DLS-387, Hell-14
387’s long wait for the start of Operation Corona came to a shattering and totally unexpected end.
“Command, this is Mother. I have a positive gravitronics intercept. Six vessels. Grav wave pattern indicates pinchspace transition imminent. Estimated drop bearing Red 30 Up 5. Initial drop vector suggests ships inbound for Hell Flotilla Base.”
Ribot’s heart turned in an instant to a block of ice. He struggled to breathe. Just as he had begun to hope that Mr. Murphy would not crash the party, the son of a bitch had arrived with a vengeance. He’d always known that it might come to this. Hell-14 was close to the primary approach axis for ships transiting from Commitment, and there had always been a chance that the two light scouts would have to do more than provide forward surveillance, precisely why they’d been on Hell-14 in the first place. But where the hell had six Hammer ships come from? Not from Commitment, that was for damn sure; otherwise he’d have been told, been given plenty of time to deploy his missiles to ambush the warships as they dropped and then get the hell out.
“Shit.” Ribot paused to think for a second. “All hands to general quarters, Maria. And depressurize as well.”
Hosani shot him a worried look as she commed the necessary orders through the ship.
Ribot commed Chen, whose anxious face gave him all the confirmation he needed.
“Bill, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I suspect I am. We can’t just sit here and let the Fleet Base attack group just drop into their laps.”
“No, we can’t. We’ve gone to general quarters, so let’s get our heads together and see what we can do. We’ve got a little time before the bastards drop. Though I think it’s going to be real simple. Throw ourselves at them and pray that they can’t shoot straight.”
“I’m rather afraid that’s right. Wonder where they came from.”
“God knows. The surveillance reports from Commitment nearspace showed no ships boosting out-system for Hell, and we’ve had no reports of military traffic inbound from any of the other planetary systems.” Ribot sighed in frustration. “I suppose they’ve been in deepspace somewhere. God knows there’s plenty of it, so I guess we can’t blame fleet intelligence for not knowing. Reconvene in five. Ribot out.”
“All stations, this is the captain. We’ve gone to general quarters early because we have Hammer ships dropping at Red 30, six of them, and from the quality of the grav array intercept, they look to be dropping very close. I’ll be honest with you all. It’s going to be rough, very rough. But God willing, we’ll come through. That is all.”
“All stations, command. Ship will depressurize in five, repeat, five minutes.”
Michael and his surveillance drone team were struggling into their suits, chromaflage skins already darkening from their normal Day-Glo orange down to combat gray-black.
Michael felt like a marathon runner closing in on the finish line only to be told that he had to run another 40 kilometers. The whole business had gone on for so long that he could barely remember any life other than the waking nightmare he was in. If all had gone well-and Michael had spent hours obsessively going through the Corona time line to the point where he knew the plan down to the second-the marines would have Mom and Sam safe by now and soon Dad would know that. But just as he had begun to think about getting home, this had to happen. For the life of him he couldn’t begin to imagine how two light scouts were going to be able to hold up six Hammer ships, and for an instant a terrible icy hand clamped itself around his heart at the thought that death for him and everyone else onboard 387 might be only minutes away.
Michael pushed the fear away with a conscious effort as he settled his helmet onto the neck ring, the seal locking with its usual quiet hiss. With a final quick look at the tense faces of his team, Strezlecki’s deep brown stress-narrowed eyes staring deep into his, Michael smacked his visor down, commed the nitro-purge autoject, and started his suit checks. He consoled himself with the thought that even if they weren’t going home, they might take some of the Hammers with them.
He quickly said a little prayer for Anna, who’d be dropping in-system in Damishqui in fifteen minutes or so, and then concentrated on the job at hand.
“Command, this is Mother. Sensors confirm pinchspace drop of hostiles at 68,500 kilometers Red 30 Up 5. Six ships: one Hammer City Class heavy cruiser provisionally identified as New Dallas, two Panther Class deepspace heavy escorts, Cougar and Shark, and three heavy patrols, Gore, Arroyo, and MacFarlane.”
Anonymous behind the visor of her space suit and struggling to steady her ragged breathing, Hosani flicked Ribot a glance. Fear had soaked into every fiber of her being; her heart was pounding, and her breathing was shallow and ragged. Somehow, and she couldn’t work out why or how, she knew this was it for her. She wouldn’t be going home. She wondered how Ribot felt sending 387 and 166 and all onboard to an almost certain death, and she thanked God it was he and not she making the decisions. She wasn’t sure she could have done what he was doing.
As the last suit check came in, she forcibly turned her mind to business.
“All stations, command. Depressurizing in one minute, repeat, one minute.”
“Permission to step across, sir?” The unexpected voice of Warrant Officer Ng cut across Hosani’s thoughts.
“Yes, of course, Warrant Officer Ng. What can we do for you?”
“Word with the captain, sir.”
“Sure. Captain, sir? Warrant Officer Ng.”
Ribot nodded. Hosani was happy to have her captain doing something better than worry about the less than encouraging results of Mother’s latest quick and dirty sim. The prohibition on nukes set by Corona’s rules of engagement were reducing to zero what little chance the two light scouts had of causing the Hammers some grief.
Ribot waved Ng across the thick yellow and black goofers line.
“Warrant Officer Ng. Desperate business,” Ribot said flatly.
Ng nodded her agreement. “It is, sir. I realize my team are just supernumeraries now, but from what I can see, you’re going to need all the help you can get. So I’d like to spread them around. With the damage control parties would probably be the best.”
“Good idea, Doc. Should have thought of it first,” Ribot said apologetically. “Talk to the XO and tell her it’s fine by me so far as your team is concerned. But I want you to walk the ship for me. You know, steady people down, that sort of thing. They’re very young, most of them, and I don’t think any of them ever thought this would be happening to them.”
“No problem, sir. I’ll do that.”
387 and 166 had not wasted the precious few minutes that had been given them.
Ribot had slowly pulled the ships back away from Hell-14. With a bit of luck, he hoped to be able to convince the Hammer after-action analysis teams that the two light scouts had been drifting slowly in-system rather than sitting dirtside right under the Hammers’ noses the whole time.
And then a lot happened in a very short time.
First, the Hammer sensors were fed carefully crafted dummy data telling them that two light scouts had gone active, apparently to launch four Merlin antistarship missiles directly at the installations that had been so carefully and painstakingly neutralized by Warrant Officer Ng and her team; the sensor towers duly disappeared in a searing blue-white flash as the massive demolition charges laid by Michael’s teams were fired by tightbeam laser command. Ribot smiled for a second as he imagined the Hammer after-action analysis teams struggling to work out just how 387 and 166 had managed to get so close without being detected by Hell-14’s sensors. The bastards would be even more puzzled as they tried to work out how two light scouts had apparently each gotten four Merlin antistarship missiles onboard. After all, everyone knew that Federated Worlds light scouts could carry only a maximum of twelve of the smaller and much less capable Mamba missiles.
Even as Ribot enjoyed the prospect of angry and confused Hammers, hatches whipped open on the flanks of the two ships, and in a matter of seconds hydraulic missile dispensers had deployed 387’s full complement of short-range Mambas. Moments later, the two ships deployed a small cloud of active ship decoys, each one mimicking the emissions profiles of 387 and 166.
Forlorn though it might be, the attack was on.
Ribot grunted in satisfaction as he watched the holovids blank out as the intense light of a swarm of exhaust plumes momentarily overwhelmed the holocams, mass drivers lighting off to accelerate the salvo and its decoy cloud toward New Dallas. He knew full well that it wasn’t much of a salvo as salvos went, but at least they’d give the Hammers in New Dallas something to think about.
Mother’s emotionless tones reported the launch. “Missiles away. Target New Dallas.”
Ribot intervened. “Mother, hold lasers until they’ve woken up. If we go active now, they’ll pick us out of the decoy cloud.” Fed active ship decoys were very good but not so good that they could mimic the awesome power of an antistarship laser.
“Mother, roger.”
Then it was time for 387 and 166 to show their hands.
Flanked by ship decoys doing their best to look like the real thing, the two ships erupted into life, main engines spewing blue-white tails of driver efflux, speed rapidly building under the thrust of a maximum-g tactical burn.
With his neuronics patched into the command plot, Michael waited, suited up with nowhere to go and nothing to do. All he could do was sit and worry, watching anxiously as the four antiship lasers mounted by 387 and 166 slowly chewed away at New Dallas.
He sighed in frustration as Mother faithfully reported the near futility of it all. The lasers were doing their job, burning off heavy frontal armor, but only by the centimeter, and the Hammer ship had meters of the damn stuff. All the while, New Dallas was turning ponderously toward them, untroubled by the light scouts’ attack. The x-ray antiship lasers carried by light scouts were good, and their beam diffusion was minimal at such close range. But Hammer ceramsteel armor was also good, and the heavy cruiser had plenty of it to spare.
Well, Michael consoled himself, all 387 had to do was keep the Hammer ships’ attention away from the incoming Fed warships and it would have done its job.
The good news was that the lights scouts’ armor was holding up well despite the best efforts of the Hammer ships to burn their way through it, which by rights they should have been well on their way to doing. By Fed standards, the performance of the Hammers’ lasers was very poor, to the point where, as Holdorf put it, they were giving 387’s bows only a light all-over tan rather than the third-degree burns they should have been dishing out.
To cap it all, 387’s Krachov microshrouds, pumped out in a never-ending stream from forward-mounted dispensers, were having some success in attenuating the lasers’ destructive force even if the tiny disks lasted only seconds before the lasers overwhelmed them. But thankfully, there were an awful lot of disks.
That man Krachov was a fucking genius, Michael thought gratefully. He would make a point of buying him a beer if he ever emerged alive from what was beginning to look worryingly like a suicide mission. Michael felt powerless as nail by nail the Hammers slowly banged down the lid on 387’s coffin, a strange sense of resignation coming over him as he faced the inevitability of his death.
Mother broke his thoughts. “Command, Mother. Missile launch from New Dallas. Estimate twelve missiles plus decoys. Initial vector analysis shows salvo split equally between 166 and 387.”
“Command, roger.” Ribot’s confusion was obvious to Michael. “Confirm missiles twelve.”
“Confirmed. Missiles twelve. Six on 166 and six on 387.” Mother was emphatic.
