Helfort's War: Book 1

by Graham Sharp Paul

  Jaruzelska nodded absently.

  At that moment, she was more concerned about whether her ships were ready to deal with the incoming Hammer attack. They looked to be, and with minutes to prepare, they’d be even more ready when the attack arrived. The good news was that the delay meant that the Hammer was unlikely to be able to get another missile salvo away. The task group’s massive rail-gun attack would see to that.

  Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the issue at hand. After a further short discussion with her flag staff, she made up her mind.

  She hated overruling her flag AI, but there were times when it had to be done. The task group’s second missile salvo would be ready to launch in less than thirty seconds, and if she was going to change the plan, she needed to do it now.

  “Flag AI, flag. I don’t think the decoys are going to keep the attention of the New Dallas task group much longer. Now that we have the main Hammer force on the back foot, I want New Dallas and her escorts taken out before they give us too much grief.”

  The flag AI’s consideration of Jaruzelska’s proposition was noticeably prolonged as it digested the implications of her orders. “Flag, flag AI. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed.” Jaruzelska’s tone was very emphatic even as she keyed a marker into her neuronics as a reminder to have the AI boffins look at the flag AI’s inability to see that the New Dallas group was every bit as big a threat as the flotilla base ships. A bigger threat, in fact, as the task group’s relentless assault slowly ground the Hell Flotilla and its base’s fixed defenses into dust. Even if the New Dallas and her escorts weren’t shooting at them right now, they would be soon.

  “Flag AI, roger. Missile salvo on New Dallas task group. Stand by, stand by…away now.”

  That was one thing she liked about AIs, Jaruzelska thought. Unlike some of the prima donnas on her staff, they never sounded hurt when you overruled them.

  Before Mother, safe in her meter-thick shock-mounted ceramsteel box, commed him, Michael had been sitting amid the shattered wreckage of the surveillance drone hangar, watching but not seeing the frantic efforts of the ship’s damage control teams to seal the damage to 387’s hull. The hangar was a mess of emergency foamsteel generators, steel bracing, and welding gear. Bienefelt had been crash-bagged and taken below to join Karpov in regen. There was nothing more he could do for any of them now except watch. He’d patched his neuronics into the sick bay’s holocams and, with his head a mass of white-hot agony, watched as the medics struggled to stabilize the surviving members of his team and get them into the regen tanks in time. Worst of all were the ones the medics had lost, their crash bags laid out neatly against the sick bay bulkhead. Michael struggled to remember the faces of Ng, Strezlecki, Leong, Carlsson, and Athenascu.

  But he couldn’t. They were just blurs behind a thick red-gray fog of hurt.

  It was all he could do just to sit there slumped on the deck as pain poured through his system. He was a mess. His neuronics told him he had lost a fair bit of blood and that there had been a whole lot of other damage involving bones, muscles, and tendons that didn’t sound too good, but he didn’t care.

  Through the red haze and with blood pouring down his face and into his suit, Michael finally answered Mother’s increasingly insistent comm.

  “Yes, what?” He winced. Just talking hurt.

  “Michael, this is Mother. I know you are hurt, but you’ll be okay.” Mother had firmed her voice to a point just short of being brutally direct. “But I need you and I need you now. You are now the senior line officer, and you must take command.”

  “Senior line officer? Command? What do you mean?” Michael struggled to concentrate. The blood around his neck was getting sticky as it congealed, but thank God the bleeding was stopping. “Command? Why?”

  “They’re all dead, Michael. Ribot, Hosani, Holdorf, Armitage, Kapoor. All dead. That last slug took out most of the combat information center crew and the lander as well. Reilly’s okay. He was in propulsion control.”

  Michael nodded painfully, not fully understanding what Mother was saying to him. All in all, it was much easier to do what the insistent voice was saying and not argue. Arguing required thought, and thinking hurt. “Okay. Where do I go?”

  “Wardroom, Michael. Best I can do and the only large holovid screen left intact. And please be quick. The next attack is due in under ninety seconds.”

