Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (14 page)

“I agree,” Captain Aleppo said after a moment. “Kematian’s orbital defenses are not impregnable, but it would take time for the battleship to wear them down – time our presence denies them.”

It
sounded
right, but the thought bothered Kyle. With a mental command, he highlighted the planet’s orbital platforms.

“If we focus on Force One,” he pointed out, “the entirety of Kematian’s orbital industry and infrastructure are at risk. If they avoid the civilian habitats, it’s a legitimate military target, and one whose destruction would leave us committing even more resources to this system’s defense.

“While a
Resolute
-class battleship lacks the firepower bring down the defenses without time, if they don’t decelerate they’ll pass the planet at a velocity that will make their weapons even more dangerous.

“If we ignore Force Two, they could destroy Kematian’s economy,” Kyle warned. “I recommend splitting our forces, sir,” he told Vice Admiral Tobin. “We can send two, even three, of
Avalon’s
Wings after the landing force without compromising our ability to destroy Force One.

“We could even deploy decoys to make our fighter strength seem larger, and leave them doubting which fighter force is real,” he continued. “It would achieve the goal of making Force One nervous and threatening Force Two.”

Alstairs whistled softly.

“That’s not bad, sir,” she added. “Play the cards right, we could leave them guessing to the last minute – might even get both Force One and Force Two to run.”

“Or we could find ourselves flying right into the teeth of two super-modern battleships without the starfighter strength to press home the assault,” Sanchez objected. “We don’t have a lot of data on the capabilities of the
Saints
. If Intelligence’s estimates are off, even two fighter Wings could make the difference between a comfortable victory, and a tight-fought one that loses us more ships than we can afford!”

“You raise a good point, Captain Roberts,” Tobin interjected before he could reply. “It’s a risky plan, though – the kind that looks fantastic on paper but that reality tends to shred.”

Kyle
might
have been falsely maligning his Admiral, but he was pretty sure there was a factor of ‘a more
experienced
officer would know that’ in his words. Though C
ameroon’s
Captain Alstairs was the most senior Captain in the group by at least two years.

“The Commonwealth is also unlikely to launch the kind of attack you’re predicting,” Tobin continued. “There is a not-insignificant risk of hitting the habitats or even the
planet
in that kind of rushed bombardment, and the Terrans tend to
shoot
officers who hit planets – however accidentally.

“The simple fact ladies, gentlemen, is that we
know
Walkingstick is prioritizing inflicting capital ship casualties over anything else. We can sadly afford to lose Kematian’s orbital industry better than we can afford multiple starship losses.

“We will keep the Battle Group and Commodore Stanford’s fighters together,” the Vice Admiral ordered. “This is a chance to punch out five of the Commonwealth’s shiniest warships. If the Marshal is willing to give me this chance, then I am by God going to take it!”

Almost as soon as the warp bubble around
Avalon
collapsed, acceleration slammed Michael back into the command seat of his starfighter. The Kematian system resolved into reality around him, and he started checking in with his fighter Wings.

It took roughly a minute for all of the Battle Group’s fighters to launch into space, and he scanned the numbers. Two hundred and forty from
Avalon
, eighty from
Gravitas
– they’d replaced their losses and their commanding officer before BG 17 had left Castle – and forty-eight from
Cameron
gave him almost three hundred and seventy of the little ships, all seventh-generation spacecraft.

“Wing leaders, check in,” he ordered.

“
Avalon
Alpha here,” Thomas Avignon reported.

“Bravo on your left,” Russell Rokos chimed in.

“Charlie’s locked and loaded.”

“
Avalon
Delta is looking pretty.”

“Epsilon online.”

“
Cameroon
Wing in position,” Wing Commander Andreas Volte told him.

“Attack Wing
Gravitas
online and awaiting your orders,” Lieutenant Colonel Annika Schmidt reported last. She’d been yanked from another Imperial ship in Castle – the one escorting the Ambassador, no less! – to replace Kai Metzger after the Imperials had finally admitted the previous commander had screwed up.

Michael took a quick moment to review the tactical display now feeding directly to his optic nerves. The Kematian Navy was now outright running in front of the Commonwealth force. The Terrans, unfortunately, edged them by about ten gravities overall – and had a velocity edge of almost ten percent of lightspeed.

They were in missile range now, and the starfighters had
just
been sent into the attack. The missiles would follow, though with twelve hundred Kematian starfighters providing cover, they weren’t likely to get through.