Michael banged Petty Officer Strezlecki on the shoulder. “Stupid Hammer fuckheads have split the salvo, Strez. And the salvo’s badly underweight. Only twelve missiles. They could have launched hundreds of the damn things, for God’s sake. I wonder why.” Michael couldn’t conceal his relief. Six missiles gave them a chance at least, whereas without a miracle, a full missile salvo from New Dallas would have been the end.
Then it hit Michael. A small split salvo might be Hammer stupidity, but there was another, much less encouraging explanation.
Obviously Ribot had just had the same awful thought. “Mother, command. Could these be nukes?”
“Negative, command. Best estimate is conventional warheads. Hammer standard operating procedures preclude use of nuclear warheads this close to friendly installations. Electromagnetic pulse and residual radiation unacceptably high.”
Michael gratefully offered up a silent prayer of thanks. 387 might be small, but she was very tough, her inner titanium hull shock-mounted and her artgrav and active quantum-trap radiation screens good enough to shield the crew from the transient shock and radiation produced by a nuclear warhead burst as long it wasn’t too close. But nobody liked nukes, and if one got close enough, it was all over.
Ribot had watched impassively as the Hammer ships had finally swung bows onto 387.
Now we’re in for it, he thought. Any moment now, any moment now. It looked like the heavy patrol ship Gore would be first to get a rail-gun firing solution. She was, followed a good twenty seconds later by Arroyo and MacFarlane. But Gore’s command team, clearly at one and the same time overexcited and overconfident, couldn’t wait. They should have.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from Gore. Target 387.”
“Why 387?” Ribot mumbled as fear crunched his stomach into a tightly packed ball. This was getting horribly serious. “Command, roger.”
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launches from Arroyo, target 387, and MacFarlane, target 166.”
“Command, roger. I don’t think they like us,” Ribot said, mouth dry and heart pounding at the thought of what the rail-gun swarms launched by Gore and Arroyo could do to 387.
Hosani nodded. She could hardly think given the terrible certainty that she was eking out her last minutes, that she and everyone onboard were doomed. It was only by an enormous effort of will that she kept going. “You can say that again, skipper. I have the horrible feeling that we are going to get more than our fair share,” she said shakily.
“Command, Mother. Multiple rail-gun launches. Shark, target 387. Cougar, target 166.”
“So where the fuck is New Dallas?” Holdorf asked rhetorically. “Surely she doesn’t want to miss the party.”
“Give the fat bitch time, Lucky, give the fat bitch time. I’m sure she’ll get to us.” Maria Hosani’s voice was tight. By her calculations, they had six Hammer missiles and hundreds of thousands of rail-gun slugs inbound, all due on target in a matter of minutes. Each slug had a kinetic energy equal to damn near 600 kilograms of high explosive and was focused on an area considerably smaller than the end of her little finger. That made-her brow furrowed as she did the math-200 kilotons of high explosive give or take, and all heading for her. She cursed silently. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t see how 387 was going to get out alive, a conclusion absolutely reinforced by an unshakable conviction that even if 387 made it, she wasn’t going to.
Hosani damned her Iranian ancestry. Too many mystics in the bloodline.
“Command, Mother. Speed now 80,000 kph. At pinchspace jump speed in three minutes.”
“Command, roger. Warn propulsion that I’m going to jump 387 and 166 together as soon as we can.”
“Mother, roger.”
“If we live that long, that is,” Hosani commed Holdorf.
“I’m not called Lucky for nothing, Maria, so have faith,” Holdorf commed back.
“Command, Mother. Vector analysis of incoming salvos confirms very low probability of slug impact. 166’s AI concurs. Time on target has been inadequately synchronized. Ripple timing and swarm geometry are very poor. Confirms THREATSUM assessment that Hammer fire control discipline is weak.”
“Command, roger.”
Ribot took a deep breath to try to slow his body down. Hammer fire control discipline might be weak, but just how 387 was going to duck and weave its way clear of the incoming rail-gun slugs was a question he could only hope Mother had a damn good answer to. Apart from a nearly overwhelming urge to run away and hide, he sure as hell didn’t.
In her flag combat data center deep within the heavy cruiser Al-Jahiz, Vice Admiral Jaruzelska came to her feet as she cleaned up after the pinchspace drop, her eyes fixed on the command plot as the flag AI got the tactical situation settled down into some semblance of order.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but there it was, plain as day.
Her chief of staff interrupted her shocked study of the command plot. “Do you see what I see, sir?”
“I do, and I don’t believe it. The crazy, crazy bastards.” Jaruzelska could not keep the intense pride she felt out of her voice as she watched the hopelessly one-sided battle unfolding on the other side of her primary target, Hell’s flotilla base.
“But thank God for it, Admiral. If they hadn’t gone in, those fuckers might have had us on toast. We could have dropped right into a rail-gun swarm. I’ve ordered the task group to engage with lasers. The rail guns and missiles can take care of the flotilla base.”
“Concur. I just hope it helps.”
Any hope that New Dallas’s rail-gun swarm would be delayed until after her missiles had arrived died as the huge ship finally completed its turn.
Eyes fixed on the New Dallas, Michael felt like a small child watching a cobra. The laborious and painfully slow maneuver had taken a lifetime, the maneuvering systems spewing furious jets of reaction mass as they pushed the ship’s unwieldy bulk around to bring her forward rail-gun batteries to bear on 387 and 166.
Heavy cruisers had many advantages in the business of space warfare, but agility was not one of them, Michael thought.
As the huge black bulk of the New Dallas settled onto her attack vector, brief flashes of reaction mass spurting out as she fine-tuned her rail-gun launch, Ribot zoomed 387’s holocams in close. He could see every detail of the two pinlike rows of rail-gun and decoy ports stretching from one side to the other across the otherwise black nothingness of the Hammer ship’s stealth bows. They were all pointed directly at 387 and 166. Ribot’s heart pounded. Who’s going to get it? he wondered. Then New Dallas fired the swarm, searing blue-white dots rippling out from the ship’s centerline.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from New Dallas. Swarm split to target 387 and 166.”
“Thank you, you Hammer motherfucker, thank you very much,” Michael cursed under his breath. But at least the stupid bastards had split the swarm, and that meant that only 96,000 slugs were heading their way, spread out by the time they arrived at 387 across a 40-square-kilometer front. Taking them for granted? he wondered. How stupid could you get. Try that in a Fed command exercise and you would get your ass kicked hard and justifiably so. Nonetheless, add in thousands of decoys and Mother was going to have her work cut out to keep 387 out of trouble.
Holdorf’s excited shout beat Mother to it. “I don’t believe it, skipper,” he yelled. “They’re turning; the bastards are bloody well turning away. They’ve fallen for Kawaguchi’s decoy attack.”
Ribot’s heart thudded in his chest as hope flared for the first time since the Hammers had dropped. “Shit, Leon! Are you sure?” Ribot stared at the command plot, desperately praying that 387’s navigator was right. “By God,” he said finally. “I think you’re right. Mother, you confirm?”
“Confirmed, command. But not Gore. She remains on targeting vector.”
“Command, roger. Mother, any chance the New Dallas and the heavy escorts will get off a salvo from their stern batteries?” Ribot tried unsuccessfully to keep the edginess out of his voice. Together, the three heavy ships in the Hammer group could fire close to 400,000 slugs from their after rail-gun batteries. Even if they targeted both of the light scouts and got their swarm geometry and ripple timing only half-right, it really would be all over.
“Stand by, command…Negative. They are having to pitch up to get a firing solution on the decoys, so they’ll be off vector for us by the time they are stern on.”
“Command, roger. Let’s hope we can ride it out, and with a bit of luck the task group can help us finish off Gore.” Ribot’s voice resonated with new hope.
“Confirmed.”
“Roger. Keep the lasers on New Dallas. If she shows us enough of her big fat ass, we may get lucky. Mother, what are our chances?”
“Probability of mission abort level of damage is 7 percent. Probability of hard kill is negligible.”
“Bugger.” Ribot sighed in disappointment. “Not great odds. Okay. Priority mission is own ship defense. Second priority, 166 defense. Third, New Dallas.”
Michael shared Ribot’s disappointment.
For one wonderful fleeting moment, he had thought, had hoped, they might have a chance of killing New Dallas. But with the rail-gun swarms now coming thick and fast, 387’s lasers weren’t getting enough time on target to have a chance with a warship as big and tough as New Dallas. That was a hell of a shame, as the distance and angle of attack were good and getting better by the minute as New Dallas swung her stern into 387’s and 166’s lines of attack.
Add yet another tactical screwup to the Hammer’s already long list, Michael muttered, even if it looked like one 387 and 166 wouldn’t be able to exploit.
“All stations, command. First rail-gun salvos due in one minute.”
They were in Mother’s hands now. For Christ’s sake, do it well, Michael thought.
In the end, the rail-gun swarms hurled at them by the two Hammer heavy patrol ships were an anticlimax. Mother was easily able to maneuver 387 down and away out of the path of Gore’s and Arroyo’s onrushing slugs. The attack was too poorly targeted, the swarm too small, the rail-gun slugs spread too far apart and leaving too many holes for Mother to exploit. The ship barely registered the impact of the lightweight thin-skinned decoys intended to confuse its sensors as they smashed uselessly into the ship’s thick frontal armor.
Then it was all over, and the slugs were gone. Two light scouts had survived the first Hammer rail-gun attack in twenty years. A miracle, that was what it was, Michael told himself, a bloody miracle.
Ribot didn’t think it was a miracle at all. Nor did Holdorf.
“Stupid, impatient bastards,” he said. “If the whole lot of them had hung on and fired as one, they’d have had us on toast. And if they’d taken us one at a time instead of trying to kill us both…” Holdorf’s voice trailed off into silence as the thought of 387’s destruction at the hands of a Hammer rail-gun attack struck home.
“True enough, Lucky. But it’s not over yet,” Ribot said as Mother flung 387 almost onto her back under emergency maneuvering power as she desperately tried to get the ship out of the way of the next swarm. The artgrav howled in protest as Mother struggled to get 387’s bulk clear of Shark’s slug rail-gun salvo. Ribot winced as Mother took the terrible risk of presenting her thin upper armor to three objects on a collision course.
Christ on the Cross, Ribot prayed desperately, his heart pounding as fear threatened to swamp him. They’d better be decoys and not slugs. If they were slugs…
Ribot breathed out raggedly as Mother reported three decoy impacts and no damage. Jesus, he thought, this is tough. There were still more incoming slugs, not to mention missiles, than he cared to think about.
