Helfort's War: Book 1

by Graham Sharp Paul

  Pecora turned his attention back to the group in front of him.

  When not participating in the role-play sims so beloved of Fed management experts, he had spent much of the previous week reviewing everything the Feds knew about the trio on the other side of the conference table. It had been a depressing exercise.

  The three men were survivors, the fittest that Hammer society could produce, God help it and its oppressed citizens. They had clawed their way to the top of the Hammer heap over the broken and bleeding bodies of ordinary Hammer citizens, with the corpses of more than a few competitors tossed in for good measure.

  Solomatin in particular was a nasty piece of work. His file was full of examples of his sadistic and brutal approach to DocSec business. He was rumored to have personally shot more than two hundred so-called heretics during his time as DocSec commander on Fortitude, but never with one clean shot. No. That would have been too easy. Solomatin preferred multiple shots: two to wound, one in each thigh, and then, after an agonizing wait as the victim writhed in agony on the ground, another shot to finish it all when Solomatin got bored and it was time to move on to the next victim, who was invariably kept close at hand to heighten the terror of those last few awful moments of life. Pecora felt sick as for probably the tenth time he wiped his hand down the side of his trousers as if to rub away the contamination from Solomatin’s clammy handshake.

  And even if Sodje and Albrecht weren’t as bad as Solomatin, it was probably only for lack of opportunity. Pecora had little doubt that they, too, would have just as little compunction about putting a bullet into the back of his head.

  As he waited for Nikolas Kaminski, the Old Earth Alliance secretary for interstellar relations and as decent a man as Albrecht and his crew were psychopathic killers, to bring the meeting to order, Pecora knew deep down that the ten weeks set aside by the Hammer and Federated Worlds governments for mediation brokered by Old Earth were going to be the longest weeks of his life. He just hoped that they wouldn’t be the most wasted.

  A small cough from Kaminski announced the start of the meeting, and with a sigh Pecora settled back in his chair to listen to the mediator’s opening statement. Pecora knew it would be a worthy speech. It would be full of pleas for common sense to prevail, for the standards of civilized behavior to apply, and so on. But no matter how worthy the sentiments, Pecora’s view of the Hammer would not change. They were so far beyond the bounds of decency that Kaminski might as well piss on a forest fire for all the good it would do.

  Wednesday, February 24, 2399, UD

  Fleet Orbital Heavy Repair Station Terranova-2, in Orbit around Terranova Planet

  Happy for once not to have to stand on a leg that still ached when he put his full weight on it, Michael hung back and watched the painfully slow process of moving 387 out of the orbital repair station’s maintenance dock and into the cavernous hold of the huge ultraheavy planetary lander.

  387, tiny against the orbital heavy repair station’s vast bulk, was being maneuvered with infinite care to line up with the lander’s gaping cargo hold. An army of orange-suited spacers shepherding a swarm of heavy-duty cargobots, anticollision lights flashing like demented orange fireflies, fussed around the scarred and torn hull, which had been cleaned of the tons of foamsteel and bracing that had been used to get the ship safely home. All classified equipment had been stripped out, and fusion plants shut down and decommissioned.

  A moment of sadness struck Michael.

  387 once had been a living thing and, through Mother, almost a friend, or at least a comrade in arms. He’d miss her quirky, deadpan sense of humor. But now 387 was just another dead warship hulk, and Mother had gone on to other things. She was the latest in a long line of warship AIs safely downloaded into Attila the Hun, the massive AI that powered the Fleet’s StratSim Facility at the Fleet College. Michael knew that some warship captains liked to reminisce with their old AIs, but he didn’t think he’d ever be one of them. For him, 387 was something that had happened in the past, and there it should stay.

  As the bows of 387 nosed slowly into the lander’s hold, Michael could look directly down into the hole that marked the point where Weapons Power Charlie’s plasma containment bottle had blown out most of the starboard bow. The hole was huge, a mass of twisted titanium frames and shredded ceramsteel. The edges, torn, twisted, jagged, and razor-sharp, had been masked off with Day-Glo plasfiber for the trip. Down through the hole, its sides etched out of the darkness by 387’s internal lighting, Michael could trace the path of the platinum/iridium slug inside its deadly shroud of plasma as it had cut its way down through the ship, taking the lives of so many of the crew on the way.

