Yeah, yeah, yeah, Michael murmured to himself, tuning out; we’ve called that bluff. He concentrated on watching Sedova’s every move. Not that he had anything to offer her. Sedova had graduated in the top 5 percent of her command pilot class at combat flight school. If a v-max reentry was beyond her capabilities, it was definitely beyond his. Compared to Sedova, he was a rank amateur.
Sedova pitched the Ghost’s nose up for reentry. Plunging planetward, the lander started to feel the first tenuous threads of Serhati’s upper atmosphere. A thin high-pitched whistle developed rapidly into a full-blooded scream as Caesar’s Ghost ripped the air apart in its plunge to Earth, nose and belly armor glowing first red, then white-hot as ablation started in earnest, leaving a fiery tail to mark its passing. Hands locked tightly onto the arms of his seat, Michael prayed-hard-that Caesar’s Ghost would get through this. At normal reentry speeds, any lander could complete ten reentries a week without breaking a sweat. V-max reentries were another matter; heated by massive compression, Serhati’s atmosphere would reach 13,000 Kelvin as it tore past, too much for the lander’s armor to resist, the excess heat carried away by ablation of the carbon-impregnated ceramsteel, the lander tracing a blazing arc across the sky as it dropped to earth.
In the end, a v-max reentry was a race to see which happened first: a successful transition to winged flight or ablation of the armor until none was left. Without armor, Caesar’s Ghost would not survive two minutes before superheated plasma broke through her inner titanium skin and she disintegrated into a flaming shower of burning wreckage.
Trailing fire, Caesar’s Ghost plunged deeper into Serhati’s atmosphere. The lander shook violently as the aerodynamic stress built, its artificial gravity struggling to absorb deceleration, pushing the lander’s frame to its limits.
“Approaching max g,” Sedova announced, her voice calm. “Stand by pitch down. Hold on, folks.”
Michael braced himself, hands locked onto the arms of his seat. This was the most critical, the riskiest phase of the reentry; in a v-max reentry, this was the point where the command pilot risked her life and those of her passengers and crew. Reducing pitch minimized the g forces acting on the lander but exposed more of the lander’s lightly armored nose to superheated air, increasing the risk of thermal breakthrough into the hull. When v-max reentries went to shit, it was during pitch down, and everybody knew it.
When-after a lifetime-Sedova pitched the nose back up, Michael allowed himself to breathe out. Slowly the lander’s speed bled off. Maybe, just maybe, they might make it, he thought.
The rest of the flight turned out to be an anticlimax, not that Michael was complaining. He’d had all the excitement he could take. Extending the wings in small increments as the lander’s speed decayed, Sedova flew a perfect engine-off approach into Norton Field, kicking the engines back into life only when the Ghost neared the threshold. Dropping steeply and still traveling at speed, she extended the lander’s huge triple-slotted flaps, the landing gear locking down with a muffled, metallic thunk, then pulled Caesar’s Ghost sharply back onto its tail in the vomit-inducing maneuver called-without any affection at all-“walking the blowtorch.” With the lander now held up entirely by the power of its main engines, its nose pointing nearly vertically into the sky, Sedova rammed the belly-mounted thrusters to full power, killing the Ghost’s speed. Crossing the threshold, Sedova eased back on the throttles and rotated the Ghost’s nose forward and down, dropping the lander with a crunching thud onto the runway. Braking gently, she let the lander run before turning off the runway and coming to a stop. Caesar’s Ghost was surrounded immediately by what had to be the best part of Serhati’s planetary defense forces.
Sedova broke the stunned silence.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for flying Sedova Space Lines”-Michael noticed that her voice shook ever so slightly-“and welcome to Serhati. You may disembark now. And make it quick, please. I’ve set the self-destruct charges to blow in five minutes.”
Wednesday, April 4, 2401, UD
McNair
Chief Councillor Polk damned the vaulting ambition that had driven him to the chief councillorship, clawing his way up every blood-drenched step of the ladder. He damned the stupidities that had turned the Hammer Worlds into a crippled, corrupt shambles. He damned the incompetent fools he was forced to work with. He damned a military that once again had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He damned the Feds for wriggling out of the death grip the Hammers had on their throats.
But most of all, he damned his nemesis, a man with an uncanny ability to be there every time the Feds kicked the Hammers in the balls.
Helfort … Lieutenant Michael Wallace Helfort, Federated Worlds Space Fleet, may Kraa damn his evil heretic soul, the man responsible more than any other for the loss of the Hammer’s precious antimatter plant.
He asked himself for the thousandth time why he was so stupid. Why had he ever allowed one miserable man to get so far under his skin? Kraa knew how hard he attempted to keep Helfort in perspective, but no matter how hard he tried, it made no difference. Not a day went by without him thinking about the man. He had even started to dream about the son of a bitch, for Kraa’s sake!
Was he asking too much? No, he did not think so: He wanted the man dead, one miserable, no-account human being dead; that was all. With the full resources of the Hammer Worlds at hand, why was that so hard? Well, he decided, maybe things were going to get easier; Helfort’s luck had run out … finally. Fate had given the Hammers the best chance they were ever going to get, and Polk intended to make sure the bungling blockheads who worked for him took it. If those useless Serhatis tried to dick him around, he would kick their Kraa-damned asses. He would give them a week to transfer the Feds back.
All being well, he decided, he would get his hands on Helfort, after all. Once the man had been tried, shot, and dumped into a DocSec lime pit-Helfort should feel right at home lying there beside Fleet Admiral Jorge and all the rest of the useless scum responsible for the Hammer’s defeat at Devastation Reef-he might be able to forget him.
Thursday, April 5, 2401, UD
Hajek Barracks, Serhati
Michael stared out of the grimy windows of the barracks at the start of another stinking hot Serhati day. In the distance, the heat-battered landscape faded away into the brown haze before reappearing as the ground climbed into the Red Mountains, a hellish chain of splintered rock rising abruptly out of the narrow coastal plain that hosted the only settlement of note, Serhati City. Why the hell anyone would want to live on a planet like this was beyond him. The bits of Serhati that were not mountains were desert, and its one and only ocean was a fetid puddle so salty that the first arrivals called it, with the lack of originality that so characterized the place, the Great Salt Sea. Great Stinking Sea would have been more apt, though that would not have done much to encourage migrants.
Admiral Jaruzelska knew what she was talking about. She had said the place was a real shithole, and it was. It was not even a rich shithole. Serhati was one of far too many marginal planets scattered across humanspace, proof, were it needed, that optimism and hope beat common sense and rational thinking far too often. It had been settled by colonists riding the wave of euphoria that had driven millions of humans off Old Earth and across hundreds of light-years of space, looking for a better life; now they struggled to survive. When the first migrants found that euphoria was not enough to live on, most saw sense and left. Some stayed, settling down to an existence that was precarious in the extreme. For centuries the planet teetered over the abyss of economic collapse, its only income coming from exports of Serhati saltmullet-considered by some to be an exquisite delicacy when served raw; in Michael’s opinion, it tasted like mud-and a thin trickle of tourists braving Serhati’s abhorrence of customer service to gaze upon the admittedly magnificent rock formations of the Red Mountains. Even that was barely enough to maintain the fabric of civil society. In the end, all that kept Serhati out of liquidation was an annual payment from the Hammer Worlds to ensure that the Serhatis voted the way the Hammers wanted in meetings of the Humanspace Council. Needless to say, that made Serhati irredeemably corrupt.