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

  Even if what she had wanted to do was standard operating procedure, Michael could see that no matter how hard Mother turned, Moaning Minnie would be uncomfortably close to the debris of missiles closing in on them at 5,000 kph. Even if they cooked off on the decoys, the warhead debris would spread out in a high-velocity cone to envelop the fleeing Minnie. And if they survived, they would still have to get Minnie back where she belonged-back on track heading for the landing zone to dump her hypothetical load of heavily armed marines and their mounds of equipment precisely where they wanted to get off. Sure, the risk was small, but it was a risk. But by turning left, Minnie could duck under the decoys and give the incoming missiles no time to decide that she was a better target.

  “New track up, Shrivaratnam approved. Stand by, forty seconds to turn, fifty seconds to missile impact.”

  “Roger. Command approved.”

  “Stand by turn left.” This turn would be uncomfortably sluggish with no starboard engine to overcome the port engine’s opposition. Hopefully, it won’t matter, Michael prayed.

  And around they went, smooth as silk this time, Mother winding the power back as Minnie settled down for the final approach.

  “Command, Tac. Stand by missile impact in ten…Stand by. Multiple warhead explosions behind and above us; no hits, no collateral damage. Shrivaratnam reports hostiles breaking off. Ground attack commander reports landing zone sanitized and secure, clear to land.”

  Michael heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Roger that, Tac. Mother, command approved to autoland.” Michael itched to take manual control and do it himself, but he told himself not to be stupid. Although he knew he could hand fly the lander down, it would be a big mistake. Poor situational awareness, less than sixty seconds to run, and another sharp turn to port with the starboard engine out to boot. No, let Mother do it, he decided.

  And a lovely job Mother did.

  As a subdued rumble told everyone that the gear was going down, Mother extended the lander’s massive triple-slotted flaps, the fourteen-meter-wide strips of plasteel rammed out to bite hard into the air still ripping fast past the lander’s hull. Michael’s hands clenched unconsciously as Mother began the countdown to the pitch-up maneuver that so impressed the hearts, minds, and stomachs of new recruits. It wasn’t surprising that landers always had to be hosed out after recruit flights, Michael thought. There were few experiences like it. He knew that even experienced lander pilots like Hadley never enjoyed something that felt all wrong, and with one engine out, it was going to feel a whole lot worse.

  With less than one kilometer to run and with Minnie’s speed decaying slowly, Mother pulled the lander sharply back onto her tail. The belly-mounted mass drivers, which were capable of holding a lightly loaded lander in the hover if need be, went to full power to fire mass directly ahead to kill the lander’s still-enormous residual kinetic energy. Walking the blowtorch, the maneuver was called, and for good reason, as Mother powered up Fusion B, with plumes of incandescently hot hypersonic water vapor ripping and blasting the earth as the lander slowed for landing, its nose angled up nearly vertically into the sky. Losing speed rapidly, Moaning Minnie came low across the threshold as Mother, neatly rotating the lander forward and down hard onto her gear, cut the power and popped the chute. The lander’s crew members were thrown hard up against their safety straps as Mother brought Minnie to a shuddering halt, titanium ceramic brakes nearly white-hot and howling in protest.

  Minutes later, with the hypothetical marines safely delivered and on their way to wherever marines went when they finally got dirtside, the exercise was over and Minnie was taxiing slowly off Runway 28 Left. As the lander made its way to the stand, Michael rapidly completed the shutdown checklist with Mother. Finally, with a small screech of protest from heavily punished brakes, Mother brought Moaning Minnie to a stop, the lander bobbing its nose down for a moment as the nose gear absorbed the last remnants of her kinetic energy. The final shutdown items, and that was it. Exercise over. Survived. Thank God.

  Michael commed CombatNet for the last time. “Thank you, team-helmets off. Free to disembark. A memorable trip, I think. See you all in the Dog and Duck at 20:00 tonight. First round is on me.”

  “And the rest,” came a poorly disguised voice to general laughter. Aguilar, Michael thought.

  “Command, Pax 1.”

