“I can get a shot off, sir,” said Webb. “There’ll be no time to aim it unless you’re trying to get me killed.”
“Do what you can, else they’re going to wipe us out!”
Neither Webb nor Musser were visible from where McKinney was hiding. He saw one rocket race away, its trajectory clearly marking it as a miss.
“Damnit,” said Musser.
“That third one is coming our way,” shouted McKinney, flicking another grenade around the edge of the bench towards the two aliens. “Try harder!”
The ominous sound of heavy footsteps informed him that one of the Vraxar was advancing, doubtless with the intention of getting a clear shot at the squad. A few of the men rose up, trying to bring it down with repeaters. McKinney joined them, firing a short burst before a clattering of enemy fire drove him to the floor again.
Clay Reeves was killed, reduced to something unrecognizable when he remained in sight for too long. Ricky Vega screamed something across the open channel and the squad medic Armand Grover swarmed towards him, pulling a med-box behind him.
“Clifton, what have you got?” yelled McKinney to the squad’s lone explosives man.
“You don’t want to know, sir.”
“I do want to know!” shouted McKinney furiously. “Why do you think I’m asking? Stop pissing around and throw something, you stupid bastard! We’re getting murdered here!”
“Whatever you say, sir.”
McKinney wasn’t sure which bench Clifton was hiding behind. He looked frantically around and caught sight of a square, light-blue object sailing through the air overhead. He tried to predict where it was going to land – somewhere near the far exit he guessed.
“Everyone get down, that’s on a really short…”
The explosion drowned out the end of the sentence. The entire, vast room was lit up in brilliant white-blue light, overloading the sensor in McKinney’s visor. Static covered his vision and his earpiece emitted a high-pitched squeal of distress. Flames from the plasma charge washed outwards and upwards. They hit the ceiling with tremendous force and were diverted sideways and downwards, creating a hurricane of fiery wind. It swept over the bench in front of McKinney and engulfed his body. He shouted his defiance at the fire, commanding it to leave him alive.
The light faded, taking the worst of the heat with it. The sensor feed in McKinney’s visor stabilised and the squealing in his ears disappeared. He raised his head cautiously over the top of the bench to see what damage the explosive charge had wrought.
One of the Vraxar was almost completely incinerated – its armoured body was slumped over one of the flatbed lifters and it burned fiercely and brightly. The second was upright and aflame. It was still alive and it struggled to lift its chain gun. McKinney opened up on it with his repeater and watched impassively as his bullets plunged through the heat-softened armour. In a moment it joined the other Vraxar in death.
“Up!” he ordered. “TO Rhodes said there were four of these things and it won’t have escaped your attention that we’ve only killed three.”
McKinney assessed the situation. Three soldiers had died in the engagement and Ricky Vega had lost a hand. His spacesuit had sealed over the wound and in combination with Grover’s med-box, the man spoke as if he couldn’t give a damn about the injury. If he lived through this, one of the Space Corp’s medical facilities would happily grow him a new hand. For the moment, he couldn’t fire a gun very well but he wouldn’t slow them down.
If there was one positive to be taken, it was proof that the level of toxins had fallen far enough that the human skin’s exposure to the air wasn’t sufficient to cause death. Or at least McKinney hoped that was the case.
“My repeater’s out of ammo,” said Munoz. “Those bastards sucked up a lot of bullets.”
A few of the other men were in a similar situation and they dropped their repeaters to the ground. The weapons could be reloaded easily enough, but here on the Juniper it was just as likely they’d be able to pick up a whole new replacement rather than finding a spare magazine. McKinney checked how much ammunition remained in his repeater. Thirty percent. It was lower than he wanted, but not so low that it was time to abandon the weapon.
“What if there’s another of those things along there, Lieutenant?” asked Corporal Evans. “There’s no way we could kill one if we ran into it in the corridor.”
