The battle at the Moons of Hell

fatigue but by knowing how much had to be gotten right if the whole sorry Mumtaz affair was to be sorted out and his mother and Sam recovered safely. That they might not make it didn’t bear thinking about. He opened his eyes to see Warrant Officer Ng looking at him in the uncomfortably direct way that was one of her trademarks.

“Oh! Didn’t realize you were still here.”

“I am. And I’m just hoping that you aren’t taking this all too much to heart, sir. That would be a worry.” Ng’s face betrayed her concern.

“You’d be right to, but no, I’m not. It’s just…Well, it’s just that I’ve never been part of anything that mattered so much before, and that takes a bit of getting used to, I suppose.” He rubbed his face as Ng’s eyes seemed to bore right into his soul. Not a woman to bullshit, he thought.

Ng’s eyes softened. “That’s why sims aren’t the answer, sir. Never forget. They’ve got a fatal flaw. No risk. Nothing to lose. So keep it in perspective. Let me tell you something. I’ve always found that the real thing is easier somehow. Don’t really know why; never been able to work it out. But my theory is that some people perform better when it comes to the real thing precisely because it is risky. And I suspect that you are one of those people.”

“I hope you’re right, I hope you’re right,” Michael said doubtfully.

“Well, I think I am, and I’m not usually wrong. Anyway, that’s it for me. A shower, something to eat, and then a solid eight hours will do me. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Tuesday, October 6, 2398, UD

DLS-387, Hell System (Revelation-II) Farspace

With its usual stomach-churning lurch, 387 dropped out of pinchspace 19 million kilometers out from Hell system.

In seconds, Mother had begun to build up the normalspace tactical picture of Hell system, the threat plot blossoming with hundreds of red Hammer intercepts.

“This all seems very familiar.” Armitage grunted as the threat plot filled up with red symbols marking the mass of long-and short-range radars, lasers, and radio frequency and other emitters that infested the Hell system. One by one, Mother analyzed each intercept and downgraded the threat it presented, turning the symbols to orange as she did so. The tension in the combat information center visibly decreased as the threat plot finally changed to all orange.

“Captain, sir. Command. Threat plot is orange, ready to conduct vector alignment and deploy pinchcomsats.” Hosani didn’t try to keep the relief out of her voice. Dropping out into normalspace was bad enough. Dropping into hostile normalspace was ten times worse.

“Approved. Stand the ship down from general quarters and revert to defense stations. I’m going for a walk- around and then to my cabin.”

“Sir.”

Extravehicular activity conducted while the ship was doing 150,000 kilometers per hour was never popular, and this time it was even less so. Michael and his team were denied the protection of 387’s short-range defensive lasers, which normally were tasked with picking off any space debris that got too close to the drone team. The chance that Hammer sensors would pick up laser fire was simply too great. The risk was very real. The death of three of Bombard’s crew doing a routine drone launch five years earlier-the spacers had been drilled through one after the other by a single fragment of rock only millimeters across that had been let pass by a defective short-range laser-was all the reminder Michael’s team needed that what they were doing was a very risky business.

It was from the heart that Michael heaved a sigh of relief as the surveillance drone team finally maneuvered the last pinchcomsat out of its protective container and clear of 387.

“Command, Alfa. Pinchcomsats deployed. Containers closed and secured. Returning,” Michael commed as he and the team scrambled to get back inside 387.

“Alfa, command, roger.”

Ten minutes later, the six pinchcomsats were boosted on their way to take up their positions in orbit 4 million kilometers out from the gray-black mass that was the planet Revelation-II. Their tiny low-power pinchcomms arrays had been locked successfully on to the pinchcomms carrier wave transmitted by a temporary tactical pinchcomms relaysat drifting in deepspace 2 light-years out from the Revelation system.

Thursday, October 8, 2398, UD

29:37 Local Time

Eternity Base

For a moment Kerri Helfort struggled to remember where she was.

It didn’t take long; the hated breather mask cutting into her face saw to that. She rolled onto her back and checked the time. She had twenty minutes before midnight and reveille for Red Shift. She hated getting up in the dark and, along with everyone else, had been more than happy with Digby’s announcement that the much-disliked system of two back-to-back shifts seven days a week would end on Friday. Even the stupidest Hammer, and Kerri hadn’t taken long to work out that Digby was far from stupid, understood that you couldn’t work people nearly fifteen hours a day every day of the week forever.

And so this Saturday would be a big day for the mostly unwilling inhabitants of the Hammer’s newest settled planet.

Not only would it be their first free weekend, it also would mark the end of phase 1 of the terraforming project with all the primary infrastructure well on its way to completion. With the massive methane/carbon dioxide converters now in final testing, the next day would see the carbon sequestration and oxygen production plant commissioned, all of which was something of a relief to Kerri and everyone else dirtside. Nobody liked the idea of depending on the breather oxygen supplies being ferried down from the Mumtaz. Speaking of which, she saw that her oxygen supplies would get marginal during the shift, so she’d need to get replacement cylinders. And while she was at it, she thought, she might as well cycle the breather’s molecular filters.

But far more important to Kerri was Sam’s welfare. Not surprisingly, Sam had taken the hijacking very hard. But things were looking up. Thankfully, the biomass plant was only days away from final acceptance, and once it was on-stream, seeding the planet with geneered plants and cyanobacteria would start in earnest. In the absence of anything better to do, Sam had secured a position on one of the crews that would be responsible for field biomass management and atmospheric monitoring. Kerri said a small prayer of thanks for the experience Sam had gotten back on Ashakiran at the Manindi Center for Oceanic Research. Even though it was largely irrelevant, it had sounded impressive enough to land her the job.

And the job was a good one.

Sam would be a member of Doctor Jack Loudon’s atmosphere monitoring team. Despite his cultural heritage, Loudon seemed different from the rest of the Hammers who had been brought dirtside. Most unusually, he did not seem to share the view held by most Hammer men that all women were good for was sex, reproduction, and housekeeping and that if they really had to take paid employment, it had to be doing the crappy jobs that men or cheap labor imported from Scobie’s World couldn’t be persuaded to do. In fact, Kerri strongly suspected that Jack Loudon’s three or so years as an unwilling guest at the Hammer’s premier prison facility had made him think long and hard about what the Hammer of Kraa really stood for.

To top it all and thanks to Sam’s holding a basic grade flier’s license, a sixteenth birthday present, she had been selected for flight duties. That was not really a big deal given the power of the average flier’s AI and the fact that almost everyone had a fliers’ license of some sort, but nonetheless it was not something offered to everybody. She strongly suspected that Doctor Loudon’s promotion of Sam had been motivated by more than professional