The battle at the Moons of Hell

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