by Dan Worth
The ship was large, around a kilometre in length. Though it was ten millennia old it still shared some characteristics with modern Arkari vessels, resembling as it did some form of weird mechanical marine life. The basic shape reminded Katherine of a horse-shoe crab, though one greatly streamlined. A fat delta shaped fore section sprouted a long tapered tail from its rear as well as two elongated weapon pods along the shoulders of the craft and two matching ones on the underside. These projected back above and below the primary exhausts for the engines.
Unlike contemporary craft the vessel lacked the nanotechnology and finely tuned warp technology that made its modern equivalents so utterly deadly. Even so, it was still far more advanced than any human vessel yet constructed. The hull of the Arkari ship was virtually seamless and undoubtedly incredibly robust. It had survived the fall from orbit as well as the pressure generated by the millions of tonnes of dust it had lain under for ten thousand years and it had remained almost virtually intact.
The only damage the vessel had incurred was certainly not due to any natural causes. The starboard side of the main hull was badly mangled. The edge of the fuselage had been entirely sliced away and a second strike had carved a deep gash inwards toward the centre of the ship, cutting across the engines mounted on that side of the vessel. There was also some secondary damage, probably caused by the heat of re-entry acting upon the now unshielded portion of the craft. It had no doubt been a fatal blow to the ship, but it provided the archaeologists with an easy access point to the interior of the vessel.
An hour later and both Katherine and Rekkid sat, fully suited up, in the small AG maintenance flitter as it carried them over to the rent in the starship’s hull. They wore the variant of marine combat armour that the engineers from the Brunel wore in potentially hazardous environments. The suits’ armour plates would protect them from falls of debris or structural collapse, and their radiation shielding and ability to environmentally seal themselves would provide further protection if necessary.
Katherine still hated wearing the things, for now she had her suit’s visor up. Though the military issue suits were easy to move in, the sense of claustrophobia when the visor was down was deeply unsettling to her. Plus, it reminded her of their expedition aboard the Khostun. It seemed so long ago now, but that day had set in motion everything that had happened since. Part of Katherine wished that she could travel back in time and warn herself away from going on that mission. Another part kept reminding her of all the wonders she had witnessed since amongst the horrors of the past months.
Rekkid was fidgeting. Uncomfortable in a suit designed for humans, he shifted in his seat, swearing under his breath. He dropped some of his equipment under his seat and swore some more.
The pilot of the tiny craft took them low over the nose of the ship, and then swung round towards the gaping wound on its starboard wing. It dwarfed the flitter. The great ragged hole hung as though something had taken a giant bite from the ancient vessel. A dozen decks, piled with dust that still fell in gentle falls lay exposed to the light, draped in severed conduits and twisted spars. The flitter edged between the jutting edges of the smashed structure, landing as far inside as the pilot dared before coming to rest on an area of exposed deck large enough to deposit the two archaeologists. As it lifted off and returned to the platform, they checked in via their comm. links.
‘Rekkid here. Steven, are you picking us up?’
‘Loud and clear. Your video feed’s a little glitchy though.’
Rekkid thumped his helmet with the flat of his hand. ‘That any better?’
‘Much better. Okay we’ve scanned the ship as best we can to determine its layout. I’d advise sealing your suits. There’s still a degree of radiation coming from that cracked engine housing you’re standing near.’
‘Great,’ muttered Katherine and flipped her visor down.
‘Steven we intend to make our way to the ship’s bridge,’ said Rekkid. ‘Katherine and I have decided between us that it might be best if we can recover any records the ship might contain from there. The workings of Arkari vessels of this age are well documented so I should be able to extract any computerised information without too much trouble - provided I can get any of it to work. The backup power cells in our suits should be enough to kick-start the emergency systems and use any reserves still left in the ship’s batteries. I gave the engineers aboard the platform the specifications of the interfaces I needed and they’ve kindly manufactured them for me. We shouldn’t have any problems.’
‘You think it’ll still work after all this time?’
‘Arkari ships are built to last Steven. ’
‘Alright, let me know if you need any of our engineers to assist.’
‘Will do.’
‘Okay, I’ve locked in the position of the bridge, downloading it to your suits now.’
A zoomable 3D model of the ship appeared in front of Katherine’s vision; the path they must take to the bridge zigzagged through the interior of the craft, gradually leading inwards and upwards. A bar of icons hovered at its side. Katherine moved her hand and made to touch the virtual phantom image. The model disappeared, replaced with a directional arrow that hovered at the top of her vision.
‘Well Rekkid,’ she said. ‘Here we are again. Shall we?’ She indicated with a gloved hand.
The dark interior of the ship beckoned.
The drifts of dust only lasted as far as the first set of bulkheads that they encountered. The heavy doors had automatically slammed shut when the ship had been hit, maintaining its atmospheric integrity. It took some time for Rekkid and Katherine to open one of the battered doors via the manual over-ride. The ratchet mechanism had become clogged with dust over the centuries and proved stubborn in the extreme. Eventually they cranked one door open far enough so that they could squeeze through in their bulky suits.
