Perimeter

  Joe Ballen, Book Two

  David M. Kelly

  Nemesis Press

  Perimeter: Joe Ballen, Book Two

  Copyright ©2018 by David M. Kelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9953294-7-8

  ISBN-10: 0-9953294-7-8

  First Published 2018

  Nemesis Press

  Wahnapitae, Ontario

  www.nemesispress.com

  Dedication

  To my mother. Thank you for the dreams and

  the insanity, without which none of this

  would have happened.

  One

  "You're a bastard, Joe Ballen."

  It might have been true in a biological sense as I never knew my parents. It was probably true in a euphemistic sense too, but I listened rather than responding. I'd like to say that was down to me being a patient guy, but the truth was Helios Station was over one A.U. from Earth, and the transmission delay at this distance was over eight minutes, so a direct two-way conversation was impossible.

  I also had to admit Dollie had a point. She'd not wanted me to take the Mercury job and we'd fought—ending with me walking out and stepping on the elevator to the High-Rig. I'd been "on the job" for almost ten months and wasn't planning on going back Earthside before it was finished.

  "Do you know how long it's been? You're turning me into a frustrated old maid. I swear there are cobwebs forming." Dollie looked at me with lowered eyes. "A girl deserves to be treated well. You can't expect me to keep it all wrapped up warm for you for so long."

  Despite the fact that we'd gone through the legal marriage process, I thought it highly unlikely Dollie was "keeping it warm" for me. It wasn't in her nature. She had at least twice the sexual drive of a regular person, and I often got the feeling she'd have been happy if we stayed in bed 24/7.

  "It's great to see you, Dollie. You look as good as ever." Even though I knew she wouldn't hear me for several minutes, the cost of the call was so high I couldn't say nothing. "I miss you too. A whole lot. The work here is important though—you know that."

  I slipped into my chair, the phone pickup automatically tracking my face. The artificial gravity in the rotating habitation section felt good. As much as I liked free fall, it was surprisingly tiring, especially with the heat inside the station. "Everything is going well here. We finished installing the first four rocket launcher systems last week, and the upgrades to the Mass Driver are underway. The new crew members are doing well for the most part—though a couple need to learn more about personal hygiene in close quarters. Inestria is working on that."

  Isabell Inestria was my second. She knew almost as much about Zero-G construction as I did and also had similar experience in handling construction teams. But as soon as I mentioned her name, I cursed myself silently, anticipating the response I'd get in seventeen minutes. Ever since Dollie discovered Helios was a mixed-sex operation, she'd convinced herself I'd be bedding every single female on board. The fact that Isabell was friendly, outgoing, and robustly attractive, did nothing to assuage Dollie's mistaken accusations.

  "When are you coming home, Joe? Dollie isn't happy. And when Dollie isn't happy she gets restless and naughty. You wouldn't want me to be naughty, now would you? I swear I'm making all the drivers nuts, I'm so wound up. Perhaps I should organize a big orgy to settle my nerves and theirs."

  My throat was dry, and not only from the ever-present traces of bitter dust from the ore processing sections. Working at Dollie's Cabs had taught me how rough Dollie could be with people at times. Her mixed-up hermaphroditic DNA gave her a sizzling personality that sometimes showed the worst of both worlds: a male-oriented harshness combined with a female spite that could peel your skin if you were unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end.

  "Ballen?"

  I looked up and grimaced when I spotted Delacort outside my door. He was the leader of the small MilSec unit stationed with us, and the official monkey on my back. He always dressed perfectly in uniform, completing the look with cropped regulation hair giving his narrow-domed skull a passing resemblance to a kiwifruit. He insisted he was a "regular guy" despite his military rank, but somehow he still managed to make every job we had at least three times harder than necessary.

  "Personal call." I took a sip of my dark coffee. It was hot and bitter, quite appropriate since we were currently in orbit two thousand kilometers above Mercury. Whatever he wanted to bitch about I didn't want to know. "After that, I have another six solar arrays to bring online. Look me up after I'm done."

