FWSS Eridani, pinchspace
“All stations, command. Stand by artgrav shutdown in ten seconds. . artgrav shutdown now. All stations, final suit checks. Dropping in two minutes.”
Ignoring the sudden heave from a stomach deprived of its gravitational frame of reference, Michael flicked his visor down. He waited as his suit’s AI ran final diagnostics, a row of green lights confirming that he had a good suit. Flicking his visor back up, he looked around at Eridani’s combat information center. With Eridani at general quarters, the place was jammed with spacers. Even so, it was quiet, an obvious tension showing in the way the command team concentrated intently on the holovids, the command plot running off the seconds until the ship dropped.
He looked at his team of sensor operators. He knew their names and service records but not much more than that. He hoped they were as good as his new captain had assured him they were, because this time the Hammers would be on their guard, and although the chances were small, there was always the possibility they might drop straight into the arms of a waiting heavy cruiser.
That thought made Michael’s stomach turn over; he remembered the shock and terror he had felt when Ishaq was destroyed. She had been a heavy cruiser up against a damn mership armed with obsolete rail guns, for God’s sake. And compared to Ishaq, Eridani was tiny, less than one-thirtieth the size, with flank and stern armor that would have trouble keeping out a kid armed with a slingshot.
Then Eridani turned the universe inside out and dropped into normalspace. In an instant, the combat information center was a mass of furious but disciplined activity as the command team worked frantically to make sense of the mass of data pouring in from the ship’s passive sensors. Michael watched his team monitoring the assessments being made by the sensor AI; now and again, one of them stepped in to correct a mistaken classification, making his confidence grow. His captain had been right. This team was good. Calm, focused, and extremely competent, they quickly and efficiently put together an accurate threat plot, the mass of red highthreat vectors marking Hammer contacts being downgraded one by one to orange.
When the last red vector on the plot changed to orange, Michael allowed himself to relax a little. For the moment at least, they were clear of any immediate threats, the space between the deepspace heavy scout and the Hammer home planet of Commitment almost completely empty. Michael shivered. Even if they were 90 million kilometers away, Commitment felt way, way too close, the memories of that awful place all of a sudden crowding in on him.
He gave himself a mental kick. He had a job to do, and allowing the ghosts of the past to distract him was not going to help. He focused on the threat plot, his team stepping methodically through each contact, tightening classifications to a point where track numbers started to have names put to them. Michael’s breath caught in his throat as track 445311 was classified as the Hammer heavy cruiser Bravery. That was the son of a bitch that almost had gotten him and the 387 the last time out. Talk about close shaves. The light scout 387 had jumped only five seconds before Bravery’s rail-gun salvo would have ripped them apart.
Finally, the process of mapping the billions of cubic kilometers around the Eridani came to an end. They were clear. Time to call it in.
“Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”
“Command, roger.”
Having taken formal responsibility for the information now up on the threat plot, Michael sat back. Apart from the familiar pattern of traffic flowing to and from Hell’s Moons showing up clearly as a tangled mass of orange vectors running off the right-hand side of the holovid, there was not a lot to see. There was a heavy concentration of units around Commitment, its planetary nearspace thick with everything from space battle stations and heavy cruisers to light scouts, circling in a web of Clarke and polar orbits. Farther out, there were three task groups largely made up of heavy and light cruisers with a sprinkling of smaller units. Beyond them, Commitment farspace was empty, with not a single Hammer starship.
The more Michael looked at it, the more puzzled he became. He would have expected patrols at least out to the 4-light-minute mark to stop intruders like the Eridani from having too easy a run in, but no. There was nothing. It was odd.
“All stations, this is command. Revert to defense stations. Stand by artgrav in ten seconds. . artgrav on now. Stand by to launch surveillance drones.”
The moment the weight came back on his body, Michael felt better. He had always wondered if a career as a Space Fleet officer was such a smart idea considering how badly he tolerated zero-g, not to mention the horrors of jumping into and out of pinchspace. Around him, the combat information center burst into life as half the command team stood down, the inevitable buzz of conversation bringing the equally inevitable order to keep it quiet. Michael waited until the rush was over before stripping off his space suit and changing seats. When the ship was at defense stations-its second-highest alert state-he was one of the two warfare officers in the combat information center, and it made more sense to be sitting close to his partner, in this case Lieutenant Tanvi Kidav, Eridani’s senior warfare officer.
Michael liked Kidav a lot. At first, her implacably taciturn exterior had put him off. But after a few days, he had discovered that there was much more to Kidav than met the eye. It turned out she was an engaging woman with a quiet, dry sense of humor allied with an ability to deliver one-liners to devastating effect. Her speciality was deflating the more pompous of Eridani’s crew. Michael knew. He had seen her do it to the ship’s senior engineer, Pavel Duricek, a pompous windbag who clearly believed he was the most important person on board, a view that, needless to say, Kidav did not agree with. Pope Pavel, she called him. Duricek hated it.