“Command, Mother. Report from Commander Task Group 256.1. First rail-gun and missile salvos away. Target Hell system Flotilla Base fixed defenses and warships on station.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Ribot shouted, slapping the arm of his command chair.
Ribot couldn’t help himself; a broad smile split his face behind the visor of his space-suit helmet. That was more like it, and with a bit of luck, the Hammer might leave them alone now that Admiral Jaruzelska and her cruisers had joined the party.
From the moment the sixteen cruisers that made up Task Group 256.1 had dropped into Hammer normalspace, Admiral Jaruzelska and her entire flag staff had watched the deadly game being played out by the two massively out-gunned Fed light scouts in horrified fascination. The flag combat data center was deathly silent as the task group’s holocams tracked 387 and 166 as they writhed and twisted their way out of the path of the rail-gun swarms from Gore, Arroyo, and MacFarlane.
Their concentration was broken only when Al-Jahiz shuddered with the characteristic heavy metal-on-metal crunching thud of rail-gun mass drivers punching a full swarm of slugs and its decoy cloud toward the hapless ships berthed at the flotilla base at over 3.8 million kph, the salvo flanked on all sides by the slug swarms and yet more decoy clouds from the other ships. The attack was massive, the kinetic energy thrown at the Hammers equal to three megatons of high explosive.
“Flag, flag AI. Force rail-gun salvos away.”
“Flag, roger,” Jaruzelska said mechanically as she switched half her brain away from her two smallest ships and back to the big picture.
She shivered as she thought of what the salvo was going to do to the unprepared warships of the Hell Flotilla and its fixed defenses. She wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of a ten-slug salvo, let alone one with millions of the mean ugly bastards. For all their massive bulk and enormously thick frontal armor, the flotilla flagship Verity and its sister heavy cruiser Integrity were doomed, and the two light cruisers Cordoba and Camara wouldn’t be long in following. It was just a matter of time, and with a bit of luck the Hammers would soon be without the massive phased-array radars that provided targeting data for the base’s missile and antiship laser systems and would have to fight back half-blind.
Five seconds after the rail-gun swarm had departed, the characteristic ripping-metal buzz of a full missile salvo launch ran through Al-Jahiz. The ship’s massive hydraulic missile dispensers rammed a full salvo of Merlin heavy missiles clear of the ship in only a matter of seconds.
“Flag, flag AI. Force missile salvos away.”
“Flag, roger.” Jaruzelska could do nothing now but watch the flag combat data center’s command plot as the task group’s two salvos reached out toward the Hammer, their vectors thin green lines of death stark against deep black.
No, that wasn’t right. There was something she could do, and she should have done it long before. If she didn’t, Gore would be the death of 387 and 166.
“Flag AI, flag. Hostile Gore. Engage with force lasers.”
The flag AI didn’t even blink at the sudden change in mission priorities.
Within seconds, the cruisers had turned their antiship lasers away from New Dallas and onto the distant form of the Gore. The intense beams of coherent light quickly began the process of tunneling a hole into Gore’s ceramsteel side armor; high-definition targeting holocams were focusing the task group’s antistarship lasers down onto a single point on the Hammer ship’s hull.
It took a desperate combination of high-g maneuvering and good work with the ship’s defensive systems to save 387.
Close-range rail-gun engagements had been described as something akin to high-speed four-dimensional chess, with swarm after swarm trying to checkmate the target, herding it into a position where it had nowhere to move except into the path of the oncoming slugs. Then it was just a matter of the weight of metal as the slugs ripped away armor to allow the slugs following them to punch through into the hull. At that point it was checkmate.
But Ribot knew full well that there was a lot of space out there and how very small warships were in the grand scheme of things. Therefore, a well executed rail-gun attack, as much a matter of art as of science, needed very precise timing, close coordination of the swarm patterns, and good swarm design, all based on what could only be described as an intuitive understanding of how the target would behave. Those were all things the Hammers had yet to demonstrate they were capable of. The simple fact that 387 had survived a 96,000-slug rail-gun attack was all the proof needed that the Hammers didn’t have their shit together. One thing was for sure: If the ships attacking 387 and 166 had been Feds, they’d be dead by now.
Even so, it was scary stuff. Ribot couldn’t remember being so terrified. Ever.
Leaving 387’s long-range antiship lasers on target as long as possible in the hope of doing some serious damage to New Dallas, Mother finally brought their awesome power to join the ship’s short-range defensive lasers in time to try and fend off the few slugs from Shark that posed any threat. Shark’s swarm had been bigger, better aimed, and more carefully timed than those from Gore and Arroyo, forcing 387 to move down and across the path of the final four slugs to the point where Ribot would have been prepared to swear on his life that three of the four had passed close enough to graze 387’s outer stealth coat.
But the fourth was luckier. It hit 387 almost directly where her armor was thickest. The slug vaporized in a nanosecond to blow a huge crater in 387’s armor, the massive explosion smashing the ship down and into a slow spiraling turn, spewing rolling, twisting clouds of vaporized ceramsteel. Great gouts of reaction mass poured from her maneuvering thrusters as Mother struggled to bring the ship back on vector, artgrav screaming as it absorbed the shock waves that racked it from end to end.
“Christ Jesus protect us. That was way, way too close,” Holdorf said, desperately wishing he could unsuit and wipe away the ice-cold sweat running down his spine.
“Maria! Get Helfort and one of his team out there. I want that impact damage repaired.”
“But sir,” Hosani protested, “the next salvo’s due any minute now.”
Ribot’s voice was brutal. “I know, Maria. But if we get another slug where that one hit, it’ll go through us end to end and we’ll all be dead. And it’s too close to Weapons Power Charlie. I can’t take the chance. That crater has to be filled.” He held a hand up even as Hosani started to protest his callous indifference. “Okay, okay. Hold them back until the next salvo’s passed. There’s not time for them to make a difference, anyway.”
“Sir.” Hosani sounded relieved as she commed the warning order to Michael.
Ribot sat back. He’d come as close as he could to condemning Helfort and his surveillance drone team to death, but what choice did he have?
“Command, Mother. 166 reports single grazing impact. Minor damage only to hull armor, no loss of hull integrity.”
“Command, roger.” Bastards. Ten points to the Shark and Cougar. It seemed that the Hammer might actually be getting its act together.
“How long, Maria?”
“Fifteen seconds, sir.”
“Warn the troops.”
“All stations, command. Stand by next rail-gun swarm. Ten seconds. Out.”
As the incoming swarm had approached, Michael had unconsciously pulled his head down into his shoulders, his already tense stomach contracting even further into a tight knot. He’d never seen a command plot, even in the worst tactical exercise scenarios thrown at him during his college time, as bad as the one he was looking at now.
The instant Shark’s swarm had passed, Mother had thrown the ship even farther off vector before the cone of 96,000 slugs buried somewhere inside a huge cloud of decoys from New Dallas shut down her options even more. But with only seconds between salvos and a lot of mass to shift, Mother didn’t have enough time and maneuvering power to get it right. Her desperate attempt to get 387 clear between salvos was not enough to move the ship completely clear of danger.
Michael cursed wordlessly as Mother updated the command plot, the primary threat vector turning a deep red as the impact probability approached 100 percent. This couldn’t go on. If rail guns didn’t get them, missiles might. And if missiles didn’t, the lasers slowly chewing away at 387’s hull eventually would break through, and people would begin to die. The frustrating thing was that they would be at jump speed any minute now. So close and yet so far.
But maybe he should be thankful for small blessings, Michael thought as he stared almost mesmerized at the time-on-target clock counting off the seconds. Gore must have a problem with her rail guns; she still hadn’t fired again. This early in an engagement, she should have gotten her second rail-gun salvo away in under two minutes or so if her crew and systems were up to scratch, but it was now well past that. If Gore didn’t fire soon, 387 and 166 would jump, provided that they weathered the incoming storm of slugs from New Dallas. If they could do that, the ships would vanish into pinchspace, leaving the one and only missile salvo fired at them nothing more than an ultraviolet flash to home in on.
Michael started to pray really, really hard. They were so close to safety, it hurt. The wait was pure torture. And now, as if the wait wasn’t bad enough, Ribot wanted him outside to fix the damage caused by the last slug. Heart pounding, he could only stand and wait.
By nature and duty physically active people, the surveillance drone team suffered in silence as the seconds dragged by, the weight of space suits and full EVA gear dragging them down, with only the occasional update from Ribot and Hosani in the combat information center to tell them what was going on. Michael tried to shut out the terrible images of what a rail-gun slug could do to him, concentrating with furious effort on the gray plasteel deck of the harshly lit hangar and its clutter of infinitely deep black holes that were 387’s eight surveillance drones, Michael’s pride and joy. Fat lot of use they were now.
That didn’t help much, so Michael eased himself back into the surveillance drone air lock. There were a couple of small comms boxes at just the right height to take the weight of his EVA pack if only he could find them. In the end, it wasn’t hard: Bienefelt had gotten there first. Michael smiled. He should have known better than to think he could ever be a step ahead of her.
Unnoticed by Michael, now busy twisting around in an attempt to find somewhere else to rest, Warrant Officer Ng had made her way up from below. She stuck her head through the open air lock door and leaned her helmet against Michael’s. He jumped as she spoke.
“How’s it going, sir?”
“Oh, um, hi. Yeah, okay, Warrant Officer Ng. But nobody told me that Space Fleet life was a combination of pure terror dished out in random dollops along with long periods of stupefying boredom. You know, the old cliche.”
“Well, so it is, but I must say that it has been a long time since I was quite so scared shitless. And for Christ’s sake, call me Doc.”
“Er, right. Okay, Doc,” Michael said, feeling like someone who’d just been blessed. “Was it like this last time around?”
“As best as I can remember ’cause it was a very long time, yes, it was. Though I was in big ships then. Must say, I don’t remember being in a situation quite as bad as this.”
“All stations, Command. Stand by next rail-gun swarm. Ten seconds. Out.”
“Don’t exactly tell us a hell of-”
Michael thought that the world had come to an end.
Frantically winnowing out the decoys, Mother had successfully deflected three high-risk slugs. 387’s massive antiship lasers hit the platinum/iridium slugs, ionized metal imparting sufficient energy to shift the slugs’ vectors fractionally away from them.
