Helfort's War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet (17 page)

“Yes, sir,” Mother said, the hint of a smile creasing the corners of her eyes, “but you’ll be fine.”

“We’ll see,” Michael said, doing his best to ignore a sudden cramping that banded his chest with iron, “we’ll see.”

Giving
Widowmaker
another pat, this time to reassure himself that things really would work out, he pulled his awkward space-suited mass up the crew access ladder to
Widowmaker
’s flight deck one step at a time as he dragged his damaged leg behind him. Shutting the hatch behind him, he squeezed past the crew stations and dropped heavily into his seat, nerves jangling, his stomach turning over and over with the feeling of sick dread he always felt before combat.

   Time to get started, he said to himself. “All stations, command. Depressurizing in two, so faceplates down, suit integrity checks to Mother. We’ll be jumping on schedule. Command out.”

Michael commed Petty Officer Morozov,
Widowmaker
’s newly appointed loadmaster.

“Tammy, how’s my LALO team?”

“Shitting themselves, I think, sir,” Morozov said from a jury-rigged seat atop a stack of cases holding shells for
Widowmaker
’s cannons, a ghostly figure through the skeins of mist chasing their way through the cargo bay as the lander depressurized. “I know I’d be if I was them; I hate LALO. But they’re ready to go. I have six personnel pods and four stores pods closed up, all nominal for launch, deployment system nominal. The only problem is Chief Bienefelt. She’s not happy, not happy at all, sir.”

“Not happy,” Michael said with a frown. “That’s not like her. Why?”

“Get this, sir. She’s pissed because we insisted she’s too big to share a pod, so she has one pod all to herself. She says she’s lonely.”

“Oh! Is that all?” Michael laughed, struggling to envisage Bienefelt feeling lonely. “Tell her I’ll buy her a beer when we get dirtside. Assuming there’s somewhere to buy beer, that is.”

“Don’t worry about that, sir. I don’t know of a single system in humanspace where you can’t get a beer.”

“You’re right. Good luck.”

“Thanks, sir.”

Quick comms to Sedova and Acharya confirmed that everything was ready to go. Fidgety and pale,
Hell Bent
’s command pilot looked nervous; Sedova the exact opposite. Smiling, chatty, and bright eyed, she clearly relished the prospect of going back into action. He hoped all that cheerful anticipation would not be misplaced. He turned to Ferreira. “All set?”

“Am, sir. Mother confirms
Widowmaker
is nominal; we have all green suits.
Redwood, Red River
, and
Redress
are nominal.
Alley Kat
and
Hell Bent
are nominal. We’re ready to go.”

“Warfare?”

“Concur. Ready.”

“Roger.”

The seconds dragged past in silence until, an age later, it was time. “All stations, this is command. Stand by to jump. Weapons free. Warfare has command authority.”

“Roger, Warfare has command authority.
Red River
and
Redress
jumping now … Stand by to jump … jumping … now!”

Twelve seconds behind her sister dreadnoughts,
Redwood
microjumped into and out of pinchspace. Michael jerked back in his seat, his heart battering at the walls of his chest as the vid from the external holocams stabilized, the ugly black mass that was Commitment planet filling the screen. They were committed; they had to go on. This deep inside Commitment’s gravity well, any attempt to jump back into pinchspace would be instant suicide.

Warfare acted.
Redwood
shuddered as her main engines went to emergency power, lances of white-hot energy stabbing down toward the Hammer planet. Ahead of
Redwood, Red River
and
Redress
were already decelerating hard, their Krachov generators spewing millions of tiny disks, chased into space by the first salvo of missiles and their protective shroud
of decoys.
Redwood
followed suit; a crunching metallic thud announced the dreadnought’s opening rail-gun salvo from her aft batteries, the huge swarm of tiny slugs racing toward Commitment. The dreadnoughts’ forward rail-gun batteries joined the battle, their salvos of slugs dumped into space to form a cloud of confusion expanding away from the dreadnoughts.

Without knowing it, Michael’s mouth tightened into a savage rictus of sheer animal ferocity. He watched as the rail-gun slugs smashed into Commitment’s upper atmosphere, transforming it into an incandescent flaming mass of ionized air.

