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

  According to the notes attached to the picture, it had been taken at the height of Charlie Mbeki’s birthday party in Year 2 and showed Anna, head back and face glowing with pure happiness as Michael buried his face in her neck. In a way that he couldn’t begin to express, the holopic encapsulated everything about her that attracted him. Behind the two of them, the faces of the old team reminded him of the innocence they had all lost, he more than most.

  The awful thought that he might lose Anna as well as his mother and sister at the hands of the Hammer crossed his mind for a moment before he firmly shoved the unwelcome thought away. You’ll go mad if you think like that, Michael, he told himself, so don’t. Anna was onboard the Damishqui, and a deepspace heavy cruiser was a good place to be in the middle of a punch-up with the Hammer. If anyone should be worried, it was Anna about him. He made up his mind that when this was all over, he would grab Anna with both hands and tell her that he loved her. And he did. Sure, the other girls who’d passed through his life had been fun, but that was all he had been to them and vice versa.

  But Anna was different. In some way he couldn’t fully define or express, she made him feel complete. Even if she didn’t share the feeling, he knew he owed it to himself to say so, however inadequately.

  Mentally squaring his shoulders, he swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and onto the narrow strip of plasfiber carpet tastefully decorated with a mottled purple, yellow, and brown pattern. The bloody designer must have been on something, Michael thought, if he or she imagined that the end result, used in every ship of the Fleet and known Fleetwide as the rat’s vomit carpet, was in any way attractive or desirable. He dressed quickly in a fresh ship suit and within minutes had his tiny cabin squared away in best college style, the bedding immaculate, the plasfiber bedcover taut as a drum skin. Andreesen had a reputation for conducting unscheduled tours, and Michael did not want to be the one who let the side down.

  Picking up his old-fashioned scriber and e-paper notebook-he had never gotten out of the doodling habit, though he did draw the line at using real paper, leaving that to the real diehards-he left his cabin to make his way down to the wardroom.

  Hosani wanted him to run through his part of the operations plan, and Michael intended to get it 100 percent right. Andreesen was not a man to screw up in front of.

  “And so to conclude, sir,” Ribot said with a confidence that he didn’t fully feel in the face of Andreesen’s basilisk-like stare, “a standard covert ops approach and deployment. As ever, the primary risk comes from any late changes that the THREATSUM hasn’t picked up or any unusual Hammer ship movements. But all factors taken into account, we have the right mission profile to succeed. That’s all I have to say. Do you have any questions, sir?”

  For fully twenty heart-stopping seconds, Andreesen said nothing, his stare unwavering. Ribot could only look him straight in the eye across the combat information center conference table. Then Andreesen did something that to the best of Ribot’s knowledge had never been observed before. He stood up and leaned over. With the faintest hint of a smile on a face that was, considering the heavy responsibilities borne by its owner, surprisingly young and untroubled, he took Ribot’s hand and shook it vigorously. “No, I don’t. Excellent, Captain, excellent. Not something I say often, as you know. But good luck and may God watch over you all this day.”

  Even safely tucked away at his workstation as far away from Andreesen as he could get, Michael imagined he could hear Ribot’s sigh of relief clear across a crowded combat information center.

  But Andreesen had Michael’s measure. He turned, and his eyes skewered him. “Helfort! I knew both your father and mother when they were in Space Fleet. Good officers, both of them, and a loss to the Fleet when they retired. My thoughts are with them and of course with your sister. We’ll get them all back safely, I promise.”

  Michael could only nod as Andreesen turned back to face Ribot. “Now, Captain, let’s have that drink you promised me and then I’ll leave you in peace.”

  For a moment, Michael and everyone else present felt the full force of the Federated Worlds’ commitment to resolve the crisis no matter what. It was an awesome and sobering statement of raw power, and Michael pitied any Hammer stupid enough to get in the way.

  Thursday, October 1, 2398, UD

  Eternity Base

  The transition from the cool air-conditioned comfort of the lander to Eternity’s atmosphere was as sudden as it was brutal.

