Helfort's War Book III Page 3

  “Command, roger. Wait.”

  Michael stared at the threat plot. Warfare might be happy with the tactical situation, but he was not. The problem was the Hammer task group his ships had been sent to attack. For a force tasked with nearspace defense, it had too many auxiliary ships. With plenty of support and maintenance platforms in Clarke orbit to support the Hammer warships protecting Commitment planet, auxiliaries would be an unnecessary complication, something no half-competent commander would want in a task group intended to stop a Fed attack in its tracks, yet there they were. Why?

  The Hammers were up to something: There had to be a reason why the commander of the Hammer task group had been saddled with a bunch of thin-skinned and poorly armed auxiliaries. What that reason might be, Michael had no idea, and neither did Warfare. Without any better ideas and with nobody else to talk to, he would take all the time he had in the hope of finding out. If the threat plot looked the same when it came time to launch the attack, so be it. He would have done his best, and all the admirals in the Federated Worlds Space Fleet could not ask for more than that.

  “Warfare, command,” Michael said. “We’ll maintain formation until 22:00 and then jump as planned.”

  “Warfare, roger.”

  Michael sat back, frustrated. The dreadnought concept was all very well in theory, even if it had been forced on a reluctant Fleet by the appalling loss of spacers at the Battle of Comdur. But the simple fact remained that artificial intelligence worked only up to a point. When it came down to it, AIs were no substitute for the human brain, of which the ten heavy cruisers of Dreadnought Squadron One had only his to call on. Not enough, he was sure; he had a horrible feeling that his brain could not get the job done on its own. Not for the first time he wished he had a combat information center crewed by real live spacers to talk to before making the hard decisions. But it was not to be—too many good spacers had died at Comdur to allow Fleet the luxury of deploying fully crewed warships—and he might as well get used to that fact.

  Eyes half closed, Michael began the slow and tedious process of reviewing the raw sensor data spilling through his neuronics. His only hope—the faintest of faint hopes—was that he would get lucky and uncover whatever it was the Hammers were up to.

  * * *

  “Stand by to drop.”

  Michael started, his attention dragged away from a nearly obsessive review of the threat plot. It was a good thirty minutes out of date, the time the dreadnoughts needed to jump clear of Commitment and reverse vector to make a single, slashing run back through Hammer nearspace before heading for home and safety, having, he hoped, consigned the Hammer task group to Kraa, that damned god of theirs. He offered up a silent prayer that—please, just this once—things would go his way.

  The week had consisted of an endless stream of tactical simulations, and a bad week for him it had been. Sadly, if his instincts were right, things would not improve. Each and every tactical simulation exercise was marred by mistake after mistake, all his. It was humiliating. Despite his best efforts, controlling the Tufayl and the nine other heavy cruisers of Dreadnought Squadron One had been like trying to juggle soap bubbles: at best impossible, at worst a complete disaster, a point of view expressed that very morning with some vigor by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, director of the dreadnought project and his boss.

  He breathed in slowly to steady himself. Going into combat a raggedy-assed bundle of nerves would not improve his already slim chances of turning the squadron into an effective fighting force. Jaruzelska had made it clear: Failure was not an option. The Hammer of Kraa would tear the Federated Worlds apart if the Feds did not come up with an effective counter to their dammed antimatter missiles. Dreadnoughts were the only answer at hand, the only ships tough enough to have any chance of surviving an antimatter missile attack. There was no choice; they had to work.

  “Command, roger,” he acknowledged, mouth dry with tension, stomach tightening into a twisted ball of acid. “Warfare. Confirm weapons free. You have command authority.”

  “Warfare, roger. Weapons free. I have command authority.”

  Michael settled into his shock-resistant seat. He commed the AI to tighten his safety straps and waited for the Tufayl and her sister ships to drop out of pinchspace, one last check confirming that the ten dreadnoughts under his command were fully operational.

  “Command, Warfare, stand by, dropping … now.”

  In an instant, space-time turned itself inside out, the ten dreadnoughts erupting into normalspace, intense flashes of ultraviolet radiation marking their transition from pinchspace.

