“Damn,” said Eastwood. He sounded stunned by the hair-thin margin. “That’s the closest yet.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” said Recker. “We’ve got a job to do.”
“Near scan finished,” said Burner. “I’ve got Etrol on the underside array, at three-point-two million klicks.”
“Let’s see it.”
“Not much to look at.”
The central section of the bulkhead screen filled with a sphere of mixed greys. One half of the planet was in darkness and the image intensifiers turned that side into a different shade to the other. It was too soon to tell what imperfections were represented by the other varying hues – usually on a rock like this Recker expected to find craters, mountains and other signs of billion-year-old catastrophic upheaval. The universe was hard on its children.
“Diameter, sixteen thousand klicks,” said Aston. “Cold and old.”
“Lieutenant Burner’s going to have his hands full,” said Eastwood.
“I can help out,” said Aston. “I worked sensors for three years.”
“And then someone offered you a promotion. Only trouble being it was on the Finality,” laughed Recker.
“No regrets, sir.”
“I’ve expanded the local area scan sweep and still nothing,” said Burner.
The further out you looked, the exponentially harder it became to locate and identify objects or spaceships. The Finality wasn’t exactly packing old hardware, but neither was it the newest kit. It also wasn’t fitted with as many sensor arrays as a larger warship and the mainframe which processed the data wasn’t a fraction as quick as the cores they were installing on the most recent cruisers and battleships.
“Commander Aston will take over the area sweeps. Lieutenant Burner, concentrate on the planet. If there’s something on the visible side, I want to find it.”
“Yes, sir. I recommend we approach to an altitude of one hundred thousand klicks. If the surface isn’t too broken and what we’re looking for isn’t small or hidden, I should be able to locate it in one or two circuits.”
If the Daklan had installed any halfway sophisticated detection tech on the ground, the Finality would be vulnerable at that distance. It was a matter of balancing speed and thoroughness against safety.
“A hundred thousand klicks it is, Lieutenant,” said Recker, after giving it some consideration. “Let’s aim for one sweep.”
“And not too fast, sir.”
Recker knew the routine, though he didn’t much like it. “Not too fast,” he confirmed. “Commander Aston, you’ll need to juggle weapons and local area sweeps once we get closer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get on with it.”
With a deep breath, Recker fed power into the ternium drive and the Finality sped towards the planet. The nav comp indicated it was a fifty-five-minute journey once acceleration and deceleration were taken into account. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t long, but Recker was tight like a spring and his mouth was dry from the alternating hot and cold air on the bridge. He found himself suddenly desperate for a drink.
Before he could deal with the physical requirements of his body, Recker had another duty to perform. He was feeling shitty that he’d kept Sergeant Vance in the dark for so long. The internal comms indicated the soldier was in one of the spaceship’s two small bunk rooms and Recker opened a channel.
“Sergeant Vance,” he said.
“Sir,” growled Vance. The man was built like a wrought-iron Daklan shithouse and had a voice that suggested he chewed live rounds for pleasure.
“We’re on the run from a Daklan destroyer and we’re spilling ternium particles,” said Recker. “And our mission’s not over yet.”
Vance gave a rumbling laugh. “It’s never over until the landing feet touch solid ground, sir.”
“We’re on a Priority 1 now, Sergeant.” Recker didn’t need to disclose the details of the mission, though there was nothing preventing him doing so if that’s what he decided. He’d encountered plenty of COs who took pleasure in keeping everything under lock and key, and Recker wasn’t going to be one of them. “Deep Space Quad1 found something that’s got high command interested and we’re the only warship close enough to find out what it is.”
“Sounds easy.” Another laugh.
“Like you said, Sergeant. Once the landing feet hit solid, that’s when we can congratulate ourselves.”
Recker cut the channel and briefly checked his console. Everything was holding stable after the Daklan missile strikes and if it wasn’t for the cone of ternium particles they were leaving behind, he’d have felt comfortable with the operational status of the warship.
