Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (22 page)

“That… makes sense,” Sanchez admitted, and Tobin smiled to himself at her strained tone.

“I’m not going to stop you dropping whatever drones you want, Captain,” he told Roberts. “
Avalon’s
your ship. Let’s just make damn sure
Triumphant
doesn’t make it out of here.”

“Right now I’m enjoying the unusual feeling of sneaking up on someone in space,”
Avalon’s
Captain replied brightly. “Once
Triumphant
arrives in an hour or so, I may reconsider. But for now, let’s play it nice and safe.”

“Do you even know the meaning of the word, safe?” Sanchez demanded, and Tobin’s smile faded.

“Right now, Senior Fleet Commander,” Roberts said levelly, “‘Safe’ means I’m presuming there’s enough force hiding behind that moon to destroy
Avalon
, and I don’t want to attract their attention until I know I can take out
Triumphant
. Safe enough for you?”

“There she is,” Anderson announced into the anticipatory quiet of
Avalon’s
bridge as
Triumphant
appeared on the screens.

The image was most of an hour old,
Triumphant
having emerged on a very different approach track than
Avalon
. The Commonwealth battleship wasn’t trying to hide from the logistics depot, after all.

The big carrier’s own approach seemed to be going unnoticed. It was hard to be absolutely certain, though, as the light from their drive activation was still fifteen minutes from the base – and it would be another hour still after that before
Avalon
saw their reaction.

“What’s your assessment of her approach?” Kyle asked his Tactical Officer. “That’s a bit closer in than I expected.”

Anderson paused to think for a second, highlighting the battleship on the feed going to the entire bridge crew and dropping vector data in on it.

“She didn’t exactly thread the needle,” the Commander replied after a moment. “Came in a few minutes late, carved half an hour off of her approach. It’s risky, but not too dangerous… but it’s an
assault
profile, sir, not a friendly system arrival profile.

“And look,” he flashed the vector data, “she’s going in fast – two hundred and thirty gravities.
Resolutes
are only rated for two hundred, so either they upgraded her engines and manipulators at some point, or she’s burning fuel like water.”

“So she’s not planning on showing up for hugs and kisses,” Kyle observed. “What’s the Marine complement of a ship like that?”

“Depends on the mission,” Anderson replied. “Their default is a single eight hundred man battalion, but they can
carry
a full regiment – and since she was escorting an assault group…”

“Richardson probably has over two thousand Commonwealth Marines aboard.” Kyle regarded the layout of the system calmly. “With, if I remember their table of equipment correctly, at least four or five companies of battle armor and enough heavy weapons to make the security detachment of, say, a medium-sized forward logistics base, piss their pants.”

“Would they follow his orders to assault the depot?” Solace asked from Secondary Control.

Kyle shook his head, glancing at the link to the flag deck.

“Commander Snapes?”

“I’m… not sure, sir,” the Intelligence Officer admitted. “But it looks like he and his Marine commander go a long way back. And, well… if he isn’t going to surrender to Commonwealth authority, his Marines can either turn on him, or continue following orders.”

“So one way or another, Captain Richardson plans on getting his resupply,” Tobin rumbled. “That seems like it will provide us a useful opportunity.”

“What’s
Triumphant’s
ETA?” Kyle asked Anderson.

“If they’re planning on resupplying, they’ll be heading for a zero-zero intercept,” the younger man replied, “I make it just over five hours.”

“And we’re still nine and a half out, correct?” the Captain turned to Pendez.

“Yes, sir.”

“Richardson can cause a lot of trouble in four hours, and still manage to evade anything except long-range missile fire,” Kyle told Tobin quietly. “I wouldn’t expect our missile salvos to penetrate a battleship’s defenses, either.”

“What about our starfighters?” the Admiral asked.

“If we launched right now, they’ll get there
before
Triumphant
,” Kyle replied. “The catch is that to keep their safety zones clear, a full fighter launch needs to take up a
lot
more space than
Avalon
does. It’s not a question of if they’ll be detected, but when.”

“We can’t let Richardson escape,” Tobin told him firmly. “I won’t tell you how to fight your ship, Captain, but that is the mission.”

“Understood, sir.”
Avalon’s
Captain eyed the feed, studying the position of the ships and the depot. “The joker in the deck is still the question of what, if anything, is hiding behind the moon,” he admitted. “I intend to keep Stanford’s fighters aboard until we see how the depot responds to
Triumphant
.”

He turned to Anderson.

“I want Q-probes on route to the depot and on an intercept course for
Triumphant
,” Kyle ordered. “Do everything you can to keep them undetected – but we need to know what’s going on
now
, not what was happening half an hour ago.”

Tobin’s face was calm, not giving any hints as to what the Vice Admiral was thinking when Kyle turned back to him.

“We’ll get him, sir,” the Captain told him.

There was a feed from the carrier’s sensors running in the Flight Control Center attached to the main flight deck. When Michael entered the room, every eye was focused on it, even though it didn’t show anything exciting.

Triumphant
continued her course towards the depot. No one at the base had taken any action beyond pulling the fighter patrols in and placing those twenty fighters between the orbiting platforms and the battleship.

With confirmation that his fighters wouldn’t be called for immediately, Stanford had stepped out to get coffee and a shower. Reviewing the updates of the last half-hour, it had been a better use of time than waiting.

“How are we looking, Chief?” he asked Kalers quietly, stepping up next to his Acting Deck Chief.

