Operation Medusa Page 6

  But he knew exactly what Admiral Rothenberg meant. There was safe because the laws of physics said nothing could touch you…and then there was safe because you were surrounded by friends and allies.

  Russell knew he was going to sleep better once Normandy was docked.

  Once Task Force Midori was fully inside the protective umbrella of the Via Somnia fleet base, Russell pulled his carrier space patrol back aboard Normandy. His fighter group was better off than many of the others, but he’d still lost a lot of people getting out of Midori.

  To his surprise, Captain Herrera was waiting for him on the flight deck as he exited his fighter craft.

  “Sir.” He saluted crisply.

  “With me, CAG,” Herrera ordered. He was a short, gaunt man with skin as dark as interstellar space, but he moved with the certainty of a falling avalanche. Russell knew better than to ignore even a seemingly polite request from his boss.

  The Captain led the way to Russell’s own office, however, and took a seat across from the CAG’s desk.

  “What a fucking week,” Herrera exhaled in a single breath. “How are your people holding up?”

  “Rough,” Russell said after a moment. “SFG-292 got away better than most; we only lost twenty ships.”

  Putting aside the MSDF’s suicide charge, the Alliance had lost a third of TF Midori’s starfighters. That Normandy’s SFG-292 had only lost ten percent of her fighters meant Russell’s people had been lucky.

  Just not lucky enough.

  “We lost a lot of friends in the other groups,” he murmured. “LaCroix and I weren’t close, but we’d known each other since the war began.” Russell chuckled. “Since back when she tried to seduce the Fox, though he was just Wing Commander Roberts then.”

  Herrera’s responding chuckle was tired.

  “Your people always take the brunt of it,” he said quietly. “Are they going to be ready for action?”

  “How soon?” the CAG asked bluntly. “Tomorrow? Only in desperation. Give me a week and we’ll be a bit rusty around the new crews we’ll steal from Via Somnia, but we can fight. Give me three, and I’ll match my people against the Commonwealth’s best.”

  “Might need to hold you to that,” Herrera told him. “If Walkingstick took Midori—”

  “Then he’s kicking off his endgame,” Russell agreed. “Which means I’ll be ecstatic to get that three weeks before we go toe to toe with the Marshall’s best.”

  “You’ll get it,” Herrera said grimly. “I won’t send you into battle before you’re ready. We’ve lost too many people and too many ships doing that when we had no choice.”

  “Don’t make a promise you might not be able to keep,” the CAG replied. “‘No choice’ happens. It might happen again.”

  7

  Castle System

  17:00 August 7, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  New Cardiff and Castle Orbit

  “They gave me a star and all I got was a pile of gunships,” Mira Solace grumped, leaning into Kyle’s shoulder as the two embraced at the edge of the landing pad. “And what are they giving you, Vice Admiral?”

  Kyle chuckled.

  “At last count, I’m shepherding thirteen capital ships and nine logistics ships,” he told her. “My understanding is that I don’t get to keep them—all I’ve been promised is Elysium and Gaia—but that’s the flock I’m taking out to Via Somnia.”

  “Must be nice to be important,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it.

  The flotilla of sixty Gallant-class gunships Solace had been given command of might be restricted to the Castle System, but it represented over twice Gaia’s firepower and four times her crew.

  “I don’t know about that,” he replied. “They’re putting you in charge of a good chunk of Castle’s defense and sending me off as far as they can! Plus, you get to sleep in your own bed at night!”

  The Gallants didn’t have flag decks. Rear Admiral Mira Solace would lead her command from a buried operations center on the surface, though tradition required she spend as much time aboard her ships as possible regardless.

  “A bed that’s going to be cold and empty,” Mira said. “You be careful, Kyle,” she ordered. “I want a living husband-to-be, not a dead hero; are we clear?”

  He chuckled again and kissed her, ignoring the collected officers waiting around them as the surface-to-orbit shuttles swept down.

