The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

With that, Michael slumped to the deck before rolling slowly onto his side. Two seconds later, he was asleep.

Sunday, September 5, 2399, UD

HWS Quebec-One, pinchspace

Michael felt much better despite the fact that he was one huge ache shot through with sharp stabbing shards of pain from a brutally mistreated body. A good night’s sleep made a huge difference, even if he had to sleep on the bare metal deck like all the rest of the spacers in his cage.

Things could have been a lot worse, he thought philosophically. The ship’s doctor, now seemingly convinced that Michael was not a man to be trifled with, had taken great care to fix him up. To Michael’s surprise, the lack of AI-controlled medibots made Hammer medicine no less effective, slower than he was used to but good enough. Now, wounds stitched and what turned out to be a fractured cheekbone operated on, Michael was happy to sit back and let the handful of remarkably effective painkillers he had been given work their magic. On top of that, the rest of his cage had been checked out; they had been fed and watered properly and given access to a crude but effective pair of heads installed in the cage behind a screen.

Arguably better than all of that, they had established a makeshift communication system with the rest of the Ishaqs captured by the Hammers. Under the cover of some suitable noisy diversion- singing badly at the top of their voices was popular-tap-code messages could make their way up the pipework that ran vertically through all the cages. Primitive it might be, slow it certainly was, but the system worked, and that was all that mattered.

Amid an ocean of bad news, there was some good. Fellsworth and Chief Ichiro both had survived; they were up two decks from Michael’s cage in what the Ishaqs now called Cage Bravo, along with the rest of the women prisoners, 142 in all. They had gotten out of the warfare training department ahead of Michael, and their lifepod must have left the ship only seconds before his. Aaron Stone had made it, too, though he was badly injured and now in the ship’s sick bay; nobody seemed to know if he would make it. Corporal Yazdi and Marine Murphy were okay, of course, the pair having survived the ordeal without so much as a scratch. Yazdi was in Cage Bravo. Murphy was up in Alpha. Leading Spacer Petrovic, Matti Bienefelt’s classmate from basic training, was injured and still in the sick bay but would pull through. Sadly, so were a few people Michael would have traded for one of his friends in a heartbeat, Constanza supporters all of them.

Fellsworth appeared to be the ranking officer, so onto her shoulders fell the dubious honor of being senior officer. He wondered how that would sit with the Hammers. They had rigid views on the role of women in society. Cooking, cleaning, sex, babies, and deferring to men on all matters pretty well summed Hammer attitudes to women. Up against a set of prejudices a tacnuke could not shift, Fellsworth was not going to find being senior officer easy. Michael worked his way through the survivors one more time. “Bugger,” he muttered. If the Hammers bypassed Fellsworth, the next in line was a Lieutenant Commander Hashemian and then his old friend, Xing. Hashemian was very bad news; from the moment they had met, the man had made no attempt to conceal a bitter resentment of Michael. He and Xing were soul mates of the worst sort. If the Hammers refused to work with Fellsworth and one of those useless timeservers ended up as the man in charge, God help them all, Michael thought.

There was bad news, of course, and much too much of it. Only 286 Ishaqs had gotten clear before the ship blew. Petty Officer Bettany had not made it. Word was that rail-gun slugs had caught him. Michael felt awful. His probably had been one of the bodies Michael had climbed over on his way to the lifepods.

Constanza, Morrissen, and the command and sensors teams had all died when a rail-gun salvo had hit Ishaq’s aft quarter, the slugs penetrating the armor up into the combat information and sensor management centers, both of which were packed for the ship’s drop into normalspace. He did not give a damn about Constanza, but Morrissen and all the rest deserved better. Ishaq’s marines and air group were all pretty well gone, too, lost when the ship’s mine magazine on 8 Deck went up, triggering a sympathetic detonation in the aft missile magazine.

Michael had sat in a corner as the full import of the news sank in. Head in his arms, he had wept silently as the enormity of what had happened hit home. Most of the people Michael had been close to on board were gone, their deaths fueling the white-hot flame of hate that burned deep inside him. When he ran through the list of survivors, he swore he would do whatever it took to destroy the Hammer.

The moment of weakness did not last long. Michael buried the grief deep inside and got on with surviving. Enduring was all that mattered. He had to survive long enough to make the Hammers pay in full for the pain and suffering they seemed determined to inflict on the rest of humanspace.

His second in command, Chief Ferreira, dropped to the deck beside him.

“How are things, sir?”

“Ripping along, Chief, ripping along. How are the troops today?”

“Oh, you know, sir. They’re all pretty shell-shocked by it all but otherwise okay. They’re starting to complain about things, so that’s a good sign.”

Michael smiled. Fleet folklore said the time to worry about spacers’ morale was when they stopped complaining about things in general and the food in particular. His dad had always sworn by the old adage; he reckoned he should, too.

“Good. I’m going to ask Kingpig for exercise time. I’m going to suggest another cage. We can play futbol or something.”

“That’d be good. Another few days and this lot”-Ferreira waved an arm at the cage’s occupants-“will be getting antsy. Be good to head that off.”

“I agree. I’ll have a go today. Apart from that, anything?”

“Nothing serious. Nelson and Khurtsidze are due to go back to sick bay to have dressings changed at 10:00. That’s about it.” Ferreira paused for a second. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Well. .”

“Come on, Chief. Spit it out!”

“What do you think we’re in for?”

Michael shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. I think I’ve managed to convince Kingpig that Fleet knows the Hammers are responsible, so I don’t think they’ll space us. Even the dumbest Hammer knows they’ll be hunted down if they do. That means a prison camp somewhere. But beyond that?” He shook his head. “I have no idea. It’s what, three hundred plus light-years from Xiang Reef back to the Hammer Worlds? If that’s where we are going, we’ll be dropping sometime during the afternoon of the twelfth. Say a week from today.” Michael shrugged his shoulders. “If we drop earlier or later than that, then your guess will be as good as mine.”

“Shit.” Ferreira leaned back against the wire and thought about it for a while. “A week. Long time. Any chance of taking the ship?”

“I wish.” Michael shook his head sadly. He looked around. “No, don’t think so. Christ, a baby with a teaspoon could get us out of these cages. The problem is that the Hammers know that. Notice how they keep us covered all the time from the main access lock with stun guns anytime we go in or out of the cage? We could rush them, but I don’t think we would get far. Anyway, as of last night, word from on high”-Michael pointed up to the women’s cage two decks above-“is to sit tight and protect the escape kits. Sorry, meant to tell you, but you’d crashed out.”

“No prob, sir. Much as I would like to think we could take this sucker and swan on home, I don’t think we could. I would put good money down that Kingpig is too smart.”

“So would I, Chief. So would I.”

Sunday, September 12, 2399, UD