“When I find the technicians responsible for this damned smell I’m going to wring their filthy, rotten necks!” Blake snarled.
He sat down once more, cursing the factory which had covered his seat. A minor alert on the tactical screen required his input and he touched it with a fingertip. The warning didn’t clear immediately and he banged at it with his knuckles, swearing loudly.
He heard quiet footsteps and a figure appeared at his side.
“They’re gone, sir,” said Pointer. “We can’t bring them back and we can’t mourn them yet, but we need to put everything to one side until the living are safe.”
“I hate these Vraxar,” he said. “I always prided myself in being above hatred, but I can’t help myself.”
“We all want the same thing, sir.”
“The extermination of another species.”
“That’s what it’s going to take. We can’t allow our humanity to weaken us. If we don’t win, we’ll become Vraxar and we’ll be the ones carrying their guns when they reach the next civilisation on their route.”
He twisted in his seat and studied Pointer’s face. There was a strength there he’d never seen in her before – a determination that was non-existent in the Caz Pointer he’d once known. Or thought I knew.
“We’ll finish this mission and we won’t be diverted,” he said. “This is too important for us to mess up.”
She smiled in understanding and returned to her seat. Lieutenant Quinn interrupted the following silence and the news he brought wasn’t in any way welcome.
“Look at this, sir,” said Quinn.
Blake leapt from his chair and crossed the bridge until he was standing next to the man. There was a stack of empty cups about thirty high on the edge of the engine monitoring console which Quinn had evidently been cultivating and Blake struggled against the urge to knock the tower over.
“I can see from your face I’m not going to like this.”
“No, you aren’t going to like it, sir. You really aren’t going to like it.”
Blake’s eyes darted over the numerous gauges and charts on the console. “Which one am I looking at?”
“This one here. I’ve been monitoring the fluctuations from the rear nullification sphere. It’s been spiking since we arrived and if you look at this chart here…”
“Going up.”
“Yes, sir, it’s going up and at an increasing rate. I can’t tell you what that thing is made of or how it works, but I’m absolutely certain it’s failing.”
“Not a gentle failure from the looks of this chart.”
“It’s going critical.”
“What happens then?”
“There’s a chance it’ll simply shut down like the front sphere.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I wouldn’t like to be here to witness what happens. If even a fraction of its known power generation capabilities are converted into a more destructive form of energy, we could end up with a crater the size of a moon.”
“Or worse.”
“Much worse.”
“How long?”
“This is guesswork – somewhere between one hour and four. I can run it through a standard simulator if you want something more exact.”
Blake wasn’t sure if he was more shocked at the imminent failure of the Neutraliser or that there was a premade simulator to predict it. “Run the sim. And can you provide an estimate of how long our energy shield will hold out if we remain at an altitude of eighty klicks and that Neutraliser blows up?”
“Assuming it doesn’t simply shut down and reaches critical mass…” Quinn furrowed his brow. “Do you remember when we left that bomb in the middle of the Vraxar mothership and what happened to those battleships they had parked nearby?”
“Our shield won’t help us?”
“If I was a betting man, I’d say it won’t last longer than half a second.”
“One day you’ll give me a happy surprise, Lieutenant. How long until the sim is finished?”
“It’s finished, sir. You might have misunderstood when I described it as a standard sim. We know so little about the Neutralisers that it’s entirely guesswork.”
“There’s a simulator that tries to derive a probability from guesswork?”
“There are a lot of clever men and women in the research labs, sir. This isn’t so much a guesswork simulator as such. More of a chaos distiller.”
Blake shook his head in wonder. “Just tell me how long.”
“Two hours and ten minutes, sir.”
“What’s the expected degree of accuracy?”
“Thirty percent.”
“Not at all accurate, then.”
“Nope.”
The results of the ES Abyss’s simulator software were so inaccurate it was impossible to have any confidence in them. Blake mulled things over briefly; when it came down to it, there was no choice in how to proceed.
“Lieutenant Pointer, speak to Corporal Evans. Tell him to locate the other squads in preparation for a fastest-speed withdrawal. Stress the urgency so there is no scope for misunderstanding.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ensign Bailey – send our remaining two shuttles out on autopilot and programme them to hover at an altitude of one hundred metres, without coming close to the Neutraliser. This may be a staged withdrawal.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
Pointer finished speaking with Corporal Evans. “He’s going to look for the other squads and will order them to the shuttles.”
It was frustrating and Blake wanted to do something that would give him a semblance of control. Apart from sending his crew out to the Neutraliser, there was nothing he could do and he clenched his fists. It was about to get worse.
“When the shuttles have launched, we should climb to an altitude of not less than forty thousand klicks and keep two of our cores wound up for short range transits,” said Lieutenant Hawkins.
