The battle of Devastation reef

The spacers needed no encouragement. Not all the Hammers had been cut down, and reinforcements were arriving. Recovering their composure, Kallewi’s marines began to fight back, pouring rifle fire into the lobby, their bullets smacking into the rock walls. Shielded by a second shower of grenades, the Feds pulled back past the hunched figures of Bienefelt and Carmellini while they packed demolition charges into the frame around the inner air lock door.

“Charges set,” Bienefelt said. “Fused twenty seconds.”

“Fire them and get the hell out,” Ferreira said, her voice tight with pain, pushing the wounded marine at Chief Chua.

Bienefelt and Carmellini wasted no time, clearing the personnel access facility close behind Lomidze and Chua as they struggled to push the marine into the safety of a crash bag and get back to the lander at the same time. When the last spacer had crossed the threshold into the lander’s cargo bay, the personnel access facility shivered, a transient cloud of smoke and flame boiling out of the doors before vanishing into space.

Sedova wasted no time closing the cargo bay ramp.

“Hold on,” she shouted the instant Trivedi confirmed that everyone had made it back safely. Without any urging from Michael, she rammed the Ghost’s engines to full power, driving the lander in a skidding turn to place the asteroid’s massive bulk between them and the Hammers before heading into Devastation Reef.

Michael patched his neuronics into the reconsats tracking Reckless as he made his way up the Ghost’s flight deck, throwing himself into a spare seat. It was a heartbreaking sight; around the doomed ship-the last of Battle Fleet Lima to fight and die that awful day-space sparkled as Reckless fought its final battle, salvo after salvo falling on the dreadnought, the searing heat of proximity-fused fusion warheads stripping armor off, rail-gun slugs slamming home to blow huge craters into her armor, her hull wreathed in a ghastly death shroud of ionized armor.

Michael cut the holovid feed. He could not watch anymore, so he turned his attention back to the threat plot, the latest Hammer arrivals an ugly splash of red sprawled across the screen. The big question still sat there, unanswered: Would they come after Caesar’s Ghost?

Michael took a long, careful look at the plot. Whatever the reason, the Hammers showed not even the slightest interest in Caesar’s Ghost. The ships of Hammer-7 focused on Reckless; every missile and rail-gun slug they fired had just that one target. Not that Michael blamed them: He would be concentrating on a heavy cruiser with a death wish inbound under emergency power; that much suicidal mass could inflict an awful lot of damage. The Hammers did not even bother to lock the Ghost up with fire control radar, nor did they send a few missiles its way. Not that worrying what the Hammers might do made any difference; if they came after Caesar’s Ghost, there was nothing he could do about it. Heavy landers were tough but not tough enough to keep out even a small salvo of Eaglehawk missiles. Their best bet was to run, hoping Reckless convinced the Hammers that they had better things to do than chase after a single fleeing assault lander that was doomed to die in the uncharted wastes of Devastation Reef.

Good thing the Hammers did not know about pinchspace jump-capable Block 6 landers; if they did …

For Michael, postcombat exhaustion had set in with a vengeance, the shipsuit under his space suit-as always after combat-an icy, sweat-soaked wreck. All he wanted was a shower, clean gear, and a long sleep.

“Kat. Update.”

“Roger, sir. We’re … hold on, sir … the demolition charges will blow in ten.”

Michael sat up. Shit, he chided himself, how had he forgotten? “Get SuppFac27 up on holovid and let the troops know.”

Utterly focused, Michael stared at the asteroid when it popped onto the command holovid, the ugly ball of rock a black shape cut out of star-strewn space. He struggled to breathe, all too aware that Kallewi’s demolition charges had to work. If they did not, he was as good as dead. Perkins would destroy him, and maybe he would be right to.

“Stand by … now!”

Nothing happened.

Even as Michael began to think that the whole operation was a bust, the appalling loss of ships and lives, the risks he had taken, all a complete waste, the asteroid’s surface, crystal clear in the holovid feeds coming from the reconsats, he shivered. Michael was not even sure he had seen anything, it all happened so fast. There was another tremor, much bigger this time, shock lifting dust off the asteroid, and the black surface of the asteroid cracked open, flaming jets of white-hot plasma lancing out when SuppFac27’s fusion plants blew, the enormous overpressure following every access tunnel back up to the surface, the blast blowing huge chunks of rock to tumble away into space, pursued by jets of incandescent gas.

“Oh, yeah,” Sedova said, her face a snarl of pure hatred. “Suck that, you Hammer bastards. I don’t think there’ll be much more antimatter coming out of that place.”

Michael choked up, but Reckless’s crew did not, their cheers and shouts swamping the Ghost’s com circuits.

“Right, Kat,” Michael said, spirits soaring as the weight came off his shoulders before reality brought them crashing back to ground. He was acutely aware how far from home they all were; he hoped the cheers were not premature. For him, this mission was not over until every last spacer and marine made it home safely. “Update.”

“Roger. We’re at jump speed, though the navigation AI says there is way too much gravitational instability for us to get into pinchspace safely. There’s still no sign of any interest from the Hammers. Cleft Stick has recovered lifepods from Seljuk, Secular, Iron Bridge, and Darter. She is chasing down the last of them, two from Skeandhu. When she’s recovered those, she’ll rendezvous with us.”

“How long?”

“Four hours, give or take. We’ll have a precise time once she’s recovered Skeandhu’s survivors.”

“Roger. Any sign of Hammers responding?”

“No, sir. Still none, and something tells me there won’t be. Hammers being Hammers, they’ll be more interested in lining up the poor bastards in charge and shooting them.”

“My heart bleeds for the pricks. Is there a list of survivors?”

“No, not yet. The Stick’s AI is doing the best it can, but routine administration is not one of its strong points.”

Michael chuckled softly. Assault landers were never designed to fly without a human crew; of course they could, but some of the finer points of command tended to fall by the wayside. “Fine. Ask it nicely to let us know if it can find the time. Even better, see if it can patch us through to one of the survivors. Next question: We can’t go back, so where the hell do we go?”

“I was afraid you’d ask me that, sir. The bad news is that we have just one option, I’m afraid. I’ve checked and rechecked. Serhati is the only non-Hammer world we can reach with the driver mass and consumables we have onboard. I’ve done a navigation plan to get us there.”

“Shit,” Michael said softly with a shake of his head; Serhati did not appear on any list of friendly systems he had ever seen. “What’s the transit time?”

“Not good, sir. It’s … let me see … yes, a thirteen-day transit.”

Michael winced; the cramped confines of a heavy lander would make for an uncomfortable trip. “Can we do that?” he said, trying not to look concerned.

“Assuming Cleft Stick recovers no more than 200 survivors, yes, we can … just,” Sedova said. “Assuming 250 souls all up, consumables are the problem: We’ll be out of food, our carbon dioxide scrubbers will be on their last legs, and we’ll be critically low on oxygen and water. And that’s even after we’ve stripped Cleft Stick bare.”

“Umm,” Michael said after he took a long look at Serhati’s profile. “Yes, you’re right. It has to be Serhati, so that’s where we’ll go. And yes, it’ll be damn tight. But I think we can do it if we keep the troops in their bunks twenty-two hours a day to reduce oxygen consumption. The big problem is that Serhati is a Hammer client. Not officially, of course; it pretends to be a Kalici Protocol world, but scratch the surface and it’s not. According to the