The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 24

  There was absolutely no point hanging around. If things went pear-shaped, he’d know about it pretty quickly. He would take the longest, hottest shower he could bear, get some food inside him, and then get some badly needed sleep.

  Sunday, October 18, 2398, UD

  DLS-387, on Final Approach to Hell-14

  Heart pounding and mouth dry, Michael woke with a start, for a moment completely lost. The gray plasfiber deck head above his bunk was no help as he tried to orient his tangled mind in the dark.

  When he’d checked the time, he’d been astonished to see that he had slept for almost the full fourteen hours he’d given himself. And he’d slept through the shutdown of 387’s artificial gravity, something he’d never been able to do before. Must have needed the sleep, he thought with a grin as he pulled himself out of his bunk and into the 0-g shower before changing into a clean set of coveralls, grabbing some food, and hurtling into the combat information center.

  There was no way he was going to miss 387’s arrival on Hell-14.

  As he did that, he cursed as he remembered an unfinished vidmail to Anna. He would have to finish it later. He’d started it more than a week earlier, along with one for his father, not that they would see their vidmails until the punch-up with the Hammer was over.

  He just hoped his father was all right, though God knew he would have no reason to be. The pain of not being able to talk to him, to tell him that Sam and Mom were all right and that if all went well they would all be home soon, cut deep into him.

  And then there was Anna onboard Damishqui. Michael had a horrible feeling that she would be in the thick of it since that was what heavy cruisers were specifically built for. Even if the Feds had a technology edge over the Hammer, in the end a rail gun was a rail gun and there wasn’t a heavy cruiser that could take too many hits, heavily armored though it was. Michael had seen the holovids of a full swarm attack, the tiny slugs smashing into the bows of Fidelity, an old Arcturus class deepspace heavy cruiser, during the final Fleet acceptance trials of the new ultra-high-velocity Mark 56 rail-gun system.

  It had not been a pretty sight. Michael and the rest of the audience of second-year cadets had winced as the iridium/ platinum alloy rail-gun slugs had smashed into the hapless cruiser at better than 1,000 kilometers a second, her bows disappearing behind a firestorm of exploding ceramsteel armor, the outermost layer of high-explosive reactive armor able to deflect only grazing impacts. Less than a microsecond after impact, each slug had turned to plasma, an incandescent mass of ionized gas cutting a tunnel deep into the cruiser’s heavy frontal armor. A few microseconds later, the slug had done its job, its enormous kinetic energy, equivalent to more than a ton of conventional explosive, completely transformed by the ship’s armor into heat, with the resultant thermal explosion blowing a broad flat crater deep into the cruiser’s bows.

  The cruiser was doomed. Slug after slug blasted away its armor, ceramsteel spewing off into space in colossal swirling clouds of gas until huge sections of its bows had been stripped down to the inner titanium hull. Then it was the turn of the second salvo, just a matter of time until a slug got lucky and scored a direct hit on the exposed inner hull, with the tiny mass of plasma blasting into the ship to smash indiscriminately through everything in its way. The damage was almost unimaginable as the shock wave from the slug spalled shards of metal off ship and equipment alike to drive a cone of destruction through the ship. Michael shivered as he tried not to think about what a slug would do to any human unlucky enough to be in its way.

  If the plasma ball survived long enough, and some did, it would explode out of the hull to disappear into deepspace, its lethal job done as all around it its swarm siblings finished the job of turning the inside of a once-proud ship into a shambles of molten metal, shattered equipment, and ionized gas, the ship’s hull visibly rippling as wave after wave of energy release shocked its fabric. You didn’t have to be a genius to see why bow-on penetrations were so deadly and why all warships had heavy frontal armor many meters thick.

  Michael had to give himself a mental shake.

