The battle of Devastation reef

Reckless,

in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

“Attention on deck. FWSS Retrieve, FWSS Recognizance.”

Immaculate in dress blacks, Reckless’s side party snapped to attention and the time-honored ritual of piping the side played out under the watchful eye of the coxswain: Bosun’s calls squealed, hands snapped to foreheads in salute, the two new captains in command saluting in turn when they crossed the bow to board Reckless. Michael returned their salute. When the carry-on was piped, he stepped forward, arm extended.

“Captains. Welcome to Reckless and welcome to the Dreadnought Force.”

“It’s good to be here, sir,” Kelli Rao said, shaking Michael’s hand. “I think.”

Michael smiled. “I’m sure it’s a bit overwhelming, being a junior lieutenant in command of a heavy cruiser like Retrieve. I felt the same in Adamant. But you’ll get used to it. Welcome,” he said to Nathan Machar. “How’s Recognizance?”

“I think you just said it, sir. Overwhelming. She’s a big ship.”

“She sure is. If you’d follow me. Thank you, Chief Bienefelt, impeccable as always.”

“My pleasure, sir,” Bienefelt replied, smiling.

Michael led the way along empty passageways. The emptiness of the place disturbed him. There was a time when Reckless had echoed to the sounds of hundreds of spacers and marines, their noise transforming the ship into a living thing: voices, laughter, activity, boots on decks, tools on metal, doors thudding shut, the soft hiss of air flowing through high-pressure lines, the whine of hydraulics opening and closing armored hatches. Their absence produced a quiet that was palpable, a quiet much more than the absence of noise, a powerful reminder of the changes inflicted on dreadnoughts; worse, it drained too much of the life from Reckless itself, leaving the ship an uncomfortable shadow of the heavy cruiser it once had been.

Shrugging aside his unease, Michael ushered the new arrivals into his cabin. Settled into a comfortable armchair, he studied his two new captains with a critical eye while the drinkbot served coffee. One thing was shockingly evident: how young both Rao and Machar were. Michael knew he was hardly a candidate for senior citizen of the year, but, those two were babies. Rao reminded him a bit of Anna: the same honey skin, a fall of fine black hair cut into a fashionable bob to frame a face dominated by pink-dusted cheeks and a firm, full nose. The similarities stopped there; Rao was much taller, heavily built, and with eyes so dark that they were almost black. Machar’s bloodlines were pure African; he had the blue-black skin, height, rangy frame, whipcord muscles, and tightly-curled hair of his Nuer ancestors, migrants in the second great wave of the diaspora from Old Earth. Like most Feds, Machar was deeply proud of his links to Old Earth, links that had survived separation measured not in days and meters but in centuries and trillions of kilometers. The four small scars on his forehead bore testament to his distant roots in drought-stricken, violence-wracked Sudan.

Michael had studied their service records in detail.

Rao had seen combat in the heavy scout Aldebaran, Machar in the light escort Sarissa. They were the cream of the young officers coming out of Space Fleet College: natural leaders, technically sound, quick-thinking, and steady under pressure. Both were instinctive tacticians, their fitness for their new roles confirmed by weeks of cruelly intensive assessment under the critical eyes of Jaruzelska and her staff.

Even so, Michael wondered how they would hold up when Hammer rail-gun slugs and missiles started to tear their ships apart around them, an experience far beyond anything the sims could inflict on a spacer. Thus far, both had been lucky-though they had seen combat, their ships had come through the war unscathed, hit by not a single missile or rail-gun slug-so Michael knew he had reason to be skeptical. Rao and Machar might be fine on paper, they might be good in the sims, but they were a long way from being combat-hardened.

“Once again,” Michael said, “welcome. First things first. Any issues with your ships or your crews that I need to know about? Kelli?”

“None, sir,” Rao said. “Retrieve is 100 percent. The yard did a good job with the conversion, though it’s obviously a bit rough in places. I know how much pressure they were under. All systems are nominal, we’ll be fully massed within the hour, and we’re provisioned for war patrol. Same goes for all the ships of the Second. We’ve crawled over them, we’ve checked every last square centimeter, and they are all operational. As to my crew, again no problems that I can see. I have a good executive officer, and my coxswain is old school, which I suspect is a good thing. The rest look good if their service records are to be believed, but I guess we’ll have to see how they hold up when we get to grips with the Hammers.”

“Nathan?”

“Same, sir. Recognizance is 100 percent, my exec and crew look good, and the same goes for the ships of the Third. We’re ready to go.”

“All right. Next thing. Training.”

Michael tried not to laugh when Rao and Machar flicked sideways glances at each other. He understood how they felt. Not for nothing was Fleet called humanspace’s largest training organization; at times it seemed to do nothing else.

“The admiral and I have finalized the training plan for your squadrons,” Michael said. “Our aim is to have you combat-ready in three months”-the new captains blinked anxiously-“so you and your crews will be busy. I’m afraid all you have to look forward to is long days, not much sleep, and a lot of pressure. A word of caution, though. Given the shortage of capital ships in our order of battle, we may not have three months. If the Hammers start pulling stunts on us, Fleet may not … no, will not be able to leave thirty perfectly good heavy cruisers idling their time away doing endless sims. So train like every day in the sims was your last before you deploy on active service, because a few hours may be all the notice we get. Is that clearly understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Rao and Machar chorused, faces tightening as the enormousness of the task ahead of them sank in.

“Good. But remember this. Dreadnoughts are Hammer killers. They’re faster, tougher, better armored than anything they have in space. You’ve seen the records of our operations to date?”

Rao and Machar nodded.

“So you’ll know what I mean. In all of Fleet history, ships have never been considered expendable. We don’t throw ships away; we don’t sacrifice crews. Never have. But dreadnoughts have changed that. The unmanned dreadnoughts in your squadron are expendable, and don’t you forget it. I’m not saying waste them, but you will find you can use dreadnoughts in ways that few senior officers with all their years of command and combat experience ever could. Something, I might add, we have proved conclusively not just in the sims but in combat. And that’s the reason why you’re the captains of Retrieve and Recognizance instead of a pair of crusty old four-ringers.”

“Did you wonder why on Earth Fleet would give me an entire heavy cruiser squadron to command?” Machar said.

“There’s your answer.”

“Explains why we have been … well, why …” Rao’s voice trailed off.

“Treated like shit is what I think you are trying to say, Junior Lieutenant Rao,” Michael said bluntly. “Why are you surprised? If Fleet did to the rest of the fleet what it’s done to dreadnoughts, there’d be what … half as many officers needed? Maybe even less. It’s no wonder they’re unpopular. Fleet has its fair share of Luddites, and they aren’t going to sit around and let people like us change the world any more than we can change human nature. That’s just the way it is, so get used to it.”

“Yes, sir,” Rao said, looking embarrassed.

“Now you know. Which brings me to what may be a more important reason. Let me tell you about the poor old Pericles, the reason why dreadnoughts make some people very, very nervous, the reason why some of those Luddites aren’t completely wrong. Now …”

“How did it go, sir?”

“Rao and Machar?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pretty good, Jayla, pretty good.” Michael looked at his executive officer for a moment before continuing. “But