Helfort's War Book III Read online

  A DANGEROUS PROPOSITION

  Unseen, Dreadnought Squadron One—ten ships arrayed in an extended line abreast across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space—coasted in toward Commitment, the distant home planet of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. All around the ships, countless millions of stars hung in great cascading sheets, diamondsharp pinpricks of light strewn in careless profusion across the black of deepspace. For a moment, Michael Helfort forgot himself, overwhelmed by the sight, its glorious extravagance in stark contrast to the wretched, self-serving schemes that preoccupied most of humankind most of the time. Michael stretched to ease stress-tightened muscles, wondering just what the hell the point of it all was. The cosmos did not care whether the Federated Worlds or the Hammer of Kraa came out on top, that much was for sure.

  “Command, Warfare.” The steady voice of the artificial intelligence responsible for battle management dragged Michael’s attention back to the job at hand.

  “Command,” he replied.

  “Threat plot is confirmed. Hammer task group designated Hammer-1 has four heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, plus escorts and multiple auxiliaries. The Hammer task group’s orbit is nominal for Commitment near space defense. Mission prime directives met. We are go for the operation.”

  “Command, roger. Wait.”

  Michael stared at the threat plot. Warfare might be happy with the tactical situation, but he was not. The problem was the Hammer task group his ships had been sent to attack. For a force tasked with near space defense, it had too many auxiliary ships. With plenty of support and maintenance platforms in Clarke orbit to support the Hammer warships protecting Commitment planet, auxiliaries would be an unnecessary complication, something no half-competent commander would want in a task group intended to stop a Fed attack in its tracks, yet there they were. Why?

  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

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  For my sons:

  Alan, Iain, and Andrew

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to my wife, Vicki, to Russ Galen and Tara Wynne, to the team at Random House, and in particular to Liz Scheier.

  Friday, August 4, 2400, Universal Date

  Comdur Fleet Base

  The nightmare roared out of the darkness.

  He had to get clear. If he stayed, he would die, incinerated in the hellish blast of a runaway fusion plant, his body vaporized into a ball of incandescent gas expanding into space. Panic tore him apart, and he started to run. Hammer missiles and rail-gun slugs ripped the heavy cruiser’s fabric, and the huge ship died around him. Beneath his feet, the tangled bodies of dead spacers carpeted the deck, but the harder he ran, the less progress he made. He was getting nowhere: unable to breathe, lungs afire, legs refusing to work properly, mouth open in a soundless scream. And there, in front of the lifepod, between him and safety, stood Detective Sergeant Kalkov, eyes bulging, face a hate-twisted mask drifting in and out of flame-shot smoke, jeering at Michael’s frantic efforts to get away, the knife that had killed him held in an outstretched fist, dripping blood to the deck.

  The nightmare ended the way it always did.

  The ship exploded in a searing flash of white, a ball of raw energy, and he woke up, his body wrapped in tangled sheets. For a long time, he lay there sweat-soaked, chest heaving, heart racing, the face of the Hammer police sergeant he had killed during his escape after the loss of the Ishaq still burning in his mind’s eye.

  Forcing himself out of his bunk, he went over to the washbasin to clean the sweat off his face, the water so cold that it stung. He peered at himself in the mirror.

  “You look like shit, Lieutenant Michael Helfort,” he said aloud. His face stared back from wide-set hazel eyes sunk deep in gray-framed sockets and underscored by dark bags. His skin, normally tanned to a rich brown, stretched ashen and washed out, tightened by stress across well-defined cheekbones, his lips clamped shut, thin and bloodless. His hair, overlong and unruly at the best of times, spiked into a tangled mess, sweat-darkened from brown to black.

  It was true: He looked like shit. He sighed despairingly. He decided not to waste time trying to sleep. Invariably it eluded him after the Ishaq nightmare, so he hunted around the net to see what the holovids offered; he preferred to watch the dross they churned out. Even that was better than picking over the ghosts from his past.

