With that she was gone.
Michael stood for a moment, her all-too-quick farewell kiss still warm on his cheek.
He sighed deeply, wearily rubbing eyes gritty from too little sleep and too much stress. The good news was that it could have been a hell of a lot worse. The bad news was that it could have been a hell of a lot better. Still, Anna was talking to him, had agreed to see him again, and had kissed him good-bye. Michael allowed himself to think that maybe, when the latest fracas with the Hammer was over, they could put things back on the rails.
Anyway, he had stolen enough of Eridani’s time; with his tame maintainers reporting good progress, he wanted to be there when they did their final tests on the recalcitrant ultraviolet detector arrays. He had learned the hard way that all maintainers had an uncanny knack of making systems work perfectly as long as they were there to twiddle the knobs, only to have everything fall apart the second they left.
If that happened, Lenski would kick his ass from breakfast time to Christmas.
“Any final questions?” Eridani’s captain scanned the faces in front of her. “No? Okay. That’s all, folks. Go to it.”
The mission briefing broke up in noisy confusion around Michael. For a moment, he stared at the command plot with its mission summary. It all looked so easy, so clinical, he thought, laid out tidily like that. In theory, Eridani’s upcoming mission should be no problem at all.
He suppressed an involuntary shiver.
Remassed, rearmed, they were going back into Hammer space, this time as part of a task group—four heavy cruisers and four heavy escorts supported by light patrol ships—and it was no quick dash-in, dash-out job this time, either. The task group had orders to take out one of the battle stations in orbit around the planet Faith, the third planet of the Retribution system. According to the Einsteins responsible for planning Fleet operations, the mission was intended to demonstrate the Fed’s ability to operate freely even against targets as hard as a battle station, and Hammer battle stations were hard targets. Massing millions of tons, they were not quite as large as the Fed version, but in Michael’s humble opinion they were quite large enough and heavily armed. No rail guns, though, thank God. He was beginning to get a real bee in his bonnet about rail guns, to the point where he did not even want to think about the damned things, let alone jump into Hammer space to face them. He smiled ruefully. He would be packed off to the shrinks if Lenski ever found out.
He looked again at the mission summary and shook his head. How many times had he seen mission briefings end up so neatly packaged? He shook his head again. Things were never that easy—he should know—and there was no reason why this mission should be any different.
Doing his best to ignore a sudden twinge of fear that twisted his stomach into a ball, he turned his mind to the things he had to get done before the Eridani unberthed.
Twelve hours after the Eridani had arrived, Koh’s hydraulic rams pushed it gently clear. The minute the ship fell out from berthing stations, Michael headed straight for his bunk. He would be on watch in less than six hours, and his sleep deficit was beginning to get out of hand.
Thursday, March 30, 2400, UD
Defense Council Secretariat, city of McNair, Commitment
“Now let me turn to FedWorld force dispositions.” Fleet Admiral Jorge cued the next holovid slide, this one speckled with red icons marking the estimated positions of every Fed warship identified by Hammer intelligence and endless reconnaissance missions.
“In general, what we can see is the same trend we have observed for some time,” Jorge continued. “Apart from ships tasked with operations against our home planets, the Feds have been progressively building up the forces around their Fleet base at Comdur. Here.” He stabbed a marker down into a thick mass of red icons 10 or so light-years galactic west of Terranova.
“We now know for certain that these are the forces assigned for the invasion. We do not know which planet they have selected as their primary target, but our assessment is that it is almost certain to be Commitment.”
A small shiver ran through the men around the Defense Council table. The consequences of a successful Fed invasion of Commitment did not bear thinking about.
“Now, in addition—”
“Forgive me, Admiral,” interrupted Tobias de Mel, councillor for internal security.
“Sir?”
“How can we be sure that planetary invasion is what these ships are for?”
“Well, sir,” Admiral Jorge replied, “in part, it’s because of the nature of the forces assembled. The last reconnaissance drone fly-by of Comdur positively identified the planetary assault vessels Cheng Ho, Jefferson, Al-Fayed, Adams, and Yamamato. We also have unconfirmed intelligence reports that the planetary assault vessels Shrivaratnam, Nelson, Washington, Tourville, and Monroe have been tasked to Comdur, though we don’t yet know when they will drop in-system. All told, we estimate these ships have close to 400,000 marines embarked.”
“Kraa!” de Mel hissed. “That’s one hell of a lot of marines. Are we sure we can stop this, Admiral?”
That is a damn good question, Jorge thought. “Absolutely, Councillor,” he replied, his voice emphatic, confident. “When we launch Operation Damascus, all the ships tasked with the invasion will be in orbit around Comdur. When we have finished with them, the Feds will have barely enough warships left to protect their home planets. They will not have the ships they need to conduct offensive operations. They will also have suffered massive losses of experienced spacers and marines. So yes, I am sure we can stop this,” he said flatly, even though it was a lie. Anyone who believed that there was any such thing as an absolute certainty when it came to space warfare was a fool. These were politicians, and in Jorge’s book at least, that automatically made them fools when it came to all matters military.
“Now, in addition to the planetary assault vessels, the latest reconnaissance fly-by shows the bulk of the Fed fleet’s heavy units in orbit at Comdur station. We have also . . .”
Thursday, March 30, 2400, UD
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 be
en 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 jam
ming 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.
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds Page 27
