FWSS Eridani, pinchspace
Heart pounding, Michael waited for Eridani to drop.
Behind a closed visor, his face was slick with a thin, cold sweat. In two days it would be April Fools’ Day, which felt uncomfortably appropriate. Here was the ship of fools about to drop right into the Hammer’s lap. If Eridani and her crew got out safely, they would be right back to do it all over again. Michael could not help but feel they were pushing their luck.
Eight hours earlier, Task Group 300.1, under the command of Commodore Perkins in Damishqui, had dropped well out from the planet Faith. Undetected by the Hammer, the task group had laboriously assembled a comprehensive threat plot, data pouring in by the terabyte from both ship sensors and a far-flung constellation of surveillance drones orbiting on the fringes of Hammer farspace. Eventually, Commodore Perkins had pronounced himself satisfied that things were as they should be. Now the task group was on its way in to attack.
What a way to make a FedMark, Michael thought as he watched the seconds run off the drop timer with glacial slowness.
At last Eridani dropped, and the shit hit the fan.
The urgent sound of the threat proximity alarm told Eridani that things had changed significantly in the short time it had taken the task group to microjump out-system, reverse vector, and microjump back.
“This doesn’t sound good, team. So let’s do it properly.” Lenski cut off the alarm. “Sensors, don’t rush it. I don’t want us going off half-cocked.”
“On it, sir,” Michael replied, grateful for Lenski’s reassuring calm. He watched his sensors team working feverishly to distill the threat out of the chaotic mass of blood-red vectors spattered across the threat plot. His eyes tightened in disbelief as the cause of the proximity alarm became all too obvious. “Jeez,” he said out loud. The operation was falling apart, and they had been in Hammer space for what? Five seconds? The threat plot was a terrifying sight. Where there should have been nothing but empty space, there were thirty Hammer ships-ten of them heavy cruisers-all frighteningly close and all sitting across the task group’s attack vector. Where in God’s name had they come from? Stop dreaming, Michael, he chided himself. You have a job to do, so call the plot.
“Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”
“Command, roger.”
To his credit, Commodore Perkins did not waste a second. His orders were brutally simple. “Close the enemy and engage.” In an instant, Perkins’s carefully choreographed attack on the Hammer space battle station, now safely tucked away behind a solid wall of Hammer capital ships, dissolved into the freewheeling chaos of a close-quarters space battle.
Lenski did not hesitate, either. As Eridani deployed its first salvo of Mamba antistarship missiles, she pitched the ship violently down and to the left in a frantic effort to get clear of the rail-gun salvos the Hammers would be launching at any second. Until she and every other ship had opened out, the task force-tightly grouped for what Commodore Perkins had intended to be a single surgical strike through the Hammer’s outer defenses-was a sitting duck. Forewarned by gravitronics intercepts, the Hammer ships were working furiously to slew their ships onto the threat axis to allow them to get their rail-gun salvos away; their missiles would be close behind.
Michael’s heart was in his mouth. There would be little time to maneuver clear, little time to hack enough rail-gun slugs out of space to neutralize the Hammer attack.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun salvos inbound. Targets Damishqui, Resplendent, Renown, Secular.”
“Command, roger. Sensors?”
“Rail-gun vectors confirmed, sir.” Michael’s voice was ash-dry. This was looking bad; it felt uncomfortably like Ishaq all over again. Michael shivered; it was pure luck the Hammer ships had been pointing in the wrong direction when the Fed ships had dropped. If they had been pointing at the drop datum. .
When it came, the Hammer’s opening salvo was a good one and well targeted. It took only seconds to close the gap and smash into the four heavy cruisers at the center of the Fed task group. The slugs punched huge holes in the ships’ ceramsteel armor, with their kinetic energy transformed in nanoseconds into enough heat to blow great craters in the bows of the heavy cruisers.
As the clouds of ionized armor cleared from around the ships, Michael checked the status of Damishqui. He was relieved to see that she had weathered the storm, though her bows had been deeply scarred by the attack, impact craters still spewing white-hot clouds of ionized ceramsteel armor. Now it was the Hammer’s turn to receive; the task group’s rail-gun salvo was inflicting serious damage on the Hammer starships. Fed rail guns threw a heavier slug that was almost half again as fast as the Hammer’s, each slug delivering energy equal to a ton of TNT onto an area smaller than the end of a little finger. Already, one Hammer light escort was pulling out of line, her hull opened up by a secondary explosion, probably from an auxiliary fusion plant powering one of her weapons systems.