  It wasn’t all doom and gloom. On the plus side, slugs worked well only at relatively short ranges and in large swarms, mixed in with plenty of decoys. They could maneuver no better than a shotgun pellet, and the Hammers’ swarm geometry computers were as poor as the Feds’ AIs were good at winnowing out slugs from decoys and choreographing the maneuvers needed to get ships out of the way of an incoming attack. Even better, the Hammer’s rail guns had a muzzle velocity of only 778 kilometers a second, and their rail-gun slugs were slightly smaller. But on the minus side, Hammer decoy technology was improving, and that made picking the slugs out of the incoming swarm increasingly difficult.

  But all things considered, Damishqui should be all right. No properly handled Fed warship would ever have to withstand what the Fidelity had endured. Damishqui had very good close-in defenses, a carefully integrated triple layer of lasers, missiles, and chain guns, so she should have no trouble handling whatever the Hammer could throw at it. That was the theory, anyway, and at the rational level, Michael believed it. But at the emotional level the thought of Anna on the receiving end of a serious Hammer rail-gun swarm made his guts knot.

  As he hung unnoticed at the back of the combat information center, he comforted himself with the thought that at least Anna wasn’t in a light scout like 387 completely on its own millions of kilometers inside Hammer space. The trials that had destroyed the Fidelity also had targeted a light scout. The holovid footage showed the ship literally being gutted by a single slug coming in at an angle steep enough to defeat the armor’s best efforts to absorb the slug’s impact, hitting just where the armor thinned back from the bow and releasing enough energy to blow the hull apart. Not a pretty sight and one that rumor had it was shown to all prospective light scout captains to remind them why they should stay well away from rail-gun-fitted opposition. And here they were, deep in Hammer nearspace thick with rail-gun-fitted warships and, what was more, for the second time in a matter of weeks.

  Michael dismissed the thought that it might happen to them and turned his mind to the command plot, with Ribot switching the massive holovid over to 387’s aft-mounted holocams. What they showed was the stuff of nightmares.

  Every detail of the shattered, twisted surface of Hell-14 was clearly visible. Job done and done well in Mother’s opinion. The Krachov shields, now switched from passive to active star-simulation mode to defeat Hammer holocams searching for stars occulted by a stealth ship, had opened out to cover 387’s final approach. She now was only 500 meters above the dust-filled depression that would be her hiding place until the operation was complete, closing in at a shade under 1.4 meters per second, viciously sharp ridges surrounding her landing site, reaching up as if to grab the ship.

  The combat information center was deathly quiet; the entire crew watched as the dusty gray-black surface crept closer. So intense was their concentration that Michael visibly jumped when Mother triggered a final brief main engine burn to bring 387 to a dead stop, with the efflux driving plumes of ancient dust writhing up into the sky and just as quickly vanishing from sight.

  “Hope it really does resemble a meteorite strike like it’s supposed to,” Michael whispered to Warrant Officer Ng, who was standing silently beside him. A burn that close to the moon’s surface wouldn’t be missed by the Hammer’s sensors.

  “We’re fucked if it doesn’t, that’s for sure,” Ng muttered.

  So precise had been its final burn, 387 hung motionless for a few seconds only meters above the surface.

  All around her, massive rock walls rose hundreds of meters from the shallow basin, their faces shimmering in the low-light holovid display, splintered spines of rock etched sharply against a dazzling star-studded sky, the dirty gray-black cliff faces fractured by huge cracks. The place was completely alien and totally dead. Hostile, harsh, and utterly pitiless, Michael thought. They were a very long way from home, and all around them were t
he forces of the most ruthless regime in human history. Michael knew full well that they wouldn’t get any second chances. He suppressed the shiver of fear that ran through him, turning his attention with a conscious effort back to the holovid.

  With infinite patience and care, Mother gradually spun the ship on its axis to roll its stern away from the landing site below, putting the hull parallel to the moon’s surface, ready to touch down. Mother let Hell-14’s microgravity do the rest, the moon gently pulling 387 to ground.

  Seventy-two seconds later, 387 settled with barely a tremor onto the surface of Hell-14.

  “Landed, sir.” Armitage’s face was split by a broad grin, a mixture of triumph and relief, as the ship erupted in cheering. In penetrating a heavily defended system to put down on Hammer real estate, 387 had done something no Fed ship had done in twenty years, and the pride in the accomplishment was tangible.

