The Final Battle

by Graham Sharp Paul

  “This is Low-Energy Antiproton Facility Number One,” Ndegwa said, waving a hand across the chaos. “LEAF-1 we call it, and it’s the first of the twenty LEAFs we plan to construct.”

  “Is it working?” Polk asked, casting a skeptical eye around the cavern. Apart from the rush of the air-conditioning and a myriad of status lights, there was nothing to say that the facility was actually functioning.

  “Yes, it is. LEAF-1 came on-stream five weeks ahead of schedule. It’s currently operating at 15 percent of its planned capacity, though we plan to be at 100 percent within six months.”

  “Good. I do not want this project to take one day longer than it absolutely has to. The Hammer of Kraa needs its antimatter capability sooner rather than later. Understood?”

  Ndegwa nodded. “Yes, sir. And while we’re talking about schedules, there’s something I’d like you to see. This way, please.”

  Polk followed the man along the catwalk and into a small meeting room that was empty except for a table on which sat a plasfiber box.

  “This,” Ndegwa said, reaching in to pull out an object two-thirds the size of a shoe box, its metallic surface polished to a mirror finish and unbroken except for two ports and a digital readout, “is an antimatter container from our new Mark-50C warhead, and it has been charged with antihydrogen produced by the Hendrik Island plant.”

  Polk reared back; knowing how close he was to the unimaginable power contained inside the container, he could not help himself. “Kraa’s blood,” he hissed, “are you fucking mad?”

  “It’s quite safe, sir,” Ndegwa said, dropping the warhead back into its box with a thud that rattled the table and made Polk flinch.

  “I know it is,” Polk said, cursing himself for letting Ndegwa see his fear. “It was just … wait. Did you just say it’s filled with antihydrogen produced here?”

  “I did. And we are well ahead of schedule; we plan to have sixteen operational Mark-50Cs by the end of this year.”

  “Who else knows about this?” Polk asked, his mind flooded all of a sudden with the strategic possibilities sixteen antimatter-armed missiles opened up.

  “Apart from the three of us here, only the people in warhead production.”

  “What about those Pascanicians scumbags?”

  “We do not allow them anywhere near the warheads. They might know all there is to know about magnetic flux engineering, but they have no idea how to weaponize antimatter, and it’s my policy to keep it that way.”

  “Good.” Polk turned to Ngaro. “This changes things, Lou,” he said. “Find Admiral Kerouac. I want to see him as soon as we get back to McNair.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, Chief Councillor,” Admiral Kerouac said, “we’ll need to look at this in more detail, but a first strike against the Feds, even with only sixteen Mark-50C warheads in our inventory, would destroy most of their warship construction yards and a good percentage of their fleet as well. There would be considerable collateral damage to the civilian population, though. The majority of their yards are in Clarke orbits around inhabited planets or orbital habitats.”

  “Like I give a shit about that,” Polk said with a snort of derision. “Put together a brief to present to the next Defense Council meeting. If we’re to do this, we need to start planning now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Saturday, May 22, 2404, UD

  Operation Juggernaut headquarters, Karrigal Creek, Terranova

  Admiral Jaruzelska looked up as Michael pushed open the door to her office. “Come in; take a seat.”

  “Sir,” Michael replied, mystified by the summons. As Operation Juggernaut’s launch approached—not that there was a definite date for J-Day yet—Jaruzelska had become remote and unapproachable. It had been weeks since Michael had done anything more than pass the time of day with her, and even then not often.

  And all the time there was the nagging fear that Hartspring might have done to Anna what he had promised to do, a fear feeding an angry frustration that threatened to spiral out of control.

  “Right, let’s get started,” Jaruzelska said. “We’ve just received an intelligence report from the NRA. It seems the Hammers may have gotten wind that we’re up to something. Worse, they know that I am involved. The only good news is that the NRA’s source says the Hammers have no firm idea what we’re planning, though knowing how their minds work, I’d bet my life their money’s on a coup.”

