Helfort's War Book III

by Graham Sharp Paul

  But quite how he was going to rescue Anna and destroy the Hammers at the same time, he had absolutely no idea.

  Thursday, April 19, 2401, UD

  City of McNair, Commitment

  The moon threw a thin light across the city of McNair.

  The streetscape was washed of all color: flame-blackened buildings, crude barricades smashed apart in the night’s fighting, smoke drifting from shops and government offices, from the wrecked cars, mobibots, and buses that littered the streets—all were painted in shades of gray splashed with daubs of black.

  DocSec troopers in black jumpsuits and body armor, visors down and riot shields up, stood in small groups at crossroads, with more in front of those government offices as yet undamaged, stun guns and gas-grenade throwers cradled in their arms, assault rifles slung across their backs. Close at hand, half-tracks and troop carriers were parked in neat rows. They struck an incongruous note, their good order in stark contrast to the chaos around them.

  The rioters had been forced out of the city center, harried and harassed every step of the way by DocSec; the streets were deserted. Nothing moved except smoke and ash.

  The city waited, silent, still, an edgy calm settling over devastated streets.

  Chief Councillor Polk stared out of the armored plasglass window of the flier while it climbed away from the brutal ceramcrete bulk of the Supreme Council building. From the air, McNair was an ugly sight. All across the city, piles of burning plasfiber spewed pillars of protest up into a gray sky, every greasy black plume of smoke a stark reminder that his grip on power might be slipping away.

  He had been around long enough to know how the Hammer Worlds worked. When the unwritten contract between government and governed—prosperity and stability from the government in exchange for unquestioning acquiescence from the governed—started to unravel, it was up to DocSec to restore the status quo.

  DocSec could deal with thousands of protesters: divide the mob up, kill any that stood and fought, track down those who ran, shoot some, imprison the rest, exile their families, and harass their friends and associates to remind them of the benefits of staying in line. The formula worked, as hundreds of neofascist governments had proved over the centuries. He just hoped it kept working long enough for him to die quietly in his own bed.

  If the formula failed, DocSec would find itself facing millions of protesters. When it did—and Polk’s instincts told him it would happen sooner rather than later—it was just a matter of time before the whole rotten edifice that was the Hammer government collapsed. Something told him that the Worlds were closer to that day than anyone was prepared to admit.

  Polk dismissed the problem; if the day came, it came, and when it did, why would he care? He would be dead, left to dangle by one leg from a streetlight. He sat back as the flier cleared McNair’s smoke-smeared skies. Without much success, he tried not to think about the day ahead: one meaningless public event after another, every second filmed by the holocams to demonstrate to the Hammer people that he, Jeremiah Polk, Chief Councillor of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds, was master of all the forces shaping the Worlds’ destiny.

  Which he was not, as anyone with half a brain knew after the fiasco at Devastation Reef.

  From the largest down to the smallest, his capacity to influence events was limited, laughably so. Kraa! Despite all his pushing, the Hammer of Kraa was unable to get even one miserable piece of Fed filth off Serhati, a planet that owed its day-to-day survival to Hammer largesse. How pitiful was that? Anyway, he consoled himself, at least he could make Helfort’s life miserable. That much he could and would do. Money slipped to a venal trashpress, money used to suborn Fed spacers with lavish hospitality—together they would make Helfort’s life hell. Polk told himself to be patient. One day, the relentless pressure would make Helfort careless, flush him out into the open, where a Hammer hit team would find a way to get to him.

  Much cheered by that prospect, Polk found to his amazement that he was actually looking forward to the rest of the day.

  Monday, May 7, 2401, UD

  Space Fleet headquarters, city of Foundation, Terranova

  Thanks to one of Fleet’s postcombat stress teams, Michael was coping a damn sight better than he had after his escape from Commitment the last time around, but it was not easy.

