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

  “I think that the main issues have been addressed. Any more things we need to consider now?” Ribot, receiving a chorus of “no”s in reply, pushed on. “Okay, let’s do it.” Small tight smiles were all the response he got as the group split up.

  Forty-five frantic minutes later, everything had been done to Ribot’s satisfaction, and Michael stood at the back of the combat information center watching as Armitage ran the clock down to the pinchspace jump. They were in for an interesting trip, and Michael hoped to God that there weren’t any Hammer ships out there that could turn interesting into fatal.

  At 22:45, with its jump report sent, 387 pinched out en route to the Revelation System and its fly-by of Hell’s Moons in search of the missing Mumtaz.

  Friday, September 11, 2398, UD

  Mumtaz-Brooks Gravitational Anomaly, Deep Space

  The economy class lounge was a large compartment that normally was studded with comfortable chairs around low tables and filled with the gentle buzz of conversation from passengers making the most of their enforced idleness.

  But not now.

  The tables and chairs were gone. Packed into the center of the room, wrists held together with plasticuffs, were the survivors of the brutal attack mounted on the Mumtaz’s crew by the group of young men who now stood guard in a loose half circle across the front of the room. Light assault carbines looted from the Mumtaz’s armory were cradled casually but competently in their arms.

  In the front were the bloodied bodies of the seven crew members-three men and four women-who had held out until the last. Their knives and homemade clubs had provided no defense against assault carbines.

  The man standing in the door, corn-gold hair falling untidily across his forehead down into hard gray-blue eyes, watched the group as they absorbed the implications of the callous and brutal display of power they had just witnessed, a low murmur of shocked conversation rising and falling like a strange chant. He held up his hand to quiet the assembly.

  “My name is Andrew Comonec, and I want you to listen to what I have to say very, very carefully.” He paused until he was sure that every living soul was focused on him and what he was about to say.

  He nodded casually at the bodies at his feet. “That, my friends, is what happens to those who do not do what we tell them to do. And just in case any of you still do not understand”-Comonec nodded to the guard nearest him and watched impassively as the man walked to the front of the group, pulled out a small pistol, and without visible emotion shot an elderly woman in the head-“what I am saying, then perhaps that little demonstration will make things clear for you.”

  He paused as a low moaning sound washed over the group, the sheer terror of the moment threatening to turn to hysteria. The passengers nearest the dead woman were screaming in panic.

  Comonec lifted his voice, willing his control onto the mob. This was the moment of greatest risk. If a group rushed them, they were dead. Assault carbines or not, they couldn’t kill enough people to win. But Comonec was a gambler, and he stretched the moment until he knew he had won, the pure pleasure of the adrenaline rush that came from controlling the minds of hundreds of people flooding through him.

  He smiled. “Good. I think you do understand. If you do what you are told, the rest of you have nothing to fear. Nothing at all. You have my word. I will personally see to it that you are all safely reunited with your families and loved ones. But you must do as you are told as soon as you are told. If you do, you will be fine.” He smiled again, the smile of someone who cared, a smile completely at odds with his eyes. They weren’t smiling. They were dreamy with the pleasure of the kill, of fresh blood.

  “Now, what I want you to do is this. We will comm you in alphabetical order so that we can check your details to make sure we know who you are and who we have to contact to let them know you are okay. We’ll also remove the plastic ties around your wrists. I know they must be hurting by now, so the sooner we do this, the better. When we’ve done that, we’ll ask you to go to your cabins and stay there for the moment until we get things sorted out. We’ll then let you know what happens next with meals and so on. Okay?”

  The minute nods of shocked acceptance confirmed Comonec’s victory, and his body flushed with the exquisite pleasure of the win. “Right. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Andreesen family first. Please come up.”

  Slowly and reluctantly, a man, his face gray with shock, barely able to control the trembling that shook his body, stood up, closely followed by a woman and two children who seemed catatonic, so slow were they to move.

