The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 3

  So the Hammer would continue to be hamstrung for as long as doctrine required it. To add further pressure, the trade and technology embargo against it remained in place. Merrick snorted derisively. Why should the Hammer sign the Planetary Use of Nuclear Weapons Treaty? If Kraa’s purposes required the use of nuclear weapons against planetary targets, Kraa’s people would use them and the rest of humankind be damned.

  Meanwhile, not only was Frontier developing Ganesh, the Federated Worlds were about to settle the first wave of colonists on Roper-III, the Sylvanians had started on Guardian-I, and the Earth Alliance had plans not only for 40 Eridani A, B, and C but for Pi 3 Orionis as well, not to mention a whole clutch of orbital habitats and other worlds targeted for mineral extraction, low-g manufacturing, space tourism, and so on.

  Not for the first time, Merrick cursed the Hammers’ fate, a fate that condemned them to seemingly endless stagnation without the hope of growth. Kraa’s blood! It wasn’t just the major polities in humanspace-the Old Earth Alliance, the Federated Worlds, the Sylvanians, the Javitz and Delfin Federations-that were terraforming new planets as fast as capital and skill allowed. Even the smaller systems were expanding: Frontier, the Buranans-by Kraa, the list was endless. Everywhere it was expand, expand, expand. Even that rabble on Scobie’s World had plans for terraforming in an adjacent star system, and they were practically a Hammer vassal state. And the Hammer? Nothing. It couldn’t even develop a new orbital habitat.

  Merrick stopped himself dead. This was getting him nowhere.

  All those things might be true, but, he thought viciously, they were going to change. And the Feds were going to help them get started. After that, it would be up to the Hammer, but the time saved would be measured in decades; the extensive use of the latest geneered bacteria and organisms would see to that. That was another reason Merrick couldn’t talk to his fellow councillors about the matter, he thought. But meeting the growing demands for more living space could not be deferred in favor of long-winded sermons from narrow-minded, stiff-necked priests like John Calverson. The stresses imposed by the growing population of the Hammer Worlds, made all the worse by a seriously underperforming economy, were beginning to open up the social fault lines in a way that had the Supreme Council increasingly concerned. Not that they had any answers other than more propaganda, more repression, more violence.

  Well, let’s try more hope, Merrick thought as he turned his attention back to the man waiting patiently in front of him.

  “Continue, General.”

  “Sir. I was about to say that my contacts on Terranova tell me that the prime contractor, Planetary Dynamics Corporation, has begun final assembly of the terraforming package. Package elements have started to come from the subcontractors’ plants on Anjaxx, New Paradise, Suleiman, and Planetary Dynamics’s plant on Nuristan. As things stand, they are due to ship out to Frontier in early September. And best of all, the last-ditch Frontier Supreme Court challenge mounted by the Deep Ecology Coalition with the support of the Naess-Rolston Foundation has been thrown out on its ear, so the last legal barriers are now gone.”

  Merrick grunted. He would have liked to see a bunch of cosmic preservationists try to tell him what he could and could not do. “Who’s the carrier?”

  “Prince Interstellar Shipping Lines. The ship is the Mumtaz.” Digby smiled.

  “Ah, Prince Interstellar. Now I see where this is going. I know I shouldn’t ask, but indulge me. That man we implicated in the Protector incident, what was his name?”

  “Jean-Luc d’Castreaux, sir. A very, very nasty piece of work but more than happy to cooperate when General Cassidy’s agents presented him with the autopsy reports on the bodies he stupidly left behind.”

  Merrick watched Digby grimace at the memory. Even Merrick blanched a little. The Hammer could be a brutal and merciless place, but mostly out of necessity. Its reputation for single-minded cruelty in the pursuit and punishment of anyone who strayed from the Path of Doctrine, even if only slightly, was well deserved and widely feared.