  As Digby stood at the foot of the ladder, the raw heat and humidity of late morning wrapped itself around him and left him gasping as he struggled to make his breather seal to a face instantly slicked with sweat.

  “So now you know what’s it’s like down here with us mud crawlers, General.” Unlike Digby’s, Professor Cornelius Wang’s face was barely damp, his voice hardly distorted by the bright yellow breather mask that shrouded his lower face. This was his territory, not the general’s, and his body language betrayed his inner confidence, his sense of command.

  “Welcome to Eternity Base, General.”

  “Kraa’s blood, Cornelius. Is it always as hot as this?” Digby said, his voice half-strangled, his left hand engaged in a futile attempt to keep the sweat beading on his forehead out of his eyes.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is, General,” Wang said apologetically. “Just be thankful it’s not raining, which it seems to do a lot. But a couple of days will have you acclimatized. The Feds’ drug protocols are very effective at accelerating adaptation to heat and humidity. In a few days, you’ll find it relatively comfortable, believe it or not.”

  “By Kraa, I hope so. I don’t think this is something I’d want to put up with for very long. Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get on. I want to see everything.”

  “Of course. And we have a lot to show you.” With that, Wang waved Digby toward a jeep parked on an access ramp. Despite the fact that it had been planetside for less than two weeks, the jeep’s mud-streaked and battered sides betrayed the intensity with which Wang had been driving the terraforming project forward.

  Beyond the jeep stood the skeletal frames of spaceport infrastructure as they emerged from the yellow-brown earth of Eternity’s surface, an army of orange-coveralled figures and scuttling buildbots swarming over every part. To the left lay the lander maintenance hangars, and to the right the massive supplies warehouse, its vitrified rock floor so smooth that Digby could almost see the sky reflected in it as it waited for the roof to go on.

  Directly ahead of Digby, the fusion plant was coming along, its roof of ultra-lightweight plasfiber panels now on, bright red primary power modules installed, and high-voltage power cables beginning to grow outward in every direction from the power distribution modules. Alongside the fusion plant sat the carbon sequestration and oxygen production plant, a mass of cryogenic gas separators and methane and carbon dioxide converters, and behind them was the liquid oxygen storage farm and raw carbon dumps.

  Beyond it all stood the focus of this incredible display of Federated Worlds technology, the biomass production plant. Once it was commissioned, from this plant and others to follow would pour a torrent of fast-growing geneered biomass: photosynthetic cyanobacteria, diatoms, coccoliths, and other marine phytoplankton, together with methane-tolerant plants capable not only of surviving on Eternity’s uninviting surface but of reproducing like wildfire.

  As explained by Professor Wang, the process was simple, in principle at least.

  Some geneered organisms converted water, carbon dioxide, and methane to free oxygen and carbon-based biomass. Others-high-energy crackers they were called, one of the keys to the Federated Worlds’ terraforming technology-split hydrogen directly out of Eternity’s superabundant methane. Eternity’s excess methane was reduced further when, in the presence of oxygen, it was split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere into yet more hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.

  The hydrogen escaped to space, and the carbon dioxide returned to start the process all over ag
ain, leaving a net increase in the amount of atmospheric oxygen and falling methane levels. The process was agonizingly slow to start with but would accelerate dramatically as methane levels fell, the planetary surface oxidized, the levels of dissolved oxygen built up in the sea, and less and less oxygen was lost into the planetary surface and oceans.

  Easy, really, when you put it like that, Digby thought as he massaged a forehead that still ached with the mental gymnastics he was having to do to understand it all.

  It was the sheer scale of the terraforming process that confounded him. The quantities involved were mind-numbingly huge. Wang’s calculations showed that getting Eternity’s atmosphere to a level at which humans could live comfortably at low altitudes would require close to 780 teratonnes-7.814 metric tons-of free oxygen to enter and, more important, stay in Eternity’s atmosphere. Or as Wang had kindly and more understandably put it, an average of 2.5 million metric tons of oxygen every second for ten years. In the process, Eternity’s oceans, the source of all that oxygen in the first place, would drop by over 3 meters and would go on dropping until Eternity’s atmosphere stabilized centuries in the future.