“The rockets took out the first one,” said McKinney. “We’ll need to take care we don’t get surprised, so we can get the first shots away. More importantly, there’s no choice for us – we have to keep moving or we’re going to be overrun by the Vraxar behind us.”
“Yeah.”
McKinney rounded the men up and got them moving. He tried to convince himself there’d be time to mourn the fallen later, but he couldn’t give himself that promise.
The workshop was a mess and the air was more than a hundred degrees hotter than it had been when they first entered it. McKinney’s suit was blistered in patches but still intact. It now creaked when he walked, which he figured was an acceptable outcome given what the material had endured.
“Clifton, what the hell was that?” he asked, remembering the size of the blast. “Didn’t you have anything smaller?”
“I didn’t want to take any chances, sir.”
“There’s something wrong with you, Clifton,” said Garcia.
After the struggles so far, it was a surprise to meet no further resistance on the way to level 285. The squad heard occasional sounds, without being to identify exactly where they were coming from. Other than that, it appeared as though they’d outpaced the Vraxar coming from behind and whatever enemy were on the upper levels, they hadn’t yet reached this far. McKinney wasn’t at all convinced it would be plain sailing from here – there was another one of those huge Vraxar out there, still looking for the survivors. The Juniper is big. Maybe it got lost.
They reached the Juniper’s primary comms hub room a full five minutes ahead of Sergeant Woods. The hub was another square room amongst the thousands of other square rooms that filled the orbital. It was accessed by a single doorway in a wall at least ten metres thick. The door was in its recess to one side – all the alloy in the world didn’t make a difference if the enemy could disable your most sophisticated locks.
McKinney walked slowly into the room, his eyes taking in the three rows of comms consoles. There’d been a full shift working here by the looks of it – most of the chairs were occupied, whilst there were seven or eight bodies on the floor and another propped forehead-first against the replicator. A cup of dark fluid sat unclaimed in the serving slot.
“I worry that I’m getting used to all this,” said Garcia. “Look, these two consoles are operational.”
“Leave them, soldier. I don’t want you breaking anything before Lieutenant Cruz gets here.”
“Sergeant Woods and the others are coming, sir,” said Mills. “I can see him outside.”
“Give him a wave.”
Moments later, several figures dressed in a mixture of military and civilian spacesuits entered the comms room. It wasn’t exactly crowded, but they were too bunched up for McKinney’s liking. He ordered most of the people out and instructed Corporals Li and Evans to find somewhere outside they could fortify.
There wasn’t a lot of time for greetings, nor to find out how Sergeant Woods had made it so far without apparent difficulty. McKinney was sure he’d find out later.
His HUD overlay identified Lieutenant Cruz amongst the figures remaining in the room. McKinney stepped forward. “We’re in deep trouble again.”
“I’d laugh if it wasn’t so awful,” she said, holding her gauss rifle across her chest as if she were afraid to lower it for even a second.
“We need to get a message out to the Space Corps. In case they think we’re all dead.”
“They won’t come for us, Lieutenant,” said Woods. “Our fleet doesn’t have the firepower to take out whatever it is that’s captured the Juniper.”
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“We’re going to do something – even if it fails.”
“These look like the secondary comms consoles,” said Cruz, taking a few steps across the floor. “They must run off an alternative power source.”
“We haven’t had a chance to pull the bodies away,” said McKinney.
He joined Cruz at one of the consoles. The former operator’s head was tipped back and his mouth was open, as if he’d fallen asleep at his station. McKinney put a hand under the man’s shoulders and hauled him off his seat. The body was stiff and it retained its pose when he placed it reverently onto the floor.
Cruz took the dead man’s place. She studied the console briefly, before reaching out with both hands. Her fingers darted here and there across the screens and the buttons.
“There,” she said. “I’ve send out a distress signal, letting the Space Corps know we’re still alive.” She turned in her seat. “Do you want the bad news?”
“Go on.”
“The signal will take a couple of hours to reach Atlantis and longer to get to Overtide.”
