Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (13 page)

“Bluntly, sir, we don’t have probable cause to order five thousand implant downloads, and it would take us two weeks to process the paperwork and downloads anyway.

“With O’Madden’s death and the virus screwing with our cameras, everything outside Commodore Stanford’s fighter is effectively useless to us.”

Kyle caught the codicil there, and from the look in his CAG’s eyes, so did Stanford.

“What did you find in my fighter, Major?” the pilot asked softly.

“Our initial sweep turned up nothing other than O’Madden’s fingerprints and some evidence to suggest someone with proper gloves was in there,” she admitted. “I… deemed that unlikely, and we commandeered your Flight Engineer and took a second look.

“We found this.”

She pulled a small black box, less than six centimeters long, from inside her uniform jacket and dropped it on the conference table.

“I’m trusting what your Engineer told me,” she continued, “but it agrees with my own review of the schematics. This was placed on the power conduit to the mass manipulators used for inertial compensation. The assessment I was given was that it was designed to do two things: shut off power to those manipulators, and prevent the fail-safes from engaging for at least half a second.”

The room was silent, and Kyle felt ill. You always knew there were risks to riding fire at five hundred gravities – it wasn’t really a sane man’s game, and few flight crews would pretend it was. You relied on the fail-safes to keep those gravities from crushing you. Your starfighter could lose half of its mass manipulators, and while it would guzzle fuel like water, it would still keep you safe because the failsafes prioritized compensating for acceleration over anything else.

Half a second of five hundred gravities was, roughly, half a second more than a human would survive.

“That’s murder,” Tobin said into the silence, the Admiral’s voice a growl. “You’re telling me that someone just tried to assassinate the Battle Group CAG?”

“My people ripped into its code,” Barsamian said quietly. “It was designed to trigger after a sustained four minute sequence in excess of four hundred and fifty gravities. There would have been no survivors.

“O’Madden had the skills and knowledge to build this,” she continued. “But… he was a ten year man, a loyal spacer, a loyal citizen of the Federation. There is
nothing
in his background to suggest he would want to murder Commodore Stanford.”

“You said there was someone else in the fighter?” Kyle demanded.

“There was,” she agreed. “And they were a
professional
. O’Madden’s fingerprints and DNA were everywhere. The person with him… they wore the right type of gloves, they had a DNA-cleaning nano-field, the works. I’m guessing they were the source of our virus, and the instigator of the assassination attempt.

“Sirs, ma’ams,” the Ship’s Marshal told them all, “I only see one conclusion: we have a Commonwealth spy aboard
Avalon
.”

Kyle sighed. He’d drawn the same conclusion himself already, and everything Barsamian had said only confirmed that.

“All right, Major,” he told her. “I want you to take the ship to Counter Intelligence Level Three. No communication leaves or arrives without your office being aware of it. All classified communiques can be reviewed by the Admiral’s staff,” he nodded towards Sanchez.

“My intelligence officer will take care of it,” Tobin agreed grimly. “We need to do more, though, Captain – we can’t have a spy on the Battle Group flagship!”

“We will do what we can, Admiral,” Kyle replied. “Major, I want your people to go through
everything
O’Madden has done since he reported aboard. You said you could have built the device himself – I want to know if he actually did. I want to know who he spoke to, what he did – I want to know every time he
sneezed
. Understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” she confirmed.

Dimitri Tobin was
not
happy with the discovery of a Commonwealth spy aboard
Avalon
. Since this wasn’t an unhappiness he could actually direct
at
anyone, he was grumpier than usual as he sat on his flag deck drinking his coffee.

They were still six hours outside of Kematian, where the convoy would make their last delivery, and he hadn’t yet received orders for where he was supposed to take Battle Group Seventeen from there. His last communique instructed him to take several days in the system for shore leave and Battle Group level exercises while Alliance High Command apparently sat around debating what to do with their most powerful available mobile formation.

That High Command didn’t have a mission for his group yet told him that there was a debate going on – and probably a political one. Different elements of the Alliance wanted different things – not just a split between defensive and offensive action, but between different kinds of offensive action.

There were six Alliance systems currently in Commonwealth hands. Alizon, Cora, Frihet, Hammerveldt, Huī Xīng, and Zahn were all single-system star nations. None had heavy industry, none had built their own starships, and in truth, none were strategically vital. Many officers and politicians felt their liberation should be the priority regardless.

Dimitri was in agreement with the
other
faction, one usually spearheaded by the Imperium – the destruction of fleet bases and re-fuelling depots had to be a priority. If the Alliance eliminated or reduced the Commonwealth’s ability to deploy forces in the region they called the Rimward Marches, then the conquered systems could be liberated with ease.

