With relief, Recker found that his crew had suffered only minor injuries. Their combat suits were built to take a beating and nobody would suffer more than bruises, though Burner’s hearing still hadn’t recovered from the earlier stun grenade burst and Eastwood had somehow managed to catch his balls on the edge of a console when he was thrown from his feet.
“What’s the plan, sir?” asked Eastwood, leaning against one of the consoles and taking deep breaths to try and counter the pain.
Recker didn’t answer the question at once. Instead, he got on the comms to Vance again. “Did you kill the enemy, Sergeant?”
“They’re mostly dead, sir,” Vance confirmed. “The Daklan don’t give up easily, so there may be others nearby, thinking up ways to catch us by surprise.”
“Casualties?”
“A few damaged suits and not much else. I call this a lucky result.”
“I don’t think luck played a part. We’re getting out of here, Sergeant.”
“I’m sure the squad will be glad to hear it, sir. Exactly how are we planning to do that?”
“The Daklan destroyed our incision craft and stole our dock. It seems only right that we steal their shuttle.”
“If they left it unguarded.”
“Failing that, there’s another shuttle docked next to it. If it’s capable of flight, I’ll get it up into the air. Watch the doorway and wait for my word.”
“Yes, sir.”
Recker gave his attention to the members of his crew. “Before we depart, I want every single piece of useful data we can extract from this cylinder.”
“I think we’ve got most of it already, sir,” said Burner. “I’ve got the transmission vector for the two linked tenixite converters – assuming the failed link was to Etrol, that gives us a shot at locating the second.”
“You want to shut this cylinder down,” said Aston.
“If I can. Seems to me like the Daklan were too interested in this one for me to think they got everything they needed from the converter on Etrol.”
“They haven’t had time to study that one, sir.”
“I know, Commander. My reasoning may be flawed. Still, the Daklan have a far greater chance of recovering this cylinder than we do. I’d like to deny them any advantage.”
In the end, the task wasn’t so easy and the tenixite converter’s software and databanks couldn’t be deleted or disabled from this control level. Recker knew enough about how these things worked that he was sure the command could be given from elsewhere on the cylinder – maybe on the levels above this one.
During the few minutes he allowed himself for the task, the shuttle outside the particle beam opening accelerated hard away across the planet’s surface. Recker assumed the Daklan onboard had seen enough and didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the annihilator and the heavy lifter.
With reluctance, he admitted defeat in his efforts to delete the contents of the cylinder’s databanks. Having pulled through so many near-misses, his crew and the squad deserved this chance at life, where previously there had been none. Risks could often win wars, but Recker admitted that as far as this mission went, he’d taken enough, and it was time to move on.
“Sergeant Vance, we’re ready to leave. Any sign of Daklan on those stairs?”
“No, sir. I sent Gantry down for a look and all he found was bodies.”
“We’re on our way.”
Recker led the way towards the far doorway and had to stop when Burner stumbled to the ground.
“Looks like something screwed with my balance, sir.”
Leaning forward, Recker offered a hand and hauled Burner to his feet. “Lieutenant Eastwood, help me out,” he said.
Between the two of them, Recker and Eastwood kept Burner upright and they made it to where Sergeant Vance was waiting. The squad members were still hunkered down behind the nearby consoles and most of their combat suits were turned brown as a result of the polymers being exposed to the heat of nearby explosions.
With a wave of his hand and a single barked order, Vance brought the soldiers out of cover and they gathered at the top of the stairs. They were still wary, reminding Recker that the Daklan might still have a presence on the cylinder.
“Corporal Hendrix, this man keeps falling over,” said Recker. “Have you got anything for him?”
Hendrix fished in her side pack and came out with a familiar booster injector.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. This needs to go in the place where it’ll act the quickest.”
“What?” asked Burner uncertainly.
Without ceremony, Hendrix stepped closer and jabbed the needle through the flexible combat suit and into Burner’s neck. The injector hissed as it forced its contents into his body, though the sound of it was mostly hidden by the stream of expletives pouring from his mouth.
“Damn that hurt.”
“You get used to it, Lieutenant,” said Recker, patting him on the shoulder.
In about thirty seconds, you’re going to feel like you can punch a Daklan body builder clean through a two-metre plate of warship armour, Lieutenant,” said Hendrix, giving Burner the new recruit lecture.
“Yeah, don’t go running off ahead,” said Aston, grinning.
Burner rolled his shoulders. “You’re talking like this is my first time.”
Recker was impatient to be off and he gave Sergeant Vance the nod. A couple of soldiers scouted the staircase again. Raimi came back to declare the room below clear of hostiles.
“Montero’s watching from the bottom in case anymore of the enemy show,” he said.
The squad descended in stages. Having survived this long, Vance was unwilling to see the soldiers wiped out by a surprise shoulder launcher attack - the blast from which might be enough to kill anything caught in the stairwell.
Recker and Aston were best equipped to fly one of the two shuttles, so they stayed close to the back in order to avoid a potential instant kill surprise attack from the Daklan. Everything in the stairwell was a mess of char, melted alloy and carbonised body parts. The intense heat should have burned away the worst of the stench, yet somehow it lingered, bitter and acrid, redolent of once-living creatures.