But it wasn’t enough.
New Dallas had done it well even if she’d made the elementary tactical error of splitting her salvo between two targets. She’d carefully fashioned the 96,000 slugs into a cone-shaped swarm, with the point of the cone leading the way, forcing 387 to commit, to move out into the path of the rest of the swarm as it lagged fractionally behind.
And so 387’s luck began to run out.
Ninety-six thousand slugs buried inside a well-designed and well-timed swarm all wrapped up in a mass of decoys was simply too many for the little ship to deflect or evade. As Mother tried desperately to roll 387 in a dive out of the path of the last of the swarm, the ship shuddered as three slugs hit home. The massive impacts, only microseconds apart, wracked the ship with terrible violence until the entire fabric of the hull screamed in protest.
Moving at nearly 800,000 meters per second, the first slug hit the lower starboard side of 387’s bow at a fine, almost grazing angle. Another meter farther out and it would have missed altogether. With the slug only meters and microseconds away from hitting home, 387’s hull-mounted microwave sensors had computed its precise impact point and predicted its vector through the hull before firing the ship’s last-ditch defenses of ultra-high-gain explosive reactive armor nested in hexagonal titanium cells. The armor’s shaped charges fired in a carefully calculated pattern, at best to drive the slug away from the ship, at worst to diffuse and spread its kinetic energy wave front.
This time 387 was lucky; the slug’s angle of attack was sufficiently shallow to allow the reactive armor to deflect it slightly away from the inner hull. Even so, the slug gouged a gaping furrow across the hull before erupting violently back into space in a cloud of shattered ceramsteel armor and platinum/iridium plasma. The ship rang with the shock as high-explosive-packed armor exploded against the shock-mounted titanium that formed its inner hull.
The second slug met the same fate.
As it smashed into 387’s upper bow on the starboard side, again the reactive armor did what it was designed to do. High explosive blasted out with enough force-barely, but enough-to turn the tiny slug out of the hull to disappear back into space, its short path through the hull a white-hot smoking scar cut deep into the bottomless black of the ship’s stealth coat. But this time real damage was done, the slug taking with it much of 387’s short-range laser capability as it gouged its way across the ship’s outer armor.
387 had spent all the luck it had been given. Slug swarm tactics were a numbers game, and the Hammer had the numbers.
Unlike the others, the third slug hit 387 well aft of the bow, at the forward end of the surveillance drone hangar, just where the ship’s titanium frames locked the forward upper personnel access hatch to the main structure of the ship, an unavoidable weak spot in the ship’s armor. This time, the slug came in at an angle steep enough to overcome the reactive armor’s efforts to turn it back out of the hull. Even as the armor exploded vainly underneath it, the slug kept coming, its trajectory only marginally flattened as its plasma sheath vaporized the entire air lock.
Within microseconds of hitting, the slug was pure plasma and had reached the inner hull. The titanium armor vaporized in an instant to let the plasma into the ship, the shock of its entry driving viciously high-energy metal shards from the ship’s titanium frame through the Kevlar splinter matting bonded to the inner hull. Each shard was a deadly missile pushing a growing cone of destruction deep into 387; the ship’s hull around the entry point peeled back in tangled sheets like wet cardboard.
Without warning, the surveillance drone hangar exploded into a searingly bright maelstrom of ionized gas and flying metal splinters. The lethal shroud of plasma came down through the small personnel air lock to cut across the hangar at an angle, vaporizing the drones in its path before exiting through the aft end of the hangar. It took out the aft personnel access hatch and the pinchcomms antenna in the process before finally leaving the ship, its path marked by a lethal firestorm of incandescent metal and swirling high-energy plasma.
The massive overpressure from the slug’s plasma blast wave was enough to smash Michael back into the surveillance drone air lock. For a moment he could only half stand, half kneel there, unable to move as waves of pain racked his body, his tortured back and ribs screaming at him, until the urgent shrieking of his suit alarm and a tightness in his chest told him that he’d lost suit integrity and had better do something about it quickly. He couldn’t work out why Warrant Officer Ng was half sitting crumpled in her heat-seared suit at his feet, helmeted head hanging awkwardly to one side, her suit front gaping open and strangely slick in the swirling murky aftermath of the slug’s passing.
Then he got it. Ng was dead. Somehow, it didn’t mean anything, so Michael pushed the unresponsive Ng away and quickly slapped bright red suit patches out of the dispenser on the bulkhead behind him. In seconds, his fumbling efforts guided by his suit AI, he had sealed a gaping hole in the upper left leg of his suit, a smaller one lower down, and a small but dangerous-looking crack in his plasglass visor. The hole in the left leg of his suit was strangely shiny, surrounded by a sort of crystalline sheen that some dim recess of his mind told him must be heat-carbonized blood. But apart from a numbness in his leg, he felt no pain. With a huge effort, he forced his mind back to work and tried to decide what to do next.
With no air to hold it up and only residual hot spots spewing metal vapor into the compartment, the plasma fog filling the hangar cooled and cleared quickly. It revealed a scene of utter devastation, the sight so awful that Michael saw it without understanding any of it. Evidence of the fury of the slug’s passing was everywhere, with almost every surface, every bit of equipment, every fitting, baked by intense heat and scarred and slashed by the metal splinters that had been thrown up as the slug had passed. Collapsed in untidy stiff heaps on the deck was his team, the last tendrils of gas spewing from ripped and torn space suits.
Only Bienefelt had been left standing, her suit a mass of hurriedly applied red patches.
Michael forced himself to put the comm through to Mother. “Medics and crash bags, surveillance drone hangar. Quick, for God’s sake.”
And then, pulling another wad of suit patches from the nearest dispenser, he made his way out of the corner that had shielded him from the full fury of the slug’s passing, climbing over Warrant Officer Ng. A quick check confirmed that she was dead, and he started trying to seal endless gashes in suits, ignoring the stinging prickle of wound foam as his suit tried to stop the bleeding in his leg.
Even as he did that, medics erupted from the hatch.
In seconds, helped by Michael and Bienefelt, the worst of the casualties were shoved unceremoniously into crash bags, zipped up, and pressurized before being manhandled hurriedly down the hatch on their way to the ship’s tiny sick bay, the only part of the ship still with pressure inside its triple thickness of ceramsteel armor.
Numbly, Michael watched as the shattered remains of Ng, Strezlecki, Leong, Carlsson, and Athenascu were taken below. Their suits were so badly ripped that he knew in his heart that they weren’t ever coming back.
Finally, Maddox and Karpov, both clearly in pain and badly hurt but at least with suits more or less intact-Michael couldn’t begin to work out how-were helped down the hatch. He began to tremble as the awful shock of it all hit him as he stood there with Bienefelt amid the metal-splintered, flame-seared, black-blood-spattered wreckage of the hangar.
Michael was shaken out his trance by Ribot, his voice soft but firm. “Michael, this is the captain. Your people are in good hands now, so it’s time to do what you’re paid for. I want that slug crater over Weapons Power Charlie fixed before the next attack, so get moving. Main propulsion’s been shut down, but watch out for no-notice maneuvers. I’ll keep things steady for as long as I can, but Mother’s going to do whatever she’s got to do to keep us out of trouble, so make sure you’re well clipped on.”
“Sir.”
With a heavy heart but grateful that he had something better to do than stand around waiting for the ax to fall, Michael commed Bienefelt to follow him. At least, he thought, he didn’t have to wait for any damn air lock to open. There wasn’t one anymore, just a fucking great big hole. Wearily and more scared than he’d ever been in his life, he clipped his safety line onto a handy stanchion. With a deep breath, a kick, and a heave, he was safely past the ripped and torn remnants of the forward personnel air lock and out into the awful darkness, heart pounding and mouth dry.
“Command, Mother. 166 reports two hits. Moderate damage only, hull has lost integrity in two places; all combat systems nominal but unable to jump. Casualties. Three dead and twelve injured but none critical. Time to repair, ninety minutes maximum.”
“Command, roger,” Ribot said. Shit, shit, shit. Now neither of them could jump. This couldn’t go on. But it could and it would, and with a conscious effort, Ribot forced himself to face whatever would come next.
“Command, Mother. At pinchspace jump speed.”
“Roger,” Ribot said with a heavy heart. Too late.
With both 166’s and 387’s hulls ripped open, it was all academic now, anyway. The mass distribution model used by the nav AI to compute 387’s pinchspace jump parameters was hopelessly compromised by the gaping holes in 387’s hull. The ship was hours away from being jump-capable; any jump now would destroy it and kill them all. Ironically, they were safer staying put, where the chances of death and destruction weren’t quite 100 percent.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from Gore. Swarm of 48,000-plus decoys. Target 387.”
Good old Gore, Ribot thought. It finally got its act together. Better late than never. But what the Hammer was doing still didn’t make sense.
“Mother, Command. Why no missiles? Gore’s got missiles and plenty of them. Why doesn’t she use them?”
“Command, Mother. Uncertain. Only clue is given by the missile salvo from New Dallas. I believe it confirms orders to conserve missile reserves for the decoy assault, which is now their primary objective.”
“Makes sense, I suppose.”
Ribot pulled up the standard incoming salvo report. It was not good reading.
Shit, Ribot thought, get a grip, man. He was definitely losing his edge when he forgot that 387 and 166 weren’t just receivers but givers as well. For a few seconds he felt good about what his missiles might do to the Hammer ship. 387 and 166 weren’t just sitting there like sacrificial lambs waiting for the ax to fall. Ribot zoomed the holocam as far in on New Dallas as it would go, the ship’s size losing nothing in the process.
His feel-good moment didn’t last long. “Don’t think our missiles are going to hurt that big bastard very much.” Ribot’s voice reflected his pessimism.
“Can but try, skipper.”
As ever, Holdorf’s voice was bright with optimism, and not for the first time Ribot wondered how he managed it in the circumstances. Space warfare had often been compared to standing with one’s feet stuck in concrete boots, watching a homicidal maniac walk slowly toward you, meat cleaver in hand, with every intention of hacking you to pieces. And so it had turned out. Waiting as death rushed toward you was the hard part, the entire process made worse for 387 and its crew by knowing there was almost nothing they could do to hit back. How Holdorf always managed to sound so damn cheerful was a real mystery.
