The battle of Devastation reef hw-3 Read online

  Operation Opera was under way.

  Friday, March 16, 2401, UD

  FWSS

  Reckless,

  Deepspace

  “Pretty awesome, sir,” Ferreira said.

  Michael nodded, doing his best to ignore a sick churning in his stomach. Thick clusters of green icons marked where the ships of Battle Fleet Lima spread out across space; they were a formidable sight.

  “Sure is, Jayla,” he said. “I just wish we had the extra dreadnought squadrons Admiral Jaruzelska asked for. I’d be a lot more confident with another thirty dreadnoughts alongside me when we go into the attack.”

  “Me, too, sir. Still,” Ferreira said cheerfully, “if the sims are to be believed, we’ll pull this one off.”

  “Sims are sims, Jayla; when you strip them back, they are just fancy mathematical models, and remember what you’ve been taught about them.”

  “Crap in, crap out, sir. That’s the one thing I remember.”

  “Exactly so, Jayla. Can’t say I have much confidence in them after the Hell’s Moons operation. That sure as shit did not turn out the way we simmed it. You cannot simulate the arrival of Hammer task groups you don’t know anything about. One thing’s for certain. The second we drop in to attack, the Hammer commander is going to start screaming for help. And guess what?”

  “What, sir?”

  “He’ll get it. The Hammers will ignore all our diversionary attacks to send every ship they can lay their hands on. They cannot afford to lose their precious antimatter plant. That’s why this lot”-he waved a hand at the green icons crowding the command holovid-“are going to have to be quick off the mark when Hammer reinforcements start turning up and all that planning goes off the rails. And it will … which is why those extra dreadnoughts would have come in handy.”

  Ferreira nodded her agreement. The two of them stood without saying a word, staring at the command holovid, the space between the ships of Battle Fleet Lima busy with remassing drones shuttling to and fro, refilling mass bunkers for the coming operation.

  “How’s our remassing going?” he asked eventually.

  “Nearly there, sir. Two more drones should see us at 100 percent.”

  “Good. I’m going walkabout. Let me know when we’ve completed remassing.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. I’ll keep an eye on things.”

  Michael walked out of the gutted shell that was Reckless’s combat information center. Walking forward, he came to the drop tube. Without breaking stride, he stepped into it and dropped down to the hangar. The enormous space was echoingly empty, the tightly packed ranks of landers and space attack vehicles carried by a conventional heavy cruiser all gone, leaving only the lonely shapes of Caesar’s Ghost and Cleft Stick, the two landers flanked by the marines’ accommodation modules. When he walked over, Michael shook his head. He had not bothered to ask Kallewi’s opinion of the landers’ names; without exception, marines held the whole naming landers business to be unprofessional and unmilitary, a practice that reflected badly on them. Michael grinned. He had seen holovid of a marine colonel apoplectic over the prospect of boarding an assault lander called Betty’s Bouncing Ball.

  But that, of course, was the whole point. Teasing anchor-faced marines by giving assault landers outrageous names-and Betty’s Bouncing Ball was by no means the worst of them-was one of the small pleasures that made spacers’ lives bearable.

  Ramp down to reveal its brightly lit cargo bay, Caesar’s Ghost was a hive of activity. Kallewi’s marines were busy off-loading all their equipment into neat piles on the hangar deck before-presumably-moving it all back again. Quite why they were doing something so pointless was not clear. Michael shook his head. He would never understand marines as long as he lived. Not all of them, though, he noticed, were involved in shifting stuff from A to B and back again. The security detail required for all special weapons not secured in dedicated magazines-marines in full combat armor, helmets on, armored plasglass visors down, assault rifles cradled across their chests-stood guard over three chromaflage-skinned boxes sitting atop maneuvering sleds. The diminutive figure of Petty Officer Trivedi, Ghost’s loadmaster, was fussing over the chains that secured them to the hanger floor.

  The assault demolition charges appeared innocuous enough, but they had a yield in excess of 2 megatons of TNT each. Michael’s pulse quickened as he imagined the damage they would inflict on the Hammer’s precious antimatter plant, their enormous power tamped into place by kilometers of rock.

