The Battle of the Hammer Worlds hw-2 Page 30

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve said some stuff I shouldn’t have said. I’m with the Fleet Advanced Projects Unit, so I know things that most people don’t. I should have kept my mouth shut. So I’m going to classify everything we’ve talked about as top secret and put a neuronics block on it. Okay?”

  Michael nodded. He was not going to argue with the man. “Do it, sir.” He paused for a moment. “Okay, sir. Go ahead. I’ve enabled access to my neuronics.”

  “Thanks. . right. That’s done. Now, get back to your ship. Remember this, Helfort. Helfort!” Baker took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Helfort! Listen to me. This isn’t over. It’s going to take a bit longer than we thought, that’s all. Believe that and you’ll be fine. Got it?”

  “Sir.” Michael’s voice was ash-dry.

  “Good. Get back to your ship. Go. Now!”

  Michael turned and ran as though the Devil himself were after him.

  Nine point six light-years from Comdur and 75 million kilometers out from Terranova, home planet of the FedWorld system, two Hammer heavy cruisers dropped out of pinchspace. Each deployed a single Eaglehawk missile. Ten seconds later, the missiles were accelerating hard toward Terranova on thin pillars of white fire.

  Five seconds later, the two Hammer cruisers jumped.

  Hours later, the warheads on the missiles exploded, a wall of gamma radiation driving in toward Terranova, its double pulse the unmistakable fingerprint of matter/antimatter annihilation.

  Tuesday, April 11, 2400, UD

  FWSS Eridani, berth Bravo-10, Comdur Fleet Base Repair Facility

  Lieutenant Commander Lenski strode grim-faced into Eridani’s wardroom, waving her officers and senior spacers to be seated. She grabbed a coffee from the drinkbot and sat down.

  “Okay, folks. First, some good news. The casualty recovery teams have done a great job getting the crews off the ships. Well, those still alive,” she added bitterly. “Anyway, the base hospital is struggling, but thank God there are plenty of regen tanks, so we should be able to save most of them. Radiation damage takes a lot of fixing, so we won’t see them back in uniform for a long time. They’ll start shuttling the survivors back to their home planets tomorrow.”

  She paused to take a mouthful of coffee and then another. Michael thought she looked terrible, and it was not from lack of sleep. True, they were all tired. Nobody had slept much since the Hammers had come calling, but it was not that. No, it was something much more fundamental; Michael had seen the same thing on the faces of every spacer he had met since what was now being called the Comdur Disaster. It had taken a while for him to work out what it was, but now he was sure he knew.

  It was the awful realization that for all the power, all the technology, and all the wealth possessed by the Federated Worlds, nothing in humanspace was guaranteed. The Federation could be beaten and beaten badly, beaten like they had never been beaten before. Worse, they had been beaten by the Hammers, a people all Feds thought little better than brutal fundamentalists pursuing a bizarre and arcane religion spawned from the deranged mind of an indentured Martian colonist. More than any of that and worst of all, it was the humiliation of losing the Federation’s rightful place as the leader of humanspace.

  Lenksi continued. “Apart from the fact that the Hammers missed the planetary assault vessels, the other good news is that the ships damaged in the attack are not all write-offs. Some are. My first ship for one, but-”

  “That can’t be right, skipper. The ark went to the scrap yard centuries ago,” a voice chipped in from the back of the wardroom.

  “Watch it, Chief O’Halloran, ’cause I know where you live,” Lenski called out with a tight smile as laughter rippled around the packed wardroom. “Anyway, as I was saying, most can be recovered, so thank God for radiation-hardened optronics. Again, it’ll take time, but a lot less time than building from scratch. Most of the damage is to bow armor, though there’s a lot of spalling up forward. Fleet will be calling for ferry crews to get them back to the builders’ yards for repair, so stand by for some detached duty.”

  Lenski took a deep breath. “Now the bad news. The final casualty lists are out, and they make pretty grim reading. The other bad news is that Operation Falcon has been postponed indefinitely.”

