The Battle of the Hammer Worlds hw-2 Page 28

  It was a massacre.

  The Hammer ships reeled under the sheer weight of the ordnance thrown at them. One after another, they began to fall out of the line of battle. The first to go were the few light units that had survived the first attack, their thinner armor and less capable close-in defenses simply not able to absorb the enormous weight of metal thrown at them. In quick succession, most lost the unequal fight. One ship after another disappeared into huge balls of plasma, leaving behind five units, damaged but still mostly intact, venting gas to space as they struggled to get to safety.

  They did not get far before scavenging missiles smashed home and they, too, vanished in searing white-hot explosions. Then the first capital ship went.

  The City class heavy cruiser Morristown, its port bow slashed wide open into a tangled mass of metal by a failed auxiliary fusion plant, rolled out of line into a stately, slow corkscrewing turn. The battle management AI in Damishqui did not miss the chance, and a handful of missiles that had been loitering in reserve were sent in to finish the job, hitting home precisely where the previous attack had opened up the Morristown’s bows. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a blinding flash, the entire front half of the Morristown blew apart, followed a few seconds later by the rest of the ship as missile warheads gutted it from end to end, blowing the main engine fusion plants apart into incandescent balls of blue-white plasma.

  In quick succession, four more heavy cruisers followed the Morristown. The N’debele trailed the Witness of Kraa, the Concorde, and the Restitution as they death-rolled out of the line of battle. Two more light cruisers, the Williams and the Chen, followed close behind, their battered and broken hulls bleeding long streams of ice-laden air into space as they tumbled planetward. All around the disintegrating Hammer task group, space was thick with orange-strobed lifepods blossoming outward in a ghastly slow-motion fireworks show.

  Michael turned his attention back to the threat plot. Every bone in his body told him that the Hammers would be sending reinforcements. God knew, they had the ships, and so it was only a matter of time. His instincts were confirmed when the threat plot erupted; two ugly splashes of red announced the arrival of two Hammer task groups. Immediately, Michael’s team was buried in the task of confirming who and what the new arrivals were. Backed by the massive processing power of the task group’s AIs, it was a quick process, helped by the fact that the Hammer ships were making no attempt to conceal their identities. Every active sensor they possessed was transmitting on full power. Why? Michael wondered as he confirmed the plot.

  Lenksi answered his unspoken question. “They want us to leave, I think.”

  Michael nodded. That made sense, though the Hammer ships had a lot of space to cover before they posed a serious threat.

  He held his breath. The Hammers had been handled roughly, but they were still a sizable force, and now help was on the way. Commodore Perkins had only seconds left to decide whether to jump or stay and ride out the next Hammer attack.

  Perkins chose to stay. His orders were brief: “Close and destroy the enemy.”

  For the first time that day, and much to Michael’s surprise, the leaden cloak of fear he had carried into the battle fell away. Perkins’s decision made sense. If the Hammer was to be beaten, this was what it would take: standing toe to toe and slugging it out blow for blow, salvo for salvo, until they could not take any more. With a quick prayer asking whoever it was in charge of the universe to look after Damishqui, he checked that his team was not allowing another Hammer task force to creep up on them. Satisfied that everything was under control, he turned back to the command plot. Once more, it was the Hammer’s turn. Perkins’s ships might have inflicted serious damage, but combat-ineffective they were not. Yet.

  “Command, Mother. Multiple missile launches. Estimate 2,300 heavy and 500 light missiles plus decoys. Targets not known.”

  Michael braced himself. This was the moment of truth. If the Eridani survived this, she would be in at the kill. If not. .

  “Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch. Targets Damishqui, Resplendent, Renown, Secular.”

  Michael flinched as he watched the awful sight of Damishqui and her fellow cruisers disappearing behind huge, boiling clouds of ionized armor, the ships visibly recoiling as the Hammer slugs dumped massive amounts of kinetic energy into their hulls. He held his breath until one by one the ships reemerged, anxiously watching the Damishqui to make sure she was not badly hit. Michael allowed himself to relax a bit. She seemed okay, but it was hard to tell.

  All hell broke loose. For the second time that day, Eridani fought desperately to keep out the wave of missiles that fell on her. This time around, not a single missile got through. Facing a much smaller salvo, Eridani was able to pick off the missiles one by one, a pattern largely repeated across the task group, although by some accident of Hammer fire control, the Renown got more than her fair share, allowing two Eaglehawk missiles to make it through. They, too, were defeated by the Renown’s immensely thick frontal armor, exploding harmlessly deep in the heavy armor protecting the cruiser’s bows.

