“All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Port watch has the watch. Command out.”
As he opened his eyes, the blackness of deep space gave way to the brilliant brightness of the hangar and the cheerful faces of his team. Michael sighed with relief. They had been at general quarters for an hour, an hour that came off his precious off-watch time. He handed over the watch to Petty Officer Strezlecki as he and half the team desuited.
Michael paused at the ladder down to the accommodation level as the captain came up on main broadcast.
“All stations, this is the captain. Just a quick update on how I see things. I think the best way to sum it up is that I have good news and bad news. The good news, as you may by now have realized, is that we weren’t ambushed as we dropped out of pinchspace. We’ve dropped well outside the detection threshold for their long-range passive sensor arrays, and just as important, there are no Hammer warships inside 15 million kilometers. The nearest hostiles are a couple of Constancy Class light escorts fiddling around conducting what look like basic weapon drills. So it’s almost certain we got in undetected. We’ve also got a good laser tight-beam link with Bonnie, and we’re getting good data. She’s a day ahead of us, say, 7 million kilometers out from Hell’s Moons, which is where we hope to find the Mumtaz, of course. So hopefully Bonnie will pick her up. She’s scheduled to arrive sometime on the fourteenth, though we don’t know when.
“The bad news is Mother has confirmed and refined Bonnie’s earlier report of a large number of Hammer ships around Hell’s Moons. Currently, Mother is tracking no less than forty-five warships—three heavy and six light cruisers, twelve escorts of various sizes, eighteen patrol ships, four scouts, and two support ships to round out the group. And that’s on top of the space battle station capabilities the Hammer has built into its flotilla base. We’re going to watch them closely, but I am pretty well convinced they are not there for our benefit. If they were, it’d be overkill by a factor of about ten, and they wouldn’t be in orbit, they’d be deployed in a defensive screen perhaps 5 million kilometers out along our most likely approach vector. Which, by the way, is not the vector we are now coming in on.
“So it could get exciting, though I think that’s pretty unlikely. We’ll wait and see what they get up to. Captain out.”
Michael and all the rest of 387’s crew breathed out heavily as the captain finished. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to work out that forty-five Hammer warships created a bit of a problem for Ribot. As Michael hurried down the ladder, he wondered what Ribot was going to do about it.
That very question was exercising Ribot’s mind in no uncertain way.
The last THREATSUM from Fleet had said that there was a 95 percent chance that the number of Hammer warships on station would not exceed twenty, the normal battle strength of the Hell flotilla. To minimize the risks, 387’s route had been chosen carefully to avoid the vectors used regularly by Hell-based warships, whose commanders, like all humans everywhere, were creatures of routine and habit. But having no less than forty-five warships in-system significantly increased the chance that their behavior would not follow normal patterns.
Ribot’s worry, amply shared by Mother, was that Hammer ships would use vectors that intersected 387’s fly-by vector. Mother’s concern was reflected in her revised THREATSUM. She now put the overall chance of 387 not surviving the fly-by at one in twenty, which as far as Ribot was concerned was an extremely bad number. Taking on that risk wasn’t the problem. Ribot knew that somebody had to find the Mumtaz as soon as possible; 387 had gotten the job, and that was the end of it. No, it was waiting for the ax to fall, not knowing if it was going to happen and, if it was, when. Ribot could think of nothing worse.
He commed the combat information center, where Hosani had the watch.
“Maria, I’m going to do a walk-around to see how everyone is. When I’ve done that, I’m going to put my head down while things are quiet. But call me if you need to.”
“Sir.”
An hour later, Ribot was satisfied that all was well with his little bubble of civilization as it flew into the heart of Hammer darkness. With no sign that the Hammer ships were going to leave their berths, Ribot slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.
Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD
Planetary Transfer Station, in Clarke Orbit around Commitment Planet
Ever since the coded pinchcomms message announcing the successful takeover of Mumtaz had come through from Comonec, the tension inside Digby had built.
