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

by Graham Sharp Paul

  Polk’s eyes narrowed. He did not like the Kallian one bit. The man was rude, intemperate, interested only in money, and happy to tell anyone who cared to listen that the Hammer of Kraa was a crock of shit. Worst of all, he was not frightened by Polk and they both knew it.

  If van Luderen had not been one of only two men he trusted to keep the far-flung pieces of what he called his retirement fund connected, Polk would have had him shot, off-worlder or not. He waited in silence until the drinkbot delivered the man’s beers.

  The first beer was gone in seconds; picking up the second, van Luderen belched softly as he smacked the empty bottle down onto the table. “That’s better. You wanted to see me?”

  “I did,” Polk said. “I have a consignment for you.”

  “Oh? Wondered why you’d dragged me all this way. Still, it’s your money.”

  “Yes, Marten,” Polk said through gritted teeth. “It is my money.” He pushed a battered briefcase over to van Luderen. “Here’s 250 million dollars in stored-value cards.”

  “Ah,” van Luderen said, eyes lighting up, “now I see why you wanted me to come to this asshole of a planet.”

  “Watch it, Marten,” Polk growled.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” van Luderen said. “Why so much?”

  “Insurance.”

  “Insurance?” van Luderen said with a skeptical frown. “Things not going so well, eh?”

  “No, the exact opposite. Things are going extremely well.”

  “That’s not what I hear, Jeremiah. Those Feds have been giving your people a lot of grief, the NRA’s doing well, and most of those poor suckers you call your loyal citizens want the Nationalists to take over. Doesn’t sound to me like things are going well at all.”

  “You are misinformed, Marten,” Polk said. “A few minor setbacks, that’s all. Trust me. Things are going well.”

  “You think so?” van Luderen said. “I have very good sources. They don’t think things are so good. The way I see it, there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Polk said. “If you need to know something, I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” van Luderen said with a shrug. “I think you’ve just given me millions of reasons for thinking things are not going well, but maybe I’m wrong.”

  “You are, Marten, you are. Like I said, it’s just insurance. Now, I want that money working for me, not sitting in some trust account. Any ideas?”

  “Oh, yes,” van Luderen said, throwing off the mantle of indifference and disinterest, his eyes sparkling into sudden life. “Oh, yes.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Get me another beer and I’ll tell you about the Buranan Federation and a cozy little cartel that’s making so much money, it’s indecent. I think with 250 million to play with, we can make them an offer they won’t refuse even if they are not going to like it very much.”

  “One beer coming up.”

  “Make it two, Jeremiah, make it two. Fuck, this poxy place is hot!”

  Wednesday, November 14, 2401, UD

  Sector Oscar, Branxton Base, Commitment

  The final briefing for the crews of the three Fed landers broke up in the usual welter of conversation. Sedova leaned over. “Hope this one gets a better result than the last time the NRA visited Perdan.”

  Michael nodded. “Let’s hope so.”

  He wanted desperately for Operation Tappet to be a success, if only to douse the smoldering embers of doubt that so troubled him. Had the whole Commitment business been the biggest mistake of his life? He hoped not. Not that Sedova and Acharya seemed to share his doubts; few of the Feds did. If the two command pilots were any guide, most had seized the chance to inflict some serious damage on the Hammers with both hands, any doubts they might have had had been swamped by the relentless pace of operations. True, the Fed landers had had a golden run. They had completed almost fifty operations, destroying targets right across the hinterland around McNair in slashing hit-and-run operations that minimized the risks they faced from the Hammer’s air-defense Kingfishers and their Alaric missiles.

  There was a problem, though, a problem that the Feds, absorbed in the business of killing Hammers, were happy to ignore. Hit-and-run operations were fine, but only up to a point; they had their limitations, too.

  They made the Hammer’s lives miserable. They encouraged the never-ending plague of civil disobedience all across the Hammer Worlds. They eroded morale in the Hammer military. They sapped DocSec’s confidence.