  Michael forced himself to his feet with as much speed as his bruised and battered body would allow and made his way down to 2 Deck and past the combat information center. It was no more. It had been blown apart, its forward bulkhead a shattered and shredded curtain of plasteel opening onto a nightmare vision of pure destruction.

  The slug’s deadly shroud of plasma and its escort of metal splinters spalled off Weapons Power Charlie had passed right through the center of the combat information center, with the blast wave smashing people and equipment with indiscriminate disregard. Now the compartment was a scene of appalling carnage and frantic activity as overworked medics and damage control crews struggled desperately to crash-bag the survivors and get them below and into regen.

  Michael couldn’t see much, and what he could see did not look good.

  There was very little left of Ribot, Hosani, and Holdorf, only a few pathetic shreds of shattered flesh and pieces of heat-seared gray-black space suit slowly turning back to orange as combat chromaflage settings wore off. On the port side, he recognized Armitage, whose suit looked surprisingly intact, though the body was slumped over at an awkward angle. Armitage was being ignored by the medics, so she must be dead, Michael thought without emotion.

  As he pushed past the shattered chaos that once had been 387’s combat information center, he could see no sign of Kapoor. Must have been in the hangar, poor bastard, he thought.

  It took all the willpower he possessed, but finally Michael was settled in the wardroom, itself badly damaged both by the slug as it had torn through one bulkhead en route to the combat information center and by the shock from Weapons Power Charlie going up on the other side of the heavily armored bulkhead. Thank God for blast venting, Michael thought, and for the designers and engineers who had put it in 387.

  As Mother ran Michael through the tactical situation, his heart sank as his badly battered brain slowly came to grips with what was happening to 387 and, even worse, what was about to happen. With much of the ship’s forward armor now stripped, most of her short-range laser capability destroyed, and her long-range lasers degraded by the loss of Weapons Power Charlie, even six missiles and their attendant decoy swarm would be a handful.

  Despite the pain and after a careful look at the tactical plot, Michael knew instinctively what had to be done.

  He commed Chen. 166’s skipper was the boss now that Ribot was gone, so it would be his call.

  Jaruzelska watched the command plot, her thoughts a mix of professional satisfaction and private pity.

  No matter how hard she tried, she could never take any pleasure from the spectacle of spacers dying in the pitiless hard vacuum of space, whether they were Hammers or not. She sat back in her chair struggling to get comfortable, her combat space suit heavy and uncooperative. Christ on the Cross, she thought, I’m getting too damn old for this sort of thing. She watched in silence as the task group’s first rail-gun salvo finished its 150,000-kilometer journey to drop a hailstorm of platinum/iridium death onto the Hammer’s fixed defenses and the hapless ships of Rear Admiral Pritchard’s flotilla as they struggled to get going.

  Jaruzelska hissed through clenched teeth as the slugs smashed home, the surface of Hell-8 disappearing behind a roiling, churning mass of pulverized dirt. The Hammer ships, their shapes sharply black against massed stars, were spewing clouds of ceramsteel and reactive armor into space.

  “Caught the bastards asleep, Martin.” There was no triumph in Jaruzelska’s voice.

  Her chief of staff nodded somberly. “True. But I doubt that even our ships could
get going from a cold start in ten minutes, never mind four.”

  “God, is it only four minutes?” To Jaruzelska it felt like hours.

  Oblivious to all else, Jaruzelska watched as the damage assessments flowed in. If she didn’t think too much about the human cost of it all, the news was good. The heavy cruisers Verity and Integrity and the light cruisers Cordoba and Camara had been damaged but were still assessed as combat-effective. The heavy escort Titov had been hit hard and probably was combat-ineffective. So, she thought, it’s really started.

  “Sir, priority vidlink from 166. Will you take it?”

  “Of course.”

  Two seconds later the vidlink connected.

  “Jaruzelska.”

  The tortured face of Lieutenant Chen filled her neuronics as he made his request for help. Jaruzelska reviewed with mounting horror the damage and threat assessments commed through to the flag AI by 166 and 387.