He knew all too well that with every step the project took, the personal risk to him grew. It wasn’t just because Merrick needed him less and less. It wasn’t just Digby’s suspicion that Merrick had no intention of letting him survive. No, it was the Feds. If they showed their hand too early, Merrick would know instantly that he had been betrayed. At that point, as Merrick had explained to him with admirable clarity and force of purpose, Digby’s life was forfeit whether or not he’d been responsible for the breach, and he would be handed over to DocSec for disposal.
At least, he thought with some relief as the up-shuttle from McNair finally docked with the planetary transfer station, he was putting himself outside Merrick’s immediate reach. If he could delay his return to Commitment for some reason or other and if the Feds took their time mounting their rescue mission, Merrick would begin to believe that he had gotten away with it, and his justifiable lack of trust in Digby might fade to the point where there was no need to dispose of him.
One thing was absolutely clear: If he wanted to survive to see his wife again, he had better not be anywhere near Merrick when the Feds did make their move. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the best place for him to be, the only safe place for him to be, was dirtside on Eternity, overseeing the terraforming project.
He would have to invent some plausible reasons why a brigadier general of marines who knew less than nothing about terraforming should be heading up the project rather than Professor Cornelius Wang, formerly head of the School of Exobiology at the University of McNair. Wang was now a resident of Hell after some very ill-advised comments on the mental state of the councillor for the preservation of doctrine, one Angus Jessop. Wang’s mistake had been to make those comments to his deputy, Marais Landon, a man he’d known almost all his adult life and one of the few people he thought he could trust. Sadly for Professor Wang, his faith in his deputy had been misplaced, and he was on Hell to prove it while Landon enjoyed being the new head of the School of Exobiology.
Though Digby privately agreed wholeheartedly with Wang’s statement that Jessop was, and Digby could quote verbatim from the investigating tribunal’s records, “a mentally unstable psychopath who was a disgrace to Kraa,” he would never be so stupid as to say so publicly. Sadly for Wang, his defense—that he had been very drunk and had meant it only as a joke—had cut no ice with the tribunal. Their unsympathetic view, supported by precedents stretching back to the early years of the Hammer of Kraa, was that alcohol promoted the truth; it did not confuse or obscure it. After a trial lasting all of two and a half minutes and with his character witnesses left outside the tribunal chamber uncalled and unheard—Wang had managed to find two friends not only brave but stupid enough to stand up in public on his behalf—the tribunal did what it was paid to do and found him guilty before passing his case for confirmation of sentence up to the Supreme Tribunal for the Preservation of the Faith.
Two minutes after his sentencing hearing closed, Wang was on his way to a ten-year stay in Hell without the chance to say goodbye to his wife and three children.
But Digby had no doubts, none at all, that Wang would do an outstanding job. By Kraa, he would have plenty of incentives, not the least of which was Digby’s firm promise that he would never have to return to Hell again. But it seemed to Digby that he would have to point out to Chief Councillor Merrick that people like that couldn’t be
trusted, and then it would be obvious that Digby would be best used making sure that Wang and his crew of xenobiologists, xenoecologists, atmospheric scientists, logistics engineers, and the rest—amazing who ended up on Hell, thought Digby—behaved themselves. In the best interests of the project as a whole, of course.
A small security incident would do the trick, Digby decided. Nothing too serious but enough to encourage Merrick to leave him where he was until the Feds came and put an end to the whole lunatic scheme, as they surely would. Of that he had absolutely no doubt.
Five minutes later and much happier in his mind, he was safely onboard the Councillor class light scout Myosan, the small starship marked out as one of the chief councillor’s personal flotilla by a titanium hull polished to a mirror finish, by gold trim, and by its massive Kraa sunburst symbols, also in gold.
As Digby gave the orders to drop from the transfer station and clear Commitment as soon as possible, he settled back in a comfortable armchair in his private suite, facing the holovid display that was taking feeds from the hull-mounted holocams. Myosan was one of the fastest starships in the Hammer order of battle, and if all went well, it would have Digby safely docked at the Hell transfer station in time for breakfast the next day.
