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

  Finally, the twitching stopped as the dull silver array locked on to the pinchcomms carrier wave, ready for the routine 22:00 message broadcast.

  “Captain, sir. Command. Pinchcomms are up and locked on, and the jump report has gone. Er, hold on a minute, sir. Something is coming through for us marked flash.” Armitage’s voice betrayed her shock.

  What the fuck is going on? Michael asked himself. Messages with a flash precedence were usually used only to report enemy contacts, and so far as he knew, it was very unlikely that the Feds had gone to war with anybody in the five days since they had left Terranova.

  “I’ll deal with it in my cabin.” From the look on his face, the captain clearly shared Armitage’s shock. As Ribot hurried out of the combat information center, Michael was left with a very uneasy feeling in the bottom of his stomach, and it had nothing to do with the residual effects of 387’s transition back into normalspace. A flash pinchcomm could mean only one thing: bad news, very bad news.

  Ten minutes later, Ribot sat alone in his cabin.

  The message had finally come through, with the glacially slow data rate of the pinchcomms message broadcast transmission doing nothing for his nerves. The message was short and to the point: 387’s mission had been aborted, and they were now on their way into Hammer space. Something had gone seriously wrong somewhere, and he had a nasty feeling that 387 was about to get very close to that something, whatever it was.

  Taking time only to tell Mother to acknowledge safe receipt of the message from CINCFEDWORLDSFLT, Ribot commed Holdorf.

  “Leon. Captain.”

  The navigator’s avatar popped up in a flash.

  “Leon. I want a new nav plan for Revelation-II, and I want it yesterday. I’ve commed you the system identifier.”

  “Revelation-II?” Leon’s voice was heavy with disbelief. “But that’s in Ham-”

  Ribot cut him off. “I know it’s in Hammer space, and no, I don’t know why yet. I have to speak to Fleet.”

  Holdorf’s avatar hung there, mouth half-open.

  “Leon, for fuck’s sake, stop standing there like a pregnant goldfish! Get on with it,” Ribot snapped impatiently. “You and Mother get started and get back to me when you’ve got an 80 percent plan good enough to initiate the burn for the vector change. We’ll fine-tune the plan once I have a better idea from Fleet what they want to achieve. Now go. I need to speak to Fleet.”

  “Sir.” With his normally taciturn face working overtime to express a mixture of doubt, anxiety, and fear-Hammer space was absolutely to be avoided at all costs, and the prospect of jumping little 387 direct to Revelation-II was enough to make the bravest person think twice-Holdorf’s avatar disappeared.

  Ribot commed Mother. “Mother, set up a priority pinchcomm vidlink to Fleet and let me know when you are through to the duty operations officer. I’ll take it in the pinchcomms shack. Oh, and warn Cosmo that I’ll be using as much ship’s power as I need to keep the data rate up. I don’t want him finding out only when the lights go out.”

  “Roger, command.”

  As Ribot got to his feet to make his way to the pinchcomms shack, Holdorf commed him back.

  “Yes, Leon?”

  “Sir, I have the first cut of the nav plan, and we are realigning the ship, ready to commence the burn. The burn’s going to be a right bastard, skipper.”

  Ribot wasn’t surprised. Warships were never intended to do hard left turns at 150,000 kph.

  “Okay, do it.”

  “Sir.”

  A good twenty minutes later, the protracted pinchcomms conference with Fleet operations finally wound up, and Ribot sat back. He couldn’t put off the evil moment any longer. He commed Michael. After the briefest pause, Michael’s avatar popped up, the excitement of the urgent changes to 387’s plans plain to see. At least one of the crew relished the thought of a punch-up with the Hammers, Ribot thought.

  “Michael, pinchcomms shack now, please.”

  You poor bastard, Ribot thought as Michael, face flushed with the excitement of it all, appeared in the doorway. He’d be seeing it all as some sort of huge adventure. “Come in, Michael. Shut the door and sit down.” Puzzled, Michael did as he was told, wondering what the hell all of this had to do with him. Ribot took a deep breath before he spoke. “Michael, I have some bad news. You, like everyone else onboard, are wondering what the hell is going on. Well, it appears that the Hammers are going to hijack the Mumtaz, and Fleet has confirmed that your mother and sister are onboard. Michael, I’m so sorry.”