  “Chen, okay. Stop. I’ll do it,” she said, cursing herself for losing sight of the big picture to such an extent that she had forgotten the unequal struggle being waged by two of her ships. It was a classic example of why people were still in command, not AIs.

  Her ships, her people, her responsibility.

  She wasted no time, and in seconds the task group’s massive laser batteries had switched away from the New Dallas and the Shark to fill the void between the two light scouts and the onrushing missile salvo with a lethally focused curtain of light. The lasers first blinded and then shredded the missiles into pieces as their microfusion plants were turned into spectacular balls of rolling white-yellow light.

  The threat to 166 and 387 was over.

  With a final prayer that the two light scouts would get home safely, Jaruzelska turned her attention back to the Hammer ships.

  As the cruisers switched their heavy antiship lasers back to New Dallas and Shark, the next round of damage assessments scrolled across Jaruzelska’s neuronics.

  Titov was confirmed destroyed, the ship having erupted in an enormous ball of flame, probably as a result of a direct hit on her main engine fusion plant as it powered up to get the ship under way. The flotilla base’s fixed missile batteries and phased-array missile control radars had almost all been destroyed. Verity, Integrity, Cordoba, and Camara, no change: damaged but combat-effective.

  The news from Hell Central was even better.

  The administrative center of the Hell system was lightly defended and stood no chance against the four heavy and two light cruisers of Commodore Molefe’s task group, its fixed defenses wiped out in the first seconds of the attack. Two Hammer light scouts unfortunate enough to be caught alongside had fared no better. They had disintegrated as rail-gun slugs had ripped them apart, their fusion plants erupting in huge secondary explosions to send two shattered hulks spinning off into space. As they tumbled away, the hulls began to spit out a pathetically small cluster of lifepods, their characteristic double-pulsed orange strobes winking like demented fireflies; the international distress band was busy with radio beacons pumping out cries for help.

  “Flag, flag AI. Shark combat-ineffective.”

  “Flag, roger.” The light cruiser Shark; that was good. New Dallas could ill afford to lose her and her firepower. And it was a surprise. For all the awesome power of antiship lasers, they did not have a high kill probability against ships as large as light cruisers. Too big, too much armor, and, in this case, at 320,000 kilometers getting very close to the maximum effective range of the system. But the Shark had been turning, and the task group had been able to catch her side on where her armor was thinner. Good laser beam formation and tight coordination had done the rest. And for that she had the 387 and the 166 to thank, a debt of gratitude she hoped they would survive long enough to be repaid.

  Jaruzelska sat back to watch the arrival of her second rail-gun salvo.

  The Hammer’s last missile attack disintegrated around Michael and his scratch command team.

  With 387’s short-range lasers largely inoperative and its chain guns overwhelmed, a few of the missile fragments made it through. The laser-shredded, heat-warped remains of the Hammer’s heavy missiles and their decoys smashed into 387 at over 280,000 meters per second, their kinetic energy strong enough to punch deep gashes in the ship’s armor. The ship’s hull shuddered as the last of its battered and torn reactive bow armor struggled to protect the inner hull.

  But finally all was quiet, and for the first time in what seemed like hours the plot showed no immediate threats to the battered hulk that was 387. Michael slumped back in his seat, so tired that he wanted to crawl somewhere quiet and sleep. He forced himself back to the task at hand.

  “Command, Mother. Shark combat-ineffective.”

  Michael sat up. “Command, roger. Put it up.”

  Michael and his team watched in awe as the holocams zoomed in on the huge bulk of the light cruiser Shark, one of the Hammer’s newest warships. Its bottomless black shape was riven along one side by a long gash, venting ship’s atmosphere to space; the humid air turned instantly to an ice cloud that was visible in 387’s low-light holocams as a scintillating plume writhing its way into nothingness. Then, as Michael watched, a secondary explosion racked the stricken ship, a huge cloud of yellow-red plasma boiling out of the hull.

