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

  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.

  He turned his attention back to the Hammer task group. The three Hammer ships were in trouble, the two dreadnoughts pressing home their attack with remorseless force, their massive armor absorbing everything the Hammer ships threw at them. Already Vigilant had pulled out of the battle, reeling back from Red River’s exquisitely coordinated missile and rail-gun attack; spewing reaction mass from maneuvering thrusters and with main engines at emergency power, the Hammer heavy cruiser tried to get clear before the next wave of Fed missiles and rail-gun slugs arrived to finish her off. Behind Vigilant, Vindicator and Virtue were also in trouble, their flank armor stripped away—in places right down to the titanium frames to expose their inner pressure hulls—by the fusion warheads fitted to the Fed’s Merlin missiles, their bows smashed into a shambolic mess of craters by a well-crafted rail-gun attack. Even now, missiles with conventional chemical explosive warheads plunged into the Hammer ships, targeting the weak spots in the ships�
�� armor that would allow lances of plasma deep into their guts, hunting the fusion plants powering the ships’ main engines.

  The Fed missiles found what they were looking for.

  Explosive plasma jets cut through secondary armor, slicing through ceramsteel containment vessels and magnetic flux fields to expose the unimaginable temperatures and pressures at the heart of every fusion plant, unleashing balls of energy so intense that the Hammer ships disappeared, engulfed by spheres of blue-white gas, any lifepods launched by the ships swallowed by a hellish brew of heat and radiation that raced away into the darkness, leaving tumbling masses of heat-scoured armor and heavy equipment held in precarious embrace by shock-twisted titanium frames, with a few pods the only evidence that the ships had ever existed.

  Michael watched the cruisers die with mixed feelings; even though these were Hammer ships and deserved everything his ships threw at them, the thought of all the spacers doomed to die that day unsettled him. His earlier elation had evaporated. Poor bastards, he thought. How many more had to die before this damn war was over? he asked himself for the thousandth time. The unemotional tones of Warfare dragged his attention back to the job at hand.

  “Command, Warfare. Launching ground assault.”

  “Command, roger. Advice. Suggest Red River take station on Redwood and detach Redress to recover survivors.” If there are any, he said to himself. The Hammers had waited a long time to abandon ship.

  “Warfare, roger. Concur. Will advise time to complete.”

  Michael commed Kallewi. “Good luck, Janos.”

  “Thank you, sir. We’ll be quick.”

  “Hope so. Command, out.”

  Michael sat back to watch, patching one of the combat information center’s huge screens into the holovid feed coming from Kallewi’s helmet-mounted high-definition holocam, the image so real that for an instant Michael might have been there with the marines. Redwood’s heavy assault lander, captained by Lieutenant Kat Sedova and blessed with the name Alley Kat, was on final approach to the asteroid. Sedova was a natural pilot, one of the few able to hand fly a lander to its limits, handling the ugly mass with rare precision and grace; true to form, she dropped the lander dirtside without the flashy maneuvering so many lander pilots regarded as an essential part of the job.

  Kallewi and his marines wasted no time. They spilled out of the lander the instant Alley Kat’s ramp went down, a stream of black-armored shapes powering across the asteroid’s surface toward the shattered remains of the station’s main personnel access portal, a swarm of gas-powered tacbots leading the way, a small convoy of cargobot sleds bringing up the rear.

  The marines made short work of the access air lock, its doors blown open to release a blizzard of ice-loaded air out into space. Balawal-34’s small security team, a platoon-sized force of planetary ground defense troops, clumsy in combat space suits, proved no match for the marines. After a short, vicious firefight, the Hammers capitulated; soon a sorry procession wended its way back to Alley Kat, leaving the way clear for the marines to work their way down to the heart of the station: massive storage arrays holding terabytes of electronic intercepts.

  The marines’ quiet efficiency always impressed Michael. With the security team dealt with, Kallewi split his force into teams, calm, unhurried, and methodical. One started to tear out the storage arrays, piling them onto cargobots for the trip back to the lander. A second started to flush out the civilians who operated the station, a bewildered and shocked group of men conspicuous in their Day-Glo orange emergency space suits. The third team—Kallewi called them his scroungers—ransacked the station for anything of interest to the intelligence analysts, and the fourth laid demolition charges around the station’s fusion plant.

  Less than thirty minutes after the marines blasted their way into the station, Kallewi commed Michael.

  “Command, assault.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re done here, sir. Pulling back now. Demolition charges set to fire in twenty minutes.”

  “Roger that. Nice job. Command out.”

  Satisfied that the ground assault was running to plan, Michael turned his attention back to the command plot. That looked as it should. Red River hung motionless a kilometer from Redwood, its gigantic shape cutting a black hole out of the star-curtained immensity of deepspace. Redress was on her way back to rejoin the rest of the squadron, the last of the Hammer lifepods recovered. Best of all, no Hammer ships appeared on the threat plot. The Nyleth squadron was alone.

