As they walked back to the open-sided hut that passed for home, Kerri marveled for a moment at how the young girl had been transformed in the space of a few short weeks. The steel in her voice, the determined look on her face, the ability to rise above the moment, were pure Helfort. For the first time in many weeks Kerri’s mood lifted.
Perhaps it would all work out, though for the life of her she couldn’t see how or when.
Thursday, October 1, 2398, UD
DLS-387, departing Space Battle Station 4, Jackson’s World
As SBS-4 receded slowly behind 387 as she boosted out-system to make the jump back to Hell, finally and much to Michael’s relief, the order to fall out from berthing stations came through.
In the whole history of humanspace, Michael was pretty sure, there had never been such a thing as a comfortable space suit. Worse for someone destined to see a lot of the inside of space suits, he doubted there ever would be. In front of and around him, Michael’s team morphed from the large orange lumps that made up 387’s EVA team into real people who, with suit turnaround complete, disappeared to do whatever spacers did when off-watch.
But no such luck for Michael, and after a few words with Spacer Karpov, the youngest member of the surveillance drone division, he and Strezlecki disappeared down the hatch, heading for the first planning meeting with the covert support operations team and its extremely taciturn and uncommunicative leader, Warrant Officer Jacqueline Ng, known as Doc but only to anyone prepared to take liberties with a woman who had a Fleetwide reputation as a thoroughly competent and tough operator.
As Michael entered the wardroom, Ng and her senior spacers-two chiefs and two petty officers-were sitting waiting, marked out as special forces by left shoulder patches embroidered with one of the most elusive and smartest alien animals yet discovered by man, the T’changa from Carr’s World, an animal with the ability to adjust its skin pattern and color to blend into the background so fast and so effectively that it put marine-issue chromaflage suits to shame. But it didn’t escape Michael’s notice that the regulation acknowledgment of an officer’s arrival was conspicuously absent.
Fuck that, Michael thought. He didn’t care if Ng was a fucking legend.
“Doc. How are you? Ready to go?” Michael’s voice was deliberately enthusiastic, as though they were there to swap bullshit war stories-of which he had a few now, come to think of it-over a few beers rather than review the difficult and dangerous business of landing a deepspace light scout on one of Hell system’s outer moons right under the noses of the Hammer.
Waving Strezlecki into the seat alongside him, Michael sat at the end of the small table with a fixed grin on his face and waited a moment while the chunky woman, her hair streaked with iron-gray and her face expressionless, looked steadily at him for a good ten seconds. Then, as a tiny small smile turned up one corner of her mouth, she leaned forward and half stood up, followed by the rest of her team.
“My apologies, sir. We’ve quite forgotten our manners.”
Michael couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing, less at the elaborate charade he and Ng had played and more because he successfully had navigated yet another trap that the people who ran the day-to-day business of the Fleet liked to set for young officers.
“Not a problem, Warrant Officer Ng, not a problem.”
A tiny nod from Ng acknowledged Michael’s small victory as he continued. “It’s good to have you and your team onboard. I think you know we’ve seen a lot of the Hammer close up, and it seems we are going to do it again. Now, before we start, I’ve commed you all with the cargo manifests-all containers loaded and stowed as per the plan you sent up. And none bent or damaged, I’m happy to say.”
“Pleased to hear it, sir. We get very unhappy when grunts-sorry, sir, regular spacers-damage our stuff.” From the look on her face, Michael was prepared to believe her. “By the way, sir, could you give my regards to your parents when next you see them. I served with both of them way back when.”
God’s blood, Michael thought. Was there any spacer over the age of fifty who hadn’t served with one or the other or both of his parents? “Of course I will.” He paused for a second. “You know that I have a personal stake in this business?”
“We do, sir. Is it an issue?” Ng’s face and voice were carefully neutral.
“No. Just makes me want to get the job done right, that’s all. And I’m sure if it gets too personal, someone will take the time to let me know.”