  “I have every intention of coming back alive,” he told her. “You think a minor obstacle like the Commonwealth’s top commander and a hundred or so warships are actually going to put me in danger? Have you met the Stellar Fox?!”

  Mira shook her head.

  “I have, actually,” she pointed out. “I’ve also met Kyle Roberts, and my impression is that they’re not necessarily the same man. And I want them both to come back to me.”

  “You keep Castle intact and I’ll come home to her. And you,” he promised.

  Behind him, Archie Sterling coughed.

  “Admiral, sir? The shuttle is here…and tradition does say you board first.”

  Kyle sighed and nodded, wrapping Mira in his arms again in a fierce embrace she returned tightly.

  “I will be back,” he assured her. “Through Void, through Hell, through Summerlands or war, I will return to you. I promise you.”

  She kissed him.

  “I know. Now go! You can’t keep twenty-two starships waiting while the Admiral makes out with his fiancée!”

  He stepped back and grinned at her.

  “Why not? Isn’t rank supposed to have its privileges?”

  “Go!” she ordered, but she was smiling as she said it.

  Elysium looked so much like Avalon that it took Kyle a moment to recover his composure. He’d commanded two ships after Avalon, but the big Sanctuary-class carrier still held a special place in his heart.

  His new flagship was her twin. Even knowing she was a different ship, there were no differences Kyle could pick out from the outside. A few sensor arrays or Stetson stabilizer emitters in different places, but nothing identifiable as his shuttle approached the kilometer-and-a-half-long abbreviated arrowhead.

  Behind the big carrier hung the equally immense form of one of the only two Titan-class battleships in existence. Gaia was longer than the carrier, not needing a flattened prow for a landing deck, and bristled with a massive array of firepower.

  Past her, none of the other ships assembled into Kyle’s convoy were visible as more than tiny white triangles at best. Four more carriers, four battlecruisers, and three strike cruisers filled out the thirteen warships he was taking out.

  His understanding was that he would keep Elysium, Gaia, and Carolus Rex, the three most modern ships in the convoy, while the remainder of the ships would be joining Vice Admiral Rothenberg as the Imperial officer took command of a newly expanded Seventh Fleet.

  Kyle may have drafted the plans that were now setting the Alliance’s fleets into motion, but he didn’t have need to know on the final details. He could guess which target Rothenberg was going after, but he hadn’t been briefed.

  For that matter, if they were following the plan, Rothenberg wouldn’t have been briefed. Even the Admirals leading the strike fleets wouldn’t know their destinations more than eight hours in advance of going FTL.

  It would be obvious to the Admirals who would be leading the strikes at the closer switchboard stations that something was going on. Some of the fleets would have seven-week flight times. Others would only have three. Flag officers weren’t going to miss dozens of starships disappearing and entire fleets going off the grid for an entire month.

  “Elysium Control has provided landing clearance,” the pilot announced. “They’ve been advised we have Forty-First Fleet Actual aboard and are clearing a priority lane.”

  Kyle sighed.

  “‘Forty-First Fleet’ currently is officially, what, two ships?” he murmured to Sterling.

  “Maybe,” his aide-turned-chief-of-staff replied. “But
one of those ships is Elysium, so Captain Novak wants to put her best foot forward, after all.”

  “Well, then. I suppose I should prepare to be impressed, shouldn’t I?”

  “It would be…polite, sir.”

  The shuttle slid to a perfectly calculated halt in the middle of Elysium’s massive flight deck. Neat rows of Falcon-type starfighters and Vulture-type bombers lined the walls, tucked away into alcoves that allowed them to be fueled, cleaned and maintained without interfering with landing operations.

  Interspaced with those alcoves were the massive hatches covering Elysium’s fighter-launch tubes. Twenty-four tubes to a side of the hangar linked to twelve on each of the carrier’s four “broadsides”. In an emergency, the automated trucks, arms and systems of the flight deck would feed a fighter or bomber into each of those tubes every fifteen seconds.

