mug in my tiny hand.'
Michael rolled his eyes in mock despair and shook his head. Without another word they turned into the ENCOMM canteen. As with everyone else in the NRA, Hok's love of coffee bordered on the obsessive. Not that she was unusual; he had heard of Hammer units refusing combat until a defective drinkbot had been fixed.
Coffee in hand, Hok and Michael sat down in a corner, out of the way of the endless ebb and flow of ENCOMM staff.
'You think this can work, don't you?' Hok said. 'Talk about a surprise. Thought the general was going to choke.'
'Our Block 6's, you mean?'
'Yup. I've been with the NRA for four years now, and let me tell you something. Knowing that we're trapped dirtside with no chance of ever getting off this Kraa-forsaken planet is hard to take sometimes. I used to love my trips to Scobie's,' she said with a wistful smile, 'and now we find we have our very own starship sitting not 200 klicks from here. I have to hand it to you Feds; my father was a pinchspace generator engineer, so I know more than most. How you guys managed to shoehorn them into something as small as an assault lander is beyond me.'
'You miss him? Your father, I mean.'
Hok's head dropped. Oh, shit, thought Michael, wrong question. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't ha-'
'No, no. There's no way you could have known. I used to be a marine officer, ninth in my class, set for a good career, loyal and unquestioning, successful and ambitious. Then those black-uniformed scum went and arrested my father… Never did find out what for, maybe an anonymous report from a neighbor with an ax to grind. Don't know. Last the family heard, he had been sent to the mass driver mines of Hell's Moons. Not many people come back from there. I suppose we were lucky; DocSec didn't arrest my mother, and the family was left alone. Anyway, two months after my dad was taken away, I decided that I couldn't be part of the Hammer of Kraa anymore, so I deserted and here I am. Still wonder whether my father's still alive… don't suppose he is. Those mines are awful places.'
Michael's face was grim; Hok's story was one of many he had heard since joining the NRA. 'We have to win this,' he said, 'if only so people like you can know what happened. It must be tearing you apart.'
'Every minute of every day another little bit of me dies. There are hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people, with stories every bit as bad as mine, some even worse, and that's why we have to destroy the Hammers.'
'Yes, we do.'
'Enough navel gazing, Lieutenant. Drink your coffee and let's get going. We have a lot to do.'
'Sir.'
Rubbing her eyes, Hok pushed back from the holovid screen. 'Please tell me that's it.'
'Yes, it is. I'll feed everything into the Long Shot simulation, run it again, and see what it comes up with… but we're missing something.'
'Oh, Kraa help me,' Hok said with a heartfelt sigh. 'Come on, then. What?'
'No, no. It's not an intel issue.'
'So what is it?'
'Let's assume for a moment that we can reach the Feds. Wha-'
'Isn't that all that matters? What else is there?'
Michael frowned. 'That's just it. The more I look at it, the more I think getting to the Feds is not the problem. Persuading them to do what we want, to do what the NRA needs, is the problem. That's the part that's bothering me.'
'Holy Kraa. You have a gift for seeing problems. Tell you what. Let's take this one step at a time. Work out how we get to the Feds and then worry about convincing them. Okay?'
'Okay.' Friday, February 15, 2402, UD ENCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment
'… and that concludes my presentation.' Michael paused to glance around the room. 'Are there any questions?'
'You're kidding,' an anonymous voice whispered from the back. 'You can't be serious.'
'Deadly serious,' Michael said. 'This has to be done, and what I've just shown you is the only way to do it. Any other comments or questions?'
'The deception plan,' a staffer said. 'That seems to me to be the critical element of Long Shot. Two questions: Has ENCOMM signed off on it, and how well does it stand up in the sims?'
'Let me take that one, Lieutenant,' Brigadier General Cortez said, getting to his feet. He turned to the questioner, the head of ENCOMM's strategic policy unit. 'You are absolutely correct, Charlie. The deception plan is the key. If it works, Long Shot works. If it does not, then… well, you can fill in the blanks. Has ENCOMM approved it? No, not yet. There's more to be done. Does what we have so far work in the sims? Most of the time. So, speaking as the NRA's chief of staff, we're close but not quite there yet, which is why we're all here today. We'll get one chance at this, so it has to work, and I'm relying on all of you to identify and then fill in the gaps. I'm sorry; I'm getting ahead of myself. Questions?'
For the next two hours, Michael fielded questions that ranged from the farcically irrelevant to the worryingly probing, the process more than once erupting into heated debate. The one thing that kept him going was the fact that not one of the many people who spoke ever questioned the need for Long Shot. He should not have been surprised; one of the NRA's greatest strengths was its willingness to face up to the realities of life, however unpalatable.
Finally Vaas was getting to his feet.
'Okay, folks. That's enough for now. I have one more thing to say before we close. At its meeting this morning, the Resistance Council approved my recommendation that Operation Long Shot be scheduled for 04:45 Universal Time, March 24-'
There was a murmur of shock and dismay. Michael felt sick as the fact that Long Shot was going to happen crashed home, the impact as physical as a kick to the head.
'-so let's get on to it. Thanks to those Kraa-damned Pascanicians, Long Shot won't be given more time, so don't bother asking. We know the things that need fixing, so fix them. That is all.' Friday, March 22, 2402, UD Hendrik Island, Commitment
Chief Councillor Polk stepped out of the lander into wind so cold that it seared its way down into his lungs, a single harsh sliver of pain. He flinched as a savage gust of wind lashed his face, the air filling with ice crystals blown off the ceramcrete runway. 'What a Kraa-forsaken shithole this is!' he muttered as aides bundled him into the warmth of a large snow crawler.
'Welcome to Hendrik Island, sir,' a man dressed in a bulky cold suit said.
'Thank you,' Polk said, shaking the man's hand. 'Good to see you again, Doctor Ndegwa. Where do we start?'
'I thought you'd like to see our first consignment, sir.'
'Ah, yes,' Polk said, his face lighting up. 'That I want to see.'
The ride was brief, the crawler making short work of the wind-drifted snow en route to a towering wall of laser-cut rock, a single slab of granite that climbed vertically to disappear into clouds flogged remorselessly across the sky by a southwesterly gale. Only minutes after Polk's lander had touched down, he was stepping out of the crawler and into the warmth of Hangar 2B, a cavernous space hewn from rock, its vaulted ceiling studded with massed banks of high-intensity lights that threw a line of heavy cargo landers into stark relief, their shadows black against the ceramcrete floor. A small army of cargobots fussed around each lander, streaming up their ramps to reappear shepherding standard shipping containers, large gray boxes marked GOVERNMENT OF THE PASCANICI LEAGUE in Day-Glo letters a meter high.
'So, Doctor. What am I looking at?'
'Well, sir. That'-Ndegwa waved an arm across the landers-'is 625 million k-dollars worth of microfabs, each one capable of turning out the components for a complete Kadogo-Penning stasis gen-'
'Doctor, Doctor, please! I'm no engineer, so spare me the jargon.'
Ndegwa bobbed his head. 'Sorry, sir. Um… yes, you're looking at the best microfabs in humanspace, far beyond anything we have access to. They will make the new antimatter plant's critical components, and they will do in months what used to take us years. Each one is…'
