FWSS Ishaq, pinchspace
Ishaq’s flag combat data center was hushed as the opening moves of the COMEX played themselves out on huge holovids arrayed all around Captain Constanza and her command team. From the back of the compartment, Fellsworth and the rest of her directing staff watched the proceedings, a noticeably nervous Michael among them.
Fellsworth leaned over to him. “For Christ’s sake, Michael, relax,” she whispered. “It’s an exercise.”
“Wish it was only an exercise, sir,” he whispered back. He was more nervous than he’d expected. Putting together a COMEX was a serious intellectual challenge, and he did not want the work he and his team had done to be found wanting. More than that, he wanted Constanza to do well. He wanted her to make an obvious and public success of the COMEX. Sadly, he had a sinking feeling that he was going to be very, very disappointed.
Without being too obvious about it, Fellsworth had worked hard to position things for Constanza. She had made damn sure that the flood of background information setting up the COMEX’s political and military context would give Constanza every opportunity to see that this Hammer attack would not-could not-be like every other attack. The clues had been there-lots of them-but Constanza had refused to take them despite the best efforts of the rest of her command team to make her do that. Michael shook his head in frustration. To a spacer, Constanza’s team had drawn the right conclusions from the intelligence provided, but Constanza had not.
In the end, she had rejected the possibility that nukes might be used dirtside out of hand. It was “something the Hammers would never do,” she had declared forcefully. So that had been that. From that point on, her forces were always positioned to deal with a nonnuclear planetary attack. The possibility that she might be wrong had no place in her thinking. Sadly, that meant that there was little in the way of fallback planning. Worst of all, to allow her ships to engage the attackers right down to the edge of Terranova’s atmosphere, the bulk of her long-range Merlin missiles, the backbone of any FedWorld space fleet, would not be nuclear-armed.
In the absence of any nuclear threat, Constanza had adopted what space warfare strategists called the shell. She withdrew the bulk of her forces to be close to Terranova in planetary nearspace, concentrating her ships where they could best support one another. Out deep along the most likely attack vectors were smaller groups of ships made up of heavy escorts with a scattering of light escorts to fill in the numbers. Constanza was hoping to get lucky. If she did, the escorts would get close enough to ambush the Hammers as they dropped out of pinchspace. Luck was not all she was relying on, though. Constanza would use a far-flung network of remote sensors to give her enough warning to allow her to move her ships within the shell around Terranova to meet the oncoming attacks head on. All standard stuff and fine so long as one was facing a standard attack.
Oh, well, Michael thought resignedly, Fellsworth and the warfare training department had done their best. Now it was up to Constanza.
All of a sudden, things began to happen, and fast.
“Command, sensors.”
“Command.”
“Multiple positive gravitronics intercepts, Sector 2. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector appears nominal for grazing run past Terranova.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael watched, fascinated. Constanza and her team began the intricate game of three-dimensional chess that was space warfare. She would assume this first attack was not the major attack. Most likely, the ships would drop and unload every piece of ordnance they could, their fire control solutions based on targeting data acquired from surveillance drones loitering out in farspace. Then, before the forces converging on them got close enough to pose a problem, the attackers would jump back into pinchspace. Standard operating procedure for a Hammer attack and intended to sound out the opposition, so no surprises there. Chief Ichiro had pointed out that one of the great weaknesses of the Hammer was its military commanders’ fondness for standard operating procedures, an assumption that Constanza had been more than happy to accept without challenge.
“Command, sensors. Multiple ship drops Sector 2, range 250,000 kilometers. Thirty-five ships. Stand by identification.”
Within seconds, sensor AIs on hundreds of FedWorld ships began turning terabytes of raw data vacuumed out of space by their active and passive sensors into useful tactical data. It was a quick process; the result was an ugly mass of bright red vectors painted on the flag combat data center holovids. The Hammer attack quickly took shape; feverishly, Constanza and her team worked to make sure Ishaq’s fleet battle management AI had the situation under control. Orders poured out across laser tightbeam tactical networks to move ships into position, coordinate missile and rail-gun salvos, integrate radar and laser jamming, and manage the flood of decoys on their way to baffle and confuse the incoming Hammers.
