Graham Paul: The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

Gravity Research Station Lima-5, deepspace

Fleet Admiral Jorge left the fast courier ship and brushed past the small gaggle of officers who made up the formal welcoming party. A casual salute was his only acknowledgment.

Professor Wendt was waiting for him by the door of the conference room.

“Professor,” Jorge said curtly. “Ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Wendt replied, ushering Jorge into a cramped room that was brilliantly lit and sparsely furnished. Jorge ignored the rest of Wendt’s team, a mixed bunch of men in white lab coats, their faces a mix of fear, tension, and exhaustion. Professor Wendt and what he had to say were the only things that mattered to him. He took his seat. “Let’s go.”

“Right, sir. The purpose of this meeting is-”

“Professor! I know why I’m here, so get to the point,” he snarled.

Wendt gulped. “Yes, sir.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “As you know, the only thing delaying operational deployment of the Mark-48G warhead was the unacceptably high failure rate of its antimatter container.”

Jorge’s eyes narrowed. He knew that. Why, he wondered, did people like Wendt find it so hard to cut to the chase?

“Now,” Wendt continued, “we know we cannot make a fail-safe antimatter warhead. So our design objective has been to develop a warhead with an acceptably low risk of accidental detonation, even though that risk can never come even close to zero.”

Jorge nodded. There was no avoiding it: Antimatter warheads were much more dangerous than the fusion and chemex warheads fitted to the missiles now in frontline service with Hammer warships. He waved for Wendt to continue.

Wendt reached into a plasfiber box on the table in front of him. “And here it is.” He pulled out a metallic object the size of a shoe box. Its mirror-finished metallic surface was deeply scarred, and at some point it had been subjected to intense heat; one end was badly discolored by blue-black streaks.

“This is the antimatter container from a Mark-48G warhead,” Wendt said, unable to keep the pride out of his voice. “This is a live operational container. It’s fully charged with antihydrogen, there’s no external power, and it’s still maintaining full containment. We recovered this one from a missile we test-fired last night, and as you can see, it has survived not only launch but impact with the target.”

“Holy Mother of Kraa, Professor,” Jorge said finally. “Well done. All of you. By Kraa! Well done!” Then Jorge was on his feet, his face split side to side by a huge grin, his arm across the table to shake the hands of Wendt and his team. “By Kraa! This is great news, Professor.” His voice hardened. “This is for real? This is the real thing?”

“Yes, it is,” Wendt said triumphantly. “Now, if you would like to look at the holo-”

Jorge’s hand stopped Wendt in his tracks. “One second. Give it to me.”

Wendt pushed the lump of metal across the table. Jorge picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy. He turned it over in his hands, marveling at the ingenuity of Wendt and his engineers, shocked that something so small could contain so much destructive energy. He shook his head in wonder. Then, without any warning, his arm went back, and he hurled the object into the rock wall behind Wendt, the heavy metal shape barely missing the man’s head. As the object crashed to the floor, Wendt and every member of his team flinched instinctively away from the threat, their faces white with shock.

“Kraa!” one of them hissed softly. Wendt just stared in horror at Jorge as he struggled to recover his equilibrium.

Jorge laughed out loud at the sight of grown men cringing in front of him. He nodded slowly as he sat down. “You know what, Professor? I think I believe you. I think it really is a live container from a 48G.”

“It is, sir. Trust me, it is.”

When the fast courier unberthed, Jorge allowed himself the luxury of a smile. It had been a good day, one of the best for a long time.

But Wendt’s success told only part of the story. Ironically, the Feds-Kraa damn them-had played their part, and an important part, too. Jorge had no illusions about the Feds. Fed warships would thrash Hammer warships in most head-to-head fights. Their ships were too good, their sensors were too good, their weapon systems were too good, their people were too good, and they were not afraid to use their Kraa-damned AIs to devastating effect. Any way he looked at it-it pained him to have to admit the fact-the Feds were better than good. When it came to space warfare, they were the best in humanspace, and by a very respectable margin.

Sadly for the Feds, there was a catch. Yes, the Feds were good and they knew it, but over time, that knowledge was highly but insidiously corrosive. After a while, success sapped the will to do better. Success blunted the urge to try harder. Success stifled innovation. Success encouraged politicians and politicking. Success made hard decisions easy to avoid, and why not? After all, with the best space fleet in humanspace, there was always time to stab your peers in the back before fixing things later. Wasn’t there?

So, for a raft of reasons, antimatter had never been a high priority for the Feds, and Jorge had seen the intelligence reports to prove it. Even better, the Feds had no idea how successful the Hammer’s work on antimatter had been. That work was buried so deep that only a tiny handful of people outside the project knew of its existence; many of them had no idea how close the project was to success. Jorge had seen the internal security reports to prove that, too. He was pleased to know the Feds had not the faintest suspicion that tucked away on an obscure planet-sized asteroid in deepspace many light-years distant from the settled Hammer Worlds, antimatter labs and a production plant were working flat out to make the Fed’s much-vaunted military technology obsolete.

Well, Jorge thought, trying not to feel too smug, those Kraa-damned Feds were about to find out what a terrible mistake that had been.

Operation Cavalcade was on.

FWSS Ishaq, Vijati Reef

“Sensors, gravitronics.”

“Sensors,” the duty sensor officer replied. She sounded bored.

“Sir, we have a positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Red 5 Up 2. Designated track 775101. One vessel. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector is nominal for Earth-FedWorld transit. Traffic schedule indicates the vessel is the Fed cargo ship Treaty of Paris en route Old Earth to Terranova, mixed cargo and passengers.”

“Confidence?”

“It’s 99.99 percent, sir.”

“Helfort?” the duty sensor officer asked, looking to Michael for confirmation.

“Confirmed, sir.” Michael was confident. The Treaty of Paris was on schedule to the minute.

Satisfied, the duty sensor officer nodded. “Roger. Red 5 Up 2. Watch track 775101.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Watch 775101.”

The duty sensor officer looked as bored as she sounded. “Well,” Michael grumbled under his breath, “fair enough-maybe.” It was some ungodly hour in the early morning, the middle watch had dragged interminably, and the intercept would be the latest in an unbroken and utterly predictable succession of merchant ships. One by one, they had dropped out of pinchspace in a brief flash of ultraviolet to cross Vijati Reef, a rip in space-time hundreds of light-years wide and high but less than 800,000 kilometers deep, the gravitational anomaly creating a barrier in pinchspace no ship could ever cross.

Michael pushed his holovid range scale out to a billion kilometers, well past Vijati Reef. The sight of the two hundred or so merchant ships making the crossing was breathtaking. Michael failed to understand how anyone could be bored with such a spectacle. Well, okay, he conceded. It might be a slow-moving show, but it still had a fascination, even a magic about it. The ships’ positions were a mass of green diamonds painted onto black emptiness, their vectors probing out into interstellar space. Well beyond them, thrown out in a protective shell, were ranged a small array of tiny surveillance satellites, their simple optronics suites keeping an eye on the proceedings. Michael patched his neuronics into the master surveillance AI. All nominal, he noted. He turned back to the ships.