Helfort's War Book III Page 9

  “Shall we go, sir?” Michael said. “I should get back to the CIC.”

  “By all means. Lead on, Captain.”

  Setting off, Michael shoved the admiral out of his mind. Only a fool took Comdur’s defenses for granted, and no admiral in humanspace would distract him from getting Tufayl safely inside them.

  An awkward silence followed while the pair made their way down to Tufayl’s combat information center. Michael did not care. Once back in the command seat, he kept his eyes on the command holovid, much more concerned to keep an eye on Tufayl’s transit through Comdur’s defenses.

  “Captain,” Perkins said. “I see you are on vector, so may we go to your cabin? I would like to debrief you on your shakedown week.”

  Michael was on the point of agreeing, when something in Perkins’s eyes stopped him. Shit, he said to himself. Was this a test? “Happy to, sir, but would you mind if we dropped into parking orbit first?”

  “Not at all,” Perkins responded, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a mere lieutenant had just refused an admiral’s request. “I’ll be staying with you, so that’s fine.”

  “Thank you, sir. Appreciate that,” Michael said gratefully.

  “Can I get you a drink, Admiral?”

  “A beer, thanks.”

  Michael waited until the drinkbot handed Perkins his drink before speaking. “Well, sir,” he said, “once again, welcome to dreadnoughts.”

  Perkins nodded. “Thank you. The Flag Officer, Space Training”—Michael’s heart skipped a beat; had they found some fatal flaw in Tufayl’s performance? Was that why Perkins had shown up so unexpectedly?—“asked me to pass on his congratulations. Not the best week they’ve ever seen at space training, but pretty good considering how few spacers”—he waved a dismissive hand around Michael’s day cabin—“these things carry. You’ll get your Operational Readiness Certificate tomorrow. Oh, yes. Admiral Jaruzelska asked me to say well done.”

  Michael slumped back in his chair, the relief washing through him. “Thank you, sir,” he said, “thank you very much.” Fatigue did not allow him to say much more. All he wanted was for Perkins to drink up and leave. When the man did, he could turn in. He needed to catch up on a week’s lost sleep—badly.

  It took Michael a while to get rid of Perkins, but at long last the admiral was piped over the side for the shuttle transfer back dirtside. It had been an interesting session, and not in a good way.

  Perkins’s message was pretty simple, even if cloaked in enough euphemism, equivocation, understatement, and ambiguity to give the man all the wiggle room he would need if Jaruzelska found out what he was saying. Perkins’s message was nearly subliminal, to a point where Michael struggled to work out what the message actually was. But despite having little sleep for a week, he did work it out in the end, and when he did, it shocked him.

  Perkins did all the talking: The dreadnought concept was dangerous, it did serious damage to the Fleet, and it risked the long-term security of the Federated Worlds. Michael’s job was to stay in line and follow orders. Under no circumstances was he to offer the dreadnoughts any support or encouragement. Once the dreadnought heresy was consigned to the trash can of history, Perkins would see to it personally that Michael received the recognition an officer of his talent and potential so richly deserved.

  Michael had been stunned and unsettled by Perkins’s veiled insubordination, and his response had been perfunctory in the extreme. He had said nothing more than “yes” or “no” throughout. Not that Perkins noticed; he seemed more than happy to interpret Michael’s reticence as agreement.

  Wrong, Rear Admiral Perkins, Michael said to himself while Perkins left the ship. Admiral or not, Perkins would find out that Michael’s taciturnity was not consent. With or without Perkins’s support, he vowed to make dreadnoughts work.

  Friday, October 13, 2400, UD

  Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair

  The weekly Defense Council meeting over, Chef Councillor Polk beckoned Councillor Jones over. Polk waited until the room cleared before speaking, his face dark with anger and frustration.

  “Kraa damn it!” Polk said with a snarl. “I am sick and tired of this council telling me what I can’t do. When”—his hand smacked down with a dull thump—“will you tell me what I can do? All I hear is excuses!”

  “Well, sir, as you know,” the councillor for war said warily, “our antimatter warhead stocks are limited. We expended most of our inventory in the Comdur attack. We need to conserve what few missiles we have left. And there is an armistice in force.”