  Michael started as he realized that Bukenya had been with him all the time. Well, no better way to show who you believed in, he supposed.

  “Sorry, sir, didn’t realize you were aboard.” Michael tried without success to hide his surprise.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world”-Bukenya laughed-“and well done. That looked very good from where I was sitting. And I’d forgotten how much I really enjoy assault landings with one engine out.”

  “Thank you, sir. Pleased you had fun. I’ll catch up with you later.” Seconds later, Mother had popped Minnie’s accesses open and deployed the stairs. Michael unbuckled and climbed stiffly out of the command pilot’s chair. Then it struck him. Had he passed?

  He turned to Hadley, already asking the question, but Hadley stopped him dead.

  “Don’t ask. Somebody much more senior than me wants to tell you the good news, so don’t drop me in it by letting on that I’ve already told you. But you should know that if you had taken manual control from Mother for the final approach, I would have failed you. But you didn’t, and I know you won’t believe me, but that was the best decision you made all mission. Wait here till I call you down.” And with that Hadley was gone, space-suit boots clattering down the vertical ladder that led from the lander’s bridge down to the upper pax deck.

  Ten long minutes later, Michael finally got the call, emerging from the long-suffering Moaning Minnie to give her hull an affectionate pat of thanks as she sat patiently clicking and clinking in the late evening sun, the residual heat of her reentry radiating off a blackened fuselage. As Michael came down the stairs, he could see Admiral Fielding standing patiently at the foot of the stairs, Hadley to one side and Bukenya to the other. Michael hurried down and came to attention as smartly as his combat space suit would allow.

  “Junior Lieutenant Helfort reporting, sir,” he said, saluting stiffly. The admiral returned the salute and then took his hand and shook it until Michael thought it would fall off.

  Finally releasing her grip, the admiral smiled. “Lieutenant Hadley has briefed me, and I have to say I agree with him. That was one of the best-flown assault landing missions by a junior pilot I have ever seen, Helfort, so my congratulations. Get some experience under your belt and you’ll be a certainty for combat flight school. Sorry about the loss of Fusion A and the cross-feed. You can blame me for that and not directing staff. Oh, and I also agree with Lieutenant Hadley on one other thing. If you had taken manual control for landing, he would have been right to fail you.

  “But you didn’t, and that’s why you are going to be a good pilot. So well done, Helfort. You are back on track. Make damn sure you stay there.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Well, that’s it. Good evening to you all. Where’s my damn car?” Fielding muttered as she turned and walked away across the apron.

  Hadley looked at Michael for a moment. “You know why I was so pissed off at the beginning?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Michael replied.

  “Because if I passed you and then you went and messed up, I would be remembered throughout the Fleet as the man who let Helfort off the hook. But then, I hadn’t ever flown with you, so how was I to know any better?”

  There was nothing Michael could say.

  “So you’ve passed. Full mission debrief at 08:00 tomorrow, and we’ll see what you didn’t do right. In the meantime, a long shower and change and then down to the Dog and Duck, I think.”

  For his part, Michael could think of nothing he would like to do more.

  Sunday, August 9, 2398, UD

  Arcadia Spaceport, Ashakiran Planet

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sp; At long last, Michael thought as the down-shuttle thumped emphatically onto the Arcadia spaceport’s Runway 09 Left.

  Since leaving the college Saturday morning, he had been traveling continuously without sleep, though traveling wasn’t the best way to describe what he’d been doing. Hanging around waiting would have been more like it. Michael had concluded long ago that it was one of the immutable laws of the cosmos that up-shuttles never connected with merships, which in turn never connected with down-shuttles.

  The tension of the previous months had slowly begun to seep away, but he was more tired than he had ever been. But it was not just physical exhaustion; three years as a cadet had taught Michael how to cope with lack of sleep. No, it was more than that. It was almost as though he were just emerging from a prolonged coma and his body just didn’t want to play, all energy spent. Michael would have been happy to stay where he was and let the world move on without him. He closed his eyes and waited for the OK to disembark.