  Farther aft on the port side, the entry point for the slug that nearly had taken Michael’s life was framed untidily by yet more orange plasfiber. Less dramatic, the pear-shaped puncture was surprisingly small. The slug’s awesome kinetic energy, with little armor to slow it, had been focused as it hit on a single small part of 387’s hull.

  And then, farther back, there was another hole. The slug’s exit from the hull aft had been much more dramatic, its plasma shroud by that stage blooming into a lethal blast wave that had opened up the ship’s ceramsteel armor like a tin can. The hole was much bigger, now rimmed with yet more orange plasfiber to mark the place where the slug had finally cleared the ship, taking with it 387’s pinchcomms antenna, leaving only the stump of its hydraulic ram to show that it ever had existed.

  Michael smiled as he tried to picture the surprise of some poor spacer crew centuries down the track as they tried to work out just what the hell a pinchcomms antenna was doing floating in interstellar space.

  As Michael watched, performing his final duty as ex-captain of 387 and with orders posting him to Fleet freshly received, something made him look up. Across the massive hangar, a substantial orange figure emerged from a small personnel air lock and with considerable verve shot across the gap that separated them before coming to an impeccably judged halt only centimeters from Michael. The spacer barely had to move to touch helmets.

  Michael only knew one very large spacer that good.

  “Junior Lieutenant Helfort, sir. Leading Spacer Bienefelt reporting for duty, sir.”

  “Benny, you are a fucking rogue,” Michael said with a broad grin. “Last time I checked, they said two more days.”

  “I know, sir. I am a fucking rogue, and they didn’t want to let me go. But I can be very persuasive when I have to. I had to see 387 one last time before she went dirtside.”

  Michael laughed.

  He’d always believed that Bienefelt would make it, and even though it had taken months in regen, the news that she would be fine had set the seal on his own slow recovery.

  Saturday, April 3, 2399, UD

  Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

  Chief Councillor Polk wearily rubbed his eyes. They felt like someone had poured sand into them.

  He’d always wondered why Merrick had aged twice as fast as his peers. Now he knew. The pressure was unrelenting, the workload enormous, the torrent of issues that poured into his secretariat so huge that he felt like he was drowning.

  But he was making some progress. It had taken time, but he now had people he was prepared if not to trust at least to let handle much of the day-to-day work he’d been forced to take on in the days after Merrick’s fall from power.

  Day-to-day work! One crisis after another was more like it. He ran through the list in his mind.

  The Hammer economy was completely stuffed. In truth, it was always stuffed, so maybe he shouldn’t classify it as a crisis; no change there. In any case, his handpicked successor at the Department of Economy and Finance, Tobias de Mel, was pretty competent, so Polk was happy to let him get on with it.

  The riots in McNair provoked by his predecessor’s departure and execution were finally over. The city and the rest of the planet were simmering in unhappy silence, which was just fine with Pol
k. Let them simmer.

  The situation on Faith was coming under control. Doc-Sec’s ruthlessness backed by marine firepower was slowly grinding the life out of the heretics, the ground having been cut out from under their feet by a carefully stage-managed upsurge of xenophobic anger and resentment after the Feds’ attacks on Eternity and Hell.

  Of the really big issues, that left only what to do about those Kraa-damned and insufferably arrogant Feds.

  Polk picked up the latest report from the negotiating team on Old Earth from a paper-cluttered desk. He snorted derisively as he reread the document. Councillor Albrecht thought the Feds might agree to let Brigadier General Digby carry the can for the Mumtaz affair. In return, Albrecht wanted the authority to agree to the Feds’ long-standing demand for a formal public apology before any further discussions took place. Polk snorted again. Stupid bastard. They might as well agree to what the Feds really wanted: referral of their outrageous demand for financial restitution to the interstellar court for determination, because they sure as hell were not going to stop at an apology.

