As Digby settled himself into the jeep, he began to understand the power of Merrick’s vision. For the first time he could begin to see the impact it would have on a people starved of hope.
The only problem with Merrick’s vision, grand though it might be, was the price the Hammer would have to pay sooner or later. Any way he looked at it, it would be way too high. The Feds would see to that.
Oh, well, he thought philosophically as the jeep set off with a lurch and Wang launched into an enthusiastic and detailed account of every part of the massive undertaking that passed in front of Digby, that was a problem for another day.
Four hours later, the jeep was waved through the razor-wire security fence that surrounded the project control center, and they drew up in front of a drab two-story plascrete building.
Eternity’s sun was a searingly bright point almost directly overhead, its harsh light turning the slight irregularities in the walls into a strange mottled mix of light and shade. Aesthetics was not high on the terraforming project’s priority list, and it had been a long time since Digby had seen a building so brutally functional, and he’d seen a lot of Hammer government buildings in his time.
“Home sweet home,” said Wang, his cheerful and exuberant manner in stark contrast to Digby’s as the general climbed, exhausted and sweat-stained, from the jeep. “This is the security block here.” Wang waved a casual hand at a second plascrete building, which was identical in every way to and every bit as ugly as the first.
“Yes, thank you, Professor, you’ve made your point. And just so that we are in no doubt, I am impressed, very impressed, in fact, and you have every right to be proud of the progress you’ve made.
“But”—Digby’s voice hardened—“don’t make the mistake of taking me for granted. It would be the last mistake you ever made. So get the job done and done well and you will be rewarded. But no games. Understood?”
Wang’s face went white with shock. In his excitement and enthusiasm, he had forgotten the brutality that lay at the heart of every Hammer undertaking, big or small, the violence that underwrote the entire structure and fabric of the Hammer Worlds.
“Yes, General. Understood,” he said quietly.
“I hope so.”
Digby truly hoped Wang did, if only because progress, blatantly obvious uninterrupted progress and lots of it, was probably the only thing that would keep Merrick from recalling him to a certain death. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to clean up before I meet our unwilling guests. Which shift do I talk to first?”
“Red, General. Blue is on-shift at the moment, and they won’t finish up until this evening. I’ve scheduled you to speak to Red Shift this afternoon, if that’s okay. It’s 15:00 local now, so that gives you plenty of time. Blue Shift is scheduled for tomorrow.” Wang’s tone was brisk but businesslike as he recovered his composure.
“Fine. Show me where to put my kit.”
“Follow me, General.”
“And so, let me finish by saying that for all of you, Eternity is now your destiny and what you put in will determine what you take out. This is your planet now, so make the most of it. That’s all.”
As Digby stepped down from the back of the jeep, a small sigh washed across the untidy throng gathered in front of him. If they hadn’t worked it out before, they certainly had now, Digby thought. The one part of the Feds’ standard terraforming package that Digby had not brought planetside—the food production plant—would ensure their cooperation, and Digby was now happy that they all knew where they stood.
At the front of the crowd, Kerri and Sam Helfort stood silent. Like everyone else ripped out of the comfortable and safe world that had been the Mumtaz, they had continued to hope that somehow, some way, this was all a horrible dream and that it would come to a happy end, just as the holovid soaps always did. But the man now walking back to the Hammer compound, his steps radiating power and authority, had dispelled every last ounce of that hope.
Sam was the first to speak. “Fuck” was all she said.
After a long silence, Kerri spoke. “Sam, please.” Her voice was tired. She didn’t have the energy to take Sam to task as once she would have done.
“I know, Mom, I know,” Sam said, her voice flat, the uncertainty obvious. “But it’s how I feel.”
“Sam!” Kerri said fiercely, turning to look Sam right in the face. “Promise me. I know we have no reason to hope, but tell me that you will never ever give up. If we are to come out of this, we just have to stay fit and well until the Feds come to get us. And come they will, one day. These bastards can’t keep it a secret forever, I know they can’t.”