  Five minutes later, the aerobridge was connected and the sparse complement of passengers began to disembark. Michael waited until almost everyone was off before he forced himself to his feet, grabbed his bag, and walked off the shuttle. His brief words of thanks to the cabin crew were the most he had spoken for days. Quickly through the retinal scan and DNA identity check, he collected his case and headed to check-in for the red-eye to Calvert, the enormous bulk of the spaceport echoing and empty as Sunday night wound its way to its usual dull conclusion.

  Much to Michael’s surprise, he had passed out into an exhausted sleep the minute Mitrakis Emirates Flight ME 0255 had lifted off from Arcadia, heading for Calvert, 4,400 kilometers away.

  He was only woken by the thump of the landing gear locking down as the big Boeing maneuvered on its final approach, the two wing-mounted water-fed mass drivers barely audible as they powered up for landing. Through the window, Michael could see the early dawn flushing a mauve-black eastern sky a golden pink, but the ground below was still dark, with only pools of light thrown by the carefully shaded streetlights of Calvert to give him any sense of terrain. For some reason and even though he had slept only a bit under six hours and that in seats whose design, he swore, dated from the dark ages of air travel, Michael felt different. He was still very tired but no longer felt half-drugged.

  Twenty minutes later, Michael was outside breathing the fresh air of his home world for the first time in almost twelve months. He struggled for a moment to remember whether it was autumn or spring; autumn, he thought after considering it for a while, not that Ashakiran’s seasons were much different from one another: The planet had only a four-month year and a 19.5-degree axial tilt, after all. He stood there, heedless of the steady trickle of early-morning passengers coming and going. It was easy to let the southeast trade winds wash over him and enjoy the sounds of the breeze as it moved through the trees, palms, and bushes-a disorganized unruly riot of whites, blues, reds, golds, yellow, lilacs, and purples, all with the luscious, heady aromas of geneered plants and set against a leafy backdrop of every conceivable shade of green with the odd purple or red for variety-that framed the approach to Calvert airport.

  With renewed energy, Michael headed for the Avis office.

  With his identity checked with the usual excruciating care, his credit established, and pilot’s license painstakingly verified to give him the privilege of hand flying the machine, Michael took temporary loan of a two-seat Honda flier. It was a new model he hadn’t seen before, and very neat-looking it was. A single piece of molded plasglass screen flowed back and over the passenger compartment before turning down to blend seamlessly into stubby variable-profile plasfiber wings. A FusionIndustries commercial microfusion plant driving a single-vectored water-fed mass driver, a noise reduction shroud, a retractable tricycle under-carriage, eight reaction control nozzles, and a simple tail assembly completed the machine. Inside the cabin, there were two big brightscreen multifunction displays, both rendered totally redundant by neuronics, thought Michael. Why did Honda and every other flier manufacturer insist on installing them? A two-axis sidestick controller, yaw pedals, throttle lever, and radio selector completed the pilot’s station.

  With the flight plan completed and uploaded to Calvert Control, Calvert airport’s airspace and traffic management AI, Michael took care to establish good relations with the flier’s AI, called Mother, naturally, and blessed with an engagingly firm tone of voice as if to say she had seen quite enough hire flier pilots in her time, hadn’t been impressed by any of them, and would Michael please behave himself. That done, Michael rapidly completed the prelaunch checks, got the OK for his flight plan from Calvert Control, and uploaded the approved flight pipe to Mother.

  Calvert airport’s house rules allowed noncommercial flier operations only under the joint control of Mother and Calvert Control until clear of restricted airspace around the airport. So it was Mother and not Michael who taxied the flier out to the small satellite strip south of the main runway complex. She held the flier on the brakes while the mass driver ran up to full power, the jet efflux ripping and howling, the steam plume driving down the runway behind them before Mother let the brakes go, slamming Michael back into his seat before lifting the flier sharply up off the ground and into a steep climb.

  Michael was happy to sit back and gaze out at the Coral Bight as it slowly came into view below the plasglass nose of the flier, the deep blue ocean stunningly pretty under the blush pink of an early-morning sky. His daydream was interrupted by Mother’s no-nonsense tones.