The Commonwealth force seemed willing to play the long game. Every minute that passed got Force Two closer to the planet and, in the end, if the Kematians didn’t get offensive with their starfighters, they couldn’t win.

Whoever was in charge had to be wondering what the defenders were thinking – the position they’d taken was buying them time, but at the cost of their best chance for victory.

Of course, the Commonwealth commander didn’t have the advantage of being linked into the system’s sensor net and the Kematian Navy’s sensors by Q-Com. He had to wait for light to reach him at its age-old pace of three hundred thousand kilometers a second.

Which meant the Terrans would know about Battle Group Seventeen’s arrival roughly… now. Almost as soon as the light would have reached them, the acceleration of the starfighters cut to zero. Moments later, they resumed acceleration – at a rate that would bring them back into company with their warships.

The Terrans were still going after the defending fleet – but they were being a
lot
more careful about it.

“They know we’re coming,” he told his Wing Commanders. “Let’s go say hello, shall we?”

Moments later, three hundred and sixty eight starfighters fired off their drives and charged the enemy at five hundred gravities.

#

Over the next five hours, Michael had a front row seat to a display that would have made any ancient Spanish matador proud.

Force One’s commander had clearly decided to try to finish off the Kematian Navy before engaging BG 17. Unfortunately, his ten gravity edge in acceleration wasn’t enough to
force
the three cruisers into range of his battleships, not when they kept adjusting vectors.

By now, the defenders’ fighter strength had been gutted. Of the twelve hundred four thousand ton ships Kematian had sent out to defend herself, barely three hundred survived – but they’d
annihilated
the Terran
Scimitars
.

It looked like the Kematians’ luck was running out. With most of their fighters gone, the Commonwealth opened up with every missile launcher they had. Fifty missiles blasted into space, followed by fifty more twenty-one seconds later.

Flight time for the Stormwinds was over fifteen minutes still, but that steady metronome of incoming salvos could easily be too much for the remaining starfighters.

Of course, Battle Group Seventeen had fired
fifty
minutes ago, and sixty-five missiles were now burning up behind Vice Commodore Stanford’s starfighters – and with less than fifty starfighters left, Force Two was about to have a very bad day.

“On my mark,” Michael said calmly. “All fighters fire two salvos. First is to detonate at one hundred thousand kilometers to screw with their sensors for the starships’ missiles. Second is to close and kill.”

He smiled.

“We’ll be right behind them.”

He waited. At the speed they were closing, milliseconds would make the difference – but he was fully linked into his starfighter, and milliseconds were all the time in the world.

“
Mark
,” he snapped.

The rotary launcher the Federation had developed, and the Imperium had ‘borrowed’ – mostly with permission – had a cycle time of a little over four seconds. By the time those seconds had passed, his three hundred and sixty odd ships had thrown over three thousand missiles into space,

They shot ahead of his ships at a thousand gravities and the Battle Group’s Jackhammers came up behind them, their higher velocities closing the gaps between the three salvos.

Seconds ticked by like years. Positron lances started to flash in space around them, the battleships and their carrier charges lighting up space as they tried to destroy missiles and starfighters at maximum range. In theory, the
Saint’s
one megaton main guns could hit them at this range – but the whole purpose of having a pilot in the expendable little spacecraft was to make them too unpredictable for that.

Force One had started accelerating directly away from Michael’s people. Not enough to change anything, but enough to allow their lances and defense lasers to have a chance. At the speed they were closing, it changed the time frame by only seconds – but at these speeds, seconds were everything.

The first salvo detonated exactly on cue, a hundred thousand kilometers clear of the Commonwealth force. The interlaced shockwaves and radiation clouds shot forward, maintaining the velocity of the missiles and filling space with natural jamming.

On the heels of that chaos came the
Falcons
and the Battle Group’s Jackhammers. Decoys and even more jamming filled in the space behind the radiation cloud, rendering the empty space a chaotic hell that rivaled the heart of a star for discord and chaos.

Sixty-five Jackhammer missiles struck from the heart of that cloud of chaos.

They met the starfighters first. Fifty-four
Scimitars
remained, and they charged the missiles, lances and defensive lasers flashing into space. The missiles were designed for this, weaving and dodging and scattering electronic signatures across thousands of kilometers.