“You’re right, Mom, that’s all we have to do. I know that’s all we have to do.” Sam’s voice brightened. “Come on, the gang’s going down to the beach for a swim, and I’m hoping that John and Jarrod are going to go along as well.”
“All well and good but don’t forget Arkady, young lady,” Kerri said, getting only a grin in response, a grin that said, “I’m only young once, for God’s sake, and I intend to make the most of it!”
As they walked back to the open-sided hut that passed for home, Kerri marveled for a moment at how the young girl had been transformed in the space of a few short weeks. The steel in her voice, the determined look on her face, the ability to rise above the moment, were pure Helfort. For the first time in many weeks Kerri’s mood lifted.
Perhaps it would all work out, though for the life of her she couldn’t see how or when.
Thursday, October 1, 2398, UD
DLS-387, departing Space Battle Station 4, Jackson’s World
As SBS-4 receded slowly behind 387 as she boosted out-system to make the jump back to Hell, finally and much to Michael’s relief, the order to fall out from berthing stations came through.
In the whole history of humanspace, Michael was pretty sure, there had never been such a thing as a comfortable space suit. Worse for someone destined to see a lot of the inside of space suits, he doubted there ever would be. In front of and around him, Michael’s team morphed from the large orange lumps that made up 387’s EVA team into real people who, with suit turnaround complete, disappeared to do whatever spacers did when off-watch.
But no such luck for Michael, and after a few words with Spacer Karpov, the youngest member of the surveillance drone division, he and Strezlecki disappeared down the hatch, heading for the first planning meeting with the covert support operations team and its extremely taciturn and uncommunicative leader, Warrant Officer Jacqueline Ng, known as Doc but only to anyone prepared to take liberties with a woman who had a Fleetwide reputation as a thoroughly competent and tough operator.
As Michael entered the wardroom, Ng and her senior spacers—two chiefs and two petty officers—were sitting waiting, marked out as special forces by left shoulder patches embroidered with one of the most elusive and smartest alien animals yet discovered by man, the T’changa from Carr’s World, an animal with the ability to adjust its skin pattern and color to blend into the background so fast and so effectively that it put marine-issue chromaflage suits to shame. But it didn’t escape Michael’s notice that the regulation acknowledgment of an officer’s arrival was conspicuously absent.
Fuck that, Michael thought. He didn’t care if Ng was a fucking legend.
“Doc. How are you? Ready to go?” Michael’s voice was deliberately enthusiastic, as though they were there to swap bullshit war stories—of which he had a few now, come to think of it—over a few beers rather than review the difficult and dangerous business of landing a deepspace light scout on one of Hell system’s outer moons right under the noses of the Hammer.
Waving Strezlecki into the seat alongside him, Michael sat at the end of the small table with a fixed grin on his face and waited a moment while the chunky woman, her hair streaked with iron-gray and her face expressionless, looked steadily at him for a good ten seconds. Then, as a tiny small smile turned up one corner of her mouth, she leaned forward and half stood up, followed by the
rest of her team.
“My apologies, sir. We’ve quite forgotten our manners.”
Michael couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing, less at the elaborate charade he and Ng had played and more because he successfully had navigated yet another trap that the people who ran the day-to-day business of the Fleet liked to set for young officers.
“Not a problem, Warrant Officer Ng, not a problem.”
A tiny nod from Ng acknowledged Michael’s small victory as he continued. “It’s good to have you and your team onboard. I think you know we’ve seen a lot of the Hammer close up, and it seems we are going to do it again. Now, before we start, I’ve commed you all with the cargo manifests—all containers loaded and stowed as per the plan you sent up. And none bent or damaged, I’m happy to say.”
“Pleased to hear it, sir. We get very unhappy when grunts—sorry, sir, regular spacers—damage our stuff.” From the look on her face, Michael was prepared to believe her. “By the way, sir, could you give my regards to your parents when next you see them. I served with both of them way back when.”