  Michael held his breath as alarms told him his laboriously assembled threat plot was worthless. By the time they jumped and reversed vector into Hammer space for the attack, the Hammer task group he had been sent to destroy had split into two and opened out. A single glance told him that much, but what did it mean? Which of the two groups presented the real threat? Desperately, Michael scanned the torrent of data pouring in from the dreadnoughts’ sensors even though he knew full well he could never make sense of it before Tufayl’s AIs did.

  The warfare AI entertained no doubts which of the two groups of Hammer ships posed the greater threat. “Command, Warfare. Primary threat axis is Red 10 Up 3, Hammer auxiliaries and escorts designated Hammer-2. Stand by … missile salvos away.”

  While Tufayl’s hydraulic launchers dumped a full missile salvo outboard, Michael ignored the rest of the AI’s report, acting on adrenaline-fueled instinct alone. The AI had to wait; maneuvering the dreadnoughts into position to survive the inevitable Hammer counterattack could not. He had to act. Everything told him that Warfare had made a terrible mistake. Struggling to bring order out of chaos, the warfare AI had ordered the dreadnought squadron to turn toward what it believed to be the primary threat: Hammer-2, the Hammer ships directly up-sun. Michael scowled with frustration, certain he had spotted the AI’s mistake. The sunward ships consisted of the auxiliaries along with a handful of light escorts, screened by decoys pumping out enough electromagnetic radiation to fool the unwary into thinking they were heavy cruisers. Was Warfare dumb enough to fall for it?

  Yes, it was.

  Michael swore out loud. Auxiliaries did not have the firepower to kill a dreadnought. The real threat was the cruisers in the second group of Hammer capital ships—task group Hammer-1—now sitting 40 degrees off Tufayl’s port bow; already they had launched their Eaglehawk long-range antiship missiles toward the dreadnoughts. The bastards were close; it would not be long before they flung rail-gun salvos at his ships. If he did not get them before they turned to meet the attack …

  He hesitated for a second. Should he split his forces? Should he attack both Hammer task groups? No, he decided. Go for the primary threat, deal with the rest later.

  “Command override. All ships, come left, emergency turn to threat axis Red 40 Up 3. Close and engage task group Hammer-1,” Michael said, his voice half choked by stress. Warfare’s order to ignore the Hammer cruisers was plain wrong: They orbited closer; they carried missiles, rail guns, and long-range antiship lasers. Of course they posed the primary threat!

  “Command, Warfare. Roger,” the AI replied calmly. “Redesignating targets … stand by rail guns.”

  Michael forced himself to sit back in his seat. There was nothing more he—or any other human—could do now. Close-quarters battle management was the one thing AIs excelled at. Making tactical decisions based on the avalanche of data generated by ship sensors tracking thousands of incoming missiles and rail-gun slugs and at the same time controlling the outgoing counterattack was simply too much for any human. To sit still was an effort, yet Michael forced himself to do exactly that, to watch the squadron’s defensive weapon systems soak up the Hammer attack, missile after missile erupting in brilliant balls of white flame as medium-range missiles and lasers hacked them out of space. But some made it through, triggering the dreadnoughts’ close-in defenses: a triple layer of lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns working
desperately to keep the Hammer missile attack out, the problem greatly compounded when a rail-gun salvo blasted its way through to smash into his ships, timed to arrive a few seconds before the surviving missiles hit home.

  Michael braced himself; the Tufayl bucked and heaved under the impact of multiple missile and rail-gun slug strikes. “You’ll have to try harder than that, you sons of bitches,” he murmured while the Tufayl’s reinforced frontal and flank armor shrugged off the attack with contemptuous ease. “Now it’s our turn.”

  He watched intently as the dreadnoughts finally turned their bows onto the threat axis. The instant they did, all ten ships let go with everything they had, the Tufayl reverberating with the characteristic crunching metal-on-metal thud of the rail guns punching slugs and decoys—hundreds of thousands of them—toward the Hammer cruisers at more than 3 million kilometers per hour, the shape of the swarm designed to force the Hammer ships to move where the slug density was greatest, where the ship-kill probabilities were highest.

