Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2)

By Glynn Stewart

Copyright 2015 by Glynn Stewart

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons – living or dead – is entirely coincidental.

Cover art Copyright 2015 by Jack Giesen 

Corona
was dying.

Even the mightiest of the Castle Federation’s battleships couldn’t take multiple antimatter hits, and she’d been hit five times. Communications were down, and Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin had no idea how the rest of the relief fleet he’d led to Midori was doing.

“Come on, sir!” his Chief of Staff bellowed. “Engineering tells me we have
minutes
at most until the positron capacitors fail. The entire ship is coming apart.”

Tobin nodded and came to his feet. The immense, dark-haired Castle Federation Admiral met his Chief of Staff’s gaze and nodded calmly.

“Any word?”

“No coms, no reports,” the Fleet Commander told him. “We’ve got nothing – all I can tell you is that nobody is
shooting
at us anymore.”

“It’s not going to matter for
Corona
,” Tobin noted calmly. “It’s the fleet I’m concerned about. Let’s go.”

With a clearly audible sigh of relief, Fleet Commander Robert Brown gestured towards the exit from the flag deck. Even to the Admiral’s implants, the room was dead – computers, networks, everything was gone.

“We’re cut off from the shuttle bay,” Brown told Tobin. “Escape pods are this way.”

The Vice Admiral followed the younger officer, coughing as the smoke began to overwhelm the rapidly failing air control units.

They’d barely made it out of the flag deck before the entire warship lurched
again
, and a safety bulkhead slammed shut behind them. A moment later, the massive bulkhead flashed red as energy pulsed against it.

Tobin stared at the red hot wall for a moment, then sucked in a deep breath as his shipsuit automatically activated its helmet, the transparent shield extending over his head in a single motion. His implants confirmed that air was rapidly leaving the corridor.

“I guess I was wrong about them not shooting at us. We need to move,” Brown sent over their implants. “Follow me.”

Somehow, despite the beating
Corona
had taken, their deck still had gravity. It seemed everyone except for unusually stubborn old Admirals had evacuated already as the corridors were empty as they made their way to the escape pods.

The next explosion was clearly internal – a set of power conduits that over-loaded as the ship’s network fragmented – and hit as they
reached
the pods. Brown was thrown backwards as debris hammered across the deck and gravity finally failed.

Tobin managed to catch his Chief of Staff and
barely
to brace himself against the explosion itself. Brown met his eyes, half of the officer missing and blood pouring from his torso in impossible quantities.

“It’s all your fault,” his loyal aide told him bluntly. “I shouldn’t have still been here.”

There was, Tobin noted in the back of his mind, no way someone missing that much of their body could speak that clearly.

And Brown had
survived
the
Corona
.

Before his mind could process that, the entire ship came apart in a shower of blood and fire, and Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin woke up.

Dimitri woke up to his wife shaking him gently. Sasha Tobin was upright in bed, looking down at him in the soft light she’d turned on. She smiled softly at her husband as he shook himself.

She started to say something, but he held up a finger as he focused on his therapist’s instructions for the dreams. With a simple command, he told his implant to access its picture-perfect memory of those last terrifying minutes aboard
Corona
and remembered.

The power conduits had exploded all right – Brown had caught the worst of the blast, losing half a leg and taking shrapnel damage across his body. Tobin’s years-old first aid training had come in handy, as he’d thrown an old-fashioned tourniquet on the man’s leg and dragged his Chief of Staff to an escape pod.

Whatever his
subconscious
might think, Robert Brown had survived – and survived because one Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin had saved his Chief of Staff’s life.

“The dream again?” Sasha asked as he opened his eyes and returned his attention to her.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is… getting better.” He checked the time and groaned. He wasn’t due at Joint Command for another six hours, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to get back to sleep.

“Are you sure you’re ready?” she asked. After thirty years, he swore his wife could read his thoughts. “You did get an entire starship blown apart around you, Dimitri.”

“And the war continues, Sasha,” he answered, his voice still gentle. “I put on the uniform, I took the stars they gave me. If Kane and Blake want to give me a new battle group, I can only obey.”

“We both know you don’t have to go,” she told him. “The Federation isn’t that short of Admirals, my love.” She shook her head. “You went to one war for them, love, and almost didn’t come home. What will I tell the boys if you don’t come back from this one?”

With Dimitri away at war for most of the first few years of their marriage, they’d been late to have children. Their two sons were in their early teens, not yet ready to face a world without their father in it.

“I plan on coming home,” he told his wife. “But if I don’t…” he sighed. “It has to be me, my love. Someone else might get it wrong.”

“I knew you’d say that,” she told him, smiling. “I want you to stay, my love, but I know who I married. Now, go back to sleep!”