  But for sheer cold-blooded sadism, what d’Castreaux had done was worse than anything the Hammer had ever committed in the name of Kraa. It was just d’Castreaux’s bad luck that a Hammer light cruiser dropping out of pinchspace short of the planet Fortitude with a serious systems malfunction had literally stumbled on the three bodies, still roped together and heading for interstellar oblivion. And it had been d’Castreaux’s even worse luck that the cruiser had had a captain smart enough to recognize foul play when he saw it and to work the vectors back to see where the bodies had come from. After that, it had been just a matter of patient investigation to track down who’d been responsible. It had taken more than five years to sift d’Castreaux’s name out of the thousands of Feds involved in the bitter fight for Space Battle Station Protector, but in the end there had been no doubt.

  “Yes, d’Castreaux. Pity he was kicked out of the Fleet by the Feds. He would have been much more useful as a serving officer, especially if he’d made it to flag rank. But of course his wife is the real force behind Prince Interstellar.” Merrick smiled. He enjoyed blackmail, which was why he forced an unwilling intelligence department to feed him the juicier cases, source protection be damned. He was chief councillor, for fuck’s sake. Who was he going to tell?

  “She is. But every dog has his day, and d’Castreaux has done what we needed him to do.” Digby’s satisfaction at successfully completing the hardest part of the project was evident.

  “Yes, well, don’t look so bloody smug, Digby. We have a long way to go yet.”

  “Yes, sir, you’re right. We do.”

  Digby paused as he collected his thoughts.

  “As I was saying, thanks to d’Castreaux and, I have to say, even more thanks to his wife’s complete lack of concern over computer security, we were able to set up the access tunnel into the Mumtaz’s AI from a maintenance terminal she had at home. Once the tunnel was in, a contract team from Scobie’s World did the rest. With the AI onboard the Mumtaz successfully subverted, our people onboard can take control any time they want. It takes only a single codephrase spoken into any comms port, and the AI is ours and so’s the ship.” Digby’s hand reinforced the point with a sharp chop.

  “Scobie’s World? Outsiders! I don’t much like the sound of that, General, let me tell you.”

  Digby had to struggle not to let his frustration at Merrick’s hyperactive sense of paranoia upset his report, though to a degree Merrick had a point. Scobie’s World, the closest system to the Hammer, was notoriously corrupt and freewheeling, a place where everything was for sale. And, for those willing to pay the price, that included even the most secret of Hammer secrets.

  “A two-man team, sir. They had to come to Commitment to be briefed before starting, so it was logical that they work from here as well. They weren’t too happy, but then, money talks. They knew they were working on an off-world mership master AI but not which one, and in any case, the minute the job was done, I had them picked up and neurowiped. They’re safely tucked away on Hell now, and there they’ll stay.”

  For once, Merrick had the good grace to look faintly apologetic.

  “Fine. So Mumtaz leaves when?”

  “Six September. She will drop out of pinchspace to avoid the Brooks Reef gravitational anomaly 200 light-years out of Terranova. My team will take control as soon as Mumtaz has sent her pinchspace drop report. They’ll broadcast a fake jump report followed immediately by a coded message to let us know the hijack team has control and then microjump her clear of the Brooks Reef’s network of surveillance drones before altering vector to jump direct to Hell, where she’ll down-shuttle the original crew. There will also be a replacement crew at Hell-the hijackers don’t know that, of course. I’ll meet the Mumtaz there, and we will jump to Eternity to be safely in orbit before she’s reported overdue at Frontier. No one will be any the wiser. Just another unexplained casualty of pinchspace like all the others.”

  “And getting your people on
to Terranova in the first place?” Merrick knew how difficult it was to circumvent Terranova’s security AIs.

  “Already done, sir, thanks to careful adjustment of personal identity records with the help of a certain avaricious person inside the Ministry of Planetary Security. The Feds would have a fit if they knew how cheaply some of their people can be bought.” That was the Federated World’s Achilles’ heel, Digby thought. There was always someone for whom money was everything.

  “Weapons?”

  “Not needed. A properly coordinated and timed attack on the officers and crew using a high level of violence and intimidation will achieve the results we want. Off-world commercial spacers rely too much on their AIs for security, but we’ve dealt with that. Once we have control, the weapons we need are in the armory, and my information is that they are not DNA security coded, so using them won’t be a problem.”

