FWSS Adamant, in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base
Accompanied by Duricek and Bienefelt, Michael walked the length and breadth of his new command. The feeling of loss was unnerving. The Adamant’s huge mass was echoingly empty, the only sound the steady hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning system.
He found it all deeply unsettling.
When the quantum traps that deflected radiation away from the crew had collapsed under the enormous wall of gamma radiation, the ship had been completely sterilized, her crew condemned to months in regen to repair the massive damage that had been inflicted on them. Not a single spacer or marine had escaped serious injury; many would never recover fully. Some had already died, and more would follow.
If not for the AIs embedded in every system on board, their massively redundant optronics completely immune to the effects of gamma or any other form of radiation, the Adamant would have been a lump of ceramsteel wrapped around a pressure hull protecting a lot of useless air-filled spaces. But Adamant was no empty shell. Apart from the fact that she had no crew, Adamant was a fully mission-capable ship.
Michael left the forward compartments for last. It was there that Adamant had suffered most of her losses. When the first spike of gamma radiation had dumped huge amounts of energy into the ship’s bow armor in less than a billion billionth of a second, an impulse shock wave had smashed back through the armor and into the ship’s inner hull. Thousands of those shock waves had hit the Adamant in a tiny fraction of a second. In theory, the heavy-duty elastomeric mountings anchoring the ship’s armor to the inner titanium pressure hull should have protected the crew from external shock. But under the relentless hammering of successive waves of gamma radiation, the overloaded shock mountings had failed, allowing shock waves to jump into the pressure hull, spalling off lethal shards of metal. Most of the shards had been trapped by the ship’s last line of defense-a Kevlar splinter mat bonded directly to the pressure hull-but not all. By the time the Hammer attack was over, far too many of Adamant’s crew were dead, their combat space suits no match for shards of highvelocity razor-sharp metal.
Michael followed Duricek and Bienefelt as they made their way forward along the cruiser’s central passageway, past the missile batteries, and into the forward rail-gun control room. Michael stifled a shocked gasp as he walked through the airtight door. The compartment was straight out of a horror vid. The cleanup crews and their bots had done their best, but they had a lot of ships to deal with; the aftereffects of the Hammer attack were still plain to see. Every surface was covered in a grisly mix of dried blood and pieces of metal-shredded space suits, all liberally dusted with plasfiber fragments torn from shattered panels and cabinets, bulkheads gouged deep by metal splinters. The three spacers stood in shock.
Bienefelt broke the awful silence. “Mother of God,” she whispered.
“Wasn’t here to look after these poor bastards. Wish she had been.” Michael’s face was grim, white with shock. He checked the ship’s AI. Nineteen dead in this compartment alone. “That’ll do. Matti.”
“Sir?”
“All the compartments like this. Get the bots back in. Let’s see if we can do a better job. Use your spacers, too.”
“Yes, sir,” Bienefelt replied, her normal ebullience buried for the moment.
Michael turned to Duricek. “Chief.”
“Yes?”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. He had not missed the calculated insult. Duricek might be senior to him, but Michael held a warrant from the president appointing him captain in command of Adamant. Duricek would regret ignoring that simple fact, but this was not the time.
“When will the systems status report be ready?” he asked calmly.
“Another hour or so.” Duricek’s casual tone made it clear that as far as he was concerned, it did not matter when the systems status report would be finished.
Michael’s voice hardened. “I’m sorry, Chief. That won’t do. Give me a specific time I can work with.”
A tiny grain of common sense somewhere deep inside Duricek must have stopped a smart-ass response in its tracks. “Er, right. I’ll have it for you in two hours,” he mumbled sulkily.
Michael turned to Bienefelt, his face a stony mask. Standing in a compartment drenched in the blood of good spacers, he was in no mood to be jerked around by a pompous, selfimportant dickhead like Duricek. “On you go, Petty Officer Bienefelt. Get things moving. I can see no reason why we can’t depart on schedule, but I’ll make that decision once Lieutenant Duricek and I are happy with the state of the ship’s systems.”
