22

DropShipHimmelstor
Over Hesperus II
Lyran Commonwealth
22 November 3134

Refusing with a sharp shake of his head to leave the bridge of the Himmelstor, Jasek weathered Kaptain Goran’s pointed stare and belted himself into the chair normally reserved for the ship’s executive officer. The DropShip’s command center was a beehive of activity as they approached atmospheric insertion over Hesperus II, with crewmen manning the different stations, calling out time checks, attitude adjustments, and range to target on a contact that Jasek would feel better forgetting was even there.

“And I can’t convince you to go below,” the kaptain said, his voice rough and gravelly from decades of calling out orders. Thick-necked and heavy-browed, Eduard Goran was a fourth-generation spacer with family ties back to the Lyran Commonwealth.

Jasek gripped the arms of the command-style chair. “I will if you will,” he said easily.

The Stormhammers’ leader had had enough of “below” after four days under a high-gravity burn, ramping up and holding at the equivalent of 2.5 Gs. Except for short low-gravity periods where a skeleton crew made their rounds and everyone was allowed to eat or take care of personal ablutions, Jasek had been confined to quarters and strapped into bed, feeling as if his spine were threatening to snap in half. Hammered until his joints ached and every muscle felt bruised.

A “suicide sled” run, that’s what Goran had called it when Hesperus authorities approved Jasek’s request for a fast insertion lane. A Lyran Scout jumped the Himmelstor to a special Lagrange point in-system, near Hesperus III. Then the trial began.

After barely an hour of the rough treatment, Jasek could think of it only as a necessary evil.

Even with his personal JumpShip fitted out with lithium-fusion batteries, able to make the double-jump transfer from Chaffee’s Lagrange point to the Hesperus system in less than a day, this was the only way he hoped to get in and out fast enough to do Skye any good. Using a closer set of nonstandard jump coordinates was out of the question. Jasek had been willing to risk it—anything to save himself the eighteen-day insertion time—but Goran had flat refused. There were things worse than a deep gravity well protecting Hesperus II from unwanted trespassers.

And thinking of which . . . “She’s going to come down our port ventral side,” the ship’s sensor officer called out, and if it was possible to ratchet tension on the bridge up another few degrees, that did it.

Goran grunted. “Roll five degrees starboard. Bring her up on the main screen.”

There was no ferroglass viewport on an Overlord bridge. No “weather deck” bulkheads at all, in fact. The command center was nestled safely and securely in the DropShip’s centerline spaces where only a naval-class missile might hope to penetrate.

And if there hadn’t currently been a half dozen launchers capable of throwing such a missile at the Himmelstor already locked on to them, Jasek might have felt fairly safe.

The screen, which had been filled with black space and bright stars a moment before, switched camera angles and found the fast-approaching world of Hesperus II. Duncolored with streaks of dark brown, the planetary surface had a craggy, unfinished look about it with very little vegetation to soften the knife-edged mountains that divided the main continents. Jasek knew that with mean equatorial temperatures up to eighty degrees Celsius, the world was habitable only in the far northern reaches, and most of the population preferred to live under atmospherically controlled domes.

He knew a lot, in fact, about this world he had never visited. Hesperus II was a storied world in the Lyran Commonwealth. One of perhaps twelve worlds about which legend had it that if you knew their history you knew nearly everything important to know about the Inner Sphere. It was here that House Steiner learned of BattleMech designs when an ancient ancestor of Jasek’s, Simon Kelswa, raided the Terran Hegemony world in 2445. Hesperus II eventually became a Lyran holding, and was attacked more than fifteen times in major assaults by Houses Kurita, Marik, even Davion. But the world never gave up its allegiance or its secrets again. The ’Mech factories, so important during the Succession Wars and the Jihad, were built beneath the Myoo Mountains and essentially impenetrable to an outside force. Even in this time of downsized militaries coming off a golden age of peace, the factories at Hesperus II continued to turn out ’Mechs at a pace that most other worlds considered reckless.

And this was one of the reasons for Jasek’s hastily planned visit.

“The Myoos,” Kaptain Goran said, using a laser pointer to scribe a fast circle around a particularly wrinkled range of mountains in the northwest section of the planet’s northernmost continent. With a practiced spacer’s eye, he found the gray stain that was the only city on the planet large enough to be recognized as such from space. “Maria’s Elegy. Put Defiance Peak about here, then.” He speared a large mountain with the pointer, seemingly at random.

Defiance Peak. Home of the local Defiance Industries factories. Duke Vedet Brewster, the world’s hereditary ruler, would have his capital at Maria’s Elegy, which was also where House Steiner’s personal ambassador would reside.

Yes, Jasek was interested in those landmarks.

Then a gray-black veil swept over the planet, hazy in its eclipse. Jasek felt a sharp thrill run through him as Goran ordered his technicians, “Scale back. Bring her into focus.”

Coming down the Himmelstor’s port ventral side. That’s what the sensor officer had said. But no one had adjusted the camera’s eye—configured to take in space travel distances that usually ran to hundreds of thousands of kilometers—for close-up viewing.

Now he did, and the gray veil hardened into an angular wall. It dropped back to show a DropShip docking collar and a pair of heavy naval particle cannons guarding the approach. Another level of magnification removed, and the thick-waist profile of a Lyran battle cruiser cut across the planet’s profile.

“The Yggdrasil,” Goran said with an appropriate touch of awe.

Mjolnir-class. Displacing more than 1,200,000 tons, it was one of the valiant Lyran WarShips to survive the Word of Blake Jihad. Thought lost several times over its active life, it was placed in orbit around Hesperus II in 3084, underscoring how important the local factories were to House Steiner, even if Devlin Stone had wanted to pick the world up in his grab for a new Hegemony.

“Never been moved again,” Goran said, as if sensing Jasek’s thoughts. “Some say it can’t be taken out of system. Burned out its KF drive in the last jump it made to arrive here.”

“You believe that?” Jasek asked. He shifted in his chair, easing tired muscles, and tried to distract himself by counting the weapon bays visible as dimpled shells and long-barreled turrets on the Mjolnir’s side. At least nine naval-class autocannon in its overlapping broadside arcs, he saw. Several particle cannon. And, yep, there were the AR10 launchers. Each one with a set of Killer Whale missiles that could crack the Himmelstor like an egg.

Goran cocked his head in what might have been a shrug, or only a pause to think. “What I believe and what I’m careful about ain’t always the same thing, Landgrave.”

“Good advice,” Jasek decided. “And speaking of being careful, you’d better call Colonel Vandel up here.”

“More mud sloggers cluttering up my bridge for no reason,” the kaptain groused.

“You may be right,” Jasek acknowledged. “The Brewsters have never been enemies of Skye or the Kelswas, after all, and I believe Trillian Steiner will give us an audience and vouchsafe us regardless of the local duke’s attitude.” He shrugged. “But she knows Joss Vandel. And that monster of a ship will be holding position above Hesperus II, which means we have to come back up past it. How careful do you want to be today?”

Goran picked up his all-hands mic and dialed for shipboard announcement, calling Joss Vandel to the bridge.

Jasek was careful not to let the crotchety spacer see his smile.