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

  “Command, Mother. At pinchspace jump speed.”

  “Roger,” Ribot said with a heavy heart. Too late.

  With both 166’s and 387’s hulls ripped open, it was all academic now, anyway. The mass distribution model used by the nav AI to compute 387’s pinchspace jump parameters was hopelessly compromised by the gaping holes in 387’s hull. The ship was hours away from being jump-capable; any jump now would destroy it and kill them all. Ironically, they were safer staying put, where the chances of death and destruction weren’t quite 100 percent.

  “Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from Gore. Swarm of 48,000-plus decoys. Target 387.”

  Good old Gore, Ribot thought. It finally got its act together. Better late than never. But what the Hammer was doing still didn’t make sense.

  “Mother, Command. Why no missiles? Gore’s got missiles and plenty of them. Why doesn’t she use them?”

  “Command, Mother. Uncertain. Only clue is given by the missile salvo from New Dallas. I believe it confirms orders to conserve missile reserves for the decoy assault, which is now their primary objective.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose.”

  Ribot pulled up the standard incoming salvo report. It was not good reading.

  Shit, Ribot thought, get a grip, man. He was definitely losing his edge when he forgot that 387 and 166 weren’t just receivers but givers as well. For a few seconds he felt good about what his missiles might do to the Hammer ship. 387 and 166 weren’t just sitting there like sacrificial lambs waiting for the ax to fall. Ribot zoomed the holocam as far in on New Dallas as it would go, the ship’s size losing nothing in the process.

  His feel-good moment didn’t last long. “Don’t think our missiles are going to hurt that big bastard very much.” Ribot’s voice reflected his pessimism.

  “Can but try, skipper.”

  As ever, Holdorf’s voice was bright with optimism, and not for the first time Ribot wondered how he managed it in the circumstances. Space warfare had often been compared to standing with one’s feet stuck in concrete boots, watching a homicidal maniac walk slowly toward you, meat cleaver in hand, with every intention of hacking you to pieces. And so it had turned out. Waiting as death rushed toward you was the hard part, the entire process made worse for 387 and its crew by knowing there was almost nothing they could do to hit back. How Holdorf always managed to sound so damn cheerful was a real mystery.

  And then the holovid began to flash as, too fast to count, the missiles and decoys from 387 and 166 began to die useless deaths at the hands of the Hammers’ defenses. But just as Ribot gave up hope that any would get through, there was a single red-yellow bloom on New Dallas’s upper hull, a short-lived plume of ionized gas marking the impact point.

  “Got the fucker! And it was one of ours.” Hosani’s voice rang with triumph. “Suck that, you Hammer bastard! They must be asleep over there.”

  The combat information center team watched the holovid with furious concentration, hoping against hope that the missile’s shaped charge warhead had shot its plasma lance far enough into the huge ship to reach something vital.

  But it was not to be.

  The Mamba antistarship missiles carried by light scouts were too small and had too small a warhead to have any chance against a Hammer heavy cruiser. Even hitting the New Dallas had been a minor miracle. In seconds the bloom had darkened, and then just as quickly it died, leaving only a tiny hot spot on the ship’s hull. New Dallas continued on as though nothing had happened.

  Ribot sighed in resignation. “Can’t win them all. Mother, tell 166 to close on me for mutual support. How long until the missiles from New Dallas arrive?”

  “Command, Mother. Two minutes.”

  Ribot grunted. Two minutes before they lived or died, assuming of course they survived Gore’s rail-gun salvo, which was due in-he did a quick check-less than a minute.

  “Roger that. Tell-”

  Ribot could only watch open-mouthed as Gore’s port side, flayed by the enormous power of FedWorld long-range antiship lasers, suddenly ripped open. It was almost as if somebody had taken a huge knife and cut the ship open from stem to stern. A huge plume of incandescent gas and debris spewed out into space as the shattered hulk began a slow spiraling tumble to nowhere, automatic distress alarms sounding frantically in Ribot’s neuronics until he commed them off.

