Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (15 page)

   Stepping out of the drop tube, Michael walked aft down the passageway toward
Redwood
’s hangar, the soft slap of ship boots on the plasteel deck plates the only sound over the ever-present hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning. The complete absence of
Redwood
’s crew heightened his sense of isolation. Apart from Acharya, who was standing the middle watch in the combat information center, Michael was the only person onboard awake. It was not a good feeling, and the isolation added to the crushing weight of responsibility he carried for the spacers and marines he was leading into the most harebrained scheme ever devised by humans. Yes, they were all adults, rational, sensible people. Yes, they had been given the option to bail out with the rest of the abstainers. Yes, they had all decided to go along, but none of that altered the fact that the safety of every spacer and marine rested in his hands.

If it had not been for him and Anna, none of them would
have been asked to risk everything—career, reputation, family, friends, citizenship, not to mention their lives—out of a misguided sense of loyalty, lust for adventure, frustration at the stalemate in the war against the Hammers, or whatever other crazy motivation might have urged them on.

He struggled to control his stomach, a churning mess of anxiety and dread. In an instant, he was overwhelmed. He made it to the heads, just. There, crouched over the sterile whiteness of the nearest toilet, he threw up his dinner, his body driven to its knees by the spasms that wracked it, the muscles of his stomach and chest screaming in protest.

An age later his body relented, and Michael struggled to his feet to wash his face. He stared into the mirror. The man who looked back was not he. Stress had stripped kilos off a once-solid frame, leaving his face gaunt, his skin stretched gray and tight across now-prominent cheekbones, his eyes the eyes of a man condemned to die.

“How did it ever come to this?” he whispered, weighed down by the weight of Operation Gladiator. How well he managed an attack on the most heavily defended planet in humanspace would rewrite the history of space warfare. If, he reminded himself, any of them lived long enough to tell the tale.

With a conscious effort, he forced himself out of the heads and down the passageway into the hangar. He paused, taking a moment to make sure that none of Kallewi’s marines were around. Satisfied they had all turned in, he walked around the hangar, eyes scanning left and right to make sure that nothing was out of place. Happy that things were all right, he made his way over to the nearest landers.
Alley Kat
and
Hell Bent
were ranged hard up against the inner air lock door with
Widowmaker
tucked in close behind. The landers’ ramps were down, their cargo bays loaded with anything that might come in handy once the attack on J-5209 was over.

Ferreira had gone over the loads with a fine-tooth comb. Gladiator would not be much of an operation if the landers ended up so overloaded that they were forced to leave behind some of the Fed prisoners they had come so far and risked so much to rescue. Even so, they looked crowded. If he had not checked for himself, he would not have believed the landers
had enough payload left to lift hundreds of Feds out of J-5209. As it was, it was going to be standing room only, the prisoners packed into the spaces around the mounds of equipment and ordnance the landers were taking with them.

It was
Widowmaker
’s cargo he was most interested in. Ranged across the threshold of the ramp rested the stealthed LALO—low altitude, low opening—drop pods; they would carry Bienefelt and her team down to secure the lay-up point. Once Gladiator was over, the Hammers, angry and humiliated, would come looking for them, and though Fed landers might be tough, they were not tough enough to hold off an entire planetary ground defense force thirsting for revenge. If they were not holed up where the Hammers would never find them, none of them would live to see another day. Michael shivered as he ran a hand across the skin of the nearest pod. A LALO drop pod exercise had been part of his cadet training. He had been terrified then, and thinking about it terrified him now; it still raised goose bumps. Squeezed two to a pod, ejected to plunge earthward for what seemed like an eternity even though the fall had been all of two seconds long before the chutes popped to bring the pods to a brutal stop meters above the ground, it had been a horrible experience, one he hoped he would never, ever have to repeat.

With a silent prayer that Bienefelt would come through okay, he patted the pod for luck and moved on.

The rest of his walk-around was a formality. Michael knew that there was nothing more to do. He also knew that sleep would be a scarce commodity once they were dirtside on Commitment. With exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him, he started to walk back to the drop tube. Maybe he would be lucky; maybe for once sleep would come quickly, before his brain resumed its never-ending review of all the things that might go wrong with Operation Gladiator.

