Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet

Mouth open, Chief Councillor Polk gaped at the appalling sight sprawled out in front of him. Two weeks earlier, he had presided over a medals ceremony at this very base. It had been flawless. Air-superiority fighters and ground-attack fliers had been arrayed in precise lines, their crews and the base’s support personnel drawn up immaculate in their dress blacks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all proof positive that not every part of the Hammer Worlds was a corrupt, decaying farce.

Now the place was a wasteland, a blast-smashed expanse of ceramcrete littered with the shattered wrecks of fighters, the base’s elaborate infrastructure reduced to blackened piles of rubble through which casualty recovery teams picked their way with painstaking care, a red flag appearing every time a new body was located. There were hundreds of red flags already, Polk noted, and the teams had covered only a fraction of the base.

With a start, Polk realized how dumb he must look. He turned to the latest in a long line of commanders in chief, standing alongside him, his face drawn tight with shock.

“How, Admiral Belasz? How could this have happened?”

Belasz licked his lips; Polk could see a small tic working under the man’s left eye. Given that his predecessor had been consigned to a DocSec lime pit for the last disaster, he had every right to be nervous.

H
ELFORT
’
S
W
AR
The Battle at the Moons of Hell
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds
The Battle of Devastation Reef
The Battle for Commitment Planet

My thanks go to my wife, Vicki, to my agents, Russ Galen and Tara Wynne, and to Chris Schluep and the team at Random House.

Anna would be dead soon.

Lieutenant Michael Helfort tumbled a datacore between gloved fingers in an unconscious effort to blunt the fear that gnawed at him every waking moment, to stop the churning in his stomach.

But nothing blurred the horror that would be Anna’s death. He had condemned her to die scoured of all dignity, agonizing, slowly, and inevitable, a dying no human should have to endure, a dying that condemned the only woman he had ever loved to perish abandoned and alone, raped, beaten, shot—a life consumed in an unthinking process of casual cruelty, a life stripped away layer by layer to leave only an empty shell, the broken and abused body dumped into a DocSec lime pit, its empty eyes turned skyward, eyes that once danced and sparkled and sang with love so strong it would tear him apart, eyes that stared sightless into the void, eyes that branded his psyche with the word
betrayed
.

And all because of him.

He moved to get comfortable, trying to make the pain radiating up into his body go away. Psychosomatic, the doctors had said finally; Michael reckoned they were right. No matter how many painkillers he pumped into his system, the pain never went away. Four months had passed since a Hammer bullet had ripped its way through his thigh during the frantic, scrambling escape from Serhati, and even though the leg had healed well, even though he walked with only the faintest hint of a
limp most of the time, it never allowed him to forget the insult it had suffered.

He laughed softly, a short, bitter laugh. Truth was, he did not want the pain to leave him. At times, he almost welcomed it, its relentless stabbing the punishment he deserved for putting Anna’s life at risk. Only a lingering, nagging sense of obligation, faint but impossible to ignore, persuaded him to go back to his duty. With an enormous effort, he dragged his mind away from the horror of Anna’s death to scan the threat plot, the massive holovid screen dominated by a blood-red icon marking the position of the signals intelligence station
Redwood
and her sister dreadnoughts had crossed hundreds of light-years of space to attack.

He might be captain in command of the Federated Worlds Starship
Redwood
, but destroying a remote—and unimportant—SIGINT station the Hammers had buried beneath the crust of a wandering asteroid called Balawal-34 was the least of his concerns.

For the millionth time, he asked himself what Anna had done to des—

“Sir! Sir!” The voice of his executive officer, Junior Lieutenant Jayla Ferreira, battered its way through the fog of despair and fear that clouded his thinking. She stood waiting for him to respond, hands on hips, lips squeezed tight into a bloodless slash of disapproval. Michael struggled to recall what she had just said, but he could not. He had no idea; her words had bounced off him, shards of glass shattering on a marble floor, splintering, spinning, tumbling away into oblivion.

“Ah, yes,” Michael said, suppressing a pang of guilt, ramming the datacore back into its port. Ferreira was a good officer, and she deserved a good captain, one she could trust to keep his mind on the job, not one whose every waking moment centered on … For chrissakes, he swore silently, his attention was wandering again. “Sorry, Jayla, I was somewhere else. You were saying?”

“I have made this point already, but I’ll make it again … sir,” Ferreira said, voice taut and face pinched. “I understand what Warfare is saying. Problem is I just cannot agree. It might
be only a small temperature anomaly, but the fact is there is one, we don’t know why, and we should.”

“Fair point, and I agree,” Michael said. He looked across at Warfare’s space-suited figure. The hunched shape was so real, he had to remind himself it was nothing more than an avatar, a computer-generated figment of his neuronics-enhanced imagination. “Warfare?”

“Why is easy,” the artificial intelligence responsible for battle management said. “There’s an unexplained heat source in the rubble field. What that source is … well, that’s another matter. Almost certainly it’s a ship, maybe two, lying low, hoping people like us don’t detect them. They mustn’t have aligned one of their heat dumps properly.”

“Exactly,” Ferreira said. “Which means we may face serious opposition. Balawal-34 might not be the soft target the intelligence summaries say it is.”