stand by to drop,' he said. 'Warfare. Confirm weapons free. You have command authority.'
'Warfare, roger,' the AI said. 'Weapons free. I have command authority.'
Michael sat back, happy to leave the battle in Warfare's hands. He glanced around the gutted shell of Redwood's combat information center, an eerie sight through the mist as the pumps depressurized the compartment, the last thin white skeins of moisture drawn, twisting and writhing, away into the air-conditioning ducts. Everything removable had been stripped out in a ruthless drive to reduce the once-great ship's mass; the conversion from heavy cruiser to dreadnought was a brutal and unforgiving process devoid of all finesse. Redwood was a different ship when the yard finished with her. She and her fellow dreadnoughts, Red River and Redress, were the toughest ships in the Federated Worlds' order of battle, heavily armored, their crews of hundreds replaced by a handful of spacers. Being the captain of a dreadnought was a lonely business. Redwood's CIC did not help, its crew of three spacers precious few to take three dreadnoughts into battle. It was an empty, lifeless place, even if he included the space-suited avatars of Warfare and the artificial intelligences responsible for operations and threat assessment. Karol and Kenny, Michael had called them after the obsolete K-Class heavy cruisers Karolev and Kendrick they had served in throughout the Second Hammer War before being retired to Fleet's StratSim facility. Their avatars might look like real people, but that did not help.
Redwood's combat information center was still a shell, its very emptiness a monument to a once dominant Federated Worlds, a dominance destroyed by the Hammer of Kraa in a few brutal seconds at the Battle of Comdur.
Michael dragged air deep into his lungs to sharpen his focus on the operation. He might not want to be here- and he sure as hell did not-but he had to think about Redwood and her crew. If getting them and the rest of the squadron home in one piece was too big a task, he should not be sitting in the command seat. Concentrate now, he urged himself. Concentrate!
'Command, Warfare, stand by… dropping now.'
Michael's stomach turned over as Redwood dropped out of pinchspace, the ships erupting into normalspace a scant 10,000 kilometers from their targets, violent flares of ultraviolet marking their arrival. With practiced calm, Redwood's crew confirmed that the threat plot was how it should be. To Michael's relief, there was no sign of the Hammer ships Ferreira was so concerned about. Warfare, oblivious to Michael's petty concerns, was wasting no time; rail-gun salvos from the three dreadnoughts' forward batteries punched toward the hapless Hammer base in tight swarms of tiny slugs and decoys that raced to their targets at more than 3 million kilometers per hour.
Phase 1 of the operation lasted less than a second. With the Fed ships dropping so close, there was no time for Hammer defenses to think, let alone react. In that time, hundreds of thousands of rail-gun slugs blasted the surface of the asteroid into space, obliterating missile platforms and batteries along with the radar and laser stations that controlled them.
Michael grunted in satisfaction, adrenaline-fueled excitement flushing away all his earlier disinterest.
'Command, Warfare. Detaching Red River to investigate heat anomaly. Redwood and Redress closing on primary objective. Stand by deceleration burn.'
'Command, roger. Ground assault?'
'Standing by. Landers are at Launch 1.'
'Command, roger.' Michael sat back, satisfied that the operation was running to plan. Provided that happy state of affairs continued, they should be on their way back to Nyleth inside-
Michael's moment of self-congratulation was destroyed by Jarrod Carmellini, the leading spacer in charge of the dreadnoughts' sensor arrays. 'Command, Warfare, this is sensors,' he said. 'New track. Green 20 Up 0, range 50,000 kilometers. Designated hostile task group Hammer-1. Stand by… hostiles confirmed to be Hammer cruisers, stand by identification… Verity-Class heavy cruisers Vindicator, Vigilant, and Virtue.'
'Command, Warfare. Threat concurs.'
'Damn, damn, damn,' Michael muttered, all too aware he had let Ferreira down, how right she had been, how wrong, how negligent his response.
