The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Read online

  “Age before beauty,” Michael commed, pointing for Petty Officer Strezlecki to go first.

  “Remember the rest of that aphorism, sir, and don’t tempt me into saying something that should stay belowdecks,” Strezlecki retorted as, without fuss or wasted effort, she pushed her boots into the air lock clear of the rungs of the ladder that dropped into the brightly lit space three meters below them. The ship’s gravity tugged at her feet and drew her in, gloves braking the fall to drop her neatly to the deck.

  Michael laughed. “I didn’t want you to see what a screwup I’m going to make of this,” he said as he struggled to emulate Strezlecki’s effortless move into the air lock without a great degree of success. First he wasn’t dropping fast enough and then he was falling too fast, his boots thumping onto the deck, the weight of his suit almost forcing him to his knees. But finally he stood there as Strezlecki commed the close command to Mother and they waited as the outer hatch closed and the air lock pressure equalized. At last the flashing red light gave way to a steady green, and the inner door opened onto the drone hangar deck.

  Ten minutes later, with suit turn-around completed, Michael stood there, his gray one-piece innersuit rumpled and sweat-stained. “That’s it,” he said to an equally disheveled Petty Officer Strezlecki. “Enjoy the party and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Sir.”

  As Michael turned to go below, the XO commed him. “Finished?” she asked.

  “I have, sir, yes.”

  “Okay. My cabin, now.”

  “Sir.” Shit. That didn’t sound good. What now? Michael thought as he dived for the ladder down to 3 Deck.

  Seconds later, Michael was at the XO’s cabin. Seeing him at the door, she waved him into the one and only chair in the cramped compartment where Lieutenant Jacqui Armitage both lived and worked. For a couple of seconds, the young woman just stared at him from brown eyes set wide in a ruddy, almost windburned face overshadowed by a shock of barely controlled brown hair, her face a set of flat planes that made it look as if she had been chiseled out of stone. Her mouth had a firm set to it that all of a sudden told Michael that he wasn’t there to be told what a good boy he was.

  “Pretty good job you and your team did, Michael. You certainly look like you’ve been working hard.”

  “Thank you, sir. We have. Though I need a lot more practice before I’m as good as they are.”

  “That’s what I knew you would think, Michael, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Young officers are always over-impressed by space gymnastics.” Armitage paused for a second. And here it comes, Michael thought, at a loss to know what he had missed. “I had Mother analyze the whole operation end to end, and she agrees with me. While acceptable, your oversight of the safety aspects of the operation was close to being compromised on three occasions. Have a look.”

  Armitage popped Mother’s analysis up on Michael’s neuronics. “See? Here you got so close in to the container that you missed Leong drifting off-station. A few more meters and he could have been in trouble. Now, he’s a good spacer and caught himself in time. But you should have seen it first just in case he didn’t. People with their heads down very often don’t. And here, Leong again. And here, Athenascu. Too close to that mass driver efflux for comfort. So Michael, the moral of the story is this: You are paid to command, so stand back and command. You are not paid to be just another cargo handler. And nothing will lose you respect faster than a damaged team member. So learn the lesson and do better next time, okay?”

  “Sir.” There wasn’t much Michael could say. Armitage was right.

  “Okay. That’s all. See you at supper tonight.”

  Tired but reasonably content even after the moderately severe singeing he had received from the XO, Michael sat quietly in the wardroom on 3 Deck.

  Supper over, the wardroom was filled with the give-and-take of team members who knew one another well. Sitting at the mess table, Armitage and Michael’s boss, Maria Hosani, were in the middle of a spirited debate on the relative merits of planetary life compared with life on orbital habitats. Michael suspected it was a debate months in the making and with many more to run. Sprawled in the two armchairs at the far end of the compartment in front of an impressive holovid of a large fireplace set into a stone wall, complete with a cheerfully blazing wood fire, were the navigator, Leon Holdorf, and John Kapoor, the proud commander of 387’s lander, Jessie’s Hope. Why Jessie’s Hope? Michael had had to ask. Because, Kapoor had explained patiently, probably for the hundredth time, the rest of the crew wouldn’t allow his first choice, Mom’s Hope, so he’d had to settle for her first name, “Jessie.” Yes, and the “Hope” bit, Michael had prompted. That he’d come home safely, Kapoor had said with a faint air of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders. Michael had laughed. He’d liked Kapoor from the moment they had met, and as the only other junior lieutenant onboard apart from Michael, he was a natural ally. Though not for long. Kapoor was about to pick up his second stripe.

