The battle at the Moons of Hell

Finally, the container was where it needed to be. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots as Leong and Athenascu connected the thick armored power and ventilation umbilicals. Two minutes later, Mother was happy that this was one container that would survive the trip, and Michael and the team turned to await the next; this one, according to Mother, would be the last to go into the starboard 3 Deck cargo space.

It had been a long hard day by the time the last container had been pinned home and after an exhaustive gear check to make sure nothing had been left behind-captains got pretty upset if they had to stop acceleration to recover lost equipment rattling around loose in the cargo bays-and Michael could dismiss the team. He and Petty Officer Strezlecki did a last fly-past along the containers.

“Looks fine to me,” Michael said as he checked out the last of the containers on the port side.

“Me, too, sir,” Strezlecki confirmed. “All personnel clear and accounted for. All equipment accounted for. Button her up?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Michael and Strezlecki pushed back as Mother turned off the cargo bay lights and one by one closed the massively thick armored access doors until all that was left was an absolute and total nothing. Michael knew 387 was there because logic told him it had not moved and he could see her shape as a black cutout against the gray-black hull of SBS-20. But all of a sudden, the sense of form, solidity, and mass, of firm reality that the open cargo doors had provided, was gone. All Michael could see was void, a pit into which he felt for one awful moment he was going to tumble.

Strezlecki also felt it. “That’s something, isn’t it? Never get used to it even after all these years.” Her voice brought Michael back to his senses.

“Christ, thanks for that cheerful thought. I’d rather hoped I would get used to it.”

“Never, sir, trust me,” Strezlecki said confidently as they turned to make a final inspection of the hull to confirm that every cargo hatch had sealed as flush as Mother said it had, guided only by the ship schematics brought up on their neuronics. Finally, the job was done and they made their way back to the personnel access lock, the ship passing below them unseeable and unseen.

“Any thing else we-I-need to think about?” Michael didn’t think there was, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“No, sir, that’s it for today. I’m headed for the shower and then to the Fleet senior spacers club-got a birthday bash to attend.” Strezlecki’s voice made it clear that with a patrol scheduled to last almost two months less than twenty-four hours away, she intended to get in a final round of serious partying before they dropped.

“I wish I had half your luck. Quiet evening for me and then a decent night’s sleep would be good.” In the frantic scramble to get everything done in time, Michael had managed only about three hours of sleep since he had stepped-sorry, stumbled and fell-aboard 387.

According to Michael’s neuronics, they were only two meters from their destination, and in confirmation Mother opened the outer hatch of the forward personnel access lock. The brilliant white light from inside the ship seemed to come from nowhere.

“Age before beauty,” Michael commed, pointing for Petty Officer Strezlecki to go first.

“Remember the rest of that aphorism, sir, and don’t tempt me into saying something that should stay belowdecks,” Strezlecki retorted as, without fuss or wasted effort, she pushed her boots into the air lock clear of the rungs of the ladder that dropped into the brightly lit space three meters below them. The ship’s gravity tugged at her feet and drew her in, gloves braking the fall to drop her neatly to the deck.

Michael laughed. “I didn’t want you to see what a screwup I’m going to make of this,” he said as he struggled to emulate Strezlecki’s effortless move into the air lock without a great degree of success. First he wasn’t dropping fast enough and then he was falling too fast, his boots thumping onto the deck, the weight of his suit almost forcing him to his knees. But finally he stood there as Strezlecki commed the close command to Mother and they waited as the outer hatch closed and the air lock pressure equalized. At last the flashing red light gave way to a steady green, and the inner door opened onto the drone hangar deck.

Ten minutes later, with suit turn-around completed, Michael stood there, his gray one-piece innersuit rumpled and sweat-stained. “That’s it,” he said to an equally disheveled Petty Officer Strezlecki. “Enjoy the party and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sir.”

As Michael turned to go below, the XO commed him. “Finished?” she asked.

“I have, sir, yes.”

“Okay. My cabin, now.”

“Sir.” Shit. That didn’t sound good. What now? Michael thought as he dived for the ladder down to 3 Deck.

Seconds later, Michael was at the XO’s cabin. Seeing him at the door, she waved him into the one and only chair in the cramped compartment where Lieutenant Jacqui Armitage both lived and worked. For a couple of seconds, the young woman just stared at him from brown eyes set wide in a ruddy, almost windburned face overshadowed by a shock of barely controlled brown hair, her face a set of flat planes that made it look as if she had been chiseled out of stone. Her mouth had a firm set to it that all of a sudden told Michael that he wasn’t there to be told what a good boy he was.

“Pretty good job you and your team did, Michael. You certainly look like you’ve been working hard.”

“Thank you, sir. We have. Though I need a lot more practice before I’m as good as they are.”

“That’s what I knew you would think, Michael, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Young officers are always over-impressed by space gymnastics.” Armitage paused for a second. And here it comes, Michael thought, at a loss to know what he had missed. “I had Mother analyze the whole operation end to end, and she agrees with me. While acceptable, your oversight of the safety aspects of the operation was close to being compromised on three occasions. Have a look.”

Armitage popped Mother’s analysis up on Michael’s neuronics. “See? Here you got so close in to the container that you missed Leong drifting off-station. A few more meters and he could have been in trouble. Now, he’s a good spacer and caught himself in time. But you should have seen it first just in case he didn’t. People with their heads down very often don’t. And here, Leong again. And here, Athenascu. Too close to that mass driver efflux for comfort. So Michael, the moral of the story is this: You are paid to command, so stand back and command. You are not paid to be just another cargo handler. And nothing will lose you respect faster than a damaged team member. So learn the lesson and do better next time, okay?”

“Sir.” There wasn’t much Michael could say. Armitage was right.

“Okay. That’s all. See you at supper tonight.”

Tired but reasonably content even after the moderately severe singeing he had received from the XO, Michael sat quietly in the wardroom on 3 Deck.

Supper over, the wardroom was filled with the give-and-take of team members who knew one another well. Sitting at the mess table, Armitage and Michael’s boss, Maria Hosani, were in the middle of a spirited debate on the relative merits of planetary life compared with life on orbital habitats. Michael suspected it was a debate months in the making and with many more to run. Sprawled in the two armchairs at the far end of the compartment in front of an impressive holovid of a large fireplace set into a stone wall, complete with a cheerfully blazing wood fire, were the navigator, Leon Holdorf, and John Kapoor, the proud commander of 387’s lander, Jessie’s Hope. Why Jessie’s Hope? Michael had had to ask. Because, Kapoor had explained patiently, probably for the hundredth time, the rest of the crew wouldn’t allow his first choice, Mom’s Hope, so he’d had to settle for her first name, “Jessie.” Yes, and the “Hope” bit, Michael had prompted. That he’d come home safely, Kapoor had said with a faint air of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders. Michael had laughed. He’d liked Kapoor from the moment they had met, and as the only other junior lieutenant onboard apart from Michael, he was a natural ally. Though not for long. Kapoor was about to pick up his second stripe.

Sitting next to them on one of the benches that ran down the length of the mess and as officer of the day the only person in uniform was 387’s chief engineer, Cosmo Reilly. With the aid of a firmly pointed forefinger, Reilly was at that moment making the point very emphatically that warfare branch officers paid too little attention to engineers when it came to the conduct of Space Fleet business. Michael had to smile as he watched Reilly’s impassioned diatribe. Long, long ago, Space Fleet had decided in its infinite wisdom that too much engineering was a bad thing for the officers responsible for fighting on the Federation’s ships and had split