It was a somber, grim-faced group that sat around the combat information center conference table digesting the full import of what they’d just been told, struggling to answer the challenges Ribot had just put to them. They knew what had to be done. Now the question was how, and the profound silence around the conference table more than demonstrated that those answers would not come easily.
With a huge effort, Michael pushed family to the back and duty to the front. Half closing his eyes, he turned his mind inward, comming his neuronics to bring up the standard Fleet mission planning template. Shit, he thought as he took a good hard look at what 387, the only Fleet unit within hundreds of millions of light-years, was being asked to do.
The mission was clear enough, its objectives spelled out in brutally simple and unemotional language by Ribot.
One, make a covert entry into the Revelation Star System.
Two, deploy surveillance assets around the second planet, Revelation-II, or Hell, as the Hammers called it.
Three, confirm whether the Mumtaz had in fact dropped into the Revelation-II/Hell System to off-load Mumtaz’s crew.
Four, once Mumtaz’s arrival was confirmed, recover surveillance assets, make a covert departure, and jump to the Judgment System for a fly-by of the planet Eternity to see just what the hell the Hammers were up to.
Five, leave Eternity and jump out of Hammer normalspace.
Oh, Michael had almost forgotten. There was a six, a very important six: Under no circumstances get caught.
He breathed out unevenly, his body still hyped by shock and stress. The mission objectives were easy to list. They sounded straightforward, but Michael had done enough combat sims to know that space warfare was never that simple, and the Hammers could never be underestimated.
The easiest part of the new mission-the initial vector change burn, all thirteen rattling, banging, and shaking minutes of it-had been accomplished. 387, now many tons of driver mass lighter than when she had set off from SBS-20, was aligned for the jump to the Revelation System, a jump Ribot had said must be the best and most accurate 387 had ever made.
Michael already had offered up three silent prayers. The first was to thank the Good Lord that of all the many Fleet warships, 387 was the one with the Mod 45 navigation AI. The second was that the Mod 45 would drop 387 into the Revelation System as precisely as its designers claimed it would. The third was that they’d get away with it. It had been a long time since a Fed warship had swanned through Hammer space as brazenly as 387 was going to.
But that left them with the first problem they had to solve. The huge amount of driver mass used up making the vector change to line 387 up for the pinchspace jump to Revelation had ruled out any option for 387 to loiter in the vicinity of Hell’s Moons in the Revelation System and then Eternity planet in the Judgment System.
Michael sighed in frustration. Any way he cut it, a conventional recon profile meant stranding 387 in hostile Hammer space out of driver mass, easy pickings for even the most incompetent Hammer captain of the least efficient rail-gun-fitted Hammer warship. Even Fleet, hard-nosed though they could be, wouldn’t ask that of any of its captains, and Michael didn’t think Ribot was going to volunteer. Anyway, Fleet hadn’t specified the time. No, this would have to be a quick-very quick-and dirty fly-by of both systems.
There were a few other problems besetting 387 and its command team.
Dropping in-system was one thing. Just how to do that without squandering too much driver mass on the one hand and taking too much time on the other was the first question Ribot wanted answered. The Hammer’s long-range ultraviolet flash detectors were poor; provided that 387 dropped more than 18 million kilometers from the nearest detector arrays, it was pretty safe, according to Mother.
So that was okay unless, of course, the Hammer had a warship out deep, in which case it would be all over. But based on the latest THREATSUM, Fleet reckoned that the chances of a Hammer warship being that far out were vanishingly small, an assessment Michael was prepared to agree with. Remote sensors were a risk, but the Hammer usually didn’t deploy them deep-field. Actually, nobody did; there was simply too great a volume of space to cover unless, of course, the Hammer knew where and when 387 was coming. But he couldn’t worry about that. If they did, they did. He couldn’t see how they could know, but it didn’t matter.
However, even if 387 was lucky and the Hammers were all safe in orbit somewhere, that still left 387 to make a ten-day, 36-million-kilometer transit at 150,000 kph past Hell’s Moons. If they tried to speed things up, that meant a main propulsion burn that even the Hammer couldn’t miss. To add to 387’s woes, to drop accurately out of pinchspace and as close to the 18-million-kilometer detection threshold as possible, 387 would have to do the jump at 150,000 kph. Any faster and 387 risked dropping inside the threshold, and that could make for a bad day all around.
All that was why, Michael thought savagely, the fighting instructions stressed the importance of giving ships undertaking covert operations all the time they needed to slip in and slip out without having to resort to too many main propulsion burns and the like. But time was one thing they did not have.
Then a thought came to him. What if…Yes, Michael said to himself. That might do it. After a quick check, it looked okay to him, so with some hesitation he decided to see what the rest of the team thought. To look at them, they weren’t having much luck so far.
Michael’s hesitant voice broke the awkward silence. “Um, Captain, sir. What if we dropped well short, did a main engine burn to get our speed up, got our alignment spot-on, and then microjumped the last little bit so that the loss of jump accuracy didn’t matter so much.”
Ribot thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “Nice idea, Michael, but a main propulsion burn is something you cannot hide without Krachov shrouds, and those we don’t have. The Hammers might not see it immediately, but there is too much risk they would see it, and then they would know we had come visiting.”
Ribot sounded troubled. Michael felt for him. There was no obvious way out of this one, time was running out, and nobody, not even Mother (not that AIs were any good at solving problems like this), seemed to have the answers Ribot needed.
Another long moment of silence was interrupted, this time by Hosani. “Actually, sir, Michael’s got most of the answer. There might be a way. Look here,” she said as she commed the two outermost planets of the Revelation system to come up on the command plot. “We could do what Michael suggested if we dropped behind Revelation-III. God knows, the bloody thing is big enough to hide a burn, and we know the Hammer have no dirtside or orbital surveillance assets there. We could then fire main engines without the Hammer seeing us, slingshot around the planet, get lined up for Hell’s Moons, and get the microjump all nicely set up. Might work, and God knows, I think we’d all be a lot happier doing a fly-by of Hell’s Moons at 300,000 kph rather than 150,000.”
Ribot was silent for a moment, and then he turned to Michael with a smile. “Michael, you might not have had all of the answer, but by God, you had enough of it. And Maria, well done for thinking it through. Leon, that’s a beer you owe me for not getting there first!”
“You’re a hard man, sir,” Leon said, his smile even broader than Ribot’s. Michael knew why. They were all happy that there might be a way to do what had to be done without getting themselves killed in the process.