Helfort's War Book III Read online

  “So you say, Admiral,” Polk hissed, his face twisted into a vicious sneer, “so you say.”

  Fear had turned Jorge’s mouth dry as ashes. He knew Polk well enough to recognize when the man was about to lose all self-control. If Polk did, he was as good as dead. “What matters is how we win,” he said, keeping his voice quietly confident, “how we keep the Feds off balance, demoralized, ineffective, until we have secured our political objectives.”

  “Yes, Admiral, that is what matters.” Polk said, bitter with disappointment. “We have to win this. If we don’t, there is no future for the Hammer Worlds. And,” he added, voice dripping with venom, “no future for you, Fleet Admiral Jorge.”

  “No, sir, there’s not.” Nor for you, you psychopathic dirtbag, Jorge wanted to say; wisely, he did not. “So we need to strike and strike hard,” he continued. “Yes, the Feds can destroy us, but we can destroy them, too. So we won’t, and neither will they. Mutually assured destruction. We might not like it, but history shows it works.”

  For an age, Polk stared thoughtfully at the man who controlled the Hammer’s enormous military. Jorge was relieved to see the man’s rage begin to subside, the angry red flush across both cheeks fading slowly. Polk’s silence gave Jorge his opening. He leaned forward. “If they destroy our home planets, we’ll destroy theirs, sir,” Jorge said, repeatedly stabbing a finger into the desk to emphasize the point. “And why would we do that, sir? Kraa! We’re not a bunch of suicidal fundamentalists.”

  “No, Admiral, we’re not,” Polk said. “That much we can agree on. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we. What is it you want?”

  Jorge steadied himself. “Well, sir. We cannot beat them at the negotiating table. We need to take the fight back to them. Beat them the hard way.”

  “And we can do that? Even if they have antimatter weapons?” Polk’s face had tightened into a skeptical frown.

  Jorge made sure he sounded convinced; his life depended on it. “After Comdur, we can,” he said. “Antimatter missiles are just another weapon. We need to keep our nerve. We have a plan to escalate offensive operations, and we need to stick to it. It’s the only way we can bring the Feds back to the negotiating table. We have the strategic advantage … we can force them back. We can and we will.”

  It was a long time before Polk replied, and when he did, his voice was subdued. “Fine, Admiral. Call me a fool, but I’m going to trust you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jorge responded, trying not to sound too relieved that Polk did not want him shot out of hand, the fate all too often inflicted on the bearers of bad news.

  Friday, December 1, 2400, UD

  FWSS Tufayl, in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

  Vice Admiral Jaruzelska’s avatar popped into Michael’s neuronics. “You ready to go, Captain?” she asked.

  “We are, sir. We’ll be on our way when Admiral Perkins is onboard.”

  “Glad I caught you. Is there anything we need to talk about?”

  Michael blinked. Just the one thing, not that he would be telling the admiral that. “No, sir,” he said.

  Vice Admiral Jaruzelska must have noticed Michael’s momentary hesitation. “Perhaps,” she said, her voice a touch curt, “I should make sure that the command arrangements for this mission are completely clear. Are they completely clear, Lieutenant Helfort?”

  Bloody woman must be psychic, Michael decided. “Yes, sir. They are to me,” he said with a confidence he did not feel. “I am captain in command. Rear Admiral Perkins is onboard strictly to observe. He is to take no part in the planning or execution of the operation. He is here to watch what we do and how we do it and report back.”

  Jaruzelska stared at him long and hard. “Exactly so,” she said, “and you can be assured that I have made that clear in written orders, hard-copy orders”—Michael blinked; he had never known a senior officer to be forced to issue orders on paper—“to the admiral. We … I need to know, I must know whether or not Tufayl under your command can hold her own in a fight against the Hammers, and there’s no way we’ll know that if I have to send admirals along to hold your hand.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Yes, I think it is.” Jaruzelska paused. “Go to it, Michael,” she said with sudden warmth. “Jam it up those Hammer sons of bitches.”

  “I will, sir. And thanks.”

  Jaruzelska shook her head. “Don’t thank me. Just kill as many Hammers as you can. That’s all the thanks I’m looking for. If we can’t put the pressure back on them, we’re in serious trouble. Remember Comdur. Jaruzelska out.”

