The battle of Devastation reef

them all, he had eyeballed every one of them, and they’d all told him the same thing.

Reckless and her tiny crew were ready for the battle to come, as ready as they would ever be. He would have one last chat with Mother-Reckless’s primary AI always had something useful to add-and then grab some badly needed sleep.

“You have the ship, Jayla,” he said when he slipped out of his seat and headed for his cabin. “If nothing crops up, call me thirty minutes before we jump.”

“Sir.”

Saturday, March 17, 2401, UD

Support Facility 27 nearspace,

West Devastation Reef

In a savage flash of white light, antimatter warheads stripped out of captured Hammer Eaglehawk missiles exploded. Seconds later, a wall of gamma radiation overwhelmed the sphere of heavily armed defense platforms and pinchspace jump disrupters protecting the drop zone for ships heading for the Hammer antimatter buried deep in the heart of Support Facility 27. The radiation, ferocious in its intensity, pushed through the platforms’ meager armor, forcing fusion reactors out of limits until they, too, erupted into massive balls of white-red gas, before it reached out to destroy a small Hammer task group on forward picket duty.

In less than a nanosecond, billions of cubic kilometers of Hammer space had been scoured clean, its defenses blown to incandescent gas.

Seconds later, more cargo drones dropped out of pinchspace to the north and south of the drop zone; their payloads of antimatter warheads sterilized two bubbles of space large enough to accommodate the ships of Battle Fleet Lima, the void filling with hundreds of thousands of white-hot flares as space mines were overwhelmed by gamma radiation, their directed-fission warheads going critical, stabbing jets of fire uselessly into space.

For a while, nothing happened. Slowly cooling spheres of gas expanding out into the void were the only things moving.

“Captain, sir. All suits are green, ship is at general quarters in ship state 1, airtight condition zulu, artificial gravity off, ship depressurized,” Ferreira said.

Michael ignored a stomach doing somersaults as Reckless’s gravity disappeared. “Roger. I have the ship. All stations, stand by to drop. Thanks, Jayla.”

“I’m glad it’s started, sir,” Ferreira said, “that’s all I can say.”

“Amen to that,” Michael said; he meant it. The wait was killing him.

“I’ll be in damage control, sir. Good luck. Remember Comdur.” Ferreira spun on the spot; with a one-footed push, she glided away.

“Remember Comdur,” Michael whispered while his executive officer flew effortlessly out of Reckless’s combat information center. The huge compartment felt uncomfortably empty, its only other occupants the anonymous combat space-suited figures of Carmellini and Lomidze strapped into their shock-resistant seats, hunched forward over consoles in front of Michael. Flanking him were the two AI-generated avatars in the operations and threat assessment seats. Kubby and Kal-their clones, to be precise; the original AIs were a small part of the diffuse cloud of gas that once had been Tufayl-might look every bit as solid as Carmellini and Lomidze, but they were just images spun across his mind’s eye, figments of a computer’s imagination. Michael did not care; it was good to have them there.

Time to commit. “Warfare, command,” Michael said. “Weapons free. You have command authority.”

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

Maddeningly slow, the drop counter ran off the seconds. “All stations, this is Warfare. Stand by … dropping.”

Michael’s gloved fingers dug into the arm of his seat while Reckless turned the cosmos inside out, the navigation AI depositing the ship precisely onto its drop datum. The rest of the dreadnoughts fell neatly into station around her.

After months of work, Operation Opera started in earnest. With a quiet prayer that he would make it out alive and that Anna would be home soon, he closed his mind to everything except the job at hand.

A crunching shudder shook the ship from end to end, the opening move of Operation Opera: Reckless and her sister ships each deployed their first salvo of long-range Merlin antistarship missiles along with their clouds of protective decoys. The missiles would keep station while the dreadnoughts added more missiles to the salvo. When the time came, and coordinated to the second, first stage engines would fire, driving the missiles toward the target in a single enormous wave, a rail-gun salvo timed to arrive on target seconds before the missiles smashed home.

Executed properly, a well-crafted missile and rail-gun attack was a brutally effective tactic, a tsunami of missiles and rail-gun slugs intended to confuse, overload, and overwhelm. Space fleets all across humanspace spent enormous amounts of time trying to get it right; Michael’s dreadnoughts were no exception, and he liked to think they, too, had gotten it right.

The Hammers had more than the dreadnoughts to worry about. Running ahead of Michael’s ships was Group North, a mixed task group of heavy and light cruisers backed up by fleet escorts and led by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska in Seljuk. Their missiles and rail guns would add to the misery to be inflicted on the Hammer ships tasked with defending the northern approaches to SuppFac27.

That was the good part.

The problem was that anything the Feds dished up, the Hammers would return with interest. Two hundred thousand kilometers ahead of Group North and Michael’s dreadnoughts, the Hammer ships of task group Hammer-2 were already adjusting vectors to intercept the incoming Feds, their first missile salvo quickly deployed, with many more to follow.

It was going to be rough, and there was always the chance that the Hammers’ first missile salvo would carry antimatter warheads, even if Fleet’s intelligence analysts had been emphatic that they would not. The risk of collateral damage to the intricate web of fixed defenses and minefields and to the roving task groups of Hammer warships that protected SuppFac27 was too high, they argued. Michael agreed with them, not that his opinion mattered: The intelligence wonks had been known to get things spectacularly wrong, and if they had, the heavy cruisers were doomed, and so was Operation Opera.

For Jaruzelska, accepting the analysts’ call had been an enormous gamble, the biggest of her long and successful career. If the analysts were wrong, she risked the future of the Federated Worlds and its billions of citizens. Michael was more than happy that Jaruzelska was in charge; it was a good time to be a lowly lieutenant, responsible for only a small part of the mind-bendingly complex business that was Operation Opera. If it all went to shit-and there was a good chance it would-it would not be his scalp the politicians came after.

“Command, Warfare. Threat plot confirmed.”

“Command, roger.”

Relieved, Michael whistled softly. The Hammers were where the few reconsats Jaruzelska was allowed to deploy said they would be. There were three task groups: Hammer-1, covering the central approaches to the antimatter plant; Hammer-2, 100,000 kilometers to the north; and Hammer-3, the same distance to the south. That was nice, Michael thought, a threat plot that did not turn to shit in the first few seconds of an operation, though he knew that happy state of affairs would not last. Things would go wrong, he reminded himself, the moment Hammer reinforcements started to arrive. If there was one thing certain about Operation Opera, that was it.

“Command, Warfare. Dreadnought Group established on vector. Groups North and South report launch of minefield clearance drones.”

“Roger.”

A quick check confirmed that Warfare had the dreadnought force in station and on vector. Michael settled back, eyes flicking between the threat and command plots. The Fed attack was developing according to a plan that for once-most unusually-was addressing a two-dimensional tactical problem rather than the three that bedeviled most space combat. That was because, buried in the heart of Devastation Reef, SuppFac27 was a difficult place to get into. Thanks to an impenetrable tangle of gravitational rips, ships approaching the Hammer plant in pinchspace