“Command, Mother. Missiles inbound. Estimate 6,000 missiles plus decoys. Targets not known. Time to target eighteen seconds.”
Oh, Jesus, Michael thought desperately, this is it. He and the rest of Eridani’s sensors team could do no more. They could not keep up with the enormous avalanche of information that was pouring in from the task group’s sensors; they were now totally in the hands of the battle management AI in Damishqui, totally dependent on its interpretation of the mass of data being processed by the sensor AIs in the task group’s ships. Putting one’s life in the hands of an AI might be a necessary evil, but it was never something that Michael-or any other spacer, come to that-much enjoyed. When AIs messed up, they tended to do it in spades. Then the tsunami of Hammer Eaglehawk missiles was on them, with the Eridani’s close-in weapons working desperately to keep out the fifty or so that had picked it as a target. The vibration coming up through the deck shook Michael’s chair as Eridani let go with everything she had. Defensive lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns all worked in a last desperate attempt to hack down the missiles that had clawed their way through the antimissile screen put up by the cruisers.
“All stations, stand by missile impact.”
Michael braced himself.
The attack hit home. Eridani’s last-ditch defenses had smashed most of the Hammer missiles into useless junk, leaving only broken fragments of hardened ceramsteel falling on her bows like iron rain. Even so, six got through, their shaped-charge warheads punching deep into Eridani’s forward armor, blowing great gouts of yellow-red gas into space. The ship was bucking and heaving as shock wave after shock wave ripped through it, the artgrav struggling to keep up.
A few terrible seconds later the missile attack was over, and for one awful moment there was complete silence. Then there was bedlam as the damage reports began to flow in. To Michael’s relief, there were no casualties; the damage had been limited. The Hammer missiles had all hit well forward, and a quick check with the remote holocams showed Michael that Eridani’s heavy frontal armor had done what it was supposed to do. Her bows looked like a mad giant had run amok, pickax in one hand, blowtorch in the other, leaving six gaping craters vomiting white-hot gas into space. Despite the missiles’ best efforts, Eridani’s inner hull had not been breached, though the Hammer antiship lasers were following up the missile strike by probing the impact sites for any weak spots. Lenksi had already reacted to the threat, ordering Eridani’s Krachov shroud generators to full power; the tiny disks designed to shield Eridani from laser attack were spewing out in the thousands. Another quick check confirmed that Damishqui had weathered the storm, though she, too, had been punished heavily up forward, her bows speckled with red-white hot spots, the remnants of multiple missile strikes; ghostly streams of ionized gas still were spewing out into space from the impact craters.
The light patrol ship Marie Curie and the heavy scout Kaminski had not been so lucky. The two ships were finished. Slowly they fell out of formation, spitting lifepods in all directions, their orange strobes double-flashing desperate calls for help. Michael’s heart went out to them. He remembered all too well the dreadful thudding jolt as his lifepod was blasted clear of the dying Ishaq.
The two Fed ships were doomed. Hammer missiles loitering behind the main attack accelerated hard to finish them off, the ships’ hulls carpeted with the red-white flashes of warheads punching deep before detonating. Michael flinched as without any warning the two Fed starships blew up almost as one, searing blue-white flashes announcing the loss of main engine fusion plants. He hoped the two heavy scouts nominated as rescue ships-Sirius and Pavonis-would have enough time to recover the pods. He checked the relative vectors of the lifepods and the oncoming Hammers. God help them, he thought. It would be a close thing.
“So, team,” Lenski said, her tone casual to the point of disinterest. “The big question now is what Commodore Perkins is going to do next.”
The combat information center was silent. Eridani’s spacers knew a rhetorical question when they heard one. For his part, Michael knew the answer he wanted to hear. He hoped like hell Perkins would jump and jump soon, but what he thought did not matter. All that mattered was what Perkins wanted, and for the next two minutes or so the Feds had the tactical advantage. The Achilles’ heel of all Hammer warships was their inferior rail-gun and missile salvo rates. Perkins could get a second rail-gun and missile salvo away well before the Hammers could reply with theirs. During that time, all the Hammers could throw at him would be antiship lasers, and they would not be on target long enough to burn through the ceramsteel armor and breach the inner hulls. If everything went well, the Fed task group’s second salvo would hit Hammer ships already severely damaged by the first attack well before they could respond.
