Graham Sharp Paul - The Battle of Devastation Reef

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A DANGEROUS PROPOSITION

Unseen, Dreadnought Squadron Oneten ships arrayed in an extended line abreast across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of spacecoasted in toward Commitment, the distant home planet of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. All around the ships, countless millions of stars hung in great cascading sheets, diamondsharp pinpricks of light strewn in careless profusion across the black of deepspace. For a moment, Michael Helfort forgot himself, overwhelmed by the sight, its glorious extravagance in stark contrast to the wretched, self-serving schemes that preoccupied most of humankind most of the time. Michael stretched to ease stress-tightened muscles, wondering just what the hell the point of it all was. The cosmos did not care whether the Federated Worlds or the Hammer of Kraa came out on top, that much was for sure.

Command, Warfare. The steady voice of the artificial intelligence responsible for battle management dragged Michaels attention back to the job at hand.

Command, he replied.

Threat plot is confirmed. Hammer task group designated Hammer-1 has four heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, plus escorts and multiple auxiliaries. The Hammer task groups orbit is nominal for Commitment near space defense. Mission prime directives met. We are go for the operation.

Command, roger. Wait.

Michael stared at the threat plot. Warfare might be happy with the tactical situation, but he was not. The problem was the Hammer task group his ships had been sent to attack. For a force tasked with near space defense, it had too many auxiliary ships. With plenty of support and maintenance platforms in Clarke orbit to support the Hammer warships protecting Commitment planet, auxiliaries would be an unnecessary complication, something no half-competent commander would want in a task group intended to stop a Fed attack in its tracks, yet there they were. Why?

By Graham Sharp Paul H ELFORTS W AR
The Battle at the Moons of Hell
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds
The Battle of Devastation Reef
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For my sons:
Alan, Iain, and Andrew

Acknowledgments

My thanks to my wife, Vicki, to Russ Galen and Tara Wynne, to the team at Random House, and in particular to Liz Scheier.

Friday, August 4, 2400, Universal Date
Comdur Fleet Base

The nightmare roared out of the darkness.

He had to get clear. If he stayed, he would die, incinerated in the hellish blast of a runaway fusion plant, his body vaporized into a ball of incandescent gas expanding into space. Panic tore him apart, and he started to run. Hammer missiles and rail-gun slugs ripped the heavy cruisers fabric, and the huge ship died around him. Beneath his feet, the tangled bodies of dead spacers carpeted the deck, but the harder he ran, the less progress he made. He was getting nowhere: unable to breathe, lungs afire, legs refusing to work properly, mouth open in a soundless scream. And there, in front of the lifepod, between him and safety, stood Detective Sergeant Kalkov, eyes bulging, face a hate-twisted mask drifting in and out of flame-shot smoke, jeering at Michaels frantic efforts to get away, the knife that had killed him held in an outstretched fist, dripping blood to the deck.

The nightmare ended the way it always did.

The ship exploded in a searing flash of white, a ball of raw energy, and he woke up, his body wrapped in tangled sheets. For a long time, he lay there sweat-soaked, chest heaving, heart racing, the face of the Hammer police sergeant he had killed during his escape after the loss of the Ishaq still burning in his minds eye.

Forcing himself out of his bunk, he went over to the washbasin to clean the sweat off his face, the water so cold that it stung. He peered at himself in the mirror.

You look like shit, Lieutenant Michael Helfort, he said aloud. His face stared back from wide-set hazel eyes sunk deep in gray-framed sockets and underscored by dark bags. His skin, normally tanned to a rich brown, stretched ashen and washed out, tightened by stress across well-defined cheekbones, his lips clamped shut, thin and bloodless. His hair, overlong and unruly at the best of times, spiked into a tangled mess, sweat-darkened from brown to black.

It was true: He looked like shit. He sighed despairingly. He decided not to waste time trying to sleep. Invariably it eluded him after the Ishaq nightmare, so he hunted around the net to see what the holovids offered; he preferred to watch the dross they churned out. Even that was better than picking over the ghosts from his past.

Here we go, he thought finally. One of the better news channels had a segment dealing with a report from one of the Federations think tanks on Space Fleet. Should be worth a look, he decided; comming micropaymenthe was in no mood for advertisementshe pulled the item off the net. When the program anchor, Thad Horung, appeared, he put his feet up to watch.

and our thanks to Johanna Morgenstern for that report from the Frontier Planets, Horung said. Their refusal to support the Federation in the war against the Hammers will continue to be a major headache for this government, and we will of course keep you up to date with any developments there.

Now we turn to the Tesdorf Institute. Yesterday it released its analysis of the long-term effects the Comdur disaster will have on Space Fleet. In a moment, I will talk with retired admiral Orenda PekefierMichael groaned out loud; the woman was self-centered, opinionated, and bombastic, traits he did not enjoyabout the key issues the Tesdorf Institute has identified. But first, what are those issues? Ashokan Mokhtar takes up the story.

The holovid cut to Mokhtar, a tall and impeccably dressed man standing in front of an imaginative re-creation of the Comdur disaster, all fireballs and tumbling Fed ships. Michael winced; it bore little resemblance to the awful day when Hammer missiles carrying antimatter warheads destroyed the Federated Worlds fleet at the Battle of Comdur.

Thank you, Thad, Mokhtar said. The Tesdorf Institutes report is an impressively detailed document. Reading it throughyou liar, Michael mouthed; an underpaid research hack had that thankless taskone issue stands out, the radical changes forced on Space Fleet by the loss of so many experienced personnel at Comdur and, in particular, the development of what we understand Fleet is calling dreadnoughts. These

Shocked, Michael sat bolt upright. The fact that dreadnoughts existed was one of the worst kept of Fleets many secrets. In itself, talking about them was not a problem. But spelling out in detail what Fleet had done to convert its heavy cruisers to dreadnoughts: massively upgraded ceramsteel armor, crews cut to a handful of spacers, their air groups, landers, and marines removed, all unnecessary equipment torn out to reduce mass? For the Hammers to discover all that would be a major disaster. Even they could work out what the enhancements had created: a warship orders of magnitude tougher and more maneuverable than any conventional heavy cruiser, a warshipthe only warship in humanspaceable to withstand antimatter weapons, the Hammer weapon that had wreaked such havoc at Comdur.

All traces of tiredness gone, Michael listened intently to Mokhtar.

ships are essentially heavy cruisers with skeleton crews. No surprises therewe know Fleet is critically short of experienced spacers after their losses at Comdurexcept for one very disturbing fact. Sources inside Fleet have confirmed that some of these dreadnoughts will carry no human crew at all, a development the Tesdorf Institute says is and I quote deeply problematic for the future of Space Fleet, prejudicial to the security of the Federated Worlds, and potentially a breach of the Dakota System Treaty, which prohibits the use of self-replicating machines. Those are very serious charges, and we will explore them with Admiral Pekefier in some depth. Clearly, Fleet faces these and many other challenges at the present time, one of which must be whether or not Admiral Martha Shiu is the woman to lead Space Fleet at this critical time. The institute also identifies