Helfort's War: Book 1 Read online

Much more important, he had an account allocated to him by the chief councillor personally, an account DocSec’s normally relentless investigators wouldn’t go near. Even they had more sense than to ask what the chief councillor was up to.

  Wonderful place, the Hammer, he thought as he bent to the task of finding what he needed to know about Captain Ashok Kumar. If you worked for the chief councillor, you could pretty much get away with anything, go anywhere, do anything, know everything about everybody.

  Until the next chief councillor took over.

  Then you were dead.

  Thursday, August 6, 2398, UD

  Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) 005338 Berthed on Space Battle Station 1, in Orbit around Terranova

  Michael realized that not once in the two weeks of his lander command requalification had Lieutenant Michael Hadley said one word more than was absolutely necessary.

  The silent, moodily uncommunicative Hadley had not cut him one inch of slack or encouraged the slightest hope that he might get the 98 percent he needed if he was to have the career path he wanted. As a member of the warfare branch of the Federated Worlds Space Fleet, that meant only one thing as far as he was concerned: assault lander pilot. The alternatives—most likely a career as a navigator or an intel spook, or, even worse, a transfer to the engineering or logistics branches of the Fleet—just didn’t bear thinking about. Still, Hadley hadn’t failed him yet, so maybe he still had a chance.

  So far the atmosphere had been heavy and formal, and Michael hated it. Maybe Hadley was pissed off at having to change his leave plans; Michael had no idea. Seeing Hadley’s glowering, almost sullen face the day after graduation had been more than enough to kill off any idea Michael might have had of talking about Hadley’s private affairs.

  He sighed and settled deeper into the battered and scarred command pilot’s chair of Moaning Minnie, more properly known as Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) Number PHLA-005338, his combat space suit stiff and uncomfortable as he waited for Hadley to complete briefing the directing staff who’d be controlling the opposition forces Michael was up against for the final live exercise of his requalification.

  Michael looked around the flight deck with affection. As landers went, Moaning Minnie wasn’t a bad ship. Michael had flown it many times before. Everything worked, and its AI was reasonably stable and had no bad habits that he knew of. For the tenth time, he had his neuronics call up the mission and, eyes shut, methodically worked through the mission plan and the supporting threat summary step-by-step, item by item. He knew the THREATSUM (Threat Summary) forward and backward by now, but at least it was something to do while he waited.

  Mother, the lander’s AI, broke his fierce concentration to tell him that Hadley had come aboard. Finally, Michael thought as he closed the mission file and stood up to await Hadley’s arrival.

  He didn’t have long to wait.

  “Right,” Hadley said as he settled himself into the tactical officer’s chair alongside Michael, ignoring the rest of Michael’s team ranged to the left and right of him. His voice became very formal. “Junior Lieutenant Helfort. You have command.”

  “Roger, sir. I have command. Stand by.” Michael activated the lander’s CombatNet; it would stay open until the mission had been completed. With a deep breath to steady himself, he started in on the checklists, the slow and tedious process of confirming that Moaning Minnie was ready for the torture he was going to put her through. One by one, his crew signed off, and finally the ship was ready to go.

  “All stations, ship is go for launch. Stand by for drop in”—Michael checked the master mission timer—“ten minutes. Helmets on, suit integrity checks to Mother. Command out.”

  Michael commed BaseNet. “Space Battle Station 1, this is PHLA-005338, mission call sign Golf Charlie. Ready to launch at designated drop time. Golf Charlie over.”

  “Roger, Golf Charlie. Stand by, out.”

  Settling his helmet onto its neck ring, Michael quickly ran through his own suit checks and, visor down, confirmed suit integrity. He uplinked the results to Mother and confirmed for himself that Mother had fifteen good suits onboard: fourteen crew and one pax. Hang on. A passenger? Who the hell could that be? he wondered, but he had too much to think about to bother checking. Flipping his armored plasglass visor back up, Michael turned slightly to look at Hadley out of the corner of one eye. The man who carried his fate in his hands was sitting unmoving in the tactical officer’s seat, staring out at the vast gray bulk of Space Battle Station 1’s hull as it curved away from them.

