To his credit, Commodore Perkins did not waste a second. His orders were brutally simple. “Close the enemy and engage.” In an instant, Perkins’s carefully choreographed attack on the Hammer space battle station, now safely tucked away behind a solid wall of Hammer capital ships, dissolved into the freewheeling chaos of a close- quarters space battle.
Lenski did not hesitate, either. As Eridani deployed its first salvo of Mamba antistarship missiles, she pitched the ship violently down and to the left in a frantic effort to get clear of the rail-gun salvos the Hammers would be launching at any second. Until she and every other ship had opened out, the task force-tightly grouped for what Commodore Perkins had intended to be a single surgical strike through the Hammer’s outer defenses-was a sitting duck. Forewarned by gravitronics intercepts, the Hammer ships were working furiously to slew their ships onto the threat axis to allow them to get their rail-gun salvos away; their missiles would be close behind.
Michael’s heart was in his mouth. There would be little time to maneuver clear, little time to hack enough rail-gun slugs out of space to neutralize the Hammer attack.
“Command, Mother. Rail-gun salvos inbound. Targets Damishqui, Resplendent, Renown, Secular.”
“Command, roger. Sensors?”
“Rail-gun vectors confirmed, sir.” Michael’s voice was ash-dry. This was looking bad; it felt uncomfortably like Ishaq all over again. Michael shivered; it was pure luck the Hammer ships had been pointing in the wrong direction when the Fed ships had dropped. If they had been pointing at the drop datum. .
When it came, the Hammer’s opening salvo was a good one and well targeted. It took only seconds to close the gap and smash into the four heavy cruisers at the center of the Fed task group. The slugs punched huge holes in the ships’ ceramsteel armor, with their kinetic energy transformed in nanoseconds into enough heat to blow great craters in the bows of the heavy cruisers.
As the clouds of ionized armor cleared from around the ships, Michael checked the status of Damishqui. He was relieved to see that she had weathered the storm, though her bows had been deeply scarred by the attack, impact craters still spewing white-hot clouds of ionized ceramsteel armor. Now it was the Hammer’s turn to receive; the task group’s rail-gun salvo was inflicting serious damage on the Hammer starships. Fed rail guns threw a heavier slug that was almost half again as fast as the Hammer’s, each slug delivering energy equal to a ton of TNT onto an area smaller than the end of a little finger. Already, one Hammer light escort was pulling out of line, her hull opened up by a secondary explosion, probably from an auxiliary fusion plant powering one of her weapons systems.
“Command, Mother. Missiles inbound. Estimate 6,000 missiles plus decoys. Targets not known. Time to target eighteen seconds.”
Oh, Jesus, Michael thought desperately, this is it. He and the rest of Eridani’s sensors team could do no more. They could not keep up with the enormous avalanche of information that was pouring in from the task group’s sensors; they were now totally in the hands of the battle management AI in Damishqui, totally dependent on its interpretation of the mass of data being processed by the sensor AIs in the task group’s ships. Putting one’s life in the hands of an AI might be a necessary evil, but it was never something that Michael-or any other spacer, come to that-much enjoyed. When AIs messed up, they tended to do it in spades. Then the tsunami of Hammer Eaglehawk missiles was on them, with the Eridani’s close-in weapons working desperately to keep out the fifty or so that had picked it as a target. The vibration coming up through the deck shook Michael’s chair as Eridani let go with everything she had. Defensive lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns all worked in a last desperate attempt to hack down the missiles that had clawed their way through the antimissile screen put up by the cruisers.
“All stations, stand by missile impact.”
Michael braced himself.
The attack hit home. Eridani’s last-ditch defenses had smashed most of the Hammer missiles into useless junk, leaving only broken fragments of hardened ceramsteel falling on her bows like iron rain. Even so, six got through, their shaped-charge warheads punching deep into Eridani’s forward armor, blowing great gouts of yellow-red gas into space. The ship was bucking and heaving as shock wave after shock wave ripped through it, the artgrav struggling to keep up.
