The Grand Alliance

  The Grand Alliance

  Blood on the Stars 11

  By Jay Allan

  Copyright 2019 Jay Allan Books Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Chapter One

  1,200,000 Kilometers from CFS Tarsus

  Sigma Vegaron System

  Year 320 AC

  “Gray Wolf Nine, tighten that formation, now! You’re Seven’s wingman, and that means you keep up and cover his flank.” Stanton Hayes was a veteran, at least by the standards of the raiding force currently closing on the Hegemony convoy. That designation was a relative one, however, and Hayes’s claim to elite status had more to do with his entrance to the Academy dating before the White Fleet had departed on its ultimately disastrous mission, one that had led to the discovery of the Hegemony, and the unleashing of a war like none that had come before.

  There was more to that than simply the historical notation. Hayes had completed the entire Academy course, and his class had been the last to graduate before the curriculum had been accelerated to feed graduates more quickly into the battle lines.

  To the pilots who had survived the last war against the Union, and racked up countless kills in the process, Hayes was a journeyman at best, and the fact that his fighter still flew devoid of any of the marks pilots used to track the fighters they’d defeated denied him access to the truly elite rankings of the Confederation’s fighter corps.

  It wasn’t fair, of course. The current war, the war in which he’d made his bones, was without fighter duels, completely absent the massive dogfights that had played such crucial roles in prior conflicts. The Hegemony was a deadly enemy, larger and more advanced than any on the Rim, and its invasion had taken the Confederation to the brink of the abyss, its capital occupied, and hundreds of its warships destroyed in continued desperate—yet mostly futile—attempts to stop the onslaught.

  But the Hegemon didn’t have fighters.

  That string of defeats had finally ended, in the bloody space around Craydon. The Confederation, and its allies from around the threatened Rim, had held against the enemy, and the Hegemony fleet had retreated…for the first time since the war began. The enemy still held the capital at Megara, of course, and numerous other vital systems, but the Confederation had managed to hang on to most of the Iron Belt, the worlds with the production to sustain the war effort, and hope of eventual victory.

  For now.

  “I’m in tight, Commander. Less than two hundred kilometers.” The voice on the comm was high-pitched, tentative. Doug Velet was a sparkling new ensign, as raw as they came. Hayes had struggled to remember the names of all the new pilots cycling through his wing. The newbs, raw and rushed through training to feed the war’s butcher bill, died so quickly, it was hard sometimes to memorize their names. Velet’s was firmly in his mind, however, only because the rookie was the shakiest of the newest batch of baby pilots dumped in his lap.

  “Two hundred kilometers? You might as well be back at Craydon, having a snack and waiting for the battle report to come in. If you’re not under a hundred kilometers, you ain’t a wingman, you got that?. Now, tuck in there and hold your formation!” Hayes knew the wingman’s role had more or less disappeared in the Hegemony War, that without enemy interceptors to worry about, it just wasn’t all that important a tactical element. But the new pilots were half-trained, at best, and sloppiness in one area of doctrine spread to another. It was what Hayes knew, what he’d been taught, and he was determined to shape up the unprepared pilots he commanded…before every last one of them managed to get himself killed.

  “Yes, Commander…”

  Hayes didn’t like the sound of Velet’s response, soft, weak. Shaky. He knew the pilot was well aware of where he should be. He understood how difficult it was to maintain position when your ship was moving at almost one percent of lightspeed, but going easy on the rookie would be no kind of favor. The enemy might not have interceptors, but they had become increasingly adept at anti-bomber tactics, and their escort cruisers and frigates had developed into war machines deadly to the attacking squadrons.

  Velet—and his comrades—had to shape up, and get one hell of a lot sharper in their Lightning craft than they were now. Or they would die.

  All of them. It was that stark, and that simple.

  “Listen up, all of you…we’re moving into the defensive perimeter. These bastards don’t have fighters of their own, but that doesn’t mean they won’t blast you to atoms if you aren’t damned careful.” They were likely to blow away a good number of his ships whether his people were careful or not. But they didn’t need to hear that.

  “Stay tight, and keep at those evasive maneuvers. You rely completely on the nav computer, and I’ll be back aboard writing, ‘I’m sorry to inform you’ letters to your folks. And, I hate writing those damned things!” Hayes reminded his people constantly to add their own instincts to the AI’s vector changes, to inject a bit of pure randomness, so often he couldn’t stand hearing himself say it again. It seemed impossible that his pilots didn’t know what he wanted them to do…but yet, he’d watched dozens of them fly right into the thickest enemy fire with nothing but the canned evasive routines to save them from getting blasted to plasma. The results had been depressingly similar.

  More letters to write.

  So, he kept at them. It was all he could think to do.

  He looked up at his main screen. The scanner readings were getting tighter as his strike force moved closer to their targets. He’d been leading attacks on enemy shipping for over a year, since just after ‘Sledgehammer’ Winters had led the daring strike on the enemy support fleet at Megara, destroying over ninety percent of the Hegemony fleet’s logistics and supply capability. The attack hadn’t forced the enemy to withdraw, but it had stolen the advantage their massive logistics advantage had provided them. They were dependent on conventional supply lines now, in a way they hadn’t been before, and that had provided the Confederation and its allies with something they’d previously lacked in the war. A weakness to exploit.

