The Battle of the Hammer Worlds hw-2 Page 25

  “Sir. Bear with me, please,” Jorge pleaded. “Fleet has never, ever worked on the assumption that we could keep the Feds in the dark until we launched Operation Damascus. That would have been unforgivable. There are simply too many points of failure to be sure. So, while we hoped they would never find out, we have always assumed they might, and for that reason Rear Admiral Keniko and his planners have long had a fallback plan in case.”

  Polk’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. This was news to him; it all sounded rather convenient.

  Jorge plowed on. “Sir, I have Admiral Keniko outside. I think the best thing would be for me to have him explain the changes. I think you will see that far from setting us back, the Feds’ declaration of war may play straight into our hands. In a nutshell, we believe we can achieve all the operational objectives we set for Operation Damascus and possibly more. Our plans will change, but our objectives won’t. If anything, our chances of success are much improved. So may I bring Keniko in?”

  Polk nodded, trying not to encourage the little germ of hope that had sprung to life.

  Jorge returned, followed by an extremely anxious-looking Keniko. Polk was not sure why Keniko was looking so worried. Kraa’s blood, he was the only man in the room without a death sentence hanging over his head.

  Polk did not waste time. “Let’s hear it, Keniko,” he growled, “and you’d better pray that I’m convinced.”

  “Sir!” Keniko was quite unable to conceal the tiny tremble of fear in his voice.

  Friday, March 17, 2400, UD

  Transit officers’ quarters, Space Battle Station 39, in orbit around Jascaria planet

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Michael was on his feet, folding Anna into his arms the instant she walked through the door into his cramped cabin.

  “Anna,” he murmured, face buried in her neck. “Oh, Anna, Anna, Anna. .”

  He stopped. Something was terribly wrong. Anna was not responding; she stood there stiff and unresponsive, arms by her side.

  Michael pushed her back. “Anna?” he said, a sudden sliver of panic stabbing at his heart. This was not how it was supposed to be. “What’s up?”

  Anna pulled his arms from her shoulders. With a firm shove, she pushed him away, eyes filling with tears as she sat down heavily on his bunk. Michael made to sit next to her, but her hand went up.

  “No, Michael,” she said, her voice breaking. “No.”

  “Anna!” Michael said desperately, stepping back, confused and afraid. “What’s the matter? For God’s sake, tell me!”

  She stared at him for a long time before answering, making no effort to wipe away the tears that poured down her cheeks.

  “Matter?” she said finally, her voice subdued. “What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. You think you can disappear for months on end? We thought you must be dead. Missing, presumed dead; that’s what they told us. And now-poof! You suddenly reappear like some sort of genie?”

  “Anna,” Michael said, “that’s all in the past. That’s-”

  “Shut up!” she hissed. “For once, just shut up. I don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you want, I don’t care what you say. And you know what?” She lifted her head defiantly.

  “No, what?” Michael muttered miserably.

  “You’re right. It is all in the past.” Her voice hardened. “It’s over, Michael. It’s over. You’re a damn fool. You can’t just walk back into my life and expect things to be back where they were. You can’t, you can’t,” she said, her voice breaking. She took a deep breath to steady herself, hands going to her face to wipe away the tears. “And I won’t let you. I thought you were dead. God help me, I thought you were dead. Far as we all knew, the Ishaq was lost and every one of her crew with her. You included. But you weren’t, and here you are again, trying to pretend that nothing has really happened.”

  “Anna-”

  “Don’t, Michael. Don’t say a thing. There’s nothing you can say. We’re heading for another fight with those damned Hammers, and I can’t, I won’t stand around wondering if I’m going to lose you all over again. I can’t go through that. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  With that, without giving him a chance to say anything, Anna got to her feet and was gone, the cabin door hissing shut behind her with an awful finality. Stunned, Michael could only stand there openmouthed, staring at the door as his entire world crashed around him, every fiber of his body seared by flames of despair and loss, the pain so bad that he did not know how he would survive.

