Fires of Oblivion

by Anthony James

  “I think they’re going to shatter those two pieces with their particle beams,” said Duggan, knowing that would be game over for the ship and its crew.

  “Absolutely,” said McGlashan. “And then they’ll have us.”

  “Maybe,” said Duggan, that moment spotting something which might give them a chance.

  “What is it?” asked McGlashan, picking up on the tone of his voice.

  “If we keep on our current course, the enemy vessel is going to come up against some trouble of its own,” said Duggan, trying his best to make sense of the crowded tactical display.

  “Nothing that’s going to destroy them,” said Chainer.

  “I just need a distraction,” said Duggan. “If they lose track of us for a few seconds, it might give us time to get away from here.”

  No one asked where exactly he thought they would get away to. His words offered a tiny amount of hope and that was enough. The ES Lightning ploughed on through a sea of smaller particles, heading towards the two huge chunks of rock ahead. The Dreamer mothership kept the same approximate distance and continued to fire its particle beams in their general direction.

  “They’ve got something really big heading their way,” said Chainer. “A thousand klicks of red-hot planetary core spinning towards them.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed they’re too proud to take evasive action,” said Duggan. The mothership hadn’t deviated significantly from its course so far and he hoped the aliens would choose to destroy the fragment instead of avoid it.

  “Thirty seconds until we’ll have our own problems to contend with,” said Chainer.

  “They’ll have to act soon,” said McGlashan.

  The alien warship did exactly as Duggan wanted. The huge cannon they’d seen earlier – one of two on the mothership – rotated with blinding speed, until it pointed at the incoming wall of rock. The cannon fired, its short barrel becoming a blur of recoil and repositioning. All across the centre of the thousand-kilometre length of spiralling rock, huge holes appeared, each more than a hundred metres in diameter. The Dreamer cannon didn’t stop and its projectiles continued to pummel the object, knocking away vast pieces of the whole. Within fifteen seconds, an unthinkable quantity of stone had been split, ruptured and broken. Particle beams and smaller gauss fire raked through the fragments, breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces. Like the waters of a great sea parting, the section of Corai split around the alien mothership, allowing them to fly through the middle.

  The moment the enemy vessel vanished amongst the rubble, Duggan acted. He turned the nose of the ES Lightning away until they were heading in almost the complete opposite direction. With the enemy lost amongst the obscuring rock, Duggan hoped they had a few seconds to put some distance between them.

  There were several large rocks ahead. Duggan skimmed over the top of one and dropped the spaceship behind it. He reduced their speed and kept pace with the tumbling stone. “I need help,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’ve got to keep as much stone between us and that mothership as we can. The moment they have a clear sight of our location, they’ll be onto us.”

  “Understood,” said Chainer. “I’m trying to work out a new course.”

  “Can’t we just stay where we are?” asked Breeze.

  “Negative, Lieutenant. We’re too close for comfort. We need to get further away.”

  “I’m overlaying a course onto your display, sir,” said Chainer. “We should be able to hide behind that five-klick piece below and to the left.”

  “The enemy should be clear of the debris by now,” said McGlashan.

  “Yeah, we’re going to be making some best-guesses as to where they’ll go, Commander,” said Chainer. “There’s no room to get it wrong.”

  “Statistics and chance,” said Duggan without bitterness. “We should learn to worship them.”

  “I do, sir,” said Chainer. “In my head I’m their most fervent acolyte.”

  Under Duggan’s control, the ES Lightning plunged away from the shielding rock and onwards to the next. The greater the distance they managed to travel, the more obstacles they’d put between themselves and the mothership. Without the stealth modules, this tactic would be useless – any modern warship would detect them immediately. Once again, Duggan found himself relying on technology. It was comforting and he mentally celebrated humanity’s ingenuity for producing something which none of their enemies possessed.

  “Don’t let them see us,” said Breeze quietly to himself, as if his words could stave off discovery.

  “If I can’t see them, they can’t see us,” said Chainer. “At least that should be the case in theory. Who knows what these bastards can do?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I haven’t picked up on their new position yet.”

  Duggan completed the manoeuvre and tucked the Lightning behind the target rock, once more keeping pace with it. The strain of relying on manual control was building within his muscles. His heart beat fast and his hands were clammy. “Where next, Lieutenant?”

  “In twelve seconds, a new course will become available, sir. The overlay is on your screen.”

  “Got it,” said Duggan, preparing to follow the new flight path.

  After exactly twelve seconds, he hauled the ES Lightning away from the cover of stone and pointed the warship’s nose towards the new target. This next fragment was almost a thousand kilometres in diameter. It was peculiarly spherical and burned bright with heat from the cataclysm. Duggan took them as near as he dared – several hundred kilometres away. The ferocious heat lapped around the hull and the temperature climbed rapidly.

  “Got to get in close, sir,” said Chainer. “Otherwise they’ll see us.”

  “It’s too hot to get closer,” snapped Duggan.

  “Never stopped you before,” said McGlashan.

  “Damn right it hasn’t,” he replied, swinging another two hundred kilometres nearer to the burning surface.

  “Closer,” said Chainer.

