The battle of Devastation reef

Michael forced himself to sit back in his seat. There was nothing more he-or any other human-could do now. Close-quarters battle management was the one thing AIs excelled at. Making tactical decisions based on the avalanche of data generated by ship sensors tracking thousands of incoming missiles and rail-gun slugs and at the same time controlling the outgoing counterattack was simply too much for any human. To sit still was an effort, yet Michael forced himself to do exactly that, to watch the squadron’s defensive weapon systems soak up the Hammer attack, missile after missile erupting in brilliant balls of white flame as medium-range missiles and lasers hacked them out of space. But some made it through, triggering the dreadnoughts’ close-in defenses: a triple layer of lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns working desperately to keep the Hammer missile attack out, the problem greatly compounded when a rail-gun salvo blasted its way through to smash into his ships, timed to arrive a few seconds before the surviving missiles hit home.

Michael braced himself; the Tufayl bucked and heaved under the impact of multiple missile and rail-gun slug strikes. “You’ll have to try harder than that, you sons of bitches,” he murmured while the Tufayl’s reinforced frontal and flank armor shrugged off the attack with contemptuous ease. “Now it’s our turn.”

He watched intently as the dreadnoughts finally turned their bows onto the threat axis. The instant they did, all ten ships let go with everything they had, the Tufayl reverberating with the characteristic crunching metal-on-metal thud of the rail guns punching slugs and decoys-hundreds of thousands of them-toward the Hammer cruisers at more than 3 million kilometers per hour, the shape of the swarm designed to force the Hammer ships to move where the slug density was greatest, where the ship-kill probabilities were highest.

“Command, Warfare. Missile launch from auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2. Stand by … missiles are Eaglehawks.”

“What?” Michael suppressed a momentary flash of unease. Eaglehawks? That made no sense. “Command, confirm.” The auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2 had just done something they were not-supposedly-capable of: launching Eaglehawk missiles. According to every technical intelligence report he had ever read, Hammer auxiliaries did not carry the Hammer’s heavyweight antistarship missiles. In theory, they posed no real threat. So how were they able to launch Eaglehawks?

“Confirmed, command. Task group Hammer-2 has launched Eaglehawk missiles. Stand by … Hammer-1 is jumping.”

Michael watched in despair as brief flares of ultraviolet light signaled the cruisers of task group Hammer-1’s jump into pinchspace, his missile and rail-gun salvos arriving too late to do anything but rip uselessly through the knuckles of tangled space-time left by the ships’ departure. This does not look good, he said to himself. Hammer capital ships did not make a habit of abandoning their posts in the middle of an attack, but that was what they were doing. Why? He had been so sure that they posed the main threat to his ships, that they would stay to slug it out.

Something cold and clammy slimed its way into Michael’s chest and squeezed his heart hard. Without understanding why, he knew something bad was about to happen. Now his only option was to jump his own ships to safety, and he would be dammed if he was going to run away. He had come here to fight, and while he faced Hammer ships, fight he would.

“Command, Warfare. Missile salvo from Hammer-2 assessed to be low-density attack consisting of multiple Eaglehawk ASSMs plus decoys. Vectors and salvo geometry are nominal for antimatter attack. Insufficient time to complete turn onto threat axis. Probability of mission-abort damage is high and rising. Recommend emergency jump into pinchspace. Repeat, recommend emergency jump into pinchspace.”

Michael did not give himself time to think. “Negative, negative,” he shouted. “Expedite turn to threat axis and engage.”

“Warfare, roger. Expediting,” Warfare replied calmly. “Hammer missiles are inside our mission abort damage radius … missile detonation imminent.”

“Goddamn it,” Michael whispered. He slumped back, the sweat-soaked shipsuit under his armored combat space suit suddenly ice-cold. With shocking clarity, it became all too obvious. Apprehension washed through him, and his stomach acid-churned, sour and unsettled. He had walked right into the trap set for him and his ships. Pride and stupidity had stranded him there, and now it was too late; he had to wait and pray that his ships would ride out the Hammer attack.

Inside the Hammer missiles, traps holding the warheads’ antihydrogen payload collapsed. Antimatter annihilated matter, releasing a tsunami of gamma radiation into space. Tufayl and her sister ships did not stand a chance. For all their reinforced armor, the dreadnoughts were too close to withstand the prodigious wave of energy released by the missiles. Impulse shock waves bludgeoned the ships with lethal force, battering critical systems to the point of failure and beyond. Seconds after the attack, the enormous fusion plants powering the dreadnoughts’ main propulsion power plants lost containment, transformed into blue-white flashes of raw energy that consumed the ships from end to end, leaving nothing but a few shattered fragments of ceramsteel armor and writhing tendrils of ionized matter to mark the passing of ten once-powerful ships.

There was complete quiet, the command holovid flashing “SHIP DESTROYED” in letters that flooded the combat information center with bloodred light. Then the holovid displays that curtained the combat information center went blank and the lights came on.

Michael stared, stunned, unable to move. The weight of yet another failure was close to unbearable.

“All stations,” a disembodied voice announced. “This is control. End of exercise. Hot wash-up in Conference Room 4 in thirty minutes. Control out.”

“Shit, shit, shit. What a bloody disaster,” Michael muttered. The day had been bad enough without having to sit through the humiliation of a debrief chaired by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, the Fleet’s most respected, experienced, and successful combat commander.

Why me? he asked himself, throwing off his safety straps. He forced a body stiff with tension and stress to its feet. All he had ever wanted to be was an assault lander pilot, not some damned cruiser captain, a job he had not asked for, a job he was beginning to think he should not have. He smiled for an instant, his mouth twisting into a grim gash devoid of any humor. Well, look on the bright side, he told himself dispiritedly. After today’s performance, there was every chance he would not be Tufayl’s captain designate much longer.

Someone else would have to make dreadnoughts work.

“So, to sum up, the critical command error occurred here, at drop plus fifteen seconds, a mistake compounded by the warfare AI’s failure to communicate effectively with the command. The Hammer capital ships in task group Hammer-1 were too close to our ships to deploy antimatter missiles. Conventional chemex and tacnuke-armed missiles were their only options. That made them the lesser threat. The auxiliaries and their escorts in Hammer-2, on the other hand, orbited far enough away to launch and survive an antimatter attack, and that is exactly what they did once our ships committed to the attack. After missile launch, command had the option to jump to safety but elected to ride out the attack. That was the wrong decision, and as a result …” The analyst’s voice trailed off; she appeared somewhat embarrassed.

Michael squirmed in his seat. In the cold light of day, it was all so easy, so damn obvious. Why was he so stupid? His head slumped onto his chest, the shame nearly unbearable.

Vice Admiral Jaruzelska’s voice cut through the hush. “Okay, folks. I think that’ll do. I want department heads back here, Monday morning, 08:00. We’ll review lessons learned from this week and your recommendations for improvement. No top of the head stuff, either. Detailed proposals. I’ll also com you a list of specific areas I want checked. Any questions?”

There were none, and the meeting broke up, the mood subdued and-to Michael’s mind at least-the atmosphere heavy with the smell of failure.

Jaruzelska called Michael over.

“Sir?”

“My office in ten.”

Unable to speak, Michael nodded. For all his could-not-care-less bravado, he did care. He wanted to be the one who transformed dreadnoughts from a bright idea into the weapon that would drive the Hammers into the ground. But maybe he was not the one; maybe Jaruzelska was keeping him back to tell him just that.