  Digby’s mind had been duly boggled as Wang had reeled off the statistics, but he was not a numbers man, and the very idea of a teratonne was more than he could grasp. To his way of thinking, the best part of the whole extraordinary drama, the only part he could get his mind around, was played by a family of FedWorld geneered plants unofficially called bursters, one of fifty or so geneered species that made up the land-based biomass program.

  Bursters were a small, fleshy plant that pushed out long arms of reddish-green leaves studded with small bright purple flowers. Digby liked them in part because they were distant-to the point of being remote, it would have to be said-relatives of his wife, Jana’s, favorite plant, the carpet sedums of Old Earth, Sedum lineare. The garden of their house in McNair was covered in mats of their starlike yellow, orange, and red flowers and gray-green-red leaves. Jana was constantly on the lookout for new varieties to plant.

  But FedWorld geneers had taken the humble carpet sedum light-years from its modest origins. Not only would the sedums flourish in Eternity’s appallingly hostile low-oxygen atmosphere, they would produce vast quantities of tiny seed pods that would burst to scatter tiny airborne seeds over a wide radius. Within weeks, those seeds would have germinated and grown into adult plants, each one producing new seed bursts to start the whole process all over again.

  And so it would go on, the pace relentless, the timetable unforgiving, the progress awesome.

  A single heavy lander run would drop half a million tiny burster and other seedlings in a precise pattern over an area 2 kilometers wide and 1,000 kilometers long. Within months, the entire area would be a flourishing mat of sedum and other plants busily churning out oxygen from the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, water, and methane feedstock. According to Wang, Eternity’s land surface was just over 136 million square kilometers, and that meant-Digby’s brow wrinkled as he struggled with the arithmetic-68,000 lander missions if the entire planet was to be carpeted, which of course it wouldn’t be. Even the Feds hadn’t been able to geneer a plant capable of growing on bare rock on the top of a 10,000-meter mountain.

  That was how, according to the all-powerful project plan, phase 1 land bioseeding, paralleled by an equally aggressive ocean-seeding program, could be finished in under three years and the irreversible change from a methane/nitrogen/ carbon dioxide atmosphere to an oxygen/nitrogen one would have started.

  But it still belied belief, Digby thought. Such was the power of the Feds’ bioengineering that the entire process, which on Old Earth had taken some 270 million years to complete, would take only ten years on Eternity. By then, the planet would have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, admittedly hugely unstable as its oxygen-depleted mantle and oceans soaked up their share of the free oxygen churned out by the trillions of tons of geneered land and ocean biomass but leaving enough to allow the hated breathers to be thrown away and serious migration to begin.

  Left to Hammer technology, it would have taken a full century, maybe more, and even then the results could not have been guaranteed, so completely had all the terraforming skills and systems transplanted from Old Earth been lost. In fact, now that he had seen firsthand what was involved, Digby seriously doubted that the Hammer had what it took to manage a project of such mind-bending complexity that even the Feds couldn’t do it without the assistance of literally hundreds of AIs. Just nursing Eternity through the tricky and, by geological standards, nearly instantaneous crossover from a methane-to an oxygen-rich atmosphere without having the whole lot blow up was a problem of such intricacy that Digby seriously doubted that even the mighty Professor Wang truly understood what would be going on.

  As Digby settled himself into the jeep, he began to understand the power of Merrick’s vision. For the first time he could begin to see the impact it would have on a people starved of hope.

  The only problem with Merrick’s vision, grand though it might be, was the price the Hammer would have to pay sooner or later. Any way he looked at it, it would be way too high. The Feds would see to that.

  Oh, well, he thought philosophically as the jeep set off with a lurch and Wang launched into an enthusiastic and detailed account of every part of the massive undertaking that passed in front of Digby, that was a problem for another day.