  “Remember Comdur,” Michael responded. He stared at the blank holovid screen for a moment. He never doubted that Jaruzelska backed him 100 percent. He wished he could say the same for Rear Admiral Perkins.

  Thursday, December 7, 2400, UD

  FWSS Tufayl, Faith planetary deepspace

  “All stations, command. Faceplates down, depressurizing in two. Secure artificial gravity.”

  The voice of Tufayl’s executive officer was wooden, stiff with stress. Michael sympathized. Ferreira had every reason to be nervous. The last time she had seen action, her ship had been blown out from under her; she had been lucky to escape with her life when so many of Sailfish’s crew had not. He glanced around the shell of Tufayl’s massive combat information center, the operational heart of the once great heavy cruiser. It was an unsettling sight, the huge compartment all but empty. It had been gutted, every last bit of equipment not needed for its new role as a dreadnought ripped out by an unstoppable army of voracious salvagebots.

  But none of that fazed him as much as the sight of Rear Admiral Perkins: Combat space suit closed up, face inscrutable behind the plasglass visor, the man sat in back of Michael’s small command team.

  If he did not have enough to worry about, Perkins had already crossed the line drawn in the sand by Jaruzelska. He had been quick to say that the ops plan for the attack was fatally flawed, forcing Michael to remind him—more than once since they had departed from Comdur—that he was there to watch, not to take control of the operation. It was a bitter exchange, one that Michael had no doubt would happen again.

  Needless to say, the admiral was not a happy man, and why would he be? Lieutenants did not make a habit of telling flag officers to butt out, and it could not be easy for a man with Perkins’s combat record—a long and distinguished record, it had to be said—to sit back and watch a lieutenant take a heavy cruiser into battle.

  Michael pushed Perkins to the back of his mind; he had better things to worry about than the man’s feelings. The most important thing on his plate was getting Tufayl through its first combat mission intact and its crew home alive. He turned his attention back to the massive holovids that filled the forward bulkhead of Tufayl’s combat information center.

  The threat plot was an ugly mess of red vectors, each tracking a Hammer warship in orbit around the planet Faith, the third planet of the Retribution system. Michael grimaced at the sight. Faith nearspace was not new to him. He had been there before, in Eridani, ironically one of a task group led by none other than the totally pissed Perkins. Eridani had been lucky to get back in one piece from that incursion, though that had not been Perkins’s fault to be fair.

  “Captain, sir. I have all green suits, ship is at general quarters, ship state 1, airtight condition zulu, artificial gravity off, ship depressurized,” Ferreira said, a brave attempt at a smile visible through the plasglass faceplate of her combat space suit. “I’ll be with the coxswain and the rest of the damage control crew, all one of him.”

  Michael chuckled; a conventional heavy cruiser’s damage control team numbered in the hundreds. “Command, roger. You hang in there, Jayla. All stations, stand by to drop. Warfare. Confirm weapons free. You have command authority.”

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

  Michael flicked a glance at Perkins while the drop timer ran down; the man had not moved, a glowering lump of unhappiness at the bac
k of the combat information center. A quick check confirmed that the two AIs responsible for threat assessment and operations were ready. Michael called them Kubby and Kal after the ships they came from, the long-scrapped K-Class heavy cruisers Kuibyshev and Kaladima. To maintain the illusion that they were real people, he had ordered his neuronics to integrate their whole-body avatars into his vision. The human factors wonks assured him that this would help absorb the intense stress of combat. Looking at them, two anonymous combat space-suited shapes sitting on either side of him, he was not so sure. However solid their avatars appeared, however real their space-suited figures might seem, he knew Kubby and Kal to be figments of his neuronics’ imagination. Even with them, it was a small team to run a dreadnought’s combat information center.

  Using AIs in such mission-critical roles represented the big unknown. Brought out of retirement, they had decades of combat experience in heavy cruisers, but this was something different. Michael was surprised by their enthusiasm for their new roles as his principal advisers. Did AIs get bored in retirement? Officially, no: endless hours in Fleet’s StratSim facility ensured that retired AIs stayed current, yet Michael did wonder. Anyway, what was important was that Kubby and Kal had worked well in the sims; Michael hoped they would perform as well when they faced real Hammers firing real missiles and rail-gun slugs.