  “Command, Warfare. Missile launch from auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2. Stand by … missiles are Eaglehawks.”

  “What?” Michael suppressed a momentary flash of unease. Eaglehawks? That made no sense. “Command, confirm.” The auxiliaries of task group Hammer-2 had just done something they were not—supposedly—capable of: launching Eaglehawk missiles. According to every technical intelligence report he had ever read, Hammer auxiliaries did not carry the Hammer’s heavyweight antistarship missiles. In theory, they posed no real threat. So how were they able to launch Eaglehawks?

  “Confirmed, command. Task group Hammer-2 has launched Eaglehawk missiles. Stand by … Hammer-1 is jumping.”

  Michael watched in despair as brief flares of ultraviolet light signaled the cruisers of task group Hammer-1’s jump into pinchspace, his missile and rail-gun salvos arriving too late to do anything but rip uselessly through the knuckles of tangled space-time left by the ships’ departure. This does not look good, he said to himself. Hammer capital ships did not make a habit of abandoning their posts in the middle of an attack, but that was what they were doing. Why? He had been so sure that they posed the main threat to his ships, that they would stay to slug it out.

  Something cold and clammy slimed its way into Michael’s chest and squeezed his heart hard. Without understanding why, he knew something bad was about to happen. Now his only option was to jump his own ships to safety, and he would be dammed if he was going to run away. He had come here to fight, and while he faced Hammer ships, fight he would.

  “Command, Warfare. Missile salvo from Hammer-2 assessed to be low-density attack consisting of multiple Eaglehawk ASSMs plus decoys. Vectors and salvo geometry are nominal for antimatter attack. Insufficient time to complete turn onto threat axis. Probability of mission-abort damage is high and rising. Recommend emergency jump into pinchspace. Repeat, recommend emergency jump into pinchspace.”

  Michael did not give himself time to think. “Negative, negative,” he shouted. “Expedite turn to threat axis and engage.”

  “Warfare, roger. Expediting,” Warfare replied calmly. “Hammer missiles are inside our mission abort damage radius … missile detonation imminent.”

  “Goddamn it,” Michael whispered. He slumped back, the sweat-soaked shipsuit under his armored combat space suit suddenly ice-cold. With shocking clarity, it became all too obvious. Apprehension washed through him, and his stomach acid-churned, sour and unsettled. He had walked right into the trap set for him and his ships. Pride and stupidity had stranded him there, and now it was too late; he had to wait and pray that his ships would ride out the Hammer attack.

  Inside the Hammer missiles, traps holding the warheads’ antihydrogen payload collapsed. Antimatter annihilated matter, releasing a tsunami of gamma radiation into space. Tufayl and her sister ships did not stand a chance. For all their reinforced armor, the dreadnoughts were too close to withstand the prodigious wave of energy released by the missiles. Impulse shock waves bludgeoned the ships with lethal force, battering critical systems to the point of failure and beyond. Seconds after the attack, the enormous fusion plants powering the dreadnoughts’ main propulsion power plants lost containment, transformed into blue-white flashes of raw energy that consumed the ships from end to end, leaving nothing but a few shattered fragments of ceramsteel armor and writhing tendrils of ionized matter to mark the passing of ten once-powerful ships.

  There was complete quiet, the command holovid flashing “SHIP DESTROYED” in letters that flooded the combat information center with bloodred light. Then the holovid displays that curtained the combat information center went blank and the lights came on.

  Michael stared, stunned, unable to move. The weight of yet another failure was close to unbearable.

  “All stations,” a disembodied voice announced. “This is control. End of exercise. Hot wash-up in Conference Room 4 in thirty minutes. Control out.”

  “Shit, shit, shit. What a bloody disaster,” Michael muttered. The day had been bad enough without having to sit through the humiliation of a debrief chaired by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, the Fleet’s most respected, experienced, and successful combat commander.

