Helfort's War Book III Read online

  Wednesday, September 6, 2400, UD

  Hammer Warship Penhaligon, in deepspace

  “Captain, sir, officer in command.”

  Lieutenant Commander Kaya, Penhaligon’s captain, snapped awake. “Yes?”

  “Flash pinchcomm signal from Fleet, sir. Your eyes only.”

  “On my way.”

  “Kraa damn it,” Kaya mumbled as he climbed out of his bunk, what now? Fleet had been on his back from the word go, the entire patrol an endless sequence of “hurry up and do this” orders sending Penhaligon chasing one shadow after another. But a flash precedence signal—usually reserved for enemy contact reports and other urgent traffic—well, that was a first. After a brief struggle with a reluctant shipsuit and pair of uncooperative boots, he made his way to Penhaligon’s combat information center.

  Kaya’s irritation soon vanished. He read the signal one more time just be to be sure he understood it. He half smiled. He did, and it was just what the crew of the Penhaligon needed: a short, sharp operation. He glanced around the combat information center. The on-watch crew avoided his eyes with studious care. Kaya’s smile broadened; he was pleased to see the hungry anticipation on their faces. Bored they might be, but by Kraa, they wanted action just as much as he did.

  Kaya picked up the old-fashioned hand mike, flicking a switch to patch it into the ship’s main broadcast. “Lieutenant Yasuhiko to the combat information center,” he said, his voice booming through every compartment on the ship. “Ops planning team to the wardroom. I say again, ops planning team to the wardroom.”

  The commander of Penhaligon’s marine detachment arrived promptly. Kaya watched Lieutenant Yasuhiko stride into the combat information center. The marine was a lean, dark-faced man dressed in an immaculate dark-green ship-suit and well-used combat boots polished to a soft shine. Kaya liked and respected Yasuhiko; he trusted the man to get things done and done right the first time.

  Yasuhiko weaved his way through the combat information center’s maze of workstations. He snapped to attention in front of his captain. “Sir?”

  “Have a look at this,” Kaya said as he authorized Yasuhiko’s access to the pinchcomm signal. Yasuhiko flicked his microvid screen down to read the message; he did not take long.

  “Seems straightforward enough, sir,” Yasuhiko said, pushing his microvid back up. “Kraa knows, we’ve practiced deepspace boarding operations often enough. The target, this VIP, Professor Saadak. Someone that important will be in the ship’s knowledge base, as will the Galaxy Queen. I’ll download the files and get my boys started. We don’t have a huge amount of time. But a body snatch from a Fed mership should not be too difficult. Unless …” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Unless Fleet intell—” Kaya stopped himself in time. Ambitious captains never criticized Fleet. Anyway, he did not need to say any more. There wasn’t a Hammer spacer or marine who had not been screwed around by poor intelligence at some time or other.

  Yasuhiko worked it out, anyway. He grinned, his mouth a predatory slash of hungry anticipation. “Maybe this is the one they get right, sir.”

  Kaya smiled back. “I hope so. Go to it. I’ll see you in the wardroom after you’ve briefed your team.” Yasuhiko’s lust for action showed, and Kaya was happy to see it.

  “Sir!”

  Yasuhiko turned and left. Kaya climbed out of his seat to follow him, suppressing an urge to laugh out loud at the look on the officer in command’s face. The young lieutenant in charge of Penhaligon’s on-watch crew struggled not to ask him what the signal actually said. Kraa! The man was hopping from one foot to the other, a pained grimace betraying his frustration. Kaya patted him on the shoulder when he walked past.

  “Patience, my son, patience,” he whispered. “All good things …”

  “Captain, sir. Comsat jammer on station, on standby, all systems confirmed nominal.”

  “Roger.” Kaya nodded his satisfaction. Penhaligon’s patrol might have been a long and fruitless one so far, but that had not diminished the professionalism of his crew. Which was all very well, but if the spooks had gotten it wrong—an all too common event, he would have to say—all that professionalism would be a complete waste of time and energy. He settled down into his seat to await his target’s arrival.