  Sitting next to them on one of the benches that ran down the length of the mess and as officer of the day the only person in uniform was 387’s chief engineer, Cosmo Reilly. With the aid of a firmly pointed forefinger, Reilly was at that moment making the point very emphatically that warfare branch officers paid too little attention to engineers when it came to the conduct of Space Fleet business. Michael had to smile as he watched Reilly’s impassioned diatribe. Long, long ago, Space Fleet had decided in its infinite wisdom that too much engineering was a bad thing for the officers responsible for fighting on the Federation’s ships and had split engineering and warfare officers into two specialized streams. The merits of that decision still were hotly argued, a never-ending debate and one that Michael was sure went on in every mess in the Fleet most nights of the week.

  Kapoor just couldn’t resist. “I remember one time on the old Zube-”

  “Don’t you mean the Zuben-el-Genubi?” Reilly interrupted indignantly. “You bloody warfare types can’t even get the names of your ships right.”

  The rest of the officers broke out laughing. Michael just smiled. Clearly, teasing Reilly by shortening ship names was one of those long-running gags that made small ship life bearable. Michael reckoned that Reilly played up to the rest of them by putting on the personality of a cantankerous old space dog.

  “Enough of this,” Reilly said, waving the debate to a halt as he climbed to his feet. “Time for a walk-around. Can’t let the masses think management isn’t paying attention.” Michael was beginning to suspect that Cosmo Reilly was only half joking; of all the officers onboard, he was the most old-fashioned and almost always had an authoritarian tone to his voice. Be interesting to see what the troops think of him, Michael mused as Reilly left the mess.

  Kapoor’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Michael, you’re far too quiet. Get your fat ass over here and tell us what you think so far. But before you do, refill these glasses.”

  As instructed, Michael refilled the two port glasses at the little bar before sitting next to the fireplace, which, if it had been real, would have fried the lot of them long before.

  Soon he was deeply involved in a debate about the merits or otherwise of the Honorable Valerie Burkhardt, the Fed Worlds’ current moderator, whether she and the New Liberals had any chance of being reelected to the government in the forthcoming elections, and whether Space Fleet would be better off with a new federal minister of defense given the view commonly held in the Fleet that the present incumbent was a party hack promoted not because she had any talent for the job but because she had a hold over Valerie Burkhardt. Soon the debate sucked in Armitage and Hosani, and by the time Reilly returned from his rounds, the wardroom was well into an appraisal of how the Space Fleet had had to put up with an endless succession of ambitious but not necessarily capable ministers and so on and so on.

  Probably, Michael thought as he sat back to let the debate rage around him, if you did a survey, four or five topics would account for 80 percent of all conver
sation in officers’ messes across the Fleet, and this was surely one of them.

  Finally, he’d had enough. “If you’ll excuse me, people, I am going to make this an early night. Big day tomorrow.” He rose to his feet.

  “Can’t persuade you to step ashore to sample the delights of the Fleet O club? I think everyone else is up for it.” Hosani’s suggestion was tempting in the extreme, but Michael shook his head.

  “Not this time, sir.”

  “Okay. Get your beauty sleep. God knows you need it.”

  “Night all, see you in the morning.” With that, Michael turned and left. He really must vidmail his parents and reply to Anna’s last comm before they left.

  As the wardroom door hissed shut behind Michael, the group was quiet for a moment.

  “What do you think of our latest recruit, Jacqui?” Holdorf looked at the XO, his face quizzical.