  Two days and one massive, sanity-threatening alcoholic bender later, Michael had rationalized the pain away, even though deep inside losing Anna hurt more than anything had ever hurt before. With a mental shrug of the shoulders, he had consigned her to life’s out tray. He had made a promise to Corporal Yazdi, and he was going to keep it.

  That was what was important right now.

  Monday, March 20, 2400, UD

  FWSS Eridani, pinchspace

  Michael felt at home the minute he walked on board his new ship. The deepspace heavy scout Eridani had the same sense of closeness he had enjoyed in 387, a feeling of coherence, of common purpose that the poor Ishaq had never enjoyed. Even better, he was able to talk to the ship’s master AI-called Mother, just like in 387.

  The best news of all was the cheery presence of Matti Bienefelt. Michael had last seen her more than twelve months earlier, when the battered wreck of DLS-387 was being loaded for its journey down to its final resting place in Braidwood National Cemetery, from where it would watch over the last remains of the spacers it had not been able to bring home safely. Here was Bienefelt again, fully recovered from the injuries she had sustained during the Battle of Hell’s Moons and newly promoted to petty officer to boot. Somehow-Bienefelt refused to explain exactly how-she had wangled a posting to the Eridani, where she was now second in command of the heavy scout’s surveillance drone team. Michael did not care how she had gotten there. It was really good to have her around again.

  He settled back into his seat. He had the watch, but there was not much to do now that they were in pinchspace except keep a careful eye on the ship’s automated systems to make sure their embedded AIs did not get any silly ideas and do something stupid. Around him, the on-watch command team was quiet, the sensor holovids blank except for system status reports, the soft buzz of idle conversation barely audible over the ever-present soft hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning.

  Despite the events of the last few days, Michael was more or less happy. Not ecstatic, he had to admit, but feeling okay. Considering how dumb he had been, that was not too bad a result.

  With time on his hands, he commed his neuronics to patch into the sim of Eridani’s forthcoming patrol. Although not quite as terrifying as 387’s forays into Hammer space before the Battle of Hell’s Moons, this operation-a tiny cog in the enormous machine tasked with the invasion of the Hammer home planet of Commitment-looked as if it might have its moments. Even though the thought of dropping back into Hammer space sent shivers chasing up and down his spine, things had changed. He welcomed the risk, welcomed the fear, because without them he would not be doing all he could to destroy the Hammer.

  With Anna gone, even though he would never give up on her, and with his family barely speaking to him anymore, he was well and truly on his own. Well, apart from the always-comforting presence of Petty Officer Matthilde Bienefelt, that was. At least she would always be there for him, though somehow he did not ever see her displacing Anna. He grinned at the thought. No doubt about it, a life with Matti, who towered over him by close to half a meter and outmassed him by a good fifty kilos, all of it pure muscle, would be an interesting experiment in interpersonal relationships.

  Sunday, March 26, 2400, UD

  FWSS Eridani, pinchspace

  “All stations, command. Stand by artgrav shutdown in ten seconds. . artgrav shutdown now. All stations, final suit checks. Dropping in two minutes.”

  Ignoring the sudden heave from a stomach d
eprived of its gravitational frame of reference, Michael flicked his visor down. He waited as his suit’s AI ran final diagnostics, a row of green lights confirming that he had a good suit. Flicking his visor back up, he looked around at Eridani’s combat information center. With Eridani at general quarters, the place was jammed with spacers. Even so, it was quiet, an obvious tension showing in the way the command team concentrated intently on the holovids, the command plot running off the seconds until the ship dropped.

  He looked at his team of sensor operators. He knew their names and service records but not much more than that. He hoped they were as good as his new captain had assured him they were, because this time the Hammers would be on their guard, and although the chances were small, there was always the possibility they might drop straight into the arms of a waiting heavy cruiser.

  That thought made Michael’s stomach turn over; he remembered the shock and terror he had felt when Ishaq was destroyed. She had been a heavy cruiser up against a damn mership armed with obsolete rail guns, for God’s sake. And compared to Ishaq, Eridani was tiny, less than one-thirtieth the size, with flank and stern armor that would have trouble keeping out a kid armed with a slingshot.