  “Come on. Please hurry. We won’t hurt you.”

  Thirty minutes later it was Sam’s turn. No matter where she looked, she couldn’t see her mother, and she was almost frantic with worry. Oh, please God, let Mom be okay, she prayed desperately as heart-pounding panic rose in waves, threatening to overwhelm her.

  “Helfort, Kerri and Samantha.”

  Sam rose to her feet, and as she did, she saw her mother, way across the room, rise to her feet also. “Oh, Mom,” she sobbed, “thank God you’re all right.”

  They came together at the front of the room. Sam was trembling visibly, tear-filled eyes spilling glistening wet tracks down a face ash-gray with shock and stress as she tried to avoid the blood pooled across the carpet, her head turned away from the shattered bodies of what had once been ordinary people like her. Her mother took Sam’s hand and started to embrace her, to tell her everything would be fine and not to worry, but Comonec stepped forward.

  “Later, later. There’ll be time for that later,” he said, pushing them through the door with a brutal roughness completely at odds with his comforting assurances that all would be well.

  As Kerri and Sam stumbled through the door and out of sight of the remaining passengers, strong hands grabbed them. Sam started to panic again, and even as that panic spurred her into a last desperate attempt to escape, a gas-powered inoculation gun was jammed into her neck, with only a brief puff of high-pressure air and a short stabbing pain that was gone almost before she could feel it to mark the injection.

  “Oh, God,” she sobbed. What were they doing to her? Fear turned to terror as the terrible thought that this was the end hit her. With a horrible sense of the inevitable, she realized that it all made ghastly good sense. What good was she to the hijackers? None, none at all. Even as a creeping gray fog started to overwhelm her, she reached out to her mother, who was still struggling desperately to keep a gas gun-wielding hijacker at bay. But to no effect. Even as Kerri Helfort took Sam’s outstretched hand, the gas gun hit home.

  “Mom,” Sam croaked, her voice strangled into an in-choherent croak. “Mom, help me.”

  “Sam, Sam,” her mother said, her voice fast being choked off by whatever the hijackers had just pumped into her. “Sam, listen to me. This is just something to keep us quiet, so don’t worry. It’ll be okay, I promise.”

  Sam nodded, and then the gray fog overwhelmed her. As her grip on reality began to slip away, the last thing she could hear was her mother muttering to herself: “I knew there was something wrong with those bastards. You should have trusted your instincts, and none of this would have happened. You old fool. You…”

  And then the fog claimed her.

  Three hours later, as the Zanussi family disappeared through the door, Comonec felt the last traces of tension seep out of him.

  They had done it. By God, they had done it.

  Over a thousand crew members and passengers brought under control by just thirty men. And no casualties. Well, none on his team, anyway. He hoped that the faceless man who’d commissioned the mission didn’t get too upset about the Mumtazers who’d gotten in his way. The man, had been rather insistent, very insistent, in fact, that the job be done without anyone getting hurt.

  “Well, screw him, whoever he is,” Comonec muttered. The entire exercise had been a work of extreme professionalism, even if he said so himself, and his unknown sponsor was just going to have to see it the same way. Wha
t did a few damn Fed lives matter, anyway?

  He turned and strode through the door to see the unfortunate Zanussi family moving like zombies back to their cabins. A wonderful drug that Pavulomin-V, he thought, even if being caught with it was a federal offense punishable by ten years in jail. He now had an entire mership’s worth of people who would do everything and anything they were told to do without a moment’s hesitation or argument.

  Leaving instructions to have the bodies disposed of, Comonec commed his section leaders to meet him on the bridge. He had a rendezvous to make, and he intended to be there on schedule. Nothing was going to get in the way of the big fat juicy pile of anonymous cash that was now his by rights.

  Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD

  DLS-387, Revelation-III Nearspace

  For sheer, unremitting pressure, the days since 387 had dropped into Hammer space safely behind the hulking black mass of Revelation-III, a J-Class planet orbiting 7.5 billion kilometers out from its sun, had been like nothing Michael had experienced before.

