The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

Commodore Monroe looked at his chief of staff in frustration. “What do you mean we can’t eliminate them? They’re only damn lifepods, for Kraa’s sake. Rail guns, lasers, machetes, baseball bats, sticks. I don’t give a damn what you use. Get rid of them. No survivors, remember?”

“I do, sir, but these are military lifepods with hardened, self-sealing hulls. They are damn tough. We’re only fitted with standard mership lasers. They are taking far too long to break into them, and even then we’re only depressurizing them for a second or two. They’ll go to skinsuits and wait until the hull reseals. We could be all day.”

“Rail guns, then.”

“Sir,” Monroe’s chief of staff replied, a touch impatiently. “They’re too small. We can’t get them all. We’ve had two hits, neither fatal. It’ll take too long. Sir, I strongly advise that we move in and scoop them up. We can work out what to do with them later.”

Monroe thought about it for a moment. His chief of staff was right. He knew now that he had made a mistake. He had sent the rest of his ships on their way without thinking the problem through. According to the traffic schedule, the next merchant ship was due to arrive in less than half an hour. The window of opportunity he had taken to destroy twenty-seven FedWorld merchant ships and one heavy cruiser was closing fast. He was confident that his false identity would hold up to scrutiny, but not if he was sitting in the middle of an expanding cloud of ionized gas, firing lasers and rail guns at defenseless lifepods. Then there was the FedWorld heavy cruiser Al-Masu’di due in fifty minutes to worry about. He was damn sure they would not let him go without asking the hard questions.

“Right, I agree. Let’s do it.” He watched as his chief of staff gave the orders to move Quebec- One in close. Its two shuttles would launch as it approached to round up the strays.

“Okay, sir. That’s done.”

“Good. How long?”

“Twenty minutes, sir. Unlike ours, their pods are programmed to close in on each other to make recovery easier.”

Monroe grimaced. It would be close. “How kind of them. Such caring people, the Feds.” He sniffed. “How many pods?”

“Twenty-five, sir.”

Monroe’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty-five? That all?”

“Twenty-five, sir. That’s it.”

Monroe blinked, still struggling to understand the full magnitude of the loss. “Kraa! So few.”

“We didn’t give them much time, sir. We caught them napping. When the fusion plant powering the aft rail- gun batteries lost containment. . Well, that was pretty much it for most of them. The rest would have gone when the main engines went up.”

“So how many spacers are we talking about?”

“FedWorld heavy cruisers carry twelve-man lifepods, sir. So at most, let’s see. . Three hundred? Probably less allowing for casualties.”

Monroe turned away. For a brief instant he felt sick, his adrenaline-fueled compulsion to eliminate the pods gone.

He might be a Hammer. He might hate the Feds-and he did-but he was a spacer, too, a human speck alone in the appalling vastness of space. Three hundred survivors from a crew of-what? — well over a thousand spacers. That was hard.

Monroe turned back to his chief of staff. “One more thing.”

“Sir?”

“They will have seen Quebec-One. Nothing we can do about that, but they must not know who we are. I want standard mership skinsuits worn, visors down. Nothing obviously Hammer, nothing military-issue, and stun-gun anyone who’s not already unconscious. Once we’ve got them locked down on board, we’ll work out what to do next.”

“Understood, sir!”

Monroe watched as the man fired off the necessary orders. He did not have to ask his chief of staff what he wanted to do with their three hundred or so unwanted guests. It was bloody obvious. He could see it in the man’s eyes. But somehow he could not see himself ejecting defenseless spacers into the void. Killing at a distance was one thing. Killing people you had just rescued, well, that was quite another-he smiled grimly-even for a Hammer who had commanded an operation that had killed twenty-eight ships and close to two thousand spacers.

Monroe sat back; he was well satisfied with the day’s work. The Feds would be shitting themselves when the news broke, he thought. The loss of twenty-seven merships would be bad enough; the impact on their interstellar trade would be nothing short of a disaster. But the loss of the Ishaq would be ten times worse. For the Feds, it would be an absolute catastrophe. Monroe had been to staff college. He knew how the Feds saw themselves. The power of their Space Fleet was the foundation on which the safety and security of the entire Federated Worlds was built.

He smiled again. For once, things were going the Hammer’s way. It was a good feeling.

Friday, September 3, 2399, UD

HWS Quebec-One, pinchspace

Michael could not work it out.

Why would that damn dog not leave him alone? All he wanted to do was sleep; the warm, fuzzy, welcoming darkness kept pulling him down to a safe place away from all the pain and disappointment of the world. The dog was persistent; it kept licking his face, its cold wet tongue dragging him back from the warm, safe depths toward a cold light burning fiercely far above him. And the dog was winning; bit by bit, the light got stronger and stronger.

He opened his eyes and screamed in agony. Blinding white light drove red-hot slivers of pain into his skull. He dropped back into the darkness, but not for long. Slowly, the darkness seeped away, the cold and light returning until he was fully conscious again.

This time he opened his eyes slowly. The overhead lights were searingly bright, and a blue-white glare hammered into a head suddenly splitting with pain. He closed his eyes and lay still for a moment, his entire body jangling and fizzing with little shocks of pain. Shit. He remembered now. Stun guns; the bastards had stun-gunned him, but who were they, for God’s sake? He could not even remember what they looked like.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. Standing above him was a shipsuited figure, black against the blinding brightness overhead, his face covered by some sort of mask. Michael’s eyes hurt. He could not make the man out. Where was he? He started to turn his head.

“Ah, ha, you little Fed wart. Awake, are we? Get up. Now!”

Michael did his best, but nothing would work properly. His legs collapsed under him as he tried to struggle to his feet.

“You idle piece of crap. Get the fuck up,” the shipsuit ordered, reinforcing his words with a full-blooded kick to the ribs.

Michael screamed as the boot hit home, the pain almost overwhelming him as something inside his chest tore with a crackling rip. The agony was almost unbearable. He could barely breathe, but at least it had cleared his head. He could think now. He commed his neuronics to dump painkillers into his system. Instantly, the pain receded; after a huge effort, he managed to get to his feet, hand clamped to a pipe to keep himself upright. He stood swaying in front of the anonymous shipsuited figure. He stared at a pair of pale blue-green eyes, the only thing visible through two slits in the hood, a crudely made piece of cloth like a small bag draped loosely over the man’s head. I’m going to call you Shithead, Michael decided.

“Good,” Shithead said. “Walk!” He waved Michael toward a hole in a wire cage crudely erected across one corner of what looked like the empty cargo bay of a merchant ship. “I’ll tell you where to go.”

Michael began an unsteady shuffle out of the cage. Apart from the two of them, the huge bay was completely empty, an echoing shell. Where in God’s name were the rest of his lifepod? Where were Yazdi, Murphy, and the