The Vraxar weren’t done yet.
“Behind!” shouted Munoz. “Lots of them!”
“Squad C reinforce!”
The sound of two thumping grenade explosions reached McKinney. He didn’t dare turn until he was sure the left side of the room was clear. There was another blast and then another.
“Left side clear,” he called.
“Right side clear,” Corporal Li confirmed.
The passage along which they’d entered the gym wasn’t clear and Squad C continued to roll grenades through the open doorway to keep the Vraxar from approaching. The Vraxar threw their own grenades in response and the dark energy mixed and swirled amongst the plasma fires. Luckily, the alien soldiers had no angle to land a throw close to the squad and it was already looking like a standoff.
“Squad B, cover these two exits,” barked McKinney, indicating the passages leading from the opposite wall of the gym. “Corporal Evans, how many are they?”
“Shitloads, sir.”
It was as good an estimate as any.
“Fall back slowly. Squad A provide cover – keep up the pressure on that opening. Musser, rockets.”
Step by step they retreated over the floor of the gym. Musser fired rockets along the corridor to keep the enemy at bay and some of the men lobbed grenades during the recharge period of the plasma tube. The walls of the corridor glowed dull red and lumps of molten alloy dripped from the ceiling.
Twice, McKinney nearly tripped over the mangled body of a Vraxar as he walked backwards. He took final note of the tragedy in the room - there was a pile of human bodies against one wall and other, uncollected, bodies were scattered amongst the broken equipment.
He reached the exit passageway – Squads B and C were already fifty metres ahead, having taken cover around a corner.
“Webb, Musser, we’re going to make a run for that next turning.”
The men knew what to do and they fired in turn. As soon as the first rocket exploded, McKinney shouted out the order to retreat. He turned and joined the soldiers in a frantic sprint towards the safety of the turning ahead.
They made it. McKinney had no intention of stopping and he carried on at a run, barging his way through to take the lead. The stairwell was some way ahead, though there was no guarantee it would offer any kind of safety.
“Sir?” said Bannerman urgently. With the expertise of a born pack man, he was able to operate his comms unit under almost any circumstances.
“What is it?” grunted McKinney.
“It’s TO Hattie Rhodes, sir. You need to hear this.”
McKinney reached a T-junction and stopped to look both ways. “This isn’t a good time.” He set off again to the right.
“You need to hear.”
Bannerman didn’t wait for the go-ahead and simply patched Rhodes directly through to McKinney’s suit comms.
“What?” he asked.
“I thought I’d better let you know, Lieutenant. We just saw something running across the hangar floor here on level 300.”
“Tell me something new.”
“You need to listen to me. These were big – really big. Ten feet tall big, with lots of armour and carrying some kind of guns.”
That got McKinney’s attention.
“How many?”
“I saw four. There could be more. Lieutenant McKinney – they entered the stairwell. They’re coming down. I don’t think you want to meet them.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
He cut off the comms and kept running. Most of the Vraxar he’d encountered up until now were originally Estral. If the aliens had conquered hundreds of other species, it made sense there’d be plenty of other types. Whatever these new ones were, he didn’t like the sound of them and hoped he wouldn’t meet them soon. Deep inside, he knew the Vraxar had deployed these new creatures for the specific purpose of locating and killing his squad. He ground his teeth together and ran on.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“HOW LONG UNTIL WE REACH NESTA-T3?” asked Captain Charlie Blake.
“Six hours, sir.”
“Still plenty of time to figure out what Fleet Admiral Duggan is keeping hidden from us.”
“We have no right to know,” said Lieutenant Hawkins.
“I disagree with your assertion, but don’t worry – I’m not about to go against the Fleet Admiral’s wishes and try to circumvent whatever locks he’s put in place,” said Blake. “As tempting as it is to try.”