“All the birds are locked and loaded,” the older woman replied. “Avignon has his people in their birds. Rokos’ are up next in an hour, barring the Captain ordering us into space.”

“Let’s keep an eye on everything,” Michael replied. “By the time the Captain orders us into space, I want everybody already in their starfighters.” He studied his implant feed for a moment. “Barring any change in affairs, let’s assume we’re taking the Group to Readiness Alpha in… three hours.”

That would put the carrier six hours short of the depot, and the
Triumphant
two hours short. By then,
some
kind of reaction would have been seen from the depot – even no reaction would suggest that the base and the battleship had reached some agreement.

“What sort of operation are we anticipating, sir?” the Chief asked, pitching her voice so the rest of the Center couldn’t hear him.

“Anti-shipping and boarding party cover,” Michael replied. “We’re going to go after
Triumphant
, and if they’re playing nice with each other, whoever’s behind that moon.” He paused, then waved at one of the other figures in the room.

“Rokos, over here.”

His Bravo Wing commander joined them in a moment.

“Since things aren’t exciting right now, I’m guessing you’re planning how to make my life exciting later?” the broad-shouldered officer asked.

“Exactly,” Michael promised. “I’m tasking Bravo Wing for boarding party security,” he told the Wing Commander. “One way or another, Major Norup’s people will be hitting that facility. I want you to make sure they all get there. Chew on that, and let Chief Hammond know if you need any gear or munitions switched.”

Without a very specific mission profile, it was rare for any of the Federation’s starfighters to launch with anything other than Starfire missiles – the short-range missiles with their one-gigaton warheads being the weapon of choice for both anti-fighter and anti-shipping strikes. There
were
, however, more specialized munitions in
Avalon’s
magazines.

“I will
definitely
want some Banshees,” Rokos replied immediately. He glanced at Kalers. “I’ll let you know how many in… fifteen minutes? Will that give you enough time?”

“I can’t see the Marines launching in less than an hour,” the Senior Chief replied. “I’ll need forty-five minutes for the switchover, but, strangely, I already had a few dozen pallets of Banshees up for ease of loading.”

The Banshee Seven was one of the most specialized munitions a starfighter could carry. It was the same size as a Starfire, but it was a MIRVed weapon with no less than
eighty
sub-munitions. While significantly shorter ranged than the anti-fighter missile, the Banshee’s sub-munitions were smart anti-radiation weapons. Once deployed, each would seek a radar installation – such as those on the close-in defenses intended to shoot down boarding shuttles – and impact with the force of a half-ton or so of TNT.

“Good,” Michael told them with a smile. “Unless there’s something
real
nasty behind that moon, we are
not
leaving this system in Terran hands.”

“Well,
hello
there.”

Kyle waited for several seconds, then cleared his throat and glared at his Tactical Officer.

“Would you care to share with the class, James?”

The redheaded officer’s pale skin showed an embarrassed flush
very
clearly, as it turned out, and he quickly turned his attention to his Captain.

“Running the feed from Q-Probe Three,” he said quickly. “I was angling Three around a bit to try to see around the moon, so it saw her first. Not too much of a difference though.”

Kyle was about to ask him for more details when the feed from Q-Probe Three hit his implant. The familiar elongated egg shape of a Commonwealth warship was emerging from behind the moon. A single Terran squadron of ten
Scimitar
starfighters flew a high – low escort pattern as the ship set an intercept course for
Triumphant
.

“Well, I’d say our Captain Richardson wasn’t being clear enough about his peaceful intentions for his friends,” he said aloud. “What have we got on our newcomer?”

“Thousand meters long, twenty million tons, starfighter escort,” his Tactical Officer reeled off in an instant. “Wrong shape to be a carrier, so unless the starfighters are from the base, that’s a
Hercules
sir.”

Avalon’s
Captain thought a command at his implant and zoomed in on the image.

“Definitely a
Hercules
, Commander Anderson,” he said quietly. “You can’t make out the details of her armament from this distance, but note the hull bulge pattern. Those are the blisters for her main guns – she’s got a single set of three blisters around the middle, but a
Saint
has
two
sets of blisters, each a hundred meters from the center.”

The junior officer blinked. “Of course. Why didn’t I see that?” he asked.

“We got jumped by a
Hercules
at Hessian,” Kyle pointed out. “The image, ah, stuck in my mind.”

It was one of the very few images from that day he really remembered. The loss of his implant in that battle had cost him almost all of his memories from that day – his personal backup couldn’t update from his starfighter.

“The question, I suppose, is just what our friend
Hercules
is planning on doing about
Triumphant?
” Tobin asked. The Admiral was watching the same feed as everyone else.

“I think he isn’t certain himself,” Solace observed. “If he
was
certain, he’d have all thirty of his fighters out and pulling a high speed attack run with his missiles right ahead of them. Instead, that looks like an intercept course – hard to say yet, but I think he’s planning on pulling alongside.”

That
raised an interesting thought, and Kyle turned his gaze to the Vice Admiral.

“Sir, what do we do if the
Commonwealth
has arrested Richardson?”

“We are in position to retake the Alizon system,” Tobin pointed out. “Unless they pick Richardson up and run straight for FTL, I think Richardson is going to end up in our custody anyway, don’t you?”

After a moment’s thought, Kyle returned his Admiral’s grin coldly.