“That gorge is about eight thousand metres deep and three thousand across,” said Mercer with a low whistle. “And it’s still nowhere near big enough to fit that thing inside, whatever it is.”
“It’s an Interstellar,” said Talley quietly.
Drone #3 found the breach and more besides. Where the left-hand side of the spaceship was wedged into the canyon, there were extensive markings on the thick metal plating of the hull. Several thousand square metres were blackened, pitted and heavily cratered.
“Particle beam,” said Commander Adams. “And damage from other stuff I don’t recognize.”
“Those other areas nearby look like the result of impact with Vontaren’s surface,” said Talley.
The drone hovered for a few seconds and then it was off. It accelerated rapidly towards the front end of the vessel. There was a five-hundred-metre tear in the hull, where the metal plates were buckled and bent. Talley saw a duller metal which he recognized as Gallenium engines. The drone flew onwards, until it found a place where the rip was deeper still – there was a three-hundred-metre jagged-edged hole leading to the interior. Drone #3 wasn’t programmed with fear of the unknown. It sped through the hole and into the spaceship.
The drone emerged into a huge, open area within the vessel. It was difficult to be sure of the dimensions – Talley guessed it was several thousand metres wide and with a far greater length. The floor was scratched grey metal and the ceiling was more than two hundred metres high. There were no lights but the drone’s image intensifiers picked up a jumbled stack of objects a thousand metres to the left. The spaceship was tilted and the drone sped down the slope to investigate.
“What’s all that stuff?” asked Mercer.
“Cargo,” said Talley. “It must have been held in place by gravity clamps until they lost power.”
There was an enormous quantity of equipment – ten billion tonnes of excavation machinery, construction vehicles, pre-made factory units, compact smelters, cranes, engine modules. Everything necessary to start afresh was crushed together in the hold of the ship.
The drone didn’t remain in place – it flew through the room until it located a wide exit doorway towards the front of the ship. Here, it entered a second storage area. This room was smaller, though still with a large enough footprint for a Galactic class heavy cruiser to have landed upon, were it open to the skies.
“Drone #3 has registered a catastrophic drop in temperature,” said Harper. “I’m not sure what that’s all about.”
“Obsidiar,” said Talley. “Chill exudes from it. Hold the drone there and rotate its camera slowly so we can get a better view.”
This part of the hold was packed with shaped pieces of Obsidiar. Brackets were fitted to the walls and floors and each set of brackets held a block or a cylinder of Obsidiar. The pieces were many different sizes. Some were only as big as a four-seat transport shuttle, whilst others reached from the floor to the ceiling.
“Billions of tonnes,” said Talley. “Enough to fulfil the Confederation’s needs for a hundred years.”
“And give us a fighting chance against the Vraxar?” asked Lieutenant Johnson.
Talley wasn’t ready to commit an answer to that question and he simply shrugged to indicate he’d heard the words.
“Drone #5 is inside and has found a second exit from the rear cargo area,” said Harper. “Maybe there’ll be even more Obsidiar.”
“Perhaps.” Talley dragged his eyes away from the emperor’s ransom in the forward storage bay and followed the progress of Drone #5. It entered a series of narrower corridors, turning left and right apparently at random.
“Another holding area,” said Harper. “What’s all this?”
The drone hovered patiently in the middle of a space much smaller than either of the cargo bays. Its instrumentation measured the room to be ninety metres long, eight wide and ten high. There was no decoration, but there were alcoves in each wall. These alcoves were three metres long and a metre high. They were arranged in rows and columns, with absolute precision. This room contained exactly one hundred of these alcoves and in each recess was a grey-skinned humanoid. They lay flat on their backs, their eyes closed and their expressions unreadable.
“Are they Ghasts?” asked Mercer.
“Not Ghasts, Lieutenant. I think these are their parent race - Estral.”
“The drone isn’t picking up any life signs,” said Harper. “They’re all dead.”
The drone had seen enough of this room. It located an exit on the opposite wall and it continued its flight deeper into the spaceship. The horror of it soon became apparent – there was a vast area of the vessel given over to identical rooms. They were linked together by a series of grid-patterned corridors, each one leading to another of the rooms.
“Endless rooms, endless dead,” said Talley. The Estral had sought to destroy humanity, but there was something profoundly sad about all these bodies lying here, perfectly preserved.
“How many do you think there are?” whispered Ensign Chambers, her eyes wide. “And could any of them be alive?”
“They’re all dead,” said Talley. He didn’t want to put a number to the catastrophe.
Lieutenant Poole wasn’t so restrained. “If this pattern is replicated throughout the remainder of the ship, there could be upwards of eight hundred million bodies here.”
“What were they doing?”
“Running,” said Talley. “When the Estral realised their defeat by the Vraxar was inevitable, they sent their people as far away as they could with the resources they’d need to start again.”
“A last throw of the dice,” said Adams. “I wonder how many more of these Interstellars are out there.”
“We’ll probably never find out, Commander.”
“Why did this one crash, sir?” asked Sykes.
“I don’t know, Ensign.”
