The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 31

  “Flag, roger.” Jaruzelska could do nothing now but watch the flag combat data center’s command plot as the task group’s two salvos reached out toward the Hammer, their vectors thin green lines of death stark against deep black.

  No, that wasn’t right. There was something she could do, and she should have done it long before. If she didn’t, Gore would be the death of 387 and 166.

  “Flag AI, flag. Hostile Gore. Engage with force lasers.”

  The flag AI didn’t even blink at the sudden change in mission priorities.

  Within seconds, the cruisers had turned their antiship lasers away from New Dallas and onto the distant form of the Gore. The intense beams of coherent light quickly began the process of tunneling a hole into Gore’s ceramsteel side armor; high-definition targeting holocams were focusing the task group’s antistarship lasers down onto a single point on the Hammer ship’s hull.

  It took a desperate combination of high-g maneuvering and good work with the ship’s defensive systems to save 387.

  Close-range rail-gun engagements had been described as something akin to high-speed four-dimensional chess, with swarm after swarm trying to checkmate the target, herding it into a position where it had nowhere to move except into the path of the oncoming slugs. Then it was just a matter of the weight of metal as the slugs ripped away armor to allow the slugs following them to punch through into the hull. At that point it was checkmate.

  But Ribot knew full well that there was a lot of space out there and how very small warships were in the grand scheme of things. Therefore, a well executed rail-gun attack, as much a matter of art as of science, needed very precise timing, close coordination of the swarm patterns, and good swarm design, all based on what could only be described as an intuitive understanding of how the target would behave. Those were all things the Hammers had yet to demonstrate they were capable of. The simple fact that 387 had survived a 96,000-slug rail-gun attack was all the proof needed that the Hammers didn’t have their shit together. One thing was for sure: If the ships attacking 387 and 166 had been Feds, they’d be dead by now.

  Even so, it was scary stuff. Ribot couldn’t remember being so terrified. Ever.

  Leaving 387’s long-range antiship lasers on target as long as possible in the hope of doing some serious damage to New Dallas, Mother finally brought their awesome power to join the ship’s short-range defensive lasers in time to try and fend off the few slugs from Shark that posed any threat. Shark’s swarm had been bigger, better aimed, and more carefully timed than those from Gore and Arroyo, forcing 387 to move down and across the path of the final four slugs to the point where Ribot would have been prepared to swear on his life that three of the four had passed close enough to graze 387’s outer stealth coat.

  But the fourth was luckier. It hit 387 almost directly where her armor was thickest. The slug vaporized in a nanosecond to blow a huge crater in 387’s armor, the massive explosion smashing the ship down and into a slow spiraling turn, spewing rolling, twisting clouds of vaporized ceramsteel. Great gouts of reaction mass poured from her maneuvering thrusters as Mother struggled to bring the ship back on vector, artgrav screaming as it absorbed the shock waves that racked it from end to end.

  “Christ Jesus protect us. That was way, way too close,” Holdorf said, desperately wishing he could unsuit and wipe away the ice-cold sweat running down his spine.

  “Maria! Get Helfort and one of his team out there. I want that impact damage repaired.”

  “But sir,” Hosani protested, “the next salvo’s due any minute now.”

  Ribot’s voice was brutal. “I know, Maria. But if we get another slug where that one hit, it’ll go through us end to end and we’ll all be dead. And it’s too close to Weapons Power Charlie. I can’t take the chance. That crater has to be filled.” He held a hand up even as Hosani started to protest his callous indifference. “Okay, okay. Hold them back until the next salvo’s passed. There’s not time for them to make a difference, anyway.”

  “Sir.” Hosani sounded relieved as she commed the warning order to Michael.

  Ribot sat back. He’d come as close as he could to condemning Helfort and his surveillance drone team to death, but what choice did he have?

  “Command, Mother. 166 reports single grazing impact. Minor damage only to hull armor, no loss of hull integrity.”

  “Command, roger.” Bastards. Ten points to the Shark and Cougar. It seemed that the Hammer might actually be getting its act together.

  “How long, Maria?”

  “Fifteen seconds, sir.”

  “Warn the troops.”