God’s blood, Michael thought. Was there any spacer over the age of fifty who hadn’t served with one or the other or both of his parents? “Of course I will.” He paused for a second. “You know that I have a personal stake in this business?”
“We do, sir. Is it an issue?” Ng’s face and voice were carefully neutral.
“No. Just makes me want to get the job done right, that’s all. And I’m sure if it gets too personal, someone will take the time to let me know.”
Ng put her head back and laughed. “I can tell you, sir, you are your parents’ son. Now, shall we?”
“Yes, let’s start. Captain Ribot wants a joint briefing at 20:00 this evening, so we need to get on with it. First, let me introduce my offsider, Petty Officer Strezlecki.” Ng and Strezlecki exchanged frosty nods. She was what Ng was pleased to call a grunt, and it was no surprise that Strezlecki was no great fan of special forces; clearly, she wasn’t going to make an exception even for a woman with Ng’s fearsome reputation. “Second, have you gotten everything you need from 387?”
“We have. Lieutenant Kapoor has gotten us everything we needed. We’re well settled in, thanks.”
Michael hadn’t expected anything else. “Okay, they didn’t tell us much about dirtside covert ops at the college. We always got the feeling that the powers that be didn’t exactly approve. So this is all new to me, and Petty Officer Strezlecki tells me that she’s done precious little dirtside herself, so I think we should hand it over to you. In all honesty, Warrant Officer Ng, I think we have to be guided by you.”
The fact that there would have been a riot if he had tried to throw his weight around with people with the experience of Ng and her team didn’t have to be mentioned. Everybody knew it. But there were plenty of fresh-out-of-the-egg officers who wouldn’t have picked up on that.
“Okay. Makes sense. Anyway, meet my team. Chief Petty Officers Harris and Mosharaf, Petty Officers Patel and Gaetano. My two leading hands are prepping gear, so that’s the lot. Now, from the latest intel, we are pretty sure we know what we are up against.
“Even though at about 60 k’s in diameter it’s not the smallest of Hell’s moons, Hell-14 has no value as a driver mass mine on account of its relatively low density. Some sort of volcanic material riddled with gas bubbles and holes. It’s also very rugged, though nobody’s got a good explanation why, with peaks rising 200 to 300 hundred meters above the surface datum and depressions almost as deep. So the Hammer has no interest in it other than as a surveillance post, and even then not a very good one. Because installing a large array grav detector would have involved some very serious earthmoving, they have limited their sensors to two polar installations. Let’s have a look.”
The holovid behind Ng sprang to life with an image like no moon Michael had ever seen before.
Hell-14 was something out of a nightmare, with razor-sharp peaks lifting into the star-studded sky, their sides falling sheer into deeply fissured twisting ravines broken occasionally by depressions into which an eon’s worth of dust had accumulated slowly. Some were easily large enough to berth an entire squadron of Fleet heavy cruisers.
The sensor installations were two large four-sided white towers protected by antipersonnel lasers and studded with passive sensor arrays and the large flat panels of phased-array radar. The tower was topped off with more phased-array panels and finally a small-array grav detector. To get the sensors up above the terrain, the Hammers had simply picked the two largest mountains at what would have been the poles if the moon had rotated and laser-sliced their tops off. The ground for kilometers around each installation was littered with the resultant debris, some pieces hundreds of tons in mass and held to Hell-14’s surface only by its tiny gravitational field.
The overall effect was one of utter confusion. Michael could immediately see the problem: how to get through what was in effect a hugely complex three-dimensional maze without being detected by the polar arrays. That was, of course, assuming that they’d gotten in undetected in the first place.
“Um” was all Michael could say. He couldn’t begin to think how to solve a problem like this. He looked helplessly at Strezlecki, but she, too, was stumped.