Kidav smiled as he sat down. “Hi, Michael. Nice and quiet out there, thank God.”
Michael nodded. “Way I like it.”
“Me, too. Right. You keep an eye on the drone launch; I’ll watch the rest.”
“Sir.”
Truth be told, launching surveillance drones and a pair of pinchcomm satellites was not the most difficult task in Eridani’s mission inventory. Michael was pretty sure that Eridani’s drone team would do it with the smooth efficiency he was beginning to expect from everyone on board. He could not speak for Carlos Galvan, Eridani’s drone officer, but with Petty Officer Bienefelt to back Galvan up, he knew things would go as they should. Eridani’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Dana Lenski, seemed to have something that the late and unlamented Captain Constanza did not: the ability to get the best out of her people.
“Command, drones.” Galvan’s voice was matter-of-fact.
“Command.”
“Ready for drone deployment.”
“Command, roger. Stand by.” Michael did a quick final check of the threat and command plots to make sure nothing had slipped past him. Nothing had. “Deployment approved.”
“Roger.”
Michael watched intently as the drone handlers spilled out of the forward upper air lock, their chromaflage space suits dialed down to a dirty gray-black all but invisible in the miserable light coming from Commitment’s orange-red dwarf sun more than 150 million kilometers away. Bienefelt’s huge bulk was easy to spot. Michael nodded appreciatively as he watched the team.
The drone team knew what they were doing. Splitting into two, they quickly had the massive cargo bay doors open, and a steady stream of drones started to appear. Finally, two much larger pinch comsats appeared, and the cargo bay doors were closed. Michael heaved a sigh of relief. The Eridani was hard for Hammer radar or optronics to see, but only when fully stealthed with her skin chromaflage activated. Two bloody great sharp-edged cargo bay doors rather spoiled the effect, increasing Eridani’s radar cross section dramatically.
Now the handlers were pushing the drones clear of Eridani, and Michael watched as one by one the drones’ diagnostics confirmed they were ready to go. The two pinchspace comsats were following close behind like two sheepdogs.
“Command, drones.”
“Command.”
“Ready to launch. Passing control to Mother.” Michael did another check. The threat plot was unchanged. A quick look at the drones confirmed that they were ready to go. There was no need to keep the handlers out any longer, and with Eridani slipping through space at more than 40 kilometers per second, they should be back inside, where bumping into a piece of dirt no bigger than a pinhead was not a lifethreatening event. Michael knew. He had been there.
“Roger. Recover teams.”
“On our way.”
From the first time he had seen her working, Michael knew Bienefelt was good, but Eridani’s handlers were every bit her match. With economical elegance, they swarmed back to the air lock, stopping precisely with only centimeters to go before dropping neatly back into the ship. Well, not all of them, Michael noted with a smile. Carlos Galvan was as clumsy as Michael had been when he had been the drone officer in 387. Even so, it took only a minute and they were all back, the air lock closing behind them.
“Surveillance, command. Nicely done. Thank you.”
“Roger that.” Galvan sounded pleased. He should, Michael thought. Surveillance drones had minds of their own, and once they started to get out of control, things could get dicey in seconds.
Michael turned his attention back to the drones. Mother was happy with them, her own checks confirming that she had good birds.
“Captain, sir, command.”
“Captain.”
“Drones and pinchspace comsats deployed, sir. All nominal. Ready to launch.” Michael half smiled. Lenski knew all that or she was not the skipper he suspected. But tradition was tradition: AIs were not to be trusted, so keep humans in the loop and all that.
“Launch authorized.”
“Sir.”
Michael watched intently as Mother drove the drones slowly clear of Eridani before methodically aligning each one along its intended vector. The pinchspace comsats followed, leaving Eridani coasting along alone. Then, as one, engines powered by hypercompressed nitrogen came to life, thin whiskers of gas driving the drones away from Eridani and toward Commitment, the comsats angled away to take up their positions well outside Commitment nearspace, where a wandering Hammer ship on antidrone patrol was unlikely to trip over them.
Three hours later, the captain slid into her seat between Michael and Kidav. “Ignore me, guys,” she said. “How’s Mother going on Phase 2?”
“Another two hours, sir,” Kidav replied. “We’ve got a short list of possible targets, but I agree with Mother. We should watch things a bit longer. There’s no rush.”
“Agreed.” She turned. “So, Michael. An old friend of yours over there, I think.” Lenski waved a hand in the general direction of the plot.
“The Bravery you mean, sir?”
“The same.” Lenski leaned closer. “You did well, Michael,” she said softly. “Hell’s Moons. Must have been hard.”
