The battle at the Moons of Hell

Planet

Happy for once not to have to stand on a leg that still ached when he put his full weight on it, Michael hung back and watched the painfully slow process of moving 387 out of the orbital repair station’s maintenance dock and into the cavernous hold of the huge ultraheavy planetary lander.

387, tiny against the orbital heavy repair station’s vast bulk, was being maneuvered with infinite care to line up with the lander’s gaping cargo hold. An army of orange-suited spacers shepherding a swarm of heavy-duty cargobots, anticollision lights flashing like demented orange fireflies, fussed around the scarred and torn hull, which had been cleaned of the tons of foamsteel and bracing that had been used to get the ship safely home. All classified equipment had been stripped out, and fusion plants shut down and decommissioned.

A moment of sadness struck Michael.

387 once had been a living thing and, through Mother, almost a friend, or at least a comrade in arms. He’d miss her quirky, deadpan sense of humor. But now 387 was just another dead warship hulk, and Mother had gone on to other things. She was the latest in a long line of warship AIs safely downloaded into Attila the Hun, the massive AI that powered the Fleet’s StratSim Facility at the Fleet College. Michael knew that some warship captains liked to reminisce with their old AIs, but he didn’t think he’d ever be one of them. For him, 387 was something that had happened in the past, and there it should stay.

As the bows of 387 nosed slowly into the lander’s hold, Michael could look directly down into the hole that marked the point where Weapons Power Charlie’s plasma containment bottle had blown out most of the starboard bow. The hole was huge, a mass of twisted titanium frames and shredded ceramsteel. The edges, torn, twisted, jagged, and razor-sharp, had been masked off with Day-Glo plasfiber for the trip. Down through the hole, its sides etched out of the darkness by 387’s internal lighting, Michael could trace the path of the platinum/iridium slug inside its deadly shroud of plasma as it had cut its way down through the ship, taking the lives of so many of the crew on the way.

Farther aft on the port side, the entry point for the slug that nearly had taken Michael’s life was framed untidily by yet more orange plasfiber. Less dramatic, the pear-shaped puncture was surprisingly small. The slug’s awesome kinetic energy, with little armor to slow it, had been focused as it hit on a single small part of 387’s hull.

And then, farther back, there was another hole. The slug’s exit from the hull aft had been much more dramatic, its plasma shroud by that stage blooming into a lethal blast wave that had opened up the ship’s ceramsteel armor like a tin can. The hole was much bigger, now rimmed with yet more orange plasfiber to mark the place where the slug had finally cleared the ship, taking with it 387’s pinchcomms antenna, leaving only the stump of its hydraulic ram to show that it ever had existed.

Michael smiled as he tried to picture the surprise of some poor spacer crew centuries down the track as they tried to work out just what the hell a pinchcomms antenna was doing floating in interstellar space.

As Michael watched, performing his final duty as ex-captain of 387 and with orders posting him to Fleet freshly received, something made him look up. Across the massive hangar, a substantial orange figure emerged from a small personnel air lock and with considerable verve shot across the gap that separated them before coming to an impeccably judged halt only centimeters from Michael. The spacer barely had to move to touch helmets.

Michael only knew one very large spacer that good.

“Junior Lieutenant Helfort, sir. Leading Spacer Bienefelt reporting for duty, sir.”

“Benny, you are a fucking rogue,” Michael said with a broad grin. “Last time I checked, they said two more days.”

“I know, sir. I am a fucking rogue, and they didn’t want to let me go. But I can be very persuasive when I have to. I had to see 387 one last time before she went dirtside.”

Michael laughed.

He’d always believed that Bienefelt would make it, and even though it had taken months in regen, the news that she would be fine had set the seal on his own slow recovery.

Saturday, April 3, 2399, UD

Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

Chief Councillor Polk wearily rubbed his eyes. They felt like someone had poured sand into them.

He’d always wondered why Merrick had aged twice as fast as his peers. Now he knew. The pressure was unrelenting, the workload enormous, the torrent of issues that poured into his secretariat so huge that he felt like he was drowning.

But he was making some progress. It had taken time, but he now had people he was prepared if not to trust at least to let handle much of the day-to-day work he’d been forced to take on in the days after Merrick’s fall from power.

Day-to-day work! One crisis after another was more like it. He ran through the list in his mind.

The Hammer economy was completely stuffed. In truth, it was always stuffed, so maybe he shouldn’t classify it as a crisis; no change there. In any case, his handpicked successor at the Department of Economy and Finance, Tobias de Mel, was pretty competent, so Polk was happy to let him get on with it.

The riots in McNair provoked by his predecessor’s departure and execution were finally over. The city and the rest of the planet were simmering in unhappy silence, which was just fine with Polk. Let them simmer.

The situation on Faith was coming under control. Doc-Sec’s ruthlessness backed by marine firepower was slowly grinding the life out of the heretics, the ground having been cut out from under their feet by a carefully stage-managed upsurge of xenophobic anger and resentment after the Feds’ attacks on Eternity and Hell.

Of the really big issues, that left only what to do about those Kraa-damned and insufferably arrogant Feds.

Polk picked up the latest report from the negotiating team on Old Earth from a paper-cluttered desk. He snorted derisively as he reread the document. Councillor Albrecht thought the Feds might agree to let Brigadier General Digby carry the can for the Mumtaz affair. In return, Albrecht wanted the authority to agree to the Feds’ long-standing demand for a formal public apology before any further discussions took place. Polk snorted again. Stupid bastard. They might as well agree to what the Feds really wanted: referral of their outrageous demand for financial restitution to the interstellar court for determination, because they sure as hell were not going to stop at an apology.

Well, Polk thought as he flicked Albrecht’s report back onto his desk, many things might come to pass, but agreeing to Feds’ demands was never going to be one of them. Not while he was chief councillor.

In any case, he didn’t much care what Albrecht did, thought, or said. Short of complete capitulation by the Feds, whatever Albrecht achieved would not be enough to save him no matter how well he’d done under the circumstances. On his return from Old Earth, Albrecht would be arrested the second he stepped off the down- shuttle; the carefully doctored holovid of him in unwisely close proximity to known agents of the Old Earth Alliance would be more than enough to take him down. If the bastard lived for another week after that, he’d be Kraa- damned lucky, thought Polk with a small shiver of pleasure. He made a note to himself. He must be sure to get holovids of Albrecht’s execution. That would seal the moment. Yes, he’d enjoy that, he thought, as he jotted down a short note to get it arranged.

Flicking on his voicewriter, Polk pushed back in his chair and closed his eyes. His response to Councillor Albrecht was not going to be what the man wanted to hear.

Two minutes later a blunt, short, and dismissive note was on its way to Albrecht. Polk felt good, very good in fact. Telling Albrecht to tell the Feds to fuck off always made him feel that way. Knowing that Albrecht was finished made him feel even better. Of the remaining Merrick appointees to the Council, that left only Khan and al-Hamidi. Unknown to Khan, the case against him being put together by a secret DocSec task force was almost finished. Very compelling it was, too, Polk had been pleased to see when presented with a preliminary draft.