  “Yes, so? That sounds to me like more of the same, Councillor Jones,” Polk hissed venomously. “So tell me. What the hell is the point of stockpiling missiles? The bloody things are there to be used, for Kraa’s sake. As for the armistice, what do I care? It’s just a bit of paper. I signed the damn thing. I can unsign it if I want, and I will.”

  Polk pushed himself back in his seat. “I’ve had enough of this, Councillor,” he said. “I want the armistice torn up. I want offensive operations against the Feds resumed. I want them hounded back to the negotiating table. I want them forced to make the concessions we need. Kraa! We have antimatter weapons, and the damn Feds don’t. How much simpler does it get? So brief Fleet Admiral Jorge. Tell him I want to see an options paper from him for next week’s Defense Council meeting. It is time to take the offensive.”

  “Yes, Chief Councillor,” Jones said glumly.

  Thursday, October 19, 2400, UD

  Szent-Gyogyi Merchant Ship Pasternak, Ashakiran planetary farspace, Federated Worlds

  The captain of the mership Pasternak had been cursing sotto voce for a good hour, a steady stream of profanity that derived its considerable color and diversity from a long career as a mership officer. Not that cursing made the slightest difference, even though it did make him feel better. Fact was, he was well and truly screwed, and no amount of swearing would change that.

  With only a fraction of a second left to run before Pasternak was scheduled to leave pinchspace, the ship’s error-prone navigation AI lost lock, precipitating an emergency drop into normalspace. Now, rather than tying up alongside a planetary transfer station to off-load passengers and cargo, the ship was coasting through farspace at a leisurely 150,000 kph on vector for Ashakiran.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that Ashakiran was a depressingly long way away. It would be days before they decelerated into orbit around the second of the Federated Worlds’ home planets, and nothing would make it happen any sooner. The only way of getting home any faster would be to trust the navigation AI that had dropped Pasternak into the shit in the first place; since that risked emerging inside Ashakiran itself, he was not going to chance it.

  That left Pasternak a long way out in farspace, very much on its own. It was not a good feeling. He hoped that the armistice with the Hammers still held. Ashakiran Farspace Control, though sympathetic, refused his request that a Fed warship—ever hopeful, he had asked for at least three—be sent to escort him in. So there they sat in farspace, alone and defenseless should a wandering Hammer warship happen to pass by, a tiny bubble of life sitting at the heart of a sphere of electromagnetic radiation that expanded at the speed of light screaming “Defenseless mership; come and get me.” Anyone who imagined the Hammers would stick to the terms of the armistice when presented with a soft target like poor old Pasternak was a damn fool. They would have to be saints, and he had never met a Hammer who came even close.

  He hated the idea that he might end up having to beg some Hammer spacer to spare his ship thanks to a useless navigation AI. It would be just his luck if one of the worst trips in his long career ended in being captured by those bastards.

  He was not happy, his crew was not happy, and worst of all, the self-loading cargo—a bunch of arrogant, overbearing xenobiologists returning from a field trip to Kanaris-IV with a mountain of equipment and thousands of samples—were not happy. “Miserable jerks,�
� he mumbled under his breath. What else did they expect from a clapped-out mership? Why did the penny-pinching bozos think the Pasternak charter was so cheap in the first place?

  Pasternak’s captain fidgeted in his seat, trying hard not to think about how quickly the profit from the trip—never huge to start with—was disappearing. If there was any left at all by the end of the trip, it would be a miracle. Why did he bother? he wondered despondently while he made himself settle down to wait.

  Five minutes later, a wall of gamma radiation from two antimatter warheads fired hours earlier by a Hammer cruiser smashed into the aging mership’s hull. The radiation ripped through the mership and raced away toward Ashakiran planet. Less than a nanosecond later, the fusion plant driving Pasternak’s main propulsion lost containment; the hellish energy released by the fusion plant’s failure expanded in a huge blue-white ball of ionized gas.

  The ship had ceased to exist.

