The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 38

  “Sir.”

  It took only minutes for Michael and Harris to check that the 387s were as they should be, the spacers precisely arrayed in a few thin ranks, a gap in the last rank serving as a stark reminder of those missing.

  “Very good, chief. Stand the crew at ease.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  As Harris turned away to give the order, huge double gates to Michael’s right began to swing slowly back. Michael’s heart sank as the gates opened to reveal an old-fashioned column of horse-drawn gun carriages.

  He’d been dreading this moment.

  To Michael’s way of thinking, black-plumed horses and the deeply varnished wood, polished leather, and burnished brass of gun carriage and harness struck an oddly discordant note. Their primitive simplicity was out of place in a world of neuronics, AIs, mass drivers, and pinchspace travel. But as his father often had pointed out, the archaic traditions of military ceremony were dear to every Worlder’s heart. So whatever he might think, horses pulling gun carriages would play their traditional part in carrying the ashes of those fallen in battle to their final resting place.

  On a sudden impulse, Michael left his 387s and made his way across the yard to the column of gun carriages. The pungent earthy straw smell of horses in the warmth of the morning sun hit him as he walked over.

  The gray-uniformed Planetary Service warrant officer at the head of the column snapped to attention and saluted as Michael approached.

  “Chief Warrant Officer Kamal, officer in charge. An honor, sir.”

  “Thanks, Mister Kamal. I…I just…I just wanted to see them before we left. I…” Michael’s voice trailed off as the emotion rose, choking his throat shut with sudden intensity.

  “Go ahead, sir. We’ve got time.” Kamal’s voice was gentle. “And I think the captains of the Al-Jahiz and Damishqui want to do the same. And Lieutenant Chen. Behind you, sir.”

  Befuddled for a second as protocol and emotion short-circuited his brain, Michael recovered in time to half turn and salute as the two four-ring captains stopped in front of him; his salute was returned by the pair with military precision. Bill Chen stood a pace behind with a half smile on his face as he watched Michael recover from his momentary confusion.

  The older of the two, Captain van Meir of the Al-Jahiz, a broad-shouldered woman with startlingly deep blue, almost violet eyes set in a dark face the color of aged teak, was the first to speak, reaching across as she did to shake Michael’s hand. “Helfort. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “It is indeed,” said Captain Chandra, his grip painfully strong, clear hazel eyes boring right into Michael’s. “You did well, very well.”

  “Thank you, sirs. But what a price.” He nodded at the line of gun carriages. “I still have trouble coming to terms with it all.”

  Van Meir nodded sympathetically. “We all do, believe me, we all do. I really hoped we’d taught the Hammer enough of a lesson the last time around, but apparently not. Sadly, there are times when we have to stand up and be counted, and this was one of them. But it still hurts, especially when you knew the people. Chief Kazumi was one of mine on Warhammer, and Corporal Meritavich was with me on Qurrah when I was her XO. I’ll miss them. They were good people.”

  The small group stood in silence for a moment as memories crowded in, the clinking of harnesses and the soft breathing of horses the only sounds breaking the intensity of the moment.

  Chandra brought the group back to earth. “Helfort, good to meet you. If you are passing the Damishqui, please step aboard for a drink. It would be an honor, and I’m sure a certain junior lieutenant of your acquaintance would be more than happy to see you as well.”

  In an instant, Michael’s face was bright pink with embarrassment. How the hell had the captain in command of a heavy cruiser found the time to know about him and Anna?

  Chandra smiled indulgently. “Now, I have some people I wish to say goodbye to, so forgive me.”

  “Sir.”

  Michael and Chen followed the two captains as they made their way past the depressingly long line of 387’s gun carriages to those of the Al-Jahiz, Damishqui, and finally 166.

  As Chen walked on, giving a brief pat to Michael’s shoulder to steady him, Michael slowly moved past gun carriage after gun carriage, all draped in the gold and purple flag of the Federated Worlds. Mounted in the center of each gun carriage was a simple mahogany plinth cradling a small gold funeral urn in front of which was a cushion, its deep crimson fabric decorated with a pathetic spread of medals, with a small brass plaque being the only clue to each urn’s identity.