Captain Kyle Roberts was a massive redheaded man, almost two meters tall with shoulders to scale. He had faced battleships and Commonwealth fleets and emerged victorious against the odds. He was, the media assured him, a Hero of the Federation.

He was currently being frustrated by an eleven year old boy.

“Yes, Jacob, you do still have to go to school today,” he assured his son. On the other side of the kitchen table, his son’s mother – who was
not
his girlfriend, hadn’t been for twelve years in which they’d hadn’t even spoken – laughed into her coffee.

“But Mom doesn’t!” said Jacob Kerensky, who looked to one day grow into his father’s height.

“That’s because Lisa has
finished
her school, and gets to job hunt today,” Kyle explained reasonably. He checked the time in his implant. While Jacob had to be at school in half an hour, the school was ten minutes away.
Kyle
needed to be at Joint Command in New Cardiff at ten hundred hours – and the main headquarters for the Castle Federation Space Navy was
much
further away.

He glanced at Lisa for support, and she just continued laughing into her coffee and gestured for him to carry on. She was
enjoying
subjecting him to his first tantrum ever. He had missed eleven years of them, after all.

The Marine Sergeant standing next to the door was no help.
That
worthy, in charge of the seven-person security detail assigned to an O-7 ranked Federation officer, was currently pretending to ignore the whole scene.

“Sergeant Rosenberg,” he said, assuring himself he did not sound desperate, “when is the aircar due for me?”

“Corporal Heimdall reports they’ll be arriving in about five minutes,” the gaunt, shaven-haired man in a black uniform with green piping informed him calmly.

Kyle looked back to his son, who was momentarily distracted by the thought of the military aircraft he’d seen come round the house all of twice now. His neural implant wasn’t what it had once been – lethal doses of radiation always left
some
scars – but it was enough for him to judge that he had extra time.

“If you eat your breakfast,” he told Jacob, whose toast was cooling rapidly, “and promise to be
very
good at school today, we can drop you off in the aircar.”

His eyes suddenly wide, Jacob dug into his breakfast with gusto, even as Lisa finally stopped chuckling.

“That’s not fair,” she objected. “I can’t bribe him with military vehicle rides!”

“It would be improper tactics not to use every resource at my disposal,” Kyle told her virtuously. Her response was a flung piece of toast, and he grinned.

Twelve years of hating and hiding might have killed any spark between them stone-dead, but they at least got along for more than just Jacob’s sake now his existence had finally forced them to speak again.

As Jacob ran off to grab his school things and the sound of ducted fans suggested the arrival of the aircar outside, Lisa gave Kyle a hard appraising glance.

“You’re going back out, aren’t you?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” he told her. “But… probably. They left me grounded longer than I expected after decommissioning
Avalon
. It’s been three weeks since we stood her down. Kane has a job for me – hopefully a command.”

The neurophysician his high school girlfriend had grown into shook her head.

“Good luck, then,” she said quietly, as their son came pounding down the stairs.

Despite the detour to drop Jacob off at school – a detour Corporal Heimdall had taken completely in stride – Kyle arrived at Vice Admiral Mohammed Kane’s office precisely on time. The head of the Joint Department of Personnel’s aide was waiting for him and ushered him into the office at exactly ten hundred hours.

Kane, a tanned man with striking blue eyes under a plain white turban, rose from behind his desk to shake Kyle’s hand and direct the young Captain to a seat. The room was cluttered with the mementoes of a long life of service – one wall was covered in pictures of the Admiral at different ages with various people and ships, though the rest were bookshelves stuffed to overflowing. About a third of the contents were books, the remainder were paper folios with names in tiny black print. It was more paper than Kyle had ever seen outside a library.

“Welcome, Captain Roberts. I trust the flight was uneventful?”

“Still getting used to being flown around,” Kyle admitted cautiously. “I never made a particularly good passenger.”

“From your background, I’m hardly surprised,” Kane admitted. “We don’t see very many officers transfer from the Space Force to the Space Navy – most would resign after an injury of the scale you took. Are you having issues adjusting?”

Kyle somewhat absently touched his temples. He had been a fighter pilot until a close encounter with an antimatter warhead had burned out his neural implant and left him unable to fly a starfighter. Shifting into the Navy had kept him in uniform.

“I’ll never have what I had,” he said quietly. “But I am adjusting. I prefer to be busy.”

“We’ve seen what you regard as busy,” Vice Admiral Kane replied dryly. “The Tranquility system remains free, Captain, and they thank you for it. You seem to have weathered the transfer between services well.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kyle told him, inclining his head slightly as he eyed the Admiral across the cluttered old wooden desk.