  Jesus, Ribot thought. Jaruzelska’s ships must have cracked the armor and hit a fusion plant. Big one, too. Main propulsion by the look of it. Great targeting considering the range.

  “But we can win some,” Ribot said jubilantly. “Maria, tell the troops. I suspect they could do with some good news. And get the XO to confirm when she expects to have the drone hangar foamsteeled. I’m sure I don’t have to remind her that we can’t jump with it ripped open.”

  “Sir.”

  As Mother confirmed that 166 was closing in, Ribot settled down once again to wait. At least there were only two more rounds to go, and neither would be as bad as what they had gone through before. Maybe, just maybe, they’d get out of this.

  He was quickly disabused.

  “Command, Mother. Final vector analysis on Gore’s rail-gun salvo indicates very high probability of impact.”

  “Command, roger. Maria, how’s Michael doing?”

  “It’s slow, sir. That’s one hell of a big hole out there. They’ve got the emergency ceramsteel generator secured and are putting the supply feeds in place now. Michael estimates another two minutes will see the job done.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t have two minutes.”

  “He knows, sir.”

  Desperately aware that they were standing directly in front of an oncoming rail-gun salvo, Michael and Bienefelt had dragged the ceramsteel generator and a bolt gun out of the forward emergency repair stowage. Their back-mounted personal maneuvering units were working overtime as they manhandled the awkward heavy lumps of metal across the hull to the lip of the huge crater that had been blown deep in 387’s armor, its walls still glowing with residual patches of red heat. As Bienefelt worked desperately, punching explosive bolts deep into 387’s hull to hold the generator in place, Michael, struggling to connect the generator to its high-pressure supply feeds, took a moment to marvel that 387 had been able to withstand the violent explosive release of so much energy. Finally, Bienefelt got the last bolt home. Working with frantic controlled haste, Michael helped Bienefelt run hoses into the crater. The armored hoses were awkward and stiff to space-suited hands, and a terrible feeling of panic threatened to overwhelm him as the seconds ticked remorselessly away.

  But finally, all the feeds were in place. Bienefelt’s massive frame was braced against the crater wall as she tightened the last connector.

  “Done, sir,” she said laconically.

  She could have been talking about the damn weather, Michael thought. One last check and Mother brought the generator online, gray-black ceramsteel sludge already pouring out of the generator ports to bond instantly with the walls of the crater. Looking good, Michael thought as the crater began to fill at an impressive rate.

  “Okay, Benny. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Not before time, sir.”

  As they cleared the rim of the blast crater to start their frantic dash back to safety, Mother ran out of time. As she simultaneously fired main propulsion and rolled the ship, Michael and Bienefelt were hurled back along the hull until, with a vicious slamming snap, their safety lines brought them to a dead stop before the recoil threw them back where they’d come from, skidding and sliding uncontrollably along 387’s hull before swinging out into space and back again to hit the ship full on with a sickening crunch that tested their suits’ crashworthiness to the fullest. With a despairing lunge, Michael grabbed Bienefelt as she cannoned into him and snap-hooked his suit harness onto hers, all the while desperately fighting to reel in his safety line.

  A quick check with Mother, and Michael saw that 387’s violent maneuvering had destroyed any chance of getting b
ack inside the ship. They didn’t have time to get back to the personnel air lock; they’d have to snap into the nearest hard point, secure their safety lines, and wait it out. There was nothing more they could do. They were going to ride out the next attack locked out of 387, hanging on the end of monofil safety lines with only combat space suits between them and God knew how many oncoming slugs.

  If their monofil safety lines failed, at least they’d die together.

  And then they waited. As Michael hung there, Bienefelt’s massive bulk tightly locked alongside him, he knew he was about to die. He had never been more certain of anything in his life.

  Ribot glanced across at the XO, who had just arrived from the surveillance drone hangar to report. He hoped she had good news. Restoration of jump capability in the next ten seconds would qualify.

  But he waved her back. She’d have to wait.

  The final rail-gun salvo from the now-crippled Gore hurtled toward 387, the bright red icons on the plot closing the gap with remorseless intent.