  Michael sat back. If all went well, they should be on vector back to Nyleth within the hour.

  Michael climbed out of his combat space suit, his body stiff and uncooperative. Breath hissed through clenched teeth as he struggled to ease his left leg free of the suit’s awkward bulk, the stabbing pain impossible to ignore. You would think, he said to himself, finally free, that the goddamned thing had had more than enough time to get over it. His shipsuit was a sweat-sodden wreck thanks to the stress of combat. Tossing it into the recycler, he prepped his combat space suit before allowing himself the luxury of a long hot shower and a fresh shipsuit. He ignored the demands of duty. He should walk through the ship to make sure that Redwood and her crew had come through okay, but the effort that demanded was beyond him. He slumped into an armchair, the last few dregs of the euphoric high of combat draining away the instant he turned his mind to the crisis that threatened to overwhelm him. He still did not have the faintest idea what to do about it.

  A knock on his cabin door announced the arrival of his executive officer.

  “Come in, Jayla,” Michael said to the XO, waving her into a chair. “Drink?”

  “Coffee, sir, thanks,” she said.

  Michael waited until the drinkbot served Ferreira her coffee. “So, Jayla,” he said when the bot withdrew, “I’ve scheduled the hot wash-up for 18:00. Any initial thoughts?”

  Ferreira looked at him for a long time before responding. “Sir,” she said at last, “may I speak freely?”

  Michael’s eyebrows shot skyward. This was a first. “Yes, of course. What’s on your mind?”

  “You, sir,” Ferreira said.

  The determined set of her jaw unsettled Michael. “Me?” he said.

  “Yes, you. Something’s bothering you, sir. I’ve racked my brains, and I can’t work out what it is, but I do know this. You’re not the same person who took us into battle at Devastation Reef. Not the same person at all.”

  Michael’s heart pounded; were his personal concerns that obvious? “How, Jayla? How am I different?” he said, with an effort keeping his voice casual.

  “You’re tired, you’re easily distracted, you lose focus, and—with the greatest respect, sir—I don’t think you’re … I don’t think you are handling the squadron the way you used to. Today was a good example. We were lucky, damn lucky, that only three Hammer heavy cruisers waited for us. We knew we had a problem, but we ignored it. We should have taken the time to make another reconsat run, but we didn’t even though we had all the time in the world. That was wrong, sir, and it risked this ship and the lives of all onboard. It’s not the first time, either. The Barcoola operation. Grendell and Tyrlathi before that. Too many chances taken, too many corners cut. I’m sorry, sir, but this cannot go on.”

  “Shit, Jayla,” Michael muttered. “Now, that’s what I call speaking freely.”

  “Well, sir, I’m your executive officer, and I did ask your permission,” she said. “I have a duty to be straight with you, and I wouldn’t be much of an exec if I wasn’t.”

  “True,” Michael said, wondering how to fix a situation fast spinning out of control. He understood Ferreira well enough to know she was worked up about something right now, and he was that something.

  A long and uncomfortable silence followed before Ferreira spoke. “I’ve checked Fleet Regulations, sir”—her voice hardened into a flat monotone—“and specifically section 34, subsection 15, Duties and Responsibilities of the Executive Officer.”

&nb
sp; “Ah,” Michael said. “I see.”

  And he did. He knew where this was heading. One part of him wanted to rip Ferreira’s head off, another wanted to tell her to do whatever the hell she liked, and a third wanted to curl up in some dark corner until the demons went away. Truth was, he did not know himself how much longer he could go on. The unseen burden on his shoulders was killing him, and now that Ferreira knew something was wrong, the load was close to unbearable.

  “May I continue, sir?”

  “Yes, yes. Go on,” Michael said.

  “Well, sir. We both know what my responsibilities are. 3415 is clear. If I have reasonable doubts—”

  Michael raised a hand to stop her. “I know, Jayla,” he said. “I know what 3415 says. If you have reasonable doubts about my fitness for command, you are obliged to report that fact to the relevant authorities. It is your duty. I understand that.”

  A long silence followed before Ferreira spoke again.

  “I will, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I will meet my obligations under 3415. This cannot go on because if it does, well … ah, let’s say that I think there is a better way.”

  “Well, then,” Michael said, rubbing eyes gritty with stress, “I suppose … I suppose I’d better tell you what the problem is.”

  Ferreira looked right at him, eyes narrowed, mouth set in a stubborn line that brooked no dissent. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I think you should.”

  Michael sighed, a sigh of capitulation, a sigh of resignation, the sigh of a sinner brought to repentance. “Okay, okay, I will,” he said. “Watch this. It’s a personal vidmail I received from one of my Hammer friends. It’s self-explanatory.”

  “Okay, sir,” Ferreira said, face screwed up into a look of pure bewilderment.