He put the matter from his mind and directed his energies towards other priorities. The Juniper was a vital asset to the Space Corps and it was protected by numerous advanced missile batteries. What it lacked was an Obsidiar energy source. Therefore, it was easy enough to guess the Vraxar had managed to disable or destroy it without a problem. The records showed the cruiser ES Impact Crater was assigned to the orbital’s protection – an Imposition class was a powerful warship, though not something that would stop the Vraxar. In addition, there was a Crimson class destroyer in one of the hangars, along with a scout and a prospector in for scheduled maintenance. Again, nothing of a threat to the four Vraxar warships.
“Why would they attack?” he muttered to himself. “What is there to gain?”
“Do you want a list?” asked Lieutenant Pointer.
Blake was curious to hear her thoughts. “Go on, then.”
“I’ve been told the Juniper has seventy-two Obsidiar processing clusters.” said Pointer. “That’s clusters, rather than individual processors.”
“You heard that?”
“I told you I have my sources.” She smiled primly. “It strikes me that they’re not going to break through the Juniper’s encryption if it has so much processing power. The enemy could steal the physical data array again – I’m sure it holds plenty more secrets than what was on the ES Determinant. That might benefit them long term, but in reality, they’ll still need to break it down for analysis, however long that will take.”
“So, what do they want it for? They may have simply destroyed it.”
Pointer shook her head. “Some of the Space Corps’ best minds work on the Juniper. If you were an alien race which used the bodies of your opponents, would you pick a man from the gutter or would you choose someone working in a tech lab?”
Blake understood what she was suggesting. “If the Vraxar converted everyone on every planet, they would number in the trillions.”
“Maybe that’s not what they want,” she said. “Maybe they pick the best from every race. What if the conversion to Vraxar allows them to utilise the expertise of the subject?”
“The Vraxar we spoke to on Tillos told us the conversion process destroyed the mind of the individual. If I remember correctly, you were unconscious during that part of the conversation.”
“You told me afterwards!” she said accusingly. “The Vraxar told you the conversion often destroys the mind, while sometimes they are able to extract memories afterwards.”
“Yes, that’s what it said,” he admitted.
“The new subjects are still able to serve, sir. With or without conscious memories of what they once were, perhaps the new Vraxar retain the knowledge of what they did in life. It could be that a human scientist becomes a Vraxar scientist. A human soldier becomes a Vraxar soldier.”
“It makes sense to me,” said Hawkins.
“I can’t really offer you an argument,” said Blake. “Your idea makes as much sense as any other.”
“It makes more sense, sir. Admit it.”
He opened his mouth, without knowing quite how to respond to the teasing challenge. He gave up.
“Fine, I’ll admit that as far as theories go, it’s a decent one.”
“Thank you.”
“How does it help us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve still got nearly six hours to come up with something, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
The flight continued until, with an hour to go, Blake gave
the instruction for them to come out of lightspeed in order to find out the most recent information on the status of the Juniper. Once again, he found Admiral Duggan was available and the news was grim.
“We have little in the way of intel. In truth, we don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on. I am pulling a fleet together which I may or may not send to the Juniper’s location. I can tell you already, it won’t be enough; furthermore, it’s several days away and there won’t be a single Obsidiar-cored ship amongst the numbers.”
“There’re still no comms from the orbital? I thought the backups worked in pretty much any situation?”
“A short while after we initially lost contact, one of our bases on Overtide started receiving low-speed distress signals from the Juniper. Much of the information was scrambled, consistent with interference from somewhere close to the source. A jammer, perhaps.”
“I take it from your voice there is no longer a distress signal, sir?”
“No there is not. The signal stopped without warning.”
“Have they destroyed the Juniper?”
“We don’t know. We’ve got an old monitoring station on Atlantis focused on Nesta-T3. An hour ago, it located the two Neutralisers and the mothership. We’ve had no sighting of the Vraxar battleship or the Juniper.”
“What aren’t you telling me, sir?”