  But hit-and-run operations could never end this war. That happy day would come only when the NRA broke out of the Branxtons and took McNair. In theory at least, today’s operation was the next step in that long and bloody process. This time, for the first time, the Fed landers were not running diversionary attacks; ENCOMM intended them to be an integral part of the operation to take Perdan from the Hammers and keep hold of it in the face of a furious and sustained Hammer counterattack.

  Privately, Michael was increasingly persuaded that the NRA had little chance of succeeding. Yes, they would take Perdan. It was garrisoned by planetary defense troops, and they had no stomach for the NRA’s shock tactics. So Perdan would fall to the NRA; Michael was sure of it. Great propaganda for the NRA and the Nationalists but a military dead end. To cap it all, Anna and the 120th would be in the thick of it, which was fine, but this operation, like all the others, would end the same way: The Hammers would send in reinforcements, backed up by ground-attack fliers, and take it back.

  With a quiet prayer that he would be proved wrong, that Operation Tappet—the most complex, far-ranging, and ambitious operation ENCOMM had ever planned—would deliver and that Anna would come back alive, Michael followed the rest of the Fed lander crews out of the briefing room.

  Widowmaker sat waiting for him, its massive brooding shape filling the tunnel. Michael patted it affectionately before he started his preflight walk-around. Strictly speaking, the whole business was unnecessary—Widowmaker’s AIs had already told him everything worth knowing about the lander’s flight status—but he was old-fashioned. He liked to see things for himself, so he walked around, checking everything he could see and touch.

  The lander—brand new when delivered to Redwood—was fast losing its pristine good looks, the ceramsteel armor scarred by shrapnel from Hammer missiles that had come too close. They had been lucky; none had made it past the lander’s defenses, thankfully, but for how much longer? The Hammers must be getting very pissed by now, and in Michael’s experience, pissed people could be very creative. Somebody out there would be spending a great deal of time and effort trying to work out a way to hack the Fed landers out of the sky.

  Michael worked his way methodically around and underneath the lander before climbing the ladder to check the upper hull. It was a tight squeeze, the armored blisters housing Widowmaker’s electronic warfare equipment and defensive lasers close to scraping the roof of the limestone tunnel. A quick scan confirmed that nothing was untoward. Widowmaker was in good shape: not the 100 percent he wanted, more like 95 percent, but with the nearest Fed heavy maintenance team hundreds of light-years away, that had to suffice. A final check confirmed that the tug assigned to drag the lander to its new launch position was hooked up and ready to go. Michael commed Ferreira.

  “Sir?” she replied.

  “My walk-around’s done,” he said. “No surprises. Okay to confirm we’re ready to go?”

  “Affirmative. All systems are nominal except the port cooling pump. It’s holding up, but Chief Fodor says don’t be surprised if it blows.”

  “Roger, that. I think we’ll have to strip it out after this mission. I don’t fancy flying ops on one engine. Call us in when ready to launch,” he said. “And while you’re at it, download any crew mail.”

  “Uh, ENCOMM won’t like that, sir,” Ferreira said. “We’re only authorized to access operations bandwidth.”

  “Screw it,” Michael said; the NRA’s rules were too petty for him to worry about. �
�Just do it. Who knows,” he added, “you might have something from that ugly NRA captain who’s been stalking you.”

  Ferreira face creased into an indignant scowl. “Sir!” she spluttered. “Captain N’duma isn’t ugly. Well, yes he is … but only by Fed standards. Anyway, I like him, and he isn’t stalking me … sir!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Michael said with a grin. Ferreira’s blossoming love affair with one of ENCOMM’s operations staff was a soft target he and the rest of Widowmaker’s crew enjoyed taking potshots at. “Just call us in and get the mail.”

  “Sir.”

  Michael climbed Widowmaker’s ramp to where Petty Officer Morozov was waiting. “All set?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s one hell of a tight squeeze.”

  Michael looked around Widowmaker’s cargo bay; the brilliantly lit space had been stripped back to bare metal to accommodate its load: a containerized Hammer mobile air-defense battery. Michael shook his head in wonderment at the sight. Reportedly, the whole lot had been handed over to the NRA by a PGDF air-defense battalion when it deserted en masse to the NRA: radar, fire control and missile guidance computers, launchers, Gordian missiles, everything. He shook his head again, marveling at the NRA’s ingenuity … and luck.