  Monday, October 23, 2400, UD

  FWSS Tufayl, in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

  Alone in his cabin, nursing a welcome coffee, Michael Helfort sat thinking about the day.

  He was drained of all energy and saturated by fatigue; only willpower kept his body and mind going. The week had been long, full of relentless, grinding pressure while he struggled to achieve the impossible. More than that, it had been a solitary week; all the old clichés about the loneliness of command were right on the money. Apart from Mother, there were few people he could talk openly to. The spacers seconded from fleet development to work on the dreadnought project were senior to him by ten years or more, and his peers—those who had escaped alive after the Hammers trashed much of the Fleet at Comdur—worked all the hours there were to keep as many ships operational as possible, so catching up for a quick drink was always difficult, more often than not impossible.

  Needless to say, Damishqui was equally hard to pin down. Michael had given up asking Anna when they might meet again. Anna being Anna, she had recovered from her injuries in record time; refusing an offer of extended sick leave, she was back onboard Damishqui, chasing Hammers somewhere in the deepspace approaches to al-Jaffar planet, a pointless mission with the fingerprints of nervous politicians all over it.

  To think, all he ever wanted to be was the command pilot of an assault lander. Climb aboard, strap in, go in hard, beat the crap out of the target of the day, come home, have a few beers with your mates, and talk shop for a few hours before turning in for a good night’s sleep. Simple, straightforward, the way life should be.

  Instead of which, here he sat, the biggest guinea pig of all time, the captain in command of the first ever dreadnought, a concept so new that the damn things had not even entered operational service yet.

  Frustrated, he exhaled sharply, the air hissing out past tightly clenched teeth. Admiral Jaruzelska made it all sound so simple. Appoint a bright, combat-proven officer in command of ten dreadnoughts and bingo! In place of a bunch of useless hulks, the Fleet had a squadron of ships, but without all the spacers needed to operate heavy cruisers.

  Michael had no problem with the theory. It was a good theory, a great theory. After losing thousands of spacers at the Battle of Comdur, Fleet had plenty of warships but not the spacers to crew them, so what else was it going to do?

  Problem was, the theory had proved difficult to put into practice. Morosely, Michael sipped his coffee. Knowing his luck, tomorrow would be every bit as tough as today had been—hour after hour in the sims having endless tactical problems thrown at him, problems that would stretch a battle fleet’s staff. He could only try his best, and as long as Jaruzelska had faith in him, he would keep doing everything in his power to make dreadnoughts work.

  Michael set his problems aside to check the broadcast news. It had been a while, and he wondered what the Hammers were up to. Closing his eyes, he watched the familiar Federated News Network icon pop into his neuronics.

  Five minutes later he shut the broadcast off, even more depressed, if that was possible. “Bloody Hammers,” he grumbled. After a long period of inactivity, the bastards had detonated more antimatter warheads in Fed nearspace, two for each home planet. Apart from the usual electromagnetic pulse and some spectacular atmospheric fireworks, there was no real harm done, of course—some mership wandering around in Ashakiran farspace had been the only casualty—but that was the whole point of the exercise. The Hammers’ message was brutally simple: Give them what they wanted at the negotiating table or they would reduce the Federation’s home planets to radioactive slag. And just to make sure even the most dim-witted Fed politician understood the message, a Hammer spokesman—some drone in the high-necked black uniform all Hammer officials favored—had repeated the threat almost word for word. Give us what we want or you and your planets will die, he had said.

  The threat was clear. Worse, despite all the posturing by the Feds’ so-called allies threatening the Hammers with all sorts of retribution if they did attack the Feds—none of which amounted to a row of beans; the rest of humanspace were allies in name only—he knew the Hammers were more than capable of carrying out their threat. After being soundly thrashed in three wars by the Feds, the Hammers had come out on top thanks to their antimatter warheads and the brutal defeat they had inflicted on the Fed Fleet at Comdur. So why would the Hammers give up?

  For the Hammers, success was at hand.

