many hulls into space at the same time. Suddenly it all made sense; this was why the
Hundreds of ships or not, it still did not make sense. Comdur’s defenses, backed up by the Fleet units now getting under way, would chop the attackers to pieces. It did not matter how many Hammers there were. It was only a matter of time.
He looked again. There was another odd thing. When the Hammer ships had dropped-they had dropped a long way out-the Hammers had launched a missile salvo, but it had been small. The tightly grouped formation undoubtedly was the usual deceptive mix of Eaglehawks bundled with active decoys and jammers, preceded by what looked like a poor copy of the Fed’s Krachov shroud. Their version of the Krachov might not be up to Fed standards, but the thick mass of tiny disks was doing a good enough job of deflecting the intense barrage of laser fire being thrown at the missile salvo by Comdur’s defensive platforms, encasing the salvo in what looked like a swarm of brilliantly lit scintillating diamonds. Michael looked across at Baker questioningly.
Baker shrugged his shoulders. “Strange. Never seen anything like this before,” he muttered, obviously puzzled. “This is something new. Wonder what the rabble are up to now.”
They got the answer an instant later. The missiles exploded as one, a single fleeting blue-white flash that was so fast, so transient, that Michael was not even sure he had seen it. The missiles were gone, leaving only thin spheres of ionized gas to mark their passing. Then came the awful sound of radiation alarms, their racket bouncing off the walls of the rock-cut passageway.
Baker went white. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Oh, no. It can’t be,” he whispered, his voice cracking. Michael stared. The man was beginning to panic. Why? he thought desperately. What was going on?
Then the space mines standing in the way of the Hammers blew, radiation-overloaded fission warheads filling the entire sector with thousands of brilliant blue-white balls of flame shot through with scarlet-red threads. An instant later, they too vanished, leaving only tenuous balls of ionized gas expanding into nothingness.
“Oh, Jesus,” Baker croaked to himself as Michael strained to hear what he was saying. “Intense gamma radiation flux. Has to be. Those damn things are supposed to be fail-safe, for God’s sake.”
Baker’s obvious fear was infectious, and Michael felt an ice-cold dread beginning to roll over him. “Sir! What is it? Tell me!”
Baker’s hand went up. “One sec. I need to isolate a single warhead detonation from the datastream so I can see the weapon-specific radiation profile, so hang on. . Oh, Holy Mother. Oh, my God. It is.” Baker’s voice trembled with shock. “It bloody well is.”
“Is what, sir?” Michael asked desperately.
“Antimatter. Shit. Intense gamma radiation, double spike profile. Textbook example. First spike at 84 attoseconds, second one around 6 nanoseconds, but smaller. All gamma radiation. Oh, God help us all. We are screwed. Those clever sons of bitches. Goddamn it, who would have thought?” Baker shook his head, his voice an uncomfortable blend of grudging admiration and shocked disbelief.
“Sir. I don’t understand,” Michael said urgently, struggling to understand what Baker was talking about.
“Antimatter warheads. They’ve worked out how to weaponize antimatter. We’ve always thought it was too difficult.”
“Oh, shit!” Michael was stunned, the fear of something he did not fully understand pulling at him. Physics had never been one of his strong suits, but he knew enough about antimatter to know that even a tiny amount coming into contact with normal matter would release a prodigious amount of energy. With a sinking heart, he turned his attention back to BattleNet.
Out in Comdur nearspace, the tactical situation went from bad to catastrophic.
A second Hammer missile salvo followed the first. It was small, too, a tightly packed cluster of Eaglehawk missiles, decoys, and jammers. Ten thousand kilometers short of the nearest space battle station, the only thing left standing between the oncoming Hammers and Comdur, the salvo exploded in a single intense flash. Then, to Michael’s horror, the battle station’s armor turned white-hot and started to boil off, writhing jets of ceramsteel plasma lancing out into space, the battle station itself starting an almost imperceptibly slow roll out of station. Then the third salvo was on its way in, but this time the salvo was huge. The missile swarm, thousands and thousands strong, drove through the gap blown in Comdur’s outer defenses, past the dying battle station, and toward the Fed ships coming out to meet the oncoming Hammer attack.
Michael watched hypnotized by the awful sight. He could barely breathe. Something terrible was about to happen.
The missiles closed in on the Fed ships. One by one, missiles began to die under a hail of defensive fire. Missiles and lasers weeded out the decoys to hack missiles into shattered pieces of tumbling wreckage.
Baker whistled in disbelief as he watched. “How the hell are they doing that?” he muttered.
“What?” Michael asked.
“Maintaining warhead integrity. How do they stop the warheads from exploding even though the missiles have been shredded around them? They should fail, for God’s sake. Shit,” he added despairingly. “We have got a lot to learn, that’s bloody obvious.”
Not all the missiles died. Closing in past 10,000 kilometers, the survivors erupted in a single tightly coordinated flash that seemed to vanish even before it appeared. The Fed ships accelerating out hard to meet the Hammer attack began to die as the double pulse of gamma radiation turned their armor first white-hot and then into a seething mass of boiling ceramsteel spewing out and back to envelop the ships in death shrouds of white plasma. Deep inside the ships, spacers followed their ships into death as the wall of gamma radiation punched impulse shock waves through the armor and into the inner titanium hulls, vicious shards of metal spalling off to cut spacers into bloody pulp. Those spared the slashing of razor-sharp metal started to die a slow death from radiation poisoning as their ships’ grossly overloaded quantum traps collapsed, gamma radiation sleeting through unprotected bodies.
Then the Hammers jumped.
It was over.
Michael and Baker stood unmoving, silent, stunned by the horror of it all, their neuronics laying it out in pitiless detail. Michael could hardly get his mind around the list of ships dying right in front of his eyes, ships from every class in the Fleet. With them died any hope that this war could be brought to a quick end by an invasion of the Hammers’ home planet using overwhelming force.
Hope flared. He was wrong. Not every class in the Fleet was on the rack.
“Sir!” Michael cried urgently.
“What?” Baker replied flatly, all hope ground out of him by the brutally effective Hammer attack.
“Sir! Don’t you see? Where are the planetary assault vessels? There’s not one in-system. Not one!”
Baker stared for a moment. “By God, Helfort. You are right. How could I have missed it?” His voice rose sharply with excitement. “They’ve missed them. Let me check. . yes, by God! They’re out doing drop and launch exercises with the marines in deepspace and won’t be back until next week. Jesus! Lucky? That’s beyond lucky. That’s a miracle; that’s what that is.”
With an obvious effort, Baker got himself under control. “Look. I’d better go. There’s work to be done.” Baker paused. “Now, Helfort, listen to me.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve said some stuff I shouldn’t have said. I’m with the Fleet Advanced Projects Unit, so I know things that most people don’t. I should have kept my mouth shut. So I’m going to classify everything we’ve talked about as top secret and put a neuronics block on it. Okay?”
Michael nodded. He was not going to argue with the man. “Do it, sir.” He paused for a moment. “Okay, sir. Go ahead. I’ve enabled access to my neuronics.”
“Thanks. . right. That’s done. Now, get back to your ship. Remember this, Helfort. Helfort!” Baker took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Helfort! Listen to me. This isn’t over. It’s going to take a bit longer than we thought, that’s all. Believe that and you’ll be fine. Got it?”
“Sir.” Michael’s voice was ash-dry.
“Good. Get back to your ship. Go. Now!”
Michael turned and ran as though the Devil himself were after him.
Nine point six light-years from Comdur and 75 million kilometers out from Terranova, home planet of the
