Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Read online

  THE BIGGER THEY ARE

  Mouth open, Chief Councillor Polk gaped at the appalling sight sprawled out in front of him. Two weeks earlier, he had presided over a medals ceremony at this very base. It had been flawless. Air-superiority fighters and ground-attack fliers had been arrayed in precise lines, their crews and the base’s support personnel drawn up immaculate in their dress blacks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all proof positive that not every part of the Hammer Worlds was a corrupt, decaying farce.

  Now the place was a wasteland, a blast-smashed expanse of ceramcrete littered with the shattered wrecks of fighters, the base’s elaborate infrastructure reduced to blackened piles of rubble through which casualty recovery teams picked their way with painstaking care, a red flag appearing every time a new body was located. There were hundreds of red flags already, Polk noted, and the teams had covered only a fraction of the base.

  With a start, Polk realized how dumb he must look. He turned to the latest in a long line of commanders in chief, standing alongside him, his face drawn tight with shock.

  “How, Admiral Belasz? How could this have happened?”

  Belasz licked his lips; Polk could see a small tic working under the man’s left eye. Given that his predecessor had been consigned to a DocSec lime pit for the last disaster, he had every right to be nervous.

  By Graham Sharp Paul

  HELFORT’S WAR

  The Battle at the Moons of Hell

  The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

  The Battle of Devastation Reef

  The Battle for Commitment Planet

  Helfort’s War: The Battle for Commitment Planet is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2010 by Graham Sharp Paul

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the DEL REY colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52304-4

  www.delreybooks.com

  v3.1

  For Lisa, Elodie, and Eva

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Friday, August 3, 2401, Universal Date: FWSS Redwood, West Kent Reef

  Friday, August 3, 2401, UD: Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet, Hammer of Kraa Worlds

  Saturday, August 4, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in pinchspace en route to Nyleth-B

  Sunday, August 5, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in pinchspace en route to Nyleth-B

  Tuesday, August 7, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in pinchspace en route to Nyleth-B

  Thursday, August 9, 2401, UD: West coast of central Maranzika, Commitment

  Monday, August 20, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in orbit around Nyleth-B

  Tuesday, August 28, 2401, UD: Nyleth system base

  Friday, August 31, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in orbit around Nyleth-B

  Wednesday, September 5, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in orbit around Nyleth-B

  Friday, September 7, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in deepspace

  Friday, September 14, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, in deepspace

  Saturday, September 15, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, Commitment farspace

  Sunday, September 16, 2401, UD: Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair, Commitment

  Sunday, September 16, 2401, UD: FWSS Redwood, Commitment farspace

  Tuesday, September 18, 2401, UD: Gwalia Planetary Ground Defense Force base, Commitment

  Friday, September 21, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, Commitment

  Sunday, September 23, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, Commitment

  Friday, September 28, 2401, UD: Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair, Commitment

  Tuesday, October 2, 2401, UD: West Branxton Ranges, Commitment

  Tuesday, October 2, 2401, UD: Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair, Commitment

  Tuesday, October 9, 2401, UD: Sector Golf, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Thursday, October 11, 2401, UD: NRA Disciplinary Facility 13, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Sunday, October 14, 2401, UD: Sector Juliet, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Monday, October 15, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, Commitment

  Sunday, November 11, 2401, UD: Chief councillor’s residence, McNair City, Commitment

  Wednesday, November 14, 2401, UD: Sector Oscar, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Tuesday, November 20, 2401, UD: Perdan, Commitment

  Friday, November 23, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

  Saturday, November 24, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

  Tuesday, November 27, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

  Thursday, November 29, 2401, UD: Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment

  Friday, November 30, 2401, UD: Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith

  Saturday, December 1, 2401, UD: Portal Yankee-34, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Monday, December 3, 2401, UD: Sector Echo Base Hospital, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Monday, December 3, 2401, UD: Lakash Valley Lodge, Scobie’s World

  Wednesday, December 5, 2401, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Friday, December 21, 2401, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Thursday, January 3, 2402, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Friday, January 4, 2402, UD: 120th Regiment billet, Sector Mike, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Sunday, January 6, 2402, UD: Sector Juliet, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Monday, January 14, 2402, UD: FLTDETCOMM administrative center, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Tuesday, January 15, 2402, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Wednesday, January 16, 2402, UD: Yamaichi marine base, Commitment

  Saturday, January 26, 2402, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Monday, February 11, 2402, UD: Sector Juliet, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Friday, February 15, 2402, UD: ENCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Friday, March 22, 2402, UD: Hendrik Island, Commitment

  Saturday, March 23, 2402, UD: FLTDETCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Sunday, March 24, 2402, UD: Portal Whiskey-45, Branxton Base, Commitment

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go to my wife, Vicki, to my agents, Russ Galen and Tara Wynne, and to Chris Schluep and the team at Random House.

  Friday, August 3, 2401, Universal Date

  FWSS Redwood, West Kent Reef

  Anna would be dead soon.