  Kallewi spotted him and walked over, flanked by his platoon sergeant, a burly Anjaxxian who overtopped Michael by a good fifty centimeters. Sergeant Tchiang was quiet to the point of being mute, but for all his mass, he was one of the fastest humans Michael had ever seen. He had watched Tchiang training for the assault on SuppFac27; the man was pure controlled ferocity. Michael was glad he would not be the one on the receiving end of the marine’s special brand of explosive violence.

  “Janos, Sergeant Tchiang. Just came to see how things were.”

  “Under control, sir,” Kallewi said, “though I’ll be a lot happier when we get this damn business started.”

  “You and me both. Never been good at waiting.”

  After a few minutes of small talk and reassured that Kallewi and his marines were as ready as they would ever be for whatever Operation Opera might throw at them, Michael made his way through the lander’s cargo bay and climbed up boot-polished rungs to the flight deck.

  “Welcome aboard the Ghost, sir,” Kat Sedova said from the command pilot’s seat. Flanked by the three leading spacers responsible for the lander’s sensors, weapons, and systems, she appeared confident and completely in control; she had every right, after all the training sims she had been subjected to.

  “Thanks. All well?”

  “Yes, sir. Caesar’s Ghost here”-Sedova patted the arm of her seat affectionately-“is ready to go. And so is the Stick. We’ve just run her up, and she’s 100 percent, too.”

  “Good. Not long.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “That’s what our tame marine said,” Michael said, looking around, “and I have to say I agree with him. Glad to see you’ve fixed that damned fire control radar, Jackson.”

  “Mothering thing,” the leading spacer responsible for Ghost’s sensors said with considerable feeling, “but the new AI module has done the trick. I don’t think it will let us down.”

  “Just hope it works,” the spacer at the weapons station said. “I will be seriously pissed if I end up having to fire my cannons by eye.”

  “Careful what you wish for, Leading Spacer Paarl,” Michael said with a grin.

  “I know, sir,” the woman said, returning the grin, “I know. I might get it.”

  “Sorry,” Michael said. “Have I said that before?” “Just a few times, sir,” Paarl shot back amid chuckles of amusement from the rest of the crew.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Michael said. “Leading Spacer Florian.”

  “Yes, sir?” the engineer responsible for all the lander’s main propulsion and pinchspace jump systems said.

  “I know the answer to this question, but it would be good to hear it from you. You have the backup mass distribution model set up in case we have to jump without those damned demolition charges the marines are so proud of?”

  “Sure have, sir. If we have to jump in a hurry, we won’t need to hang around recomputing.”

  “Good. I plan to have Reckless bring us home, but you never know.”

  “No, sir, you don’t,” Florian said, her face betraying the anxiety she-and everyone else-must have been feeling.

  “Right. Kat, I’m off to engineering. Far as I know, the remassing is running on schedule, so I think we’ll be jumping as planned. Any changes, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Leaving Caesar’s Ghost surrounded by its ants’ nest of marines, Michael walked aft, leaving the hangar by way of yet more empty spaces, spaces where the heavy cruiser’s air group mainten
ance teams once had lived. The compartments had been gutted. With all nonstructural bulkheads removed along with the air group’s fixtures and fittings, they were little more than large empty boxes that reverberated to the echo of boots on plasteel. Right aft, two massive doors opened through the belt of secondary armor that protected the vulnerable fusion reactors that powered Reckless’s main propulsion. Still moving aft, Michael found himself inside the ship’s port primary power compartment. Packed with an intricately nested tangle of pipes, wiring, pumps, and control equipment, it was an enormous space, fully 60 meters high from armored deck underfoot to armored deckhead above him.

