The battle at the Moons of Hell

Saturday, August 22, 2398, UD

Outside the Diplomatic Compound, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

The fear gripping Digby felt like a hand plunged deep inside his stomach trying to pull his guts out.

The stress of making his way unseen every second night, ducking and weaving to avoid the random Doctrinal Security patrols, was beginning to tell. Worse, time was starting to run out. This was his last chance. If he couldn’t get to Kumar unnoticed this morning, Kumar would not be able to get any messages up to the fortnightly routine starship courier to Sylvania-leaving in less than eighteen hours, for Kraa’s sake-for onward transmission to the Feds in time for them to do something about the Mumtaz. And that assumed that Kumar took him seriously enough to order the mership to drop out of pinchspace to make the pinchcomm transmission.

Digby could just imagine how a commercial mership skipper, even one under contract to the Sylvanian government, would respond to that suggestion.

The only thing about Kumar’s routine he had managed to establish was that the bloody man didn’t really have one.

Some mornings-Digby laughed bitterly; on this planet, that could mean anything from broad daylight to, as now, pitch darkness-Kumar jogged alone. Sometimes, in company. Sometimes, not at all. Sometimes, three days in a row. Sometimes, not for a week. The only thing definite about Kumar was that when he did go jogging, he always left the compound between 06:00 and 06:10. Even better, DocSec had given up escorting him as it should have; the prospect of running in the dark early-morning hours clearly was not to the taste of the average and usually overweight DocSec trooper.

So it was that Digby stood in the deep blackness of the trees shading the Avenue of Heroes as it ran up to the one and only gate giving access to the diplomatic compound and waited.

Twenty agonizing minutes later and with a heavy heart, he tasted the bitter fruits of failure. The road from the diplomatic compound had remained empty, the only sign of life being the bored DocSec guards at the compound gate. Digby stood in the shadows, lost. He had been sure that, provided that he was prepared to take the terrible risk, and he was, there would be a chance to slip a message into Kumar’s hand in time to avert the catastrophe. But Kraa had decided otherwise. Now he had missed the starship due out that night, and the next one wouldn’t go out for another two weeks. Even if he could get a message to Kumar, the man would have one hell of a job getting a seat on any starship at all with the Establishment Day holidays coming up. Digby cursed his fate. It was getting too late.

Digby waited in the shadows, undecided. Did he give up and hope for the best, or did he at least try to lessen the damage by making it clear to the Feds that the entire affair was the unilateral action of a chief councillor gone mad? Would they even believe that? he wondered. He wasn’t at all sure that he would. But it was all he could hope for now, to lessen the blow that would surely fall on the Hammer Worlds. He slipped away through the darkness unseen.

He knew he had no choice. He would have to be back in two days to do it all over again. He’d gone too far to turn back now.

Friday, August 28, 2398, UD

Torrance Airport, Ashakiran Planet

Michael turned to walk through security and onto his flight back to the Arcadia spaceport, from where he would catch the up-shuttle to the planetary transfer station.

Behind him stood his mother, teary-eyed, and his father, tight-lipped. It would be months before Michael saw them again, but that was part and parcel of Space Fleet life, as they knew better than he did. Worse, he wouldn’t be seeing Anna.

She had commed him to say that Damishqui’s program had been changed at short notice to go to Anjaxx and that their two ships would be berthed together on SBS-22 for eighteen glorious hours. But just as Michael’s elaborate plans to make the most of the few hours they would have together had begun to take shape, another comm had come in from Anna. It was as unwelcome as it was short and to the point. Damishqui’s program had been changed again, and they would miss each other by a day. Sorry, can’t be helped. Love and kisses, Anna.

Michael cursed his luck, the Fleet, Damishqui, and anything else he could think of.

So slowly that the change had been almost imperceptible, he’d begun to miss Anna, really miss her. That was not surprising, he realized, since he’d spent the best part of three years with her at the college, not really appreciating that graduation meant they would go their separate ways.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered aloud as he made his way to the identity station, automatically presenting himself for the routine DNA and retinal checks. No wonder Space Fleet people had trouble keeping a relationship going. They were never together long enough for there to be a relationship.

Michael shut Anna out of his mind and turned his attention to a more immediate concern: the reception that awaited him onboard DLS-387. Michael hoped that Fielding’s call to his new skipper would at the very least mean that he’d be given a fair chance. Oh, well, he thought as he joined the line to make his way onboard the up-shuttle, only one way to find out. Thirty-five minutes later, as the shuttle blasted its way into orbit en route to the huge transfer station hanging in geostationary orbit, Michael put his seat back. Seconds later, despite the chorus of oohs and aahs of the space travel virgins transfixed by the magical holovid image of Ashakiran as it fell away below the incandescent mass driver plumes of the up-shuttle, he was asleep.

Sunday, August 30, 2398, UD

Deepspace Light Scout 387 Berthed on Space Battle Station 20, in Orbit around Anjaxx Planet

“Welcome aboard, sir. Identity check and orders, please.”

Even as she saluted, the quartermaster’s voice betrayed none of the fun she’d had watching the young officer make a complete mess of crossing the line. She’d known he would do that the second it became obvious that he wasn’t going to use the lubber’s rail, because crossing the line was not the straightforward exercise it first appeared. As one approached any berthed starship, up was definitely and without doubt up. Down was down. Left was left. Right was right. Easy and, after millions of years of evolution, something the human mind was well able to manage.

But as you crossed the line that marked the change from the space battle station’s artificial gravity to ship’s artificial gravity, up could be down or sideways or all three mashed together. In this particular case, 387 was berthed so that horizontal became down by way of a sharp, almost 90-degree lean backward coupled with a slight right-hand twist. And Leading Spacer Matthilde Bienefelt had seen everyone from admirals down to the youngest and most inexperienced recruit ignore the lubber’s rail and make a mess of a deceptively simple problem: how to cross a red and white striped line, adjust to a new gravity field, and maintain some semblance of balance, control, and dignity in the space of less than a second. But after more than twenty years in Space Fleet, Bienefelt knew full well that the human brain simply could not cope with the instantaneous rearrangement of the forces of gravity through three axes and that Junior Lieutenant Helfort was wasting his time trying. His brain’s balance control system would stay shut down until it was ready to cope. That, of course, was why the lubber’s rail was provided, though a remarkably large number of spacers let ego override common sense and ignored it.

He would learn, Bienefelt thought, standing patiently as Michael scrambled his way across the threshold and fell rather than climbed down the ladder into the ship’s surveillance drone deployment air lock. He arrived at her feet standing up, thanks to a desperate lunge for the ladder handrail.

After a few seconds and conscious that he, like generations of junior officers before him, had just made a