Battleship Raider

by Paul Tomlinson

  The environmental control unit was connected into the ship’s main systems and also offered proximity connection, so I let Trixie offer a handshake. Neither of us was surprised when the battleship gave it the cold shoulder. Just because we were inside didn’t mean she was going to let us in. That required access to security protocols that we didn’t have. We were just going to have to wait until we got into the Navigator’s vault where we could force a direct connection.

  Behind me there was a loud clicking sound and the lights went out again. After a few seconds the corridor was lit again, but by red emergency lighting only. Some sort of circuit breaker had been tripped – hardly surprising after forty years in the dark. I could try and fix it, but I’d be off this deck soon and heading down to the next one, so decided I could manage with the emergency lighting. While I was exploring this deck, I could keep an eye out for additional flashlights, in case I needed them later.

  Back in the corridor, I got a sense that the air was still moving, if only sluggishly, so life support was functioning at some level. As well as smoke there was a whiff of decay in the air, but it was no worse than the jungle outside. My eyes quickly adjusted to the red lighting. Everything around me was painted battleship grey so I wasn’t really missing anything colour-wise.

  The Celestia had nose-dived into the dirt from a great height. We aren’t talking about a minor fender-bender. The ground would have shaken like a major earthquake. Anything loose inside the ship must have been tossed around like a bingo caller’s balls. It should have looked like a garbage truck exploded in here. But it was tidier than a politician’s alibi. Someone or something had been through the ship from stem to stern and cleaned it up. And they had carried on maintaining it for the last forty years. If you ignored the fact that she was broken into three pieces, the Celestia looked like she was ready to take flight tomorrow.

  This made me uncomfortable, because it meant my feeling of not being alone couldn’t be written off as simple paranoia. I was not alone here, I felt sure of that.

  Most of the rooms off the corridor were crew quarters. Narrow cubicles containing two bunks, one above the other, or slightly wider rooms with four bunks. This was where the pilots and the engineers that maintained their fighters would have slept. It was functional living space with few creature comforts. Typical military accommodation. There were pictures on the walls of most of the bunks. Curled photographs of family members. Faded pin-ups of actresses, motor vehicles, and porn stars – all of them decades old. There were small toys hanging in some of the bunks, meagre attempts at personalising the space. It was like looking into rooms that had been preserved for a museum exhibit. A hermetically sealed time capsule.

  I didn’t open any of the lockers or drawers. It would have been disrespectful. ‘Treasure hunter’ is just a polite euphemism for tomb robber. This was the uneasy feeling I’d had since I came on board. I was intruding in a place that belonged to the dead.

  I was seeing little evidence of the impact. There were a few things scattered on the floor or piled in corners, but nothing more. I had expected to see corpses. Though most of the crew from this deck had probably been on duty when the Celestia was hit. As I moved inwards towards the centre, there was less evidence of structural damage. Everything seemed normal, nothing crushed or twisted into crazy angles. You could imagine an end of shift klaxon sounding and crew members streaming back down to their quarters to wash up before heading to the mess hall. These imaginings were the closest that I came to seeing ghosts.

  The last cubicle in the corridor held only a single bed, belonging to a sergeant or some other lower-ranked officer, presumably. The wall opposite the bed was filled by a mesh-fronted locker that held weapons. Handguns and rifles. I popped the padlock. The weapons all seemed to be loaded. In the bottom of the locker was a row of flashlights. I picked up a couple that showed as being fully charged. The weapons could wait – for now. I asked Trixie to tag the location so we could come back to it later. Depending on what other loot there was to carry away, I would pick up a few guns on the way out.

  Around the corner was a small medical bay. There were half-a-dozen of these scattered throughout the ship, as well as the main trauma centre that housed the operating theatres. There was a refrigerated locker filled with blood products and medicines, all long past their use-by dates. And there was a cupboard full of vacuum-packed dressings and other equipment. This was another location to tag for later. I doubted I would be back – there were much richer pickings on the deck below – but you never know. This might turn out to be the first of several visits I made to the Celestia.

  I figured I’d seen all this deck had to offer. Time to head downwards. By definition, Security was going to be housed in a location that was more secure. And the increased protection meant it was also the ideal place to house the most valuable items of equipment. There would be robots down there and other equally saleable items of hardware. And also the greatest prize of all, the Navigator, shielded in its own (allegedly) impregnable vault. That sounded like my kind of challenge.

  How do you travel between decks on a battleship? You take the elevator the same as anywhere else. With only emergency power available, I was thinking that the elevators would be offline. Aren’t we always told not to use them in an emergency? The elevator cars usually descend to ground level and sit there until the emergency is over. If you want to escape, you have to use the stairs. I wasn’t sure if battleships had stairs. I’d been on space stations and passenger liners where a staircase swept majestically down into the ballroom, but this was set dressing designed for impact rather than practicality. Warships don’t have ballrooms. But surely they must have some sort of utilitarian stairway for use in case of fire or flood? What did they do when the elevators broke down? Even on a military vessel you must occasionally see an out-of-order sticker. There had to be some kind of manual back-up.

