Marten pointed at the Sun Works Factory as it curved away from them—they were inside the fantastic structure. The curving space satellite seemed to go on forever, until it disappeared behind the planet. On the outer side of the factory, unseen from the viewing deck because the outside part faced the Sun, were huge solar panels that soaked up the fierce energy and fed it into waiting furnaces. Catapulted from Mercury came load after load of various ores.
“Look at that,” Omi said.
Far to the left sat the damaged Doom Star
Genghis Khan
. It was a huge warship kilometers spherical. Blue and red lights winked around it, sometimes dipping into it. They were repair pods. Some were automated robots and some were human-occupied pods.
Omi turned to Marten. “So how is standing here going to help us from getting gelded?”
“Look over there.”
Omi squinted and shook his head.
“There,” Marten said, pointing more emphatically. “See?”
“That pod?”
“Correct.”
A small, one-man pod floated about a hundred meters from the habitat’s inner surface. No lights winked from it. It sat there, seemingly dead, a simple ball with several arms controlled from within. There were welder arms, clamps and work lasers. Anyone sitting inside the pod could punch in a flight code. Particles of hydrogen would spray out the burner.
“What about it?” Omi asked.
“Remember how I told you I grew up here?”
Omi nodded.
“Well,” Marten said, “I bet most of my equipment—my family’s equipment—should still be intact. It was well hidden.”
“So?”
“So my family built an ultra-stealth pod to escape to the Jupiter Confederation.”
“PHC found it, you said, over four and half years ago.”
“I’m pretty sure they found it back then. But that doesn’t matter because I could build another one.”
“Impossible.”
Marten managed a smile. “You’re right. Let’s stay and get gelded.”
Omi paled. “How do you plan on going about this, a…?”
“I need a vacc suit,” Marten said. “So I can go outside and enter the pod.”
“Then?”
“Then it gets hard,” admitted Marten.
“But not impossible, right?”
Marten checked his chronometer. “Time to head back.”
Omi glanced at the hissing spot in the Plexiglas bubble, and then he turned with Marten for the barracks.
On the experimental Social Unity Beamship
Bangladesh
, Admiral Rica Sioux sank into her acceleration couch. She wore a silver vacc suit, the faceplate dark and the conditioner-unit humming. Around her and suited as well languished the officers of the armored command capsule.
Despite the
Bangladesh
’s
heavy shielding, months in near-Sun orbit had leaked enough radiation so Admiral Sioux had ordered the command crew together with the Security detail into the vacc suits. There had barely been enough suits for higher command and security, a grim oversight from requisitioning. The rest of ship’s company had bitterly complained about the lack of vacc suits for them. After the first cases of radiation sickness, Security had overheard talk of mutiny. Finally, in order to regain a sort of normalcy, the Admiral had ordered drumhead executions of the ringleaders—in this instance, randomly selected personnel.
The experimental spacecraft, the only one of its kind, had already set two hazardous duty records: one for its nearness to the Sun, two for the duration of its stay. Their greatest danger was a wild solar flare. One flare, over 60,000 kilometers long, had already shot out of the Sun’s photosphere and looped over the
Bangladesh
, only to fall back into the cauldron of nuclear fire. The ship’s heavy magnetic shielding, the same as in Earth’s deep-core mines, kept the x-rays, ultra-violet and visible radiation and high-speed protons and electrons from penetrating the ship and zapping everyone aboard. Not even the vacc suits would have protected them from that. Unfortunately, the rare occurrence of a giant solar flare had signaled the commencement of Admiral Sioux’s troubles. Somehow, the image of their beamship sailing under the flare’s magnetic loop of hot gas had horrified the crew. If a flare should ever hit them—even with the beamship’s magnetic shields at full power— there would be instant annihilation.
They had been in near-Sun orbit since the start of hostilities. Their ship was probably the only one in the Solar System that could have done it. The magnetic shields that protected them this near the nuclear furnace took fantastic amounts of energy to maintain—too much to make the M-shields useful in combat. The gaining of power here was simple but deadly for the personnel aboard. Special solar panels soaked up the incredible wattage poured out of the Sun. Unfortunately, they couldn’t collect when the magnetic shields were up. So they switched off the M-shield and used the heavy particle shields—millions of tons of matter—to keep the worst radiation at bay while the solar collectors collected. Then and none too soon went up the magnetic shields. Most of the radiation leakage, naturally, occurred between these switches.
The reason Admiral Sioux had chosen the near-Sun orbit to hide was basic strategy. Social Unity Military Command well knew the combat capabilities of the enemy Doom Stars. No combination of the Social Unity Fleet could face one, and at the rebellion’s commencement, the Highborn had captured all five. So to save the Fleet, SUMC had ordered an immediate dispersion of ships into the nether regions of space. The scattering kept the Fleet in being, and just as importantly, it forced the enemy to split his Doom Stars, if he wanted to picket each of the four inner planets.
This near the Sun was the perfect hiding spot, at least since the destruction of the robot radar probes that had long ago been set at far-Sun orbit. Neither radar nor optics could spot the
Bangladesh
if the viewer looked directly at the Sun. The Sun’s harsh radio signals blanketed the beamship, while the Star’s light—seeing the
Bangladesh
in near-Sun orbit would be like trying to pinpoint a candle’s flame with a forest fire a few millimeters behind it. The trick, of course, would be to look “down” and get a side view, with space as the background and not the nuclear ball of fire. It was the military reason for at least three, robot radar probes at three, equidistant locations around the Sun, and why the Admiral had destroyed the probes.
Admiral Sioux shifted on her couch, trying to relax her left shoulder. The horrible acceleration threatened to cramp her muscles. Nor could she lift her arm and massage her shoulder. Simply breathing, forcing her chest up in order to drag down another breath, was becoming hard.
