The instant the hangar doors cleared the ships, the landers fired their main engines in a short, sharp burst of pure energy that shot them out of the hangar. Turning hard, the landers went to emergency power, Widowmaker shuddering as its artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the sudden deceleration. The instant the landers were clear, Warfare fired the explosive charges laid out across the hangar deck, smashing the carefully assembled piles of scrap out into space around the dreadnoughts. All three dreadnoughts drove on hard, surrounded by a whirling maelstrom of broken metal and lifepods, thousands and thousands of pieces of radar-reflective scrap. Michael was glad he would not be there when all that mass arrived dirtside. One thing was for sure: If the Hammer commander had not been confused thus far, he would be now with all that metal-part of which was the battered but still intact Redwood-now plunging earthward.
"Command, tac." Ferreira's voice was laconic, matter-of-fact. "Stand by… lander speed nominal for reentry."
"Command, roger. Turning onto new vector." Mother shut down the main engines, spinning the lander up and around until its nose was aligned for reentry. Michael sighed; much as he wanted to hand-fly the mission, he had better things to do than piloting Widowmaker's headlong plunge back to Commitment's surface. "Command, Warfare. Initiating final missile engine burn."
"Command, roger." A quick check of the holovids confirmed Warfare's report. The enormous swarm of Merlin antistarship missiles-ASSMs-had kept station on the dreadnoughts while they decelerated in toward Commitment. Now they rode down tail first on thin needles of white fire, slowing to allow their warheads to survive reentry.
"Missiles at reentry speed. Stand by warhead deployment… warheads deployed… warheads confirmed nominal, vectors nominal for reentry."
"Command, roger," Michael said. The Hammers must be struggling to work out what amid all of that metal hurtling in their direction they should worry about. More than a thousand of the dreadnoughts' missiles had survived the three Hammer missile attacks; now the salvo had doubled in size.
"Command, Warfare. Red River and Redress reentry imminent."
"Roger." Michael put the feed from the lander's external holocams up on one of the holovids. Many kilometers ahead, the sky over the Hammer capital burst into an extravagant display of red, yellow, and gold flares, some gone no sooner than they had appeared, the larger fragments along with the battered remnants of Red River and Redress, now two huge balls of fire stabbing trails of flame down into Commitment's atmosphere before they disappeared into the storm raging across McNair.
"Oh, yes," Michael hissed softly, entranced by the sight. Seconds later, Redwood followed her sisters into oblivion. She, too, died a warrior's death, driving a blazing stake deep into the Hammer heart.
"Command, sensors. Missile telemetry is nominal, missiles locked on to target. Yalla, Gwalia, and Perkins air-defense radars are up. Debris clouds now being engaged by Hammer surface-to-air missiles."
"Roger."
"Command, Sensors. Lost telemetry from Redress."
"Roger," Michael said, burying a quick pang of regret at what he had done to three of the best ships in the Federated Worlds order of battle, the last of the dreadnoughts gone.
"Command, tac. Twenty seconds to reentry. Launching comsats."
"Command, roger." He watched dispensers spit the tiny black spheres into space, solid-fuel motors firing them an instant later to lift them into orbit. They would not last long, but long enough to contact the NRA.
"Command, sensors," Carmellini said. "Comsats are online. Go ahead, sir."
"Roger," Michael said, checking that the landers were on vector and that they faced no immediate threats. "Okay, Jayla. Take over. You have command."
"Roger, sir. I have command. Let's hope the NRA will talk to us."
"We'll see," Michael said. He patched his neuronics into the comsat network. "NRA, NRA, this is Helfort, Helfort. Urgent message for Mutti Vaas. Urgent message for Mutti Vaas. Please respond, over."
The silence that followed seemed to drag on forever, the only sound the soft rattling of Widowmaker's hull as it started to bite into Commitment's upper atmosphere. "NRA, NRA, this is Helfort, Helfort. Urgent message for Mutti Vaas. Urgent message for Mutti Vaas. Please respond, over."
"Screw it," he muttered under his breath. The comsats transmitted on all the frequencies Fed intelligence said the NRA used for tactical communications, but was anybody listening?
"NRA, NRA, this is Helfort, Helfort. Personal message for Mutti-"
A man replied. "Unknown station calling NRA. Identify yourself." The flattened vowels, chopped syllables, and staccato delivery were pure Hammer. Michael shivered at the flood of memories the words triggered.
"NRA, this is Michael Helfort," he replied. "Mutti Vaas knows me. Stand by burst transmission, but I need authentication. Send me the name of the man who took me to see Vaas and I'll transmit."
After a brief pause, the voice responded. "Understood. Stand by, out."
Michael sat back. Telling the NRA what he was doing was not mission-critical, but if he was ever to bring Vaas onside, he needed to be open and up front. "Update, Jayla," he said, scanning the threat plot, which was thick with the red icons of Hammer air-defense radars.