  "Well, zip your pants. I've received a priority one notification from Central. The Atolls have launched a cruiser and, as near as they can tell, it's headed our way." Sweat prickled his face. Even with almost unlimited solar power the cooling systems struggled to fight off the sun's heat. The units worked well enough, the problem was getting rid of the excess heat—even the best exchangers work only marginally in a vacuum. Not only that, we were almost at closest approach to the sun, and that, combined with radiation from Mercury, made it a losing battle.

  "You better keep your hands off that—" I killed the comm channel, cutting Dollie off in a way that would cause me a mountain of grief later. Assuming there'd be a "later." Even if the defenses worked, we weren't equipped to fight off a determined attack from an Atoll ship.

  "How long?"

  "The simulations show arrival probabilities of the enemy from eight hours to seventeen days depending on flight parameters." Delacort shrugged. "You know how it is."

  Tactical sims have a habit of showing you every possible piece of information, but not the one you need to know. What you get are probabilities and estimates, but it's basically a shopping list of what-might-be's—choose your own level of optimism or pessimism. We had relatively poor monitoring capabilities, limiting our knowledge of Atoll force movements, so it was hard to see any benefit from such vague numbers. From what Delacort said, if they came straight for us they'd be here in half a day—any change from the most direct approach would place the time of arrival at any point in the future.

  "They're sure they're coming for us?" It was wishful thinking, but I had to ask.

  "Ninety-three percent confidence rating based on the figures they have."

  "You'd think they'd give us a break. It's not like we're treading on their toes."

  Three years ago the Atolls had taken out Deimos Base, a mining relay station in Mars orbit feeding raw materials to both the Atolls and Earth. It was the only operation Earth was involved in outside of planetary orbit and tolerated only because it provided resources to both sides.

  But the starship Ananta changed everything, including that miserably slim piece of collaboration. It was a prototype, built by Earth, which the Atolls had scoffed at. When the possibility arose that it might work, the Atolls were ready for blood. They'd clamped down on every deep space endeavor we had. And those restrictions hadn't been lifted even though the Ananta had been lost for the past three years.

  Earth had looked inward. Mercury wasn't a good bet for ore extraction. Although its orbit made it easy to deliver materials to the inner solar system, the heat and difficulty in achieving a stable orbit made the project much more expensive than the Deimos operation. But the Atolls controlled everything farther out, leaving us little choice.

  "Everyone into the Rabbit Hole in seven hours. I'll pass the word."

  The Rabbit Hole was a bunker deep in the heart of the station. Theoretically, it could hold the crew and protect them for nine days—long enough for a rescue vessel to get here from Earth—but we'd never tried it. It was surrounded by as much mass as possible to "armor" it: packed rock from the extraction process, water tanks, and finally several layers of matted ballistic material. It might survive a sustained attack, but it was probably a fifty-fifty proposition at best. I grabbed my comm-set to contact Isabell; she could handle most of the arrangements.

  "How about infrastructure?" Delacort waved his hand in an all-inclusive gesture.

  "What about it?"

  "The solar arrays, heat sinks, cooling systems. Should we shut them down to protect them?"

  I thought of telling him where he could stick his "infrastructure" but didn't. He was only doing his job the way I tried to do mine, and we'd need all those things if we survived. "Heat sinks are maxed out. We can't take them offline, not this close to perihelion. We'd fry in a matter of hours. Same with cooling."

  "Right. The bastards timed it to hit us when we'd be most vulnerable."

  "We could furl the arrays. That would make them less prone to damage but would only leave battery power."

  I waited while Delacort thought about it. Running on batteries would mean the railguns and lasers would be useless after a few shots and, unless we got impossibly lucky, there'd be nothing left of us except for a cloud of trace elements drifting slowly inward to fry in the Sun. I knew he'd want to make a stand, his tightly muscled jawline delivered that message clearly.

  "We have to be able to fight. Forty-eight rockets aren't going to sa