The Final Battle

“Come on!” Malvern shouted to the unseen guards. “Get this damn screen up.”

“Sorry, counselor,” a voice said. The screen opened a fraction, and the woman slipped the envelope through the gap. Michael Helfort took it with hands slick with cold sweat.

“Open it,” Malvern said, her voice soft.

Michael shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Erica; I just can’t.”

“You want me to?”

“Not really,” Michael replied, misery splashed all across his face. “I don’t want to know.”

“You need to know. Pass it back.”

Michael did as he was told and watched Malvern tear the envelope open, his heart hammering in his chest with painful intensity. She scanned the letter and then looked up at him, the tears in her eyes sparkling in the harsh light. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “The president has turned down your appeal for clemency. Sentence will be carried out one week from today.”

“No!” Michael hissed. “She can’t have. I trusted her.” He slumped back in his seat, and his head dropped into his hands. “I’ve been screwed,” he said, his voice strengthening as anger pushed fear aside. “They’ve betrayed me, all of them. Goddamn the bastards all to hell.”

HELFORT’S WAR
^*

Book I:
The Battle at the Moons of Hell

Book II:
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

Book III:
The Battle of Devastation Reef

Book IV:
The Battle for Commitment Planet

THE GUILD WAR

Book I:
Vendetta

Book II:
Counterattack (late 2012)

^*
Books 1 to 4 of the Helfort’s War series are published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.

For Vicki. Hang in there.

As ever, my thanks to Tara Wynne and Liz Scheier for their support, encouragement and advice.

Sunday, March 24, 2402, Universal Date
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.

Monday, March 25, 2402, UD
Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, city of McNair, Commitment planet

“They’d have had a damn good reason to waste one of their precious landers like that,” Jeremiah Polk said. “The
NRA
and the Revival are gambling and gambling big, and we don’t know why.”

“Let’s be realistic, Chief Councillor,” Viktor Solomatin, the Hammer of Kraa’s councillor for foreign relations, said. “The only people who can help that heretic scum are the Federated Worlds, but with Caroline Ferrero as moderator, that will never happen.”

Polk leaned forward to look Solomatin right in the face. “Care to back that up, Councillor?” he said.

“That’s why I wanted to see you, Chief Councillor. The Fed chargé d’affaires has just forwarded me a personal message from Caroline Ferrero. She wants to know whether we would agree to a cease-fire.”

“Kraa! The woman hasn’t wasted any time,” Polk said. He took a deep breath to control a sudden rush of excitement. “She’s been moderator for what … a week?” He paused to think. “Two questions,” he went on. “Why would the Feds propose a cease-fire, and why would we agree to one?” Again he stopped, a finger tapping his lips. “That said,” Polk said, “I think we know the answer to the first question.”

“One of my staff members summed it up nicely: Caroline Ferrero is the right appeaser at the right time.”

“So it seems, but should we agree to a cease-fire?”

“The Feds always believed they would defeat the Hammer of Kraa. It was an article of faith, but when we dropped antimatter warheads into Fed nearspace—” Solomatin’s voice was animated now, his eyes glistening, his excitement unmistakable. “—we destroyed that belief. Ferrero doesn’t think the Feds can win, not anymore. That gives us the leverage to accept their offer, but on our terms, not—”

Polk’s hand came up. “What terms?” he said.

“The Feds must halt their fleet rebuilding program; they must terminate all research into weaponizing antimatter and agree to verification inspections.”

Polk frowned, unconvinced. “The Feds will never agree to that,” he said. “Even they aren’t that stupid.”

“They’re frightened. Trust me; they’ll agree.”

“Morons,” Polk said; he shook his head dismissively. “The Fed fleet’s still a serious threat; given enough time to rebuild, it could defeat us. So I cannot understand why Ferrero’s being so lily-livered. She doesn’t have to be.”

“It doesn’t matter why. We need to negotiate hard to keep the Feds as weak as possible until the Hendrik Island antimatter plant comes online, which it will as long as we keep the Pascanicians happy.”

Polk looked hard at Solomatin. “I though we
were
keeping them happy,” he said.

“Oh, we are,” Solomatin replied. “We can’t afford not to.”

“No, we can’t,” Polk said, his eyes glittering in anticipation, “and if we have to tolerate those bloodsucking assholes to get our new antimatter plant, then that’s what we’ll do. And when it’s operational, the Federated Worlds will never threaten the security of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds again.”

