Michael managed a laugh. “Sorry, sir—er, Bill.”
“And one more thing, Michael. Get yourself to the sick bay. You need attention.”
“All in good time. There are things I need to do first.”
Flanked by her senior staff, all standing dumbstruck, Vice Admiral Jaruzelska stared open-mouthed at the holovid.
She’d known that 387 and 166 had kept up their laser attack on New Dallas but had tucked that information away in the back of her mind, where she parked stuff that wasn’t significant, bits and pieces that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things for which she was responsible.
Therefore, it took a good long time before she and the rest of the flag staff believed what they were seeing: a huge ship slowly falling out of the line of attack, the massive explosion on her starboard quarter pushing her into a slow spiraling spin to nowhere.
And then the cheers from the ship’s company of Al-Jahiz and from her own flag staff drove home the extent of what the two little ships had achieved. “By God, that was one for the record books,” Jaruzelska muttered, disabling a ship hundreds of times their size. Finally, order prevailed and the flag staff turned their attention back to the rest of the battle now under way across hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers of Hell nearspace. The command plot was now showing the Hell nearspace component of Operation Corona in its entirety. Along with the two heavy assault forces tasked with reducing the flotilla base, Hell Central, and any warships unlucky enough to be on station to dust, the command plot now tracked Task Group 256.3, under the command of Commodore Pinto in the heavy cruiser Repudiate together with four heavy patrol ships as they ran in on Hell-5, one of the three moons holding those of Mumtaz’s passengers and crew who had not been sent to Eternity.
Much farther out, Commodore Yu Genwei in the heavy cruiser Ulugh Beg and the fourteen other ships of Task Group 256.4 had dropped out of pinchspace on schedule and were tracking in toward three of Hell system’s outer moons. Hell-16 and Hell-18 held the rest of the Mumtazers, and the third, Hell-20, held the overly trusting and no doubt thoroughly disillusioned hijackers of the Mumtaz.
Satisfied with the big picture and after a final check that the Hammer forces in orbit around the system’s home planet of Commitment were still showing no signs of moving, Jaruzelska collected her thoughts. “Flag AI, flag. Message to the captains and crews of DLS-387 and DLS-166.”
She paused for a moment, conscious that what she said would go down in history and wanting to get it right. Not for her own sake but for the sake of those who needed to understand, to know at what a terrible price the freedoms long enjoyed by the Worlds came.
She took a deep breath. “In the face of appalling odds, crippling damage, and severe casualties, your unrelenting attack on vastly superior forces is in the highest traditions of the Federated Worlds Space Fleet. With you, we mourn the loss of your comrades. The ultimate sacrifice they have made to protect the freedoms we all hold so dear will never be forgotten. I and every other member of Battle Group Delta salute you all. Signed, A. J. Jaruzelska, vice admiral, Federated Worlds Space Fleet, Commander, Battle Group Delta.”
Jaruzelska braced herself for what was to come as she counted down the seconds to the arrival of what the flag AI assured her would be the first and last missile salvo launched at her ships from the shattered flotilla base.
Jaruzelska hadn’t much enjoyed missile engagements with the Hammer the last time around and didn’t expect to now. It had been nearly twenty years since she’d been shot at seriously by the bastards, and she wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience, a view shared by her chief of staff as he exercised his authority to shut down the excited chatter and get the flag staff to focus on what came next.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. One minute.”
Only half-aware of what she was doing, Jaruzelska hunched down in her seat and struggled to bring her breathing under control, if only to give her fogged-up visor a chance to clear. As always, her space suit was uncomfortable, the helmet neck ring heavy on her shoulders as she watched the massive attack make its way inexorably toward them.
Jaruzelska completely approved of Captain van Meir’s caution in going to full suits. Unlike some heavy cruiser captains, the Al-Jahiz’s skipper insisted that visors be closed and suit checks completed as an attack became imminent. Heavy cruisers rarely depressurized for combat. They were too big and too tough, and the loss of personal communication was too keenly felt, particularly by command teams under pressure. But not shutting up suits as an attack approached risked the lives of anyone caught in a compartment suddenly open to hard vacuum.