She took short, small gasps and her thigh cramped. Despite that, she grinned hideously. The acceleration made it so.
They were finally going to hit back. After long months of inactivity, she would be allowed to hurt the enemy.
A week ago, they had picked up General James Hawthorne’s scratchy orders. It had taken computer enhancement to make sense of the Supreme Military Commander’s words. Because of the orders, she now used the Sun as a pivoting post, building up speed.
The Sun’s diameter was roughly 1.4 million kilometers, or 109 times the size of the Earth. The
Bangladesh
thus orbited or circled a greater distance than the Moon did in its orbit around the Earth. The diameter of the Moon’s orbit was approximately 770,000 kilometers.
The beamship’s huge engines increased power and changed the direction of their thrust, and the experimental
Bangladesh
broke free from its near-Sun orbit. It sped toward Mercury. In three weeks, the ship would fly past the planet by 30 million kilometers.
A second later, the awful acceleration snapped off. The G-forces shoving Admiral Sioux into the couch quit. She expelled air, and then she clamped her teeth together, forcing herself not to vomit. The sudden weightlessness always did that to her, a weakness she despised in herself.
She unbuckled her harness and sat up. So did the others.
The
Bangladesh
still hid in the Sun’s glare from anyone looking from Mercury. They coasted now and thus gave away no gravity-wave signatures. Just as importantly, they knew exactly where their target would be during the coming window of opportunity. Everything depended upon surprise, complete, utter and total surprise.
Behind her darkened visor, the Admiral flashed a wicked smile.
The
Bangladesh
had been built for just such an attack. In this one particular, it broke the “rules” of modern space warfare.
She pushed off the couch and floated to the First Gunner. Together and with ship’s AI, they would work out several attack patterns.
Admiral Sioux chinned on her suit’s outer speakers, and said to the Command Crew, “We must not fail.”
Several dark visors turned toward her.
Finally, they were going to hit back at the Highborn. No more hiding, no more cowering from the enemy. Her chest swelled with pride. “For Social Unity,” she said, thrusting her arm in the Party salute.
Only the First Gunner raised his hand in return. Two others turned away, another was coughing.
Admiral Sioux squinted thoughtfully. If they lived through the attack, she would mark this into their profile, this lack of zeal in face of the enemy. But there was no sense bringing it up now and ruining morale even more. Better if she didn’t have to bring Security onto the command capsule.
Rica Sioux reached the First Gunner, grabbed his shoulder and settled herself into the module beside him. She logged onto the targeting computer and rubbed her gloved hands in glee. Soon everyone would see the power of the
Bangladesh
. Then, yes, then her name would blaze as the visionary who had saved Social Unity.
The Sun Works Factory rotated around the dead planet. A million lights glittered from this greatest of space stations. Thousands of system-craft darted into docking bays or launched outward. They went to or returned from other parts of the factory that were half a world away. They zoomed down to the planet or caught the billions of tons of ores catapulted from Mercury. Many circled the mighty Doom Star
Genghis Khan
. Others endlessly patched, fixed and mended the spinning satellite. Relentless work was the only way to keep the hated enemy—entropy—at bay.
Several military shuttles docked at a kilometers-huge Zero-G Training Room that drifted between the Sun Works Factory and Mercury. Training Master Lycon put his shock troops through their paces.
Within the kilometers-huge room floated cubes and triangles the size of barns. The geometric shapes had been made to look like portions of a blasted spaceship. Far in the background and all around appeared points of light, make-believe stars. The farthest wall shone brightly, the supposed sun-reflected side of an orbital habitat.
Floating thickest in the room’s mid-section were nearly fifty frozen shock troops. They wore stiff orange bodysuits that periodically buzzed. The sound was the suit’s generator releasing punishment-volts that zapped through the frozen victim. The enclosed helmets kept any grunting or groaning internal, although a detector within the helmet picked up the noise, causing the generator to add a few extra volts during the next charge.
The Highborn firmly believed in the virtue of suffering in silence. Premen training theory also stated that failures should be instantly punished. Furthermore, these pain procedures accustomed premen to pain endurance, another virtue. Also, the fear of training failure made the exercise “real” in the subjective sense of the zapped trainee. Finally, at least so the theory went, how could an instructor train premen to overcome pressure unless pressure was vigorously applied?
On the simulated space-habitat wall watchdogged a single remaining laser pulse-cannon, this one ready to emit a low-watt beam. The pitted nozzle rotated back and forth, hunting for motion and the color orange.
The last five-man maniple hid behind a nearby cube, out of sight of the cannon. They were all that was left of the attackers. These five knew that if one of those pulses touched their suit they would freeze, giving a practice kill to the enemy for this satellite storming drill.
One of the floating, orange-suited men peeked around the cube’s corner and at the pulse-cannon. On the top of his helmet was stenciled OMI.
The other four floated behind him, holding onto rails. Their helmets read MARTEN, KANG, LANCE and VIP. Kang was a massive man and dwarfed the others. Vip was the smallest. Otherwise, their bodysuits and helmet seemed identical.
Omi jerked back as a low-watt pulse grazed the cube’s corner. He held a heavy laser tube, his image glowing in the momentary red beam.
“A good leader leads through example,” Vip said, peering at Marten as he spoke via comlink. Through Vip’s faceplate showed the little man’s hair-lip scar and a pulp nose, all mashed about his narrow face.
“That’s a good maxim,” said Lance. “Bet the HBs would like it.”
Marten kept staring at Vip, watching the man’s twitchy eyeballs, like little lead pips. They were always on the move.
Yeah, like a weasel looking for a chicken to steal
.
“What’cha grinning at?” asked Vip.
When Marten didn’t answer, Lance said, “You’ve been outvoted, Marten.”