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Commitment planetary nearspace
Hell Bent was in a race it could never win, and Michael Helfort knew it. “How long?” he asked the battered lander’s command pilot.
“Provided the battlesats don’t get us first,” Kat Sedova replied, “the first missile salvo will be inside hard kill radius in two minutes.” Her voice was barely audible over the racket of pulsed antiship lasers chewing away at Hell Bent’s ceramsteel armor.
Fear churned Michael’s guts. It would be five minutes before Hell Bent could jump safely into pinchspace. “I guess this is it, then,” he said.
“I’ll jump us just before the salvo gets that close. We might get lucky.”
Michael glanced across Hell Bent’s cargo bay. He threw a smile at Shalini Prashad, the best political mind in the New Revolutionary Army’s political wing, the Revival; she stared back at him, eyes wide with terror. He turned to the two NRA officers who were sitting alongside him. “We still have a good chance,” Michael said, making himself sound confident, “even this deep inside Commitment’s gravity well.”
“Let’s hope so,” General Cortez replied, grim-faced. “If we don’t make it …” His voice trailed off into silence.
Major Hok said nothing, her face grim.
Nothing more needed to be said. After more than a century of brutal, bloody conflict between the Hammer of Kraa and the Federated Worlds-a conflict fueled by the Hammers’ religious fundamentalism-humanspace teetered on the edge of the abyss, and every soul onboard knew it.
The Hammers had been the only polity to weaponize antimatter. None of the other major systems of humanspace had even tried. They had judged it impossible, only to find how wrong they had been when in a single brutal attack the Hammers had used missiles with antimatter warheads to destroy much of the Feds’ fleet at the Battle of Comdur.
Now the Hammers were constructing a new antimatter plant-with help from the Pascanicians-to replace the one the Feds had destroyed at Devastation Reef. Once it was on-stream, the Hammers would have the antimatter warheads they needed to defeat not just the Feds but every last system in humanspace. Nothing could stop them. Billions would be plunged into slavery, their only task to serve the all-powerful Empire of the Hammer of Kraa.
Michael closed his eyes. He told his neuronics to bring up his favorite picture of Anna. He sat back and waited for the end.