  The Hegemony command was as aware as Hayes, and any of his people, of just how crucial their supply lines had become. The size of the escort contingents attached to the convoys had steadily increased, and with each successive raid—and their defense efforts against the same—their tactics improved.

  There was a line just ahead of his incoming bombers, two dozen enemy escorts, bristling with the latest in Hegemony point defense weaponry. They were organized in a convex line, directly between his wing and the freighters that were his targets. Any attempt to change vectors to avoid the defenders would involve massive thrust, and far too much time. The slower-moving cruisers and frigates would simply adjust their own positions, far more easily than his squadrons could, and position themselves astride any modified approach vector. There was no choice, none save the obvious—and very unpleasant—one. His wing would go right through the escorts.

  Worse, they would take all the Hegemony ships could throw at them without fighting back. His ships carried the new cluster bombs, which gave them half a dozen shots instead of the single one a torpedo provided, but even that was a limitation on the punch his birds packed. There were over a hundred freighters and tankers lined up beyond the first line of defenders, and it would take every bomb his ships carried, and then some, to cut them down.

  At least to destroy enough of them to strike a serious blow to the Hegemony war effort. The war had been at a stalemate for over a year, ever since the bloodbath that had gone into the records as the Battle of Craydon. Hayes knew as, he suspected, did Admirals Barron and Winters—and every other competent officer in the fleet—that putting a crimp in the enemy’s supply chain was crucial to any strategy to gain the upper hand, and to begin pushing the Hegem
ony out of Confederation space, rather than just stopping their advance.

  He watched as the scanners updated, the warning lights along the top of his panel blinking yellow, an alert that he was approaching enemy firing range. He could feel his body tighten, and as much as he tried to take deep controlled breaths, he found himself gasping raggedly. He was scared. It was something he’d never have admitted to his pilots, but he’d come far enough along his own personal trail of development to acknowledge it to himself. He was an elite pro, a hardcore veteran to the inexperienced Lightning jocks he was leading into the fight. But he knew, inside, where his deepest thoughts resided, that he was only a middling pilot, perhaps with the talent to become more, but lacking, at the very least, the serious battle experience needed to match the grim warriors flying under Jake Stockton’s command in Craydon, waiting for their next matchup against the main Hegemony fleet.

  You may not be one of them, but what you’re doing here is important, too. In some ways, every bit as important…

  His eyes caught the first flashes on his screen, enemy defensive fire coming in. He’d already been deep into evasive maneuvers, but as he saw the incoming fire—and watched the first of his ships vaporized by it—his hands moved the throttle even more wildly, his ship shaking all around in a desperate attempt to fool the Hegemony targeting computers.

  Six minutes.

  That was how long it would take his fighters to get past the Hegemony defensive line. Assuming the enemy escorts didn’t come about as his squadrons flew by, and blast away at full thrust, following the bombers in toward their targets. The Hegemony forces had done that in the last raid, a new development in their defensive tactics, and one that had cost him an extra dozen ships at least, and seriously cut down on the effectiveness of the strike.

  He angled his thrust to the side, an abrupt, jerky motion that slid him away from most of the incoming fire. It was half a response to what he was seeing on his screen…and half wild guess, or intuition, depending on how one viewed such things. Two more of his people were gone, victims of fire they hadn’t managed to evade as skillfully as he had.

  At least the rest of them are putting some effort in…

  Watching his people die was a form of personal hell, but there was one good thing to it. Nothing spurred the others to keep their eyes open and do what they could to avoid incoming fire like watching their friends and comrades blasted to plasma.

  Hayes didn’t like placing a value on the deaths of his men and women, or seeking gain from such losses, but if he could lose five to save ten, it was a devil’s bargain he would make every time.

  Five fewer letters to write…

  * * *

  “They’re through the forward line, Captain. They’ll be in launch range in…four minutes thirty seconds.” Bart Tarleton’s voice was a deep and powerful bass that almost rattled the looser components on Tarsus’s bridge.

  Not that the rickety old thing is all that tightly put together…

  “Acknowledged, Commander.”

  Sonya Eaton sat in the command chair, a perch positioned not quite in the middle of the vessel’s irregular-shaped bridge, but close enough. Tarsus had begun her life as a freight-carrying ship, and she’d served in that capacity for close to sixty years…until someone high up in Confederation logistics came up with the brilliant idea of converting freighters into something new, inventively dubbed the escort carrier.

  It seemed like a joke at first thought, and from the perspective of an officer commanding eight of the slow and fragile ships, a pretty bad one at that. But fighters were the Confederation’s—no, she reminded herself, the Grand Alliance’s—greatest strength. The swift attack craft were the only thing the enemy couldn’t match, and Sonya knew, as did everyone, that the war would have been lost long before without the desperate and repeated attacks of the wings.

