Graham Paul: The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

Constanza had a big problem. She had committed her reserves to meet an attack that already had been well contained. Now those forces were heavily engaged, pinned down by the incoming Hammer ships, and unable to disengage without presenting their relatively thin stern and flank armor to Hammer missile, rail-gun, and laser attack. Constanza did what she could. She threw the last of her ships, none of them heavier than a light escort, into the breach, with the fleet battle management AI pumping out the orders to position her limited assets to meet the new attack. Time to start praying, Michael thought.

“Command, sensors. Multiple ship drops Sector 6, range 160,000 kilometers. Forty-five ships. Stand by identification.”

Constanza’s confusion visibly deepened. Michael sympathized. Forty-five ships was too small a number for a primary attack. If this was not the primary attack, what was the point of another diversion? The main attack was well developed already. More confusing still was the fact that by dropping into Terranova’s gravity well only 200,000 kilometers out, those ships soon would be inside the 150,000-kilometer threshold for a jump back into pinchspace. Unless they jumped inside twenty minutes or so, they would be in Terranova nearspace for at least two hours, more than enough time for them to be mopped up.

None of it made any sense to Ishaq ’s command team, and Michael watched with a heavy heart as they began to thrash around looking for answers.

Then the game changed. The Hammer went nuclear.

Constanza’s face turned ash-gray as she watched her defense of Terranova fall apart. Earlier, her task force AI had highlighted the fact that a surprisingly large number of the Hammer’s Eaglehawk missiles seemed to be going nowhere in particular. A quick discussion among the command team had put it down to poor Hammer technology. One even had gone so far as to say that the useless pricks could not hit a barn door at five paces. Constanza had made her decision. Missiles without targets were missiles without a job to do, so they were to be ignored. And they were; the missiles were left untouched to continue their drive toward Terranova.

It soon became clear that the Hammer’s missiles were doing exactly what was asked of them. One by one in blindingly quick succession, the multimegaton fusion warheads fitted to the missiles detonated. In seconds, an immense wall of gamma radiation was expanding toward Terranova. Ishaq ’s alarms screeched as sensor after sensor shut down to minimize damage from the electromagnetic pulse that washed over the Fed ships.

The combat information center went quiet as alarms were muted. “Oh shit,” Constanza muttered, her voice hoarse with stress, before her training kicked in, driving her into a desperate attempt to cope with a situation that was past saving.

Moments later, it was the turn of the third and last wave of Hammer ships to fire. Their first salvo destroyed Terranova’s six space battle stations. The huge mass, immensely thick armor, and multilayered missile and laser defenses of the stations were no match for an overwhelming flood of hardened fusion warheads detonating in waves until the stations had been irradiated into blackened submission. Terranova stood alone, and only ground-based antiballistic missiles and satellite-mounted lasers were standing in the way of the oncoming Hammer attack.

With Terranova’s space battle stations silenced, the Hammer ships launched a second salvo, their hybrid solid fuel/pinchspace generator engines accelerating the missiles at more than 200 g. Seconds later, thousands of Eaglehawk missiles dropped onto Terranova at more than a million kph. Seconds before they were ripped apart by Terranova’s upper atmosphere, fusion warheads began to explode directly over Terranova’s major cities. Two minutes later a third salvo followed. Two minutes after that, a fourth. Then a fifth. Finally the sixth, seventh, and eighth salvos were on their way, but this time the missiles had been throttled right back to ensure that they could survive entry into Terranova’s atmosphere. These missiles would be ground bursts targeted on every known high-value target on Terranova, starting with Foundation, its capital. A handful of missiles were kept back until the end. Their target was Terranova’s oceans. The missiles plunged deep into the sea before detonating to drive tsunamis into Terranova’s low-lying coasts and columns of ionized, superheated steam high into the air.

Two minutes before they would be locked into Terranova’s gravity well, the Hammer ships, swatting aside the incoming missile and rail-gun attacks with contemptuous ease, jumped.

It had taken less than twenty minutes to destroy an entire planet and most of the ships tasked with its defense. Terranova no longer was habitable by humans or by any other species known to humankind. Now it was a shattered, charred, radioactive ruin of a planet. Its atmosphere was a seething, roiling mass of flame-shot cloud punctured by huge black hammerheads climbing out of the murk into nearspace as ground bursts drove millions of tons of earth and water kilometers into the air.

Terranova was finished.

Leaving the shattered wrecks of their casualties behind, surrounded by swarms of lifepods, the rest of the Hammer ships jumped out of Terranova nearspace. There was a long, long silence as every spacer in the combat information center absorbed the awful sight of Terranova writhing in agony, a planet dying a slow and terrible death. “Holy Mother,” Michael muttered. Even though it was only a simulation, he felt sick.

The soft voice of the AI running the COMEX broke the silence with the pointless observation that the exercise was over.

Flanked on either side by Ishaq ’s executive officer, Commander Morrissen, and the head of the warfare department, Commander Pasquale, Fellsworth stood rock solid. Her eyes were focused on the bulkhead as a ranting, nearly demented Constanza, her face red with anger, spittle-flecked lips working furiously, struggled to get her words out.

“How dare you? How dare you humiliate me like that! By God, Fellsworth, I’m going to break you for this; you can depend on it. And I know it’s not only you. I know you had that arrogant, self-serving shit Helfort do the legwork. That makes it a conspiracy, Fellsworth,” she screeched furiously, “a conspiracy against your legally appointed captain. I can put you away for twenty years and that little worm Helfort and the rest of your lickspittle team if I want.”

“Sir-”

The executive officer’s attempt to intervene was stillborn; Constanza cut him off with an angry wave of the arm. “No, Commander Morrissen. I do not want to hear from you. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that you’re part of this.”

She turned back to Fellsworth. “Well, it won’t work. I’m taking formal action against you, Fellsworth. Conspiracy. I’m charging you with conspiracy to mutiny. That’ll do it. You are confined to your cabin. Morrissen, get the provost marshal in here. I want the ship to see this woman in custody. I want them to see what happens to people who conspire against me.”

“Sir!” The executive officer’s voice was thick with protest.

“Be quiet, Morrissen! I won’t tell you again.”

“No, sir, I will not be quiet,” the executive officer replied firmly. “I should not have to remind you that under Fleet regulations I have a duty to speak.”

“Sir!” Commander Pasquale waded into the fray. Constanza’s appalling behavior-her intemperate language, her arrogant disregard for subordinates, her refusal to take counsel-went against everything she believed in. “I must tell you, sir,” she protested, “that you have no choice but to hear Commander Morrissen out. Fleet regu-”