“That way, sir. It’s a long run. The quickest way will be to cut diagonally across the hangar bay floor.”
“Will we be visible from any of the viewing windows?”
“Maybe. If so, it won’t be for long. The Lucid’s squeezed in tightly - we’ll not be an easy target even if we’re spotted.”
“That’s the way we’ll go,” said McKinney. It was the right choice in terms of efficiency and additionally he was secretly keen to see the heavy cruiser from close up.
Stein set off at a run, not once looking back to see if the others were following. The repeater he was carrying affected his gait and the man’s shoulders swayed peculiarly with each stride. It looked as if he was forging a path through waist-high mud.
The squad pounded along a wide passage which was at the lowest level of the bunker. There were no windows, though there were doors in the right-hand wall at regular intervals.
“We’re coming into the storage and maintenance area,” panted Stein, evidently not in the sort of good shape demanded by the Space Corps. “It’s something, all right.”
The passage emerged into a square room, the dimensions of which caused McKinney to falter in his stride. His suit HUD calculated the place to be more than eight hundred metres along each of its metal-clad sides and close to seven hundred metres tall. Backup lighting strips in the walls, floor and ceiling weren’t enough to fill the room and shadows reached into every corner, twisting the original shapes into new and irregular copies.
“The hangar is four thousand metres long,” said Stein. “What most people don’t know is that they also have this storage area here, another one at the far end, plus a third one in the middle. If anyone bothered to ask me about it, I’d tell them it was obvious that they needed a place to keep these cranes and all the other shit that you use to fix a spaceship.”
McKinney was too busy looking to pay much heed to what Stein was telling him. Although the light was poor, it was ample to illuminate a row of three cuboid gravity cranes parked up along one wall. There was a flatbed lifter that looked as if it could carry fifty million tonnes of Gallenium.
McKinney had once been told that the Space Corps ships were modular – they assembled them from hundreds of different pieces flown in from factories across the Confederation to the shipyards, where they were fitted together like a jigsaw that could kill a hundred billion people.
“Behind that door is the cargo lift. It goes all the way to the surface,” said Stein, continuing with his description. “Can you see that safety notice on the wall next to it? Do not exceed rated capacity of four hundred million tonnes. Imagine that shit! Four hundred million tonnes. When they fire up the gravity generators for it, you can feel it through the walls when you’re taking a crap at the other end of the hangar. There’s another lift just like it in the central storage area.” Stein laughed as if he’d told the funniest joke imaginable.
“Lots of positrons,” said McKinney, keeping one eye on the flashing amber alert on his HUD.
“Best if you don’t think about it too hard, sir.”
Stein set off again, casting shadows of his own to mingle with those of the smaller ground vehicles. Each of these vehicles looked as if it was designed for a specific purpose, though McKinney couldn’t divine the functions from the shapes. As the squad rounded the side of the flatbed lifter, they found objects which had unmistakeable purposes.
Lying on its side was a huge turret of polished alloy, with ten thick runners still attached to the top, bottom and sides. A thirty-metre barrel pointed out through a wide, circular opening. McKinney found the half-metre muzzle opening was aimed directly at him and he stared into the infinite blackness within.
“Bulwark cannon,” he said in wonder.
“They don’t fit them on every ship these days, so I hear,” said Stein, taking on the role of unofficial tour guide. When you worked down here and had an ear for gossip, it was easy to pick stuff up from the technicians. “Countermeasures that can destroy any ground armour in a single shot. Maybe one of the new Colossus tanks could take a few hits, but this baby can fire a half a million rounds per minute.”
“Five hundred and thirty-two thousand rounds per minute for thirty seconds before burnout chance exceeds fifty percent likelihood,” McKinney corrected him.
“Whatever you say, sir.”
They were in a hurry and marched onwards as they discussed the array of weapons left almost carelessly in this storage area. Near to the Bulwark cannon was something else. A metal tube lay on the back of a smaller flatbed. The tube was over a hundred metres long, with a diameter of three metres. It had a rounded nose and a status panel on one side displayed a series of numbers. McKinney knew exactly what it was and even the insulating properties of his suit couldn’t prevent him from feeling a terrible chill.
“I thought they banned these ten years ago,” he said.
Stein shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what the Council wants. If Old Man Duggan thinks his spaceships need to carry two-point-five gigaton nuclear missiles, then he can pull the right strings and make it happen.”
“Lambdas over there,” said McKinney.
The missiles were about forty metres long and a metre in diameter. Each had an armour-piercing head and a secondary, main plasma charge behind. There was a row of ten in the bunker, standing in a purpose-built half-magazine from which they could be easily moved and loaded onto a warship. Lights on the missiles indicated they were active.
The squad continued through the storage area until they came to the three-hundred metre opening which led into the hangar bay. McKinney looked up as he went through and saw a ten-metre-thick blast door, suspended in its recess high above him. Stein evidently caught the look.
“The door was up when the power went off. It’s powered by the Gallenium generators, so they must have built in a lock to stop it falling closed when something like this happens.”
“Good news for us,” said McKinney.