  The rest of it is detail, Merrick thought, nodding. Digby has things well under control. But there was one final question.

  “Deniability, Digby.” Merrick’s voice was harsh, his eyes stabbing. “You recall my instructions, I trust.”

  “Believe me, sir, I do.” How could he forget Merrick’s promise that he would die a slow and painful death at the hands of DocSec if the Hammer’s links to the hijacking of the Mumtaz ever leaked back to the Feds.

  Digby ticked the points off on his fingers.

  “I’ve used multiple cutouts between us and all field operatives. Even d’Castreaux has no idea that he’s actually working for the Hammer. I’ve double-checked with General Cassidy: The agents did not know who was behind the blackmail, and none of them will live to know why they had to force d’Castreaux’s cooperation. The mership AI hackers I’ve covered. The hijack team thinks it’s just an act of piracy funded by faceless interests out of one of the Rogue Planets, and only the team leader will know Mumtaz’s final destination, and he’ll be told only when the ship is in pinchspace four days out of Terranova. And he and the rest of his crew will be spending the rest of their lives on Hell. The sensors on Eternity have been bypassed, so all the duty operators in deepspace ops are seeing is prerecorded data, and I doubt anyone will pick up on the fact that it’s the same data looping over and over on an annual cycle. And no survey or other activity is planned around Eternity or in the Judgment System, for that matter, for at least thirty-six months.”

  Digby paused to catch his breath. He knew he had to get this bit right if he wanted to live to enjoy a long and happy retirement.

  Thoughts marshaled, he continued. “As for the passengers of the Mumtaz, all of the men who aren’t part of the terraforming technical support team, as well as anyone who looks like a potential troublemaker and obviously anyone from the military, will go to Hell. The rest, including women and children, will be landed on Eternity to be part of the terraforming ground teams, and there they will stay. Those who don’t cooperate…” Digby did not need to say it again.

  “As for Mumtaz, it will have an unfortunate accident in pinchspace when it finally jumps out of Eternity nearspace: The AI has a self-destruct subroutine already loaded that will blow every hatch wide open and disable the pinchspace drive. But best of all, the Feds will not suspect anything in the first place, and so they won’t be looking. Losing ships in pinchspace doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

  “And finally, the terraforming management team will all be Kraa citizens currently serving out their time on Hell. Believe me when I say, sir, that they will be model citizens.

  “So I believe our operational security is good. The keys will be keeping the lid on Eternity and Hell to make sure nothing leaks out. But we are very good at that sort of thing.” Digby smiled a bleak and wintry smile.

  “Good,” Merrick said, looking pleased. “I don’t think we need to talk again. I want a personal report back from you when the terraforming process is safely under way. And when the time is right, I’m going to ask you to brief the Council in person. I think they should know who made it all happen.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Digby said to the top of Merrick’s head as he turned to leave.

  Once outside the handsomely imposing pink granite building that housed Chief Councillor Merrick and the Supreme Council’s secretariat, one of the very few Hammer government buildings worth looking at, Digby stopped in the predawn gloom of another of Commitment’s forty-nine-hour days to catch his breath, a deep unhappiness pulling his spirits down.

  Digby had never gotten used to the long drawn-out days, and he positively hated waking up in the middle of the night one day and in broad daylight the next and so on ad nauseam. His native planet of Fortitude had twenty-six-hour days and was a much more pleasant place to live. Fortitude also had seasons, unlike Commitment, where each forty-nine-hour day blurred into the next, the weather was average all the time, and one never had any idea where one was in the year unless one checked with the net.

  But it wasn’t just being stuck on Commitment. The problem was that he was tired, a sick tiredness that came from years of doing things that he knew were wrong. Outwardly, he had been a loyal, energetic, and motivated servant of the Hammer for over thirty years, but that was just a matter of survival, something he liked to think of as behavioral camouflage. The real problem was that underneath his carefully contrived air of controlled competence, he knew, he really knew, without any illusions at all, the Hammer for what it truly was-a brutal totalitarian regime, as vicious and self-serving as any in human history and one whose leaders paid lip service to Kraa while concentrating all their efforts on staying in power while accumulating as much wealth as possible, with every cent ripped from the pockets of ordinary Hammers.

