The battle at the Moons of Hell

“Command, Alfa. Ready for system tests.”

“Command, roger. Stand by.”

Within seconds, Michael’s neuronics confirmed that all eight intercept bots were nominal. Without further delay, the tethers were disconnected, and with a gentle shove, the eggs were pushed clear of 387. His team’s job done, Michael commed Strezlecki.

“Strez, Alfa, sitrep.”

“Roger, Alfa. Krachovs Alfa and Bravo deployed and mounted. Fifteen minutes to deploy the rest.”

“Roger, Strez. Need any assistance?”

“Negative.”

“Roger, Alfa and team returning to ship. Out.”

Michael was happy to leave Strezlecki to it. The Krachov shroud generators were very large and could be difficult to mount. But if Strezlecki could get two mounted in the time it took Michael and his team to deploy the intercept bots, she certainly didn’t need any help from a novice like him.

He took a final look down the length of the ship in an optimistic attempt to spot the Hell system. Even though he’d commed Mother to put the planetary datum on his heads-up display to tell him where to look, there was nothing to be seen against the dazzling array of stars spread out before him. Not to worry. He was damn sure he’d see more than enough of the Hell system before they were finished, he thought as he dropped down the air lock.

Fifteen minutes later, Petty Officer Strezlecki and her team were finished and 387 was safely buttoned up, much to the barely concealed relief of all onboard.

Michael sat at the back of the combat information center and watched as Mother, communicating over ultra- low-power frequency-jittering whisker-beam lasers, sent the interceptbots on their way. Everyone onboard, from the most junior spacer up, understood the crucial importance of the insignificant-looking black eggs. They had a lot to do. First, they had to locate and tap into the laser and microwave backbones that formed the administrative comms network used by the Hammers to run every nonmilitary element of the Hell prison system. Second, they had to crack the low-grade encryption used by the network. Third, they had to drop autonomous softwarebots into the system to try to search out where the Mumtaz’s crew, its male military passengers, and the hijackers had been taken. Fourth, they had to report back.

As always, there was a fifth, the key to light scout covert ops: Don’t get caught.

And if they didn’t succeed, this part of the operation would be a bust, and God only knew how many people would be condemned to rot on Hell. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Friday, October 16, 2398, UD

DLS-387, on Final Approach to Hell-14

“Okay, everybody. Now it gets interesting, so on your toes.”

Ribot’s tone was carefully controlled. Hell-14 and its sensor arrays lay only 5,400 kilometers ahead of them, and as the sims had pointed out, this was the point of maximum risk. Unavoidably, 387’s stealth integrity was slightly degraded by the Krachov shroud generators even though they were mounted as far aft as possible to get the maximum protection from the flare of the hull. Ribot felt uncomfortably exposed even if Mother was sure that the risk was minimal.

To make things worse, it needn’t have been that way. Fleet had only gotten as far as installing the smaller tactical shroud generators for antilaser defense. Integral Krachov shroud generators big enough to shield a light scout’s main engine burn had long been promised, but relatively modest though the generators were, the work needed to put them into existing ships was significant and was done only during major quarter-life refits. That put 387’s shroud generators at least seven years away, which was no help to him right now.

Ribot cursed softly. He, like every other light scout captain, was obsessive when it came to keeping his ship stealth, and the sooner he could get the protective shroud out and the damn Krachov generators stowed, the happier he would be.

“Captain, sir. Ready to deploy Krachov shroud.” For the benefit of a crowded combat information center, Armitage’s voice sounded firmly confident, but Ribot knew better. Krachov shrouds big enough to shield a ship safely were relatively new, and though they had performed well in trials, they had never been used for real, certainly never when the cost of failure was so high. Not for the first time, Ribot shivered at the thought of what an ambushing Hammer warship could do to them.

“Deploy.”

And with that, the eight Krachov shroud generators began to spew out what in broad daylight would have looked like a gigantic swarm of tiny flies. In fact, they were small wafer-thin disks, hundreds of thousands of them. Each was carefully designed, some to absorb the radar energy thrown at the ship by the Hammer’s phased-array radars, most to diffuse and deflect the infrared signature of 387’s main engines as they braked the ship for its rendezvous with Hell-14.

The shroud’s job was simple: to stop the Hammer’s sensors on Hell-14 and elsewhere from seeing 387. Easy to say and very hard to do, so hard that the Krachov shroud had been in development for more than ten years before the hard-nosed men and women of Fleet’s operational acceptance board would allow it to be used in earnest. And 387 was the guinea pig, the first warship to take the system into a hostile environment.

Within minutes the shroud began to take shape. The sheer scale and complexity of the task were huge as the shroud’s master AI carefully choreographed an elaborate space dance across a dense spiderweb of ultra-low-power laser comms, with hundreds of subordinate AIs manipulating each disk’s tiny onboard processors. In response, minute explosive puff thrusters fired to move the disks into a complex three-dimensional set of disk clouds; the overall shroud was many hundreds of meters across and perfectly constructed to put a thick layer of disks between 387 and every known Hammer sensor in Hell nearspace. If the engineers had gotten it right, the radio frequency energy thrown at them by the Hammer’s radars would be absorbed and the thermal energy produced by 387’s main engines would be contained by the Krachov shroud-just like pissing into a bottle, as one of the development team had delicately explained it to Ribot-allowing only a tiny, undetectable fraction to leak through. Ribot hoped that the technical intelligence reports about the sensitivity of Hammer radars and infrared sensors were correct.

If the TECHINT reports weren’t…

As the shroud was being shaped to the master AI’s satisfaction, Michael and his team had been deployed, working frantically to recover the now-useless shield generators. Finally, with the generators safely secured, all was set and the master AI gave the word. As one, the disk clouds making up the shroud began to accelerate gently away from 387. With a final check to make sure the shield was far enough away not to be disrupted by main engine efflux, Mother carefully turned ship and fired up the main engines. 387 began its slow deceleration down to Hell-14, its modest exhaust plume safely hidden from the Hammer’s infrared sensors behind the Krachov shroud.

Not one to miss an opportunity to do some housekeeping, Ribot extended the heat panels, which quickly turned a bright cherry-red as they dumped the excess heat load accumulated during 387’s long run in to Hell-14.

After desuiting in record-breaking time, Michael returned to his usual position behind the goofers line at the back of the combat information center to watch as the holovid tracked the shroud swarm as it moved away, blotting out the stars as it did so.

He was beyond tired. Ribot’s endless sims had seen to that. But tired as he was, Michael could see the sense in Ribot’s relentless pursuit of perfection. Even in the final run, with every possible problem thrown at them to slow them, Michael’s sherpas had gotten Ng and her team to the poles on schedule and, more important, without being spotted.

Now all Ribot had to do was get the ship down safely.

Knees sagging with fatigue, Michael decided to call it quits. He and the rest of his team were now officially off