The battle at the Moons of Hell

wave sensors, and passive sensors covering the full electromagnetic spectrum.

Bringing up the rear and the last screen to starboard was the surveillance drone control desk. Drones weren’t always a lot of use in a shooting war; that was why the desk was tucked away at the back of the combat information center and why the officer responsible for a ship’s surveillance drones was always the most junior warfare officer onboard.

The first workstation on the port side managed 387’s offensive weapons capability. Unlike her bigger sisters, 387 had no rail guns. The stresses imposed and the power needed by the pinchspace rail-gun engines to accelerate a salvo of slugs to 3.6 million kilometers per hour instantaneously were simply too great for a warship as small as 387. So, for her stand-off offensive capability, she had to manage with twelve Mamba antistarship missiles in two six-round containers supported by twin Lamprey x-ray antistarship lasers, depowered versions of the system fitted to major Fleet units.

The second and third workstations managed 387’s suite of defensive weapons: hypervelocity armor-piercing discarding sabot chain guns and short-range defensive lasers, both tasked with protecting 387 from incoming missile and rail-gun salvos inside a bubble of space 20,000 kilometers in diameter. But as good as 387’s point-defense systems were, they could handle only small, low-rate attacks. That was precisely why the captains of deepspace light scouts were so emphatically advised by the Fleet’s fighting instructions to stay well clear of anything bigger than themselves.

The last desk on the port side was where active countermeasures-jammers, spoofers, and decoys-were managed.

Finally, in the center, ranged crosswise immediately behind the captain’s chair, were the nav, ship control, and damage control desks and, right aft on the port side, a pair of maintenance workstations.

At general quarters, Michael could see that it would be a crowded place with every station manned by spacers in bulky space suits crammed into less than 100 square meters of deck space together with a mess of chairs, workstations, and screens. And the irony was, he thought, that arguably it was all redundant. Neuronics long ago had removed the need for large holovid screens, and it was perfectly possible for the captain and his command team to fight the ship lying flat on their backs in the comfort and security of their bunks.

But there were three fundamental problems with that approach.

The first was good old human nature: Especially when under severe stress, people liked to be able to work close to other people as part of a team.

The second was the objective fact that the big holovid screens, particularly when managed by experienced command plot operators, helped prompt warfare officers to think about things they might have missed in a way that neuronics, with their emphasis on user-controlled data filters, seemed incapable of doing.

But in the end, the real clincher was tradition. Federated Worlds Space Fleet warships had always had combat information centers, and they probably always would. But he did concede that screen-fitted ships did better than neuronics-only ships, albeit only marginally, and then only in sims. Space Fleet had never dared send a neuronics-only vessel into actual combat, and Michael was pretty sure it never would.

He checked the time. 12:25. Time to go.

“Permission to step across, sir?” he asked the outgoing officer in command, Junior Lieutenant Kapoor.

“Yeah, Michael. Across you come.” Kapoor waved his hand vaguely in his direction as Michael stepped across the thick yellow and black line painted on the gray plasteel deck. The goofers line it was called, and to cross it without the officer in command’s permission was to ask to have your ass kicked hard.

“Okay. Welcome. Maria is running late-the captain wanted to see her about something-so we’ll do the handover and then you brief her while I watch. Okay?”

“Sure. Fine by me.”

Within seconds, Kapoor had started to dump everything he thought Michael needed to know about the current state of 387 and its intended plans together with a succinct summary of everything that was going on in Anjaxx nearspace. Finally, the torrent subsided. “Right.” Kapoor’s tone was firm. “You take Warfare-1, and I’ll keep an eye on things from Warfare-2 until Maria turns up. Off you go. You have the ship?”

“I have the ship.”

“Good. You have the ship.”

Michael settled himself into Warfare-1, the chair to the right of the captain’s command chair, and methodically began to review the information Kapoor had given him. Five minutes later, he felt he was on top of things. In the absence of any threat, he had the vid feed from the forward holocams put up onto the command plot, an impressive if not terribly useful view of billions of stars with Anjaxx’s second moon in the bottom right-hand corner to provide some context. Michael set up the local and threat plots the way he wanted them so that he’d be ready to brief Maria Hosani when she appeared.

As ever, when operating in ship state 3-transits in friendly normalspace in peacetime-the combat information center was almost empty. Only Warfare-1, Warfare-2, Sensor-1, and Weaps-1 were occupied. He glanced across at Kapoor, who appeared to be sound asleep. Surely not, Michael thought. It was his first watch. Oh, well, he couldn’t worry about it, and if he got into trouble, he could always wake Kapoor.

The watch progressed, with Michael maintaining a cycle of Q amp;A with the command team as well as keeping regular contact with propulsion control as 387 slowly cleared Anjaxx innerspace at a steady if unspectacular 0.1-g acceleration. Not only was using serious amounts of thrust this close to heavily trafficked space unpopular, pinchspace jumps that deep inside Anjaxx’s gravity could produce unpredictable results. During the Second Hammer War back in ’14, the old Adamantine, hard-pressed by overwhelming Hammer forces, had been forced into a pinchspace jump deep inside Retribution VI’s gravity well and had been discovered only by accident by a passing Sylvanian patrol eighteen months later, out of driver mass and drifting in interstellar space 155 light-years from Sylvania. That can’t happen today, of course, Michael thought, thanks to the huge improvements made to pinchcomms since, but it was not to be recommended nonetheless.

Slowly, 387 approached the imaginary line marking the edge of Anjaxx innerspace, 150,000 kilometers from the Anjaxx planetary datum. Still wondering where Hosani had gotten to and concerned that Kapoor really looked as though he had gone to sleep, Michael got busy. Damn them, he decided; he would cope. For the umpteenth time, he double-checked the nav plan, taking particular care to ensure that the planned ship’s vector was precisely right for the pinchspace jump to Martinson Reef. He made Mother and the nav AI check independently of each other and ran the numbers himself. He was very relieved when all three of them agreed to the required twenty-five significant figures. He took a deep breath. It was time to get the OK from the captain, and with Kapoor still looking for all the world like he was unconscious, he was on his own.

He needn’t have worried. Ribot listened in silence and okayed the navplan without any comment. But Michael’s feeling of self-satisfaction was short-lived.

“What have you forgotten, Michael?” Kapoor inquired mildly from behind firmly closed eyes.

Shit, Michael thought. What have I forgotten? Think. Think. And it came to him.

“All stations, this is command. We will cross into Anjaxx nearspace in two minutes. As soon as we do, we will initiate a 5-g burn. That’ll put us at pinchspace escape velocity in time to jump as planned at 15:32. Command out.”

“Good boy. Keep the troops informed, and they’ll do the same for you.” Kapoor smiled. “And I’ll bet you thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

Michael laughed with embarrassment. “I must say I didn’t think you were, so that’s one I owe you.”

“You’re on.”

With two minutes to go, Ribot arrived. “Captain in command,” Fell announced in her most formal tones.

“Ignore me, Michael. Just do it all as normal.” Ribot sank into his seat directly in front of the massive command plot without another word.

“Roger, sir.”

The seconds ticked away. One final check with Fell and Asmari to make sure they were clear, and 387 was ready.

All of a sudden, it was as though 387 had been strapped to a massive jackhammer. The ship began to shake as the main propulsion used unimaginable amounts of power to turn tons of driver mass pellets into flaming torches of incandescent gas moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Michael felt