political affairs commissioner, Shalini Prashad, a scrawny woman with stringy brown hair that hung down to bony shoulders, already looked dead: hunched down in her seat, unmoving, head down, eyes closed, face a death-mask gray.
Not that he felt much better. His body was doing what it always did before combat: His stomach seethed and boiled and churned with a fear-fueled fire that stabbed acid up into his throat, his chest had tightened to a point where breathing became labored, his mouth had dried to dust, and his face was slick with a thin veneer of sweat.
'How are you doing, General?' Michael forced himself to say.
'Kraa's blood,' Cortez croaked. 'I did not join the NRA for this.'
'Nor me,' Hok muttered. 'I never liked landers.'
Michael smiled. 'Don't worry about it, sirs,' he said, forcing a cheery confidence into his voice. 'Hell Bent is a good machine, Sedova's a good pilot, and Long Shot is a good plan. We'll be fine.'
'Don't bullshit me, Lieutenant,' Cortez growled. 'I've sat through every sim of this mission. I know the odds of us surviving, and they are a lot less than I'd like them to be.'
Michael's stomach churned some more; Cortez was dead right. 'Sims always overstate the risks, General. That's why we use them: to make sure that we don't take things for granted, that we are ready for every eventuality.' For chrissakes, shut up, Michael told himself, conscious he was beginning to sound like a salesman.
'Humph,' was Hok's response. Cortez looked sick. Prashad moaned softly but still did not move.
Michael decided that anything he said would only make everyone more stressed. No matter what the sims said, deep down Michael had faith in the operational plan. Thanks to the chaos inside the Hammer military, he was pretty sure their response would be slow, ill coordinated, and in effective.
Who needs the NRA? Michael wondered. Chief Councillor Polk was doing a great job wiping out the Hammer's armed forces all on his own.
'All stations, this is command. Stand by… launching now.'
Hell Bent's main engines burst into life to kick the lander from its hiding place with a heavy metallic thud up and out into the rain-lashed air of late evening. Then Sedova rammed the engines to emergency power and turned hard away from the portal's rock walls, foamalloy wings deploying as the lander accelerated down the valley, speed building fast through Mach 1 and beyond, faster and faster until Michael's hands locked onto the armrest of his seat in a death grip, hypnotized by the awful sight of rock walls screaming past in a blur of limestone so close that the lander's wingtips looked certain to hit. The forest beneath Hell Bent's nose was speed-smeared into a chaotic mess of greens and browns and grays, on and on, the lander twisting and turning to follow the valley south.
Michael switched his neuronics to the threat plot, unable to watch anymore. He knew to the last second what Hell Bent and the rest of the forces involved in Long Shot should be doing. What he did not know was how the Hammers would react. Nobody did.
If the Hammers got it right, if they destroyed the lander before it reached the safety of pinchspace, Long Shot was over. The Hammers would crush the Federated Worlds and the rest of humanspace, system after system after system blasted into the maw of a rampant Hammer empire by the irresistible force of antimatter weapons until all that was good and decent and honest had vanished.
And humankind's greatest experiment would have failed.
The stakes could not be higher. Michael did the only thing he could do: He sat back to pray that Long Shot would pull humanspace back from the brink of a new Dark Ages.