  Four hours later, the jeep was waved through the razor-wire security fence that surrounded the project control center, and they drew up in front of a drab two-story plascrete building.

  Eternity’s sun was a searingly bright point almost directly overhead, its harsh light turning the slight irregularities in the walls into a strange mottled mix of light and shade. Aesthetics was not high on the terraforming project’s priority list, and it had been a long time since Digby had seen a building so brutally functional, and he’d seen a lot of Hammer government buildings in his time.

  “Home sweet home,” said Wang, his cheerful and exuberant manner in stark contrast to Digby’s as the general climbed, exhausted and sweat-stained, from the jeep. “This is the security block here.” Wang waved a casual hand at a second plascrete building, which was identical in every way to and every bit as ugly as the first.

  “Yes, thank you, Professor, you’ve made your point. And just so that we are in no doubt, I am impressed, very impressed, in fact, and you have every right to be proud of the progress you’ve made.

  “But”-Digby’s voice hardened-“don’t make the mistake of taking me for granted. It would be the last mistake you ever made. So get the job done and done well and you will be rewarded. But no games. Understood?”

  Wang’s face went white with shock. In his excitement and enthusiasm, he had forgotten the brutality that lay at the heart of every Hammer undertaking, big or small, the violence that underwrote the entire structure and fabric of the Hammer Worlds.

  “Yes, General. Understood,” he said quietly.

  “I hope so.”

  Digby truly hoped Wang did, if only because progress, blatantly obvious uninterrupted progress and lots of it, was probably the only thing that would keep Merrick from recalling him to a certain death. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to clean up before I meet our unwilling guests. Which shift do I talk to first?”

  “Red, General. Blue is on-shift at the moment, and they won’t finish up until this evening. I’ve scheduled you to speak to Red Shift this afternoon, if that’s okay. It’s 15:00 local now, so that gives you plenty of time. Blue Shift is scheduled for tomorrow.” Wang’s tone was brisk but businesslike as he recovered his composure.

  “Fine. Show me where to put my kit.”

  “Follow me, General.”

  “And so, let me finish by saying that for all of you, Eternity is now your destiny and what you put in will determine what you take out. This is your planet now, so make the most of it. That’s all.”

  As Digby stepped down from the back of the jeep, a small sigh washed ac
ross the untidy throng gathered in front of him. If they hadn’t worked it out before, they certainly had now, Digby thought. The one part of the Feds’ standard terraforming package that Digby had not brought planetside-the food production plant-would ensure their cooperation, and Digby was now happy that they all knew where they stood.

  At the front of the crowd, Kerri and Sam Helfort stood silent. Like everyone else ripped out of the comfortable and safe world that had been the Mumtaz, they had continued to hope that somehow, some way, this was all a horrible dream and that it would come to a happy end, just as the holovid soaps always did. But the man now walking back to the Hammer compound, his steps radiating power and authority, had dispelled every last ounce of that hope.

  Sam was the first to speak. “Fuck” was all she said.

  After a long silence, Kerri spoke. “Sam, please.” Her voice was tired. She didn’t have the energy to take Sam to task as once she would have done.

  “I know, Mom, I know,” Sam said, her voice flat, the uncertainty obvious. “But it’s how I feel.”

  “Sam!” Kerri said fiercely, turning to look Sam right in the face. “Promise me. I know we have no reason to hope, but tell me that you will never ever give up. If we are to come out of this, we just have to stay fit and well until the Feds come to get us. And come they will, one day. These bastards can’t keep it a secret forever, I know they can’t.”

  “You’re right, Mom, that’s all we have to do. I know that’s all we have to do.” Sam’s voice brightened. “Come on, the gang’s going down to the beach for a swim, and I’m hoping that John and Jarrod are going to go along as well.”

  “All well and good but don’t forget Arkady, young lady,” Kerri said, getting only a grin in response, a grin that said, “I’m only young once, for God’s sake, and I intend to make the most of it!”