The battle at the Moons of Hell

anything they were told to do without a moment’s hesitation or argument.

Leaving instructions to have the bodies disposed of, Comonec commed his section leaders to meet him on the bridge. He had a rendezvous to make, and he intended to be there on schedule. Nothing was going to get in the way of the big fat juicy pile of anonymous cash that was now his by rights.

Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD

DLS-387, Revelation-III Nearspace

For sheer, unremitting pressure, the days since 387 had dropped into Hammer space safely behind the hulking black mass of Revelation-III, a J-Class planet orbiting 7.5 billion kilometers out from its sun, had been like nothing Michael had experienced before.

Apart from doing Ribot’s endless sims, the only real work Michael and his team had had to do was to launch the surveillance drone nicknamed Bonnie to jump a day ahead of 387 and, they hoped, if there were any nasty surprises, to let 387 know in advance. But apart from an unusually large number of Hammer ships close to Hell’s Moons, Bonnie hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, though as Michael reminded himself, Bonnie’s capabilities against stealth warships weren’t good-her sensor baselines were too short-so anything could happen. But at least the microjump was on.

Now, two and a half days outward bound from Revelation-III, 387 was running in a gentle parabola through the fabric of space-time at over 300,000 kph, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Michael, like everyone else, wanted to get on with it, and he cursed the delays as Holdorf and Mother fine-tuned and fine-tuned 387’s alignment and vector to get it ready for the 1.5-billion-kilometer microjump that would drop them safely just over 18 million kilometers from Revelation-II.

For Michael, the pressure was doubled by the knowledge that two of the people he most loved in the world would be so close, if only for a brief few hours. Because he was a rational person, it was easy for him to accept that what he was doing was giving them their best chance of coming through this nightmare alive. But at the emotional level, Michael felt like crawling off into a dark corner and howling out his fear and anxiety.

As the jump approached, the ship was at general quarters, with every system online, every station manned, and every hatch and door firmly shut. Michael and his team stood in the drone hangar fully suited up, helmets on but visors open, ready to cope with the usual aftermath of the upcoming jump. Needless to say, Bienefelt had been her usually chatty self, pointing out in suitably grave tones to Michael how much worse a microjump was than a normal pinchspace jump. It was obvious, she had said, if one thought about it. In the space of a second or so the ship first jumped into and then dropped out of pinchspace, so it was bound to be twice as bad as a normal jump. Michael tried not to think about it and just stood there, hunched over like the rest of his team, in his own private world of despair, waiting for the damn thing to happen. The idea that they might actually meet a Hammer warship almost appealed to him. At least they might get to kill a few of the fuckers.

“All stations, this is command. We are go for pinchspace microjump in one minute. Command out.”

Michael took a deep breath and instructed his stomach to stay put. Then the world tipped upside down, and Michael braced himself for his stomach to empty in its usual gut-wrenching way. But the jump never happened. He looked up to see Bienefelt and the rest of his team, including Strezlecki, who was supposed to be on his side, for God’s sake, he thought, standing there with smiles on their faces that turned into laughs as they saw the indignant look on Michael’s face.

“Bastards,” Michael said as he realized he had been taken for a ride. “You unprincipled bastards. So much for mutual respect. Right, I won’t forget this. You in particular, Bienefelt. I think additional casualty desuiting drills are what’s called for. Petty Officer Strezlecki, you, too.” It felt good to laugh, to relieve the tension even for a moment, and with a new resolve that things would turn out all right, Michael held his hand up for silence as Mother finally got a grip on what 387 had dropped herself into.

Closing his eyes, Michael commed into the threat plot and dropped himself into a position in space slightly behind and above 387. For one horrible moment, as bright red threat symbols blossomed in front of him, he thought they had run right into a Hammer task group. But methodically, Mother processed the passive sensor returns, and one by one the red symbols turned to orange: real enough threats but too far away to pose any immediate risk to 387.

“All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Port watch has the watch. Command out.”

As he opened his eyes, the blackness of deep space gave way to the brilliant brightness of the hangar and the cheerful faces of his team. Michael sighed with relief. They had been at general quarters for an hour, an hour that came off his precious off-watch time. He handed over the watch to Petty Officer Strezlecki as he and half the team desuited.

Michael paused at the ladder down to the accommodation level as the captain came up on main broadcast.

“All stations, this is the captain. Just a quick update on how I see things. I think the best way to sum it up is that I have good news and bad news. The good news, as you may by now have realized, is that we weren’t ambushed as we dropped out of pinchspace. We’ve dropped well outside the detection threshold for their long- range passive sensor arrays, and just as important, there are no Hammer warships inside 15 million kilometers. The nearest hostiles are a couple of Constancy Class light escorts fiddling around conducting what look like basic weapon drills. So it’s almost certain we got in undetected. We’ve also got a good laser tight-beam link with Bonnie, and we’re getting good data. She’s a day ahead of us, say, 7 million kilometers out from Hell’s Moons, which is where we hope to find the Mumtaz, of course. So hopefully Bonnie will pick her up. She’s scheduled to arrive sometime on the fourteenth, though we don’t know when.

“The bad news is Mother has confirmed and refined Bonnie’s earlier report of a large number of Hammer ships around Hell’s Moons. Currently, Mother is tracking no less than forty-five warships- three heavy and six light cruisers, twelve escorts of various sizes, eighteen patrol ships, four scouts, and two support ships to round out the group. And that’s on top of the space battle station capabilities the Hammer has built into its flotilla base. We’re going to watch them closely, but I am pretty well convinced they are not there for our benefit. If they were, it’d be overkill by a factor of about ten, and they wouldn’t be in orbit, they’d be deployed in a defensive screen perhaps 5 million kilometers out along our most likely approach vector. Which, by the way, is not the vector we are now coming in on.

“So it could get exciting, though I think that’s pretty unlikely. We’ll wait and see what they get up to. Captain out.”

Michael and all the rest of 387’s crew breathed out heavily as the captain finished. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to work out that forty-five Hammer warships created a bit of a problem for Ribot. As Michael hurried down the ladder, he wondered what Ribot was going to do about it.

That very question was exercising Ribot’s mind in no uncertain way.

The last THREATSUM from Fleet had said that there was a 95 percent chance that the number of Hammer warships on station would not exceed twenty, the normal battle strength of the Hell flotilla. To minimize the risks, 387’s route had been chosen carefully to avoid the vectors used regularly by Hell-based warships, whose commanders, like all humans everywhere, were creatures of routine and habit. But having no less than forty-five warships in-system significantly increased the chance that their behavior would not follow normal patterns.

Ribot’s worry, amply shared by Mother, was that Hammer ships would use vectors that intersected 387’s fly-by vector. Mother’s concern was reflected in her revised THREATSUM. She now put the overall chance of 387 not surviving the fly-by at one in twenty, which as far as Ribot was concerned was an extremely bad number. Taking on that risk wasn’t the problem. Ribot knew that somebody had to find the Mumtaz as soon as possible; 387 had gotten the job, and that was the end of it. No, it was waiting for the ax to fall, not knowing if it was going to happen and, if it was, when. Ribot could think of nothing worse.