Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1)

by Anthony James

  The suit’s comms unit detected the presence of a local network. McKinney joined it and read through the names of the men and women stationed down here. Corporal Johnny Li’s name appeared on the list, quickly followed by the names R1T Martin Garcia and R1T Dexter Webb.

  “Hey Webb, you never did tell me why your mama gave you two surnames,” said Garcia.

  “Shut up, Garcia,” McKinney ordered.

  “Sorry, Sergeant. Just checking to see if the comms are working.”

  McKinney didn’t answer and walked over to the weapons rack. He picked up a repeater. The main part of the weapon was a curved slab, slightly over two inches thick, which held the power cell and a few thousand rounds of ammunition. A two-foot-long barrel protruded – this barrel could be lowered to the horizontal when the repeater was firing. Afterwards, the barrel could be moved into a vertical position where it was slightly less intrusive for the soldier carrying the weapon.

  There were self-fastening straps and McKinney pushed his arms through until the power/ammunition cell was positioned over his chest and stomach. It didn’t take much adjusting and he slung his rifle over his shoulder.

  The repeater interfaced with his suit. [Repeater ammunition: 100%] appeared on his HUD.

  Corporal Li and Garcia took repeaters as well. It was no surprise to find Webb holding the six-foot tube of a plasma launcher.

  “You sure you can handle that in here?” asked McKinney.

  “It’s what I was born to do, sir.”

  If it had been any other soldier, McKinney would have ordered him to put the rocket tube down. He’d seen Webb using one many times in wargames and there wasn’t a man or woman on the base who had anything like the same skill.

  “Just try not to kill us.”

  McKinney picked up a bandolier of miniature plasma grenades and went out of the room, to find Corporal Evans waiting with the other seventeen men and women. They were all suited and, in spite of the earlier signs of lax discipline, they stood alert and at attention. Every foot soldier in the Corps went through ongoing training in the form of off-world exercises, sometimes in exceptionally hostile conditions. The weapons might only fire simulated rounds, but the officers running the exercises made sure everyone took it seriously. Dismissals from the Corps for exceptionally poor performance were not unheard of.

  “Why are none of you carrying repeaters?” was the first question McKinney asked. The repeaters were shatteringly effective in close-quarters combat. In fact, they were designed specifically for such conditions.

  “They’re too heavy to carry on routine patrol, sir,” said Evans.

  “You’re not on routine patrol anymore, Corporal. Get in there and get properly kitted.”

  While the others filed into the weapons room, McKinney continued to provide instruction. He was angry – not so much with these soldiers as he was with the whole situation. He’d grown up listening to the tales of the Space Corps’ past conflicts, the bravery of troops thrown into combat against the Ghasts. McKinney had only ever wanted to be a soldier and though he hated himself for it, he always wished he’d been born in wartime instead of the longest time of peace ever recorded. Now that fighting had come, the Space Corps – or at least the Tillos base – had been comprehensively defeated.

  “We’re going to form two squads of seven and one of eight,” he barked. “Your HUDs will show who you’re with. It is my opinion the Ghasts have launched a surprise attack on us and equally, it seems certain they want to capture the ES Lucid. It’s our job to ensure they fail in their mission.”

  “Sir, there are multiple entrances to the main hangar bay. We don’t have enough men to keep them all secure,” said Evans.

  “What about choke points? Is there a place they’ll have to come through to get here, or is there a route we can expect them to follow?”

  “Third floor, breakout area six, sir. It’s usually the busiest place in the bunker at 8am and again at 5pm.”

  The spacesuits’ data chips held layouts for the bunker and McKinney tried to get an overall impression of the area. There was too much for him to absorb at the same time as giving instructions to the other men. “Where else?” he asked.

  Evans thought for a moment. “Second floor, main viewing walkway. It’s a long corridor and it acts as a funnel for people coming to work on the bay floor.”

  “Anywhere else?”

  Evans shrugged. “This place is a warren, sir. Anyone coming here could flood through dozens of different corridors.”