“There’s a chance the Vraxar mothership has picked up the Juniper – brought the whole damned lot into their bay. The alternative is, they’ve destroyed the orbital and are scavenging whatever pieces they think might be of use. The monitoring station isn’t sophisticated enough to perform a quick sweep of the area to find evidence of wreckage. The technicians are recalibrating it and we should have an idea soon.”
“My comms lieutenant thinks the Vraxar might value the personnel onboard, sir. Based on our experiences on Tillos, she believes the enemy may try to make use of their expertise through conversion.”
Duggan was silent for a moment. “It’s a strong theory and similar to an idea one of my own teams came up with.”
“If it’s true, the personnel on the Juniper may already be lost to us, sir.”
“I know.” Duggan swore, revealing the depths of his anger. “Some of our leading scientists are working on the Juniper – in the field of weapons, defence and propulsion. In death they might become our enemies. It’s a terrible thought and one which makes me despise these Vraxar more than I thought possible. They’re our men and women. Until I’m certain, I won’t give up. I will never give them up.”
“We will be there within the hour, sir. Once the ES Blackbird is in position, we should be able to give you something to work with.”
Duggan answered, his voice strong with the certainty of a man who’d made up his mind about something he wasn’t going to divulge. “Your primary mission is to discover if there’s anyone left alive on the Juniper, Captain Blake. Learn what you can about the Vraxar and send the details to the Space Corps’ main command and control. Mostly, I want you to find out what’s happened and then I can decide.”
“Decide on what, sir?”
“Too many questions, Captain Blake. I’m glad you didn’t ask me how to accomplish your mission. It gives me hope you have the ability to pull it off.”
Blake was nonplussed. “It’s what I signed up for, sir. Basic training tells us there’s no such thing as a suicide mission – there’s always a way.”
“Is that what they tell you these days?”
“Was the lesson lacking in accuracy, sir?”
“Ask me the same question when we’ve beaten the Vraxar, Captain Blake.”
“I will definitely do so.”
“Good. Now stop wasting time and get on your way to Nesta-T3.”
“We’re on it, sir.”
The comms went dead abruptly. Blake was quickly learning that Duggan wasn’t a man who partook of extended goodbyes.
“I think he likes you,” said Lieutenant Hawkins.
“You reckon?”
“Absolutely, sir. You’re the most experienced captain in his fleet.”
“That only means he’s going to throw the most crap my – our - way.”
“Don’t you know anything about the Fleet Admiral?” asked Pointer with surprising heat.
“No, I don’t suppose I do, now you mention it,” said Blake.
“Maybe you should do some more reading, sir.”
“I will.”
“And thank you for telling him it was my idea, sir. About the Vraxar wanting to convert our best personnel.”
Blake studied her for a moment. Perhaps in the world of Caz Pointer, everyone stabbed everyone else in the back whenever the opportunity arose. He scrubbed the uncharitable thought. The old Caz Pointer was either gone or somewhere in hiding, leaving behind a much more appealing example of humanity. He caught himself staring and averted his eyes before it became obvious.
“No problem,” he said.
He twisted in his seat and made a familiar gesture towards Lieutenant Quinn. Quinn acknowledged with a nod.
“Fission engines coming online, sir.”
It was another rough transition. Blake kidded himself he was getting used to them, when in reality they were distinctly unpleasant to endure. Nevertheless, he smiled and pretended it was little more uncomfortable than finding a stone in his shoe.
“Do you understand what we’re doing, Lieutenant Quinn?”
“Yes, sir. Admiral Duggan sent through the trajectory and speed of the Vraxar warships. We’re going to arrive low to Nesta-T3 and on the far side of the moon, to reduce the chance they see our fission signature.”
“With the additional protection from the fission suppression system, we should be safe,” said Blake.
“It’s riskier than dropping out of lightspeed ten million klicks out and coming in on the gravity engines, sir.”
“In technology we trust.”
