Graham Paul: The battle at the Moons of Hell

As the last gun carriage pulled away, the senior spiritual guide to the Federated Worlds Space Fleet stepped forward. In somber tones, she recited the formal address for the fallen in battle, its archaic language and complex sentences somehow exactly right for the occasion. But it mostly washed over Michael as he enjoyed the simple pleasure of standing still, careful to keep almost all his weight off his tortured left leg.Finally, the spiritual guide had finished. Michael stepped forward to perform his final duty as captain in command of DLS-387 .

At precisely midday, he removed his dress cap and in a voice firm with a confidence he didn’t feel gave the order that would consign what little remained of 387 ’s lost crew to the ground. Marine burial parties moving with careful precision interred the urns before lifting plain granite slabs inscribed with the names of the fallen into place. Then the firing party raised its carbines, and with a sudden shocking violence, the air above the burial plots was ripped apart with volley after volley of carbine fire.

It was all but over. Michael replaced his cap and, saluting, gave the final blessing.

“ Deepspace Light Scout 387 . May God watch over you this day.”

He was finished. With DLS-387 now formally decommissioned, he was no longer a captain in command.

He was plain ordinary Junior Lieutenant Michael Wallace Helfort again.

And even if part of him yearned to be just plain ordinary Mr. Helfort, he knew that when the day of reckoning with the Hammer came, and it surely would, he would be there to do his part.

Conference Room 24-1, Interstellar Relations Secretariat Building, Geneva, Old Earth

As Giovanni Pecora looked across the table at his Hammer counterpart, he knew in his heart that the chances of settling the Mumtaz affair on anything remotely like reasonable terms were slim.

The Hammer’s councillor for foreign relations, the unlovely Claude Albrecht, sat directly opposite Pecora. He was flanked on one side by Pius Sodje, his undercouncillor for Federated Worlds relations, and on the other by Viktor Solomatin, officially the undercouncillor for departmental security but in fact the man put into Albrecht’s department by Doctrinal Security to keep an eye on things. According to the latest intelligence briefings, Solomatin was under Polk’s control now that the head of DocSec, Austin Ikedia, reportedly had jumped ship, abandoning what little was left of the Merrick/Commitment faction.

Given the typically ruthless way Polk had been consigning Merrick’s followers to DocSec lime pits, Pecora had been surprised to see Albrecht still holding his position. He shook his head in despair. Trying to understand the Hammer was made nearly impossible by the endless infighting that went on as faction struggled with faction for supremacy, as the winners took advantage of their position to cull as many of the losers as they could until, inevitably, the tables were turned. Then losers became winners, winners became losers, and the whole ghastly blood-drenched process started again.

Pecora sighed. Hammer politics could best be described as a blood-soaked mass of lies and deceit liberally laced with treachery, backstabbing, and appalling brutality. Exactly what was going on inside the Hammer was anyone’s guess.

Pecora turned his attention back to the group in front of him.

When not participating in the role-play sims so beloved of Fed management experts, he had spent much of the previous week reviewing everything the Feds knew about the trio on the other side of the conference table. It had been a depressing exercise.

The three men were survivors, the fittest that Hammer society could produce, God help it and its oppressed citizens. They had clawed their way to the top of the Hammer heap over the broken and bleeding bodies of ordinary Hammer citizens, with the corpses of more than a few competitors tossed in for good measure.

Solomatin in particular was a nasty piece of work. His file was full of examples of his sadistic and brutal approach to DocSec business. He was rumored to have personally shot more than two hundred so-called heretics during his time as DocSec commander on Fortitude, but never with one clean shot. No. That would have been too easy. Solomatin preferred multiple shots: two to wound, one in each thigh, and then, after an agonizing wait as the victim writhed in agony on the ground, another shot to finish it all when Solomatin got bored and it was time to move on to the next victim, who was invariably kept close at hand to heighten the terror of those last few awful moments of life. Pecora felt sick as for probably the tenth time he wiped his hand down the side of his trousers as if to rub away the contamination from Solomatin’s clammy handshake.

And even if Sodje and Albrecht weren’t as bad as Solomatin, it was probably only for lack of opportunity. Pecora had little doubt that they, too, would have just as little compunction about putting a bullet into the back of his head.

As he waited for Nikolas Kaminski, the Old Earth Alliance secretary for interstellar relations and as decent a man as Albrecht and his crew were psychopathic killers, to bring the meeting to order, Pecora knew deep down that the ten weeks set aside by the Hammer and Federated Worlds governments for mediation brokered by Old Earth were going to be the longest weeks of his life. He just hoped that they wouldn’t be the most wasted.

A small cough from Kaminski announced the start of the meeting, and with a sigh Pecora settled back in his chair to listen to the mediator’s opening statement. Pecora knew it would be a worthy speech. It would be full of pleas for common sense to prevail, for the standards of civilized behavior to apply, and so on. But no matter how worthy the sentiments, Pecora’s view of the Hammer would not change. They were so far beyond the bounds of decency that Kaminski might as well piss on a forest fire for all the good it would do.

Fleet Orbital Heavy Repair Station Terranova-2, in Orbit around Terranova Planet

Happy for once not to have to stand on a leg that still ached when he put his full weight on it, Michael hung back and watched the painfully slow process of moving 387 out of the orbital repair station’s maintenance dock and into the cavernous hold of the huge ultraheavy planetary lander.

387, tiny against the orbital heavy repair station’s vast bulk, was being maneuvered with infinite care to line up with the lander’s gaping cargo hold. An army of orange-suited spacers shepherding a swarm of heavy-duty cargobots, anticollision lights flashing like demented orange fireflies, fussed around the scarred and torn hull, which had been cleaned of the tons of foamsteel and bracing that had been used to get the ship safely home. All classified equipment had been stripped out, and fusion plants shut down and decommissioned.

A moment of sadness struck Michael.

387 once had been a living thing and, through Mother, almost a friend, or at least a comrade in arms. He’d miss her quirky, deadpan sense of humor. But now 387 was just another dead warship hulk, and Mother had gone on to other things. She was the latest in a long line of warship AIs safely downloaded into Attila the Hun, the massive AI that powered the Fleet’s StratSim Facility at the Fleet College. Michael knew that some warship captains liked to reminisce with their old AIs, but he didn’t think he’d ever be one of them. For him, 387 was something that had happened in the past, and there it should stay.

As the bows of 387 nosed slowly into the lander’s hold, Michael could look directly down into the hole that marked the point where Weapons Power Charlie’s plasma containment bottle had blown out most of the starboard bow. The hole was huge, a mass of twisted titanium frames and shredded ceramsteel. The edges, torn, twisted, jagged, and razor-sharp, had been masked off with Day-Glo plasfiber for the trip. Down through the hole, its sides etched out of the darkness by 387 ’s internal lighting, Michael could trace the path of the platinum/iridium slug inside its deadly shroud of plasma as it had cut its way down through the ship, taking the lives of so many of the crew on the way.