The battle of Devastation reef

nervous politicians all over it.

To think, all he ever wanted to be was the command pilot of an assault lander. Climb aboard, strap in, go in hard, beat the crap out of the target of the day, come home, have a few beers with your mates, and talk shop for a few hours before turning in for a good night’s sleep. Simple, straightforward, the way life should be.

Instead of which, here he sat, the biggest guinea pig of all time, the captain in command of the first ever dreadnought, a concept so new that the damn things had not even entered operational service yet.

Frustrated, he exhaled sharply, the air hissing out past tightly clenched teeth. Admiral Jaruzelska made it all sound so simple. Appoint a bright, combat-proven officer in command of ten dreadnoughts and bingo! In place of a bunch of useless hulks, the Fleet had a squadron of ships, but without all the spacers needed to operate heavy cruisers.

Michael had no problem with the theory. It was a good theory, a great theory. After losing thousands of spacers at the Battle of Comdur, Fleet had plenty of warships but not the spacers to crew them, so what else was it going to do?

Problem was, the theory had proved difficult to put into practice. Morosely, Michael sipped his coffee. Knowing his luck, tomorrow would be every bit as tough as today had been-hour after hour in the sims having endless tactical problems thrown at him, problems that would stretch a battle fleet’s staff. He could only try his best, and as long as Jaruzelska had faith in him, he would keep doing everything in his power to make dreadnoughts work.

Michael set his problems aside to check the broadcast news. It had been a while, and he wondered what the Hammers were up to. Closing his eyes, he watched the familiar Federated News Network icon pop into his neuronics.

Five minutes later he shut the broadcast off, even more depressed, if that was possible. “Bloody Hammers,” he grumbled. After a long period of inactivity, the bastards had detonated more antimatter warheads in Fed nearspace, two for each home planet. Apart from the usual electromagnetic pulse and some spectacular atmospheric fireworks, there was no real harm done, of course-some mership wandering around in Ashakiran farspace had been the only casualty-but that was the whole point of the exercise. The Hammers’ message was brutally simple: Give them what they wanted at the negotiating table or they would reduce the Federation’s home planets to radioactive slag. And just to make sure even the most dim-witted Fed politician understood the message, a Hammer spokesman-some drone in the high-necked black uniform all Hammer officials favored-had repeated the threat almost word for word. Give us what we want or you and your planets will die, he had said.

The threat was clear. Worse, despite all the posturing by the Feds’ so-called allies threatening the Hammers with all sorts of retribution if they did attack the Feds-none of which amounted to a row of beans; the rest of humanspace were allies in name only-he knew the Hammers were more than capable of carrying out their threat. After being soundly thrashed in three wars by the Feds, the Hammers had come out on top thanks to their antimatter warheads and the brutal defeat they had inflicted on the Fed Fleet at Comdur. So why would the Hammers give up?

For the Hammers, success was at hand.

If Rear Admiral Perkins had his way, and the dreadnoughts did not work …

Friday, November 3, 2400, UD

FWSS

Achernar,

Commitment planetary farspace

The air was thick with tension, the eyes of all present locked on the massive holovid display that curtained the front bulkhead of Achernar’s combat information center.

“Shiiiiit,” an anonymous voice said softly from the back of the compartment.

“Quiet!” Achernar’s captain snapped. Boris Andermak was not enjoying this operation any more than his crew was. It had been an ordeal from the word go, and the sooner it finished, the happier he would be.

The cause of all the angst filled the command holovid. Moving slowly from left to right was what any first- year cadet would identify readily as an Eaglehawk, a long-range, two-stage antistarship missile. It was an ugly brute of a thing, the backbone of the Hammer fleet’s offensive missile capability. Matte black, it was big, dwarfing the space-suited handlers shepherding it away from the Achernar, and-to Fed eyes at feast-crudely assembled and poorly finished. Not that it mattered how the thing looked. Eaglehawks might be slower and less capable than the Merlin ASSM, their Fed equivalent, but they worked and had killed more than their fair share of Fed ships over the years. The Eaglehawk was a nasty piece of ordnance and definitely not something to be taken for granted.

And that was before the Hammers went and fitted antimatter warheads to the Eaglehawk, turning it into the weapon that had snuffed out much of the Fed space fleet at the Battle of Comdur. Achernar’s captain was not a praying man, but he prayed now. Antimatter was the stuff of nightmares, and here he sat, meters from enough of it to vaporize him and his ship.

Andermak would be damn glad when the two Eaglehawk missiles he had been ordered to deploy cleared his ship and were on their way back to their makers. Watching the missiles, he wondered how they had fallen into Fleet’s hands; he guessed they were two duds left over from the Comdur attack. But, however it had found them, Fleet refused to let on. The fact they had them at all was classified so highly that he and his crew were scheduled for selective neurowiping the instant they returned home, a process Andermak was not looking forward to.

The deployment took forever, but at long last it was done, the handlers back inboard safely. Achernar, sealed up, waited, ready to jump. The two Eaglehawk missiles hung in space, drifting away from the Achernar toward Commitment, home planet of the Hammer Worlds and seat of the Hammer of Kraa government. Slowly, the gap between the Achernar and the missiles opened. Andermak suppressed a shiver, not at all sure-despite all the assurances he had been given by the brass, none of whom would be within light-years of the missiles when he sent them on their way-that the damn things would work.

It took a long time, but finally the two Eaglehawks moved safely outside Achernar’s antimatter blast damage radius. Andermak allowed himself to relax just a fraction.

“Ops.”

“Sir?”

“Send those evil sonsofbitches on their way.”

“Sir. Stand by … missile launch sequence initiated, missiles nominal … missile first stages firing … missiles on their way, vectors nominal.”

Stiff with nervous tension, Andermak watched while the two missiles streaked away toward Commitment on thin pillars of blue-white flame, more relieved than he cared to admit. “Thank goodness for that. My money was on them blowing us all to hell. Let’s go home.”

“Amen to that, sir,” the Achernar’s operations officer replied with considerable and all too obvious feeling.

Many hours after the Eaglehawk missiles had been sent on their way, the traps containing their antihydrogen payload collapsed, and the two warheads exploded in unison. In less than a billionth of a second, a bubble of gamma radiation expanded outward at the speed of light, its twin-peaked signature providing the Hammers with unarguable proof of matter/antimatter annihilation.

The Hammers would have no option but to conclude that the Feds had antimatter weapons.

Saturday, November 4, 2400, UD

Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, McNair