  But Kubby and Kal were only advisers: They had no command authority and would not be giving any orders. The biggest gamble of all remained trusting Warfare, the AI tasked with overall battle management. It was no adviser. When the attack degenerated into freewheeling bedlam—and it would—and space filled with blizzards of rail-guns slugs, missiles, and decoys, when sensors started to collapse under torrents of conflicting information dumped on them by decoys, jammers, and spoofers, the job of battle management slipped beyond the ability of humans. Only the AI had the processing power to cope; only it could make the millions of decisions needed to keep Tufayl safe while its enemies were put to the sword. It was a big task, and the lives of all onboard Tufayl depended on Warfare getting it right without the benefit of a full combat information center crew to keep an eye on things, looking for those moments when the AIs messed things up—as they always had and always would.

  Tufayl dropped into normalspace with the usual gut-wrenching lurch. In an instant, things turned busy, the proximity alarms screeching to warn of Hammer ships close to the drop datum.

  Michael ignored them. The Hammer ships were supposed to be close. He forced himself to wait while the ship’s sensors rebuilt the threat plot, Tufayl’s artificial gravity pushing him deep into his seat when it came back online. Michael breathed easier; the positions of the Hammer ships had changed in the time it took Tufayl to microjump out-system, reverse vector, and microjump back, but not so much that the ops plan was compromised. The Hammer ships—a gaggle of cruisers and smaller warships—clustered around HSBS-261, one of the Hammer space battle stations that protected Faith planetary nearspace.

  “Command, Warfare. Threat plot is confirmed.” The AI’s voice was calm and untroubled, as if this were just another day in the simulators. “Executing Alfa-1.”

  Armored hatches opened. In seconds, hydraulic dispensers dumped thousands of decoys overboard, stubby black cylinders forming up into a huge cloud of electronic deceit driven ahead of the ship toward the Hammers by thin pillars of fire.

  “Executing Alfa-2.”

  Tufayl leaped forward as though smashed in the ass by a giant fist. The dreadnought shuddered, accelerating hard to follow the decoy cloud toward the Hammers.

  “Executing Alfa-3.”

  Krachov generators started spewing millions upon millions of tiny disks out into space, tiny black shapes fired ahead of the ship to form a shield to screen the Tufayl from Hammer sensors and diffuse antiship laser fire.

  Michael struggled to breathe. He understood why Perkins was so unhappy with his plan for this operation. Tufayl was about to break most of the rules in the Fighting Instructions, one of which was that single-ship attacks on targets as tough as battle stations were not a good idea, but Perkins had never taken a dreadnought into battle.

  “Command, sensors. Multiple Hammer missile launches. Eaglehawk ASSMs. Target Tufayl”—bloody AIs, Michael complained under his breath; who else would the damn target be? There wasn’t another Fed warship anywhere near Faith—“time to target forty-nine seconds.”

  “Command, roger. Threat, warhead assess—”

  Perkins’s voice stopped Michael in his tracks. “This is a direct order, Helfort. Abort!” Perkins’s voice rose to a near shriek. “Do you hear me? Abort now!”

  “You son of a bitch,” Michael whispered, “I don’t need this.” He shut down Perkins’s com links to the rest of the ship; if the man wanted to rant, he could rant to himself. “Coxswain to the CIC!” he barked, turning his attention back to the more pressing problems facing Tufayl.

  “Threat, what’s your warhead assessment?”

  “Missiles are chemex-armed,” Kal replied confidently. “Hammer ships are inside the blast-damage radius for antimatter weapons, and this far inside planetary nearspace, fusion warheads are unlikely.”

  “Yes,” Michael whispered exultantly. His gamble might pay off. He just hoped he and Kal—the AI handling threat assessment—had called it right. Tufayl was tough but not invulnerable. Fusion warheads could destroy even a dreadnought if they exploded close to it.

  “Sir?” Bienefelt appeared in front of him, enormous in her armored combat space suit.

  “Get back and strap yourself in alongside Admiral Perkins. He is not to leave his seat until I say he can. I authorize you to restrain him if you need to, using as much force as is reasonably required.”

  “Sir?” Understandably, Bienefelt sounded baffled. It was not every day a chief petty officer was called on to restrain an admiral.

  “Just do it, ’Swain!” Michael snapped. “Make sure the admiral stays in his damn seat. If he tries to get out, sit on him. That’s a direct order.”

  “Sir!”

