Battleship Raider

by Paul Tomlinson

  And then I was falling backwards, in through the hatch. I dragged my stuff in after me and I heard the drones zip in behind me. I slammed the door shut.

  It was pitch black inside and all I could hear was the dragon’s claws scraping on the outside of the door. I turned the wheel on the inside, locking it shut. If the lock got stuck again it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be going out that way. I leaned back against the door, gasping for breath. That had been a real squit in the pants moment.

  “Let’s have some light,” I said.

  The drones turned on their mini searchlights but they provided only narrow beams of light. The circles of light explored the space we were in. The bare metal room was maybe ten feet square. It was basically an airlock – an airtight room between the outside of the ship and one of its inner chambers. It was strange to think that I was the first person to set foot in here for forty years. Then Mozzie’s light passed over something that made me realise I wasn’t. I reached into my pack and drew out a flashlight, shining it towards the thing the drone had found.

  It was a human skeleton and there were still bits of flesh clinging to it. It wasn’t a fresh corpse, but it wasn’t forty years old either. One of Old Jack Sterling’s team, perhaps? I directed the flashlight beam downwards and saw three good-sized and evenly spaced circular burn marks in the front of its jacket. Bullet hits. He’d either been shot by a rival treasure hunter or... Or he’d triggered the Celestia’s automatic defences.

  These old ships were rigged with all sorts of defence mechanisms and even a self-destruct to prevent them falling into the hands – or claws – of the enemy. We didn’t want them to have access to our technology in case they worked out how to defeat us. The Celestia’s defences would have been activated after the crash – as soon as the ship’s Navigator sensed that all of the crew were dead.

  I called Gnat and Mozzie back to me. “Don’t touch anything,” I said.

  Chapter Six

  The scratching at the outer door had stopped so I assumed the dragon had gone off in search of an eyepatch. Or perhaps it was sitting there wracking its reptilian brain trying to figure out how to operate the crank to open the hatch. I wasn’t worried on that score. I’d wedged the mechanism shut with the biggest wrench from my tool roll. No one was getting in that way – not a dragon and not a human bounty hunter. There was a thick glass porthole in the door that led into the battleship, but there was only darkness on the other side.

  The air in the bare metal room was stale and there was a whiff of dead flesh that I was trying to ignore. Assuming the seals on both airlock doors were still intact, I had a limited amount of oxygen, but I wasn’t too worried about that. I could always use the laser cutter to make a hole in the bulkhead and let air in from outside. Of more immediate concern was my new friend Mr. Skellington. What had killed him? Had he triggered the ship’s automatic defence systems? If he had, I very much wanted to avoid doing the same thing. I wasn’t sure what my next move should be, but I was going to be very, very cautious. I pulled on my jacket and buckled my gun belt. Mainly because this gave me something to do.

  I wanted to set the drones to scanning for weapons, but the ship might interpret their scans as a hostile act and respond accordingly. I told them to power down and save their energy and then I stashed them in my backpack. I’d already warned Trixie not to try connecting to any of the ship’s systems. I felt it was safe for her to operate in stand-alone mode, but she had instructions to shut down completely at the first sign of danger. She was currently pulling up the schematics of the battleship that she’d downloaded from an external database. The Celestia was old technology and her blueprints and manuals had been declassified more than a decade ago, of interest now only to those who studied historical military technology.

  I shone the beam of the flashlight around the room, checking each wall carefully and then the ceiling, trying to see if the weapon that had shot the earlier intruder in the chest was located inside the airlock. I couldn’t see anything that might be a hatch. The walls were smooth metal, riveted together and painted with thick layers of pale grey paint.

  Turning the flashlight on the dead man again, I tried to figure out what had happened to him. He was slumped against the wall opposite the door that opened into the ship. My best guess was that he had opened the airlock door and been shot in the chest. The force of the three projectiles had thrown him backwards and slammed him against the inside wall. He slid down and into the half-sitting half-lying position he was in now and the door had automatically closed and locked. He’d probably been shot by someone with a gun who had stood outside the airlock or by automatic weapons that were permanently installed there. It would be helpful to know which.

  I looked at the schematics Trixie had retrieved. As the images flashed up I swiped them aside, digging deeper and deeper into the battleship’s systems, trying to see what surprises she might have in store for me. All I found was a reference to a protocol adopted early in the war to the effect that all combat ships should be retrofitted with defences and self-destruct mechanisms to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. The generals didn’t want the aliens taking apart our technology to see how it ticked, in case they figured out how to defeat it. I suppose it was left to the captains of individual ships to decide what internal defences to install.

  I closed the technical schematics and pulled up an image that showed the basic layout of the ship. I still had no way of knowing where my airlock was situated. I cast the beam of the flashlight around the room again but could see no helpful markings. The bare metal construction told me nothing apart from the fact that starship decor had come a long way in the half-decade since the Celestia’s maiden voyage.

  “They don’t build ‘em like this anymore,” I muttered. In large part, they didn’t build them like this because we were no longer at war. Though we did still have an impressive military fleet on standby. Just in case.