  Mother did her best, driving 387 up and to port to escape the slug swarm. But the task was nearly impossible. With the Gore and 387 now barely 60,000 kilometers apart, the battle geometry was heavily weighted in favor of the rail-gun attacker, the slugs having a time of flight from launch of only eighty seconds.

  And eighty seconds did not give Mother enough time to shift 387’s bulk out of the way before turning the ship back to put her heavy bow armor facing the slugs. Worse, and probably more by luck than good judgment, the Gore’s rail-gun targeting team, probably dead now, had gotten it right. The slugs in the swarm were perfectly lagged and spread, and the decoys were well positioned to confuse and overload 387’s sensors. 387 had nowhere to run.

  And one slug’s vector was exactly right.

  Even as 387’s short-range lasers belatedly flayed it, the killer slug’s surface literally bubbling as platinum/iridium boiled off into space, it smashed into the ship’s starboard upper bow, precisely where one of the slugs from Shark had gouged a crater in 387’s frontal armor. The metal slug smashed through the still-setting emergency ceramsteel repair and the remaining armor as though they didn’t exist, turning to plasma as it sliced through the inner pressure hull and down into Weapons Power Charlie. Microseconds later, the plasma containment bottle erupted in an enormous secondary explosion that ripped the upper bow of 387 apart into a mass of shredded ceramsteel and twisted titanium frames.

  The slug, now a concentrated lance of pure energy, plunged unopposed down into and through 387’s combat information center and then on into the hangar, through the bows of 387’s lander, and finally out into space.

  Michael didn’t remember much of what had happened.

  Gore’s attack was over in seconds. Afterward, all he could recall was a smashing impact as the blast wave hit, a ripping, tearing blur of heat and intense white light, a hoarse scream from Bienefelt followed by a soft bubbling moan, and then a crunching collision with 387’s hull that bounced the two tangled spacers out into space before their safety lines jerked taut. Michael’s head was driven forward hard into his armored plasglass visor and snapped forward nose first onto his collar ring with brutal force.

  And then silence. Deathly, deathly silence.

  Oh, Jesus, he thought, Bienefelt’s dead. She should be breathing, but she’s not. Frantically he spun her massive frame around, and there it was, a long rough-edged gash ripped across the lower back of the suit, moisture-laden gas spewing ice crystals out into the black night. Even as he slapped suit patches out of his thigh-mounted dispenser onto the gash, he knew he couldn’t help her.

  Calling for help and with an urgency born of desperation, Michael unclipped from the sorely tested hard point and reeled in his safety line, the inertia of Bienefelt’s body making the process agonizingly slow. As he got to the gaping hole in 387’s hull that had once been its forward upper personnel access hatch, a first aid team emerged. Within seconds, Bienefelt had been crash-bagged and taken below.

  For a moment, Michael just hung there. He didn’t care too much anymore what happened next. He went below only when the coxswain grabbed his arm and dragged him bodily down through the wickedly sharp-edged hole in 387’s hull.

  Only later did he find out how lucky they’d been. The curve of 387’s hull had been just enough to protect him and Bienefelt from the worst effects of the Hammer attack.

  The flag staff’s increasingly heated debate about what to do with the New Dallas task group was rudely interrupted.

  “Flag, flag AI. Missile launch from flotilla base fixed defenses. Stand by vector and attack profile.”

  “Flag, roger.”

  “Taken them a very long time, Admiral,” her chief of staff said. It was what they’d all been thinking. All the sims had assumed that the Hammers would get their fixed missile defenses into action inside the thirty-second launch window laid down by Hammer standard operating procedures. Something had to have gone very wrong, not that anybody on Jaruzelska’s team was complaining.

  Jaruzelska nodded absently.

  At that moment, she was more concerned about whether her ships were ready to deal with the incoming Hammer attack. They looked to be, and with minutes to prepare, they’d be even more ready when the attack arrived. The good news was that the delay meant that the Hammer was unlikely to be able to get another missile salvo away. The task group’s massive rail-gun attack would see to that.

  Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the issue at hand. After a further short discussion with her flag staff, she made up her mind.