And then the holovid began to flash as, too fast to count, the missiles and decoys from 387 and 166 began to die useless deaths at the hands of the Hammers’ defenses. But just as Ribot gave up hope that any would get through, there was a single red-yellow bloom on New Dallas’s upper hull, a short-lived plume of ionized gas marking the impact point.
“Got the fucker! And it was one of ours.” Hosani’s voice rang with triumph. “Suck that, you Hammer bastard! They must be asleep over there.”
The combat information center team watched the holovid with furious concentration, hoping against hope that the missile’s shaped charge warhead had shot its plasma lance far enough into the huge ship to reach something vital.
But it was not to be.
The Mamba antistarship missiles carried by light scouts were too small and had too small a warhead to have any chance against a Hammer heavy cruiser. Even hitting the New Dallas had been a minor miracle. In seconds the bloom had darkened, and then just as quickly it died, leaving only a tiny hot spot on the ship’s hull. New Dallas continued on as though nothing had happened.
Ribot sighed in resignation. “Can’t win them all. Mother, tell 166 to close on me for mutual support. How long until the missiles from New Dallas arrive?”
“Command, Mother. Two minutes.”
Ribot grunted. Two minutes before they lived or died, assuming of course they survived Gore’s rail-gun salvo, which was due in-he did a quick check-less than a minute.
“Roger that. Tell-”
Ribot could only watch open-mouthed as Gore’s port side, flayed by the enormous power of FedWorld long-range antiship lasers, suddenly ripped open. It was almost as if somebody had taken a huge knife and cut the ship open from stem to stern. A huge plume of incandescent gas and debris spewed out into space as the shattered hulk began a slow spiraling tumble to nowhere, automatic distress alarms sounding frantically in Ribot’s neuronics until he commed them off.
Jesus, Ribot thought. Jaruzelska’s ships must have cracked the armor and hit a fusion plant. Big one, too. Main propulsion by the look of it. Great targeting considering the range.
“But we can win some,” Ribot said jubilantly. “Maria, tell the troops. I suspect they could do with some good news. And get the XO to confirm when she expects to have the drone hangar foamsteeled. I’m sure I don’t have to remind her that we can’t jump with it ripped open.”
“Sir.”
As Mother confirmed that 166 was closing in, Ribot settled down once again to wait. At least there were only two more rounds to go, and neither would be as bad as what they had gone through before. Maybe, just maybe, they’d get out of this.
He was quickly disabused.
“Command, Mother. Final vector analysis on Gore’s rail-gun salvo indicates very high probability of impact.”
“Command, roger. Maria, how’s Michael doing?”
“It’s slow, sir. That’s one hell of a big hole out there. They’ve got the emergency ceramsteel generator secured and are putting the supply feeds in place now. Michael estimates another two minutes will see the job done.”
“Tell him he doesn’t have two minutes.”
“He knows, sir.”
Desperately aware that they were standing directly in front of an oncoming rail-gun salvo, Michael and Bienefelt had dragged the ceramsteel generator and a bolt gun out of the forward emergency repair stowage. Their back-mounted personal maneuvering units were working overtime as they manhandled the awkward heavy lumps of metal across the hull to the lip of the huge crater that had been blown deep in 387’s armor, its walls still glowing with residual patches of red heat. As Bienefelt worked desperately, punching explosive bolts deep into 387’s hull to hold the generator in place, Michael, struggling to connect the generator to its high-pressure supply feeds, took a moment to marvel that 387 had been able to withstand the violent explosive release of so much energy. Finally, Bienefelt got the last bolt home. Working with frantic controlled haste, Michael helped Bienefelt run hoses into the crater. The armored hoses were awkward and stiff to space-suited hands, and a terrible feeling of panic threatened to overwhelm him as the seconds ticked remorselessly away.
But finally, all the feeds were in place. Bienefelt’s massive frame was braced against the crater wall as she tightened the last connector.
“Done, sir,” she said laconically.
She could have been talking about the damn weather, Michael thought. One last check and Mother brought the generator online, gray-black ceramsteel sludge already pouring out of the generator ports to bond instantly with the walls of the crater. Looking good, Michael thought as the crater began to fill at an impressive rate.
“Okay, Benny. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Not before time, sir.”
As they cleared the rim of the blast crater to start their frantic dash back to safety, Mother ran out of time. As she simultaneously fired main propulsion and rolled the ship, Michael and Bienefelt were hurled back along the hull until, with a vicious slamming snap, their safety lines brought them to a dead stop before the recoil threw them back where they’d come from, skidding and sliding uncontrollably along 387’s hull before swinging out into space and back again to hit the ship full on with a sickening crunch that tested their suits’ crashworthiness to the fullest. With a despairing lunge, Michael grabbed Bienefelt as she cannoned into him and snap-hooked his suit harness onto hers, all the while desperately fighting to reel in his safety line.
A quick check with Mother, and Michael saw that 387’s violent maneuvering had destroyed any chance of getting back inside the ship. They didn’t have time to get back to the personnel air lock; they’d have to snap into the nearest hard point, secure their safety lines, and wait it out. There was nothing more they could do. They were going to ride out the next attack locked out of 387, hanging on the end of monofil safety lines with only combat space suits between them and God knew how many oncoming slugs.
If their monofil safety lines failed, at least they’d die together.
And then they waited. As Michael hung there, Bienefelt’s massive bulk tightly locked alongside him, he knew he was about to die. He had never been more certain of anything in his life.
Ribot glanced across at the XO, who had just arrived from the surveillance drone hangar to report. He hoped she had good news. Restoration of jump capability in the next ten seconds would qualify.
But he waved her back. She’d have to wait.
The final rail-gun salvo from the now-crippled Gore hurtled toward 387, the bright red icons on the plot closing the gap with remorseless intent.
Mother did her best, driving 387 up and to port to escape the slug swarm. But the task was nearly impossible. With the Gore and 387 now barely 60,000 kilometers apart, the battle geometry was heavily weighted in favor of the rail-gun attacker, the slugs having a time of flight from launch of only eighty seconds.
And eighty seconds did not give Mother enough time to shift 387’s bulk out of the way before turning the ship back to put her heavy bow armor facing the slugs. Worse, and probably more by luck than good judgment, the Gore’s rail-gun targeting team, probably dead now, had gotten it right. The slugs in the swarm were perfectly lagged and spread, and the decoys were well positioned to confuse and overload 387’s sensors. 387 had nowhere to run.
And one slug’s vector was exactly right.
Even as 387’s short-range lasers belatedly flayed it, the killer slug’s surface literally bubbling as platinum/iridium boiled off into space, it smashed into the ship’s starboard upper bow, precisely where one of the slugs from Shark had gouged a crater in 387’s frontal armor. The metal slug smashed through the still-setting emergency ceramsteel repair and the remaining armor as though they didn’t exist, turning to plasma as it sliced through the inner pressure hull and down into Weapons Power Charlie. Microseconds later, the plasma containment bottle erupted in an enormous secondary explosion that ripped the upper bow of 387 apart into a mass of shredded ceramsteel and twisted titanium frames.
The slug, now a concentrated lance of pure energy, plunged unopposed down into and through 387’s combat information center and then on into the hangar, through the bows of 387’s lander, and finally out into space.
Michael didn’t remember much of what had happened.
Gore’s attack was over in seconds. Afterward, all he could recall was a smashing impact as the blast wave hit, a ripping, tearing blur of heat and intense white light, a hoarse scream from Bienefelt followed by a soft bubbling moan, and then a crunching collision with 387’s hull that bounced the two tangled spacers out into space before their safety lines jerked taut. Michael’s head was driven forward hard into his armored plasglass visor and snapped forward nose first onto his collar ring with brutal force.
And then silence. Deathly, deathly silence.
Oh, Jesus, he thought, Bienefelt’s dead. She should be breathing, but she’s not. Frantically he spun her massive frame around, and there it was, a long rough-edged gash ripped across the lower back of the suit, moisture-laden gas spewing ice crystals out into the black night. Even as he slapped suit patches out of his thigh-mounted dispenser onto the gash, he knew he couldn’t help her.
Calling for help and with an urgency born of desperation, Michael unclipped from the sorely tested hard point and reeled in his safety line, the inertia of Bienefelt’s body making the process agonizingly slow. As he got to the gaping hole in 387’s hull that had once been its forward upper personnel access hatch, a first aid team emerged. Within seconds, Bienefelt had been crash-bagged and taken below.
For a moment, Michael just hung there. He didn’t care too much anymore what happened next. He went below only when the coxswain grabbed his arm and dragged him bodily down through the wickedly sharp-edged hole in 387’s hull.
Only later did he find out how lucky they’d been. The curve of 387’s hull had been just enough to protect him and Bienefelt from the worst effects of the Hammer attack.
The flag staff’s increasingly heated debate about what to do with the New Dallas task group was rudely interrupted.
“Flag, flag AI. Missile launch from flotilla base fixed defenses. Stand by vector and attack profile.”
“Flag, roger.”
“Taken them a very long time, Admiral,” her chief of staff said. It was what they’d all been thinking. All the sims had assumed that the Hammers would get their fixed missile defenses into action inside the thirty-second launch window laid down by Hammer standard operating procedures. Something had to have gone very wrong, not that anybody on Jaruzelska’s team was complaining.
Jaruzelska nodded absently.
At that moment, she was more concerned about whether her ships were ready to deal with the incoming Hammer attack. They looked to be, and with minutes to prepare, they’d be even more ready when the attack arrived. The good news was that the delay meant that the Hammer was unlikely to be able to get another missile salvo away. The task group’s massive rail-gun attack would see to that.
Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the issue at hand. After a further short discussion with her flag staff, she made up her mind.
She hated overruling her flag AI, but there were times when it had to be done. The task group’s second missile salvo would be ready to launch in less than thirty seconds, and if she was going to change the plan, she needed to do it now.
“Flag AI, flag. I don’t think the decoys are going to keep the attention of the New Dallas task group much longer. Now that we have the main Hammer force on the back foot, I want New Dallas and her escorts taken out before they give us too much grief.”
The flag AI’s consideration of Jaruzelska’s proposition was noticeably prolonged as it digested the implications of her orders. “Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Confirm.”
“Confirmed.” Jaruzelska’s tone was very emphatic even as she keyed a marker into her neuronics as a reminder to have the AI boffins look at the flag AI’s inability to see that the New Dallas group was every bit as big a threat as the flotilla base ships. A bigger threat, in fact, as the task group’s relentless assault slowly ground the Hell Flotilla and its base’s fixed defenses into dust. Even if the New Dallas and her escorts weren’t shooting at them right now, they would be soon.
