The Final Battle (18 page)

“Do it,” Michael said.

“Varanasi Nearspace Control,” Horda said. “This is Scobie’s World mership
Matrix Starlight
.”

“
Matrix Starlight
, Varanasi,” the voice of the duty controller said. “Go channel 42. Out.”

“And good morning to you too,” Horda muttered as he changed channels. “Varanasi,
Matrix Starlight
on four-two.”

“
Matrix Starlight
, we do not hold a valid flight plan for your arrival, and you have dropped outside the designated drop zone.”

“Sorry about that, Varanasi. We have major problems with one of our pinchspace nodes.”

“Tell that to the inspectors,
Starlight
. You are in breach of Varanasi nearspace navigation regulations. Reverse vector to—”

“Negative, Varanasi.”

“What do you mean ‘negative’,
Starlight
?” The controller sounded angry.

Michael smiled. The woman should sound angry. Ships did not make a habit of refusing to do as they were told. Her instructions had the force of law, and captains who ignored them always paid heavily.

“Regret we are unable to comply with your instructions, Varanasi,” Horda said. “Have malfunction on main engines, so cannot maneuver. Am transmitting revised flight plan to you for our transit to Commitment.”

“Be advised,
Starlight
. Commitment nearspace is closed.”

“I can’t help that. It’s the only place we can get to. If we try for anywhere else, we’re screwed.”

“We’ll pass on the flight plan,
Starlight
, but I repeat: Commitment nearspace is closed, and any unauthorized incursion risks the use of deadly force.”

“Not much choice, Varanasi. Adjusting vector for Commitment now. Wish us luck.”

“You’ll need it,
Starlight
. And I’m still citing you for breaches of Varanasi navigation regulations. Varanasi Nearspace Control, out.”

“Arrogant pricks,” Horda muttered. “Right, then,” he went on. “We’ll jump as soon as we’re on vector for Commitment. We’ll be there in nineteen hours. Make the most of them. We need to get this right.”

“I know,” Michael replied, grim-faced. He did not need any reminders. “I’ll be down in the cargo bay if you want me.”

• • •

“Good luck, Michael,” Horda said. “Even after what you’ve done to me, it’s been good knowing you. I hope we can meet again someday.”

“You and me both,” Michael replied with some feeling. “You’ve got the holovid recordings? Believe me, if those Hammer sons of bitches even think something’s not right, they’ll make you pay.”

“Don’t worry,” Horda said. He patted a pocket in his shipsuit. “They’re safe and sound.”

“I’m sorry about Kalkuz.”

“Hah!” Horda snorted. “Don’t be. That bastard would have screwed us; no doubt about it.”

“I think he would have, but I’m still sorry the way it turned out.”

“He had other choices. Anyway, you should go. If I’m to drop you where I’m supposed to, then I need to pay attention.”

“See you.”

Michael made his way to his lifepod. He put his head through the hatch. “Room for one more?” he asked.

“Not really,” Akuna said.

“I’m coming in anyway,” Michael said. He found his seat and strapped in alongside Spassky, Akuna, and Mitchell.
This is absolute fucking madness
, he thought, looking at the bulky drop shells to which they were about to entrust their lives.

He put his head back to sit out the last few minutes before they dropped. He wanted to go now. He’d had enough of the waiting, of the uncertainty, of not knowing whether Anna was still alive. He glanced at the three marines, who were anonymous behind the closed faceplates of their skinsuits, and prayed that they would all make it through.

Then it was time.

“Stand by,” Horda said. “In three … dropping, now!”

In a blaze of ultraviolet radiation, the universe turned itself inside out, and
Starlight
emerged into normalspace. The Hammer response was immediate, a barrage of invective with a simple message: Jump back into pinchspace now or your ship will be blown to plasma. Michael ignored it. He was far more interested to know whether Horda had been able to do what he had promised.

Relief flooded Michael’s body. Horda had done it. They were close to the drop datum.

“Downloading updated position and vector data,” Horda said. “Stand by to launch pods … launching.”

At that point a great deal happened in a very short span of time.