  “Too soon to say. But he looks like he’ll be okay. He did well enough today for his first time out, and he took the obligatory dressing down without complaint. Remember McPherson’s first cargo op?” Armitage laughed as she recalled the three-ring circus that Michael’s predecessor had managed to create. “And he turned out okay.”

  “What do you think, Maria?” Armitage asked.

  “Like you said, not too bad for the first day. And he’s certainly not hard on the eyes. Pity he’s in the chain of command,” Hosani said, aiming a playful wink at Armitage, who winced. An improper relationship in the chain of command? Now, that was the best definition of an XO’s nightmare Armitage could think of.

  Kapoor came to his feet. “Look, you lot! Enough. Time is getting on, and the O club calls. Are we on or not?” His insistent voice made everyone grin.

  “I can’t see any reason to hurry, can you? Time for a few more drinks?” Holdorf teased, “Unless of course there is a certain someone that John feels the need to get close to.”

  “Bastard. You know there is. So can we go?” Kapoor said, standing up. “Because if not, I’m off. Night, Cosmo. Keep her safe.”

  Tuesday, September 1, 2398, UD

  DLS-387 Berthed on Space Battle Station 20, in Orbit around Anjaxx

  “All stations, this is command. Stand by to drop in fifteen minutes.”

  The captain’s voice jerked Michael back to reality. He and his team, now morphed from cargo handlers into 387’s emergency extravehicular activity team, were assembled in the surveillance drone hangar, fully suited up with uniforms chromaflaged to Day-Glo orange and personal maneuvering units locked into position on their backs. The wait was beginning to tell on the team. The full EVA outfit added more than 30 kilos to each spacer’s body mass. The only thing to do was to hunch forward and let the suit’s inherent stiffness take some of the weight. We must look like a bunch of hunchbacked trolls, Michael thought, and big lumpy orange ones at that.

  The team had been split into three groups. Two of Michael’s team crew members stood by the forward personnel air lock, two waited aft, and the rest-four in all, including Michael, personal call sign Alfa-waited inside the big surveillance drone deployment air lock. Arranged around each group were emergency repair packs and laser cutting equipment. As he stood there, Michael wondered when an EVA team had last been needed in earnest.

  He checked his neuronics. Ten minutes to go. “EVA team, this is Alfa. Close up suits, report when nitrogen-free,” he commed, to be rewarded by the solid clunks of seven armored plasglass faceplates shutting. His followed quickly as the suit integrity check reports came in from the team.

  “Command, this is Alfa. EVA team suit integrity checks complete. Suits nominal.”

  Helped by an autojected nitrogen-purge chemical cocktail that Michael didn’t like to think about and by the suit’s 100 percent oxygen atmosphere, the suit AI reported his body nitrogen-free less than a minute later. They were ready to decompress from 387’s ambient pressure down to a suit pressure of 0.2 atmospheres if required to deploy, something Michael fervently hoped would not be necessary. The minutes dragged past until Michael could have sworn that he now carried not 30 kilos on his back but 300.

  “All stations, this is command. 387 is go for launch. May God watch over us this day.” And with that, there was a gentle push as SBS-20’s hydraulic locking arms pushed 387’s fully loaded mass away from the space battle station and down its designated departure pipe.

  The seconds passed, and Michael began to relax. He had a busy morning ahead of him before standing his first watch in the combat information center at 12:30. By that time they should be clearing the clutter in orbit around Anjaxx and beginning to align 387 for its high-g burn toward its pinchspace jump point.

  Two hours or so later and a good ten minutes early for his 12:30 watch, Michael stood at the back of combat information center, ready to understudy Hosani as officer in command.

  A bit under 10 meters square, the compartment had as its focus the command chair, which was in the middle of the room in front of a massive high-definition holovid screen 3 meters wide and 2 high that carried the full command plot. Its job was to present the captain and the two warfare officers seated beside him with a complete picture of what was going on. Two command plot operators sat in front of the captain, but below his line of sight so that he had an uninterrupted view of all the bulkhead-mounted screens around him.

