The battle of Devastation reef

officer of his talent and potential so richly deserved.

Michael had been stunned and unsettled by Perkins’s veiled insubordination, and his response had been perfunctory in the extreme. He had said nothing more than “yes” or “no” throughout. Not that Perkins noticed; he seemed more than happy to interpret Michael’s reticence as agreement.

Wrong, Rear Admiral Perkins, Michael said to himself while Perkins left the ship. Admiral or not, Perkins would find out that Michael’s taciturnity was not consent. With or without Perkins’s support, he vowed to make dreadnoughts work.

Friday, October 13, 2400, UD

Offices of the Supreme Council for the

Preservation of the Faith, McNair

The weekly Defense Council meeting over, Chef Councillor Polk beckoned Councillor Jones over. Polk waited until the room cleared before speaking, his face dark with anger and frustration.

“Kraa damn it!” Polk said with a snarl. “I am sick and tired of this council telling me what I can’t do. When”- his hand smacked down with a dull thump-“will you tell me what I can do? All I hear is excuses!”

“Well, sir, as you know,” the councillor for war said warily, “our antimatter warhead stocks are limited. We expended most of our inventory in the Comdur attack. We need to conserve what few missiles we have left. And there is an armistice in force.”

“Yes, so? That sounds to me like more of the same, Councillor Jones,” Polk hissed venomously. “So tell me. What the hell is the point of stockpiling missiles? The bloody things are there to be used, for Kraa’s sake. As for the armistice, what do I care? It’s just a bit of paper. I signed the damn thing. I can unsign it if I want, and I will.”

Polk pushed himself back in his seat. “I’ve had enough of this, Councillor,” he said. “I want the armistice torn up. I want offensive operations against the Feds resumed. I want them hounded back to the negotiating table. I want them forced to make the concessions we need. Kraa! We have antimatter weapons, and the damn Feds don’t. How much simpler does it get? So brief Fleet Admiral Jorge. Tell him I want to see an options paper from him for next week’s Defense Council meeting. It is time to take the offensive.”

“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