  The blood drained from Michael’s face, his skin turning a dirty shade of gray, his mouth working to say words that wouldn’t come.

  Finally, but only with a huge effort, Michael forced himself to speak. “Are they okay? Have they been hurt? Are they coming back? Why-”

  Ribot interrupted what threatened to become a flood of words. “Michael, we have one unconfirmed report that the hijacking is going to take place when Mumtaz drops out at the Brooks Reef around midday on the eleventh. But as yet Fleet has no independent verification, none at all. That’s why our mission has been scrubbed and why we have been diverted to Hammer space. We need to establish what really has happened.

  “Michael, we’ve got a lot to do, so I need to cut this short, but I wanted you to know first. It’ll be difficult for you, but I need you to be at your best. And believe me, I think Fleet means it when they tell me that nothing-and I mean nothing-is going to stop us from getting every soul back. And be thankful that however bad the Hammers are, they do tend to treat women civilians well. So Michael, can you do what I need you to do?”

  The anguish in Michael’s eyes was replaced by a steady cold-burning anger. “Sir. Of course. Does my father know?”

  “No. Fleet’s keeping this very tight in case it’s just the Hammer trying to make trouble. Let’s hope that’s all it is. Now, get your team mustered and get Petty Officer Strezlecki checking and double-checking every one of those birds of yours. I want them all 100 percent. We are going to need them. When you’ve got them started, you can join the think tank in the combat information center.”

  “Sir.”

  Ribot finished summarizing the detailed CINCFEDWORLDSFLT briefing he’d received and sat back.

  Michael sat unmoving, still white-faced with shock, his mind churning as he struggled not to think about what might be happening to Mom and Sam. Think, Michael, think, he scolded himself. The best thing he could do right now was help 387’s command team work out a plan that would get things started.

  It was a somber, grim-faced group that sat around the combat information center conference table digesting the full import of what they’d just been told, struggling to answer the challenges Ribot had just put to them. They knew what had to be done. Now the question was how, and the profound silence around the conference table more than demonstrated that those answers would not come easily.

  With a huge effort, Michael pushed family to the back and duty to the front. Half closing his eyes, he turned his mind inward, comming his neuronics to bring up the standard Fleet mission planning template. Shit, he thought as he took a good hard look at what 387, the only Fleet unit within hundreds of millions of light-years, was being asked to do.

  The mission was clear enough, its objectives spelled out in brutally simple and unemotional language by Ribot.

  One, make a covert entry into the Revelation Star System.

  Two, deploy surveillance assets around the second planet, Revelation-II, or Hell, as the Hammers called it.

  Three, confirm whether the Mumtaz had in fact dropped into the Revelation-II/Hell System to off-load Mumtaz’s crew.

  Four, once Mumtaz’s arrival was confirmed, recover surveillance assets, make a covert departure, and jump to the Judgment System for a fly-by of the planet Eternity to see just what the hell the Hammers were up to.

  Five, leave Eternity and jump out of Hammer normalspace.

  Oh, Michael had almost forgotten. There was a six, a very important six: Unde
r no circumstances get caught.

  He breathed out unevenly, his body still hyped by shock and stress. The mission objectives were easy to list. They sounded straightforward, but Michael had done enough combat sims to know that space warfare was never that simple, and the Hammers could never be underestimated.

  The easiest part of the new mission-the initial vector change burn, all thirteen rattling, banging, and shaking minutes of it-had been accomplished. 387, now many tons of driver mass lighter than when she had set off from SBS-20, was aligned for the jump to the Revelation System, a jump Ribot had said must be the best and most accurate 387 had ever made.