The telephone handset embedded in the arm of his chair chimed softly.
“Digby.”
“This is Commander Williams. Welcome back, sir.”
“Thank you, Commander. Always a pleasure to be back onboard the Myosan.”
“Thank you, sir. We have received our departure clearance and will be unberthing in ten minutes’ time. Allowing thirty minutes to maneuver clear of the transfer station, we will leave Commitment innerspace at 21:43. The microjump is scheduled for 22:20, and it will take just under five seconds to get to Hell.”
“How far, Commander?”
“A fraction under 6 billion kilometers, sir. All being well, we’ll be docking at 04:00 tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, Commander. For obvious reasons, I’ll stay up for the jumps, but then I’ll turn in. When we arrive, I’d like you to arrange a shuttle to transfer me to be at Hell Central. I have a meeting with Prison Governor Costigan at 08:30.”
“Won’t be a problem, sir. Just call the duty steward on 236 to let him know when you’d like to eat or if there’s anything else you need. Otherwise, we’ll leave you in peace.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
Late that evening, Michael had the watch. Heart in mouth, he acknowledged Mother’s report of a distinctive brilliant ultraviolet flash as yet another starship arrived in-system.
Twenty seconds later, the passive sensors had collected the data Mother needed to categorize the new arrival as military, possibly a light scout but more likely a courier.
Sick at heart, Michael agreed with Mother that it was not worth waking the captain for. He just wondered how much longer he could keep his last few tattered shreds of hope alive. Where the hell was the Mumtaz?
Sunday, September 13, 2398, UD
Hell Planet (Revelation-II) Innerspace
Digby watched the holovid with interest as the little inter-moon transfer shuttle, a modified light utility lander only 20 meters in length with a smooth white plasteel hull punctured only by the obligatory brilliant orange flashing anticollision lights, two mass driver nozzles, maneuvering reaction control jets, and landing gear, pushed away from the planetary transfer station.
Once it was clear, the shuttle changed vector sharply for its run in toward Hell Central, the twelfth and, at 1,570 kilometers in diameter, the largest of Hell’s moons and the nerve center from which Prison Governor Costigan managed Hell’s only real reason to exist: its network of driver mass plants. Digby had always considered the naming scheme very unoriginal. He had an enduring love of Shakespeare and inevitably would have turned to him for inspiration if faced with the challenge of naming twenty-two moons. But there were no Juliets or Violas, Desdemonas or Cordelias, here. Nothing about Hell was appealing enough for anyone to want to name any bit of it after any person, character, or place he or she loved or cared for.
So Hell-1,-2,-3, all the way up to Hell-22 was all the naming the moons of Revelation-II would get.
As the shuttle pulled away, the bright arc lights of the transfer station quickly coalesced behind them into a single brilliant point of orange-white light, and darkness rapidly took over. The Revelation system’s star, an orange-red dwarf, was too small, too dim, and at 5.9 billion kilometers too far away to be of any value as a source of light. Forty-six thousand kilometers below the shuttle, more sensed than seen, discernible only as a black circle cut out of the stars that hung in curtains on all sides, was the massive bulk of Hell—Revelation-II—itself, a U-Class planet with the usual ragingly violent methane, hydrogen, and helium atmosphere and precious little else worth talking about. With gravity of 107 percent of Earth normal, it had been able to host a small scattering of research stations staffed by a handful of brave souls but nothing else.
There had been a short-lived attempt dreamed up by some business expert in the Department of Economic Affairs to operate a tourist center in the vain hope that the cost of supporting the Hell penal system would come down if enough tourists could be persuaded to defray the costs of supporting the hideously expensive Commitment–Hell shuttles.