  “Thank you, Jacqui,” Ribot said with a smile, “though I’m sure Cosmo will have something to say about the damage to our stealthcoat.” Ribot’s smile got even broader. “Now, not to rain on anybody’s parade, but we’re not quite home yet. Jacqui, deploy the anchor team and let’s get the chromaflage covers up. If no one knocks on our door in the next six hours, I think we can say we’ve cracked it. Oh, and get the artgrav back on.”

  Armitage nodded and commed the necessary orders.

  Below and aft of the combat information center, the massive lander hangar doors swung open, and the EVA team, barely visible in their space suits now that combat gray had replaced high-visibility orange, poured out onto the moon’s surface. Effortlessly, Bienefelt, huge in her bulky space suit, maneuvered the rock bolt gun out of the hangar. Michael watched in admiration as she flew the unwieldy metal cylinder along 387’s starboard side, coming to a dead stop in precisely the right place under the ship’s starboard bow and at precisely the right attitude to fire an explosive bolt deep into Hell-14’s crust. That’s what thousands of EVA hours does for you, Michael thought enviously.

  As the bolt went home, Bienefelt was off to the next anchor point, and it was only a matter of minutes before 387 was securely tethered fore and aft, short cables pulled out of hidden recesses in her hull holding her firmly to the moon’s surface. Arguably, tethers were overkill. Even Hell-14’s microgravity was more than enough to keep 387 in place. But tidal stresses made Hell-14 earthquake-prone, and so, to comply with Fleet standard operating procedures, tethers were required. It took five more minutes to attach and arm the explosive cutters that would be needed if 387 had to leave in a hurry, and the job was done.

  While Michael and his team had been concentrating on tethering the ship, the XO’s team had not been idle. Bulky rolls of chromaflage net were unloaded and ranged hard up against the foot of the massive cliff rising above them. As Carlsson and Leong fired small pegs into the rock wall, the XO’s crew secured the end of each roll before running it out and over the ship to the cliff face on the other side, the chromaflage rolls twisting and turning as creases from long storage were shaken out. Bit by bit, 387 disappeared from sight under the gray micromesh net.

  Once 387 was fully covered and with the XO’s instructions not to allow his fucking body to get above the surrounding rock cliffs ringing in his ears, Michael was dispatched to hover 200 meters over the ship to provide an image feed to Mother as she carefully adjusted the shape, color, and texture of the chromaflage net to match the original surface. It was a surprisingly long process as Mother slowly and carefully blended the net into the background. With nothing more to do than hang motionless and keep his helmet-mounted holocam pointed in the right direction, Michael felt very vulnerable and very alone. By the time Mother had finished, he might as well have been the only human being in millions of kilometers. Apart from a slight hump where the chromaflage nets crossed over the top of 387’s hull, the landing site looked like the original basin floor, dust and all. The ship had completely vanished, and provided that the Hammer didn’t deploy high-power ground-penetrating radar, it would stay that way.

  Finally called back by Armitage, a relieved Michael and his crew still had much to do. Remote heat sinks, remote holocams, low-power whisker laser comms relay stations, and Ng’s equipment as well as the surveillance drones needed to act as 387’s long-range eyes and ears as she lay cut-off under her protective chromaflage net-all had to be moved out of the ship, ready for deployment. There was also the experimental driver mass production plant to be moved carefully out of its containers and secured to the basin floor alongside 387 under the watchful eyes of the two project engineers who had been sent along by Fleet to make sure the damn thing worked as advertised. In itself that was no small challenge given the very substandard feedstock that Hell-14 gas-riven rock would supply.

  But eventually everything got done to Ribot’s satisfaction, and a very impatient Warrant Officer Ng and her team were able to start the long haul to the north and south poles of Hell-14.

  As Ng’s team led the four heavily loaded sleds away from 387, heading for the narrow cut identified by OTTO as the only safe way out of the rock-walled basin, Michael’s sherpas struggled to keep the heavy awkward sleds on track and away from the rock walls. Ribot began to relax for the first time since they had left Frontier. There was not a lot more he could do now. It was up to Ng.

