Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) Read online

  “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 Defen
se 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.”

  Chapter 8

  Castle System, Castle Federation

  22:05 December 15, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  SFG-001 Actual – Falcon-C type command starfighter

  Vice Commodore Michael Stanford looked over the data being relayed to him from the system defense net with an appraising eye. The Commonwealth fighter force had been hammered in their engagement with the defending fighters, but not nearly enough for his liking. They still had over a hundred Scimitars tucked in close to provide missile defense.

  Someone in the enemy task group had also clearly been smart enough to guess at least the basics of Battle Group Seventeen’s plan. As soon as the defenders had been destroyed, they’d altered their vector – now they were burning for open space.

  Of course, that acceleration wasn’t changing their vector towards the Gawain Flotilla. They’d waited after destroying the defenders and let themselves get close enough for a nice solid fix on the mothballed starships, and then started launching missiles.

  A capital ship missile like the Commonwealth’s Stormwind had a flight duration of a little over an hour. At an acceleration of over a thousand gravities, that gave them a range of roughly a light minute from rest and a terminal velocity over ten percent of lightspeed.

  Of course, firing missiles through a defensive fighter screen was ineffectual at best, and the closer you were when you fired, the more accurate you were. The Commonwealth was still using a significant chunk of the Stormwind’s range, leaving them with a thirty minute flight time.

  Stanford ran the numbers through his implant and the starfighter’s computers, but he knew the answer already. There was no way any of BG17’s starships were going to get between those missiles and the Reserve Flotilla.

  BG17’s starfighters, however, were seventh-generation birds rated for five hundred gravities of acceleration. All of the battle group’s three hundred and sixty eight starfighters could manage to get in front of the missiles if they launched immediately upon emergence from Alcubierre.

  The Battle Group hadn’t taken sufficient form, yet, for Stanford to be able to order that launch as senior CAG. Once the starfighters were in space, however, he would be in command as the senior starfighter officer on the scene.

  Reviewing the statistics of the eighty Imperial Arrows under his command, he smiled grimly. Combining their extra missiles with his Falcons’ powerful electronic warfare suite gave him an idea.

  #

  Michael barely had time to register the wrenching sensation of the big carrier emerging from Alcubierre drive before he was slammed back into his acceleration couch as his fighter shot into space. It was refreshing after the improvisations they’d had to pull on the old Avalon to have a full set of fighter launch tubes.

  Ten squadrons shot into space. Twenty seconds later, another ten followed.

  Sixty seconds after exiting their Alcubierre, all of Avalon’s starfighters were in space, forming up into a loose formation that left each starfighter the space to ‘random-walk’ to avoid incoming fire.

  It took another ten seconds for Cameroon’s six squadrons and Gravitas’ ten to join Stanford’s people in space. All three hundred and sixty-plus little ships then turned as one and fired their engines – charging towards the enemy.

  Michael triggered a mental command, linking him into the Federation Wing Commanders and the Lieutenant Colonel commanding the Imperial force.

  “We can catch those bastards,” Lieutenant Colonel Kai Metzger said immediately as the channel established. “There’s no way they can reach a clear gravity zone before we can catch them.”

  “Negative,” Michael to
ld him. “We can’t catch them and defend the Flotilla – we need those ships more than we need to catch the Terrans. The missiles are the priority.”

  “Three modern ships are worth more to the Commonwealth than six obsolete hulks are worth to us,” Metzger snapped dismissively.

  “That’s not your call, Lieutenant-Colonel,” Stanford replied bluntly, emphasizing the junior man’s rank. “Castle command says we save the ships, so we go for the missiles.”

  “Do whatever the hell you want, Feddie,” the Imperial officer said dismissively. “We’re going to go kill us a carrier.”

  Even before the Coraline man had finished speaking, all eighty of his ships twisted away from the Federation fighters. Their vector would leave them completely out of position to intercept the missiles, but take them directly into the teeth of the Commonwealth task group.

  “Get your ships back into formation,” Stanford snapped immediately. Silence was his only response, and his implant calmly informed him that Metzger had dropped the link.

  “What’s the plan, CAG?” Wing Commander Russell Rokos asked after the silence stretched a moment too long. As usual, the phlegmatic pilot knew exactly what needed to be done.

  Stanford shook himself physically, updating his plan for the lack of the Imperial fighters on the fly.

  “I’m sending everyone positions for their fighter wings,” he told the Federation officers. “With only our missiles, this could cut a lot closer than I was planning on.”

  “Our Starfires can’t intercept Stormwinds,” Wing Commander Andreas Volte, the leader of Cameroon’s Wing, objected. “Not without getting damn lucky.”

  “They don’t need to,” Stanford replied. “Get them close enough and the radiation wave will screw with their sensors royally – that’ll make them sitting ducks. Trust me, gentlemen, ladies – some of us have done this before.”