  If Rear Admiral Perkins had his way, and the dreadnoughts did not work …

  Friday, November 3, 2400, UD

  FWSS Achernar, Commitment planetary farspace

  The air was thick with tension, the eyes of all present locked on the massive holovid display that curtained the front bulkhead of Achernar’s combat information center.

  “Shiiiiit,” an anonymous voice said softly from the back of the compartment.

  “Quiet!” Achernar’s captain snapped. Boris Andermak was not enjoying this operation any more than his crew was. It had been an ordeal from the word go, and the sooner it finished, the happier he would be.

  The cause of all the angst filled the command holovid. Moving slowly from left to right was what any first-year cadet would identify readily as an Eaglehawk, a long-range, two-stage antistarship missile. It was an ugly brute of a thing, the backbone of the Hammer fleet’s offensive missile capability. Matte black, it was big, dwarfing the space-suited handlers shepherding it away from the Achernar, and—to Fed eyes at feast—crudely assembled and poorly finished. Not that it mattered how the thing looked. Eaglehawks might be slower and less capable than the Merlin ASSM, their Fed equivalent, but they worked and had killed more than their fair share of Fed ships over the years. The Eaglehawk was a nasty piece of ordnance and definitely not something to be taken for granted.

  And that was before the Hammers went and fitted antimatter warheads to the Eaglehawk, turning it into the weapon that had snuffed out much of the Fed space fleet at the Battle of Comdur. Achernar’s captain was not a praying man, but he prayed now. Antimatter was the stuff of nightmares, and here he sat, meters from enough of it to vaporize him and his ship.

  Andermak would be damn glad when the two Eaglehawk missiles he had been ordered to deploy cleared his ship and were on their way back to their makers. Watching the missiles, he wondered how they had fallen into Fleet’s hands; he guessed they were two duds left over from the Comdur attack. But, however it had found them, Fleet refused to let on. The fact they had them at all was classified so highly that he and his crew were scheduled for selective neurowiping the instant they returned home, a process Andermak was not looking forward to.

  The deployment took forever, but at long last it was done, the handlers back inboard safely. Achernar, sealed up, waited, ready to jump. The two Eaglehawk missiles hung in space, drifting away from the Achernar toward Commitment, home planet of the Hammer Worlds and seat of the Hammer of Kraa government. Slowly, the gap between the Achernar and the missiles opened. Andermak suppressed a shiver, not at all sure—despite all the assurances he had been given by the brass,
none of whom would be within light-years of the missiles when he sent them on their way—that the damn things would work.

  It took a long time, but finally the two Eaglehawks moved safely outside Achernar’s antimatter blast damage radius. Andermak allowed himself to relax just a fraction.

  “Ops.”

  “Sir?”

  “Send those evil sonsofbitches on their way.”

  “Sir. Stand by … missile launch sequence initiated, missiles nominal … missile first stages firing … missiles on their way, vectors nominal.”

  Stiff with nervous tension, Andermak watched while the two missiles streaked away toward Commitment on thin pillars of blue-white flame, more relieved than he cared to admit. “Thank goodness for that. My money was on them blowing us all to hell. Let’s go home.”

  “Amen to that, sir,” the Achernar’s operations officer replied with considerable and all too obvious feeling.

  Many hours after the Eaglehawk missiles had been sent on their way, the traps containing their antihydrogen payload collapsed, and the two warheads exploded in unison. In less than a billionth of a second, a bubble of gamma radiation expanded outward at the speed of light, its twin-peaked signature providing the Hammers with unarguable proof of matter/antimatter annihilation.

  The Hammers would have no option but to conclude that the Feds had antimatter weapons.

  Saturday, November 4, 2400, UD

  Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair

  “No! No, they can’t have,” Chief Councillor Polk croaked at last, his face ashen. “This cannot be. What …” His voice drained away to nothing; he sat paralyzed, staring wide-eyed at the black-uniformed man sitting opposite him.

  “Sir, I’m afraid it’s true,” Fleet Admiral Jorge said. He paused to steady himself. “Sir,” he continued, his voice as firm as his jangling nerves allowed, “the Feds might have antimatter weapons, but they are not our equals, not after Comdur. Their offensive capability has been all but destroyed, their—”