The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Read online

  Even as Ribot enjoyed the prospect of angry and confused Hammers, hatches whipped open on the flanks of the two ships, and in a matter of seconds hydraulic missile dispensers had deployed 387’s full complement of short-range Mambas. Moments later, the two ships deployed a small cloud of active ship decoys, each one mimicking the emissions profiles of 387 and 166.

  Forlorn though it might be, the attack was on.

  Ribot grunted in satisfaction as he watched the holovids blank out as the intense light of a swarm of exhaust plumes momentarily overwhelmed the holocams, mass drivers lighting off to accelerate the salvo and its decoy cloud toward New Dallas. He knew full well that it wasn’t much of a salvo as salvos went, but at least they’d give the Hammers in New Dallas something to think about.

  Mother’s emotionless tones reported the launch. “Missiles away. Target New Dallas.”

  Ribot intervened. “Mother, hold lasers until they’ve woken up. If we go active now, they’ll pick us out of the decoy cloud.” Fed active ship decoys were very good but not so good that they could mimic the awesome power of an antistarship laser.

  “Mother, roger.”

  Then it was time for 387 and 166 to show their hands.

  Flanked by ship decoys doing their best to look like the real thing, the two ships erupted into life, main engines spewing blue-white tails of driver efflux, speed rapidly building under the thrust of a maximum-g tactical burn.

  With his neuronics patched into the command plot, Michael waited, suited up with nowhere to go and nothing to do. All he could do was sit and worry, watching anxiously as the four antiship lasers mounted by 387 and 166 slowly chewed away at New Dallas.

  He sighed in frustration as Mother faithfully reported the near futility of it all. The lasers were doing their job, burning off heavy frontal armor, but only by the centimeter, and the Hammer ship had meters of the damn stuff. All the while, New Dallas was turning ponderously toward them, untroubled by the light scouts’ attack. The x-ray antiship lasers carried by light scouts were good, and their beam diffusion was minimal at such close range. But Hammer ceramsteel armor was also good, and the heavy cruiser had plenty of it to spare.

  Well, Michael consoled himself, all 387 had to do was keep the Hammer ships’ attention away from the incoming Fed warships and it would have done its job.

  The good news was that the lights scouts’ armor was holding up well despite the best efforts of the Hammer ships to burn their way through it, which by rights they should have been well on their way to doing. By Fed standards, the performance of the Hammers’ lasers was very poor, to the point where, as Holdorf put it, they were giving 387’s bows only a light all-over tan rather than the third-degree burns they should have been dishing out.

  To cap it all, 387’s Krachov microshrouds, pumped out in a never-ending stream from forward-mounted dispensers, were having some success in attenuating the lasers’ destructive force even if the tiny disks lasted only seconds before the lasers overwhelmed them. But thankfully, there were an awful lot of disks.

  That man Krachov was a fucking genius, Michael thought gratefully. He would make a point of buying him a beer if he ever emerged alive from what was beginning to look worryingly like a suicide mission. Michael felt powerless as nail by nail the Hammers slowly banged down the lid on 387’s coffin, a strange sense of resignation coming over him as he faced the inevitability of his death.

  Mother broke his thoughts. “Command, Mother. Missile launch from New Dallas. Estimate twelve missiles plus decoys. Initial vector analysis shows salvo split equally between 166 and 387.”

  “Command, roger.” Ribot’s confusion was obvious to Michael. “Confirm missiles twelve.”

  “Confirmed. Missiles twelve. Six on 166 and six on 387.” Mother was emphatic.

  Michael banged Petty Officer Strezlecki on the shoulder. “Stupid Hammer fuckheads have split the salvo, Strez. And the salvo’s badly underweight. Only twelve missiles. They could have launched hundreds of the damn things, for God’s sake. I wonder why.” Michael couldn’t conceal his relief. Six missiles gave them a chance at least, whereas without a miracle, a full missile salvo from New Dallas would have been the end.

  Then it hit Michael. A small split salvo might be Hammer stupidity, but there was another, much less encouraging explanation.

  Obviously Ribot had just had the same awful thought. “Mother, command. Could these be nukes?”

