“Yes, Chief Councillor,” Jones said glumly.
Thursday, October 19, 2400, UD
Szent-Gyogyi Merchant Ship
Pasternak,
Ashakiran
planetary farspace, Federated Worlds
The captain of the mership Pasternak had been cursing sotto voce for a good hour, a steady stream of profanity that derived its considerable color and diversity from a long career as a mership officer. Not that cursing made the slightest difference, even though it did make him feel better. Fact was, he was well and truly screwed, and no amount of swearing would change that.
With only a fraction of a second left to run before Pasternak was scheduled to leave pinchspace, the ship’s error-prone navigation AI lost lock, precipitating an emergency drop into normalspace. Now, rather than tying up alongside a planetary transfer station to off-load passengers and cargo, the ship was coasting through farspace at a leisurely 150,000 kph on vector for Ashakiran.
That was the good news. The bad news was that Ashakiran was a depressingly long way away. It would be days before they decelerated into orbit around the second of the Federated Worlds’ home planets, and nothing would make it happen any sooner. The only way of getting home any faster would be to trust the navigation AI that had dropped Pasternak into the shit in the first place; since that risked emerging inside Ashakiran itself, he was not going to chance it.
That left Pasternak a long way out in farspace, very much on its own. It was not a good feeling. He hoped that the armistice with the Hammers still held. Ashakiran Farspace Control, though sympathetic, refused his request that a Fed warship-ever hopeful, he had asked for at least three-be sent to escort him in. So there they sat in farspace, alone and defenseless should a wandering Hammer warship happen to pass by, a tiny bubble of life sitting at the heart of a sphere of electromagnetic radiation that expanded at the speed of light screaming “Defenseless mership; come and get me.” Anyone who imagined the Hammers would stick to the terms of the armistice when presented with a soft target like poor old Pasternak was a damn fool. They would have to be saints, and he had never met a Hammer who came even close.
He hated the idea that he might end up having to beg some Hammer spacer to spare his ship thanks to a useless navigation AI. It would be just his luck if one of the worst trips in his long career ended in being captured by those bastards.
He was not happy, his crew was not happy, and worst of all, the self-loading cargo-a bunch of arrogant, overbearing xenobiologists returning from a field trip to Kanaris-IV with a mountain of equipment and thousands of samples-were not happy. “Miserable jerks,” he mumbled under his breath. What else did they expect from a clapped-out mership? Why did the penny-pinching bozos think the Pasternak charter was so cheap in the first place?
Pasternak’s captain fidgeted in his seat, trying hard not to think about how quickly the profit from the trip-never huge to start with-was disappearing. If there was any left at all by the end of the trip, it would be a miracle. Why did he bother? he wondered despondently while he made himself settle down to wait.
Five minutes later, a wall of gamma radiation from two antimatter warheads fired hours earlier by a Hammer cruiser smashed into the aging mership’s hull. The radiation ripped through the mership and raced away toward Ashakiran planet. Less than a nanosecond later, the fusion plant driving Pasternak’s main propulsion lost containment; the hellish energy released by the fusion plant’s failure expanded in a huge blue-white ball of ionized gas.
The ship had ceased to exist.
Monday, October 23, 2400, UD
FWSS
Tufayl,
in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base
Alone in his cabin, nursing a welcome coffee, Michael Helfort sat thinking about the day.
He was drained of all energy and saturated by fatigue; only willpower kept his body and mind going. The week had been long, full of relentless, grinding pressure while he struggled to achieve the impossible. More than that, it had been a solitary week; all the old cliches about the loneliness of command were right on the money. Apart from Mother, there were few people he could talk openly to. The spacers seconded from fleet development to work on the dreadnought project were senior to him by ten years or more, and his peers-those who had escaped alive after the Hammers trashed much of the Fleet at Comdur-worked all the hours there were to keep as many ships operational as possible, so catching up for a quick drink was always difficult, more often than not impossible.
Needless to say, Damishqui was equally hard to pin down. Michael had given up asking Anna when they might meet again. Anna being Anna, she had recovered from her injuries in record time; refusing an offer of extended sick leave, she was back onboard Damishqui, chasing Hammers somewhere in the deepspace approaches to al-Jaffar planet, a pointless mission with the fingerprints of nervous politicians all over it.
To think, all he ever wanted to be was the command pilot of an assault lander. Climb aboard, strap in, go in hard, beat the crap out of the target of the day, come home, have a few beers with your mates, and talk shop for a few hours before turning in for a good night’s sleep. Simple, straightforward, the way life should be.
Instead of which, here he sat, the biggest guinea pig of all time, the captain in command of the first ever dreadnought, a concept so new that the damn things had not even entered operational service yet.
Frustrated, he exhaled sharply, the air hissing out past tightly clenched teeth. Admiral Jaruzelska made it all sound so simple. Appoint a bright, combat-proven officer in command of ten dreadnoughts and bingo! In place of a bunch of useless hulks, the Fleet had a squadron of ships, but without all the spacers needed to operate heavy cruisers.
Michael had no problem with the theory. It was a good theory, a great theory. After losing thousands of spacers at the Battle of Comdur, Fleet had plenty of warships but not the spacers to crew them, so what else was it going to do?
Problem was, the theory had proved difficult to put into practice. Morosely, Michael sipped his coffee. Knowing his luck, tomorrow would be every bit as tough as today had been-hour after hour in the sims having endless tactical problems thrown at him, problems that would stretch a battle fleet’s staff. He could only try his best, and as long as Jaruzelska had faith in him, he would keep doing everything in his power to make dreadnoughts work.
Michael set his problems aside to check the broadcast news. It had been a while, and he wondered what the Hammers were up to. Closing his eyes, he watched the familiar Federated News Network icon pop into his neuronics.
Five minutes later he shut the broadcast off, even more depressed, if that was possible. “Bloody Hammers,” he grumbled. After a long period of inactivity, the bastards had detonated more antimatter warheads in Fed nearspace, two for each home planet. Apart from the usual electromagnetic pulse and some spectacular atmospheric fireworks, there was no real harm done, of course-some mership wandering around in Ashakiran farspace had been the only casualty-but that was the whole point of the exercise. The Hammers’ message was brutally simple: Give them what they wanted at the negotiating table or they would reduce the Federation’s home planets to radioactive slag. And just to make sure even the most dim-witted Fed politician understood the message, a Hammer spokesman-some drone in the high-necked black uniform all Hammer officials favored-had repeated the threat almost word for word. Give us what we want or you and your planets will die, he had said.