As Jaruzelska checked and rechecked that nothing had been overlooked, the tactical plot showed an ugly and menacing sight.
The flag AI’s latest estimate was that there were upward of 750 Sparrowhawk missiles in the attack, though based on what she’d seen so far, Jaruzelska thought that the AI’s assumptions about Hammer missile availability were too pessimistic. She snorted dismissively. The Sparrowhawk was so old that it used hypergolic fuels for its launch stage, for God’s sake. But it didn’t matter who was right. They’d soon find out one way or the other. What really mattered was how well the task group’s sensors had separated the missiles from the myriad decoys and jammers sent along to confuse, baffle, and divert the attention of the antimissile defenses.
If the task group got that right, they’d come through this pretty much unscathed. If they didn’t…
After a quick check that everything on the command plot was as it should be, Jaruzelska forced the grim prospect of a successful Hammer attack out of her mind as she turned her attention back to the tactical plot.
The Hammer had adopted what the missile attack tacticians called a standard doughnut formation, or do-form. The doughnut formation was exactly what it sounded like. After the launch and second stages burned out, the missiles would open out into a thick ring of missiles around an open center, with the attack axis running right through the middle of the hole. As the range shortened, the missiles would fire their third-stage maneuvering engines to collapse the doughnut inward onto the Fed ships, accelerating fiercely as they closed. The do-form was standard Hammer tactics for antistarship missile attacks, and Jaruzelska was not surprised to see it coming at her. It was exactly what the THREATSUM had predicted. Well done, boys and girls at Fleet intelligence, she thought.
That was fine up to a point. They had simmed such attacks to death, so Jaruzelska had little to do but sit back and watch as her warships closed in to a tight, closely packed ring, the ships’ heaviest armor facing outward at the approaching missiles. In a missile-only attack, it was a good defensive formation, although it took only one ship in the ring to fumble its defense and missiles would slip past to smash directly into the thin upper armor of ships in the rest of the ring. Not for nothing was the formation considered a great test of mutual trust, Jaruzelska thought.
But despite all the sims, facing one for real was a very different matter, as the fist of fear and tension that gripped her stomach proved.
All of a sudden, the tactical plot erupted as the Hammer missiles reached the maximum effective range of the task group’s medium-range area defense missiles. In seconds, the command plot was thick with tracks as missiles streaked out, eating up the 50,000-kilometer gap at better than 330,000 meters per second.
Barely more than two intensely frightening minutes later and with hundreds of missiles and countless decoys and jammers expended, the Hammer attack was over.
But not without cost.
A power failure on an overloaded weapons power fusion plant deprived Damishqui of an entire battery of close-range defensive lasers just as flag AI handed over two Hammer missiles that somehow had made it through the outer defensive cordon wrongly classified as decoys, and as such well down the pecking order, for the attention of Damishqui’s close-in weapons. The belated efforts of Damishqui’s chain guns had been too late to destroy the missiles, and despite her en
ormous bulk, Damishqui had shuddered as the first missile hit home, the armored warhead combined with the missile’s massive kinetic energy punching effortlessly through the upper armor, cutting right through the ship before venting its fury to space. The result was nine compartments breached, four dead, and twenty-seven injured, but no mission-critical systems degraded. The second missile had scraped through, impacting Damishqui’s bows at a shallow angle almost exactly where the armor was thickest. Apart from an enormous gouge across Damishqui’s hull, the damage was minimal.
Two missiles made Al-Jahiz suffer, though not close to the extent to which 387 and 166 had suffered. Losses on that scale in a ship the size of Al-Jahiz would have been unthinkable.
With its warhead’s circuitry fried by lasers and a close-range antimissile missile ripping its third stage apart in a brilliant flash of blue-white, the tattered fragments of a single Hammer missile had squeezed past the task group’s defenses to crash into Al-Jahiz’s bow armor. But the second missile got a better result.