Ng put her head back and laughed. “I can tell you, sir, you are your parents’ son. Now, shall we?”
“Yes, let’s start. Captain Ribot wants a joint briefing at 20:00 this evening, so we need to get on with it. First, let me introduce my offsider, Petty Officer Strezlecki.” Ng and Strezlecki exchanged frosty nods. She was what Ng was pleased to call a grunt, and it was no surprise that Strezlecki was no great fan of special forces; clearly, she wasn’t going to make an exception even for a woman with Ng’s fearsome reputation. “Second, have you gotten everything you need from 387?”
“We have. Lieutenant Kapoor has gotten us everything we needed. We’re well settled in, thanks.”
Michael hadn’t expected anything else. “Okay, they didn’t tell us much about dirtside covert ops at the college. We always got the feeling that the powers that be didn’t exactly approve. So this is all new to me, and Petty Officer Strezlecki tells me that she’s done precious little dirtside herself, so I think we should hand it over to you. In all honesty, Warrant Officer Ng, I think we have to be guided by you.”
The fact that there would have been a riot if he had tried to throw his weight around with people with the experience of Ng and her team didn’t have to be mentioned. Everybody knew it. But there were plenty of fresh-out-of-the-egg officers who wouldn’t have picked up on that.
“Okay. Makes sense. Anyway, meet my team. Chief Petty Officers Harris and Mosharaf, Petty Officers Patel and Gaetano. My two leading hands are prepping gear, so that’s the lot. Now, from the latest intel, we are pretty sure we know what we are up against.
“Even though at about 60 k’s in diameter it’s not the smallest of Hell’s moons, Hell-14 has no value as a driver mass mine on account of its relatively low density. Some sort of volcanic material riddled with gas bubbles and holes. It’s also very rugged, though nobody’s got a good explanation why, with peaks rising 200 to 300 hundred meters above the surface datum and depressions almost as deep. So the Hammer has no interest in it other than as a surveillance post, and even then not a very good one. Because installing a large array grav detector would have involved some very serious earthmoving, they have limited their sensors to two polar installations. Let’s have a look.”
The holovid behind Ng sprang to life with an image like no moon Michael had ever seen before.
Hell-14 was something out of a nightmare, with razor-sharp peaks lifting into the star-studded sky, their sides falling sheer into deeply fissured twisting ravines broken occasionally by depressions into which an eon’s worth of dust had accumulated slowly. Some were easily large enough to berth an entire squadron of Fleet heavy cruisers.
The sensor installations were two large four-sided white towers protected by antipersonnel lasers and studded with passive sensor arrays and the large flat panels of phased-array radar. The tower was topped off with more phased-array panels and finally a small-array grav detector. To get the sensors up above the terrain, the Hammers had simply picked the two largest mountains at what would have been the poles if the moon had rotated and laser-sliced their tops off. The ground for kilometers around each installation was littered with the resultant debris, some pieces hundreds of tons in mass and held to Hell-14’s surface only by its tiny gravitational field.
The overall effect was one of utter confusion. Michael could immediately see the problem: how to get through what was in effect a hugely complex three-dimensional maze without being detected by the polar arrays. That was, of course, assuming that they’d gotten in undetected in the first place.
“Um” was all Michael could say. He couldn’t begin to think how to solve a problem like this. He looked helplessly at Strezlecki, but she, too, was stumped.
“Well, the good news is that the surface approach is always the primary problem in these missions. Once we are close enough, it’s pretty straightforward. But getting close enough without being detected and bringing the wrath of the Hammer down on all of our heads, well, that’s the tricky bit.”
“But you do have a way to do this, don’t you?” Michael asked somewhat anxiously. For one awful moment, it occurred to him that Ng wanted to use the surveillance drone team as sacrificial lambs. As quickly as Michael dismissed the thought as ridiculous, Ng put him out of his misery.
“Let me introduce you to a little toy we use a lot, the optical terrain analysis vehicle, but known in the trade as OTTO. And very nifty they are, too. Here’s one.”
