Graham Paul - The battle at the Moons of Hell

Well, let’s try more hope, Merrick thought as he turned his attention back to the man waiting patiently in front of him.

“Continue, General.”

“Sir. I was about to say that my contacts on Terranova tell me that the prime contractor, Planetary Dynamics Corporation, has begun final assembly of the terraforming package. Package elements have started to come from the subcontractors’ plants on Anjaxx, New Paradise, Suleiman, and Planetary Dynamics’s plant on Nuristan. As things stand, they are due to ship out to Frontier in early September. And best of all, the last-ditch Frontier Supreme Court challenge mounted by the Deep Ecology Coalition with the support of the Naess-Rolston Foundation has been thrown out on its ear, so the last legal barriers are now gone.”

Merrick grunted. He would have liked to see a bunch of cosmic preservationists try to tell him what he could and could not do. “Who’s the carrier?”

“Prince Interstellar Shipping Lines. The ship is the Mumtaz .” Digby smiled.

“Ah, Prince Interstellar. Now I see where this is going. I know I shouldn’t ask, but indulge me. That man we implicated in the Protector incident, what was his name?”

“Jean-Luc d’Castreaux, sir. A very, very nasty piece of work but more than happy to cooperate when General Cassidy’s agents presented him with the autopsy reports on the bodies he stupidly left behind.”

Merrick watched Digby grimace at the memory. Even Merrick blanched a little. The Hammer could be a brutal and merciless place, but mostly out of necessity. Its reputation for single-minded cruelty in the pursuit and punishment of anyone who strayed from the Path of Doctrine, even if only slightly, was well deserved and widely feared.

But for sheer cold-blooded sadism, what d’Castreaux had done was worse than anything the Hammer had ever committed in the name of Kraa. It was just d’Castreaux’s bad luck that a Hammer light cruiser dropping out of pinchspace short of the planet Fortitude with a serious systems malfunction had literally stumbled on the three bodies, still roped together and heading for interstellar oblivion. And it had been d’Castreaux’s even worse luck that the cruiser had had a captain smart enough to recognize foul play when he saw it and to work the vectors back to see where the bodies had come from. After that, it had been just a matter of patient investigation to track down who’d been responsible. It had taken more than five years to sift d’Castreaux’s name out of the thousands of Feds involved in the bitter fight for Space Battle Station Protector, but in the end there had been no doubt.

“Yes, d’Castreaux. Pity he was kicked out of the Fleet by the Feds. He would have been much more useful as a serving officer, especially if he’d made it to flag rank. But of course his wife is the real force behind Prince Interstellar.” Merrick smiled. He enjoyed blackmail, which was why he forced an unwilling intelligence department to feed him the juicier cases, source protection be damned. He was chief councillor, for fuck’s sake. Who was he going to tell?

“She is. But every dog has his day, and d’Castreaux has done what we needed him to do.” Digby’s satisfaction at successfully completing the hardest part of the project was evident.

“Yes, well, don’t look so bloody smug, Digby. We have a long way to go yet.”

“Yes, sir, you’re right. We do.”

Digby paused as he collected his thoughts.

“As I was saying, thanks to d’Castreaux and, I have to say, even more thanks to his wife’s complete lack of concern over computer security, we were able to set up the access tunnel into the Mumtaz ’s AI from a maintenance terminal she had at home. Once the tunnel was in, a contract team from Scobie’s World did the rest. With the AI onboard the Mumtaz successfully subverted, our people onboard can take control any time they want. It takes only a single codephrase spoken into any comms port, and the AI is ours and so’s the ship.” Digby’s hand reinforced the point with a sharp chop.

“Scobie’s World? Outsiders! I don’t much like the sound of that, General, let me tell you.”

Digby had to struggle not to let his frustration at Merrick’s hyperactive sense of paranoia upset his report, though to a degree Merrick had a point. Scobie’s World, the closest system to the Hammer, was notoriously corrupt and freewheeling, a place where everything was for sale. And, for those willing to pay the price, that included even the most secret of Hammer secrets.

“A two-man team, sir. They had to come to Commitment to be briefed before starting, so it was logical that they work from here as well. They weren’t too happy, but then, money talks. They knew they were working on an off-world mership master AI but not which one, and in any case, the minute the job was done, I had them picked up and neurowiped. They’re safely tucked away on Hell now, and there they’ll stay.”

For once, Merrick had the good grace to look faintly apologetic.

“Fine. So Mumtaz leaves when?”

“Six September. She will drop out of pinchspace to avoid the Brooks Reef gravitational anomaly 200 light-years out of Terranova. My team will take control as soon as Mumtaz has sent her pinchspace drop report. They’ll broadcast a fake jump report followed immediately by a coded message to let us know the hijack team has control and then microjump her clear of the Brooks Reef’s network of surveillance drones before altering vector to jump direct to Hell, where she’ll down-shuttle the original crew. There will also be a replacement crew at Hell-the hijackers don’t know that, of course. I’ll meet the Mumtaz there, and we will jump to Eternity to be safely in orbit before she’s reported overdue at Frontier. No one will be any the wiser. Just another unexplained casualty of pinchspace like all the others.”

“And getting your people onto Terranova in the first place?” Merrick knew how difficult it was to circumvent Terranova’s security AIs.

“Already done, sir, thanks to careful adjustment of personal identity records with the help of a certain avaricious person inside the Ministry of Planetary Security. The Feds would have a fit if they knew how cheaply some of their people can be bought.” That was the Federated World’s Achilles’ heel, Digby thought. There was always someone for whom money was everything.

“Weapons?”

“Not needed. A properly coordinated and timed attack on the officers and crew using a high level of violence and intimidation will achieve the results we want. Off-world commercial spacers rely too much on their AIs for security, but we’ve dealt with that. Once we have control, the weapons we need are in the armory, and my information is that they are not DNA security coded, so using them won’t be a problem.”

The rest of it is detail, Merrick thought, nodding. Digby has things well under control. But there was one final question.

“Deniability, Digby.” Merrick’s voice was harsh, his eyes stabbing. “You recall my instructions, I trust.”

“Believe me, sir, I do.” How could he forget Merrick’s promise that he would die a slow and painful death at the hands of DocSec if the Hammer’s links to the hijacking of the Mumtaz ever leaked back to the Feds.

Digby ticked the points off on his fingers.

“I’ve used multiple cutouts between us and all field operatives. Even d’Castreaux has no idea that he’s actually working for the Hammer. I’ve double-checked with General Cassidy: The agents did not know who was behind the blackmail, and none of them will live to know why they had to force d’Castreaux’s cooperation. The mership AI hackers I’ve covered. The hijack team thinks it’s just an act of piracy funded by faceless interests out of one of the Rogue Planets, and only the team leader will know Mumtaz ’s final destination, and he’ll be told only when the ship is in pinchspace four days out of Terranova. And he and the rest of his crew will be spending the rest of their lives on Hell. The sensors on Eternity have been bypassed, so all the duty operators in deepspace ops are seeing is prerecorded data, and I doubt anyone will pick up on the fact that it’s the same data looping over and over on an annual cycle. And no survey or other activity is planned around Eternity or in the Judgment System, for that matter, for at least thirty-six months.”