The battle at the Moons of Hell

interest, but she didn’t care. For a Hammer, he seemed like a nice guy, and if he wasn’t, it was time Sam learned to handle herself.

Finally, there was the icing on the cake. One of the guys from the project planning office had told her over lunch the previous day that he had overheard two of the Hammers discussing the possibility that they would get their neuronics back. Mumtaz had an entire planetary neuronics system sitting in containers somewhere, and because the entire project was being run by AIs, Kerri could see that it made no sense not to bring the power of neuronics-based decision support to bear as well. She hoped Professor Wang could persuade Digby to relent on the matter. It would be nice not to have that awful empty, blank feeling in her head anymore.

Not that it was as simple as not having neuronics.

Like all the older Mumtazers she spoke to, she felt the awful certainty that everything they had spent their entire lives building-careers, homes, families, friends-was gone forever, every atom of it vanished. The loss hung over all of them every waking minute of the day like a black cloud, and no matter how hard she tried, it was always there-an immovable monument to everything she’d never see again.

And Andrew. How she missed him. There wasn’t a waking moment when she didn’t think of him, and the thought that they would never hold each other close again tore at her heart with an intensity that was almost physical. Not to mention Michael. How must he be feeling? If it were not for Sam, she feared she might have given up completely. Some already had, retreating into a world of drug-soaked might-have-beens. By God, it was hard to get up every day, to work up alongside those Hammer swine, to keep going hour after hour.

In truth, she did it only because of Sam.

Worst of all was knowing that without the goodwill of the Hammer, they were all dead. Digby had made sure of that by keeping the food plant in orbit, and there was no sign of its being brought dirtside. In the days immediately after being dumped on Eternity, the very small number of people with some claim to military experience naturally had coalesced around Kerri; she was by far the most senior service officer around. But every way the group looked at it, they were jammed. All the early talk of violent action against Digby and his goons had foundered on the rocks of cold hard reality: They had no weapons, they had no way of sustaining life, and they had no way of getting off the planet, and even if they somehow did, they had nowhere to run to and no one to call for help.

The group, now self-deprecatingly called the escape committee, still met regularly, but the focus had shifted to intelligence gathering and to planning what they would do in the unlikely event that the cavalry arrived to rescue them. Despite her private fears that the whole process was a waste of time, Kerri played her part-strong, firm, and resolute-and tried to keep alive the few embers of hope she still had left.

Another quick check of the time told her that she had three minutes to Red Shift reveille. If she got going now, she would beat the rush through the showers and be first in line for breakfast. Sitting up, she grabbed her towel and washing kit and set off down the still-dark shed that was home to almost a hundred fellow Mumtazers, their sleeping forms quiet and unmoving around her.

Monday, October 12, 2398, UD

DLS-387, Hell System Nearspace

Ribot was tired. Everyone was tired.

It had been a long run in, and with every kilometer the tension and pressure had mounted. This was no fly- by, safely in and out at a brisk 300,000 kph like the last time, with the option to jump to the safety of pinchspace always available.

No, this was a drop right into the Hammer’s backyard, and as 387’s speed fell away and the distance closed, the risk increased exponentially. Ribot and everyone else onboard knew only too well that 387 was a sitting duck if it was detected by a stealth Hammer. Even the slowest rail-gun crew would have no problem picking them off. But so far, so good. They had come millions of kilometers since dropping out of pinchspace, and only intermittently had the threat plot gone to red, and then only for a few seconds as a newly switched-on Hammer radar came online.

“Captain, sir.” Leon Holdorf had the watch, and the strain was showing in his drawn and lined face.

“Yes, Leon.”

“One minute to main engine cutoff, sir. Vector nominal. 2.2 million kilometers and 98 hours 43 minutes to run to Hell-14.”

Ribot nodded. If the tension was bad now, it would be ten times worse as they closed in on Hell-14 and its massive arrays of sensors. Still, that was what stealthed ships such as 387 were built to do even if that still left the problem of the gravitronics array. It was the one sensor that the Feds had yet to work out a sure way of defeating, though the Hammers had done what they could to make things easier for 387: The dumb fucks hadn’t put new grav wave detectors up to replace the unreliable antiques that had been on Hell-14 for decades. As the arrays measured the rate of change in the fabric of space- time caused by a moving mass, the only tactic that worked was to make the approach as slow as possible, and even that was no guarantee of success.

“Main engine cutoff, sir.” Holdorf’s comment was a formality. Even when the ship was operating at very low power, the sibilant whisper of its main engines had penetrated every corner, and the sudden silence as it fell in toward Hell-14 seemed almost deafening.

“Roger. Michael’s team ready to go?”

“Yes, sir. Deploying now.”

Two decks above the combat information center, Michael and his team cycled the air locks and moved toward the upper container stowage area. Michael moved to port, and Petty Officer Strezlecki to starboard.

As they moved aft, 387 was visible below them only as a formless black void razor-cut out of the billions of needle-sharp stars that littered the sky. Michael’s stomach twitched as he moved across the empty nothingness. On his left side sat the Revelation system’s distant orange-red dwarf star. A miserable excuse for a star it was, too, Michael thought. At only 0.65 sols in mass and 0.28 sols in luminosity, it was barely noticeable across 6 billion kilometers, shedding no useful light on Michael and his team as they moved aft across the formless abyss that was 387’s hull.

As they reached the cargo bays, Michael comforted himself with the thought that at least they weren’t doing 150,000 kph like the last time, an experience neither he nor his team had much enjoyed. In deference to their proximity to the Hammer, this exercise saw the team secured to the ship by fiber-optic comms tethers. Even at ultralow power, the risk of suit comms being intercepted was deemed too great, so tethers were the only answer even if the damn things were a pain in the ass. They appeared to have a mind of their own, and no matter how carefully Michael and the rest of the team maneuvered, the thin black cables, almost invisible in the nearly total darkness, seemed to be determined to wrap themselves around everybody and everything.

It was a frustrating five minutes later before Michael and Petty Officer Strezlecki had gotten their teams positioned safely and were ready to start.

“Command, Alfa. Open upper cargo doors.”

“Roger, opening.”

Slowly the massive doors swung open, the interior of the cargo bay barely visible in the small helmet lights of the team. Michael wasted no time. Open cargo doors and exposed containers compromised 387’s stealth capability, and Ribot had made it abundantly clear that time was absolutely of the essence, a sentiment wholly shared by Michael and his team.

As soon as the gap was large enough, the drone team was in, their target the two forwardmost containers. In seconds, the container seals were off and the doors were opened to reveal an array of what looked like elongated black eggs, four to a container, the formless blobs in their stealthcoats just over a meter long. One by one, securing straps were released, protective packaging removed and safely stowed, and tethers attached, and the eggs floated out to drift a few meters off 387’s hull. Once they were clear and had taken the time to check that all loose packaging had been accounted for, the container doors were closed and secure, and all tethers were clear, Michael ordered the port cargo doors shut.