Bienefelt’s face was impressively impassive. “Sir.”
Michael waited until Bienefelt had gone before turning back to Duricek. “Chief, I’m only going to say this once, so I strongly suggest you pay attention. You may be senior to me in rank, but you are not senior to me by appointment. If you do not show me the respect due by right to every captain in command, I will have you charged. I will not tolerate insubordination. If you have a problem with anything I say or do, let me know, and we’ll sort it out in private. In the meantime, you will oblige me by offering the captain in command the proper courtesies. Is that clear?”
Duricek’s face twitched as fear and anger wrestled for control, his mouth opening and shutting as he tried to decide what to say.
“Well?” Michael barked, making him jump.
“Yes, sir,” Duricek muttered sullenly.
“Good. Get that status report done. We’ll reconvene in two hours to go through it. I need to know exactly how fifteen of us are going to operate this bloody great big ship safely.”
Duricek gave a quick nod. He left without another word.
What a jerk, Michael thought as he watched the man go.
He had enough to worry about without massaging the ego of some pompous oaf. Why had Lenski given him Duricek to be his chief? She must have known the two of them did not get along.
Michael had to keep reminding himself that he was the captain of a real live FedWorld Space Fleet light cruiser. He still had trouble getting his mind around the idea. Junior Lieutenant Michael Wallace Helfort, captain in command, Federated Worlds Warship Adamant. It sounded faintly ludicrous. He felt faintly ludicrous.
Michael sat alone, the only occupant of the Adamant’s enormous combat information center, as the ship accelerated slowly out of Comdur nearspace and past what was left of the gamma radiation-shattered wreckage of Comdur’s elaborate defenses. If all went well, they would jump in a few hours for the five-hour transit to Terranova. Allow four or so hours to decelerate in-system, an hour to berth in the warship maintenance yards of Karlovic Heavy Industries, another hour to hand over the ship, and the job would be done. Sixteen hours, tops. Some command, he thought. Talk about short and sweet. He stretched in a vain attempt to get the ache out of his back.
“Command, engineering.” Duricek was unable to conceal the resentment in his voice.
“Go ahead, Chief,” Michael replied, careful to keep his voice neutral.
“Sir. Main engines are nominal. Pinchspace jump generators are on line. Ship’s mass distribution model is nominal. All other systems are nominal. Confirm we are good to jump.”
Better, Michael thought. He did not care for the resentful overtones, but it could have been worse.
“Command, roger. Understand we are good to jump.”
“I’ll be here in propulsion control if you need me, sir.”
“Thanks, Chief. Changing the subject, did you resolve that problem with Weapons Power Foxtrot? God knows, I hope it’s the last system we need, but it would be good to have one hundred percent weapons availability.”
“The lads are working on it, sir. We found a damaged mount, so I think it’s a shock problem. There seems to be a misalignment somewhere. I’m hoping the system AI can work out a way around it because we can’t open it up to have a look. At this stage, we don’t know when or even if we can get it back online.”
Michael could not help smiling. Christ, the man was obvious, his tone making it abundantly clear that he thought worrying about one of the fusion plants that provided power to the Adamant’s after weapons systems was a completely pointless exercise. “Okay. Keep me posted on that one. I want it back if at all possible.”
“Sir.”
Michael settled back. In truth, he was captain in name only. The Adamant and all her systems were in the hands of scores of embedded AIs, all working under the control of the ship’s master AI. On a small ship like Eridani, the master AI would be called Mother. On a ship this size, calling the AI Mother somehow did not seem proper, even if the voice of Adamant’s AIs was, as tradition dictated, that of a middle-aged woman. So Michael stuck to the official title, AI Primary or simply Prime, cold and sterile though it was.
So far, Prime was doing it right. Adamant was on vector, and every system she needed to make the pinchspace transit to Terranova was online and nominal. He had rerun the pinchspace calculations off-line; he was pleased to see that his solution and Prime’s agreed to the required number of significant figures.