They entered the hangar bay and almost immediately found themselves beneath the hulking shape of the ES Lucid. Its support legs were colossal, keeping the unimaginable weight of the spaceship above the surface. The stress fractures in the floor he’d seen earlier were much wider up close and McKinney had to keep a check on his feet to avoid tripping.
He tipped his head back – the underside of the vessel was little more than a hundred metres overhead. From this close, it was possible to identify the outlines of movable outer plates which concealed the Lambda X clusters and the Bulwark cannons. There was a single underside particle beam visible near the nose, its housing dome adding curves to the straight edges. The humming of the gravity engines sent a constant vibration through the floor.
“Over there,” said Stein, pointing again. “There’s a side exit a few hundred metres away.”
“Shame we can’t get inside the Lucid instead,” said Garcia.
“Get inside, take off and then blow the Ghasts into little pieces,” said Webb. “All we need is captain, a crew and a way to get those upper blast doors to open for us.”
“It needs a code to get in,” said Bannerman. “A code that people like us are distinctly not permitted to see or use.”
“In case someone finds a malfunctioning replicator, gets drunk and tries to steal a fleet heavy cruiser,” said McKinney, wondering briefly where the AWOLs he’d set out to find had ended up. Probably dead by now.
“They were meant to complete some big milestone in whatever work the Lucid’s in here for,” said Stein, proving to be a goldmine of gossip. “That was meant to be yesterday afternoon. I don’t know what happened – I think they had to abort for the day. There were a few pissed-off faces checking out at 5pm yesterday evening. They used to work late when there were problems. Not anymore. Anyway, the spaceship’s sealed now, like Bannerman says.”
“You’re telling me the techs, scientists and engineers can’t get onboard without having a fleet captain hanging around to open and close the boarding ramps every time they wa
nt to get inside?” asked Garcia.
“They’ve got keys,” said Stein. “They’ll be locked up tight, though.”
“Yeah.”
The side exit from the hangar floor wasn’t far. When they emerged from beneath the ES Lucid, McKinney checked anxiously to make sure there were no Ghasts waiting to shoot them from overhead balconies and then he dashed into the comparative safety of a wide passage which led back into the personnel area of the bunker. He paused for a second and checked his HUD. True to his word, Stein had brought them much closer to the Section D entrance. There were several flights of stairs, a few corridors and they’d be there.
McKinney turned up the amplification on his earpiece. There was nothing unexpected – no sound of explosions, gunfire or an approaching army of Ghasts. For some reason, he didn’t feel reassured and he waved the squad onwards, before setting off with renewed caution.
Chapter Eleven
“Section D entrance is just ahead,” said McKinney. He double-checked the overlay map on his HUD to make sure.
The squad gathered in one of the many open meeting areas found in the bunker. There were chairs and various consoles around the floor and the men stuck warily to whatever cover suited them best.
It hadn’t taken long to get here and they’d met no resistance, nor seen evidence of an incursion into the bunker. Squads B and C had already established positions at their target locations. Corporals Li and Evans checked in at regular intervals – there was no sign of hostiles.
“We’ll take it slow from here,” McKinney warned.
“Got movement,” said Corporal Li calmly.
The sound of a perfectly-machined repeater unleashing a short burst of projectiles came through the speaker.
“Corporal Li, please report!”
The repeater cut out and Li swore repeatedly.
“Shit, we got civilians down here, sir! Clifton got a jumpy and fired his repeater.”
“Casualties?”
“One civilian dead, sir. The stupid bastard shot someone!”
“Damnit! Keep it steady, Corporal!”
“The doors are active now, sir – I have no idea when that happened. She must have been trapped in one of these rooms.”
McKinney gritted his teeth. “No more crap.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Corporal Evans, the internal doors are powered up again. Please be alert to the presence of civilians.”
“Sir.”
With a shake of his head, McKinney beckoned his squad over. “It sounds like we’ve got power back. Maybe our guys have asserted some control over the base. We’re going to do whatever we can to assist them. Watch out for friendlies.”
They set off, through one of the three exits from the meeting area. The passage went left ahead and McKinney crept forward until he was at the corner. He leaned out carefully – Section D entrance was visible and he saw the expanse of the lobby. The emergency lighting was still in place - enough for him to make out several of the unmanned security desks without needing to rely on his visor’s image intensifiers.
“Wait!” he commanded.
The corridor offered nothing in the way of cover, so he sprinted along it in a burst of movement before crouching at the next corner, ready to use his repeater if necessary.
“Section D lobby is clear.”
His suit’s sensor detected nothing out of the ordinary. The entrance was in the opposite wall, fifteen metres away – the square blast door was raised and the activation panel glowed green. The angle wasn’t good enough for McKinney to see anything of the base, since the Section D entrance was reached by a long, concreted slope which went up to ground level. His HUD registered a gentle breeze coming in from outside and he thought there might be faint flickers of orange light reflected from the metal of the door frame.
“Something isn’t right,” he said across the comms channel. “We’re moving up.”
