The battle at the Moons of Hell

Heart pounding, he made his way through to his study and commed on the lights and the housebot to bring a cup of tea. Blinking in the sudden brightness, he sat down at his desk and took out an old-fashioned pad of paper and an antique liquid ink pen, things he always did in moments of stress. According to his grandmother, the pen had come from Old Earth and was over four hundred years old. The fact that it still worked was entirely due to a certain Mr. Fashliki, whose shop in the old quarter was a shrine to long-dead technologies and one of Giovanni Pecora’s favorite places.

With a cup of tea safely in hand and the housebot instructed to prepare the next one and leave it outside on the veranda, Pecora finally felt up to the task of facing whatever diplomatic horror the duty officer was sitting on. Taking a deep breath to brace himself-he really was getting far too old for this sort of nonsense, he decided-he put the comm through.

“Ms. Rodriguez. Good morning. What’s the problem?”

As the duty officer laid it out for him, reinforcing the key points with clips from Captain Kumar’s pinchcomm message, Pecora began to feel physically sick, his stomach starting a slow sour churn. He knew the Hammer all too well from way back, and as he listened, he began to understand not just what the Hammer planned to do but, much more important, what that might lead to.

“Right, I understand all that.” Pecora kept his voice level. “And Prince Interstellar was certain that Mumtaz had jumped?”

“Sir, I didn’t focus on Mumtaz in particular. I figured that would get people asking questions we didn’t want asked right now, so I had them dump all their jump records for all merships for the last month, and I’m afraid there’s no doubt. Mumtaz unberthed at 02:43 UT, a bit after 20:30 local, and Prince Interstellar’s ops center received her jump report saying that she would jump at 09:12 UT. I’ve also checked with Terranova nearspace control. Mumtaz jumped on schedule.”

“Right, then.” Shit, shit, shit. Only missed her by two hours, Goddamn it. “Okay, Ms. Rodriguez, thank you for all that. And also let me say that you were right to call me and not the ministry staff, though they won’t thank you for it. But don’t worry, I’ll fix that.”

“Thank you, sir.” The relief in Rodriguez’s voice was palpable, her avatar visibly relaxing, the lines of stress marking her mouth and eyes fading away. Damn good avatar software, Pecora thought in passing. So good that it must have cost somebody a small fortune.

“And well done also for not making it obvious that it was the Mumtaz you were interested in. That was smart thinking.” And under a lot of pressure, too. Pecora made a mental note: Rodriguez was someone to watch.

Pecora paused for a moment as he thought through the implications before continuing. “But if what we’ve been told is correct, then someone at Prince Interstellar will connect our inquiry about their ships and wonder just how the hell we knew in advance that Mumtaz was going to disappear. So comm the contact details to me, and we’ll make sure that we remind them of a few facts of life. Oh, and put a security lock on everything we’ve talked about, with key access for my and your eyes only for the moment.”

“Sir.”

“Okay. Leave it all with me, and I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, but I will. Do not tell another living soul, and that’s an order.”

“Sir, I’ve not and I won’t.”

“Pleased to hear it. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

Pecora leaned back in his chair, cradling a mug of tea in his hand, its warmth a pleasant contrast to the terrible icy fear that gripped him. He felt a million years old all of a sudden. If Rodriguez’s report was true, and they needed to be damn sure that it was-the Hammer had been known to leak false intelligence just to make mischief- the chances of this affair not turning into the Fourth Hammer War were very slim indeed. He drank the tea in a series of large gulps and set down the mug before standing up to make his way out onto the veranda. He picked up the next mug-it took a minimum of two to get him going in the morning-and settled into his favorite chair. Giovanni’s thinking chair, his wife called it. He had time. The Mumtaz was gone, and nothing in God’s universe could stop the hijacking now.

After twenty minutes of silent reflection, with the eastern sky beginning to turn pink with the promise of another hot and humid day, its light beginning to pick out the city below him and the bay that stretched out in front of it, Pecora’s mood, dark and heavy to start with, was even more depressed. Whatever the Federated Worlds might do, there was one thing they had to do, and that was get the crew and passengers of the Mumtaz back. There was simply no way that he or any other member of the federal government would allow their people to remain in the hands of those fanatics.

And that meant confronting the Hammer. And in this case, that would have two inevitable consequences, both guaranteed by the very nature of Hammer’s polity, culture, and history.

First, Merrick would go. Even though being chief councillor gave Merrick enormous power, he was not an absolute dictator, and there were certain rules that had to be followed. And Merrick had broken rule number one: Consult your fellow councillors on all matters of significance. He clearly had not, and that put him up against every other member of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of Doctrine. History showed that when that happened, there could be only one outcome: an orgy of blood as his enemies took the opportunity Merrick’s hubris had given them to eliminate both Merrick and as many of his supporters as possible.

The prospect of Merrick and his murderous cronies getting the treatment they had handed out to so many others didn’t bother Pecora too much. In fact, justice would be served by what DocSec might do to Merrick. But for a chief councillor, Merrick was somewhat unusual. Surprisingly, the man was quite popular for someone with so much blood on his hands.

Although he could be as brutal as any Hammer chief councillor, he wasn’t as dangerously devious and untrustworthy as Jeremiah Polk, the man most likely to succeed Merrick, a man that the analysts on the Hammer desk felt Merrick grossly underestimated. That meant that Merrick’s overthrow could lead to civil war. And if there was one thing worse than going to war, it was going to war with worlds whose political leaders depended for their very survival on a credible external threat or, if one did not exist, inventing one.

The second consequence, as inevitable as it was disheartening, came from the nature of Hammer people and their society. As a general rule, Hammers were almost incapable of acting honorably when dealing with outsiders. With some worthy exceptions, they just could not do it. It was not part of their culture to be held accountable by anyone not on the Path of Doctrine; that was precisely why the Hammer Worlds were shunned by most of the rest of humankind. To deal with Hammers at any level was to ask to be ripped off.

And so, any proposition that the Mumtaz might be returned with her people and cargo unharmed would be treated with absolute contempt. So, if the Feds wanted Mumtaz, they would have to take it back, and the Hammers would not like that one little bit.

All of that was fine up to a point, but Pecora had been around long enough to have learned the most fundamental lesson of interstellar relations. It was a simple lesson best summed up in only one word: self-interest. For all the overblown language trotted out by politicians and diplomats, every issue between systems came back to that word: self-interest. Very simple, really.

So yes, the Federated Worlds could act unilaterally to recover the Mumtaz together with her unfortunate crew and passengers. If it wanted to. But doing that would be a decision not taken lightly. For all that the rest of humanspace had suffered at the hands of the Hammer, and they had and grievously, the consequences of unilateral action on the interests of the Sylvanians, the Frontier, the Old Earth Alliance, and all the rest would have to be worked through in excruciatingly tedious detail.

Pecora felt the frustration rise. In the end, it all boiled down to only two issues, anyway: the impact on interstellar trade and the impact on system security. Everything else was peripheral. If unilateral action to recover the Mumtaz threatened either or, God help the Worlds, both, they were stuffed. A multilateral solution it would have to be, and that meant that weeks, months, even years of negotiation would follow while the Hammers sat back laughing. Meanwhile, the Mumtaz’s crew and passengers would be left to rot in some damned Kraa prison camp. Christ, what a depressing thought.

Fuck them all, Pecora thought in a rare flash of unrestrained anger. This time the Hammers had gone too far. If the rest of humanspace couldn’t see that, that was their problem. All of a sudden, he knew what had to be done.