Helfort's War: Book 1

by Graham Sharp Paul

  Ribot sounded troubled. Michael felt for him. There was no obvious way out of this one, time was running out, and nobody, not even Mother (not that AIs were any good at solving problems like this), seemed to have the answers Ribot needed.

  Another long moment of silence was interrupted, this time by Hosani. “Actually, sir, Michael’s got most of the answer. There might be a way. Look here,” she said as she commed the two outermost planets of the Revelation system to come up on the command plot. “We could do what Michael suggested if we dropped behind Revelation-III. God knows, the bloody thing is big enough to hide a burn, and we know the Hammer have no dirtside or orbital surveillance assets there. We could then fire main engines without the Hammer seeing us, slingshot around the planet, get lined up for Hell’s Moons, and get the microjump all nicely set up. Might work, and God knows, I think we’d all be a lot happier doing a fly-by of Hell’s Moons at 300,000 kph rather than 150,000.”

  Ribot was silent for a moment, and then he turned to Michael with a smile. “Michael, you might not have had all of the answer, but by God, you had enough of it. And Maria, well done for thinking it through. Leon, that’s a beer you owe me for not getting there first!”

  “You’re a hard man, sir,” Leon said, his smile even broader than Ribot’s. Michael knew why. They were all happy that there might be a way to do what had to be done without getting themselves killed in the process.

  “Okay. So far, so good, but there is one problem left: Will we have enough driver mass to do all this plus the fly-by of Eternity planet or whatever the Hammer call the damn place and still get back to the FedWorlds safely?” Ribot paused, a slight edge of concern in his voice as Holdorf consulted Mother.

  Holdorf shook his head emphatically. “In a word, sir, no. The vector change to get lined up for Judgment system and Eternity planet after we have done the fly-by of Hell’s Moons is very much in our favor, and Mother can fine-tune it a bit to reduce it to almost nothing, I suspect. So we’re okay there. But the vector change when we depart the Judgment system would be extreme.” Holdorf paused as Mother crunched the numbers. “Yes, as I thought, roughly Red 150 and Up 20. And we’ll be doing 300,000 kph with no large planets to hide behind when we do our burn. There is a fourth planet in the Judgment system, but it’s not close enough to be useful.”

  A heavy silence descended as the group absorbed the latest problem. Armitage broke the quiet this time. “It’s staring us in the face. Keep on keeping on. Go straight through to Frontier and mass up at Jackson’s World. Mother says the vector change would be…yes, Green 30 Up 10, which sounds okay. We can do it once we get well clear of Eternity nearspace.”

  Ribot thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I think that might do it, and we can probably adjust the fly-by of Eternity planet to reduce it some more. But”—Ribot held up his hands—“I think that leaves us dropping into Frontier space at 300,000 kph with not enough mass”—another pause to confirm with Mother—“to drop our speed as we come in-system to match orbits with wherever they send us. The delta-v needed to drop into Clarke orbit is too great. The damn planet’s coming toward us instead of away, and we’re going to be coming at a very steep angle to Jackson’s World’s orbital plane.”

  Ribot paused for a moment.

  “That means a mass driver replenishment as soon as we drop into Frontier space just in case we miss badly; otherwise we may never stop, though that’s unlikely,” he said confidently.

  Too confident, Michael thought. Much too confident. Matching vectors to complete driver mass replenishment was difficult enough, but 387 would be arriving in-system after a pinchspace jump made at 300,000 kph. Although the navigation AI’s accuracy with the Mod 45 upgrade was much improved, it was optimized for the standard jump velocity of 150,000 kph. At a jump speed of 300,000 kph, the accuracy of the nav AI dropped off dramatically, and that meant 387 could end up missing its planned drop point by millions of kilometers. Ribot would have to talk to Fleet again; Michael could see that.

  But, all those were things that could be overcome, and Michael felt a sudden surge of confidence. If Fleet could preposition ships downrange from the planned pinchspace drop point, 387 would have enough driver mass to adjust its vector to make the rendezvous point closest to wherever it was they finally dropped. Yes, as long as they didn’t run into any Hammer warships, and Mother’s THREATSUM said that was very unlikely, it would work.