“Command, sensors. Multiple positive gravitronics intercepts, Sector 3. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector is nominal for grazing run past Terranova.”
Michael could almost see Constanza relax.
Hammer standard operating procedures would have this as the main attack, though one of their more creative commanders might have thrown in a few more diversionary attacks to keep the opposition under pressure and off balance. So far, Constanza had not gone too far wrong. For once, her usual urge to override her subordinate commanders seemed well under control, and, with the usual chivvying all AIs needed to get it right, the fleet battle management AI had the right ships going to the right places to deal with the two attacks now driving hard toward Terranova.
“Command, sensors. Multiple ship drops Sector 3, range 260,000 kilometers. Seventy-five ships. Stand by identification.”
By then, Constanza’s body language was easy to read. “This has to be it,” she announced confidently to one of her team as the holovids arrayed around the combat information center blossomed with a new set of red vectors. “This is the primary attack.”
Ship sensors were tracking upward of a hundred Hammer ships as they ran planetward, wave after wave of missiles and decoys behind walls of rail-gun slugs driving on ahead. Their ceramsteel armor was beginning to boil off as FedWorld antistarship lasers flayed their hulls.
In response, Ishaq’s external holocams showed the hundreds of FedWorld Merlin long-range heavy missiles on their way to meet the attackers, the mass of searingly white-bright shafts of fire driving the Merlins onward, punctured by yellow-red blooms of ionized gas as Hammer lasers and area defense missiles began to rip missiles out of space. Closer in, Hammer missiles began to die, too, as Fed missiles started to chop the Hammer attack to pieces.
Slowly the tide began to swing in favor of the Feds. Missiles and rail-gun salvos clawed their way through the storm of defensive fire put up by the Hammer ships. The Hammer’s close-in defenses-short-range missiles, antimissile lasers, and chain guns-were being overwhelmed by a combination of speed and coordination overlaid by carefully crafted jamming and spoofing to blind and confuse them.
Then the Hammers began to lose ships. The first to go was a Jackson class light cruiser. A single Merlin missile tore a gaping hole in the ship’s ceramsteel armor left damaged by an earlier rail-gun salvo, the warhead’s plasma jet striking deep to reach a fusion power generator. Milliseconds later, the generator lost containment. Half a second after that, the hull gave way under the enormous pressure and the aft end of the ship blew wide open, spewing ice-crystal clouds out into the vacuum of space. The ship was dying now. As it died, it began to spit lifepods in all directions.
More Hammer ships began to die as the Fed response ground the Hammer attack into ionized gas, the counterattack relentless. The space around the Hammers became a mass of shattered ships surrounded by lifepods, like so many fireflies with their double-pulsed orange strobes. Constanza could not contain herself. Getting out of her chair, she overrode the fleet battle management AI. “Too cautious,” she muttered, “too damn cautious. Time to go in hard for the kill.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, without any attempt to consult her team or the battle management AI, she threw her reserves in the attack and ordered the last of her heavy units to engage. Her fist punched the air. Every shred of body language betrayed her conviction that this was the time to destroy the Hammer attack.
Michael leaned across to Fellsworth. “Even though she doesn’t know what we know, surely that’s a mistake, sir? She’s committed all the forces she needed to deal with the Hammer attack. There’s no need to assign more. Now she’s got very little in reserve.”
Fellsworth nodded, her face impassive.
With her remaining heavy cruisers accelerating hard toward the incoming Hammers, the sensor management center crashed Constanza’s party.
“Command, sensors. Multiple positive gravitronics intercepts, Sector 6. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector is nominal for grazing run past Terranova.”
Constanza stiffened. “Sensors. Confirm Sector 6.”
“Confirmed. Sector 6.”
Constanza shifted to a private circuit. Michael would have to access the voicecomm datalogs after the COMEX to see what was said, but it was clear from the command team’s body language that nobody could work out what the new attack meant. Coming from below Terranova’s orbital plane, it was developing at right angles to the attacks that were in progress. Confusingly, whatever this attack was, it was not consistent with normal Hammer operating procedures.