Michael settled back and closed his eyes, his neuronics putting him right at the heart of the Adamant to the point where he became one with the ship: His human senses were replaced by Adamant’s massive arrays of active and passive sensors reaching out millions of kilometers into space.
It was an awesome feeling.
With only an hour left before they dropped into Terranovan nearspace, the strident ringing of a primary systems alarm jolted Michael upright.
“Prime! Update.”
“Command, Prime. We have an intermittent failure reported by the navigation AI. We’re getting an unstable pinchspace vector solution. I’m working on the problem and will report back.”
Michael’s hands were suddenly damp. If the navigation AI was not able to keep Adamant on the right vector through the unstable n-dimensional probability field that made up pinchspace, things could get bad. His stomach did a quick backflip. He was in no mood to spend the rest of eternity wandering lost and alone somewhere in pinchspace or, if he took the chance and did a blind drop, spending the rest of eternity lost somewhere in normalspace hundreds of light-years from the rest of humankind, unable to jump back to civilization.
Bienefelt appeared from nowhere. “What’s up, sir?”
“Not sure, Matti. Problem with the navigation AI. Working on it.”
Matti looked worried. “Shit.”
“Shit is right. Let the team know I’ll brief them when I know something definite. I need to talk to the Chief.”
Matti nodded as Michael commed Duricek. His conversation was short and to the point because Duricek and his technicians could do nothing to solve the problem.
“Command, Prime.”
“This better be good,” Michael muttered. “Command.”
“I’ve been able to reduce the problem but not eliminate it. It seems to be coming from problems with the external pinchspace field sensors; there’s instability in the drift compensators. Most likely radiation damage.”
“The sensors. Anything we can do?”
“No. That’s a yard job.”
“So what’s it all mean?”
“Our ability to make an accurate drop out of pinchspace has been severely degraded, but not fatally so.”
“Okay, Prime. I want a new drop position to make absolutely sure we don’t come out of pinchspace inside Terra-nova.”
“Understood. Stand by. . position computed and uploaded.”
Michael checked and rechecked Prime’s new drop point. It might be a long way out from Terranova, but at least there was no chance that they would end up trying to share normalspace with something big and heavy. Like a planet.
“Revised drop position command approved.” It would be a pain in the ass flogging their way back in normalspace, but at least they would get back alive with Adamant intact. “All stations, this is command. We’ll be dropping shortly. As you know, we’ve had a small problem with the navigation AI, but Prime says she’s got it under control. To make sure we don’t hit anything, we’ll be dropping a long way out from Terra-nova, so we’ll be late getting to the pub tonight, guys. Sorry about that. Command out.”
Michael watched anxiously as the minutes to the drop ran off with excruciating slowness, but whatever Prime had done to the navigation AI seemed to be holding up. With ten minutes to go, Michael commed Bienefelt to come to the combat information center. The more he thought about dropping well out into Terranovan farspace, the more he realized how alone the Adamant would be, how far from help if things went wrong.
“Sir?”
“Matti. Get your guys together. We’re going to be hanging around out in deepspace for a long time. If we run into anything, we’re going to have to deal with it on our own. So get them up here. I want to know what’s going on. That means running full threat and command plots, and I would rather not leave Prime doing the job on its own. Any of them have sensor training?”
Bienefelt checked her neuronics. She nodded. “Yes. One gravitronics, one radar, a couple of electronic warfare types. None current, though.”
“Better than nothing. Put the rest on the holocams. Get ’em all up here; find them somewhere to sit. When you’ve done that, I want you next to me. Two pairs of eyes are always better than one. So move it; we’ll be dropping shortly.”
“Sir.”
“Oh, one more thing. Suit up.”
“Sir.”
Michael commed Prime. “Prime, this is command. Bring all combat systems online, alert zero.”
“Prime, roger. Bring combat systems online, alert zero. Stand by.”
Michael commed Duricek. “Engineering, command.”
