The battle of Devastation reef

icons crowding the command holovid-“are going to have to be quick off the mark when Hammer reinforcements start turning up and all that planning goes off the rails. And it will … which is why those extra dreadnoughts would have come in handy.”

Ferreira nodded her agreement. The two of them stood without saying a word, staring at the command holovid, the space between the ships of Battle Fleet Lima busy with remassing drones shuttling to and fro, refilling mass bunkers for the coming operation.

“How’s our remassing going?” he asked eventually.

“Nearly there, sir. Two more drones should see us at 100 percent.”

“Good. I’m going walkabout. Let me know when we’ve completed remassing.”

“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll keep an eye on things.”

Michael walked out of the gutted shell that was Reckless’s combat information center. Walking forward, he came to the drop tube. Without breaking stride, he stepped into it and dropped down to the hangar. The enormous space was echoingly empty, the tightly packed ranks of landers and space attack vehicles carried by a conventional heavy cruiser all gone, leaving only the lonely shapes of Caesar’s Ghost and Cleft Stick, the two landers flanked by the marines’ accommodation modules. When he walked over, Michael shook his head. He had not bothered to ask Kallewi’s opinion of the landers’ names; without exception, marines held the whole naming landers business to be unprofessional and unmilitary, a practice that reflected badly on them. Michael grinned. He had seen holovid of a marine colonel apoplectic over the prospect of boarding an assault lander called Betty’s Bouncing Ball.

But that, of course, was the whole point. Teasing anchor-faced marines by giving assault landers outrageous names-and Betty’s Bouncing Ball was by no means the worst of them-was one of the small pleasures that made spacers’ lives bearable.

Ramp down to reveal its brightly lit cargo bay, Caesar’s Ghost was a hive of activity. Kallewi’s marines were busy off-loading all their equipment into neat piles on the hangar deck before- presumably-moving it all back again. Quite why they were doing something so pointless was not clear. Michael shook his head. He would never understand marines as long as he lived. Not all of them, though, he noticed, were involved in shifting stuff from A to B and back again. The security detail required for all special weapons not secured in dedicated magazines-marines in full combat armor, helmets on, armored plasglass visors down, assault rifles cradled across their chests-stood guard over three chromaflage-skinned boxes sitting atop maneuvering sleds. The diminutive figure of Petty Officer Trivedi, Ghost’s loadmaster, was fussing over the chains that secured them to the hanger floor.

The assault demolition charges appeared innocuous enough, but they had a yield in excess of 2 megatons of TNT each. Michael’s pulse quickened as he imagined the damage they would inflict on the Hammer’s precious antimatter plant, their enormous power tamped into place by kilometers of rock.

Kallewi spotted him and walked over, flanked by his platoon sergeant, a burly Anjaxxian who overtopped Michael by a good fifty centimeters. Sergeant Tchiang was quiet to the point of being mute, but for all his mass, he was one of the fastest humans Michael had ever seen. He had watched Tchiang training for the assault on SuppFac27; the man was pure controlled ferocity. Michael was glad he would not be the one on the receiving end of the marine’s special brand of explosive violence.

“Janos, Sergeant Tchiang. Just came to see how things were.”

“Under control, sir,” Kallewi said, “though I’ll be a lot happier when we get this damn business started.”

“You and me both. Never been good at waiting.”

After a few minutes of small talk and reassured that Kallewi and his marines were as ready as they would ever be for whatever Operation Opera might throw at them, Michael made his way through the lander’s cargo bay and climbed up boot-polished rungs to the flight deck.

“Welcome aboard the Ghost, sir,” Kat Sedova said from the command pilot’s seat. Flanked by the three leading spacers responsible for the lander’s sensors, weapons, and systems, she appeared confident and completely in control; she had every right, after all the training sims she had been subjected to.

“Thanks. All well?”

“Yes, sir. Caesar’s Ghost here”-Sedova patted the arm of her seat affectionately-“is ready to go. And so is the Stick. We’ve just run her up, and she’s 100 percent, too.”

“Good. Not long.”

“Can’t wait.”

“That’s what our tame marine said,” Michael said, looking around, “and I have to say I agree with him. Glad to see you’ve fixed that damned fire control radar, Jackson.”

“Mothering thing,” the leading spacer responsible for Ghost’s sensors said with considerable feeling, “but the new AI module has done the trick. I don’t think it will let us down.”

“Just hope it works,” the spacer at the weapons station said. “I will be seriously pissed if I end up having to fire my cannons by eye.”

“Careful what you wish for, Leading Spacer Paarl,” Michael said with a grin.

“I know, sir,” the woman said, returning the grin, “I know. I might get it.”

“Sorry,” Michael said. “Have I said that before?” “Just a few times, sir,” Paarl shot back amid chuckles of amusement from the rest of the crew.

“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said. “Leading Spacer Florian.”

“Yes, sir?” the engineer responsible for all the lander’s main propulsion and pinchspace jump systems said.

“I know the answer to this question, but it would be good to hear it from you. You have the backup mass distribution model set up in case we have to jump without those damned demolition charges the marines are so proud of?”

“Sure have, sir. If we have to jump in a hurry, we won’t need to hang around recomputing.”

“Good. I plan to have Reckless bring us home, but you never know.”

“No, sir, you don’t,” Florian said, her face betraying the anxiety she-and everyone else-must have been feeling.

“Right. Kat, I’m off to engineering. Far as I know, the remassing is running on schedule, so I think we’ll be jumping as planned. Any changes, I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Leaving Caesar’s Ghost surrounded by its ants’ nest of marines, Michael walked aft, leaving the hangar by way of yet more empty spaces, spaces where the heavy cruiser’s air group maintenance teams once had lived. The compartments had been gutted. With all nonstructural bulkheads removed along with the air group’s fixtures and fittings, they were little more than large empty boxes that reverberated to the echo of boots on plasteel. Right aft, two massive doors opened through the belt of secondary armor that protected the vulnerable fusion reactors that powered Reckless’s main propulsion. Still moving aft, Michael found himself inside the ship’s port primary power compartment. Packed with an intricately nested tangle of pipes, wiring, pumps, and control equipment, it was an enormous space, fully 60 meters high from armored deck underfoot to armored deckhead above him.

Like every warship captain who ever lived, he felt nervous in the place. Far too many ships were destroyed by enemy action because the fusion plants that powered the main engine mass drivers lost containment, blowing a ship into a huge ball of ionized gas in a matter of milliseconds. The designers did their best, of course, to protect the plants-the huge slabs of secondary armor that shielded the compartment proved that-but there were limits to how much extra armor could be packed into a ship and to what that armor could achieve. Anyway, modern missiles were more than up to the task of smashing their way in, helped by the fact that in places the armor was more holes than ceramsteel to allow pipes, ducts, power and control cables, and driver mass feeds to get in and out of the compartment.

Michael’s gloomy review of the problem was interrupted by a shout from overhead.

“Up here, sir.” It was Chief Chua.

“Okay.”

Michael threaded his way up through the maze until he came out onto a narrow walkway, the deck below visible through the slotted metal. Surrounded by repairbots, toolboxes, and diagnostic equipment,