“I can wait,” said McKinney. “It’s not so long to find out whether they’re going to attempt a rescue or not.”
A message appeared on one of the console screens. McKinney had been around this stuff long enough to realise it was a response code. Cruz was on it in a flash, sending an acknowledgement.
“There’s a Space Corps warship shadowing us,” she said. “A spy vessel.”
“That’s not going to get us out of here,” said Woods.
A note of excitement appeared in Cruz’s voice. “It’s Captain Blake,” she said. “He’s asking details about our situation.”
“Tell him we’re in the crap.”
“He wants specifics.”
McKinney smiled behind his visor. “Give him a run-down.”
It took a few minutes and Captain Blake asked a series of questions which Cruz answered concisely. It seemed as if Blake had something in mind, though McKinney couldn’t for the life of him predict what it was. Shortly, he was to get an answer.
“He’s got a plan, Lieutenant McKinney!” said Cruz. “He’s sending over instructions about what we should do. You are not going to believe this.”
McKinney listened and, as Cruz had promised, he didn’t believe.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ON A SPACESHIP as fast as the ES Devastator, the journey to planet Vontaren took only a few short hours. The planet itself was nothing out of the ordinary. It had a diameter of fifty thousand kilometres and circled its sun at a distance which ensured its surface temperature rarely climbed much above freezing. The battleship arrived into the endless chill of the vacuum, dropped to an altitude of thirty thousand kilometres and established a course and speed which would complete a full circuit of the planet every forty minutes.
Admiral Henry Talley watched the sensor feed for a time, as if the strength of his intent could somehow pull answers from nothingness. They’d arrived here only a minute ago and already he was feeling impatient. Vontaren was a place like countless others, though its unusually jagged surface hinted at millennia of tectonic movement. It was a good place to hide something.
“I recommend we activate the stealth modules as a precaution, sir,” said Commander Adams.
“I acknowledge your suggestion. We’ll stay as we are – I’m not in the mood for subtlety.”
“Our first scan covering the visible side of Vontaren has come back negative, sir,” said Mercer. “We’ll definitely need a second sweep if you want to be sure.”
“Keep at it.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” asked Ensign Banks.
“When the Robanis first told me they had found Obsidiar, I expected they’d discovered some kind of natural formation – a seam of it on the surface, waiting to be mined. Now, I think there’s something else. You’re looking for something made of metal, Ensign.”
“A spaceship?” asked Lieutenant Johnson.
“It seems the most likely explanation.”
“We have nothing out here.”
“Which leads to the conclusion that it would not be one of ours,” said Talley. “Let us have no more speculation for the moment.”
For the next fifteen minutes, he kept his crew on edge by pacing around the bridge. He was convinced they were on the brink of something and he was desperate to find proof of it.
“Here!” said Mercer. “What the hell?”
Talley hurried over to her console. “What have you found?”
“This, sir. There’s a Robani scout craft circling over an object. They’re way lower than we are.”
“Have they seen us yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let me see the sensor feed.”
The image appeared at once, cold and grey. It showed the small scout vessel at an altitude of only a few kilometres – just high enough to clear the peaks of a range of high mountains. There was something below, wedged between the walls of a wide canyon. Talley stared at it in wonder.
“How big is it?”
“Pushing thirty thousand metres long and ten thousand across the beam, sir. It’s hard to be certain, since a lot of it’s hidden.”
“Is there anything in our databanks?”
“Checking…no. That vessel type is unknown to us.”
There was a spaceship on the surface – a vast, incredible construction of metal. Talley reached out a hand and traced an imaginary line across the sensor feed. There was no doubt the vessel had crashed. It had come in at an angle and it was easy to see the damage to the surrounding mountains where it had impacted. He guessed it had stuck the surface, skipped up, hit the ground again and then skidded along for a few hundred kilometres before coming to rest at an angle in the canyon.
