The battle at the Moons of Hell

“She is. But every dog has his day, and d’Castreaux has done what we needed him to do.” Digby’s satisfaction at successfully completing the hardest part of the project was evident.

“Yes, well, don’t look so bloody smug, Digby. We have a long way to go yet.”

“Yes, sir, you’re right. We do.”

Digby paused as he collected his thoughts.

“As I was saying, thanks to d’Castreaux and, I have to say, even more thanks to his wife’s complete lack of concern over computer security, we were able to set up the access tunnel into the Mumtaz’s AI from a maintenance terminal she had at home. Once the tunnel was in, a contract team from Scobie’s World did the rest. With the AI onboard the Mumtaz successfully subverted, our people onboard can take control any time they want. It takes only a single codephrase spoken into any comms port, and the AI is ours and so’s the ship.” Digby’s hand reinforced the point with a sharp chop.

“Scobie’s World? Outsiders! I don’t much like the sound of that, General, let me tell you.”

Digby had to struggle not to let his frustration at Merrick’s hyperactive sense of paranoia upset his report, though to a degree Merrick had a point. Scobie’s World, the closest system to the Hammer, was notoriously corrupt and freewheeling, a place where everything was for sale. And, for those willing to pay the price, that included even the most secret of Hammer secrets.

“A two-man team, sir. They had to come to Commitment to be briefed before starting, so it was logical that they work from here as well. They weren’t too happy, but then, money talks. They knew they were working on an off-world mership master AI but not which one, and in any case, the minute the job was done, I had them picked up and neurowiped. They’re safely tucked away on Hell now, and there they’ll stay.”

For once, Merrick had the good grace to look faintly apologetic.

“Fine. So Mumtaz leaves when?”

“Six September. She will drop out of pinchspace to avoid the Brooks Reef gravitational anomaly 200 light- years out of Terranova. My team will take control as soon as Mumtaz has sent her pinchspace drop report. They’ll broadcast a fake jump report followed immediately by a coded message to let us know the hijack team has control and then microjump her clear of the Brooks Reef’s network of surveillance drones before altering vector to jump direct to Hell, where she’ll down-shuttle the original crew. There will also be a replacement crew at Hell-the hijackers don’t know that, of course. I’ll meet the Mumtaz there, and we will jump to Eternity to be safely in orbit before she’s reported overdue at Frontier. No one will be any the wiser. Just another unexplained casualty of pinchspace like all the others.”

“And getting your people onto Terranova in the first place?” Merrick knew how difficult it was to circumvent Terranova’s security AIs.

“Already done, sir, thanks to careful adjustment of personal identity records with the help of a certain avaricious person inside the Ministry of Planetary Security. The Feds would have a fit if they knew how cheaply some of their people can be bought.” That was the Federated World’s Achilles’ heel, Digby thought. There was always someone for whom money was everything.

“Weapons?”

“Not needed. A properly coordinated and timed attack on the officers and crew using a high level of violence and intimidation will achieve the results we want. Off-world commercial spacers rely too much on their AIs for security, but we’ve dealt with that. Once we have control, the weapons we need are in the armory, and my information is that they are not DNA security coded, so using them won’t be a problem.”

The rest of it is detail, Merrick thought, nodding. Digby has things well under control. But there was one final question.

“Deniability, Digby.” Merrick’s voice was harsh, his eyes stabbing. “You recall my instructions, I trust.”

“Believe me, sir, I do.” How could he forget Merrick’s promise that he would die a slow and painful death at the hands of DocSec if the Hammer’s links to the hijacking of the Mumtaz ever leaked back to the Feds.

Digby ticked the points off on his fingers.