“Well, the good news is that the surface approach is always the primary problem in these missions. Once we are close enough, it’s pretty straightforward. But getting close enough without being detected and bringing the wrath of the Hammer down on all of our heads, well, that’s the tricky bit.”
“But you do have a way to do this, don’t you?” Michael asked somewhat anxiously. For one awful moment, it occurred to him that Ng wanted to use the surveillance drone team as sacrificial lambs. As quickly as Michael dismissed the thought as ridiculous, Ng put him out of his misery.
“Let me introduce you to a little toy we use a lot, the optical terrain analysis vehicle, but known in the trade as OTTO. And very nifty they are, too. Here’s one.”
The holovid switched to show a rough uneven lump of rock. It could have been any one of trillions of bits of rock floating around in space except that Michael imagined he could see the hands of the design engineers in the careful sculpting of the surface.
“It’s a surveillance drone just like ours but without the stealth coat and a lot smaller,” said Strezlecki.
Ng laughed. “Well, yes and no. The difference is inside. What it does is produce a very precise map of the surface terrain using only optical sensors feeding into the mother and father of all quantum computer–based AIs. No active transmissions at all, and it produces a surface map that’s as accurate as anything from a high-definition 3-D mapping radar. Don’t ask me how, but it does. And all you need to know is that we have had a number of these babies do the necessary fly-bys to get us the terrain maps we need. And not only do we get a map, OTTO’s AI produces the recommended routes from 387’s landing site to the poles, taking into account the threat sensors we are up against, load sizes, and so on.”
Ng switched the holovid back and zoomed it in. In a small depression almost exactly midway between the two poles and shielded from them by massive curtains of rock sat an image of 387. From it ran two colored lines, one to each of the polar sensor stations, each twisting and turning through the fractured terrain like the tracks of a Saturday night drunk.
Ng finally broke the silence that followed. “Bastards, I think it’s fair to say, but they are the best routes we’ve got. Route North comes in at 69 kilometers, and Route South at 57. Could be worse.”
Michael and Strezlecki stared at the holovid, appalled. Sixty or so kilometers didn’t sound far, but neither one knew of any suit that would do the job, and some of the gaps were decidedly tricky for sleds to get through. Then it clicked with both of them simultaneously.
“Sherpas,” Michael exclaimed. “Mountain climbing,” said Strezlecki, as one.
Ng laughed, but this time openly and from the stomach.
“Well, bugger m
e. You’d be amazed how long it takes some people to get the answer. So yes, we have to use your team plus a few others to stage supplies up the line and set up the habs along the routes so that my team can get there safely, do the job, and get back. Now that we’ve worked out the strategy, let’s work out the details.”
Ribot sat back in his chair. “Looks good to me. Anyone have any questions or issues?” He used the pause to look at each of his team members in turn. This was too tricky an operation for anyone to sit on a possible problem, and he wanted everyone to know it. The response was a succession of shakes of the head.
“Last chance to speak up. Anybody? No? Okay, then. Well, you all know me well enough by now, so I want the sim scenario set up by tomorrow morning. Maria, I’d like you and John to lend a hand on that, please. Once it’s up, I want as many run-throughs as we have time for. Michael, Warrant Officer Ng is the one with the experience here, so she’ll be mission commander, of course. Any problems with that?”
Helfort actually looked surprised. “God, no, sir. That’s absolutely fine.”
“Good. By my rough calculations, the entire mission will take five days, so I want the first run completed by”—he paused for a moment while he worked it out—“October 7. Let’s schedule the debrief for 20:00. That okay with you, Warrant Officer Ng?”
“Fine, sir. We’ll look forward to it.”
“Right, then, I’ll stay out of it until then. Michael, you and your team are exempt from all duties with the exception of general quarters, of course. Talk through the people you need with the XO, and then Jacqui, can you make sure the gaps in the rosters are covered? Any more? No? Thanks, everybody.”
Friday, October 2, 2398, UD
Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 21