  Not much to show for a life, Michael thought bitterly as he wondered if the win was worth the pain. None of it felt real to Michael as he struggled without success to connect brass plates to the faces of the people who once had been his fellow 387s.

  Michael stood alongside the last of the carriages, the one carrying the pitiful remains of Spacer Vignes, killed only weeks after his twentieth birthday and the youngest of 387’s crew. His neuronics chimed softly.

  “Yes?”

  “Junior Lieutenant Helfort, this is the AI. My apologies for interrupting, but we move off in five minutes. Would you mind taking your position.”

  “On my way.”

  Michael’s left leg had begun to ache, a vicious stabbing pain, only minutes after the cortege had left the Fleet barracks. True to form, he had forgotten to renew his supply of drugbots.

  The strain of the march through Foundation streets packed solid with an unbroken mass of silent Worlders, their faces bitter with grief and anger, began to tell. The slow, measured pace pulled mercilessly at muscles and tendons that despite the best efforts of FedWorld medical technology were not fully recovered from the slashing damage inflicted by the Hammer slug. The human body still kept some secrets, and how to quickly repair the damage inflicted by high-velocity projectiles was one of them. As for all of human history and despite the enormous advances in geneering and trauma medicine, getting well mostly took time and lots of it.

  By the time Michael had covered the seemingly endless kilometers that separated the Fleet barracks from Braidwood National Cemetery, the final resting place for the ashes of all spacers killed on active service, his leg was molten agony. So bad was the pain that the huge crowd of silent Worlders that had flanked the route from the very start had become a blur.

  As the cortege turned into Remembrance Avenue for the final approach to the massive gilt gates of the national cemetery, the deep hush broken only by the chinking of gun-carriage harnesses and the uneven beat of horses’ hooves on the ceramcrete road, Michael cursed himself for not taking the basic precaution of getting some painkiller drugbots inside him just in case. You are a fucking idiot, Helfort, he railed at himself, conscious that his left leg was beginning to drag and embarrassed that there was nothing he could do about it apart from gripping his sword so tightly that the pain in his hand and wrist would distract him, praying all the time that he made it and that the holovid commentators didn’t think he was playing to the crowd.

  At last, the cortege passed the gates. Guided by the AI, without which he would not have the slightest idea of where to go or what to do, Michael led 387’s crew and the sad column of gun carriages up a gently sloping hill away from the main access road and the rest of the cortege. The narrow road was surrounded by achingly beautiful trees and shrubs, their leaves and flowers bright with color in the late morning sun.

  And then there it was, the sight bringing a lump to Michael’s throat and tears to his eyes: the final resting place for the 387s he was there to bury that day. When the engineers had finished making the ship safe for its return dirtside, it would be the last resting place for DLS-387 also. The torn and blasted ship would be set into a sandstone-walled recess cut back into the hillside above the small hollow that would cradle the ashes of its fallen crew, almost as though it were looking down in sorrow at the people it had failed to protect.

  The marine honor guard and firing party sto
od to attention as Michael led the surviving 387s past the waiting burial plots, turning them off the road to halt opposite the temporary stand with the families and friends of the dead. Tears fell unashamedly down their faces as the gun carriages came to a halt one by one, to be relieved of their pathetically small burdens by the marine burial parties.

  For a moment, Michael had to smile to himself as a picture of Athenascu, objecting strenuously that the marines she so loved to hate were handling the last of her mortal remains, flashed across his mind’s eye.

  Michael watched the sad sight of golden urns one after another being put in position alongside each of the burial plots. As the last one was set in place, he looked across the little hollow to where his family was standing, his parents rigidly at attention in the front row of the stand. Between them stood Sam, her face a frozen mask as she struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, the final act in a tragedy that had been unthinkable just a few short months earlier. Her plain gray-black dress stood in drab contrast to the dress blacks, loud with medals, unit citations, combat command stripes, and rank badges, that flanked her. Behind his family, Michael picked out Vice Admiral Jaruzelska and, with a shock, the president herself, her mass of chalk-white hair standing out starkly like a beacon in a sea of Space Fleet black, marine green, and the dark grays and blacks of the crew’s families. Also there were Moderator Burkhardt, Minister Pecora, and most of the cabinet. But Anna, the one person he most wanted to see, the one he most wanted to have with him, was not there. Her place was with the Damishqui spacers who had fallen. Michael ached to be with her.