  The wait was a short one.

  “Command, sensors. We have a positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 30 Up 10. One vessel. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Designated hostile track 456001.”

  “Command, roger.” He turned to his operations officer. “Activate comsat jammer.”

  “Ops, roger, activating. Stand by … jammer nominal. All mership distress, calling, and data frequencies are jammed.”

  “Command, roger.”

  “Command, operations. Drop datum passed to assault landers. Stand by … landers on vector to intercept.”

  “Roger.”

  Surreptitiously crossing his fingers, Kaya forced himself to relax. The comsat jammers were new and worryingly unreliable, like all new equipment. Worse, they were in short supply; Penhaligon carried only the one. He would have been much happier with three or four out there to guarantee that a barrage of electronic noise would overwhelm his hapless target’s bleatings for help. Provided that his only jammer worked, nothing the Galaxy Queen transmitted would make it through to the satellites that sent ship arrival and departure data back to the FedWorld Traffic Coordination Center back on Terranova. So his fingers were crossed for good reason: If the jammer failed even for a few seconds, the game would be over—even the dumbest mership captain could identify a Hammer warship—and the damned Feds would know what Penhaligon had been up to; considering there was an armistice in force …

  “Command, sensors. Estimate drop datum at Red 30 Up 12, range 15,000 kilometers.”

  The encounter geometry might have been better, but not by much, Kaya realized exultantly. Clearly, the mership captain did not trust his own navigation: Galaxy Queen was about to drop into normalspace a long way short of Setianto Reef. That would give the assault landers plenty of time to intercept the mership before she crossed the reef’s gravity rip and jumped back into the safety of pinchspace.

  “Command, sensors. Track 456001 dropping. Datum confirmed Red 30 Up 12, range 13,000 kilometers. Vector consistent with the flight plan filed by Galaxy Queen.”

  “Command, roger.”

  A transient flare of ultraviolet announced the target’s arrival; Kaya sat back to watch the operation unfold. Truth was, he did not have a lot to do. Success—or failure—now lay in the hands of Lieutenant Yasuhiko and his marines.

  “Command, sensors. Hostile track 456001 has dropped on datum. Stand by identification … sir, ship is positively confirmed as FedWorlds registered mership Galaxy Queen.”

  “Confidence?”

  “One hundred percent, sir. Optical beacon is squawking correct ship ID, confirmed by hull registration, dentology, and radio frequency intercepts. Target is Galaxy Queen.”

  “Roger that,” Kaya said. It would not do for Yasuhiko and his marines to tear the wrong ship apart in their hunt for the hapless Professor Saadak. Embarrassing for Fleet but terminal for his career.

  “Command, sensors. Target vector confirmed nominal for transit of Setianto Reef en route to Surajaya system.”

  “Command, roger. All stations, target confirmed. Immediate execute Golf One. I say again, immediate execute Golf One. Assault Leader acknowledge.”

  Yasuhiko’s response was instantaneous, his voice a model of calm, controlled confidence. “Assault Leader acknowledge. Executing Golf One. Closing Galaxy Queen.”

  Lieutenant Yasuhiko hung twenty meters off the Galaxy Queen, the mership’s hull flaring a brilliant white under the assault lander’s high-intensity arc lights. Despite the best efforts of his suit’s environmental control unit, he sweated heavily inside his bulky ceramic armor while he waited for the clock to run down. He always did before combat. In front of him, the marines of Team On
e under the command of Sergeant Kambon hung clustered around the main passenger air lock, black shapes crisp against the ship’s hull.

  With five seconds to go, Yasuhiko took a deep breath and gave the order. “All teams, Assault Leader. Stand by on three … go, go, go!”

  Utterly focused, Yasuhiko scrolled through the holocam feeds from his assault team commanders’ helmets as his marines exploded into carefully choreographed action. He nodded, satisfied the operation had gotten off to a good start. He turned his attention back to the team he would follow into Galaxy Queen.

