![]() “Welcome aboard Avalon, Wing Commander Roberts,” the Captain greeted him with an extended hand. Modern prostheses could be almost indistinguishable from the real thing, but Captain Blair’s was an older model, an emergency implant Kyle had most commonly seen on men and women injured in the War who were proud of the plain but extremely functional metal eye. He was a tall, gaunt man with iron-gray hair who looked like he’d gone best out of three with Death – and the Reaper had kept an eye. Once they were done, they would deliver the old lady to the shipyards of the Castle system itself, where she would be gently laid to rest.Įxiting the shuttle, followed closely by the two Flight Commanders he’d brought with him, Kyle found the ship’s Captain waiting. One last time was true – rumor had it that the tour of the Alliance that they’d been assigned to carry out was Avalon’s last mission. ![]() “The Navy’s Old Lady, gussied up one last time.”Īfter that, Kyle was silent, considering his new ship and his new command. “She’s a special case,” Kyle said finally, continuing to eye the old carrier. Past her, he could see the twelve ships of the Castle Federation’s New Amazon Reserve Flotilla – the smallest and oldest of them twenty years newer than Avalon, and a quarter again her size. That ship, however, been almost thirteen hundred meters long, and had carried a broadside of ten half-megaton-per-second positron lances in each of the four sides of her arrowhead shape, plus missile launchers and the seventy-kiloton-per-second lances generally used as anti-fighter guns.Īvalon was less than two thirds the size of modern ships, as the technology behind the Alcubierre-Stetson Drive had advanced significantly in the forty years since she had been built. His last command, the fighter wing aboard the battlecruiser Alamo, had also been forty-eight ships. The number of ships told the story of Avalon’s age, though. The new ships strapped mass manipulators and engines rated for five hundred gravities to four three-shot launchers firing short-range missiles with gigaton antimatter warheads and a positron lance rated for fifty kilotons per second. He’d spent his trip babying six entire squadrons – forty-eight ships – of brand new, barely out of prototype, Falcon-type starfighters. If nothing else, Avalon was a carrier, and the starfighters she’d carried had been three generations out of date. He’d heard the same rumors, and he’d seen the rough brief of the work they were doing to make her fit for duty. “Rumor had it that her assignment as guardship here was just a quiet way of placing her in the Reserve.” “I never expected to see Avalon fly again,” the co-pilot observed from behind Kyle. Several of those clusters were currently open to space, weapons dating back two and three decades, according to his brief, being ripped out for replacement with the super-modern systems delivered by the transport he’d arrived on. She was smoother than more recent ships as well, with her weapons and sensors clustered together in the breaks in her now-obsolete neutronium armor. The carrier was small compared to her modern sisters, a mere eight hundred meters from her two hundred meter wide prow to her four hundred meter wide base, angling from a hundred meters thick at the prow to two hundred meters at the base. The computer in his head happily threw up stats and numbers as he scanned along the length of his new home. ![]() The abbreviated arrowhead of the carrier slowly grew in his vision, and he twigged his implants to zoom in on her. Avalon was a legend, the first modern space carrier ever built by anyone, and her SFG-001 had a list of battle honors as long as Kyle’s arm. “There she is, sir,” the pilot told him, her amused tone revealing at least some understanding of her much-senior passenger’s anticipation.Īvalon would not be the first of the Castle Federation’s Deep Space Carriers that Kyle had served on – but she was the first whose starfighter group he’d command in its entirety. The burly Commander already felt a little bit guilty over that, but that slipped from his mind as the shuttle began its final approach and Avalon came into view. Today, however, he wasn’t feeling quite so magnanimous, and had unceremoniously shunted the small craft’s normal co-pilot into the bucket seat that was supposed to be reserved for an observer like him. To make everyone’s lives easier, he normally stayed out of the cockpit. It was always a struggle for the red-haired pilot to keep his hands and implants away from the controls and overrides when he was a passenger in a shuttle. Wing Commander Kyle Roberts did not enjoy being flown by someone else.
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