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 neuronics.
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 150,0
00 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 could 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
“Okay, everybody. Now it gets interesting, so on your toes.”
Ribot’s tone was carefully controlled. Hell-14 and its sensor arrays lay only 5,400 kilometers ahead of them, and as the sims had pointed out, this was the point of maximum risk. Unavoidably, 387’s stealth integrity was slightly degraded by the Krachov shroud generators even though they were mounted as far aft as possible to get the maximum protection from the flare of the hull. Ribot felt uncomfortably exposed even if Mother was sure that the risk was minimal.
To make things worse, it needn’t have been that way. Fleet had only gotten as far as installing the smaller tactical shroud generators for antilaser defense. Integral Krachov shroud generators big enough to shield a light scout’s main engine burn had long been promised, but relatively modest though the generators were, the work needed to put them into existing ships was significant and was done only during major quarter-life refits. That put 387’s shroud generators at least seven years away, which was no help to him right now.
Ribot cursed softly. He, like every other light scout captain, was obsessive when it came to keeping his ship stealth, and the sooner he could get the protective shroud out and the damn Krachov generators stowed, the happier he would be.
“Captain, sir. Ready to deploy Krachov shroud.” For the benefit of a crowded combat information center, Armitage’s voice sounded firmly confident, but Ribot knew better. Krachov shrouds big enough to shield a ship safely were relatively new, and though they had performed well in trials, they had never been used for real, certainly never when the cost of failure was so high. Not for the first time, Ribot shivered at the thought of what an ambushing Hammer warship could do to them.
“Deploy.”
And with that, the eight Krachov shroud generators began to spew out what in broad daylight would have looked like a gigantic swarm of tiny flies. In fact, they were small wafer-thin disks, hundreds of thousands of them. Each was carefully designed, some to absorb the radar energy thrown at the ship by the Hammer’s phased-array radars, most to diffuse and deflect the infrared signature of 387’s main engines as they braked the ship for its rendezvous with Hell-14.
The shroud’s job was simple: to stop the Hammer’s sensors on Hell-14 and elsewhere from seeing 387. Easy to say and very hard to do, so hard that the Krachov shroud had been in development for more than ten years before the hard-nosed men and women of Fleet’s operational acceptance board would allow it to be used in earnest. And 387 was the guinea pig, the first warship to take the system into a hostile environment.
Within minutes the shroud began to take shape. The sheer scale and complexity of the task were huge as the shroud’s master AI carefully choreographed an elaborate space dance across a dense spiderweb of ultra-low-power laser comms, with hundreds of subordinate AIs manipulating each disk’s tiny onboard processors. In response, minute explosive puff thrusters fired to move the disks into a complex three-dimensional set of disk clouds; the overall shroud was many hundreds of meters across and perfectly constructed to put a thick layer of disks between 387 and every known Hammer sensor in Hell nearspace. If the engineers had gotten it right, the radio frequency energy thrown at them by the Hammer’s radars would be absorbed and the thermal energy produced by 387’s main engines would be contained by the Krachov shroud-just like pissing into a bottle, as one of the development team had delicately explained it to Ribot-allowing only a tiny, undetectable fraction to leak through. Ribot hoped that the technical intelligence reports about the sensitivity of Hammer radars and infrared sensors were correct.
If the TECHINT reports weren’t�
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As the shroud was being shaped to the master AI’s satisfaction, Michael and his team had been deployed, working frantically to recover the now-useless shield generators. Finally, with the generators safely secured, all was set and the master AI gave the word. As one, the disk clouds making up the shroud began to accelerate gently away from 387. With a final check to make sure the shield was far enough away not to be disrupted by main engine efflux, Mother carefully turned ship and fired up the main engines. 387 began its slow deceleration down to Hell-14, its modest exhaust plume safely hidden from the Hammer’s infrared sensors behind the Krachov shroud.
Not one to miss an opportunity to do some housekeeping, Ribot extended the heat panels, which quickly turned a bright cherry-red as they dumped the excess heat load accumulated during 387’s long run in to Hell-14.
After desuiting in record-breaking time, Michael returned to his usual position behind the goofers line at the back of the combat information center to watch as the holovid tracked the shroud swarm as it moved away, blotting out the stars as it did so.
He was beyond tired. Ribot’s endless sims had seen to that. But tired as he was, Michael could see the sense in Ribot’s relentless pursuit of perfection. Even in the final run, with every possible problem thrown at them to slow them, Michael’s sherpas had gotten Ng and her team to the poles on schedule and, more important, without being spotted.
Now all Ribot had to do was get the ship down safely.
Knees sagging with fatigue, Michael decided to call it quits. He and the rest of his team were now officially off duty until 387 touched down on Hell-14, and that was over a day away before 387 would drift in to Hell-14 at a snail-like-he’d checked the navplan with Mother-5 kph.
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