  Like every warship captain who ever lived, he felt nervous in the place. Far too many ships were destroyed by enemy action because the fusion plants that powered the main engine mass drivers lost containment, blowing a ship into a huge ball of ionized gas in a matter of milliseconds. The designers did their best, of course, to protect the plants-the huge slabs of secondary armor that shielded the compartment proved that-but there were limits to how much extra armor could be packed into a ship and to what that armor could achieve. Anyway, modern missiles were more than up to the task of smashing their way in, helped by the fact that in places the armor was more holes than ceramsteel to allow pipes, ducts, power and control cables, and driver mass feeds to get in and out of the compartment.

  Michael’s gloomy review of the problem was interrupted by a shout from overhead.

  “Up here, sir.” It was Chief Chua.

  “Okay.”

  Michael threaded his way up through the maze until he came out onto a narrow walkway, the deck below visible through the slotted metal. Surrounded by repairbots, toolboxes, and diagnostic equipment, Reckless’s engineers huddled around an access hole out of which stuck a pair of legs. A quick check of the main propulsion system schematics told him that the panel accessed trunking-a white plasfiber pipe fully two meters in diameter-protecting superconducting high-voltage feeds from the fusion plant to the mass driver at the heart of the port main engine.

  “Chief Chua. What’s up?”

  “Nothing serious, sir.”

  Michael nodded; he already knew that. If there had been a problem, the AI controlling the ship’s primary power systems would have told him already.

  “We’re seeing some instability in the power levels that shouldn’t be there, and we’re just having a look at the system to make sure it’s not part of a bigger problem waiting to happen.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. Not for the first time, he offered up a small prayer of thanks that he had engineers like Chua. More than a few he knew would have waited until the problem turned serious before doing anything about it. “Any luck?”

  “Think so. Petty Officer Lim”-Chua waved a hand at the legs sticking out of the access hole-“says it’s a power controller problem. She’s just checking it, and if she’s not happy with it, we’ll tear it out and replace it.”

  “And we have a spare?”

  “What sort of question is that, sir? Of course we have.”

  The three engineers laughed. Michael knew why. Fleet, in all its wisdom, had done its best to reduce the dreadnoughts’ inventory of spares to zero, arguing that there were not enough engineers to use them, so why bother carrying all that unnecessary mass? Michael’s response to that argument was short and unprintable but, after editorial input from Jaruzelska, sufficiently convincing to make Fleet change its mind. Thankfully.

  “Good. I’d hate not having both engines when the Hammers are breathing down our necks.”

  “Fucking Hammers,” Chief Fodor said. “Shit, I hope we kick their asses.”

  “We will, chief, we will,” Michael said with confidence he did not feel. “How’re your fusion plants?”

  “Sweet as nuts, sir, both of them. They’ll not let you down.”

  “Good. Now. Petty Officer Morozov,” he said, turning to the senior spacer standing alongside Chua, “let me see … yes, ship’s air smells good, it’s at the right temperature, oxygen levels are where they should be, trace contaminants are within limits, we have no rogue bacteria roaming around, airborne viral load is zero, the food tastes great, the water’s clean, hot and cold haven’t gotten mixed up, the recyclers are functioning normally, and let me think … what else? Oh, yes, I almost forgot. My crapper seems to be working properly at last, so am I right to assume that the habitat department is in good shape?”

  “You said it, sir,” Tammy Morozov said, a faint blush of embarrassment spreading across her cheeks. “Er, really sorry about your crapper, sir. The yard took out a vacuum pump they shouldn’t have.”

  “You know what, Petty Officer Morozov?”

  “What, sir?”

  “I believe you,” Michael said, all sincerity, “I really, really do. And on that happy note, I’ll leave you all.”

  “Sir,” Morozov mumbled over a soft chorus of chuckles from her fellow engineers.

  Michael walked forward along the catwalk, passing through the upper access doors to reenter the central part of the ship on 2 Deck. According to Mother, the coxswain and the rest of the Reckless’s spacers-all three of them-were up forward in the final stages of checking the missile magazines to make sure that they were in as good a shape as the ship’s missile AI claimed. Michael took the forward drop tube down to the hangar deck level, making his way forward to yet another massive armored bulkhead, through its double doors, and into the missile magazine lobby.

