Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (23 page)

Triumphant
was still an hour away from her destination, but she and the
Hercules
were rapidly approaching each other. Anderson had managed to sneak one of the Q-Com equipped probes in close to their intercept point, and Kyle watched with interest as the two Commonwealth warships approached.

The battleship was inbound towards the logistics depot at over eight thousand kilometers a second still, and the battlecruiser had reversed her acceleration half an hour ago and was rapidly building velocity towards the depot. They were two hundred thousand kilometers apart, the closing speed shrinking as their speeds came into alignment.

Neither ship had done anything noticeable yet. None of the defending ship’s other twenty starfighters had been launched, and neither had done anything aggressive – though both had their electromagnetic deflectors up. With the battleship-grade positron lances both ships carried, though, they were already in death range.

“What are they
doing
?” Kyle heard Solace wonder aloud.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, shaking his head. “My guess, though, is that whoever is in command of the battlecruiser is trying to talk Richardson into surrendering. Richardson… either hasn’t made up his mind, or is playing a very dangerous game.”

He flipped feeds to look up Stanford. The lack of visual data from the CAG’s communicator warned him the other man was in his starfighter.

“Vice Commodore, are your fighters prepared to launch?” he asked.

“We are prepared and loaded,” Stanford replied. “I have a Wing prepped to fly escort duty on Norup’s Marines as well.”

“Thanks, Michael,” Kyle said quietly, and then flipped to that worthy.

“Major Norup, are your people ready to go?”

“I’ve got all four companies loaded in the shuttles, with First and Third in full battle armor,” the Marine commander told him crisply. “Get us to the platforms, and we’ll take control.”

Both Kyle’s starfighters and Marine assault shuttles could double
Avalon’s
acceleration. The carrier herself had just made turnover and was still six hours away. If he launched his small craft, they could hit the depot in just over four hours.

Of course, his starfighters could make an
attack
pass, on
Triumphant
or the base, in a little over two – but they’d be moving at over thirty percent of lightspeed. A ‘point three pass’ was doable, but it was also risky and pushed the tiny spacecraft to their maximum capabilities.

Whatever happened over the next few minutes, Kyle was now confident that he could take control of the Alizon system and destroy the Commonwealth forces opposing him.

“The
Hercules
has launched shuttles, sir!” Anderson reported. “I’m reading… four ships, look like equivalents to our Marine assault craft.” He paused, clearly reviewing data.

“They’re only pulling two hundred and forty gravities, sir,” he concluded. “I’d guess they came to a conclusion.”

Kyle nodded. It seemed Captain Richardson had agreed to face Commonwealth justice. He smiled. It wasn’t
quite
going to work out that way for the man, though. Given Fleet Admiral Walkingstick’s reputation, all that was going to change was the brand name of the bullet.

“
Holy shit!
”

Richardson had apparently reached the same conclusion as Kyle.

The assault shuttles had crossed barely half of the distance between the two ships before someone on
Triumphant
pushed the button. Almost fifty light positron lances, each delivering ninety-kilotons-a-second of antimatter, lashed out into space. Four beams targeted each shuttle – and each of the
Hercules’
guardian starfighters.

But those beams were the side-show. At the same instant as the smaller craft died, eight one-megaton-a-second heavy positron lances fired – at a target that wasn’t evading, whose ECM was down, whose bridge crew
knew
Captain Richardson and
Triumphant
had surrendered.

Even one hit would have been fatal – and none of them missed.

#

It was very quiet on
Avalon’s
bridge. Kyle had taken his crew through two space battles, and they
understood
, in the bone-deep way only combat veterans could, how vulnerable the massive vessels that carried them were.

Watching seven thousand lives snuffed out in a moment of treachery was a shock to the system regardless.

“Sir,” Anderson began, then coughed to clear his throat. “Sir,” he repeated, “
Triumphant
has launched missiles at the depot. I’m reading less than twenty minutes to impact.”

“Track their vectors,” Kyle ordered. “Confirm their targets.”

“They’re… the missiles are targeted on the fighter launch platforms,” his Tactical Officer replied quietly. “I
think
they were launched without warheads… they want to protect the rest of the facility.”

At those speeds, a two ton capital missile would impact with thirty megatons of force – enough to rip through even an armored space station, but not enough to damage the rest of the depot.

“What do we do, sir?” Anderson asked.

“We wait,” Kyle ordered harshly. “Remember that this is
our
system, and that depot is supporting the occupation on the surface. Every starfighter destroyed, every missile expended, makes
our
job easier.

“This kind of betrayal isn’t something we want to watch,” he said softly, making sure all of his people could hear him, “but our mission here is to take out
Triumphant
and liberate Alizon – and if the Commonwealth wants to shoot each other, I say we let them.”

“Depot has picked up their launch and is returning fire,” Anderson reported. “I’m not picking up any fighter launches though.”

“They’ll put everything into space they can,” Stanford interjected. “But… if they didn’t have everybody up, suited, and ready to go… a launch from a cold start can easily be thirty minutes.”

“They don’t
have
thirty minutes, CAG,” the redheaded officer pointed out.

“If they weren’t ready to launch, a lot of people are about to die,” Kyle agreed. “And if they weren’t, whoever was in command made a dangerous mistake.”