It was not a question; Michael just nodded.
“You know,” Lenski said conversationally, sitting back, “I think we underestimate the Hammer sometimes. Bravery is a good example. I went through the Hell’s Moons after-action reports. The Bravery’s skipper knew what he was doing. Her drop in-system was as good a piece of work as I’ve seen. Quick to set up, quick to get salvos away.”
“It was; I’ll give them that,” Michael agreed. “Though five seconds too slow, thank God. And yes, I do think we underestimate them. Much as I hate the fuckers”-Michael’s voice hardened noticeably-“they aren’t all corrupt, incompetent fools. That’s something worth remembering.”
The depth of emotion in Michael’s voice did not surprise Lenski. His service record had left her stunned; there would be few in the Fleet who had been through what he had been through. She had also talked at length to Bienefelt when the petty officer-the largest woman Lenski had ever met-had joined Eridani. Bienefelt and Michael, not to mention the rest of 387’s crew, had done it tough, topped off in Michael’s case by having Ishaq blown out from underneath him, followed by surviving a stay with DocSec and then waging a one-man war against the Hammer before somehow getting off-planet and safely home. He had paid a price for surviving. That much was obvious, a price that was part survivor’s guilt and part an intense obsession to get even with the Hammer.
Whenever the Hammers came up in conversation, Michael’s eyes spelled out what he really thought of them. The burning hate was obvious, the intensity impossible to hide. She needed to watch him, she reminded herself. A degree of hate was fine; she had no problem with that. It was necessary to do the job. God knew, she hated the Hammers, too, but a man who hated too much could endanger her ship and the lives of her crew. She was going to watch him closely until she knew where judgment stopped and blind hatred took over.
“Okay, team. I’m going walkabout.”
“Sir.”
The insistent demands of Eridani’s klaxon as it drove the crew to general quarters could not be ignored any longer. Michael reluctantly abandoned the safe, warm, dark place he had toppled into as soon as he had collapsed into his bunk.
Running on autopilot, he swung himself out of his bunk. Moving with practiced efficiency, he was into his space suit. Pausing only to grab his gloves and then his helmet, he was out of his cabin, pounding along a crowded corridor and then up a ladder to the combat information center. When he arrived, the place was bedlam as the rest of the command team arrived, some still struggling into suits. With Eridani’s usual efficiency, bedlam was replaced swiftly by quiet calm.
Michael quickly confirmed that his team was closed up and online. He sat back as the reports flowed in from the rest of the ship. Malik Aasha, the Eridani’s executive officer, was hounding and harrying the laggards to their posts. Finally it was done, and Aasha, an extremely tall, dark man with the sharp-edged face of his Somali forebears, was satisfied.
“Captain, sir,” Aasha reported formally, “the ship is at general quarters in ship state 1, condition zulu.”
“Good. Shut down artgrav and depressurize. All stations, depressurizing in one, so final suit checks. Dropping in two minutes. Hold on to your hats, folks. This could be a rough ride.”
Hell, Michael grumbled to himself. He understood why Lenski was depressurizing the ship before they dropped, but that meant being buttoned up in his combat space suit when his stomach did its usual backflip and triple somersault. Oh, well, he consoled himself, better a small accident inside his space suit than a big one outside. Normally, Eridani and every other ship in the Fleet maintained an internal pressure of 80 percent of normal with the oxygen levels raised to compensate. Even that translated into 8 tons per square meter pressing on the pressure hull, something one could do without when shoring up battle-damaged bulkheads.
When Eridani dropped, Michael and his team did not have time to worry about what lay ahead. They worked frantically to confirm that the threat plot looked much as it had when they had jumped out-system two hours earlier and in particular that no Hammer heavy cruiser was waiting for them as they dropped. Michael sighed with relief, pleased to see that the plot was unchanged and the potential targets they had identified from 90 million kilometers out were still pretty much where they had left them. The only difference was that this time the plot did not revert to a more comforting orange. It was dominated by an uncompromisingly angry mass of red vectors tagged by Mother as hostile force Tango Golf One. Those contacts were the primary threat to the Eridani, a mixed task group of heavy and light warships led by a single heavy cruiser, though at 102,000 kilometers, they were too far away to be an immediate problem.
“Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”
“Command, roger. Weapons?”
“Targets confirmed.”
“This is command. Launch missile salvo one.”
“Roger. Launching missile salvo one.”
With the tearing buzz of hydraulically powered dispensers ramming missiles into space, Eridani deployed her first salvo of Mambas, the antistarship missiles escorted by a cloud of decoys and active jammers driving away on pillars of searing white-blue light. Ahead lay their targets: four hapless Hammer merships hauling slowly out-system, ships the system commander unwisely had allowed to stray way too far out before jumping to the safety of pinchspace. Lenski had tasked two Mambas to each mership; the rest she kept back. She had other plans for them.