Talley sat down to think. The Estral Interstellar had suffered damage to its hull, consistent with a beam weapon attack. On first glance it didn’t appear to be that which had resulted in the hull breach – the impact with Vontaren was the more likely cause. The only thing he could think of was some kind of complete and utter failure of several critical onboard systems. Consistent with a total loss of power, he thought. Talley sat upright.
“Lieutenant Mercer, please analyse the marks on the surface of the planet produced by the Estral ship’s landing.”
“What do you want to know, sir?”
“I would like to know when this happened. Ensign Harper, I assume those drones gather enough information for us to ascertain when the ship was attacked?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll run the data through one of the Devastator’s cores and tell you what it comes back with.”
Mercer answered first. “The marks on the surface were made sixteen days ago, sir.”
“Is that a certainty?”
“Yes – sixteen days, nine hours and twenty minutes ago if you want it a little more precise.”
“It took them a long time to get here,” said Adams.
“They had a long way to travel.”
Ensign Harper was looking nervous. He rubbed his face and muttered to himself.
“What’s the matter, Ensign?” asked Talley.
“I can’t get the results I was expecting.”
“The results are what they are. You can’t alter them to what you want them to be.”
“I know that, sir.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“The analysis shows that this vessel was attacked nineteen days ago, sir. In addition, I’ve accessed data from the ES Lucid’s encounter with the Vraxar near Atlantis, which confirms the same weapons types were used in both places. It probably wasn’t the exact same Vraxar, of course.”
Talley went cold at the news. He had no reason to doubt these findings, but what it meant was that the Vraxar were also in the Confederation’s Tallin Sector.
“How the hell did they get here?” he asked.
“Maybe they’ve got a way to follow through lightspeed, sir,” said Lieutenant Johnson. “It could be that this Estral carrier thought it had reached safety, only to find a pack of Vraxar ships were after it.”
“The Estral got away, though.”
“It’s a big ship, sir. It might have made a last-ditch effort to escape, but only managed a couple of days at lightspeed before its engines shut down and it crashed here.”
“Why didn’t the Vraxar follow?” mused Talley.
“Could be this Estral ship had an escort which took out the Vraxar, sir,” said Adams.
In these moments of speculation, Talley had a thought of his own – one which he didn’t like at all. “Maybe the Vraxar did follow. Maybe they arrived in time to watch the Robani prospector find this Obsidiar and then they realised they’d stumbled across another new race to conquer.”
“The attack on Atlantis happened only a few days after this Estral carrier came down,” said Adams. “Atlantis is a long way away, so how come they were able to attack at two ends of Confederation Space so quickly?”
Talley threw up his hands. “If only we knew more about them! What if there are a hundred independent Vraxar fleets, travelling in a hundred directions until they find something to kill? What if they are a single group, sweeping outwards in a pattern set out by a computer so powerful it can predict where other races are by the light from their stars?”
“And what if they’ve been waiting for the last two weeks in deep space somewhere close to Roban, watching until they decide it’s time to attack?” asked Adams. “Or scanning comms traffic to see if they can find a link to other Confederation worlds?”
What if they followed the Devastator here to Vontaren? thought Talley suddenly. To destroy us while we are away from the other warships at Roban?
“I’m reading a fission signature, sir,” said Lieutenant Johnson. “There’s something big about to arrive.”
“Get our shields up and activate the stealth modules!” shouted Talley, wondering if he’d learned to predict the future. “Get us moving but stay close to the crash site.”
With the ES Devastator on full battle alert, the crew waited anxiously. Ten seconds later, the inbound vessel exited lightspeed forty thousand kilometres away.
“It’s the Gallatrin-9, sir.”
Talley thumped his clenched fist against the arm of his chair. “Those idiots!” he snarled. “Those stupid idiots!”
His fury wasn’t directed towards the Ghasts - it was the Robanis. They’d evidently guessed where the Devastator was headed and, rather than allow the Confederation to take the Obsidiar away from them, they’d given the location to the Ghasts. What they hoped to achieve from their actions wasn’t clear and Talley could only assume this was a last-ditch effort by the Frontier League to keep what they thought was their prize by stoking up conflict between humans and Ghasts.
The bad news kept piling up. Before Talley could order a channel opened to Tarjos Rioq-Tor on the Ghast battleship, a highest-priority comms message reached the Devastator.
“Sir, we’ve received an automated signal from the ES Furnace, letting us know it’s entered combat,” said Mercer.
“Request more details, immediately!”
“I’m trying, sir,” said Mercer. “Ensign Banks, try and contact one of the other rebel warships.”
“And while you’re at it, get me a channel to someone in the damned Robani Council,” said Talley.
The Devastator’s comms teams tried to connect using every method available. Meanwhile, the Ghast battleship powered up its gravity drives and sailed with menacing, unhurried grace towards the Estral carrier’s crash site.
“The Gallatrin-9 has its shields up, sir, and there’s a lot of power running through its beam turrets,” said Adams. “Looks as though they’re ready for anything.”
“There’s no answer from Roban or its fleet,” said Mercer. “It’s like they’ve had a complete shutdown.”
There was only one conclusion to draw. “The Vraxar have decided to show up,” said Talley. “With the Devastator and the Gallatrin-9 out of the way, they’ve taken their chances and attacked Roban.”