  Flanking the command plot were two smaller screens, the local or tactical plot to the left and the threat plot-known very unofficially as the “oh shit” plot-to the right. Smaller holovid screens arranged above workstations completed the combat information center’s displays.

  Moving aft, the workstations on the starboard side managed the 387’s hugely comprehensive sensor suite: search and fire control radars, high-definition targeting holocams, laser trackers, grav wave sensors, and passive sensors covering the full electromagnetic spectrum.

  Bringing up the rear and the last screen to starboard was the surveillance drone control desk. Drones weren’t always a lot of use in a shooting war; that was why the desk was tucked away at the back of the combat information center and why the officer responsible for a ship’s surveillance drones was always the most junior warfare officer onboard.

  The first workstation on the port side managed 387’s offensive weapons capability. Unlike her bigger sisters, 387 had no rail guns. The stresses imposed and the power needed by the pinchspace rail-gun engines to accelerate a salvo of slugs to 3.6 million kilometers per hour instantaneously were simply too great for a warship as small as 387. So, for her stand-off offensive capability, she had to manage with twelve Mamba antistarship missiles in two six-round containers supported by twin Lamprey x-ray antistarship lasers, depowered versions of the system fitted to major Fleet units.

  The second and third workstations managed 387’s suite of defensive weapons: hypervelocity armor-piercing discarding sabot chain guns and short-range defensive lasers, both tasked with protecting 387 from incoming missile and rail-gun salvos inside a bubble of space 20,000 kilometers in diameter. But as good as 387’s point-defense systems were, they could handle only small, low-rate attacks. That was precisely why the captains of deepspace light scouts were so emphatically advised by the Fleet’s fighting instructions to stay well clear of anything bigger than themselves.

  The last desk on the port side was where active countermeasures-jammers, spoofers, and decoys-were managed.

  Finally, in the center, ranged crosswise immediately behind the captain’s chair, were the nav, ship control, and damage control desks and, right aft on the port side, a pair of maintenance workstations.

  At general quarters, Michael could see that it would be a crowded place with every station manned by spacers in bulky space suits crammed into less than 100 square meters of deck space together with a mess of chairs, workstations, and screens. And the irony was, he thought, that arguably it was all redundant. Neuronics long ago had removed the need for large holovid screens, and it was perfectly possible for the captain and his command team to fight the ship lying flat on t
heir backs in the comfort and security of their bunks.

  But there were three fundamental problems with that approach.

  The first was good old human nature: Especially when under severe stress, people liked to be able to work close to other people as part of a team.

  The second was the objective fact that the big holovid screens, particularly when managed by experienced command plot operators, helped prompt warfare officers to think about things they might have missed in a way that neuronics, with their emphasis on user-controlled data filters, seemed incapable of doing.

  But in the end, the real clincher was tradition. Federated Worlds Space Fleet warships had always had combat information centers, and they probably always would. But he did concede that screen-fitted ships did better than neuronics-only ships, albeit only marginally, and then only in sims. Space Fleet had never dared send a neuronics-only vessel into actual combat, and Michael was pretty sure it never would.

  He checked the time. 12:25. Time to go.

  “Permission to step across, sir?” he asked the outgoing officer in command, Junior Lieutenant Kapoor.

  “Yeah, Michael. Across you come.” Kapoor waved his hand vaguely in his direction as Michael stepped across the thick yellow and black line painted on the gray plasteel deck. The goofers line it was called, and to cross it without the officer in command’s permission was to ask to have your ass kicked hard.

  “Okay. Welcome. Maria is running late-the captain wanted to see her about something-so we’ll do the handover and then you brief her while I watch. Okay?”

  “Sure. Fine by me.”

  Within seconds, Kapoor had started to dump everything he thought Michael needed to know about the current state of 387 and its intended plans together with a succinct summary of everything that was going on in Anjaxx nearspace. Finally, the torrent subsided. “Right.” Kapoor’s tone was firm. “You take Warfare-1, and I’ll keep an eye on things from Warfare-2 until Maria turns up. Off you go. You have the ship?”