Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (33 page)

“We will range on
Triumphant
at two point one million kilometers in nineteen minutes, fifteen seconds,” Anderson reported. “
Triumphant
will range on us at one point two million kilometers in nineteen minutes, fifty seconds. Passing velocity will exceed five percent of lightspeed.”

Kyle nodded.
Triumphant
had one megaton lances to
Avalon’s
seven hundred kiloton main guns, but the newer carrier’s deflectors were over twice as powerful. He was sure the Commonwealth, like the Alliance, was looking to retrofit its older ships’ deflectors – but they hadn’t yet. Those thirty five seconds would almost certainly be enough to turn the battleship into scattered debris.

“And the
Saint Augustine
?” he asked quietly. The
Saint
-class battleship’s deflectors were as strong as
Avalon’s
, which meant he wouldn’t range on them until much later.

“
Augustine
will range on us at one point two million kilometers… fifteen seconds after we can target
Triumphant
,” Anderson said quietly. “She will be roughly two light seconds closer to us than
Triumphant
at that point. We will range on
her
at eight hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, forty-five seconds after she ranges on us.”

“We won’t live that long, Captain,” Solace pointed out quietly. “What’s your plan?”

“We carry on,” Kyle ordered. “We make them think we’re calling their bluff – and no matter what, we don’t fire at
Augustine
first.”

“Our only chance of taking her out without the starfighters is to launch missiles
now
,” Anderson told him.

“Commander, do you really think you can get a nine missile salvo past the defenses of the
Triumphant
, let alone the
Saint Augustine
?”
Avalon’s
Captain asked quietly. “Because if you can, feel free to open fire on
Triumphant
. We’re in range.”

“Why hasn’t she launched on us then?” Solace asked.

“Richardson is saving his missiles,” Kyle replied. “He can’t have many left, and he’s counting on
Saint Augustine
to cover for him today. Sadly, I suspect he’s saving his missiles
for
Saint Augustine
.”

He felt more than saw the shiver that ran through his crew.

“They’ve got to be wondering the same thing about our fighters,” Anderson realized. “It’s a guessing game all around.”

“Exactly,” Kyle told him with bared teeth. “And so whether we all live or die comes down to who guessed better – me, or Captain Richardson.”

“What about
Augustine
?” Solace asked.

“If Captain Antioch guesses right, he could change how this ends,” Kyle acknowledged. “But he’s already guessed wrong once today. I’m not discounting him, but he has shown his intuition to be… flawed.”

“Sir,
Saint Augustine
is launching missiles!”

Captain Kyle Roberts nodded with a calm smile and leaned back in his command chair, eyeing the icons marking the thirty heavy missiles on his tactical feeds.

“So it begins,” he murmured.

“You may return fire, Mister Anderson.”

Timing was everything.
Saint Augustine’s
first missiles would reach
Avalon
over three minutes before she could range on
Triumphant.
Even faced with top-of-the-line capital ship missiles, the supercarrier could probably handle thirty missiles.

Saint Augustine’s
first missiles concerned him. The second salvo, fired a minute later, worried him a bit more.

The actual
problem
was that
Triumphant
had finally fired a missile salvo shortly after
Saint Augustine
had. Those twenty-four missiles would arrive alongside
Augustine’s third
salvo. Without starfighters to play the first line of defense, Kyle wasn’t at all sure his ship could take over
fifty
missiles.

“Hold your course, Commander Pendez,” he ordered softly. “Commander Anderson, I’ll take control of our missiles if you please. Focus on your defenses.”

Kyle’s gamble might still pay off, but that required them to still be
alive
when they reached positron lance range of
Triumphant
.

“Lieutenant Carter,” he turned to his communication officer. “Any word from Commodore Tecumseh?”

“No, sir.”

The commander of the Terran Task Group was apparently willing to stand back and watch. To be fair, Tecumseh was probably the smartest Terran officer in the system, which meant he
had
to be feeling paranoid about the absence of Kyle’s fighters.

“First salvo impact in five minutes,” Anderson reported. “I estimate a thirty-five second engagement window for active defense. Commander Solace,” he turned to the XO on the intercom. “I’m passing control of the inner zone to Secondary Control.”

“We’re locked in here, Commander Anderson,” she replied calmly. “You clean, we’ll sweep.”

