accounted for.