The battle at the Moons of Hell hw-1 Page 4

  If the shit hit the fan before they finished, not only would Merrick be gone but his own life would be forfeit, too. He had seen too many changes of chief councillor to have any illusions about what happened to the loser’s people. And if they actually completed the project, Merrick would dispose of everyone involved-from Prison Governor Costigan and himself down to every last man, woman, and child who helped build Eternity-before revealing it to the Council and the rest of the Hammer Worlds.

  He laughed out loud. You’ve done a great job, Digby, he thought. So busy looking at the details that you failed to see that win or lose, your life is over. And worse, this insignificant little affair in all probability would be the trigger for the next war between the Kraa Worlds and the rest of humankind.

  If you stood back, it was obvious what would happen. Yes, Merrick would be hailed as the savior of the Hammer Worlds. Yes, the man in the street would buy the divine providence claptrap that Merrick would feed him to explain the miracle on Eternity. Yes, the apparatchiks would go along with the deception. Yes, the clans that controlled the Hammer economy would fall into line; why wouldn’t they? A new planet meant growth, and growth meant money. And yes, Merrick’s position as chief councillor would be unassailable.

  But none of that counted for a pinch of shit. Sooner or later the Feds would work it out.

  Knowing what he did about the Feds and their awesome technological capabilities, his plan for terraforming Eternity would be a success. But that success would tell the Feds, if they hadn’t already found out, that technologies well beyond the capabilities of the Hammer Worlds had been applied to terraform Eternity.

  And when they worked that out…Well, all the Feds would have to do would be to connect the dots and then the shit would really hit the fan. In very large bucketloads.

  And that meant only one thing-another war. But this time Digby didn’t think the Feds would settle for anything less than the unconditional surrender of the Hamnmer.

  As if the previous three hadn’t been destructive enough. Kraa’s blood. It was only twenty years since the last fracas, and Kraa only knew how many had died that time around!

  He reflected on the matter for a few more minutes, and then all of a sudden his mind was made up, all doubts gone so quickly that it took his breath away. A quiet commitment settled over him. For all its military power, the Hammer Worlds could not afford another war, and he would do, must do, anything in his power to try to make sure that the Mumtaz did not become a casus belli. The chances weren’t good, but he would do, must do, his absolute best.

  All of which was fine, he mused as his car pulled up in front of the low gray fortresslike building that housed the supreme headquarters of the Hammer Defense Forces. But how the hell was he going to derail the Mumtaz project without being killed either by Merrick if the bloody man survived or by the rest of the Council if Merrick did not? There was a nasty little problem, but it would just have to wait for another day.

  “Thank you, Corporal. That’s all for today. I’ll walk home tonight.”

  “Sir.”

  Friday, July 24, 2398, UD

  Federated Worlds Space Fleet College, Terranova Planet

  The serried ranks of graduating cadets, resplendent in dress blacks and the gold of their newfound rank of junior lieutenant, broke apart as friends and parents dressed in every color imaginable rushed the parade ground to seal the moment. In an instant, the tightly choreographed performance of military discipline that had brought three years of cadet training to an end had been replaced by a milling mass of people, the air bright with laughter, excitement, and relief.

  Michael hung back.

  This should have been his day: Right up to the end he had been a strong contender for the Sword of Honor. But at least, he reflected, it had gone to one of the team. He consoled himself with the thought that Jemma Alhamid might have beaten him anyway, they were so close in the rankings; she had shaded him in the final tactical exercise of the year, after all. Michael stood alone. In a difficult and long conversation with his father, he had been emphatic that nobody from the family was to attend, a hard thing to ask of a retired Space Fleet commodore mother, not to mention a Space Fleet captain father, he had to admit. But as he had pointed out, the time for the family to be present was when he had achieved something he was proud of and could celebrate in the eyes of the world.