  As the last gun carriage pulled away, the senior spiritual guide to the Federated Worlds Space Fleet stepped forward. In somber tones, she recited the formal address for the fallen in battle, its archaic language and complex sentences somehow exactly right for the occasion. But it mostly washed over Michael as he enjoyed the simple pleasure of standing still, careful to keep almost all his weight off his tortured left leg.Finally, the spiritual guide had finished. Michael stepped forward to perform his final duty as captain in command of DLS-387.

  At precisely midday, he removed his dress cap and in a voice firm with a confidence he didn’t feel gave the order that would consign what little remained of 387’s lost crew to the ground. Marine burial parties moving with careful precision interred the urns before lifting plain granite slabs inscribed with the names of the fallen into place. Then the firing party raised its carbines, and with a sudden shocking violence, the air above the burial plots was ripped apart with volley after volley of carbine fire.

  It was all but over. Michael replaced his cap and, saluting, gave the final blessing.

  “Deepspace Light Scout 387. May God watch over you this day.”

  He was finished. With DLS-387 now formally decommissioned, he was no longer a captain in command.

  He was plain ordinary Junior Lieutenant Michael Wallace Helfort again.

  And even if part of him yearned to be just plain ordinary Mr. Helfort, he knew that when the day of reckoning with the Hammer came, and it surely would, he would be there to do his part.

  Monday, February 15, 2399, UD

  Conference Room 24-1, Interstellar Relations Secretariat Building, Geneva, Old Earth

  As Giovanni Pecora looked across the table at his Hammer counterpart, he knew in his heart that the chances of settling the Mumtaz affair on anything remotely like reasonable terms were slim.

  The Hammer’s councillor for foreign relations, the unlovely Claude Albrecht, sat directly opposite Pecora. He was flanked on one side by Pius Sodje, his undercouncillor for Federated Worlds relations, and on the other by Viktor Solomatin, officially the undercouncillor for departmental security but in fact the man put into Albrecht’s department by Doctrinal Security to keep an eye on things. According to the latest intelligence briefings, Solomatin was under Polk’s control now that the head of DocSec, Austin Ikedia, reportedly had jumped ship, abandoning what little was left of the Merrick/Commitment faction.

  Given the typically ruthless way Polk had been consigning Merrick’s followers to DocSec lime pits, Pecora had been surprised to see Albrecht still holding his position. He shook his head in despair. Trying to understand the Hammer was made nearly impossible by the endless infighting that went on as faction struggled with faction for supremacy, as the winners took advantage of their position to cull as many of the losers as they could until, inevitably, the tables were turned. Then losers became winners, winners became losers, and the whole ghastly blood-drenched process started again.

  Pecora sighed. Hammer politics could best be described as a blood-soaked mass of lies and deceit liberally laced with treachery, backstabbing, and appalling brutality. Exactly what was going on inside the Hammer was anyone’s guess.

  Pecora turned his attention back to the group in front of him.

  When not participating in the role-play sims so beloved of Fed management experts, he had spent much of the previous week reviewing everything the Feds knew about the trio on the other side of the conference table. It had been a depressing exercise.

  The three men were survivors, the fittest that Hammer society could produce, God help it and its oppressed citizens. They had clawed their way to the top of the Hammer heap over the broken and bleeding bodies of ordinary Hammer citizens, with the corpses of more than a few competitors tossed in for good measure.

  Solomatin in particular was a nasty piece of work. His file was full of examples of his sadistic and brutal approach to DocSec business. He was rumored to have personally shot more than two hundred so-called heretics during his time as DocSec commander on Fortitude, but never with one clean shot. No. That would have been too easy. Solomatin preferred multiple shots: two to wound, one in each thigh, and then, after an agonizing wait as the victim writhed in agony on the ground, another shot to finish it all when Solomatin got bored and it was time to move on to the next victim, who was invariably kept close at hand to heighten the terror of those last few awful moments of life. Pecora felt sick as for probably the tenth time he wiped his hand down the side of his trousers as if to rub away the contamination from Solomatin’s clammy handshake.