  “Negative, command. Best estimate is conventional warheads. Hammer standard operating procedures preclude use of nuclear warheads this close to friendly installations. Electromagnetic pulse and residual radiation unacceptably high.”

  Michael gratefully offered up a silent prayer of thanks. 387 might be small, but she was very tough, her inner titanium hull shock-mounted and her artgrav and active quantum-trap radiation screens good enough to shield the crew from the transient shock and radiation produced by a nuclear warhead burst as long it wasn’t too close. But nobody liked nukes, and if one got close enough, it was all over.

  Ribot had watched impassively as the Hammer ships had finally swung bows onto 387.

  Now we’re in for it, he thought. Any moment now, any moment now. It looked like the heavy patrol ship Gore would be first to get a rail-gun firing solution. She was, followed a good twenty seconds later by Arroyo and MacFarlane. But Gore’s command team, clearly at one and the same time overexcited and overconfident, couldn’t wait. They should have.

  “Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from Gore. Target 387.”

  “Why 387?” Ribot mumbled as fear crunched his stomach into a tightly packed ball. This was getting horribly serious. “Command, roger.”

  “Command, Mother. Rail-gun launches from Arroyo, target 387, and MacFarlane, target 166.”

  “Command, roger. I don’t think they like us,” Ribot said, mouth dry and heart pounding at the thought of what the rail-gun swarms launched by Gore and Arroyo could do to 387.

  Hosani nodded. She could hardly think given the terrible certainty that she was eking out her last minutes, that she and everyone onboard were doomed. It was only by an enormous effort of will that she kept going. “You can say that again, skipper. I have the horrible feeling that we are going to get more than our fair share,” she said shakily.

  “Command, Mother. Multiple rail-gun launches. Shark, target 387. Cougar, target 166.”

  “So where the fuck is New Dallas?” Holdorf asked rhetorically. “Surely she doesn’t want to miss the party.”

  “Give the fat bitch time, Lucky, give the fat bitch time. I’m sure she’ll get to us.” Maria Hosani’s voice was tight. By her calculations, they had six Hammer missiles and hundreds of thousands of rail-gun slugs inbound, all due on target in a matter of minutes. Each slug had a kinetic energy equal to damn near 600 kilograms of high explosive and was focused on an area considerably smaller than the end of her little finger. That made-her brow furrowed as she did the math-200 kilotons of high explosive give or take, and all heading for her. She cursed silently. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t see how 387 was going to get out alive, a conclusion absolutely reinforced by an unshakable conviction that even if 387 made it, she wasn’t going to.

  Hosani damned her Iranian ancestry. Too many mystics in the bloodline.

  “Command, Mother. Speed now 80,000 kph. At pinchspace jump speed in three minutes.”

  “Command, roger. Warn propulsion that I’m going to jump 387 and 166 together as soon as we can.”

  “Mother, roger.”

  “If we live that long, that is,” Hosani commed Holdorf.

  “I’m not called Lucky for nothing, Maria, so have faith,” Holdorf commed back.

  “Command, Mother. Vector analysis of incoming salvos confirms very low probability of slug impact. 166’s AI concurs. Time on target has been inadequately synchronized. Ripple timing and swarm geometry are very poor. Confirms THREATSUM assessment that Hammer fire control discipline is weak.”

  “Command, roger.”

>   Ribot took a deep breath to try to slow his body down. Hammer fire control discipline might be weak, but just how 387 was going to duck and weave its way clear of the incoming rail-gun slugs was a question he could only hope Mother had a damn good answer to. Apart from a nearly overwhelming urge to run away and hide, he sure as hell didn’t.

  In her flag combat data center deep within the heavy cruiser Al-Jahiz, Vice Admiral Jaruzelska came to her feet as she cleaned up after the pinchspace drop, her eyes fixed on the command plot as the flag AI got the tactical situation settled down into some semblance of order.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but there it was, plain as day.

  Her chief of staff interrupted her shocked study of the command plot. “Do you see what I see, sir?”

  “I do, and I don’t believe it. The crazy, crazy bastards.” Jaruzelska could not keep the intense pride she felt out of her voice as she watched the hopelessly one-sided battle unfolding on the other side of her primary target, Hell’s flotilla base.

