“Oh! Didn’t realize you were still here.”
“I am. And I’m just hoping that you aren’t taking this all too much to heart, sir. That would be a worry.” Ng’s face betrayed her concern.
“You’d be right to, but no, I’m not. It’s just…Well, it’s just that I’ve never been part of anything that mattered so much before, and that takes a bit of getting used to, I suppose.” He rubbed his face as Ng’s eyes seemed to bore right into his soul. Not a woman to bullshit, he thought.
Ng’s eyes softened. “That’s why sims aren’t the answer, sir. Never forget. They’ve got a fatal flaw. No risk. Nothing to lose. So keep it in perspective. Let me tell you something. I’ve always found that the real thing is easier somehow. Don’t really know why; never been able to work it out. But my theory is that some people perform better when it comes to the real thing precisely because it is risky. And I suspect that you are one of those people.”
“I hope you’re right, I hope you’re right,” Michael said doubtfully.
“Well, I think I am, and I’m not usually wrong. Anyway, that’s it for me. A shower, something to eat, and then a solid eight hours will do me. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Tuesday, October 6, 2398, UD
DLS-387, Hell System (Revelation-II) Farspace
With its usual stomach-churning lurch, 387 dropped out of pinchspace 19 million kilometers out from Hell system.
In seconds, Mother had begun to build up the normalspace tactical picture of Hell system, the threat plot blossoming with hundreds of red Hammer intercepts.
“This all seems very familiar.” Armitage grunted as the threat plot filled up with red symbols marking the mass of long-and short-range radars, lasers, and radio frequency and other emitters that infested the Hell system. One by one, Mother analyzed each intercept and downgraded the threat it presented, turning the symbols to orange as she did so. The tension in the combat information center visibly decreased as the threat plot finally changed to all orange.
“Captain, sir. Command. Threat plot is orange, ready to conduct vector alignment and deploy pinchcomsats.” Hosani didn’t try to keep the relief out of her voice. Dropping out into normalspace was bad enough. Dropping into hostile normalspace was ten times worse.
“Approved. Stand the ship down from general quarters and revert to defense stations. I’m going for a walk-around and then to my cabin.”
“Sir.”
Extravehicular activity conducted while the ship was doing 150,000 kilometers per hour was never popular, and this time it was even less so. Michael and his team were denied the protection of 387’s short-range defensive lasers, which normally were tasked with picking off any space debris that got too close to the drone team. The chance that Hammer sensors would pick up laser fire was simply too great. The risk was very real. The death of three of Bombard’s crew doing a routine drone launch five years earlier—the spacers had been drilled through one after the other by a single fragment of rock only millimeters across that had been let pass by a defective short-range laser—was all the reminder Michael’s team needed that what they were doing was a very risky business.
It was from the heart that Michael heaved a sigh of relief as the surveillance drone team finally maneuvered the last pinchcomsat out of its protective container and clear of 387.
“Command, Alfa. Pinchcomsats deployed. Containers closed and secured. Returning,” Michael commed as he and the team scrambled to get back inside 387.
“Alfa, command, roger.”
Ten minutes later, the six pinchcomsats were boosted on their way to take up their positions in orbit 4 million kilometers out from the gray-black mass that was the planet Revelation-II. Their tiny low-power pinchcomms arrays had been locked successfully on to the pinchcomms carrier wave transmitted by a temporary tactical pinchcomms relaysat drifting in deepspace 2 light-years out from the Revelation system.
Thursday, October 8, 2398, UD
29:37 Local Time
Eternity Base
For a moment Kerri Helfort struggled to remember where she was.
It didn’t take long; the hated breather mask cutting into her face saw to that. She rolled onto her back and checked the time. She had twenty minutes before midnight and reveille for Red Shift. She hated getting up in the dark and, along with everyone else, had been more than happy with Digby’s announcement that the much-disliked system of two back-to-back shifts seven days a week would end on Friday. Even the stupidest Hammer, and Kerri hadn’t taken long to work out that Digby was far from stupid, understood that you couldn’t work people nearly fifteen hours a day every day of the week forever.