“Flag AI, roger. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Stand by, stand by…away now.”
That was one thing she liked about AIs, Jaruzelska thought. Unlike some of the prima donnas on her staff, they never sounded hurt when you overruled them.
Before Mother, safe in her meter-thick shock-mounted ceramsteel box, commed him, Michael had been sitting amid the shattered wreckage of the surveillance drone hangar, watching but not seeing the frantic efforts of the ship’s damage control teams to seal the damage to 387’s hull. The hangar was a mess of emergency foamsteel generators, steel bracing, and welding gear. Bienefelt had been crash-bagged and taken below to join Karpov in regen. There was nothing more he could do for any of them now except watch. He’d patched his neuronics into the sick bay’s holocams and, with his head a mass of white-hot agony, watched as the medics struggled to stabilize the surviving members of his team and get them into the regen tanks in time. Worst of all were the ones the medics had lost, their crash bags laid out neatly against the sick bay bulkhead. Michael struggled to remember the faces of Ng, Strezlecki, Leong, Carlsson, and Athenascu.
But he couldn’t. They were just blurs behind a thick red-gray fog of hurt.
It was all he could do just to sit there slumped on the deck as pain poured through his system. He was a mess. His neuronics told him he had lost a fair bit of blood and that there had been a whole lot of other damage involving bones, muscles, and tendons that didn’t sound too good, but he didn’t care.
Through the red haze and with blood pouring down his face and into his suit, Michael finally answered Mother’s increasingly insistent comm.
“Yes, what?” He winced. Just talking hurt.
“Michael, this is Mother. I know you are hurt, but you’ll be okay.” Mother had firmed her voice to a point just short of being brutally direct. “But I need you and I need you now. You are now the senior line officer, and you must take command.”
“Senior line officer? Command? What do you mean?” Michael struggled to concentrate. The blood around his neck was getting sticky as it congealed, but thank God the bleeding was stopping. “Command? Why?”
“They’re all dead, Michael. Ribot, Hosani, Holdorf, Armitage, Kapoor. All dead. That last slug took out most of the combat information center crew and the lander as well. Reilly’s okay. He was in propulsion control.”
Michael nodded painfully, not fully understanding what Mother was saying to him. All in all, it was much easier to do what the insistent voice was saying and not argue. Arguing required thought, and thinking hurt. “Okay. Where do I go?”
“Wardroom, Michael. Best I can do and the only large holovid screen left intact. And please be quick. The next attack is due in under ninety seconds.”
Michael forced himself to his feet with as much speed as his bruised and battered body would allow and made his way down to 2 Deck and past the combat information center. It was no more. It had been blown apart, its forward bulkhead a shattered and shredded curtain of plasteel opening onto a nightmare vision of pure destruction.
The slug’s deadly shroud of plasma and its escort of metal splinters spalled off Weapons Power Charlie had passed right through the center of the combat information center, with the blast wave smashing people and equipment with indiscriminate disregard. Now the compartment was a scene of appalling carnage and frantic activity as overworked medics and damage control crews struggled desperately to crash-bag the survivors and get them below and into regen.
Michael couldn’t see much, and what he could see did not look good.
There was very little left of Ribot, Hosani, and Holdorf, only a few pathetic shreds of shattered flesh and pieces of heat-seared gray-black space suit slowly turning back to orange as combat chromaflage settings wore off. On the port side, he recognized Armitage, whose suit looked surprisingly intact, though the body was slumped over at an awkward angle. Armitage was being ignored by the medics, so she must be dead, Michael thought without emotion.
As he pushed past the shattered chaos that once had been 387’s combat information center, he could see no sign of Kapoor. Must have been in the hangar, poor bastard, he thought.
It took all the willpower he possessed, but finally Michael was settled in the wardroom, itself badly damaged both by the slug as it had torn through one bulkhead en route to the combat information center and by the shock from Weapons Power Charlie going up on the other side of the heavily armored bulkhead. Thank God for blast venting, Michael thought, and for the designers and engineers who had put it in 387.
As Mother ran Michael through the tactical situation, his heart sank as his badly battered brain slowly came to grips with what was happening to 387 and, even worse, what was about to happen. With much of the ship’s forward armor now stripped, most of her short-range laser capability destroyed, and her long-range lasers degraded by the loss of Weapons Power Charlie, even six missiles and their attendant decoy swarm would be a handful.
Despite the pain and after a careful look at the tactical plot, Michael knew instinctively what had to be done.
He commed Chen. 166’s skipper was the boss now that Ribot was gone, so it would be his call.
Jaruzelska watched the command plot, her thoughts a mix of professional satisfaction and private pity.
No matter how hard she tried, she could never take any pleasure from the spectacle of spacers dying in the pitiless hard vacuum of space, whether they were Hammers or not. She sat back in her chair struggling to get comfortable, her combat space suit heavy and uncooperative. Christ on the Cross, she thought, I’m getting too damn old for this sort of thing. She watched in silence as the task group’s first rail-gun salvo finished its 150,000-kilometer journey to drop a hailstorm of platinum/iridium death onto the Hammer’s fixed defenses and the hapless ships of Rear Admiral Pritchard’s flotilla as they struggled to get going.
Jaruzelska hissed through clenched teeth as the slugs smashed home, the surface of Hell-8 disappearing behind a roiling, churning mass of pulverized dirt. The Hammer ships, their shapes sharply black against massed stars, were spewing clouds of ceramsteel and reactive armor into space.
“Caught the bastards asleep, Martin.” There was no triumph in Jaruzelska’s voice.
Her chief of staff nodded somberly. “True. But I doubt that even our ships could get going from a cold start in ten minutes, never mind four.”
“God, is it only four minutes?” To Jaruzelska it felt like hours.
Oblivious to all else, Jaruzelska watched as the damage assessments flowed in. If she didn’t think too much about the human cost of it all, the news was good. The heavy cruisers Verity and Integrity and the light cruisers Cordoba and Camara had been damaged but were still assessed as combat-effective. The heavy escort Titov had been hit hard and probably was combat-ineffective. So, she thought, it’s really started.
“Sir, priority vidlink from 166. Will you take it?”
“Of course.”
Two seconds later the vidlink connected.
“Jaruzelska.”
The tortured face of Lieutenant Chen filled her neuronics as he made his request for help. Jaruzelska reviewed with mounting horror the damage and threat assessments commed through to the flag AI by 166 and 387.
“Chen, okay. Stop. I’ll do it,” she said, cursing herself for losing sight of the big picture to such an extent that she had forgotten the unequal struggle being waged by two of her ships. It was a classic example of why people were still in command, not AIs.
Her ships, her people, her responsibility.
She wasted no time, and in seconds the task group’s massive laser batteries had switched away from the New Dallas and the Shark to fill the void between the two light scouts and the onrushing missile salvo with a lethally focused curtain of light. The lasers first blinded and then shredded the missiles into pieces as their microfusion plants were turned into spectacular balls of rolling white-yellow light.
The threat to 166 and 387 was over.
With a final prayer that the two light scouts would get home safely, Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the Hammer ships.
As the cruisers switched their heavy antiship lasers back to New Dallas and Shark, the next round of damage assessments scrolled across Jaruzelska’s neuronics.
Titov was confirmed destroyed, the ship having erupted in an enormous ball of flame, probably as a result of a direct hit on her main engine fusion plant as it powered up to get the ship under way. The flotilla base’s fixed missile batteries and phased-array missile control radars had almost all been destroyed. Verity, Integrity, Cordoba, and Camara, no change: damaged but combat-effective.
The news from Hell Central was even better.
The administrative center of the Hell system was lightly defended and stood no chance against the four heavy and two light cruisers of Commodore Molefe’s task group, its fixed defenses wiped out in the first seconds of the attack. Two Hammer light scouts unfortunate enough to be caught alongside had fared no better. They had disintegrated as rail-gun slugs had ripped them apart, their fusion plants erupting in huge secondary explosions to send two shattered hulks spinning off into space. As they tumbled away, the hulls began to spit out a pathetically small cluster of lifepods, their characteristic double-pulsed orange strobes winking like demented fireflies; the international distress band was busy with radio beacons pumping out cries for help.
“Flag, flag AI. Shark combat-ineffective.”
“Flag, roger.” The light cruiser Shark; that was good. New Dallas could ill afford to lose her and her firepower. And it was a surprise. For all the awesome power of antiship lasers, they did not have a high kill probability against ships as large as light cruisers. Too big, too much armor, and, in this case, at 320,000 kilometers getting very close to the maximum effective range of the system. But the Shark had been turning, and the task group had been able to catch her side on where her armor was thinner. Good laser beam formation and tight coordination had done the rest. And for that she had the 387 and the 166 to thank, a debt of gratitude she hoped they would survive long enough to be repaid.
Jaruzelska sat back to watch the arrival of her second rail-gun salvo.
The Hammer’s last missile attack disintegrated around Michael and his scratch command team.
With 387’s short-range lasers largely inoperative and its chain guns overwhelmed, a few of the missile fragments made it through. The laser-shredded, heat-warped remains of the Hammer’s heavy missiles and their decoys smashed into 387 at over 280,000 meters per second, their kinetic energy strong enough to punch deep gashes in the ship’s armor. The ship’s hull shuddered as the last of its battered and torn reactive bow armor struggled to protect the inner hull.
But finally all was quiet, and for the first time in what seemed like hours the plot showed no immediate threats to the battered hulk that was 387. Michael slumped back in his seat, so tired that he wanted to crawl somewhere quiet and sleep. He forced himself back to the task at hand.
“Command, Mother. Shark combat-ineffective.”
Michael sat up. “Command, roger. Put it up.”
Michael and his team watched in awe as the holocams zoomed in on the huge bulk of the light cruiser Shark, one of the Hammer’s newest warships. Its bottomless black shape was riven along one side by a long gash, venting ship’s atmosphere to space; the humid air turned instantly to an ice cloud that was visible in 387’s low-light holocams as a scintillating plume writhing its way into nothingness. Then, as Michael watched, a secondary explosion racked the stricken ship, a huge cloud of yellow-red plasma boiling out of the hull.
“Jesus,” Michael muttered, suddenly conscious that he had a ship to command, a ship to get out of Hell nearspace with all onboard. It was now his personal responsibility to bring them to safety.