  McKinney made his decision. “Squad B - Corporal Evans, secure breakout area six. Report any movement and shoot on sight. Squad C – Corporal Li, get up to the main walkway. Both squads fall back and defend the bay floor if you need to. Squad A, you’re the lucky ones. You’re coming with me.”

  “Where to, Sergeant?” asked Webb, the plasma tube held casually over his shoulder.

  McKinney pointed at the heavy cloth pack one of the soldiers was carrying. “We’re going to take this comms pack which Bannerman has on his back and we’re going to attempt to get a message out to whoever is left alive on this base.”

  None of the gathered soldiers dared to make a wisecrack at the plan. Before they set off, there were a few other items McKinney wanted from the storeroom since he didn’t know if they’d be able to return this way soon. One of the men was trained in explosives, another could use a medical pack and there was a third who professed himself able to carry and safely use a plasma tube. It didn’t take long. Soon, the three squads separated and moved out at the double.

  Jerry Greiner leaned against the rusty, starboard railing of his boat and squinted into the distance. He could see plenty of low, rolling waves and plenty of pure, blue, dawn sky. The one thing he couldn’t see was land.

  “Shit,” he swore. With no wife around to chastise him for using bad language, he repeated the word for good measure.

  He ducked through the low doorway which led into the wood-walled cabin. There was a fixed wooden chair, a table upon which was an open can of beans, a stand holding fishing rods and, incongruous to everything else, a sophisticated all-weather navigation and control computer against the front wall.

  Jerry sat in front of the computer and pressed a few buttons on the surface. The display remained steadfastly blank and the tiny vessel’s Gallenium micro-engine stayed offline. The boat was equipped with a battery-powered emergency beacon. It bleeped every so often as it sent its automatic distress signal up into the sky. So far, there had been no response. He pulled the headset from its stand and put it over his head.

  “Mayday, mayday, this is the Maiden’s Bounty. Do you read?”

  The earpiece hummed – if there was anyone receiving, they didn’t reply. He switched the device off, not wishing to deplete its battery when there was no one listening.

  He left the cabin, hawked and spat over the side into the water. Jerry had been stuck out here for hours – a fishing trip which now threatened to cost him his life. When his engine cut out, he’d initially thought the currents of the Plangaean sea would be kind and deliver him safely back to shore. Unfortunately, they’d done the opposite, carrying him away until eventually there was no sight of land.

  “Piece of crap boat,” he said.

  A shadow fell across the sea, appearing so suddenly it made him jump. He looked up instinctively. Overhead, a spaceship flew quietly at an altitude of only a few hundred metres. Jerry wasn’t really interested in technology anymore – he just liked to fish when he got the time. In his younger days, he’d served in the Space Corps as a comms man on one of the fleet’s prospectors and he knew enough to be certain that whatever was above, it was definitely not built by human hands.

  “Or Ghast hands,” he said to himself.

  Jerry was too old to be alarmed by much these days. Death would take him eventually and he’d die peacefully, without regret. Therefore, he studied this alien craft without fear. It was peculiar in design – something like a grey cube, a thousand metres to each side and
with thick posts protruding from the centre of each face. Underneath, hung another cube, this one featureless and only five hundred metres to a side, attached to the parent vessel by invisible gravity clamps.

  The alien ship flew on, with Jerry watching. A few kilometres away, it stopped unexpectedly, hovering motionless with its cargo dangling above the calm surface.

  Then, the clamps holding the smaller cube were released and the object dropped into the water.

  “Oh crap,” said Jerry.

  The splash was enormous, though it wasn’t that which had Jerry the most worried. He watched with horror as the water rushed towards him, speeding away from the centre. Moments later, a huge swell took the Maiden’s Bounty lifting it high up into the air. The small boat dropped down the far side of the swell, gathering pace as it raced towards the place where the cube struck the surface.