His bridge crew seemed to accept that, slowly settling back into their tasks and tracking the two sets of missiles.

The depot really had depended on its starfighters and defending starships, he noted.
Triumphant
had fired twenty-four Stormwind capital ship missiles at the depot – and the stations had only fired sixteen back. Given that the Commonwealth generally designed their capital ships to handle at least half again their own missile strength, the depot’s defenses weren’t going to do much to the battleship.

“Captain Roberts,” Tobin addressed him over a private link. “I really do hate to jog your shoulders in the middle of a fight, but what
is
your plan?”

“
Triumphant’s
salvo will almost certainly remove the depot’s starfighters as a factor,” Kyle replied. “Once
Triumphant
is the only real threat on the board, I’ll deploy Stanford’s fighters. We’ll need them to build up extra velocity to make sure they can
catch
her if she tries to run.

“There’s a risk of detection,” he admitted, “which is why I want to hold off on launching until
after
Triumphant
has neutralized the defenses. I’m not sure how Richardson will react once he sees us, but I’d rather not fight both a battleship and a depot defense fighter group if I can avoid it.”

Tobin nodded slowly.

“What if he runs, Captain?” he asked. “I am not prepared to lose our prey again.”

“We only have so long before they’re going to see us, sir,” Kyle told him. “I’m surprised we haven’t been detected yet, to be honest. Once the depot defenses are down, we will launch at
Triumphant.
If Richardson escapes…” he shrugged. “We still have a speed advantage. We can liberate Alizon today and bring him down tomorrow. It’s worth the risk in my opinion.”

The Vice Admiral looked like he was going to argue for a moment, but finally seemed to control himself and nodded again.

“Fight your ship, Captain,” he ordered.

#

Triumphant’s
missiles struck home. There had never really been any doubt in Kyle’s mind that they would, but it was still nerve-wracking to watch them hit. Anderson’s assessment that the battleship hadn’t loaded their warheads bore out, as while the explosions ripped through and gutted the six fighter launch platforms the impacts lacked gigaton-range antimatter reactions.

The depot had shot down twelve missiles, but that had still left two for each platform – and Stormwinds, like the Alliance’s Jackhammers, linked together in a networked intelligence perfectly capable of making last minute target allocations.

Whoever had been in charge of the starfighters either had never taken them to full readiness status, or had stood them down after it appeared
Triumphant
was going to surrender. Across six stations, the defenders had only put another four squadrons worth of fighters into space in almost twenty minutes.

Sixty
Scimitar
fighters wasn’t going to be enough to take down
Triumphant
– not unless they were well-trained, rigorously drilled, squadrons operating with comrades they knew and were well-prepared for the fight.

Kyle would have stacked any one of his Wings of forty-eight
Falcons
against
Triumphant
without hesitation, though the losses would be awful. The remaining defenders of Alizon’s new logistics depot didn’t stand a chance.

Triumphant
herself had vanished into a ball of jamming as the defender’s missiles closed, and even with the drones far closer than
Avalon
they couldn’t pick out the moment the last missile died. There was a cascade of explosions as lasers and positron lances slashed the big missiles apart.

And in the middle of that cascade, the drone feed suddenly out. Then the second drone feed vanished.

“Anderson,” Kyle snapped. “What happened to our drones?”

“They’re gone, sir,” the officer replied. “Give me a moment.” He paused, reviewing data. “
Void
. Probe Three got confused by their ECM and misdirected their heat venting,” he admitted softly. “They saw her, sir – and then picked up Probe Two on their active sweep. They know they’re being watched.”

The Q-probes were the stealthiest items in any Navy’s inventory, but ninety-plus percent of that stealth boiled down to carefully directing their engines and heat venting
away
from their enemies. Once that had failed, they fell back on powerful ECM to stay alive in combat environments – but that ECM also made their
presence
, if not their location, obvious.

Anderson’s Q-probes had died before they could bring their defense routines up, and without the probes in place,
Avalon
was now seeing everything as it was twenty-six minutes ago. They had
no
idea what
Triumphant
was doing in response to discovering their watchers.

“Can we say when they’ll detect us?” Kyle demanded.

“No idea, sir,” Anderson admitted. “They’ll probably guess we’re doing exactly what we’re doing, and we are throwing off a
lot
of energy. If they take a close look, we’ll be pretty obvious, sir. I’d guess they know by now.”

“Understood,” Kyle acknowledged. Well, he’d known the stealth trick wasn’t going to work forever.
Avalon
was still almost half a billion kilometers from the depot – five and a half hours of careful deceleration for a zero-zero intercept.

“Stanford, Norup,” he barked, opening channels to the two men. “Launch
now
. Don’t worry about stealth – they know we’re here.

“It looks like most of the defenses are down, but, Stanford, make sure Norup is covered all the way in. Those starfighters may still want to play.”

“Rokos and his Wing are on the depot,” the CAG replied. “I’ll send Nguyen and Epsilon to back him up with those starfighters. The rest of us are going after the battleship.”

“We’re firing new probes now,” Kyle told Stanford, with a commanding glance over at Anderson, “we’ll relay data as we have it, but they won’t be very far ahead of you for a while.”