But eventually everything got done to Ribot’s satisfaction, and a very impatient Warrant Officer Ng and her team were able to start the long haul to the north and south poles of Hell-14.
As Ng’s team led the four heavily loaded sleds away from 387, heading for the narrow cut identified by OTTO as the only safe way out of the rock-walled basin, Michael’s sherpas struggled to keep the heavy awkward sleds on track and away from the rock walls. Ribot began to relax for the first time since they had left Frontier. There was not a lot more he could do now. It was up to Ng.
Ng knew her stuff, and Michael had done particularly well in the final mission sim; his suggestion that they parallel run multiple sims to maximize Mother’s experience base had produced a marked improvement in the quality of Mother’s advice. Even better, the threat plot, fed by sensor data streams from Bonnie and Clyde, the two surveillance drones now carefully positioned on the basin rim above 387, showed only orange intercepts. There were no angry red symbols to show a Hammer force boosting out-system to investigate 387, and for that Ribot offered a small prayer of thanks. The plan called for Warrant Officer Ng and her team to reach the poles by no later than midday on 23 October and to have the two massive Hammer sensor arrays sterilized no more than twenty-four hours after that.
Ribot stretched to try to get the kinks out of a tired body.
He hoped that Mister Murphy would stay away. Even hundreds of light-years from Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, he felt all too keenly the enormous pressure on him to provide the up-to-date operational intelligence she needed to make the final commitment to the operation. The consequences of failing her were too dire to contemplate, and he was going to do everything in his power not to do that.
Thursday, October 22, 2398, UD
Hell-14
Ng’s language was unprintable as she and her team tried for the umpteenth time to maneuver the bulky sled around an impossibly tight bend in the 30-meter-deep cleft of rock slashed into the nightmare that was Hell-14’s surface.
But it was not to be. Any way she tried, the sleds were too big and the corner too tight to pass through. Ng’s frustration was understandable. Over four days, Michael’s sherpas had performed flawlessly, and the routes to the poles had matched those mapped by OTTO perfectly. But now, when they were almost there, their luck had run out and at a point where going over the choke point and picking up the route again on the other side was not an option: The surface above their heads was in clear view of the Hammer’s sensors.
Ng knew when to admit defeat. “Okay, boys, it’s not going to go. Get the rock anchors out and the sled safely tied down while I call Helfort. When that’s done, start unstrapping the gear. We’re going to have to backpack this lot in.”
As her team set to work breaking down the sled’s load, Ng found the fiber dispenser mounted on the back of the sled and quickly spliced in a comms node. Seconds later, her neuronics were patched in and she had Michael Helfort on the line.
“Problem?” Michael’s voice betrayed his concern. He’d begun to allow himself to think that the mission actually might go according to plan.
Ng nodded. “Afraid so, sir. OTTO’s let us down, and we have a choke point we can’t go around or over this close to the pole. At this late stage, there’s no alternative route in. So it’s backpack time, and I’m going to need more than my fair share of your sherpas even if it means slowing down the northern team.”
“Any chance of cutting the choke point away?”
“No. Not this close. Too much risk. All it would take is one gas pocket and we’d have a rock plume that the Hammer couldn’t fail to see.”
Michael scowled in frustration. “Fair enough. That’s one less thing to bring up. Okay, I’ll start diverting people up the line to you. The northern team’s in good shape, and in any case standard operating procedures require both sensor installations to be attacked at the same time, so we can afford to slow them up a bit.”
“Good. We’ve secured the sleds and are making up the first loads now. I’ll send Chief Mosharaf and Petty Officer Gaetano on ahead to set up the habs at the 32-k mark. That’s as far as we can go this shift.”
“Done. I’ll be back to you with a revised schedule as soon as I can.”
“Good. I’ll leave it to you to brief the captain if that’s all right.”
“Okay.”
Shit, Michael thought. Left to his own devices, he would have forgotten to do that, and Ribot was not a man to be left in the dark. “Thanks,” he said. “I would have missed that.”