  Then, it was over, leaving Jerry somehow, miraculously alive on the now-choppy surface. He had no idea what had just happened but it didn’t take much imagination to realise it wasn’t good. Jerry hurried into the cabin to see if he could work a few of his old tricks with the emergency beacon.

  Chapter Nine

  “We’re about to exit lightspeed,” said Lieutenant Rivera. “The Determinant’s AI calculates Atlantis to be a further ten minutes’ lightspeed from the rendezvous point.”

  “Right on the doorstep,” said Blake. “We’ll meet up and be on our way.”

  The Determinant’s engines growled quietly and the walls of the bridge vibrated faintly. If you’d never experienced lightspeed travel before, the transition was subtle. Once you’d done a few trips, it was easy to detect the switchover.

  “Lieutenant Pointer, get me the scans.”

  “Sir, the nears tell me there’s nothing in our immediate vicinity. I’m switching to the fars.” She didn’t get a chance to complete the scan. “We’re being hailed, sir. It’s Captain Kang of the Galactic class New Beginning.”

  “Bring him through,” said Blake, expecting a few brief formalities and a rundown of the plan before they took off back into lightspeed.

  “You’re late,” said Kang without preamble.

  “Sir, we’re exactly on time.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you. Join our comms network – all orders will come from the New Beginning and I expect you to follow them without question or hesitation. I assume you know what we’re up against. If not, please don’t waste any of my time asking.”

  “Captain Kang, I have been briefed on this mission.”

  “In that case I won’t expect any difficulties keeping the ES Determinant in line.”

  “Sir, I have been ordered here to assist in the destruction of hostile aliens, not to listen to you cast aspersions on my competence.”

  “I don’t need a hotshot in Response Fleet Alpha, Captain Blake. I need a man who will follow the orders of a senior officer who has twenty-five years’ experience commanding fleet warships. Do you understand?”

  Blake had no idea why Kang was so hostile, since he’d never come across the man before at any point in his Space Corps service to date. One thing was for sure – even Kang’s twenty-five years’ experience didn’t give him any more knowledge of real combat than Blake’s eight years’ experience. In fact, Blake didn’t know if there were any officers left in the fleet who’d fought in anger, since there’d been no war in decades. If there were any such officers, they’d definitely be close to retirement age.

  “I have been told to follow your orders.”

  “Good. We have fewer vessels than I would like, but still enough to take down a Ghast Oblivion if we were called upon to do so. Upon arrival, we will arrange ourselves in a standard formation – the New Beginning will be in the centre, with Imposition class vessels Undertow and Hurricane flanking at a distance of five thousand kilometres. You are in one of our four destroyers, Captain Blake – the Sabre, Ransack and Lingard are the others. Your vessel will range ahead with the other destroyers and act as a soak for the New Beginning. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. My comms man has provided coordinates to ensure we arrive at the same time and in the right place.”

  Blake looked over at Pointer. She raised her thumb to confirm receipt.

  “We have the coordinates,” said Blake.

  “We’re leaving in sixty seconds. Prepare for lightspeed.”

  “He’s gone,” said Pointer. “Not even a goodbye.”

  Blake suppressed a smile at Pointer’s words. It appeared as though Kang was a grade-A idiot with a stick shoved in a place sure to cause eye-watering levels of discomfort. The tactics he planned to employ had been lifted straight out of a textbook, with one major exception which Blake hadn’t failed to note.

  “Lieutenant Rivera, you heard the man. We’re going to Atlantis.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll leave the moment they do.”

  Precisely on schedule, the seven warships of Response Fleet Alpha entered lightspeed, travelling at the exact maximum speed of the slowest ship, which happened to be the ES Sabre.

  Blake prowled around the bridge of the Determinant, his mind churning.

  “It seems likely we’ll be the first Space Corps vessels to take part in hostile action in forty years,” he said. “I know we’ve all spent countless hours in the simulator, but as soon as we catch sight of a Vraxar ship, it’s going to count for nothing. We need to be ready. We need to act with purpose and ruthlessness. The people of Atlantis are counting on us.”