  “It sure is,” he said, “though I’ll be glad to see the last of all this mass”—he patted one of the battery’s scarred matte-green containers—“not to mention all those war-shot missiles. Makes me nervous, having all that Hammer ordnance onboard.”

  “Shit, me, too, sir. Hope the buggers work the way they’re supposed to.”

  “They should. If there’s one thing the Hammers are good at, it’s building missiles. Close her up, Chief. We’ll be moving in five minutes. Don’t want to keep ENCOMM waiting.”

  “Sir.”

  Michael walked through the cargo bay and climbed the ladder to the flight deck. That was as far as he got, any further progress blocked by the enormous bulk of Chief Bienefelt engaged in what looked like a life-and-death struggle with a combat space suit, a struggle made harder by the cramped space. Assault lander flight decks were never designed with spacers as large as Bienefelt in mind.

  “Jeez, Matti,” Michael said, hands up in a theatrical display of despair. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I won’t … bother to … get on, you sonofabitch, not you, sir, the suit … bother to answer that question, sir,” she muttered. “Bloody thing … ah, that’s it,” she said as her suit gave up the fight and flowed into place. “Why the hell didn’t it do that the first time?”

  “I know the answer to that one, Chief, but—”

  “A burning desire to live long enough to see retirement persuades you to silence?” Bienefelt said, grabbing her helmet from an overhead rack.

  “About sums it up, yeah. Now, to be serious. The new cannon shells. I’ve seen the results from the test firings. What do you think?”

  “Well, sir. In the end, one 30-mm cannon shell is much like any other.”

  “That’s true, but only because the Hammers stole the design from the same place we did, Matti.”

  Bienefelt laughed. “Please!” she said. “We licensed it. The Hammers stole it, and why wouldn’t they? When it comes to cannon, the Henschel HKS-30 is one of the all-time classics. The big problem’s the propellant; the one the Hammers use is not as good as ours—it burns too slow—but it’ll do. We’ve adjusted the fire-control system to compensate, so we’ll be fine.”

  “I agree. The Hammers are good at dumb ordnance. Right, time to go, I think.”

  Suiting up, Michael squeezed his way past the seats of his crew and climbed into his seat. He crammed his helmet over his head and dropped it onto its neck ring, where it sealed with a soft ffffttt, and strapped in. Wriggling around in a futile attempt to get comfortable, he allowed the seat AI to flow crash-resistant foam around his combat space suit. He was ready; a quick scan of the system status boards confirmed that Widowmaker was, too.

  “All stations, command. Suit integrity checks. Okay, let’s go. Mother, clear to start the tow when ready.”

  “Ready.”

  With a series of shuddering lurches, Widowmaker started on its way down the tunnel. Michael turned to Ferreira. “So, Lieutenant, your man get in touch?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ferreira said, a touch tartly. “He has. He’s well, thanks for asking. So did one Trooper Anna Cheung Helfort, 120th NRA.”

  “Well?” Michael demanded.

  “Well what?” Ferreira asked, eyes wide open in innocent inquiry.

  “You know what. Will you comm me her message or do I have to throw you off this lander?”

  “And miss all the fun? Hell, no! Comming it to you.”

  Michael scanned the vidmail, uncomfortably aware that this was not the time to think about Anna. He was relieved to discover nothing new, struck again by the look of grim determination on her face. That was a worry. With the 120th Regiment an integral part of Operation Tappet, it was clear that she had no intention of sitting back while others worked their butts off; Michael had spent a great deal of time and energy trying not to think what that might mean. He cursed under his breath and closed the message. Why, he wondered, was life so damn complicated? More to the point, why was Anna so damn stubborn?

