The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

that there’s going to be much to do. The AIs will do the work. Any questions?”

“Only one, sir. Who’s the skipper to be?”

Lenski’s eyebrows shot up. “Jeez, Michael. You’re a bit slow today. You, of course, you bonehead!”

Michael’s mouth dropped open, “Me? Adamant’s a light cruiser. I’m only a junior lieutenant.”

Lenski laughed at Michael’s confusion. “Let’s not get carried away, Michael. Yes, it’s a light cruiser, but a pretty battered one, and it’s only a ferry trip. Go on, off you go. We’ll see you back here Friday morning. Go on, go!”

“Sir!”

When he left Lenski’s cabin, Michael tried not altogether successfully not to let the news that Pavel Duricek, the king of pompous windbags, was going to be his engineer get him down. Still, at least it was a short run, and he would have Matti as his coxswain. She would keep things in line.

Wednesday, April 12, 2400, UD

FWSS Adamant, in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

Accompanied by Duricek and Bienefelt, Michael walked the length and breadth of his new command. The feeling of loss was unnerving. The Adamant’s huge mass was echoingly empty, the only sound the steady hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning system.

He found it all deeply unsettling.

When the quantum traps that deflected radiation away from the crew had collapsed under the enormous wall of gamma radiation, the ship had been completely sterilized, her crew condemned to months in regen to repair the massive damage that had been inflicted on them. Not a single spacer or marine had escaped serious injury; many would never recover fully. Some had already died, and more would follow.

If not for the AIs embedded in every system on board, their massively redundant optronics completely immune to the effects of gamma or any other form of radiation, the Adamant would have been a lump of ceramsteel wrapped around a pressure hull protecting a lot of useless air-filled spaces. But Adamant was no empty shell. Apart from the fact that she had no crew, Adamant was a fully mission-capable ship.

Michael left the forward compartments for last. It was there that Adamant had suffered most of her losses. When the first spike of gamma radiation had dumped huge amounts of energy into the ship’s bow armor in less than a billion billionth of a second, an impulse shock wave had smashed back through the armor and into the ship’s inner hull. Thousands of those shock waves had hit the Adamant in a tiny fraction of a second. In theory, the heavy-duty elastomeric mountings anchoring the ship’s armor to the inner titanium pressure hull should have protected the crew from external shock. But under the relentless hammering of successive waves of gamma radiation, the overloaded shock mountings had failed, allowing shock waves to jump into the pressure hull, spalling off lethal shards of metal. Most of the shards had been trapped by the ship’s last line of defense-a Kevlar splinter mat bonded directly to the pressure hull-but not all. By the time the Hammer attack was over, far too many of Adamant’s crew were dead, their combat space suits no match for shards of highvelocity razor-sharp metal.

Michael followed Duricek and Bienefelt as they made their way forward along the cruiser’s central passageway, past the missile batteries, and into the forward rail-gun control room. Michael stifled a shocked gasp as he walked through the airtight door. The compartment was straight out of a horror vid. The cleanup crews and their bots had done their best, but they had a lot of ships to deal with; the aftereffects of the Hammer attack were still plain to see. Every surface was covered in a grisly mix of dried blood and pieces of metal-shredded space suits, all liberally dusted with plasfiber fragments torn from shattered panels and cabinets, bulkheads gouged deep by metal splinters. The three spacers stood in shock.

Bienefelt broke the awful silence. “Mother of God,” she whispered.

“Wasn’t here to look after these poor bastards. Wish she had been.” Michael’s face was grim, white with shock. He checked the ship’s AI. Nineteen dead in this compartment alone. “That’ll do. Matti.”

“Sir?”

“All the compartments like this. Get the bots back in. Let’s see if we can do a better job. Use your spacers, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Bienefelt replied, her normal ebullience buried for the moment.

Michael turned to Duricek. “Chief.”

“Yes?”

Michael’s eyes narrowed. He had not missed the calculated insult. Duricek might be senior to him, but Michael held a warrant from the president appointing him captain in command of Adamant. Duricek would regret ignoring that simple fact, but this was not the time.

“When will the systems status report be ready?” he asked calmly.

“Another hour or so.” Duricek’s casual tone made it clear that as far as he was concerned, it did not matter when the systems status report would be finished.

Michael’s voice hardened. “I’m sorry, Chief. That won’t do. Give me a specific time I can work with.”

A tiny grain of common sense somewhere deep inside Duricek must have stopped a smart-ass response in its tracks. “Er, right. I’ll have it for you in two hours,” he mumbled sulkily.

Michael turned to Bienefelt, his face a stony mask. Standing in a compartment drenched in the blood of good spacers, he was in no mood to be jerked around by a pompous, selfimportant dickhead like Duricek. “On you go, Petty Officer Bienefelt. Get things moving. I can see no reason why we can’t depart on schedule, but I’ll make that decision once Lieutenant Duricek and I are happy with the state of the ship’s systems.”

Bienefelt’s face was impressively impassive. “Sir.”

Michael waited until Bienefelt had gone before turning back to Duricek. “Chief, I’m only going to say this once, so I strongly suggest you pay attention. You may be senior to me in rank, but you are not senior to me by appointment. If you do not show me the respect due by right to every captain in command, I will have you charged. I will not tolerate insubordination. If you have a problem with anything I say or do, let me know, and we’ll sort it out in private. In the meantime, you will oblige me by offering the captain in command the proper courtesies. Is that clear?”

Duricek’s face twitched as fear and anger wrestled for control, his mouth opening and shutting as he tried to decide what to say.

“Well?” Michael barked, making him jump.

“Yes, sir,” Duricek muttered sullenly.

“Good. Get that status report done. We’ll reconvene in two hours to go through it. I need to know exactly how fifteen of us are going to operate this bloody great big ship safely.”

Duricek gave a quick nod. He left without another word.

What a jerk, Michael thought as he watched the man go.

He had enough to worry about without massaging the ego of some pompous oaf. Why had Lenski given him Duricek to be his chief? She must have known the two of them did not get along.

Michael had to keep reminding himself that he was the captain of a real live FedWorld Space Fleet light cruiser. He still had trouble getting his mind around the idea. Junior Lieutenant Michael Wallace Helfort, captain in command, Federated Worlds Warship Adamant. It sounded faintly ludicrous. He felt faintly ludicrous.

Michael sat alone, the only occupant of the Adamant’s enormous combat information center, as the ship accelerated slowly out of Comdur nearspace and past what was left of the gamma radiation-shattered wreckage of Comdur’s elaborate defenses. If all went well, they would jump in a few hours for the five-hour transit to Terranova. Allow four or so hours to decelerate in-system, an hour to berth in the warship maintenance yards of Karlovic Heavy Industries, another hour to hand over the ship, and the job would be done. Sixteen hours, tops. Some command, he thought. Talk about short and sweet. He stretched in a vain attempt to get