Thirty missiles passed through, and then the Terran starfighters passed into range of Stanford’s starfighters. He hadn’t given orders for what to do – he hadn’t needed to. Moments after the Terrans entered his people’s range, they were dead, shredded by four or five positron lances apiece.

Two of his
Falcons
died with them, but he forced those feelings aside as the seconds ticked away.

Three seconds after the first missiles detonated, the Jackhammer salvo hit home. Of the sixty-five missiles launched almost an hour before, one made it through everything the Commonwealth could throw at it, and collided head-on with the lead
Saint
.

Traveling at almost twenty percent of the speed of light and carrying a one-gigaton antimatter warhead, the Jackhammer hit with
two
gigatons of force. The twenty million ton battleship
visibly
lurched backwards, debris scattering into space from the point of impact, fire blasting out of the hull to disappear as the oxygen fuelling it was exhausted.

Michael Stanford
knew
, intellectually, that battleships were the toughest things ever built by human hands; that modern meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic armor was almost as tough as the old thin shells of neutronium. It was a far different affair to watch the
Saint
take that missile on the nose and
keep firing
.

It changed nothing.

Two seconds after the sole Jackhammer impact, the second fighter missile salvo charged in on its heels. Hundreds of missiles had been deceived by jamming and other countermeasures. Hundreds more of the less-capable fighter-launched missiles died to the defenses that had killed dozens of capital ship missiles.

‘Only’ one hundred and twenty missiles made it through. The already-damaged
Saint
, with its weakened defenses, was the target of over half of them, and vanished in a ball of fire.

The other four ships survived, somehow, dancing and pirouetting in the cataclysm of fire that embraced them. Half-gutted, barely functional hulks, but they survived, and were still firing.

Vice Commodore Michael Stanford and Battle Group Seventeen’s starfighters were barely two seconds behind their missiles.

Kyle had never sent starfighters into battle without accompanying them before, and it was a far more nerve-wracking experience than he’d expected. When the battle was finally joined, everything disintegrated into a chaos even the Q-Com links to the fighters and accompanying drones couldn’t sort out.

It probably wasn’t any clearer when you were in the middle of that chaos, but it
felt
clearer. You knew what you had to do.

From the outside, you just watched a thousand people disappear into a ball of hellfire, and prayed to the Gods that they came out alive.

He knew from the speeds and firepower in play that it would be over in less than twenty seconds. Those seconds passed, and the computers still struggled to resolve anything from the debris and radiation. Another twenty seconds passed.

Finally, over a minute after Stanford had detonated the first wave of missiles, the computers combined the data from the starfighters and the probes and reported the results of the fighter strike.

Force One was
gone
. Where a minute before, fifty-plus starfighters and five of the Terran Commonwealth’s newest warships had charged through space, only wreckage remained. As Kyle watched, a handful of escape pod beacons began to light up. Not many – not nearly enough.

Fifty thousand people had just died in less than a minute.

Thirty-six of Battle Group Seventeen’s fighters had gone with them. Glancing over the numbers, Kyle saw they’d been lucky – twenty-five of the ships had ejected their emergency capsules, saving their crews.

Seventeen of the thirty-six lost starfighters were Imperial
Arrows
, a disproportionate loss. The Imperium would tear the result apart in their review sessions, but he suspected it was as simple as the Coraline fighters’ lower powered electronic warfare suites being less able to keep them alive in the middle of the fray.

“Get me a status on the Kematians and Force Two,” he heard Tobin order, and pulled his thoughts back to the living.

“The KN has six salvos, three hundred missiles, inbound,” Anderson reported onto the squadron net.

Kyle caught a quick glance over from his Tactical Officer and gave the young man a reassuring nod. He didn’t need Kyle’s permission to share that data, though some Captains might object to the junior officer taking it on themselves to respond to the Admiral’s query.

“What’s the ETA on those missiles?” he asked Anderson himself. The loss of their motherships made the missiles less deadly, but by no means helpless.

“First salvo arriving in eight minutes, final in ten,” the young man reported crisply. “Our fighters don’t have the vector for intercept – it’s all on the locals.”

“Damn,” Kyle whispered. Anderson had answered his next question before he asked it. “Gods protect them.”

“Force Two is accelerating again,” Sanchez reported, answering the second half of Tobin’s question. “They are vectoring away from the planet. The battleship will make their closest approach at two million kilometers at roughly five percent of light speed, the transports at ten million. Both will be in roughly twenty minutes.”