“Thought you might,” Ng said with a chuckle.
Two hours later, the elaborately choreographed, hugely complex dance that kept a long line of space-suited humans alive across 60 kilometers of unforgivingly hostile terrain had been transformed to accommodate the choke point. Michael had pulled people back from the northern route and pushed them up the line, heavily loaded with the additional habs and supplies needed to support the greatly increased number of sherpas working the southern route.
Frantic, scrambling, desperate hours later, things settled down and Mother was able to take control of the logistical minutiae: marrying the right sherpa with the right load at the right time in the right order, making sure that every one of Michael’s team was spaced out along the route like beads on a necklace, and stayed within limits for oxygen and water.
As Mother took the weight, Michael offered a small prayer of thanks and vowed to buy Leading Hand Kazembi a beer. No, a case of beer. In one of the final sims, it had been Kazembi who had pointed out that assuming OTTO would get everything 100 percent right was probably not a sensible thing to do, and as a result the team had run sims involving the very problem confronting them now. He didn’t like to imagine the chaos that might have been if they had not debugged what was in retrospect something that almost inevitably was going to happen.
Time to update the skipper and then he could stand down for six hours and let Hosani take the strain.
Friday, October 23, 2398, UD
M-5 Motorway, Faith Planet
Fourteen hundred kilometers east of Faith’s capital city, Kantzina, the Clearwater Hills lifted into a dramatic sandstone ridge known locally as Gordon’s Ground. The Kantzina–Schadova motorway left the riverbank, swinging up and into a long tunnel that would emerge on the other side of the ridge to run down to a fertile floodplain that ran on in an endless carpet of blue-green forest, rising and falling all the way to the city of Schadova and beyond. Thousands of kilometers across the continent the rain forest flowed, right to the shores of Marulian Sea, the rich soil studded with the massive tropical trees that made Faith famous for its timber.
It had been a long journey for the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Regiment of marines. The convoy of trucks was a frantic last-minute response to a sudden increase in heretic activity in Schadova.
Seconds after the last truck entered the long tunnel, the sensorbots leading the convoy detected a suspect laser transmission. Their futile warnings screamed out unheard as massive explosions brought tons of rock down onto the roadway. Plastex charges painstakingly concealed in the roof of the tunnel, in maintenance tunnels, and in safety recesses exploded ahead and behind the convoy.
The 2/22nd’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, only had enough time to utter one last curse, damning brigade intelligence for its stupidity in declaring the Kantzina–Schadova motorway safe for truck convoys before his half-track, brakes locked and tracks screaming in tortured protest, smashed into a pile of rubble strewn across the roadway and turned over, its plasteel armor screeching and ripping as it came to rest against the tunnel wall. It was still for a few seconds before the rest of the convoy smashed home in quick succession, the bored drivers too slow to react as truck piled into truck, the screams of injured marines echoing in the sudden silence as metal and rock came to a shuddering, wrenching halt. The tunnel filled with smoke and dust in the half-light cast by the few headlights still burning.
Ten seconds later, crude homemade fuel-air bombs mo
unted in the center of the tunnel exploded with exquisite timing, the deadly aerosol of solvents and air igniting to turn the tunnel into an inferno and the living into the dead.
Chief Councillor Merrick put his head in his hands and for one of very few times in his life felt like weeping.
Two hundred sixty-nine marines, for Kraa’s sake. Killed. In one attack. And only thirty-four survivors, most so badly burned and their lungs so badly seared that they wouldn’t survive the night despite the frantic efforts of the regen techs. How the fuck could it have happened? And he was responsible because he had not done what had to be done, what had screamed out to be done when that Kraa-damned son of a whore Herris had first crossed the invisible line between modest corruption, long an inevitable and accepted part of Hammer life, and rampant uncontrolled graft. No, not graft. That was far too kind a term for what in truth had been unrestrained looting.