Michael kept one eye on the command plot, the other on his team. There was not much for them to do. The immediate threats were obvious, and no other Hammer ships were close enough to be a problem. In any case, the blizzard of jamming and spoofing, all mixed in with clouds of active decoys, made the situation so chaotically difficult to interpret that only the task group’s sensor AIs could work out what was going on, and even they were struggling. All he and his team could hope to do was pick up any obvious mistakes and, apart from that, trust to the AIs to do the job without screwing up too badly.
The opening Fed salvos smashed home. It was a well-coordinated and brutally effective attack, missiles and rail-gun slugs arriving so close together that the Hammers’ close-in defenses were completely overwhelmed. Ship after ship disappeared behind massive clouds of ionized ceramsteel as missiles and slugs blasted huge holes in frontal armor. Michael was disappointed to see the Hammer heavy cruisers emerge apparently still operational, though their bows and flanks-a mass of white-hot impact craters-bore witness to the rough treatment they had suffered. The light units were not as lucky. A light cruiser, the Kapali, started a slow rolling turn out of line, a massive plume of ice-crystal-loaded gas scintillating in the intense sunlight confirming that her hull had been breached. She was followed by a second, the Berithsen, also breached, her entire port bow a mass of broken ceramsteel blown outward by what must have been an auxiliary fusion plant losing containment. A string of smaller ships followed the Kapali and the Berithsen out of the line of battle.
In seconds, Fed missiles held back from the initial attack fell on the crippled ships to finish them off, warheads driving explosive lances of incandescent gas deep into their guts. One after another, the Hammer ships disintegrated in huge balls of blue-white plasma as their main engine fusion plants lost containment. Rapidly expanding clouds of ionized gas peppered with orange-strobed lifepods provided the only evidence that they had ever existed.
Michael forced himself to breathe out through teeth clenched tight with stress. It was carnage. Surely they had done enough damage for one day.
“Command, Mother. Hammer task force now estimated to be 65 percent effective.”
“Roger that. Nice work,” Lenksi said dispassionately. “That’ll teach the Hammers to fuck with us.”
Michael looked across at Lenksi. She stiffened in her chair. Aha, Michael thought, mentally crossing his fingers. That would have to be Perkins calling for a bit of chat.
It was.
“All stations, command. Quick update. We have orders from the commodore. He believes we retain the tactical advantage, so the task group will launch two more salvos, one missile and one rail gun. Depending how that goes, we may jump, but don’t bank on it. Command out.”
Michael groaned softly, as, he suspected, did most of the spacers packed into Eridani’s combat information center. Commodore Perkins was going in for the kill, clearly hoping his antistarship lasers and follow-up missile and rail-gun salvos would disable enough of the Hammer ships to make their task group completely combat-ineffective. Michael sat there waiting for the buzz-rip of hydraulic rams launching Eridani’s next missile salvo. He turned his full attention to the command plot, watching in awed fascination as the missiles, thousands of them, streaked across the gap toward the Hammer. With only seconds left to run, the missile salvo was overtaken by the task group’s rail-gun salvo, the two carefully coordinated to arrive on target at precisely the same time.
It was a massacre.
The Hammer ships reeled under the sheer weight of the ordnance thrown at them. One after another, they began to fall out of the line of battle. The first to go were the few light units that had survived the first attack, their thinner armor and less capable close-in defenses simply not able to absorb the enormous weight of metal thrown at them. In quick succession, most lost the unequal fight. One ship after another disappeared into huge balls of plasma, leaving behind five units, damaged but still mostly intact, venting gas to space as they struggled to get to safety.
They did not get far before scavenging missiles smashed home and they, too, vanished in searing white-hot explosions. Then the first capital ship went.
The City class heavy cruiser Morristown, its port bow slashed wide open into a tangled mass of metal by a failed auxiliary fusion plant, rolled out of line into a stately, slow corkscrewing turn. The battle management AI in Damishqui did not miss the chance, and a handful of missiles that had been loitering in reserve were sent in to finish the job, hitting home precisely where the previous attack had opened up the Morristown’s bows. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a blinding flash, the entire front half of the Morristown blew apart, followed a few seconds later by the rest of the ship as missile warheads gutted it from end to end, blowing the main engine fusion plants apart into incandescent balls of blue-white plasma.
In quick succession, four more heavy cruisers followed the Morristown. The N’debele trailed the Witness of Kraa, the Concorde, and the Restitution as they death-rolled out of the line of battle. Two more light cruisers, the Williams and the Chen, followed close behind, their battered and broken hulls bleeding long streams of ice-laden air into space as they tumbled planetward. All around the disintegrating Hammer task group, space was thick with orange-strobed lifepods blossoming outward in a ghastly slow-motion fireworks show.