  Apart from doing Ribot’s endless sims, the only real work Michael and his team had had to do was to launch the surveillance drone nicknamed Bonnie to jump a day ahead of 387 and, they hoped, if there were any nasty surprises, to let 387 know in advance. But apart from an unusually large number of Hammer ships close to Hell’s Moons, Bonnie hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, though as Michael reminded himself, Bonnie’s capabilities against stealth warships weren’t good-her sensor baselines were too short-so anything could happen. But at least the microjump was on.

  Now, two and a half days outward bound from Revelation-III, 387 was running in a gentle parabola through the fabric of space-time at over 300,000 kph, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Michael, like everyone else, wanted to get on with it, and he cursed the delays as Holdorf and Mother fine-tuned and fine-tuned 387’s alignment and vector to get it ready for the 1.5-billion-kilometer microjump that would drop them safely just over 18 million kilometers from Revelation-II.

  For Michael, the pressure was doubled by the knowledge that two of the people he most loved in the world would be so close, if only for a brief few hours. Because he was a rational person, it was easy for him to accept that what he was doing was giving them their best chance of coming through this nightmare alive. But at the emotional level, Michael felt like crawling off into a dark corner and howling out his fear and anxiety.

  As the jump approached, the ship was at general quarters, with every system online, every station manned, and every hatch and door firmly shut. Michael and his team stood in the drone hangar fully suited up, helmets on but visors open, ready to cope with the usual aftermath of the upcoming jump. Needless to say, Bienefelt had been her usually chatty self, pointing out in suitably grave tones to Michael how much worse a microjump was than a normal pinchspace jump. It was obvious, she had said, if one thought about it. In the space of a second or so the ship first jumped into and then dropped out of pinchspace, so it was bound to be twice as bad as a normal jump. Michael tried not to think about it and just stood there, hunched over like the rest of his team, in his own private world of despair, waiting for the damn thing to happen. The idea that they might actually meet a Hammer warship almost appealed to him. At least they might get to kill a few of the fuckers.

  “All stations, this is command. We are go for pinchspace microjump in one minute. Command out.”

  Michael took a deep breath and instructed his stomach to stay put. Then the world tipped upside down, and Michael braced himself for his stomach to empty in its usual gut-wrenching way. But the jump never happened. He looked up to see Bienefelt and the rest of his team, including Strezlecki, who was supposed to be on his side, for God’s sake, he thought, standing there with smiles on their faces that turned into laughs as they saw the indignant look on Michael’s face.

  “Bastards,” Michael said as he realized he had been taken for a ride. “You unprincipled bastards. So much for mutual respect. Right, I won’t forget this. You in particular, Bienefelt. I think additional casualty desuiting drills are what’s called for. Petty Officer Strezlecki, you, too.” It felt good to laugh, to relieve the tension even for a moment, and with a new resolve that things would turn out all right, Michael held his hand up for silence as Mother finally got a grip on what 387 had dropped herself into.

  Closing his eyes, Michael commed into the threat plot and dropped himself into a position in space slightly behind and above 387. For one horrible moment, as bright red threat symbols blossomed in front of him, he thought they had run right into a Hammer task group. But methodically, Mother processed the passive sensor returns, and one by one the red symbols turned to orange: real enough threats but too far away to pose any immediate risk to 387.

  “All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Port watch has the watch. Command out.”

  As he opened his eyes, the blackness of deep space gave way to the brilliant brightness of the hangar and the cheerful faces of his team. Michael sighed with relief. They had been at general quarters for an hour, an hour that came off his precious off-watch time. He handed over the watch to Petty Officer Strezlecki as he and half the team desuited.

  Michael paused at the ladder down to the accommodation level as the captain came up on main broadcast.

