Graham Paul: The battle of Devastation reef

“Warfare, roger. Weapons free. I have command authority.”

Michael settled into his shock-resistant seat. He commed the AI to tighten his safety straps and waited for the Tufayl and her sister ships to drop out of pinchspace, one last check confirming that the ten dreadnoughts under his command were fully operational.

“Command, Warfare, stand by, dropping … now.”

In an instant, space-time turned itself inside out, the ten dreadnoughts erupting into normalspace, intense flashes of ultraviolet radiation marking their transition from pinchspace.

Michael held his breath as alarms told him his laboriously assembled threat plot was worthless. By the time they jumped and reversed vector into Hammer space for the attack, the Hammer task group he had been sent to destroy had split into two and opened out. A single glance told him that much, but what did it mean? Which of the two groups presented the real threat? Desperately, Michael scanned the torrent of data pouring in from the dreadnoughts’ sensors even though he knew full well he could never make sense of it before Tufayl ’s AIs did.

The warfare AI entertained no doubts which of the two groups of Hammer ships posed the greater threat. “Command, Warfare. Primary threat axis is Red 10 Up 3, Hammer auxiliaries and escorts designated Hammer-2. Stand by … missile salvos away.”

While Tufayl ’s hydraulic launchers dumped a full missile salvo outboard, Michael ignored the rest of the AI’s report, acting on adrenaline-fueled instinct alone. The AI had to wait; maneuvering the dreadnoughts into position to survive the inevitable Hammer counterattack could not. He had to act. Everything told him that Warfare had made a terrible mistake. Struggling to bring order out of chaos, the warfare AI had ordered the dreadnought squadron to turn toward what it believed to be the primary threat: Hammer-2, the Hammer ships directly up-sun. Michael scowled with frustration, certain he had spotted the AI’s mistake. The sunward ships consisted of the auxiliaries along with a handful of light escorts, screened by decoys pumping out enough electromagnetic radiation to fool the unwary into thinking they were heavy cruisers. Was Warfare dumb enough to fall for it?

Yes, it was.

Michael swore out loud. Auxiliaries did not have the firepower to kill a dreadnought. The real threat was the cruisers in the second group of Hammer capital ships-task group Hammer-1-now sitting 40 degrees off Tufayl ’s port bow; already they had launched their Eaglehawk long-range antiship missiles toward the dreadnoughts. The bastards were close; it would not be long before they flung rail-gun salvos at his ships. If he did not get them before they turned to meet the attack …

He hesitated for a second. Should he split his forces? Should he attack both Hammer task groups? No, he decided. Go for the primary threat, deal with the rest later.

“Command override. All ships, come left, emergency turn to threat axis Red 40 Up 3. Close and engage task group Hammer-1,” Michael said, his voice half choked by stress. Warfare’s order to ignore the Hammer cruisers was plain wrong: They orbited closer; they carried missiles, rail guns, and long-range antiship lasers. Of course they posed the primary threat!

“Command, Warfare. Roger,” the AI replied calmly. “Redesignating targets … stand by rail guns.”

Michael forced himself to sit back in his seat. There was nothing more he-or any other human-could do now. Close-quarters battle management was the one thing AIs excelled at. Making tactical decisions based on the avalanche of data generated by ship sensors tracking thousands of incoming missiles and rail-gun slugs and at the same time controlling the outgoing counterattack was simply too much for any human. To sit still was an effort, yet Michael forced himself to do exactly that, to watch the squadron’s defensive weapon systems soak up the Hammer attack, missile after missile erupting in brilliant balls of white flame as medium-range missiles and lasers hacked them out of space. But some made it through, triggering the dreadnoughts’ close-in defenses: a triple layer of lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns working desperately to keep the Hammer missile attack out, the problem greatly compounded when a rail-gun salvo blasted its way through to smash into his ships, timed to arrive a few seconds before the surviving missiles hit home.

Michael braced himself; the Tufayl bucked and heaved under the impact of multiple missile and rail-gun slug strikes. “You’ll have to try harder than that, you sons of bitches,” he murmured while the Tufayl’s reinforced frontal and flank armor shrugged off the attack with contemptuous ease. “Now it’s our turn.”

He watched intently as the dreadnoughts finally turned their bows onto the threat axis. The instant they did, all ten ships let go with everything they had, the Tufayl reverberating with the characteristic crunching metal-on-metal thud of the rail guns punching slugs and decoys-hundreds of thousands of them-toward the Hammer cruisers at more than 3 million kilometers per hour, the shape of the swarm designed to force the Hammer ships to move where the slug density was greatest, where the ship-kill probabilities were highest.

“Command, Warfare. Missile launch from auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2. Stand by … missiles are Eaglehawks.”

“What?” Michael suppressed a momentary flash of unease. Eaglehawks? That made no sense. “Command, confirm.” The auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2 had just done something they were not-supposedly-capable of: launching Eaglehawk missiles. According to every technical intelligence report he had ever read, Hammer auxiliaries did not carry the Hammer’s heavyweight antistarship missiles. In theory, they posed no real threat. So how were they able to launch Eaglehawks?

“Confirmed, command. Task group Hammer-2 has launched Eaglehawk missiles. Stand by … Hammer-1 is jumping.”

Michael watched in despair as brief flares of ultraviolet light signaled the cruisers of task group Hammer-1’s jump into pinchspace, his missile and rail-gun salvos arriving too late to do anything but rip uselessly through the knuckles of tangled space-time left by the ships’ departure. This does not look good, he said to himself. Hammer capital ships did not make a habit of abandoning their posts in the middle of an attack, but that was what they were doing. Why? He had been so sure that they posed the main threat to his ships, that they would stay to slug it out.

Something cold and clammy slimed its way into Michael’s chest and squeezed his heart hard. Without understanding why, he knew something bad was about to happen. Now his only option was to jump his own ships to safety, and he would be dammed if he was going to run away. He had come here to fight, and while he faced Hammer ships, fight he would.

“Command, Warfare. Missile salvo from Hammer-2 assessed to be low-density attack consisting of multiple Eaglehawk ASSMs plus decoys. Vectors and salvo geometry are nominal for antimatter attack. Insufficient time to complete turn onto threat axis. Probability of mission-abort damage is high and rising. Recommend emergency jump into pinchspace. Repeat, recommend emergency jump into pinchspace.”

Michael did not give himself time to think. “Negative, negative,” he shouted. “Expedite turn to threat axis and engage.”

“Warfare, roger. Expediting,” Warfare replied calmly. “Hammer missiles are inside our mission abort damage radius … missile detonation imminent.”

“Goddamn it,” Michael whispered. He slumped back, the sweat-soaked shipsuit under his armored combat space suit suddenly ice-cold. With shocking clarity, it became all too obvious. Apprehension washed through him, and his stomach acid-churned, sour and unsettled. He had walked right into the trap set for him and his ships. Pride and stupidity had stranded him there, and now it was too late; he had to wait and pray that his ships would ride out the Hammer attack.