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.