“Engineering.” Duricek’s tone was as sulky as ever. Michael suppressed a sudden urge to go aft to give the man a good kick in the balls.
“Dropping in three. All set?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I’ve brought the combat systems to instant readiness. I’m not expecting anything, but you never know. So stand by for emergency maneuvering and get your people suited up.”
“Sir.”
When Michael cut the comm, Bienefelt threw her massive bulk into the seat alongside his; suited up, she was enormous. In a cruiser, two senior warfare officers would sit alongside the captain. How things had changed; a junior lieutenant and a petty officer were now the complete command team for a light cruiser supported by a scratch team of sensor operators badly overdue for refresher training. Well, he said philosophically to himself, it would just have to do.
“Guys all okay?” Michael asked as he struggled into his combat space suit.
“Strapped in, suited up, sir.”
“Right. Patch your neuronics into Prime. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”
“Command, Prime.”
“Command,” Michael replied.
“All combat systems nominal, at alert zero, all sensors online and nominal.”
“Command, roger.” Michael knew he was being overly careful, but he would be damned if he allowed his new command to drop into normalspace unprepared for the worst.
Adamant dropped. There was the usual microsecond lurch as the universe turned itself inside out. Michael breathed out slowly as the holovids showed nothing more threatening than curtains of brilliant stars hanging in glorious confusion. For a moment it took his breath away. He quickly identified Terranova’s sun, at a rough guess 200 million kilometers away. Not the best drop in Fleet history, but a long way from the worst and close enough to make it home.
He commed his scratch crew. “All stations, command. Sitrep. We’re home, Terranova’s only 95 million kilometers away, and the threat plot is green. Prime’s contacting Terra-nova control, and I’ll let you know what they want us to do. In the meantime, we’ll start heading in. Command out.”
Michael sat back. The prospect of a long hack in-system was depressing enough. A long hack as captain of a ship with Duricek as chief engineer was even more depressing. Well, he consoled himself, at least they were going home. Maybe he would-
All thought of the pleasures of home leave disappeared in the face of an urgent shout from the operator on gravitronics. Michael was impressed to see the young spacer beating Prime to it by a full second.
“Sir, positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Green 3 Up 1. Two vessels. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Designated hostile tracks 500501 and 502. The vector’s all wrong, though, sir. Goes nowhere near Terranova.”
Goddamn it, Michael thought. Hammers. Had to be. Without thinking, he commed the ship to general quarters before he remembered that he had no crew to send. He commed the klaxon off.
“All stations, command. Sorry about that. We’ve got inbound traffic, and the traffic plot from Terranova control suggests it’s hostile. So visors down. Prime and I will fight the ship. You guys hold on. Engineering. Stand by to maneuver. Command out.”
Michael closed his eyes; he put the command plot up on his neuronics, bringing the range in until the angry red of the gravitronics intercept overwhelmed Adamant’s green vector. The rest of the plot was empty, nothing but blackness. Michael’s stomach lurched. They were completely alone. If the incoming ships were Hammers-and they almost certainly were-they could only be heavy cruisers, and he could not do what any sane captain of a battle-damaged ship manned by a scratch crew would do: jump, and jump now.
But he could not. Michael cursed his fate. With a suspect nav AI, jumping to safety was not an option.
No, the Adamant was stuck in normalspace. She would have to fight it out or die in the process.
“Prime, command. Mission priority is destruction of hostile tracks 500501 and 502, second priority own-ship defense. You have missile and rail-gun launch authority. Fire when ready.”
“Prime, roger. Mission priority is destruction of hostile tracks 500501 and 502, second priority own-ship defense.”
If responsibility for saving the Adamant and her scratch crew weighed heavily on Prime’s virtual shoulders, she did not let it show. Her voice was calm and measured. “Prime, roger. I have missile and rail-gun launch authority. Stand by. Command, I have a good drop datum on tracks 500501 and 502. Estimate drop point at Green 2 Up 1, range 40,000 kilometers. Deploying missiles now. Stand by rail-gun salvo.”