“Mother, Command. Main laser battery power status.”
“Seventy-five percent. I’ve switched targeting back to New Dallas, and 166 has done the same. We’re on a stern-crossing vector, so the angle of attack is very good. I am rerouting power from propulsion and will have both lasers back to 100 percent shortly.”
That was what Michael wanted to hear, and with the much simpler and more straightforward tactical situation firmly in Mother’s capable hands, he turned his mind to what had to be done to get 387 out of its current mess. First, he needed to talk to Chen, now senior officer of a very battered two-ship task group. Second, he needed an XO to look after getting the ship jump-worthy. Then he needed to make sure that Cosmo Reilly was getting on top of the enormous job of producing a ship capable of getting them home safely.
The comm to Chen was short and sharp, and Chen’s plan was simple: Keep lasers on New Dallas for as long as they could, make 166 and 387 jump-worthy, and then get the fuck out of the Hell system as soon as possible.
Direct orders from Admiral Jaruzelska, Chen said, and Michael saw no reason to argue. In the meantime, Chen was bringing 166 alongside to get his medics onboard to help clear 387’s backlog of casualties.
After a brief pause to watch as 387’s and 166’s lasers reignited the glowing red speck on New Dallas’s stern just outboard of her starboard heat dump, Michael commed the medics to expect help any time now. Then he commed the next most senior person left alive in the chain of command and, effective immediately, his new XO, Chief Harris from Warrant Officer Ng’s team, to meet him in the surveillance drone hangar.
Mother commed Michael as he and Chief Harris started their survey of the battered wreck that was 387.
“Command, Mother.”
“Command, go ahead.”
“Patch neuronics into primary holocam.”
“Roger, patching.”
Mother didn’t need to tell him where to look. What he saw staggered him.
What had been just a small, dull red speck, a mere pinprick on the vast expanse of New Dallas’s stern, had grown in the space of only a few minutes into a searingly bright spot. Even as Michael watched, the spot began to spew a small jet of plasma, molten metal, and debris out into space as the ships’ lasers chewed their way remorselessly into the hull. Shit, Michael thought. He was seeing ship’s atmosphere venting to space.
“By Jesus, their hull integrity’s breached,” he said. Michael could hardly breathe, the tension of the moment gripping his heart like an iron band. He had trouble believing what he was seeing, but something deep inside told him there was more to come.
“Mother, I have a feeling about this. I want everyone who can to watch.”
“Roger.”
When the end came, it came horrifyingly fast. In a matter of seconds, the jet of material pouring out of the hole in New Dallas’s stern exploded into a searing plume of incandescent gas hundreds of meters long as the lasers finally broke through deep into the ship’s hull.
And then, in a single searing flash, the antiship lasers finally connected with something big, and the entire starboard quarter of the huge ship erupted in a massive explosion. Its force punched New Dallas into a slow, tumbling stern-over-bow spin, furious jets of reaction mass spewing fore and aft as maneuvering systems struggled to bring the heavy cruiser back under control.
Mother provided the commentary this time. “According to the TECHINT briefings we’ve been given, there’s an auxiliary fusion power plant aft of the propulsion power compartments that feeds the after rail-gun batteries. I think that’s what’s gone up. She won’t be destroyed, but she will be combat-ineffective for a while until they sort things out.”
Michael could hardly speak, wishing that Ribot and all the other 387s could have been there to witness something that would go down in the record books.
Chen commed him.
“We did it, Michael, we did it.”
“Hard to believe, sir. But by God, we’ve paid a price.” Michael stopped, choked with emotion.
“You did. I’m calling a halt. It’s time we got jump-worthy and went home. And Michael!”
“Yes, sir?”
“You’re 387’s skipper now, so for fuck’s sake stop calling me ‘sir.’ It makes me nervous. Call me Bill,” Chen said, his voice soft with compassion.
Michael managed a laugh. “Sorry, sir-er, Bill.”
“And one more thing, Michael. Get yourself to the sick bay. You need attention.”
“All in good time. There are things I need to do first.”
Flanked by her senior staff, all standing dumbstruck, Vice Admiral Jaruzelska stared open-mouthed at the holovid.
She’d known that 387 and 166 had kept up their laser attack on New Dallas but had tucked that information away in the back of her mind, where she parked stuff that wasn’t significant, bits and pieces that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things for which she was responsible.
Therefore, it took a good long time before she and the rest of the flag staff believed what they were seeing: a huge ship slowly falling out of the line of attack, the massive explosion on her starboard quarter pushing her into a slow spiraling spin to nowhere.
And then the cheers from the ship’s company of Al-Jahiz and from her own flag staff drove home the extent of what the two little ships had achieved. “By God, that was one for the record books,” Jaruzelska muttered, disabling a ship hundreds of times their size. Finally, order prevailed and the flag staff turned their attention back to the rest of the battle now under way across hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers of Hell nearspace. The command plot was now showing the Hell nearspace component of Operation Corona in its entirety. Along with the two heavy assault forces tasked with reducing the flotilla base, Hell Central, and any warships unlucky enough to be on station to dust, the command plot now tracked Task Group 256.3, under the command of Commodore Pinto in the heavy cruiser Repudiate together with four heavy patrol ships as they ran in on Hell-5, one of the three moons holding those of Mumtaz’s passengers and crew who had not been sent to Eternity.
Much farther out, Commodore Yu Genwei in the heavy cruiser Ulugh Beg and the fourteen other ships of Task Group 256.4 had dropped out of pinchspace on schedule and were tracking in toward three of Hell system’s outer moons. Hell-16 and Hell-18 held the rest of the Mumtazers, and the third, Hell-20, held the overly trusting and no doubt thoroughly disillusioned hijackers of the Mumtaz.
Satisfied with the big picture and after a final check that the Hammer forces in orbit around the system’s home planet of Commitment were still showing no signs of moving, Jaruzelska collected her thoughts. “Flag AI, flag. Message to the captains and crews of DLS-387 and DLS-166.”
She paused for a moment, conscious that what she said would go down in history and wanting to get it right. Not for her own sake but for the sake of those who needed to understand, to know at what a terrible price the freedoms long enjoyed by the Worlds came.
She took a deep breath. “In the face of appalling odds, crippling damage, and severe casualties, your unrelenting attack on vastly superior forces is in the highest traditions of the Federated Worlds Space Fleet. With you, we mourn the loss of your comrades. The ultimate sacrifice they have made to protect the freedoms we all hold so dear will never be forgotten. I and every other member of Battle Group Delta salute you all. Signed, A. J. Jaruzelska, vice admiral, Federated Worlds Space Fleet, Commander, Battle Group Delta.”
Jaruzelska braced herself for what was to come as she counted down the seconds to the arrival of what the flag AI assured her would be the first and last missile salvo launched at her ships from the shattered flotilla base.
Jaruzelska hadn’t much enjoyed missile engagements with the Hammer the last time around and didn’t expect to now. It had been nearly twenty years since she’d been shot at seriously by the bastards, and she wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience, a view shared by her chief of staff as he exercised his authority to shut down the excited chatter and get the flag staff to focus on what came next.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. One minute.”
Only half-aware of what she was doing, Jaruzelska hunched down in her seat and struggled to bring her breathing under control, if only to give her fogged-up visor a chance to clear. As always, her space suit was uncomfortable, the helmet neck ring heavy on her shoulders as she watched the massive attack make its way inexorably toward them.
Jaruzelska completely approved of Captain van Meir’s caution in going to full suits. Unlike some heavy cruiser captains, the Al-Jahiz’s skipper insisted that visors be closed and suit checks completed as an attack became imminent. Heavy cruisers rarely depressurized for combat. They were too big and too tough, and the loss of personal communication was too keenly felt, particularly by command teams under pressure. But not shutting up suits as an attack approached risked the lives of anyone caught in a compartment suddenly open to hard vacuum.
As Jaruzelska checked and rechecked that nothing had been overlooked, the tactical plot showed an ugly and menacing sight.
The flag AI’s latest estimate was that there were upward of 750 Sparrowhawk missiles in the attack, though based on what she’d seen so far, Jaruzelska thought that the AI’s assumptions about Hammer missile availability were too pessimistic. She snorted dismissively. The Sparrowhawk was so old that it used hypergolic fuels for its launch stage, for God’s sake. But it didn’t matter who was right. They’d soon find out one way or the other. What really mattered was how well the task group’s sensors had separated the missiles from the myriad decoys and jammers sent along to confuse, baffle, and divert the attention of the antimissile defenses.
If the task group got that right, they’d come through this pretty much unscathed. If they didn’t…
After a quick check that everything on the command plot was as it should be, Jaruzelska forced the grim prospect of a successful Hammer attack out of her mind as she turned her attention back to the tactical plot.
The Hammer had adopted what the missile attack tacticians called a standard doughnut formation, or do-form. The doughnut formation was exactly what it sounded like. After the launch and second stages burned out, the missiles would open out into a thick ring of missiles around an open center, with the attack axis running right through the middle of the hole. As the range shortened, the missiles would fire their third-stage maneuvering engines to collapse the doughnut inward onto the Fed ships, accelerating fiercely as they closed. The do-form was standard Hammer tactics for antistarship missile attacks, and Jaruzelska was not surprised to see it coming at her. It was exactly what the THREATSUM had predicted. Well done, boys and girls at Fleet intelligence, she thought.
That was fine up to a point. They had simmed such attacks to death, so Jaruzelska had little to do but sit back and watch as her warships closed in to a tight, closely packed ring, the ships’ heaviest armor facing outward at the approaching missiles. In a missile-only attack, it was a good defensive formation, although it took only one ship in the ring to fumble its defense and missiles would slip past to smash directly into the thin upper armor of ships in the rest of the ring. Not for nothing was the formation considered a great test of mutual trust, Jaruzelska thought.
But despite all the sims, facing one for real was a very different matter, as the fist of fear and tension that gripped her stomach proved.
All of a sudden, the tactical plot erupted as the Hammer missiles reached the maximum effective range of the task group’s medium-range area defense missiles. In seconds, the command plot was thick with tracks as missiles streaked out, eating up the 50,000-kilometer gap at better than 330,000 meters per second.
Barely more than two intensely frightening minutes later and with hundreds of missiles and countless decoys and jammers expended, the Hammer attack was over.