  Ribot interrupted what threatened to become a very long silence.

  “Sorry, folks. Just making sure it all hangs together, and I think it does. Leon, I want you and Maria to work up the final nav plan with Mother based on what we’ve talked about. Oh, and work in the surveillance drone deployments as well. Michael, you work with Leon and Holdorf on that. As soon as that’s firm, we’ll pinchcomm the plan through to Fleet and I’ll speak to Fleet operations about setting up our safety net at Frontier. Jacqui, you can do the final alignment checks ready to jump once I’ve okayed the plan.

  “I think that the main issues have been addressed. Any more things we need to consider now?” Ribot, receiving a chorus of “no”s in reply, pushed on. “Okay, let’s do it.” Small tight smiles were all the response he got as the group split up.

  Forty-five frantic minutes later, everything had been done to Ribot’s satisfaction, and Michael stood at the back of the combat information center watching as Armitage ran the clock down to the pinchspace jump. They were in for an interesting trip, and Michael hoped to God that there weren’t any Hammer ships out there that could turn interesting into fatal.

  At 22:45, with its jump report sent, 387 pinched out en route to the Revelation System and its fly-by of Hell’s Moons in search of the missing Mumtaz.

  Friday, September 11, 2398, UD

  Mumtaz—Brooks Gravitational Anomaly, Deep Space

  The economy class lounge was a large compartment that normally was studded with comfortable chairs around low tables and filled with the gentle buzz of conversation from passengers making the most of their enforced idleness.

  But not now.

  The tables and chairs were gone. Packed into the center of the room, wrists held together with plasticuffs, were the survivors of the brutal attack mounted on the Mumtaz’s crew by the group of young men who now stood guard in a loose half circle across the front of the room. Light assault carbines looted from the Mumtaz’s armory were cradled casually but competently in their arms.

  In the front were the bloodied bodies of the seven crew members—three men and four women—who had held out until the last. Their knives and homemade clubs had provided no defense against assault carbines.

  The man standing in the door, corn-gold hair falling untidily across his forehead down into hard gray-blue eyes, watched the group as they absorbed the implications of the callous and brutal display of power they had just witnessed, a low murmur of shocked conversation rising and falling like a strange chant. He held up his hand to quiet the assembly.

  “My name is Andrew Comonec, and I want you to listen to what I have to say very, very carefully.” He paused until he was sure that every living soul was focused on him and what he was about to say.

  He nodded casually at the bodies at his feet. “That, my friends, is what happens to those who do not do what we tell them to do. And just in case any of you still do not understand”—Comonec nodded to the guard nearest him and watched impassively as the man walked to the front of the group, pulled out a small pistol, and without visible emotion shot an elderly woman in the head—“what I am saying, then perhaps that little demonstration will make things clear for you.”

  He paused as a low moaning sound washed over the group, the sheer terror of the moment threatening to turn to hysteria. The passengers nearest the dead woman were screaming in panic.

  Comonec lifted his voice, willing his control onto the mob. This was the moment of greatest risk. If a group rushed them, they were dead. Assault carbines or not, they couldn’t kill enough people to win. But Comonec w
as a gambler, and he stretched the moment until he knew he had won, the pure pleasure of the adrenaline rush that came from controlling the minds of hundreds of people flooding through him.

  He smiled. “Good. I think you do understand. If you do what you are told, the rest of you have nothing to fear. Nothing at all. You have my word. I will personally see to it that you are all safely reunited with your families and loved ones. But you must do as you are told as soon as you are told. If you do, you will be fine.” He smiled again, the smile of someone who cared, a smile completely at odds with his eyes. They weren’t smiling. They were dreamy with the pleasure of the kill, of fresh blood.