  Michael turned back and sat motionless. There was nothing to do but sit and wait in silence. Michael felt the pressure bear down on him. An open-mike circuit, CombatNet was quiet except for the breathing of the loadmaster, Chief Petty Officer Sara Gemmell. For some reason, before launch she breathed as hard as if she’d just run a race, a long one and uphill at that. Nerves, Michael supposed. He didn’t have the gossip, insults, and facetious comments that normally characterized the minutes immediately before a launch to take his mind off what was at stake.

  “Michael.” Hadley’s voice came up on CommandNet and cut across his thoughts.

  “Sir?”

  “Good luck.” Hadley turned away and resumed his sphinx-like study of SBS-1’s hull.

  “Tha—” Michael’s surprised acknowledgment of the first words from Hadley not specifically called for by a checklist or standard operating procedure was cut short as BaseNet came up. “Golf Charlie, this is SBS-1. You are clear to drop under SBS control. Departure pipe is Violet-34. Acknowledge, over.”

  “SBS-1, Golf Charlie. Roger, clear to drop, departure pipe Violet-34, over.”

  “Golf Charlie, SBS-1. Roger. Good hunting. On dropping, immediate chop TACON to assault mission command. Over.”

  “SBS-1, Golf Charlie. Roger. Out.”

  With a sigh, Michael sat back. If anything, he felt even more nervous. Seven minutes thirty seconds to go. Damn it, this couldn’t go on. Michael commed CombatNet again.

  “Okay, folks. The BUFF outside the windows has given us launch clearance, and we will drop as scheduled in…seven minutes and twenty seconds. At which point you will be relieved to know that our esteemed loadmaster will cease heavy breathing.”

  “I am not a heavy breather,” came Gemmell’s indignant and entirely predictable reply. It was what she always said.

  “That’s not what I hear,” chipped in Petty Officer Taksin, Michael’s weapons supervisor for the day.

  “You cheeky young pup, Taki. I’ll have you know…”

  CombatNet caught the chuckles of Minnie’s crew, and Michael felt the pressure ease. These were good people, well trained and experienced. He’d done missions like this successfully before, and he’d do them again. Having started the traditional prelaunch banter, he sat back and let it wash over him, the chatter wandering through the social lives and idiosyncrasies of the crew with careless abandon.

  At one minute to go, it was down to business.

  “Okay, folks, one minute. Visors down and stand by. Final checks. Call them in.”

  In a matter of seconds the final checks were in. It was time to go.

  “All stations, this is command. Moaning Minnie is go for launch. May God watch over us this day,” Michael said, offering up the traditional spacer’s prayer before any launch. Notwithstanding the fact that the human race had been dropping down gravity wells for hundreds of years, the process was a violent one that stressed the best-designed and best-built spacecraft to their limits and occasionally past them. Over the centuries, descent from orbit had taken the lives of far too many good spacers and was not ever to be taken for granted no matter how good Fed technology might have become.

  The seconds ticked away. BaseNet came to life. “Golf Charlie, forty-five seconds to drop. Automatic drop sequence commenced. Over.”

  “Roger. Golf Charlie out.” Michael shrugged himself down in his straps and commed CombatNet. “Stand by, everybody.” And finally, with a firm shove, hydraulic rams pu
shed Moaning Minnie away from the massive hull of Space Battle Station 1, out of any residual effect of its artificial gravity, and started the assault lander on its way planet-ward.

  The assault landing process was as rough as people and machine could tolerate and as quick as the lander’s command pilot could make it. That way, the trip was short and sharp, a decidedly attractive tactical advantage. Loitering at high altitudes in hostile airspace was not a life-extending strategy and one that the assault lander pilots did all in their power to avoid, short of actually breaking the lander into pieces.

  Barely a minute after Minnie had dropped clear, the assault commander gave the order.

  “Bravo Mike, this is Alfa. Authenticate Kilo Oscar. Immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Bravo. I say again, immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Oscar. Stand by, execute!”

