But quite how he was going to rescue Anna and destroy the Hammers at the same time, he had absolutely no idea.
Thursday, April 19, 2401, UD
City of McNair, Commitment
The moon threw a thin light across the city of McNair.
The streetscape was washed of all color: flame-blackened buildings, crude barricades smashed apart in the night’s fighting, smoke drifting from shops and government offices, from the wrecked cars, mobibots, and buses that littered the streets-all were painted in shades of gray splashed with daubs of black.
DocSec troopers in black jumpsuits and body armor, visors down and riot shields up, stood in small groups at crossroads, with more in front of those government offices as yet undamaged, stun guns and gas-grenade throwers cradled in their arms, assault rifles slung across their backs. Close at hand, half-tracks and troop carriers were parked in neat rows. They struck an incongruous note, their good order in stark contrast to the chaos around them.
The rioters had been forced out of the city center, harried and harassed every step of the way by DocSec; the streets were deserted. Nothing moved except smoke and ash.
The city waited, silent, still, an edgy calm settling over devastated streets.
Chief Councillor Polk stared out of the armored plasglass window of the flier while it climbed away from the brutal ceramcrete bulk of the Supreme Council building. From the air, McNair was an ugly sight. All across the city, piles of burning plasfiber spewed pillars of protest up into a gray sky, every greasy black plume of smoke a stark reminder that his grip on power might be slipping away.
He had been around long enough to know how the Hammer Worlds worked. When the unwritten contract between government and governed-prosperity and stability from the government in exchange for unquestioning acquiescence from the governed-started to unravel, it was up to DocSec to restore the status quo.
DocSec could deal with thousands of protesters: divide the mob up, kill any that stood and fought, track down those who ran, shoot some, imprison the rest, exile their families, and harass their friends and associates to remind them of the benefits of staying in line. The formula worked, as hundreds of neofascist governments had proved over the centuries. He just hoped it kept working long enough for him to die quietly in his own bed.
If the formula failed, DocSec would find itself facing millions of protesters. When it did-and Polk’s instincts told him it would happen sooner rather than later-it was just a matter of time before the whole rotten edifice that was the Hammer government collapsed. Something told him that the Worlds were closer to that day than anyone was prepared to admit.
Polk dismissed the problem; if the day came, it came, and when it did, why would he care? He would be dead, left to dangle by one leg from a streetlight. He sat back as the flier cleared McNair’s smoke-smeared skies. Without much success, he tried not to think about the day ahead: one meaningless public event after another, every second filmed by the holocams to demonstrate to the Hammer people that he, Jeremiah Polk, Chief Councillor of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds, was master of all the forces shaping the Worlds’ destiny.
Which he was not, as anyone with half a brain knew after the fiasco at Devastation Reef.
From the largest down to the smallest, his capacity to influence events was limited, laughably so. Kraa! Despite all his pushing, the Hammer of Kraa was unable to get even one miserable piece of Fed filth off Serhati, a planet that owed its day-to-day survival to Hammer largesse. How pitiful was that? Anyway, he consoled himself, at least he could make Helfort’s life miserable. That much he could and would do. Money slipped to a venal trashpress, money used to suborn Fed spacers with lavish hospitality-together they would make Helfort’s life hell. Polk told himself to be patient. One day, the relentless pressure would make Helfort careless, flush him out into the open, where a Hammer hit team would find a way to get to him.
Much cheered by that prospect, Polk found to his amazement that he was actually looking forward to the rest of the day.
Monday, May 7, 2401, UD
Space Fleet headquarters, city of Foundation, Terranova
Thanks to one of Fleet’s postcombat stress teams, Michael was coping a damn sight better than he had after his escape from Commitment the last time around, but it was not easy.
The board of inquiry into Operation Opera was into its umpteenth day, and still he had not been called; he had yet to say a single word. The suspense was getting to him, though it was nothing compared with his concern for Anna; the worry was like an animal, gnawing away at his guts, hour in, hour out. True, she was alive, but she was in the Hammers’ hands, and he had learned the hard way that they were never to be trusted.
If that was not bad enough, the trashpress was having a field day. His clash with Perkins was the scandal on everyone’s lips; he could not say for sure who was feeding inside information to the trashpress, but somebody was. He would have bet good money it was one of Perkins’s legion of dreadnought-hating supporters.
For the trashpress, it was a story they would sell their firstborn for. Apart from sex, it contained everything they wanted: the future of the Federation, age and experience versus callow youth and unthinking rashness, ambition, decisions made in the heat of battle, insubordination, death, and destruction. It could not have been much more appetizing if the whole business had been scripted to order.
Angry and frustrated, he pushed back from his desk. He commed the legbot that supported his injured left leg into life-the doctors might think the leg was getting better, but it still hurt like hell every time he moved it-before lifting himself carefully to his feet. It had been an unproductive day sitting in the offices of the Warfare Division, updating the Fighting Instructions; it was not the best place for him to be. To a spacer, the division was an implacable enemy of dreadnoughts, its staff not slow to let him know that over and over again.
He needed to get away. A few beers with the crew of the Reckless-like him, all posted to Fleet staff for temporary duty until the board of inquiry had finished-would go a long way to reassure him that the world was not populated completely by Neanderthal assholes.
Michael set off, limping heavily despite the best efforts of the legbot to compensate for a left thigh still a long way from complete recovery.
Three hours later, Michael found himself ensconced comfortably behind a table in one of the bars popular with Fleet spacers. Beer in hand, he was happy to let conversation wash over him, the talk ebbing and flowing over the issues that engaged most Fleet spacers most of the time: stupid politicians, amoral lobbyists, greedy defense contractors, shortsighted civilians, the pressures placed on family and friends by the demands of Fleet service, what the Hammers might do next. Around the table sat the rest of the crew of Reckless. Matti Bienefelt was well into a rambling account of a ship visit to a fringe planet settled by, of all things, an extreme cyborg sect so obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human geneering that their grasp of the harsh realities of world building and planetary economics was tenuous at best. Michael smiled; Bienefelt was being harassed-as tradition dictated-by Carmellini, Lomidze, and Faris every step of the way, each word sniped at the instant it left her mouth. The engineers were deep in an arcane discussion about fusion power plants Michael could not begin to understand, and Jayla Ferreira was talking landers with Kat Sedova and the crew of Caesar’s Ghost.