“Commander Aston, watch the controls for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed off to Aston and got to his feet, stretching and feeling his joints crackle.
The food replicator was installed in the rear-left corner and Recker stepped between Burner and Eastwood’s identical consoles. The two men performed entirely different functions, but the HPA tech was made to be flexible. Almost everything ran on the same back-end software which had been developed to such a state of reliability that Recker couldn’t recall having to deal with a failure in the last five or more years.
Eastwood met his eye and nodded when Recker walked past. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Burner was too engrossed in the sensor data to look up. A half-empty cup of cold black coffee balanced precariously on the edge of his console. The tech was purportedly sealed against liquid ingress, though Recker didn’t want to put it to the test. He picked up the hard-plastic cup.
“Thank you, sir,” said Burner absently.
It was tight on most warship bridges and a riot class was the worst of all. Six paces from his foam-padded seat, Recker was at the square blast door which kept this area sealed off from the rest of the warship’s interior. Four paces left from there and he was at the replicator.
Once he’d dropped Burner’s cup into the waste tube, Recker studied the device. A single touchscreen with green text allowed hungry or thirsty personnel to select from variety of nutritionally balanced meals and drinks. It was an ongoing joke that it didn’t matter what you chose, the result would look and taste like every other option. As with most legends, this one contained an element of truth.
Recker wasn’t hungry and he stabbed his finger at the water button. The replicator whirred softly and a cup of cool water appeared, which he drained in one. Temptation got the better of restraint and Recker ordered a coffee, no milk and no sugar. The HPA’s standard caffeine-shaming banner appeared on the screen warning him of the dangers of elevated blood pressure and low-level addiction, alongside a number he could call if he needed help with either.
The nannying pissed Recker off every time he saw it. “This is a damned warship,” he swore, pushing the on-screen cross to close the banner. The message disappeared and his drink appeared. A scent that was partially reminiscent of real coffee came to his nostrils.
“Not even worth getting angry over,” he muttered, wrapping his fingers around the cup. Recker turned from the machine. “How’re the scans, Lieutenant Burner?”
“Nothing so far, sir. Etrol’s just a place like a gazillion others. Thin atmosphere, freezing by day and colder at night. Surface rocks and formations that have almost zero percent chance of yielding any usable ores. We’re too far for me to give you anything more specific at the moment.”
“A shit from the asshole of the universe,” said Eastwood with real feeling.
“I thought you’d been taking positivity classes,” said Aston, keeping her face straight.
“Chance would be a fine thing, Commander. If I didn’t carry a photograph, I’d forget what my wife and children look like. You think I have time between flights for anything else?”
The missions had been coming nonstop lately. Usually a spaceship crew would spend a month on patrol, followed by a couple of weeks on the ground. Lately, the Finality had been landing for a re-arm and a ma
intenance once-over before being ordered somewhere else. The spaceship was long overdue a thorough strip-down.
For a time, Recker had thought his crew had been singled out for extra duty and he’d made some enquiries. It turned out every ship in the fleet was being served the same crap and it had him worried. Fleet personnel talked and most knew that the war situation was bad. Recker was beginning to wonder if it was worse than high command was letting on.
He made a mental note to wring some answers out of Admiral Telar next time he saw the man. For now, the mission wasn’t going to complete itself and Recker returned to his seat. A sip of the coffee made him wonder why he’d bothered, and he grimaced at the taste. The knowing grin on Aston’s face didn’t help his mood and he put the cup to one side.
“I’ve got the controls, Commander.”
“Sir.”
With the Finality approaching Etrol, Recker prepared himself. It was easy to succumb to wandering attention when travelling from place to place. The engine note and the way the vastness of space distorted the visual clues of movement somehow conspired to lull the brain into a state of relaxation – assuming you were inexperienced enough to let it happen.
“Half a million klicks to Etrol,” said Burner.
“Plenty of time,” said Recker. “Have you detected anything on the approach?”