A serious datastream error allowed the missile to get lost in the flood of data being handled by the task group’s AIs, an error that in theory couldn’t happen but did, one of the hazards of volume defense using laser-based high-speed datastreams to shuffle information between ships. The missile slid down a gap between Zuhr and Searchlight before crashing into Al-Jahiz, the warhead reaching into the ship to destroy an auxiliary fusion plant, with the massive explosion shaking Al-Jahiz bodily as the blast vented to space. A few anxious moments followed until the warship’s damage control crews sealed off the damage and reported no mission abort problems. Considering the enormous forces unleashed when a magnetic plasma containment bottle ruptured, casualties were relatively light at nine dead and sixty-six injured.
As Jaruzelska ran her eyes across the final damage assessments, she was relieved to see that the rest of the task group had gotten off lightly. Any missiles that had made it past the area antimissile defenses had been ripped apart by the carefully crafted layers of close-in point defense weapons systems, short-range missiles, then antimissile lasers, and finally, for last-ditch defense, chain guns. Apart from Blue- fish, which had lost its long-range search radar to an inert missile, the only damage suffered was from missile fragments chewing up small sections of hull armor.
The Hammers’ next effort turned out to be a total waste of ordnance. Close to half a million rail-gun slugs fired from extreme long range in three separate salvos gave the flag AI enough time to calculate vectors to enable the task group to slide effortlessly out of the way. In the end, it was all a bit of an anticlimax. The relief in the flag combat data center was reflected in a sudden upsurge of nervous chatter as the task group maneuvered to allow the slugs to pass harmlessly clear.
As the task group moved relentlessly in, Jaruzelska sat and watched, grim-faced and silent, as her attack ground the Hammer forces into dust. It didn’t take long, and then it was all over. Rear Admiral’s Pritchard’s two bases and his twenty-strong flotilla were no more, their only monuments blackened, slowly tumbling wrecks of ships. Hell nearspace was thick with the orange anticollision lights of rescue and recovery craft as they started the long process of gathering in the scores of lifebots spewed into space by the stricken ships.
What came next would be the Hammer’s last throw of the dice, a moderately serious missile attack compared to their first effort, which even she would call serious. Jaruzelska’s neuronics scrolled through the list of incoming attacks. The report showed seven missile salvos on their way in from the New Dallas task group, thousands of missiles in all. They wouldn’t be as easy to avoid as the rail-gun swarms had been. Jaruzelska sucked her teeth.
The command plot was not a pretty sight as it tracked the onrushing salvos.
Not for the first time that day, Jaruzelska cursed her luck that five Hammer heavies had chosen that morning to drop in-system. In all the sims they had done, it was not far off the worst-case scenario, and it was only the desperate attack by 387 and 166 that had diffused the threat they posed. Also, they carried the new Eaglehawk antistarship missile, not obsolete Mohawks. By Fed standards, the Eaglehawk was still a relatively crude piece of engineering, but it was a big improvement on its predecessor. It was faster, had a much improved terminal guidance system, had good antijamming capability, and was topped with a high-gain shaped-charge warhead: a very nasty piece of work and definitely not to be taken for granted.
But there was some good news.
The salvos were well separated and minutes apart. There was only one threat axis, and Hammer ship-launched missiles had no better off-bore capability than did Fed ship-launched missiles. That meant Jaruzelska could place her sixteen cruisers in a loose wall, the ships in two tiers in line abreast, bows and bow armor facing the missiles coming at them but positioned close enough to provide overlapping fields of fire even if the Hammers had been smart enough to focus their salvos onto one ship or maybe two. If the Hammers went for two ships, and that was the flag AI’s prediction based on what she’d observed so far, that left plenty of firepower in reserve. The greatest risk was that the Hammer would be smart enough to go for only one of the light cruisers and lucky enough to pick one that she had been stupid enough to leave exposed and unsupported on one flank.
That was something she had no intention of doing.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. Two minutes.”