Inside, the ship was still in good condition. Their suit lights pierced the gloom within, revealing the graceful yet functional design of the ship’s interior. They pressed on.
Their heavy footsteps echoed in the silence as the two archaeologists followed the path that Steven had provided for them, trailing dusty footprints behind them on the shiny flooring. The curving lines of the corridors gave them the unsettling impression of exploring the dead body of a huge beast. Darkness loomed from gaping open doorways and passageways too deep for their suit lights to penetrate fully.
Suddenly there was an awful groaning sound from the bowels of the ship.
‘Shit!’ said Katherine. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘Steven,’ said Rekkid, urgently keying his comm-link. ‘There’d better not be anything else in here with us. What was that?’
‘Nothing to worry about. It just seems like the ship’s structure was flexing back into shape after being released from all that pressure.’ To emphasise his point there was another agonizing groan. Katherine felt the floor shudder beneath her.
‘Thanks Steven,’ she replied. ‘I guess we’re just getting a little paranoid here.’
‘Which is hardly surprising,’ muttered Rekkid.
They had begun in the ship’s engineering section, but now they were moving into what would have been the more populous sections of the ship, the crew quarters. They began to see Arkari bodies, dozens of them. They lay crumpled against the walls and bulkheads, twisted at odd angles where the force of the impact had hurled them. The ship’s dampening fields must have failed, exposing its vulnerable crew to the full effects of the crash. They hadn’t stood a chance. The pitiful, broken mummies lay where they had fallen, their long dried blood still darkening the light blue of their uniforms. Katherine glanced into one of the cabins as she passed. It was a chaotic mess of smashed belongings hurled against the foremost wall along with their owner whose head had been smashed flat by the force of the crash.
Similar grim sights greeted the pair as they made their way deeper inside the ship. It seemed that the entire crew had been killed instantly when the ship had
plummeted into the desert. Only its shields and immensely robust construction had preserved the vessel itself from destruction.
After some minutes of plodding silently through the dark, up a number of stairwells and across the beam of the ship, they came to a series of larger compartments. Evidently the vessel had been designed for exploration as well as combat since it was equipped with extensive scientific facilities. The labs were in a similar state of chaos as the rest of the ship and they were scattered with piles of smashed equipment and bodies. But amid the destruction there lay something else, a large segmented form, silver skinned and heavily armed. It lay on its back against the wall where the crash had hurled it.
‘My God…’ breathed Katherine. ‘It’s one of those things, like we saw under the temple.’
‘Steven,’ said Rekkid. ‘Are you getting this?’ He cast his suit lights over the inert form.
‘Yeah I see it,’ came the reply. ‘I guess that confirms your theory that the Arkari fought those things. They must have captured one during the fight and tried to study it. Didn’t do the crew of this ship much good though.’
‘This one seems designed for space flight,’ Katherine mused. ‘Look, there aren’t any legs, just a series of fins like the wings on modern Arkari ships.’ She gripped one of the fins and pushed it. Despite appearing to be made of solid metal, it moved at her touch without resistance, like that of a fish.
‘Well,’ said Rekkid. ‘At least we know where my people got the idea from.’
‘No doubt the Navy will have a field day with all this.’
‘That I don’t doubt for a second.’
‘Not far to the bridge now,’ said Katherine as she examined her 3D map. ‘Only a couple more bulkheads to go and we’re there.’
A low moaning issued from the depths of the ship. Even though they knew its source, the pair found it unsettling. It was as if the ship itself were in pain.
‘This is like being inside a haunted house,’ said Rekkid and chuckled nervously.
‘No shit, Rekkid,’ replied Katherine. ‘There’s something about this ship that gives me the creeps. I feel like we’re being watched all the time, it sounds stupid I know but… on my way to Maranos I got talking with a Vreeth named Ikkikut. He said he’d been aboard an Arkari ship once and he felt the same thing: That the ship was watching him.’
‘And this one is watching us I think. I suppose it’s very possible that the onboard AI could have survived this long. If that’s the case then the Navy may have a harder time trying to convince it to give up its secrets than they envisaged.’
‘Come on let’s hurry, the sooner we get out of here the better,’ she said, shivering.
It took them a few more minutes to reach the bridge. They found it in a comparable state of disarray to the rest of the ship. The deck was strewn with bodies, several of which had smashed the instrument panels with the force of their impact. Those who had managed to strap themselves in to their chairs had been gruesomely sliced by the very restraining belts that had been designed to save them.
Rekkid moved over to the Captain’s command console and inspected it, carefully moving her slumped body back into its seat and wiping away some of the blood that had dried on the panels.
‘You know I can’t cease to be held in awe by your people Rekkid,’ said Katherine looking around the gloomy bridge. ‘You were building ships like this and flying to the stars whilst we were still living in the stone-age.’