  The board of inquiry into Operation Opera was into its umpteenth day, and still he had not been called; he had yet to say a single word. The suspense was getting to him, though it was nothing compared with his concern for Anna; the worry was like an animal, gnawing away at his guts, hour in, hour out. True, she was alive, but she was in the Hammers’ hands, and he had learned the hard way that they were never to be trusted.

  If that was not bad enough, the trashpress was having a field day. His clash with Perkins was the scandal on everyone’s lips; he could not say for sure who was feeding inside information to the trashpress, but somebody was. He would have bet good money it was one of Perkins’s legion of dreadnought-hating supporters.

  For the trashpress, it was a story they would sell their firstborn for. Apart from sex, it contained everything they wanted: the future of the Federation, age and experience versus callow youth and unthinking rashness, ambition, decisions made in the heat of battle, insubordination, death, and destruction. It could not have been much more appetizing if the whole business had been scripted to order.

  Angry and frustrated, he pushed back from his desk. He commed the legbot that supported his injured left leg into life—the doctors might think the leg was getting better, but it still hurt like hell every time he moved it—before lifting himself carefully to his feet. It had been an unproductive day sitting in the offices of the Warfare Division, updating the Fighting Instructions; it was not the best place for him to be. To a spacer, the division was an implacable enemy of dreadnoughts, its staff not slow to let him know that over and over again.

  He needed to get away. A few beers with the crew of the Reckless—like him, all posted to Fleet staff for temporary duty until the board of inquiry had finished—would go a long way to reassure him that the world was not populated completely by Neanderthal assholes.

  Michael set off, limping heavily despite the best efforts of the legbot to compensate for a left thigh still a long way from complete recovery.

  Three hours later, Michael found himself ensconced comfortably behind a table in one of the bars popular with Fleet spacers. Beer in hand, he was happy to let conversation wash over him, the talk ebbing and flowing over the issues that engaged most Fleet spacers most of the time: stupid politicians, amoral lobbyists, greedy defense contractors, shortsighted civilians, the pressures placed on family and friends by the demands of Fleet service, what the Hammers might do next. Around the table sat the rest of the crew of Reckless. Matti Bienefelt was well into a rambling account of a ship visit to a fringe planet settled by, of all things, an extreme cyborg sect so obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human geneering that their grasp of the harsh realities of world building and planetary economics was tenuous at best. Michael smiled; Bienefelt was being harassed—as tradition dictated—by Carmellini, Lomidze, and Faris every step of the way, each word sniped at the instant it left her mouth. The engineers were deep in an arcane discussion about fusion power plants Michael could not begin to understand, and Jayla Ferreira was talking landers with Kat Sedova and the crew of Caesar’s Ghost.

  “Well, well, well.” A sneering voice slashed through the conversation; Bienefelt and everyone else talking stopped dead. Heads turned. The speaker was a man a few centimeters shorter than Bienefelt, with close-cropped white-blond hair and a heavily muscled body struggling to break out of clothes two sizes too small. Seven more spacers, all big enough and ugly enough to cause a lot of grief, flanked him. Michael grimaced. He had seen enough bar brawls to recognize trouble, and Snow White and his seven overgeneered—far from small—dwarves were trouble, alcohol-fueled trouble.

  “So what have we here?” the man said. “The fearless crew of
the Reckless, eh? Still trying to work out how many spacers your goddamned skipper killed? Maybe we should teach the little bastard”—Snow White jabbed a wavering finger at Michael—“which I think is you, sir, how to obey orders. Waddya reckon, team?”

  A low snarl of approval greeted Snow White’s suggestion, the Seven Dwarves swaying forward. Michael commed the bar manager to get the shore patrol fast. He stood up. “I don’t know who you guys are, and I don’t much care. So just go. That’s a direct order, and I’m comming you my ID to make sure you know who I am.”

  “Oh, we know who you are,” Snow White sneered.

  “Do yourselves a favor and leave,” Michael said. “Now!”

  He might have been talking to himself. Snow White refused to move.

  “Tell you what, sir,” Bienefelt said, standing up, mashing a fist the size of a small ham into the palm of her left hand, “I’ve got a better idea. Leave the bastards to me. I’ll move them along.”