  Ng knew her stuff, and Michael had done particularly well in the final mission sim; his suggestion that they parallel run multiple sims to maximize Mother’s experience base had produced a marked improvement in the quality of Mother’s advice. Even better, the threat plot, fed by sensor data streams from Bonnie and Clyde, the two surveillance drones now carefully positioned on the basin rim above 387, showed only orange intercepts. There were no angry red symbols to show a Hammer force boosting out-system to investigate 387, and for that Ribot offered a small prayer of thanks. The plan called for Warrant Officer Ng and her team to reach the poles by no later than midday on 23 October and to have the two massive Hammer sensor arrays sterilized no more than twenty-four hours after that.

  Ribot stretched to try to get the kinks out of a tired body.

  He hoped that Mister Murphy would stay away. Even hundreds of light-years from Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, he felt all too keenly the enormous pressure on him to provide the up-to-date operational intelligence she needed to make the final commitment to the operation. The consequences of failing her were too dire to contemplate, and he was going to do everything in his power not to do that.

  Thursday, October 22, 2398, UD

  Hell-14

  Ng’s language was unprintable as she and her team tried for the umpteenth time to maneuver the bulky sled around an impossibly tight bend in the 30-meter-deep cleft of rock slashed into the nightmare that was Hell-14’s surface.

  But it was not to be. Any way she tried, the sleds were too big and the corner too tight to pass through. Ng’s frustration was understandable. Over four days, Michael’s sherpas had performed flawlessly, and the routes to the poles had matched those mapped by OTTO perfectly. But now, when they were almost there, their luck had run out and at a point where going over the choke point and picking up the route again on the other side was not an option: The surface above their heads was in clear view of the Hammer’s sensors.

  Ng knew when to admit defeat. “Okay, boys, it’s not going to go. Get the rock anchors out and the sled safely tied down while I call Helfort. When that’s done, start unstrapping the gear. We’re going to have to backpack this lot in.”

  As her team set to work breaking down the sled’s load, Ng found the fiber dispenser mounted on the back of the sled and quickly spliced in a comms node. Seconds later, her neuronics were patched in and she had Michael Helfort on the line.

  “Problem?” Michael’s voice betrayed his concern. He’d begun to allow himself to think that the mission actually might go according to plan.

  Ng nodded. “Afraid so, sir. OTTO’s let us down, and we have a choke point we can’t go around or over this close to the pole. At this late st
age, there’s no alternative route in. So it’s backpack time, and I’m going to need more than my fair share of your sherpas even if it means slowing down the northern team.”

  “Any chance of cutting the choke point away?”

  “No. Not this close. Too much risk. All it would take is one gas pocket and we’d have a rock plume that the Hammer couldn’t fail to see.”

  Michael scowled in frustration. “Fair enough. That’s one less thing to bring up. Okay, I’ll start diverting people up the line to you. The northern team’s in good shape, and in any case standard operating procedures require both sensor installations to be attacked at the same time, so we can afford to slow them up a bit.”

  “Good. We’ve secured the sleds and are making up the first loads now. I’ll send Chief Mosharaf and Petty Officer Gaetano on ahead to set up the habs at the 32-k mark. That’s as far as we can go this shift.”

  “Done. I’ll be back to you with a revised schedule as soon as I can.”

  “Good. I’ll leave it to you to brief the captain if that’s all right.”

  “Okay.”

  Shit, Michael thought. Left to his own devices, he would have forgotten to do that, and Ribot was not a man to be left in the dark. “Thanks,” he said. “I would have missed that.”

  “Thought you might,” Ng said with a chuckle.

  Two hours later, the elaborately choreographed, hugely complex dance that kept a long line of space-suited humans alive across 60 kilometers of unforgivingly hostile terrain had been transformed to accommodate the choke point. Michael had pulled people back from the northern route and pushed them up the line, heavily loaded with the additional habs and supplies needed to support the greatly increased number of sherpas working the southern route.