‘There is more to this than I can reveal at this time,’ O’Hara insisted. ‘Your detectives will be required to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director General as soon as they arrive. I will send a shuttle to you immediately. O’Hara out.’
The image of the admiral vanished as Forrester looked at them both.
‘What the hell is all that about?’ Foxx asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Forrester replied thoughtfully, and then stood up straight. ‘Why are you both still here? Get going, now!’
Foxx led the way out of the office and hurried to grab her things from her desk as Nathan pulled out his sidearm and slipped it into a shoulder holster beneath his leather jacket.
‘Glad I didn’t have any vacation booked.’
Vasquez watched Foxx furtively. ‘What’s up?’
Foxx looked up and saw Allen also watching her expectantly.
‘Get packed,’ she said. ‘We’re off to Saturn.’
‘Not Tethys Gaol again?’ Allen uttered in horror.
‘Polaris Station,’ Nathan replied. ‘We’ve got a date with some big wigs at CSS.’
Vasquez and Allen exchanged a glance and then scrambled over each other to grab their weapons from their desks as Doctor Schmidt shimmered into existence alongside Foxx.
‘Will you be requiring my presence at CSS?’ he asked. ‘I am due to report back aboard Titan in the morning anyway.’
‘Yes,’ Foxx said. ‘I want us all there. Whatever we’re up against here, CSS clearly knows something about it already. We brief them on everything we know, together.’
Nathan was about to lead the way when he suddenly thought of Sula and her mother. He set his bag down and quickly accessed a communications terminal using his ocular implant.
‘What are you doin’?’ Vasquez asked.
‘I can’t just walk out of here,’ Nathan said. ‘I promised I’d call Sula tomorrow so I gotta let her know we’re out of town.’
Allen’s features softened into a curious smile. ‘I love the way he says things like that – outta town. Makes it seem like we’re all still living in farm houses on the prairie.’
Nathan tossed a screwed–up ball of paper at Allen, who ducked the missile easily as Nathan saw the call request connect and Sula’s mother appeared before him in the room.
‘Detective Ironside,’ Rosaline said formally, placing a thin veil over her surprise and curiosity. ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear from you today.’
‘I know,’ Nathan replied. ‘I’m afraid something’s come up and I’m heading out of tow… off to Polaris Station for a couple of days. I wanted to call and let Sula know before I went.’
Rosaline appeared surprised. ‘You’re more likely to see her than I am then.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sula didn’t call you?’ her mother asked. ‘She applied for an Ensign’s commission in the fleet and was selected for an experience package. She left yesterday.’
Nathan stood in silence for a moment, not sure of what to say.
‘Okay, that’s great,’ he said, overcoming his disappointment that she’d travelled away without telling him. ‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’
Rosaline shook her head.
‘Her posting was for three days on a fleet frigate anchored at Polaris Station but I haven’t heard from them yet.’
Nathan lifted his bag onto his shoulder.
‘Okay, I’ll try to meet up with her out there. Do you know which ship she was sent to?’
‘Endeavour.’
***
XX
Ayleea
A loud alarm blared through Tyrone’s cockpit as his Phantom fighter plunged into Ayleea’s thick atmosphere. A flickering halo of fierce red light burst into life around the fighter’s sleek fuselage, forks of flame probing against the canopy as Tyrone fought with the controls to slow the craft’s fiery descent.
The distress signal from the ground contact vanished as the Phantom was surrounded by the fearsome heat of re entry. Even the latest communication technology struggled to penetrate such high energy phenomena, and the Phantom did not possess enough signal boost to maintain the link. Tyrone scanned at his instruments, screens that displayed his engine temperatures, shield strength and airspeed as the atmosphere around the fighter became gradually denser.
‘C’mon honey, bring me home.’
Tyrone locked the navigation computer onto the communication signal’s last known location as the craft plummeted down. He knew that the enemy warship would return eventually. His only hope was to make contact with survivors on the surface, learn everything that he could about the enemy, and hope that the fleet would make it to Ayleea before he was captured or killed. As to the survivors, Tyrone steeled his mind for the worst but maintained a sliver of hope that Fortitude’s crew had escaped before their ship had been overrun by the terrifying entity that had consumed it.