“Negative, sir. We’re only just coming into range where the sensors will have a reliable chance of finding anything useful to us.”
“What are the conditions like for the search?”
“No better or worse than any other place, sir. Mountains, canyons, that kind of crap. If the Daklan have an installation on the visible side of the planet I might pick it up from here, but if we aren’t about to rely on chance then it’s going to require a full scan.”
“Keep on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What if the enemy have camouflaged their presence?” asked Eastwood.
“I don’t think it’s likely, Lieutenant,” said Recker. “If there’s an enemy base here, I doubt the Daklan have gone to the trouble of concealing it.”
“Yeah, with a few hundred million planets to hide on, you rely on numerical improbability to keep you safe,” said Aston.
“Even so, here we are,” said Recker. “Our deep space monitoring stations make the universe a little smaller each time the tech guys come up with a new sensor array design.”
“One way or the other our ships keep meeting their ships,” said Burner.
“We’re chasing the same resources,” said Recker impatiently. It was old news and he didn’t want to listen to another discussion on the background of the war. “What’s done is done,” he said.
“Like you say,” agreed Burner with a shrug. “Anyway, I’ve sent two new vectors to the nav comp, sir. Either one will take us around the planet and allow me to scan the entire surface. Take your pick.”
Recker spent a moment studying the options. The first course would take the Finality over the planet’s geographic north pole, while the second headed in the opposite direction. Recker chose north and altered the spaceship’s course onto the new trajectory. At the same time, he hauled back on the control bars. They slid towards him with just the right amount of resistance and the Finality’s velocity gauge tumbled.
“Two hundred thousand klicks,” announced Burner.
“Get ready, folks,” said Recker. “If there’s anything down there, it’s likely to be fitted with military grade sensor tech. If that destroyer issued a warning, they’ll know we’re coming.”
At an altitude of a hundred thousand kilometres, Recker levelled out and stuck to the vector. The Finality was travelling at what felt like a crawl and his instincts urged him to go faster and get this done as soon as possible. He ignored the whispering voice – surface scanning required patience and care, assuming you valued accuracy.
A glance at the underside sensor feed told him the expected story – Etrol was a bleak, harsh world, cracked and torn by five billion years of unkind history.
“I’ve updated the vector,” said Burner.
“Seventy thousand klicks altitude?” asked Recker sharply.
“Either that or we reduce speed further. This place is like a patchwork quilt of the tricky stuff they throw at rookies in training.”
Recker bit his tongue and reduced altitude. His skin felt tight, like his body was pumping adrenaline or the replicator had fired a quadruple shot of espresso into his coffee.
For the next ten minutes, he held course. Every few seconds, Lieutenant Burner would provide an update, though all he turned up was rocks. The tension built on the bridge and Recker wasn’t blinkered enough to deny that he was feeling it too. This was how war could be sometimes and handling the threat of the unknown was a test of mental strength.
“Can you estimate a time to completion, Lieutenant?” Recker asked after another ten minutes.
“Three hours, sir.”
Admiral Telar was probably expecting results yesterday, but Recker had a duty to keep his crew and soldiers alive, and to let them do their jobs without him yelling at them every few minutes.
For a while, nobody spoke. Aston and Burner kept their eyes on the sensors, hunting for danger or for clues as to what had got the operators on DS-Quad1 so interested. For once, Recker was more of a spectator and he watched the sensor feeds, hoping they would give him a feel for what lay ahead. For once, his intuition was keeping its head down and the adrenaline chill subsided.
Gradually, the Finality’s path revealed more of the planet. The altitude of seventy thousand klicks was enough for Burner to scan with confidence, or at least he didn’t say otherwise. So far, the results weren’t inspiring.
“Rocks and more rocks,” Burner said, as the Finality crossed over the planet’s north pole.
“That’s the best description you’ve got?” asked Eastwood.
