The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

That was what was important right now.

Monday, March 20, 2400, UD

FWSS Eridani, pinchspace

Michael felt at home the minute he walked on board his new ship. The deepspace heavy scout Eridani had the same sense of closeness he had enjoyed in 387, a feeling of coherence, of common purpose that the poor Ishaq had never enjoyed. Even better, he was able to talk to the ship’s master AI-called Mother, just like in 387.

The best news of all was the cheery presence of Matti Bienefelt. Michael had last seen her more than twelve months earlier, when the battered wreck of DLS-387 was being loaded for its journey down to its final resting place in Braidwood National Cemetery, from where it would watch over the last remains of the spacers it had not been able to bring home safely. Here was Bienefelt again, fully recovered from the injuries she had sustained during the Battle of Hell’s Moons and newly promoted to petty officer to boot. Somehow-Bienefelt refused to explain exactly how-she had wangled a posting to the Eridani, where she was now second in command of the heavy scout’s surveillance drone team. Michael did not care how she had gotten there. It was really good to have her around again.

He settled back into his seat. He had the watch, but there was not much to do now that they were in pinchspace except keep a careful eye on the ship’s automated systems to make sure their embedded AIs did not get any silly ideas and do something stupid. Around him, the on-watch command team was quiet, the sensor holovids blank except for system status reports, the soft buzz of idle conversation barely audible over the ever- present soft hiss of the ship’s air-conditioning.

Despite the events of the last few days, Michael was more or less happy. Not ecstatic, he had to admit, but feeling okay. Considering how dumb he had been, that was not too bad a result.

With time on his hands, he commed his neuronics to patch into the sim of Eridani’s forthcoming patrol. Although not quite as terrifying as 387’s forays into Hammer space before the Battle of Hell’s Moons, this operation-a tiny cog in the enormous machine tasked with the invasion of the Hammer home planet of Commitment-looked as if it might have its moments. Even though the thought of dropping back into Hammer space sent shivers chasing up and down his spine, things had changed. He welcomed the risk, welcomed the fear, because without them he would not be doing all he could to destroy the Hammer.

With Anna gone, even though he would never give up on her, and with his family barely speaking to him anymore, he was well and truly on his own. Well, apart from the always-comforting presence of Petty Officer Matthilde Bienefelt, that was. At least she would always be there for him, though somehow he did not ever see her displacing Anna. He grinned at the thought. No doubt about it, a life with Matti, who towered over him by close to half a meter and outmassed him by a good fifty kilos, all of it pure muscle, would be an interesting experiment in interpersonal relationships.

Sunday, March 26, 2400, UD

FWSS Eridani, pinchspace

“All stations, command. Stand by artgrav shutdown in ten seconds. . artgrav shutdown now. All stations, final suit checks. Dropping in two minutes.”

Ignoring the sudden heave from a stomach deprived of its gravitational frame of reference, Michael flicked his visor down. He waited as his suit’s AI ran final diagnostics, a row of green lights confirming that he had a good suit. Flicking his visor back up, he looked around at Eridani’s combat information center. With Eridani at general quarters, the place was jammed with spacers. Even so, it was quiet, an obvious tension showing in the way the command team concentrated intently on the holovids, the command plot running off the seconds until the ship dropped.

He looked at his team of sensor operators. He knew their names and service records but not much more than that. He hoped they were as good as his new captain had assured him they were, because this time the Hammers would be on their guard, and although the chances were small, there was always the possibility they might drop straight into the arms of a waiting heavy cruiser.

That thought made Michael’s stomach turn over; he remembered the shock and terror he had felt when Ishaq was destroyed. She had been a heavy cruiser up against a damn mership armed with obsolete rail guns, for God’s sake. And compared to Ishaq, Eridani was tiny, less than one-thirtieth the size, with flank and stern armor that would have trouble keeping out a kid armed with a slingshot.

Then Eridani turned the universe inside out and dropped into normalspace. In an instant, the combat information center was a mass of furious but disciplined activity as the command team worked frantically to make sense of the mass of data pouring in from the ship’s passive sensors. Michael watched his team monitoring the assessments being made by the sensor AI; now and again, one of them stepped in to correct a mistaken classification, making his confidence grow. His captain had been right. This team was good. Calm, focused, and extremely competent, they quickly and efficiently put together an accurate threat plot, the mass of red highthreat vectors marking Hammer contacts being downgraded one by one to orange.

When the last red vector on the plot changed to orange, Michael allowed himself to relax a little. For the moment at least, they were clear of any immediate threats, the space between the deepspace heavy scout and the Hammer home planet of Commitment almost completely empty. Michael shivered. Even if they were 90 million kilometers away, Commitment felt way, way too close, the memories of that awful place all of a sudden crowding in on him.

He gave himself a mental kick. He had a job to do, and allowing the ghosts of the past to distract him was not going to help. He focused on the threat plot, his team stepping methodically through each contact, tightening classifications to a point where track numbers started to have names put to them. Michael’s breath caught in his throat as track 445311 was classified as the Hammer heavy cruiser Bravery. That was the son of a bitch that almost had gotten him and the 387 the last time out. Talk about close shaves. The light scout 387 had jumped only five seconds before Bravery’s rail-gun salvo would have ripped them apart.

Finally, the process of mapping the billions of cubic kilometers around the Eridani came to an end. They were clear. Time to call it in.

“Command, sensors. Threat plot is confirmed.”

“Command, roger.”

Having taken formal responsibility for the information now up on the threat plot, Michael sat back. Apart from the familiar pattern of traffic flowing to and from Hell’s Moons showing up clearly as a tangled mass of orange vectors running off the right-hand side of the holovid, there was not a lot to see. There was a heavy concentration of units around Commitment, its planetary nearspace thick with everything from space battle stations and heavy cruisers to light scouts, circling in a web of Clarke and polar orbits. Farther out, there were three task groups largely made up of heavy and light cruisers with a sprinkling of smaller units. Beyond them, Commitment farspace was empty, with not a single Hammer starship.

The more Michael looked at it, the more puzzled he became. He would have expected patrols at least out to the 4-light-minute mark to stop intruders like the Eridani from having too easy a run in, but no. There was nothing. It was odd.

“All stations, this is command. Revert to defense stations. Stand by artgrav in ten seconds. . artgrav on now. Stand by to launch surveillance drones.”

The moment the weight came back on his body, Michael felt better. He had always wondered if a career as a Space Fleet officer was such a smart idea considering how badly he tolerated zero-g, not to mention the horrors of