  Sergeant Kambon had things well in hand. He fired the high-energy photonic cutting charges fastset to the hull. A brilliant white flash punched a large hole around the air lock, and the hatch in its titanium frame tumbled into space, driven out by the pressure of air inside the ship. A plasfiber igloo air lock was fastset around the gaping hole in Galaxy Queen’s hull. Yasuhiko followed the assault team in; he sealed the igloo’s hatch onto its plasteel ring behind him and pulled a large red handle, the scream of high-pressure air dumped to repressurize the air lock lobby audible even through his armored helmet.

  Sergeant Kambon waved two marines—the smallest members of the team for obvious reasons—into the gaping hole in Galaxy Queen’s hull to place the next set of photonic charges.

  No sooner had they gone in then the two marines were back. Behind them, the inner air lock hatch blew out with another flash, the igloo creaking when the back blast hit. Air from the overpressured air lock blew the door out into the access lobby, its titanium frame skidding along the deck.

  A hail of indiscriminate low-velocity fire greeted the door’s arrival, rounds ricocheting off the air lock walls and out into space, passing through the plasfiber igloo with a soft popping pfffft before self-sealant stopped up the holes. One lucky shot punched a marine right in the center of his ceramfiber chest armor, the impact of the round leaving him winded but otherwise unhurt.

  “Damn,” Yasuhiko grumbled to himself. Ever the optimist, he hoped that they would get in unopposed. Hard vacuum and bullets—even low-velocity ones—were a combination he did not enjoy.

  Sergeant Kambon was wasting no time. “Flashbangs,” he said before the shattered air lock door even came to rest. Together, the marines pitched small gray cylinders into the ship, where they bounced and skittered off bulkheads and decks before exploding with an eye-watering flash and a splintering crack that hurt even inside an armored assault suit.

  When the flashbangs went off, the marines followed up with smoke and knockdown gas grenades, the entire access lobby turning into a murky scene from hell as the assault team erupted from the air lock, a tidal wave of black armor charging unstoppable through the smog. With the Galaxy Queen’s defenders lying semicomatose on the deck, it was all over in seconds. When the air cleared, Yasuhiko examined the neat row of plasticuffed bodies laid out on the lobby floor with some satisfaction, the corridors leading off the air lock lobby secured by black-suited marines while behind him a hand-operated inner air lock was fastset into place.

  Sergeant Kambon’s report was a formality. “Assault Leader, Team One. Air lock Papa-1 and access lobby secure.” Kambon sounded a touch smug. Fair enough, Yasuhiko thought. Kambon’s team had been first into the ship and by a good ten seconds; already backup teams cycled through the makeshift air lock to take up their positions for the final assault, black combat space suits dumped in favor of lightweight assault armor, the discarded suits looking uncomfortably like dead bodies strewn with careless abandon across the field of battle.

  One by one, the rest of the assault teams reported in, and Yasuhiko gave the word.

  Hammer marines erupted in ten different directions at once. To a casual observer, their movements would appear random; in fact, Yasuhiko coordinated the attack with great care to keep the Galaxy Queen’s crew off balance, pinned down, and, if unreasonably stubborn, attacked from behind, above, or below, but never head on unless there was no other way.

  Not that it was easy. Taking a mership in deepspace never was, and even an inexperienced commercial spacer could inflict serious damage on an assault-suited marine if he kept his head and aimed for the weak spots in the marine’s body armor. The only real problem faced by Yasuhiko’s marines was the personal security detail assigned to protect the VIP. Not that he had any real concerns; a handful of well-trained but lightly armed men—but these were Feds, so Professor Saadak’s security detail would include women, too, no matter how dumb it was trusting women in such an important job—might be professionals, but they only could delay the inevitable.