  Assuming she had a flight group in the tubes, Elysium could clear her decks in one minute. It would make her deck an extraordinarily dangerous place for a crewmember who wasn’t paying attention, but the crews knew their jobs.

  To Kyle’s knowledge, there hadn’t been an accidental fatality during launch operations aboard a Federation carrier during the entire war so far. Injuries were another story entirely, but given the speed with which the systems slung around multi-thousand-ton starfighters, a lack of deaths was impressive enough.

  His own attention was unavoidably drawn to the Gods-cursed cheap red carpet Elysium’s crew had rolled out, with its flanking double file of Federation Marines in full dress gear. A bosun’s pipe trilled, and an amplified voice bellowed over the flight deck:

  “Forty-First Fleet, arriving!”

  Kyle made his way carefully down the carpet and returned a quick salute from the tall, dark-haired woman waiting at the other end.

  “Welcome aboard Elysium, Admiral Roberts,” Captain Ivana Novak told him. “May I present my XO, Senior Fleet Commander Sung Yi? I believe you’ve met my CAG as well?”

  “Indeed I have,” Kyle replied, offering his hand to now Vice Commodore Michelle Williams-Alvarez. She’d come a long way from the traumatized officer he’d offered a psych discharge three years before. “It’s good to see you, Michelle. The extra circle and the wedding ring suit you.”

  “It’s your fault, you know,” the starfighter pilot replied with a smile. She and her new Captain could have been sisters, both of them pale-skinned dark-haired women. “You keep dragging me into situations where I have to be a hero.”

  “I don’t suppose we can hope to be luckier?” Sung Yi asked. The XO seem to almost fade into the background next to his Captain and CAG, a dark-skinned older man with a shaved head and tired eyes. “There’s an old saw about how heroes happen.”

  “When someone screws up,” Kyle agreed cheerfully, concealing a concerned look at the XO. With Forty-First Fleet’s mission, the last thing he needed was a hesitant XO aboard his flagship.

  “Given the war we have to fight, though, sometimes just surviving is heroism enough,” he continued. “And sometimes, acts of heroism are the only way forward. We have a job to do, after all, Commander Yi.”

  “We do,” Captain Novak agreed instantly. “Chief Campbell! See to the Admiral’s staff and their bags. Can I show you to your office, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  The speed with which Kyle had blazed past being a one-star admiral meant that he’d never actually had a flag officer’s office aboard a starship before. He’d been in them—as Captain of Avalon, he’d been a flag captain himself—but they hadn’t actually been his space before.

  He hadn’t realized just how much computing support was available to a flag officer from their desk. Just from this room, his implants could access tactical feeds and strategic information, and set data analysis runs on a dedicated set of hardware and AIs.

  The room itself was nothing to sneer at either. He’d spent most of his time in Avalon’s admiral’s office paying attention to the occupant, but he now realized the room was large enough for small-scale meetings on its own—and had the same kind of holoconferencing gear that they’d used for the JSOC presentation.

  From here, he could arrange a virtual meeting with every officer in a fleet without having to actually get out of his chair.

  Of course, since it was now his office, there were some familiar items.

  “Your beer fridge made it up yesterday,” Novak told him, gesturing to the machine in the corner. It certainly had a beer fridge in it, though it also had a coffee maker, tea maker, and general mixed-drinks facility that was hooked directly into the ship’s water lines.

  “I don’t know if it’s stocked,” she continued, “but I suspect your steward…”

  Kyle had already popped the fridge open and removed a pair of beer bottles, inspecting the labels.

  “Took care of that,” he concluded for her, sliding a bottle across the desk to her. “New Cardiff’s finest microbrewery. Try it.”

  “I don’t drink on duty,” she said slowly.

  “I won’t make you,” he said cheerfully, “but I will give you permission.”

  He dropped into the big chair, sighing in relief as it automatically adjusted to his form. “If you don’t want the beer, coffee? Tea? The drink machine can do just about anything.”

  Novak shook her head at him…but cracked the beer and took a sip as she seated herself.

  Kyle smiled and leaned back against the chair.

