were forced to come from one direction only: from the west, parallel to the galactic plane. From any other direction-up, down, north, south, or east, it did not matter-a transit through normalspace was the only way in: Tens of millions of kilometers of gravitational reef forced a long and slow transit. As one of the planners had pointed out, to come in across the reef would be to tell the Hammers a week ahead of time that an attack was on its way, ensuring that the entire Hammer fleet would be waiting to blow you to hell when you finally turned up.
All of which was why the Hammers had located SuppFac27 where they had, so from the west it was.
The result? The Feds would fight their way into the Hammer antimatter plant across what amounted to a flat-if invisible-surface. It was the one thing Opera had going for it, and Michael loved it; it simplified the tactical situation greatly.
There was one small problem, though. If fighting a battle on a flat surface made things easier for the Feds, it did the same thing for the Hammers.
Now the two Fed task groups drove east out of their drop zones and across the western edge of Devastation Reef; ahead of them lay the Hammer ships covering the antimatter plant’s flanks. In the center, two decoy attacks-configured to look like a massive force of heavy cruisers and intended to fool the Hammers into thinking that they were the main assault force-were on vector running right up the middle, heading straight for SuppFac27.
The aim was to confuse the Hammers, to conceal the real threat to the antimatter plant for as long as possible. If Opera went to plan, the Hammers’ commander would have no idea which of the Fed ships were feints and which posed the real threat to their precious antimatter plant.
To confuse them further, cargo drones spewed decoys, jammers, and spoofers into the space between the attacks until SuppFac27 nearspace was filled with an elaborately constructed torrent of electronic noise, most of it garbage. For an instant, Michael sympathized with the Hammers; he wondered what the poor sap in charge of defending SuppFac27 was thinking. Buried under an avalanche of conflicting information, flummoxed by a blizzard of electronic noise, and with attacks developing along four separate vectors, he would be struggling to sort out truth from deception, which, of course, was the whole point.
But the Hammers had one thing going for them. There was only one target, and in the end Jaruzelska’s ships would have to close in on it to have any chance of destroying the plant. If the Hammers were smart, they would pull back and wait for the Feds to come to them instead of blundering around trying to sort out reality from deception. In the sims, the margin between success and failure narrowed dramatically every time the Hammers did that. When reinforcements turned up in the right place at the right time as well …
Happily, the Hammers were not yet doing the sensible thing. Michael was watching what might have been a “best case” simulation. As Jaruzelska’s planners hoped, the Hammer ships did not wait for the Feds to come to them; they were moving out to meet and engage the incoming Feds. But the Hammers had a big problem: three task groups to interdict four Fed lines of attack. That allowed one of the Feds’ decoy attacks to run unopposed right at the antimatter plant, giving the Hammer commander, Michael hoped, a severe attack of the vapors when he realized what was happening.
“Command, Warfare, sensors. Positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 180 Up 0. Multiple vessels, range 12,000 kilometers. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Drop datum nominal for Assault Group.”
Michael acknowledged the report, relieved that Assault Group-deemed too valuable to drop with the advance guard-was on its way. The bad news was that Assault Group was under the command of Rear Admiral Perkins, a decision Michael reckoned had the fingerprints of Fleet politicians all over it. With Perkins in charge of Assault Group, the man would be in at the kill, and Michael knew full well who would take the credit for Opera’s success. All too clearly, he could see what would happen. Ignoring the task forces protecting his vulnerable flanks, ignoring the dreadnoughts that had blasted the way open for him, Perkins would attribute the success of Opera to the conventional warships of Assault Group and, no doubt, to his skills as a combat commander. Sonofabitch.
Michael dismissed the Perkins problem. What mattered was making Opera a success, though he was pretty sure who would be getting the blame if Opera turned out to be the failure the analysts said it might so easily be. He would not want to be Jaruzelska if that happened.
“Command, Warfare, sensors. Assault Group dropping. Drop datum confirmed Red 180 Up 0, range 12,500 kilometers. Stand by … confirmed. Arrivals are Assault Group.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael settled down to wait. Warfare was performing flawlessly, so he forced himself to relax a touch. Space warfare, like all warfare down the ages, was a mixture of boredom and terror, invariably bucket loads of the former seasoned with occasional pinches of the latter. Opera was definitely in the boredom phase. This was as unexciting as combat got: two groups of ships hurtling toward each other across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space, too far apart to engage, their principal task to dump missiles into space, building their opening salvos while they closed on the enemy for the inevitable. It was the bloody business of close-quarters combat, a battle of attrition as missiles and rail-gun slugs stripped armor off ships’ frames, looking for a way through to the fusion plants driving main propulsion. Michael buried an image of
Time dragged by with excruciating slowness, the quiet concentration of
“Command, Warfare. Update. Ships of task group Hammer-1 have engaged Decoy Group One. Expect Hammer breakaway imminent.”
“Command, roger.” The Hammer commander would be seriously pissed when he discovered that he had thrown one of his precious task groups into an attack on a bunch of decoys. Fed decoys were good but not good enough to mount a convincing defense once attacked. The big question was where the Hammer ships would go when they found out they had been conned.
Michael received his answer a few minutes later. The ships attacking Decoy Group One changed vector, furious jets of ionized reaction mass from maneuvering thrusters turning them end for end, the electronic and optical noise spewed out by the decoy attack ignored completely.
“Shit,” Michael muttered when the Hammers’ intentions became clear. They had ignored the one Fed attack they had not been able to deal with: Decoy Group Two, the second decoy attack running at SuppFac27. The Hammer commander was pulling his ships back to screen the antimatter plant, and that meant just one thing. Stopping Decoy Group Two was going to be somebody else’s job. Reinforcements were on the way.
He commed the admiral’s staff.
“Flag,
The avatar of one of Jaruzelska’s operations staff took the com, the stress on the man’s face all too obvious. “Go ahead,
“The Hammer ships tasked to intercept Decoy Group One are withdrawing to SuppFac27. My assessment is that reinforcements are inbound to deal with Decoy Group Two. You concur?”
“Stand by … yes, we concur. We’re just about to update the threat plot.”
“Any estimate of the drop datum?”
“Somewhere to the southeast is our best guess, but it’s just a guess at the moment.”
“Roger.
Michael’s worst fears were about to be realized. Reinforcements were the basis for all the nightmare scenarios they had been subjected to in the sims, and far too many of those had ended in disaster. If the Hammers dropped the right ships in the right places at the right times, even a commander as good as Jaruzelska was going to struggle.
The tactical problem was simple. Jaruzelska knew Hammer ships were on the way-that much was certain-but she had no idea how many or where or when they would drop. That meant she could do nothing to head them off. She had to wait, responding to the Hammer reinforcements as they arrived. Michael hated it-no commander liked being forced to react to events-but Jaruzelska had no choice.
“Command, Warfare. Group South engaging ships of task group Hammer-3.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael patched his neuronics into the holocam feed coming from the heavy cruiser leading Group South. What he saw made his skin crawl. Shrouded in clouds of decoys, Hammer missiles-arranged like a giant doughnut