  Not that he really had anything against the Path of Doctrine except that he just didn’t believe in any of it. The idea that the collection of oddly shaped rocks discovered on Mars by one Peter McNair were the only surviving relics of an ancient civilization dedicated to the universe’s supreme being, an entity called Kraa, was complete and utter nonsense. McNair had been an indentured colonist with a particularly vivid imagination, vivid, in fact, to the point, in the opinion of any reasonable person, of being barking mad. But an absolute lack of any credible evidence hadn’t bothered the Kraa fundamentalists any more than it had stopped people on Old Earth still, even now, from believing that aliens in flying saucers had landed way back in 1950 something.

  Digby shook his head in disbelief. Aliens in flying saucers! Humanspace was full of gullible fools, and the Hammer Worlds had their share, that was for sure.

  For his part, from the day when he had begun to think for himself, Digby had known that the whole Kraa myth was just so much bullshit even if, in the interests of staying alive, he had never said as much, even to his wife. Over the years that had followed, his interaction with the most powerful and monolithic religion in human history had been confined to as few temple attendances as he could get away with and a steadfast refusal to debate even the smallest point of Path theology.

  It was still one of the enduring mysteries of the universe how, in the space of a few short years, McNair had been able to strike a chord deep inside ordinary people to create the largest fundamentalist movement in Earth’s history. The movement-the Path of Kraa, they called themselves-had gathered pace rapidly, funded by probably the most ill-advised donation of all time: the entire estate of the software multibillionaire Vasco Fargas. With that sort of financial backing and McNair’s virulent blend of idealistic hope and extreme intolerance, conflict was inevitable. A vicious civil war that wracked five continents, killing innocent people in the tens of millions, soon had erupted, quickly threatening to spread to the other planets of the Old Earth Alliance.

  Finally and at huge cost, a frustrated Alliance had exported the problem onto what now were called the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. The only drawback was that where once there had been at its peak perhaps millions of hard-core disciples of Kraa, there were now billions of them, many as bigoted and unforgiving as any person could be.

  D
igby sighed. There was sure to be a day of reckoning with the rest of humankind. He just didn’t want to be around when it arrived.

  As for the Path of the Doctrine of Kraa, what a joke! How the fuck did McNair know that the supreme being’s name was Kraa? The so-called artifacts had no writing of any sort on them. But the Path had supported the Digby family. In a vast and unknowable universe, that had been enough to keep him going, with the Hammer’s mess of unresolvable contradictions and stupidities pushed to the back of his mind. But the price had always been high.

  But now, after a lifetime of shedding blood, almost none of it from the true enemies of Kraa, Merrick wanted Digby to sacrifice another-what? — two or three hundred innocent lives, and once again in the name of Kraa. In the name of Kraa! To keep Merrick in power, more like it. For a few seconds Digby couldn’t breathe, weighed down, almost crushed, by the remorse and the accumulated guilt of years of unquestioning service. He stood rigidly still as he struggled to get his rebellious body under control, to get his breath back, to calm his racing heart. Kraa’s blood, he thought savagely, he’d almost lost control of himself. When did that ever happen to a brigadier general of marines? But then the stark realization hit him. This simply could not go on, he could not go on, he had to do something because if he didn’t, he would destroy himself.

  The problem was that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, but he was nothing if not a determined and focused man. Buoyed by a sudden overwhelming urge to make some amends, however small, for a lifetime of wrongs, an urge he could not, would not deny, he waved his car over and climbed in. “Corporal. Take me to the office.”

  “Sir.”

  As the car accelerated away, Digby sat back, his face impassive but his mind racing. The more he thought things through, the more certainly he knew exactly where this insane plan of Merrick’s would end up. He cursed himself for his willful refusal to look beyond the project itself, to see the full and awful consequences of a project of which he had been the chief architect. His project. His responsibility.