The threat plot told the story. The three scarlet icons appeared as if from nowhere, their projected vectors running out from their hiding places in the rubble field right at the incoming Fed ships. 'Fucking Hammers,' Michael cursed under his breath. He did not need this, not now, not ever. Cursing was all he could do: The battle rested in Warfare's hands. Michael sat back and watched the AI divert Redress to support Red River's attempts to head off the Hammers. That left Redwood-now decelerating under emergency power to a stop over the shattered remnants of Balawal-34's surface installations-to finish the operation. Michael cursed some more; launching landers and their precious cargo of marines with Hammer heavy cruisers throwing missiles and rail-gun slugs around was never a good idea.
'Command, sensors,' Carmellini said. 'Initial missile launch from Hammer-1. Target unknown. Anticipate one more salvo followed by coordinated missile and rail-gun attack. Likely target Redwood and assault landers.'
'Command, roger,' Michael said. 'Threat?'
'Threat concurs,' the AI said.
He agreed. The Hammer ships would have been tasked to protect their signals intelligence station, and Redwood posed the most immediate threat to its survival. Red River and Redress should have no problem dealing with the attacking Hammers given their heavier armor and better maneuverability, but they had to be given the time to finish them off. Burying an urge to take control of the engagement back from Warfare, Michael commed it, closing his eyes when its avatar popped into his neuronics.
'Advice,' he said. 'Consider holding back the ground assault until the Hammer ships have been dealt with. Also consider adjusting vector so as to put Balawal-34 between us and the enemy. That'll at least keep their damn rail- gun slugs off our backs. Any problems with any of that?'
The AI considered that for a moment before responding. 'None. I concur.'
'Good. Make it so,' Michael said, wondering why the AI had not preempted him, even though he knew why. AIs had their weaknesses, and thinking outside the box was one of them; that was why Fleet doctrine insisted, rightly, on keeping humans in the loop. He commed the ground assault commander, Lieutenant Janos Kallewi.
'You copy all that, Janos?' he asked.
'Did, sir,' Kallewi said. 'I hoped you'd hold us back. Assault landers are tough but not tough enough to keep out an Eaglehawk missile.'
'Never mind rail-gun slugs.'
'Them, too,' Kallewi said with a grin.
'You'll be launching the moment we have dealt with the Hammer ships,' Michael said before dropping the comm, steadied by Kallewi's calm confidence.
He turned his attention back to the command plot, now a mass of red and green icons that tracked the battle unfolding between the Hammers and his two dreadnoughts. He liked what he saw; no Hammer would. The enemy ships had been caught between the jaws of the Fed attack the moment they emerged from the rubble field, their vulnerable flanks exposed to Redress's rail guns as she closed in from the right while Red River, approaching head- on, flayed their bows with missiles, rail guns, and antistarship lasers. Things were not looking too good for the Hammers, not that they were sitting back to wait for the inevitable.
'Command, Warfare. Second missile launch from Hammer-1. Stand by salvo commit… missiles on the way. Target Redwood, time of flight 2 minutes 5.'
'Command, roger. All stations, Command. Brace for missile attack.'
Michael's pulse quickened, the familiar mix of adrenaline-fueled excitement and fear washing the indifference and guilt out of his system. Keeping one eye on the Hammer task group while it fell apart in the face of the attack from Red River and Redress, he watched the incoming missiles crawl their way across the command plot toward Redwood.
Michael knew that missiles alone posed little threat; they were protected by the massive bulk of the asteroid, and the Hammer's rail guns were useless: The attack would not trouble Redwood's defenses. Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of a missile attack was always a nerve-wracking business. They closed in, and the missile attack dissolved into anticlimax. Redwood's medium-range defensive missiles and lasers started the relentless, grinding process of hacking Hammer missiles out of the attack, the space between the ships filling with the violent flares of exploding missile warheads and fusion power plants. The gap between missiles and target narrowed, the salvo a confused and chaotic cloud seeded with decoys intended to ensure that enough missiles survived to destroy Redwood. The dreadnought's close-in defenses took over, a triple layer of lasers, short-range missiles, and chain
