“Roger.”
Monroe checked the command plot. Impatient, he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. The rail-gun crews were taking too long to reload. He forced himself to sit still. Nothing he said or did was going to speed things up.
“Sir! All ships confirm valid firing solutions on the drop datum, full rail-gun salvos loaded, ready to engage.” His chief of staff’s voice cracked in the heat of the moment.
Monroe wasted no time. “Command approved to fire!”
“All rail-gun salvos away, sir.”
“Roger that,” Monroe snapped. He forced himself to breathe normally, to ignore the iron bands that crushed his chest with sudden force. If his ships failed to destroy the new arrival the instant it dropped, and it was a FedWorld warship, they were all dead. He buried the thought. Have faith, he chided himself. A six-ship rail-gun attack should overwhelm the unfortunate ship.
Monroe allowed himself to relax a little. Quebec-One and her sister ships might be fitted with obsolete Buranan rail guns, but the engagement geometry weighed heavily in favor of his attackers.
Crucial to their chances, the target looked to drop close and broadside three of his ships, the perfect ambush. Provided his ship’s firing solutions were accurate, the tightly grouped swarms of iridium/platinum alloy slugs should sweep through the drop datum only seconds after the target dropped into normalspace. True, most of the slugs were destined to disappear into the void. That was the fate of almost all rail-gun slugs, but proximity had allowed his ships to tighten the swarm grouping to put more slugs on target. Monroe checked the command plot again. He liked what he saw. His tactical officer predicted a first strike of more than three hundred slugs. Monroe smiled. The raw numbers looked good. Where the slugs might impact looked even better.
If the attack went as planned, slugs from the first two salvos were to hit where the armor thinned back from the bow. Seconds later, slugs from the third salvo should smash into the target toward its stern, the most vulnerable part of any warship. Hit there and hit hard, its chances of survival were close to zero. All being well, the final salvos were redundant, their contribution limited to finishing off an already dying ship.
The seconds melted away with glacial slowness. Monroe struggled to keep his breath under control. The atmosphere in Quebec-One’s combat information center thickened until it threatened to choke him. Monroe cursed under his breath. He had seen action throughout the last war; he should be used to combat by now.
“Sir! Track 22547 is dropping. Confirm drop data nominal.” The sensor officer sounded ecstatic. So he should, Monroe thought. The man had done well under intense pressure. Targeting data from commercial-grade gravitronics was unreliable at best, but this time the system had worked. Monroe’s ships had good firing solutions; the new arrival was condemned to drop directly into the path of the oncoming rail-gun salvos. Absent a miracle—Monroe put no faith in miracles—the hapless ship was trapped, denied any time to react before the massive rail-gun attack fell on her.
Commodore Monroe sat back, and waited for the Fed-World warship to die.
Helfort’s War: The Battle at the Moons of Hell is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2007 by Graham Sharp Paul
Excerpt of Helfort’s War Book Two © 2007 by Graham Sharp Paul
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming mass market edition of Helfort’s War Book Two by Graham Sharp Paul. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50234-6
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