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 cliches 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 …