  She hated overruling her flag AI, but there were times when it had to be done. The task group’s second missile salvo would be ready to launch in less than thirty seconds, and if she was going to change the plan, she needed to do it now.

  “Flag AI, flag. I don’t think the decoys are going to keep the attention of the New Dallas task group much longer. Now that we have the main Hammer force on the back foot, I want New Dallas and her escorts taken out before they give us too much grief.”

  The flag AI’s consideration of Jaruzelska’s proposition was noticeably prolonged as it digested the implications of her orders. “Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed.” Jaruzelska’s tone was very emphatic even as she keyed a marker into her neuronics as a reminder to have the AI boffins look at the flag AI’s inability to see that the New Dallas group was every bit as big a threat as the flotilla base ships. A bigger threat, in fact, as the task group’s relentless assault slowly ground the Hell Flotilla and its base’s fixed defenses into dust. Even if the New Dallas and her escorts weren’t shooting at them right now, they would be soon.

  “Flag AI, roger. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Stand by, stand by…away now.”

  That was one thing she liked about AIs, Jaruzelska thought. Unlike some of the prima donnas on her staff, they never sounded hurt when you overruled them.

  Before Mother, safe in her meter-thick shock-mounted ceramsteel box, commed him, Michael had been sitting amid the shattered wreckage of the surveillance drone hangar, watching but not seeing the frantic efforts of the ship’s damage control teams to seal the damage to 387’s hull. The hangar was a mess of emergency foamsteel generators, steel bracing, and welding gear. Bienefelt had been crash-bagged and taken below to join Karpov in regen. There was nothing more he could do for any of them now except watch. He’d patched his neuronics into the sick bay’s holocams and, with his head a mass of white-hot agony, watched as the medics struggled to stabilize the surviving members of his team and get them into the regen tanks in time. Worst of all were the ones the medics had lost, their crash bags laid out neatly against the sick bay bulkhead. Michael struggled to remember the faces of Ng, Strezlecki, Leong, Carlsson, and Athenascu.

  But he couldn’t. They were just blurs behind a thick red-gray fog of hurt.

  It was all he could do just to sit there slumped on the deck as pain poured through his system. He w
as a mess. His neuronics told him he had lost a fair bit of blood and that there had been a whole lot of other damage involving bones, muscles, and tendons that didn’t sound too good, but he didn’t care.

  Through the red haze and with blood pouring down his face and into his suit, Michael finally answered Mother’s increasingly insistent comm.

  “Yes, what?” He winced. Just talking hurt.

  “Michael, this is Mother. I know you are hurt, but you’ll be okay.” Mother had firmed her voice to a point just short of being brutally direct. “But I need you and I need you now. You are now the senior line officer, and you must take command.”

  “Senior line officer? Command? What do you mean?” Michael struggled to concentrate. The blood around his neck was getting sticky as it congealed, but thank God the bleeding was stopping. “Command? Why?”

  “They’re all dead, Michael. Ribot, Hosani, Holdorf, Armitage, Kapoor. All dead. That last slug took out most of the combat information center crew and the lander as well. Reilly’s okay. He was in propulsion control.”

  Michael nodded painfully, not fully understanding what Mother was saying to him. All in all, it was much easier to do what the insistent voice was saying and not argue. Arguing required thought, and thinking hurt. “Okay. Where do I go?”

  “Wardroom, Michael. Best I can do and the only large holovid screen left intact. And please be quick. The next attack is due in under ninety seconds.”

  Michael forced himself to his feet with as much speed as his bruised and battered body would allow and made his way down to 2 Deck and past the combat information center. It was no more. It had been blown apart, its forward bulkhead a shattered and shredded curtain of plasteel opening onto a nightmare vision of pure destruction.

  The slug’s deadly shroud of plasma and its escort of metal splinters spalled off Weapons Power Charlie had passed right through the center of the combat information center, with the blast wave smashing people and equipment with indiscriminate disregard. Now the compartment was a scene of appalling carnage and frantic activity as overworked medics and damage control crews struggled desperately to crash-bag the survivors and get them below and into regen.