  Looking around me, I couldn’t see any emergency exit signs. Presumably the crew were expected to be familiar with the escape routes. They probably got woken in the middle of the night by sadistic sergeants running fire drills and could get to the assembly points with their eyes closed. Or perhaps arrows lit up to direct you to safety when the alarms went off. I considered setting off the fire alarm to test this, but I didn’t want to make that much noise – especially when I didn’t know how to turn it off. My attention was drawn back to the elevators. Even if they weren’t operating, the shaft still went straight down to the next level.

  My journey to the wreck of the Celestia had been organised at short notice and I had travelled south with only the bare minimum of equipment. My plan, such as it was, was to improvise when I got here. With hindsight, there were a few things I wished I’d brought with me. A bigger flashlight was one. And another was a ‘burglar’s friend’ – a jemmy or crowbar – which would have been ideal for prying open the elevator doors. I was thinking that I’d have to try using the largest screwdriver from my tool roll when I spotted something more promising. At the end of the corridor close to a fire alarm button there was a box on the wall. Behind its glass front, I could see a red-handled fire axe. I used the screwdriver to lever the box open. The axe was heavy in my hands. It wasn’t an ideal substitute for a jemmy but it was sturdier than my screwdriver.

  I pushed the sharp end of the axe head into the gap between the elevator doors, wedging it in as far as it would go. Then I used a hammer to knock it further in. When most of the head was buried in the gap, I gripped the end of the handle and turned, forcing the doors apart. There was a lot of resistance from the mechanism that was supposed to keep the doors safely closed when there was no elevator car behind them, but gradually the gap widened. I didn’t want the doors snapping shut suddenly when I had my fingers between them, so I slid a fire-extinguisher into the gap to stop them closing. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to use extinguishers to prop doors open, but I’m not big on obeying regulations.

  Setting aside the axe, I used my hands to drag first one door and
then the other, and then I got first my shoulders and then my whole body in the gap and used my legs to force the doors fully open. The elevator shaft was dark and the smell of dead vegetation wafting up from the lower floor was stronger. I paused to draw breath. I’d lost track of how long I had been inside the wrecked battleship. This weird red-lit metal labyrinth seemed to have a time zone all of its own.

  I lay down on my stomach and edged forward to shine the flashlight down into the shaft. The beam of light showed me the grid-like metal structure with the cables running down the middle – and not much else. The light wasn’t strong enough to penetrate as far as the next level. I was about to reach into my pocket for a coin to drop down when I felt a breeze on the back of my neck. It was coming down the shaft.

  Adrenaline surged through my body and I pulled myself backwards out of the shaft without even thinking about it. Something big and heavy whooshed down the shaft and I felt it brush past the top of my head.

  I lay on my back for a moment and waited for the sick feeling in my stomach to fade. I didn’t want to think about how close I had just come to being decapitated by the plunging elevator car. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. I looked around, trying to see the camera that had to be watching me, but in the red half-light it was hard to see anything clearly. From this point on I would have to assume that I was being observed, that my movements were being tracked.

  Knowing that the elevators were operational, I could have jacked into the control system to call a car to take me down to the next level. But I didn’t fancy putting myself into a closed metal box that the ship could take control of and send me plunging to my death or leave me trapped between floors until I starved. I had also entirely gone off the idea of climbing down the elevator shaft.

  “Trixie, call up blueprints for the ship and show me emergency exit routes for my current position.” I was whispering, afraid of being overheard, which was crazy. If the ship wanted to listen, her sensors could probably pick up the gurgle of my stomach digesting protein bars.

  The plans showed that there were several staircases connecting the two levels, but none close by. In the event of a fire or other emergency, the crew had to use ladders built into the conduits that ran between floors. These narrow tubes carried the pipes and cables that provided services around the ship – water, electricity, data, sewage, and the like. Engineers called these conduits roach runs because no matter how sophisticated the technology became, those bugs always managed to find their way in. You’d have thought they would have evolved into stainless steel roaches or something by now, but no, their ugly prehistoric form still does the job fine.

  I popped the hatch open on the nearest access point and shone my torch inside. It was a much smaller space than the elevator shaft. A ladder was screwed to the wall on one side and the other was filled with pipes and cables of various sizes and colours that disappeared down into the darkness. I didn’t see any cockroaches but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I also couldn’t see any sign of cameras, sensors, or weapons – but again that didn’t prove anything. For my own continued well-being, I should assume that defences of some kind had been placed in the conduits. I tried to imagine what a devious military mind might come up with. Lasers criss-crossing the tube ready to chop me up like zucchini? Or could the ship seal off parts of the network and flood them with carbon dioxide?

  I took the hatch off its hinges so that the ship couldn’t seal it shut behind me. I was about to toss it aside but dropped it down the tube instead. I watched it fall until it disappeared beyond the light from the flashlight and then I listened as it clanged down in the darkness. There were no flashes of laser weapons and no sounds of explosions. Of course, the ship might be watching and could have turned off the defences temporarily. Perhaps it was trying to lure me into a trap? I had to hope that she wasn’t that devious.