  Galaxy Queen had been designed to work the minor trade routes, of which humanspace had thousands connecting lesser planets and orbital habitats to the major systems. She carried no more than two hundred passengers—this trip, fewer than fifty—so her living spaces were compact and easily contained. In the end, the ship was too small, the Hammers too numerous, and Yasuhiko’s control of the operation too good for the outcome to be in any doubt. Despite the desperate efforts of the Galaxy Queen’s crew and the target’s security detail, the operation was over and Yasuhiko’s marines had their VIP in custody barely twenty minutes after the first air lock door blew out of the hull. Success came at a cost, though—the marine assault teams had suffered two dead and eight wounded—but in the wider scheme of things, that was acceptable. Things were much worse for the Feds. Their futile attempts to keep Yasuhiko’s marines at bay had cost the lives of Saadak’s security detail—every last one of them—along with five of Galaxy Queen’s crew. So be it; Yasuhiko did not care. They were only Feds, after all.

  While the assault teams rigged demolition charges, Yasuhiko stood back to watch his men struggle with the plasticuffed VIP his marines had come to abduct. Professor Saadak, a tall, stylishly dressed woman with the foulest mouth Kaya had ever come across—that was saying something; he had been a Hammer marine for more than ten years—protested every step of the way as she was dragged to the air lock, the air ripe with abuse and threats of revenge, her objections silenced only when she was manhandled forcibly into a body bag for transfer back to the Penhaligon.

  Lieutenant Commander Kaya watched dispassionately as demolition charges ripped the Galaxy Queen apart, the explosive release of energy when her main fusion plant lost containment vaporizing the mership’s massive bulk. A microsecond later the mership had disappeared, a cloud of ionized gas all that remained to mark the Galaxy Queen’s passing, fast breaking up into writhing skeins of white-hot matter twisting uselessly away into space. By the time the next mership dropped into normalspace to transit Setianto Reef, the gas would have expanded and cooled beyond detection, all evidence the Galaxy Queen had ever been anywhere near Setianto Reef vanished.

  Kaya grunted. Things had gone well. Penhaligon would jump; once well clear of Setianto Reef, she would drop back into normalspace. The Galaxy Queen’s passengers and crew would have their neuronics sterilized and short-term memories neurowiped before they were loaded into the mership’s hijacked lifepods and dumped to await rescue, leaving not one clue that the Hammers were responsible for the outrage.

  All but one passenger: the unfortunate Professor Saadak, the woman all this effort had been about. Hammer intelligence would enjoy debriefing her. It wasn’t often they laid their hands on a deputy secretary from the Federated Worlds’ defense ministry. And not just any old deputy secretary, either. No, the professor was the ministry’s deputy secretary for finance, no less. Kaya understood why the intelligence boys wanted to get their hands on her: What she did not know about where Fed defense spending went would not be worth knowing. She would be a gold mine.

  A broad smile split Kaya’s face. It was almost too good to be true. By Kraa, the Feds would shit themselves when they found out. But not half so much as the morons who had decided it was fine for someone as important as Saadak to travel on a Fed mership without a warship escort, her security assured by a small personal protection squad carrying nothing heavier than low-velocity machine pistols. What
in Kraa’s name were the stupid Fed bastards thinking?

  Kaya stifled an urge to spit on Penhaligon’s immaculate deck. Bloody Feds! “Arrogant” did not even begin to describe them. Even though the Hammers had handed them their asses at the Battle of Comdur, they still acted like they owned humanspace. Well, they didn’t, not anymore. Chief Councillor Polk only had to give the order, and the Hammer fleet—the only fleet in humanspace with antimatter weapons—would destroy every last one of them, and their home planets while they were at it.

  With the armistice keeping the Feds and Hammers apart looking more and more fragile, Kaya was confident that it was only a matter of time before Polk gave the order for the Hammer fleet to resume offensive operations. For him, that order could not come soon enough.

  Confident that he had done his bit to make it happen, Kaya ordered Penhaligon to turn and run for home.

  Friday, September 8, 2400, UD

  Fleet Tactical Simulation Facility, Comdur Fleet Base

  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, diamond-sharp 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 nearspace defense. Mission prime directives met. We are go for the operation.”