  Putting Anna out of his mind, he turned his focus back to the command plot. Tappet might have been the most complex operation ever put together by ENCOMM, but Widowmaker’s part in it was straightforward: deliver the Gordian battery to the landing zone, take off, and provide air support for the NRA assault before making a fast run for home before the Kingfishers and their Alaric missiles arrived. Simple, straightforward, and he hated it because the Fed landers were leaving the field before the battle was over, leaving Anna and the rest of the NRA to hold Perdan against the inevitable—and always ferocious—Hammer counterattack.

  “At launch position,” Mother said after what seemed like a lifetime trundling through a succession of limestone caves and laser-cut tunnels.

  “Command, roger.” Michael said, scanning the cave mouth and the ground beyond for obstructions. “Okay, we are clear to launch. Tac, do we have the feed from ENCOMM?”

  “No sir, not yet.” Michael swore under his breath; the NRA’s communications were a million light-years from what he was used to. “Working on it,” Ferreira said, head down over her workstation. “Hold on. Okay, we’re in. Update’s on the operations plot.”

  Michael studied the plot before nodding his approval. Things were running well. Problem was, most NRA operations started off that way. The average PGDF trooper hated the NRA’s trademark mix of suicidal bravery and animal ferocity; invariably it was enough to persuade them that discretion, not valor, was the order of the day. Already, the two diversionary attacks were well under way, leading elements of the NRA’s ground assault already deep into the towns of Bretonville and Daleel, their PGDF defenders reeling back in confusion. That was the good news; the bad news was that the usual Hammer response was on its way: heavy ground-attack landers from Amokran carrying marines—tougher and better disciplined than even the best PGDF battalions—supported by Kingfishers from McNair spaceport.

  Michael said a quiet prayer of thanks for the persistent refusal of the commanding general of marines to station his precious landers any closer to the Branxton front. General Baxter’s bloody-mindedness was a priceless contribution to the NRA’s war effort; the man should get a medal for it. Even so, things around Perdan were going to be difficult; the assault there was just getting under way, and he had to hope the Hammers were slow to work out that Perdan was the primary objective.

  “Command, tac. Stand by launch. Ground crew is clear and safe. We’re good to go.”

  “Command, roger. Mother, you have control, weapons free. Faceplates down, everyone.”

  With a subdued roar, Mother brought Widowmaker’s main engines up to power, the air behind the lander dissolving into a maelstrom of flame-shot dust. She held the lander with the brakes for an instant before easing Widowmaker on
its way.

  The heavily loaded lander started to move, sluggishly at first, then gathering speed fast. Widowmaker moved out of the cave and into the gloom of a rain-soaked Commitment night. Shifting power to belly thrusters and deploying the wings, Mother drove the lander into the sky; the instant the lander was clear of the canyon, Mother transitioned it to winged flight, twin pillars of flame shredding the air behind Widowmaker while it accelerated hard into the night. Michael breathed easier as the speed built, the lander steadying in the race to get to Perdan before the Hammers sent Kingfishers to deal with it.

  “Hatchet Two Four, Bushmaster Six,” Ferreira said. “Airborne and nominal.”

  “Bushmaster Six, Hatchet Two Four. Roger. Chopping TACON to Grapple Three Three. Over.”

  “Hatchet Two Four, roger. Chopping now. Two Four out.”

  “Command, tac,” Ferreira said. “Perdan command, call sign Grapple Three Three, has tactical control.”

  It was a short ride. Swinging to starboard in a max-g turn that had the status board lighting up in protest, Mother chopped the power, easing the lander’s nose skyward to let the speed bleed off, the foamalloy wings biting deep into the rushing air.

  “One minute,” Michael said. “Tac, confirm clear to land.”

  “Grapple Three Three confirms landing zone is clear,” Ferreira said.

  “Command approved to land,” Michael said.

  He peered at the holovid feed from the forward-facing holocams, eyes flicking to and from the threat plot while he waited for any response from the Hammers. There was nothing to see: the thick cloud over Perdan, the gray-black murk turning to white when Mother fired the belly thrusters, the lander easing down, breaking through the cloud seconds before it thumped down onto Perdan’s municipal airport, the brakes screaming in protest while Mother brought the lander to walking speed before turning to follow Alley Kat and Hell Bent, shapeless black masses in the darkness.