“It’s only a matter of time until the Gallatrin-9 sees through the stealth cloak, sir,” said Adams. “They must already know we’re here.”
“I’m aware, Commander.”
It was a difficult situation and Admiral Talley tried hard to think of the best way to proceed. He could only think of one thing and there was only one man who could authorise it.
“Get me Fleet Admiral Duggan,” he said. “I don’t care where he is, or what he’s doing. Get me a channel to him now.”
Talley sat and waited.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THERE WAS a palpable air of uncertainty on the bridge of the ES Blackbird, as there had been for the last forty-five minutes since they’d been in contact with Lieutenant McKinney and the other survivors on the Juniper. Blake’s crew were shellshocked at the outline of the plan and they were clearly building up the courage to question him about it.
“Are you sure this is wise, sir?” asked Lieutenant Pointer, the first one to put words to what everyone was thinking.
“It is absolutely not wise,” Blake confirmed. “We have no choice.”
“You could hand off the decision to Fleet Admiral Duggan, sir,” said Hawkins. “There’s still time before we attempt a rendezvous.”
“He does not want to micromanage every single one of my decisions. Besides, deep down, you know he’s going to say the same thing. Admiral Duggan does not leave his people behind.”
“But sir…” Hawkins began.
“Enough, Lieutenant. We’re not abandoning Lieutenant McKinney to his fate. I made a commitment.”
“Believe it or not, that isn’t the suggestion I’m making, sir. I simply want to be sure we aren’t throwing away a chance to destroy these three Vraxar warships. This might be the one and only time we find them clustered so conveniently.”
“And what are the Vraxar going to do when they realise something’s amiss?” asked Quinn. “Will they sit in one place, waiting to see what transpires?”
Blake remained silent, his eyes locked on the tactical display. The mothership was exactly ten thousand kilometres ahead and the accompanying Neutralisers continued flanking at a distance of five thousand. In his mind, Blake had an opinion about what the enemy vessels would do once he put his plan in to motion – he simply wasn’t ready to share it with the others.
“There are fifteen minutes left,” he said. “We’re going for it.”
None of the crew offered a further objection and Blake was pleased for it. He was sure they were as loyal to the Space Corps as he was and they would do their best to pull off the exceptionally risky plan they were embarking upon.
“I’m bringing us to within a thousand kilometres of the mothership. Activate the energy shield,” he said.
“The shield is operational, sir.”
“Please confirm the enemy vessels are still running without their own shields.”
“The enemy shields are down, sir.”
“How many of those cannons do they have on the underside?”
Pointer helpfully brought up a zoomed image of one of the brutal-looking turrets which the mothership bristled with. “Dozens,” she said.
“Anyone want to hazard a guess how many rounds it’ll take from one of those things before our shield gets knocked out?”
“Well, sir. The kinetic energy contained in a dense metal object travelling at the anticipated speed from a gun with a bore the size of that would be…”
“Save the specifics for later, Lieutenant. I imagine the answer is in the approximate region of not very many.”
“Yes sir, I’m sure you’re correct.”
The brightest minds in the Space Corps were of the opinion that sudden bursts of high acceleration were the best way to flag up the presence of a vessel running under the concealment of stealth modules. The second-best way was to loa
d up for a jump into lightspeed. Consequently, any hopes of making either a quick approach or a fast escape were too big a risk for Blake to contemplate.
“Is there any way to see if we’ve been scanned?” he asked.
“These Hynus sensor arrays are able to detect that kind of activity,” Pointer confirmed. “We’ve been subjected to a general wide-area sweep on more than two hundred occasions since Lieutenant McKinney made contact. That’s standard stuff, which is why I haven’t mentioned it.”
“Will you get warning if they become suspicious?”
Pointer crinkled her nose. “There’s a bit of guesswork involved in all of this, sir, since the Space Corps is distinctly rusty when it comes to on-the-edge engagements with vastly superior enemy warships. On the other hand, if they change their pattern of scanning, I’ll pick it up straight away.”
“That’s when we start getting worried,” said Quinn.
They reached a distance of a thousand kilometres from the enemy warship – in terms of space combat, it was a miniscule gap. Blake knew if the ES Blackbird was detected, there was an excellent chance they’d be destroyed before any of them were able to blink, with or without an energy shield.
“I’m going to close to within ten klicks of the enemy warship,” he said. “Lieutenant Pointer, are you sure you can determine the thickness of those bay doors once I get close enough?”
“Assuming they aren’t made of something totally new, then yes I can tell you how thick the metal is.”
“Lieutenant Hawkins, you’re the most familiar with these Shimmer missiles. They’re as good as I’ve heard, right?”
“Possibly better, sir. I’m sure you know the rumours about what they cost.”
Blake knew only too well what each missile cost to build. After his escape from Atlantis on the ES Lucid with its locked-down Shimmer tubes, he’d done some digging. When he eventually unearthed the information, he wasn’t surprised the Space Corps didn’t want the costs made public. Hawkins implied she knew specifics, but it was almost certain she was guessing or relying on hearsay.
Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2) Page 15