Constanza had a big problem. She had committed her reserves to meet an attack that already had been well contained. Now those forces were heavily engaged, pinned down by the incoming Hammer ships, and unable to disengage without presenting their relatively thin stern and flank armor to Hammer missile, rail-gun, and laser attack. Constanza did what she could. She threw the last of her ships, none of them heavier than a light escort, into the breach, with the fleet battle management AI pumping out the orders to position her limited assets to meet the new attack. Time to start praying, Michael thought.
“Command, sensors. Multiple ship drops Sector 6, range 160,000 kilometers. Forty-five ships. Stand by identification.”
Constanza’s confusion visibly deepened. Michael sympathized. Forty-five ships was too small a number for a primary attack. If this was not the primary attack, what was the point of another diversion? The main attack was well developed already. More confusing still was the fact that by dropping into Terranova’s gravity well only 200,000 kilometers out, those ships soon would be inside the 150,000-kilometer threshold for a jump back into pinchspace. Unless they jumped inside twenty minutes or so, they would be in Terranova nearspace for at least two hours, more than enough time for them to be mopped up.
None of it made any sense to Ishaq’s command team, and Michael watched with a heavy heart as they began to thrash around looking for answers.
Then the game changed. The Hammer went nuclear.
Constanza’s face turned ash-gray as she watched her defense of Terranova fall apart. Earlier, her task force AI had highlighted the fact that a surprisingly large number of the Hammer’s Eaglehawk missiles seemed to be going nowhere in particular. A quick discussion among the command team had put it down to poor Hammer technology. One even had gone so far as to say that the useless pricks could not hit a barn door at five paces. Constanza had made her decision. Missiles without targets were missiles without a job to do, so they were to be ignored. And they were; the missiles were left untouched to continue their drive toward Terranova.
It soon became clear that the Hammer’s missiles were doing exactly what was asked of them. One by one in blindingly quick succession, the multimegaton fusion warheads fitted to the missiles detonated. In seconds, an immense wall of gamma radiation was expanding toward Terranova. Ishaq’s alarms screeched as sensor after sensor shut down to minimize damage from the electromagnetic pulse that washed over the Fed ships.
The combat information center went quiet as alarms were muted. “Oh shit,” Constanza muttered, her voice hoarse with stress, before her training kicked in, driving her into a desperate attempt to cope with a situation that was past saving.
Moments later, it was the turn of the third and last wave of Hammer ships to fire. Their first salvo destroyed Terranova’s six space battle stations. The huge mass, immensely thick armor, and multilayered missile and laser defenses of the stations were no match for an overwhelming flood of hardened fusion warheads detonating in waves until the stations had been irradiated into blackened submission. Terranova stood alone, and only ground-based antiballistic missiles and satellite-mounted lasers were standing in the way of the oncoming Hammer attack.
With Terranova’s space battle stations silenced, the Hammer ships launched a second salvo, their hybrid solid fuel/pinchspace generator engines accelerating the missiles at more than 200 g. Seconds later, thousands of Eaglehawk missiles dropped onto Terranova at more than a million kph. Seconds before they were ripped apart by Terranova’s upper atmosphere, fusion warheads began to explode directly over Terranova’s major cities. Two minutes later a third salvo followed. Two minutes after that, a fourth. Then a fifth. Finally the sixth, seventh, and eighth salvos were on their way, but this time the missiles had been throttled right back to ensure that they could survive entry into Terranova’s atmosphere. These missiles would be ground bursts targeted on every known high-value target on Terranova, starting with Foundation, its capital. A handful of missiles were kept back until the end. Their target was Terranova’s oceans. The missiles plunged deep into the sea before detonating to drive tsunamis into Terranova’s low-lying coasts and columns of ionized, superheated steam high into the air.
Two minutes before they would be locked into Terranova’s gravity well, the Hammer ships, swatting aside the incoming missile and rail-gun attacks with contemptuous ease, jumped.
It had taken less than twenty minutes to destroy an entire planet and most of the ships tasked with its defense. Terranova no longer was habitable by humans or by any other species known to humankind. Now it was a shattered, charred, radioactive ruin of a planet. Its atmosphere was a seething, roiling mass of flame-shot cloud punctured by huge black hammerheads climbing out of the murk into nearspace as ground bursts drove millions of tons of earth and water kilometers into the air.