  Here we go, he thought finally. One of the better news channels had a segment dealing with a report from one of the Federation’s think tanks on Space Fleet. Should be worth a look, he decided; comming micropayment—he was in no mood for advertisements—he pulled the item off the net. When the program anchor, Thad Horung, appeared, he put his feet up to watch.

  “… and our thanks to Johanna Morgenstern for that report from the Frontier Planets,” Horung said. “Their refusal to support the Federation in the war against the Hammers will continue to be a major headache for this government, and we will of course keep you up to date with any developments there.

  “Now we turn to the Tesdorf Institute. Yesterday it released its analysis of the long-term effects the Comdur disaster will have on Space Fleet. In a moment, I will talk with retired admiral Orenda Pekefier”—Michael groaned out loud; the woman was self-centered, opinionated, and bombastic, traits he did not enjoy—“about the key issues the Tesdorf Institute has identified. But first, what are those issues? Ashokan Mokhtar takes up the story.”

  The holovid cut to Mokhtar, a tall and impeccably dressed man standing in front of an imaginative re-creation of the Comdur disaster, all fireballs and tumbling Fed ships. Michael winced; it bore little resemblance to the awful day when Hammer missiles carrying antimatter warheads destroyed the Federated Worlds’ fleet at the Battle of Comdur.

  “Thank you, Thad,” Mokhtar said. “The Tesdorf Institute’s report is an impressively detailed document. Reading it through”—you liar, Michael mouthed; an underpaid research hack had that thankless task—“one issue stands out, the radical changes forced on Space Fleet by the loss of so many experienced personnel at Comdur and, in particular, the development of what we understand Fleet is calling dreadnoughts. These—”

  Shocked, Michael sat bolt upright. The fact that dreadnoughts existed was one of the worst kept of Fleet’s many secrets. In itself, talking about them was not a problem. But spelling out in detail what Fleet had done to convert its heavy cruisers to dreadnoughts: massively upgraded ceramsteel armor, crews cut to a handful of spacers, their air groups, landers, and marines removed, all unnecessary equipment torn out to reduce mass? For the Hammers to discover all that would be a major disaster. Even they could work out what the enhancements had created: a warship orders of magnitude tougher and more maneuverable than any conventional heavy cruiser, a warship—the only warship in humanspace—able to withstand antimatter weapons, the Hammer weapon that had wreaked such havoc at Comdur.

  All traces of tiredness gone, Michael listened intently to Mokhtar.

  “… ships are essentially heavy cruisers with skeleton crews. No surprises there—we know Fleet is critically short of experienced spacers after their losses at Comdur—except for one very disturbing fact. Sources inside Fleet have confirmed that some of these dreadnoughts will carry no human crew at all, a development the Tesdorf Institute says is … and I quote … ‘deeply problematic for the future of Space Fleet, prejudicial to the security of the Federated Worlds, and potentially a breach of the D
akota System Treaty, which prohibits the use of self-replicating machines.’ Those are very serious charges, and we will explore them with Admiral Pekefier in some depth. Clearly, Fleet faces these and many other challenges at the present time, one of which must be whether or not Admiral Martha Shiu is the woman to lead Space Fleet at this critical time. The institute also identifies …”

  By the time Horung wrapped up the segment, Michael was relieved to see that the Tesdorf Institute had no inkling that the dreadnoughts were such a breakthrough: game-changing ships intended to shift the strategic balance away from the Hammer of Kraa back to the Federated Worlds. Pekefier had spouted a great deal of verbiage about the implications of reducing crew size, the risks created by Fleet operating unmanned cruisers, the Dakota System Treaty, and so on, but that was all. Most of what the institute said was ax grinding by somebody unwilling to accept that conventional starships with large crews might no longer be the future of space warfare, a well-placed and senior Fleet officer most likely. Clearly, Pekefier knew nothing substantive about dreadnoughts, nor had she worked out the threat they posed to the Hammers. As far as she was concerned, dreadnoughts were just heavy cruisers with no crew. So much for your much-prized insights, Admiral, Michael thought as he listened to her rambling on.