At the precise moment predicted by its navigational system, the ES Blackbird arrived. The fission engine shut off, ejecting the vessel into local space seven thousand kilometres above the ice-clad surface of Nesta-T3. On the bridge, a series of proximity warnings chimed their gentle notes. Seven thousand kilometres was a wide enough buffer and Blake ignored the alarms.
“Activate the stealth modules,” he ordered.
“Stealth online, sir,” said Quinn. “The power contribution from our Gallenium blocks has dropped to zero and we’re running solely off our Obsidiar core.”
“The Vraxar are close,” said Blake.
Lieutenant Pointer was looking hard at her console. “Scanning the vicinity.”
“Remember there’s a battleship unaccounted for.”
“I’ve got my eyes wide open. You’ll learn the moment I see anything, sir.”
“We’re searching for wreckage as well,” said Blake.
“There’ll be no wreckage,” Pointer replied.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Firstly, because I am. Secondly, if the Atlantis monitoring station was capable of locating the Vraxar warships, it will certainly be able to find pieces of something as large as the Juniper, whatever Fleet Admiral Duggan says.”
“I’ll accept your assertion, Lieutenant.”
“I could be wrong, so I’m still checking out every possibility, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Blake glanced at the navigational and guidance systems. So far, everything was as he’d hoped and the Blackbird was on the exact opposite side of Nesta-T3 to the predicted position of the Vraxar warships. As moons went, Nesta-T3 was fairly large, with a circumference of fifteen thousand kilometres. It was the sole moon of the planet Elude, which it orbited at a distance of more than a million kilometres. Both the planet and its moon were what many in the Space Corps would fondly refer to as shitholes. They were bleak, barren and with nothing of interest unless you were an excessively keen geologist specialising in cold, grey stone buried beneath layers of ice.
“Let’s go find that mo
thership,” said Blake.
Flying on manual was frowned upon in the Corps, but the control bars were already becoming familiar friends to Blake. The navigation system plotted a vector and all he had to do was guide the ship along it. If anyone wanted to complain, they had the opportunity when they audited the ES Lucid.
He recognised when he was becoming distracted and snapped his attention to keeping the Blackbird on course.
“There’s no sign of the battleship so far, sir,” said Pointer, finishing the medium-range scan. “The other three ships should be visible to sensor sight shortly.”
“It’s got to be close,” he muttered. “Why else would they have brought it?”
“Unless we’re exceptionally unlucky, they won’t see us with the stealth modules running,” said Quinn.
“I don’t like unknowns, Lieutenant.”
The navigation system had plotted a textbook trajectory that took them far higher above Nesta-T3 than Blake judged was necessary. He deviated, bringing them lower and lower until they were within fifty kilometres of the icy peaks and frozen lakes which covered much of the surface. The underside sensor feed showed a blur of white alternating with grey.
Gradually, the moon fell away as he once again adjusted their heading onto a course intended to intercept with the predicted position of the three Vraxar spaceships.
“The shielding of the moon should end in less than a minute,” said Pointer. “If they’re at their expected location, I’ll pick them up straight away.”
In terms of their position, the Vraxar offered no surprises, being within a few metres of what turned out to be an exceptionally accurate prediction from the Atlantis monitoring station.
“Got them,” said Pointer. “The forward sensor has a lock.”
“At least they’re not jumping around like those other ones,” said Hawkins. “I’ve got the big one targeted with our Shatterer and Shimmer launchers.”
“Two of each,” said Blake.
“Even a needle can kill if you stick it in the right place, sir.”
Blake didn’t accept the invitation to respond. He watched the three enemy warships for a time. The mothership was thirty thousand kilometres above Nesta-T3 and orbiting slowly. It was flanked by the two Neutralisers at the comparatively short distance of five thousand kilometres. There was something repulsive about these ugly constructions of alloy. As he directed the ES Blackbird onto a following course, it struck him that everything about the Vraxar was so far from removed from what was natural, there was no way to appreciate anything about them in the way that the most sworn enemies might see something to admire in their opponents.
Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2) Page 12