  Michael turned away, more unnerved by having to deal with Perkins than by the Hammer attack.

  “Command, Warfare, sensors. Hammers have launched multiple rail-gun swarms. Impact in twenty-one seconds. Stand by impact assessment.”

  In times past, the prospect of facing a Hammer rail-gun attack would have turned Michael’s stomach inside out, but not this time. Tufayl’s forward sections carried three times the armor of a conventional heavy cruiser, the extra mass compensated for by the tens of thousands of tons of redundant systems, equipment, landers, and spares taken out of her during the conversion. Tufayl would be long gone before the Hammers fired enough rail-gun slugs to penetrate her forward armor.

  “Command, Warfare. Executing Alfa-4. Emergency override main propulsion!”

  Tufayl’s enormous mass shook as Warfare pushed her main engines to and then beyond their limits, tons of reaction mass driven out astern into thin columns of white fire that were kilometers long. Michael forced himself to breathe properly. This was the big roll of the dice. Tufayl accelerated faster than any cruiser should, and if the Hammers did not pick it up quickly and update their targeting solutions, the missile salvos would turn in too late to make their final attacks. They would attack where they thought Tufayl should be, not where she was. Wasted, the missiles would die a useless death in the pillars of fiery hell spewing from Tufayl’s, stern.

  If …

  “Command, sensors. Impact assessment. Estimate twenty to thirty rail-gun slugs on vector for direct impact.”

  Michael braced himself. He had faith in Tufayl’s reinforced frontal armor, but thirty rail-gun slugs was one hell of a lot of kinetic energy for the ship to absorb. Closing at more than 800 kilometers per second, each slug would smash the equivalent of hundreds of kilograms of TNT onto a fingertip-size patch of Tufayl’s hull. The old familiar feelings came back—stomach churning, heart racing out of control, mouth and throat ash-dry, body slicked with a cold, clammy sweat
—returning with a rush when he remembered how bad rail-gun attacks could be.

  “Threat. Hammer missile status?”

  “Turning in now. Stand by … second stages firing … vectors confirmed. Tufayl is outside missile engagement envelope.”

  “Roger.” Michael tried not to sound relieved, but he was. He had seen enough action to know that what worked in theory, what worked in the sims, often did not work in practice.

  “All stations, warfare. Brace for rail-gun impact.”

  Tufayl’s close-in defenses—defensive lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns—did their best but failed to keep the Hammer rail-gun attack out. Too many slugs screened by too many decoys moved too fast, and when they hit, the impact was tremendous, much worse than Michael had expected. With Tufayl’s artificial gravity overloaded, his seat fought—and failed—to insulate him from the shock. In a fraction of a second, twenty-six rail-guns slugs smashed into Tufayl’s bows, the ship bucking and heaving when the slugs blew huge craters in the bows. Soon the ship disappeared behind a vast cloud of vaporized ceramsteel armor.

  Tufayl shrugged off the Hammer attack. Still accelerating hard, she punched out into clear space, the Krachov shield screening them blown apart by the Hammer attack. Michael whistled in surprise; they were so close, and Tufayl’s attack so sudden, that he picked out the shapes of Hammer spacers working outside the battle station’s enormous hull racing to get back inside to safety.

  “Brace yourselves, you Hammer sonsofbitches,” he murmured, “because you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Executing Alfa-5. Launching missiles, lasers engaging primary target. Shutting down main engines. All stations. Stand by to jump.”

  Tufayl shuddered as hydraulics rammed Merlin ASSMs outboard, their first stages firing the instant the full salvo was assembled. The combat information center fell quiet, and Tufayl coasted on, the frantic attempts of the Hammer ships’ lasers to exploit the damage to her bows ignored, her own massive antiship lasers in turn flaying the armor off two Hammer ships—the heavy cruisers Keating and Persepolis—unlucky enough to be caught stern on, both spewing clouds of reaction mass in their struggle to turn to face the attack. Michael watched in grim satisfaction when the armor of both ships failed, Tufayl’s antiship lasers exploiting their vulnerable sterns to bore white-hot holes into their hulls. The lasers broke through the armor and reached deep inside, probing for the ships’ fusion plants. Seconds later, the lasers found their targets; in quick succession, first Keating and then Persepolis lost containment, their fusion plants exploding into balls of blue-white gas.