  And yet, buried in all that talk was the real issue, a truth that Horung and Pekefier had missed.

  Michael understood the concerns of the Tesdorf Institute’s anonymous source: Dreadnoughts were a problem … for some. They required much smaller crews; that meant a smaller Space Fleet. They threatened too many vested interests. They jeopardized too many entrenched positions. They imperiled the aspirations of too many ambitious officers, of whom Fleet had no shortage. So why would anybody be surprised by the response they evoked? Of course so many reacted viscerally. Dreadnoughts tore away the assumptions that underpinned the careers thousands of officers had spent decades constructing. For them, and with morale already at an all-time low after Fleet’s disastrous defeat at Comdur, dreadnoughts became part of the problem, not the solution.

  But since when had the concerns of Fleet’s aspirants, ambitious and petty, self-centered and self-serving, ever been important? Surely only one thing mattered: defeating the Hammer of Kraa?

  The dreadnoughts had to work. And when they did, they would be the only ships in the Fed order of battle capable of surviving an attack by Hammer missiles carrying antimatter warheads. If dreadnoughts worked, they would buy the Feds precious time, time to reverse engineer the antimatter weapons he and Adamant had captured from the Hammer ships McMullins and Providence Sound. With antimatter weapons the Feds could take the fight back to the Hammers, beat them on the field of battle, and bring down the most brutal, most repressive government in human history.

  That was the dreadnoughts’ destiny.

  His was to be the captain in command of Tufayl, the first dreadnought to enter service; the dreadnought’s destiny was his, too.

  “Ah, Lieutenant. Please take a seat.”

  Michael Helfort sat down, even if sitting in front of one of Fleet’s most senior psychiatrists was the last place he wanted to be.

  Surgeon Captain Indra peered at him, much the way a researcher scrutinized a laboratory rat. “Right, Lieutenant,” she said. “Let me tell you why I’ve asked you to see me, and we’ll take it from there. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. To be blunt, you’re here because my staff thinks you are not as well as you pretend to be, and I have to say I agree with them.”

  Michael nodded. Burying the ghosts of the past was easy; keeping them buried was not.

  If he read her right, Indra was about to rip away the screen he had built with such care to conceal the fear and self-loathing that festered inside his brain. If she ruled him unfit for active service, the one thing that drove him on—the promise, driven by a cold-burning resolve, to make the Hammers pay for all the death and destruction they had inflicted—would vanish.

  What would he do with his life then?

  “Let me see,” Indra continued. “We graded you P-4 immediately after your escape from Commitment. No surprises there after what you’d been through. Now, … yes, we upgraded you to P-1 once you finished postcombat stress deprogramming.”

  Michael nodded. “That’s right, sir. P-1, fit for active service. I have since been posted to Tufayl as captain in command.” Michael tried to keep any pleading out of his voice. He needed, he wanted, the Tufayl … badly.

  “Ah, yes. Tufayl. First of the dreadnoughts, I think?” Indra said.

  “Yes, sir. She is.”

  “Interesting idea,” Indra said. She looked at Michael directly. “Let’s get to the point. You’ve not been straight with us, have you?”

  Miserably, Michael shook his head. “Guess not, sir,” he said, tired of the lies all of a sudden. “The same nightmare. Every night. It’s bad.”

  “Ah, yes,” Indra said. “We were pretty sure there was something there. Problem was, you were good at covering it up. Too good.”

  “So how did you … you know, how di—”

  “Did we work it out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Lieutenant, but we’ve been watching you for a while. Admiral Jaruzelska was concerned; she asked us to have a good look at you. And when we did, it became clear to us after a while that whatever you are, you’re not P-1 … Show me your hands!” she snapped.

  Startled, Michael did. Indra nodded. “It’s that obvious, Lieutenant. Once you know where to look,” she said, her voice soft, “it really is.”