  “No!” Michael snapped, “and that’s an order, Matti.” His voice softened. “I won’t see you disrated for scum like these. Please. Just sit down”—reluctantly, Bienefelt took her seat, her face like thunder—“and you lot, go and we’ll forget what’s happened.”

  “Forget it? Forget it, after what you did? What’s the matter, frightened?” Snow White taunted. “Is that why you turned and ran, you dreadnought pissants? It is; it damn well is. That’s why you left so many good spacers and ships to die, you cowardly sacks of shit.”

  “Take that back,” Bienefelt hissed, her voice pure menace as she stood up.

  Michael swore. If the patrol did not turn up soon, blood would flow. Ferreira and Sedova were on their feet; Michael waved them back down. Things were bad enough without commissioned officers getting involved.

  “Take it back?” Snow White’s finger stabbed Bienefelt in the chest again and again and again. “Make me, you cowardly … gutless … dog turd.”

  “You should not have done that, my friend,” Bienefelt said gently, only centimeters from Snow White’s alcohol-flushed face. “You really should not have done that.”

  Something deep inside Snow White snapped; he and the Seven Dwarves made the mistake of throwing the first punches. In an instant, chairs went back and the crew of the Reckless roared to their feet, standing toe to toe with their adversaries. The bar became a shambles of swinging arms, bodies crashing to the ground, tables, chairs, and glasses going in all directions. Michael stepped back, one hand firmly locked onto Ferreira’s collar, her restraint visibly crumbling in the face of the enormous temptation to give one of the dwarves a damn good kicking, the other signaling Sedova to stay seated. Spacer attacking spacer was bad enough; spacer attacking officer was a hundred times worse, an offense guaranteed to bring a long stretch in a Fleet prison, capped off by a dishonorable discharge. A well-deserved punishment, true, but better avoided if humanly possible, a lesson ground into Michael and every other cadet at Space Fleet College; spacers were expensive commodities, after all.

  Egged on by raucous shouts of encouragement from the ring of bystanders, the fight ebbed and flowed across the bar, but the dwarves’ greater mass proved no match for the raw fury of Reckless’s crew. Michael tried not to cheer while he watched, happy to see Snow White looking distinctly the worse for wear as Bienefelt’s huge fists battered his face to a bloody pulp.

  The shore patrol arrived in force. With ruthless, practiced efficiency, they waded in and transformed the melee into a neat row of plasticuffed, stun-shot bodies in an impressively short span of time. Michael chuckled when Bienefelt twisted her head to one side to shoot him a triumphant smile, seemingly untroubled by the blood-streaked damage to her face.

  The young lieutenant in charge of the patrol waved him over. “This lot yours?” he said.

  “Some of them. Not all. Don’t know who they were, but they wanted a fight, they started a fight, so it’s a fight we gave them.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the patrol officer said wearily.

  “Luckily, that’s what my neuronics recordings will show.”

  “They all say that. One of my guys will take your statement. Who’s this?”

  “Junior Lieutenant Ferreira, my XO. Sorry, my ex-XO.”

  The patrol officer shook his head despairingly. “A joker. That’s all I want. I’ll need your statement, too, Ferreira. And you are?”

  “Junior Lieutenant Sedova.”

  “Ditto.” The patrol officer turned to survey the wreckage. “At least the officers had the common sense not to join in, which is more than I can say for this lot.”

  “My guys were provoked,” Michael said, “and they sure as hell did not start it.”

  “That’s mitigation,” the patrol officer said, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s not justification, and you know it.”

  Michael nodded. The man was right; he did know it, but it was hard not to feel proud of the fierce loyalty and commitment the Reckless’s crew had shown. Not that loyalty and commitment would help much when the matter came to trial.