  With a deep breath, Michael started Moaning Minnie, which already was positioned tail first in anticipation, on her way dirtside, firing her main engines at full military power to wipe out enough of her orbital velocity to put her almost instantly into a rapidly steepening parabolic fall to the ground. As she fell, the rest of the assault lander stream fell around her, the landers cocooned in a huge cloud of active decoys, the attack blossoming out in all directions into a huge sphere that was too confused, too complex, and too fast-moving for ground-based radar to distinguish high-value targets from decoys.

  With Minnie’s height unwinding rapidly, Michael shut down the main engines and spun Minnie back nose first, ready for reentry. He could see for himself the threat blossoming in front of them as long-range search radars appeared on the threat display. It was becoming increasingly clear that whoever had set up the exercise, the enemy had a threat profile that, as always, looked exactly like the Hammer of Kraa’s and was determined to kick Minnie hard.

  But that didn’t matter too much.

  An assault lander could do very little against long-range weapons systems except stay as far away from them as possible. The combination of poor maneuverability at very high speed and a limited self-defense capability made landers easy meat. It was up to the planetary assault force supporting the attack from orbit—in this case, lead by the hypothetical FWWS (Federated Worlds Warship) Shrivaratnam from which Moaning Minnie supposedly had dropped along with 139 other hypothetical assault and ground attack landers—to provide volume defense for the assault lander stream, and Michael was pleased to see that the Shrivaratnam had made a good start in suppressing ground radar sites and launching the follow-up waves of decoys needed to confuse the enemy’s tactical picture further. The radar sites were bound to be dummy emitters, though, he thought, and God only knew which ones were the “real” missile radar and launch sites.

  “Command, Tac. Threat Red. Multiple battle management radar emitters. Stand by…Shrivaratnam reports multiple ABM missile launches.”

  ABMs! Shit, Michael thought. Antiballistic missile systems were designed to take out missiles before atmospheric reentry, a role that made them extremely good at hacking big, fat, and relatively slow assault landers out of the sky. But there was nothing much Michael could do about them except worry and leave them to Shrivaratnam. ABMs were too big and too fast and, with tacnuke warheads, much more than any lander’s thin skin of ceramsteel armor could withstand. As he commed his neuronics to display the overall command plot, he was happy to see that the ABMs, for which an undefended stream of assault landers was the easiest of easy meat, were having a hard time of it.

  But a handful did slip through.

  Michael watched as the ABMs closed in relentlessly, the more heavily armored ground attack landers leading the assault stream filling the space between them with short-range missiles and sheets of chain-gun fire, with reddish-yellow flares marking their successes. But two landers lost their battle to fend off the massive missiles, Michael wincing as microyield tacnuke warheads exploded in searing balls of blue-white energy, turning the landers into useless lumps of metal slag tumbling end over end to burn up in the atmosphere below. But then there were no more ABMs, and Michael watched in relief as Mother downgraded the ABM threat from red to orange. He wasn’t allowed to stay relieved for long.

  “Command, Tac. Threat Red. Expect antilander missile launch at twenty-seven minutes on current track.”

  “Roger, Tac.” No surprises there. He’d seen the missile control radars come online, and there were a lot of them, which wasn’t good. Michael risked a glance across at Hadley. His face was tight with concentration, with the screwed-up eyes that came with looking at neuronics dataflows.

  As Moaning Minnie began to tear into the first thin tendrils of Terranova’s atmosphere, the lander’s thrusters started banging away to hold the finless, wingless machine at the right angle for reentry. Then Michael felt the vibration slowly begin to build as deceleration started in earnest. The lander’s artificial gravity rippled as it absorbed the growing influence of Terranova’s gravitational field.

  As he studied the command plot, his relief evaporated. Shit, he thought. The missiles would be on them quickly, and the threat wasn’t quite what the THREATSUM had predicted. For a start, there were many more medium-range missile control radars than predicted, and with them went hypersonic antilander missiles, truly nasty pieces of Hammer engineering. Big by Federated Worlds standards, they were very fast and agile enough to stay locked on to even the most desperately flown heavy lander. That and a conventional chemex warhead big enough to punch a hole through lander ceramsteel armor with no difficulty made them a real lander killer.