“Okay, lots of big rocks and a huge mountain range,” Burner replied. “Canyons that make anything on Earth look like a pencil line on a piece of paper.”
Recker was watching the same thing and could only agree with the assessment. With the sensors on maximum zoom, the mountains looked jagged and angry like a badly healed scar. One side of the range was in stark, bright sunlight, while the other was in near darkness, with long shadows that extended for dozens of kilometres.
In one area, a vast fissure ran crossways to the range, splitting several of the largest peaks right across the middle and making Recker stare in wonder.
“Like someone took an axe to the place,” he said.
“Hell of a big axe,” Aston agreed.
“We’ve got no records of the Daklan building anything in terrain like this,” said Recker. He checked one of the other feeds - the mountain range continued over the planet’s curvature and out of sight.
“It’s all got to be scanned, sir,” said Burner. “You know I’m a perfectionist.”
Eastwood cleared his throat loudly but said nothing.
“I’ll maintain course, Lieutenant,” said Recker.
“If there’s something in these mountains, we might need a second sweep,” Burner admitted a few seconds later.
Recker twisted in his seat. “You told me seventy thousand klicks altitude would be enough.”
“I’m sure Admiral Telar is expecting to find Daklan, sir. If so, they won’t be in these mountains – just like you said. If they’re out in the open, one sweep will do it.”
The flight continued without Burner locating anything unusual on the surface. Recker didn’t much like boredom, but on balance it was preferable to being shot at by a superior foe. His agitation returned – Priority 1s weren’t thrown about like confetti and Telar would have been obliged to notify other members of high command when he generated the mission briefing for this one.
Of course, if high command thought the Daklan were out here on Etrol there was an excellent chance that numerous fleet warships were already inbound. It was a shame the comm from Telar hadn’t given
Recker any details. He gritted his teeth at being left in the dark, though it was entirely possible that the admiral hadn’t been in possession of any more information at the time of transmission.
“Ternium particles detected on the far side of Etrol,” said Burner, cool as you like. “Something’s about to join us in orbit.”
The sensors couldn’t see through solid objects, but ternium had different properties to every other known substance. Even so, it was an excellent spot.
“What does the cloud modelling say?” asked Recker. It didn’t take a genius to know the answer.
“It’s the Daklan destroyer, sir. Either that or an identical model come from somewhere else.”
“Bad news but good work, Lieutenant.”
“Any other day and I’d have missed it, sir.”
It wasn’t the kind of development Recker wanted. Already it seemed like the enemy ship was determined to show up everywhere it wasn’t wanted, like the proverbial bad penny. He slowed the Finality even further, to buy himself some time to think.
“Are you able to pinpoint its location and manually add it to the tactical?”
“It’s not going to be accurate, sir, but here you go.”
On the tactical, the planet was represented by a semi-transparent rotating sphere and the red dot of the Daklan spaceship was at a similar altitude to the Finality and a few thousand klicks ahead. Additional overlays indicated the positional margin of error. On its existing course, the Finality would have come perilously near to the enemy ship and Recker didn’t want to imagine the outcome of an unexpected engagement.
“We haven’t scanned that area of Etrol yet,” said Aston.
Recker understood the implication. “Maybe they targeted their arrival at the location of their facility. Or whatever the hell it is we’re looking for.”
“And now our chances of taking a look without being blown to pieces are significantly lower.”
“What next, sir?” asked Burner. “We have no data to create a predictive model of that destroyer’s movements.”
“I know, Lieutenant.”
Recker tapped his fingertips on the edge of his console as he considered the situation. If the enemy captain had decided that the Finality was gone from the Virar-12 system, the destroyer would probably remain stationary over Etrol. Maybe. Or the unproven Daklan surface facilities might have pulled off a thousand-to-one chance and detected the Finality’s exit from lightspeed, in which case the destroyer would come hunting. This time it might not be alone, if the Daklan had other warships stationed here.
War from a Distant Sun (Savage Stars Book 1) Page 3