As he stepped into the lower room, Recker felt enormous relief to be out of the stairwell’s confines. He’d seen death before, but the moment it stopped affecting him was the moment he’d have drifted too far from his humanity.
The carnage continued in the lower quadrant room and Recker guessed that fifteen or twenty Daklan had perished, though many of the bodies were fused together making it difficult to obtain an accurate headcount. Recker didn’t even try.
Meanwhile, Private Enfield reminded everyone of his heroic charge during a lull in the fighting, in which he’d dropped one of his larger explosives before escaping back upstairs in order to detonate it remotely.
“Must’ve taken out all these poor bastards in one big boom,” he said, nudging a corpse unsympathetically with his foot.
The mood of the other soldiers was grim, despite their victory, and they didn’t say much. This battle had been won by everyone, not just the man who happened to be carrying the explosives.
Sergeant Vance took himself off, along with Corporal Givens, to scout the shaft leading the deployment craft’s original docking place. He returned shortly and Recker could read the outcome in the other man’s face.
“No Daklan, no shuttle,” he announced. “They must have had enough when their battleship came down and they decided to fly elsewhere.”
“Same as the those on the other shuttle which left,” said Recker. “Sergeant, take us to door for the second shaft.”
The access door wasn’t in this quadrant and the squad gathered at the entrance to the adjacent area. Sergeant Vance remained cautious and sent in three of the squad to search for Daklan.
As he waited in the first room, Recker couldn’t help but stare at the particle beam hole in the wall and the extensive damage to the surrounding hardware caused by the missile from the Daklan shuttle. The ope
ning itself was a stark reminder that the species which attacked this cylinder had plenty of firepower at their disposal, and if the original attack had indeed occurred eighty years ago, they’d had time to make their weapons bigger and better.
“See the flex in the walls?” said Aston, tracing an imaginary line with her finger.
Recker had missed it until it was pointed out to him. With his attention drawn to the area, he could see how the ceiling was fractionally lower at one side and the walls were slightly bowed.
“We’re clear in here, sir,” said Private Steigers. “Zero Daklan.”
The squad hurried through and Sergeant Vance strode for the door leading to the second shuttle access shaft. Once again, he took it steady and the soldiers aimed their guns towards the entrance from positions of cover. Recker watched approvingly – he’d seen plenty of soldiers lose their lives because they let down their guard when they thought the fighting was done.
Once Drawl and Montero had scouted ahead, Vance declared it was time to move. The squad entered the shaft and started the descent. When it was his turn, Recker noted how the docking clamps had been damaged, resulting in a half-metre gap between the shuttle and the shaft.
The gap presented only a minor challenge and soon Recker was inside the alien vessel, along with everyone else except for Private Rick Joiner who’d been killed by the Daklan missile.
Getting so far was a victory itself, but Recker wasn’t ready to settle. Now they had to escape from the cylinder and that job fell to him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The interior of the shuttle had been in a vacuum until the last man closed the upper hatch. Now, it was slowly filling with breathable air, though the process would take several minutes to complete.
Aside from that, it was cold, cramped and lit by a single glowing orb embedded in the ceiling. Recker guessed this shuttle had never been intended to carry significant numbers of passengers, a view reinforced by the lack of seats. The sound of the propulsion carried through the solid floor, given a muffled edge by the thin atmosphere.
This small bay at the bottom of the entrance shaft had a ceiling only just high enough for an average human to stand upright and with space to accommodate twenty in total at a push. A monitoring panel was bolted to the left-hand wall and, aside from the light orb, was the only visible sign of technology.
Recker knew where he was going – a short, narrow passage led directly towards a sealed door. He activated the security panel, hoping the atmosphere was stable enough that the fail-safes wouldn’t trigger. The door opened with a swish and he stepped into the cockpit, with Aston, Burner and Eastwood crowding behind.
“Two seats,” he observed, taking the closest.
“Looks basic,” said Aston. She dropped into the second seat and cast her gaze over the panel which ran full width across the front of the cockpit. Behind, Eastwood and Burner shuffled along the rear bulkhead, so they were nearby in case they were needed. The cockpit was cramped for two and four occupants made it far worse.
“Basic or not, everything’s online,” said Recker, calling up the software. “That’s the important part.”
Recker had learned much from the more sophisticated consoles on the levels above and he was already confident he could fly this shuttle. Manual control was handled by a pair of stubby control sticks, with a backup pair in front of the second seat.
“Activating sensors,” he said. “Let’s see what damage that battleship caused.” Recker’s voice was calm, but this was the moment of truth. The annihilator might have crushed the cylinder so badly that the exit holes were squashed closed or made too small for the shuttle to fly through.
Recker fleetingly thought that if the exits were blocked that meant the Daklan transport was also trapped in the cylinder. The enemy shuttles were fitted with weapons and Recker was sure the one he was piloting had none. An engagement would be one-sided and short-lived.
The sensor feeds appeared on a two-by-three arrangement of screens which lit up on the sloped forward bulkhead. Recker stared, trying to comprehend the magnitude of the destruction.