Adamant’s combat information center filled with the racket of hydraulic rams dumping a full missile salvo overboard. Prime throttled the missiles back, the salvo accelerating slowly toward the datum and opening out into a ring so that the Hammer ships would face missiles coming from all directions at once. Michael approved. Quite rightly, Prime did not want the missiles at full power until she was 100 percent sure where the incoming ships would drop. Michael struggled to breathe as Prime refined the drop datum, the seconds agonizingly drawn out into what felt like hours. For God’s sake, fire, he felt like shouting, but Prime held on.
The young sensor operator’s voice was cracking under the strain. “Sir! Targets dropping. Confirm I have a good drop datum at Green 2 Up 1 at 38,000 kilometers.”
“Command, roger,” Michael replied calmly.
Still Prime held on.
The ships dropped. Still Prime waited. Michael wanted to scream even though he knew she had to be sure the new arrivals really were Hammers. Hacking two Fed ships out of space would not look good on his service record.
“Command, Prime. Targets confirmed hostile. Stand by rail-gun salvo.”
Barely an instant before Michael overrode her, Prime sent the missiles on their way, more than 300 Merlin heavy antistarship missiles buried in a cloud of decoys accelerating up to their maximum speed of 300 kilometers per second toward the unsuspecting Hammers. Three seconds later, Adamant shuddered as her rail-gun batteries flung a full salvo at the new arrivals.
It was a textbook ambush; Prime had timed it to perfection. The few seconds she had waited had allowed the Hammer ships to cross Adamant’s bow and start moving away. That left their poorly armored quarters wide open to Adamant’s attack. The two ships never had a chance; Prime’s timing was so good that Michael was not sure they even saw the attack coming.
As the salvos closed in, Michael cursed. Prime’s timing had been perfect, but she had closed up the salvo too much. The slugs were too close together; only a few would hit home. Michael held his breath as the edge of the rail-gun salvo, split equally between the two ships, caught the Hammers from below and behind, ripping into the ships around their main engines, where their armor was thinnest. An instant later, the elaborate and complex maze of vulnerable high-pressure pipework disintegrated into a lethal storm of shredded metal. Michael breathed out in relief; Prime might not have designed the perfect rail-gun salvo, but enough slugs had found their targets to do the job.
Then the auxiliary fusion plants in the after section of the ships started to fail. First one blew, then the rest; four blue-white flashes of runaway fusion plants swamped the holocams, with the hulls of the two ships thrashing up and down as massive shock waves ripped forward.
Michael watched intently; he held his breath as he waited for the fusion plants that powered the ships’ main engines to blow. The slugs must have gone close enough; he was sure they would go, but nothing happened. He breathed out. The Hammers were lucky Prime had not done a better job. The ships were now slowly spinning wrecks tumbling through space end over end, lifepods spitting out in all directions, their after hulls opened up into huge metal petals festooned with molten metal and plastic fast cooling into grotesquely twisted lumps, shattered pipework, broken decking, and torn cabling trailing out into space. The last icy tendrils of ship’s atmosphere were drifting out among small white blobs spinning away into emptiness.
Jesus, Michael thought. Spacers. The white blobs were spacers.
Suddenly, with an irrational stab of panic, he remembered the Merlins now only seconds from impact.
“Missiles abort, abort, abort,” he screamed. You bloody fool, he told himself as he sat back. Those ships were finished but not completely destroyed. They could be useful. It had been years since the intelligence guys had seen the inside of a Hammer heavy cruiser, and even two-thirds of one was better than none.
Afterward, Michael would swear that his heart stopped as, with barely 5,000 meters to run, Prime aborted the missile salvo, their warheads firing jets of red-white flame ahead to bounce ineffectually off the Hammer ships’ armor. Michael sat back and took a deep breath in. “Christ, that was close,” he muttered.
“Prime, command. Confirm enemy contact report passed to Terranova.”
“Confirmed.”
“Roger.” Michael sat back, happy to wait for Terranova to tell him what to do. A bit more than ten minutes later, he had his answer.