The spacecraft itself was flat and from above it looked like the end of a trident, with squared-off tines making up the final ten thousand metres of its length. Its hull alloys were a lighter colour than those of the Vraxar spaceships. Talley supposed this could be a new type of Vraxar craft, but it didn’t seem likely.
“There’s something utilitarian about it,” Talley said. “It’s not a vessel of war, from its appearance.”
“Their engines are offline,” said Lieutenant Johnson. “I reckon there’s a breach in their hull somewhere, since they’re throwing a whole bunch of positrons into the sky.”
“I can see weapons clusters,” said Mercer. “Plus a few missile batteries and a particle beam dome near to what I assume is the front. I can see if the technology is a known type?”
“It’s Estral,” said Talley with certainty. “Has that scout still not detected us?”
“No, sir. They must be too busy looking beneath, rather than above.”
Talley shook his head. “At least the Space Corps no longer has to put up with the incompetents piloting that particular scout. Bring us close above them – really close.”
The battleship’s autopilot did as it was asked. It put the warship under maximum thrust and the Devastator’s engines grumbled for a little over eleven seconds. When the manoeuvre was complete, the huge battleship was less than two thousand metres higher than the scout craft and directly above it. The smaller vessel was only a few hundred metres long and utterly outclassed.
“We’ve got their attention now,” said Mercer. “The ship’s captain – Felicia Beck - wishes to speak with you as a matter of urgency, sir.”
“I don’t need to speak to her. Ask if she’s carrying any Obsidiar. At the same time as you’re asking, scan the scout’s hull and find out if she’s lying or not.”
“She’s playing dumb, sir – pretending she doesn’t know what Obsidiar is. She also tried to sneak out a comms message to Roban, which I blocked.”
“Let the message go to its destination, Lieutenant. It won’t affect the outcome of what happens here.”
“The scan of their hull is complete. They are not carrying any Obsidiar.”
“Tell Captain Beck that now is the time to
recover anyone she might have left on the surface.”
“Their crew is all onboard.”
“If she wishes to volunteer any information, tell her it will go in her favour when the reckoning for this nonsense comes.”
“Captain Beck has nothing to say.”
“In that case, tell her to piss off immediately or we’ll blow her out of the sky.”
Talley didn’t swear often and this outburst raised a few eyebrows amongst the crew.
“Do you want me to use those exact words, sir?” asked Mercer.
“It’ll get the message across.”
Captain Beck showed no signs she wanted to test Talley’s resolve. The scout wound up its fission engine and skipped away into lightspeed. Lieutenant Johnson captured some details from the fission cloud and set the Devastator’s twenty-four cores working on a prediction. The scout was small and its destination wasn’t far, so the result came back almost at once.
“I’m pretty sure they’re going to Roban.”
“No surprises there. I want drones launched as soon as possible. Set them to finding the hull breach in the vessel below. Next time I speak with Fleet Admiral Duggan, I would like to have some good news for him.”
The ES Devastator was equipped with dozens of programmable drones. They were unremarkable to look at – two metre cylinders of smooth metal, with protruding arms, probes and sensors that could fold flat during flight. The drones could survive in the most hostile environments and it was generally a lot quicker to launch one instead of mobilising a unit of soldiers.
“I’ve launched ten drones,” said Ensign Jay Lewis. “That’s the recommended number based on the size of the target object.”
The good old days when everything was by the book, thought Talley. It wasn’t a criticism and he certainly wasn’t going to mock any of his crew for following procedure to the letter.
“Contact with all ten is strong,” said Ensign Harper. “I can divide the bulkhead screen to show a split of each drone’s sensor feed if you wish, sir.”
“That would be appreciated.”
The drones were fast and agile. The feeds showed them darting this way and that as they separated around the stricken spaceship. The Devastator’s sensors had already established there was no breach in the upper side of the hull and the drones flew to the concealed edges where the spaceship was partway into the canyon.
Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2) Page 14