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  The battle for Commitment planet

  ( Helfort_s War - 4 )

  Graham Sharp Paul

  The battle for Commitment planet

  Graham Sharp Paul

  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 leave 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, shut
ting 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 dreadnoughts, 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.

  Michael grunted in satisfaction, adrenaline-fueled excitement flushing away all his earlier disinterest.

  "Command, Warfare. Detaching Red River to investigate heat anomaly. Redwood and Redress closing on primary objective. Stand by deceleration burn."

  "Command, roger. Ground assault?"

  "Standing by. Landers are at Launch 1."

  "Command, roger." Michael sat back, satisfied that the operation was running to plan. Provided that happy state of affairs continued, they should be on their way back to Nyleth inside-

  Michael's moment of self-congratulation was destroyed by Jarrod Carmellini, the leading spacer in charge of the dreadnoughts' sensor arrays. "Command, Warfare, this is sensors," he said. "New track. Green 20 Up 0, range 50,000 kilometers. Designated hostile task group Hammer-1. Stand by… hostiles confirmed to be Hammer cruisers, stand by identification… Verity-Class heavy cruisers Vindicator, Vigilant, and Virtue."

  "Command, Warfare. Threat concurs."

  "Damn, damn, damn," Michael muttered, all too aware he had let Ferreira down, how right she had been, how wrong, how negligent his response.

  The threat plot told the story. The three scarlet icons appeared as if from nowhere, their projected vectors running out from their hiding places in the rubble field right at the incoming Fed ships. "Fucking Hammers," Michael cursed under his breath. He did not need this, not now, not ever. Cursing was all he could do: The battle rested in Warfare's hands. Michael sat back and watched the AI divert Redress to support Red River's attempts to head off the Hammers. That left Redwood-now decelerating under emergency power to a stop over the shattered remnants of Balawal-34's surface installations-to finish the operation. Michael cursed some more; launching landers and their precious cargo of marines with Hammer heavy cruisers throwing missiles and rail-gun slugs around was never a good idea.

  "Command, sensors," Carmellini said. "Initial missile launch from Hammer-1. Target unknown. Anticipate one more salvo followed by coordinated missile and rail-gun attack. Likely target Redwood and assault landers."

  "Command, roger," Michael said. "Threat?"

  "Threat concurs," the AI said.

  He agreed. The Hammer ships would have been tasked to protect their signals intelligence station, and Redwood posed the most immediate threat to its survival. Red River and Redress should have no problem dealing with the attacking Hammers given their heavier armor and better maneuverability, but they had to be given the time to finish them off. Burying an urge to take control of the engagement back from Warfare, Michael commed it, closing his eyes when its avatar popped into his neuronics.

  "Advice," he said. "Consider holding back the ground assault until the Hammer ships have been dealt with. Also consider adjusting vector so as to put Balawal-34 between us and the enemy. That'll at least keep their damn rail-gun slugs off our backs. Any problems with any of that?"

  The AI considered that for a moment before responding. "None. I concur."

  "Good. Make it so," Michael said, wondering why the AI had not preempted him, even though he knew why. AIs had their weaknesses, and thinking outside the box was one of them; that was why Fleet doctrine insisted, rightly, on keeping humans in the loop. He commed the ground assault commander, Lieutenant Janos Kallewi.

  "You copy all that, Janos?" he asked.

  "Did, sir," Kallewi said. "I hoped you'd hold us back. Assault landers are tough but not tough enough to keep out an Eaglehawk missile."

  "Never mind rail-gun slugs."

  "Them, too," Kallewi said with a grin.

  "You'll be launching the moment we have dealt with the Hammer ships," Michael said before dropping the comm, steadied by Kallewi's calm confidence.

  He turned his attention back to the command plot, now a mass of red and green icons that tracked the battle unfolding between the Hammers and his two dreadnoughts. He liked what he saw; no Hammer would. The enemy ships had been caught between the jaws of the Fed attack the moment they emerged from the rubble field, their vulnerable flanks exposed to Redress's rail guns as she closed in from the right while Red River, approaching head-on, flayed their bows with missiles, rail guns, and antistarship lasers. Things were not looking too good for the Hammers, not that they were sitting back to wait for the inevitable.

  "Command, Warfare. Second missile launch from Hammer-1. Stand by salvo commit… missiles on the way. Target Redwood, time of flight 2 minutes 5."

  "Command, roger. All stations, Command. Brace for missile attack."

  Michael's pulse quickened, the familiar mix of adrenaline-fueled excitement and fear washing the indifference and guilt out of his system. Keeping one eye on the Hammer task group while it fell apart in the face of the attack from Red River and Redress, he watched the incoming missiles
crawl their way across the command plot toward Redwood.

  Michael knew that missiles alone posed little threat; they were protected by the massive bulk of the asteroid, and the Hammer's rail guns were useless: The attack would not trouble Redwood's defenses. Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of a missile attack was always a nerve-wracking business. They closed in, and the missile attack dissolved into anticlimax. Redwood's medium-range defensive missiles and lasers started the relentless, grinding process of hacking Hammer missiles out of the attack, the space between the ships filling with the violent flares of exploding missile warheads and fusion power plants. The gap between missiles and target narrowed, the salvo a confused and chaotic cloud seeded with decoys intended to ensure that enough missiles survived to destroy Redwood. The dreadnought's close-in defenses took over, a triple layer of lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns working frantically to keep the Hammer missile attack out. It was chaos, the task of managing Redwood's defense beyond the ability of any human to understand, let alone control. Michael braced himself, without knowing it pulling himself back and down into the protection of his armored combat space suit while around him the ship racketed with the noise of weapon systems unloading ordnance as fast as hydraulics allowed.

  A single missile slipped past Redwood's defenses. Its fusion warhead exploded off the port bow in a blue-white ball of radiation that flayed the armor off the dreadnought by the meter, the ship's artificial gravity struggling to absorb the transient shock wave from the blast.

  Then it was over, an eerie calm settling over the combat information center, broken only by Ferreira's confirmation that Redwood had suffered no significant damage in the Hammer attack. As the ship's gravity field stabilized, Michael offered up a silent prayer of thanks that the dreadnoughts carried more than enough armor to shrug off a proximity-fired fusion warhead, then a second prayer for the fact that the Hammers had been too close to fire antimatter warheads at them. Dreadnoughts were tough, but the double-pulsed wall of gamma radiation released when matter annihilated an antimatter warhead's payload of antihydrogen was more than powerful enough to destroy one if it exploded close enough.