“Command, Prime.”
“Go ahead, Prime.”
“Terranova advises four Fed heavy cruisers have been tasked to assist, designated Task Unit 822.4.1, Captain Xiong, Seigneur, commanding. Dropping in five minutes.”
That was damn quick, Michael thought.
“Names?” he asked, hoping that one might be Damishqui.
“Seigneur, Select, Ulugh Beg, and Rebuke.”
Damn, he thought. No Damishqui meant no Anna. Pity. “Command, roger. Maneuver to take station 100 kilometers behind and between the two Hammers and match vector. Confirm Hammer ship identities.”
“The McMullins and the Providence Sound.”
Michael’s eyebrows shot up. The McMullins was an old Triumph class ship, but the Providence Sound was a brand-new City class heavy cruiser. Fleet intelligence would be pleased.
The minutes dragged past. Michael was content to sit and watch the slowly tumbling remnants of the two Hammer ships, their forward sections the only clue that they once had been fully operational warships.
“Sir, positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 45 Up 0. Four vessels. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector nominal for Terra-nova outbound approach.”
“Roger.” Damn, that boy was good. He was reading the grav arrays well ahead of Prime. Must remember to write him up, Michael thought.
“Sir. Targets dropping. Confirm drop datum at Red 44 Up 1 at 9,000 kilometers.”
“Roger that.”
“Well, well, well,” Michael murmured. The new arrivals had more faith in their navigation AIs than Michael did in Adamant’s; 9,000 kilometers was close.
In a brief blaze of ultraviolet, the four Fed ships dropped into normalspace, immediately turning to close in on Adamant and her two shattered charges.
“Adamant, Seigneur.” Must be Captain Xiong, Michael thought as the command holovid switched to show a Fed captain, her face betraying the same confused mix of fatigue and uncertainty he had seen on Lenski’s right after the Hammer attack.
“Adamant.”
“I’m Captain Xiong. Effective immediately you’re assigned to Task Unit 822.4.1 under my command.”
“Roger that, sir.” No surprises there.
“We’re closing in to send boarding parties across. Then we’ll start recovering the Hammer lifepods. Do you need any immediate assistance?’
“None, thank you, sir. My navigation AI is suspect, which is why we were here in the first place, but apart from that all my systems are nominal.”
“Roger. Stand by. I’ll get back to you when we’ve secured the ships. Oh, and by the way, well done. Xiong out.”
Bienefelt leaned across. “I think she likes you, sir,” she whispered, her voice loaded with all the breathy intensity of a teenager sharing the secrets of young love.
Michael leaned over. “Piss off, Matti,” he whispered back.
Bienefelt laughed. “I’m going walkabout, sir. See if anything’s shifted.”
“Fine. Take your guys with you. I don’t want them sitting around. I’ll patch Adamant into the task group’s BattleNet. You can keep an eye on what’s happening.”
“Sir.”
After Bienefelt left Michael alone in the combat information center, he sat back. With Xiong and her ships there, there was not a lot for him to do. He patched his neuronics into the helmet-mounted holocam of the marine major leading the boarding party heading for the Providence Sound. There were some privileges to being the captain of a light cruiser, and he meant to make the most of them. The only Hammer ship he had seen the inside of had been some crappy mership conversion, and then only when he was scheduled to have the shit kicked out of him. He was keen to see what the real thing looked like.
Xiong was wasting no time getting across to what was left of the Hammer ships, and the marines certainly looked in no mood to hang around. When the first assault lander got close to the Providence Sound, doors port and starboard banged open to release a stream of black-suited marines, the boarding party cutting across the gap with an easy grace. They did not bother knocking. In seconds, a single roll of shaped-charge explosive was fast-glued to an air lock frame and fired, cutting a neat hole deep into the Providence Sound’s hull. Two marines dropped into the hole to repeat the process on the inner air lock door, and barely thirty seconds after they deployed, the marines were pouring into the ship.