The halo of plasma and flame gusted out as the Phantom slowed down to a lower Mach number. Tyrone could see the curve of the planet across the horizon, the sky above already turning a peculiar shade of red as the planet’s red dwarf star blazed down upon the jungles far below, the star itself far larger in the sky than the sun Tyrone was used to.
Tyrone had known about the thick forests that carpeted so much of this hot, violent world. A dense atmosphere was protected from radiation by a magnetosphere more powerful than the earth’s and the planet’s dense iron core was much larger. Born in an ancient nebula along with hundreds of other suns, the powerful little red dwarf star at the center of the Ayleean system possessed only half the Sol System’s central star mass, but as a Main Sequence star it often produced bursts of violent solar storms and radiation that bathed Ayleea and would have been close to fatal to most life on earth.
Tyrone saw dense banks of clouds billowing violently upward from the planet’s surface, cumulonimbus clouds four times as high and many times more violent than those on earth. They rose up in gigantic, terrifying pillars of pink and orange and red, flickering with lightning bolts ten miles high. Tyrone turned the Phantom away from the largest of them as he sought a passage through them. He reached down and manually reset his altimeter to Ayleea’s barometric pressure as he descended, and saw 1412 millibars on the readout as he did so.
The vast thundercloud trains dominated the horizon as the Phantom descended through thirty thousand feet, and Tyrone spotted a narrow patch of clear air buried deep within the violent storms. He knew how dangerous it could be to fly directly through major storm cells on earth, let alone out here on this cruel and dangerous world, but he had no choice as the signal had emanated from somewhere below the buffeting storms.
Tyrone aimed the Phantom for the fragile gap in the weather and saw sprawling tracts of dense jungle beneath it, the leaves of the forests a deep mauve and black. The planet’s parent star radiated most strongly at infra red wavelengths, producing little of the blue light common on earth. Here on Ayleea, reds, purple, mauves and blacks dominated the landscape beneath a red sky that gave the impression of a permanent sunset even during the brightest days.
The Phantom rocked violently as it hit turbulence and then suddenly the clouds closed up around Tyrone and his fighter was plunged into darkness. Tyrone switched his gaze to the flight instruments, nothing visible outside the canopy except darkness and the occasional, vivid flare of angry white light as lightning bolts forked through the atmosphere like giant, jagged fingers probing for him. The fighter’s wings rocked as though they were being hit by falling rocks and Tyrone gripped the control column tighter and eased back on the throttles as he sought some sight of the ground.
A sudden crescendo of impacts shook him to the core as a cloud of fist sized hailstones pummeled the craft, only her shields preventing the canopy from being smashed in under the blows. Tyrone cried out in surprise and his heart thumped against his chest as the Phantom blasted clear of the hailstones and then sliced downward out of the clouds.
Brutal, rugged jun
gles of dark foliage loomed before him, steep ravines and hillsides forged by crashing rivers and millennia of storms and savage gales, wrapped in wreaths and ribbons of gloomy cloud. Tyrone’s sharp eye scanned instinctively for a landing spot somewhere in the forbidding terrain and he managed to pick out a small canyon wash to his left where a clearing broke from the tree line alongside a turbulent river of dark water.
Tyrone hauled back on the throttles and control column, the Phantom sweeping around in a tight turn as he bled off airspeed and extended the fighter’s spoilers and landing struts. The EM Drive spooled up as he came in to land, the wings rocking and the fuselage bucking this way and that on the strong winds as he fought for control.
The Phantom drifted over the eerily black water, like fast flowing oil struck through with rainbow hues, and then it thumped down onto the clearing amid billowing clouds of dislodged dust and sand. Tyrone killed the main engines immediately and then extended the claw grips from beneath the landing struts to keep the fighter anchored to the shore, fearful that the gales would tip the craft over. The sound of the engines and the hum of electronics died down as Tyrone shut off the avionics and batteries to save power, and suddenly he was sitting alone in a silent cockpit staring out at an alien world.
