guns working frantically to keep the Hammer missile attack out. It was chaos, the task of managing Redwood's defense beyond the ability of any human to understand, let alone control. Michael braced himself, without knowing it pulling himself back and down into the protection of his armored combat space suit while around him the ship racketed with the noise of weapon systems unloading ordnance as fast as hydraulics allowed.
A single missile slipped past Redwood's defenses. Its fusion warhead exploded off the port bow in a blue-white ball of radiation that flayed the armor off the dreadnought by the meter, the ship's artificial gravity struggling to absorb the transient shock wave from the blast.
Then it was over, an eerie calm settling over the combat information center, broken only by Ferreira's confirmation that Redwood had suffered no significant damage in the Hammer attack. As the ship's gravity field stabilized, Michael offered up a silent prayer of thanks that the dreadnoughts carried more than enough armor to shrug off a proximity-fired fusion warhead, then a second prayer for the fact that the Hammers had been too close to fire antimatter warheads at them. Dreadnoughts were tough, but the double-pulsed wall of gamma radiation released when matter annihilated an antimatter warhead's payload of antihydrogen was more than powerful enough to destroy one if it exploded close enough.
He turned his attention back to the Hammer task group. The three Hammer ships were in trouble, the two dreadnoughts pressing home their attack with remorseless force, their massive armor absorbing everything the Hammer ships threw at them. Already Vigilant had pulled out of the battle, reeling back from Red River's exquisitely coordinated missile and rail-gun attack; spewing reaction mass from maneuvering thrusters and with main engines at emergency power, the Hammer heavy cruiser tried to get clear before the next wave of Fed missiles and rail-gun slugs arrived to finish her off. Behind Vigilant, Vindicator and Virtue were also in trouble, their flank armor stripped away-in places right down to the titanium frames to expose their inner pressure hulls-by the fusion warheads fitted to the Fed's Merlin missiles, their bows smashed into a shambolic mess of craters by a well-crafted rail-gun attack. Even now, missiles with conventional chemical explosive warheads plunged into the Hammer ships, targeting the weak spots in the ships' armor that would allow lances of plasma deep into their guts, hunting the fusion plants powering the ships' main engines.
The Fed missiles found what they were looking for.
Explosive plasma jets cut through secondary armor, slicing through ceramsteel containment vessels and magnetic flux fields to expose the unimaginable temperatures and pressures at the heart of every fusion plant, unleashing balls of energy so intense that the Hammer ships disappeared, engulfed by spheres of blue-white gas, any lifepods launched by the ships swallowed by a hellish brew of heat and radiation that raced away into the darkness, leaving tumbling masses of heat-scoured armor and heavy equipment held in precarious embrace by shock-twisted titanium frames, with a few pods the only evidence that the ships had ever existed.
Michael watched the cruisers die with mixed feelings; even though these were Hammer ships and deserved everything his ships threw at them, the thought of all the spacers doomed to die that day unsettled him. His earlier elation had evaporated. Poor bastards, he thought. How many more had to die before this damn war was over? he asked himself for the thousandth time. The unemotional tones of Warfare dragged his attention back to the job at hand.
'Command, Warfare. Launching ground assault.'
'Command, roger. Advice. Suggest Red River take station on Redwood and detach Redress to recover survivors.' If there are any, he said to himself. The Hammers had waited a long time to abandon ship.
'Warfare, roger. Concur. Will advise time to complete.'
Michael commed Kallewi. 'Good luck, Janos.'
'Thank you, sir. We'll be quick.'
'Hope so. Command, out.'
Michael sat back to watch, patching one of the combat information center's huge screens into the holovid feed coming from Kallewi's helmet-mounted high-definition holocam, the image so real that for an instant Michael might have been there with the marines. Redwood's heavy assault lander, captained by Lieutenant Kat Sedova and blessed with the name Alley Kat, was on final approach to the asteroid. Sedova was a natural pilot, one of the few able to hand fly a lander to its limits, handling the ugly mass with rare precision and grace; true to form, she dropped the lander dirtside without the flashy maneuvering so many lander pilots regarded as an essential part of the job.
