The battle of Devastation reef hw-3 Page 24

  Saturday, March 17, 2401, UD

  Support Facility 27 nearspace,

  West Devastation Reef

  In a savage flash of white light, antimatter warheads stripped out of captured Hammer Eaglehawk missiles exploded. Seconds later, a wall of gamma radiation overwhelmed the sphere of heavily armed defense platforms and pinchspace jump disrupters protecting the drop zone for ships heading for the Hammer antimatter buried deep in the heart of Support Facility 27. The radiation, ferocious in its intensity, pushed through the platforms’ meager armor, forcing fusion reactors out of limits until they, too, erupted into massive balls of white-red gas, before it reached out to destroy a small Hammer task group on forward picket duty.

  In less than a nanosecond, billions of cubic kilometers of Hammer space had been scoured clean, its defenses blown to incandescent gas.

  Seconds later, more cargo drones dropped out of pinchspace to the north and south of the drop zone; their payloads of antimatter warheads sterilized two bubbles of space large enough to accommodate the ships of Battle Fleet Lima, the void filling with hundreds of thousands of white-hot flares as space mines were overwhelmed by gamma radiation, their directed-fission warheads going critical, stabbing jets of fire uselessly into space.

  For a while, nothing happened. Slowly cooling spheres of gas expanding out into the void were the only things moving.

  “Captain, sir. All suits are green, ship is at general quarters in ship state 1, airtight condition zulu, artificial gravity off, ship depressurized,” Ferreira said.

  Michael ignored a stomach doing somersaults as Reckless’s gravity disappeared. “Roger. I have the ship. All stations, stand by to drop. Thanks, Jayla.”

  “I’m glad it’s started, sir,” Ferreira said, “that’s all I can say.”

  “Amen to that,” Michael said; he meant it. The wait was killing him.

  “I’ll be in damage control, sir. Good luck. Remember Comdur.” Ferreira spun on the spot; with a one-footed push, she glided away.

  “Remember Comdur,” Michael whispered while his executive officer flew effortlessly out of Reckless’s combat information center. The huge compartment felt uncomfortably empty, its only other occupants the anonymous combat space-suited figures of Carmellini and Lomidze strapped into their shock-resistant seats, hunched forward over consoles in front of Michael. Flanking him were the two AI-generated avatars in the operations and threat assessment seats. Kubby and Kal-their clones, to be precise; the original AIs were a small part of the diffuse cloud of gas that once had been Tufayl-might look every bit as solid as Carmellini and Lomidze, but they were just images spun across his mind’s eye, figments of a computer’s imagination. Michael did not care; it was good to have them there.

  Time to commit. “Warfare, command,” Michael said. “Weapons free. You have command authority.”

  “Warfare, roger. Weapons free. I have command authority.”

  Maddeningly slow, the drop counter ran off the seconds. “All stations, this is Warfare. Stand by … dropping.”

  Michael’s gloved fingers dug into the arm of his seat while Reckless turned the cosmos inside out, the navigation AI depositing the ship precisely onto its drop datum. The rest of the dreadnoughts fell neatly into station around her.

  After months of work, Operation Opera started in earnest. With a quiet prayer that he would make it out alive and that Anna would be home soon, he closed his mind to everything except the job at hand.

  A crunching shudder shook the ship from end to end, the opening move of Operation Opera: Reckless and her sister ships each deployed their first salvo of long-range Merlin antistarship missiles along with their clouds of protective decoys. The missiles would keep station while the dreadnoughts added more missiles to the salvo. When the time came, and coordinated to the second, first stage engines would fire, driving the missiles toward the target in a single enormous wave, a rail-gun salvo timed to arrive on target seconds before the missiles smashed home.

  Executed properly, a well-crafted missile and rail-gun attack was a brutally effective tactic, a tsunami of missiles and rail-gun slugs intended to confuse, overload, and overwhelm. Space fleets all across humanspace spent enormous amounts of time trying to get it right; Michael’s dreadnoughts were no exception, and he liked to think they, too, had gotten it right.

