Helfort's War: Book 1

by Graham Sharp Paul

  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 cliché.”

  “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 tu
rn 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.