“You’ve made quite an impression in the media,” Kane continued. “That’s partially our fault – we needed a hero after the opening Commonwealth attacks, and you fit the bill. The ‘Stellar Fox’ is what they call you, isn’t it?”

It was all Kyle could do not to roll his eyes in front of his superior.

“I am not fond of the nickname,” he told Kane slowly. “Erwin Rommel, after all,
lost
his war and was forced to commit suicide by his government. I hope for a more positive fate.”

“Our government is generally better than that,” Kane allowed. “Though I don’t know if you’ll agree after we’re done here today.”

“I serve the Federation, sir,” Kyle said automatically. Regardless of what else happened, his oath was to the Constitution and Senate of the Castle Federation.

“And in said service, you’ve put the CEO of one of our largest armaments manufacturers behind bars for a tad over sixty years,” the Admiral warned him.

“Excelsior Armaments committed treason, sir.” They had, in fact, stolen fighters from Kyle’s previous command,
Avalon
, before he’d arrived. Fighters that he’d ended up flying against when they’d ended up in the hands of a Commonwealth black operation.

“They did, and Max Arthur deserves every second of his time in prison,” Kane agreed. “Of course, you
also
put Joseph Randall’s son behind bars.”

Kyle didn’t reply. James Randall had been a rapist and a thug, but he’d become the Judge Advocate General’s star witness against Max Arthur and Excelsior Armaments. In exchange, he’d been spared the firing squad for his multiple capital offenses.

Unfortunately, between Kyle arresting James Randall and all of this becoming public knowledge on Castle,
Joseph
Randall had won a tight-fought election after his closest rival died in an air car accident. The elder Randall was now Senator for Castle, first among equals of the Federation’s thirteen person executive.

“Senator Randall would like to see you beached and buried,” Kane said flatly. “Absent that, he’d love to see you given enough rope to hang yourself. Others who were friends of Max Arthur – or at least business partners of the man – are in full agreement with him.

“Your
partisans
, on the other hand,” the head of the Federation military’s personnel department continued calmly, “think that a Hero of the Federation deserves better than a minor command. They want you given a command ‘worthy of the Stellar Fox’.”

Kyle winced. That was a lot more politics than he’d expected to go into selecting a ship to assign the most junior Captain in the Navy to.

“My impulse and preference, Captain Roberts, is to assign you to an older cruiser in one of the system defense Task Groups,” Kane told him. “One with solid fellow captains to help you learn, and a Task Group commander willing to mentor an inexperienced officer.

“But while I could withstand the pressure from
either
your enemies or your friends, Captain, with all sides clamoring to see you given a ‘worthy’ command, my choices are constrained, and I am left with the impulse to throw a giant finger at
everyone
.”

“Sir,” Kyle said quietly. “A cruiser command such as you describe sounds appropriate for my experience. I would not object to such an assignment.”

“No, but others would object on your behalf, or out of a desire to watch you fail,” the Vice Admiral replied. “I am telling you this, Captain Roberts, so that you understand that the command you are receiving is
not
a reward. The gold planet on your collar was your reward for saving Tranquility.
This
is a political necessity you’d better not fuck up.”

He presumably gave a mental command through his implant, because a moment later a hologram of a ship appeared above his desk, and Kyle inhaled sharply.

Kyle knew that ship. She’d been all over the news since he’d come home – the latest of the Federation’s newest supercarrier class. She was an abbreviated spike in space, a kilometer and a half long and almost half a kilometer high at her base. Fighter launch tubes for ten squadrons –
eighty
starfighters, more than his last command had in her entire fighter group – marked her broadsides, mixed with heavy positron lances and missile launchers.

She was a
Sanctuary
-class deep space carrier, the biggest, most advanced class of warships ever built by the Castle Federation – which meant the most advanced warships ever built by anyone.

“She won’t commission for another nine days, but it’s time her Captain got aboard,” Kane told him. “I have the paperwork here for you, Captain Roberts, and my aide will make the travel arrangements.

“I expect you take command of DSC-078
Avalon
by this time tomorrow.”

Most people who ended up in the office of the head of the Joint Department of Personnel had some degree of trepidation. Vice Admiral Mohammed Kane, after all, was ultimately responsible for all discipline that didn’t fall into the hands of the Joint Department of Military Justice.

Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin, however, had served with Kane during the last war. He’d happily arranged to insert himself into Kane’s schedule and greeted the smaller man with a crushing bear hug.

When he released Kane, Dimitri turned the chair Kane put junior officers in around and leaned against it. He studied Kane carefully, noting the new lines in his old friend’s face and the slight stoop to the shoulders that hadn’t been there six months ago.

“You, my friend, need a vacation,” Dimitri told the other man.