  A soft hiss filled the air. Nobody present could have been surprised to hear that the invasion of Commitment was off, but it hurt to hear the news officially.

  “The last thing I have for you is that yesterday two Hammer cruisers dropped into Terranovan farspace and fired two antimatter-armed Eaglehawks. Fortunately, they detonated a long way out, so apart from some spectacular atmospheric fireworks followed by a pretty sizable electromagnetic pulse when the gamma radiation arrived, there was nothing to worry about. There was no damage and no casualties. Nobody knows what the Hammers meant by that little stunt. Some sort of demonstration obviously, but to what end we don’t know. So that’s the latest. Any questions?”

  “What do we do now, skipper? Surely we’re not going to give up?” one of the engineers asked.

  Lenski shook her head emphatically. “Not a bloody chance,” she replied, her voice hardening. “The Hammers have given us a good belting, no argument, but word is that we’ll finish what those Kraa-worshipping Hammer filth have started, and by the time this is all over, they’ll regret they were ever born.”

  For a full minute, there was a profound silence. Lenski watched, a grim smile on her face, the faces in front of her taut with steely determination. She nodded. If she had had any doubts about her spacers’ willingness, about their ability to take the fight back to the Hammers, they were gone.

  Michael stared at the glass of beer Petty Officer Bienefelt had put down in front of him. She was unimpressed. Canteen etiquette was strict: Buyee raises glass first.

  “Fuck’s sake, sir!” she complained. “You are one hell of a slow drinker, and I’m dying of thirst here.”

  “Yeah, I know, Matti. Sorry. Here’s to. . well, here’s to anything that gives the Hammer grief,” he finished lamely, raising his glass.

  “Amen to that.” Bienefelt downed most of her beer in one swallow. “So what do you think? Captain seemed pretty sure it would be business as usual.”

  “I don’t know, Matti. Wish it was business as usual, but that’s hard to see. Things have changed. People say what the Hammer did off Terranova was only a stunt, but it doesn’t seem like a stunt to me. Seems more like. .” He paused for a moment to think.

  Bienefelt finished the sentence for him. “A message?”

  Michael nodded. “Spot on, Matti. That’s exactly right. It’s a message.”

  “Okay, it’s a message, but what does it mean?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” His frustration showed in hands clenched into fists. “But. .”

  “But what?”

  “Well, I hate to think this, but only one thing makes any sense. I think they are telling us to give them what they want or they’ll destroy Terranova. Shit! We know they can.”

  Bienefelt frowned skeptically. “They’d do that? I know they’re Hammers, but would they destroy a whole planet? Surely not.”

  “That’s the million-FedMark question, Matti.”

  Michael was quiet for a long time. He looked Bienefelt right in the eye. “You know what, Matti. I think they might. If we push them too hard, if they think we’re serious about invading Commitment, then they might. What have the people who run the Hammer Worlds got to lose? If we invade, all that rotten Hammer of Kraa bullshit comes crashing down; the jokers who run the place all have their balls cut off before being strung up from the nearest lamppost. Jesus, if it was you, would you care too much about Terranova?”

  Bienefelt shook her head. “Guess not, but if they nuke Terranova, we can do the same to them, surely.”

  Michael smiled grimly. “Maybe we can. Then they can. Mutually assured destruction it’s called, if I remember my history properly. So a stalemate is where this is all heading.”

  H
e shook his head despairingly.

  “Another beer, sir?”

  “Why not?” Michael lifted his empty glass.

  Bienefelt shook her head and pushed her glass across the table. “Oh, no. This one’s your shout.”

  “Tightwad!”

  Lenski waved Michael into a seat.

  “Right. I’ve got new orders for you. You are to take the Adamant back to Terranova for repairs. You’re scheduled to leave in twenty-four hours, so I suggest you get your gear together and get across to her. You’ll get detailed orders on board.”

  Michael stared for a moment. “Um, yes, sir. Anyone else from Eridani?”

  “Yes. I’m giving you Pavel as your chief engineer, plus four techs. Who do you want for coxswain?”

  Silly question, Michael thought. “Petty Officer Bienefelt if I can, sir.”