  Michael already had offered up three silent prayers. The first was to thank the Good Lord that of all the many Fleet warships, 387 was the one with the Mod 45 navigation AI. The second was that the Mod 45 would drop 387 into the Revelation System as precisely as its designers claimed it would. The third was that they’d get away with it. It had been a long time since a Fed warship had swanned through Hammer space as brazenly as 387 was going to.

  But that left them with the first problem they had to solve. The huge amount of driver mass used up making the vector change to line 387 up for the pinchspace jump to Revelation had ruled out any option for 387 to loiter in the vicinity of Hell’s Moons in the Revelation System and then Eternity planet in the Judgment System.

  Michael sighed in frustration. Any way he cut it, a conventional recon profile meant stranding 387 in hostile Hammer space out of driver mass, easy pickings for even the most incompetent Hammer captain of the least efficient rail-gun-fitted Hammer warship. Even Fleet, hard-nosed though they could be, wouldn’t ask that of any of its captains, and Michael didn’t think Ribot was going to volunteer. Anyway, Fleet hadn’t specified the time. No, this would have to be a quick-very quick-and dirty fly-by of both systems.

  There were a few other problems besetting 387 and its command team.

  Dropping in-system was one thing. Just how to do that without squandering too much driver mass on the one hand and taking too much time on the other was the first question Ribot wanted answered. The Hammer’s long-range ultraviolet flash detectors were poor; provided that 387 dropped more than 18 million kilometers from the nearest detector arrays, it was pretty safe, according to Mother.

  So that was okay unless, of course, the Hammer had a warship out deep, in which case it would be all over. But based on the latest THREATSUM, Fleet reckoned that the chances of a Hammer warship being that far out were vanishingly small, an assessment Michael was prepared to agree with. Remote sensors were a risk, but the Hammer usually didn’t deploy them deep-field. Actually, nobody did; there was simply too great a volume of space to cover unless, of course, the Hammer knew where and when 387 was coming. But he couldn’t worry about that. If they did, they did. He couldn’t see how they could know, but it didn’t matter.

  However, even if 387 was lucky and the Hammers were all safe in orbit somewhere, that still left 387 to make a ten-day, 36-million-kilometer transit at 150,000 kph past Hell’s Moons. If they tried to speed things up, that meant a main propulsion burn that even the Hammer couldn’t miss. To add to 387’s woes, to drop accurately out of pinchspace and as close to the 18-million-kilometer detection threshold as possible, 387 would have to do the jump at 150,000 kph. Any faster and 387 risked dropping inside the threshold, and that could make for a bad day all around.

  All that was why, Michael thought savagely, the fighting instructions stressed the importance of giving ships undertaking covert operations all the time they needed to slip in and slip out without having to resort to too many main propulsion burns and the like. But time was one thing they did not have.

  Then a thought came to him. What if…Yes, Michael said to himself. That might do it. After a quick check, it looked okay to him, so with some hesitation he decided to see what the rest of the team thought. To look at them, they weren’t having much luck so far.

  Michael’s hesitant voice broke the awkward silence. “Um, Captain, sir. What if we dropped well short, did a main engine burn to get our speed up, got our alignment spot-on, and then microjumped the last little bit so that the loss of jump accuracy didn’t matter so much.”

  Ribot thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Nice idea, Michael, but a main propulsion burn is something you cannot hide without Krachov shrouds, and those we don’t have. The Hammers might not see it immediately, but there is too much risk they would see it, and then they would know we had come visiting.”

  Ribot sounded troubled. Michael felt for him. There was no obvious way out of this one, time was running out, and nobody, not even Mother (not that AIs were any good at solving problems like this), seemed to have the answers Ribot needed.

  Another long moment of silence was interrupted, this time by Hosani. “Actually, sir, Michael’s got most of the answer. There might be a way. Look here,” she said as she commed the two outermost planets of the Revelation system to come up on the command plot. “We could do what Michael suggested if we dropped behind Revelation-III. God knows, the bloody thing is big enough to hide a burn, and we know the Hammer have no dirtside or orbital surveillance assets there. We could then fire main engines without the Hammer seeing us, slingshot around the planet, get lined up for Hell’s Moons, and get the microjump all nicely set up. Might work, and God knows, I think we’d all be a lot happier doing a fly-by of Hell’s Moons at 300,000 kph rather than 150,000.”