While the squad advanced along the corridor he dashed across the lobby, vaulting over one of the security desks with its smooth laminate top. At the entrance, he pressed his back to one side and looked carefully around the edge of the doorway. The concrete ramp was about forty metres long and emerged somewhere in the base he couldn’t immediately identify. The sky above had an orange glow to it and he guessed a significant part of the Tillos base was burning.
“Bannerman? Think you can get a signal out from this doorway? The rest of you, secure the area.”
A figure ran over and crouched down. The HUD in McKinney’s visor informed him it was Bannerman, though the presence of the portable comms pack also gave the game away.
“I can get you a signal out, no problems, Sergeant.”
“Find out if there’s anyone else alive on the base.”
Bannerman lowered his comms pack reverently to the ground – the sign of a man in love with his kit. There was a flap on one side of the pack which he pulled open.
“Takes a moment to fire up and interface with the visor,” he said. “Right, we’re set. Who should I speak to?”
“Might as well go straight for the top.”
“Colonel Tenney it is.”
There was something in Bannerman’s poise which told McKinney exactly what the answer was.
“He’s offline, sir.”
“These packs don’t need to route through the base comms hub, do they?” asked McKinney doubtfully.
“No, sir. This baby can force a way through to any device capable of sending or receiving a comms signal. The hub doesn’t need to be operational for it to work.”
“Is there anyone online anywhere?”
“Scanning for receptors. It takes a few seconds.”
McKinney waited impatiently. He flicked his gaze constantly around the room, checking to see where the others of his squad had positioned themselves. They were edgy too – he could see it in the way they moved and how tightly they gripped their weapons.
“There’s no one out there,” said Bannerman.
“What about beyond the base?”
“That’s what I mean, sir. There’s no one. There isn’t a single military comms receptor anywhere within range. Plenty of civilian ones, so it seems like people are still alive somewhere.”
McKinney tried to recall the names of the other military bases on Atlantis. The Tillos base was the largest, but there were three more. “They must have attacked the other bases as well. Tansul and Teklo.”
“And Tivon. I can’t reach any of them.”
Just then, something passed overhead – a dark shape travelling languidly as if it had all the time in the world. The magnitude of the problem struck McKinney with the force of a hammer blow. He’d brought the squad here in the hope they could be of some use to an imagined resistance upon the surface. As well as that, he’d wanted to find someone who could relieve him – someone to take charge and tell him what he needed to do. He smiled inwardly. Looks like I’m going to get that chance to prove myself after all, he thought. A different voice asked him if it was a chance he really wanted.
“Can you get a signal out to one of the other planets? Or that orbital. What do they call it? The Juniper?”
“I can send a birthday greeting to your great aunt on Roban if you want me to, sir. The trouble is, she won’t receive it for a few years. The stuff they pack into warships like the Lucid – that can get a signal to most places in a few seconds. Some sort of trans-dimensional crap they use. These packs are meant for comms between squads on the same planet. Maybe a planet and its moon.”
“What about that comms hub out there on the base?”
“It’s a comms hub, sir,” said Bannerman, trying unsuccessfully to prevent himself from sounding as though he thought his superior officer’s knowledge was sorely lacking. “It has the same comms arrays as the Lucid.”
“That trans-dimensional crap?”
“Yes, sir.” Bannerman kept an admirably straight face.
Having caught the implication that he was asking stupid questions, McKinney ploug
hed on with what might have been another. “Can you patch this field pack into the comms hub and get a signal out through its antennae? Even if there’s no power to the hub?”
“I don’t know. It’s not showing as a receptor. Maybe if I plugged straight in through a port in the control room. I’ve never been asked that question before.”
The sound of a detonation – low and heavy – reached them. It was followed by another and another. The harsh, metallic clinking sound of high-velocity projectiles followed.
“Someone’s still fighting,” said McKinney.
“Whatever just flew overhead must have come to give air support,” said Bannerman. “Could be that’s why the Ghasts haven’t come into the bunker yet – some of our guys are fighting back.”
“It’s sporadic,” said McKinney. “This is just a mop-up exercise before they move on to the real reason they came here.”
“The Lucid?”
“Yes.”
“Strikes me they’d have found it by now if that’s what they were looking for, sir. They might be here for something completely different.”
“Like what?”
Bannerman shrugged. “You tell me, sir. I’m only a pack mule.”
McKinney lifted his visor and smiled. “Yeah, and I’m a captain’s lapdog.”
“Are we going for the hub?”
“You bet we’re going for the hub.”
“This bunker is heavily shielded. Once we’re out we won’t be able to get a signal to the other two squads,” said Bannerman. He pulled a rectangular piece of blue metal from the top part of his comms pack and with a twist extended a long aerial rod. “Want me to leave this booster here?”
McKinney nodded. It was the little things like this which were easy to overlook when you lacked real battlefield experience. “Good idea, thanks.”
“No problem.”
With that, Sergeant Eric McKinney ordered the others of his squad to join him at the entrance. He gave them details about what he planned. When he was satisfied they understood, he stepped out into the warm night.
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 9