The battle of Devastation reef

Faith, the third planet of the Retribution system. Michael grimaced at the sight. Faith nearspace was not new to him. He had been there before, in Eridani, ironically one of a task group led by none other than the totally pissed Perkins. Eridani had been lucky to get back in one piece from that incursion, though that had not been Perkins’s fault to be fair.

“Captain, sir. I have all green suits, ship is at general quarters, ship state 1, airtight condition zulu, artificial gravity off, ship depressurized,” Ferreira said, a brave attempt at a smile visible through the plasglass faceplate of her combat space suit. “I’ll be with the coxswain and the rest of the damage control crew, all one of him.”

Michael chuckled; a conventional heavy cruiser’s damage control team numbered in the hundreds. “Command, roger. You hang in there, Jayla. All stations, stand by to drop. Warfare. Confirm weapons free. You have command authority.”

“Warfare, roger. Weapons free. I have command authority.”

Michael flicked a glance at Perkins while the drop timer ran down; the man had not moved, a glowering lump of unhappiness at the back of the combat information center. A quick check confirmed that the two AIs responsible for threat assessment and operations were ready. Michael called them Kubby and Kal after the ships they came from, the long-scrapped K-Class heavy cruisers Kuibyshev and Kaladima. To maintain the illusion that they were real people, he had ordered his neuronics to integrate their whole-body avatars into his vision. The human factors wonks assured him that this would help absorb the intense stress of combat. Looking at them, two anonymous combat space-suited shapes sitting on either side of him, he was not so sure. However solid their avatars appeared, however real their space- suited figures might seem, he knew Kubby and Kal to be figments of his neuronics’ imagination. Even with them, it was a small team to run a dreadnought’s combat information center.

Using AIs in such mission-critical roles represented the big unknown. Brought out of retirement, they had decades of combat experience in heavy cruisers, but this was something different. Michael was surprised by their enthusiasm for their new roles as his principal advisers. Did AIs get bored in retirement? Officially, no: endless hours in Fleet’s StratSim facility ensured that retired AIs stayed current, yet Michael did wonder. Anyway, what was important was that Kubby and Kal had worked well in the sims; Michael hoped they would perform as well when they faced real Hammers firing real missiles and rail-gun slugs.

But Kubby and Kal were only advisers: They had no command authority and would not be giving any orders. The biggest gamble of all remained trusting Warfare, the AI tasked with overall battle management. It was no adviser. When the attack degenerated into freewheeling bedlam-and it would-and space filled with blizzards of rail- guns slugs, missiles, and decoys, when sensors started to collapse under torrents of conflicting information dumped on them by decoys, jammers, and spoofers, the job of battle management slipped beyond the ability of humans. Only the AI had the processing power to cope; only it could make the millions of decisions needed to keep Tufayl safe while its enemies were put to the sword. It was a big task, and the lives of all onboard Tufayl depended on Warfare getting it right without the benefit of a full combat information center crew to keep an eye on things, looking for those moments when the AIs messed things up-as they always had and always would.

Tufayl dropped into normalspace with the usual gut-wrenching lurch. In an instant, things turned busy, the proximity alarms screeching to warn of Hammer ships close to the drop datum.

Michael ignored them. The Hammer ships were supposed to be close. He forced himself to wait while the ship’s sensors rebuilt the threat plot, Tufayl’s artificial gravity pushing him deep into his seat when it came back online. Michael breathed easier; the positions of the Hammer ships had changed in the time it took Tufayl to microjump out-system, reverse vector, and microjump back, but not so much that the ops plan was compromised. The Hammer ships-a gaggle of cruisers and smaller warships-clustered around HSBS-261, one of the Hammer space battle stations that protected Faith planetary nearspace.

“Command, Warfare. Threat plot is confirmed.” The AI’s voice was calm and untroubled, as if this were just another day in the simulators. “Executing Alfa-1.”

