The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 12

  It was an effort to get up and go for a walk around the ship before lunch in time for her other passion: contract bridge with a group organized by the ship’s entertainment officer. That was followed by a people-watching walk through the small piazza, coffee with Sam at one of the small cafes before happy hour in the business class lounge, followed by dinner, idle conversation, and then bed.

  If it hadn’t been for the persistent unease she felt about the group of men she had met in the gym that morning, it would have been a perfect day. Stop fussing, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep. They might well be, as she now suspected, a group of mercenaries bound for one of the endless wars that sputtered and flared on some godforsaken world out on the rim of humanspace, but that was somebody else’s problem. She’d do what little she could. She would make sure that she had full neuronics recordings of each group member, and once back home, she’d pass them on to one of her contacts in Space Fleet intelligence. They’d follow up if necessary.

  Sunday, September 6, 2398, UD

  City of Foundation, Terranova Planet

  The city of Foundation, Terranova’s oldest and, as the name suggested, the first settlement of the Federated Worlds, was quiet in the last few hours before dawn.

  Low in the western sky, Castor was setting behind the massive bulk of the New Tatra Mountains. High to the south, the razor-thin crescent of Terranova’s second moon, Pollux, cast a faint light across the sleeping city.

  The large house on the low hills overlooking the city, and beyond it, the sea, dark and quiet. Inside, the sleeping form of Giovanni Pecora, federal minister of interstellar relations, struggled to resist the increasingly strident demands of his neuronics. But eventually they could not be refused any longer, and Pecora, a bulky man in his early seventies, his dark brown hair laced liberally with streaks of white-unusual for such a heavily geneered society-and red-faced with sleep, swung himself up and out of bed, muttering under his breath.

  He accepted the comm.

  “Okay, okay, I’m up. Give me two minutes to organize myself and I’ll be straight back to you.”

  Pecora’s tone made it clear to the caller, the ministry’s duty officer, how he felt about being dragged out of bed that early in the morning. This had better be something worthwhile, something his personal agent couldn’t have dealt with, or the duty officer would wish she’d never been born. And why me? Pecora wondered as he fumbled in the dark for his dressing gown and slippers, trying hard not to wake his wife. Suddenly it hit him. The duty officer had called him direct rather than one of his senior ministerial staff, and a cold clammy hand clamped itself around his heart. Jesus, he thought, something has happened, and he was bloody sure he didn’t want to know what it was.

  Heart pounding, he made his way through to his study and commed on the lights and the housebot to bring a cup of tea. Blinking in the sudden brightness, he sat down at his desk and took out an old-fashioned pad of paper and an antique liquid ink pen, things he always did in moments of stress. According to his grandmother, the pen had come from Old Earth and was over four hundred years old. The fact that it still worked was entirely due to a certain Mr. Fashliki, whose shop in the old quarter was a shrine to long-dead technologies and one of Giovanni Pecora’s favorite places.

  With a cup of tea safely in hand and the housebot instructed to prepare the next one and leave it outside on the veranda, Pecora finally felt up to the task of facing whatever diplomatic horror the duty officer was sitting on. Taking a deep breath to brace himself-he really was getting far too old for this sort of nonsense, he decided-he put the comm through.

  “Ms. Rodriguez. Good morning. What’s the problem?”

  As the duty officer laid it out for him, reinforcing the key points with clips from Captain Kumar’s pinchcomm message, Pecora began to feel physically sick, his stomach starting a slow sour churn. He knew the Hammer all too well from way back, and as he listened, he began to understand not just what the Hammer planned to do but, much more important, what that might lead to.

  “Right, I understand all that.” Pecora kept his voice level. “And Prince Interstellar was certain that Mumtaz had jumped?”

  “Sir, I didn’t focus on Mumtaz in particular. I figured that would get people asking questions we didn’t want asked right now, so I had them dump all their jump records for all merships for the last month, and I’m afraid there’s no doubt. Mumtaz unberthed at 02:43 UT, a bit after 20:30 local, and Prince Interstellar’s ops center received her jump report saying that she would jump at 09:12 UT. I’ve also checked with Terranova nearspace control. Mumtaz jumped on schedule.”