  Perkins now split the task group. The rail-gun-fitted ships were tasked to finish off the last of the Hammer ships. The light units were ordered to dump a last missile salvo and then open out to fall back so that they could protect the ships recovering the lifepods from the Marie Curie and the Kaminski. Then, Michael thought, it would definitely be time to get the hell out of Dodge; otherwise, the two full-strength Hammer task groups now accelerating hard toward them would have them by the throat. He half turned to look across at the captain. For some reason, she turned at the same time, smiling broadly at Michael before turning her attention back to the command plot, apparently relaxed and unconcerned. Michael wondered how she did it. He had had quite enough for one day, the seconds dragging by until the characteristic buzz-rip announced the launch of Eridani’s last missile salvo.

  “Thank Christ for that,” Michael muttered. “Time to go home.”

  Thankfully, Commodore Perkins agreed.

  “Command, Mother. Commodore to all ships. Stand by to jump.”

  “Command, roger. All stations. Stand by to jump. Engineering, confirm safe to jump.”

  “Confirmed. Mass distribution recomputed; model is nominal.”

  “Command, roger.”

  Lenksi wasted no more time, bringing the main engines up to full power to drive Eridani to jump speed, the maneuvering jets firing furiously to put the ship on vector for home.

  For once, Michael had no problem with the jump. The accumulated tension fell off him as he sat back, conscious for the first time of the sweat that had turned the shipsuit under his combat space suit into a sodden, ice-cold rag.

  “Jeez,” Michael said. “That was fun.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to describe it,” Lenski said laconically. “Okay. All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Engineering, repressurize. Starboard watch has the watch. Command out.”

  Monday, April 3, 2400, UD

  Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, city of McNair, Commitment

  “Send him in!”

  Polk did something he had not done since becoming chief councillor. He got up and went around his massive desk to shake the hand of the man who entered his office before waving him, more than a little surprised, into a seat.

  “Well, Admiral. Looks like we’re actually going to do it.” Polk went back to his own seat.

  Fleet Admiral Jorge smiled. “Well, sir. If you mean give the Feds a damn good kicking they won’t forget for a long time, then yes, I think we are. And I think we’ll get them to the negotiating table.”

  Polk leaned back and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.

  “You know, Admiral, I have to be honest”-You lying jerk, Jorge thought; Polk had never been honest in his life. He would not be chief councillor if he had; that was for sure-“When we starte
d down this road, I really thought that it would all fall apart. Like so many things the Hammer has tried to do over the years,” he added bitterly.

  Jorge shook his head emphatically. “We all have doubts, sir. We need to. Our contingency planning would be nonexistent otherwise, but this time, I think Fleet can do what it has been asked to do. We certainly have the means to drive the Feds to the negotiating table.”

  “Your antimatter warheads?”

  “Exactly so, sir. It makes every Fed ship vulnerable and their tactics obsolete. You recall the briefing from defense intelligence?” Polk nodded. “I do. We have a lead of three, more like five, years over the Feds.”

  “I’ve told the planners to work on three. On the warhead front, I cannot see how they can duplicate what took us the best part of thirty years in less time. Think of the production infrastructure alone. Not to mention catching up on the fundamental research. So that’s how long we’ve got to get the monkey off our back. I hope, well, I just. .”

  Polk leaned forward with a smile. “Hope those useless sons of bitches at foreign relations can negotiate the result we need. I think that’s what you wanted to say.”

  “Well, not quite the words I would have used, sir, but close enough,” Jorge conceded. “I’m sure we can hold the Feds for three years. I think we can probably hold them for five. After that. .”

  “Kraa!” Polk sneered, his lip curling in disdain. “I’ll tell you something, Admiral. If the councillor for foreign relations hasn’t wrapped up negotiations with the damn Feds before next year is out, then you’ll be seeing a new face at the council table, I can assure you.”

  Jorge had no trouble believing Polk, just as he had no trouble believing that his own life-and the lives of his wife and only son-would be forfeit if the warships assigned to Operation Damascus did not eliminate the threat posed by the Fed fleet.

  “Now, enough of that,” Polk continued. “I recall we had some other matters to deal with.”

  “Well, sir. Let me start with the biggest problem I’ve got: the admiral commanding the Fortitude system, Rear Admiral. .”

  Sunday, April 9, 2400, UD

  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.