Alien Firestorm (Fire and Rust Book 2)

by Anthony James

  “One successful strike with the aft railgun,” said Yeringar. “Now two successful strikes.”

  To Griffin’s disbelief, the Fangrin had managed to target and score two direct hits within a half-second window. At the same time, he locked and launched plasma missiles and set the starboard chain guns on auto. The chain gun bullets had a long travel time at this range, but it might give the Raggers something to think about.

  “I’ve found the lifter’s remains, sir,” said Dominguez. “Not much of it left, and what there is won’t be safe to touch for a hundred thousand years.”

  The discovery of the lifter’s wreckage was secondary and Griffin didn’t switch attention from the primary opponent. Dominguez wasn’t finished.

  “Got something else,” she said. “Every one of these Ragger ships has absorbed a whole heap of gamma rays and it’s making them easier to detect.” She hesitated. “Damn.”

  “What?” asked Griffin sharply.

  “This is screwed up, sir. Check this out.”

  Another target appeared on the tactical, this one way out near the lifter. Griffin had to look twice to make sure he read the dimensions correctly. “What the hell is that?”

  “Mothership,” said Yeringar. “I did not expect to see one of those at your planet. It was not something we identified before the Gradior was attacked by the sustained disruptor.”

  “Maybe that’s what fired the disruptor?”

  “It is a possibility. My nemesis returns to haunt me.”

  The words made Griffin think that Yeringar and this Ragger spaceship had some history. Adding everything up, he was beginning to feel out of his depth. It was one of those situations were each event led inexorably to something bigger and more dangerous, and where backing down was not an option. The Raggers had come to New Destiny with one of their capital ships and Griffin didn’t want it to join in the fight.

  “Got a second incoming!” shouted Dominguez.

  Another, smaller target came onto the tactical, heading directly for the Gradior. A railgun slug hit the cruiser at an acute angle, before deflecting elsewhere. The initial impact was close to the bridge and the sound of it made Griffin’s head ring. He grimaced. The enemy kept popping up like weeds on a freshly-planted lawn. As soon as he thought he’d got a measure of the situation, another one arrived to piss him off.

  Yeringar launched Tarx missiles as fast as they’d load and attempted to knock out the last six inbound incendiaries with the railguns. The first Ragger ship fired its own missiles and the Gradior’s interceptors raced towards them. The tactical screen was filled with information – too much for anyone to grasp every possible eventuality.

  “We’re outgunned,” said Griffin. “That doesn’t mean we’re backing down.”

  The first Ragger warship suffered a Tarx warhead strike and its stealth tech failed. Yeringar fired everything he could bring to bear, while the chain guns sprayed high-caliber bullets in front of the target, trying to predict its flight.

  The second enemy ship launched missiles as well and the Gradior’s countermeasures were in danger of becoming overwhelmed. Yeringar did his best to divide the Alz-Tor interceptors between the two waves of incoming. Griffin had been here before – this was the moment when attack beat defense and the Gradior would soon be reduced to white hot debris, spread across the heavens – another victory for the Raggers.

  “Not without a fight,” he said under his breath.

  One of the enemy missiles made it through the Alz-Tor interceptors and exploded against the Gradior’s mid-section. Somehow the cruiser’s engines still offered their maximum and Griffin did everything to make the spaceship hard to hit. Another three missiles sped past, missing by a hundred meters.

  “Something’s up,” said Dominguez.

  Griffin wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of it. This time, it wasn’t another dozen weeds on his lawn.

  “The first target is…drifting,” Dominguez continued, like she hardly believed it.

  Two waves of the Gradior’s plasma missiles were in flight. The enemy ship didn’t eject any further countermeasures and a total of twenty warheads struck it simultaneously. The explosion was huge and the entire Ragger ship was lost from sight.

  “They aren’t living through that,” said Dominguez.

  The second wave hit, building upon the existing cloud of roiling plasma. Griffin didn’t need to watch – the damage was terminal five times over. To his shock, the other Ragger warship was also behaving erratically. It veered off course and turned away from the Gradior. Yeringar wasn’t distracted and he put two railgun shots clean through its rear section. The spaceship drifted sideways and began to spin.

  Yeringar didn’t back off and finished the job with a full launch from the front three missile clusters. The Raggers didn’t launch countermeasures and their ship was torn apart, sending burning metal in every direction. Griffin wasn’t so close that he was required to take evasive action and his brain switched onto the next priority.

  “Where are those incendiaries?”

  Dominguez had never lost track. “Still on course, sir. Two minutes until they enter the New Destiny upper atmosphere.”

  The Gradior had lost none of its agility and it came through a tight turn easily. The upper railguns were halfway charged and the lowers were ready to go. While Yeringar got the missiles in his sights, Griffin demanded an update on the last of the known enemy spaceships.

  “The capital ship is heading across the surface of the moon. It doesn’t look as if they’re in a hurry.”

  “Can we hit them with anything from here?”

  “Railguns,” said Yeringar. “The missiles will take too long.”

  “Let’s take out those incendiaries first.”

  The Fangrin fired, waited, fired again. One-by-one, the Ragger missiles vanished from the tactical screen, the final one within thirty seconds of entering the planet’s atmosphere.