What Michael saw shocked him. With her artgrav thrown off-line, the inside of the Providence Sound was a shambles. The marines’ powerful torches picked out a mess of debris and equipment floating in a surreal slow-motion dance backlit by the ship’s emergency lighting. The shock wave from the loss of the aft auxiliary fusion plants had ripped equipment, pipework, and cables indiscriminately off their mounts but here and there had left little islands of normality: A workstation with a clipboard still stuck to the bulkhead; a damage-control locker open, its contents still neatly arranged; a holovid still flashing the order to abandon ship in pulsating red and yellow.
Everywhere he could see the bodies of dead spacers, space suits slashed and ripped, visors shattered, red-black scars of blood frozen around hastily applied bright yellow emergency suit patches, evidence of desperate attempts to save the un-savable. Michael watched, sickened. They might be Hammers, but they were ordinary spacers, too.
Something struck him as he watched. Xiong’s marines weren’t acting like most other boarding parties: spreading out, poking around, seeing if there were any survivors, that sort of thing. They were not hanging around. The slightest problem with a door or hatch, and it was blown open. They did the same with equipment blocking a passageway. Bang. Gone. Move on.
No, these marines were on a mission, and belatedly, as they pushed their way down into the center of the ship before turning to go forward, Michael realized what they were after. When they came to the armored door that protected the forward missile magazines, he knew his guess had been right. These men were after Eaglehawk missiles fitted with antimatter warheads.
The magazine door was the first door the marines did not blow off. A plasma cutter was brought to bear, and a hole big enough to admit a space-suited marine was cut with infinite care. Once they got inside, the doors were opened easily by the emergency override. The marines were in.
Michael had seen plenty of missile magazines. This one looked no different from any other, but it still took his breath away. The magazine was filled with the dull black shapes of Eaglehawk missiles racked from deck to deckhead in hydraulically powered cradles. There were hundreds of the damn things in this section of the magazine alone. Above the racks were the hydraulic rams that moved missiles into the salvo dispenser that sat behind sliding blast doors. Everywhere shock-damaged pipes spawned tiny globules of hydraulic fluid. Little rainbow spheres shimmered, iridescent in the light from the marines’ torches as they floated across the magazine.
The major whose holocam Michael was patched into did not waste any time looking around. Once through the door, he was up into the missile racks, looking carefully at the closest missile’s warhead. It did not take long for him to find what he was looking for, a small RFID-radio frequency identity-tag fixed to the nose of the missile with a thin plastic tie. He waved up one of his team, who pulled out what looked like a small handgun and put it to the tag. There was a long pause as the two huddled over the missile. Michael prayed that they knew what they were doing. The thought that they might be only centimeters from an antimatter warhead, probably shock damaged, possibly unstable, and potentially liable to explode, taking everything with it-Adamant included-made his stomach flip. Thank God he had aborted the missile strike. If he had not. . Well, suffice it to say, he and his crew would not be watching Xiong’s marines stealing Hammer missiles.
Finally, they were done. A thumb went up. Michael’s privileges as captain did not extend to being able to patch in to the major’s voice circuit, but he did not need to. The man’s body language spoke volumes.
The marines had found the antimatter warheads they had been looking for.
Michael felt acutely embarrassed as he crossed the brow to board the Seigneur. He had not thought to bring dress blacks for what was supposed to be a simple transit assignment. A shipsuit was all he had to wear. A clean shipsuit, true, but it was still only a shipsuit. He stopped, coming to attention as the bosun’s mates piped him on board, the main broadcast announcing his arrival with the traditional “Attention on deck, FWWS Adamant.”
The ritual that accompanied the arrival on board of a captain in command completed, Michael stepped forward to take Captain Xiong’s outstretched hand.
“Welcome aboard, Helfort, welcome aboard. Meet my officers, and then we’ll debrief you on your trip from Comdur.”
Duty done, Michael was ensconced in a comfortable chair in Xiong’s day cabin, a welcome glass of beer in his hand. There was a moment’s companionable silence as Xiong took her own glass from the drinkbot. She put it carefully on the table before sitting down.
