Graham Paul: The battle at the Moons of Hell

Mother, the lander’s AI, broke his fierce concentration to tell him that Hadley had come aboard. Finally, Michael thought as he closed the mission file and stood up to await Hadley’s arrival.

He didn’t have long to wait.

“Right,” Hadley said as he settled himself into the tactical officer’s chair alongside Michael, ignoring the rest of Michael’s team ranged to the left and right of him. His voice became very formal. “Junior Lieutenant Helfort. You have command.”

“Roger, sir. I have command. Stand by.” Michael activated the lander’s CombatNet; it would stay open until the mission had been completed. With a deep breath to steady himself, he started in on the checklists, the slow and tedious process of confirming that Moaning Minnie was ready for the torture he was going to put her through. One by one, his crew signed off, and finally the ship was ready to go.

“All stations, ship is go for launch. Stand by for drop in”-Michael checked the master mission timer-“ten minutes. Helmets on, suit integrity checks to Mother. Command out.”

Michael commed BaseNet. “Space Battle Station 1, this is PHLA-005338, mission call sign Golf Charlie. Ready to launch at designated drop time. Golf Charlie over.”

“Roger, Golf Charlie. Stand by, out.”

Settling his helmet onto its neck ring, Michael quickly ran through his own suit checks and, visor down, confirmed suit integrity. He uplinked the results to Mother and confirmed for himself that Mother had fifteen good suits onboard: fourteen crew and one pax. Hang on. A passenger? Who the hell could that be? he wondered, but he had too much to think about to bother checking. Flipping his armored plasglass visor back up, Michael turned slightly to look at Hadley out of the corner of one eye. The man who carried his fate in his hands was sitting unmoving in the tactical officer’s seat, staring out at the vast gray bulk of Space Battle Station 1’s hull as it curved away from them.

Michael turned back and sat motionless. There was nothing to do but sit and wait in silence. Michael felt the pressure bear down on him. An open-mike circuit, CombatNet was quiet except for the breathing of the loadmaster, Chief Petty Officer Sara Gemmell. For some reason, before launch she breathed as hard as if she’d just run a race, a long one and uphill at that. Nerves, Michael supposed. He didn’t have the gossip, insults, and facetious comments that normally characterized the minutes immediately before a launch to take his mind off what was at stake.

“Michael.” Hadley’s voice came up on CommandNet and cut across his thoughts.

“Sir?”

“Good luck.” Hadley turned away and resumed his sphinx-like study of SBS-1’s hull.

“Tha-” Michael’s surprised acknowledgment of the first words from Hadley not specifically called for by a checklist or standard operating procedure was cut short as BaseNet came up. “Golf Charlie, this is SBS-1. You are clear to drop under SBS control. Departure pipe is Violet-34. Acknowledge, over.”

“SBS-1, Golf Charlie. Roger, clear to drop, departure pipe Violet-34, over.”

“Golf Charlie, SBS-1. Roger. Good hunting. On dropping, immediate chop TACON to assault mission command. Over.”

“SBS-1, Golf Charlie. Roger. Out.”

With a sigh, Michael sat back. If anything, he felt even more nervous. Seven minutes thirty seconds to go. Damn it, this couldn’t go on. Michael commed CombatNet again.

“Okay, folks. The BUFF outside the windows has given us launch clearance, and we will drop as scheduled in…seven minutes and twenty seconds. At which point you will be relieved to know that our esteemed loadmaster will cease heavy breathing.”

“I am not a heavy breather,” came Gemmell’s indignant and entirely predictable reply. It was what she always said.

“That’s not what I hear,” chipped in Petty Officer Taksin, Michael’s weapons supervisor for the day.

“You cheeky young pup, Taki. I’ll have you know…”

CombatNet caught the chuckles of Minnie ’s crew, and Michael felt the pressure ease. These were good people, well trained and experienced. He’d done missions like this successfully before, and he’d do them again. Having started the traditional prelaunch banter, he sat back and let it wash over him, the chatter wandering through the social lives and idiosyncrasies of the crew with careless abandon.

At one minute to go, it was down to business.

“Okay, folks, one minute. Visors down and stand by. Final checks. Call them in.”

In a matter of seconds the final checks were in. It was time to go.

“All stations, this is command. Moaning Minnie is go for launch. May God watch over us this day,” Michael said, offering up the traditional spacer’s prayer before any launch. Notwithstanding the fact that the human race had been dropping down gravity wells for hundreds of years, the process was a violent one that stressed the best-designed and best-built spacecraft to their limits and occasionally past them. Over the centuries, descent from orbit had taken the lives of far too many good spacers and was not ever to be taken for granted no matter how good Fed technology might have become.

The seconds ticked away. BaseNet came to life. “Golf Charlie, forty-five seconds to drop. Automatic drop sequence commenced. Over.”

“Roger. Golf Charlie out.” Michael shrugged himself down in his straps and commed CombatNet. “Stand by, everybody.” And finally, with a firm shove, hydraulic rams pushed Moaning Minnie away from the massive hull of Space Battle Station 1, out of any residual effect of its artificial gravity, and started the assault lander on its way planet-ward.

The assault landing process was as rough as people and machine could tolerate and as quick as the lander’s command pilot could make it. That way, the trip was short and sharp, a decidedly attractive tactical advantage. Loitering at high altitudes in hostile airspace was not a life-extending strategy and one that the assault lander pilots did all in their power to avoid, short of actually breaking the lander into pieces.

Barely a minute after Minnie had dropped clear, the assault commander gave the order.

“Bravo Mike, this is Alfa. Authenticate Kilo Oscar. Immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Bravo. I say again, immediate execute Ops Plan 41 Oscar. Stand by, execute!”

With a deep breath, Michael started Moaning Minnie, which already was positioned tail first in anticipation, on her way dirtside, firing her main engines at full military power to wipe out enough of her orbital velocity to put her almost instantly into a rapidly steepening parabolic fall to the ground. As she fell, the rest of the assault lander stream fell around her, the landers cocooned in a huge cloud of active decoys, the attack blossoming out in all directions into a huge sphere that was too confused, too complex, and too fast-moving for ground-based radar to distinguish high-value targets from decoys.

With Minnie ’s height unwinding rapidly, Michael shut down the main engines and spun Minnie back nose first, ready for reentry. He could see for himself the threat blossoming in front of them as long-range search radars appeared on the threat display. It was becoming increasingly clear that whoever had set up the exercise, the enemy had a threat profile that, as always, looked exactly like the Hammer of Kraa’s and was determined to kick Minnie hard.

But that didn’t matter too much.

An assault lander could do very little against long-range weapons systems except stay as far away from them as possible. The combination of poor maneuverability at very high speed and a limited self-defense capability made landers easy meat. It was up to the planetary assault force supporting the attack from orbit-in this case, lead by the hypothetical FWWS (Federated Worlds Warship) Shrivaratnam from which Moaning Minnie supposedly had dropped along with 139 other hypothetical assault and ground attack landers-to provide volume defense for the assault lander stream, and Michael was pleased to see that the Shrivaratnam had made a good start in suppressing ground radar sites and launching the follow-up waves of decoys needed to confuse the enemy’s tactical picture further. The radar sites were bound to be dummy emitters, though, he thought, and God only knew which ones were the “real” missile radar and launch sites.