Not that there was a lack of potential missions. The Hammers, taking advantage of their superior numbers, were running Fleet ragged. They were hitting Fed trade hard, to the point where Fleet was considering the introduction of convoys despite the enormous costs and delays that would impose on merchant shipping. And if the Hammers were not interdicting Fed merships, they were carrying out hit-and-run attacks on forward sensor stations, pinchcomm relay facilities, deepspace support bases, and, just in the last few days, helium-3 processing plants in orbit around the gas giants Balendra-3 and Corparien-6.
Like every officer in the Fleet, Michael studied the daily summary of Fleet operations with obsessive interest, and one thing was abundantly clear to him. With the bulk of the Fleet tied up with planetary protection-thanks to the threat posed by Hammer antimatter missiles-and trade protection, there was no shortage of soft targets for the Hammers to go after. That left the Feds one step behind the Hammers, staggering around like a punch-drunk boxer trying to work out where the next blow might come from. And things would stay that way until something changed; for Michael’s money, that something was the arrival of Dreadnought Squadron One. Thus, why they had yet to receive any tasking remained a mystery, though he would wager good money that Fleet politics had a lot to do with it.
“Command, Warfare. Squadron is in station, on vector. Request permission to jump.”
“Command approved.”
“All ships, immediate execute Kilo-2. I say again immediate execute Kilo-2. Stand by … execute!”
In an instant, the ten ships of the First jumped into pinchspace, leaving only brief ultraviolet flares to mark their departure.
“What?”
Brain clouded by sleep, Michael struggled to wake up, the insistent chiming of his neuronics impossible to ignore. Forcing his mind into gear, he accepted the com from the combat information center.
Sedova had the watch. “Captain, sir, officer in command, sir. Flash pinchcomm from Fleet. We’ve been ordered to drop into normalspace to receive new tasking.”
“Ah, right,” Michael replied, still groggy. “Get things moving. I’ll be in the CIC in a moment. Anything to tell us what Fleet has in mind?”
“No, sir. Just that we need to drop soonest.”
“Okay. On my way.”
“Okay, folks. Sorry to drag everyone out of bed, but we have a mission. Operation Blue Tango.” A scowl crossed Michael’s face; where did Fleet get mission names from? He paused while a frisson of excitement ran through the
Michael waited patiently until his crew and the avatars representing the warfare AIs of the nine other ships of the First together with those of Warfare, Kenny, and Kal came online. The virtual conference room was crowded, an air of anticipation obvious. Even the AIs-normally imperturbable-appeared interested.
“Lets go,” Michael said, cutting through the rising chatter. “I’ll give a quick overview before we split up to finalize the details of the ops plan. Fleet intelligence has reported the imminent departure of a major Hammer deployment out of the Fortitude system. Large task group size, mission unknown. This has left Fortitude’s defenses depleted and open to attack. Clearly, the Hammers don’t believe we have the assets to exploit the opportunity this deployment has given us. We also believe that they will rely on their antimatter capability to make up for any shortfall in warships left to protect Fortitude. Since dealing with antimatter threats is what dreadnoughts are for, our task is to show them the error of their ways.”
There was a soft murmur, the shock obvious. The moment of truth for the dreadnoughts was at hand, and everyone knew it.
“Our mission comes in two parts,” Michael said “First, an assault on this”-his hand stabbed out to identify a point in Fortitude nearspace marked in red on the holovid-“space battle station here, HSBS-372. Our aim is to draw the Hammer defenders out and force them to commit their antimatter missiles to the station’s defense before closing in to destroy it. You’ll understand, of course,” Michael said, his face grim, “that every antimatter missile the Hammers waste on us is one less they can use on the home planets.”
A quiet growl of anger ran through the room while Michael continued. “Once we have eliminated the battle station, we will jump out-system to remass”-another stab at the holovid-“here. When we’ve remassed, we will reverse vector for the jump back into Fortitude nearspace. Fleet believes, and I agree, that the Hammers will not be expecting us to return so quickly, so hopefully we can catch them with their pants around their ankles.
“Our target for the second run will be this orbital heavy maintenance platform, OHMP-344 here”-his finger stabbed at a red icon in Clarke orbit around Fortitude-“along with any Hammer fleet units berthed on it. Just because OHMP-344 is a maintenance platform does not mean it’s a pushover. The Hammers protect them every bit as well as we protect ours, but I think ten dreadnoughts should be more than enough for the job. When we’re done with them, we’ll adjust vector and jump for Comdur. Any questions so far?”
The conference room was deathly quiet, and for good reason. This mission was like no mission anyone present had ever seen. Once again, Michael thought, dreadnoughts are going to tear up the Fighting Instructions before throwing them in the trash.
“No questions?” Michael asked, scanning the room. “Okay. Before we get down to the details, there are two mission constraints you need to be aware of. One is time. To place the Hammers under maximum pressure-who knows, we might even force them to recall their task group before they attack-it is crucial we launch this operation on schedule. Second, we go in cold. No loitering out in farspace building the best threat plot known to humankind, no agonizing over every sensor intercept, no analyzing every last vector. On the way in, we will rendezvous with a relaysat to download whatever intelligence Fleet’s reconsats in Fortitude deepspace have been able to acquire. If that’s bugger all, so be it. The space battle station’s not going anywhere, nor is the maintenance platform. Okay, that’s enough from me. Detailed planning teams, you know who you are, so let’s get going. We’ll reconvene in two hours to put everything together.”
Michael offered up a silent prayer while he watched the virtual conference dissolve. The First would need all the help it could get. For a first operation, this one was an absolute doozy, and if it went even half-right, it would be a bloody miracle. A small shiver went down his spine when something struck him.
Was he being set up to fail?
Sunday, December 31, 2400, UD
For many months, the cluster of deepspace gravitation arrays-ugly assemblies of plasteel girders thousands of meters long hung with gravity wave detectors-monitored the tiny perturbations in pinchspace caused by the passage of ships outbound from Eternity, the fourth planet of the Hammer Worlds.
Month by month, data accumulated, terabytes of numbers recording the infinitesimal displacement of pinchspace caused by the mass of transiting starships. Over time, the data took form, and soon the arrays were able to compute the vectors followed by the Hammer ships.
Some vectors were already well known-the established trade routes between Eternity and Serhati, Scobie’s World, the planets of the Javitz Union, and the Pascanici League-but one was new, a route to no place shown on any Fed chart.
A pinchcomm signal flashed across deepspace back to the Federated Worlds to report the anomaly.
Two weeks later, deepspace survey drones were dispatched to seed the mystery vector with sensorsats, spherical satellites the size of beach balls carrying a power supply, ultraviolet sensors, and a simple laser tightbeam transmitter. Working with mindless diligence, the drones laid a line of sensorsats along the mystery vector out into deepspace, the satellites strung out like beads on a thread hundreds of light-years long.
Patiently, the sensorsats scanned space for the unmistakable signature of ships dropping in and out of pinchspace, the intense, fleeting flares of ultraviolet the one transmission no ship in humanspace could suppress. Every few days, a survey drone dropped out of pinchspace to interrogate each sensorsat in turn. A handful reported ship activity. The drone dropped more sensorsats to triangulate the source. One week later, it had established the location of the ship activity: a small asteroid, not shown on any Fed survey, wandering alone in deepspace, 235