When an alert popped up on his implant that he was being requested on a Q-Com call, he hoped it was finally news.

“I’ll be in my office,” he told Lieutenant Commander Lisa Snapes, his Intelligence Officer. “Ping me if anything comes up I need to be aware of.”

Flag decks had a much less strict transfer of responsibility than the main bridge. In practice, the Senior Lieutenant in charge of the team running the consoles held ‘the watch’ on the flag deck, but most Admirals – Dimitri included – preferred to have one of the senior officers of the Admiral’s staff on the flag deck, just in case.

Closing the door to his office, he mentally connected the Q-Com channel to the wallscreen. It quickly popped up a series of videos – the central one was Fleet Admiral Meredith Blake of the Castle Federation Space Navy, but there were a
lot
of secondary channels.

This definitely wasn’t his orders. This… wasn’t good.

“Ladies, Gentlemen, we’re waiting on a few more,” Blake said calmly. “A recording of parts of this message will be forwarded to your capital ship commanders. Distribution of this information beyond that is at your and your captains’ discretion, but everything is classified Red Two.”

Dimitri took his seat, suddenly paying a lot more attention. Red classification was the level below Top Secret, and Red Two was the second highest level of it. The entire convoy mission he was currently on was only classified Red Four.

Another half dozen windows popped up on his screen, and Tobin realized that he was seeing every Alliance Admiral who was currently awake. This was big.

“We’re still sorting out the details,” Blake told them finally, “but six hours ago a major Commonwealth Task Force, fourteen ships under Walkingstick himself, entered the Midori system.”

Avalon’s
Admiral clenched his fists, his knuckles turning white as he remembered Midori. A lot of friends had died there… if they’d lost the system… he found himself plotting how quickly he could take Battle Group Seventeen there.

“They
exited
the system thirty-seven minutes ago,” Blake, who had stepped up from Chief of Staff for the Federation to Chief of Staff for the
Alliance
, told them.

Dimitri sighed in relief. A suicide charge probably wouldn’t have saved the system if Walkingstick
had
taken it – and it could easily have ended his career either way.

“They lost one battleship and between two and three hundred fighters.
We
lost the cruisers
Horus, Diamond,
and
Thermopylae
, along with the carrier
Michelangelo
,” she finished grimly, and Dimitri winced.

That was an Imperial strike cruiser, a Federation battlecruiser, and
two
Trade Factor ships. A full quarter of the warships left at the big Alliance base in Midori.

“Reports are coming in from multiple systems of Commonwealth attacks,” Blake warned them. “We have confirmed three other incursions in at least battle group strength. Be advised, we have confirmed at least one of these attacks was accompanied by troop transports.

“Some of these attacks appear to be the same kind of attritional raids we’ve been seeing for the last few months, but at least some of them are real attempts at conquest. Watch your frontiers, people,” she ordered. “I have no intention of yielding any more ground to Walkingstick’s people!”

The video dissolved into a cascade of what could be tentatively called ‘discussion’ – there were definitely some productive offers and requests of assistance between the Admirals, mixed in with the panic and the shouting.

Before Tobin could intervene, his implant pinged him and he muted the Q-Com.

“What is it, Lisa?”

“Sir, we’ve just received a message from Kematian,” his Intelligence Officer informed him, and he cursed silently. He knew what she was going to say before she even said it.

“A Commonwealth battle group has arrived. Kematian is under attack.”

#

“Are we getting a data feed from the Kematian Navy?” Dimitri asked as he returned to his flag deck. The quiet morning of a few minutes ago was gone now, and his people were busily pulling up channels and linking into the other ships of the Battle Group.

“We are,” Snapes confirmed. “They’re vectoring Q-probes in closer and moving their fleet out to intercept.”

“Get me a display,” Dimitri ordered. “Make sure Roberts and Solace are seeing this, as well as the other Captains.”

“They’re already on the link, sir,” the Lieutenant Commander confirmed. Moments later, the big display in the center of the flag deck lit up with a tactical view of the Kematian system.

Kem, Kematian’s star, was a K9 orange dwarf with five planets. Kematian itself was the closest planet, with two cold and rocky worlds orbiting outside it that provided raw materials for its industry. Two massive gas giants marked the outer perimeter of the system and helped to extend the gravity well outwards to make the planet hard to reach.

Two of the KN’s trio of cruisers were in orbit of the planet itself. The other orbited the second planet, Sumber. The display listed numbers of smaller ships, and he noted with a grimace that there were no guardships in the system.