  As it was, it wasn’t easy. The sideways glances, the hurried looks, the whispered exchanges-isn’t that the cadet who… — were almost more than he could bear. All Michael wanted to do was to be away from this place and alone. Well, give it another hour and he would be alone, alone, that is, except for Lieutenant Hadley, his assault lander command qualification instructor. Michael wasn’t sure how happy Hadley would be at being kept back; not so unhappy, he hoped, that getting the required 98 percent he needed to requalify would be mission impossible.

  Gradually the mob thinned, leaving Michael alone at the bottom of the imposing steps leading up to the main entrance of the college. Time to go, he thought as he turned to make his way back across the huge college parade ground. He might as well put in a solid couple of hours on the assault lander simulator to get ready for Hadley the next day.

  “Michael, wait!”

  Michael turned back to see Anna, followed by every member of the team, hammering down the steps two at a time-well, in Karen Sutler’s case, three at a time. Or was it four? God knew, she had the legs to do it. The group came to a shuddering halt in front of Michael.

  “Oh, hi, guys. Thought you’d all be gone by now.”

  “You didn’t think we would all piss off without saying goodbye, did you?” Charlie Mbeki’s tone was indignant, as if, Michael thought with a smile, he had just suggested that Charlie had been sleeping with the provost marshal’s incredibly ugly offsider, Chief Petty Officer Ramona Diaz. Come to think of it, he had seen Charlie trying to kiss Chief Diaz once, but it had been very late at night and very, very dark, and Charlie had been more than a bit drunk. That little lapse in judgment had cost Charlie seventy-five demerits. Even the officer of the day appeared to have great difficulty accepting the idea that any cadet in his or her right mind would want to kiss Chief Diaz; the team suspected that only that thought had stopped him whacking Charlie with a hundred demerits.

  “No, no, no,” Michael protested, relieved that they hadn’t gone. “I knew you’d track me down. A lot easier than the other way around. I’ve seen better-behaved sheep, I have to say.”

  “Smart-ass. If you’d met my mother, you’d understand why I move around in random jerks. If she kisses me one more time and tells me how wonderful I am…” Nicco Guzevic grimaced at the thought.

  “Bull, Nicco. You love it when your mom tries to cheer you up. You don’t fool us,” said Bronwyn Kriketos, planting a huge wet kiss on his cheek. “I’d be depressed, too, if I only graduated in the third quartile.”

  “Heartless bastard,” Nicco responded amiably. “Michael, I’ve got to go. The up-shuttle won’t wait, and neither will Carlsson Space Lines. It’s been an honor. Stay in touch. You know where to find me.” With a firm shake of the hand and a pat on the cheek, he was gone.

  Two minutes later and with a bruised hand courtesy of one of Karen Sutler’s power grips-Michael swore she practiced for maximum effect-everyone was gone except Anna. The melange of Chinese, Asian, African, and European blood that ran in her veins together with generations of very expensive cosmetic geneering combined to produce a face so striking that it nearly stopped Michael’s heart when he looked at it.

  “Michael, what can I say?” Tears sprang into the corners of Anna’s eyes as she put her arms around his neck. “You know what you mean to me, so don’t lose me somewhere in your life.”

  “Anna, no chance. We’ve had too many good times for that to happen.” A memorable weekend high in the New Tatra Mountains behind the college sprang unbidden to mind; Michael shoved the thought away firmly. “Comm me when you get to the Damishqui; I hear she’s a good ship, and
my dad says Captain Chandra is a very good operator.”

  “Yeah, I hear she is.” Anna paused. “I don’t know if we should prolong this; it’s going to be really hard not having you around after three years.”

  “I know. I’ll miss you,” Michael said, still unsure of Anna and what she really meant to him and what he meant to her. Despite the time they had spent together, there had been other people in their lives during their college time, and both knew how many friendships struck early in a Space Fleet career, whether casual or intimate, failed to survive the pressure that distance and separation created. Space Fleet had no respect for personal relationships, Michael thought moodily. Never had and never would.

  Abruptly, Anna tilted her head up, kissed him full, long, and hard on the mouth, then spun on her heel and was gone without another word. Michael stood there feeling empty and flat.