“Looks good, sir,” Ferreira said. “Nothing’s changed, and it looks to me like those damn battle stations are where they’re supposed to be.”

Michael nodded. He scanned the threat plot again, the holovid display splashed with ugly patches of red marking the positions and predicted vectors of Commitment’s space defenses: battle stations, battlesats, and weapons platforms backed up by eight task groups of cruisers and their supporting escorts. The battle stations posed the biggest threat to Gladiator. Identifying when their orbits—a complex mixture of Clarke, high polar, and inclined orbits designed to minimize gaps over Commitment—opened the largest possible hole over Camp J-5209 was one of the critical tasks before the assault started. Michael was in no hurry. The other thing he needed was the right weather to keep the Hammer sensors and weapons off his back; heavy cloud, strong winds, and driving rain would do nicely. Judging by the weather systems, it would be a day or so before what he hoped would become a tropical depression made landfall. Not quite the category 5 hurricane he had hoped for, but it should be good enough to put a thick layer of water-sodden cloud over the target, eliminating the Hammers’ optical targeting systems and space-based lasers from the threat equation.

Time to talk to the troops, he decided.

“All stations, this is command. Update. We’ve dropped into Commitment farspace and are building the threat plot. The good news is that Hammer force levels in Commitment nearspace are what we expected. The bad news is that we will have to wait a while before we go in. We need bad weather, the worst we can get, to mask what we are doing from the Hammer’s orbital defenses. There is a promising system developing off the
coast to the southwest of McNair, and if it develops and tracks in toward J-5209 like the weather models predict, I expect we will be launching phase 3 of Gladiator less than forty-eight hours from now. We should know when by this time tomorrow. Any questions, feel free to come and ask. Command out.”

Michael sat back to watch the threat AI refine the plot, its enormous computing power crunching the data pouring in from sensors on the three dreadnoughts, the ships now strung out in a line tens of thousands of kilometers long. They had ended up a long way out from Commitment, farther than he wanted, but he did not have much choice. Any closer in and the Hammers could detect the unmistakable ultraviolet flashes generated when the dreadnoughts dropped out of pinchspace, but for once he had time on his side. He had more than two weeks until Hartspring’s deadline ran out, and he intended to use every minute of it if he had to. Fate offered no second chances; Gladiator had to work the way it was supposed to.

“Command, sensors.”

“Yes, Carmellini.”

“You might be interested in this, sir. It’s a holovid transmission from one of the Hammer’s commercial stations. They’re talking about the NRA.”

“Put it up.”

“Sir.”

Michael watched the holovid image appear: a blond woman in a red two-piece suit standing in front of a map of the continent of Maranzika. The quality was not the best, but the sensor AI had done a good job of stabilizing the feed.

“… to Marius de Mel, councillor for internal security. Welcome to the program, Councillor.”

“Thank you, Lara. Good to be here,” the man said.

“So, Councillor. There are unconfirmed reports of heavy fighting in the area around Daleel. That’s not far from McNair, so should we be concerned?”

“No, Lara, of course not. There is no need to be concerned. Yes, there have been some clashes around Daleel, but they are the result of our forces attacking small pockets of heretics, heretics who are intent on betraying the Faith of Kraa for their own blasphemous purposes. I talked to the area commander
not an hour ago, and he assured me that the operation will be completed before nightfall.”

“By heretics do you mean the Nationalists?”

De Mel’s face darkened with a sudden anger, hastily suppressed. “Heretics!” he snapped. “Kraa-damned heretics! Call them what they are.”

“Yes, of course, Councillor,” the woman said smoothly. “Heretics it is. Are you able to tell us anything about the numbers of National—sorry, heretics involved?”

“Ah, well, Lara. You know I can’t discuss the operational details on the air, but what I can tell is this: Their numbers are small, very small.”

“Which means the comment by General Schenk that his troops faced, and I quote, ‘thousands of the bastards’ cannot be correct then, can it, Councillor? Help me here, because I am confused.”