The holovid switched to show a rough uneven lump of rock. It could have been any one of trillions of bits of rock floating around in space except that Michael imagined he could see the hands of the design engineers in the careful sculpting of the surface.
“It’s a surveillance drone just like ours but without the stealth coat and a lot smaller,” said Strezlecki.
Ng laughed. “Well, yes and no. The difference is inside. What it does is produce a very precise map of the surface terrain using only optical sensors feeding into the mother and father of all quantum computer-based AIs. No active transmissions at all, and it produces a surface map that’s as accurate as anything from a high-definition 3-D mapping radar. Don’t ask me how, but it does. And all you need to know is that we have had a number of these babies do the necessary fly-bys to get us the terrain maps we need. And not only do we get a map, OTTO’s AI produces the recommended routes from 387’s landing site to the poles, taking into account the threat sensors we are up against, load sizes, and so on.”
Ng switched the holovid back and zoomed it in. In a small depression almost exactly midway between the two poles and shielded from them by massive curtains of rock sat an image of 387. From it ran two colored lines, one to each of the polar sensor stations, each twisting and turning through the fractured terrain like the tracks of a Saturday night drunk.
Ng finally broke the silence that followed. “Bastards, I think it’s fair to say, but they are the best routes we’ve got. Route North comes in at 69 kilometers, and Route South at 57. Could be worse.”
Michael and Strezlecki stared at the holovid, appalled. Sixty or so kilometers didn’t sound far, but neither one knew of any suit that would do the job, and some of the gaps were decidedly tricky for sleds to get through. Then it clicked with both of them simultaneously.
“Sherpas,” Michael exclaimed. “Mountain climbing,” said Strezlecki, as one.
Ng laughed, but this time openly and from the stomach.
“Well, bugger me. You’d be amazed how long it takes some people to get the answer. So yes, we have to use your team plus a few others to stage supplies up the line and set up the habs along the routes so that my team can get there safely, do the job, and get back. Now that we’ve worked out the strategy, let’s work out the details.”
Ribot sat back in his chair. “Looks good to me. Anyone have any questions or issues?” He used the pause to look at each of his team members in turn. This was too tricky an operation for anyone to sit on a possible problem, and he wanted everyone to know it. The response was a succession of shakes of the head.
“Last chance to speak up. Anybody? No? Okay, then. Well, you all know me well enough by now, so I want the sim scenario set up by tomorrow morning. Maria, I’d like you and John to lend a hand on that, please. Once it’s up, I want as many run-throughs as we have time for. Michael, Warrant Officer Ng is the one with the experience here, so she’ll be mission commander, of course. Any problems with that?”
Helfort actually looked surprised. “God, no, sir. That’s absolutely fine.”
“Good. By my rough calculations, the entire mission will take five days, so I want the first run completed by”-he paused for a moment while he worked it out-“October 7. Let’s schedule the debrief for 20:00. That okay with you, Warrant Officer Ng?”
“Fine, sir. We’ll look forward to it.”
“Right, then, I’ll stay out of it until then. Michael, you and your team are exempt from all duties with the exception of general quarters, of course. Talk through the people you need with the XO, and then Jacqui, can you make sure the gaps in the rosters are covered? Any more? No? Thanks, everybody.”
Friday, October 2, 2398, UD
Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet
Councillor Marek pushed his microvid screen away after presenting a summary, mercifully short, of his report.
Merrick felt a momentary stab of fear. What in Kraa’s sacred name were the Feds up to? Marek’s people could make no sense of the apparent link between Operation Corona, whatever that was, and Vice Admiral Jaruzelska. But vague though the intelligence was, it had come from four sources, all consistently asserting that something big was up, it was called Corona, and Jaruzelska was in charge.
So the Feds were up to something. But what?
For a moment he considered the awful possibility that the Feds had uncovered the truth about the Mumtaz. Just as quickly, he pushed that thought away. No, operational security had been as tight as the ass on his father’s proverbial duck. If the Feds had found out, Merrick would have staked his life that the Hammer would have heard from them by now with all the usual moaning and complaining from that dickless wonder of an ambassador of theirs. But maybe he’d better stall just in case, he told himself.
