FWSS
Reckless,
Comdur nearspace
“Captain, sir.”
“Yes, Jayla?”
“The up-shuttle’s just docked. The self-loading cargo’s big on green shipsuits, so I think Lieutenant Kallewi and his marines have arrived … finally.”
Michael grinned. “Pleased to hear it. It’s about time. I hope we don’t ever need them, but it’ll be good to have them just in case. Tell Kallewi I’d like to see him when he has dumped his kit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When are we embarking the demolition charges?” “The special weapons security group has just confirmed we’ll have them this afternoon: 15:00 sharp.”
“Okay.”
Five minutes after Michael dropped the com with his executive officer, there was a soft knock on his door.
“Come!”
It was Kallewi. Michael stood up to shake hands, the marine’s thickset frame towering over him. Marines came in one of two equally lethal models: tall and heavily muscled or small and wiry. Kallewi was definitely one of the former.
“Have a seat,” Michael said, “and welcome to Reckless. It’s Janos, isn’t it?”
“It is, sir.”
“Right, Janos. Anything I need to know?”
“No, sir. I’ve got a full team, thirty regular marines augmented by an assault demolition team. We were picked because we’ve just completed a month’s assault training together on the close-quarter combat ranges on Comdur.”
“Zero g and full grav?”
“Both, sir. And they let us cook off an obsolete demolition charge on one of the deepspace firing ranges. An old Mark 34. Impressive.”
“A Mark 34? What’s that? Two megatons?”
“Shade under, 1.7. We have the Mark 40 now, 2.1-megaton yield. Big enough to give the Hammers a headache.”
“I’d say so. Anything you need to know?”
“Well, actually, sir, there is. All we were told was to report onboard Reckless. I’ve asked why, what our tasking was, more than once, but I never did find anyone authorized … or willing … to answer the question.”
Shocked, Michael felt his face twisting into a frown. “Are you telling me you don’t know why you’re here?”
“Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Apart from the obvious-that something seriously big involving the Hammers is going down-no, we don’t know.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Janos. Let me fix that. Operation Opera is why you’re here. We will be part of Battle Fleet Lima under the command of Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, and we are going to kick the Hammers … hard.”
Kallewi smiled, a thin, hungry smile that made Michael glad the marine was on his side. “I’ll have some of that, sir.”
“Okay. Let me run you through the operation as it stands at the moment.” He put a schematic summarizing the operation onto the holovid screen that dominated an entire bulkhead of his day cabin. “Here’s the target. It’s an asteroid right in the middle of a shit-awful mess of gravitational rips called Devastation Reef; we don’t know what the Hammers call it, but it’s where the Kraa-loving bastards manufacture the antimatter in their missile warheads.”
“Oh, shit,” Kallewi hissed through clenched teeth, visibly shocked. “I guessed we were getting into something important, but nothing quite that big. Hell, that’s big.” The marine sounded stunned.
“It is, and they don’t come much bigger. Let me run you through the time line and explain why we might need marine assault demolition teams.”
An hour later, a subdued Kallewi shook his head. “I’ve been a marine for a while, but I have not seen anything like this. Tell you what, sir. It’s going to be a pig. A real pig.”
“Now that you know what you’re in for, what else can I tell you?”
“The layout of the Hammer plant would be nice, sir.”
“I wish,” Michael said. “I’ve stopped asking, but the last time I did, I was told the intelligence people were being flogged hard to get something. I’ve not seen anything yet. It’s no comfort, but I’m sure the admiral is frustrated-everyone is-that she doesn’t actually know what lies underneath the surface of the asteroid. As things stand, if your team ends up with the prickly end of the pineapple, you’ll have to find your own way in.”
“I’m sure we’ll manage,” Kallewi said. “We’ll have three demolition charges. Ideally, we should get them close enough to the fusion plants and hope they trigger loss of containment. That’s off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure that’s how we’ll have to do the job. Can you leave that with me, sir? I’ll get my team onto the problem right away. I should have a first cut plan within, ah … twenty-four hours. Absent any decent intelligence, it’ll be short on detail, but we’ll do our best. That okay, sir?”
“That’ll be good. I’ll com the last brief I received from the admiral’s staff to you: how the plant might be laid out and so on. You can use that for your training sims.”
“Thanks.”
“And I’d like to meet your team. Set up a time with the XO and let me know.”
“Will do, sir.”
Anger had been welling up inside Michael, and by the time Kallewi left his day cabin, he was seething. Buried under a mountain of more pressing matters, he had not spent much time worrying about the job Kallewi might have to do if Assault Group failed to make it through to the antimatter plant. The arrival of Kallewi and his marines had changed all that, and now he smelled a rat, a big smelly one. How the hell had three marine assault demotition teams been assigned to the dreadnought force but not told why? How could Perkins’s precious Assault Group ever destroy the antimatter plant when they had no idea what it looked like?
It made no sense at all. Unless …
Perkins. It had to be Perkins. The man refused to believe that the dreadnoughts might have to finish the job of destroying the Hammer antimatter plant, to the point where he had decided there was no reason to brief the marines who would take over if Perkins’s ships failed.
Michael commed Jaruzelska’s chief of staff. He needed to know if anything important was being kept back.
Four hours later, Michael stared grim-faced at the information he had just received from Captain Tuukkanen under cover of a personal note apologizing for not supplying the material earlier. An unfortunate oversight by Assault Group’s planning team, Jaruzelska’s chief of staff said, for which he apologized.
Unfortunate oversight, like hell, Michael thought. Yet more deviousness from Rear Admiral Perkins, most likely. Michael shook his head in disbelief. The bloody man still acted as though Assault Group would get through to the Hammer antimatter plant no matter what. Whose side was Tuukkanen on, for heaven’s sake? A good chief of staff was supposed to stop bullshit like this, to make sure the thousands of pieces that made up the Operation Opera jigsaw fit seamlessly together.
He stared at the intelligence he had been sent. It was priceless. Far from having no idea how the Hammer plant might be laid out, he was looking at schematics showing the maze of tunnels the Hammers had carved out deep below the surface of Mathuli-4451. The drawings had sat buried in the bowels of the intelligence ministry for a decade or more until a persistent analyst with a good memory dug them out. How the Federation had laid its hands on the schematics in the first place, he would never know, but looking at them, he would have bet good money on them coming from the hard-rock tunneling contractors used for the job. Not that it mattered how they had fallen into Fed hands. They had, and that meant Kallewi would have some idea at least of where he had to go.
The schematics were not everything Kallewi would have wanted: too little detail. They did not show what each tunnel was used for, nor was there anything showing what equipment went where, and nowhere was there even the smallest hint that an antimatter plant would occupy the tunnels. They described the place only as Deepspace Support Facility 27, a generic title that offered no clues to its real purpose. The intelligence analyst-in Michael’s opinion, the man should get a medal-only knew he had the right place because the diameter of the asteroid shown on the drawings matched the diameter of Mathuli-4451 precisely.
Still angry, still wondering what the hell Perkins was up to, still wondering why Tuukkanen had not picked this one up earlier, Michael commed Kallewi to come to his cabin. The man would be relieved to know his marines would not have to go in blind, though he might be forgiven for wondering just what sort of lying clowns Vice Admiral Jaruzelska had doing the detailed planning for Operation Opera.
He was beginning to wonder, too.