  “All right, Captain. Brief me,” he instructed her. “I’m familiar with Avalon inside and out—what’s different?”

  “Not much,” Novak told him. “Wartime construction; they didn’t want to mess with what worked. My understanding is that there’s a new generation of Alliance-standard eighty-five-million-cubic-meter ships coming down the pipeline, but they’re building the Sanctuaries to the template.”

  That was Project Armada, not that Kyle could say much. A new generation of battlecruisers, carriers, starfighters and now star bombers.

  “If there is such a thing,” he stressed, “we’d only be laying down keels now. Years before we’d see new ships.”

  “And that’s assuming we’re still here,” she said grimly. “Hard to read the strategic briefings without seeing that as a problem—not least from how much more restricted they are now than they were two years ago.”

  “I’ll get you cleared for the full versions,” Kyle promised. “There’s stuff going on I can’t brief you on yet, but as my flag captain, you’ll need to know exactly where we stand.”

  “That doesn’t sound promising, sir.”

  “It’s ugly, is what it is,” he warned her. “Forty-First Fleet, once fully assembled, is going to be seeing what we can do to take the momentum back. If you’ve any concerns about Elysium, your crew, or your starfighters, I need to know. We’re only in Castle for twenty-four more hours, Captain.”

  “That’s…a fast move-out,” she admitted. “I only came aboard three days ago. Yi ran Elysium through her trials, though she passed those with flying colors. We haven’t had time to shake out problems yet.”

  “Shake out what you can,” Kyle ordered. “We don’t have any more time. We’ll have some more in transit to Via Somnia, but…” He shook his head. “From there, it looks like we’ll have all of five days to exercise the assembled Forty-First Fleet before we move out.”

  “Do we get briefed before that?” Novak asked.

  “Sure. About twenty-four hours before we move,” he told her with a chuckle. “There’s a lot of cards in play, Captain, and the Alliance is keeping most of them under wraps.

  “That said, speaking of Yi…he’s not exactly following my drift,” Kyle noted. “I don’t need people who want to be heroes, Captain, but the last thing we need is an XO who’s determined not to be one.”

  “He’s seen action twice already,” Novak said. “Wounded in action at Kematian and decorated for pulling people out of the bridge after it was wrecked.”

  “Damn. He was at the Massacre?” Kyle asked.


  A lot of people had been, but he’d thought he’d known every senior officer of Alliance Battle Group Seventeen. He’d been BG-17’s flag captain in that godawful disaster, after all.

  “Seconded to the Kematian Navy,” Novak confirmed. “He was acting as tactical officer on their flagship and ended up saving the Captain’s life—along with about six others—before he took an ugly gut wound from shrapnel.”

  “So, he understands how men end up heroes,” Kyle said. He wasn’t going to pretend that anyone who’d served at the Kematian Massacre wasn’t going to get a little bit of extra leeway from him.

  They’d all watched a world die together, after all.

  8

  Castle System

  22:00 August 7, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-080 Elysium, Castle Orbit

  In a perfect world, it wouldn’t have taken Michelle Williams-Alvarez six months to get back into a combat command. In that perfect world, however, Vice Commodore Williams-Alvarez wouldn’t have been the only person to actually command one of the Alliance’s new bomber formations in action.

  The success of that command, along with the rest of what then-Captain Roberts had got up to out beyond the Alliance’s Rimward borders, had trapped Michelle in a months-long training command as the Alliance churned out its first wave of bomber crews.

  After what felt like two or three trillion lectures, classes, and training flights, she was finally back where she belonged: aboard a carrier with a starfighter on the flight deck with her name on it.

  The only good part of the stint on a desk was that Nurse-Commander Angela Alvarez had managed to take a month of shore leave on the capital planet in it. Enough time, apparently, for them to turn a shared apartment into an impromptu wedding.

  The admittance chime for her office chimed.

  “Enter.”

  To her surprise, it was Sung Yi who slipped into the room, almost furtively, and took an uninvited seat in front of her desk.