  Then Eridani turned the universe inside out and dropped into normalspace. In an instant, the combat information center was a mass of furious but disciplined activity as the command team worked frantically to make sense of the mass of data pouring in from the ship’s passive sensors. Michael watched his team monitoring the assessments being made by the sensor AI; now and again, one of them stepped in to correct a mistaken classification, making his confidence grow. His captain had been right. This team was good. Calm, focused, and extremely competent, they quickly and efficiently put together an accurate threat plot, the mass of red highthreat vectors marking Hammer contacts being downgraded one by one to orange.

  When the last red vector on the plot changed to orange, Michael allowed himself to relax a little. For the moment at least, they were clear of any immediate threats, the space between the deepspace heavy scout and the Hammer home planet of Commitment almost completely empty. Michael shivered. Even if they were 90 million kilometers away, Commitment felt way, way too close, the memories of that awful place all of a sudden crowding in on him.

  He gave himself a mental kick. He had a job to do, and allowing the ghosts of the past to distract him was not going to help. He focused on the threat plot, his team stepping methodically through each contact, tightening classifications to a point where track numbers started to have names put to them. Michael’s breath caught in his throat as track 445311 was classified as the Hammer heavy cruiser Bravery. That was the son of a bitch that almost had gotten him and the 387 the last time out. Talk about close shaves. The light scout 387 had jumped only five seconds before Bravery’s rail-gun salvo would have ripped them apart.

  Finally, the process of mapping the billions of cubic kilometers around the Eridani came to an end. They were clear. Time to call it in.

  “Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”

  “Command, roger.”

  Having taken formal responsibility for the information now up on the threat plot, Michael sat back. Apart from the familiar pattern of traffic flowing to and from Hell’s Moons showing up clearly as a tangled mass of orange vectors running off the right-hand side of the holovid, there was not a lot to see. There was a heavy concentration of units around Commitment, its planetary nearspace thick with everything from space battle stations and heavy cruisers to light scouts, circling in a web of Clarke and polar orbits. Farther out, there were three task groups largely made up of heavy and light cruisers with a sprinkling of smaller units. Beyond them, Commitment farspace was empty, with not a single Hammer starship.

  The more Michael looked at it, the more puzzled he became. He would have expected patrols at least out to the 4-light-minute mark to stop intruders like the Eridani from having too easy a run in, but no. There was nothing. It was odd.

  “All stations, this is command. Revert to defense stations. Stand by artgrav in ten seconds. . artgrav on now. Stand by to launch surveillance drones.”

  The moment the weight came back on his body, Michael felt better. He had always wondered if a career as a Space Fleet officer was such a smart idea considering how badly he tolerated zero-g, not to mention the horrors of jumping into and out of pinchspace. Around him, the combat information center burst into life as half the command team stood down, the inevitable buzz of conversation bringing the equally inevitable order to keep it quiet. Michael waited until the rush was over before stripping off his space suit and changing seats. When the ship was at defense stations-its second-highest alert state-he was one of the two warfare officers in the combat information center, and it made more sense to be sitting close to his partner, in this case Lieutenant Tanvi Kidav, Eridani’s senior warfare officer.

  Michael liked Kidav a lot. At first, her implacably taciturn exterior had put him off. But after a few days, he had discovered that there was much more to Kidav than met the eye. It turned out she was an engaging woman with a quiet, dry sense of humor allied with an ability to deliver one-liners to devastating effect. Her speciality was deflating the more pompous of Eridani’s crew. Michael knew. He had seen her do it to the ship’s senior engineer, Pavel Duricek, a pompous windbag who clearly believed he was the most important person on board, a view that, needless to say, Kidav did not agree with. Pope Pavel, she called him. Duricek hated it.

  Kidav smiled as he sat down. “Hi, Michael. Nice and quiet out there, thank God.”