  “Right, then.” Shit, shit, shit. Only missed her by two hours, Goddamn it. “Okay, Ms. Rodriguez, thank you for all that. And also let me say that you were right to call me and not the ministry staff, though they won’t thank you for it. But don’t worry, I’ll fix that.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The relief in Rodriguez’s voice was palpable, her avatar visibly relaxing, the lines of stress marking her mouth and eyes fading away. Damn good avatar software, Pecora thought in passing. So good that it must have cost somebody a small fortune.

  “And well done also for not making it obvious that it was the Mumtaz you were interested in. That was smart thinking.” And under a lot of pressure, too. Pecora made a mental note: Rodriguez was someone to watch.

  Pecora paused for a moment as he thought through the implications before continuing. “But if what we’ve been told is correct, then someone at Prince Interstellar will connect our inquiry about their ships and wonder just how the hell we knew in advance that Mumtaz was going to disappear. So comm the contact details to me, and we’ll make sure that we remind them of a few facts of life. Oh, and put a security lock on everything we’ve talked about, with key access for my and your eyes only for the moment.”

  “Sir.”

  “Okay. Leave it all with me, and I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, but I will. Do not tell another living soul, and that’s an order.”

  “Sir, I’ve not and I won’t.”

  “Pleased to hear it. Good night.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  Pecora leaned back in his chair, cradling a mug of tea in his hand, its warmth a pleasant contrast to the terrible icy fear that gripped him. He felt a million years old all of a sudden. If Rodriguez’s report was true, and they needed to be damn sure that it was-the Hammer had been known to leak false intelligence just to make mischief-the chances of this affair not turning into the Fourth Hammer War were very slim indeed. He drank the tea in a series of large gulps and set down the mug before standing up to make his way out onto the veranda. He picked up the next mug-it took a minimum of two to get him going in the morning-and settled into his favorite chair. Giovanni’s thinking chair, his wife called it. He had time. The Mumtaz was gone, and nothing in God’s universe could stop the hijacking now.

  After twenty minutes of silent reflection, with the eastern sky beginning to turn pink with the promise of another hot and humid day, its light beginning to pick out the city below him and the bay that stretched out in front of it, Pecora’s mood, dark and heavy to start with, was even more depressed. Whatever the Federated Worlds might do, there was one thing they had to do, and that was get the crew and passengers of the Mumtaz back. There was simply no way that he or any other member of the federal government would allow their people to remain in the hands of those fanatics.

  And that meant confronting the Hammer. And in this case, that would have two inevitable consequences, both guaranteed by the very nature of Hammer’s polity, culture, and history.

  First, Merrick would go. Even though being chief councillor gave Merrick enormous power, he was not an absolute dictator, and there were certain rules that had to be followed. And Merrick had broken rule number one: Consult your fellow councillors on all matters of significance. He clearly had not, and that put him up against every other member of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of Doctrine. History s
howed that when that happened, there could be only one outcome: an orgy of blood as his enemies took the opportunity Merrick’s hubris had given them to eliminate both Merrick and as many of his supporters as possible.

  The prospect of Merrick and his murderous cronies getting the treatment they had handed out to so many others didn’t bother Pecora too much. In fact, justice would be served by what DocSec might do to Merrick. But for a chief councillor, Merrick was somewhat unusual. Surprisingly, the man was quite popular for someone with so much blood on his hands.

  Although he could be as brutal as any Hammer chief councillor, he wasn’t as dangerously devious and untrustworthy as Jeremiah Polk, the man most likely to succeed Merrick, a man that the analysts on the Hammer desk felt Merrick grossly underestimated. That meant that Merrick’s overthrow could lead to civil war. And if there was one thing worse than going to war, it was going to war with worlds whose political leaders depended for their very survival on a credible external threat or, if one did not exist, inventing one.