Kyle left his subordinates to it. The light positron lances used for anti-fighter and anti-missile defense could start killing missiles at a million kilometers. The laser defense array had more coverage and more beams, but a lot less effective range.

He focused on that third combined salvo. The nine missile salvos that Anderson had launched weren’t going to get through either battleship’s defenses. Kyle had let his Tactical Officer launch them as much in reflex as anything else, but he still had a use for them.

“Impact in one minute, targeting with outer defenses.”

Keeping a quarter of his mind on the immediate threat,
Avalon’s
Captain directed his missiles carefully. Unlike the drones they could use to watch the battle, missiles didn’t carry Q-Com systems – no one was going to put entangled particle arrays on something
designed
to be destroyed. An array large enough to be useful would increase the cost of a missile roughly a hundred-fold, leaving a single capital ship missile costing a third of the price of an entire starfighter.

Timing was everything.

Even as his subordinates fought to protect the carrier from the current attack, Kyle studied the enemy missiles, laid in the directions, and programmed his orders. A moment’s thought sent a second salvo of missiles thundering out into space.

“First salvo is clear,” Solace reported, her voice spiky with adrenaline. “Second salvo entering engagement range in twenty seconds. Third salvo in ninety seconds.”

“Lance range in two minutes, thirty seconds,” Anderson reported.

Kyle gave his final orders and returned his attention to the main plot. The inevitable natural ‘jamming’ effect of antimatter explosions was messing with their sensors now, with the cloud of radioactive debris from the first thirty missiles surrounding the big carrier.

“Second salvo entering range.”

In the same instant
Saint Augustine’s
second set of thirty missiles entered range of
Avalon’s
defense, her
third
salvo interpenetrated with the nine missiles the carrier had fired back. The screen flashed with white light as all nine of Kyle’s missiles shot closer to the Commonwealth missiles and detonated.

His subordinates wisely focused on their own work and Kyle studied the results. He’d lucked out – twelve missiles were gone, the Stormwinds not smart
enough
to avoid proximity kills without some kind of warning.

Even as he watched, though, the missiles spread apart – as did
Triumphant’s
. His second salvo dove into the heart of
Triumphant’s
salvo, but the missiles’ simplistic but
fast
brains had reacted in time.

Only six missiles died this time, and Kyle leaned back in his chair as the remaining forty missiles charged in on his command.

“Second salvo clear,” Solace reported grimly. “Third salvo entering range in thirty seconds. I confirm forty – repeat, four zero, missiles remaining.” She met Kyle’s gaze through the intercom. “We’ll do what we can, sir.”

The statue he’d accepted as his XO in time of stress was gone, and there was something in her eyes as she looked at him. He shook his head gently.

“No, Mira,” he told her. “This is
Avalon
. We do what
no one
else
can!”

There was a smile and a cheer on his people’s lips as the enemy missiles charged into range.

#

Kyle was out of tricks now. No missiles left to use as sacrificial lambs. No aggressive suicide charge to shock and awe a second-rate enemy into submitting. No smart Alcubierre tricks to confound and surprise the foe.

Just one hole card he’d already played, and the sheer grit and skill of the crew of the deep space supercarrier
Avalon
. It would have to do.

Positron beams glittered across his tactical display as Anderson opened fire. Ghosts flickered around them as the Tactical Officer’s subordinates unleashed the carrier’s electronic warfare suite, tempting and tricking missiles away from their targets.

Seconds ticked by before the near-lightspeed weapons hit their targets. Missiles began to die.
Avalon’s
forward broadsides mounted one hundred seventy-kiloton-per-second lances, and those weapons tore into the Terran missiles.

But those missiles had their own ECM. Ghosts flickered and appeared around the missiles, and the missiles themselves jerked and spiraled, throwing off Anderson’s targeting programs and forcing misses.

A dozen missiles died. Then another dozen. Then sixteen missiles tore into the inner defense zone and the hundreds of small lasers mounted along
Avalon’s
arrowhead hull opened fire.

Kyle held his breath. He wasn’t the only one, and seconds passed in dead silence as
Avalon’s
crew guided their ship from inside their implants. Missiles died, first in singles, then in pairs – a full
dozen
of the deadly weapons flashing apart in antimatter fire as Solace took them out with deadly precision.