  “Now, what I want you to do is this. We will comm you in alphabetical order so that we can check your details to make sure we know who you are and who we have to contact to let them know you are okay. We’ll also remove the plastic ties around your wrists. I know they must be hurting by now, so the sooner we do this, the better. When we’ve done that, we’ll ask you to go to your cabins and stay there for the moment until we get things sorted out. We’ll then let you know what happens next with meals and so on. Okay?”

  The minute nods of shocked acceptance confirmed Comonec’s victory, and his body flushed with the exquisite pleasure of the win. “Right. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Andreesen family first. Please come up.”

  Slowly and reluctantly, a man, his face gray with shock, barely able to control the trembling that shook his body, stood up, closely followed by a woman and two children who seemed catatonic, so slow were they to move.

  “Come on. Please hurry. We won’t hurt you.”

  Thirty minutes later it was Sam’s turn. No matter where she looked, she couldn’t see her mother, and she was almost frantic with worry. Oh, please God, let Mom be okay, she prayed desperately as heart-pounding panic rose in waves, threatening to overwhelm her.

  “Helfort, Kerri and Samantha.”

  Sam rose to her feet, and as she did, she saw her mother, way across the room, rise to her feet also. “Oh, Mom,” she sobbed, “thank God you’re all right.”

  They came together at the front of the room. Sam was trembling visibly, tear-filled eyes spilling glistening wet tracks down a face ash-gray with shock and stress as she tried to avoid the blood pooled across the carpet, her head turned away from the shattered bodies of what had once been ordinary people like her. Her mother took Sam’s hand and started to embrace her, to tell her everything would be fine and not to worry, but Comonec stepped forward.

  “Later, later. There’ll be time for that later,” he said, pushing them through the door with a brutal roughness completely at odds with his comforting assurances that all would be well.

  As Kerri and Sam stumbled through the door and out of sight of the remaining passengers, strong hands grabbed them. Sam started to panic again, and even as that panic spurred her into a last desperate attempt to escape, a gas-powered inoculation gun was jammed into her neck, with only a brief puff of high-pressure air and a short stabbing pain that was gone almost before she could feel it to mark the injection.

  “Oh, God,” she sobbed. What were they doing to her? Fear turned to terror as the terrible thought that this was the end hit her. With a horrible sense of the inevitable, she realized that it all made ghastly good sense. What good was she to the hijackers? None, none at all. Even as a creeping gray fog started to overwhelm her, she reached out to her mother, who was still struggling desperately to keep a gas gun–wielding hijacker at bay. But to no effect. Even as Kerri Helfort took Sam’s outstretched hand, the gas gun hit home.

  “Mom,” Sam croaked, her voice strangled into an in-choherent croak. “Mom, help me.”

  “Sam, Sam,” her mother said, her voice fast being choked off by whatever the hijackers had just pumped into her. “Sam, listen to me. This is just something to keep us quiet, so don’t worry. It’ll be okay, I promise.”

  Sam nodded, and then the gray fog overwhelmed her. As her grip on reality began to slip away, the last thing she could hear was her mother muttering to herself: “I knew there was something wrong with those bastards. You should have trusted your instincts, and none of this would have happened. You old fool. You…”

  And then the fog claimed her.

  Three hours later, as the Zanussi family disappeared through the door, Comonec felt the last traces of tension seep out of him.

  They had done it. By God, they had done it.

  Over a thousand crew members and passengers brought under control by just thirty men. And no casualties. Well, none on his team, anyway. He hoped that the faceless man who’d commissioned the mission didn’t get too upset about the Mumtazers who’d gotten in his way. The man, had been rather insistent, very insistent, in fact, that the job be done without anyone getting hurt.

  “Well, screw him, whoever he is,” Comonec muttered. The entire exercise had been a work of extreme professionalism, even if he said so himself, and his unknown sponsor was just going to have to see it the same way. What did a few damn Fed lives matter, anyway?

  He turned and strode through the door to see the unfortunate Zanussi family moving like zombies back to their cabins. A wonderful drug that Pavulomin-V, he thought, even if being caught with it was a federal offense punishable by ten years in jail. He now had an entire mership’s worth of people who would do everything and anything they were told to do without a moment’s hesitation or argument.