  “So what does that mean for us?” Michael asked.

  “We’re bringing Juggernaut forward, probably to the last week of July. It’s earlier than we wanted, and we won’t have all the auxiliaries we’d like, but that can’t be helped. Now that the Hammers suspect something, they’ll be pushing hard to find out what we’re doing, and I wouldn’t discount the possibility of the Hammers running interference as well.”

  “Interference?”

  “They’ll pressure Ferrero into taking preemptive action against people like me. They’ll try to cut the heads off Juggernaut, and I’m one of the heads. There’s a good chance they’ll manufacture a crisis to help them do that.”

  “Like an assassination or something?”

  “That would do. It’ll be much easier for the Hammers to get Ferrero to move against us if there’s a state of emergency in force.”

  “Will any of this stop Juggernaut?”

  “Not if we move fast,” Jaruzelska said, “and that’s why I need you to go back to Commitment early, through Scobie’s.”

  Michael frowned. “But I’m going back with you, in the Iron Lance.”

  “Pay attention,” Jaruzelska snapped, her face marred by a peevish frown. “I said to go back early, by way of Scobie’s World, before Juggernaut launches.”

  Michael’s stomach knotted. Much as he wanted to go back—if only to see Anna again—doing that meant getting past DocSec border security. “Umm, yes,” he said, “I guess.” He shrugged. “Can’t be any worse than going back in Iron Lance.” That was a lie; it would be much, much worse. “But can I ask why?”

  “You can. The peace treaty allows both sides to maintain their networks of surveillance microsats, but we cannot provide any material support to the Revival and NRA, and that includes comsat networks. Needless to say, Fleet has ignored that prohibition, but thanks to all the ships the Hammers have in Commitment nearspace, our comms have become a very hit or miss business—mostly miss, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Because we can’t afford to get caught?”

  “We have to keep the Hammers thinking that we’re complying with the treaty. But our bandwidth has been close to zero for most of the last few weeks, and if we’re to bring Juggernaut forward, there’s a pile of planning material we have to get to the NRA. We can’t get dirtside safely without their help.”

  “And you need a courier to do that?”

  “Just in case we don’t get our comms back. The NRA and Revival need our latest plans for Operation Juggernaut. We also want to give them a brevity code book.”

  “Brevity codes?” Michael shook his head in disbelief. “Talk about primitive.”

  “I know, I know,” Jaruzelska replied, “but we need a fallback if we don’t have adequate bandwidth to the NRA on J-Day. If we have to make mission-critical changes at the last minute, the NRA has to know.”

  “Okay, sir,” Michael said after a moment’s thought. “I can see why you need a courier, but why me?” He paused. “I’m not saying no,” he added, “but if I’m going to do this, I need to know.”

  “Because we have access to only two valid Hammer IDs: yours and Marine Shinoda’s—sorry, she’s Sergeant Shinoda now. Luckily for us, your IDs were never handed back to the spooks in Department 66 after you both got back from Commitment; it was an administrative error …’

  Administrative error, my ass, thought Michael. Somebody thought they might come in handy one day.

  “… and they’ve been sitting in Fleet intelligence all this time. We have friends inside 66, but they can’t generate brand-
new IDs without a lot of very awkward questions being asked. Anyway, will you do it?”

  Michael swore under his breath. He shivered at the memory; walking up to the black-uniformed DocSec immigration officers had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. There’s no way I want to do this, he said to himself, but how can I say no? Duty has me by the balls, and Jaruzelska knows it. “There is one problem, admiral,” he said eventually. “What about the Hammer’s border security records? We left Commitment to go to Scobie’s World, and we never went back. Department 66 will need to fix them; otherwise we’ll be arrested the minute we arrive.”

  “They will be,” Jaruzelska said with some asperity, impatient now. “We’re not stupid. Our friends in 66 can do that without any questions being asked.”

  Fuck you, Michael thought, glaring back at Jaruzelska. It’s my life you’re gambling with.