No, he had a better idea, a much better idea and one that had been germinating for weeks. Now its time had come. Time to cut the head off the intelligence department. Together with Faith’s seemingly unstoppable slide into chaos, the inevitable confusion that followed would keep everyone’s head down, probably for months. He looked benignly down the Council table at Marek.
“Thank you, Councillor. For my part, I don’t think we should read too much into the reports. Those Kraa-less Fed bastards are always up to something that never comes to much, so unless anyone has anything to add, I suggest that intelligence keep an eye on things and we leave it at that. Councillor Marek?”
“Yes, Chief Councillor.” Marek struggled to keep the relief out of his voice. No doubt, he had expected Merrick to dish out his usual thrashing for bringing vague and unsubstantiated rumors to the Council table, but not this time, it seemed. “We’ll see if anything turns up, but as you say, the Feds are always chasing after some shadow or other, so that’s probably all it is.”
“Fine. And that brings us to our last agenda item, the situation on Faith.” Merrick’s voice, which had been amiable and relaxed in the exchange with Marek, hardened into steely sarcasm as he turned to look directly at his nemesis.
“Well, Councillor Polk! It seems that the marines have taken the situation under control with only at last count, let me see, 426 civilian, 231 DocSec, and 32 marine deaths and Kraa only knows how many thousands of wounded. Oh, and I forgot, Planetary Councillor Herris. I’m not sure what category we would put his imminent demise under, but I think we can add him to the list. Councillor Khan?” Merrick looked down the table at the man responsible for the internal security of the Hammer Worlds.
Khan nodded. “Yes, Chief Councillor. Herris was tried this morning and sentenced to death without leave to appeal. Sentence has been confirmed by the Supreme Tribunal and will be carried out tomorrow morning.”
Merrick smiled broadly. “Well, that’s what happens when you treat this Council with disrespect.” He could barely keep the triumph out of his voice. “You must be as relieved as the rest of us are, Councillor Polk, not just that the situation on Faith is back under control but that Planetary Councillor Herris has paid the price for his incompetence and corruption.”
The impotent
fury in Polk’s eyes lifted Merrick’s spirits no end. He enjoyed impotent fury as long as it was in other people.
“Yes, Chief Councillor,” Polk muttered reluctantly.
What else could the spineless bastard say? Merrick thought.
“However,” he continued, “it must be said that the situation on Faith is far from secure. I don’t think I need to remind anybody of the Great Schism. The Supreme Council thought they had that under control, and look how it ended up. And I’m not just talking about the heretics, either.”
A small shiver ran down the back of every man at the table. The power and wealth that accrued to councillors were substantial, but they were well matched by the risks. Within days of the end of the Great Schism, James MacFarlane had overthrown the Council and had installed himself as chief councillor before hunting down and hanging every councillor by one leg from the nearest tree in time-honored Hammer mob fashion, with the people howling their triumph over the corpses as they swung slowly in the wind.
Merrick watched and enjoyed the fear so visibly obvious in the eyes of all present. “Yes, well. Now that I have your attention, let me just say this. Councillor Marek!”
Marek jerked upright.
“Ah, good, Councillor Marek. You are paying attention. Now, I am sure it’s abundantly clear to everyone here that you made the situation worse by refusing to provide the Council with honest reports on the causes of the unrest on Faith and the resultant heavy loss of life. So”-Merrick dropped his voice to a sibilant whisper, forcing the men around the table to lean forward to hear him-“I believe it is impossible for you to continue. I require your resignation. Now, if you wouldn’t mind.”
As Merrick slipped the knife in, the shock on Marek’s face was instant and total, but he could only sit there immobile, unable to believe what he had heard. As the full import of Merrick’s demand finally sank in, he turned in desperation to his patron, mouth working but saying nothing.
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