There were, thankfully, almost a thousand starfighters – but they were an old design. The
Kavaleri
-type fighter was a
fifth
-generation design, notably inferior to the
Scimitars
the Commonwealth would be fielding.

“What do we know about the Commonwealth’s strength?” Dimitri asked, stepping over to the red splotch on the edge of the display and studying it.

“We’ve confirmed nine ships,” Snapes told him. “The Kematians are still sorting out details, but it looks like four are hanging back while five move in.” As she spoke, the red splotch resolved into slightly more detail, tags on the individual ships resolving as the group split apart. “Their guess is we’re looking at three transports and a battleship in Force Two on a slow gravity-assist course towards Kematian.”

“And Force One?” Dimitri eyed the five ships. They were moving quickly for Commonwealth ships, at two hundred and thirty gravities.

“Acceleration makes them modern units,” she agreed with his own silent assessment. “They haven’t deployed starfighters yet, but Commonwealth doctrine would suggest a roughly even split between starfighters and heavy weapons.

“Given accelerations, we’re likely to see a mix of
Hercules
battlecruisers,
Saint
battleships and
Volcano
heavy carriers,” she noted. Those were the Commonwealth’s most modern units, twenty million tons and sixty-five million cubic meters apiece.
Avalon
was bigger and more massive than any of them, but the
rest
of the Battle Group was the same size or smaller.

The Kematian Navy, on the other hand, had three
Majesty
-class cruisers purchased from the Imperium, equivalent to BG 17’s
Gravitas
. They were ten percent smaller than the Commonwealth ships, with barely three quarters of the mass and firepower.

Dimitri opened a channel to Roberts.

“Captain, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yes, sir,” Roberts confirmed. “It looks like Force One is intentionally maneuvering to allow the KN to concentrate before engaging. Given what they know, it makes sense, and it helps draw the KN to a position where they can’t intercept Force Two.”

Looking back at the display, Dimitri realized his Flag Captain was correct. The Kematians would consolidate their forces in about four hours, and unless the Commonwealth launched fighters in the next twenty minutes, Force One wouldn’t engage until after that. If they meant to keep their missiles and fighters together, that clash would likely take place in about six hours.

But Force One represented the main threat, so the KN
had
to maneuver to block them. And while they were doing that, Force Two would drop past them and intercept the planet in
eight
hours, where if Force Two went in with Force One, no landing would take place for half a standard day.

What the Commonwealth commander
didn’t
know was that Battle Group Seventeen was on the way – and would arrive in the system in… just over six hours.

Kyle was getting sick of watching battles he couldn’t influence. At least this time, Battle Group Seventeen would arrive before the action was likely to be concluded. Their arrival could – and hopefully would – make a difference in how the Commonwealth forces reacted.

Tobin had sent up a virtual conference with himself and Sanchez for all of the Group’s Captains and Executive Officers, plus Vice Commodore Stanford as the Group CAG. All ten of them were reviewing the same tactical display of the system, watching the icons of the various forces in play.

The Kematian Navy was completing its rendezvous, with just under twelve hundred starfighters forming into a defensive sphere around the three cruisers. They were now vectoring away from both their homeworld and Force One, trying to draw the Commonwealth into a stern chase.

It was a stern chase the Commonwealth force’s faster, more modern, ships would win. Three
Volcano
-class carriers and two
Saint
-class battleships followed the Kematians, and they’d already deployed over six hundred
Scimitars
between them.

For the moment, both fleets were keeping their starfighters close to hand, though that would likely end before
Avalon
and her companions entered the system.

Meanwhile, Force Two had accelerated its approach towards the planet. A single
Resolute
-class battleship – a last-generation ship, but still modern – escorted the three assault transports as all of them made an easy hundred gravities toward Kematian.

It was pretty clear Force Two believed Force One could take the Kematians, and Kyle had to admit they were probably right. The
Scimitars
were more than a match for the
Kavaleris
one on one, and while they couldn’t take them at two to one odds, they could definitely keep them from closing with the Commonwealth ships.

Once those two
Saints
with their megaton-range positron lances ranged on the Kematian ships the battle was over. With the newer ships’ heavier weapons
and
heavier deflectors, they had the locals outranged by the best part of a light second.

Of course, Battle Group Seventeen could change that entire calculation – and they would arrive in slightly less than an hour.

“We need to concentrate our forces, combine with the Kematians and pound Force One into debris,” Lord Captain Anders concluded. “With their heavy space power destroyed, Force Two will run – there’s no point in landing troops when we control the skies.”