"All landers on reentry vector, all systems nominal. You can see"-she waved a space-suited hand at the plot-"that there's one hell of a lot of radar and missile activity, but that's what we planned for. What matters is that so far none of them are showing any interest in us. The Hammers are doing what we expected."
"Wasting missiles hacking big, useless lumps of metal out of the sky, you mean?" Michael said with a grin.
Ferreira grinned back. "Precisely, and by the thousand. It's worse than chaos. We've overloaded them. What's left of poor old Red River is getting some attention. The Hammers fired an entire salvo of Gomers into what was left of her."
"Better Red River than us," Michael said; at the mention of Gomers, something cold grabbed his heart and squeezed. Big, fast, and agile, the Hammer's Gomer hypersonic air-defense missiles were lethally dangerous. A lander's chances against one were not good; Michael prayed and prayed hard that the Hammers stayed distracted long enough for them to get close to the dirt.
Michael forced himself to relax. Either Widowmaker made it or a missile hacked her out of space, and no amount of worrying would change anything.
"Passing 90,000 meters," Mother said matter-of-factly. "Stand by pitch up."
Michael braced himself; the lander's nose lifted, the 40-degree angle of attack putting Widowmaker's hull belly-into the air ripping past the hull with such force that the lander's artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the g forces generated.
With terrible slowness, the lander's speed bled off and the altimeter unwound the meters.
"Tac, you ready?" Michael asked.
"Decoy on standby, sir."
"Roger."
Ignoring standard operating procedures, Mother tipped the nose of the lander over until the forward holocams filled with an endless rumpled mat of ugly cloud, the top of the tropical depression sitting across McNair painted a dirty gray-black by the low-light optronics processors. "Holy shit," he whispered, his gloved hands squeezing the arms of his seat with desperate force. Trailed by Alley Kat and Hell Bent, Widowmaker plummeted down in a desperate race to get clear of the Gomers' engagement envelope before the Hammers started to wonder why some of the crap falling out of the skies was not in free fall.
Michael watched the altimeter unwind with frightening speed; with one eye on the altimeter, he started to reach for the side stick controller-Widowmaker was frighteningly close to the sea-when Mother lifted the nose sharply and fired Widowmaker's fusion plants to emergency power. Every gram of thrust was diverted to the lander's belly thrusters in a desperate attempt to slow its reckless rush into the ocean, foamalloy wings rammed out into the rushing air to help brake the fall.
An instant later, the lander plunged out of the murk into the rain-lashed darkness of a Commitment night. "Too fast, too fast," Michael hissed; without knowing it, he steeled himself for the inevitable.
"Brace, brace, brace," Ferreira shouted, the altimeter still unwinding at a sickening rate: 600, 500, 400, 300, 200, 150, 100, 90, 85, 80… Michael allowed himself to breathe again only when the lander slowed to a halt. Mother had stopped Widowmaker only 75 meters above the sea, its mass sitting on top of twin plumes of flame that boiled seawater into huge, roiling clouds of steam ripped away by the gale into the night. "Nice one, Mother," he whispered. It had been a beautifully executed, if terrifying, piece of lander flying.
If Mother had been at all concerned, she refused to let it show. "Transitioning," she said calmly, warping the lander's variable-geometry wings for maximum lift. Dropping the nose, she progressively shifted power away from the thrusters and back to the main engines, accelerating Widowmaker hard out of the hover and into winged flight. "Closing to take station on Alley Kat," the AI said.
"Command, roger," Michael said, his voice shaking, the full realization of just how close to disaster the Widowmaker had come beginning to sink in. If they'd had Gomers to deal with as well, who knew how they would have survived. "Confirm when on track and let me know our estimated time of arrival at Point Lima."
"Roger."
He checked the command plot, happy to see Alley Kat and Hell Bent on track and heading for Camp J-5209. Then he scanned the threat plot; it was thick with the icons of radio frequency intercepts-it seemed that the Hammers had every radar they owned operating at full power-but for once, every intercept had been downgraded to a comforting orange. Widowmaker was now all but invisible thanks to the appalling weather and her active stealth systems, the enormous plumes of incandescent gas pouring from her main engines screened from view by the impenetrable cloud cover overhead. Michael suppressed the urge to laugh. Here they were, flying deep inside Hammer space-any deeper and they would be underwater-and the threat plot showed not one red icon. That had to be a first; for the moment at least, they were safe.
In close formation, Alley Kat and Hell Bent ran on ahead of Widowmaker, the landers invisible, the only sign of their passing twin trails of wave tops shredded white by the shock wave from the landers as their massive hulls bludgeoned their way through the rain-filled night. When Widowmaker's AI eased the lander over to pass Alley Kat, Michael commed Sedova.
"Had us worried there for a while," Sedova said. "We were sure you guys were going to take an unscheduled bath."
"Wasn't a good moment, Kat, I have to say."
"I bet. All systems are nominal, and we're on track. We'll hit 5209 on schedule."