The battle of Devastation reef

Let me know when the Ghost is 100 percent.”

“Sir.”

“How are we doing?” Michael asked when he climbed back into the command seat.

“Good timing, sir. Stand by …” Ferreira said as the subdued rumbling of the Tufayl’s main engines cut out. “We’re in station. The drone is launching its shuttles. Estimate squadron will complete remassing on schedule.”

“Good.” Quickly he scanned the threat plot-still green-before double-checking what the ship’s passive sensors were picking up, pleased to see nothing out of the ordinary. Leading Spacer Carmellini had the sensor watch; Michael walked over to him and patted him on the shoulder. “Am I missing anything?”

Carmellini shook his head. “No, sir.”

Michael dropped into a seat alongside Carmellini’s workstation, the better to see his face. “Way I like it.”

“Me, too, sir,” Carmellini said with feeling.

“You okay?”

“I am, sir. The first time back in action, well … that was pretty hard after, you know, after …” Carmellini’s voice faded away. “But it’s better this time, though it’s still tough. But tough or not, it’s what we are all about,” he said, recovering his composure, “so I’m happy to be here. We owe those Hammer sonsofbitches big time.”

“We sure do. You’re doing well, son. Very well,” Michael said, pleased to see Carmellini every bit as steady as he sounded.

“Thank you, sir. Remember Comdur.”

“Remember Comdur,” Michael replied.

He returned to his seat to watch the remassing, a slow-motion space ballet performed by chunky black boxes fitted with simple thrusters shuttling to and fro to dump their loads of driver mass pellets into the dreadnoughts’ depleted bunkers.

It was a pleasant, even soothing, sight, but even though Michael was tempted to relax-with the adrenaline leaching fast out of his system, he was tired-not for one microsecond did he let his guard down. Dreadnought Squadron One was in deepspace light-years from the Hammers-so far from anything that its chances of being detected and attacked were infinitesimal-but that did not matter. Captain Constanza, Ishaq’s skipper, had assumed her ship was safe, and the Hammers had gone and ambushed it at Xiang Reef. Her reward? To have her ship blown apart around her, killing her along with hundreds of Ishaq’s crew, dumping Michael and close to three hundred other survivors into Hammer hands.

Not on my watch, he said to himself, counting the minutes down until the First returned to Faith nearspace for the second phase of Operation Blue Tango.

“Shiiiiit,” Michael hissed through clenched teeth, reflexes forcing his body right back in its seat in a vain attempt to get away from the disaster bearing down on them, a disaster he could do nothing to avert.

The command holovid filled with the awful sight of a Hammer ship-the light escort O’Connor-closing with horrifying speed, Tufayl’s bows aimed right into her flank. Michael cursed his luck. Tufayl had dropped so close to O’Connor that there was no way either ship could avoid the looming disaster. A collision was inevitable. He swore again; of all the billions and billions of cubic kilometers of space O’Connor might have been in, it had to pick the same tiny bubble Tufayl would be in seconds after it dropped out of pinchspace.

“Another first for the dreadnoughts,” he said sardonically, “a ramming.”

“All stations,” Warfare said laconically. “Brace for collision.”

With nearly superhuman effort, Michael forced himself to look away. There might be only seconds before Tufayl was ripped apart, but he still had a squadron to think about, a squadron right in the middle of an attack on the small Hammer task group-designated Hammer-1-in loose formation close to OHMP- 344, one of the orbital heavy maintenance platforms in Clarke orbit around Faith planet. Needless to say, neither the Hammer task group nor the unfortunate O’Connor had been anywhere near OHMP-344 when the dreadnoughts had departed from Hammer space to remass before returning for the second phase of Blue Tango. Murphy, Michael reminded himself, was very fond of military operations.

“Warfare. Status?”

“Own missile and rail-gun salvos have ten seconds to impact. Targets still turning; probability of first strike kill on Novo City and Jarramshia is high. Hammer missile salvo inbound from OHMP-344’s defensive platforms, time to impact four minutes, targets Rebuke and Sina. Iron Duke adjusting vector to take station on Tufayl for casualty recovery; Caesar’s Ghost and Creaking Door are at Launch 1.”

“Command, roger.” He had not needed to ask-Warfare’s report matched Michael’s mental plot of the operation-but it was never a bad thing to know for certain that nothing had been overlooked.

Turning back to look at the holovid and the relentlessly closing O’Connor, Michael promised himself that never, ever again would he allow the First to be thrown into an attack on the basis of old, stale intelligence. Never, and if the admirals did not like it, they could go screw themselves.

The last few seconds to impact ran off with glacial slowness. For fuck’s sake, Michael swore; it was like being back in the eighteenth century! One ship ramming another. What next? All hands to boarding stations? Issue cutlasses? And if that was not bad enough, nobody could tell him whether Tufayl would survive what would be the first recorded collision in space combat. Michael hoped she would survive. Tufayl outmassed the hapless O’Connor by a big margin, and her reinforced bow armor should make short work of the light escort’s thinly protected flanks, but that was a long way from being sure. What if the O’Connor’s fusion plants lost containment? What if she carried antimatter miss-

With a sickening, tearing crash that picked the ship up and shook it, Tufayl plowed into O’Connor about one-third of the way back from her bows, the impact dragged out into a series of grating crunches as Tufayl tore through the hapless Hammer ship, overloaded metal frames squealing in protest, bending and twisting under the stress of the collision. Horrified, Michael and the rest of Tufayl’s crew watched the dreadnought slice the Hammer ship apart, forcing its hull wide open, air dumped into space in a shivering, scintillating white mass of ice crystals. Nausea twisted Michael’s guts into a tangled knot: The cloud wasn’t just ice. It was seeded through with small, tumbling shapes blown bodily out of the ship by explosive decompression, some space-suited, most not, thin shipsuits no protection against the hard vacuum of space.

Michael shivered; Tufayl was not the only one taken by surprise.

Even as Michael allowed himself to hope that Tufayl might escape unscathed, the ship was picked up again, only to be smashed bodily to starboard, overstressed frames screeching as it was blown away from the fractured corpse of O’Connor. One of the Hammer ship’s auxiliary fusion plants probably, Michael reckoned. Might have been worse. The Tufayl might not have survived if one of the Hammer ship’s main propulsion plants had exploded.

Damage reports flooded in. Michael’s face turned grim while he studied them. He commed Ferreira. Her face spoke volumes.

“Not looking good, sir,” she said. “We don’t have the spacers to deal with half the problems we’re facing. And we’re no longer jump-capable.”

Michael nodded; he knew Tufayl was in serious trouble. “Can we save her?”

“No, sir,” Ferreira said emphatically. “She either blows up or O’Connor does the job for us. Either way, chances of saving her are nil.”

“I agree. I’ll give the order. Get your people into Creaking Door.” Michael did not waste any more time. There were plenty more ships to go around. It was spacers Fleet could not replace.

“All stations, command. Abandon ship. I say again, abandon ship. All hands to the lander! Command, out.” Michael’s space-suited finger struggled with the black and yellow cover over the abandon ship alarm, but he forced it open finally. His finger stabbed down, and the ship filled instantly with an unmistakable whoop whoop