  “All stations, this is the captain. Just a quick update on how I see things. I think the best way to sum it up is that I have good news and bad news. The good news, as you may by now have realized, is that we weren’t ambushed as we dropped out of pinchspace. We’ve dropped well outside the detection threshold for their long-range passive sensor arrays, and just as important, there are no Hammer warships inside 15 million kilometers. The nearest hostiles are a couple of Constancy Class light escorts fiddling around conducting what look like basic weapon drills. So it’s almost certain we got in undetected. We’ve also got a good laser tight-beam link with Bonnie, and we’re getting good data. She’s a day ahead of us, say, 7 million kilometers out from Hell’s Moons, which is where we hope to find the Mumtaz, of course. So hopefully Bonnie will pick her up. She’s scheduled to arrive sometime on the fourteenth, though we don’t know when.

  “The bad news is Mother has confirmed and refined Bonnie’s earlier report of a large number of Hammer ships around Hell’s Moons. Currently, Mother is tracking no less than forty-five warships-three heavy and six light cruisers, twelve escorts of various sizes, eighteen patrol ships, four scouts, and two support ships to round out the group. And that’s on top of the space battle station capabilities the Hammer has built into its flotilla base. We’re going to watch them closely, but I am pretty well convinced they are not there for our benefit. If they were, it’d be overkill by a factor of about ten, and they wouldn’t be in orbit, they’d be deployed in a defensive screen perhaps 5 million kilometers out along our most likely approach vector. Which, by the way, is not the vector we are now coming in on.

  “So it could get exciting, though I think that’s pretty unlikely. We’ll wait and see what they get up to. Captain out.”

  Michael and all the rest of 387’s crew breathed out heavily as the captain finished. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to work out that forty-five Hammer warships created a bit of a problem for Ribot. As Michael hurried down the ladder, he wondered what Ribot was going to do about it.

  That very question was exercising Ribot’s mind in no uncertain way.

  The last THREATSUM from Fleet had said that there was a 95 percent chance that the number of Hammer warships on station would not exceed twenty, the normal battle strength of the Hell flotilla. To minimize the risks, 387’s route had been chosen carefully to avoid the vectors used regularly by Hell-based warships, whose commanders, like all humans everywhere, were creatures of routine and habit. But having no less than forty-five warships in-system significantly increased the chance that their behavior would not follow normal patterns.


  Ribot’s worry, amply shared by Mother, was that Hammer ships would use vectors that intersected 387’s fly-by vector. Mother’s concern was reflected in her revised THREATSUM. She now put the overall chance of 387 not surviving the fly-by at one in twenty, which as far as Ribot was concerned was an extremely bad number. Taking on that risk wasn’t the problem. Ribot knew that somebody had to find the Mumtaz as soon as possible; 387 had gotten the job, and that was the end of it. No, it was waiting for the ax to fall, not knowing if it was going to happen and, if it was, when. Ribot could think of nothing worse.

  He commed the combat information center, where Hosani had the watch.

  “Maria, I’m going to do a walk-around to see how everyone is. When I’ve done that, I’m going to put my head down while things are quiet. But call me if you need to.”

  “Sir.”

  An hour later, Ribot was satisfied that all was well with his little bubble of civilization as it flew into the heart of Hammer darkness. With no sign that the Hammer ships were going to leave their berths, Ribot slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD

  Planetary Transfer Station, in Clarke Orbit around Commitment Planet

  Ever since the coded pinchcomms message announcing the successful takeover of Mumtaz had come through from Comonec, the tension inside Digby had built.

  He knew all too well that with every step the project took, the personal risk to him grew. It wasn’t just because Merrick needed him less and less. It wasn’t just Digby’s suspicion that Merrick had no intention of letting him survive. No, it was the Feds. If they showed their hand too early, Merrick would know instantly that he had been betrayed. At that point, as Merrick had explained to him with admirable clarity and force of purpose, Digby’s life was forfeit whether or not he’d been responsible for the breach, and he would be handed over to DocSec for disposal.