A few terrible seconds later the missile attack was over, and for one awful moment there was complete silence. Then there was bedlam as the damage reports began to flow in. To Michael’s relief, there were no casualties; the damage had been limited. The Hammer missiles had all hit well forward, and a quick check with the remote holocams showed Michael that Eridani’s heavy frontal armor had done what it was supposed to do. Her bows looked like a mad giant had run amok, pickax in one hand, blowtorch in the other, leaving six gaping craters vomiting white-hot gas into space. Despite the missiles’ best efforts, Eridani’s inner hull had not been breached, though the Hammer antiship lasers were following up the missile strike by probing the impact sites for any weak spots. Lenksi had already reacted to the threat, ordering Eridani’s Krachov shroud generators to full power; the tiny disks designed to shield Eridani from laser attack were spewing out in the thousands. Another quick check confirmed that Damishqui had weathered the storm, though she, too, had been punished heavily up forward, her bows speckled with red-white hot spots, the remnants of multiple missile strikes; ghostly streams of ionized gas still were spewing out into space from the impact craters.
The light patrol ship Marie Curie and the heavy scout Kaminski had not been so lucky. The two ships were finished. Slowly they fell out of formation, spitting lifepods in all directions, their orange strobes double-flashing desperate calls for help. Michael’s heart went out to them. He remembered all too well the dreadful thudding jolt as his lifepod was blasted clear of the dying Ishaq.
The two Fed ships were doomed. Hammer missiles loitering behind the main attack accelerated hard to finish them off, the ships’ hulls carpeted with the red-white flashes of warheads punching deep before detonating. Michael flinched as without any warning the two Fed starships blew up almost as one, searing blue-white flashes announcing the loss of main engine fusion plants. He hoped the two heavy scouts nominated as rescue ships- Sirius and Pavonis-would have enough time to recover the pods. He checked the relative vectors of the lifepods and the oncoming Hammers. God help them, he thought. It would be a close thing.
“So, team,” Lenski said, her tone casual to the point of disinterest. “The big question now is what Commodore Perkins is going to do next.”
The combat information center was silent. Eridani’s spacers knew a rhetorical question when they heard one. For his part, Michael knew the answer he wanted to hear. He hoped like hell Perkins would jump and jump soon, but what he thought did not matter. All that mattered was what Perkins wanted, and for the next two minutes or so the Feds had the tactical advantage. The Achilles’ heel of all Hammer warships was their inferior rail-gun and missile salvo rates. Perkins could get a second rail-gun and missile salvo away well before the Hammers could reply with theirs. During that time, all the Hammers could throw at him would be antiship lasers, and they would not be on target long enough to burn through the ceramsteel armor and breach the inner hulls. If everything went well, the Fed task group’s second salvo would hit Hammer ships already severely damaged by the first attack well before they could respond.
Michael kept one eye on the command plot, the other on his team. There was not much for them to do. The immediate threats were obvious, and no other Hammer ships were close enough to be a problem. In any case, the blizzard of jamming and spoofing, all mixed in with clouds of active decoys, made the situation so chaotically difficult to interpret that only the task group’s sensor AIs could work out what was going on, and even they were struggling. All he and his team could hope to do was pick up any obvious mistakes and, apart from that, trust to the AIs to do the job without screwing up too badly.
The opening Fed salvos smashed home. It was a well-coordinated and brutally effective attack, missiles and rail-gun slugs arriving so close together that the Hammers’ close-in defenses were completely overwhelmed. Ship after ship disappeared behind massive clouds of ionized ceramsteel as missiles and slugs blasted huge holes in frontal armor. Michael was disappointed to see the Hammer heavy cruisers emerge apparently still operational, though their bows and flanks-a mass of white-hot impact craters-bore witness to the rough treatment they had