With a series of
whumps
, explosive charges blasted four of
Starlight
’s lifepods clear of the ship, pushing them out at right angles to the ship’s track and away from the planet below, radiating preprogrammed bleats for help across all the international distress frequencies, their presence advertised by blazing double-pulsed orange strobes. There was a heart-stopping pause while
Starlight
’s ponderous bulk rolled into position, then more
whumps
to punch the two lifepods holding Michael and his marines into the ship’s wake, back the way she had come.

Seconds later, Shinoda’s array of jury-rigged chisels sliced effortlessly through hydraulic lines, venting fluid under enormous pressure. The cargo bay’s oxygen-enriched atmosphere filled with a volatile mist that hesitated for a moment, eddying and swirling. Then it detonated. The explosion blasted the cargo door away and drove the carefully assembled piles of scrap out into space. The roiling, tumbling cloud of radar-reflective confusion engulfed the fleeing lifepods. The chaos worsened as Hammer battlesat-mounted lasers seared the
Starlight
’s fabric into rolling clouds of ionized plasfiber and metal. Compartment after compartment was punctured, releasing yet more ice-loaded air and debris into space.

Deep inside the mayhem, the two lifepods trailed the
Starlight
as she drove on to her destruction. As one, engines burst into life and thin pillars of plasma erupted from their sterns to decelerate the pods to a safe speed for reentry.

Michael could do nothing except ride the lifepod out of orbit and down into Commitment’s gravity well. He focused his attention on the only number that mattered: the lifepod’s speed. If they hit Commitment’s upper atmosphere too fast, the stress of reentry would tear their drop shells apart. “Come on, come on,” he urged the pod even though the small part of his brain that stayed calm told him that he had nothing to worry about.

So intense was his focus that he missed the Hammer’s first attempts to communicate with the lifepods.

“
Matrix Starlight
lifepods, Commitment, over.”

When Horda finally deigned to answer, his response was a carefully crafted mélange of bullshit, misinformation, and pathos, all underscored by a torrent of invective against the fucking bastards who had taken his beloved
Starlight
away from him because now the ship he loved was doomed to die. On and on he raved, the Hammer controller’s attempts to get a word in edgewise overwhelmed by the endless stream of words.

Horda was so good, Michael did not know whether to laugh or cry. He shut off the audio feed. Enjoyable though it was, what the Hammers had to say was not important. “Okay, guys,” he said. “We’re close, and provided the Hammers don’t shoot at us”—
even the Hammers wouldn’t shoot down a lifepod, would they?
—“stand by to abandon ship. Final checks. Skinsuits, drop shells, inertial nav, survival packs.”

“All green, sir,” came the replies. The voices were thick with apprehension.

The clock ran off the seconds, and the time arrived. Michael armed the emergency jettison mechanism and blew the airlock doors off. Explosive decompression turned the air inside the pod to a thick white mist. His skinsuit stiffened around his body against the hard vacuum. He hoped that Shinoda and her team were okay.

Michael took a deep breath and threw off his safety harness; he forced himself into the airlock, his efforts to squeeze his skinsuited body through made more difficult by the drop shell strapped to his back. “See you on the other side, guys,” he said.

He pushed himself out into space and was greeted by the awful sight of the dying
Starlight
. She was finished, her hull slashed and lacerated by antiship lasers. As he watched, the first of the antiballistic missiles punched deep into her carcass; its warhead exploded, blasting a massive cloud of flame and debris outward. A second missile followed, then another, and another.

The end came fast. A missile lanced down to the
Starlight
’s core. An instant later, the ship shivered, then vanished, enveloped by a searing blue-white flash that consumed the entire hull and sent a sphere of incandescent gas into the void.

And when the gas had gone, so too had the
Starlight
.

Clear of the lifepod, Michael tumbled through the vacuum of space. Now all that mattered was survival. Shinoda and her marines either made it or they didn’t, and there was not a damn thing he could do to change things.

Thanks to the hours spent in the sims, it was all very straightforward as long as he did not think too long or too often about Commitment’s unforgiving surface, which was invisible in the darkness below him. A final check confirmed that the drop shell was good to go. Michael gave the go-ahead. High-pressure gas drove reagents into containers of polymer smartfoam. Foam boiled in the vacuum. Foam expanded to fill the preformed plasfiber shell. Foam wrapped itself around Michael’s skinsuited body.