  Ribot was silent for a moment, and then he turned to Michael with a smile. “Michael, you might not have had all of the answer, but by God, you had enough of it. And Maria, well done for thinking it through. Leon, that’s a beer you owe me for not getting there first!”

  “You’re a hard man, sir,” Leon said, his smile even broader than Ribot’s. Michael knew why. They were all happy that there might be a way to do what had to be done without getting themselves killed in the process.

  “Okay. So far, so good, but there is one problem left: Will we have enough driver mass to do all this plus the fly-by of Eternity planet or whatever the Hammer call the damn place and still get back to the FedWorlds safely?” Ribot paused, a slight edge of concern in his voice as Holdorf consulted Mother.

  Holdorf shook his head emphatically. “In a word, sir, no. The vector change to get lined up for Judgment system and Eternity planet after we have done the fly-by of Hell’s Moons is very much in our favor, and Mother can fine-tune it a bit to reduce it to almost nothing, I suspect. So we’re okay there. But the vector change when we depart the Judgment system would be extreme.” Holdorf paused as Mother crunched the numbers. “Yes, as I thought, roughly Red 150 and Up 20. And we’ll be doing 300,000 kph with no large planets to hide behind when we do our burn. There is a fourth planet in the Judgment system, but it’s not close enough to be useful.”

  A heavy silence descended as the group absorbed the latest problem. Armitage broke the quiet this time. “It’s staring us in the face. Keep on keeping on. Go straight through to Frontier and mass up at Jackson’s World. Mother says the vector change would be…yes, Green 30 Up 10, which sounds okay. We can do it once we get well clear of Eternity nearspace.”

  Ribot thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I think that might do it, and we can probably adjust the fly-by of Eternity planet to reduce it some more. But”-Ribot held up his hands-“I think that leaves us dropping into Frontier space at 300,000 kph with not enough mass”-another pause to confirm with Mother-“to drop our speed as we come in-system to match orbits with wherever they send us. The delta-v needed to drop into Clarke orbit is too great. The damn planet’s coming toward us instead of away, and we’re going to be coming at a very steep angle to Jackson’s World’s orbital plane.”

  Ribot paused for a moment.

  “That means a mass driver replenishment as soon as we drop into Frontier space just in case we miss badly; otherwise we may never stop, though that’s unlikely,” he said confidently.

  Too confident, Michael thought. Much
too confident. Matching vectors to complete driver mass replenishment was difficult enough, but 387 would be arriving in-system after a pinchspace jump made at 300,000 kph. Although the navigation AI’s accuracy with the Mod 45 upgrade was much improved, it was optimized for the standard jump velocity of 150,000 kph. At a jump speed of 300,000 kph, the accuracy of the nav AI dropped off dramatically, and that meant 387 could end up missing its planned drop point by millions of kilometers. Ribot would have to talk to Fleet again; Michael could see that.

  But, all those were things that could be overcome, and Michael felt a sudden surge of confidence. If Fleet could preposition ships downrange from the planned pinchspace drop point, 387 would have enough driver mass to adjust its vector to make the rendezvous point closest to wherever it was they finally dropped. Yes, as long as they didn’t run into any Hammer warships, and Mother’s THREATSUM said that was very unlikely, it would work.

  Ribot interrupted what threatened to become a very long silence.

  “Sorry, folks. Just making sure it all hangs together, and I think it does. Leon, I want you and Maria to work up the final nav plan with Mother based on what we’ve talked about. Oh, and work in the surveillance drone deployments as well. Michael, you work with Leon and Holdorf on that. As soon as that’s firm, we’ll pinchcomm the plan through to Fleet and I’ll speak to Fleet operations about setting up our safety net at Frontier. Jacqui, you can do the final alignment checks ready to jump once I’ve okayed the plan.