The battle of Devastation reef

a single tangled mass of red that came down to a single point: the tiny bubble of space occupied by the First. The Hammers were good, very good, without exception getting their missiles away barely seconds after the squadron dropped, then accelerating away from the battle station before adjusting vectors to turn bows on to the incoming Fed ships.

Michael did not care. His ships had one target-space battle station HSBS-372-and the Hammers essentially had left it to look after its own defense. There was a Hammer commander with altogether too much faith in antimatter missiles, he thought; Michael enjoyed the prospect of teaching the man the error of his ways.

“Command, Warfare. Hammer missiles will be inside our mission abort blast damage radius in three minutes. If they haven’t fired their missiles before then, I intend to jump the squadron.”

“Command, roger.” Michael had no option but to agree. It would have been good to see this phase of the operation through, but not if it meant rendering his squadron ineffective. His ships were tough enough to withstand an antimatter attack, but not if the warheads blew too close. There was always nex-

Afterward, Michael would swear that the entire universe turned an incandescent white, a white beyond white, a white so bright that his eyes refused to open for many minutes afterward. An instant later, the Tufayl was thrown backward when its artificial gravity failed, slamming Michael hard against his safety harness. Even through the radiation-resistant layers of the armored combat space suit designed specifically for dreadnought crews, he sustained heavy bruises across his shoulders that lasted for weeks.

The Tufayl’s combat information center dissolved into bedlam, radiation alarms shrieking to tell Michael what he already knew-that they had been on the receiving end of a wall of gamma radiation intense enough to make a dreadnought feel like it had run into a brick wall. He breathed out with relief and shut the alarms off. He was alive, and so was the rest of Tufayl’s crew, even though his neuronics screamed blue murder about the amount of radiation he had received. Not that he cared; Tufayl carried medibots purpose-built to deal with just that problem, and he and everyone else onboard would live more than long enough to use them.

“Command, Warfare. Missile salvo one is nominal; no significant damage from antimatter attack. Launching second missile salvo. Deploying decoys and Krachov shrouds.”

“Roger.” Anxiously, he scanned the damage reports flowing in from the squadron. The ships had absorbed a prodigious amount of energy in a short span of time, the wall of gamma radiation blasting off hundreds of tons of bow armor before the shock wave drove into the dreadnoughts’ titanium inner hull and frames. But ships and crews had survived. Not bad, he said to himself. The hundreds of design changes had done their job.

He ran down the list of ships. One of his ships had come out badly: Iron Knight’s starboard missile launcher rams were damaged and nonoperational, cutting her ASSM salvo capability by 50 percent. As for the rest, Khaldun and Orion suffered damage to the fusion plants supplying their antiship lasers. Tufayl, Rebuke, and Qurrah, had some damage to their starboard main propulsion. And that was it; the rest of the squadron had minor problems but none worth worrying about.

Michael turned his attention back to the command plot, making sure it tallied with the mental image of the operation he carried in his head. Things looked good. Accelerating hard, his ships were now close enough to the Hammers to deny them the option to fire a second salvo of antimatter missiles. Doing so might kill the Fed ships, but they would destroy themselves in the process. The decoys were doing the job of convincing the Hammer ships screening the battle station that they were the primary target for the Fed attack. His squadron’s second missile salvo was on its way, and if Warfare’s calculations were right, his ships would fire their rail guns before the Hammer ships could get their own second missile salvo away. All of that meant the Hammers’ one chance of doing any serious damage was to fire a well-targeted rail-gun attack before the Feds jumped.

Edgily, Michael watched the distance close. It was the hardest thing about his job, to sit back and wait, even though that was what he should be doing.

“Command, Warfare. Firing rail guns … now!”

Tufayl shuddered when the forward rail-gun batteries threw a full salvo at the Hammer battle station. Michael nodded his approval; the rail-gun swarm was tightly grouped, its timing impeccable. The squadron’s missiles would arrive on target seconds after the rail-gun slugs smashed home, hoping to exploit any weaknesses blasted into the battle station’s armor by the slugs.

“Command, Warfare. Hammer ships turning in. Rail-gun attack imminent.”

“Roger,” Michael replied, trying in vain to keep his stomach under control, the sweat running cold down his spine. He swore under his breath. He would be happy never to see another Hammer rail-gun salvo ever again.

“Command, Warfare, sensors. Multiple rail-gun launches. Impact in sixty seconds. Stand by impact assessment.”

“Roger.”

“Command, sensors. Vector assessment on rail-gun salvo. Targets are Sina and Rebuke. Impact fifty seconds.”

“Command, Warfare. All ships, stand by to jump.”

“Warfare, hold. Reconfirm mass distribution models.” Michael knew they had the time, so why not recheck the one thing that might really screw up the operation.

“Stand by … confirmed. All ships report mass distribution recomputed and nominal. Safe to jump.”

“Roger. Command approved to jump when ready.”

“All stations, Warfare. Jumping.”

Poorly supported by the warships of a defensive screen more interested in looking after themselves, the battle station had no chance of survival. Focused, unstoppable, the Fed attack overwhelmed the station; it reeled as the massive shock of a well-timed rail-gun salvo racked its frame and fusion warheads flayed armor off by the meter, allowing missiles carrying conventional chemex warheads to punch lances of white-hot gas deep into its guts. For a while, the station hung there, seemingly untroubled, the only movement that of thin skeins of smoke boiling off into space from puddles of white-hot ceramsteel armor. It could not last; their defenses breached by Fed missiles, the station’s two primary fusion power plants lost containment. A microsecond later, the unimaginable power of their explosion blew the massive armored sphere into a ball of white-hot gas seeded though with a million pieces of blast-shattered wreckage.

Phase 1 of Operation Blue Tango was over, Fed reconsats its only witnesses.

The universe twisted in on itself, and Tufayl dropped out of pinchspace. Michael tried to ignore jangling nerves and a protesting stomach, more interested in the flurry of activity while Tufayl’s crew made sure they had not dropped into the arms of a waiting Hammer task group.

“Command, Warfare. Threat plot confirmed green.”

“Command, roger. Warfare. Weapons still free; you retain command authority.”

“Warfare, roger.”

Michael allowed himself to relax a fraction; he watched the proceedings, more than happy to see the mass tankers where they were supposed to be and relieved when the tankers dumped their passive sensor intercept logs across to Tufayl, confirming that no other ships were operating within billions of kilometers. He allowed himself to relax.

“Jayla, you have the ship. Stand down from general quarters. Restore ship’s atmosphere and artgrav. Take us in. Oh, yes, tell our wandering lander it can come home.”

“Roger, sir. They’ll be pleased,” Ferreira said.

“I reckon. Bit lonely over there.”

Michael left the combat information center, happy to breathe ship’s air in place of the moisture-laden muck that cycled around his suit over and over again, happy to get out of his combat space suit, and even happier to be able to ditch a sweat-soaked shipsuit. Back in his cabin, he stripped off, prepared his combat space suit for its next outing, showered, and was back in the combat information center freshly shipsuited in a matter of minutes.

“Sir, ship is at defense stations.”

“Thanks, Jayla.” Michael settled down to watch the squadron decelerate to take station on the tankers.

“Er, sir,” Ferreira said.

“Yes?”

“Sick bay, sir, if you don’t mind. The medibots need to take care of the radiation damage.”