  Leaving instructions to have the bodies disposed of, Comonec commed his section leaders to meet him on the bridge. He had a rendezvous to make, and he intended to be there on schedule. Nothing was going to get in the way of the big fat juicy pile of anonymous cash that was now his by rights.

  Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD

  DLS-387, Revelation-III Nearspace

  For sheer, unremitting pressure, the days since 387 had dropped into Hammer space safely behind the hulking black mass of Revelation-III, a J-Class planet orbiting 7.5 billion kilometers out from its sun, had been like nothing Michael had experienced before.

  Apart from doing Ribot’s endless sims, the only real work Michael and his team had had to do was to launch the surveillance drone nicknamed Bonnie to jump a day ahead of 387 and, they hoped, if there were any nasty surprises, to let 387 know in advance. But apart from an unusually large number of Hammer ships close to Hell’s Moons, Bonnie hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, though as Michael reminded himself, Bonnie’s capabilities against stealth warships weren’t good—her sensor baselines were too short—so anything could happen. But at least the microjump was on.

  Now, two and a half days outward bound from Revelation-III, 387 was running in a gentle parabola through the fabric of space-time at over 300,000 kph, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Michael, like everyone else, wanted to get on with it, and he cursed the delays as Holdorf and Mother fine-tuned and fine-tuned 387’s alignment and vector to get it ready for the 1.5-billion-kilometer microjump that would drop them safely just over 18 million kilometers from Revelation-II.

  For Michael, the pressure was doubled by the knowledge that two of the people he most loved in the world would be so close, if only for a brief few hours. Because he was a rational person, it was easy for him to accept that what he was doing was giving them their best chance of coming through this nightmare alive. But at the emotional level, Michael felt like crawling off into a dark corner and howling out his fear and anxiety.

  As the jump approached, the ship was at general quarters, with every system online, every station manned, and every hatch and door firmly shut. Michael and his team stood in the drone hangar fully suited up, helmets on but visors open, ready to cope with the usual aftermath of the upcoming jump. Needless to say, Bienefelt had been her usually chatty self, pointing out in suitably grave tones to Michael how much worse a microjump was than a normal pinchspace jump. It was obvious, she had said, if one thought about it. In the space of a second or so the ship first jumped into and then dropped out of pinchspace, so it was bound to
be twice as bad as a normal jump. Michael tried not to think about it and just stood there, hunched over like the rest of his team, in his own private world of despair, waiting for the damn thing to happen. The idea that they might actually meet a Hammer warship almost appealed to him. At least they might get to kill a few of the fuckers.

  “All stations, this is command. We are go for pinchspace microjump in one minute. Command out.”

  Michael took a deep breath and instructed his stomach to stay put. Then the world tipped upside down, and Michael braced himself for his stomach to empty in its usual gut-wrenching way. But the jump never happened. He looked up to see Bienefelt and the rest of his team, including Strezlecki, who was supposed to be on his side, for God’s sake, he thought, standing there with smiles on their faces that turned into laughs as they saw the indignant look on Michael’s face.

  “Bastards,” Michael said as he realized he had been taken for a ride. “You unprincipled bastards. So much for mutual respect. Right, I won’t forget this. You in particular, Bienefelt. I think additional casualty desuiting drills are what’s called for. Petty Officer Strezlecki, you, too.” It felt good to laugh, to relieve the tension even for a moment, and with a new resolve that things would turn out all right, Michael held his hand up for silence as Mother finally got a grip on what 387 had dropped herself into.

  Closing his eyes, Michael commed into the threat plot and dropped himself into a position in space slightly behind and above 387. For one horrible moment, as bright red threat symbols blossomed in front of him, he thought they had run right into a Hammer task group. But methodically, Mother processed the passive sensor returns, and one by one the red symbols turned to orange: real enough threats but too far away to pose any immediate risk to 387.