  Lieutenant Michael Helfort tumbled a datacore between gloved fingers in an unconscious effort to blunt the fear that gnawed at him every waking moment, to stop the churning in his stomach.

  But nothing blurred the horror that would be Anna’s death. He had condemned her to die scoured of all dignity, agonizing, slowly, and inevitable, a dying no human should have to endure, a dying that condemned the only woman he had ever loved to perish abandoned and alone, raped, beaten, shot—a life consumed in an unthinking process of casual cruelty, a life stripped away layer by layer to l
eave only an empty shell, the broken and abused body dumped into a DocSec lime pit, its empty eyes turned skyward, eyes that once danced and sparkled and sang with love so strong it would tear him apart, eyes that stared sightless into the void, eyes that branded his psyche with the word betrayed.

  And all because of him.

  He moved to get comfortable, trying to make the pain radiating up into his body go away. Psychosomatic, the doctors had said finally; Michael reckoned they were right. No matter how many painkillers he pumped into his system, the pain never went away. Four months had passed since a Hammer bullet had ripped its way through his thigh during the frantic, scrambling escape from Serhati, and even though the leg had healed well, even though he walked with only the faintest hint of a limp most of the time, it never allowed him to forget the insult it had suffered.

  He laughed softly, a short, bitter laugh. Truth was, he did not want the pain to leave him. At times, he almost welcomed it, its relentless stabbing the punishment he deserved for putting Anna’s life at risk. Only a lingering, nagging sense of obligation, faint but impossible to ignore, persuaded him to go back to his duty. With an enormous effort, he dragged his mind away from the horror of Anna’s death to scan the threat plot, the massive holovid screen dominated by a blood-red icon marking the position of the signals intelligence station Redwood and her sister dreadnoughts had crossed hundreds of light-years of space to attack.

  He might be captain in command of the Federated Worlds Starship Redwood, but destroying a remote—and unimportant—SIGINT station the Hammers had buried beneath the crust of a wandering asteroid called Balawal-34 was the least of his concerns.

  For the millionth time, he asked himself what Anna had done to des—

  “Sir! Sir!” The voice of his executive officer, Junior Lieutenant Jayla Ferreira, battered its way through the fog of despair and fear that clouded his thinking. She stood waiting for him to respond, hands on hips, lips squeezed tight into a bloodless slash of disapproval. Michael struggled to recall what she had just said, but he could not. He had no idea; her words had bounced off him, shards of glass shattering on a marble floor, splintering, spinning, tumbling away into oblivion.

  “Ah, yes,” Michael said, suppressing a pang of guilt, ramming the datacore back into its port. Ferreira was a good officer, and she deserved a good captain, one she could trust to keep his mind on the job, not one whose every waking moment centered on … For chrissakes, he swore silently, his attention was wandering again. “Sorry, Jayla, I was somewhere else. You were saying?”

  “I have made this point already, but I’ll make it again … sir,” Ferreira said, voice taut and face pinched. “I understand what Warfare is saying. Problem is I just cannot agree. It might be only a small temperature anomaly, but the fact is there is one, we don’t know why, and we should.”

  “Fair point, and I agree,” Michael said. He looked across at Warfare’s space-suited figure. The hunched shape was so real, he had to remind himself it was nothing more than an avatar, a computer-generated figment of his neuronics-enhanced imagination. “Warfare?”

  “Why is easy,” the artificial intelligence responsible for battle management said. “There’s an unexplained heat source in the rubble field. What that source is … well, that’s another matter. Almost certainly it’s a ship, maybe two, lying low, hoping people like us don’t detect them. They mustn’t have aligned one of their heat dumps properly.”

  “Exactly,” Ferreira said. “Which means we may face serious opposition. Balawal-34 might not be the soft target the intelligence summaries say it is.”

  “That begs the question why,” Michael said. “Why do the Hammers have ships waiting for an attack on a target our reconsats only found out about by accident?”

  “Because they’re expecting us, sir,” Ferreira said. “That’s why. How, who knows? It doesn’t matter. Maybe a Hammer deepspace gravitronics sensor array had a good day. Maybe a passing reconsat spotted us when we jumped out of Nyleth nearspace. Wouldn’t be too hard to work out what targets of interest lay along our pinchspace vector. But it doesn’t matter. What does matter is what we do now. I recommend we hold off until we’ve done another reconsat pass. We need to see what’s hidden away in that rubble field.”

  Michael studied the threat plot, stung by Ferreira’s obvious frustration. He shared it; successful operations depended on accurate intelligence, and here they were, wondering what else the intel guys might have missed. Nothing in the premission briefing mentioned the possibility that the Hammers might have deployed reinforcements hidden in a slow-moving rubble field that covered the approaches to the rear of the Hammer deepspace signals intelligence station. It should have been a simple operation against a soft target. Balawal-34—a modular facility buried below the surface of a convenient asteroid and defended by missile platforms and surface batteries armed with containerized Eaglehawk antistarship missiles—was no match for the three dreadnoughts; they would trash the place in a matter of minutes. Hammer heavy cruisers were another matter.

