getting off-planet and safely home. He had paid a price for surviving. That much was obvious, a price that was part survivor’s guilt and part an intense obsession to get even with the Hammer.
Whenever the Hammers came up in conversation, Michael’s eyes spelled out what he really thought of them. The burning hate was obvious, the intensity impossible to hide. She needed to watch him, she reminded herself. A degree of hate was fine; she had no problem with that. It was necessary to do the job. God knew, she hated the Hammers, too, but a man who hated too much could endanger her ship and the lives of her crew. She was going to watch him closely until she knew where judgment stopped and blind hatred took over.
“Okay, team. I’m going walkabout.”
“Sir.”
The insistent demands of Eridani’s klaxon as it drove the crew to general quarters could not be ignored any longer. Michael reluctantly abandoned the safe, warm, dark place he had toppled into as soon as he had collapsed into his bunk.
Running on autopilot, he swung himself out of his bunk. Moving with practiced efficiency, he was into his space suit. Pausing only to grab his gloves and then his helmet, he was out of his cabin, pounding along a crowded corridor and then up a ladder to the combat information center. When he arrived, the place was bedlam as the rest of the command team arrived, some still struggling into suits. With Eridani’s usual efficiency, bedlam was replaced swiftly by quiet calm.
Michael quickly confirmed that his team was closed up and online. He sat back as the reports flowed in from the rest of the ship. Malik Aasha, the Eridani’s executive officer, was hounding and harrying the laggards to their posts. Finally it was done, and Aasha, an extremely tall, dark man with the sharp- edged face of his Somali forebears, was satisfied.
“Captain, sir,” Aasha reported formally, “the ship is at general quarters in ship state 1, condition zulu.”
“Good. Shut down artgrav and depressurize. All stations, depressurizing in one, so final suit checks. Dropping in two minutes. Hold on to your hats, folks. This could be a rough ride.”
Hell, Michael grumbled to himself. He understood why Lenski was depressurizing the ship before they dropped, but that meant being buttoned up in his combat space suit when his stomach did its usual backflip and triple somersault. Oh, well, he consoled himself, better a small accident inside his space suit than a big one outside. Normally, Eridani and every other ship in the Fleet maintained an internal pressure of 80 percent of normal with the oxygen levels raised to compensate. Even that translated into 8 tons per square meter pressing on the pressure hull, something one could do without when shoring up battle-damaged bulkheads.
When Eridani dropped, Michael and his team did not have time to worry about what lay ahead. They worked frantically to confirm that the threat plot looked much as it had when they had jumped out-system two hours earlier and in particular that no Hammer heavy cruiser was waiting for them as they dropped. Michael sighed with relief, pleased to see that the plot was unchanged and the potential targets they had identified from 90 million kilometers out were still pretty much where they had left them. The only difference was that this time the plot did not revert to a more comforting orange. It was dominated by an uncompromisingly angry mass of red vectors tagged by Mother as hostile force Tango Golf One. Those contacts were the primary threat to the Eridani, a mixed task group of heavy and light warships led by a single heavy cruiser, though at 102,000 kilometers, they were too far away to be an immediate problem.
“Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”
“Command, roger. Weapons?”
“Targets confirmed.”
“This is command. Launch missile salvo one.”
“Roger. Launching missile salvo one.”
With the tearing buzz of hydraulically powered dispensers ramming missiles into space, Eridani deployed her first salvo of Mambas, the antistarship missiles escorted by a cloud of decoys and active jammers driving away on pillars of searing white-blue light. Ahead lay their targets: four hapless Hammer merships hauling slowly out-system, ships the system commander unwisely had allowed to stray way too far out before jumping to the safety of pinchspace. Lenski had tasked two Mambas to each mership; the rest she kept back. She had other plans for them.
The Hammer task group did not sit back and watch the Eridani at work. Even as the Mambas hit home, with the doomed merships erupting into gigantic balls of red-white plasma as their main engine fusion plants lost containment, antiship lasers from the Hammer task group found the Eridani and were beginning to flay the ceramsteel armor off her starboard bow. Quick work, Michael thought as he scanned the data coming in from the AI that was monitoring the integrity of Eridani’s armor. Good work, too. The lasers were tightly grouped, with the Hammer’s master fire controller holding the beams steady on the target point on Eridani’s hull, forcing Lenski to start rolling the ship to minimize the damage to her forward armor.
Despite himself, Michael was impressed. The Hammer’s laser beam formation and targeting was better than anything Michael had seen reported in the technical intelligence summaries pushed out by Fleet. Not for the first time, he reminded himself not to take the Hammers for granted.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from hostile Tango Golf One. Target Eridani. Time of flight 2 minutes 12.”
In an instant Michael’s stomach knotted, the taste of sour bile rising up into his throat. He hated rail guns. Christ, with the Eridani barely 100,000 kilometers from the Hammer warships, it was going to be tight. He glanced forward to where Lenksi sat flanked by her two senior warfare officers. She did not move as the report was acknowledged. Michael turned back to the job at hand, his team watching intently as the sensor AI sorted through the mass of onrushing slugs in a desperate attempt to eliminate the decoys. To Michael’s horror, at one point during the planning, the command team had seriously considered riding out any rail-gun attack if the swarm geometry gave them a good chance of survival. Jesus Christ, he had thought, staring in horror as the idea was batted around. Survive a few Hammer rail-gun attacks and then see how you feel about that idea, he had said to himself.
In the end, Michael had not needed to object. Much to his relief, Lenski had killed the idea stone dead.
This Hammer rail-gun swarm was good. In a matter of seconds, four heavy cruisers from the Hammer task group had gotten a well-coordinated, tightly grouped rail-gun salvo away that left Eridani with absolutely nowhere to hide. Her only chance was to jump into pinchspace. Michael counted the clock down as Eridani’s missile crews worked frantically to get the next salvo away. The instant the missiles were deployed and on their way, joined by the missiles held back from the first salvo, their targets two 10,000-ton Diamond class light patrol ships running exposed on the edge of the task group, Lenski gave the order.
After barely two minutes in Hammer nearspace, the Eridani jumped, leaving behind the ionized remnants of four merships and two Diamond class light patrol ships fighting for their lives as the Eridani’s missiles fell on them.
The mood in Eridani’s combat information center was upbeat, not that anybody had any illusions about the mission they had just completed. Hit-and-run attacks made little difference to the strategic balance of the war. In truth, all they did was put the Hammer on notice that they weren’t going to have things all their own way while preparations for the invasion of the Hammer’s home planet moved ponderously forward. But Eridani was now officially blooded, and four Hammer merships had been destroyed and two light patrol ships had been attacked and probably damaged. All in all, it was a creditable tally for her first combat patrol.
After a while, with the ship safely in pinchspace, Michael slipped quietly out of the combat information center. He had mixed feelings. Yes, the Eridani had performed well; it was always good to hit the Hammer.
But there were some negatives from the day’s operation. First, the Hammers he had seen were a step above the rabble that had opposed them at Hell’s Moons-a big step, too. Something had changed, but what? Second, where were all the Hammer’s ships? If the Feds had come calling in force, it would have been all over in a matter of hours. The Hammers would simply not have had the ships to oppose a full-scale attack. So they were taking a