  He looked at them in turn, only Lieutenant Rivera failing to meet his eye.

  “Are you ready?” Blake asked.

  The response wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as he’d hoped. Nevertheless, the three members of his crew appeared ready for action. The testing would come soon enough.

  “Sir?” asked Pointer. “I thought the newer Galactics were specifically designed and built to act as soaks, so our smaller vessels can engage in combat without being knocked out in the first exchange of fire.”

  “Well spotted, Lieutenant. You are quite correct.”

  “Why are we acting as a soak, then?”

  “Do you need me to spell it out?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think I do.”

  After ten minutes at lightspeed, the fleet entered local space a little over seven million kilometres from Atlantis. The Obsidiar cores installed on every warship were so fast, they could calculate short journeys such as this one down to the nanosecond and could be relied upon to deposit a spaceship within a few hundred kilometres of a precise set of coordinates.

  “Everyone on full alert!” shouted Blake. “Give me our status!”

  “We’re seventy minutes out on gravity engines,” said Rivera.

  “We have no enemy ships within a quarter of a million klicks,” said Pointer. “I’m checking further out.”

  “The New Beginning has provided us with a trajectory.”

  The AI cores on the New Beginning sent instructions to each member of the fleet, keeping them in formation. Blake checked the tactical screen – the ES Determinant’s gravity engines were at seventy percent and the destroyer was on a course towards the distant planet. Blake didn’t like giving up control of his ship, particularly when the area scans were incomplete. This was Kang’s call.

  Blake scanned the RFA comms network. Not all comms operators worked at the same speed and he wanted to find out if there were any hostiles within sensor range as soon as the details came in.

  “Fars clear,” said Pointer.

  “Well done on being the first.”

  “The super fars are still going. I wish we had a Hynus sensor array.”

  “They’ve got three on the New Beginning. I don’t know what’s keeping them,” said Brady.

  “Put Atlantis up on the screen,” Blake said.

  The image appeared, projected onto the flat wall of the forward bulkhead. The distance was such that the forward sensor cluster couldn’t quite produce a pin-sharp image, and the features on th
e planet’s surface were grainy and wavering. The Determinant faced the night side of Atlantis, directly above the main land mass.

  “No lights,” said Brady.

  “The power output of the planet is effectively zero when compared to its expected levels,” said Rivera. “Even the major population centres are barely causing a flicker on the needles.”

  “Can you interface with any of their satellites?”

  “No, sir. As far as communications go, Atlantis may as well be back in the dark ages.”

  “Whatever’s caused the blackout, I can’t find any trace,” said Pointer. “It must be around the other side of the planet.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Blake. “We came in so close only a fool could have failed to detect seven fission signatures. It would have taken a star to shield us from sight.”

  One-by-one, the super-far scans from the ships in RFA came back clear. The New Beginning altered their course slightly. Blake looked at the projection on his navigational screen.

  “We’re going to come in a wide circle around the planet,” he said. “Captain Kang is being cautious.”

  “That’s for the best, sir,” said Brady.

  “I agree. No point in rushing in just yet.”

  Minutes passed and the New Beginning instructed an increase in speed to the maximum of the slowest vessel, this one again being the ES Sabre.

  “Not even seventeen hundred klicks per seconds,” muttered Rivera. “Fast in its day, not so much now.”

  Blake checked through a few of the sensor feeds – the Determinant had a total of eight arrays. There was nothing out there but space and stars. Pointer continued working hard at the sensors, whilst also juggling the inbound comms from the other vessels in the fleet. Comms work on a warship was the easiest to perform at a basic level and the hardest to excel at. Blake wasn’t afraid to admit Pointer seemed to be doing a good job so far – she had a look of absolute focus and her hands flew across the indentations on her console as she made adjustments to the focus of the lenses.

  “This is wrong,” said Blake after another few minutes. He didn’t know why he was so certain, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was coming. “Lieutenant Rivera, please load a short-range lightspeed jump sequence onto two of our cores.”