The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

might be two of the oldest warships in the Fed’s order of battle, but they were still a force to be reckoned with. One of their sister ships, the Bonito, had given his ship, the heavy escort Jaguar, a hell of a mauling at the Battle of Cord’s Deep the last time around, a mauling he had been lucky to survive. Still bitter, he remembered the many who had not.

The Seadevil’s officer in command appeared on the command holovid, the flat tones of his heavily accented Standard English interrupting his thoughts. The man in the gray shipsuit looked bored; he sounded bored.

“Merroneth system mership Marta Jacovitz, this is the FedWorld Warship Seadevil. Good morning. Chop vidcomm channel 67. Over.”

“Seadevil, Marta Jacovitz. Roger. Going to 67. Out.”

Monroe braced himself. If they wanted to board and search, Quebec-One’s captain had only seconds to alter vector away from the East Yuan to jump into the safety of pinchspace before a rail-gun salvo took them out. With one eye on the plot, Monroe watched as the duty officer in command ran through the formalities with Seadevil as the ship’s false registration details squirted by laser tightbeam across to the Fed warship.

The Seadevil obviously was not in the mood to worry about a ratty tramp ship from some obscure system out galactic west. With an offhand good-bye, Monroe’s ship was dismissed. “Enjoy the day while you can, my Fed friends,” Monroe muttered, “because things are about to get a whole lot worse.”

Monroe turned back to the command plot. Leaving the drop zone and heading across the reef ahead of them was a FedWorld mership, Liberty of Man. Monroe snorted. Liberty of Man! Watch this space, you Fed pigs, because any minute now Quebec-One will be taking a few liberties of her own, he thought.

“Commodore, sir?”

It was Quebec-One’s captain, a depressingly younglooking lieutenant commander. The man made him feel a million years old. “Yes, Captain?”

“On vector, sir. Target positively identified as the Fed mership Liberty of Man. Closing on target at 1,000 meters per second. Rail guns have a valid firing solution. I intend to fire as soon as we are clear of the reef.”

Monroe smiled as he stood up. It always felt good to send another shipload of Feds to the damnation of Kraa. “Roger that. I’ll be in my cabin. Call me thirty minutes before we leave the East Yuan.”

“Sir.”

The captain of the Liberty of Man yawned. It had been a dull trip so far. Sadly, he had more of the same to look forward to. He yawned again as the navigation plot ran off the seconds until their next jump. Once safely in pinchspace, he would do his daily walk around the ship in an attempt to find out what his first officer-the laziest and most dishonest spacer he had worked with in over thirty years as a mership officer-had been up to behind his back.

He did not get the chance. A single tightly grouped rail-gun salvo from the Merroneth system mership that had been behind them all the way from the Delfin Confederation 200 light-years back ripped into the Liberty of Man’s hull.

The Liberty of Man’s captain did not have time to think before the massive fusion plants powering his main engines lost containment, vaporizing his ship into a huge ball of incandescent gas. Cursing, the officer in command of the Seadevil belatedly sent the ship to general quarters, but it was much too late.

Quebec-One had jumped into pinchspace, with only a fading flash of ultraviolet left to mark her presence.

Tuesday, September 28, 2399, UD

Camp I-2355, Branxton Mountains, Commitment

With infinite care, Michael swung his feet out of the bed and onto the floor. After a struggle, he was on his feet, swaying from side to side.

Watching anxiously, Leading Spacer Kostas stood back, but Michael had told him in no uncertain terms that he was going to the head under his own steam and nothing short of a direct order from the president herself was going to stop him. He still ached all over, and the nagging, stabbing pain from his repeatedly broken cheek and grossly abused ribs was a constant reminder of his time with DocSec. Not that he needed much reminding. The memories of that awful time would stay with him as long as he lived.

Michael took a deep breath before shuffling off in a swaying drunkard’s walk. Even if he had to crawl, he told himself sternly, he was going to use a proper toilet instead of one of Leading Spacer Kostas’s damned bottles. After that, he was going to have a decent shower, and then he was going to put on the clean shipsuit procured by Kostas from God knew where. Once that was all done, he would be ready for anything, including Fellsworth.

Twenty minutes later, refreshed in both mind and body, Michael sat in bed waiting as Fellsworth arrived. The door banged open as she barged her way in out of the blizzard raging outside.

It was good to see her. Pulling up a chair, Fellsworth sat down next to Michael’s bed. She looked at him for a moment, smiling.

“How do you feel, spacer?”

Michael took a long time to answer. He stared at her. “Well, sir, not the best, I have to say. I, er. .” He stammered to a halt, unable to speak.

Fellsworth waited patiently. It was not like she had anything more important to do, after all. The boy-and he was only a boy, for God’s sake-looked awful, and it was not just the physical injuries so shockingly on display. There was something about his eyes that was hard to describe, a desperate emptiness that spoke of the horrors he had been through more than the man himself ever could.

“It’s been a bit rough, you know,” Michael said after a while.

“I think I do. Do you want to tell me about it or leave that for another time?”

“Got a better idea, sir. I put my neuronics to full recording whenever. . whenever the Hammers started anything. I would like to dump the complete data file across to you.”

Fellsworth blinked in surprise. She had never known anyone willingly give another human the window right into the soul that full neuronics recordings provided. Well, apart from pornovid stars, of course, but they did it because it made them money, lots of it. If she downloaded the data file into a virtsim machine, she would be able to go through exactly what Michael had gone through, every last excruciating second of it. If she wanted to? She was damn sure she did not.

“You really want to do that?” she asked dubiously. “You don’t have to, you know. You’ve got time to edit your recordings back to the key facts we’ll need if we ever get to prosecute the Hammers responsible.”

Michael shook his head. “No, sir,” he said firmly. “I don’t think I could, anyway. I don’t think I’ll ever look at the file again. In fact, I’ll probably delete it. So please, take it.”

“Fine, as long as you’re sure. I’ll archive it with two or three other people to be safe. It’ll be locked. That okay?”

“That’s fine, sir. I would love to think that we can use it one day, but-”

Fellsworth’s hand on his arm stopped him dead. “Michael! You listen to me. We are getting out of here one way or another. You can trust me on that. Still got your escape kits?”

Michael nodded. Despite all the attention he had gotten from DocSec, the little kits patched to his skin were intact.

“Good. We’ve all got ours, and suffice it to say there’s no damn Hammer prison that can keep 283 Fed spacers armed with their escape kits locked up. Right? You sure?”

Michael nodded. He was.

“Okay. Let’s do the transfer.”