Graham Paul: The Battle of the Hammer Worlds

“Not on the traffic schedule, I take it.”

“No, sir.”

“Okay. Call it in.”

Michael’s heart began to pound as the gravitronics operator formally reported the suspect contact. No ship should be joining the traffic stream from that angle. That would put it on the wrong side of the traffic lane running galactic north toward the Federated Worlds. Depending on the new arrival’s vector, it could mean chaos as fully loaded merchant ships, probably the most sluggish things in deepspace, made desperate attempts to avoid a collision. “Unbelievable,” Michael muttered. Billions of cubic light-years of space to work in, yet here was some clown looking to get up close and personal. The son of a bitch should be shot.

The sensor management center was no longer the relaxed place it had been. In seconds, Michael had every available sensor on the task of working out what was about to drop and, much more important, what its vector was. If the ships transiting Karovic Reef were to have any chance of avoiding a rogue crosser, they needed good vector data, and fast.

The tension rose and, as quickly, ebbed away. To Michael’s relief, the bearing of the gravitronics intercept started to move across Ishaq ’s bows, dropping as it did so. It was a rogue for sure, no doubt about it. The ship had no flight plan logged into the traffic control AIs and was about to make an illegal entry into restricted space. Thankfully, it was not a dangerous rogue. All Michael could hope for was that eventually the ship would fall into the hands of the International Admiralty Court, though there was not much chance of that. According to the sensor AI’s best guess, the ship was probably in transit from the Rogue Worlds across humanspace to one of the Marakoff Consortium Planets. Because neither system paid much-if any-regard to the institutions of international space justice, he did not think the ship would ever be caught.

“Sensors, gravitronics. Track 781553 is dropping. Estimate drop datum at Green 5 Down 15, range 55,000 kilometers.”

Ouch, Michael thought, 55,000 kilometers was safe but still way, way too close. “Sensors, roger.”

Track 781553 dropped in a short-lived blaze of ultraviolet light. Michael went through the routine of reporting the new arrival’s identity, but it was a short report. Apart from confirming the ship’s vector and noting that the starship was a small, spherical high-speed courier, there was little more the sensor team could add.

The ship carried registration marks recorded in no database held by Ishaq -probably false in any case, Michael thought-squawked the same unknown identity, transmitted nothing else on any frequency, and refused to acknowledge Ishaq ’s strident requests to stop and be boarded.

For a moment, Michael wondered if Constanza would launch one of Ishaq ’s space assault vehicles to get close enough to have a better look. When he worked out the vector needed to intercept, he realized that although it could be done, it would be pretty marginal. In the end, the Ishaq ’s log recorded the rogue crosser as yet another of space’s little mysteries.

The watch ground its predictable way to an end. Michael handed over to his relief; after a quiet word of thanks to the gravitronics operator, he was on his way to grab a quick lunch.

He had a lot to do, and the previous night’s fracas had added to the load.

The debate got quite heated. It was surprising, Michael thought, that two people who normally were so controlled could get so worked up, and Ichiro and Bettany were pretty worked up. Each was clinging like a limpet to the rock of a well dug-in position. Michael waited until logic started to give way to emotion before interrupting.

“Okay, guys. Enough. Can I have a go?”

“Be my guest, sir,” Ichiro replied with a wave of her hand. “I’m not getting anywhere with Petty Officer Bonehead here. Maybe you’ll have more luck.”

Michael laughed. He knew as well as Bettany did that there was no malice in Ichiro’s invective. “Yes, thanks for that, Chief.” He paused to gather his thoughts. How the debate was resolved would decide the Hammer strategy Michael and his team were putting in place for the COMEX. With a mountain of small details to be worked out before uploading the exercise parameters into the AI running the COMEX, time was getting short.

“If it were left to the Hammer’s admirals, I would agree with you. They hate nukes because in the end war is about territory, productive territory. Keeping theirs, taking ours. So what’s the good of an irradiated planet? It’s just another lump of useless, slag-encrusted dirt. God knows we have trillions of those to choose from, whereas there are precious few terra-standard planets. Left to the admirals, there’d be no nukes, but it’s not up to the Hammer’s admirals, not this time. We’ve been through all the intelligence summaries analyzing what’s changed with Polk’s takeover. Merrick was a hard man, no doubt about it. Until he went solo with that damn stupid Mumtaz hijacking, he would at least listen to his military staff. Polk won’t. He’s put the best part of the Hammer’s brass into DocSec lime pits, so who in their right mind is going to stand up to him? I’ll tell you. Nobody! It’s too dangerous.”

“So it’s Polk’s call,” Ichiro said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Exactly! In the end, Polk will tell the military what to do.”

Ichiro sat back, hands behind her head. She took a while to think it through. Patiently, Michael and Bettany waited until Ichiro, mind apparently made up, came back to the table. She nodded her agreement. “Okay, I agree. Dirtside nukes it is. Of course, there’ll be hell to pay, sir.” Ichiro looked troubled. “You know that?”

Michael nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

FWSS Ishaq, pinchspace

Ishaq ’s flag combat data center was hushed as the opening moves of the COMEX played themselves out on huge holovids arrayed all around Captain Constanza and her command team. From the back of the compartment, Fellsworth and the rest of her directing staff watched the proceedings, a noticeably nervous Michael among them.

Fellsworth leaned over to him. “For Christ’s sake, Michael, relax,” she whispered. “It’s an exercise.”

“Wish it was only an exercise, sir,” he whispered back. He was more nervous than he’d expected. Putting together a COMEX was a serious intellectual challenge, and he did not want the work he and his team had done to be found wanting. More than that, he wanted Constanza to do well. He wanted her to make an obvious and public success of the COMEX. Sadly, he had a sinking feeling that he was going to be very, very disappointed.

Without being too obvious about it, Fellsworth had worked hard to position things for Constanza. She had made damn sure that the flood of background information setting up the COMEX’s political and military context would give Constanza every opportunity to see that this Hammer attack would not-could not-be like every other attack. The clues had been there-lots of them-but Constanza had refused to take them despite the best efforts of the rest of her command team to make her do that. Michael shook his head in frustration. To a spacer, Constanza’s team had drawn the right conclusions from the intelligence provided, but Constanza had not.

In the end, she had rejected the possibility that nukes might be used dirtside out of hand. It was “something the Hammers would never do,” she had declared forcefully. So that had been that. From that point on, her forces were always positioned to deal with a nonnuclear planetary attack. The possibility that she might be wrong had no place in her thinking. Sadly, that meant that there was little in the way of fallback planning. Worst of all, to allow her ships to engage the attackers right down to the edge of Terranova’s atmosphere, the bulk of her long-range Merlin missiles, the backbone of any FedWorld space fleet, would not be nuclear-armed.