“Suck that, you bastards,” he hissed, fierce joy engulfing his body in an exultant flood. After the stress of the last weeks, it felt so good to be striking back, even though he knew the slugs were too small to achieve much except a spectacular if shortlived fireworks show. But they would pressure the Hammer’s inflexible and rule-bound commanders, commanders for whom the price of failure was always the same: a DocSec lime pit. Everything the dreadnoughts did was designed to make those commanders stop, wonder just what the hell was going on, worry that they had missed something important, keep the awful image of lime-filled graves in their mind’s eye.

So he hoped. Michael needed all the confusion he could get; Gladiator’s success depended on it.

   “Command, Warfare, sensors,” the AI responsible for integrating the dataflows from the three dreadnoughts’ sensors arrays said calmly. “Multiple missile launches from McNair missile defense system. Estimate one thousand Goshawk ABM missiles plus decoys now inbound. Attack is designated Golf-1. Time of flight 3 minutes 40. Task groups Hammer-1 and Hammer-2 downgraded, assessed no threat.”

“Command, roger,” Michael said, thankful for small mercies.

That still left the missile defense shield protecting McNair, the capital of the Hammer Worlds and a scant 100 kilometers from Camp J-5209; it was the major threat. Funded by a Hammer leadership concerned to the point of paranoia that renegade officers inside missile defense command might launch an attack on the seat of all Hammer power, it was the most elaborate
antiballistic missile defense system in humanspace. The damage they could inflict on his ships made Michael cringe; massive confusion was the dreadnoughts’ only defense.

“Command, Warfare, sensors. Multiple missiles from Space Battle Station 138. Confirmed Eaglehawks. Salvo designated Echo-3. Times of flight 3 minutes 36. SBS-155 downgraded, assessed no threat.”

“Command, roger. Bastards,” he muttered. So much for confusing the Hammer’s commanders; their counterattack was the best the battle’s geometry allowed, and quick, worryingly so. The dreadnoughts would still be in space by the time the ABMs from McNair arrived on target; the Eaglehawk missiles fired from the closest battle station would arrive two seconds later. Somebody in Hammer nearspace control was paying attention. That meant they faced a thousand Goshawk ABM missiles and 350 Eaglehawks, a lot of missiles for three ships to fight off in the space of two seconds. Suddenly the chances of making a success of Gladiator did not look quite so good.

He forced himself to sit back, to do nothing. If one believed the trashvids, space warfare was all action. The sad truth? It was mostly inaction, waiting for incoming missiles to crawl their way across thousands of kilometers of space. When they hit home, it was all action, but that usually lasted less than a minute. Lifetimes of anticipation, seconds of terror, his mother always said.

Warfare was doing its best to make sure the Hammers’ missiles would not have an easy run in. The dreadnoughts’ massive antistarship lasers had begun the job of disrupting the attack, but there were too many missiles and decoys to deal with, a rare success marked by a sudden flare when a missile’s fusion drive plant lost containment and blew, a racking sound announcing the launch of
Redwood
’s second missile salvo, this one pushed out well clear of the incoming Hammer attack. Seconds later the characteristic metal-on-metal crunching announced the after batteries’ second rail-gun salvo, the swarm pattern tightened to throw the largest possible number of slugs down the line of the incoming ABM missiles. Might as well throw pebbles at flies, Michael thought.

The slugs lived a short but incandescent life. A handful were
lucky enough—and that was all it was, pure, blind luck—to rip a Hammer ABM missile apart, spawning a brief flash as mass converted mass to pure energy, before the rest ripped into Commitment’s upper atmosphere, the slugs exploding in a dazzling fireworks display. Michael hoped they were not a metaphor for Gladiator: a short, brilliant, but ultimately pointless exercise.

“Command, Warfare, sensors. Multiple missile launches from McNair missile defense system. Estimate one thousand Goshawk ABM missiles plus decoys. Designated Golf-2. Time of flight 1 minute 58. Salvo Golf-1’s time to target is 1 minute 30.”

“Command, roger. Targets identified?”

“Stand by … affirmative. Initial vector analysis suggests that the Hammers are targeting
Red River
and
Redress
.”

“
Redwood?
”

“No indication we have been targeted yet.”