  “But thank God for it, Admiral. If they hadn’t gone in, those fuckers might have had us on toast. We could have dropped right into a rail-gun swarm. I’ve ordered the task group to engage with lasers. The rail guns and missiles can take care of the flotilla base.”

  “Concur. I just hope it helps.”

  Any hope that New Dallas’s rail-gun swarm would be delayed until after her missiles had arrived died as the huge ship finally completed its turn.

  Eyes fixed on the New Dallas, Michael felt like a small child watching a cobra. The laborious and painfully slow maneuver had taken a lifetime, the maneuvering systems spewing furious jets of reaction mass as they pushed the ship’s unwieldy bulk around to bring her forward rail-gun batteries to bear on 387 and 166.

  Heavy cruisers had many advantages in the business of space warfare, but agility was not one of them, Michael thought.

  As the huge black bulk of the New Dallas settled onto her attack vector, brief flashes of reaction mass spurting out as she fine-tuned her rail-gun launch, Ribot zoomed 387’s holocams in close. He could see every detail of the two pinlike rows of rail-gun and decoy ports stretching from one side to the other across the otherwise black nothingness of the Hammer ship’s stealth bows. They were all pointed directly at 387 and 166. Ribot’s heart pounded. Who’s going to get it? he wondered. Then New Dallas fired the swarm, searing blue-white dots rippling out from the ship’s centerline.

  “Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from New Dallas. Swarm split to target 387 and 166.”

  “Thank you, you Hammer motherfucker, thank you very much,” Michael cursed under his breath. But at least the stupid bastards had split the swarm, and that meant that only 96,000 slugs were heading their way, spread out by the time they arrived at 387 across a 40-square-kilometer front. Taking them for granted? he wondered. How stupid could you get. Try that in a Fed command exercise and you would get your ass kicked hard and justifiably so. Nonetheless, add in thousands of decoys and Mother was going to have her work cut out to keep 387 out of trouble.

  Holdorf’s excited shout beat Mother to it. “I don’t believe it, skipper,” he yelled. “They’re turning; the bastards are bloody well turning away. They’ve fallen for Kawaguchi’s decoy attack.”

  Ribot’s heart thudded in his chest as hope flared for the first time since the Hammers had dropped. “Shit, Leon! Are you sure?” Ribot stared at the command plot, desperately praying that 387’s navigator was right. “By God,” he said finally. “I think you’re right. Mother, you confirm?”

  “Confirmed, command. But not Gore. She remains on targeting vector.”

  “Command, roger. Mother, any chance the New Dallas and the heavy escorts will get off a salvo from their stern batteries?” Ribot tried unsuccessfully to keep the edginess out of his voice. Together, the three heavy ships in the Hammer group could fire close to 400,000 slugs from their after rail-gun batteries. Even if they targeted both of the light scouts and got their swarm geometry and ripple timing only half-right, it really would be all over.

  “Stand by, command…Negative. They are having to pitch up to get a firing solution on the decoys, so they’ll be off vector for us by the time they are stern on.”

  “Command, roger. Let’s hope we can ride it out, and with a bit of luck the task group can help us finish off Gore.” Ribot’s voice resonated with new hope.

  “Confirmed.”

  “Roger. Keep the lasers on New Dallas. If she shows us enough of her big fat ass, we may get lucky. Mother, what are our chances?”

  “Probability of mission abort level of damage is 7 percent. Probability of hard kill is negligible.”

  “Bugger.” Ribot sighed in disappointment. “Not great odds. Okay. Priority mission is own ship defense. Second priority, 166 defense. Third, New Dallas.”

  Michael shared Ribot’s disappointment.

  For one wonderful fleeting moment, he had thought, had hoped, they might have a chance of killing New Dallas. But with the rail-gun swarms now coming thick and fast, 387’s lasers weren’t getting enough time on target to have a chance with a warship as big and tough as New Dallas. That was a hell of a shame, as the distance and angle of attack were good and getting better by the minute as New Dallas swung her stern into 387’s and 166’s lines of attack.

  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.”