FWSS Eridani, Comdur Fleet Base, nearspace
“Dropping.”
With a lurch, Eridani dropped into normalspace. The command plot bloomed with a thick mass of green icons as the ship went online to Comdur’s battle management AI.
Comdur command center was not taking any chances. By the time it had confirmed that Eridani really was who she said she was, the ship had been stood down from general quarters and Michael had taken over the watch. In his opinion, the identification process had taken an inordinate amount of time in that it was only one damned AI talking to another. Finally, Eridani’s navplan for its entry in-system was authorized, and she was given her final approach instructions.
It was time to start the slow process of decelerating into orbit around Comdur.
Comdur was not any old system, and Lenski was not taking any chances. The Fleet base’s outer defenses were a shell of defensive platforms, each an ugly lattice of plasteel girders festooned with double-redundant fusion microplants, a phased-array radar, and the usual clutter of comm dishes, and armed with Lamprey antistarship lasers backed up by containerized Merlin missile launchers. The gaps between the platforms were filled with clouds of randomly shifting deepspace mines.
Lasers and missiles Lenski could cope with. It was the mines she worried about. The two-meter-diameter black stealthed spheres were equipped with a simple optronics/laser fire control system, a 10-kiloton directed fission warhead, and a liquid nitrogen-powered reaction jet maneuvering system. They were basic, nasty, and extremely cheap. In theory the mines knew how to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. Even so, Fleet doctrine was absolutely emphatic: Under no circumstances was a starship captain to trust the things. After all, contractors bidding wholly on price had made every part of them.
“Okay, Michael. You have the ship. Take her in, and for Christ’s sake, stick exactly to the navplan,” Lenski ordered as she climbed out of her chair.
“Sir,” Michael replied. He would; Lenski could depend on it.
Michael turned Eridani end for end. After carefully checking that the ship’s vector was good, he fired her main engines in a long burst. She would drop in-system carefully, even if it did add a few hours to the process.
Michael looked around to see if Lenski had managed to get clear of the combat information center without being held up. She had not. “Captain, sir,” he called out.
Lenski looked up from what looked like a heart-to-heart conversation with an engineer who Michael knew was in the middle of an ugly divorce. “Yes?”
“Initial deceleration burn completed. Vector is nominal for drop in-system.”
“Good.” Lenski looked intently at the command plot for a good few minutes. It was as if she were committing the positions of the thousands of space mines that lay between Eridani and Comdur to memory. Finally, she seemed satisfied that Michael was not going to run into anything unpleasant. “When I’m done here, I’m off. I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.” She turned back to resume her interrupted conversation.
“Sir.”
Even though Lenski was one of the better starship captains around, there was a tangible sense of relief when she finally left the combat information center. Nobody liked having the captain looking over his or her shoulder.
After ten minutes of intense concentration triple-checking every last piece of Eridani’s navplan, Michael began to relax. Eridani was precisely on vector, the nearest space mines were comfortably far away, and the projected approach to the ship’s assigned slot in low orbit around Comdur was clear all the way. By way of reward, he was not being hassled by Comdur control, which was always a good thing.
He sat back in the command chair, suddenly exhausted. Hard as he tried, he could not shake the feeling that he was using up his store of good luck faster than was prudent. Their third and last foray into Hammer space had been as bad as the first two missions had been good. In fact, Eridani had been lucky to survive. In theory, the mission should have been straightforward, right out of the tactical textbook.
Stand off, select a target, drop in a sacrificial lamb thirty seconds ahead of the main force as a distraction; main force arrives, shreds the target, and everyone leaves happy. In this case, Eridani had drawn the short straw as the sacrificial lamb, with four heavy escorts acting as the main force. With good intelligence, the mission was a classic right out of the idiot’s guide to space warfare.
But with poor intelligence compounded by a hefty dose of bad luck, the mission had become the stuff of nightmares.
Standing well out in farspace, Commander Ho, the mission commander in the New Horizon, had picked the Hammer light cruiser Breuseker, operating alone in a high orbit around the planet Fortitude, apparently conducting trials on its long-range phased-array search radar. And why not? The sensor AIs in all five ships of Ho’s task unit unanimously agreed that it had to be the Breuseker. Despite objections from Michael and two of his fellow sensor officers-all of them shared a nagging feeling that there was more to the Breuseker-the mission went ahead. Breuseker it was.
There turned out to be more to the Breuseker than first met the eye, a lot more, and none of it good. For a start, she was not the Breuseker at all. She was the brand-new City class heavy cruiser Jennix; that explained the mistaken identification. The City class shared active sensor suites with the latest Jackson class light cruisers; both being new, Fed sensor AIs had relatively little data to go on when trying to distinguish between the two. In the end, the whole business turned out to be a textbook example of an AI-assisted screwup, the confidence level assigned by the sensor AIs to their identification completely unwarranted.