  “Jesus,” Michael muttered, suddenly conscious that he had a ship to command, a ship to get out of Hell nearspace with all onboard. It was now his personal responsibility to bring them to safety.

  “Mother, Command. Main laser battery power status.”

  “Seventy-five percent. I’ve switched targeting back to New Dallas, and 166 has done the same. We’re on a stern-crossing vector, so the angle of attack is very good. I am rerouting power from propulsion and will have both lasers back to 100 percent shortly.”

  That was what Michael wanted to hear, and with the much simpler and more straightforward tactical situation firmly in Mother’s capable hands, he turned his mind to what had to be done to get 387 out of its current mess. First, he needed to talk to Chen, now senior officer of a very battered two-ship task group. Second, he needed an XO to look after getting the ship jump-worthy. Then he needed to make sure that Cosmo Reilly was getting on top of the enormous job of producing a ship capable of getting them home safely.

  The comm to Chen was short and sharp, and Chen’s plan was simple: Keep lasers on New Dallas for as long as they could, make 166 and 387 jump-worthy, and then get the fuck out of the Hell system as soon as possible.

  Direct orders from Admiral Jaruzelska, Chen said, and Michael saw no reason to argue. In the meantime, Chen was bringing 166 alongside to get his medics onboard to help clear 387’s backlog of casualties.

  After a brief pause to watch as 387’s and 166’s lasers reignited the glowing red speck on New Dallas’s stern just outboard of her starboard heat dump, Michael commed the medics to expect help any time now. Then he commed the next most senior person left alive in the chain of command and, effective immediately, his new XO, Chief Harris from Warrant Officer Ng’s team, to meet him in the surveillance drone hangar.

  Mother commed Michael as he and Chief Harris started their survey of the battered wreck that was 387.

  “Command, Mother.”

  “Command, go ahead.”

  “Patch neuronics into primary holocam.”

  “Roger, patching.”

  Mother didn’t need to tell him where to look. What he saw staggered him.

  What had been just a small, dull red speck, a mere pinprick on the vast expanse of New Dallas’s stern, had grown in the space of only a few minutes into a searingly bright spot. Even as Michael watched, the spot began to spew a small jet of plasma, molten metal, and debris out into space as the ships’ lasers chewed their way remorselessly into the hull. Shit, Michael thought. He was seeing ship’s atmosphere venting to space.

  “By Jesus, their hull integrity’s breached,” he said. Michael could hardly breathe, the tension of the moment gripping his heart like an iron band. He
had trouble believing what he was seeing, but something deep inside told him there was more to come.

  “Mother, I have a feeling about this. I want everyone who can to watch.”

  “Roger.”

  When the end came, it came horrifyingly fast. In a matter of seconds, the jet of material pouring out of the hole in New Dallas’s stern exploded into a searing plume of incandescent gas hundreds of meters long as the lasers finally broke through deep into the ship’s hull.

  And then, in a single searing flash, the antiship lasers finally connected with something big, and the entire starboard quarter of the huge ship erupted in a massive explosion. Its force punched New Dallas into a slow, tumbling stern-over-bow spin, furious jets of reaction mass spewing fore and aft as maneuvering systems struggled to bring the heavy cruiser back under control.

  Mother provided the commentary this time. “According to the TECHINT briefings we’ve been given, there’s an auxiliary fusion power plant aft of the propulsion power compartments that feeds the after rail-gun batteries. I think that’s what’s gone up. She won’t be destroyed, but she will be combat-ineffective for a while until they sort things out.”

  Michael could hardly speak, wishing that Ribot and all the other 387s could have been there to witness something that would go down in the record books.

  Chen commed him.

  “We did it, Michael, we did it.”

  “Hard to believe, sir. But by God, we’ve paid a price.” Michael stopped, choked with emotion.

  “You did. I’m calling a halt. It’s time we got jump-worthy and went home. And Michael!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You’re 387’s skipper now, so for fuck’s sake stop calling me ‘sir.’ It makes me nervous. Call me Bill,” Chen said, his voice soft with compassion.