“Stand by, command…Negative. They are having to pitch up to get a firing solution on the decoys, so they’ll be off vector for us by the time they are stern on.”
“Command, roger. Let’s hope we can ride it out, and with a bit of luck the task group can help us finish off Gore.” Ribot’s voice resonated with new hope.
“Confirmed.”
“Roger. Keep the lasers on New Dallas. If she shows us enough of her big fat ass, we may get lucky. Mother, what are our chances?”
“Probability of mission abort level of damage is 7 percent. Probability of hard kill is negligible.”
“Bugger.” Ribot sighed in disappointment. “Not great odds. Okay. Priority mission is own ship defense. Second priority, 166 defense. Third, New Dallas.”
Michael shared Ribot’s disappointment.
For one wonderful fleeting moment, he had thought, had hoped, they might have a chance of killing New Dallas. But with the rail-gun swarms now coming thick and fast, 387’s lasers weren’t getting enough time on target to have a chance with a warship as big and tough as New Dallas. That was a hell of a shame, as the distance and angle of attack were good and getting better by the minute as New Dallas swung her stern into 387’s and 166’s lines of attack.
Add yet another tactical screwup to the Hammer’s already long list, Michael muttered, even if it looked like one 387 and 166 wouldn’t be able to exploit.
“All stations, command. First rail-gun salvos due in one minute.”
They were in Mother’s hands now. For Christ’s sake, do it well, Michael thought.
In the end, the rail-gun swarms hurled at them by the two Hammer heavy patrol ships were an anticlimax. Mother was easily able to maneuver 387 down and away out of the path of Gore’s and Arroyo’s onrushing slugs. The attack was too poorly targeted, the swarm too small, the rail-gun slugs spread too far apart and leaving too many holes for Mother to exploit. The ship barely registered the impact of the lightweight thin-skinned decoys intended to confuse its sensors as they smashed uselessly into the ship’s thick frontal armor.
Then it was all over, and the slugs were gone. Two light scouts had survived the first Hammer rail-gun attack in twenty years. A miracle, that was what it was, Michael told himself, a bloody miracle.
Ribot didn’t think it was a miracle at all. Nor did Holdorf.
“Stupid, impatient bastards,” he said. “If the whole lot of them had hung on and fired as one, they’d have had us on toast. And if they’d taken us one at a time instead of trying to kill us both…” Holdorf’s voice trailed off into silence as the thought of 387’s destruction at the hands of a Hammer rail-gun attack struck home.
“True enough, Lucky. But it’s not over yet,” Ribot said as Mother flung 387 almost onto her back under emergency maneuvering power as she desperately tried to get the ship out of the way of the next swarm. The artgrav howled in protest as Mother struggled to get 387’s bulk clear of Shark’s slug rail-gun salvo. Ribot winced as Mother took the terrible risk of presenting her thin upper armor to three objects on a collision course.
Christ on the Cross, Ribot prayed desperately, his heart pounding as fear threatened to swamp him. They’d better be decoys and not slugs. If they were slugs…
Ribot breathed out raggedly as Mother reported three decoy impacts and no damage. Jesus, he thought, this is tough. There were still more incoming slugs, not to mention missiles, than he cared to think about.
“Command, Mother. Report from Commander Task Group 256.1. First rail-gun and missile salvos away. Target Hell system Flotilla Base fixed defenses and warships on station.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Ribot shouted, slapping the arm of his command chair.
Ribot couldn’t help himself; a broad smile split his face behind the visor of his space-suit helmet. That was more like it, and with a bit of luck, the Hammer might leave them alone now that Admiral Jaruzelska and her cruisers had joined the party.
From the moment the sixteen cruisers that made up Task Group 256.1 had dropped into Hammer normalspace, Admiral Jaruzelska and her entire flag staff had watched the deadly game being played out by the two massively out-gunned Fed light scouts in horrified fascination. The flag combat data center was deathly silent as the task group’s holocams tracked 387 and 166 as they writhed and twisted their way out of the path of the rail-gun swarms from Gore, Arroyo, and MacFarlane.
Their concentration was broken only when Al-Jahiz shuddered with the characteristic heavy metal-on-metal crunching thud of rail-gun mass drivers punching a full swarm of slugs and its decoy cloud toward the hapless ships berthed at the flotilla base at over 3.8 million kph, the salvo flanked on all sides by the slug swarms and yet more decoy clouds from the other ships. The attack was massive, the kinetic energy thrown at the Hammers equal to three megatons of high explosive.
“Flag, flag AI. Force rail-gun salvos away.”
“Flag, roger,” Jaruzelska said mechanically as she switched half her brain away from her two smallest ships and back to the big picture.
She shivered as she thought of what the salvo was going to do to the unprepared warships of the Hell Flotilla and its fixed defenses. She wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of a ten-slug salvo, let alone one with millions of the mean ugly bastards. For all their massive bulk and enormously thick frontal armor, the flotilla flagship Verity and its sister heavy cruiser Integrity were doomed, and the two light cruisers Cordoba and Camara wouldn’t be long in following. It was just a matter of time, and with a bit of luck the Hammers would soon be without the massive phased-array radars that provided targeting data for the base’s missile and antiship laser systems and would have to fight back half-blind.
Five seconds after the rail-gun swarm had departed, the characteristic ripping-metal buzz of a full missile salvo launch ran through Al-Jahiz. The ship’s massive hydraulic missile dispensers rammed a full salvo of Merlin heavy missiles clear of the ship in only a matter of seconds.
“Flag, flag AI. Force missile salvos away.”
“Flag, roger.” Jaruzelska could do nothing now but watch the flag combat data center’s command plot as the task group’s two salvos reached out toward the Hammer, their vectors thin green lines of death stark against deep black.
No, that wasn’t right. There was something she could do, and she should have done it long before. If she didn’t, Gore would be the death of 387 and 166.
“Flag AI, flag. Hostile Gore. Engage with force lasers.”
The flag AI didn’t even blink at the sudden change in mission priorities.
Within seconds, the cruisers had turned their antiship lasers away from New Dallas and onto the distant form of the Gore. The intense beams of coherent light quickly began the process of tunneling a hole into Gore’s ceramsteel side armor; high-definition targeting holocams were focusing the task group’s antistarship lasers down onto a single point on the Hammer ship’s hull.
It took a desperate combination of high-g maneuvering and good work with the ship’s defensive systems to save 387.
Close-range rail-gun engagements had been described as something akin to high-speed four-dimensional chess, with swarm after swarm trying to checkmate the target, herding it into a position where it had nowhere to move except into the path of the oncoming slugs. Then it was just a matter of the weight of metal as the slugs ripped away armor to allow the slugs following them to punch through into the hull. At that point it was checkmate.