The Battle of the Hammer Worlds Page 2

  “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. “

  You know what, ops? I think you might be right,” Gianfranco said, cheered by the thought that Adamantine might not have gotten away cleanly. “When the dust has settled, have Mother take a good look at it. I’d like to know what she thinks. Okay, how long before we can get the boarding party away? I really want to see what was so damned important that the Hammers would send a Diamond class deepspace light patrol ship to pick it up. Oh, yes. Ops! Detach Markeb and Alioth to recover the people the Hammers left behind. I have a feeling the boys and girls at Fleet intelligence will want to talk to them.”

  Thursday, June 24, 2399, UD

  FWSS Ishaq, berthed on Space Battle Station SBS-44, in orbit around Jascaria

  Michael’s first two days on board Ishaq passed in a blur. Harried from one place to another by the AI—artificial intelligence—that managed the ship’s administration, he had found the pace relentless.

  “Getting near that time, I think.” Michael was exhausted. His guide for the day, Cadet Aaron Stone, was good company, but Michael had another long day to look forward to. He needed a good night’s sleep.

  Stone nodded. “You might be right. One for the road?”

  Michael’s determination to call it a night crumbled. Being alone in his cabin did not seem so attractive all of a sudden.

  “Oh, go on, then.”

  Stone walked off to the bar. Michael commed his neuronics to bring up the news. It had been a while since he had checked what was going on in humanspace, and this was as good a time as any to catch up. Moments after the World News Networ
k popped into view, he wished he had not bothered.

  The news was bad. Talks with the Hammer over the hijacking of the Fed Worlds mership Mumtaz had collapsed; the Hammers were pulling out of the negotiations.

  Stone was back with two new beers. “Check out WNN,” Michael said. “Looks like the Hammers have pulled the plug.” He sighed. Suddenly he was a million years old. “Well, Aaron. I think the shit is going to hit the fan.”

  “Bastards.” Stone frowned. “Beats me how that new chief councillor . . . what’s his name?”

  “Polk. Chief Councillor Jeremiah Polk.”

  “Yup, him. How can he try to pin the Mumtaz hijacking on someone else? Do the Hammers ever take responsibility for anything?” Stone took a long pull at his beer. “Man’s a total idiot,” he said dismissively.

  Michael shook his head. Jeremiah Polk was many things—devious psychopath sprang most immediately to mind—but Michael was damn sure he was not an idiot.

  “Don’t know about that, Aaron. He’s a very dangerous man, that Polk. This doesn’t look good.”

  A gloomy silence fell over the two young officers.

  Intently, Michael watched Polk being interviewed. He had read pretty much every word written about—and by—Jeremiah Polk. He struggled to think of a more amoral man. Christ! To call Polk a psychopath was being unkind to psychopaths, but a few things were clear. True to his Hammer bloodlines, Jeremiah Polk was a man who never forgave. He was a man who never forgot. He was a man unable to let an insult pass unavenged. He was a man whose preferred solution to most problems was violence. He despised intellectuals; smart-assed thinkers, he called them. On the basis of those traits alone, something was brewing. He would stake his life on it.

  “So, Michael. What does it all mean?”

  Michael had been asking himself the same question.

  “Hard to tell . . .”

  Michael’s voice trailed off as he contemplated the terrible prospect of another full-blown war against the fundamentalist Hammers. It was not a happy thought. Nothing but nothing could ever convince the Hammers that their so-called religion was the invention of one man, that everything they thought and did was based on one giant lie. He shook his head in despair. The curiously shaped rocks discovered on Mars by Peter McNair were no more relics of an ancient civilization dedicated to the universe’s supreme being, Kraa, than his toenail clippings were. The whole thing was an elaborate charade on which the Hammers had erected possibly the most viciously cruel society known to humankind. But like all fundamentalists down the ages, reason and logic had no weight with the Hammers. They understood only one thing: brute force, so brute force it would have to be. Maybe this time, Michael thought, the Federated Worlds would go for the throat, not stopping until the entire rotten edifice that was Hammer society lay crushed into dust.

  “Now,” he continued, “exactly what does it all mean? Well, I hate to say this, but I think we’re in for a fight. I think that’s what it means. So stand by for a fourth worlds war.”

  Stone’s eyes opened wide in shock. “You sure of that?”

  Michael shook his head. “No, I’m not. There’s no way I can be. But Polk’s got to do something. Look at the problems he’s got at home. The Hammer’s falling apart at the seams. Remember your Politics 101: When things at home are going to shit, fight a foreign war. Distracts the peasants; keeps them in line. Anyway, I think force is the only thing the Hammers really understand, so force is what Polk will turn to.”

  Stone ran his hands through his hair. His face hardened. “So what? Bring it on. We’ll kick those Hammers back to the Stone Age where they damn well belong.”

  Michael shook his head. “Be careful what you wish for, Aaron,” he cautioned.

  Stone stared at Michael. He looked guilty. “Oh, yes. You’ve been there. Sorry. Forgot.”

  “That’s all right. Anyway, there’s nothing much we can do about it. We are junior officers, nothing but low-life bottomfeeders. So drink up. I need a decent night’s sleep.”

  Monday, June 28, 2399, UD

  Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, city of McNair, Commitment planet, Hammer of Kraa Worlds

  Chief Councillor Jeremiah Polk sat back in his chair, stretching in yet another vain attempt to ease the kinks out of an aching back. His mood was foul. “Kraa’s blood,” he muttered. For once it would be good to have a day without crisis after crisis crashing onto his desk.

