The battle of Devastation reef

light-years out from the Hammer Worlds.

To the stealthed reconsats sent in to investigate, the asteroid’s purpose was obvious: to support a small plant mining and processing the driver mass used by starships. The survey drone noted the vectors of ships leaving the planetoid after remassing. Calling for assistance, it started the process again, seeding another vector to nowhere with sensorsats.

A month after the initial report from the gravitation arrays, the survey drone found what the Federated Worlds had been searching for so desperately. Judging by the gigantic infrared signature radiated into space from massed banks of heat dumps, a substantial industrial-scale facility lay buried inside a small carbonaceous asteroid- identified on Fed charts as Mathuli-4451-deep in the heart of the confused tangle of rips in space-time marked on Fed space charts as Devastation Reef.

When analysts examined the survey drone’s reports, their conclusion was emphatic. The Devastation Reef complex was the Hammer antimatter manufacturing facility, the linchpin of the Hammer fleet’s strategic advantage.

Thursday, January 11, 2401, UD

FWSS

Tufayl,

Fortitude planetary farspace

Junior Lieutenant Kat Sedova’s face popped onto the command holovid. The Ghost’s command pilot appeared nervous, her tongue flicking out across dry lips. For a moment, he wondered if he had been right to send Tufayl’s lander across to the Iron Duke. Michael pushed the concern away. Either Sedova coped or she did not. Either way, he could not worry about it. He had done his bit; it was up to her.

“All set?”

“We are, sir. This is one big ship. Kind of spooky being here on our own.” She stopped. “But we’ll be fine. We’ve simmed the mission, and we’re just setting it up to run it again with a few problems thrown in. But I’m confident.”

“Good. Follow the plan and you’ll be fine.”

“Roger that, sir. Ghost, out.”

“Sensors. Where are we up to with the threat plot?”

“We’re downloading data from the reconsats,” Leading Spacer Carmellini said from the sensor management workstation. “I’ll have the threat plot updated shortly.”

“Roger.” Michael was relieved. For some reason, the relay satellite collating data from the far-flung web of reconnaissance satellites thrown around Fortitude was not where it was supposed to be. With time running out, it had been a frantic business trying to locate it without using any active sensors; the fact that the dreadnoughts’ heat dumps were radiating the prodigious amounts of waste heat accumulated in their pinchspace jump was all the advertising he was prepared to tolerate.

Michael watched the threat plot while it updated. Some update. It was time-stamped hours earlier. “Shit,” he muttered. Tactical intelligence that old was worthless. It made no difference; his dreadnoughts would be going into this attack cold. The Hammers might have deployed their entire fleet across their path when the time came to attack, and he would not know it.

“Warfare. Weapons free. You have command authority.”

“Roger, I have command authority,” the battle management AI replied, its voice, as always, calm and measured. “All ships, Warfare. Weapons free. Execute to follow, Foxtrot-1. I say again execute to follow, Foxtrot-1. Acknowledge.”

Michael listened with half an ear while the acknowledgments flowed in. It was an impressive roll call: Orion, the oldest ship in the squadron, proudly bearing a list of battle honors longer than that of any other ship in the Fed order of battle; Iron Knight, blooded in the Fourth Hammer war and sister ship to the Iron Duke; Sina, Qurrah, Khaldun, and Al-Khayyam, all sister ships to the Tufayl; Rebuke and Rebut, the youngest ships in the squadron.

One thing all those ships had in common was the Battle of Comdur. Far too many spacers and marines had been killed or injured in those ships, and more than ever before, the awful pressure to avenge those casualties weighed heavily on him.

Warfare gave the order. “All ships, command. Foxtrot-1, stand by … execute!”

In a blaze of ultraviolet, the squadron jumped, and Operation Blue Tango was under way in earnest.

A tiny fraction of a second later, the squadron erupted into Hammer space, proximity alarms screeching to let Michael know his threat plot was seriously out of line with reality. Michael ignored them while he watched the threat plot firm up, the blazing red icon of the Hammer space battle station dead ahead of them, surrounded by a gaggle of Hammer ships. Iron bands squeezed his chest hard, making breathing difficult; he counted five heavy cruisers, supported by many times that number of smaller ships, ranging from light cruisers to heavy scouts. “Goddamnit,” he murmured. That was a lot of firepower; even though his dreadnoughts were tough, this was going to be one hell of a fight.

“Command, Warfare. Threat plot confirmed.”

The squadron wasted no time. Things moved so fast that the ships had to be under Warfare’s direct control, the comforting-to humans, at least-rituals of order and acknowledgment giving way to laser tightbeam commands that welded ten dreadnoughts into a single offensive weapon. Truth be known, the human crews were along only for the ride, there to step in if the AIs made a mistake blatant enough for a slow-moving human brain to pick it up.

Radiating every transmitter they carried at full power-some joker at one of the planning meetings called this the “hello, please shoot at us” signal-the dreadnoughts dumped full missile salvos overboard, more than three thousand Merlin ASSMs opening out on vectors to send them far enough away to survive the inevitable Hammer antimatter attack. Deception formed no part of Blue Tango. The exact opposite, in fact. Michael wanted the Hammers to know they had a serious problem heading their way. Going in fast and loud seemed to him to be the best way to achieve that; if he could have sent a cheer squad on ahead in Day-Glo space suits, he would have done just that. He wanted to ratchet the pressure up, to force the Hammer commander to react without thinking, to make mistakes.

With the dreadnoughts now driving in hard toward the Hammers, Warfare held the rail guns back. To fire this far out meant having the dreadnoughts’ missile salvo arrive long after the rail-gun slugs had arrived on target, setting a defensive problem even the dumbest Hammer commander would have little problem dealing with.

It was not easy, sitting there, Tufayl’s combat information center silent while the ships closed on the Hammers. Adrenaline took effect. Heart thumping, Michael forced himself not to fidget, his eyes locked on the threat plot. If the Hammers did not respond soon …

“Command, sensors. Multiple missile launches. Eaglehawk ASSMs. No targeting assessment possible at this range. Initial salvo pattern suggests antimatter attack highly probable. Time to target 5 minutes 23.”

“Command, roger. All stations. Brace for antimatter missile attack.”

Michael zoomed the holovid in to focus on the incoming attack. Antimatter missiles were precious; they had to be husbanded, and the Hammers did that. To ensure that every one counted, Hammer antimatter attacks were always the same. An outer layer of sacrificial decoys and missiles carrying conventional chemex and fusion warheads led the way. They had only one task: to distract the Feds’ medium-range antimissile defenses. If they made it through to their targets, that was a bonus. Following on came more missiles, some-but not all-fitted with antimatter warheads mixed with yet more decoys, the whole attack formed into a hemispherical mass. It was so unmistakable that the Hammer commander might as well have sent a message en clair telling the dreadnoughts antimatter missiles were on their way.

Michael had trouble breathing; the bands around his chest refused to ease. He checked the threat plot, looking at it the way a man watches a cobra about to strike. It was a truly terrifying sight, missile vectors fused into