Xiong looked across at the young man sitting opposite her. Considering Helfort’s reputation, he was not that impressive at first sight. For a Fed, he was small. Probably to compensate, he was heavily built, with well-defined shoulder and chest muscles pushing hard against his shipsuit. It was the face that impressed her. It had the stretched look she had seen in so many spacers fresh from combat. His eyes, a striking hazel color, were sunk deep, framed by a gray-black dusting of fatigue and stress, and were half covered by lanky brown hair falling down across his face, the lines of a much older man beginning to cut their way out from eyes and mouth.
“What made you abort the missile strike, Michael?” Xiong asked.
“Luck, sir, to be honest,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Aborting the missiles suddenly seemed like a good idea. Can’t really say why. I don’t know why. Instinct? Fear, maybe.”
Xiong’s eyebrows went up in surprise. She took another sip of her beer. “You know, Michael, I would have put a million FedMarks down that you would have spun me some yarn or other.”
Michael shook his head. “You know what, sir?”
“What?”
“Well,” he declared, his voice a crude parody of Pavel Duricek at his pompous best, “between us cruiser captains. .”
Xiong’s head went back as she roared with laughter. “Us cruiser captains. Oh, my. . us cruiser captains. Now, that’s a good one,” she gasped, struggling to draw breath. “God’s blood, Michael. If you can make jokes at a time like this, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. Sorry. You were saying?”
“Well, the truth is I just did it. But what if I’d been wrong? What if they’d gotten a full salvo away? What if the salvo had been targeted on Terranova?”
Xiong shook her head. “If, if, if. Sometimes I think it’s the worst word in the English language. Actually, Michael, it would not have been a problem. Fleet’s pulled back most of the heavy units to cover the home planets. A two-ship attack probably would not have gotten through.” She sighed heavily. “I’m not sure I can say the same thing for a full-scale attack like the one on Comdur, but. .” Her voice trailed off. The thought of the Hammer dropping an antimatter attack on the Fed Worlds was too much to think about.
Michael nodded. He looked relieved.
Xiong regathered her thoughts. “Anyway, enough of that. I have new orders for you and your crew.”
Michael looked up.
“Yes, Michael. Orders. We’re going to keep the Adamant here as a temporary base until we’ve offloaded the Eaglehawk missiles. Needless to say, our esteemed government doesn’t want the damned things anywhere near Terranova. A courier ship is on its way; you’ll transfer to that. Now, this may change, but at this stage you’ll get some leave, and then it’s back to the Eridani with another combat command hash mark to add to the one you already have. And that, my boy, is one more than me.” Captain Xiong raised her glass in a mock salute. “Fleet has commed me the authorization already, so next time you’re in dress blacks, make sure you’re properly dressed.”
Michael blinked. The thought of hash marks obviously had not occurred to him.
“Oh,” was all he could say.
Michael watched the holovid intently as the battered wrecks of the McMullins and the Providence Sound fell away.
Behind the fast courier, the orange strobes of shuttles transporting captured Eaglehawk missiles across to cargo drones flashed brilliantly against the star-dusted blackness of deep space. Now and again, a searing white flash flared up as a drone and its precious cargo accelerated away to what Michael would have bet his life was, after centuries of willful neglect, a seriously reenergized interest in all things antimatter.
Around the two Hammer ships but pulled well back out of harm’s way in case a missile exploded, were the Fed ships, their hulls visible only as bottomless black shapes cut out of the stars. Now they were home to a small team of defense scientists and engineers laboring desperately to try to work out how the Hammers had done what every Fed scientist would have sworn was impossible.
Hope they’re dispensable, Michael thought. It seemed to him that poking around antimatter was the quickest way to get a one-way ticket straight into the great unknown.
Michael closed his eyes as a sudden wave of tiredness broke over him. Antimatter was going to change a lot of things, and space warfare would be one of them. What those changes were he would be happy to wait to find out.
Soon he was asleep.