  Well, Polk thought as he flicked Albrecht’s report back onto his desk, many things might come to pass, but agreeing to Feds’ demands was never going to be one of them. Not while he was chief councillor.

  In any case, he didn’t much care what Albrecht did, thought, or said. Short of complete capitulation by the Feds, whatever Albrecht achieved would not be enough to save him no matter how well he’d done under the circumstances. On his return from Old Earth, Albrecht would be arrested the second he stepped off the down-shuttle; the carefully doctored holovid of him in unwisely close proximity to known agents of the Old Earth Alliance would be more than enough to take him down. If the bastard lived for another week after that, he’d be Kraa-damned lucky, thought Polk with a small shiver of pleasure. He made a note to himself. He must be sure to get holovids of Albrecht’s execution. That would seal the moment. Yes, he’d enjoy that, he thought, as he jotted down a short note to get it arranged.

  Flicking on his voicewriter, Polk pushed back in his chair and closed his eyes. His response to Councillor Albrecht was not going to be what the man wanted to hear.

  Two minutes later a blunt, short, and dismissive note was on its way to Albrecht. Polk felt good, very good in fact. Telling Albrecht to tell the Feds to fuck off always made him feel that way. Knowing that Albrecht was finished made him feel even better. Of the remaining Merrick appointees to the Council, that left only Khan and al-Hamidi. Unknown to Khan, the case against him being put together by a secret DocSec task force was almost finished. Very compelling it was, too, Polk had been pleased to see when presented with a preliminary draft.

  But al-Hamidi wouldn’t be so easy, far from it. Shifting him would be hard.

  Unique among Merrick’s appointees to the Council, al-Hamidi was not from Commitment, and winning his support had been one of the keys to Merrick’s success. Al-Hamidi had a deep-rooted power base centered on his home town of Providence Sound. From there, he controlled the huge continent of South Barassia, the center of the Hammer’s substantial defense industry. Needless to say, it was a matter of considerable frustration to Polk that even after years of effort, his supporters, whose control over the rest of the planet Fortitude was total, had been unable to shake al-Hamidi’s grip.

  Well, Polk thought, he’d be interested to see how well al-Hamidi coped now that Merrick was gone, along with control of DocSec. History showed that no single individual could stand up against DocSec, and in the end, that was all al-Hamidi was. Just one man, and like all the others, his time would come.

  Polk sat for a while, comfortable in the warm glow of self-congratulation. The more he thought about it, the closer he was to securing his domestic power base, so maybe this was the time to start thinking about making the Feds wish that they had left the Mumtaz business alone. Yes, he decided, it was time, despite unanimous agreement at the last Defense Council meeting that the matter was probably best left alone. Fact was, he didn’t give a flying fuck what the Defense Council thought. They would do as they were damned well told.

  He reached for the intercom. “Singh!”

  “Sir?”

  “Contact Fleet Admiral Jorge. See if he’s free for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Sir.”

  Polk flicked off the intercom.

  By all accounts, Jorge was a good man. He was an off-worlder, which meant he probably wasn’t much of a Merrick supporter, though according to DocSec, he had taken scrupulous care throughout a long and competent career to stay well clear of factional politics, so who would know? Much more significantly, Jorge owed his appointment as commander in chief of Hammer Defense Forces to Polk, and Polk had made damn sure he knew it. He had plucked Jorge out of relative obscurity as the flag officer in command of Space Fleet research and development, promoting him two ranks over the heads of those Polk judged to be largely responsible for the Hammer’s spineless and incompetent response to the Feds’ attack.

  Most of those men, Polk was happy to remind himself, were now anonymous bodies among the thousands in some DocSec lime pit somewhere.

  The purge of Space Fleet in the weeks after the attack on the Hell system had been merciless. Senior officers had been cut down in the hundreds without appeal, the executioner’s bullet reaching deep into the organization to root out anyone even remotely connected to the humiliation dished out by the Feds at Hell’s Moons.

