Michael took a deep breath and instructed his stomach to stay put. Then the world tipped upside down, and Michael braced himself for his stomach to empty in its usual gut-wrenching way. But the jump never happened. He looked up to see Bienefelt and the rest of his team, including Strezlecki, who was supposed to be on his side, for God’s sake, he thought, standing there with smiles on their faces that turned into laughs as they saw the indignant look on Michael’s face.
“Bastards,” Michael said as he realized he had been taken for a ride. “You unprincipled bastards. So much for mutual respect. Right, I won’t forget this. You in particular, Bienefelt. I think additional casualty desuiting drills are what’s called for. Petty Officer Strezlecki, you, too.” It felt good to laugh, to relieve the tension even for a moment, and with a new resolve that things would turn out all right, Michael held his hand up for silence as Mother finally got a grip on what 387 had dropped herself into.
Closing his eyes, Michael commed into the threat plot and dropped himself into a position in space slightly behind and above 387. For one horrible moment, as bright red threat symbols blossomed in front of him, he thought they had run right into a Hammer task group. But methodically, Mother processed the passive sensor returns, and one by one the red symbols turned to orange: real enough threats but too far away to pose any immediate risk to 387.
“All stations, this is command. Secure from general quarters. Revert to defense stations, ship state 2, airtight integrity condition yankee. Port watch has the watch. Command out.”
As he opened his eyes, the blackness of deep space gave way to the brilliant brightness of the hangar and the cheerful faces of his team. Michael sighed with relief. They had been at general quarters for an hour, an hour that came off his precious off-watch time. He handed over the watch to Petty Officer Strezlecki as he and half the team desuited.
Michael paused at the ladder down to the accommodation level as the captain came up on main broadcast.
“All stations, this is the captain. Just a quick update on how I see things. I think the best way to sum it up is that I have good news and bad news. The good news, as you may by now have realized, is that we weren’t ambushed as we dropped out of pinchspace. We’ve dropped well outside the detection threshold for their long-range passive sensor arrays, and just as important, there are no Hammer warships inside 15 million kilometers. The nearest hostiles are a couple of Constancy Class light escorts fiddling around conducting what look like basic weapon drills. So it’s almost certain we got in undetected. We’ve also got a good laser tight-beam link with Bonnie, and we’re getting good data. She’s a day ahead of us, say, 7 million kilometers out from Hell’s Moons, which is where we hope to find the Mumtaz, of course. So hopefully Bonnie will pick her up. She’s scheduled to arrive sometime on the fourteenth, though we don’t know when.
“The bad news is Mother has confirmed and refined Bonnie’s earlier report of a large number of Hammer ships around Hell’s Moons. Currently, Mother is tracking no less than forty-five warships-three heavy and six light cruisers, twelve escorts of various sizes, eighteen patrol ships, four scouts, and two support ships to round out the group. And that’s on top of the space battle station capabilities the Hammer has built into its flotilla base. We’re going to watch them closely, but I am pretty well convinced they are not there for our benefit. If they were, it’d be overkill by a factor of about ten, and they wouldn’t be in orbit, they’d be deployed in a defensive screen perhaps 5 million kilometers out along our most likely approach vector. Which, by the way, is not the vector we are now coming in on.
“So it could get exciting, though I think that’s pretty unlikely. We’ll wait and see what they get up to. Captain out.”
Michael and all the rest of 387’s crew breathed out heavily as the captain finished. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to work out that forty-five Hammer warships created a bit of a problem for Ribot. As Michael hurried down the ladder, he wondered what Ribot was going to do about it.
That very question was exercising Ribot’s mind in no uncertain way.
The last THREATSUM from Fleet had said that there was a 95 percent chance that the number of Hammer warships on station would not exceed twenty, the normal battle strength of the Hell flotilla. To minimize the risks, 387’s route had been chosen carefully to avoid the vectors used regularly by Hell-based warships, whose commanders, like all humans everywhere, were creatures of routine and habit. But having no less than forty-five warships in-system significantly increased the chance that their behavior would not follow normal patterns.
Ribot’s worry, amply shared by Mother, was that Hammer ships would use vectors that intersected 387’s fly-by vector. Mother’s concern was reflected in her revised THREATSUM. She now put the overall chance of 387 not surviving the fly-by at one in twenty, which as far as Ribot was concerned was an extremely bad number. Taking on that risk wasn’t the problem. Ribot knew that somebody had to find the Mumtaz as soon as possible; 387 had gotten the job, and that was the end of it. No, it was waiting for the ax to fall, not knowing if it was going to happen and, if it was, when. Ribot could think of nothing worse.
He commed the combat information center, where Hosani had the watch.
“Maria, I’m going to do a walk-around to see how everyone is. When I’ve done that, I’m going to put my head down while things are quiet. But call me if you need to.”
“Sir.”
An hour later, Ribot was satisfied that all was well with his little bubble of civilization as it flew into the heart of Hammer darkness. With no sign that the Hammer ships were going to leave their berths, Ribot slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.
Saturday, September 12, 2398, UD
Planetary Transfer Station, in Clarke Orbit around Commitment Planet
Ever since the coded pinchcomms message announcing the successful takeover of Mumtaz had come through from Comonec, the tension inside Digby had built.
He knew all too well that with every step the project took, the personal risk to him grew. It wasn’t just because Merrick needed him less and less. It wasn’t just Digby’s suspicion that Merrick had no intention of letting him survive. No, it was the Feds. If they showed their hand too early, Merrick would know instantly that he had been betrayed. At that point, as Merrick had explained to him with admirable clarity and force of purpose, Digby’s life was forfeit whether or not he’d been responsible for the breach, and he would be handed over to DocSec for disposal.
At least, he thought with some relief as the up-shuttle from McNair finally docked with the planetary transfer station, he was putting himself outside Merrick’s immediate reach. If he could delay his return to Commitment for some reason or other and if the Feds took their time mounting their rescue mission, Merrick would begin to believe that he had gotten away with it, and his justifiable lack of trust in Digby might fade to the point where there was no need to dispose of him.
One thing was absolutely clear: If he wanted to survive to see his wife again, he had better not be anywhere near Merrick when the Feds did make their move. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the best place for him to be, the only safe place for him to be, was dirtside on Eternity, overseeing the terraforming project.
He would have to invent some plausible reasons why a brigadier general of marines who knew less than nothing about terraforming should be heading up the project rather than Professor Cornelius Wang, formerly head of the School of Exobiology at the University of McNair. Wang was now a resident of Hell after some very ill-advised comments on the mental state of the councillor for the preservation of doctrine, one Angus Jessop. Wang’s mistake had been to make those comments to his deputy, Marais Landon, a man he’d known almost all his adult life and one of the few people he thought he could trust. Sadly for Professor Wang, his faith in his deputy had been misplaced, and he was on Hell to prove it while Landon enjoyed being the new head of the School of Exobiology.