  I fastened the red axe to my backpack and threaded my arms through the straps. I had some of the smaller tools in the pocket of my jeans and the pistol in the holster on my belt – I hoped these would be enough to deal with any challenges I met on the way down. I had a spare flashlight attached to my belt and I could quickly unsling the axe if I needed it. I went back down the corridor and made a quick scouting exhibition to try and find a helmet of some kind, but all I came up with was a moth-eaten baseball cap that I didn’t want to put anywhere near my hair. I was just going to have to hope that the ship had nothing it could drop down on me while I was in the roach run.

  I stepped into the tube and grabbed hold of the ladder, tugging at it to make sure it was firmly screwed to the wall. The rungs of the ladder felt warmer than I’d expected. They were probably a composite made of recycled plastic waste but the clammy feel of them made me think of bone for some reason – like I was climbing around inside the ship’s skeleton. Trying not to shudder, I started downwards.

  Chapter Eight

  Initially, I had been confused by the distance between the crew quarters level and the security level below. The deck between them couldn’t be seventy feet thick, could it? It wasn’t clearly marked on the blueprints, but it turned out that there was a sort of subfloor between the two levels. A basement or attic, depending which of the levels you were standing on. It was basically a warehouse where they stored all of the stuff you needed to run a ship of this size – toilet paper and spare mattresses and all those other things that you never really think about when you imagine a warship. If I had been planning a longer expedition, I would have wanted to have a good look around this warehouse. But given my experiences so far, I had decided that I wanted to be off this wreck as soon as I had enough valuables to take back with me. Preferably in the form of something I could easily carry. Like the core of the Navigator unit. Anything less than that was going to be a major disappointment.

  Sweat trickled down my nose and dripped off the end. There was no air conditioning in the roach run. I doubted that the cockroaches cared much, but it must have been unpleasant for the engineers who had to work in these tight spaces. It was dark too and the bobbing of the flashlight was disorientating.

  Something grabbed me from behind and tried to pull me up. Or that’s what it felt like. My backpack had caught on the little wheel of some sort of valve and was stopping me going downwards. I had to go back up and reach around to unhitch it. I decided to shrug off the shoulder straps so I could lower the backpack down the shaft on the rope – this would avoid further entanglements and would also give me greater freedom of movement. And while I was at it, I took off my jacket and gun belt and tucked them under the flap of the pack. I lowered the backpack down until I ran out of rope and then I let it fall the rest of the way – it didn’t fall for long, so I figured I had only another thirty or so feet to go.

  As I got closer to the security deck, a glow filtered upwards, getting brighter as I descended. Looking down I could see that the hatch was partially open.

  “Level 3: security, weaponry and robot guards, bombs and navigation, space helmets and drones. Going down.”

  Reaching the hatch I pushed it open and peered out into the corridor. There was no sign of my jacket or backpack. I looked all around in case they’d bounced or rolled and I looked up in case they had snagged on something on the way down. But they were gone. Someone or something had taken them. I was definitely not alone on the Celestia. This thought gave me the creeps. But on a positive note, this was a much better class of spaceship corridor. The walls were a clean off-white that the brochure probably called ‘desert sand’ and sensors turned on the lights just ahead of me as I moved – and they were proper ‘evening sun’ lights, none of your nasty ‘bloodshot red’. It was like being in the office building of an expensive law firm. Any minute now there’d be a corner with a potted palm in it.

  With no backpack and no computer, I was feeling vulnerable. Who or what had snatched my things? Out in the corridor, I was more exposed than I wanted to be, so I decided to duck into one of the rooms. I could take a moment to consider my next steps.


  “Pick a door, any door.”

  Again there was a complete absence of helpful signage. Maybe it was a War thing. I remember reading somewhere that planets in the war zone used to remove all of their street names and road signs in an attempt to confuse any enemy invaders. I bet the Gators were furious when they couldn’t find the name of the place that they were just about to blow up.

  I chose a door at random. It had a standard electronic lock that had probably been state of the art back in the day. I took the lockpick out of my pocket and slid the sensor into the mechanism. It vibrated slightly to let me know that it had tricked the lock into thinking that an ‘access denied’ signal said ‘open sesame.’ I snatched my hand away as the lockpick suddenly grew very hot and then exploded in a shower of sparks. I glanced over my shoulder up towards the lens of a security camera.

  “Spoilsport.”

  The door had opened about an inch and then stopped. I grabbed the edge of it and pulled, sliding it open a little further. Eventually there was room for me to squeeze through.

  “Mind the gap.”

  The door slammed shut the moment I was through it. Behind me the lights flickered on. Something, just an odd feeling, warned me that something was wrong. I turned slowly.

  The narrow room was filled with security robots. Two rows of them – six to my right and three to my left. I froze, holding my breath. Were they active? I’ve had some nasty experiences with security robots in the past. The carbon-fibre carapaces of these were painted the usual pale blue and white to mark them as security rather than military hardware and the bare metal of their joints was bright and shiny. I was starting to feel light-headed and had to let go of the breath I was holding.

  “Pardon the intrusion, gentlemen, I was looking for the bathroom.”