“I’ve used multiple cutouts between us and all field operatives. Even d’Castreaux has no idea that he’s actually working for the Hammer. I’ve double-checked with General Cassidy: The agents did not know who was behind the blackmail, and none of them will live to know why they had to force d’Castreaux’s cooperation. The mership AI hackers I’ve covered. The hijack team thinks it’s just an act of piracy funded by faceless interests out of one of the Rogue Planets, and only the team leader will know Mumtaz’s final destination, and he’ll be told only when the ship is in pinchspace four days out of Terranova. And he and the rest of his crew will be spending the rest of their lives on Hell. The sensors on Eternity have been bypassed, so all the duty operators in deepspace ops are seeing is prerecorded data, and I doubt anyone will pick up on the fact that it’s the same data looping over and over on an annual cycle. And no survey or other activity is planned around Eternity or in the Judgment System, for that matter, for at least thirty-six months.”

Digby paused to catch his breath. He knew he had to get this bit right if he wanted to live to enjoy a long and happy retirement.

Thoughts marshaled, he continued. “As for the passengers of the Mumtaz, all of the men who aren’t part of the terraforming technical support team, as well as anyone who looks like a potential troublemaker and obviously anyone from the military, will go to Hell. The rest, including women and children, will be landed on Eternity to be part of the terraforming ground teams, and there they will stay. Those who don’t cooperate…” Digby did not need to say it again.

“As for Mumtaz, it will have an unfortunate accident in pinchspace when it finally jumps out of Eternity nearspace: The AI has a self-destruct subroutine already loaded that will blow every hatch wide open and disable the pinchspace drive. But best of all, the Feds will not suspect anything in the first place, and so they won’t be looking. Losing ships in pinchspace doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

“And finally, the terraforming management team will all be Kraa citizens currently serving out their time on Hell. Believe me when I say, sir, that they will be model citizens.

“So I believe our operational security is good. The keys will be keeping the lid on Eternity and Hell to make sure nothing leaks out. But we are very good at that sort of thing.” Digby smiled a bleak and wintry smile.

“Good,” Merrick said, looking pleased. “I don’t think we need to talk again. I want a personal report back from you when the terraforming process is safely under way. And when the time is right, I’m going to ask you to brief the Council in person. I think they should know who made it all happen.”

“Thank you, sir,” Digby said to the top of Merrick’s head as he turned to leave.

Once outside the handsomely imposing pink granite building that housed Chief Councillor Merrick and the Supreme Council’s secretariat, one of the very few Hammer government buildings worth looking at, Digby stopped in the predawn gloom of another of Commitment’s forty-nine-hour days to catch his breath, a deep unhappiness pulling his spirits down.

Digby had never gotten used to the long drawn-out days, and he positively hated waking up in the middle of the night one day and in broad daylight the next and so on ad nauseam. His native planet of Fortitude had twenty- six-hour days and was a much more pleasant place to live. Fortitude also had seasons, unlike Commitment, where each forty-nine-hour day blurred into the next, the weather was average all the time, and one never had any idea where one was in the year unless one checked with the net.

But it wasn’t just being stuck on Commitment. The problem was that he was tired, a sick tiredness that came from years of doing things that he knew were wrong. Outwardly, he had been a loyal, energetic, and motivated servant of the Hammer for over thirty years, but that was just a matter of survival, something he liked to think of as behavioral camouflage. The real problem was that underneath his carefully contrived air of controlled competence, he knew, he really knew, without any illusions at all, the Hammer for what it truly was-a brutal totalitarian regime, as vicious and self-serving as any in human history and one whose leaders paid lip service to Kraa while concentrating all their efforts on staying in power while accumulating as much wealth as possible, with every cent ripped from the pockets of ordinary Hammers.

Not that he really had anything against the Path of Doctrine except that he just didn’t believe in any of it. The idea that the collection of oddly shaped rocks discovered on Mars by one Peter McNair were the only surviving relics of an ancient civilization dedicated to the universe’s supreme being, an entity called Kraa, was complete and utter nonsense. McNair had been an indentured colonist with a particularly vivid imagination, vivid, in fact, to the point, in