Terranova was finished.
Leaving the shattered wrecks of their casualties behind, surrounded by swarms of lifepods, the rest of the Hammer ships jumped out of Terranova nearspace. There was a long, long silence as every spacer in the combat information center absorbed the awful sight of Terranova writhing in agony, a planet dying a slow and terrible death. “Holy Mother,” Michael muttered. Even though it was only a simulation, he felt sick.
The soft voice of the AI running the COMEX broke the silence with the pointless observation that the exercise was over.
Flanked on either side by Ishaq’s executive officer, Commander Morrissen, and the head of the warfare department, Commander Pasquale, Fellsworth stood rock solid. Her eyes were focused on the bulkhead as a ranting, nearly demented Constanza, her face red with anger, spittle-flecked lips working furiously, struggled to get her words out.
“How dare you? How dare you humiliate me like that! By God, Fellsworth, I’m going to break you for this; you can depend on it. And I know it’s not only you. I know you had that arrogant, self-serving shit Helfort do the legwork. That makes it a conspiracy, Fellsworth,” she screeched furiously, “a conspiracy against your legally appointed captain. I can put you away for twenty years and that little worm Helfort and the rest of your lickspittle team if I want.”
“Sir-”
The executive officer’s attempt to intervene was stillborn; Constanza cut him off with an angry wave of the arm. “No, Commander Morrissen. I do not want to hear from you. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that you’re part of this.”
She turned back to Fellsworth. “Well, it won’t work. I’m taking formal action against you, Fellsworth. Conspiracy. I’m charging you with conspiracy to mutiny. That’ll do it. You are confined to your cabin. Morrissen, get the provost marshal in here. I want the ship to see this woman in custody. I want them to see what happens to people who conspire against me.”
“Sir!” The executive officer’s voice was thick with protest.
“Be quiet, Morrissen! I won’t tell you again.”
“No, sir, I will not be quiet,” the executive officer replied firmly. “I should not have to remind you that under Fleet regulations I have a duty to speak.”
“Sir!” Commander Pasquale waded into the fray. Constanza’s appalling behavior-her intemperate language, her arrogant disregard for subordinates, her refusal to take counsel-went against everything she believed in. “I must tell you, sir,” she protested, “that you have no choice but to hear Commander Morrissen out. Fleet regu-”
Constanza’s face was a cruelly contorted mask of vicious, uncontrolled anger. “Shut the fuck up, Commander Pasquale, or I’ll have you arrested as well.”
Pasquale could only gape at Constanza in amazement. Captains did not swear at commanders-well, not in front of witnesses at any rate.
The executive officer put his hand on Pasquale’s arm; he shook his head. This was his fight. Morrissen tried again. “Sir, I really must-”
One last thin shred of sanity forced Constanza to take control of herself. “Go on, then. If you must,” she muttered bad-temperedly.
“Sir. I have to tell you you are making a very serious mistake. An officer who does her duty cannot be conspiring to mutiny. Fellsworth was doing her duty, and I will attest to that fact when asked.”
“So will I, sir,” Pasquale interjected.
The executive officer plowed on. He wished Pasquale would stay out of it. A first-shot commander, Pasquale was young, talented, and ambitious. She had a career ahead of her; as for him, he was beginning to be pretty damn sure he did not. “So, under the circumstances, I think-”
Constanza lost it. In seconds, she was incandescent with rage; her voice crackled with uncontrolled fury. “Think! Think? I don’t care what you think, Morrissen. I don’t give a damn what you think.” She paused for a second, noticeably struggling to get her voice under control. “Listen to me, all of you. . ah, wait!”
The door opened to admit Lieutenant Armstrong, Ishaq’s provost marshal.
“Armstrong!”
Armstrong, a thin, wiry man with the watchful eyes of a policeman, looked puzzled. Something bad was happening here, that much was obvious, but it was clear he had no idea what. “You wanted me, sir?”
