The assault demolition charges appeared innocuous enough, but they had a yield in excess of 2 megatons of TNT each. Michael’s pulse quickened as he imagined the damage they would inflict on the Hammer’s precious antimatter plant, their enormous power tamped into place by kilometers of rock.
Kallewi spotted him and walked over, flanked by his platoon sergeant, a burly Anjaxxian who overtopped Michael by a good fifty centimeters. Sergeant Tchiang was quiet to the point of being mute, but for all his mass, he was one of the fastest humans Michael had ever seen. He had watched Tchiang training for the assault on SuppFac27; the man was pure controlled ferocity. Michael was glad he would not be the one on the receiving end of the marine’s special brand of explosive violence.
“Janos, Sergeant Tchiang. Just came to see how things were.”
“Under control, sir,” Kallewi said, “though I’ll be a lot happier when we get this damn business started.”
“You and me both. Never been good at waiting.”
After a few minutes of small talk and reassured that Kallewi and his marines were as ready as they would ever be for whatever Operation Opera might throw at them, Michael made his way through the lander’s cargo bay and climbed up boot-polished rungs to the flight deck.
“Welcome aboard the Ghost, sir,” Kat Sedova said from the command pilot’s seat. Flanked by the three leading spacers responsible for the lander’s sensors, weapons, and systems, she appeared confident and completely in control; she had every right, after all the training sims she had been subjected to.
“Thanks. All well?”
“Yes, sir. Caesar’s Ghost here”-Sedova patted the arm of her seat affectionately-“is ready to go. And so is the Stick. We’ve just run her up, and she’s 100 percent, too.”
“Good. Not long.”
“Can’t wait.”
“That’s what our tame marine said,” Michael said, looking around, “and I have to say I agree with him. Glad to see you’ve fixed that damned fire control radar, Jackson.”
“Mothering thing,” the leading spacer responsible for Ghost’s sensors said with considerable feeling, “but the new AI module has done the trick. I don’t think it will let us down.”
“Just hope it works,” the spacer at the weapons station said. “I will be seriously pissed if I end up having to fire my cannons by eye.”
“Careful what you wish for, Leading Spacer Paarl,” Michael said with a grin.
“I know, sir,” the woman said, returning the grin, “I know. I might get it.”
“Sorry,” Michael said. “Have I said that before?” “Just a few times, sir,” Paarl shot back amid chuckles of amusement from the rest of the crew.
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said. “Leading Spacer Florian.”
“Yes, sir?” the engineer responsible for all the lander’s main propulsion and pinchspace jump systems said.
“I know the answer to this question, but it would be good to hear it from you. You have the backup mass distribution model set up in case we have to jump without those damned demolition charges the marines are so proud of?”
“Sure have, sir. If we have to jump in a hurry, we won’t need to hang around recomputing.”
“Good. I plan to have Reckless bring us home, but you never know.”
“No, sir, you don’t,” Florian said, her face betraying the anxiety she-and everyone else-must have been feeling.
“Right. Kat, I’m off to engineering. Far as I know, the remassing is running on schedule, so I think we’ll be jumping as planned. Any changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Leaving Caesar’s Ghost surrounded by its ants’ nest of marines, Michael walked aft, leaving the hangar by way of yet more empty spaces, spaces where the heavy cruiser’s air group maintenance teams once had lived. The compartments had been gutted. With all nonstructural bulkheads removed along with the air group’s fixtures and fittings, they were little more than large empty boxes that reverberated to the echo of boots on plasteel. Right aft, two massive doors opened through the belt of secondary armor that protected the vulnerable fusion reactors that powered Reckless’s main propulsion. Still moving aft, Michael found himself inside the ship’s port primary power compartment. Packed with an intricately nested tangle of pipes, wiring, pumps, and control equipment, it was an enormous space, fully 60 meters high from armored deck underfoot to armored deckhead above him.
Like every warship captain who ever lived, he felt nervous in the place. Far too many ships were destroyed by enemy action because the fusion plants that powered the main engine mass drivers lost containment, blowing a ship into a huge ball of ionized gas in a matter of milliseconds. The designers did their best, of course, to protect the plants-the huge slabs of secondary armor that shielded the compartment proved that-but there were limits to how much extra armor could be packed into a ship and to what that armor could achieve. Anyway, modern missiles were more than up to the task of smashing their way in, helped by the fact that in places the armor was more holes than ceramsteel to allow pipes, ducts, power and control cables, and driver mass feeds to get in and out of the compartment.
Michael’s gloomy review of the problem was interrupted by a shout from overhead.
“Up here, sir.” It was Chief Chua.
“Okay.”
Michael threaded his way up through the maze until he came out onto a narrow walkway, the deck below visible through the slotted metal. Surrounded by repairbots, toolboxes, and diagnostic equipment, Reckless’s engineers huddled around an access hole out of which stuck a pair of legs. A quick check of the main propulsion system schematics told him that the panel accessed trunking-a white plasfiber pipe fully two meters in diameter-protecting superconducting high-voltage feeds from the fusion plant to the mass driver at the heart of the port main engine.
“Chief Chua. What’s up?”
“Nothing serious, sir.”
Michael nodded; he already knew that. If there had been a problem, the AI controlling the ship’s primary power systems would have told him already.
“We’re seeing some instability in the power levels that shouldn’t be there, and we’re just having a look at the system to make sure it’s not part of a bigger problem waiting to happen.”
“Okay,” Michael said. Not for the first time, he offered up a small prayer of thanks that he had engineers like Chua. More than a few he knew would have waited until the problem turned serious before doing anything about it. “Any luck?”
“Think so. Petty Officer Lim”-Chua waved a hand at the legs sticking out of the access hole-“says it’s a power controller problem. She’s just checking it, and if she’s not happy with it, we’ll tear it out and replace it.”
“And we have a spare?”
“What sort of question is that, sir? Of course we have.”
The three engineers laughed. Michael knew why. Fleet, in all its wisdom, had done its best to reduce the dreadnoughts’ inventory of spares to zero, arguing that there were not enough engineers to use them, so why bother carrying all that unnecessary mass? Michael’s response to that argument was short and unprintable but, after editorial input from Jaruzelska, sufficiently convincing to make Fleet change its mind. Thankfully.
“Good. I’d hate not having both engines when the Hammers are breathing down our necks.”