  Giving his statement to the shore patrol, along with the records his neuronics had made of the incident, took an age, and it was almost midnight before Michael made it back to his cabin. The impersonal box—one of hundreds of identical cabins making up the transit officers’ quarters—was as uninviting as ever. With a groan, he toppled onto his bunk, doing his best to ignore the anger and resentment that still simmered inside him. He knew one thing for sure. Whatever humanspace lacked, it was not assholes, something Snow White and his seven pea-brained sidekicks proved. Sons of bitches, he swore silently. He hoped the provost marshal would throw the book at them; they deserved it.

  Out of habit, he flicked on the holovid. When it lit up, he wished he had not; World News was running its breaking news segment, the ticker tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen with the words “Fleet Hero in Bar Brawl—Provost Marshal to Lay Charges.”

  “For chrissakes,” Michael shouted, frustrated beyond belief. “The fucking bastards.”

  He did not have to watch the story to know how World News would spin it. He had been on the receiving end often enough to know exactly how they would lay it out: heavy on the fight—no doubt using recordings helpfully provided by one or more of the bar’s patrons—but light on who had started it. With careful editing and without ever saying so, they would leave the viewer with two impressions: first, that he had been in the thick of the fight, fists swinging with the best of them, and second—picking up the idea sown by the ticker tape—that he had been charged. If they were feeling creative, they probably would find a way to blame him for starting it.

  World News did that sort of thing all the time, and they were extremely good at it, which was why they were so popular and profitable. Worse, any corrections his lawyers forced out of them would be buried in a quick one-liner at the end of the news a week later, by which time millions of Feds would know—as certain fact—that he had been charged with brawling, their opinions immune to any evidence to the contrary.

  Michael understood none of it. For some reason, he was well and truly in their sights, and presumably, he would stay there until they got bored with him or a bigger sucker came along. He would talk to Mitesh in the morning. Despite the fact that his agent was just another AI-generated avatar, he had a way of getting things into perspective.

  Too demoralized even to get undressed, Michael lay there until sleep overtook him.

  Wednesday, May 9, 2401, UD

  Offices of the fleet provost marshal, Space Fleet headquarters, city of Foundation, Terranova

  “For God’s sake,” Michael muttered, “how much longer do we have to wait?”

  “As long as it takes, sir,” Ferreira said. “The staff captain is extremely pissed, and I imagine she’s had a lot to say. Not that I blame her. It’s not every day she has to deal with a heavy cruiser’s entire complement of senior spacers.”

  Michael laughed out loud. The crew of a conventional heavy cruiser included hundreds of senior
spacers; he loved the idea of all of them lined up in front of some long-suffering staff captain, though he knew the staff captain would not see anything even remotely funny about the whole business.

  Finally, the doors opened, and Chief Petty Officer Bienefelt emerged, leading a line of spacers out of the Fleet provost marshal’s offices. Michael could not help noticing that not one of them showed the smallest sign of remorse.

  “All right, chief,” Michael said, shaking his head. “Tell me how it went.”

  Bienefelt smiled, a smile of smug self-satisfaction. “Justice prevailed, sir, as it should. Charges of common assault were dismissed, though sadly we were all found guilty of a breach of the peace.” Bienefelt even managed to sound hurt.

  “Well,” Michael snorted, “what a surprise, considering the patrol used a stun gun to stop you from beating the crap out of … what the hell was the useless jerk’s name?”

  “Leading Spacer Rasmussen, sir. Off Ebonite, which wasn’t within a hundred light-years of Operation Opera. Useless, scum-sucking toe rag.”

  “Yeah, him. And the damage?”

  “Fine, stoppage of leave, loss of seniority, and we’ve had to kick the tin to pay for the damage to the bar.”

  “Oh,” Michael said, “so you’re still a chief petty officer?” He shook his head despairingly. “That’s a fucking miracle. I think you got off lightly.”

  “Maybe so, sir,” Bienefelt said, looking not in the least apologetic, “but let me tell you this. It was well worth it, not that Rasmussen would agree. The provost marshal threw the book at him, big-time. He’s screwed, and his mates, too. My spies inside the provost marshal’s office tell me they are on their way to Fleet Prison 8 as we speak.”