To confuse them further, cargo drones spewed decoys, jammers, and spoofers into the space between the attacks until SuppFac27 nearspace was filled with an elaborately constructed torrent of electronic noise, most of it garbage. For an instant, Michael sympathized with the Hammers; he wondered what the poor sap in charge of defending SuppFac27 was thinking. Buried under an avalanche of conflicting information, flummoxed by a blizzard of electronic noise, and with attacks developing along four separate vectors, he would be struggling to sort out truth from deception, which, of course, was the whole point.
But the Hammers had one thing going for them. There was only one target, and in the end Jaruzelska’s ships would have to close in on it to have any chance of destroying the plant. If the Hammers were smart, they would pull back and wait for the Feds to come to them instead of blundering around trying to sort out reality from deception. In the sims, the margin between success and failure narrowed dramatically every time the Hammers did that. When reinforcements turned up in the right place at the right time as well …
Happily, the Hammers were not yet doing the sensible thing. Michael was watching what might have been a “best case” simulation. As Jaruzelska’s planners hoped, the Hammer ships did not wait for the Feds to come to them; they were moving out to meet and engage the incoming Feds. But the Hammers had a big problem: three task groups to interdict four Fed lines of attack. That allowed one of the Feds’ decoy attacks to run unopposed right at the antimatter plant, giving the Hammer commander, Michael hoped, a severe attack of the vapors when he realized what was happening.
“Command, Warfare, sensors. Positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 180 Up 0. Multiple vessels, range 12,000 kilometers. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Drop datum nominal for Assault Group.”
Michael acknowledged the report, relieved that Assault Group-deemed too valuable to drop with the advance guard-was on its way. The bad news was that Assault Group was under the command of Rear Admiral Perkins, a decision Michael reckoned had the fingerprints of Fleet politicians all over it. With Perkins in charge of Assault Group, the man would be in at the kill, and Michael knew full well who would take the credit for Opera’s success. All too clearly, he could see what would happen. Ignoring the task forces protecting his vulnerable flanks, ignoring the dreadnoughts that had blasted the way open for him, Perkins would attribute the success of Opera to the conventional warships of Assault Group and, no doubt, to his skills as a combat commander. Sonofabitch.
Michael dismissed the Perkins problem. What mattered was making Opera a success, though he was pretty sure who would be getting the blame if Opera turned out to be the failure the analysts said it might so easily be. He would not want to be Jaruzelska if that happened.
“Command, Warfare, sensors. Assault Group dropping. Drop datum confirmed Red 180 Up 0, range 12,500 kilometers. Stand by … confirmed. Arrivals are Assault Group.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael settled down to wait. Warfare was performing flawlessly, so he forced himself to relax a touch. Space warfare, like all warfare down the ages, was a mixture of boredom and terror, invariably bucket loads of the former seasoned with occasional pinches of the latter. Opera was definitely in the boredom phase. This was as unexciting as combat got: two groups of ships hurtling toward each other across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space, too far apart to engage, their principal task to dump missiles into space, building their opening salvos while they closed on the enemy for the inevitable. It was the bloody business of close-quarters combat, a battle of attrition as missiles and rail-gun slugs stripped armor off ships’ frames, looking for a way through to the fusion plants driving main propulsion. Michael buried an image of Reckless’s fusion plants going up, doing his best to ignore his body’s reaction to the impending fight: churning stomach, sweaty hands, hammering heart, and dry mouth.
Time dragged by with excruciating slowness, the quiet concentration of Reckless’s tiny combat information center crew interrupted by the routine reports of missile launches when Fed and Hammer ships dumped missiles into space.
“Command, Warfare. Update. Ships of task group Hammer-1 have engaged Decoy Group One. Expect Hammer breakaway imminent.”
“Command, roger.” The Hammer commander would be seriously pissed when he discovered that he had thrown one of his precious task groups into an attack on a bunch of decoys. Fed decoys were good but not good enough to mount a convincing defense once attacked. The big question was where the Hammer ships would go when they found out they had been conned.
Michael received his answer a few minutes later. The ships attacking Decoy Group One changed vector, furious jets of ionized reaction mass from maneuvering thrusters turning them end for end, the electronic and optical noise spewed out by the decoy attack ignored completely.
“Shit,” Michael muttered when the Hammers’ intentions became clear. They had ignored the one Fed attack they had not been able to deal with: Decoy Group Two, the second decoy attack running at SuppFac27. The Hammer commander was pulling his ships back to screen the antimatter plant, and that meant just one thing. Stopping Decoy Group Two was going to be somebody else’s job. Reinforcements were on the way.
He commed the admiral’s staff.
“Flag, Reckless.”
The avatar of one of Jaruzelska’s operations staff took the com, the stress on the man’s face all too obvious. “Go ahead, Reckless.”
“The Hammer ships tasked to intercept Decoy Group One are withdrawing to SuppFac27. My assessment is that reinforcements are inbound to deal with Decoy Group Two. You concur?”
“Stand by … yes, we concur. We’re just about to update the threat plot.”
“Any estimate of the drop datum?”
“Somewhere to the southeast is our best guess, but it’s just a guess at the moment.”
“Roger. Reckless, out.”
Michael’s worst fears were about to be realized. Reinforcements were the basis for all the nightmare scenarios they had been subjected to in the sims, and far too many of those had ended in disaster. If the Hammers dropped the right ships in the right places at the right times, even a commander as good as Jaruzelska was going to struggle.
The tactical problem was simple. Jaruzelska knew Hammer ships were on the way-that much was certain-but she had no idea how many or where or when they would drop. That meant she could do nothing to head them off. She had to wait, responding to the Hammer reinforcements as they arrived. Michael hated it-no commander liked being forced to react to events-but Jaruzelska had no choice.
“Command, Warfare. Group South engaging ships of task group Hammer-3.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael patched his neuronics into the holocam feed coming from the heavy cruiser leading Group South. What he saw made his skin crawl. Shrouded in clouds of decoys, Hammer missiles-arranged like a giant doughnut perpendicular to Group South’s vector-had turned inward; now they plunged down onto the Fed task group, the fast-closing gap between attackers and defenders filled with the flash of missiles exploding as Group South’s mediumrange missiles and lasers did the grim work of tearing the Hammer attack to pieces. The battle was degenerating fast into a wretched, scrambling fight for survival, one that no Fed ship could afford to lose: A single fusion warhead, triggered by a proximity fuse to explode close to its target, released enough raw power to strip a heavy cruiser’s flank armor right down to the inner titanium hull, the impulse shock violent enough to send razor-sharp splinters ripping through the ship to lethal effect.