  The alien armada had appeared on the edge of known space almost a century ago and broadcast a single message in Earth-tongue:

  “We are the Ulthavi Yulori and we declare war on the dry-skins in the name of our glorious creator.”

  Ulthavi Yulori translates as ‘people of the amphibian god’ or something like that. Most people just called them Gators because that’s what they looked like. They walked upright and wore battle armour, but they looked like alligators. More or less. Official accounts of the conflict state that this was an unprovoked declaration of war. But given mankind’s past history, you’ve gotta suspect that someone somewhere did something to swazz them off. The aliens probably sent an emissary with an olive branch and some redneck turned him into a handbag and a matching pair of high-heel mules for his honey.

  A lot of good people – and a fair few disreputable ones – sacrificed their lives to defeat the Gators. The War lasted for fifty years.

  No one has seen or heard from the Gators since before I was born. Some folk think they are off somewhere preparing for a second invasion. Others say we wiped them out completely with a haemorrhagic virus cooked up in one of our labs. Official accounts neither confirm nor deny this. But again, referring to mankind’s past history, genocide cannot be ruled out.

  And now there was a real risk that one of our own battleships was going to wipe me out. That would be a cruel twist of fate given the fact I played no part in the conflict. If I’d been alive back then I would have been a black market profiteer, I’m sure.

  I went to the inner hatch and peered out through the glass porthole. There was only darkness out there. I pressed the lens of the flashlight to the glass to try and see what lay on the other side. I wasn’t too worried about the light triggering the weapons, the door and the thick glass window in it were designed to endure rapid depressurisation and re-pressurisation and were sturdy enough to withstand a few close-range bullet hits. The round glass in the door was like a lens, distorting what lay on the other side. I could make out a larger chamber but the light didn’t penetrate far enough to show
me the presence – or absence – of machine-guns on the wall opposite the hatch.

  I had to proceed on the assumption that there were wall-mounted weapons outside the airlock, primed and ready to fire at me as soon as I opened the hatch. They were probably triggered by motion-sensors or heat sensors or perhaps both. That’s what I would have used. Simple but effective.

  I could try opening the door a few inches and stick my arm out, try to shoot the guns off the wall. But not knowing the precise position of the weapons made the chances of success pretty slim. And the risk of having my hand blasted off made this option even more unattractive. A thief, like a pianist, values every one of his fingers.

  If I could see the gun mechanism, it would probably be possible to see the limits of its movement and range. There might be a gap that I could sneak through that the bullets couldn’t reach – by crawling out on my belly, perhaps. But even then there was the danger of being hit by shrapnel or ricochets.

  How do you disable the weapons so you can open the door when you need to open the door to disable the weapons?

  I could throw open the door and send out a fake moving target – Mr. Skellington, for example – and stay in hiding until the guns had exhausted their ammunition on him. But how would I know when or if the guns were empty? And again, there might be shrapnel and ricochets.

  The drones were another option. I could send one out to draw the fire while I went out and headed the opposite way from the moving drone. But I didn’t really want to sacrifice either Gnat or Mozzie. Not this early in the game.

  A shield? I could use the laser cutter to remove a piece of hull plate. But that would take ages, even assuming the cutter had enough power to finish the job. And if I was going to cut a hole that big, I may as well cut myself a new doorway to walk through. Though knowing my luck, I’d walk straight into another airlock and face the same problem all over again.

  I used the toe of my boot to ease the dead man’s holdall away from his bony fingers. A quick glance inside told me that he was even more poorly equipped than me. He had schematics of the ship too – printed on paper. They showed nothing that wasn’t on the images I’d already seen.

  I sat down and popped open another can of instant coffee and chewed on another protein bar – a roast duck scented slipper this time – and tried to think of some way to avoid being killed. Escaping from tricky situations was supposed to be my speciality. Despite the caffeine boost, I drifted off to sleep. That should have been my first warning that something was wrong.

  I was woken minutes later buy an insistent buzzing and chirping from Trixie.

  “Warning! Oxygen levels at thirty-eight per cent of normal and falling,” she said.

  It seemed that the ship had grown tired of waiting for me to trigger the guns. She was bleeding the air out of the airlock and replacing it with carbon dioxide from the fire suppression system. The Celestia knew this would either kill me or flush me out. As deaths go, asphyxiation would be a relatively painless one, but my preference was for no death at all. I could cut a small hole in the hull using the laser cutter to let in air from outside. Or I could just stop dithering and get out of the airlock and into the ship.

  If the fire suppression system had been squirting water into the airlock, I could have used it to make steam and used it as cover to make my way out, confusing the motion sensors. And if it had been squirting out fairy dust, I could have wished my way out. In the absence of steam, I could use the next best thing. Smoke.

  My plan was simple enough. I’d use smoke to hide me from the battleship’s visual sensors and hope the fire confused the heat sensors long enough for me to get away from the airlock and out of range of the machine-guns. The difficult part would be making sure I did all the right things in the right order. Smoke first.

  Working feverishly, I screwed up the sheets of paper in Mr. Skellington’s holdall, pushing some of them back into the bag and a few of them into the front of his shirt.

  “I can’t offer you a proper burial,” I told his grinning face, “but I can probably manage a cremation.”