Kallewi and his marines wasted no time. They spilled out of the lander the instant Alley Kat's ramp went down, a stream of black-armored shapes powering across the asteroid's surface toward the shattered remains of the station's main personnel access portal, a swarm of gas-powered tacbots leading the way, a small convoy of cargobot sleds bringing up the rear.
The marines made short work of the access air lock, its doors blown open to release a blizzard of ice-loaded air out into space. Balawal-34's small security team, a platoon-sized force of planetary ground defense troops, clumsy in combat space suits, proved no match for the marines. After a short, vicious firefight, the Hammers capitulated; soon a sorry procession wended its way back to Alley Kat, leaving the way clear for the marines to work their way down to the heart of the station: massive storage arrays holding terabytes of electronic intercepts.
The marines' quiet efficiency always impressed Michael. With the security team dealt with, Kallewi split his force into teams, calm, unhurried, and methodical. One started to tear out the storage arrays, piling them onto cargobots for the trip back to the lander. A second started to flush out the civilians who operated the station, a bewildered and shocked group of men conspicuous in their Day-Glo orange emergency space suits. The third team-Kallewi called them his scroungers-ransacked the station for anything of interest to the intelligence analysts, and the fourth laid demolition charges around the station's fusion plant.
Less than thirty minutes after the marines blasted their way into the station, Kallewi commed Michael.
'Command, assault.'
'Go ahead.'
'We're done here, sir. Pulling back now. Demolition charges set to fire in twenty minutes.'
'Roger that. Nice job. Command out.'
Satisfied that the ground assault was running to plan, Michael turned his attention back to the command plot. That looked as it should. Red River hung motionless a kilometer from Redwood, its gigantic shape cutting a black hole out of the star-curtained immensity of deepspace. Redress was on her way back to rejoin the rest of the squadron, the last of the Hammer lifepods recovered. Best of all, no Hammer ships appeared on the threat plot. The Nyleth squadron was alone.
Michael sat back. If all went well, they should be on vector back to Nyleth within the hour.
Michael climbed out of his combat space suit, his body stiff and uncooperative. Breath hissed through clenched teeth as he struggled to ease his left leg free of the suit's awkward bulk, the stabbing pain impossible to ignore. You would think, he said to himself, finally free, that the goddamned thing had had more than enough time to get over it. His shipsuit was a sweat-sodden wreck thanks to the stress of combat. Tossing it into the recycler, he prepped his combat space suit before allowing himself the luxury of a long hot shower and a fresh shipsuit. He ignored the demands of duty. He should walk through the ship to make sure that Redwood and her crew had come through okay, but the effort that demanded was beyond him. He slumped into an armchair, the last few dregs of the euphoric high of combat draining away the instant he turned his mind to the crisis that threatened to overwhelm him. He still did not have the faintest idea what to do about it.
A knock on his cabin door announced the arrival of his executive officer.
'Come in, Jayla,' Michael said to the XO, waving her into a chair. 'Drink?'
'Coffee, sir, thanks,' she said.
Michael waited until the drinkbot served Ferreira her coffee. 'So, Jayla,' he said when the bot withdrew, 'I've scheduled the hot wash-up for 18:00. Any initial thoughts?'
Ferreira looked at him for a long time before responding. 'Sir,' she said at last, 'may I speak freely?'
Michael's eyebrows shot skyward. This was a first. 'Yes, of course. What's on your mind?'
'You, sir,' Ferreira said.
The determined set of her jaw unsettled Michael. 'Me?' he said.
'Yes, you. Something's bothering you, sir. I've racked my brains, and I can't work out what it is, but I do know this. You're not the same person who took us into battle at Devastation Reef. Not the same person at all.'
Michael's heart pounded; were his personal concerns that obvious? 'How, Jayla? How am I different?' he said, with an effort keeping his voice casual.