Hawkins was absolutely correct, though it felt to Blake like a failure when he gave the order. The ES Abyss’s two shuttles left the hangar bay and the heavy cruiser climbed higher until it was at an altitude of exactly forty thousand kilometres. If anything went catastrophically wrong it wasn’t going to be far enough, but Blake couldn’t bring himself to sit half a million kilometres off world and watch events unfold like a coward hiding behind the curtains.
“The comms beacon is going to struggle to push a signal through the storm,” said Cruz. “The beam strength is less than ten percent and it fluctuates with the weather conditions.”
“This is the hand we’ve been dealt, Lieutenant.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in fate, sir?”
“I don’t, but I’m beginning to learn I’m not right about everything.”
“The knowing makes you stronger, not weaker,” said Hawkins.
Blake smiled though he didn’t feel it inside. With the lives of sixty men and women no longer in his control, he resumed pacing.
At the top of the ladder, there was a space. It was too small to call it a room – the ceiling wasn’t high enough for McKinney to stand and if he’d been interested enough to try it, he could have touched the opposite walls by reaching out with both arms. There was a narrow tunnel, which his sense of direction told him led towards the centre of the Neutraliser’s connecting beam. There was no light and he couldn’t see how far the passage went.
“Anything up there?” asked Roldan.
“Another tunnel. I’m going to have a look.”
“If you find any Vraxar valuables, remember we’re a team, sir.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
The tunnel was just wide enough for him to walk front-on, though he was forced to stoop to avoid knocking his head on the metal ceiling. His visor’s image intensifiers were running at 100% and the best they could manage to show were a few areas of green and lines where the walls met with floor and ceiling. He turned on his visor torch and continued.
“Doesn’t look like t
here’s much here,” he said.
There was no response from the comms – not even a background hum. Whatever material he was passing through it was dense enough to block a comms signal after only a few metres. He pressed on and gradually he became aware of a buzzing sound, coming from an unknown source. The walls carried no vibration, leaving him mystified as to what it might be.
McKinney guessed he’d walked for two hundred metres when he reached the end of the tunnel – it simply terminated at a blank wall. By this stage, the buzzing sound was so persistent he needed to reduce the feed level from his visor microphone. It wasn’t enough and the buzzing seated itself in his joints and bones, making his entire body ache.
At the discovery of this apparent dead-end, McKinney’s brain was stumped. His hand knew what to do and it reached out to the side wall, finding another of the lever grooves. He poked his fingers inside and pulled. A large section of the smooth wall slid sideways into a recess. Green light flooded in and McKinney closed his eyes until he felt everything adjust.
He walked another few paces and stepped into an area like nothing he’d seen before. He found himself standing on a narrow walkway close to the bottom of an immense, cylindrical space. This space continued for a thousand or more metres to the left, while to the right it went so far it confounded the efforts of his sensor to locate the end.
The highest point of the ceiling may have been a thousand or more metres above. It was impossible to tell, since there was a thick bundle of black-metal cords along the entire length of the Neutraliser’s interior. These cords were held in place by huge crossbeams and were of many different sizes, intertwined in such a way as to defy the eye. They twisted this way and that, like the entrails of a gigantic world-destroying beast.
The green light came from sparks running through this metal vine. The sparks jumped and flashed, racing from one end of the spaceship to another. The buzzing, which had been loud before, was almost too much to bear and McKinney ground his teeth together and placed a hand over the visor earpiece.
He stumbled, only dimly aware of a red alert inside his visor advising him that his heart had stopped. A sharp, terrible pain squeezed his chest until he thought his ribs would crack from the agony. He fell to one knee and his sight dimmed. He fought to stay awake in a battle his mind couldn’t win.
The spacesuit’s defibrillator thumped off his chest, once, twice, three times. Its medical computer made the decision to inject him with a fatal dose of battlefield adrenaline. The combination brought McKinney back to consciousness, gasping, retching and feeling as if he’d been dumped into a vat of icy water. His heart rate began to fluctuate wildly as the excess of adrenaline caused it to fail again. At just the right moment, the suit computer injected him in four places with a second substance, this one designed to bring a soldier down from the highs of running too long on boosters.
Got to get out of this room!
His heart went into spasm again and recovered. The battlefield adrenaline cleared his mind and gave strength to his limbs. McKinney threw himself into the passage and his fingers fumbled for the lever. He pulled it hard and kept running. The door closed, cutting off the light in the passage and leaving him once more in the darkness.
McKinney didn’t allow himself a second to rest and he ran back towards the hatch in a half-crouch, his shoulders scraping against the side walls. He reached the top and saw his squad milling around uncertainly. His suit re-established a connection with the Squad A channel and he caught a few snippets of the conversation.
“We should go up there.”
“Nah, the Lieutenant will be fine.”
“It’s been too long.”
“Look, here he is,” said Vega. “Welcome back, sir.”
McKinney came down the ladder at speed, closing the upper hatch as he did so.
“Grover, plug me into that machine,” he said, pointing at the med-box on the floor.
Grover was a man who acted and talked at once, rather than queuing the two up. “What’s up?” he asked, plugging a wire into the interface on McKinney’s suit.