Needless to say, the scheme had not worked, doomed by the unforgiving economics of getting people into the Hell system in the first place, down to the planet, and then back home again, not to mention the significant fact, ignored by the bureaucrats in their planning, that there was little worth seeing on Hell. Once you had seen one methane storm, you had seen them all, particularly as they all happened in the pitch dark of Hell’s permanent night. To cap it all, tourists were not at all keen on sharing their accommodations with criminals even if those criminals were securely held under lock and key.
Finally, when all he could see were stars and faint black lumps that might have been moons, Digby swung the cameras to face the way they were going and keyed the holovid to put up a computer-generated overlay to help him make sense of what he wasn’t seeing.
The shuttle covered the 200 kilometers between the transfer station and Hell Central without any fuss, and as they approached, Digby was finally able to make out the dull gray-black shape of the moon and, as they curved in, the blaze of lights that marked Prison Governor Costigan’s domain. With 5 kilometers to run, the lander spun on its axis to point its mass drivers at a moon whose 1.7 m/sec2 gravitational field was able to kill the lander if it dropped from far enough out. With the usual rattling and banging of reaction control thrusters and the occasional thump from the mass drivers, the pilot eased the lander gently down Hell Central’s gravity well and onto the brilliantly lit landing pad.
Within minutes the lander had docked and Digby was safely inside the plascrete complex that was Hell Central’s raison d’être clearing the usual intense security, and stripping off his survival suit. Leaving his escort scrambling to catch up, he collected his thoughts and set off down the long, brightly lit corridors at a brisk walk toward Costigan’s office.
Costigan waved Digby into a seat in front of a large and very ugly desk.
The horrible thing was supposed to look like teak, Digby guessed. It was a pity that it looked like precisely what it really was: a very badly painted assembly of crudely veneered plasfiber panels. And behind the abomination sat Prison Governor Costigan. He was seven or so years older than Digby, and his deeply lined face radiated his trademark unhappiness.
And why not? Digby thought in an unusually sympathetic moment. Hell was hell, and the prison governor’s job was probably no fun at all. But enough sympathy, Digby thought as Costigan’s personal assistant handed him a cup of coffee. Let’s get on with it.
“Governor, first I am happy to confirm that the, uh, target should drop in-system on schedule tomorrow at 12:00 UT, give or take a few minutes. Allowing, say, five hours for the deceleration burn, we should have her standing off a safe d
istance from Hell-13 ready to do the crew change and for the transfer of personnel for processing.”
Costigan nodded. He knew all that. “What about the military? Won’t they be curious as to just who this target of yours actually is? Rear Admiral Pritchard runs things pretty tightly around here, and you’ll have noticed we’ve got a lot of ships in-system at the moment.”
Digby nodded. “Fair question. For your information, and please do not inquire any further, the target is the Esmereldan mership Maria J. Velasquez, here under charter to the chief councillor’s squadron. I should also add that she has filed a valid flight plan, has all the necessary clearances from Revelation system command, and Admiral Pritchard’s combat data center team has been given strict instructions not to mess with her.”
“Oh. Okay. Sounds good. It seems things are going well, whatever those things are.” Digby could see that Costigan desperately wanted to know what exactly he was up to.
Digby held up a cautionary hand. “Let’s not go there, Governor. Trust me when I say that there are times when you really do not want to know and this is one of those times.”
Costigan nodded, but very ungraciously.
“So you have my security team, the replacement crew for the target, and my team of scientists?”
“Yes. Security team in Holding Cage Delta-4, crew in Bravo-1, and your scientists in Kilo-4, all scared shitless, wondering what is going to happen to them. The security team especially. They are all ex-marine personnel with between two and five years to go and good records. A holding cage is not where they would expect or want to be at this stage in their sentences.”
“Well, I intend to fix that. I’ve reviewed the files of everyone you’ve nominated and can see no problems. I have a few issues with some of the people you’ve selected but nothing that I can’t resolve in the final interviews. Major Nkomo’s a very good man, an extremely competent marine. I knew him when he was a company commander in the 3/22nd before his, er, his little falling out with DocSec.
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 15