Federated Worlds Space Fleet Headquarters, Foundation, Terranova Planet
With 387’s pinchcomms message confirming the hijacking of the Mumtaz, the full seriousness of the situation finally had sunk in. All of them, from flag officers on up, sat silent as they worked out the full implications of what the Hammer had done.
Up to that point, the frantic work of Battle Fleet Delta’s hastily appointed staff had had a strange air of unreality about it, as if there still were some chance that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and in the end the Mumtaz would drop out of pinchspace safely, on vector and decelerating into one of Jackson’s two planetary transfer stations. Angela Jaruzelska also had felt the fear in everybody’s mind, the terrible fear that once again the Federated Worlds would have to go to war against its most long-standing and bitter enemy.
At fifty-six, she was old enough to have been through the last round with the Hammer in the late ’70s, and it was not an experience she would ever want to repeat. But then, she had chosen the Fleet and it had chosen her. With God’s help, she would do her best to make sure that this time around the Hammers would be repaid tenfold for their stupidity and greed.
A glass of very fine Anjaxxian Pinot Noir cradled in her left hand, its heady perfume washing over her, Jaruzelska settled into her favorite chair on the broad timber deck that overlooked the sky-shaded lights of Foundation that were spread out below her.
Midnight was fast approaching. It had been another very long day.
Getting approval for the operation to recover the Mumtaz-Operation Corona it was now officially called-had not been easy. The preliminary concept of the operation had shocked the cabinet with its complexity, unavoidably so, given the mission objectives set. But what had really stunned the inner cabinet had been the risk assessment with its sobering estimates of the ships and lives that could be lost. For a moment, Jaruzelska had been surprised by the impact her casualty estimates had had.
What did they think?
That the Fleet could waltz into Hammer space, retrieve the hostages, and waltz out again while the Hammers sat on their big fat asses and let it all happen?
But in the end, the cabinet’s go-ahead had been emphatic and unequivocal. She had thought there might be some of the weaseling around one expected from politicians, but there had been none. Jaruzelska strongly suspected that whichever Hammer genius had thought up the Mumtaz hijacking plan had completely misunderstood the Worlds in general and the ruling New Liberal government in particular. Despite the fact that it had ended nineteen years earlier and even though people no longer talked about it as much as they once had, apart from the Veterans of Interstellar Wars, of course, the most enduring legacy of the Third Hammer War was a deeply held hatred of the Hammer and total distrust of all its works.
So if she was to be totally cynical, maybe the politicians understood that and thought the idea of a nice clean war against a despised enemy on clear-cut and unambiguous moral grounds would be a good thing politically.
She sighed as she brought the wineglass to her lips. She was sure there was no such thing as a nice clean war. However, tomorrow she would have her staff rework the concept of operations to see if they could get a bit closer to a risk-free operation, something that could exist only in the minds of politicians.