“I found the Neutraliser’s central power conduit. It stopped my heart.”
“You got lucky, then. You’ve got a significantly elevated heart rate and enough battlefield adrenaline in your veins to kill fifty percent of the entire Confederation’s population. Other than that? No lasting damage that I can see. You should get back to the entry point.”
“Negative. We press on and I’m leading.”
“Fine, ignore the advice of your trained medical staff and piss off deeper into the bowels of an alien spaceship. See if I care.”
McKinney clapped Grover on the back in response and set off once more. He wasn’t sure what conclusions he could draw from the Neutraliser’s central conduit – doubtless there were people in the Space Corps who would be very interested and could make a few educated guesses. The one overriding feeling he had was that the Vraxar followed a technology path which was very different to that of either humans or Ghasts.
What do I know? he thought. I’m only a soldier.
Squad A continued along the wide corridor, this time at an increased pace.
Chapter Seven
“According to my visor reading, we’ve walked four thousand metres, and for nearly an hour,” said Huey Roldan.
“We should be in the central section,” McKinney replied. “There’s got to be a way up soon.”
“Do you reckon this is only a maintenance corridor?” asked Garcia. “I’ve counted ten ceiling hatches.”
“It seems like wasted space if you ask me,” said Vega.
“I doubt they added this corridor without a reason,” said McKinney. He stopped suddenly, bringing the others to a halt with him. “It looks like the corridor ends ahead. What’s that I can see to the side?”
“On the left wall?” asked Webb.
“Yes.”
“An opening.”
The opening turned out to be a long flight of steps with high risers and a deep tread. The men gathered at the stairwell entrance and tried to determine what might be at the top. It was no good – there were too many steps and the distance was too great.
“No sign of a lift,” said Clifton.
“These Vraxar must like climbing,” said Webb.
“I don’t think they feel pain, soldier. Seems to me that they’ll keep doing what they’re told, even if it kills them.”
“What’s the point?” said Munoz.
“Eh?”
“Who’d want an existence like that? Why bother with living if you’ve had everything taken away from you?”
“None of them had a choice,” said McKinney. “The Vraxar killed them and used their bodies.”
“There’s got to be some original Vraxar out there, hasn’t there?” said Whitlock. “The ones we’ve seen are treated like slaves. I’ll be there’re some head honchos hiding in the shadows and ordering these other ones about, while they sit back with a glass of cold beer.”
It was an idea which had enough appeal to take hold and soon the soldiers were nodding sagely as if they’d figured out a significant part of the Vraxar’s motivations. McKinney was fairly sure there was no fairness or equality within the Vraxar ranks but it didn’t take a genius to figure that out. Martial races weren’t known for their adherence to democratic rights.
“We’re going up,” McKinney said, letting the men know what they’d already guessed.
To the squad’s credit, they got on with it. The effects of extra gravity, along with the weight of their equipment and the height of the steps soon cut off any inconsequential conversation and the squad toiled its way upwards.
McKinney was still burning with battlefield adrenaline and he found the climb easy, though he was aware there’d be a price to pay in the future. His brain idly rotated the jigsaw pieces of what they’d discovered so far on the Neutraliser. It wasn’t difficult to assume the entire ship was designed around the single task of shutting off other power sources, but as
far as McKinney knew, most in the Space Corps believed it was the forward and aft spheres which did all the work while the central section was thought to be packed with their troops.
What McKinney saw made him think there was something in the central section which was doing the nullification, whilst the spheres were more likely to be amplifiers. He found the idea interesting, though admitted to himself there was little chance of gaining a tactical advantage if there was any proof to his theory.
The steps ended after an interminable time and McKinney was sure everyone in his squad had taken some kind of booster. He didn’t blame them.
After checking for signs of life, they entered the top room. It was a big space, eighty metres or more to each side. At floor level, there were rows of metal workbenches arrayed in neat rows and there was a jumble of objects piled untidily against one wall. Higher up, there were ladders and gantries, with connecting walkways of grated metal, and the ceiling itself was lost in the gloom far above. McKinney got a ping off the highest visible point – it was three hundred metres away.
He paused to listen - it was silent.
“This place looks like its centuries old,” said Roldan, putting words to what they were all feeling.
“I’ve seen pictures of factories on Old Earth that looked newer than this,” said Garcia.
“This reminds me of a mineshaft.”
“I don’t like it,” said McKinney. “We’ll be easy to pick off from those gantries.”
“There’s another exit,” said Clifton. “Unless you want to go up?”
“I don’t want to stay in here. We’ll head towards that far exit. Keep on your guard.”
They spread out across the room, the soft hum of their plasma repeaters rising to prominence above their footsteps. McKinney had positioned himself so he would be closest to the pile of objects. He stooped to examine one or two – whatever they had originally been intended for, they’d been smashed off the wall of this room when the Neutraliser crashed down and they were flattened or broken.
God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3) Page 6