  “All stations, command. Stand by next rail-gun swarm. Ten seconds. Out.”

  As the incoming swarm had approached, Michael had unconsciously pulled his head down into his shoulders, his already tense stomach contracting even further into a tight knot. He’d never seen a command plot, even in the worst tactical exercise scenarios thrown at him during his college time, as bad as the one he was looking at now.

  The instant Shark’s swarm had passed, Mother had thrown the ship even farther off vector before the cone of 96,000 slugs buried somewhere inside a huge cloud of decoys from New Dallas shut down her options even more. But with only seconds between salvos and a lot of mass to shift, Mother didn’t have enough time and maneuvering power to get it right. Her desperate attempt to get 387 clear between salvos was not enough to move the ship completely clear of danger.

  Michael cursed wordlessly as Mother updated the command plot, the primary threat vector turning a deep red as the impact probability approached 100 percent. This couldn’t go on. If rail guns didn’t get them, missiles might. And if missiles didn’t, the lasers slowly chewing away at 387’s hull eventually would break through, and people would begin to die. The frustrating thing was that they would be at jump speed any minute now. So close and yet so far.

  But maybe he should be thankful for small blessings, Michael thought as he stared almost mesmerized at the time-on-target clock counting off the seconds. Gore must have a problem with her rail guns; she still hadn’t fired again. This early in an engagement, she should have gotten her second rail-gun salvo away in under two minutes or so if her crew and systems were up to scratch, but it was now well past that. If Gore didn’t fire soon, 387 and 166 would jump, provided that they weathered the incoming storm of slugs from New Dallas. If they could do that, the ships would vanish into pinchspace, leaving the one and only missile salvo fired at them nothing more than an ultraviolet flash to home in on.

  Michael started to pray really, really hard. They were so close to safety, it hurt. The wait was pure torture. And now, as if the wait wasn’t bad enough, Ribot wanted him outside to fix the damage caused by the last slug. Heart pounding, he could only stand and wait.

  By nature and duty physically active people, the surveillance drone team suffered in silence as the seconds dragged by, the weight of space suits and full EVA gear dragging them down, with only the occasional update from Ribot and Hosani in the combat information center to tell them what was going on. Michael tried to shut out the terrible images of what a rail-gun slug could do to him, concentrating with furious effort on the gray plasteel deck of the harshly lit hangar and its clutter of infinitely deep black holes that were 387’s eight surveillance drones, Michael’s pride and joy. Fat lot of use they were now.

  That didn’t help much, so Michael eased himself back into the surveillance drone air lock. There were a couple of small comms boxes at just the right height to take the weight of his EVA pack if only he could find them. In the end, it wasn’t hard: Bienefelt had gotten there first. Michael smiled. He should have known better than to think he could ever be a step ahead of her.

  Unnoticed by Michael, now busy twisting around in an attempt to find somewhere else to rest, Warrant Officer Ng had made her way up from below. She stuck her head through the open air lock door and leaned her helmet against Michael’s. He jumped as she spoke.

  “How’s it going, sir?”

>   “Oh, um, hi. Yeah, okay, Warrant Officer Ng. But nobody told me that Space Fleet life was a combination of pure terror dished out in random dollops along with long periods of stupefying boredom. You know, the old cliche.”

  “Well, so it is, but I must say that it has been a long time since I was quite so scared shitless. And for Christ’s sake, call me Doc.”

  “Er, right. Okay, Doc,” Michael said, feeling like someone who’d just been blessed. “Was it like this last time around?”

  “As best as I can remember ’cause it was a very long time, yes, it was. Though I was in big ships then. Must say, I don’t remember being in a situation quite as bad as this.”

  “All stations, Command. Stand by next rail-gun swarm. Ten seconds. Out.”

  “Don’t exactly tell us a hell of-”

  Michael thought that the world had come to an end.

  Frantically winnowing out the decoys, Mother had successfully deflected three high-risk slugs. 387’s massive antiship lasers hit the platinum/iridium slugs, ionized metal imparting sufficient energy to shift the slugs’ vectors fractionally away from them.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  New Dallas had done it well even if she’d made the elementary tactical error of splitting her salvo between two targets. She’d carefully fashioned the 96,000 slugs into a cone-shaped swarm, with the point of the cone leading the way, forcing 387 to commit, to move out into the path of the rest of the swarm as it lagged fractionally behind.

