“Relax, my boy,” Xiong said with a chuckle. “My wife’s one of Anna’s many cousins. She’s expecting an invite to the wedding, by the way.”
“Oh, right,” Michael said feebly. “I’ll remember that. Far as I know, Anna’s okay. Still no vidmail from her, but the Red Cross’s monthly status reports say she’s fine.”
“Pleased to hear it. We were worried for a while. Bad business that. But to be serious for a moment. Opera. You and your guys ready?”
“We are, sir.” Michael’s face was grim. “Well, as much as we can be. The two new squadrons are good though still green, and I worry about how well they’ll hold up under pressure. But they did well at Salvation, we’ve simmed the operation every which way, and provided we stay focused on reducing the plant’s defenses, on getting through to the plant itself, we’ll be fine. It’ll be tough, but that’s the whole point of the dreadnoughts.”
“I agree. It’ll be a dirty business. The shit will be flying everywhere. Just ignore it, keep going, never lose sight of the objective, and I think you’ll get this done.”
Michael’s stomach did a couple of lazy somersaults at the prospect of facing the Hammers again. “I certainly hope so, sir,” he said.
Michael had had enough. More than anything he wanted the formal dinner to wrap up so he could get back to Reckless to concentrate on the business of destroying the Hammer’s antimatter plant. He turned his attention back to the podium, where, thankfully, Jaruzelska was winding up her speech.
“… and finally, remember this. It’s in the operation order in big black letters, but I’ll say it again for those of you who don’t read so well. Only one thing matters … destroying the antimatter plant.” Jaruzelska paused to scan the faces of the captains of Battle Fleet Lima’s ships. “Compared to that, nothing else does,” she said fiercely. “Nothing. I don’t, you don’t, your crews don’t, and your ships don’t, so you should treat what I am about to say as a direct order.
“Every other operation I’ve ever been part of has gone off the rails at some point, and Opera will, too. You can count on it, especially as we know the Hammers are certain to send reinforcements; we just don’t know when or how many. And when those damned Hammers start turning up, it will be up to one of you to do whatever”-her voice slashed through the air-“and I mean whatever it takes to reduce that damned antimatter plant to a ball of molten slag. Do I make myself clear?”
Silence hung heavy in the air for a few seconds before the room erupted, the sound of chairs kicked back overwhelmed by roars of support.
Unmoving, Jaruzelska waited until the noise died down. “That’s all, folks. I look forward to seeing you all at the postoperation debrief. Until then … Remember Comdur!”
This time, the noise was deafening, the shout of “Remember Comdur” racketing across the hangar, an unstoppable wave of hate-fed energy.
Safely back onboard Reckless, Michael raised his mug of coffee. “Here’s to us; here’s to the Dreadnought Force.”
Rao and Machar raised their mugs in silent acknowledgment.
“You guys all set?”
“Apart from wanting to throw up all the time, yes,” Machar said with a crooked smile, his normally blue-black skin tinged with gray. “That dinner was too much. Admiral Lord Nelson has a lot to answer for.”
“Tell me,” Rao said. “Going head to head against a pair of Hammer light escorts in Aldebaran was bad, but that damn dinner was ten times worse.”
“We’ll come through,” Michael said. “Dreadnoughts are tough. I have faith in them, in their crews, and in you. Just remember what the admiral said. The one thing, the only thing, that matters is destroying the antimatter plant. When things go to shit, and they will, if the First gets blown out of space, you guys press on. Just keep going. One of us will get through.”
Michael took a sip of coffee.
“One of us will get through,” he said. “We have to.”
Four hours later, Battle Fleet Lima accelerated out of Comdur nearspace en route to Devastation Reef, 400 light-years distant.
Operation Opera was under way.
Friday, March 16, 2401, UD
FWSS
Reckless,
Deepspace
“Pretty awesome, sir,” Ferreira said.
Michael nodded, doing his best to ignore a sick churning in his stomach. Thick clusters of green icons marked where the ships of Battle Fleet Lima spread out across space; they were a formidable sight.
“Sure is, Jayla,” he said. “I just wish we had the extra dreadnought squadrons Admiral Jaruzelska asked for. I’d be a lot more confident with another thirty dreadnoughts alongside me when we go into the attack.”
“Me, too, sir. Still,” Ferreira said cheerfully, “if the sims are to be believed, we’ll pull this one off.”
“Sims are sims, Jayla; when you strip them back, they are just fancy mathematical models, and remember what you’ve been taught about them.”
“Crap in, crap out, sir. That’s the one thing I remember.”
“Exactly so, Jayla. Can’t say I have much confidence in them after the Hell’s Moons operation. That sure as shit did not turn out the way we simmed it. You cannot simulate the arrival of Hammer task groups you don’t know anything about. One thing’s for certain. The second we drop in to attack, the Hammer commander is going to start screaming for help. And guess what?”
“What, sir?”
“He’ll get it. The Hammers will ignore all our diversionary attacks to send every ship they can lay their hands on. They cannot afford to lose their precious antimatter plant. That’s why this lot”-he waved a hand at the green icons crowding the command holovid-“are going to have to be quick off the mark when Hammer reinforcements start turning up and all that planning goes off the rails. And it will … which is why those extra dreadnoughts would have come in handy.”
Ferreira nodded her agreement. The two of them stood without saying a word, staring at the command holovid, the space between the ships of Battle Fleet Lima busy with remassing drones shuttling to and fro, refilling mass bunkers for the coming operation.
“How’s our remassing going?” he asked eventually.
“Nearly there, sir. Two more drones should see us at 100 percent.”
“Good. I’m going walkabout. Let me know when we’ve completed remassing.”
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll keep an eye on things.”
Michael walked out of the gutted shell that was Reckless’s combat information center. Walking forward, he came to the drop tube. Without breaking stride, he stepped into it and dropped down to the hangar. The enormous space was echoingly empty, the tightly packed ranks of landers and space attack vehicles carried by a conventional heavy cruiser all gone, leaving only the lonely shapes of Caesar’s Ghost and Cleft Stick, the two landers flanked by the marines’ accommodation modules. When he walked over, Michael shook his head. He had not bothered to ask Kallewi’s opinion of the landers’ names; without exception, marines held the whole naming landers business to be unprofessional and unmilitary, a practice that reflected badly on them. Michael grinned. He had seen holovid of a marine colonel apoplectic over the prospect of boarding an assault lander called Betty’s Bouncing Ball.
But that, of course, was the whole point. Teasing anchor-faced marines by giving assault landers outrageous names-and Betty’s Bouncing Ball was by no means the worst of them-was one of the small pleasures that made spacers’ lives bearable.
Ramp down to reveal its brightly lit cargo bay, Caesar’s Ghost was a hive of activity. Kallewi’s marines were busy off-loading all their equipment into neat piles on the hangar deck before-presumably-moving it all back again. Quite why they were doing something so pointless was not clear. Michael shook his head. He would never understand marines as long as he lived. Not all of them, though, he noticed, were involved in shifting stuff from A to B and back again. The security detail required for all special weapons not secured in dedicated magazines-marines in full combat armor, helmets on, armored plasglass visors down, assault rifles cradled across their chests-stood guard over three chromaflage-skinned boxes sitting atop maneuvering sleds. The diminutive figure of Petty Officer Trivedi, Ghost’s loadmaster, was fussing over the chains that secured them to the hanger floor.