  I ignited the laser cutter and directed it at the bag of crumpled paper. It was reluctant to light in the oxygen-poor atmosphere, but the edges began to glow and that’s all I needed. I used the laser cutter’s flame to set fire to the dead man’s clothes. The fabric started turning black and thin whisps of smoke coiled upwards. As soon as I pushed the hatch outwards, air would rush in and the smoke would billow outwards. I hoped.

  The rest of it depended on me working quickly. And being very, very lucky. I had to get the airlock door open before all of the oxygen was gone. It wasn’t just me who needed it. If the door was welded shut or jammed on the other side, I was in trouble. My only option then was out the way I’d come in. And that meant a good chance of running into my old friend the one-eyed dragon.

  I needed to circumvent the locking mechanism of the inner door and prevent the ship from immediately relocking it. A lock this old didn’t offer much of a challenge. I could open it with my eyes closed. Which was a good thing, because the airlock was now filling with smoke. And the smell of burning bone. There wasn’t time for artistry. I tore the front panel off the lock and plugged in the lock-pick. I needed to send a signal to the lock to say ‘open sesame’ while at the same time sending a message to the ship that the door was still locked. If the lock said ‘I’m locked’, the ship would believe it. At least until the sensors outside showed the door opening.

  Even as the mechanism clicked open, I was reaching for the smouldering holdall. The smoke was burning my eyes and the inside of my nostrils. I was trying not to breathe it in. Staying low, I pulled the airlock door and it swung inwards on protesting hinges. The air rushing in ignited the flames in the holdall. I swung it around and out through the opening, sending it across the floor of the outside corridor to the left. Almost instantly the machineguns rattled into life.

  Not even looking that way, I grabbed my backpack and scrambled out through the hatch and headed to the right. I risked a glance back, but I could see nothing through the haze of smoke. The guns would be swivelling round to target me, I felt sure of it. I headed across the chamber. There was a corner or alcove just ahead on my left. I didn’t know what it contained. If there were more guns there, I was going to be the new Mr. Skellington. I skidded around the corner just as the floor behind me was ripped up by exploding bullets. I shielded my eyes. The chattering of guns and the thunder of bullet hits vibrated the hull of the ship and the inside of my skull. The hailstorm seems to go on forever.

  When the guns finally fell silent, I glanced around me. I had my pistol in my hand, ready to open fire on any threats I saw, but there was nothing to get excited about. I was huddled against the wall in a small area that had been some sort of administrator’s workspace. The desk, chair, and screen of the terminal had been within the sweep of the guns and were completely destroyed by gunfire. They still smoked slightly, adding to the fog in the air. In the wall that had been beyond the range of the guns, there was an ordinary-looking door that opened onto a corridor. Staying close to the floor, I crawled towards it.

  I eased the door open quietly and tossed a bit of smouldering seat foam out into the corridor. There was no gunfire. With any luck, this meant that the automatic weapons were only targeted on entrances from the outside of the ship. This didn’t mean that I was past all of the ship’s defences, but it did seem to indicate that I have passed the first challenge.

  I fished the drones out of my pack and sent them ahead to scout the corridor. They sent back an ‘all clear’ and an image that helped me, finally, figure out where I was on the battleship. The drone was showing me the crew’s quarters. That meant that Engineering and the warbird launch decks were above me and that Security was on the deck below. I needed to go down there to reach the vault where the artificial sentience that had been the ship’s Navigator was housed. But first I’d explore this deck and see what there was to salvage. This would also give me a chance to blink away
the tears that were blurring my vision and blow the soot from my nostrils.

  I also wanted to try and get the lighting back online. I had no idea how much charge was left in the flashlight and didn’t want to end up wandering the labyrinth in total darkness. The fact that the machineguns were working meant there was still power in the ship.

  I headed towards the crew’s quarters, trying to shake off that uncomfortable feeling that always seems to come up in situations like this.

  Chapter Seven

  At the first T-junction in the corridor, there was a narrow door that opened into a maintenance cubbyhole. There was just enough room for a plumber or an electrician to squeeze inside and fix whatever problem was plaguing this section of the ship. Luckily I was more or less the same size as a plumber and had some of the skills of an electrician.

  The power sub-systems on this deck weren’t protected by anything more than basic security protocols and the only reason it took me a whole five minutes to bypass them was because I had a sneezing fit. It was going to be days before I got the smell of smoke out of my clothes and hair.

  The little orange and black screen showed me that the ship’s systems were mostly in hibernation mode. Drawing just enough power from the batteries to keep things ticking over, but ready to respond almost instantly if stirred by external threat. After a couple of tries, I pulled up the correct menu and told the system to kick things up into minimal habitation mode. That would be enough to get the air circulating and the lights on. I hoped. I could hear a humming sound and feel a slight vibration through the soles of my boots. Perhaps these were good signs. Outside in the corridor, the lights flickered on and off a few times and then settled down to a subdued bluish light. That must mean we were in a daylight phase – at least as far as the Celestia was concerned. I felt sure it must be night outside the ship now. Who knows what time zone she was mimicking?