  “Mr. Helfort. We shall shortly be levelling off at 10,250 meters. Calvert Control authorizes you to take control at that time. Any departure outside approved flight pipe Purple 24 Alfa will result in my taking control for the remainder of the flight. Please acknowledge.”

  “Roger, Mother,” Michael sighed resignedly. “Acknowledged.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Helfort.” Mother’s voice was firm.

  As he took control, the flier was alive under Michael’s hands as he reveled in the crisp responsiveness of the Honda machine, turning off the machine’s AI-controlled ride-smoothing system so that he could fly through the occasional bump as the flier hit small patches of low-grade clear air turbulence.

  All of a sudden the weight of the last few months dropped off his shoulders as he enjoyed the simple pleasure of flying.

  Above him, the sky, broken only by a light scattering of high altocumulus clouds, and the occasional contrails of a high-flying jet, had turned a deep blue as they cleared the salt haze pulled off the Equatorial Sea by the nearly constant southeast trades. Out to the left, the early-morning sun had cleared the horizon and was beginning to make its presence felt; Michael had to have Mother darken the plasglass to compensate.

  Three hundred kilometers south of Calvert, the flier crossed the southern coast of the Calvert Peninsula. Ahead of him, Michael could see nothing but the endless blue of the Coral Bight, broken by atolls of fast-growing geneered coral; immense irregular patches of white shaded down through every tint of blue imaginable until blending into the cobalt of the deep ocean, their windward edges fringed with brilliant white necklaces of broken surf. Beyond the bight lay the Atalantan Mountains, with six peaks over 15,000 meters, but they were more than 1,000 kilometers ahead of him; Michael doubted he would see them before the turn to the southwest.

  The minutes passed as Michael flew onward, happy and content for the first time in months, the journey interrupted only by a steady stream of traffic information as the flier wove its way through the mass of flight pipes funneling early-morning traffic into Calvert from Manaar, York, and the Petrov spaceport to the east.

  Five hundred kilometers southeast of Calvert, Michael banked the flier onto a course that would see him across the Tien Shan Mountains and on his final approach to the Palisades, the mountain retreat of the Helfort family and the perfect place, he thought, to recover both physically and spiritually.

  The flier whispered on; Michael was immersed in the simple r
outines of flying until finally the peaks of the Tien Shan began to take shape in front of him. They were emerging slowly from the surface haze, as awe-inspiring and spectacular as the first time he remembered seeing them as a little boy.

  From the broad, mangrove-fringed coastal plain that ran across the foot of the Coral Bight from New Beijing in the north to Harbin in the south, thickly wooded slopes of geneered hardwoods rose up into the foothills before giving way to conifers and then scrubby bushes, mosses, and lichens. Finally, at almost 7,000 meters, even the geneered vegetation introduced to Ashakiran centuries earlier had to admit defeat. Above that point, only broken rock and snow covered the steep slopes running up to the awesome granite cliffs of Mount Izbecki to the left-all 15,690 meters of it and to this day conquered only by cliffbot-assisted climbers-and its equally imposing sisters to the right. As Michael flew across the coast and into the foothills, steadily lifting the flier to the 12,500 meters needed to cross the Tien Shan, Mount Izbecki and its companions came into sight, Mount Clarke and Mount Christof at 14,990 and 14,450 meters, respectively, the jet stream ripping long tails of cloud thick with ice and snow off their rocky summits.

  And then, finally, between mountain peaks to the left and right and framed by sheer granite cliffs rising impossibly sheer for more than 2,000 meters, the High Pass appeared, visible at first as little more than a thin dark streak down the face of the huge cliffs between the Izbecki and the Clarke-Christof massifs. Slowly the streak opened up as the flier closed in to reveal a narrow gorge. Not for the first time Michael wondered at the arrogance of pushing a tiny flier into a narrow pass more than 12,000 meters above sea level with no place to go but straight ahead.

  “Mother, positive nav check, please.” Michael wanted to make absolutely sure that the 800-meter-wide gap he was heading for at 1,000 kph was the right 800-meter-wide gap and not some dead end.