“Yes,” Michael muttered under his breath, much relieved.
Red River
and
Redress
were the bait Michael had dangled in front of the Hammers. And the Hammers had taken the bait by targeting their initial missile salvo—certain to be carrying fusion warheads—on the two leading dreadnoughts. Unless the Hammer nearspace commander was insane, there would be no more fusion warheads coming their way. The Hammer regime might be utterly disinterested in the welfare of its people, but even it had limits it could not ignore: Cooking off hundreds of high-yield fusion warheads inside Commitment’s atmosphere was an absolute no-no, which meant the odds of the three landers getting through to Commitment unscathed had improved dramatically.

He turned to Ferreira. “Jayla.”

“Sir?” Behind the armor plasglass of her visor, her face was pale, sweat beading on her forehead to run down her cheeks.

“We ready with our homemade decoys?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Let’s hope they work as well as they’re supposed to.”

Michael nodded. So much of Gladiator was in the “great idea, sounds good, but will it work?” category that no rational military commander would have sanctioned the operation.

The Hammer missiles closed, and the dreadnoughts’
medium-range area defense weapons got to work. With agonizing slowness, pulsed lasers and missiles ground down the Hammer attack, the space between ships and missiles filling with the flares of missiles as they died violent deaths. Inevitably, some made it through; now they had to run the gauntlet of the dreadnoughts’ close-in defenses—lasers, short-range missiles, and chain guns—before the survivors closed in and proximity-fused warheads exploded.

Michael flinched when the holovid screens went blank, the holocams overwhelmed by a hellish wall of radiation that flayed the armor off
Red River
and
Redress
. Desperately, he waited for telemetry from the two ships to be restored; the two dreadnoughts had to survive for Gladiator to work. An age later, the links came back online. Fatally wounded by a lethal combination of radiation and shock,
Red River
and
Redress
were a heartbreaking sight. In less than a second, Hammer missiles had turned the two ships into incandescent wrecks spewing ionized gas into space from armor that was white-hot from the intense radiation flux. But they remained intact, and, protected by meters-thick secondary armor and massive shock mountings, their main engines still functioned, decelerating the ships atop pillars of fire; that was all that mattered.

Redwood
celebrated their survival by sending a third rail-gun salvo on its way, followed by the last of her missiles shrouded in every decoy she could launch into space.

“Command, Warfare. Hammer ABM salvo has thirty seconds to run. Targets
Red River, Redress
. Executing emergency shutdown of
Red River
and
Redress
main engines.”

“Command, roger.”

Red River
and
Redress
were the sacrificial lambs; Michael hated to think of them that way, but that was their job. Any weapon still working was tasked to keep Hammer missiles away from
Redwood
even if that meant their own death.

With their main engines shut down, the two dreadnoughts pulled away,
Redwood
dropping astern, still decelerating hard. Now Michael prayed in earnest. Gladiator involved more risks than he cared to think about; the biggest was that the Hammers might decide that
Redwood
was their most pressing problem and divert missiles from their second Goshawk ABM
salvo to deal with her. He forced himself to stay calm: The die was cast. Nothing would change what was about to happen. Either the daunting sight of two dreadnoughts with a death wish plunging headlong toward their capital city had convinced the Hammers that
Red River
and
Redress
were the real threat or it had not.

Michael knew what he would be doing if he were the poor bastard unlucky enough to be in the Hammer commander’s chair. He smiled. Right now, he would be trying to work out how the hell to avoid a DocSec firing squad.

Dreadnoughts and Hammer missiles closed on each other, and again the space between them filled with the flares of dying missiles hacked out of the attack by the dreadnoughts’ medium-range defenses. The missiles that survived plunged into the hulls of the ships, warheads packed with chemical explosive lancing through what little armor remained to reach deep down into the guts of the ships, searching for the vulnerable fusion plants.

But the two dreadnoughts’ fusion plants had been shut down, the vast residual energy in their containment vessels blown out into space in long jets of white-hot ionized gas. The missiles tore at the carcasses of the ships, blowing debris off their frames and out into space, a shambolic mass of scrap tumbling toward Commitment. Now it was
Redress
’s turn to suffer, her hull shaking while her short-range defenses worked frantically to keep out the few Goshawk missiles that had made it past the combined defenses of the three dreadnoughts, space filling with the violent flares of missile fusion plants as they died.