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 enormous 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.