  “Chief Councillor?” The diffident tones of his secretary broke into his thoughts.

  “Yes, Singh.”

  “Fleet Admiral Jorge is here, sir.”

  “Ah, good. Send him in.”

  The man ushered into his office was tall, his looks well served by his Spanish forebears. Once his face must have been classically handsome. Now it was deeply lined by the long hours and stress that went with every senior position in the Hammer Worlds.

  Jorge looked nervous, his forehead slicked with a telltale sheen of sweat. That was not surprising, Polk thought as he waved Jorge into a seat. The man should be nervous. After all, it was only a matter of months since Polk, in the wake of the Hammer fleet’s pathetic response to the Fed’s attack on Hell’s Moons, had personally ordered the deaths of thousands of Jorge’s fellow officers, their bodies even now rotting in DocSec lime pits. Truth be known, Polk was reassured by fear. He liked being feared—very much.

  Once Jorge was settled, Polk pinned him back in his chair with a long, unblinking stare. Polk was pleased to see the man actually push back a fraction as if trying to escape.

  “So, Admiral,” Polk said eventually. “Let’s get on with it. The last time we met, I asked for a firm date for the start of Operation Cavalcade.”

  Jorge nodded in agreement. “You did, Chief Councillor. I’ve scheduled a full Operation Cavalcade presentation for next week’s Defense Council, and I’ll be asking for formal approval to proceed with the operation then. If I get the goahead, the ships assigned to Cavalcade—”

  “Those ships. Where are they now?”

  “The shipbuilder handed over the converted ships on schedule. They are now in a Keradiniyan black weapons yard having their rail-gun systems fitted. We expect to take delivery of all six q-ships in late July.”

  Polk looked pleased. “Good. I just hope your man . . .”

  “Monroe, Commodore Monroe.”

  “Yes. Monroe. I just hope he can do the job.”

  “He can, sir, and he will. I have every confidence in him.”

  Polk stared at Jorge. “Yes,” he said. “I certainly hope so, for your sake. Continue.”

  “As I was saying, provided I get approval to proceed, the ships assigned to Cavalcade will start interdicting FedWorld mership traffic to and from the Old Earth system from the end of August.”

  Polk waved a hand dismissively. “You’ll get your approval, Admiral.”

  Jorge sat back a bit; he looked relieved. For all his powers as the commander in chief of all Hammer defense forces—and those powers were huge—the Hammer was at heart a bureaucratic beast. Without the right bits of paper signed by the Defense Council, there were always limits to those powers.

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Nothing immediate, sir. I’ll have the plan for Operation Damascus. You’ll recall that’s the operation that will follow on from Cavalcade”—Polk nodded—“from Rear Admiral Keniko and his team next week. I’m happy with what I’ve seen so far. I’ll be looking to brief you within the next two weeks before going to the council.”

  Polk was not able to restrain himself; a broad smile split his face wide open. Damascus was all about taking the fight back up to the Kraa-damned Feds. This time the Hammer would be on the offensive. This time they would win. “By Kraa, Admiral, I shall look forward to that. Make a time with Singh as you leave.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Wednesday, June 30, 2399, UD

  FWSS Ishaq, berthed on Space Battle Station SBS-44, in orbit around Jascaria

  The comma
nd training simulation had been a complete and utter shambles. A simple sim, but Captain Constanza had managed to make a complete mess of it, ignoring her staff, short-circuiting the chain of command, and overriding her subordinates until the whole debacle ground to an embarrassed and disastrous conclusion.

  Michael, along with every other spacer in Ishaq’s flag combat data center, did his best to melt into the background. In full view of all present, Captain Constanza was flaying the man she held responsible for the shambles, her second in command and Ishaq’s executive officer, Commander Jack Morrissen.

  Michael watched in horrified fascination as Constanza tore Morrissen to shreds—in public, in front of Ishaq’s officers, and without restraint. The public humiliation of Ishaq’s second most senior officer was an appalling sight.

  Constanza might be captain in command and supreme under God and all that, Michael thought, but he would not have blamed Morrissen if he had strangled her on the spot. Nobody watching would. Thankfully, Constanza’s second in command was too smart to do anything. Silent and unmoving, he refused to respond in any way. Michael watched as Morrissen weathered the storm. In the end, something must have told Constanza that she had better call a halt as, with a final spray at Morrissen, she stalked out of the combat data center.

  Michael could only stand there, wondering just what sort of ship he had been posted to.

  Michael lay in his bunk for a long time. His earlier optimism had all but evaporated. Sleep eluded him. He cursed. Not sleeping was beginning to become a habit.

  His mind churned through all the complexities and unknowns facing him. The worst and most immediate of his concerns was Ishaq herself. In one short week, he had seen more than enough to convince him that it was a ship in trouble.

  Outwardly Ishaq was the very embodiment of the Federation’s awesome wealth and technology. She was big, she was impressive, and she radiated raw power, but to Michael, form had triumphed over substance. Michael could see past the ship itself and did not like what he saw: carelessly stowed equipment, safety racks short of gear, untidy compartments, more dust and dirt than he had ever seen in any Fleet unit, large or small. But worst of all was the crew. Their attitude, with some honorable exceptions such as Leading Spacer Petrovic, largely ranged from sullen through uncooperative to downright hostile. As for the officers, Michael was even more confused; without exception, they acted as though all were well, as though this were how Federated Worlds warships were supposed to be. And Michael was under no illusions that he was going to be voted Ishaq’s most popular officer. So far, he had been given the cold shoulder by almost everyone he had met; the resentment, the envy, the bitterness were all too obvious.