The Hammer task group did not sit back and watch the Eridani at work. Even as the Mambas hit home, with the doomed merships erupting into gigantic balls of red-white plasma as their main engine fusion plants lost containment, antiship lasers from the Hammer task group found the Eridani and were beginning to flay the ceramsteel armor off her starboard bow. Quick work, Michael thought as he scanned the data coming in from the AI that was monitoring the integrity of Eridani’s armor. Good work, too. The lasers were tightly grouped, with the Hammer’s master fire controller holding the beams steady on the target point on Eridani’s hull, forcing Lenski to start rolling the ship to minimize the damage to her forward armor.
Despite himself, Michael was impressed. The Hammer’s laser beam formation and targeting was better than anything Michael had seen reported in the technical intelligence summaries pushed out by Fleet. Not for the first time, he reminded himself not to take the Hammers for granted.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from hostile Tango Golf One. Target Eridani. Time of flight 2 minutes 12.”
In an instant Michael’s stomach knotted, the taste of sour bile rising up into his throat. He hated rail guns. Christ, with the Eridani barely 100,000 kilometers from the Hammer warships, it was going to be tight. He glanced forward to where Lenksi sat flanked by her two senior warfare officers. She did not move as the report was acknowledged. Michael turned back to the job at hand, his team watching intently as the sensor AI sorted through the mass of onrushing slugs in a desperate attempt to eliminate the decoys. To Michael’s horror, at one point during the planning, the command team had seriously considered riding out any rail-gun attack if the swarm geometry gave them a good chance of survival. Jesus Christ, he had thought, staring in horror as the idea was batted around. Survive a few Hammer rail-gun attacks and then see how you feel about that idea, he had said to himself.
In the end, Michael had not needed to object. Much to his relief, Lenski had killed the idea stone dead.
This Hammer rail-gun swarm was good. In a matter of seconds, four heavy cruisers from the Hammer task group had gotten a well-coordinated, tightly grouped rail-gun salvo away that left Eridani with absolutely nowhere to hide. Her only chance was to jump into pinchspace. Michael counted the clock down as Eridani’s missile crews worked frantically to get the next salvo away. The instant the missiles were deployed and on their way, joined by the missiles held back from the first salvo, their targets two 10,000-ton Diamond class light patrol ships running exposed on the edge of the task group, Lenski gave the order.
After barely two minutes in Hammer nearspace, the Eridani jumped, leaving behind the ionized remnants of four merships and two Diamond class light patrol ships fighting for their lives as the Eridani’s missiles fell on them.
The mood in Eridani’s combat information center was upbeat, not that anybody had any illusions about the mission they had just completed. Hit-and-run attacks made little difference to the strategic balance of the war. In truth, all they did was put the Hammer on notice that they weren’t going to have things all their own way while preparations for the invasion of the Hammer’s home planet moved ponderously forward. But Eridani was now officially blooded, and four Hammer merships had been destroyed and two light patrol ships had been attacked and probably damaged. All in all, it was a creditable tally for her first combat patrol.
After a while, with the ship safely in pinchspace, Michael slipped quietly out of the combat information center. He had mixed feelings. Yes, the Eridani had performed well; it was always good to hit the Hammer.
But there were some negatives from the day’s operation. First, the Hammers he had seen were a step above the rabble that had opposed them at Hell’s Moons-a big step, too. Something had changed, but what? Second, where were all the Hammer’s ships? If the Feds had come calling in force, it would have been all over in a matter of hours. The Hammers would simply not have had the ships to oppose a full-scale attack. So they were taking a chance-a big chance-and to Michael’s way of thinking, there had to be one hell of a big payoff to justify exposing the planet from which all Hammer power flowed.
Michael made his way to the Eridani’s canteen. He had promised to buy Bienefelt a beer; the opportunity to have a quiet chat with her was something he never passed up. Over a couple of beers, she would tell him more about what was really going on below decks than ten years of ship’s management meetings could. He whistled scornfully. Management meetings! Hot air fests, more like it, another opportunity for the ship’s officers and senior spacers to be treated to the latest pompous lecture from the resident gasbag in chief, Pavel Duricek. The man was a pain in the ass.
He would catch up with Bienefelt; then he would sleep on the problem of the missing Hammer warships. If by some miracle he was struck by a blinding revelation, he would talk to Kidav about it in the morning. Otherwise he would bury the problem. After all, it could simply be nerves, and he had plenty of those to go around. He sighed. They were stuck in pinchspace until they got to the mobile forward operating ship positioned in deepspace 100 light-years out from the Hammer system, so there was nothing he could do no matter what brilliant insights he might come up with.