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 mounted 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.