The battle at the Moons of Hell

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 was 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.

Michael couldn’t see much, and what he could see did not look good.

There was very little left of Ribot, Hosani, and Holdorf, only a few pathetic shreds of shattered flesh and pieces of heat-seared gray-black space suit slowly turning back to orange as combat chromaflage settings wore off. On the port side, he recognized Armitage, whose suit looked surprisingly intact, though the body was slumped over at an awkward angle. Armitage was being ignored by the medics, so she must be dead, Michael thought without emotion.

As he pushed past the shattered chaos that once had been 387’s combat information center, he could see no sign of Kapoor. Must have been in the hangar, poor bastard, he thought.

It took all the willpower he possessed, but finally Michael was settled in the wardroom, itself badly damaged both by the slug as it had torn through one bulkhead en route to the combat information center and by the shock from Weapons Power Charlie going up on the other side of the heavily armored bulkhead. Thank God for blast venting, Michael thought, and for the designers and engineers who had put it in 387.

As Mother ran Michael through the tactical situation, his heart sank as his badly battered brain slowly came to grips with what was happening to 387 and, even worse, what was about to happen. With much of the ship’s forward armor now stripped, most of her short-range laser capability destroyed, and her long-range lasers degraded by the loss of Weapons Power Charlie, even six missiles and their attendant decoy swarm would be a handful.

Despite the pain and after a careful look at the tactical plot, Michael knew instinctively what had to be done.

He commed Chen. 166’s skipper was the boss now that Ribot was gone, so it would be his call.

Jaruzelska watched the command plot, her thoughts a mix of professional satisfaction and private pity.

No matter how hard she tried, she could never take any pleasure from the spectacle of spacers dying in the pitiless hard vacuum of space, whether they were Hammers or not. She sat back in her chair struggling to get comfortable, her combat space suit heavy and uncooperative. Christ on the Cross, she thought, I’m getting too damn old for this sort of thing. She watched in silence as the task group’s first rail-gun salvo finished its 150,000- kilometer journey to drop a hailstorm of platinum/iridium death onto the Hammer’s fixed defenses and the hapless ships of Rear Admiral Pritchard’s flotilla as they struggled to get going.

Jaruzelska hissed through clenched teeth as the slugs smashed home, the surface of Hell-8 disappearing behind a roiling, churning mass of pulverized dirt. The Hammer ships, their shapes sharply black against massed stars, were spewing clouds of ceramsteel and reactive armor into space.

“Caught the bastards asleep, Martin.” There was no triumph in Jaruzelska’s voice.

Her chief of staff nodded somberly. “True. But I doubt that even our ships could get going from a cold start in ten minutes, never mind four.”