The battle at the Moons of Hell

duty until 387 touched down on Hell-14, and that was over a day away before 387 would drift in to Hell-14 at a snail-like-he’d checked the navplan with Mother-5 kph.

There was absolutely no point hanging around. If things went pear-shaped, he’d know about it pretty quickly. He would take the longest, hottest shower he could bear, get some food inside him, and then get some badly needed sleep.

Sunday, October 18, 2398, UD

DLS-387, on Final Approach to Hell-14

Heart pounding and mouth dry, Michael woke with a start, for a moment completely lost. The gray plasfiber deck head above his bunk was no help as he tried to orient his tangled mind in the dark.

When he’d checked the time, he’d been astonished to see that he had slept for almost the full fourteen hours he’d given himself. And he’d slept through the shutdown of 387’s artificial gravity, something he’d never been able to do before. Must have needed the sleep, he thought with a grin as he pulled himself out of his bunk and into the 0-g shower before changing into a clean set of coveralls, grabbing some food, and hurtling into the combat information center.

There was no way he was going to miss 387’s arrival on Hell-14.

As he did that, he cursed as he remembered an unfinished vidmail to Anna. He would have to finish it later. He’d started it more than a week earlier, along with one for his father, not that they would see their vidmails until the punch-up with the Hammer was over.

He just hoped his father was all right, though God knew he would have no reason to be. The pain of not being able to talk to him, to tell him that Sam and Mom were all right and that if all went well they would all be home soon, cut deep into him.

And then there was Anna onboard Damishqui. Michael had a horrible feeling that she would be in the thick of it since that was what heavy cruisers were specifically built for. Even if the Feds had a technology edge over the Hammer, in the end a rail gun was a rail gun and there wasn’t a heavy cruiser that could take too many hits, heavily armored though it was. Michael had seen the holovids of a full swarm attack, the tiny slugs smashing into the bows of Fidelity, an old Arcturus class deepspace heavy cruiser, during the final Fleet acceptance trials of the new ultra-high-velocity Mark 56 rail-gun system.

It had not been a pretty sight. Michael and the rest of the audience of second-year cadets had winced as the iridium/ platinum alloy rail-gun slugs had smashed into the hapless cruiser at better than 1,000 kilometers a second, her bows disappearing behind a firestorm of exploding ceramsteel armor, the outermost layer of high-explosive reactive armor able to deflect only grazing impacts. Less than a microsecond after impact, each slug had turned to plasma, an incandescent mass of ionized gas cutting a tunnel deep into the cruiser’s heavy frontal armor. A few microseconds later, the slug had done its job, its enormous kinetic energy, equivalent to more than a ton of conventional explosive, completely transformed by the ship’s armor into heat, with the resultant thermal explosion blowing a broad flat crater deep into the cruiser’s bows.

The cruiser was doomed. Slug after slug blasted away its armor, ceramsteel spewing off into space in colossal swirling clouds of gas until huge sections of its bows had been stripped down to the inner titanium hull. Then it was the turn of the second salvo, just a matter of time until a slug got lucky and scored a direct hit on the exposed inner hull, with the tiny mass of plasma blasting into the ship to smash indiscriminately through everything in its way. The damage was almost unimaginable as the shock wave from the slug spalled shards of metal off ship and equipment alike to drive a cone of destruction through the ship. Michael shivered as he tried not to think about what a slug would do to any human unlucky enough to be in its way.

If the plasma ball survived long enough, and some did, it would explode out of the hull to disappear into deepspace, its lethal job done as all around it its swarm siblings finished the job of turning the inside of a once- proud ship into a shambles of molten metal, shattered equipment, and ionized gas, the ship’s hull visibly rippling as wave after wave of energy release shocked its fabric. You didn’t have to be a genius to see why bow-on penetrations were so deadly and why all warships had heavy frontal armor many meters thick.

Michael had to give himself a mental shake.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. On the plus side, slugs worked well only at relatively short ranges and in large swarms, mixed in with plenty of decoys. They could maneuver no better than a shotgun pellet, and the Hammers’ swarm geometry computers were as poor as the Feds’ AIs were good at winnowing out slugs from decoys and choreographing the maneuvers needed to get ships out of the way of an incoming attack. Even better, the Hammer’s rail guns had a muzzle velocity of only 778 kilometers a second, and their rail-gun slugs were slightly smaller. But on the minus side, Hammer decoy technology was improving, and that made picking the slugs out of the incoming swarm increasingly difficult.

But all things considered, Damishqui should be all right. No properly handled Fed warship would ever have to withstand what the Fidelity had endured. Damishqui had very good close-in defenses, a carefully integrated triple layer of lasers, missiles, and chain guns, so she should have no trouble handling whatever the Hammer could throw at it. That was the theory, anyway, and at the rational level, Michael believed it. But at the emotional level the thought of Anna on the receiving end of a serious Hammer rail-gun swarm made his guts knot.

As he hung unnoticed at the back of the combat information center, he comforted himself with the thought that at least Anna wasn’t in a light scout like 387 completely on its own millions of kilometers inside Hammer space. The trials that had destroyed the Fidelity also had targeted a light scout. The holovid footage showed the ship literally being gutted by a single slug coming in at an angle steep enough to defeat the armor’s best efforts to absorb the slug’s impact, hitting just where the armor thinned back from the bow and releasing enough energy to blow the hull apart. Not a pretty sight and one that rumor had it was shown to all prospective light scout captains to remind them why they should stay well away from rail-gun-fitted opposition. And here they were, deep in Hammer nearspace thick with rail-gun-fitted warships and, what was more, for the second time in a matter of weeks.

Michael dismissed the thought that it might happen to them and turned his mind to the command plot, with Ribot switching the massive holovid over to 387’s aft-mounted holocams. What they showed was the stuff of nightmares.

Every detail of the shattered, twisted surface of Hell-14 was clearly visible. Job done and done well in Mother’s opinion. The Krachov shields, now switched from passive to active star-simulation mode to defeat Hammer holocams searching for stars occulted by a stealth ship, had opened out to cover 387’s final approach. She now was only 500 meters above the dust-filled depression that would be her hiding place until the operation was complete, closing in at a shade under 1.4 meters per second, viciously sharp ridges surrounding her landing site, reaching up as if to grab the ship.

The combat information center was deathly quiet; the entire crew watched as the dusty gray-black surface crept closer. So intense was their concentration that Michael visibly jumped when Mother triggered a final brief main engine burn to bring 387 to a dead stop, with the efflux driving plumes of ancient dust writhing up into the sky and just as quickly vanishing from sight.

“Hope it really does resemble a meteorite strike like it’s supposed to,” Michael whispered to Warrant Officer Ng, who was standing silently beside him. A burn that close to the moon’s surface wouldn’t be missed by the Hammer’s sensors.

“We’re fucked if it doesn’t, that’s for sure,” Ng muttered.

So precise had been its final burn, 387 hung motionless for a few seconds only meters above the surface.

All around her, massive rock walls rose hundreds of meters from the shallow basin, their faces shimmering in the low-light holovid display, splintered spines of rock etched sharply against a dazzling star-studded sky, the dirty gray-black cliff faces fractured by huge cracks. The place was completely alien and totally dead. Hostile, harsh, and utterly pitiless, Michael thought. They were a very long way from home, and all around them were the forces of the most ruthless regime in human history. Michael knew full well that they wouldn’t get any second chances. He