  From Polk’s perspective, the daily reports from DocSec summarizing the previous day’s arrests, convictions, and sentences—all but a tiny minority of those arrested going to the firing squad the next day—had been profoundly satisfying. It was very simple. Most if not all of those condemned must have been tacit supporters of Merrick. Otherwise, how could they have flourished during Merrick’s time as chief councillor? Add in their contribution, actual or inferred—it didn’t much matter which—as Fleet’s senior management to the defeat at Hell’s Moons and it was pretty straightforward if you thought about it.

  Polk’s enjoyment of the moment was interrupted by the carefully neutral tones of Ramesh Singh, his longtime confidential secretary. “Chief Councillor?”

  “Yes, Singh.”

  “Fleet Admiral Jorge would be delighted to meet you for lunch tomorrow, sir.”

  I bet he would, Polk thought. As if he had any choice in the matter.

  “Good. I’m so pleased to hear it,” Polk said sarcastically.

  “I’ll arrange lunch for 13:00 at the residence.”

  “Yes, that should be fine. What else do I have tomorrow?”

  “Photo opportunity at 12:30, sir. Front lawn, weather permitting. Medal ceremony for crew members of the New Dallas. Ten minutes.”

  “Ah, good. Will Jorge be there?”

  “Not planned to be, sir. It’s a Space Fleet–sponsored affair, so Admiral Kseki will be there, and he’s hosting the lunch afterward.”

  “Okay. Fine.” Admiral Kseki. Another one of his recent appointments.

  As the intercom clicked off, Polk smiled a grim smile of satisfaction.

  If necessary, Jorge would be left in no doubt that any reluctance on his part to commit body and soul to what Polk was beginning to think of as a righteous crusade against the Feds would be a career-, not to say life-threatening move on his part.

  But somehow Polk didn’t think it would come to that.

  Monday, April 19, 2399, UD

  Conference Room 24-1, Interstellar Relations

  Secretariat Building, Geneva, Old Earth

  Three hundred forty light-years away from the Federated Worlds, the late-afternoon sun of an Old Earth day threw long bars of golden sunlight into the small conference room on the top floor of the Interstellar Relations Secretariat building on the outskirts of Geneva.

  The room was empty except for a small table and a scattering of chairs. Two people were seated at the end closest to the window, the spring sun enjoyably warm on their backs. Giovanni Pecora had his head in his hands, the frustration obvious.
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  “You know, Marta,” he said despairingly, “I don’t think a single fucking word we’ve said here today to those Hammer bastards has had the slightest effect. They really are the most stiff-necked and obstinate people in all of humanspace. We’ve always been prepared to consider compromise, but the Hammer? Never. I was afraid that this mediation might be a waste of time, and so it’s turning out. I’d give it another week, maybe two, tops.”

  Marta Diallo, Pecora’s deputy secretary responsible for the Hammer Worlds and one of the very few people in the Fed Worlds with a deep understanding of the Hammer psyche, nodded. Her frustration was obvious.

  “Well, Giovanni, there was a chance, I suppose,” she said. “Small one, maybe, but there was a chance. If the Hammer had publicly blamed the whole affair on Digby and made the necessary apologies, then they might have been able to save enough face to look at the compromise positions we proposed.” Diallo sighed deeply, running her hands through thick black hair as if to push away the problem. “But I’m afraid that Polk’s intervention has blown that chance out of the water. Why he wouldn’t blame Digby is beyond me. He had his boss put up against a wall and shot, after all, and we’ve got Digby locked up, so who the hell’s going to argue?”

  She paused for a moment before continuing. “No, stupid me. We know why, and it’s the age-old reason. Domestic politics is why he wouldn’t put Digby in the frame. Digby was a Merrick man, and everyone knows it. Blaming Digby is as good as blaming Merrick. But putting the blame on us gives Polk his best and probably only chance to gut the opposition and rally support behind himself as leader of the Hammers. I hate to say it, Giovanni, but unless we get something positive out of them at tomorrow’s session, and I don’t believe we will, I think there is a real risk that this is going to slide into full-scale war.”