  And so 387’s luck began to run out.

  Ninety-six thousand slugs buried inside a well-designed and well-timed swarm all wrapped up in a mass of decoys was simply too many for the little ship to deflect or evade. As Mother tried desperately to roll 387 in a dive out of the path of the last of the swarm, the ship shuddered as three slugs hit home. The massive impacts, only microseconds apart, wracked the ship with terrible violence until the entire fabric of the hull screamed in protest.

  Moving at nearly 800,000 meters per second, the first slug hit the lower starboard side of 387’s bow at a fine, almost grazing angle. Another meter farther out and it would have missed altogether. With the slug only meters and microseconds away from hitting home, 387’s hull-mounted microwave sensors had computed its precise impact point and predicted its vector through the hull before firing the ship’s last-ditch defenses of ultra-high-gain explosive reactive armor nested in hexagonal titanium cells. The armor’s shaped charges fired in a carefully calculated pattern, at best to drive the slug away from the ship, at worst to diffuse and spread its kinetic energy wave front.

  This time 387 was lucky; the slug’s angle of attack was sufficiently shallow to allow the reactive armor to deflect it slightly away from the inner hull. Even so, the slug gouged a gaping furrow across the hull before erupting violently back into space in a cloud of shattered ceramsteel armor and platinum/iridium plasma. The ship rang with the shock as high-explosive-packed armor exploded against the shock-mounted titanium that formed its inner hull.

  The second slug met the same fate.

  As it smashed into 387’s upper bow on the starboard side, again the reactive armor did what it was designed to do. High explosive blasted out with enough force-barely, but enough-to turn the tiny slug out of the hull to disappear back into space, its short path through the hull a white-hot smoking scar cut deep into the bottomless black of the ship’s stealth coat. But this time real damage was done, the slug taking with it much of 387’s short-range laser capability as it gouged its way across the ship’s outer armor.

  387 had spent all the luck it had been given. Slug swarm tactics were a numbers game, and the Hammer had the numbers.

  Unlike the others, the third slug hit 387 well aft of the bow, at the forward end of the surveillance drone hangar, just where the ship’s titanium frames locked the forward upper personnel access hatch to the main structure of the ship, an unavoidable weak spot in the ship’s armor. This time, the slug came in at an angle steep enough to overcome the reactive armor’s efforts to turn it back out of the hull. Even as the armor exploded vainly underneath it, the slug kept coming, its trajectory only marginally flattened as its plasma sheath vaporized the entire air lock.

  Within microseconds of hitting, the slug was pure plasma and had reached the inner hull. The titanium armor vaporized in an instant to let the plasma into the ship, the shock of its entry driving viciously high-energy metal shards from the ship’s titanium frame through the Kevlar splinter matting bonded to the inner hull. Each shard was a deadly missile pushing a growing cone of destruction deep into 387; the ship’s hull around the entry point peeled back in tangled sheets like wet cardboard.

  Without warning, the surveillance drone hangar exploded into a searingly bright maelstrom of ionized gas and flying metal splinters. The lethal shroud of plasma came down through the small personnel air lock to cut across the hangar at an angle, vaporizing the drones in its path before exiting through the aft end of the hangar. It took out the aft personnel access hatch and the pinchcomms antenna in the process before finally leaving the ship, its path marked by a lethal firestorm of incandescent metal and swirling high-energy plasma.

  The massive overpressure from the slug’s plasma blast wave was enough to smash Michael back into the surveillance drone air lock. For a moment he could only half stand, half kneel there, unable to move as waves of pain racked his body, his tortured back and ribs screaming at him, until the urgent shrieking of his suit alarm and a tightness in his chest told him that he’d lost suit integrity and had better do something about it quickly. He couldn’t work out why Warrant Officer Ng was half sitting crumpled in her heat-seared suit at his feet, helmeted head hanging awkwardly to one side, her suit front gaping open and strangely slick in the swirling murky aftermath of the slug’s passing.

