The battle at the Moons of Hell

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.