Armored hatches opened. In seconds, hydraulic dispensers dumped thousands of decoys overboard, stubby black cylinders forming up into a huge cloud of electronic deceit driven ahead of the ship toward the Hammers by thin pillars of fire.

“Executing Alfa-2.”

Tufayl leaped forward as though smashed in the ass by a giant fist. The dreadnought shuddered, accelerating hard to follow the decoy cloud toward the Hammers.

“Executing Alfa-3.”

Krachov generators started spewing millions upon millions of tiny disks out into space, tiny black shapes fired ahead of the ship to form a shield to screen the Tufayl from Hammer sensors and diffuse antiship laser fire.

Michael struggled to breathe. He understood why Perkins was so unhappy with his plan for this operation. Tufayl was about to break most of the rules in the Fighting Instructions, one of which was that single-ship attacks on targets as tough as battle stations were not a good idea, but Perkins had never taken a dreadnought into battle.

“Command, sensors. Multiple Hammer missile launches. Eaglehawk ASSMs. Target Tufayl”-bloody AIs, Michael complained under his breath; who else would the damn target be? There wasn’t another Fed warship anywhere near Faith-“time to target forty-nine seconds.”

“Command, roger. Threat, warhead assess-”

Perkins’s voice stopped Michael in his tracks. “This is a direct order, Helfort. Abort!” Perkins’s voice rose to a near shriek. “Do you hear me? Abort now!”

“You son of a bitch,” Michael whispered, “I don’t need this.” He shut down Perkins’s com links to the rest of the ship; if the man wanted to rant, he could rant to himself. “Coxswain to the CIC!” he barked, turning his attention back to the more pressing problems facing Tufayl.

“Threat, what’s your warhead assessment?”

“Missiles are chemex-armed,” Kal replied confidently. “Hammer ships are inside the blast-damage radius for antimatter weapons, and this far inside planetary nearspace, fusion warheads are unlikely.”

“Yes,” Michael whispered exultantly. His gamble might pay off. He just hoped he and Kal-the AI handling threat assessment-had called it right. Tufayl was tough but not invulnerable. Fusion warheads could destroy even a dreadnought if they exploded close to it.

“Sir?” Bienefelt appeared in front of him, enormous in her armored combat space suit.

“Get back and strap yourself in alongside Admiral Perkins. He is not to leave his seat until I say he can. I authorize you to restrain him if you need to, using as much force as is reasonably required.”

“Sir?” Understandably, Bienefelt sounded baffled. It was not every day a chief petty officer was called on to restrain an admiral.

“Just do it, ’Swain!” Michael snapped. “Make sure the admiral stays in his damn seat. If he tries to get out, sit on him. That’s a direct order.”

“Sir!”

Michael turned away, more unnerved by having to deal with Perkins than by the Hammer attack.

“Command, Warfare, sensors. Hammers have launched multiple rail-gun swarms. Impact in twenty-one seconds. Stand by impact assessment.”

In times past, the prospect of facing a Hammer rail-gun attack would have turned Michael’s stomach inside out, but not this time. Tufayl’s forward sections carried three times the armor of a conventional heavy cruiser, the extra mass compensated for by the tens of thousands of tons of redundant systems, equipment, landers, and spares taken out of her during the conversion. Tufayl would be long gone before the Hammers fired enough rail-gun slugs to penetrate her forward armor.

“Command, Warfare. Executing Alfa-4. Emergency override main propulsion!”

Tufayl’s enormous mass shook as Warfare pushed her main engines to and then beyond their limits, tons of reaction mass driven out astern into thin columns of white fire that were kilometers long. Michael forced himself to breathe properly. This was the big roll of the dice. Tufayl accelerated faster than any cruiser should, and if the Hammers did not pick it up quickly and update their targeting solutions, the missile salvos would turn in too late to make their final attacks. They would attack where they thought Tufayl should be, not where she was. Wasted, the missiles would die a useless