Electrified, Michael sat up. He had watched his share of Hammer newscasts; without exception, they had been exercises in mind-numbing boredom as newsreaders parroted whatever dross the propaganda merchants wanted the great unwashed to hear. This was different; this was something new. Lara the newscaster was frowning, her lips tightened in skeptical disapproval. De Mel knew it, too; his forehead shone, and sweat started to bead under his eyes. Well, well, well, Michael said to himself, the sonofabitch is frightened. Things were not running to plan for the Hammer government if a newscaster had the freedom to slip the knife into a councillor live on air. Twelve months ago, doing that would have seen Lara the newscaster locked away, maybe even shot, if she upset anyone important.

“Look, Lara,” de Mel said. “General Schenk cannot have said that since it is just not true. Like I say, we are dealing with a handful of heretics, that’s all.”

“I see,” the newscaster said. “So the holovid we have of him saying the exact opposite is a fake? I’m sorry, Councillor. I must apologize.” She shook her head in mock despair. “It seems this network has been duped.”

De Mel was angry and embarrassed, and his eyes bulged.
Michael thought he looked like someone trying to swallow a pineapple, blunt end first. “Ah, yes,” de Mel muttered. “I think that must be what’s happened.”

“Fine. I’m glad we’ve sorted that one out. Now, what about casualties, Councillor? The casualties inflicted on our brave troops by that … let me see, yes, by that handful of heretics?”

“Casualties?” de Mel croaked; he looked around for an escape route.

“Yes, Councillor. Casualties. How many casualties have there been in the Daleel operation so far?”

“Er, so far as I know, there have been none. Some minor cuts and bruises, perhaps, nothing more serious.”

“Okay. Now, I understand the holovid we have been given showing General Schenk discussing the operation is most likely a fake, and thank you for pointing that out to us, Councillor—”

“Ah, well,” de Mel mumbled.

“—but we have more recent holovid showing a Seventh Brigade casualty clearing station outside Daleel. I must say, Councillor, it looks a lot worse than a few cuts and bruises, a lot worse. Unless this vid is a fake, too, it shows heavy casualties, many in a bad way. Perhaps you could comment after I run the vid.”

“I don’t think that would be wise, Lara,” de Mel said, recovering some of his composure. “Let’s establish where the vid came from before we jump to any conclusions.”

“That’s good advice, Councillor, which we’re happy to accept, thank you,” the newscaster said, her gung-ho tone belied by eyes burning with contempt.

The interview degenerated into an exchange of banalities, so Michael tuned out, much encouraged by what he had just seen. If newscasters were prepared to take on powerful men like de Mel, things were changing in the Hammer Worlds, and not in the government’s favor.

“How we doing, Jayla?”

“Good, sir. Threat plot’s settling. We’ll start to get a feel for the Hammer’s operating patterns over the next twenty-four
hours. If that weather system comes in like I expect, we should be ready to go. At this stage, it looks like we’ll be on our way in day after tomorrow.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Councillor de Mel is here, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Wordlessly, Polk watched de Mel take his seat for what Polk liked to call their weekly chat. Clearly, de Mel would not have called it a chat. That much was obvious from the thin film of sweat across his forehead. De Mel’s eyes were restless, looking anywhere but right at him. Polk let the man stew for a while before opening the proceedings.

“So, Councillor de Mel,” he said. “Yesterday wasn’t your finest media performance. In fact, I’d say it was your worst. It does not look good when Lara Chen is better informed than my councillor for internal security. She made you look a fool.”

Polk’s criticism galvanized de Mel. He sat bolt upright and leaned forward. “No, Chief Councillor, it wasn’t my best performance. I accept that, but may I remind you that it is difficult to stay on message when those incompetent clowns in planetary ground defense cannot deal with a handful of heretics without losing hundreds of their men.”

“Settle down, Councillor,” Polk chided. “You’re not on the holovids now. Whatever we’re saying in public, we both know that the NRA threw thousands of troopers into the Daleel attack. The PGDF’s commanding general has assured me that General Schenk and the Seventh Brigade had done well.”