Squalls of rain drummed against the now unshielded canopy, drenching it in seconds. Tyrone loosened his harnesses and pulled back all four manual canopy restraints before hitting the open switch. The angular canopy opened with a hiss of equalizing pressure and Tyrone felt a hot breath of air waft into the cockpit along with the scent of rotting vegetation and electrically charged air.
The heat hit him hard as he breathed it in, dense and clogging in his lungs as though they were filling with warm water. He sucked in air as he clambered out of the cockpit and jumped down onto the sandy shore, the rain squall passing but leaving millions of impressions in the sand where rain drops had landed with impressive force. He landed surprisingly hard on the beach and his legs almost folded beneath him, Ayleea’s mass greater than that of the earth due to its larger iron core. He forced himself to stand upright against the increased gravity and looked for some sign of habitation.
The forest canopy swayed in the hot and buffeting winds like shimmering black towers, the sand of the clearing beneath him coarse and crunching beneath his boots as he walked up the beach. Behind him the water of the river flowed like black treacle, the higher gravity of the world reducing the peaks and troughs in the waves as above the sky flickered with latent energy and the flashes of lightning bolts high in the blood red atmosphere.
Tyrone reached the tree line and crouched down as he pulled out an emergency communicator and activated it. Capable of both broadcasting and receiving on a multitude of frequencies, it represented his only means of detecting the source of the transmission he’d received while in orbit.
Tyrone downloaded the coordinates of the signal and looked at a display screen on the device. He had landed within a couple of miles of the source but he knew instantly that in this terrain the journey there would be extremely tough. Worse, he had heard as a child the stories of the kind of creatures that inhabited this world, stories designed to scare children into being good for their parents or be sent to Ayleea. He looked up into the jungles before him, wreaths of vapor swirling around the thick, flat topped trees draped in dense coils of vines and creepers. To his right, in the distance he could see coils of thick smoke boiling up into the atmosphere from fires raging in a nearby city.
‘Damn it,’ he cursed as he looked back at his fighter.
The Phantom was in good enough shape to fly in this kind of weather but he might not be able to find anywhere to land closer to the source of the signal on this horrendous planet. The origin of the signal was somewhere to the north, or currently east on this world due to its rapidly changing magnetic orientation. Mountain chains dominated the horizon in that direction, weathered into ragged peaks as though he were looking at the upturned blade of a gigantic combat knife, its serrated edges black and…
A noise attracted his attention and he peered into the forest as one hand flashed to the plasma pistol at his side. The darkness of the dense forest was compounded by the pigmentation of the leaves and trees, making the jungle depths seem like midnight even during the day. The glow from the red dwarf star cast an unusual hue across the turbulent clouds above, disorientating Tyrone and making it hard to detect motion, and the rumbling winds disguised any sound.
He knew that he couldn’t hope to follow the river to the source of the signal as it headed in the wrong direction, flowing away from the mountains, and its force would be far too great for him to swim against. He turned to his right and saw the flood plain spreading out before him, endless miles of watery swamps stretching toward the oceans.
And then he saw the lights coming toward him.
Four of them, bright white and moving fast, zipping low across the water like insects. Tyrone dashed for the tree line even as he heard a familiar crump of energy and a hail of small plasma shots swept like burning hail across the beach. Tyrone sprinted into the trees as the shots peppered the sand around him, puffs of smoke from the scorched beach leaving pools of glassy black material as the superheated plasma melted the sand.
Tyrone crouched down and aimed his pistol out across the beach as four small, metallic craft raced by. He could hear the whine of their engines as they zipped past and turned as one like a flock of tiny birds. Through beams of weak sunlight slicing through the clouds he saw the mass of objects wheel toward him to the sound of beating wings.