And all because he hadn’t wanted to take on Councillor Polk. Polk was the man whose influence protected and nurtured Herris. Polk was the man who made sure that all his parasitical fellow travelers enjoyed the huge dividends from Herris’s uncontrolled pillaging of Faith. What had made Polk think that the people of Faith, always the most difficult and independent of the Hammer Worlds, would put up with having their wealth confiscated, husbands and wives cheated, sons conscripted or arrested, daughters corrupted, homes despoiled, and institutions pillaged by DocSec? DocSec! The guardians of the Path of Doctrine, and all under the direction of the very man appointed by Kraa to watch over his people on Faith, Planetary Councillor Herris.
Merrick sat back in his chair, his mind a churning, confused mess.
At every point in his life he had known what he had to do and where he had to go, but not anymore. The Mumtaz project, his master plan, the biggest risk of his life, was the only piece of his world that was going according to plan, and he thanked Kraa for giving him Digby to make it all happen. But as the moment approached when he could reveal the project to an amazed and grateful Council before telling the tired peoples of the Hammer that there was hope for them and their families, that there was room to grow and flourish, that there was a new planet to take the pressure off the Hammer Worlds, Faith looked like it was about to go over the cliff. And if it did, it would drag the Hammer into another Great Schism and him to his fate in front of a DocSec firing squad.
So what was he doing now? He was getting ready for yet another Kraa-damned useless Supreme Council meeting.
As Merrick scanned the agenda, he could see nothing but bad news. Faith of course, as usual, headed the list, followed by the even worse than expected economic results for the July–September quarter. Unemployment up, consumer confidence down, business investment down, inventories up, and capital markets fragile as Faith’s battered economy, in theory the Hammer Worlds’ second largest, went into free-fall.
Then there was the arrest of a senior DocSec officer for a particularly nasty rape-murder on Fortitude that had brought the people of the capital, Mardoz, out in the streets in protest. Thank Kraa, DocSec had been sensible for once and had not indulged in the usual brutal street-clearing tactics. Must find out who the incident commander was and promote him, he thought in passing. Then there was the usual industrial unrest in the star shipyards of Commitment, the spiraling cost of the subsidies for unprofitable interplanetary space lines, allegations of corruption in the contract administration branch of the defense department.
On and on it went, a never-ending nightmare. By Kraa, he was tired.
Worst of all, he couldn’t begin to think how to make things work anymore. He sighed deeply. More of the same, it would have to be. Maybe things would settle down; they always had in the past. But Faith was a real worry. Perhaps he could remove some heads, especially the moron who had sent the 2/22nd to their deaths. What was his name? Oh, yes, Brigadier General Abinse. A spell on Hell would fix him. Might even have the useless bastard shot. And Abinse’s senior staff officers as well. Why not? Why not indeed?
Somewhat cheered by doing what he enjoyed best—the brutal exercise of his authority—Merrick picked up the phone.
Sunday, October 25, 2398, UD
Hell-14
Michael watched as Chief Petty Officer Mosharaf raised his right hand in victory, the remote holovid feed picking up the broad grin that split his face.
A herd of space-suited elephants could now tap-dance in lead boots in front of the massive sensor tower, and the Hammer’s operators would see only what the Feds wanted them to see: nothing but shattered rock and a star-studded sky.
Safely tucked away under a broad chromaflage net secured to the rock walls of a deep depression well out of sight of the tower and its deadly array of sensors, Michael and his team of sherpas had looked on in horrified fascination as Mosharaf and his team had worked with infinite care and patience to place suppressors on the tower’s infrared sensors and holocams, their every move in full sight of the tower’s antipersonnel lasers. Michael had practically died as he’d watched them cross the open ground, protected by nothing more than a smart screen, a milky-gray net supported by hair-thin gas-filled ribs tuned by its onboard AI to blend perfectly with the rock surface around it; surface-mounted emitters had adjusted the screen’s signature until it did not exist even to the most discriminating eyes.
