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 back 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.
“Abort remaining missile salvos,” Jaruzelska said flatly. The butchery was done.
Jaruzelska rubbed her face wearily. She now had status reports from all of her subordinate commanders. Thankfully, they’d gotten what they’d come for: the 158 passengers and crew taken from the Mumtaz and 22 of the 30 hijackers. The rest were dead. And she’d had the pinchcomm from Rear Admiral Kzela confirming the successful recovery of the Mumtazers marooned on Eternity.
Could have been a hell of a lot worse, she thought, though the price paid by 387 had been far too high. But considering that the premission sims had shown a strong chance that Battle Group Delta would lose at least one major fleet unit with heavy casualties, they had been lucky. She shivered. With only a pair of heavy cruisers close to any one of the battle group’s four drop points, the losses could have been even worse. Still, the only real surprise had been the New Dallas and the ships of her task group. Thank God they’d dropped well short and, even more important, that 166 and 387 had been there to lure them into turning away for those critical few minutes as the battle group dropped.