  Lenski nodded. “Thought you might, but that’s fine by me. Have her pick eight spacers as working hands. Not that there’s going to be much to do. The AIs will do the work. Any questions?”

  “Only one, sir. Who’s the skipper to be?”

  Lenski’s eyebrows shot up. “Jeez, Michael. You’re a bit slow today. You, of course, you bonehead!”

  Michael’s mouth dropped open, “Me? Adamant’s a light cruiser. I’m only a junior lieutenant.”

  Lenski laughed at Michael’s confusion. “Let’s not get carried away, Michael. Yes, it’s a light cruiser, but a pretty battered one, and it’s only a ferry trip. Go on, off you go. We’ll see you back here Friday morning. Go on, go!”

  “Sir!”

  When he left Lenski’s cabin, Michael tried not altogether successfully not to let the news that Pavel Duricek, the king of pompous windbags, was going to be his engineer get him down. Still, at least it was a short run, and he would have Matti as his coxswain. She would keep things in line.

  Wednesday, April 12, 2400, UD

  FWSS Adamant, in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

  Accompanied by Duricek and Bienefelt, Michael walked the length and breadth of his new command. The feeling of loss was unnerving. The Adamant’s huge mass was echoingly empty, the only sound the steady hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning system.

  He found it all deeply unsettling.

  When the quantum traps that deflected radiation away from the crew had collapsed under the enormous wall of gamma radiation, the ship had been completely sterilized, her crew condemned to months in regen to repair the massive damage that had been inflicted on them. Not a single spacer or marine had escaped serious injury; many would never recover fully. Some had already died, and more would follow.

  If not for the AIs embedded in every system on board, their massively redundant optronics completely immune to the effects of gamma or any other form of radiation, the Adamant would have been a lump of ceramsteel wrapped around a pressure hull protecting a lot of useless air-filled spaces. But Adamant was no empty shell. Apart from the fact that she had no crew, Adamant was a fully mission-capable ship.

  Michael left the forward compartments for last. It was there that Adamant had suffered most of her losses. When the first spike of gamma radiation had dumped huge amounts of energy into the ship’s bow armor in less than a billion billionth of a second, an impulse shock wave had smashed back through the armor and into the ship’s inner hull. Thousands of those shock waves had hit the Adamant in a tiny fraction of a second. In theory, the heavy-duty elastomeric mountings anchoring the ship’s armor to the inner titanium pressure hull should have protected the crew from external shock. But under the relentless hammering of successive waves of gamma radiation, the overloaded shock mountings had failed, allowing shock waves to jump into the pressure hull, spalling off lethal shards of metal. Most of the shards had been trapped by the ship’s last line of defense-a Kevlar splinter mat bonded directly to the pressure hull-but not all. By the time the Hammer attack was over, far too many of Adamant’s crew were dead, their combat space suits no match for shards of highvelocity razor-sharp metal.

  Michael followed Duricek and Bienefelt as they made their way forward along the cruiser’s central passageway, past the missile batteries, and into the forward rail-gun control room. Michael stifled a shocked gasp as he walked through the airtight door. The compartment was straight out of a horror vid. The cleanup crews and their bots had done their best, but they had a lot of ships to deal with; the aftereffects of the Hammer attack were still plain to see. Every surface was covered in a grisly mix of dried blood and pieces of metal-shredded space suits, all liberally dusted with plasfiber fragments torn from shattered panels and cabinets, bulkheads gouged deep by metal splinters. The three spacers stood in shock.

  Bienefelt broke the awful silence. “Mother of God,” she whispered.

  “Wasn’t here to look after these poor bastards. Wish she had been.” Michael’s face was grim, white with shock. He checked the ship’s AI. Nineteen dead in this compartment alone. “That’ll do. Matti.”

  “Sir?”

  “All the compartments like this. Get the bots back in. Let’s see if we can do a better job. Use your spacers, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bienefelt replied, her normal ebullience buried for the moment.

  Michael turned to Duricek. “Chief.”