  So, he wondered, what to do? More reconnaissance like Ferreira wanted? Go in anyway? Then something deep inside him snapped, releasing a flood of reckless indifference.

  Screw it, he thought. Screw the Hammers; screw everyone. He did not care if Hammer ships waited to ambush his ships. If forced to, the three dreadnoughts that formed the Nyleth squadron had the firepower to take on and defeat a task group of Hammer heavy cruisers, and he was confident no task group was waiting to spoil his day. If there were two Hammer ships waiting for them, his dreadnoughts would make short work of them. He was certain of that, too. Only one thing mattered to him right now: getting this operation over and done with so he could return to Nyleth. He had more important things to worry about, and he needed to be back in orbit around Nyleth to deal with them.

  “No, Jayla,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time doing more reconsat runs. We’ll assu—”

  “Wait, sir,” Ferreira protested, cheeks flushing red with anger. “That makes no sense. We don’t need to assume anything. We have the time, we have the reconsats, we can check. We should check. Sir! We should check—”

  “Enough!” Michael said. He glared at his executive officer. “I was about to say that we’ll assume there are two Hammer ships there and adjust our plans accordingly. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ferreira said; a scowl, hastily suppressed, made it plain that things were far from okay.

  Michael knew she was right and he was wrong, but he ignored her anyway; he brushed aside a second twinge of guilt. “Right,” he said. “Warfare. We’ll reconvene in fifteen to review the updated plan, but I want the jump in-system on schedule.”

  “Sir.”

  Michael sat back in his seat and picked up the datacore. Redwood’s mission was forgotten as the horror returned.

  * * *

  “Captain, sir,” Ferreira said. “I have all green suits, ship is at general quarters, ship state 1, airtight condition zulu, shutting down artificial gravity, depressurizing now.”

  “Roger,” Michael replied. Ferreira left without another word, her trademark smile noticeably absent. Michael no longer cared. All he wanted was for this damn operation to be finished so he could get back home. “All stations, stand by to drop,” he said. “Warfare. Confirm weapons free. You have command authority.”

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

  Michael sat back, happy to leave the battle in Warfare’s hands. He glanced around the gutted shell of Redwood’s combat information center, an eerie sight through the mist as the pumps depressurized the compartment, the last thin white skeins of moisture drawn, twisting and writhing, away into the air-conditioning ducts. Everything removable had been stripped out in a ruthless drive to reduce the once-great ship’s mass; the conversion from heavy cruiser to dreadnought was a brutal and unforgiving process devoid of all finesse. Redwood was a different ship when the yard finished with her. She and her fellow dreadno
ughts, Red River and Redress, were the toughest ships in the Federated Worlds’ order of battle, heavily armored, their crews of hundreds replaced by a handful of spacers. Being the captain of a dreadnought was a lonely business. Redwood’s CIC did not help, its crew of three spacers precious few to take three dreadnoughts into battle. It was an empty, lifeless place, even if he included the space-suited avatars of Warfare and the artificial intelligences responsible for operations and threat assessment. Karol and Kenny, Michael had called them after the obsolete K-Class heavy cruisers Karolev and Kendrick they had served in throughout the Second Hammer War before being retired to Fleet’s StratSim facility. Their avatars might look like real people, but that did not help.

  Redwood’s combat information center was still a shell, its very emptiness a monument to a once dominant Federated Worlds, a dominance destroyed by the Hammer of Kraa in a few brutal seconds at the Battle of Comdur.

  Michael dragged air deep into his lungs to sharpen his focus on the operation. He might not want to be here—and he sure as hell did not—but he had to think about Redwood and her crew. If getting them and the rest of the squadron home in one piece was too big a task, he should not be sitting in the command seat. Concentrate now, he urged himself. Concentrate!

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

  Michael’s stomach turned over as Redwood dropped out of pinchspace, the ships erupting into normalspace a scant 10,000 kilometers from their targets, violent flares of ultraviolet marking their arrival. With practiced calm, Redwood’s crew confirmed that the threat plot was how it should be. To Michael’s relief, there was no sign of the Hammer ships Ferreira was so concerned about. Warfare, oblivious to Michael’s petty concerns, was wasting no time; rail-gun salvos from the three dreadnoughts’ forward batteries punched toward the hapless Hammer base in tight swarms of tiny slugs and decoys that raced to their targets at more than 3 million kilometers per hour.

  Phase 1 of the operation lasted less than a second. With the Fed ships dropping so close, there was no time for Hammer defenses to think, let alone react. In that time, hundreds of thousands of rail-gun slugs blasted the surface of the asteroid into space, obliterating missile platforms and batteries along with the radar and laser stations that controlled them.