Graham Paul - The battle for Commitment planet

"Good question," Vaas said. "Until a few weeks ago, I shared your view that it would be a close-run thing. If the Hammers finished that damned antimatter plant of theirs, they would win. If the Federation managed to rebuild its Fleet and put together an invasion force first, they would. All very simple, but we think things might have changed, and not for the better."

"Changed?" Adrissa demanded. "How? And if things have changed, why was FLTDETCOMM not told?"

"Steady, Captain, steady," Vaas said, his voice even and untroubled. "We have no obligation to tell you anything, please remember that, and in any case, I wanted to wait for confirmation. I don't like going off half-cocked."

Adrissa stared at Vaas before nodding. "My apologies, General," she said.

"Accepted. As I was saying, things have changed. We're not sure of this, but we believe the Pascanici League has signed a treaty with the Hammers, a treaty of mutual support."

Michael and Adrissa glanced at each other. "A treaty of mutual support," Michael asked. "What does that mean?"

"Simple. They provide the Hammer of Kraa with capital and technology in exchange for a share of future spoils, the enormous spoils which an all-powerful Empire of the Hammer of Kraa is sure to generate."

"Shit," Michael hissed softly as he connected the dots. "Antimatter."

"Oh, no," Adrissa said, blanching. "That's not good."

"No, sir," Michael said. "Apart from being mercenary scum, the Pascanicis have some of the best magnetic flux engineers in humanspace, and they are one of the wealthiest systems around. Which means-"

Vaas finished the sentence for him. "The Hammers will have their new antimatter plant operational a lot sooner than the five years you Feds have been assuming. You've got to hand it to Polk. It's a very sweet deal."

Fear clawed at Michael's heart. If Vaas was right, it was game over. Everything he loved, his family and friends, all might be blown away. At best, the Federated Worlds would become irrelevant, subject to the Hammer's every whim, a vassal system like Scobie's World, a system whose sole purpose would be to support Polk's megalomaniac dreams of empire.

He breathed in hard and deep to bring the fear under control. He turned to Adrissa. "There's no choice, sir. Long Shot just has to work."

"Yes, it does. It does," Adrissa said. She scanned the faces of the three NRAs sitting across the table. "I think it is safe to assume that you agree."

Silent, the three nodded.

"Good," Adrissa said, "in which case can we look at what Helfort's produced so far. I want to know what you think. Once we're agreed on his analysis, we need to agree on a timetable and plan for executing Long Shot."

"I agree," Vaas said. "Lieutenant?"

"Thank you, General," Michael said, relieved that the meeting was going to move on; he was sick of talking about the problem. "If you'd look at the holovid, this is what I have so far. First…"

Leaving Adrissa to talk to Vaas about something he was too junior to hear, Michael followed Major Hok out of the meeting room. He had mixed feelings. He had Vaas's support, Cortez was onside, things were moving, and he was happy to be working with Hok. Vaas had refused to let him access ENCOMM's intelligence knowledge base, so that was her job. All that was good.

The bad was an undercurrent of quiet desperation that permeated everything Vaas and Cortez said. The NRA's defeat of the Hammer's latest attempt to winkle them out of the Branxtons had been a Pyrrhic victory. Vaas knew it; every staffer in ENCOMM knew it. Add to that the fact that the Hammers might defeat the Federated Worlds inside three years and the NRA's future did not look good.

"Coffee?" Michael asked.

"Dumb question, Lieutenant," Hok said with a grin. "I was born a Hammer, remember, born with a tiny coffee mug in my tiny hand."

Michael rolled his eyes in mock despair and shook his head. Without another word they turned into the ENCOMM canteen. As with everyone else in the NRA, Hok's love of coffee bordered on the obsessive. Not that she was unusual; he had heard of Hammer units refusing combat until a defective drinkbot had been fixed.

Coffee in hand, Hok and Michael sat down in a corner, out of the way of the endless ebb and flow of ENCOMM staff.

"You think this can work, don't you?" Hok said. "Talk about a surprise. Thought the general was going to choke."

"Our Block 6's, you mean?"

"Yup. I've been with the NRA for four years now, and let me tell you something. Knowing that we're trapped dirtside with no chance of ever getting off this Kraa-forsaken planet is hard to take sometimes. I used to love my trips to Scobie's," she said with a wistful smile, "and now we find we have our very own starship sitting not 200 klicks from here. I have to hand it to you Feds; my father was a pinchspace generator engineer, so I know more than most. How you guys managed to shoehorn them into something as small as an assault lander is beyond me."

"You miss him? Your father, I mean."

Hok's head dropped. Oh, shit, thought Michael, wrong question. "Sorry," he said. "I shouldn't ha-"

"No, no. There's no way you could have known. I used to be a marine officer, ninth in my class, set for a good career, loyal and unquestioning, successful and ambitious. Then those black-uniformed scum went and arrested my father… Never did find out what for, maybe an anonymous report from a neighbor with an ax to grind. Don't know. Last the family heard, he had been sent to the mass driver mines of Hell's Moons. Not many people come back from there. I suppose we were lucky; DocSec didn't arrest my mother, and the family was left alone. Anyway, two months after my dad was taken away, I decided that I couldn't be part of the Hammer of Kraa anymore, so I deserted and here I am. Still wonder whether my father's still alive… don't suppose he is. Those mines are awful places."

Michael's face was grim; Hok's story was one of many he had heard since joining the NRA. "We have to win this," he said, "if only so people like you can know what happened. It must be tearing you apart."

"Every minute of every day another little bit of me dies. There are hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people, with stories every bit as bad as mine, some even worse, and that's why we have to destroy the Hammers."

"Yes, we do."

"Enough navel gazing, Lieutenant. Drink your coffee and let's get going. We have a lot to do."

"Sir."

Rubbing her eyes, Hok pushed back from the holovid screen. "Please tell me that's it."

"Yes, it is. I'll feed everything into the Long Shot simulation, run it again, and see what it comes up with… but we're missing something."

"Oh, Kraa help me," Hok said with a heartfelt sigh. "Come on, then. What?"

"No, no. It's not an intel issue."

"So what is it?"

"Let's assume for a moment that we can reach the Feds. Wha-"

"Isn't that all that matters? What else is there?"

Michael frowned. "That's just it. The more I look at it, the more I think getting to the Feds is not the problem. Persuading them to do what we want, to do what the NRA needs, is the problem. That's the part that's bothering me."

"Holy Kraa. You have a gift for seeing problems. Tell you what. Let's take this one step at a time. Work out how we get to the Feds and then worry about convincing them. Okay?"

"Okay." Friday, February 15, 2402, UD ENCOMM, Branxton Base, Commitment

"… and that concludes my presentation." Michael paused to glance around the room. "Are there any questions?"

"You're kidding," an anonymous voice whispered from the back. "You can't be serious."

"Deadly serious," Michael said. "This has to be done, and what I've just shown you is the only way to do it. Any other comments or questions?"

"The deception plan," a staffer said. "That seems to me to be the critical element of Long Shot. Two questions: Has ENCOMM signed off on it, and how well does it stand up in the sims?"