“God, is it only four minutes?” To Jaruzelska it felt like hours.
Oblivious to all else, Jaruzelska watched as the damage assessments flowed in. If she didn’t think too much about the human cost of it all, the news was good. The heavy cruisers Verity and Integrity and the light cruisers Cordoba and Camara had been damaged but were still assessed as combat-effective. The heavy escort Titov had been hit hard and probably was combat-ineffective. So, she thought, it’s really started.
“Sir, priority vidlink from 166. Will you take it?”
“Of course.”
Two seconds later the vidlink connected.
“Jaruzelska.”
The tortured face of Lieutenant Chen filled her neuronics as he made his request for help. Jaruzelska reviewed with mounting horror the damage and threat assessments commed through to the flag AI by 166 and 387.
“Chen, okay. Stop. I’ll do it,” she said, cursing herself for losing sight of the big picture to such an extent that she had forgotten the unequal struggle being waged by two of her ships. It was a classic example of why people were still in command, not AIs.
Her ships, her people, her responsibility.
She wasted no time, and in seconds the task group’s massive laser batteries had switched away from the New Dallas and the Shark to fill the void between the two light scouts and the onrushing missile salvo with a lethally focused curtain of light. The lasers first blinded and then shredded the missiles into pieces as their microfusion plants were turned into spectacular balls of rolling white- yellow light.
The threat to 166 and 387 was over.
With a final prayer that the two light scouts would get home safely, Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the Hammer ships.
As the cruisers switched their heavy antiship lasers back to New Dallas and Shark, the next round of damage assessments scrolled across Jaruzelska’s neuronics.
Titov was confirmed destroyed, the ship having erupted in an enormous ball of flame, probably as a result of a direct hit on her main engine fusion plant as it powered up to get the ship under way. The flotilla base’s fixed missile batteries and phased-array missile control radars had almost all been destroyed. Verity, Integrity, Cordoba, and Camara, no change: damaged but combat-effective.
The news from Hell Central was even better.
The administrative center of the Hell system was lightly defended and stood no chance against the four heavy and two light cruisers of Commodore Molefe’s task group, its fixed defenses wiped out in the first seconds of the attack. Two Hammer light scouts unfortunate enough to be caught alongside had fared no better. They had disintegrated as rail-gun slugs had ripped them apart, their fusion plants erupting in huge secondary explosions to send two shattered hulks spinning off into space. As they tumbled away, the hulls began to spit out a pathetically small cluster of lifepods, their characteristic double-pulsed orange strobes winking like demented fireflies; the international distress band was busy with radio beacons pumping out cries for help.
“Flag, flag AI. Shark combat-ineffective.”
“Flag, roger.” The light cruiser Shark; that was good. New Dallas could ill afford to lose her and her firepower. And it was a surprise. For all the awesome power of antiship lasers, they did not have a high kill probability against ships as large as light cruisers. Too big, too much armor, and, in this case, at 320,000 kilometers getting very close to the maximum effective range of the system. But the Shark had been turning, and the task group had been able to catch her side on where her armor was thinner. Good laser beam formation and tight coordination had done the rest. And for that she had the 387 and the 166 to thank, a debt of gratitude she hoped they would survive long enough to be repaid.
Jaruzelska sat back to watch the arrival of her second rail-gun salvo.
The Hammer’s last missile attack disintegrated around Michael and his scratch command team.
With 387’s short-range lasers largely inoperative and its chain guns overwhelmed, a few of the missile fragments made it through. The laser-shredded, heat-warped remains of the Hammer’s heavy missiles and their decoys smashed into 387 at over 280,000 meters per second, their kinetic energy strong enough to punch deep gashes in the ship’s armor. The ship’s hull shuddered as the last of its battered and torn reactive bow armor struggled to protect the inner hull.
But finally all was quiet, and for the first time in what seemed like hours the plot showed no immediate threats to the battered hulk that was 387. Michael slumped back in his seat, so tired that he wanted to crawl somewhere quiet and sleep. He forced himself back to the task at hand.
“Command, Mother. Shark combat-ineffective.”
Michael sat up. “Command, roger. Put it up.”
Michael and his team watched in awe as the holocams zoomed in on the huge bulk of the light cruiser Shark, one of the Hammer’s newest warships. Its bottomless black shape was riven along one side by a long gash, venting ship’s atmosphere to space; the humid air turned instantly to an ice cloud that was visible in 387’s low-light holocams as a scintillating plume writhing its way into nothingness. Then, as Michael watched, a secondary explosion racked the stricken ship, a huge cloud of yellow-red plasma boiling out of the hull.
“Jesus,” Michael muttered, suddenly conscious that he had a ship to command, a ship to get out of Hell nearspace with all onboard. It was now his personal responsibility to bring them to safety.
“Mother, Command. Main laser battery power status.”
“Seventy-five percent. I’ve switched targeting back to New Dallas, and 166 has done the same. We’re on a stern-crossing vector, so the angle of attack is very good. I am rerouting power from propulsion and will have both lasers back to 100 percent shortly.”
That was what Michael wanted to hear, and with the much simpler and more straightforward tactical situation firmly in Mother’s capable hands, he turned his mind to what had to be done to get 387 out of its current mess. First, he needed to talk to Chen, now senior officer of a very battered two-ship task group. Second, he needed an XO to look after getting the ship jump-worthy. Then he needed to make sure that Cosmo Reilly was getting on top of the enormous job of producing a ship capable of getting them home safely.
The comm to Chen was short and sharp, and Chen’s plan was simple: Keep lasers on New Dallas for as long as they could, make 166 and 387 jump-worthy, and then get the fuck out of the Hell system as soon as possible.
Direct orders from Admiral Jaruzelska, Chen said, and Michael saw no reason to argue. In the meantime, Chen was bringing 166 alongside to get his medics onboard to help clear 387’s backlog of casualties.
After a brief pause to watch as 387’s and 166’s lasers reignited the glowing red speck on New Dallas’s stern just outboard of her starboard heat dump, Michael commed the medics to expect help any time now. Then he commed the next most senior person left alive in the chain of command and, effective immediately, his new XO, Chief Harris from Warrant Officer Ng’s team, to meet him in the surveillance drone hangar.
Mother commed Michael as he and Chief Harris started their survey of the battered wreck that was 387.
“Command, Mother.”
“Command, go ahead.”
“Patch neuronics into primary holocam.”
“Roger, patching.”
Mother didn’t need to tell him where to look. What he saw staggered him.