And so this Saturday would be a big day for the mostly unwilling inhabitants of the Hammer’s newest settled planet.
Not only would it be their first free weekend, it also would mark the end of phase 1 of the terraforming project with all the primary infrastructure well on its way to completion. With the massive methane/carbon dioxide converters now in final testing, the next day would see the carbon sequestration and oxygen production plant commissioned, all of which was something of a relief to Kerri and everyone else dirtside. Nobody liked the idea of depending on the breather oxygen supplies being ferried down from the Mumtaz. Speaking of which, she saw that her oxygen supplies would get marginal during the shift, so she’d need to get replacement cylinders. And while she was at it, she thought, she might as well cycle the breather’s molecular filters.
But far more important to Kerri was Sam’s welfare. Not surprisingly, Sam had taken the hijacking very hard. But things were looking up. Thankfully, the biomass plant was only days away from final acceptance, and once it was on-stream, seeding the planet with geneered plants and cyanobacteria would start in earnest. In the absence of anything better to do, Sam had secured a position on one of the crews that would be responsible for field biomass management and atmospheric monitoring. Kerri said a small prayer of thanks for the experience Sam had gotten back on Ashakiran at the Manindi Center for Oceanic Research. Even though it was largely irrelevant, it had sounded impressive enough to land her the job.
And the job was a good one.
Sam would be a member of Doctor Jack Loudon’s atmosphere monitoring team. Despite his cultural heritage, Loudon seemed different from the rest of the Hammers who had been brought dirtside. Most unusually, he did not seem to share the view held by most Hammer men that all women were good for was sex, reproduction, and housekeeping and that if they really had to take paid employment, it had to be doing the crappy jobs that men or cheap labor imported from Scobie’s World couldn’t be persuaded to do. In fact, Kerri strongly suspected that Jack Loudon’s three or so years as an unwilling guest at the Hammer’s premier prison facility had made him think long and hard about what the Hammer of Kraa really stood for.
To top it all and thanks to Sam’s holding a basic grade flier’s license, a sixteenth birthday present, she had been selected for flight duties. That was not really a big deal given the power of the average flier’s AI and the fact that almost everyone had a fliers’ license of some sort, but nonetheless it was not something offered to everybody. She strongly suspected that Doctor Loudon’s promotion of Sam had been motivated by more than professional interest, but she didn’t care. For a Hammer, he seemed like a nice guy, and if he wasn’t, it was time Sam learned to handle herself.
Finally, there was the icing on the cake. One of the guys from the project planning office had told her over lunch the previous day that he had overheard two of the Hammers discussing the possibility that they would get their neuronics back. Mumtaz had an entire planetary neuronics system sitting in containers somewhere, and because the entire project was being run by AIs, Kerri could see that it made no sense not to bring the power of neuronics-based decision support to bear as well. She hoped Professor Wang could persuade Digby to relent on the matter. It would be nice not to have that awful empty, blank feeling in her head anymore.
Not that it was as simple as not having ne
uronics.
Like all the older Mumtazers she spoke to, she felt the awful certainty that everything they had spent their entire lives building—careers, homes, families, friends—was gone forever, every atom of it vanished. The loss hung over all of them every waking minute of the day like a black cloud, and no matter how hard she tried, it was always there—an immovable monument to everything she’d never see again.
And Andrew. How she missed him. There wasn’t a waking moment when she didn’t think of him, and the thought that they would never hold each other close again tore at her heart with an intensity that was almost physical. Not to mention Michael. How must he be feeling? If it were not for Sam, she feared she might have given up completely. Some already had, retreating into a world of drug-soaked might-have-beens. By God, it was hard to get up every day, to work up alongside those Hammer swine, to keep going hour after hour.
In truth, she did it only because of Sam.
