Free Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) by Glynn Stewart

remaining hundred and fifty starfighters. They continued to fire them, but they were wide salvos – intended more to fill space with radiation and distort sensors than to kill starships.
    Their own defenses shattered missiles by the dozens as they closed. Their heavy beams had a range that left a starfighter pilot like Kyle green with envy, with a chance of hitting their targets from almost a million kilometers away.
    They almost reached that range intact. Missile salvo after missile salvo filled the space between the two forces, thoroughly demonstrating why no one regarded even capital ship missiles as ship killers as not a single missile hit.
    Until one did. A laser cluster on one of the battleships didn’t track in time. Three missiles slipped past and slammed into the Castle Federation battleship Jackson .
    Three one-gigaton warheads flared within a second of each other. The battleship’s massive armor shed some of the impact… but not enough. Jackson reeled, her engines flaring out as her mass manipulators failed and she tried to evade.
    Without her sister to help stop missiles, Kennedy couldn’t cover them both. Four more missiles from the next salvo made it through, and Jackson simply ceased to exist – and five thousand souls went with her.
    Kennedy sought to avenge her. Moments after Jackson’s death, the battleship reached her range of the Commonwealth ships – a range the cruisers and carrier couldn’t match. Six hundred kiloton-per-second main lances spoke in anger, but at this range it took the lance beams almost three seconds to reach their targets.
    That was enough to throw off accuracy, and the Terran Assassin -class battlecruisers had six hundred kiloton lances of their own. Kennedy’s deflectors were stronger, but not enough to reduce the range by much.
    Five ships danced in space, pirouetting like dancers as they dodged around beams of deadly antimatter. More missiles slashed in on both sides, and the Terran starfighters grimly stuck to their larger brethren’s sides, picking off the robotic attackers.
    Kyle watched in grim silence, convinced that it was all going to be for naught – and then one of the battlecruisers zigged when it should have zagged. Eight heavy positron lances slammed into the warship.
    Where they hit, the matter of the ship’s armor collided with the antimatter of the beams and annihilated. The starship’s own armor turned into a devastatingly powerful explosive and ripped open vast gaping holes in her hull. The beams were only connected for half a second – and that was enough.
    The battlecruiser came apart into pieces, its interior gutted by the beams of pure destruction that had ripped through her.
    Any hope for Kennedy was short-lived. Even as her target died, the old battleship’s defenses proved unable to handle the missile fire that she and her sister had withstood together. Five missiles made it through in a single salvo – and not even the mightiest battleship could stand that kind of fire.
    Silence reigned on Avalon’s bridge, and Kyle knew his crew had been watching the battle alongside him.
    “Commander Pendez,” he said quietly. “ETA?”
    “We will arrive in forty-seven minutes, sir,” she replied.
    “Inform Vice Commodore Stanford,” Kyle ordered. “Let’s see if we can give these people a well-deserved shock.”

Chapter 8
Castle System, Castle Federation
22:05 December 15, 2735 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
SFG-001 Actual – Falcon -C type command starfighter
     
    Vice Commodore Michael Stanford looked over the data being relayed to him from the system defense net with an appraising eye. The Commonwealth fighter force had been hammered in their engagement with the defending fighters, but not nearly enough for his liking. They still had over a hundred Scimitars tucked in close to provide missile defense.
    Someone in the enemy task group had also clearly been smart enough to guess at least the basics of Battle Group Seventeen’s plan. As