“Messy,” said Aston.
Where before, the cylinder’s interior had been damaged, it had still been possible to see how it was originally constructed. Now, the immense space was changed beyond recognition. The upper curve of the shell had been pushed in by the impact of the battleship, so that it formed a slanted wall beginning a few hundred metres from where the shuttle was docked.
In the intervening area, snapped and bent spokes were crushed and flattened, twisted together or jutting at different angles. The main pillar – or what part of it was in the visual arc of the sensors - was broken into jagged pieces that were scattered everywhere. When he looked at the debris, Recker wasn’t sure if the pillar had even been made from metal, since the way it had broken made him think of an enormous piece of stone shattered by a heavy blow.
A dark grey lump of immeasurable weight lay in the centre of it all, pieces of wreckage protruding from beneath the half-disintegrated ternium of the Daklan battleship’s propulsion system. The irregular block threw out enough particles to kill a health and safety officer at a million klicks.
“No sign of a way out,” he said. “And no sign of that Daklan shuttle.”
“I can disengage the clamps,” said Aston.
“Do it.”
The gravity clamps were damaged and Recker prepared himself for a hardware failure. Instead, a green light appeared and the shuttle dropped free of its docking place. The autopilot kicked in, but Recker cancelled it at once and fed in enough power to keep the vessel stationary in the air.
Rotating the shuttle slowly allowed a better view of the crushed interior and Recker watched carefully for a place he might use as an exit. For a time, he found nothing and began to think the Daklan had escaped just before the battleship crashed.
“There,” said Aston. “Beneath that overhang on the left.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Recker.
The alien shuttle was easy to fly, and he piloted it towards the place Aston had indicated. With so many jutting pieces of debris, he was required to take great care. His patience was wearing thin and the slow approach was frustrating.
“A way out,” said Aston. “Looks tight.”
“I reckon this shuttle is little more than engines and plating, Commander,” he said, sizing up the opening. It looked like one of the original missile breaches had been crushed into a longer, narrower shape than before. “If necessary, we’ll use it as a battering ram and smash our way through.”
Like Aston said, it was tight, but Recker got the shuttle through without striking the sides or having to resort to more drastic means. The cylinder’s armour was thick, and it required some careful positioning before the spaceship finally emerged on the far side – out into the thin air of Oldis.
“Watch for that Daklan shuttle,” he said, unwilling to drop his guard for a moment.
“No sign of anything nearby, sir. Our arrays aren’t the best.”
“Do what you can.”
Recker didn’t hang about and he tapped into the shuttle’s propulsion, uncertain what it was capable of. A few gauges and electronic needles jumped, and the vessel accelerated vertically at a more impressive rate than he’d expected.
“I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve had enough of Oldis,” he said with feeling.
“I’ve seen a few crap-holes, and this is another one on the list,” said Eastwood.
The shuttle climbed higher, revealing more of the destruction below. Pieces of the annihilator were strewn across a huge area and where the two largest sections had crashed down, countless fissures snaked away across the rock, many of them in excess of a hundred metres wide.
The cylinder itself was likely damaged beyond repair – certainly beyond the expertise of the HPA, though it might yet contain some recoverable tech. Recker felt sure that a salvage operation wasn’t going to happen. The Daklan would be here in days, while the
HPA military high command timidly scoured through deep space data looking for a dead cert win that was never going to materialise. Not against the Daklan.
“Where’s the hole our depletion burst made?” asked Burner once the shuttle had gained enough altitude for the sensors to detect the pocked area of the surface.
It didn’t matter and Recker wasn’t interested in finding out. Nor were the others, judging by the lack of response to Burner’s question.
“Exiting the upper atmosphere,” said Aston. She offered her middle finger to the sensor feed and grinned like the gesture gave her enormous satisfaction.
“Let’s find out how fast this shuttle will go,” said Recker, pushing the engines to maximum.
While the propulsion grumbled, Aston came out with the question he’d been waiting for.
“I take you’re not planning to park us in empty space and wait for Admiral Telar to send a rescue party?”
“We’re going to Tanril.”
“The crashed ship?” said Eastwood.
“You have a better plan, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir.”
“Tanril is 120 million klicks,” Burner observed. “Maybe a little more.”
Recker glanced at the velocity gauge. The language module attempted to work out how fast the shuttle was travelling and failed. Using the sensors, Recker located Tanril – a tiny speck from this range - and obtained an estimate of the distance, which, combined with the rate at which that distance was falling, allowed him to come up with an approximate time to arrival.
“Six-and-a-half days,” he said. “Give or take.”
“I guess I should be thankful this shuttle is faster than it looks,” Burner muttered.
“Better get used to standing,” said Aston with another grin. “You’ve got a lot of it coming up.”
“Along with suit energy shots,” said Eastwood.
A combat suit could keep its occupant alive for several weeks, even in complete isolation. It wasn’t much of an existence, but it was better than dying.
Recker gave Vance the bad news and was impressed when the other man accepted it without complaint. A few of the soldiers weren’t so restrained and their language was colourful.
War from a Distant Sun (Savage Stars Book 1) Page 22