Worst of all was knowing that without the goodwill of the Hammer, they were all dead. Digby had made sure of that by keeping the food plant in orbit, and there was no sign of its being brought dirtside. In the days immediately after being dumped on Eternity, the very small number of people with some claim to military experience naturally had coalesced around Kerri; she was by far the most senior service officer around. But every way the group looked at it, they were jammed. All the early talk of violent action against Digby and his goons had foundered on the rocks of cold hard reality: They had no weapons, they had no way of sustaining life, and they had no way of getting off the planet, and even if they somehow did, they had nowhere to run to and no one to call for help.
The group, now self-deprecatingly called the escape committee, still met regularly, but the focus had shifted to intelligence gathering and to planning what they would do in the unlikely event that the cavalry arrived to rescue them. Despite her private fears that the whole process was a waste of time, Kerri played her part—strong, firm, and resolute—and tried to keep alive the few embers of hope she still had left.
Another quick check of the time told her that she had three minutes to Red Shift reveille. If she got going now, she would beat the rush through the showers and be first in line for breakfast. Sitting up, she grabbed her towel and washing kit and set off down the still-dark shed that was home to almost a hundred fellow Mumtazers, their sleeping forms quiet and unmoving around her.
Monday, October 12, 2398, UD
DLS-387, Hell System Nearspace
Ribot was tired. Everyone was tired.
It had been a long run in, and with every kilometer the tension and pressure had mounted. This was no fly-by, safely in and out at a brisk 300,000 kph like the last time, with the option to jump to the safety of pinchspace always available.
No, this was a drop right into the Hammer’s backyard, and as 387’s speed fell away and the distance closed, the risk increased exponentially. Ribot and everyone else onboard knew only too well that 387 was a sitting duck if it was detected by a stealth Hammer. Even the slowest rail-gun crew would have no problem picking them off. But so far, so good. They had come millions of kilometers since dropping out of pinchspace, and only intermittently had the threat plot gone to red, and then only for a few seconds as a newly switched-on Hammer radar came online.
“Captain, sir.” Leon Holdorf had the watch, and the strain was showing in his drawn and lined face.
“Yes, Leon.”
“One minute to main engine cutoff, sir. Vector nominal. 2.2 million kilometers and 98 hours 43 minutes to run to Hell-14.”
Ribot nodded. If the tension was bad now, it would be ten times worse as they closed in on Hell-14 and its massive arrays of sensors. Still, that was what stealthed ships such as 387 were built to do even if that still left the problem of the gravitronics array. It was the one sensor that the Feds had yet to work out a sure way of defeating, though the Hammers had done what they could to make things easier for 387: The dumb fucks hadn’t put new grav wave detectors up to replace the unreliable antiques that had been on Hell-14 for decades. As the arrays measured the rate of change in the fabric of space-time caused by a moving mass, the only tactic that worked was to make the approach as slow as possible, and even that was no guarantee of success.
“Main engine cutoff, sir.” Holdorf’s comment was a formality. Even when the ship was operating at very low power, the sibilant whisper of its main engines had penetrated every corner, and the sudden silence as it fell in toward Hell-14 seemed almost deafening.
“Roger. Michael’s team ready to go?”
“Yes, sir. Deploying now.”
Two decks above the combat information center, Michael and his team cycled the air locks and moved toward the upper container stowage area. Michael moved to port, and Petty Officer Strezlecki to starboard.
As they moved aft, 387 was visible below them only as a formless black void razor-cut out of the billions of needle-sharp stars that littered the sky. Michael’s stomach twitched as he moved across the empty nothingness. On his left side sat the Revelation system’s distant orange-red dwarf star. A miserable excuse for a star it was, too, Michael thought. At only 0.65 sols in mass and 0.28 sols in luminosity, it was barely noticeable across 6 billion kilometers, shedding no useful light on Michael and his team as they moved aft across the formless abyss that was 387’s hull.