  Why me? he asked himself, throwing off his safety straps. He forced a body stiff with tension and stress to its feet. All he had ever wanted to be was an assault lander pilot, not some damned cruiser captain, a job he had not asked for, a job he was beginning to think he should not have. He smiled for an instant, his mouth twisting into a grim gash devoid of any humor. Well, look on the bright side, he told himself dispiritedly. After today’s performance, there was every chance he would not be Tufayl’s captain designate much longer.

  Someone else would have to make dreadnoughts work.

  * * *

  “So, to sum up, the critical command error occurred here, at drop plus fifteen seconds, a mistake compounded by the warfare AI’s failure to communicate effectively with the command. The Hammer capital ships in task group Hammer-1 were too close to our ships to deploy antimatter missiles. Conventional chemex and tacnuke-armed missiles were their only options. That made them the lesser threat. The auxiliaries and their escorts in Hammer-2, on the other hand, orbited far enough away to launch and survive an antimatter attack, and that is exactly what they did once our ships committed to the attack. After missile launch, command had the option to jump to safety but elected to ride out the attack. That was the wrong decision, and as a result …” The analyst’s voice trailed off; she appeared somewhat embarrassed.

  Michael squirmed in his seat. In the cold light of day, it was all so easy, so damn obvious. Why was he so stupid? His head slumped onto his chest, the shame nearly unbearable.

  Vice Admiral Jaruzelska’s voice cut through the hush. “Okay, folks. I think that’ll do. I want department heads back here, Monday morning, 08:00. We’ll review lessons learned from this week and your recommendations for improvement. No top of the head stuff, either. Detailed proposals. I’ll also com you a list of specific areas I want checked. Any questions?”

  There were none, and the meeting broke up, the mood subdued and—to Michael’s mind at least—the atmosphere heavy with the smell of failure.

  Jaruzelska called Michael over.

  “Sir?”

  “My office in ten.”

  Unable to speak, Michael nodded. For all his could-not-care-less bravado, he did care. He wanted to be the one who transformed dreadnoughts from a bright idea into the weapon that would drive the Hammers into the ground. But maybe he was not the one; maybe Jaruzelska was keeping him back to tell him just that.

  * * *

  Jaruzelska waved Michael into a seat in front of her desk. She stared at him for a long time before speaking.

  “Been a bad week, Michael,” she said at last.

  “You might say that, sir.”

  “Ridden you pretty hard, haven’t we?’

  Michael nodded. “Yes, sir, you have,” he said, unable to conceal a sudden bitterness.

  “Well,
I think it’s time for me to own up.”

  “Own up? I don’t underst—”

  Jaruzelska’s hand went up, cutting him off. “You weren’t supposed to. You see, Michael, the point of this week was to see just what one of the best tactical brains in Fleet was capable of unaided. And you showed us. Quite understandably, you saw this week’s sims as just one failure after another, and it’s true. They were. But we saw the week differently. For us, the sims shone the spotlight on the things we need to do to make dreadnoughts work.”

  Jaruzelska paused; she studied him thoughtfully. “So let me ask you something, Michael,” she continued. “There are thousands of lieutenants in Space Fleet. Know how many come even close to you?”

  Michael shook his head. What a dumb question. After one of the worst weeks of his life, probably most.

  Jaruzelska half smiled. “None that I know of,” she said, “none. You are one of the few spacers I’ve ever met who can hold an entire engagement in his head. All those ships, not to mention missiles, rail-gun swarms, decoys, and all the rest.” She shook her head. “We don’t know how you do it, Michael, but you do. Problem is, there’s no point in watching you do well, there’s no point designing tactical exercises we know you can cope with. Success doesn’t teach us squat. What does teach us something is failure, watching you make a complete dog’s breakfast of things. Thanks to you, we know how to help you become the best damn squadron commander this side of deepspace.”

  “Shit, sir! You might have told me!” Michael said, his face twisted into a grimace of pained frustration. “Oh, sorry, sir.” In his limited experience, admirals—even the good ones—did not appreciate overly familiar junior officers.

  Jaruzelska let it pass. She nodded indulgently. “Don’t worry about it, son. Would not have worked if we’d told you. Anyway, I have some good news for you. The first thing is to give you what every cruiser captain has sitting alongside him.”