  “We’ll burn up!”

  “It’s that or be destroyed by the mothership, sir.”

  I’ve never been scared to take a chance before, thought Duggan, berating himself for his hesitation. And I’m not about to start. With a deep breath, he flew within a hundred kilometres of the furnace. The temperature of the already-damaged hull went far beyond its design maximum and the metal softened and shifted. “How long?” he asked. “If the armour gets much softer, even the smallest particles will go through it at this speed.”

  “Not long…now!” yelled Chainer.

  A new course appeared on his screen and Duggan immediately directed the warship along it. This time, there was a large gap to the next suitable object and it was more than thirty seconds until they were back in cover. Whatever information Chainer was squeezing out of the AI it hadn’t let them down yet. The area behind them was cluttered with debris of all sizes – the alien mothership was going to find it progressively harder to spot them.

  In his head, Duggan thought of it as a game – a high stakes contest between Space Corps technology and an alien behemoth. The longer the game progressed, the more important it became for him to win, as though he and his crew were representatives of the whole Confederation. He was desperate to show the Dreamers that their most powerful warship could be outwitted by something as small as a Gunner, albeit a heavily-modified example. They made three more hops, each one taking them further from the last known location of the enemy.

  “Is it fifty-two seconds for lightspeed?” asked Duggan, holding the Lightning a steady five kilometres from a vast chunk of Gallenium-laden rock.

  “Plus a couple of minutes for the switchover from stealth to deep fission. They’ll detect our signature as soon as we warm the engines up for the final fifty-two,” said Breeze. “It won’t matter if we’re hidden behind the largest piece of Gallenium-rich ore that Corai has thrown out here.”

  “They’ve got another three ships that we know about, sir,” said McGlashan. “We’re at
the periphery of the debris and the longer we stay here, the greater the chance one of their warships will detect us once we deactivate the stealth modules.”

  “We’re going,” said Duggan. “The Juniper is where we need to be. Prepare a course for us.”

  “Yes sir,” said Breeze. “Cloaks disengaged. In two minutes we can prepare for lightspeed. Expect all hell to break loose when we light them up.”

  “Two minutes,” said Chainer to himself.

  The enemy didn’t appear on their sensors and Duggan had to force himself to breathe evenly. After what seemed like a lifetime, Breeze spoke again.

  “Fifty seconds and counting down before we can jump.” He grinned. “Approximately five days until we arrive.”

  “Any movement on the sensors?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I see something, sir,” Chainer replied.

  “Forty seconds.”

  “Still clear.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Still clear.”

  Before Breeze was able to announce twenty seconds, the ES Lightning’s sensors identified a series of detonations amongst the tumbling rocks further towards the periphery of Corai’s debris. White plasma was visible at the extremes of range, spilling around dozens of different fragments of the planet.

  “They’re coming,” said McGlashan.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “It’s not the mothership, at least,” said Breeze. “The smaller ships can’t knock out our engines.”

  “Small mercies,” said Chainer with a shake of his head.

  “I’ll take mercies no matter how small,” said McGlashan.

  “More missile impacts,” said Chainer. “At least two hundred. They’re trying to blast their way through to us.”

  “How far?” asked Duggan.

  “Can’t tell.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “We’re going to make it.”

  Just then, something punched clean through the sheltering chunk of Gallenium ore, sending a huge shower of stone into violent collision with the battered hull of the ES Lightning. Another impact struck the shield of rock and then another. They’ve turned their cannon on us, thought Duggan. There’s no way in hell we’ll get away.

  The onslaught continued and dozens of enormous-calibre slugs pummelled their way through the rock. Each strike tore away a vast chunk of their defence and ejected a fountain of shards thousands of kilometres away from the surface. From the other direction, the Dreamer cruiser had cleared a path through the barricade of spiralling pieces and it came towards them at a speed of two thousand kilometres per second. A flood of red dots on the tactical screen indicated the launch of several waves of missiles. Something cracked into the Lightning’s hull and the lights on the bridge flickered and dimmed. The warship rocked under another impact and Duggan stumbled, catching hold of his chair to steady himself. He felt sickness rise in his stomach and wondered if it heralded his death.

  Then, everything went quiet and the lights stopped flickering. The urgent red of the alarm continued to cycle and Duggan’s ears made out the humming of the engines. He looked at the other members of the crew and saw the still expressions of people who had expected death and had made peace with themselves. Today wasn’t their day.

  “We made it,” said Duggan.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In most circumstances, achieving lightspeed was a guarantee of escape. On this occasion, Duggan was concerned in case the Dreamer mothership had managed to direct its engine scrambling weapon against them just before the Lightning departed. It soon became apparent this hadn’t happened and the only reason he could think of was because the sheltering rock had given them enough cover to prevent the weapon’s use. Their situation remained far from ideal.

  “I’ve got plenty of red alerts across several major onboard systems,” said Breeze.

  “Will we hold together until we reach the Juniper?” asked Duggan.

  “Probably.”

  There were times when it was best to summarise the possibilities with a single word and this was one of those times. “Probably is better than we had a few minutes ago,” Duggan replied. He opened an internal comms channel. “Lieutenant Ortiz, please report.”

