“Command, Warfare. Missiles committed. Time to target seventy seconds.”
“Roger. Update.”
“Retrieve reports dreadnoughts have engaged. Hammer ships interdicted by preemptive rail-gun and missile attack.”
“Command, roger. Nice work, guys, nice work.” Michael focused his attention back on the First’s salvo. He watched it smash home, the combination of missiles and rail-gun slugs overwhelming SuppFac27’s defenses, space flaring white as proximity-fused fusion warheads detonated. The Hammer battle stations and platforms disappeared from view behind clouds of flaming armor.
While he waited for the battle damage assessments, Michael checked the dreadnoughts of the Second and Third squadrons, which were closing on the Hammer ships. Rao had to stop the Hammers; if she did not, Michael knew he would be attacking SuppFac27’s defenses while the Hammers fired missiles up the sterns of his ships, precisely where dreadnoughts were most vulnerable.
It seemed a long wait, though it probably was not. Taking aggression to new heights, Rao and Machar threw their ships directly at the Hammers; soaking up everything thrown at them, they closed until the Hammers had nowhere left to run. The massive ships, shrouded in clouds of ionized armor blown off by the Hammers’ frantic attempts to keep them out, were unstoppable. Smashing into the enemy, the dreadnoughts blew themselves apart, taking the Hammer cruisers with them, the rest of the Hammer ships falling to waves of missiles and rail-gun slugs, sheer brute force battering them into bloody wrecks tumbling away into space.
Michael frowned. Rao and Machar had done well. It was a great victory, but it had come at a terrible cost: Twenty dreadnoughts was an awful price to pay but one worth paying to give Michael’s ships the clear run in he needed so badly.
“Command, Warfare. Message from Retrieve: Mission accomplished. Hammer task groups combat-ineffective. Own losses heavy: sixteen ships destroyed, four ships seriously damaged and combat-ineffective. Casualties: six wounded, two serious, in regen tanks. Retrieve and Recognizance abandoning ship. Kill those Hammer bastards. Remember Comdur. Retrieve, out.”
“Command, roger. Reply: To Retrieve and Recognizance, thanks, job well done. Good luck. Get home safely. Reckless out.”
“Warfare, roger. Message sent … stand by … missile launch from SuppFac27 ground defenses.”
“Command, roger.” Michael was unconcerned. SuppFac27’s missile and laser batteries were well camouflaged and hard to eliminate, space battle stations were tough, and defensive platforms were expendable, but that was about all SuppFac27 had going for it. It had an Achilles’ heeclass="underline" None of its defenses could maneuver, which made them the sort of target every rail gunner dreamed about, and his rail guns bettered any in humanspace. His dreadnoughts would make short work of SuppFac27’s defenses; millions of rail-gun slugs had already pulverized the surface of the asteroid and everything on it into a finely milled cloud of dust, the destruction systematic and unrelenting. Now his ships had to survive the Hammer missile attack pushing through his outer defensive screen of medium-range missiles at over 1,000 kilometers per second.
“Command, Warfare. Update. Assault Group reports task group Hammer-6 combat-ineffective”-well done, Rear Admiral Perkins, Michael thought acidly; you are good for something, after all-“surviving Hammer units scattering to the north, assessed no threat.”
“Command, roger. And Assault Group?”
“Combat-ineffective. Heavy losses, including Seiche”-this was turning out to be a bad day for flag officers, Michael said to himself, trying to ignore an image of Perkins being bundled ignominiously into a lifepod, a glorious moment of unalloyed schadenfreude-“Flag has passed to Sephardic; Commodore Jun has operational command. Assault Group conducting lifepod recovery. Flag advises that Assault Group will withdraw on completion.”
“Roger that. Request Flag to recover landers with survivors from Retrieve and Recognizance.”
“Roger … Flag confirms landers will be recovered. Stand by, message from Flag … Message reads: Personal from Commodore Jun for captain in command, FWSS Reckless. Your actions in keeping with highest traditions of Fleet. Well done. Regret in no position to assist you. All ships combat-ineffective. Good luck. Remember Comdur. Jun out.”
Michael sat for a moment, stunned. He had more friends in high places than he knew. “Send to Flag: Thanks, Reckless out.”
Much as he appreciated Jun’s vote of confidence, her confirmation that he could expect no support from Assault Group was a blow, not unexpected but disappointing nonetheless. Of all the ships committed to Opera, only his could finish what Opera had set out to achieve: the destruction of SuppFac27.
It was a lonely feeling, not least because success or failure rested on a single pair of shoulders: his.
“All stations, Warfare, brace for missile impact.”
Reckless reverberated with the familiar racket of close-in defensive weapons systems fighting to keep a Hammer attack at bay, the noise underscored by a crunching thud when Reckless fired her rail guns, the job of reducing SuppFac27’s defenses not forgotten. After the terrifying brutality of the earlier Hammer engagements, the attack launched by SuppFac27’s defenses was an anticlimax: There were simply too few missiles attacking too many ships. Without the mindless violence of a rail-gun attack to break open their defenses, the dreadnoughts could focus every weapon they had on the incoming missiles while they clawed their way across tens of thousands of kilometers of space. The noise died away finally, the last Hammer missile blown apart hundreds of kilometers short of its target.
Turning his attention back to the battle damage assessment, Michael took stock. His last salvo had inflicted enormous damage but not enough to finish the job. The defensive platforms might have been scoured out of space, but the Hammer battle stations still stood; they were a much tougher proposition altogether. Though badly damaged, they had survived to launch another missile salvo, their antistarship lasers still working hard to strip the frontal armor off the inbound dreadnoughts. Enough, Michael decided, enough. What came next broke his heart, but it had to be done. He did not have the time-or the missiles-to do this the hard way.
“Warfare, command. Commit the dreadnoughts. Send them in.”
“Warfare, roger.”
The unmanned dreadnoughts responded. Pushing their main engines to emergency power, the ships accelerated away from Reckless on vectors direct for the Hammer battle stations, their defensive weapons scouring the Hammer’s last missile salvo out of existence with contemptuous ease. Outnumbered, the battle stations never stood a chance. Shrugging off everything an increasingly desperate Hammer defense threw at them, the ships smashed headlong into the armored spheres, ripping them open before joining them in incandescent balls of plasma when their main propulsion fusion plants exploded.
Michael emptied his lungs in a long slow hiss of relief. The approaches to SuppFac27 lay wide open.
Reckless, the last ship of Battle Fleet Lima still engaged in Operation Opera, turned end for end and started to decelerate, its main engines firing across space toward the tiny asteroid that was home to SuppFac27, blazing pillars of driver mass reaching down to a surface scrubbed clean by the dreadnoughts’ relentless rail-gun salvos.
There was one more thing to do before Michael turned his attention back to the thorny problem of destroying SuppFac27. “Warfare, command.”
“Warfare.”
“Launch Cleft Stick under your control. Looks to me like there’ll be lifepods left in Hammer space by the main force. I want them picked up. When that’s done, set the Stick on vector east away from SuppFac27 across the reef. We’ll rendezvous with her when we leave this goddamn place. Any problems with that?”