  Jaruzelska’s hands went up when she saw the look on Michael’s face. “I’m sorry. You have every right to ask,” she said.

  “I’ve been lied to a lot lately,” Michael replied. “I don’t take much on trust anymore.”

  “Fair enough.” Jaruzelska paused for a few seconds before she went on. “Look. This is not about IDs. I want you to go. You’re the best person for the job, and I trust you to get it done.”

  “Relax, admiral; I’ll do it,” Michael said. “Has Shinoda agreed?”

  “She has. She’ll be here next week along with the four marines who’ll make up the support team. I’ve arranged for one of our friends from 66 to be here tomorrow; he’ll help with the detailed planning. I’ll let you know when he arrives.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Once outside Jaruzelska’s office, Michael stopped. The relationship between him and the admiral had changed. He’d ‘yes sir, no sir’ the woman until the cows came home.

  But trust her? Not a chance.

  Tuesday, June 8, 2404, UD

  Terranova planetary nearspace

  Michael drifted in and out of consciousness. He floated on a sea of drug-induced calm, untroubled by the fact that he had been in a box the size of a coffin inside a container of mining machinery for hours now. What did bother him was an itch somewhere down by his left ankle, an itch he could not reach no matter how hard he wriggled and squirmed. The plasfiber box was simply too small. He did his best to ignore it, but cut off from the outside world except for transient shifts in the ship’s artificial gravity field that told him only that he had been moved onboard a shuttle, he had little else to focus on.

  He wondered when to start panicking. He should have been released hours ago. Six hours, he had been promised; six hours to clear Fed border security for transfer to the freighter to take him to Lagerfeld.

  Right from the start, he’d resigned himself to a long wait. The entire consignment had been lashed with a nearly lethal dose of x-rays during security scanning, sending his neuronics into a near panic, alarms urging him to get the hell out of there. Even now the nanobots loaded into his system worked furiously to repair the damage to his system the x-rays had inflicted.

  In the end, border security must have been satisfied by the scan. Otherwise, they’d have torn the container apart and he’d be in custody. That would have been interesting in light of the fact that he was supposed to be dead. He sighed. So what if things were not running to schedule? As long as his supply of sedatives held out, he didn’t care. He tried not to think about how he’d feel if they did run out. Michael suffered, and badly, from claustrophobia, and he had never been in such a tight space.

  So he did the only thing he could do: He upped his sedatives and within minutes was asleep.

  • • •

  “Hey, spacer! Wake up!”

  Michael opened his eyes. Where the hell … Then he remembered. He focused with an effort—he might have overdone the sedatives a bit, he realized—and looked up into Sergeant Shinoda’s anxious face.

  “Oh, hi,” he mumbled.

  “You had us worried. Now let’s get you out of there.”

  With an effort, Shinoda and a second marine—one of the four making up the security detail Jaruzelska had insisted on sending along—levered him out of the coffinlike box and stood him on his feet.

  Shinoda’s nose wrinkled. “I think we left you in there a bit long.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Michael said, flushing with embarrassment, “I think you did. There’s only so much those diapers can take, so show me to the shower.”

  “This way,” Shinoda said, standing well clear and pointing to the access door leading from the freighter’s cargo bay.

  • • •

  Michael cradled a welcome cup of coffee as Shinoda popped the silver cube of a near-field jammer onto the table. “So what happened?” Michael asked.

  “Those assholes at border security smelled a rat. At first we thought they’d been tipped off, but it turned out they just wanted to know why we were taking mining machinery to Lagerfeld.”

  “Fair question. The mines there stopped production a century ago. But you showed them our end-user certificates?”

  “We did, but of course they had to check. I mean, would you accept an end-user certificate from the Live-in-Hope Mining Company?”

  Michael laughed. “I guess not.”

  “So they checked, and that took a while—” Shinoda turned to glare at the gangly marine sitting alongside her. “—which it need not have done if Marine Clothcock Mitchell here—” She reached out and smacked the back of Mitchell’s head. “—hadn’t given the border security guys some lip.”

