The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

Friday, September 3, 2399, UD

HWS Quebec-One, Xiang Reef

Commodore Monroe’s mouth tightened into a bloodless slash. Face grim, he stared at the command holovid. When his final rail-gun salvo ripped into the FedWorld merchant ship Betthany Market, he bared his teeth for a second. Satisfied, he sat back.

Monroe had to give credit where credit was due.

The captain of the Betthany Market had tried his best to escape from the trap. With merships exploding all across Xiang Reef, he had pushed his main engines far beyond their manufacturer’s limits; Monroe had expected the mership’s fusion power plants to lose containment. By some miracle of FedWorld engineering they had not, but nothing was going to help the doomed Betthany Market and her ill-fated crew. Fully loaded, sluggish, and unwieldy, the mership had no chance of evading a rail-gun salvo fired at close quarters, and Quebec-One had been so close that her optronics had picked out every last dent and scratch on the hard-worked mership’s hull.

In the end, Betthany Market died like all the rest of the merships ambushed by Monroe’s ships that bloody morning. Rail-gun slugs sliced through her thin plasteel hull. Punched deep into the ship, two slugs reached the engine room to release the enormous energy bottled up inside her fusion power plants. Microseconds later, the ship exploded into a gigantic ball of incandescent plasma that writhed away into the emptiness of deepspace.

The command team of Quebec-One sat silent around Monroe. They stared in horrified fascination at the command holovid. The mership had vanished. Only a gas cloud and a few shattered fragments of the ship remained; the cloud twisted away into nothing, cooling fast, its dance of death a fading memorial to mership and spacers now dead.

Monroe’s ships had executed the operation with brutal efficiency. Most of their victims knew nothing of the attack before death engulfed them. The hellish fires of runaway fusion plants consumed the few lifepods launched. The last witnesses to the latest in a long line of Hammer atrocities survived only a few seconds before they, too, were wiped out.

The operation had been easy. No, Monroe thought, it had been too easy. Twenty-seven merships destroyed in less than an hour. Cold-blooded murder was what it was.

Monroe broke the spell when the last traces of the Betthany Market disappeared. He had pushed his luck far enough; they should have been long gone by now. He turned to his chief of staff. “Time we were on our way. To all ships, immediate execute-”

The sensor officer’s voice broke in, urgent with alarm. “Sir, we have a positive gravitronics intercept. Designated track 220547. Stand by. . estimated drop bearing Red 3 Up 1. One ship. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector is nominal for Earth-FedWorld transit. Sir! This one’s not on any schedule. Military, sir. It has to be military.”

Monroe wasted no time. Every instinct told him his sensor officer was right. The new arrival must be a FedWorld warship. The Old Earth Alliance never patrolled deepspace this far out; the Xiang Reef gravitation anomaly was too remote. If it turned out to be an Alliance warship, bad luck; he needed to survive before he worried about that possibility.

“Designate track 220547 hostile,” Monroe barked. “Immediate to all ships, stand by rail-gun salvo. Targeting data to follow. Kraa’s blood! Sensors! Get me the drop data. .come on, sensors, come on! I need a drop time, position, and vector. Now, Kraa damn it!”

The sensor officer’s voice shook under the stress. “Stand by. . okay, sir. Here it comes. She’s close. Confirmed Red 3 Up 1 at 85,000 kilometers. Stand by. . targeting data confirmed and passed to all ships.”

“Roger.”

Monroe checked the command plot. Impatient, he drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. The rail-gun crews were taking too long to reload. He forced himself to sit still. Nothing he said or did was going to speed things up.

“Sir! All ships confirm valid firing solutions on the drop datum, full rail-gun salvos loaded, ready to engage.” His chief of staff ’s voice cracked in the heat of the moment.

Monroe wasted no time. “Command approved to fire!”

“All rail-gun salvos away, sir.”

“Roger that,” Monroe snapped. He forced himself to breathe normally, to ignore the iron bands that crushed his chest with sudden force. If his ships failed to destroy the new arrival the instant it dropped and it really was a FedWorld warship, they were all dead. He buried the thought. You ought to have more faith, he chided himself. A six-ship rail-gun attack would overwhelm the unfortunate ship.

Monroe allowed himself to relax a little. Quebec-One and her sister ships might be fitted with obsolete Buranan rail guns, but the engagement geometry weighed heavily in favor of the attackers.

Crucial to their chances, the target would drop close and broadside on to three of his ships; it would be the perfect ambush. Provided that his ship’s firing solutions were accurate, the tightly grouped swarms of platinum/iridium alloy slugs should sweep through the drop datum only seconds after the target dropped into normalspace. True, most of the slugs were destined to disappear into the void. That was the fate of almost all rail- gun slugs, but proximity had allowed his ships to tighten the swarm grouping to put more slugs on target. Monroe checked the command plot again. He liked what he saw. Quebec-One’s warfare officer predicted a first strike of more than three hundred slugs. Monroe smiled. The raw numbers looked good. Where the slugs might impact looked even better.

If the attack went according to plan, slugs from the first two salvos would hit where the armor thinned back from the bow. Seconds later, slugs from the third salvo should smash into the target toward its stern, the most vulnerable part of any warship. After it was hit there and hit hard, its chances of survival were close to zero. If everything went well, the final salvos would be redundant, their contribution limited to finishing off an already dying ship.

The seconds melted away with glacial slowness. Monroe struggled to keep his breath under control. The atmosphere in Quebec-One’s combat information center thickened until it threatened to choke him. Monroe cursed under his breath. He had seen action throughout the last war; he should be used to combat by now.

“Sir! Track 220547 is dropping. Confirm drop data nominal.” The sensor officer sounded ecstatic. He deserves to, Monroe thought. The man had done well under intense pressure. Targeting data from commercial-grade gravitronics were unreliable at best, but this time the system had worked and worked well. Monroe’s ships had solid firing solutions; the new arrival was condemned to drop right into the path of the oncoming rail-gun salvos. Without a miracle-and Monroe put no faith in miracles-the hapless ship was trapped. She would have little time to react before the massive rail-gun attack fell on her.

Commodore Monroe sat back and waited.

Friday, September 3, 2399, UD

FWSS Ishaq, pinchspace

Under strict instructions from Commander Pasquale, Fellsworth had wasted no time getting the warfare training department back on its feet. The routine weekly team meeting had been in full swing for over an hour when it was interrupted by the main broadcast announcing five minutes to the drop for the transit through the Xiang Reef.

Fellsworth knew when to quit. From long experience, she knew she could never compete with a pinchspace drop, and so she was not about to try. “Okay, folks. Take a break. We’ll reconvene once the drop’s over.”