  The second consequence, as inevitable as it was disheartening, came from the nature of Hammer people and their society. As a general rule, Hammers were almost incapable of acting honorably when dealing with outsiders. With some worthy exceptions, they just could not do it. It was not part of their culture to be held accountable by anyone not on the Path of Doctrine; that was precisely why the Hammer Worlds were shunned by most of the rest of humankind. To deal with Hammers at any level was to ask to be ripped off.

  And so, any proposition that the Mumtaz might be returned with her people and cargo unharmed would be treated with absolute contempt. So, if the Feds wanted Mumtaz, they would have to take it back, and the Hammers would not like that one little bit.

  All of that was fine up to a point, but Pecora had been around long enough to have learned the most fundamental lesson of interstellar relations. It was a simple lesson best summed up in only one word: self-interest. For all the overblown language trotted out by politicians and diplomats, every issue between systems came back to that word: self-interest. Very simple, really.

  So yes, the Federated Worlds could act unilaterally to recover the Mumtaz together with her unfortunate crew and passengers. If it wanted to. But doing that would be a decision not taken lightly. For all that the rest of humanspace had suffered at the hands of the Hammer, and they had and grievously, the consequences of unilateral action on the interests of the Sylvanians, the Frontier, the Old Earth Alliance, and all the rest would have to be worked through in excruciatingly tedious detail.

  Pecora felt the frustration rise. In the end, it all boiled down to only two issues, anyway: the impact on interstellar trade and the impact on system security. Everything else was peripheral. If unilateral action to recover the Mumtaz threatened either or, God help the Worlds, both, they were stuffed. A multilateral solution it would have to be, and that meant that weeks, months, even years of negotiation would follow while the Hammers sat back laughing. Meanwhile, the Mumtaz’s crew and passengers would be left to rot in some damned Kraa prison camp. Christ, what a depressing thought.

  Fuck them all, Pecora thought in a rare flash of unrestrained anger. This time the Hammers had gone too far. If the rest of humanspace couldn’t see that, that was their problem. All of a sudden, he knew what had to be done. He’d push for unilateral action, and if the Old Earth Alliance, the Sylvanians, and all the rest were disinclined to go along, then so be it. The Federated Worlds would of course follow due process. Oh, yes. Every tedious step of the way: a formal notice of a state of limited war, properly served, of course, and supported by an affirmed statement of facts and a demand for financial restitution. All strictly in accordance with every word of the New Washington Convention, of course. That should do it, he said to himself, suddenly energized by the thought of taking the fight to the Hammers with or without the support of the rest of civilized humanspace.

  Pecora finished his tea-his fourth cup-and got up, legs and back stiff from inactivity. The eastern sky was now a stunning melange of mauve shading into blues, golds, and pinks rich with the promise of a hot sunny day. Beyond the city, the ocean was turning from a dark gunmetal gray to an inviting deep blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. Pecora sighed deeply as he strangled at birth any idea he might have had of going down the coast to catch a long lunch at Trinh’s and watch the world go by. It was almost six, and the matter at hand couldn’t wait any longer.

  He put the comm out, tagged with the codephrase “Sampan Two” needed to convene an urgent meeting of the inner cabinet, and went to take a shower.

  After some perfunctory small talk, the meeting of the inner cabinet broke up.

  The meeting had been a bruising one. Shocked disbelief had shifted to a blend of outrage and frustration before degenerating into interfactional squabbling, with the unspoken question of who was going to be blamed looming large in the minds of most of those present. But as always, Moderator Burkhardt had pulled things together long enough to get the massive if sometimes cumbersome resources of the Federated Worlds moving in the right direction.

  It wasn’t long before Pecora found himself alone at the table. Throughout the meeting, even if only as an undertone, the mood had been harsh and unforgiving. Over the years, the Federated Worlds and its allies had been dragged into war by deliberate Hammer provocations three times and had hundreds of thousands of deaths to show for it. Although the Sylvanians had stressed that the information was being provided to head off war, that now looked very much like a forlorn hope. If the Federated Worlds moved with speed and precision to recover the Mumtaz and its people and minimized the collateral damage to the Hammer, Pecora knew that there was a chance, if only a very faint chance, that the situation would not degenerate into full-scale war.

