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Friday, August 3, 2401, Universal Date
FWSS Redwood, West Kent Reef
Anna would be dead soon.
Lieutenant Michael Helfort tumbled a datacore between gloved fingers in an unconscious effort to blunt the fear that gnawed at him every waking moment, to stop the churning in his stomach.
But nothing blurred the horror that would be Anna’s death. He had condemned her to die scoured of all dignity, agonizing, slowly, and inevitable, a dying no human should have to endure, a dying that condemned the only woman he had ever loved to perish abandoned and alone, raped, beaten, shot—a life consumed in an unthinking process of casual cruelty, a life stripped away layer by layer to leave only an empty shell, the broken and abused body dumped into a DocSec lime pit, its empty eyes turned skyward, eyes that once danced and sparkled and sang with love so strong it would tear him apart, eyes that stared sightless into the void, eyes that branded his psyche with the word betrayed.
And all because of him.
He moved to get comfortable, trying to make the pain radiating up into his body go away. Psychosomatic, the doctors had said finally; Michael reckoned they were right. No matter how many painkillers he pumped into his system, the pain never went away. Four months had passed since a Hammer bullet had ripped its way through his thigh during the frantic, scrambling escape from Serhati, and even though the leg had healed well, even though he walked with only the faintest hint of a limp most of the time, it never allowed him to forget the insult it had suffered.
He laughed softly, a short, bitter laugh. Truth was, he did not want the pain to leave him. At times, he almost welcomed it, its relentless stabbing the punishment he deserved for putting Anna’s life at risk. Only a lingering, nagging sense of obligation, faint but impossible to ignore, persuaded him to go back to his duty. With an enormous effort, he dragged his mind away from the horror of Anna’s death to scan the threat plot, the massive holovid screen dominated by a blood-red icon marking the position of the signals intelligence station Redwood and her sister dreadnoughts had crossed hundreds of light-years of space to attack.
He might be captain in command of the Federated Worlds Starship Redwood, but destroying a remote—and unimportant—SIGINT station the Hammers had buried beneath the crust of a wandering asteroid called Balawal-34 was the least of his concerns.
For the millionth time, he asked himself what Anna had done to des—
“Sir! Sir!” The voice of his executive officer, Junior Lieutenant Jayla Ferreira, battered its way through the fog of despair and fear that clouded his thinking. She stood waiting for him to respond, hands on hips, lips squeezed tight into a bloodless slash of disapproval. Michael struggled to recall what she had just said, but he could not. He had no idea; her words had bounced off him, shards of glass shattering on a marble floor, splintering, spinning, tumbling away into oblivion.
“Ah, yes,” Michael said, suppressing a pang of guilt, ramming the datacore back into its port. Ferreira was a good officer, and she deserved a good captain, one she could trust to keep his mind on the job, not one whose every waking moment centered on … For chrissakes, he swore silently, his attention was wandering again. “Sorry, Jayla, I was somewhere else. You were saying?”
“I have made this point already, but I’ll make it again … sir,” Ferreira said, voice taut and face pinched. “I understand what Warfare is saying. Problem is I just cannot agree. It might be only a small temperature anomaly, but the fact is there is one, we don’t know why, and we should.”
“Fair point, and I agree,” Michael said. He looked across at Warfare’s space-suited figure. The hunched shape was so real, he had to remind himself it was nothing more than an avatar, a computer-generated figment of his neuronics-enhanced imagination. “Warfare?”
“Why is easy,” the artificial intelligence responsible for battle management said. “There’s an unexplained heat source in the rubble field. What that source is … well, that’s another matter. Almost certainly it’s a ship, maybe two, lying low, hoping people like us don’t detect them. They mustn’t have aligned one of their heat dumps properly.”
“Exactly,” Ferreira said. “Which means we may face serious opposition. Balawal-34 might not be the soft target the intelligence summaries say it is.”
“That begs the question why,” Michael said. “Why do the Hammers have ships waiting for an attack on a target our reconsats only found out about by accident?”
“Because they’re expecting us, sir,” Ferreira said. “That’s why. How, who knows? It doesn’t matter. Maybe a Hammer deepspace gravitronics sensor array had a good day. Maybe a passing reconsat spotted us when we jumped out of Nyleth nearspace. Wouldn’t be too hard to work out what targets of interest lay along our pinchspace vector. But it doesn’t matter. What does matter is what we do now. I recommend we hold off until we’ve done another reconsat pass. We need to see what’s hidden away in that rubble field.”
Michael studied the threat plot, stung by Ferreira’s obvious frustration. He shared it; successful operations depended on accurate intelligence, and here they were, wondering what else the intel guys might have missed. Nothing in the premission briefing mentioned the possibility that the Hammers might have deployed reinforcements hidden in a slow-moving rubble field that covered the approaches to the rear of the Hammer deepspace signals intelligence station. It should have been a simple operation against a soft target. Balawal-34—a modular facility buried below the surface of a convenient asteroid and defended by missile platforms and surface batteries armed with containerized Eaglehawk antistarship missiles—was no match for the three dreadnoughts; they would trash the place in a matter of minutes. Hammer heavy cruisers were another matter.
So, he wondered, what to do? More reconnaissance like Ferreira wanted? Go in anyway? Then something deep inside him snapped, releasing a flood of reckless indifference.
Screw it, he thought. Screw the Hammers; screw everyone. He did not care if Hammer ships waited to ambush his ships. If forced to, the three dreadnoughts that formed the Nyleth squadron had the firepower to take on and defeat a task group of Hammer heavy cruisers, and he was confident no task group was waiting to spoil his day. If there were two Hammer ships waiting for them, his dreadnoughts would make short work of them. He was certain of that, too. Only one thing mattered to him right now: getting this operation over and done with so he could return to Nyleth. He had more important things to worry about, and he needed to be back in orbit around Nyleth to deal with them.
“No, Jayla,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time doing more reconsat runs. We’ll assu—”
“Wait, sir,” Ferreira protested, cheeks flushing red with anger. “That makes no sense. We don’t need to assume anything. We have the time, we have the reconsats, we can check. We should check. Sir! We should check—”
“Enough!” Michael said. He glared at his executive officer. “I was about to say that we’ll assume there are two Hammer ships there and adjust our plans accordingly. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Ferreira said; a scowl, hastily suppressed, made it plain that things were far from okay.
Michael knew she was right and he was wrong, but he ignored her anyway; he brushed aside a second twinge of guilt. “Right,” he said. “Warfare. We’ll reconvene in fifteen to review the updated plan, but I want the jump in-system on schedule.”
“Sir.”
Michael sat back in his seat and picked up the datacore. Redwood’s mission was forgotten as the horror returned.