“Not happening,” Kane replied crisply. “I won’t pretend it isn’t good to see you, Dimitri, but I do have a war to help run. You got yourself onto my schedule for this morning – what do you need?”

“It’s not what I need.” Dimitri leaned forward, meeting his friend’s gaze evenly. “It’s what the Federation needs. We don’t have that many Admirals of any stripe, Mohammed, and we can’t afford for me to sit on my ass getting fat.”

“You got a ship shot out of from underneath you, and half a battle group blown apart around you,” Kane said mildly. “There are those who’d say we don’t need admirals who turn in performances like that – and I have psychiatrists who say you need time to recover.”

“I lost three ships,” Dimitri said flatly. “
Corona, Liberation
, and
Tara
. Two battleships, one carrier. The Imperium lost four ships, and the Factor two. The Commonwealth lost twelve and failed to take Midori. I will mourn my dead for the rest of my life, as I mourn those who died in the last war.”

He shivered, old memories rippling through his mind.

“I will also take any man who dares suggest I should have done better into a dark alley and leave them wishing they’d been at Midori instead of meeting me there,” he finished bluntly.

Kane chuckled and made a throwaway gesture.

“I agree,” he admitted. “Though we have, as always, some mouthy politicians. Mostly MFAs, the Senators are better briefed than that.”

Members of the Federation Assembly, drawn from all fifteen of the Federation’s member worlds and its three Protectorates, were the democratically elected representatives of the Federation’s people. They wrote its law and passed its budget and acted as a check on the power of the thirteen person Senate who ruled the seventeen star systems containing those eighteen worlds.

“I’m more concerned about the psych report, old friend,” Kane told Dimitri. “They worry about you tearing open old wounds – Amaranthe. Trinity. Hessian.”

“I read their report, Mohammed,” Dimitri replied. “And, yes, I know I wasn’t supposed to, but it’s amazing what a Vice Admiral’s stars open up.

“I’ll add Midori to my ghosts,” he continued, “but the psychiatrists cleared me for duty. And we both know the Federation has damned few experienced admirals left.”

“We never had many, and most of them are dead,” Kane admitted. “Are you certain, Dimitri? Let’s be honest – we expected you to
lose
at Midori. You’ve already delivered one victory we didn’t expect.”

“Mohammed,” the big Vice Admiral said sharply. “How bad is it?”

Kane swallowed and glanced at a paper report on his desk, its folder jet-black – marking the contents as Top Secret. The folder would contain tech that would check the identity of the user and destroy the contents if an unauthorized person tried to open it.

He leaned back and faced Dimitri, and the last of the mask dropped away. Kane looked
old
– well beyond what seventy years should do to a man with full anagathic treatments.

“We’re losing,” he said bluntly. “I know that’s not what the news says – we aren’t even controlling the media too much on that count, they’re focusing on systems lost. They’re quite cooperative in calling it a ‘victory’ if we still hold the system at the end of the day.

“So far as we can tell, Walkingstick’s losses in the first offensives were, thanks to you and young Captain Roberts most prominently, far higher than he expected. He expected to hit Midori with twenty-five to thirty warships, facing ten to fifteen.

“Instead, you met his twenty with eighteen and kicked his ass six ways to Sunday,” Kane concluded with some relish.

Fleet Admiral James Calvin Walkingstick had been declared ‘Marshal of the Rimward Marches’ by the Congress of the Terran Commonwealth. His new job description boiled down to ‘conquer the Alliance in the name of unifying the human race’.

“So Walkingstick has a lot fewer ships than he expected for phase two, and we have more,” Kane said after a few moments. “Unfortunately, the man is smart enough to have
planned
for that possibility, and he’s currently engaging in a series of hit and run raids that aren’t taking systems or even doing much damage – except to our capital ships.

“Every ship he destroys is one less mobile asset for Alliance High Command to shuffle,” the turbaned Vice Admiral said grimly. “He’s grinding us down, Dimitri. We’re recommissioning the Reserve, but… they’re still months away from deployment.”

“He won’t wait that long,” Dimitri finished grimly. “Once he’s stretched us thin, he’ll concentrate his ships and hit the systems we need to fuel our war machine.”

“Exactly.”

“So you need me,” the old Admiral told Kane. “My life is the Federation’s, old friend. Tell me what we need.”

With a sigh and a hand gesture, Kane brought up an image of a battle group. Dimitri’s practiced eye picked out a Renaissance Trade Factor
Magellan
-class battleship, two Coraline Imperium strike cruisers – a
Rameses
-class and a
Majesty
-class – a Castle Federation
Last Stand
-class battlecruiser… and at the heart of it, the immense mass of a
Sanctuary-
class Federation supercarrier.