As Ng’s people completed the laborious process of installing the massive active radar suppressors, Michael and his sherpas began the weary process of recovering all the equipment used to get Ng and her teams safely up to the towers. As the last load began its long trek back to 387, Michael completed his final task—putting in place and arming demolition charges, enough boosted chemex to flatten the tower and destroy everything on it—before he, too, with one last tired look around, set off.
Back onboard 387 and with no reaction from the Hammer to indicate any problems, Ribot flashed a pinchcomms message to Fleet to report Ng’s success. That’ll cheer them up, Michael thought as he turned in for a well-earned rest.
Tracking through deepspace 120 million kilometers out from Hell at a sedate 150,000 kph, Lieutenant William Chen, captain of DLS-166, smiled broadly as he read the latest pinchcomm broadcast from Fleet, his pride mixed with anxiety at the thought of the mission that lay ahead. Ribot’s team had done the job, and finally 166 was on its way in.
Comming the officer in command to finalize 166’s vector, he made his way to the combat information center for the microjump that would drop them a safe 18 million kilometers from Hell-14 en route to his rendezvous with Ribot and 387.
After dropping out of pinchspace 18 million kilometers from Hell, DLS-166 coasted in unseen.
Even though 387 had done all the heavy lifting, the nerves of all onboard were stretched tissue-thin as the pressure of dropping so deep in Hammer space built up. Thank Christ he didn’t have to do it like 387, Chen thought gratefully. Going in second was bad enough: hour after hour of slow deceleration right into the face of the Hammer’s sensors, not knowing if at any moment a great Hammer heavy cruiser would go active and smash the ship into a cloud of battered and twisted metal.
“Captain, sir. Krachov shields deployed and in position. Final deceleration burn in two minutes ten seconds.”
“Roger that.”
Two minutes later, with 166’s driver efflux safely blocked from view by Krachov shields positioned with exquisite care top and bottom, left and right, and now by Hell-14 itself, so close directly ahead so that every possible intercept angle between 166 and the Hammers’ surveillance satellites was blocked, Mother fired the main engines. The ship bucked and heaved in the face of the sudden deceleration, the drivers pouring hundreds of kilos of ionized mass per second out into space, the pencil-thin plume of plasma reaching out toward the waiting moon.
Finally, Mother shut down the main engines. 166 hung motionless for a few seconds before Hell-14’s tiny gravitational field took hold of her; the ship drifted down to the moon’s surface with painful slowness as Mother rolled it belly down in preparation for land
ing. Long minutes later, 166 had settled down alongside 387, and Chen felt his breathing and heartbeat return to normal.
Friday, October 30, 2398, UD
Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Planet Commitment
Merrick massaged temples split by the sudden onset of yet another in a long line of shockingly intense headaches as the Council erupted around him in a storm of furious argument.
The issue of the moment—what else did they talk about these days? Merrick thought morosely—was Faith’s continuing slide into anarchy. Merrick watched through pain-slitted eyes as Polk defended himself furiously against the charge leveled by Merrick’s supporters that the entire situation had been caused by Polk’s protection of Herris and the stinking web of corruption that Herris had woven through the entire fabric of Faith’s economy.
Merrick cursed quietly to himself as Polk refused to be moved. Polk’s association with the late and unlamented Herris was the only chink in the bloody man’s armor, and Merrick had tried every way he could to exploit that weakness. But Polk had not given an inch and wasn’t going to.
Time to call off the dogs, Merrick thought. This is going nowhere.
He smashed his hand down on the table, the noise cutting through the argument. “Enough! The situation on Faith has clearly deteriorated to a point where I intend to establish a formal inquiry into the causes of the problem. We need to know why we’ve ended up where we have and what we can do to avoid further outbreaks. I’m sure I have your support on this.”
Nice try, you old buzzard, Polk said to himself, but there was no way he was going to let Merrick off the hook. Polk loaded his voice with what he fondly imagined to be equal parts sincerity and doubt. Merrick thought he just sounded sarcastic. “Well, Chief Councillor, I’m not sure we need one. We—”
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 25