  “Hey, sarge,” the man protested.

  “Don’t fucking ‘hey, sarge’ me, Marine Mitchell. I’ve told you before: Keep your damn mouth shut. If I need you to speak, I’ll tell you. Understood?”

  Mitchell nodded.

  “Anyway,” Shinoda continued, “the Live-in-Hope Mining Company duly came back to say that all was aboveboard. Turns out the border security guys thought we might have been planning to sell the consignment to the Rogue Worlds.”

  “Well, Lagerfeld does trade with them.”

  “It does.”

  Michael looked around the battered bulkheads of the tiny compartment that passed for the ship’s passenger saloon. “Not the best ship I’ve ever been in,” he said.

  “The Golden Gladiator?” Shinoda chuckled. “She’ll do. The captain’s a strange man, the mate’s even weirder, but the engineer is solid as rock. We’ve had a look around. She’s an old ship, but they look after her.”

  “So we’ll get to Lagerfeld okay?”

  “We will … Let me see; yes, another day and half should see us there.”

  “Any changes to the plan?”

  “None. We transfer to the President Cruz as soon as we dock; it breaks orbit four hours later. We should be dirtside on Scobie’s on schedule.”

  “Good,” Michael said. The moment of truth was fast approaching; he shivered at the thought of what it would take to get past DocSec security and safely dirtside on Commitment. For all the assurances he had been given by Jaruzelska, by Fellsworth, by the spooks from 66, by the tech guys from intelligence support, the fact was that the Hammers, always obsessed with their border security, were now beyond paranoid.

  “You okay?” Shinoda asked.

  “Oh, sorry,” Michael said. “I was just thinking about DocSec. Can’t say I’m looking forward to meeting them again.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, we will,” Michael said. He tried to ignore the fact that they had a reasonable chance of not making it. “They got anything like a gym onboard this scow?”

  “Hey! Don’t let the crew hear you calling their beloved Golden Gladiator a scow. They’ll tear you a new one.”

  “Oops,” Michael said, chuckling. “So no gym?”

  “Afraid not. But we have found some mats. We’ll be doing unarmed combat drills. Care to join us?”

  Michael did not like the way a wolfish grin had appeared on Shinoda’s face. He sigh
ed. “I hate marines. All you ever want to do is kick ass.”

  “Never kicked the ass of a dead man before.”

  Michael sighed again. “Well, now’s your chance. Come on, then. Let’s do it.”

  • • •

  With frightening speed and power, Shinoda scythed Michael’s legs from under him and smashed him into the mat with a sickening thud that drove the air from his lungs. An instant later, Shinoda had somehow gotten her arms around his throat and head, twisting and squeezing until Michael had to slap the mat in surrender.

  Gasping, he dragged the air back into tortured lungs sip by agonizing sip. “You fucking bastard,” he wheezed.

  “Had enough, spacer boy?” Shinoda said. She let him go and rolled away. “Honestly,” she said, standing up to pull Michael to his feet, “you Fleet guys are a bunch of pussies. You couldn’t fight off a three-legged dog.”

  “Yeah, right,” Michael muttered. He tried to ease the aches out of his back and shoulders. “Anyway, better a pussy than a fucking psycho.”

  “Not where we’re going. Now, you had enough?”

  “One more, but show me how you did that throw.”

  “Sucker! Right, stand like this … yes, okay. Now …”

  • • •

  Michael lay in his bunk in the half darkness. The only sound was the gentle hiss of the air-conditioning. The images of Shinoda and her four marines had stayed with him, stuck in his mind. It had been almost frightening to watch the carefully controlled mix of skill, finesse, speed, and brutality at work. Their drills looked like the real thing. More than once Michael had been sure, absolutely sure, that one of the team members would end up badly injured, even dead.

  I might be the man to captain a dreadnought, he thought, but I want Shinoda and her marines alongside me when the fighting gets up close and personal.