  The Hammers had more than the dreadnoughts to worry about. Running ahead of Michael’s ships was Group North, a mixed task group of heavy and light cruisers backed up by fleet escorts and led by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska in Seljuk. Their missiles and rail guns would add to the misery to be inflicted on the Hammer ships tasked with defending the northern approaches to SuppFac27.

  That was the good part.

  The problem was that anything the Feds dished up, the Hammers would return with interest. Two hundred thousand kilometers ahead of Group North and Michael’s dreadnoughts, the Hammer ships of task group Hammer-2 were already adjusting vectors to intercept the incoming Feds, their first missile salvo quickly deployed, with many more to follow.

  It was going to be rough, and there was always the chance that the Hammers’ first missile salvo would carry antimatter warheads, even if Fleet’s intelligence analysts had been emphatic that they would not. The risk of collateral damage to the intricate web of fixed defenses and minefields and to the roving task groups of Hammer warships that protected SuppFac27 was too high, they argued. Michael agreed with them, not that his opinion mattered: The intelligence wonks had been known to get things spectacularly wrong, and if they had, the heavy cruisers were doomed, and so was Operation Opera.

  For Jaruzelska, accepting the analysts’ call had been an enormous gamble, the biggest of her long and successful career. If the analysts were wrong, she risked the future of the Federated Worlds and its billions of citizens. Michael was more than happy that Jaruzelska was in charge; it was a good time to be a lowly lieutenant, responsible for only a small part of the mind-bendingly complex business that was Operation Opera. If it all went to shit-and there was a good chance it would-it would not be his scalp the politicians came after.

  “Command, Warfare. Threat plot confirmed.”

  “Command, roger.”

  Relieved, Michael whistled softly. The Hammers were where the few reconsats Jaruzelska was allowed to deploy said they would be. There were three task groups: Hammer-1, covering the central approaches to the antimatter plant; Hammer-2, 100,000 kilometers to the north; and Hammer-3, the same distance to the south. That was nice, Michael thought, a threat plot that did not turn to shit in the first few seconds of an operation, though he knew that happy state of affairs would not last. Things would go wrong, he reminded himself, the moment Hammer reinforcements started to arrive. If there was one thing certain about Operation Opera, that was it.

  “Command, Warfare. Dreadnought Group established on vector. Groups North and South report launch of minefield clearance drones.”

  “Roger.”

  A quick check confirmed that Warfare had the dreadnought force in station and on vector. Michael settled back, eyes flicking between the threat and command plots. The Fed attack was developing according to a plan that for once-most unusually-was addressing a two-dimensional tactical problem rather than the three that bedeviled most space combat. That was because, buried in the heart of Devastation Reef, SuppFac27 was a difficult place to get into. Thanks to an impenetrable tangle of gravitational rips, ships approaching the Hammer plant in pinchspace were forced to come from one direction only: from the west, parallel to the galactic plane. From any other direction-up, down, north, south, or east, it did not matter-a transit through normalspace was the only way in: Tens of millions of kilometers of gravitational reef forced a long and slow transit. As one of the planners had pointed out, to come in across the reef would be to tell the Hammers a week ahead of time that an attack was on its way, ensuring that the entire Hammer fleet would be waiting to blow you to hell when you finally turned up.

  All of which was why the Hammers had
located SuppFac27 where they had, so from the west it was.

  The result? The Feds would fight their way into the Hammer antimatter plant across what amounted to a flat-if invisible-surface. It was the one thing Opera had going for it, and Michael loved it; it simplified the tactical situation greatly.

  There was one small problem, though. If fighting a battle on a flat surface made things easier for the Feds, it did the same thing for the Hammers.

  Now the two Fed task groups drove east out of their drop zones and across the western edge of Devastation Reef; ahead of them lay the Hammer ships covering the antimatter plant’s flanks. In the center, two decoy attacks-configured to look like a massive force of heavy cruisers and intended to fool the Hammers into thinking that they were the main assault force-were on vector running right up the middle, heading straight for SuppFac27.

  The aim was to confuse the Hammers, to conceal the real threat to the antimatter plant for as long as possible. If Opera went to plan, the Hammers’ commander would have no idea which of the Fed ships were feints and which posed the real threat to their precious antimatter plant.

