The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

When Michael cut the comm, Bienefelt threw her massive bulk into the seat alongside his; suited up, she was enormous. In a cruiser, two senior warfare officers would sit alongside the captain. How things had changed; a junior lieutenant and a petty officer were now the complete command team for a light cruiser supported by a scratch team of sensor operators badly overdue for refresher training. Well, he said philosophically to himself, it would just have to do.

“Guys all okay?” Michael asked as he struggled into his combat space suit.

“Strapped in, suited up, sir.”

“Right. Patch your neuronics into Prime. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”

“Command, Prime.”

“Command,” Michael replied.

“All combat systems nominal, at alert zero, all sensors online and nominal.”

“Command, roger.” Michael knew he was being overly careful, but he would be damned if he allowed his new command to drop into normalspace unprepared for the worst.

Adamant dropped. There was the usual microsecond lurch as the universe turned itself inside out. Michael breathed out slowly as the holovids showed nothing more threatening than curtains of brilliant stars hanging in glorious confusion. For a moment it took his breath away. He quickly identified Terranova’s sun, at a rough guess 200 million kilometers away. Not the best drop in Fleet history, but a long way from the worst and close enough to make it home.

He commed his scratch crew. “All stations, command. Sitrep. We’re home, Terranova’s only 95 million kilometers away, and the threat plot is green. Prime’s contacting Terra-nova control, and I’ll let you know what they want us to do. In the meantime, we’ll start heading in. Command out.”

Michael sat back. The prospect of a long hack in-system was depressing enough. A long hack as captain of a ship with Duricek as chief engineer was even more depressing. Well, he consoled himself, at least they were going home. Maybe he would-

All thought of the pleasures of home leave disappeared in the face of an urgent shout from the operator on gravitronics. Michael was impressed to see the young spacer beating Prime to it by a full second.

“Sir, positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Green 3 Up 1. Two vessels. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Designated hostile tracks 500501 and 502. The vector’s all wrong, though, sir. Goes nowhere near Terranova.”

Goddamn it, Michael thought. Hammers. Had to be. Without thinking, he commed the ship to general quarters before he remembered that he had no crew to send. He commed the klaxon off.

“All stations, command. Sorry about that. We’ve got inbound traffic, and the traffic plot from Terranova control suggests it’s hostile. So visors down. Prime and I will fight the ship. You guys hold on. Engineering. Stand by to maneuver. Command out.”

Michael closed his eyes; he put the command plot up on his neuronics, bringing the range in until the angry red of the gravitronics intercept overwhelmed Adamant’s green vector. The rest of the plot was empty, nothing but blackness. Michael’s stomach lurched. They were completely alone. If the incoming ships were Hammers-and they almost certainly were-they could only be heavy cruisers, and he could not do what any sane captain of a battle-damaged ship manned by a scratch crew would do: jump, and jump now.

But he could not. Michael cursed his fate. With a suspect nav AI, jumping to safety was not an option.

No, the Adamant was stuck in normalspace. She would have to fight it out or die in the process.

“Prime, command. Mission priority is destruction of hostile tracks 500501 and 502, second priority own-ship defense. You have missile and rail-gun launch authority. Fire when ready.”

“Prime, roger. Mission priority is destruction of hostile tracks 500501 and 502, second priority own-ship defense.”

If responsibility for saving the Adamant and her scratch crew weighed heavily on Prime’s virtual shoulders, she did not let it show. Her voice was calm and measured. “Prime, roger. I have missile and rail-gun launch authority. Stand by. Command, I have a good drop datum on tracks 500501 and 502. Estimate drop point at Green 2 Up 1, range 40,000 kilometers. Deploying missiles now. Stand by rail-gun salvo.”

Adamant’s combat information center filled with the racket of hydraulic rams dumping a full missile salvo overboard. Prime throttled the missiles back, the salvo accelerating slowly toward the datum and opening out into a ring so that the Hammer ships would face missiles coming from all directions at once. Michael approved. Quite rightly, Prime did not want the missiles at full power until she was 100 percent sure where the incoming ships would drop. Michael struggled to breathe as Prime refined the drop datum, the seconds agonizingly drawn out into what felt like hours. For God’s sake, fire, he felt like shouting, but Prime held on.

The young sensor operator’s voice was cracking under the strain. “Sir! Targets dropping. Confirm I have a good drop datum at Green 2 Up 1 at 38,000 kilometers.”

“Command, roger,” Michael replied calmly.

Still Prime held on.

The ships dropped. Still Prime waited. Michael wanted to scream even though he knew she had to be sure the new arrivals really were Hammers. Hacking two Fed ships out of space would not look good on his service record.

“Command, Prime. Targets confirmed hostile. Stand by rail-gun salvo.”

Barely an instant before Michael overrode her, Prime sent the missiles on their way, more than 300 Merlin heavy antistarship missiles buried in a cloud of decoys accelerating up to their maximum speed of 300 kilometers per second toward the unsuspecting Hammers. Three seconds later, Adamant shuddered as her rail-gun batteries flung a full salvo at the new arrivals.

It was a textbook ambush; Prime had timed it to perfection. The few seconds she had waited had allowed the Hammer ships to cross Adamant’s bow and start moving away. That left their poorly armored quarters wide open to Adamant’s attack. The two ships never had a chance; Prime’s timing was so good that Michael was not sure they even saw the attack coming.

As the salvos closed in, Michael cursed. Prime’s timing had been perfect, but she had closed up the salvo too much. The slugs were too close together; only a few would hit home. Michael held his breath as the edge of the rail-gun salvo, split equally between the two ships, caught the Hammers from below and behind, ripping into the ships around their main engines, where their armor was thinnest. An instant later, the elaborate and complex maze of vulnerable high-pressure pipework disintegrated into a lethal storm of shredded metal. Michael breathed out in relief; Prime might not have designed the perfect rail-gun salvo, but enough slugs had found their targets to do the job.

Then the auxiliary fusion plants in the after section of the ships started to fail. First one blew, then the rest; four blue-white flashes of runaway fusion plants swamped the holocams, with the hulls of the two ships thrashing up and down as massive shock waves ripped forward.

Michael watched intently; he held his breath as he waited for the fusion plants that powered the ships’ main engines to blow. The slugs must have gone close enough; he was sure they would go, but nothing happened. He breathed out. The Hammers were lucky Prime had not done a better job. The ships were now slowly spinning wrecks tumbling through space end over end, lifepods spitting out in all directions, their after hulls opened up into huge metal petals festooned with molten metal and plastic fast cooling into grotesquely twisted lumps, shattered pipework, broken decking, and torn cabling trailing out into space. The last icy tendrils of ship’s atmosphere were drifting out among small white blobs spinning away into emptiness.

Jesus, Michael thought. Spacers. The white blobs were spacers.

Suddenly, with an irrational stab of panic, he remembered the Merlins now only seconds from impact.

“Missiles abort, abort, abort,” he screamed. You bloody fool, he told himself as he sat back. Those ships were finished but not completely destroyed. They could be useful. It had been years since the intelligence guys had seen the inside of a Hammer heavy cruiser, and even two-thirds of one was better than none.

Afterward, Michael would swear that his heart stopped as, with barely 5,000 meters to run, Prime aborted the missile salvo, their warheads firing jets of red-white flame ahead to bounce ineffectually off the Hammer ships’ armor. Michael sat back and took a deep breath in. “Christ, that was close,” he muttered.

“Prime, command. Confirm enemy contact report passed to Terranova.”

“Confirmed.”