death in the pillars of fiery hell spewing from Tufayl’s, stern.
If …
“Command, sensors. Impact assessment. Estimate twenty to thirty rail-gun slugs on vector for direct impact.”
Michael braced himself. He had faith in Tufayl’s reinforced frontal armor, but thirty rail-gun slugs was one hell of a lot of kinetic energy for the ship to absorb. Closing at more than 800 kilometers per second, each slug would smash the equivalent of hundreds of kilograms of TNT onto a fingertip-size patch of Tufayl’s hull. The old familiar feelings came back-stomach churning, heart racing out of control, mouth and throat ash-dry, body slicked with a cold, clammy sweat-returning with a rush when he remembered how bad rail-gun attacks could be.
“Threat. Hammer missile status?”
“Turning in now. Stand by … second stages firing … vectors confirmed. Tufayl is outside missile engagement envelope.”
“Roger.” Michael tried not to sound relieved, but he was. He had seen enough action to know that what worked in theory, what worked in the sims, often did not work in practice.
“All stations, warfare. Brace for rail-gun impact.”
Tufayl’s close-in defenses-defensive lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns- did their best but failed to keep the Hammer rail-gun attack out. Too many slugs screened by too many decoys moved too fast, and when they hit, the impact was tremendous, much worse than Michael had expected. With Tufayl’s artificial gravity overloaded, his seat fought-and failed-to insulate him from the shock. In a fraction of a second, twenty-six rail-guns slugs smashed into Tufayl’s bows, the ship bucking and heaving when the slugs blew huge craters in the bows. Soon the ship disappeared behind a vast cloud of vaporized ceramsteel armor.
Tufayl shrugged off the Hammer attack. Still accelerating hard, she punched out into clear space, the Krachov shield screening them blown apart by the Hammer attack. Michael whistled in surprise; they were so close, and Tufayl’s attack so sudden, that he picked out the shapes of Hammer spacers working outside the battle station’s enormous hull racing to get back inside to safety.
“Brace yourselves, you Hammer sonsofbitches,” he murmured, “because you haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Executing Alfa-5. Launching missiles, lasers engaging primary target. Shutting down main engines. All stations. Stand by to jump.”
Tufayl shuddered as hydraulics rammed Merlin ASSMs outboard, their first stages firing the instant the full salvo was assembled. The combat information center fell quiet, and Tufayl coasted on, the frantic attempts of the Hammer ships’ lasers to exploit the damage to her bows ignored, her own massive antiship lasers in turn flaying the armor off two Hammer ships-the heavy cruisers Keating and Persepolis-unlucky enough to be caught stern on, both spewing clouds of reaction mass in their struggle to turn to face the attack. Michael watched in grim satisfaction when the armor of both ships failed, Tufayl’s antiship lasers exploiting their vulnerable sterns to bore white-hot holes into their hulls. The lasers broke through the armor and reached deep inside, probing for the ships’ fusion plants. Seconds later, the lasers found their targets; in quick succession, first Keating and then Persepolis lost containment, their fusion plants exploding into balls of blue-white gas.
“Command, Warfare. Firing rail guns.” Tufayl trembled when her forward batteries sent a full salvo of slugs on its way, timed to arrive on target seconds before the missile salvo hit home.
“Warfare, time to go.”
“Stand by. Confirming ship’s mass distribution.”
Michael nodded. If the navigation AI jumped the ship without an accurate estimate of the mass blasted off by Hammer rail-guns, the Tufayl might well end up anywhere in deepspace, including-though the odds were not high-inside something hard and unforgiving, such as an asteroid. He forced himself to sit still and watch Tufayl’s missile and rail-gun attack, backed up by the full weight of her forward laser batteries, fall on the heavily armored space battle station. He nodded his approval. It was a textbook attack, timed to the split second, accurate to a few meters, and focused on the station’s most vulnerable point: the huge air lock doors accessing the hangars where the station stowed its air wing.
The strike dissolved into confusion. Too late, the remaining Hammer ships and the station shifted their focus from the dreadnought, concentrating their defense on hacking Tufayl’s missiles and rail- gun slugs out of space, their successes marked by vicious flares of wasted energy. Too few; their efforts were in vain. Michael stared at the holovid as the attack broke through the Hammer defenses. Rail-gun slugs and missiles slammed home, the battle station disappearing behind great sheets of incandescent armor blown off into space. He held his breath, cursing out loud when the station reappeared. Though its outer air lock door had been blown open, the hangar inside a blackened ruin, it seemed undamaged.
“Command. Mass distribution model is confirmed. Request approval to jump.”
Reluctantly, Michael dragged his attention back to the problem of getting Tufayl home safely, never an easy task. Tufayl was jumping from inside Faith’s gravity well; it was not far enough to risk the ship but far enough to make getting back to Comdur a challenging exercise in navigation. And if that was not bad enough, the ship was traveling faster than the optimum for an accurate pinchspace jump.
Quickly, Michael confirmed that the ship was ready. He said a quick prayer that they would not end up in the heart of a wandering asteroid and gave the order.
Tufayl jumped, the briefest of brief flashes of ultraviolet marking her leap into pinchspace.
Only moments after Tufayl departed Faith nearspace, a small red flare flickered out of the battle station’s hangar air lock. In seconds, the flare grew into a raging jet, driving out into space and broadening out as it gathered power, red rapidly bleaching into white. The station shuddered, its millions of tons of mass shifted bodily planetward by the force of an explosion that spewed debris in an ugly red and black cloud. A second and a third explosion followed, their vectors perfectly aligned to push the station into a ponderous death roll out of orbit and down to the planet’s surface far below.
In Faith farspace, Fed reconsats recorded the death of the Hammer battle station, the holovid transmitted by tightbeam laser through a network of relaysats to the mass tanker waiting patiently in deepspace for Tufayl’s arrival.
Michael allowed himself to relax only when the navigation AI-after an agonizingly long wait-finally decided where the Tufayl had ended up after its desperate microjump out of Faith’s gravity well.
“Command, navigation.”
“Command.”
“Ship’s position confirmed. On the screen.”
Michael studied it carefully before nodding his approval, relieved that Tufayl would not be forced to send out a pinchcomm signal asking for help. The public admission that a ship’s navigation had not lived up to Fleet’s unforgiving standards was always an embarrassing business. No, Tufayl’s navigation AI had done well: Under the circumstances, it was not the best bit of space navigation, nor was it the worst. They had ended up a long way from where they were supposed to be, but they had enough mass for the ship to adjust vector before microjumping back to rendezvous with their mass tanker. Ordering the navigation AI to set vector, he handed the ship over to Ferreira with orders to stand down from general quarters and climbed wearily out of his seat.
He steeled himself for the coming confrontation. He was out of time; it was necessary to deal with the problem of Rear Admiral Perkins. He made his way aft to where Bienefelt and Perkins sat.
“Thank you, ’Swain. You can carry on.”
“Sir!”
Michael waited until Bienefelt left before addressing Perkins; the man had not said a word throughout the attack.