Constanza waved him in. “I do. First, I want you to witness the order I am about to give.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” She turned back to look her second in command right in the eye. “Commander Morrissen! I am giving you a direct order to take Lieutenant Commander Fellsworth here into custody pending the completion of investigations into the charges I will be laying against her. She is to be confined to her cabin under close arrest until further notice. Now, Commander, is there any part of that order you did not understand?”
Morrissen shook his head; he knew when he was beaten.
“No, sir. I understand,” he muttered unhappily.
“Good,” Constanza crowed triumphantly. “Now that that’s out of the way, I am also giving you a direct order to take Junior Lieutenant Helfort into close custody. He is to be confined to his cabin under guard until further notice. Now, Commander,” she declared looking right into his eyes. “Did you understand that?”
“I understood the order, sir,” Morrissen replied dejectedly. This was turning into a clusterfuck of serious proportions, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“Pleased to hear it. So good of you to comply.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “Now get on with it. Dismissed!”
Morrissen tried one more time. Pasquale tried one more time. Their protests were to no avail as Armstrong took Fellsworth by the arm and led her out of the captain’s office.
Michael was in the wardroom, deep in the middle of a subdued discussion of the morning’s extraordinary events with Aaron Stone, when a quiet voice interrupted.
“Helfort. Come with me.” It was the provost marshal. The man’s tone was quiet but firm.
“Yes, sir. What’s up?” Michael asked, climbing to his feet.
“You’ll find out. Come on, let’s go.”
When they left the wardroom, one of Ishaq’s marines was waiting outside, the man falling in behind them as they made their way up two decks to the ship’s regulating office. When they got there, Armstrong waved Michael into his office, telling the marine to wait outside.
“Sit!”
Armstrong looked right at Michael while he gathered his thoughts. He had been a cop for a long time. He had more experience than he cared to think about, and every bit of that experience argued that the business at hand was a goldplated crock of shit. Sadly, for the moment at least, his hands were tied. There was a process to follow, even if that meant trampling all over two officers who by all accounts had always tried to do their duty and-in Helfort’s case at least-had the scars to prove it.
“Right, then.” Armstrong’s voice was flat, unemotional. “I’m going to comm you a document. It’s a preliminary charge sheet alleging that you and Lieutenant Commander Fellsworth entered into a conspiracy to mutiny.”
Michael looked stunned. “What?” he finally stammered. “Mutiny? I don’t understand.”
“Just read the charge sheet, Helfort.”
Minutes later, Michael looked up, his pain and confusion plain to see. “Sir,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve read this thing five times over, and it still makes no sense, none at all. How can developing a COMEX be construed as mutiny? This is a complete load of crap-”
Armstrong’s hand went up, stopping him in his tracks. “Now’s not the time to respond, so-”
“Sir!” Michael protested. “It’s wrong. It’s-”
“Stop right now! Goddamn it, Helfort! That’s an order!” Armstrong barked. His voice softened as he continued. “Now. Listen to me. This is what’s going to happen. You’ll be confined to your cabin until further notice. You’ll eat there, have an hour’s exercise twice a day under escort, and be able to have visitors at my discretion. Maximum two at any one time. The ship’s legal AI will act as the accused’s friend, and let me tell you it will do a better job of it than anyone I know, so don’t waste your time looking for any amateur lawyers on board. When I have the brief of evidence, I’ll pass that to the AI, and it’ll tell you what it thinks of the case against you.” And what a no-brainer that’ll be, Armstrong thought savagely.
Michael sat openmouthed, obviously not taking any of it in. Armstrong felt for him. The whole business must be like a bad dream, some dreadful black comedy, a bizarre tale of a mad captain crossing swords with a young officer too dumb not to know when to keep his head down.
“Helfort! Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Hmm,” Armstrong grunted. “Okay. Where was I? Oh, yes. Accused’s friend, use the legal AI, brief of evidence. I think that covers it all, so that’s it for now. Any questions?”
“Fellsworth, sir. Has she been charged, too?”
“She has.”
“Can I see her?”
“No, not at the moment. If I decide both cases can be dealt with jointly, you will. Be patient.”
“Not much choice there, then, sir,” Michael muttered with a twisted half smile.
“No, I suppose not. Right, let’s get you to your cabin. I’ve got work to do. Lance Corporal Johannsen!”