As they reached the cargo bays, Michael comforted himself with the thought that at least they weren’t doing 150,000 kph like the last time, an experience neither he nor his team had much enjoyed. In deference to their proximity to the Hammer, this exercise saw the team secured to the ship by fiber-optic comms tethers. Even at ultralow power, the risk of suit comms being intercepted was deemed too great, so tethers were the only answer even if the damn things were a pain in the ass. They appeared to have a mind of their own, and no matter how carefully Michael and the rest of the team maneuvered, the thin black cables, almost invisible in the nearly total darkness, seemed to be determined to wrap themselves around everybody and everything.
It was a frustrating five minutes later before Michael and Petty Officer Strezlecki had gotten their teams positioned safely and were ready to start.
“Command, Alfa. Open upper cargo doors.”
“Roger, opening.”
Slowly the massive doors swung open, the interior of the cargo bay barely visible in the small helmet lights of the team. Michael wasted no time. Open cargo doors and exposed containers compromised 387’s stealth capability, and Ribot had made it abundantly clear that time was absolutely of the essence, a sentiment wholly shared by Michael and his team.
As soon as the gap was large enough, the drone team was in, their target the two forwardmost containers. In seconds, the container seals were off and the doors were opened to reveal an array of what looked like elongated black eggs, four to a container, the formless blobs in their stealthcoats just over a meter long. One by one, securing straps were released, protective packaging removed and safely stowed, and tethers attached, and the eggs floated out to drift a few meters off 387’s hull. Once they were clear and had taken the time to check that all loose packaging had been accounted for, the container doors were closed and secure, and all tethers were clear, Michael ordered the port cargo doors shut.
“Command, Alfa. Ready for system tests.”
“Command, roger. Stand by.”
Within seconds, Michael’s neuronics confirmed that all eight intercept bots were nominal. Without further delay, the tethers were disconnected, and with a gentle shove, the eggs were pushed clear of 387. His team’s job done, Michael commed Strezlecki.
“Strez, Alfa, sitrep.”
“Roger, Alfa. Krachovs Alfa and Bravo deployed and mounted. Fifteen minutes to deploy the rest.”
“Roger, Strez. Need any assistance?”
“Negative.”
“Roger, Alfa and team returning to ship. Out.”
Michael was happy to leave Strezlecki to it. The Krachov shroud generators were very large and coul
d be difficult to mount. But if Strezlecki could get two mounted in the time it took Michael and his team to deploy the intercept bots, she certainly didn’t need any help from a novice like him.
He took a final look down the length of the ship in an optimistic attempt to spot the Hell system. Even though he’d commed Mother to put the planetary datum on his heads-up display to tell him where to look, there was nothing to be seen against the dazzling array of stars spread out before him. Not to worry. He was damn sure he’d see more than enough of the Hell system before they were finished, he thought as he dropped down the air lock.
Fifteen minutes later, Petty Officer Strezlecki and her team were finished and 387 was safely buttoned up, much to the barely concealed relief of all onboard.
Michael sat at the back of the combat information center and watched as Mother, communicating over ultra-low-power frequency-jittering whisker-beam lasers, sent the interceptbots on their way. Everyone onboard, from the most junior spacer up, understood the crucial importance of the insignificant-looking black eggs. They had a lot to do. First, they had to locate and tap into the laser and microwave backbones that formed the administrative comms network used by the Hammers to run every nonmilitary element of the Hell prison system. Second, they had to crack the low-grade encryption used by the network. Third, they had to drop autonomous softwarebots into the system to try to search out where the Mumtaz’s crew, its male military passengers, and the hijackers had been taken. Fourth, they had to report back.
As always, there was a fifth, the key to light scout covert ops: Don’t get caught.
And if they didn’t succeed, this part of the operation would be a bust, and God only knew how many people would be condemned to rot on Hell. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Friday, October 16, 2398, UD
DLS-387, on Final Approach to Hell-14
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 23