That was the poor intelligence. The bad luck had come in two parts.
First, Jennix was not doing radar trials at all. She was setting up for a live rail-gun firing exercise. Second, Jennix had changed vector as the Fed ships were on their way to drop in-system. Rather than ending up off the Jennix’s starboard beam, safely clear of her rail-gun batteries, the Eridani dropped into normalspace directly ahead of the Hammer ship and much too close-so close, so well positioned, that the Jennix had to do nothing except push the button to fire her rail-gun salvo down Eridani’s throat.
When Eridani dropped, all hell broke loose. Eridani’s command team did not see the attack coming until it was too late. To his dying day, Michael would never know how Eridani had survived. Someone on board the Jennix had been paying close attention to their gravitronics arrays because her rail-gun salvo, timed to split-second perfection, hit Eridani only seconds after she dropped. Nine of the tiny platinum/iridium alloy slugs smashed into her bows, the impact so severe that Eridani was thrown bodily backward.
Michael and the rest of the command team looked on in horror while Lenski proved what a great captain she was. Ignoring damage control’s reports of major hull penetration around the upper cargo air lock and serious casualties, she did what Eridani had been ordered to do: keep Jennix distracted. Eridani did exactly that, getting a full missile salvo away as the four heavy escorts dropped to join the party. Holding out for as long as she could, Lenski smashed the red Emergency Jump button barely seconds before a salvo of Jennix’s Eaglehawk missiles arrived to rip her apart.
Five minutes later, the heavy escorts jumped back into pinchspace. They, too, had done what they had come to do. They jumped, leaving the Jennix a twisted, bleeding wreck tumbling slowly end over end, spitting orange-strobed lifepods in all directions. The luckless Jennix was headed for the scrap yard, the shortest commission in Hammer Space Fleet history, Michael had suggested at the postmission debriefing with a grim, humorless laugh.
In the end, Eridani got off pretty lightly, much better than she deserved in fact. Nobody killed, thank God, but eight spacers went straight into regen tanks, with fifteen more walking wounded, one of whom needless to say was Petty Officer Bienefelt, though she was only scratched.
Michael shook his head. It had not been Eridani’s finest hour, and even Lenski’s heartfelt apology for not taking him and his sensor team more seriously could not obscure the fact that one bad call had put Eridani seconds away from total destruction. There was not a heavy scout built that could survive a sustained short-range encounter with a Hammer heavy cruiser. The fact that Jennix’s first rail-gun salvo had failed to cripple Eridani’s pinchspace jump capability was pure undeserved luck, as was Jennix’s delay in getting her first missile salvo away; that delay had been long enough to allow Eridani to launch her own missiles and jump clear. Even then the danger had not been over. With her mass distribution model distorted by the ceramsteel armor blasted off by the Jennix’s rail-gun attack and only enough time for engineering to do a first cut recalculation, it had been touch and go whether the Eridani could ever drop safely back into normalspace. Waiting for the drop had been one of the worst and longest moments of Michael’s life, a life, as he had pointed out to Bienefelt, that had seen more than its fair share of bad moments.
Still, they had made it in the end, and the news was not all bad. The damage to Eridani had been beyond the Koh’s ability to fix, and that meant they would score time off while Comdur’s yards repaired the upper cargo air lock.
Even as he relived Eridani’s run-in with the Jennix, Michael was keeping a close eye on Eridani’s slow progress through Comdur’s defenses. To his and no doubt Lenski’s relief, they were safely through the minefields. They were now passing the massive bulk of one of the nine battle stations that made up Comdur’s second line of defense, the space beyond them filled with jump disrupters that would force any attacker to drop well outside the minefields and fight its way in. Michael whistled softly at the thought. In three wars against the Hammer, there had not been a single successful attack against Comdur. God knew, the Hammer had tried. At one point in the Second Hammer War, they had thrown every ship they could scrape together into an attack that had cost them so dearly that they had never tried again.
“Captain, sir, officer in command.”
“Yeah, go ahead, Michael.”
“We’ll be clear of the jump disrupters shortly. Intend initiating final deceleration burn as soon as we do.”
“Good. Have we heard from Comdur when we’ll be moving into the yard?”
“No, sir, not yet. I’ll chase them up.”
“Do that. I would rather go straight in than hang around in orbit if that’s possible.”
“Leave it with me, sir.”
When Michael had Eridani’s final low-g deceleration burn adjusted to his satisfaction, he contacted control. Much to his surprise, they came straight back with the answer Lenski wanted to hear. There was a berth waiting for them; they were to go straight in.
Three hours later, Eridani, its mass firmly held by Comdur’s hydraulic docking system, was being lowered slowly down the shaft that led to the repair yards kilometers below Comdur’s desolate, airless, gray-black surface.