Four made it through. Out of over a hundred capital ship missiles, costing millions of Commonwealth dollars apiece, four penetrated every active defense the supercarrier could throw at them.

They made it through every defense… and missed.

The carrier
lurched
as the missiles, fooled by ECM and the radiation clouds of their dead sisters, detonated well clear of her hull, waves of energy hammering into the warship’s meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic armor. The lights flickered, dimmed, and came back up.

The tactical feed didn’t. A moment later, a fuzzy, mixed image appeared in Kyle’s brain.

“Wong?” he snapped. “Where’s our feed?”

“You’re getting all you’re getting,” the Engineer replied bluntly. “Those blasts just melted every sensor array on our hull.”

“We need those sensors to target the guns,” Anderson said grimly. “Q-Com relay from the drones won’t cut it – the bandwidth is enough for keeping an eye on people, but not for attack telemetry. Our drones are moving
fast
– we’ve got significant relativity impacts. The computers can adjust… but not fast enough to hit an evading target at two million kilometers.”

“Damn,” Kyle said mildly. “Prepare for random fire then,” he told Anderson. “We may not hit them, but by the gods let’s keep their eyes on…”

“Wait!” Anderson snapped. “
Augustine
just flipped and went to emergency decal.
Anthony
flipped as well – they’re inbound. What the Void?!”

Captain Kyle Roberts glanced at the tactical display and ran the angles in his mind. A cold, savage smile grew on his face.

“It seems Commodore Tecumseh is
almost
paranoid enough,” he said aloud. “He just spotted Stanford.”

It was almost a relief when the Commonwealth starships finally reacted to the starfighter group.

The expanding radiation cloud from
Avalon’s
burst of emergency acceleration had covered and concealed Michael’s people on their approach, but he’d
known
it couldn’t last forever. Even if his gunner was estimating the antimatter left behind would keep annihilating itself for another twenty to thirty minutes, the further they got from the initial point, the more and more likely it was that almost
two hundred
antimatter drives would be picked up.

As they’d grown closer and closer, Michael had started to suspect that the two battleships he was targeting
had
to have seen him, and the whole thing was a trap, waiting to lure the starfighters in and annihilate them at a range where the starships could hit them and they couldn’t return the favor.

Instead, they were almost
on top
of
Triumphant
, and only half a million kilometers from
Saint Augustine
, flying straight between the two starships at almost five percent of the speed of light. This was
insane
.

“All fighters,” he snapped. “Random-walk to avoid fire, full missile salvo on
Augustine
. Close with
Triumphant
and
finish the son of a bitch
!”

Fitting actions to words, he twisted his starfighter into a spiral, narrowly dodging the first beam of the day as
Triumphant
finally realized the danger.
Saint Augustine
was trying to put distance between her and the starfighters, but with eight hundred Starfire missiles barrelling down on her, all she was doing was buying time.

Spiraling in towards
Triumphant
, Michael left the missiles to his gunner and spun up the positron lance. The six thousand ton starfighter vibrated gently as the zero point cell feeding the weapon fired up, pulsing power back into the fighter’s grid and positrons into the capacitor banks for the weapon.

Now!

One hundred and ninety-two
Falcon
starfighters spun in space, dancing a pirouette of survival around the deadly beams of antimatter – and then fired their own lances.

Many missed. Some only contacted for fractions of a second. A handful struck and held, the beams burning clean through the battleship as they converted her own mass into devastatingly powerful explosives.

It took Michael Stanford’s starfighters a mere eight seconds to cross their range envelope of
Triumphant
. When they left it, there was nothing left of the fifteen million ton battleship but radiation and debris.

Kematian was avenged.

#

Michael had fractions of a second to process
Triumphant’s
destruction. Even as their missiles struck home and his starfighters flashed by,
Saint Augustine
was firing on them. Her anti-fighter lances were targeting the swarm of missiles blasting in on her, but the battleship’s main guns could
not
target missiles.

They were simply inefficient at targeting starfighters. Michael winced as he saw ships simply
disappear
as the massive, megaton-a-second, lances struck home on starfighters barely able to withstand laser hits.

Then the missiles struck home. Starfires were fighter-launched weapons, a tenth the size and even less of the capability of capital ship missiles. The secondary lances and laser arrays took a vicious harvest, and hundreds of missiles detonated, filling the space around
Saint Augustine
in radiation and debris.