Sentry Drones. The most horrific of battlefield weapons, Tyrone had heard of them being deployed by the enemy during the Ayleean War, and of similar devices being used by the CSS Marines in retaliation. So cruel were the bugs and so horrific the injuries they had caused in combat that in the end an agreement had been signed by both sides in the conflict banning their use.
Tyrone whirled and launched himself into the forest with the speed of the possessed, his legs and arms pumping as he vaulted over a fallen tree. He looked over his shoulder and saw the swarm of ugly metallic creatures accelerate as they plunged into the forest and closed on him rapidly. He knew that they were not biological: the glint of metal on their bodies and wings suggested machines at least the size of his fist and aggressively styled like some kind of demonic hornet.
The humming grew louder and he dared not look over his shoulder to see how close the drones were as he struggled to maintain his pace under the heavy gravity and dense foliage clogging his path. Tyrone tried to keep moving but it was as though his body was shutting down, the extra effort required just to run too much for his muscles. His vision began to blur and he staggered sideways, momentarily off balance as he fought to maintain his pace.
Tyrone struggled along what looked like an animal trail between rows of trees and chanced a look over his shoulder. The swarm of mechanical horrors was closing in fast, and he could see through the feeble shafts of red light beaming down through the trees that they had metallic antennae that probed the air ahead of them, glossy black abdomens and inch long stingers that he knew contained a vile cocktail of poisons designed to paralyze and kill.
He ran harder but his lungs were spent and his legs trembled as he staggered deeper into the forest. The rumble of the winds faded, replaced by the sounds of a jungle that were both familiar and alien: strange cries, whispering insects, falling branches and the sound of unknown creatures up in the canopy. Sweat drenched his skin and ran in thick rivulets down his face, clogging his vision.
He looked back again and saw one of the bugs within a few meters of him now, big glossy black eyes watching him with a soulless intent, wings beating the air as it weaved between the thick ferns and dropped down under branches before popping back up in single minded pursuit.
Tyrone changed direction again, plunging deeper into the forest in the hopes of avoiding being cut off by the terrible machines. He heard them shift course behind him, dog legging his path as they rush
ed in with their ugly abdomens and needle sharp stingers rolled up beneath their bodies to point at him. He skittered to a halt, turned, took careful aim and fired his pistol. The shot rocketed out in a bright blaze of plasma and struck the nearest drone square on its ugly face, the metallic creature dissolving in a cloud of incandescent embers as its now headless abdomen plummeted to the forest floor and crashed into thick bushes alongside Tyrone.
The other drones wheeled up sharply and veered away as Tyrone fired randomly at them, scattering them away as he backed up. His back thumped against something solid and he turned to see the great, squat trunk of a tree blocking his path, thick with vines. Suddenly the vines moved and he realized that they were not vines at all. Primeval instinct made him look up and he saw the cruel eyes of some unspeakable creature nestled in its lair amid the branches of the canopy, its thick beak as big as his torso and clicking loudly as its countless arms writhed out and pinned him to the tree before he could escape.
Tyrone screamed as the powerful vines hauled him up toward the clicking beak and he smelled a rancid odor of rotting meat. The tentacles wrapped more tightly around him and he felt his boots lifted from the jungle floor as he was dragged up the rough trunk toward the creature’s mouth.
Tyrone writhed as he tried to free his right arm, his pistol pressed against his leg, trapped by one of the thick vines. He looked up and saw the beak clicking, juddering as though in anticipation of a fresh meal as thick drool spilled in copious loops and strings to drench his flight suit.
Tyrone looked down and saw more vines moving to wrap around him and he cried out in horror. He twisted his pistol hand until the barrel of the weapon was pointing as much away from his leg as possible and then he squeezed the trigger.
A plasma bolt roared from the barrel and blasted through the thick vines and he heard the creature emit a deep, guttural roar that reverberated through his chest and the tree itself. The vines flinched and recoiled from the damage and Tyrone felt the pressure released slightly. He hauled his arm up out of the grasp of the tentacles and looked up as the animal’s beak brushed against the roof of his skull, a gaping maw of pink tissue and rotting strings of flesh and bone fragments.
Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Page 15