  For as long as Confederation history recorded such things, fighters and bombers had been based on battleships, huge vessels, heavily armored and bristling with weapons. Until ten months before, that is, when the first two modified freighters blasted out from the Craydon shipyards and made their way—slowly—to launch a strike on the Hegemony supply line.

  Neither of those ships returned, though one, at least, had made it about halfway back before her crew, unable to repair her damaged reactor, had been forced to ditch her. The lessons of that inauspicious beginning had been well-used, however, and Eaton had to admit, her eight ships, though slow and with hulls as thin as paper by comparison to real warships, packed some serious punch. Each one had eighteen Lightnings crammed into spaces that had once held cargoes of various kinds, and 144 armed bombers made up a strike force no Hegemony convoy could ignore…even if all but a handful of her pilots were bright green, readier for a few more years of training than for combat.

  That didn’t matter, of course. Not in this war. The Confederation was fighting for its life, for its very existence, and the enemy culture was so alien, anything short of outright triumph was unthinkable. She regretted sending unprepared pilots to their deaths, but she also knew, she’d strap toddlers still sucking their thumbs into those birds, too, if that was the difference between victory and defeat.

  She looked over at her tactical officer and primary aide. She knew she wore the platinum and gold striped eagle on her shoulders, the insignia of perhaps the least-used rank in the navy. The ‘fleet captain’ designation had been thought up way back during the Second Union War, likely in the dark days before the original Admiral Barron had led the battered Confederation forces to resurgence and victory. It’s purpose then had likely been very much the same as it was now…to signify a level of command for an officer promoted far too early to carry even a commodore’s single star.

  Eaton fit that bill, completely. She’d spent years as an executive officer, serving under Tyler Barron, and later her sister. She’d gotten her own command only a couple years before, and she was the first to admit, she had no place suddenly commanding a fleet of sixteen warships, not to mention, an entire strike wing of bombers. She’d served with distinction, acquitted herself well, even her naturally humble psyche could acknowledge that. But she was not even close to experienced enough for the command she now held.

  She held it still, though and for one reason, the single factor that pushed officers up the order of battle more quickly and surely than accomplishment.

  Casualties.

  There was a vacuum at the top ranks of the Confederation command structure, one that nearly five years of war had created and continued to expand with each gruesome battle. Eaton had been swept up to fill one of those holes and, like many other capable officers, she found herself somewhere she shouldn’t yet have been, not for years, if ever.

  Her eyes were fixed on the main display, on the scrolling figures along the left side, watching as the AI updated the casualty reports. Eight of her one hundred forty-four Lightnings were gone, and another six were damaged. Two of those were pushing ahead, struggling to complete their attack runs. The other four were frantically trying to make their way back toward the base ships, squeezing out every bit of thrust battered engines could produce. They were sitting ducks, of course. Two of them, at least. They’d never get away before the escorts finished them off. The other two had a chance, at least.

  She tried not to focus on that, though. Losses were irrelevant, certainly at that moment. Damaged—or destroyed—ships were of no use to the attack, and that was all that mattered. It was cold, almost fiendish to think that way of spacers who had died carrying out her orders, but the war left no room for warmth, or even basic morality. It was a struggle to the death, and there could be no let up, no hesitation to do what had to be done. If the enemy got enough supplies through to Megara, they could hold onto the Confederation’s capital…and to the simpering, collaborationist rump Senate, whose cringing proclamations were making their way across the Confederation, to worlds that were still resisting the enemy, urging, ordering, haranguing them to lay down their arms and heed
the surrender documents the craven politicians had signed.

  Never!

  Eaton couldn’t speak for everyone in the Confederation, but she had a good idea that most of the fleet’s personnel, at least, felt the same way she did. No surrender. Not now, not ever. She would fight, her people would fight—and as many of them would die as need be—but they would never yield, never end the battle.

  If the Hegemony wanted to win the war, they would have to kill her first…and Tyler Barron and Clint Winters, and the thousands who followed them to battle. The Confederation was battered, but it wasn’t beaten yet, not by a long shot.

  She watched as Stanton Hayes led his ships into the maw of the enemy’s second line, and right at the huge column of supply ships, his lead birds already launching their cluster bombs as they completed their attack runs.

  No, no surrender…not by a long shot…

  Chapter Two

  Hegemony Supreme Headquarters

  Megara, Olyus III

  Year of Renewal 265 (320 AC)

  “Senator Garrison, I am extremely disappointed in the effectiveness of your proclamations. It seems your Confederation citizens care very little what you and your colleagues have to say…at least outside of those areas under the control of our armed forces.” Chronos was wearing his finest military uniform, an almost absurd creation, one he despised for its foolish ostentation. The light gray garment, almost a shimmering silver, was resplendent with the decorations and badges of rank one might expect from the eighth most perfect human then alive. It might have served to bolster ego and morale for one who lacked the quiet confidence Chronos had always possessed, but he found it unnecessary and, quite simply, stupid.