“Here we go. A small one to get us started and then some serious stuff,” Jaruzelska muttered.
And then, in a flash, Verity’s missiles were upon them, every one targeting Al-Jahiz as she rode at the center of the task group. But the combined firepower of sixteen cruisers was more than enough to rip the missiles out of space, leaving Al-Jahiz to be troubled only by scattered fragments of missile debris, with the impacts triggering only tiny puffs of reactive armor.
Jaruzelska settled her breathing down. Her turn now, she thought, and a short pause in the action while her missiles fell on the unfortunate ships of the New Dallas group.
“Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas group in one minute.”
“Flag, roger.”
Jaruzelska watched as the missiles from her ships, their arrival carefully timed and their final vectors orchestrated to stretch and overwhelm the defenses of their targets, did what they had been sent to do.
For a brief few seconds, the holovid was filled with brilliant white flashes as the Hammer ships’ close-in defenses reached out to destroy the early arrivals before the sheer weight of numbers allowed missile after missile to smash home, burying warheads deep into armor. Plasma jets reached inside until one by one hulls were ripped open, spilling debris and molten metal into space. The crippled New Dallas was the last to go, but eventually, for all her enormous size, the numbers were against her and she, too, succumbed.
Jaruzelska felt sick as she watched.
It had to be done, and she had no doubts about doing it. In any case, the Hammer was still trying to do to her what she had done to the unfortunate New Dallas and its task group. But it was still butchery, and she didn’t have to like it.
“All stations, command. Missile salvo inbound. Two minutes.”
And so it started again, only this time the salvos were larger, and just as the flag AI had predicted, all were targeted on just two ships. The first three salvos were aimed at Damishqui, and the last three at Al-Jahiz, though Jaruzelska and the flag AI could find no logical reason why they had been picked other than that they rode in the center of the task group. But the missile attacks were doomed to failure; the enormous defensive firepower of sixteen cruisers was simply too much to overcome.
Then the Hammer attack was spent. After more than half a million rail-gun slugs and thousands of missiles, it was all over. Jaruzelska settled down with little more to do than watch as the four task groups responsible for the rescue of the Mumtaz’s passengers and crew swept in on their targets.
As the order to relax visors came through, Jaruzelska leaned bac
k in her suit and squirmed her body around to try to relieve a persistent itch in the small of her back. She hoped that there would be no more surprises like New Dallas.
Jaruzelska cursed the Hammer for its willingness to sacrifice good ships and spacers for no possible gain. Unbelievably, Commitment had dispatched the heavy cruiser Ascania and the heavy escort Perez. Picked up by surveillance drones in orbit around Commitment, the two ships jumped out of pinchspace directly into Jaruzelska’s missile salvos.
She had taken no pleasure in what followed. It was far too close to cold-blooded murder for her liking. The two Hammer ships never had a chance.
Still struggling to set up after the drop, the Hammers saw the missiles coming only when it was far too late to do anything effective. The space around the two ships turned into a blazing mass of defensive laser fire, with missiles and chain-gun fire clawing at the Merlins as they raced in, the sheer size of the attack overwhelming the Hammer ships’ tracking and fire control systems. The space around the two ships sparkled with the red-gold blooms of their few successes.
Ascania took the brunt of the attack. Close to a hundred Merlin antistarship missiles slipped past her defenses, hitting home in the space of only two seconds. Perez did better but not well enough, absorbing forty-two direct hits, a nearly impossible number for a cruiser to deal with, never mind a heavy escort. The two doomed ships heaved as nose cones of vanadium/tungsten-hardened steel cut deep before explosive warheads unleashed a storm of white-hot gas and shrapnel that scoured the life out of every compartment; the hapless crews were incinerated where they sat.
Sickened, Jaruzelska watched as the warheads finally found what they were looking for: the fusion plants that powered the ships’ propulsion and weapons systems. The appalling energy within them was unleashed as the magnetic bottles containing the fusion plasma gave way, successive blasts ripping huge holes in the sides of the two ships.
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 34