But not without cost.
A power failure on an overloaded weapons power fusion plant deprived Damishqui of an entire battery of close-range defensive lasers just as flag AI handed over two Hammer missiles that somehow had made it through the outer defensive cordon wrongly classified as decoys, and as such well down the pecking order, for the attention of Damishqui’s close-in weapons. The belated efforts of Damishqui’s chain guns had been too late to destroy the missiles, and despite her enormous bulk, Damishqui had shuddered as the first missile hit home, the armored warhead combined with the missile’s massive kinetic energy punching effortlessly through the upper armor, cutting right through the ship before venting its fury to space. The result was nine compartments breached, four dead, and twenty-seven injured, but no mission-critical systems degraded. The second missile had scraped through, impacting Damishqui’s bows at a shallow angle almost exactly where the armor was thickest. Apart from an enormous gouge across Damishqui’s hull, the damage was minimal.
Two missiles made Al-Jahiz suffer, though not close to the extent to which 387 and 166 had suffered. Losses on that scale in a ship the size of Al-Jahiz would have been unthinkable.
With its warhead’s circuitry fried by lasers and a close-range antimissile missile ripping its third stage apart in a brilliant flash of blue-white, the tattered fragments of a single Hammer missile had squeezed past the task group’s defenses to crash into Al-Jahiz’s bow armor. But the second missile got a better result.
A serious datastream error allowed the missile to get lost in the flood of data being handled by the task group’s AIs, an error that in theory couldn’t happen but did, one of the hazards of volume defense using laser-based high-speed datastreams to shuffle information between ships. The missile slid down a gap between Zuhr and Searchlight before crashing into Al-Jahiz, the warhead reaching into the ship to destroy an auxiliary fusion plant, with the massive explosion shaking Al-Jahiz bodily as the blast vented to space. A few anxious moments followed until the warship’s damage control crews sealed off the damage and reported no mission abort problems. Considering the enormous forces unleashed when a magnetic plasma containment bottle ruptured, casualties were relatively light at nine dead and sixty-six injured.
As Jaruzelska ran her eyes across the final damage assessments, she was relieved to see that the rest of the task group had gotten off lightly. Any missiles that had made it past the area antimissile defenses had been ripped apart by the carefully crafted layers of close-in point defense weapons systems, short-range missiles, then antimissile lasers, and finally, for last-ditch defense, chain guns. Apart from Blue- fish, which had lost its long-range search radar to an inert missile, the only damage suffered was from missile fragments chewing up small sections of hull armor.
The Hammers’ next effort turned out to be a total waste of ordnance. Close to half a million rail-gun slugs fired from extreme long range in three separate salvos gave the flag AI enough time to calculate vectors to enable the task group to slide effortlessly out of the way. In the end, it was all a bit of an anticlimax. The relief in the flag combat data center was reflected in a sudden upsurge of nervous chatter as the task group maneuvered to allow the slugs to pass harmlessly clear.
As the task group moved relentlessly in, Jaruzelska sat and watched, grim-faced and silent, as her attack ground the Hammer forces into dust. It didn’t take long, and then it was all over. Rear Admiral’s Pritchard’s two bases and his twenty-strong flotilla were no more, their only monuments blackened, slowly tumbling wrecks of ships. Hell nearspace was thick with the orange anticollision lights of rescue and recovery craft as they started the long process of gathering in the scores of lifebots spewed into space by the stricken ships.
What came next would be the Hammer’s last throw of the dice, a moderately serious missile attack compared to their first effort, which even she would call serious. Jaruzelska’s neuronics scrolled through the list of incoming attacks. The report showed seven missile salvos on their way in from the New Dallas task group, thousands of missiles in all. They wouldn’t be as easy to avoid as the rail-gun swarms had been. Jaruzelska sucked her teeth.
The command plot was not a pretty sight as it tracked the onrushing salvos.
Not for the first time that day, Jaruzelska cursed her luck that five Hammer heavies had chosen that morning to drop in-system. In all the sims they had done, it was not far off the worst-case scenario, and it was only the desperate attack by 387 and 166 that had diffused the threat they posed. Also, they carried the new Eaglehawk antistarship missile, not obsolete Mohawks. By Fed standards, the Eaglehawk was still a relatively crude piece of engineering, but it was a big improvement on its predecessor. It was faster, had a much improved terminal guidance system, had good antijamming capability, and was topped with a high-gain shaped-charge warhead: a very nasty piece of work and definitely not to be taken for granted.
But there was some good news.
The salvos were well separated and minutes apart. There was only one threat axis, and Hammer ship-launched missiles had no better off-bore capability than did Fed ship-launched missiles. That meant Jaruzelska could place her sixteen cruisers in a loose wall, the ships in two tiers in line abreast, bows and bow armor facing the missiles coming at them but positioned close enough to provide overlapping fields of fire even if the Hammers had been smart enough to focus their salvos onto one ship or maybe two. If the Hammers went for two ships, and that was the flag AI’s prediction based on what she’d observed so far, that left plenty of firepower in reserve. The greatest risk was that the Hammer would be smart enough to go for only one of the light cruisers and lucky enough to pick one that she had been stupid enough to leave exposed and unsupported on one flank.
That was something she had no intention of doing.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. Two minutes.”
“Here we go. A small one to get us started and then some serious stuff,” Jaruzelska muttered.
And then, in a flash, Verity’s missiles were upon them, every one targeting Al-Jahiz as she rode at the center of the task group. But the combined firepower of sixteen cruisers was more than enough to rip the missiles out of space, leaving Al-Jahiz to be troubled only by scattered fragments of missile debris, with the impacts triggering only tiny puffs of reactive armor.
Jaruzelska settled her breathing down. Her turn now, she thought, and a short pause in the action while her missiles fell on the unfortunate ships of the New Dallas group.
“Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas group in one minute.”
“Flag, roger.”
Jaruzelska watched as the missiles from her ships, their arrival carefully timed and their final vectors orchestrated to stretch and overwhelm the defenses of their targets, did what they had been sent to do.
For a brief few seconds, the holovid was filled with brilliant white flashes as the Hammer ships’ close-in defenses reached out to destroy the early arrivals before the sheer weight of numbers allowed missile after missile to smash home, burying warheads deep into armor. Plasma jets reached inside until one by one hulls were ripped open, spilling debris and molten metal into space. The crippled New Dallas was the last to go, but eventually, for all her enormous size, the numbers were against her and she, too, succumbed.
Jaruzelska felt sick as she watched.
It had to be done, and she had no doubts about doing it. In any case, the Hammer was still trying to do to her what she had done to the unfortunate New Dallas and its task group. But it was still butchery, and she didn’t have to like it.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. Two minutes.”
And so it started again, only this time the salvos were larger, and just as the flag AI had predicted, all were targeted on just two ships. The first three salvos were aimed at Damishqui, and the last three at Al-Jahiz, though Jaruzelska and the flag AI could find no logical reason why they had been picked other than that they rode in the center of the task group. But the missile attacks were doomed to failure; the enormous defensive firepower of sixteen cruisers was simply too much to overcome.
Then the Hammer attack was spent. After more than half a million rail-gun slugs and thousands of missiles, it was all over. Jaruzelska settled down with little more to do than watch as the four task groups responsible for the rescue of the Mumtaz’s passengers and crew swept in on their targets.
As the order to relax visors came through, Jaruzelska leaned back in her suit and squirmed her body around to try to relieve a persistent itch in the small of her back. She hoped that there would be no more surprises like New Dallas.
Jaruzelska cursed the Hammer for its willingness to sacrifice good ships and spacers for no possible gain. Unbelievably, Commitment had dispatched the heavy cruiser Ascania and the heavy escort Perez. Picked up by surveillance drones in orbit around Commitment, the two ships jumped out of pinchspace directly into Jaruzelska’s missile salvos.
She had taken no pleasure in what followed. It was far too close to cold-blooded murder for her liking. The two Hammer ships never had a chance.
Still struggling to set up after the drop, the Hammers saw the missiles coming only when it was far too late to do anything effective. The space around the two ships turned into a blazing mass of defensive laser fire, with missiles and chain-gun fire clawing at the Merlins as they raced in, the sheer size of the attack overwhelming the Hammer ships’ tracking and fire control systems. The space around the two ships sparkled with the red-gold blooms of their few successes.
Ascania took the brunt of the attack. Close to a hundred Merlin antistarship missiles slipped past her defenses, hitting home in the space of only two seconds. Perez did better but not well enough, absorbing forty-two direct hits, a nearly impossible number for a cruiser to deal with, never mind a heavy escort. The two doomed ships heaved as nose cones of vanadium/tungsten-hardened steel cut deep before explosive warheads unleashed a storm of white-hot gas and shrapnel that scoured the life out of every compartment; the hapless crews were incinerated where they sat.
Sickened, Jaruzelska watched as the warheads finally found what they were looking for: the fusion plants that powered the ships’ propulsion and weapons systems. The appalling energy within them was unleashed as the magnetic bottles containing the fusion plasma gave way, successive blasts ripping huge holes in the sides of the two ships.
“Abort remaining missile salvos,” Jaruzelska said flatly. The butchery was done.
Jaruzelska rubbed her face wearily. She now had status reports from all of her subordinate commanders. Thankfully, they’d gotten what they’d come for: the 158 passengers and crew taken from the Mumtaz and 22 of the 30 hijackers. The rest were dead. And she’d had the pinchcomm from Rear Admiral Kzela confirming the successful recovery of the Mumtazers marooned on Eternity.
Could have been a hell of a lot worse, she thought, though the price paid by 387 had been far too high. But considering that the premission sims had shown a strong chance that Battle Group Delta would lose at least one major fleet unit with heavy casualties, they had been lucky. She shivered. With only a pair of heavy cruisers close to any one of the battle group’s four drop points, the losses could have been even worse. Still, the only real surprise had been the New Dallas and the ships of her task group. Thank God they’d dropped well short and, even more important, that 166 and 387 had been there to lure them into turning away for those critical few minutes as the battle group dropped.
But that didn’t help 166 and 387, which were still a good two or more hours away from being jump-capable. Jaruzelska had no intention of leaving them alone in Hammer space. A minute’s consideration and she knew what she would do. She’d keep Al-Jahiz and Sina together with Crossbow and Bombard back in support of 166 and 387 until they jumped.
For everyone else, it was time to go home.