  Numbed by despair, Michael stared at his hands. They trembled, and no matter how hard he tried, they refused to stop. “Does this mean I’ll lose the Tufayl?”

  “Not necessarily,” Indra replied with an emphatic shake of her head. “I know how badly Fleet needs you and the dreadnoughts. Admiral Jaruzelska was quite forceful in that regard, I have to say,” she added wryly, “so I’ll give you two options. You can be honest with us and work with us to get your postcombat stress under control. I can’t say it will ever disappear, and since neurowiping is not an option, I can’t make you forget what you’ve been through. But we can help you manage it. If you won’t cooperate, you can keep doing what you have been doing—covering the problem up—in which case we can’t really help you much, I’m afraid. One thing I can tell you for certain, though. If you won’t work with us, you’ll be downgraded to, let me see … yes, at best, P-2, more likely P-3. In fact, never mind ‘will.’ As of now, that’s what you have been graded.”

  “P-3?”

  “Yes, P-3, unfit for combat duties. You are not stable enough to take the stress of combat. You’d be risking the lives of your fellow spacers. But it does not have to be that way.”

  “So there’s a chance I can be P-1 again?”

  “Yes, most certainly … if you’re honest with us. I cannot guarantee it, of course, because in the end it’s up to you, but your exposure to stress after the loss of Ishaq, although extreme, was relatively short. You’re young, you’re strong, and you’re fit. So yes, you can be P-1 again. But if you’re not open with us, postcombat stress will continue to be a problem for you, and much as you might want to be the captain in command of Tufayl, it’ll never happen. We’ve analyzed the simulator exercises you’ve been doing for the admiral, and postcombat stress is affecting your performance. Transient episodes of indecision, loss of concentration, a lack of mental resilience, and more. Do I need to go on?”

  Michael shook his head. “No, sir, you don’t. It has to be the first option. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to play games. I was sure I’d get over it. I really was.”

  The concern on Indra’s face was obvious. “I know you were, Lieutenant, so there’s no need to apologize. Everyone thinks they’ll get over it. We see it all the time. Now,” she said, her tone brisk and businesslike, “we have a job to do. Your boss says the world won’t end if we keep you for the day. So unless there’s somewhere else you�
��d rather be?”—Michael shook his head—“No? Good. Let’s get started. What we will do first is …”

  * * *

  After a long day with Indra’s people, Michael walked slowly back to his quarters. His mind felt strangely empty, hollowed out, scoured by the postcombat stress team as they probed back to a time before the Hammers.

  Not that Michael had forgotten anything. He remembered everything he had been through as if it had only just happened: DLS-387 fleeing for its life after the Battle of Hell’s Moons, Ishaq’s loss in a Hammer ambush, the dead, empty eyes of Doctrinal Security’s Colonel Hartspring as he ordered yet another savage beating, the escape from the Hammer prisoner-of-war camp, the look of terror on Detective Sergeant Kalkov’s face when he slipped the knife up into the man’s heart, the DocSec trooper whose throat he had cut so effortlessly, the death of Corporal Yazdi, Eridani’s short but brutal war, the catastrophic defeat of the Fed Fleet at Comdur. It was all so fresh, just thinking about what he had been through threw his heart into overdrive.

  Today was just the start. Indra wanted him back to do it again and again. When all the emotional baggage he had picked along the way up had been identified, labeled, sorted, and analyzed, Indra’s team could start the painstaking business of training him to control all he had been through. He had no illusions. It was not going to be easy; worse, the nightmares would still be there—Indra said they came from a place so deep in his brain that they would never leave him—but at least she held out the promise that much of the soul-destroying load he had been carrying all these months would be lifted.

  It had to work. He needed to be fit enough to return to active duty. He had a job to do. He had promised to make the Hammers pay for all the pain they had inflicted, and taking Tufayl and the rest of the dreadnought force into battle was the first step in keeping those promises.