The foam hardened, and Michael was sitting in a crash-resistant cocoon inside a heat-resistant shield. The master AI orchestrating the process fired the solid-fuel boosters to align the shell for reentry. The deceleration kicked Michael hard in the back.

He steeled himself for the ride down and prayed that he would look like just another piece of debris from the ill-fated
Starlight
heading out of orbit for cremation in Commitment’s atmosphere, a piece of junk that Hammer planetary defense would not think worth a second glance.

It was a rough ride down, worse than anything the sims had put him through. It was so rough that Michael gave up worrying about the Hammers shooting at him, worrying instead about whether his brain would disintegrate under the pressure of a relentless battering, worrying about being consumed in the ball of fire marking his fall to ground, worrying that the flimsy shell would fall apart in the face of the unbelievable punishment.

When will this ever end?
he wondered.

But it did end. So slowly Michael was not even sure it was happening, the pummeling eased and the fiery trail thinned until the shell was no longer needed. The AI blew the shell off and dropped his body into a sickening free fall that ended only when the container on his back popped open. Michael came to a vicious stop as his parachute bit into air thick with cloud and rain, the AI steering him down through the murk toward a rendezvous that only it could see.

“Two hundred meters,” the AI told him, “one hundred … fifty … brace … thirty, twenty, ten, brace!”

Michael smashed down through a thin canopy of trees and hit the ground with a thud. His legs absorbed the impact, and he was thrown sideways onto the rain-soaked ground. “Fuuuuck,” he whispered. He flicked his visor up to let the rain fall cool and sweet on to his face, “I made it.”

Seconds later, a black shape thumped into the ground only meters from where he lay, followed by three more in quick succession.
There should be one more
, Michael thought. He scrambled to his feet to strip off his skinsuit and begin the painful business of gathering in a wet parachute.

Shinoda emerged out of the gloom. “You okay?” she said.

“Sure am,” Michael said. “Anyone not make it?”

“Spassky.” She paused and spit on the ground. “His shell never deployed; bloody thing was a piece of garbage,” she went on. “Next time I’m on Scobie’s, I’m going to kill that son of a bitch Chang.”

The loss of the lance corporal hit Michael hard. “The poor bastard,” Michael muttered. “He must have known he wouldn’t make it.”

“Yeah.” There was a moment’s silence. “Anyway,” Shinoda said, “now we need to get the hell out of here.” She looked around. “First thing, chromaflage capes on and weapons checked … all green? Good. Nugget, Mitch. Start digging. Give me a 2-meter-deep hole in ten minutes or I’ll kick your asses. Stick! Find everything we don’t need and put it in the hole.”

“Yes, sarge,” Prodi said.

Shinoda turned to Michael. “You get up that hill and keep an eye out,” she said. “I don’t think the Hammers were too interested in us, but you never know. They might send drones to have a look.”

“Yes, sergeant,” Michael said. Machine pistol in hand, he shouldered his pack and set off.

Monday, June 28, 2404, UD
NRA command center, Branxton Ranges, Commitment

General Vaas looked up when one of his personal aides led Michael in.

“Lieutenant Helfort, sir,” Major Davoodi said.

“Thanks, Major,” Vaas said. He stood and came around the desk to where Michael waited. “Reentry drop shells!” He shook his head. “Insane, absolutely insane.”

“Not the way I planned to come back, General,” Michael said as they shook hands. He thought the man looked exhausted, the lines incised over prominent cheekbones deeper than ever. But the eyes had not changed. Even when the man smiled, they stared deep into Michael’s soul.

“I can’t tell you how good it is to have you back, Michael,” Vaas said. He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “You got my message that Anna’s alive and well?”

“I did, thank you, General. I’ve put in a request to join her. I think my spacer days are over.”

“We’ll talk about that later. The good news is that Lieutenant Colonel Anna Cheung Helfort has been a right pain in the ass. Not to me, of course. To the Hammers.”

Michael blinked. “Did you just say Lieutenant Colonel?”

“A well-deserved promotion,” Vaas said with a huge grin. “We’ve given her command of the 120th’s 3rd Battalion. That’s where most of you Feds have ended up.” He turned to the wall-mounted holovid screen that dominated one side of the limestone cell he called his office. “Let me show you how the war’s going.”