Saturday, April 6, 2402, UD
Clevennes, Asthana planet

The young woman put the mug of steaming hot coffee down on the table beside the man’s bed and leaned over to look him right in the face. “Feel better?” she asked.

“Yes.” The voice was scarcely a whisper.

“You had us worried. Those comatropic drugs are very unpredictable.”

“Who are you?”

“Marnie Bakker,” she said. “I’m with the Revival. We handle things here on Asthana. It’s good to meet you, Michael.”

“Ah, yes,” Michael mumbled. He looked around. “Where am I?”

“You’re now in one of our safe houses. A Revival team smuggled you out of Haaken Military Hospital.”

“I don’t remember that. Where’s Kat Sedova? Is she okay?”

“She’s somewhere else. Better that way. This planet is infested with Hammer agents. Everybody knows a Fed lander dropped into Asthana nearspace, so they’ll be out looking for you.”

Michael’s eyes flared wide with alarm. “Looking for me? They don’t know I was onboard, do they?”

Bakker shook her head. “Don’t worry; they don’t. They just like to get their hands on any Feds who end up here.”

“What about your people?”

“Cortez and Hok are okay. Prashad didn’t make it. The Revival will miss her.”

Michael said nothing for a moment; Prashad’s death was a serious blow. “We needed her,” he went on. “I didn’t know her well, but everyone said she had the sharpest political mind of any Hammer. Sorry. You don’t like to be called Hammers.”

“No, we don’t, even though we were all born Hammers. ‘Revivalists’ will do. Anyway, here’s the plan. As soon as the doctor says you’re okay to be moved, we’ll relocate you to another safe house.”

“Cortez and Hok will be there?”

“They will. Sedova, too.”

“I hope Admiral Jaruzelska’s in a good mood,” he said. “We’re screwed if she refuses to help us get the Fed government to back the
NRA
.”

“Stop worrying, Michael,” Bakker said. “She knows the Hammers have to be beaten, and she knows we can’t do that without Fed support, so why wouldn’t she?”

Because I betrayed the trust she’d always shown in me,
Michael thought.
That’s why.

Thursday, April 11, 2402, UD
Graymouth, Asthana planet

Marnie Bakker’s eyes betrayed her apprehension as they flicked from side to side in a restless search for anything out of place. Her anxiety was contagious. Michael’s nerves were a mess. His mouth was dry, and his heart was racing. For all he knew, there could have been hundreds of Asthanan Community Safety agents in crowds thronging Graymouth’s busy town square, waiting for him to break cover, waiting to arrest him, waiting to hand him over to their DocSec masters.

Finally Bakker nodded. She turned to Michael. “Okay,” she said. “My people say there’s no sign of CommSafe, so I think we’re good to go.”

“You sure?”

“No, not really. CommSafe has more agents than you’ve had hot dinners, and even though we do our best to ping them, we can’t know them all.”

“Great,” Michael muttered.

“Let’s do it, and don’t forget the bailout plan if it all goes to shit.”

“I won’t,” Michael said, sticking close to Bakker as she set off for the Asthana Communications building, the largest and most imposing on the square.

• • •

The months had not been kind to Vice Admiral Jaruzelska. She had aged. Dulled gray by fatigue and stress, her skin was tight across a thin, angular face, her eyes sunk into black-dusted wells.

Jaruzelska was angry: eyes narrowed, cheeks red, lips thinned into a bloodless line, fingers drumming on the desk.

For an eternity after the pinchcomm call stabilized, nothing was said. “Admiral,” Michael said at last, “it’s good to see—”

“You have one minute, Helfort,” Jaruzelska said, “and that is all. If you cannot convince me I should talk longer, the next time you hear me speak will be when I give evidence at your court-martial, and believe me when I say that day will come. You betrayed me, you betrayed the Fleet, you betrayed the Federated Worlds, and for what? A goddamned woman!”

In an instant, fury engulfed Michael. It took an enormous effort to choke back his angry response. He took a deep breath. “What I have done—and why—is irrelevant. This is not the time or the place. I—”

“How dare you!” Jaruzelska barked. “Never in our history has one officer done so much damage, and not just any officer.
You
. The most decorated, the most experienced, the most promising junior officer I have … the fleet has ever seen. And you threw it all away because you loved a woman. It makes no sense, and you must stand trial for what you have done.”