  After a few moments, he turned and set off for the assault lander simulator building.

  Thursday, July 30, 2398, UD

  Space Marines Headquarters, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

  The walls of Digby’s small office seemed to close in on him as he stared at the e-mail on his workstation screen.

  It couldn’t be, he thought, it couldn’t be. But there it was, in plain Standard English. The Sylvanian National Day reception had been canceled.

  Digby cursed quietly but fluently and at great length.

  Canceled. As simple as that. Not that the cancellation came as a surprise. The Sylvanians had been very rough on the captain and crew of the Hammer tramp spacer Geronimo’s Spear when they had discovered that its cargo was not medical supplies, which were allowed into the Hammer Worlds under the Allied Declaration of Embargo of 2282, but rather rail-gun power management systems, which most definitely were not. The diplomats had been wrangling for months, with the Hammers as usual knowing nothing and conceding less. Digby wondered whether the foreign relations people actually had done the canceling; he thought it more likely the other way around. Those Sylvanians were a precious lot.

  But none of that helped him.

  The Sylvanian National Day reception had offered Digby his only opportunity to meet Ashok Kumar without drawing the attention of Doctrinal Security and thereby risking his own death warrant. And now the opportunity had gone. Captain Ashok Kumar, the Sylvanian embassy’s military attache and its one and only senior military member of staff, was the one man on Commitment whom Digby was prepared to trust to do something quickly. He and Kumar went back a long way, nineteen years to be precise, to the bloody shambles that had followed the Battle of Delta Chimensis in the closing days of the Third Worlds War. Captured along with the shattered remnants of MARFOR-13, his interrogator had been none other than a very young Lieutenant Commander Kumar, a man Digby got to know quite well in the long days that followed. A hard man, a tough and persistent interrogator, not a man you could ever like but decent despite that.

  And Kraa knew the Sylvanians had plenty of reasons not to be decent to any Hammer-the use of tactical nuclear weapons for one thing, small ones, thank Kraa, but still nukes, slipped past defenses badly stretched by the chaos of a full-scale Hammer planetary assault to fall on the cities of Vencatia and Jesmond. The only thing that had saved the Hammer was the fact that the nukes had been launched by renegade elements outside the chain of command. But it had been a close thing: Digby remembered as if it were yesterday the crippling fear that had gripped him at the thought of his family disappearing in the blinding flash of a fusion air burst. With that sort of history, even with the passage of almost twenty years, Digby knew that the fight would be to the death the next time around.

  Struggling to work out how he was going to live up to his newfound resolve, he put his head in his hands, a small, solid, and in many ways quite unremarkable man seated behind a small cluttered desk in a windowless office deep below the ground.

  After a long pause, Digby slipped on his lightweight comms headset and fired up his workstation. If Kumar wasn’t going to come to him, he’d have to go to Kumar. Thanks to DocSec’s obsessive interest in the minutiae of people’s lives, a quick walk through the Section 4 knowledge base should tell him more than enough about Kumar’s daily routine to allow him to set up an “accidental” meeting.

  It was his only chance.

  As he started work, Digby said a quiet word of thanks to Chief Councillor Merrick. The bloody man was obsessive about the operational security of the Eternity project, the blackest of all his many black projects. Understandably, of course. Chief councillor or not, any leak would see Merrick in front of a DocSec firing squad in no time flat. Thus, he’d given Digby unrestricted access to every knowledge base in the Hammer Worlds to make sure the Eternity project stayed black.

  Much more important, he had an account allocated to him by the chief councillor personally, an account DocSec’s normally relentless investigators wouldn’t go near. Even they had more sense than to ask what the chief councillor was up to.

  Wonderful place, the Hammer, he thought as he bent to the task of finding what he needed to know about Captain Ashok Kumar. If you worked for the chief councillor, you could pretty much get away with anything, go anywhere, do anything, know everything about everybody.

  Until the next chief councillor took over.

  Then you were dead.