  And even if Sodje and Albrecht weren’t as bad as Solomatin, it was probably only for lack of opportunity. Pecora had little doubt that they, too, would have just as little compunction about putting a bullet into the back of his head.

  As he waited for Nikolas Kaminski, the Old Earth Alliance secretary for interstellar relations and as decent a man as Albrecht and his crew were psychopathic killers, to bring the meeting to order, Pecora knew deep down that the ten weeks set aside by the Hammer and Federated Worlds governments for mediation brokered by Old Earth were going to be the longest weeks of his life. He just hoped that they wouldn’t be the most wasted.

  A small cough from Kaminski announced the start of the meeting, and with a sigh Pecora settled back in his chair to listen to the mediator’s opening statement. Pecora knew it would be a worthy speech. It would be full of pleas for common sense to prevail, for the standards of civilized behavior to apply, and so on. But no matter how worthy the sentiments, Pecora’s view of the Hammer would not change. They were so far beyond the bounds of decency that Kaminski might as well piss on a forest fire for all the good it would do.

  Wednesday, February 24, 2399, UD

  Fleet Orbital Heavy Repair Station Terranova-2, in Orbit around Terranova Planet

  Happy for once not to have to stand on a leg that still ached when he put his full weight on it, Michael hung back and watched the painfully slow process of moving 387 out of the orbital repair station’s maintenance dock and into the cavernous hold of the huge ultraheavy planetary lander.

  387, tiny against the orbital heavy repair station’s vast bulk, was being maneuvered with infinite care to line up with the lander’s gaping cargo hold. An army of orange-suited spacers shepherding a swarm of heavy-duty cargobots, anticollision lights flashing like demented orange fireflies, fussed around the scarred and torn
hull, which had been cleaned of the tons of foamsteel and bracing that had been used to get the ship safely home. All classified equipment had been stripped out, and fusion plants shut down and decommissioned.

  A moment of sadness struck Michael.

  387 once had been a living thing and, through Mother, almost a friend, or at least a comrade in arms. He’d miss her quirky, deadpan sense of humor. But now 387 was just another dead warship hulk, and Mother had gone on to other things. She was the latest in a long line of warship AIs safely downloaded into Attila the Hun, the massive AI that powered the Fleet’s StratSim Facility at the Fleet College. Michael knew that some warship captains liked to reminisce with their old AIs, but he didn’t think he’d ever be one of them. For him, 387 was something that had happened in the past, and there it should stay.

  As the bows of 387 nosed slowly into the lander’s hold, Michael could look directly down into the hole that marked the point where Weapons Power Charlie’s plasma containment bottle had blown out most of the starboard bow. The hole was huge, a mass of twisted titanium frames and shredded ceramsteel. The edges, torn, twisted, jagged, and razor-sharp, had been masked off with Day-Glo plasfiber for the trip. Down through the hole, its sides etched out of the darkness by 387’s internal lighting, Michael could trace the path of the platinum/iridium slug inside its deadly shroud of plasma as it had cut its way down through the ship, taking the lives of so many of the crew on the way.

  Farther aft on the port side, the entry point for the slug that nearly had taken Michael’s life was framed untidily by yet more orange plasfiber. Less dramatic, the pear-shaped puncture was surprisingly small. The slug’s awesome kinetic energy, with little armor to slow it, had been focused as it hit on a single small part of 387’s hull.

  And then, farther back, there was another hole. The slug’s exit from the hull aft had been much more dramatic, its plasma shroud by that stage blooming into a lethal blast wave that had opened up the ship’s ceramsteel armor like a tin can. The hole was much bigger, now rimmed with yet more orange plasfiber to mark the place where the slug had finally cleared the ship, taking with it 387’s pinchcomms antenna, leaving only the stump of its hydraulic ram to show that it ever had existed.