  Then he got it. Ng was dead. Somehow, it didn’t mean anything, so Michael pushed the unresponsive Ng away and quickly slapped bright red suit patches out of the dispenser on the bulkhead behind him. In seconds, his fumbling efforts guided by his suit AI, he had sealed a gaping hole in the upper left leg of his suit, a smaller one lower down, and a small but dangerous-looking crack in his plasglass visor. The hole in the left leg of his suit was strangely shiny, surrounded by a sort of crystalline sheen that some dim recess of his mind told him must be heat-carbonized blood. But apart from a numbness in his leg, he felt no pain. With a huge effort, he forced his mind back to work and tried to decide what to do next.

  With no air to hold it up and only residual hot spots spewing metal vapor into the compartment, the plasma fog filling the hangar cooled and cleared quickly. It revealed a scene of utter devastation, the sight so awful that Michael saw it without understanding any of it. Evidence of the fury of the slug’s passing was everywhere, with almost every surface, every bit of equipment, every fitting, baked by intense heat and scarred and slashed by the metal splinters that had been thrown up as the slug had passed. Collapsed in untidy stiff heaps on the deck was his team, the last tendrils of gas spewing from ripped and torn space suits.

  Only Bienefelt had been left standing, her suit a mass of hurriedly applied red patches.

  Michael forced himself to put the comm through to Mother. “Medics and crash bags, surveillance drone hangar. Quick, for God’s sake.”

  And then, pulling another wad of suit patches from the nearest dispenser, he made his way out of the corner that had shielded him from the full fury of the slug’s passing, climbing over Warrant Officer Ng. A quick check confirmed that she was dead, and he started trying to seal endless gashes in suits, ignoring the stinging prickle of wound foam as his suit tried to stop the bleeding in his leg.

  Even as he did that, medics erupted from the hatch.

  In seconds, helped by Michael and Bienefelt, the worst of the casualties were shoved unceremoniously into crash bags, zipped up, and pressurized before being manhandled hurriedly down the hatch on their way to the ship’s tiny sick bay, the only part of the ship still with pressure inside its triple t
hickness of ceramsteel armor.

  Numbly, Michael watched as the shattered remains of Ng, Strezlecki, Leong, Carlsson, and Athenascu were taken below. Their suits were so badly ripped that he knew in his heart that they weren’t ever coming back.

  Finally, Maddox and Karpov, both clearly in pain and badly hurt but at least with suits more or less intact-Michael couldn’t begin to work out how-were helped down the hatch. He began to tremble as the awful shock of it all hit him as he stood there with Bienefelt amid the metal-splintered, flame-seared, black-blood-spattered wreckage of the hangar.

  Michael was shaken out his trance by Ribot, his voice soft but firm. “Michael, this is the captain. Your people are in good hands now, so it’s time to do what you’re paid for. I want that slug crater over Weapons Power Charlie fixed before the next attack, so get moving. Main propulsion’s been shut down, but watch out for no-notice maneuvers. I’ll keep things steady for as long as I can, but Mother’s going to do whatever she’s got to do to keep us out of trouble, so make sure you’re well clipped on.”

  “Sir.”

  With a heavy heart but grateful that he had something better to do than stand around waiting for the ax to fall, Michael commed Bienefelt to follow him. At least, he thought, he didn’t have to wait for any damn air lock to open. There wasn’t one anymore, just a fucking great big hole. Wearily and more scared than he’d ever been in his life, he clipped his safety line onto a handy stanchion. With a deep breath, a kick, and a heave, he was safely past the ripped and torn remnants of the forward personnel air lock and out into the awful darkness, heart pounding and mouth dry.

  “Command, Mother. 166 reports two hits. Moderate damage only, hull has lost integrity in two places; all combat systems nominal but unable to jump. Casualties. Three dead and twelve injured but none critical. Time to repair, ninety minutes maximum.”

  “Command, roger,” Ribot said. Shit, shit, shit. Now neither of them could jump. This couldn’t go on. But it could and it would, and with a conscious effort, Ribot forced himself to face whatever would come next.