  Bienefelt was inside the starboard lower missile magazine with Carmellini, Faris, and Lomidze, busy with running diagnostic routines on each missile in turn. As this magazine alone held more than six hundred missiles, it was a big job. Michael took a set of magazine coveralls from a locker and, with a final check to make sure he carried no prohibited items, stepped through the double blastproof doors and into the magazine.

  The place nearly took his breath away; it always did. Racks holding the matte black shapes of Merlin antistarship missiles packed the magazine, the air rich with the telltale smell of the hydraulics that rammed missiles out of their stowages and into the salvo room, ready for launch. For Michael, this place with its mix of power and menace was what Reckless was all about.

  “How’s it going, ’Swain?”

  Bienefelt stepped back from the missile she was checking. “Getting there, sir. This is the last magazine.”

  “Any duds in this lot?” Michael waved a hand at the racks of missiles.

  “Three so far, but none that we didn’t already know about. Looks like the missile AI might have its shit together for once.”

  Michael nodded. He could live with that. “Makes a change,” he said. “The other magazines?”

  “Seven duds, all known.”

  “Okay. How are my sensors, Carmellini?”

  “All nominal, sir. Before the coxswain hijacked us-”

  “Watch it, spacer,” Bienefelt growled, mock serious.

  “Sorry, ’Swain,” Carmellini said, not looking sorry at all as Faris stifled a laugh. “All good, sir.”

  “Weapon systems?”

  Leading Spacer Jenna Lomidze nodded at the missiles racked around her. “Apart from a few dud Merlins and number 7 chain-gun battery-the yardies are going to have to fix that-all weapons systems are online. We’re good to go, sir.”

  “And finally, comms. Faris?”

  “One hundred percent, sir.”

  “Good. Word in your ear, ’Swain.”

  Bienefelt followed Michael out of the magazine back into the lobby. “Anything I need to know, Matti?” he asked while he stripped off his coveralls.

  “No, sir. Reckless is as ready as she can be. Troops are in good shape. Nervous as hell, most of them. Shit! I am, too, but they’ll be fine.”

  “Carmellini?”

  “He’s solid. Shitting himself, of course, but I think he’ll be okay.”

  “Good. Last I heard, we should be jumping on schedule.”

  “Thanks for that, Skipper. I am sick of waiting.”

 
“Me, too. It’ll be rough, Matti. You know that?”

  “With you in command, sir, what else would it be?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Michael said with a laugh. “I’ll try not to disappoint.”

  “Not much chance of that.”

  “We’ll see. I’d better leave you to it. I’ll be in the CIC.”

  “Righto, sir.”

  “How we doing?” Michael asked Ferreira when he slipped back into his seat.

  “Iron Sword managed to get herself rammed by one of the drones, but there was no damage done.”

  “Take more than a remassing drone to dent a cruiser’s armor.”

  “It would, sir. Flag has confirmed we will jump on schedule.”

  “Good.” Michael resisted the temptation to go through Opera’s time line again. He had done that so many times, he knew what was supposed to happen to the second. He was glad he had done the walk-around. For all the sophistication of AI-managed information systems, for all the power of avatar software, for all the convenience of virtual meetings, there was nothing quite like seeing things for oneself. He knew captains who relied on all those things to run their ships, spending their tours of duty confined to their cabins and the combat information center.

  But he was not one of those captains.

  At one level, the walk through the ship told him nothing he did not already know, nothing one of the AIs had not told him already. If it had, he would have been worried. But at another level, he learned a lot, and it was all to do with the spacers and marines who would go into battle alongside him. Even if he had not been able to speak to them all, he had eyeballed every one of them, and they’d all told him the same thing.

  Reckless and her tiny crew were ready for the battle to come, as ready as they would ever be. He would have one last chat with Mother-Reckless’s primary AI always had something useful to add-and then grab some badly needed sleep.

  “You have the ship, Jayla,” he said when he slipped out of his seat and headed for his cabin. “If nothing crops up, call me thirty minutes before we jump.”

  “Sir.”