  “It got a bit bumpy down below, sir,” she said with her customary level of understatement. “We’ve been watching that big bastard of an alien warship on the screens down here. Witnessing things as they happen beats going to the movies, that’s for sure.”

  Duggan had worked with Ortiz long enough to know she’d have given him news of casualties before anything else and her silence on the matter gave him an enormous feeling of relief. “We’re going to the Juniper. ETA five days, as long as we don’t break up first.”

  “It’s that bad is it?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. When you see what the hull looks like, you’re going to wonder how it held together.”

  “I never waste time thinking about how close to death I came, sir,” she said. “It’ll happen when it happens and there’s nothing I can do to change it.”

  “That’s a good philosophy.”

  “It’s served me up until now.”

  “We’ll catch up later.”

  “Right you are. The guys here reckon you did a good job. You and your crew.”

  Duggan smiled. “Thanks. I’ll let everyone know.”

  As soon as he’d finished speaking to Ortiz, Lieutenant Breeze announced that things weren’t going to plan.

  “Sir, one of these alerts is on the life support system. It began as amber and now it’s turned red.”

  It didn’t seem likely that Breeze had mentioned it without specific reason. “How serious?” asked Duggan.

  “I can’t be sure – I’ve not seen this happen before. I’ve read enough about similar incidents to realise we’re in a proper mess.”

  Duggan had a look and McGlashan also came over. They trawled through the failure warning logs for a time. Between them, they couldn’t understand what the underlying cause was.

  “The life support is degrading,” said McGlashan.

  “It might stabilise,” said Breeze, scratching his head in thought.

  “Want to take that gamble?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nor me,” said McGlashan.

  That was enough for Duggan. “Where’s the closest space port that can handle a fleet warship? Atlantis?”

  “Yes, sir. If we change course, we’ll be there in three days.”

  “Will that be soon enough?” asked McGlashan.

  “It’ll have to be. Please set us on a new course to Atlantis, Lieutenant.”

  “Atlantis it is.”

  The three days passed slowly. The life support system modules went offline one by one. The crew did their best to identify the problem and resolve it, to no avail. A warship had so much redundancy it was usually possible to re-route or simply use one of the many backup systems. Rarely – very rarely – a multiple hardware failure meant the only option was to dock and undergo a full programme of repairs. This was one of those times and it put the crew under stress while they waited to see if they would live or die. Duggan became impatient and irritable, whilst the others sank into themselves and made little attempt at conversation.

  It wasn’t only the failing life support system that they had to contend with – the warship had been badly damaged in numerous places and the last fusillade from the Dreamer mothership had opened two small breaches into the engines and damaged the Lightning’s structural integrity enough that it was in danger of breaking up. Hour-by-hour, one of the penetrations through the hull became wider and longer, exposing more of the engine mass beneath.

  Oddly enough, the thing Duggan found most annoying was the alarm light on the bridge - it refused to shut down and bathed the crew in depressing, red illumination. It was no danger, but its persistence was galling. Eventually, McGlashan stuck a metal tray from the food replicator over it. The red light remained visible, but it was less irritating than it had been. />
  “Where are we going to on Atlantis?” asked Breeze when the third day was almost over. It was like he had a superstition that forbade him from asking about a precise final destination when there was a danger they weren’t going to make it.

  “There’s only one space port with the ability to refit us.”

  “Tillos?”

  “That’s the one. I’m sure Admiral Teron will want us on our way again as soon as we’ve been debriefed. There’ll be a ship for us either on Atlantis or one they can get to us in a day or two.”

  “War on two fronts,” said Chainer gloomily. “One front was bad enough.”

  “I’m itching to hear what’s gone wrong with the peace negotiations,” said Duggan. “We had it in the palm of our hands and it’s gone.”

  “You sound like you’re blaming the Confederation, sir,” said McGlashan.

  “I’m really not, Commander,” he replied. “There’s too much that’s up in the air with what’s happening between the Ghasts and the Dreamers. Too many unknowns for us to commit to peace without certain reassurances. I suppose I’m not too surprised. I’m disappointed, that’s for sure.”

  “It probably didn’t help when they shot all those Ghast soldiers during the mission to rescue us,” said Breeze.

  “This may be a stupid idea,” began Chainer.

  “It usually is when you start a sentence with those words,” said McGlashan.

  Chainer lifted his hand to indicate she should give him a chance to speak. “If it were me at the negotiating table, I’d have told the Ghasts that we had doubts about them because we found their pyramid on Vempor and because we found creatures that looked exactly like Ghasts on Trasgor and Kidor when they had no reason to be there. Then I’d sit back in my chair and ask them to explain what the hell is going on.” As if to demonstrate, Chainer leaned backwards in his seat and reached out for his cup of coffee.

  “It’s not that easy, Lieutenant,” said Duggan. “If only it was. We’ve had to keep things in reserve, in case we gave up an advantage. We don’t trust them and it seemed better to play our cards close to our chest. In the end, the Ghasts have resumed hostilities. In my mind that goes a long way towards justifying the way we’ve handled it.”