  “Yes?”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. He had not missed the calculated insult. Duricek might be senior to him, but Michael held a warrant from the president appointing him captain in command of Adamant. Duricek would regret ignoring that simple fact, but this was not the time.

  “When will the systems status report be ready?” he asked calmly.

  “Another hour or so.” Duricek’s casual tone made it clear that as far as he was concerned, it did not matter when the systems status report would be finished.

  Michael’s voice hardened. “I’m sorry, Chief. That won’t do. Give me a specific time I can work with.”

  A tiny grain of common sense somewhere deep inside Duricek must have stopped a smart-ass response in its tracks. “Er, right. I’ll have it for you in two hours,” he mumbled sulkily.

  Michael turned to Bienefelt, his face a stony mask. Standing in a compartment drenched in the blood of good spacers, he was in no mood to be jerked around by a pompous, selfimportant dickhead like Duricek. “On you go, Petty Officer Bienefelt. Get things moving. I can see no reason why we can’t depart on schedule, but I’ll make that decision once Lieutenant Duricek and I are happy with the state of the ship’s systems.”

  Bienefelt’s face was impressively impassive. “Sir.”

  Michael waited until Bienefelt had gone before turning back to Duricek. “Chief, I’m only going to say this once, so I strongly suggest you pay attention. You may be senior to me in rank, but you are not senior to me by appointment. If you do not show me the respect due by right to every captain in command, I will have you charged. I will not tolerate insubordination. If you have a problem with anything I say or do, let me know, and we’ll sort it out in private. In the meantime, you will oblige me by offering the captain in command the proper courtesies. Is that clear?”

  Duricek’s face twitched as fear and anger wrestled for control, his mouth opening and shutting as he tried to decide what to say.

  “Well?” Michael barked, making him jump.

  “Yes, sir,” Duricek muttered sullenly.

  “Good. Get that status report done. We’ll reconvene in two hours to go through it. I need to know exactly how fifteen of us are going to operate this bloody great big ship safely.”

  Duricek gave a quick nod. He left without another word.

  What a jerk, Michael thought as he watched the man go.

  He had enough to worry about without massaging the ego of some pompous oaf. Why had Lenski given him Duricek to be his chief? She must have known the two of them did not get along.

  Michael had to keep reminding himself that he was the captain of a real live FedWorld Space Fleet light cruiser. He still had trouble getting his mind around the idea. Junior Lieutenant Michael Wallace He
lfort, captain in command, Federated Worlds Warship Adamant. It sounded faintly ludicrous. He felt faintly ludicrous.

  Michael sat alone, the only occupant of the Adamant’s enormous combat information center, as the ship accelerated slowly out of Comdur nearspace and past what was left of the gamma radiation-shattered wreckage of Comdur’s elaborate defenses. If all went well, they would jump in a few hours for the five-hour transit to Terranova. Allow four or so hours to decelerate in-system, an hour to berth in the warship maintenance yards of Karlovic Heavy Industries, another hour to hand over the ship, and the job would be done. Sixteen hours, tops. Some command, he thought. Talk about short and sweet. He stretched in a vain attempt to get the ache out of his back.

  “Command, engineering.” Duricek was unable to conceal the resentment in his voice.

  “Go ahead, Chief,” Michael replied, careful to keep his voice neutral.

  “Sir. Main engines are nominal. Pinchspace jump generators are on line. Ship’s mass distribution model is nominal. All other systems are nominal. Confirm we are good to jump.”

  Better, Michael thought. He did not care for the resentful overtones, but it could have been worse.

  “Command, roger. Understand we are good to jump.”

  “I’ll be here in propulsion control if you need me, sir.”

  “Thanks, Chief. Changing the subject, did you resolve that problem with Weapons Power Foxtrot? God knows, I hope it’s the last system we need, but it would be good to have one hundred percent weapons availability.”

  “The lads are working on it, sir. We found a damaged mount, so I think it’s a shock problem. There seems to be a misalignment somewhere. I’m hoping the system AI can work out a way around it because we can’t open it up to have a look. At this stage, we don’t know when or even if we can get it back online.”