Graham Paul: The battle at the Moons of Hell

“Michael, what can I say?” Tears sprang into the corners of Anna’s eyes as she put her arms around his neck. “You know what you mean to me, so don’t lose me somewhere in your life.”

“Anna, no chance. We’ve had too many good times for that to happen.” A memorable weekend high in the New Tatra Mountains behind the college sprang unbidden to mind; Michael shoved the thought away firmly. “Comm me when you get to the Damishqui; I hear she’s a good ship, and my dad says Captain Chandra is a very good operator.”

“Yeah, I hear she is.” Anna paused. “I don’t know if we should prolong this; it’s going to be really hard not having you around after three years.”

“I know. I’ll miss you,” Michael said, still unsure of Anna and what she really meant to him and what he meant to her. Despite the time they had spent together, there had been other people in their lives during their college time, and both knew how many friendships struck early in a Space Fleet career, whether casual or intimate, failed to survive the pressure that distance and separation created. Space Fleet had no respect for personal relationships, Michael thought moodily. Never had and never would.

Abruptly, Anna tilted her head up, kissed him full, long, and hard on the mouth, then spun on her heel and was gone without another word. Michael stood there feeling empty and flat.

After a few moments, he turned and set off for the assault lander simulator building.

Space Marines Headquarters, City of McNair, Commitment Planet

The walls of Digby’s small office seemed to close in on him as he stared at the e-mail on his workstation screen.

It couldn’t be, he thought, it couldn’t be. But there it was, in plain Standard English. The Sylvanian National Day reception had been canceled.

Digby cursed quietly but fluently and at great length.

Canceled. As simple as that. Not that the cancellation came as a surprise. The Sylvanians had been very rough on the captain and crew of the Hammer tramp spacer Geronimo’s Spear when they had discovered that its cargo was not medical supplies, which were allowed into the Hammer Worlds under the Allied Declaration of Embargo of 2282, but rather rail-gun power management systems, which most definitely were not. The diplomats had been wrangling for months, with the Hammers as usual knowing nothing and conceding less. Digby wondered whether the foreign relations people actually had done the canceling; he thought it more likely the other way around. Those Sylvanians were a precious lot.

But none of that helped him.

The Sylvanian National Day reception had offered Digby his only opportunity to meet Ashok Kumar without drawing the attention of Doctrinal Security and thereby risking his own death warrant. And now the opportunity had gone. Captain Ashok Kumar, the Sylvanian embassy’s military attache and its one and only senior military member of staff, was the one man on Commitment whom Digby was prepared to trust to do something quickly. He and Kumar went back a long way, nineteen years to be precise, to the bloody shambles that had followed the Battle of Delta Chimensis in the closing days of the Third Worlds War. Captured along with the shattered remnants of MARFOR-13, his interrogator had been none other than a very young Lieutenant Commander Kumar, a man Digby got to know quite well in the long days that followed. A hard man, a tough and persistent interrogator, not a man you could ever like but decent despite that.

And Kraa knew the Sylvanians had plenty of reasons not to be decent to any Hammer-the use of tactical nuclear weapons for one thing, small ones, thank Kraa, but still nukes, slipped past defenses badly stretched by the chaos of a full-scale Hammer planetary assault to fall on the cities of Vencatia and Jesmond. The only thing that had saved the Hammer was the fact that the nukes had been launched by renegade elements outside the chain of command. But it had been a close thing: Digby remembered as if it were yesterday the crippling fear that had gripped him at the thought of his family disappearing in the blinding flash of a fusion air burst. With that sort of history, even with the passage of almost twenty years, Digby knew that the fight would be to the death the next time around.

Struggling to work out how he was going to live up to his newfound resolve, he put his head in his hands, a small, solid, and in many ways quite unremarkable man seated behind a small cluttered desk in a windowless office deep below the ground.

After a long pause, Digby slipped on his lightweight comms headset and fired up his workstation. If Kumar wasn’t going to come to him, he’d have to go to Kumar. Thanks to DocSec’s obsessive interest in the minutiae of people’s lives, a quick walk through the Section 4 knowledge base should tell him more than enough about Kumar’s daily routine to allow him to set up an “accidental” meeting.

It was his only chance.

As he started work, Digby said a quiet word of thanks to Chief Councillor Merrick. The bloody man was obsessive about the operational security of the Eternity project, the blackest of all his many black projects. Understandably, of course. Chief councillor or not, any leak would see Merrick in front of a DocSec firing squad in no time flat. Thus, he’d given Digby unrestricted access to every knowledge base in the Hammer Worlds to make sure the Eternity project stayed black.

Much more important, he had an account allocated to him by the chief councillor personally, an account DocSec’s normally relentless investigators wouldn’t go near. Even they had more sense than to ask what the chief councillor was up to.

Wonderful place, the Hammer, he thought as he bent to the task of finding what he needed to know about Captain Ashok Kumar. If you worked for the chief councillor, you could pretty much get away with anything, go anywhere, do anything, know everything about everybody.

Until the next chief councillor took over.

Then you were dead.

Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) 005338 Berthed on Space Battle Station 1, in Orbit around Terranova

Michael realized that not once in the two weeks of his lander command requalification had Lieutenant Michael Hadley said one word more than was absolutely necessary.

The silent, moodily uncommunicative Hadley had not cut him one inch of slack or encouraged the slightest hope that he might get the 98 percent he needed if he was to have the career path he wanted. As a member of the warfare branch of the Federated Worlds Space Fleet, that meant only one thing as far as he was concerned: assault lander pilot. The alternatives-most likely a career as a navigator or an intel spook, or, even worse, a transfer to the engineering or logistics branches of the Fleet-just didn’t bear thinking about. Still, Hadley hadn’t failed him yet, so maybe he still had a chance.

So far the atmosphere had been heavy and formal, and Michael hated it. Maybe Hadley was pissed off at having to change his leave plans; Michael had no idea. Seeing Hadley’s glowering, almost sullen face the day after graduation had been more than enough to kill off any idea Michael might have had of talking about Hadley’s private affairs.

He sighed and settled deeper into the battered and scarred command pilot’s chair of Moaning Minnie, more properly known as Planetary Heavy Lander (Assault) Number PHLA-005338, his combat space suit stiff and uncomfortable as he waited for Hadley to complete briefing the directing staff who’d be controlling the opposition forces Michael was up against for the final live exercise of his requalification.

Michael looked around the flight deck with affection. As landers went, Moaning Minnie wasn’t a bad ship. Michael had flown it many times before. Everything worked, and its AI was reasonably stable and had no bad habits that he knew of. For the tenth time, he had his neuronics call up the mission and, eyes shut, methodically worked through the mission plan and the supporting threat summary step-by-step, item by item. He knew the THREATSUM (Threat Summary) forward and backward by now, but at least it was something to do while he waited.