‘Now you know how the Dendratha feel when they see us.’
‘Rekkid,’ said Katherine. ‘If Arkari ships are equipped with AIs, why do they need crews?’
‘Something to do with a distinct lack of trust I think,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think the military is entirely comfortable with an independent machine having all of this power to itself. I think they had some bad experiences… Ah here it is!’ he exclaimed triumphantly and plugged his Commonwealth manufactured computer into the ancient, yet more sophisticated, Arkari console. He indicated towards a small power port on the rear of the device, to which he had attached a small makeshift adapter.
‘Katherine if you could just plug your suit’s auxiliary power jack into that? Thanks.’
She did as he asked. There was a pregnant pause, and then the console began to power itself up. The light from its displays cast flickering shadows on the walls of the bridge as it booted itself. The screen began to fill with Arkari characters. They made little sense to Katherine, but to Rekkid they proved no obstacle, this was merely an older version of his native tongue.
‘Right let’s have a look…’ he mused. ‘Okay I’ve found the ship’s log but it’s encrypted, I’ll make a copy then we’ll need to get someone on the platform to hack that for us… weapon systems and targeting commands… AI diagnostic tools, all of this is locked out, sensor management ah… here we are, sensor records. This could be interesting, okay let’s copy that too.’
‘That isn’t encrypted.’
‘No, I wonder why?’
‘Perhaps someone wanted us to see it?’
‘Then maybe we ought to have a look at it right now.’
‘If we can, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it to read these file formats. Alright, let’s see if we can have a look at the most recent entries I… what the hell?’
Rekkid looked in astonishment at his computer; something had taken it over. Programs were beginning to load themselves without his intervention. New ones appeared that converted the files into formats his software could read properly. The screen filled with a recording from the ship’s external cameras. Sound recordings of the ship’s crew issued from the computer’s speakers. Katherine’s translator interpreted for her.
The screen showed the space above Maranos’s north-pole. The banded appearance of the planet was instantly recognisable as was the blazing pillar of light that projected from the northern ocean into space.
There was an enormous battle in progress. Thousands upon thousands of ships duelled above the portal in an engagement of apocalyptic proportions. The ship they stood in was manoeuvring hard, desperately striking out at swarms of smaller combatants that shifted and danced like schools of fish, tiny iridescent craft that took apart the Arkari ships with deadly efficiency. At the heart of the storm lay an alien ship of immense size. Where its shimmering bulbous body began to taper to a point at its bow, it split a further five ways into long curving arms that arced forwards. These five appendages spat deadly energies from their tips that carved up the attacking vessels with ease.
‘That thing…’ began Katherine. ‘That thing looks just like the temple!’
‘The evil that Maran protects the Dendratha from: it’s a ship, a bloody great ship!’
‘How big is that thing do you think? God, it must be a hundred kilometres long!’
‘It looks like our brave crew are moving in for an attack run. I’d say that this is where they all die…’
The ship was growing to fill the screen as the Arkari craft charged through swarms of attackers. The vast ship loomed. It was both terrible and beautiful. Its hull displayed hypnotic shifting colours like oil on water and quivering rainbow scales the size of starships that shed still more of the tiny deadly ships by the thousand.
A searing beam of energy reached out lazily and swatted the Arkari ship. The view began to shudder but as the vessel kept moving the AI tried a desperate twisting attack pattern to attempt to evade any more hits. Its weapons lashed out at the enemy that dwarfed it.
There was a further hit, and the view began to spin wildly. The AI succeeded in avoiding collision with the enemy vessel but they were now tumbling out of control towards the planet, and inevitable death. Katherine heard the crew report power failures across the board. The damage to the engines had caused a system wide overload and the AI was losing control of the ship. It would attempt a crash landing on the surface. It was their only hope…
The image disappeared suddenly. Against a black screen stood a line of Arkari lettering.
‘It says,’ he gulped. ‘It says: ‘My own kind will come for me. You must save yourselves. Shut down the portal. Leave now!’
‘It’s the portal’s AI. It’s trying to warn us,’ said Katherine. ‘We have to show the Navy this! We have to let them know the danger we’re all in!’
‘Steven? We’re coming back out… Steven, are you there?’
‘Steven here, I apologise. I was… distracted. Look, something’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘The portal has re-opened.’
Rekkid looked at Katherine. Even in the gloom she could clearly read the terror on his face.
Chapter 35
The Mark Antony was still docked with the Brunel. The last stages of repairs had been completed and the only remaining task was the removal of the repair teams and their equipment before the ship could launch.
Chen sat impatiently on the bridge. She wanted to feel space beneath her again. It had been like an itch she couldn’t scratch all through the boredom of the past week. She’d been placed in charge of the system’s defence, but there had been nothing for her to do once the patrol patterns of the various ships had been established. However, the rest had done her and the crew some good. It had given them time to recover from the stress of battle, and time to mourn their lost comrades.