Graham Paul: The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

“Mother. To all ships. Weapons free. Acknowledge.”

“Stand by. . all ships acknowledge weapons free.”

“To all ships, execute to follow, Kilo Tango 45, I say again, Kilo Tango 45.”

“Mother, roger.”

“Ops! Ready?”

“As we’ll ever be, sir,” Gianfranco’s operations officer replied, teeth behind the plasglass visor of his combat space suit bared in anticipation.

Nerves jangling, Gianfranco waited until Constancy ’s second container was making its final approach to the Adamantine, a third and a fourth close behind. Now, he thought, let the damn lawyers argue their way out of this one.

“Mother. To all ships. Kilo Tango 45, stand by, stand by. . execute!”

As one, the four ships of Task Unit 950.5.3 fired their main engines, pillars of white-hot flame driving them toward the two blockade runners. A second later, the ripbuzz of missile dispensers announced the deployment of a warning salvo of Mamba antistarship missiles, the ASSMs accelerating hard away from the incoming ships and toward the hapless smugglers.

“Constancy, Adamantine. This is FedWorld Warship Kapteyn’s Star. You are in violation of the Allied Declaration of Embargo. Do not attempt to jump. Maintain current vectors. Stand by to be boarded. Failure to comply will result in the use of deadly force. No further warnings will be given. Acknowledge.”

Constancy ’s captain needed no more persuasion. With her massive cargo hatches wide open and the better part of his crew outside handling containers, his ship was a long way from being pinchspace jump-capable. Voice trembling with shock, he capitulated on the spot. Mother wasted no time, the missiles targeting the Constancy command destructing in a massive wall of white-hot flame.

The Adamantine ’s captain had other ideas; Gianfranco knew he would. There wasn’t a Hammer captain alive who would allow the Feds to board his ship, and Adamantine ’s skipper was not going to be the exception. Ignoring the inbound missile salvo, Adamantine fired her main engines barely seconds after Gianfranco had sprung the ambush, the ship slewing to bring her rail-gun batteries to bear on the Kapteyn’s Star even as she worked frantically to close the cargo doors that stopped her from jumping safely into pinchspace. The bodies of her cargo handlers were abandoned to spin away into space, their orange distress strobes marking vectors to oblivion.

“Making a run for it,” the operations officer said, “but not before he drops a rail-gun swarm on us, I think.”

Gianfranco grunted. He didn’t need to say any more; blockade standard operating procedures were clear. Any attempt to run invited the use of deadly force, and his ships were already responding.

Gianfranco watched intently as the four Fed ships, their antiship lasers flaying Adamantine ’s hull, sent a full salvo of Mamba ASSMs on their way, the missiles masked by active decoys and a blizzard of jamming to baffle and confuse Adamantine ’s sensors. The Adamantine treated everything thrown at her with disdain. Slowly, inexorably, she came bows on to Kapteyn’s Star and fired her forward batteries, her bows split from side to side by the brilliantly white pinpricks of a rail-gun salvo.

“Command, Mother. Rail-gun launch from Adamantine. Target is Kapteyn’s Star. Time to impact 54 seconds.”

“Command, roger. All stations, rail-gun attack imminent. Brace for impact.” Gianfranco swallowed hard, his stomach knotted into a hard ball of fear. This was a first for him; he had never been on the receiving end of a Hammer rail-gun swarm, and he wasn’t enjoying the experience. Somehow, all those hours in the sims beating back Hammer attacks just like this one did not quite convey the pitiless horror of a rail-gun swarm.

The swarm-thousands of tiny platinum/iridium slugs seeded with thousands of decoys to confuse Kapteyn’s Star ’s defenses-leaped across the gap between the two ships at close to 3 million kilometers per hour.

“Command, Mother. Swarm geometry is good. Slug impact certain. No time to maneuver clear.”

Gianfranco swore as he checked Mother’s assessment. She was right. Whoever the Hammer commander was, he was no slouch. Adamantine had dropped into normalspace closed up and cleared away for action, and her rail-gun crew was good. Taking full advantage of the close range, the thousands of slugs that made up the swarm were tightly grouped and perfectly synchronized. Ripple fired into the shape of a cone whose pointed end was coming right at Kapteyn’s Star, the swarm left her nowhere to run. Bows on to the threat, Kapteyn’s Star could only wait.

Hands slippery with sudden sweat, Gianfranco sat and stared at the command holovid, with the incoming swarm, an ugly rash of brilliant red icons, closing in at frightening speed. There was nothing he could do, nothing any human could do. The fate of Gianfranco’s ship and crew now rested with Mother; dumping noncritical tasks, her massive processing arrays worked frantically to weed out the decoys strewn at random through the rail-gun swarm, the better to direct the lasers, missiles, and chain guns that made up Kapteyn’s Star ’s close-in defenses as they worked desperately to blow the incoming rail-gun slugs out of existence.

All things considered, Mother and the Kapteyn’s Star did a good job-but not good enough. The swarm geometry was too good, and there were too many slugs for the ship’s close-in defenses to deal with. In less than a microsecond, five slugs, all wrongly classified as decoys and ignored until too late, slipped through the defenses, their enormous kinetic energy transformed into enough thermal energy to blow massive craters in the ship’s armored bows. The Kapteyn’s Star staggered under the weight of the slugs, their impact momentarily overwhelming the ship’s artgrav. Gianfranco was snapped hard against the safety harness that locked him into his chair as the ship bucked and heaved under the shock. He ignored it. It would take more than a few Hammer slugs to get through Kapteyn’s Star ’s frontal armor. Thank God, he thought, the attack had not been beam or stern on. The result might have been very different. A quick check of the ship’s damage-control status board reassured him. The Kapteyn’s Star had suffered a serious loss of forward armor but was otherwise undamaged.

“Our turn now, so suck this,” Gianfranco hissed venomously as the task unit’s first missile salvo fell on the Hammer ship. In desperation, Adamantine ’s defenses clawed missile after missile out of the attack, her successes marked by searingly white-hot flares as missile warheads and fusion drives blew. In the confused melee, a single missile made it through, driving into a slowly closing cargo hatch to punch deep into the ship before exploding, the warhead driving a white-hot lance of plasma deep into the Hammer vessel. It was all to no avail; the warhead’s blast was absorbed in the bunkers that fed driver mass pellets into Adamantine ’s main engines. Gianfranco cursed softly; the Hammer ship barely registered the blow. Then, seconds before the second missile salvo fell on her, the Adamantine jumped into pinchspace; the briefest of brief flashes of intense ultraviolet provided the only record that she had ever been there.

“Son of a bitch,” Gianfranco said, bitterly disappointed. The Adamantine ’s scalp would have looked good on his service record. Around him, the Kapteyn’s Star ’s combat information center crew was silent, their unspoken frustration obvious.

“Hang on, sir. Have another look.” The operations officer’s voice crackled with excitement. “The cargo hatch. Still open. Must have been jammed open by the missile impact. Unless they recomputed their mass distribution, and I don’t think they had the time, their chances of making it home safely would not be good. We might have a kill to our name, after all. Well, a quarter share at least,” he concluded hopefully. “