  But there was only one way down, and Michael turned his focus to the job at hand: getting Minnie and her crew home safely, threading her way through the layers of defense standing between him and his objective.

  Plummeting almost vertically nose first past 90,000 meters, Mother pulled Moaning Minnie up into a steady 40-degree angle of attack as the lander punched into the atmosphere in earnest. In seconds, Minnie had disappeared into the heart of an incandescently hot fireball as her still-massive residual kinetic energy bled off into the air ripping past the hull. For the moment they were safe; no weapon system yet invented could get even a half-decent targeting solution out of the enormous ball of ionized gas that had wrapped itself around Moaning Minnie, and even the Hammer didn’t like popping off tacnukes inside their own atmosphere. Not that Michael was completely happy. This element of the reentry would have been familiar to the pioneers of space flight centuries earlier, and he hated every painful second of it as the lander’s speed bled off. One day, he said to himself, one day maybe the designers would work out how to get a lander through ionization ass first, with the main engines firing all the way to get her dirtside as quickly as possible. But good though lander technology was, that happy day was a long way off.

  Any minute now, Michael thought.

  “Ionization finish in ten seconds. Speed now 12,200 kph, altitude 51,500 meters. Standing by to maneuver.” Mother’s calm tones belied the storm still raging outside.

  And then they were out; it was time to screw up the opposition’s missile firing solutions. “Standby max g aerobrake, stand by, stand by. Now!”

  Mother didn’t hang around. She rammed Moaning Minnie back almost onto its tail, holding the lander at an 85-degree angle of attack to present the lander’s flat underbelly nearly at right angles to the airflow. For an instant Minnie’s artgrav, as always slow to react, allowed the gravity to push Michael into his seat as the lander shed speed. Minnie’s airframe was twanging and twitching as it absorbed the enormous stresses being imposed on it by turbulent air ripping past, the lander’s kinetic energy dumped into the freshly reenergized plume of intensely hot gas coming off its underbelly.

  “Weapons, Tac. Decoys now.”

  “Decoys away.” Taksin sounded bored, not at all like somebody sitting inside a 750-ton lump of armored ceramsteel plunging groundward with all the finesse of a huge boulder.

  With decoys safely away, Mother powered up the main engines to stab Moaning Minnie’s blunt nose straight dow
n at Terranova’s surface, now only 48,000 meters below them. As the lander settled into a nearly vertical dive, Mother slowly extended its variable-geometry wings to mark the beginnings of the lander’s transition from a brick to something more like a proper aircraft and then cut the main engines to let Moaning Minnie drop into free fall, pushing Michael’s stomach up into his mouth before the artgrav could respond. The height unwound at a dramatic rate before Mother extended the wings and started the slow and careful process of pulling the lander out of its headlong plunge to earth. Michael’s neuronics were plugged into the lander’s neural system to make doubly sure that the huge stresses on the lander’s wings stayed within acceptable limits. Even so, the synthpain was uncomfortably intense. Michael’s concern was well justified. The lander’s foamalloy wings were incredibly strong, but even they would have trouble taking the load imposed by a 750-ton lander trying to pull too sharp a recovery.

  At last, the lander leveled off at 5,000 meters, and Mother allowed it to slow before bringing the main engines back up to power, turning the lander slowly back toward the landing site.

  “Tac. How do we look going in?” Michael asked.

  “Well, we are in the first wave, so in theory the opposition has only a hazy idea of where we will land, at least to start with.”

  “Other than the college spaceport, you mean?” said Michael, at which Hadley actually laughed. Good, Michael thought. Things were looking up if the man could take a joke and not bite his head off.

  “Play the game, Helfort. As I was saying, the only advantage we have is where we will hit the ground. Ah, good. Mother thinks this is the optimum final approach track.” The track bloomed in Michael’s neuronics. Pretty simple: two doglegs, both over water, which was always nice, a sharp turn onto a short final approach, which would be fun, and then onto the ground. But no terrain to hide behind for the final approach, which was a pity. They had twenty-three minutes to run, and Michael offered up a small prayer that there wouldn’t be too many surprises.