Graham Paul: The battle at the Moons of Hell

Digby paused to catch his breath. He knew he had to get this bit right if he wanted to live to enjoy a long and happy retirement.

Thoughts marshaled, he continued. “As for the passengers of the Mumtaz, all of the men who aren’t part of the terraforming technical support team, as well as anyone who looks like a potential troublemaker and obviously anyone from the military, will go to Hell. The rest, including women and children, will be landed on Eternity to be part of the terraforming ground teams, and there they will stay. Those who don’t cooperate…” Digby did not need to say it again.

“As for Mumtaz, it will have an unfortunate accident in pinchspace when it finally jumps out of Eternity nearspace: The AI has a self-destruct subroutine already loaded that will blow every hatch wide open and disable the pinchspace drive. But best of all, the Feds will not suspect anything in the first place, and so they won’t be looking. Losing ships in pinchspace doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

“And finally, the terraforming management team will all be Kraa citizens currently serving out their time on Hell. Believe me when I say, sir, that they will be model citizens.

“So I believe our operational security is good. The keys will be keeping the lid on Eternity and Hell to make sure nothing leaks out. But we are very good at that sort of thing.” Digby smiled a bleak and wintry smile.

“Good,” Merrick said, looking pleased. “I don’t think we need to talk again. I want a personal report back from you when the terraforming process is safely under way. And when the time is right, I’m going to ask you to brief the Council in person. I think they should know who made it all happen.”

“Thank you, sir,” Digby said to the top of Merrick’s head as he turned to leave.

Once outside the handsomely imposing pink granite building that housed Chief Councillor Merrick and the Supreme Council’s secretariat, one of the very few Hammer government buildings worth looking at, Digby stopped in the predawn gloom of another of Commitment’s forty-nine-hour days to catch his breath, a deep unhappiness pulling his spirits down.

Digby had never gotten used to the long drawn-out days, and he positively hated waking up in the middle of the night one day and in broad daylight the next and so on ad nauseam. His native planet of Fortitude had twenty-six-hour days and was a much more pleasant place to live. Fortitude also had seasons, unlike Commitment, where each forty-nine-hour day blurred into the next, the weather was average all the time, and one never had any idea where one was in the year unless one checked with the net.

But it wasn’t just being stuck on Commitment. The problem was that he was tired, a sick tiredness that came from years of doing things that he knew were wrong. Outwardly, he had been a loyal, energetic, and motivated servant of the Hammer for over thirty years, but that was just a matter of survival, something he liked to think of as behavioral camouflage. The real problem was that underneath his carefully contrived air of controlled competence, he knew, he really knew, without any illusions at all, the Hammer for what it truly was-a brutal totalitarian regime, as vicious and self-serving as any in human history and one whose leaders paid lip service to Kraa while concentrating all their efforts on staying in power while accumulating as much wealth as possible, with every cent ripped from the pockets of ordinary Hammers.

Not that he really had anything against the Path of Doctrine except that he just didn’t believe in any of it. The idea that the collection of oddly shaped rocks discovered on Mars by one Peter McNair were the only surviving relics of an ancient civilization dedicated to the universe’s supreme being, an entity called Kraa, was complete and utter nonsense. McNair had been an indentured colonist with a particularly vivid imagination, vivid, in fact, to the point, in the opinion of any reasonable person, of being barking mad. But an absolute lack of any credible evidence hadn’t bothered the Kraa fundamentalists any more than it had stopped people on Old Earth still, even now, from believing that aliens in flying saucers had landed way back in 1950 something.

Digby shook his head in disbelief. Aliens in flying saucers! Humanspace was full of gullible fools, and the Hammer Worlds had their share, that was for sure.

For his part, from the day when he had begun to think for himself, Digby had known that the whole Kraa myth was just so much bullshit even if, in the interests of staying alive, he had never said as much, even to his wife. Over the years that had followed, his interaction with the most powerful and monolithic religion in human history had been confined to as few temple attendances as he could get away with and a steadfast refusal to debate even the smallest point of Path theology.

It was still one of the enduring mysteries of the universe how, in the space of a few short years, McNair had been able to strike a chord deep inside ordinary people to create the largest fundamentalist movement in Earth’s history. The movement-the Path of Kraa, they called themselves-had gathered pace rapidly, funded by probably the most ill-advised donation of all time: the entire estate of the software multibillionaire Vasco Fargas. With that sort of financial backing and McNair’s virulent blend of idealistic hope and extreme intolerance, conflict was inevitable. A vicious civil war that wracked five continents, killing innocent people in the tens of millions, soon had erupted, quickly threatening to spread to the other planets of the Old Earth Alliance.

Finally and at huge cost, a frustrated Alliance had exported the problem onto what now were called the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. The only drawback was that where once there had been at its peak perhaps millions of hard-core disciples of Kraa, there were now billions of them, many as bigoted and unforgiving as any person could be.

Digby sighed. There was sure to be a day of reckoning with the rest of humankind. He just didn’t want to be around when it arrived.

As for the Path of the Doctrine of Kraa, what a joke! How the fuck did McNair know that the supreme being’s name was Kraa? The so-called artifacts had no writing of any sort on them. But the Path had supported the Digby family. In a vast and unknowable universe, that had been enough to keep him going, with the Hammer’s mess of unresolvable contradictions and stupidities pushed to the back of his mind. But the price had always been high.

But now, after a lifetime of shedding blood, almost none of it from the true enemies of Kraa, Merrick wanted Digby to sacrifice another-what? — two or three hundred innocent lives, and once again in the name of Kraa. In the name of Kraa! To keep Merrick in power, more like it. For a few seconds Digby couldn’t breathe, weighed down, almost crushed, by the remorse and the accumulated guilt of years of unquestioning service. He stood rigidly still as he struggled to get his rebellious body under control, to get his breath back, to calm his racing heart. Kraa’s blood, he thought savagely, he’d almost lost control of himself. When did that ever happen to a brigadier general of marines? But then the stark realization hit him. This simply could not go on, he could not go on, he had to do something because if he didn’t, he would destroy himself.

The problem was that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, but he was nothing if not a determined and focused man. Buoyed by a sudden overwhelming urge to make some amends, however small, for a lifetime of wrongs, an urge he could not, would not deny, he waved his car over and climbed in. “Corporal. Take me to the office.”

“Sir.”

As the car accelerated away, Digby sat back, his face impassive but his mind racing. The more he thought things through, the more certainly he knew exactly where this insane plan of Merrick’s would end up. He cursed himself for his willful refusal to look beyond the project itself, to see the full and awful consequences of a project of which he had been the chief architect. His project. His responsibility.