  To confuse them further, cargo drones spewed decoys, jammers, and spoofers into the space between the attacks until SuppFac27 nearspace was filled with an elaborately constructed torrent of electronic noise, most of it garbage. For an instant, Michael sympathized with the Hammers; he wondered what the poor sap in charge of defending SuppFac27 was thinking. Buried under an avalanche of conflicting information, flummoxed by a blizzard of electronic noise, and with attacks developing along four separate vectors, he would be struggling to sort out truth from deception, which, of course, was the whole point.

  But the Hammers had one thing going for them. There was only one target, and in the end Jaruzelska’s ships would have to close in on it to have any chance of destroying the plant. If the Hammers were smart, they would pull back and wait for the Feds to come to them instead of blundering around trying to sort out reality from deception. In the sims, the margin between success and failure narrowed dramatically every time the Hammers did that. When reinforcements turned up in the right place at the right time as well …

  Happily, the Hammers were not yet doing the sensible thing. Michael was watching what might have been a “best case” simulation. As Jaruzelska’s planners hoped, the Hammer ships did not wait for the Feds to come to them; they were moving out to meet and engage the incoming Feds. But the Hammers had a big problem: three task groups to interdict four Fed lines of attack. That allowed one of the Feds’ decoy attacks to run unopposed right at the antimatter plant, giving the Hammer commander, Michael hoped, a severe attack of the vapors when he realized what was happening.

  “Command, Warfare, sensors. Positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 180 Up 0. Multiple vessels, range 12,000 kilometers. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Drop datum nominal for Assault Group.”

  Michael acknowledged the report, relieved that Assault Group-deemed too valuable to drop with the advance guard-was on its way. The bad news was that Assault Group was under the command of Rear Admiral Perkins, a decision Michael reckoned had the fingerprints of Fleet politicians all over it. With Perkins in charge of Assault Group, the man would be in at the kill, and Michael knew full well who would take the credit for Opera’s success. All too clearly, he could see what would happen. Ignoring the task forces protecting his vulnerable flanks, ignoring the dreadnoughts that had blasted the way open for him, Perkins would attribute the success of Opera to the conventional warships of Assault Group and, no doubt, to his skills as a combat commander. Sonofabitch.

  Michael dismissed the Perkins problem. What mattered was making Opera a success, though he was pretty sure who would be getting the blame if Opera turned out to be the failure the analysts said it might so easily be. He would not want to be Jaruzelska if that happened.

  “Command, Warfare, sensors. Assault Group dropping. Drop datum confirmed Red 180 Up 0, range 12,500 kilometers. Stand by … confirmed. Arrivals are Assault Group.”

  “Command, roger.”

  Michael settled down to wait. Warfare was performing flawlessly, so he forced himself to relax a touch. Space warfare, like all warfare down the ages, was a mixture of boredom and terror, invariably bucket loads of the former seasoned with occasional pinches of the latter. Opera was definitely in the boredom phase. This was as unexciting as combat got: two groups of ships hurtling toward each other across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space, too far apart to engage, their principal task to dump missiles into space, building their opening salvos while they closed on the enemy for the inevitable. It was the bloody business of close-quarters combat, a battle of attrition as missiles and rail-gun slugs stripped armor off ships’ frames, looking for a way through to the fusion plants driving main propulsion. Michael buried an image of Reckless’s fusion plants going up, doing his best to ignore his body’s reaction to the impending fight: churning stomach, sweaty hands, hammering heart, and dry mouth.

  Time dragged by with excruciating slowness, the quiet concentration of Reckless’s tiny combat information center crew interrupted by the routine reports of missile launches when Fed and Hammer ships dumped missiles into space.

  “Command, Warfare. Update. Ships of task group Hammer-1 have engaged Decoy Group One. Expect Hammer breakaway imminent.”

  “Command, roger.” The Hammer commander would be seriously pissed when he discovered that he had thrown one of his precious task groups into an attack on a bunch of decoys. Fed decoys were good but not good enough to mount a convincing defense once attacked. The big question was where the Hammer ships would go when they found out they had been conned.

  Michael received his answer a few minutes later. The ships attacking Decoy Group One changed vector, furious jets of ionized reaction mass from maneuvering thrusters turning them end for end, the electronic and optical noise spewed out by the decoy attack ignored completely.

