The battle at the Moons of Hell

Petty Officer Strezlecki tells me that she’s done precious little dirtside herself, so I think we should hand it over to you. In all honesty, Warrant Officer Ng, I think we have to be guided by you.”

The fact that there would have been a riot if he had tried to throw his weight around with people with the experience of Ng and her team didn’t have to be mentioned. Everybody knew it. But there were plenty of fresh-out- of-the-egg officers who wouldn’t have picked up on that.

“Okay. Makes sense. Anyway, meet my team. Chief Petty Officers Harris and Mosharaf, Petty Officers Patel and Gaetano. My two leading hands are prepping gear, so that’s the lot. Now, from the latest intel, we are pretty sure we know what we are up against.

“Even though at about 60 k’s in diameter it’s not the smallest of Hell’s moons, Hell-14 has no value as a driver mass mine on account of its relatively low density. Some sort of volcanic material riddled with gas bubbles and holes. It’s also very rugged, though nobody’s got a good explanation why, with peaks rising 200 to 300 hundred meters above the surface datum and depressions almost as deep. So the Hammer has no interest in it other than as a surveillance post, and even then not a very good one. Because installing a large array grav detector would have involved some very serious earthmoving, they have limited their sensors to two polar installations. Let’s have a look.”

The holovid behind Ng sprang to life with an image like no moon Michael had ever seen before.

Hell-14 was something out of a nightmare, with razor-sharp peaks lifting into the star-studded sky, their sides falling sheer into deeply fissured twisting ravines broken occasionally by depressions into which an eon’s worth of dust had accumulated slowly. Some were easily large enough to berth an entire squadron of Fleet heavy cruisers.

The sensor installations were two large four-sided white towers protected by antipersonnel lasers and studded with passive sensor arrays and the large flat panels of phased-array radar. The tower was topped off with more phased-array panels and finally a small-array grav detector. To get the sensors up above the terrain, the Hammers had simply picked the two largest mountains at what would have been the poles if the moon had rotated and laser-sliced their tops off. The ground for kilometers around each installation was littered with the resultant debris, some pieces hundreds of tons in mass and held to Hell-14’s surface only by its tiny gravitational field.

The overall effect was one of utter confusion. Michael could immediately see the problem: how to get through what was in effect a hugely complex three-dimensional maze without being detected by the polar arrays. That was, of course, assuming that they’d gotten in undetected in the first place.

“Um” was all Michael could say. He couldn’t begin to think how to solve a problem like this. He looked helplessly at Strezlecki, but she, too, was stumped.

“Well, the good news is that the surface approach is always the primary problem in these missions. Once we are close enough, it’s pretty straightforward. But getting close enough without being detected and bringing the wrath of the Hammer down on all of our heads, well, that’s the tricky bit.”

“But you do have a way to do this, don’t you?” Michael asked somewhat anxiously. For one awful moment, it occurred to him that Ng wanted to use the surveillance drone team as sacrificial lambs. As quickly as Michael dismissed the thought as ridiculous, Ng put him out of his misery.

“Let me introduce you to a little toy we use a lot, the optical terrain analysis vehicle, but known in the trade as OTTO. And very nifty they are, too. Here’s one.”

The holovid switched to show a rough uneven lump of rock. It could have been any one of trillions of bits of rock floating around in space except that Michael imagined he could see the hands of the design engineers in the careful sculpting of the surface.

“It’s a surveillance drone just like ours but without the stealth coat and a lot smaller,” said Strezlecki.

Ng laughed. “Well, yes and no. The difference is inside. What it does is produce a very precise map of the surface terrain using only optical sensors feeding into the mother and father of all quantum computer-based AIs. No active transmissions at all, and it produces a surface map that’s as accurate as anything from a high-definition 3-D mapping radar. Don’t ask me how, but it does. And all you need to know is that we have had a number of these babies do the necessary fly-bys to get us the terrain maps we need. And not only do we get a map, OTTO’s AI produces the recommended routes from 387’s landing site to the poles, taking into account the threat sensors we are up against, load sizes, and so on.”

Ng switched the holovid back and zoomed it in. In a small depression almost exactly midway between the two poles and shielded from them by massive curtains of rock sat an image of 387. From it ran two colored lines, one to each of the polar sensor stations, each twisting and turning through the fractured terrain like the tracks of a Saturday night drunk.

Ng finally broke the silence that followed. “Bastards, I think it’s fair to say, but they are the best routes we’ve got. Route North comes in at 69 kilometers, and Route South at 57. Could be worse.”

Michael and Strezlecki stared at the holovid, appalled. Sixty or so kilometers didn’t sound far, but neither one knew of any suit that would do the job, and some of the gaps were decidedly tricky for sleds to get through. Then it clicked with both of them simultaneously.

“Sherpas,” Michael exclaimed. “Mountain climbing,” said Strezlecki, as one.

Ng laughed, but this time openly and from the stomach.

“Well, bugger me. You’d be amazed how long it takes some people to get the answer. So yes, we have to use your team plus a few others to stage supplies up the line and set up the habs along the routes so that my team can get there safely, do the job, and get back. Now that we’ve worked out the strategy, let’s work out the details.”

Ribot sat back in his chair. “Looks good to me. Anyone have any questions or issues?” He used the pause to look at each of his team members in turn. This was too tricky an operation for anyone to sit on a possible problem, and he wanted everyone to know it. The response was a succession of shakes of the head.

“Last chance to speak up. Anybody? No? Okay, then. Well, you all know me well enough by now, so I want the sim scenario set up by tomorrow morning. Maria, I’d like you and John to lend a hand on that, please. Once it’s up, I want as many run-throughs as we have time for. Michael, Warrant Officer Ng is the one with the experience here, so she’ll be mission commander, of course. Any problems with that?”

Helfort actually looked surprised. “God, no, sir. That’s absolutely fine.”

“Good. By my rough calculations, the entire mission will take five days, so I want the first run completed by”-he paused for a moment while he worked it out-“October 7. Let’s schedule the debrief for 20:00. That okay with you, Warrant Officer Ng?”

“Fine, sir. We’ll look forward to it.”

“Right, then, I’ll stay out of it until then. Michael, you and your team are exempt from all duties with the exception of general quarters, of course. Talk through the people you need with the XO, and then Jacqui, can you make sure the gaps in the rosters are covered? Any more? No? Thanks, everybody.”

Friday, October 2, 2398, UD

Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

Councillor Marek pushed his microvid screen away after presenting a summary, mercifully short, of his report.

Merrick felt a momentary stab of fear. What in Kraa’s sacred name were the Feds up to? Marek’s people could make no sense of the apparent link between Operation Corona, whatever that was, and Vice Admiral Jaruzelska. But vague though the intelligence was, it had come from four sources, all consistently asserting that something big was up, it was called Corona, and Jaruzelska was in charge.

So the Feds were up to something. But what?

For a moment he considered the awful possibility that the Feds had uncovered the truth about the Mumtaz. Just as quickly, he pushed that thought away. No, operational security had been as tight as the ass on his father’s proverbial duck. If the Feds had found out, Merrick would have staked his life that the Hammer would have heard from them by now with all the usual moaning and complaining from that dickless wonder of an ambassador of theirs. But maybe he’d better stall just in case, he told himself.

No, he had a better idea, a much better idea and one that had been germinating for weeks. Now its time had