  But he also knew the Hammer. It would take every ounce of diplomatic skill backed by an overwhelming show of military strength to stop them from overreacting. Pecora didn’t like the odds. Deep down he knew that if it came to an all-out shooting war, Burkhardt would have great difficulty persuading the public to settle for anything less than the Hammer’s unconditional surrender. There were still too many people mourning the deaths of too many loved ones killed at the hands of the Hammer to allow for anything less.

  As Pecora left the building, he made up his mind. Planetary security had been tasked with finding out just how in the hell the supposedly inviolate system of personal identity security checks might have been compromised enough to allow a gang of psychopathic hijackers onboard a Fed mership, the intel spooks at Department 24 were going to mobilize their Hammer humint assets to try to find out what the Hammers were up to, and the Data Intercept Agency’s massive databanks of electronic intercepts were being trawled to see if anything relevant had been missed.

  More relevant to solving the problem if it really was as Captain Kumar had described it, the task of working out how to get the Mumtaz back was now in the hands of the people at defense. Even better news was the appointment of Vice Admiral Jaruzelska as commander of an as yet unformed Battle Fleet Delta. Pecora knew Angela Jaruzelska, the Federated Worlds’ youngest vice admiral, from the most recent biennial strategic war games and had been impressed with her performance under pressure. The war games simulated full-scale conflict across five star systems and hundreds of planets and were so intense that they had been known to destroy less capable officers.

  So, short of declaring war on the Hammer himself, there wasn’t much more he could do right now.

  He commed his wife. They would take that long lunch at Trinh’s, after all, and if asked, he would ascribe this morning’s meeting to factional party politics.

  Sunday, September 6, 2398, UD

  DLS-387, Pinchspace

  387 was now 250 light-years from Terranova, and the drop back into normalspace was imminent.

  The trip had been surprisingly busy. Ribot believed in sims, sims, and more sims. Michael and his team had spent hours and hours going through the deployment, setup, calibration, and go-live
of DefGrav’s remote gravitronics packages. The schedule called for the entire process to take seven days, but Michael was increasingly confident that they could do it in less, not that he would ever admit that to anyone and certainly not to Ribot, who would have immediately moved the goalposts.

  For once not on watch-another thing Ribot believed in was giving Michael as much combat information center time as he could bear-a tired Michael stood at the back, well out of the way, as he waited for the pinchspace drop.

  “All stations, this is command. Get ready, everybody; we will drop in five minutes.” The XO’s voice was irritatingly cheerful, and no wonder, Michael thought. Jacqui Armitage was one of the very few people onboard for whom a move into or out of pinchspace caused nothing more than a momentary spasm.

  Michael began to steel himself, to try to will his body into behaving itself.

  “All stations, dropping now.”

  With that, Michael’s stomach turned itself inside out. But, he consoled himself, perhaps it was not quite as bad as last time. Or so he fervently hoped.

  The command crew rapidly got itself back together. With the threat plot reassuringly empty, in quick succession Armitage had confirmed that everyone had survived the drop, deployed the heat dump panels, and begun the process of spinning the ship on its axis, ready to commence its deceleration burn.

  “Captain, sir. Command. We are on track, vector correct and aligned ready to commence our deceleration burn, which is due in fifty-five minutes’ time. That gives us time to deploy pinchcomms to catch the 22:00 transmission sked and get our drop report away.”

  “Captain, roger. Let’s do it.”

  Seconds later, Michael watched as the holocams tracked the massive pinchcomms antenna as it deployed. At almost 10 meters across and 3 high, it was an impressively large piece of equipment; it had to be if it was to get the beam accuracy it needed to communicate across pinchspace. To look at, it was just a shallow concave oval shape with the jet-black pinchspace stasis generator mounted dead center. Slowly the antenna emerged, the single massive hydraulic ram lifting it smoothly clear of its armored container behind the surveillance drone hangar. As it cleared the hull, the array began to twitch as its AI hunted out the optimum path to the nearest relay station, in this case a long-range pinchcomms relaysat sitting in interstellar space about halfway between 387 and the Federated Worlds 150 light-years away. It looked like a dog scenting something, Michael thought.