  “Time to find out what that capital ship can do,” said Griffin, in no mood to let the Raggers fire anything else at New Destiny. He brought the Gradior onto a new heading with the enemy in his sights. From this distance, railguns were his only concern and he added unpredictable left-right movements to an otherwise direct course.

  “Fire when ready.”

  “This opponent is beyond us,” said Yeringar, his voice low and filled with something that might have been fear. “I have encountered these before. My home planet was destroyed by such a spaceship – perhaps this one we face here.”

  The estimated shape and dimensions of the capital ship caught Griffin’s eye again. “A disk with a diameter of 2500 meters and a central height of 1000 meters,” he said.

  The figures finally sank in – the mothership was vastly, incomprehensibly larger than anything in either the human or the Fangrin navies. Size didn’t always equate to offensive prowess, but Yeringar’s words gave Griffin pause and he backed off the controls.

  “This could be our moment,” he said, reluctant to give up. “The radiation from the nuclear blast must have killed the crews of those Ragger spaceships just when they thought they had us beat. Maybe everyone on that mothership is dying too.”

  “I think they’re preparing a lightspeed transit, sir,” said Dominguez. “I’m getting all sorts of readings off them. The range is extreme, which makes the data hard to read.”

  The enemy ship hadn’t lost its stealth cloak, so Griffin saw nothing on the sensor feed beyond the grainy background of New Destiny’s crater-scarred rocky moon.

  “They’ll come back and finish what they started,” he said. “Next time we might not be able to stop them until they’ve killed billions.”

  “This is what the Unity League faces, human. Uncertainty and death, leading to inevitable defeat.”

  “Screw that! You sound like you’ve already lost, Yeringar.”

  “Not lost. The Fangrin will never stop fighting.”

  “You seem happy enough to let this capital ship go.”

  Yeringar
growled, the sound cavernous in his chest. “We can track them. Strike when the time is right for us to do so!”

  Griffin remembered the new tech the Gradior had onboard and wondered how effective it was. There was only one way to find out.

  “I’m on it, sir,” said Dominguez, ahead of the instruction.

  “I will assist,” said Yeringar, unclipping himself from his harness and leaning across Dominguez to make sure she didn’t miss the opportunity. The alien’s thickset frame made her seem tiny in comparison.

  “Keep the enemy in sight, Jake Griffin. Otherwise, the tracking will fail.”

  The enemy ship didn’t seem concerned about the Gradior, which may have been a sign that they were in real trouble. Either that, or a heavy cruiser was too insignificant to warrant a delay in their departure from the Anderol system.

  Within sixty seconds, the Ragger capital spaceship – or at least the gamma radiation which gave away its position – vanished from the sensors.

  “Gone,” said Dominguez. “What now?”

  “The Gradior’s main computer will require time to process the data,” said Yeringar. “It will provide the information we require.”

  “I mean what happens afterwards?” asked Dominguez.

  “We follow it,” said Griffin. “And blow the crap out of whatever Raggers we find.”

  “That is an excellent plan,” said Yeringar.

  The enormity of everything finally got to Griffin. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. The Fangrin had described the plan as excellent, when in reality Griffin knew it was a crap one. The problem was, they didn’t have anything better. Maybe his superiors would have a few ideas. Somehow, he didn’t think they would amount to anything more than the original, with a couple of bells and whistles to make it seem like a bit of thought had gone into the organization.

  A times like this, blowing the crap out of things was the best you had.

  II

  Meat Storage

  Chapter Fifteen

  Yeringar didn’t know exactly how long was required to process the lightspeed data and he told Griffin it would depend on many factors such as the length of the journey the Raggers were taking.

  It wasn’t a time for sitting idly and Griffin ran a damage report for the Gradior. The heavy cruiser was beaten and not broken. The Fangrin had built it well and clad it in thicker plates than usual. It looked a mess when viewed through the external sensors, and one of the broken chain gun turrets was twisted like it would fall off at any moment. The single plasma missile had come closest to making a breach and the armor was reduced to a few inches thick across a large area nearby and the heat made that part of the interior uninhabitable.

  Dominguez used the comms to speak to Colonel Doyle and informed him that the immediate threat had passed. Doyle wanted to speak directly to Griffin.

  “What is it, Colonel?”

  “The Raggers turned up elsewhere, Captain. They sent five ships to Centrium.”

  Griffin went cold at the news. “The rust mines there aren’t operational.”

  “No, they aren’t, but that didn’t stop those bastards dropping bombs on us while we’re trying to rebuild.”

  “There’s a fleet on Centrium.”

  “Not anymore. Gone – destroyed by the Raggers. Another set of coordinates they pulled out of the Fangrin’s data center.”

  The Fangrin knew where to find a total of four Unity League planets. “That leaves two more planets vulnerable.”

  “We’re stepping up the security on those. It’s going to screw us over in other places. This is what the Fangrin gave us – they should help out.”

  Griffin watched Yeringar from the corner of his eye, trying to judge his reaction. “Maybe they will help, Colonel. I don’t think they’re having it too easy themselves.”