  Michael nodded. “Way I like it.”

  “Me, too. Right. You keep an eye on the drone launch; I’ll watch the rest.”

  “Sir.”

  Truth be told, launching surveillance drones and a pair of pinchcomm satellites was not the most difficult task in Eridani’s mission inventory. Michael was pretty sure that Eridani’s drone team would do it with the smooth efficiency he was beginning to expect from everyone on board. He could not speak for Carlos Galvan, Eridani’s drone officer, but with Petty Officer Bienefelt to back Galvan up, he knew things would go as they should. Eridani’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Dana Lenski, seemed to have something that the late and unlamented Captain Constanza did not: the ability to get the best out of her people.

  “Command, drones.” Galvan’s voice was matter-of-fact.

  “Command.”

  “Ready for drone deployment.”

  “Command, roger. Stand by.” Michael did a quick final check of the threat and command plots to make sure nothing had slipped past him. Nothing had. “Deployment approved.”

  “Roger.”

  Michael watched intently as the drone handlers spilled out of the forward upper air lock, their chromaflage space suits dialed down to a dirty gray-black all but invisible in the miserable light coming from Commitment’s orange-red dwarf sun more than 150 million kilometers away. Bienefelt’s huge bulk was easy to spot. Michael nodded appreciatively as he watched the team.

  The drone team knew what they were doing. Splitting into two, they quickly had the massive cargo bay doors open, and a steady stream of drones started to appear. Finally, two much larger pinch comsats appeared, and the cargo bay doors were closed. Michael heaved a sigh of relief. The Eridani was hard for Hammer radar or optronics to see, but only when fully stealthed with her skin chromaflage activated. Two bloody great sharp-edged cargo bay doors rather spoiled the effect, increasing Eridani’s radar cross section dramatically.

  Now the handlers were pushing the drones clear of Eridani, and Michael watched as one by one the drones’ diagnostics confirmed they were ready to go. The two pinchspace comsats were following close behind like two sheepdogs.

  “Command, drones.”

  “Command.”

  “Ready to launch. Passing control to Mother.” Michael did another check. The threat plot was unchanged. A quick look at the drones confirmed that they were ready to go. There was no need to keep the handlers out any longer, an
d with Eridani slipping through space at more than 40 kilometers per second, they should be back inside, where bumping into a piece of dirt no bigger than a pinhead was not a lifethreatening event. Michael knew. He had been there.

  “Roger. Recover teams.”

  “On our way.”

  From the first time he had seen her working, Michael knew Bienefelt was good, but Eridani’s handlers were every bit her match. With economical elegance, they swarmed back to the air lock, stopping precisely with only centimeters to go before dropping neatly back into the ship. Well, not all of them, Michael noted with a smile. Carlos Galvan was as clumsy as Michael had been when he had been the drone officer in 387. Even so, it took only a minute and they were all back, the air lock closing behind them.

  “Surveillance, command. Nicely done. Thank you.”

  “Roger that.” Galvan sounded pleased. He should, Michael thought. Surveillance drones had minds of their own, and once they started to get out of control, things could get dicey in seconds.

  Michael turned his attention back to the drones. Mother was happy with them, her own checks confirming that she had good birds.

  “Captain, sir, command.”

  “Captain.”

  “Drones and pinchspace comsats deployed, sir. All nominal. Ready to launch.” Michael half smiled. Lenski knew all that or she was not the skipper he suspected. But tradition was tradition: AIs were not to be trusted, so keep humans in the loop and all that.

  “Launch authorized.”

  “Sir.”

  Michael watched intently as Mother drove the drones slowly clear of Eridani before methodically aligning each one along its intended vector. The pinchspace comsats followed, leaving Eridani coasting along alone. Then, as one, engines powered by hypercompressed nitrogen came to life, thin whiskers of gas driving the drones away from Eridani and toward Commitment, the comsats angled away to take up their positions well outside Commitment nearspace, where a wandering Hammer ship on antidrone patrol was unlikely to trip over them.