Michael turned his attention back to the threat plot. Every bone in his body told him that the Hammers would be sending reinforcements. God knew, they had the ships, and so it was only a matter of time. His instincts were confirmed when the threat plot erupted; two ugly splashes of red announced the arrival of two Hammer task groups. Immediately, Michael’s team was buried in the task of confirming who and what the new arrivals were. Backed by the massive processing power of the task group’s AIs, it was a quick process, helped by the fact that the Hammer ships were making no attempt to conceal their identities. Every active sensor they possessed was transmitting on full power. Why? Michael wondered as he confirmed the plot.
Lenksi answered his unspoken question. “They want us to leave, I think.”
Michael nodded. That made sense, though the Hammer ships had a lot of space to cover before they posed a serious threat.
He held his breath. The Hammers had been handled roughly, but they were still a sizable force, and now help was on the way. Commodore Perkins had only seconds left to decide whether to jump or stay and ride out the next Hammer attack.
Perkins chose to stay. His orders were brief: “Close and destroy the enemy.”
For the first time that day, and much to Michael’s surprise, the leaden cloak of fear he had carried into the battle fell away. Perkins’s decision made sense. If the Hammer was to be beaten, this was what it would take: standing toe to toe and slugging it out blow for blow, salvo for salvo, until they could not take any more. With a quick prayer asking whoever it was in charge of the universe to look after Damishqui, he checked that his team was not allowing another Hammer task force to creep up on them. Satisfied that everything was under control, he turned back to the command plot. Once more, it was the Hammer’s turn. Perkins’s ships might have inflicted serious damage, but combat-ineffective they were not. Yet.
“Command, Mother. Multiple missile launches. Estimate 2,300 heavy and 500 light missiles plus decoys. Targets not known.”
Michael braced himself. This was the moment of truth. If the Eridani survived this, she would be in at the kill. If not. .
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch. Targets Damishqui, Resplendent, Renown, Secular.”
Michael flinched as he watched the awful sight of Damishqui and her fellow cruisers disappearing behind huge, boiling clouds of ionized armor, the ships visibly recoiling as the Hammer slugs dumped massive amounts of kinetic energy into their hulls. He held his breath until one by one the ships reemerged, anxiously watching the Damishqui to make sure she was not badly hit. Michael allowed himself to relax a bit. She seemed okay, but it was hard to tell.
All hell broke loose. For the second time that day, Eridani fought desperately to keep out the wave of missiles that fell on her. This time around, not a single missile got through. Facing a much smaller salvo, Eridani was able to pick off the missiles one by one, a pattern largely repeated across the task group, although by some accident of Hammer fire control, the Renown got more than her fair share, allowing two Eaglehawk missiles to make it through. They, too, were defeated by the Renown’s immensely thick frontal armor, exploding harmlessly deep in the heavy armor protecting the cruiser’s bows.
Perkins now split the task group. The rail-gun-fitted ships were tasked to finish off the last of the Hammer ships. The light units were ordered to dump a last missile salvo and then open out to fall back so that they could protect the ships recovering the lifepods from the Marie Curie and the Kaminski. Then, Michael thought, it would definitely be time to get the hell out of Dodge; otherwise, the two full-strength Hammer task groups now accelerating hard toward them would have them by the throat. He half turned to look across at the captain. For some reason, she turned at the same time, smiling broadly at Michael before turning her attention back to the command plot, apparently relaxed and unconcerned. Michael wondered how she did it. He had had quite enough for one day, the seconds dragging by until the characteristic buzz-rip announced the launch of Eridani’s last missile salvo.
“Thank Christ for that,” Michael muttered. “Time to go home.”
Thankfully, Commodore Perkins agreed.
“Command, Mother. Commodore to all ships. Stand by to jump.”
“Command, roger. All stations. Stand by to jump. Engineering, confirm safe to jump.”
“Confirmed. Mass distribution recomputed; model is nominal.”
“Command, roger.”
Lenksi wasted no more time, bringing the main engines up to full power to drive Eridani to jump speed, the maneuvering jets firing furiously to put the ship on vector for home.
For once, Michael had no problem with the jump. The accumulated tension fell off him as he sat back, conscious for the first time of the sweat that had turned the shipsuit under his combat space suit into a sodden, ice-cold rag.
“Jeez,” Michael said. “That was fun.”
“I suppose that’s one way to describe it,” Lenski said laconically. “Okay. All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Engineering, repressurize. Starboard watch has the watch. Command out.”