The battle at the Moons of Hell

suppressed the shiver of fear that ran through him, turning his attention with a conscious effort back to the holovid.

With infinite patience and care, Mother gradually spun the ship on its axis to roll its stern away from the landing site below, putting the hull parallel to the moon’s surface, ready to touch down. Mother let Hell-14’s microgravity do the rest, the moon gently pulling 387 to ground.

Seventy-two seconds later, 387 settled with barely a tremor onto the surface of Hell-14.

“Landed, sir.” Armitage’s face was split by a broad grin, a mixture of triumph and relief, as the ship erupted in cheering. In penetrating a heavily defended system to put down on Hammer real estate, 387 had done something no Fed ship had done in twenty years, and the pride in the accomplishment was tangible.

“Thank you, Jacqui,” Ribot said with a smile, “though I’m sure Cosmo will have something to say about the damage to our stealthcoat.” Ribot’s smile got even broader. “Now, not to rain on anybody’s parade, but we’re not quite home yet. Jacqui, deploy the anchor team and let’s get the chromaflage covers up. If no one knocks on our door in the next six hours, I think we can say we’ve cracked it. Oh, and get the artgrav back on.”

Armitage nodded and commed the necessary orders.

Below and aft of the combat information center, the massive lander hangar doors swung open, and the EVA team, barely visible in their space suits now that combat gray had replaced high-visibility orange, poured out onto the moon’s surface. Effortlessly, Bienefelt, huge in her bulky space suit, maneuvered the rock bolt gun out of the hangar. Michael watched in admiration as she flew the unwieldy metal cylinder along 387’s starboard side, coming to a dead stop in precisely the right place under the ship’s starboard bow and at precisely the right attitude to fire an explosive bolt deep into Hell-14’s crust. That’s what thousands of EVA hours does for you, Michael thought enviously.

As the bolt went home, Bienefelt was off to the next anchor point, and it was only a matter of minutes before 387 was securely tethered fore and aft, short cables pulled out of hidden recesses in her hull holding her firmly to the moon’s surface. Arguably, tethers were overkill. Even Hell-14’s microgravity was more than enough to keep 387 in place. But tidal stresses made Hell-14 earthquake-prone, and so, to comply with Fleet standard operating procedures, tethers were required. It took five more minutes to attach and arm the explosive cutters that would be needed if 387 had to leave in a hurry, and the job was done.

While Michael and his team had been concentrating on tethering the ship, the XO’s team had not been idle. Bulky rolls of chromaflage net were unloaded and ranged hard up against the foot of the massive cliff rising above them. As Carlsson and Leong fired small pegs into the rock wall, the XO’s crew secured the end of each roll before running it out and over the ship to the cliff face on the other side, the chromaflage rolls twisting and turning as creases from long storage were shaken out. Bit by bit, 387 disappeared from sight under the gray micromesh net.

Once 387 was fully covered and with the XO’s instructions not to allow his fucking body to get above the surrounding rock cliffs ringing in his ears, Michael was dispatched to hover 200 meters over the ship to provide an image feed to Mother as she carefully adjusted the shape, color, and texture of the chromaflage net to match the original surface. It was a surprisingly long process as Mother slowly and carefully blended the net into the background. With nothing more to do than hang motionless and keep his helmet-mounted holocam pointed in the right direction, Michael felt very vulnerable and very alone. By the time Mother had finished, he might as well have been the only human being in millions of kilometers. Apart from a slight hump where the chromaflage nets crossed over the top of 387’s hull, the landing site looked like the original basin floor, dust and all. The ship had completely vanished, and provided that the Hammer didn’t deploy high-power ground-penetrating radar, it would stay that way.

Finally called back by Armitage, a relieved Michael and his crew still had much to do. Remote heat sinks, remote holocams, low-power whisker laser comms relay stations, and Ng’s equipment as well as the surveillance drones needed to act as 387’s long-range eyes and ears as she lay cut-off under her protective chromaflage net-all had to be moved out of the ship, ready for deployment. There was also the experimental driver mass production plant to be moved carefully out of its containers and secured to the basin floor alongside 387 under the watchful eyes of the two project engineers who had been sent along by Fleet to make sure the damn thing worked as advertised. In itself that was no small challenge given the very substandard feedstock that Hell-14 gas-riven rock would supply.

But eventually everything got done to Ribot’s satisfaction, and a very impatient Warrant Officer Ng and her team were able to start the long haul to the north and south poles of Hell-14.

As Ng’s team led the four heavily loaded sleds away from 387, heading for the narrow cut identified by OTTO as the only safe way out of the rock-walled basin, Michael’s sherpas struggled to keep the heavy awkward sleds on track and away from the rock walls. Ribot began to relax for the first time since they had left Frontier. There was not a lot more he could do now. It was up to Ng.

Ng knew her stuff, and Michael had done particularly well in the final mission sim; his suggestion that they parallel run multiple sims to maximize Mother’s experience base had produced a marked improvement in the quality of Mother’s advice. Even better, the threat plot, fed by sensor data streams from Bonnie and Clyde, the two surveillance drones now carefully positioned on the basin rim above 387, showed only orange intercepts. There were no angry red symbols to show a Hammer force boosting out-system to investigate 387, and for that Ribot offered a small prayer of thanks. The plan called for Warrant Officer Ng and her team to reach the poles by no later than midday on 23 October and to have the two massive Hammer sensor arrays sterilized no more than twenty-four hours after that.

Ribot stretched to try to get the kinks out of a tired body.

He hoped that Mister Murphy would stay away. Even hundreds of light-years from Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, he felt all too keenly the enormous pressure on him to provide the up-to-date operational intelligence she needed to make the final commitment to the operation. The consequences of failing her were too dire to contemplate, and he was going to do everything in his power not to do that.

Thursday, October 22, 2398, UD

Hell-14

Ng’s language was unprintable as she and her team tried for the umpteenth time to maneuver the bulky sled around an impossibly tight bend in the 30-meter-deep cleft of rock slashed into the nightmare that was Hell-14’s surface.

But it was not to be. Any way she tried, the sleds were too big and the corner too tight to pass through. Ng’s frustration was understandable. Over four days, Michael’s sherpas had performed flawlessly, and the routes to the poles had matched those mapped by OTTO perfectly. But now, when they were almost there, their luck had run out and at a point where going over the choke point and picking up the route again on the other side was not an option: The surface above their heads was in clear view of the Hammer’s sensors.

Ng knew when to admit defeat. “Okay, boys, it’s not going to go. Get the rock anchors out and the sled safely tied down while I call Helfort. When that’s done, start unstrapping the gear. We’re going to have to backpack this lot in.”

As her team set to work breaking down the sled’s load, Ng found the fiber dispenser mounted on the back of the sled and quickly spliced in a comms node. Seconds later, her neuronics were patched in and she had Michael Helfort on the line.

“Problem?” Michael’s voice betrayed his concern. He’d begun to allow himself to think that the mission actually might go according to plan.

Ng nodded. “Afraid so, sir. OTTO’s let us down, and we have a choke point we can’t go around or over this close to the pole. At this late stage, there’s no alternative route in. So it’s backpack time, and I’m going to need more than my fair share of your sherpas even if it means slowing down the northern team.”