  “That’s what happens when you go around starting wars. One day you’ll bite off more than you can chew.”

  “A discussion for another time, Colonel. Keep me updated.”

  The channel went dead and Griffin sensed Yeringar approaching. “In war, the Fangrin regret nothing,” he said. “However, we always pay our debts.”

  “Looks like we’re in this together. Human and Fangrin.”

  “That is the way events are leading us. I am sure the decision will come soon.”

  “A decision you will play a part in?” asked Griffin, his eyes locked onto those of the Fangrin.

  “You have guessed that I am not what I seem.” A hint of the rumbling laughter.

  “In my experience, soldiers are damned good at fighting, not so much on the operations of naval warships, nor the use of new technologies to track enemy spaceships into lightspeed.”

  “I hold a senior rank within the Fangrin navy. I will use the Gradior’s comms station to advise my base what has transpired here.”

  “You can clearly fly, Yeringar. Why did you leave it to me?”

  “I did not leave it to you. I assisted when you asked.”

  Griffin was exasperated and he tried to recall the training he’d been given in how to deal with alien species. The details of the lessons didn’t seem relevant to the current situation. “What about Zargol over there?” he asked.

  The second Fangrin on the bridge was once again at the food station. Zargol turned his head and bared his teeth. Griffin told himself it was a smile.

  “Zargol is a soldier and an excellent one, in the same way that those others you found with me on the lifter are soldiers. They could not crew a spaceship.”

  “You left it to us.”

  “To see if you could help yourselves.”

  “When it was human lives at stake.”

  “Without the Gradior, the Raggers would have reduced many more cities to rubble. They do not care.”

  Griffin remembered the sight of the chewed bodies on the Star Burner.

  “What do they want? Food? Resources?”

  “They take everything. Bodies and rust. Life on a subjugated world would not be easy.”

  “Have they subjugated any Fangrin worlds?”

  “We do not submit, human. We know the outcome. Even if the Raggers were kind masters, we would still fight to the end.”

  “If you do not submit…”

  “That is right, Jake Griffin. The Raggers have killed in excess of fifty billion of the Fangrin. Now they have taken the data from our comms facility on Zevrol and this has tipped the scales in their favor.”

  “You haven’t located any of their comms facilities, I take it?”

  “Not through lack of effort, human. Now, I must send an FTL comm to my officers.”

  “Was this a test?” asked Griffin suddenly. “To see if the Unity League had the guts to beat the Raggers?”

  “I would not call it a test.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Admiral Enixlan Yeringar.”

  “What about Captain Jostral?”

  “He was in charge of this vessel before his death. I was here to observe the performance of the lightspeed tracking modules.”

  The Fangrin returned to the comms station and took the seat adjacent to Dominguez. Her face said many things and she attempted to smile at Griffin. He attempted to smile back.

  The dog was out of the bag as far as Yeringar’s status went. In a way, it wasn’t much of a surprise and Griffin didn’t think too long about it. He drummed his fingers, wondering if the lightspeed tracker took five minutes or a thousand to finish. Certainly it was hitting the Gradior’s mainframe hard and the calculations were eating up every spare cycle.

  Yeringar didn’t speak his message, which irritated Griffin since he’d intended listening in. He sent whatever he wanted to send in text, and then sat while he waited for a response. This was a long way from known Fangrin territory, so he’d be waiting a while, unless the Gradior was also fitted with a super-FTL comms transmitter that travelled much faster than anything else known.

  Conway spoke to Dominguez, asking if the fighting was over and if he cou
ld have an update. Griffin realized he’d been an ass and had forgotten that other things were just as important as eavesdropping on alien officers. He entered the comms channel.

  “The Raggers are gone, Lieutenant. I don’t know how long for.”

  “What about Durham, sir?”

  The Gradior was too far in space for the sensors to get a decent image. “Some wreckage landed on the town – not much, but some. I don’t have any information on the casualties.” He paused. “I’ll get you a comms link to one of the satellites.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  For Lieutenant Conway, the news was good. Griffin didn’t listen in to the conversation, but he asked when it was over.

  “I’ve told my family to get the hell away from Durham, sir. Until this is all over.”

  “That might be a long time.”

  “The same way it’s been ever since I signed up, sir.”

  “How are you getting on with the Fangrin?”

  “It’s tense. I won’t pretend it’s otherwise. We’ll have to make the best of it.”

  “And Corporal Freeman?”

  “Not good. One of the dogs – sounds like his name is Mavingkar or something like it – claims to be a medic. He’s got Freeman in one of the bays, wired up to a medical box. Reckons he’ll be out of it for weeks.”

  “Better than death.”

  “Yes, sir. He’s got a lot to live for and a talent for shooting aliens.”

  “Something we need more of in the ULAF.”

  A sound from Yeringar – a cross between a growl and a roar – made Griffin close the channel abruptly. “What is it?”

  “The tracker has returned an answer! We must prepare our tharniol drive!”

  Griffin was surprised enough to stumble over his words. “I thought we were going to prepare joint action?”

  “That is not how the tracker works, Captain Jake Griffin!”

  “I thought it was able to derive a destination from the output of a tharniol drive?”