  Thursday, August 6, 2398, UD

  Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) 005338 Berthed on Space Battle Station 1, in Orbit around Terranova

  Michael realized that not once in the two weeks of his lander command requalification had Lieutenant Michael Hadley said one word more than was absolutely necessary.

  The silent, moodily uncommunicative Hadley had not cut him one inch of slack or encouraged the slightest hope that he might get the 98 percent he needed if he was to have the career path he wanted. As a member of the warfare branch of the Federated Worlds Space Fleet, that meant only one thing as far as he was concerned: assault lander pilot. The alternatives-most likely a career as a navigator or an intel spook, or, even worse, a transfer to the engineering or logistics branches of the Fleet-just didn’t bear thinking about. Still, Hadley hadn’t failed him yet, so maybe he still had a chance.

  So far the atmosphere had been heavy and formal, and Michael hated it. Maybe Hadley was pissed off at having to change his leave plans; Michael had no idea. Seeing Hadley’s glowering, almost sullen face the day after graduation had been more than enough to kill off any idea Michael might have had of talking about Hadley’s private affairs.

  He sighed and settled deeper into the battered and scarred command pilot’s chair of Moaning Minnie, more properly known as Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) Number PHLA-005338, his combat space suit stiff and uncomfortable as he waited for Hadley to complete briefing the directing staff who’d be controlling the opposition forces Michael was up against for the final live exercise of his requalification.

  Michael looked around the flight deck with affection. As landers went, Moaning Minnie wasn’t a bad ship. Michael had flown it many times before. Everything worked, and its AI was reasonably stable and had no bad habits that he knew of. For the tenth time, he had his neuronics call up the mission and, eyes shut, methodically worked through the mission plan and the supporting threat summary step-by-step, item by item. He knew the THREATSUM (Threat Summary) forward and backward by now, but at least it was something to do while he waited.

  Mother, the lander’s AI, broke his fierce concentration to tell him that Hadley had come aboard. Finally, Michael thought as he closed the mission file and stood up to await Hadley’s arrival.

  He didn’t have long to wait.

  “Right,” Hadley said as he settled himself into the tactical officer’s chair alongside Michael, ignoring the rest of Michael’s team ranged to the left and right of him. His voice became very formal. “Junior Lieutenant Helfort. You have command.”

  “Roger, sir. I have command. Stand by.” Michael activated the lander’s CombatNet; it would stay open until the mission had been
completed. With a deep breath to steady himself, he started in on the checklists, the slow and tedious process of confirming that Moaning Minnie was ready for the torture he was going to put her through. One by one, his crew signed off, and finally the ship was ready to go.

  “All stations, ship is go for launch. Stand by for drop in”-Michael checked the master mission timer-“ten minutes. Helmets on, suit integrity checks to Mother. Command out.”

  Michael commed BaseNet. “Space Battle Station 1, this is PHLA-005338, mission call sign Golf Charlie. Ready to launch at designated drop time. Golf Charlie over.”

  “Roger, Golf Charlie. Stand by, out.”

  Settling his helmet onto its neck ring, Michael quickly ran through his own suit checks and, visor down, confirmed suit integrity. He uplinked the results to Mother and confirmed for himself that Mother had fifteen good suits onboard: fourteen crew and one pax. Hang on. A passenger? Who the hell could that be? he wondered, but he had too much to think about to bother checking. Flipping his armored plasglass visor back up, Michael turned slightly to look at Hadley out of the corner of one eye. The man who carried his fate in his hands was sitting unmoving in the tactical officer’s seat, staring out at the vast gray bulk of Space Battle Station 1’s hull as it curved away from them.

  Michael turned back and sat motionless. There was nothing to do but sit and wait in silence. Michael felt the pressure bear down on him. An open-mike circuit, CombatNet was quiet except for the breathing of the loadmaster, Chief Petty Officer Sara Gemmell. For some reason, before launch she breathed as hard as if she’d just run a race, a long one and uphill at that. Nerves, Michael supposed. He didn’t have the gossip, insults, and facetious comments that normally characterized the minutes immediately before a launch to take his mind off what was at stake.