  “Shit,” Michael muttered when the Hammers’ intentions became clear. They had ignored the one Fed attack they had not been able to deal with: Decoy Group Two, the second decoy attack running at SuppFac27. The Hammer commander was pulling his ships back to screen the antimatter plant, and that meant just one thing. Stopping Decoy Group Two was going to be somebody else’s job. Reinforcements were on the way.

  He commed the admiral’s staff.

  “Flag, Reckless.”

  The avatar of one of Jaruzelska’s operations staff took the com, the stress on the man’s face all too obvious. “Go ahead, Reckless.”

  “The Hammer ships tasked to intercept Decoy Group One are withdrawing to SuppFac27. My assessment is that reinforcements are inbound to deal with Decoy Group Two. You concur?”

  “Stand by … yes, we concur. We’re just about to update the threat plot.”

  “Any estimate of the drop datum?”

  “Somewhere to the southeast is our best guess, but it’s just a guess at the moment.”

  “Roger. Reckless, out.”

  Michael’s worst fears were about to be realized. Reinforcements were the basis for all the nightmare scenarios they had been subjected to in the sims, and far too many of those had ended in disaster. If the Hammers dropped the right ships in the right places at the right times, even a commander as good as Jaruzelska was going to struggle.

  The tactical problem was simple. Jaruzelska knew Hammer ships were on the way-that much was certain-but she had no idea how many or where or when they would drop. That meant she could do nothing to head them off. She had to wait, responding to the Hammer reinforcements as they arrived. Michael hated it-no commander liked being forced to react to events-but Jaruzelska had no choice.

  “Command, Warfare. Group South engaging ships of task group Hammer-3.”

  “Command, roger.”

  Michael patched his neuronics into the holocam feed coming from the heavy cruiser leading Group South. What he saw made his skin crawl. Shrouded in clouds of decoys, Hammer
missiles-arranged like a giant doughnut perpendicular to Group South’s vector-had turned inward; now they plunged down onto the Fed task group, the fast-closing gap between attackers and defenders filled with the flash of missiles exploding as Group South’s mediumrange missiles and lasers did the grim work of tearing the Hammer attack to pieces. The battle was degenerating fast into a wretched, scrambling fight for survival, one that no Fed ship could afford to lose: A single fusion warhead, triggered by a proximity fuse to explode close to its target, released enough raw power to strip a heavy cruiser’s flank armor right down to the inner titanium hull, the impulse shock violent enough to send razor-sharp splinters ripping through the ship to lethal effect.

  The missiles that survived closed in, and the Feds’ short-range defensive weapons joined the fight, throwing up a wall of metal backed up by lasers, clawing more and more missiles out of the attack. But missiles still made it through, relentless, unstoppable; there were too many of them. Just before missile detonation, the Hammers’ rail-gun salvo arrived, slugs burying themselves deep in the frontal armor of their targets, great gouts of ionized ceramsteel armor blasted out into space, ugly clouds of white-hot gas boiling away from the ships. Seconds later, the missiles hit home, a brutally effective mix of boosted chemex and fusion warheads, lances of white-hot fire and hellish torrents of radiation putting their victims to the sword.

  It was a sickening sight. Michael watched the damage reports flooding in. The ships attacking SuppFac27’s southern flank had been roughly handled. Too many were beyond help, broken hulls spitting lifepods in all directions, orange-strobed specks driving away through clouds of ice and fire in a frenzied race to get clear before the ships blew, violent blue-white flashes marking the loss of one ship after another. More ships, battered and combat-ineffective, pulled out of the line of battle to reverse vector and run for safety.

  The fight was not one-sided, though; now it was the Hammers’ turn to suffer. The Fed ships dropped their own exquisitely coordinated rail-gun and missile salvos onto the enemy ships, flame-shot clouds of plasma erupting as rail-gun slugs and missile warheads clawed at the Hammer ships. When the clouds cleared, Michael saw that the Hammers had suffered every bit as badly as the Feds, maybe more so. Ship after ship pulled out of the line, brilliant flares flagging the death of ships when their fusion power plants lost containment.