The battle at the Moons of Hell

form. The doughnut formation was exactly what it sounded like. After the launch and second stages burned out, the missiles would open out into a thick ring of missiles around an open center, with the attack axis running right through the middle of the hole. As the range shortened, the missiles would fire their third-stage maneuvering engines to collapse the doughnut inward onto the Fed ships, accelerating fiercely as they closed. The do-form was standard Hammer tactics for antistarship missile attacks, and Jaruzelska was not surprised to see it coming at her. It was exactly what the THREATSUM had predicted. Well done, boys and girls at Fleet intelligence, she thought.

That was fine up to a point. They had simmed such attacks to death, so Jaruzelska had little to do but sit back and watch as her warships closed in to a tight, closely packed ring, the ships’ heaviest armor facing outward at the approaching missiles. In a missile-only attack, it was a good defensive formation, although it took only one ship in the ring to fumble its defense and missiles would slip past to smash directly into the thin upper armor of ships in the rest of the ring. Not for nothing was the formation considered a great test of mutual trust, Jaruzelska thought.

But despite all the sims, facing one for real was a very different matter, as the fist of fear and tension that gripped her stomach proved.

All of a sudden, the tactical plot erupted as the Hammer missiles reached the maximum effective range of the task group’s medium-range area defense missiles. In seconds, the command plot was thick with tracks as missiles streaked out, eating up the 50,000-kilometer gap at better than 330,000 meters per second.

Barely more than two intensely frightening minutes later and with hundreds of missiles and countless decoys and jammers expended, the Hammer attack was over.

But not without cost.

A power failure on an overloaded weapons power fusion plant deprived Damishqui of an entire battery of close-range defensive lasers just as flag AI handed over two Hammer missiles that somehow had made it through the outer defensive cordon wrongly classified as decoys, and as such well down the pecking order, for the attention of Damishqui’s close-in weapons. The belated efforts of Damishqui’s chain guns had been too late to destroy the missiles, and despite her enormous bulk, Damishqui had shuddered as the first missile hit home, the armored warhead combined with the missile’s massive kinetic energy punching effortlessly through the upper armor, cutting right through the ship before venting its fury to space. The result was nine compartments breached, four dead, and twenty-seven injured, but no mission-critical systems degraded. The second missile had scraped through, impacting Damishqui’s bows at a shallow angle almost exactly where the armor was thickest. Apart from an enormous gouge across Damishqui’s hull, the damage was minimal.

Two missiles made Al-Jahiz suffer, though not close to the extent to which 387 and 166 had suffered. Losses on that scale in a ship the size of Al-Jahiz would have been unthinkable.

With its warhead’s circuitry fried by lasers and a close-range antimissile missile ripping its third stage apart in a brilliant flash of blue-white, the tattered fragments of a single Hammer missile had squeezed past the task group’s defenses to crash into Al-Jahiz’s bow armor. But the second missile got a better result.

A serious datastream error allowed the missile to get lost in the flood of data being handled by the task group’s AIs, an error that in theory couldn’t happen but did, one of the hazards of volume defense using laser-based high-speed datastreams to shuffle information between ships. The missile slid down a gap between Zuhr and Searchlight before crashing into Al- Jahiz, the warhead reaching into the ship to destroy an auxiliary fusion plant, with the massive explosion shaking Al-Jahiz bodily as the blast vented to space. A few anxious moments followed until the warship’s damage control crews sealed off the damage and reported no mission abort problems. Considering the enormous forces unleashed when a magnetic plasma containment bottle ruptured, casualties were relatively light at nine dead and sixty-six injured.

As Jaruzelska ran her eyes across the final damage assessments, she was relieved to see that the rest of the task group had gotten off lightly. Any missiles that had made it past the area antimissile defenses had been ripped apart by the carefully crafted layers of close-in point defense weapons systems, short-range missiles, then antimissile lasers, and finally, for last-ditch defense, chain guns. Apart from Blue- fish, which had lost its long-range search radar to an inert missile, the only damage suffered was from missile fragments chewing up small sections of hull armor.

The Hammers’ next effort turned out to be a total waste of ordnance. Close to half a million rail-gun slugs fired from extreme long range in three separate salvos gave the flag AI enough time to calculate vectors to enable the task group to slide effortlessly out of the way. In the end, it was all a bit of an anticlimax. The relief in the flag combat data center was reflected in a sudden upsurge of nervous chatter as the task group maneuvered to allow the slugs to pass harmlessly clear.

As the task group moved relentlessly in, Jaruzelska sat and watched, grim-faced and silent, as her attack ground the Hammer forces into dust. It didn’t take long, and then it was all over. Rear Admiral’s Pritchard’s two bases and his twenty-strong flotilla were no more, their only monuments blackened, slowly tumbling wrecks of ships. Hell nearspace was thick with the orange anticollision lights of rescue and recovery craft as they started the long process of gathering in the scores of lifebots spewed into space by the stricken ships.

What came next would be the Hammer’s last throw of the dice, a moderately serious missile attack compared to their first effort, which even she would call serious. Jaruzelska’s neuronics scrolled through the list of incoming attacks. The report showed seven missile salvos on their way in from the New Dallas task group, thousands of missiles in all. They wouldn’t be as easy to avoid as the rail-gun swarms had been. Jaruzelska sucked her teeth.

The command plot was not a pretty sight as it tracked the onrushing salvos.

Not for the first time that day, Jaruzelska cursed her luck that five Hammer heavies had chosen that morning to drop in-system. In all the sims they had done, it was not far off the worst-case scenario, and it was only the desperate attack by 387 and 166 that had diffused the threat they posed. Also, they carried the new Eaglehawk antistarship missile, not obsolete Mohawks. By Fed standards, the Eaglehawk was still a relatively crude piece of engineering, but it was a big improvement on its predecessor. It was faster, had a much improved terminal guidance system, had good antijamming capability, and was topped with a high-gain shaped-charge warhead: a very nasty piece of work and definitely not to be taken for granted.

But there was some good news.

The salvos were well separated and minutes apart. There was only one threat axis, and Hammer ship- launched missiles had no better off-bore capability than did Fed ship-launched missiles. That meant Jaruzelska could place her sixteen cruisers in a loose wall, the ships in two tiers in line abreast, bows and bow armor facing the missiles coming at them but positioned close enough to provide overlapping fields of fire even if the Hammers had been smart enough to focus their salvos onto one ship or maybe two. If the Hammers went for two ships, and that was the flag AI’s prediction based on what she’d observed so far, that left plenty of firepower in reserve. The greatest risk was that the Hammer would be smart enough to go for only one of the light cruisers and lucky enough to pick one that she had been stupid enough to leave exposed and unsupported on one flank.

That was something she had no intention of doing.

“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. Two minutes.”

“Here we go. A small one to get us started and then some serious stuff,” Jaruzelska muttered.

And then, in a flash, Verity’s missiles were upon them, every one targeting Al-Jahiz as she rode at the center of the task group. But the combined firepower of sixteen cruisers was more than enough to rip the missiles out of space, leaving Al-Jahiz to be troubled only by scattered fragments of missile debris, with the impacts triggering only tiny puffs of reactive armor.

Jaruzelska settled her breathing down. Her turn now, she thought, and a short pause in the action while her missiles fell on the unfortunate ships of the New Dallas group.

“Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas group in one minute.”

“Flag, roger.”

Jaruzelska watched as the missiles from her ships, their arrival carefully timed and their final vectors