The Obsidiar itself was stored far beneath the surface in a huge room which reminded McKinney a little of the storage areas in the Tillos underground bunker on Atlantis. There was a single main lift to bring the Obsidiar to the surface, this lift kept operational by its own Obsidiar-driven gravity engine. Once the cargo arrived at the surface, it was carried towards the nearby shipyard on the back of one of the dedicated OSF crawlers.
Throughout the facility there were fully-armed soldiers and numerous automated emplacements. After a recent disastrous inspection report on the organisation of the soldiers, McKinney had been drafted in to sort things out and he’d brought a few of his experienced men with him.
The pair walked in silence for a time. They passed other soldiers and McKinney occasionally stopped to ask questions. It was obvious Bannerman had something to say and eventually he spoke what was on his mind.
“When will they come for us, Lieutenant?”
“Soon. Hours.” McKinney shrugged. “I’m surprised we’re still alive.”
“Maybe they’ve got something in mind for us.”
“You know what they’ve got in mind.”
“Yeah. I thought they’d be a bit more interested in what we’ve got in this building.”
McKinney stopped. “Who’s to say they aren’t?”
“Why would they hang around? If they know what we’re holding.”
“Maybe they’ve got more Obsidiar than they know what to do with. Every time they run out, simply blow up a few planets and get some more.”
“You just implied they’d be coming here.”
“Whatever they do, we’ll be ready for them.”
“Unless it’s death from above.”
“If they want this Obsidiar I can’t believe they’d be stupid enough to level the place with missiles. If the Vraxar know it’s here and they want it enough, they’ll land with a hundred thousand of their rotting corpses and send them inside to take it.”
“And we’ll kill every last one of them.”
“You’re not normally one for bravado, Corporal.”
Bannerman grinned. “I’ve been around the others too long. It’s affecting the way I think.” His smile faded. “We’ve been dealt another shitty hand.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if there are any aces in the pack. If there are, I can’t remember holding one.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t been reinforced.”
“There are two thousand men and women guarding this place. We could add another sixty thousand and it wouldn’t be enough if the Vraxar were determined to get what they wanted. And the lack of comms has screwed everything up.”
They reached one of the interior airlifts and stepped inside. It was colder here and the lift descended silently to the lowest level. The door opened onto another square room and Bannerman smiled uncomfortably when the three ceiling guns spun towards them. There were no soldiers present – an automated check-in console was fixed to the floor and there was a single metal door in the far wall. McKinney knew from experience this door was about seven metres thick and it was currently closed.
The internal comms system was working fine, but McKinney was still obliged to enter his details into the check-in console. A tiny sensor in the unit scanned him, confirmed his identity and also that he wasn’t acting under duress.
After a long pause, the square door rose until it vanished into the ceiling. A squad of six soldiers waited on the opposite side, with rifles at the ready. McKinney gestured for them to lower their weapons and they did so. He walked towards the group.
“How’s it going, Corporal Evans?”
Evans lifted a hand in greeting. He could have given the standard answer that everything was absolutely gleamingly perfect, but chose otherwise. “The guys are getting jumpy, sir.” He indicated those around him. “They reckon they’re going to die down here.”
“Is that right?” asked McKinney, fixing one of the soldiers with his gaze.
“Not me, sir,” said the man. “I’ve got a date tomorrow and I don’t want to miss it.”
“A date with his dead grandmother’s best friend,” said a woman standing to one side.
“Nah, I told you it’s with the goat farmer’s three-titted daughter,” said another.
McKinney had heard enough and he pointed through the doorway. “Get back to your duties,” he said. “I don’t want any more pissing around.” He turned to Bannerman. “Come on.”
They walked quickly through the passage into the next room, conscious that several thousand tonnes of door hung overhead – a door which relied on a faulty computer system to keep it in place.
“Lower it,” Evans ordered when everyone was through.
McKinney took in the details of this new room – it was fifteen metres to a side and with a three-metre-high ceiling. A window took up much of the far wall, made of a substance much more durable than glass. There were more gun emplacements in the ceiling, as well as a couple of trapezoidal four-barrel mobile repeater turrets which were as nasty in operation as they were in appearance.
“Any problems?” asked McKinney in a low voice.
Evans grimaced. “They’re crapping themselves, Lieutenant. What you saw a minute ago? That was just for show to make you think they’re on top of it. None of them wants to die and they’re all sure it’s coming to them soon.”
“What do you think, Corporal?”
“I think it’s coming to us soon as well, Lieutenant. It’s just that I’ve faced it before and I’m not scared anymore.”
“We have a lot of spaceships guarding New Earth.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself. And then I ask why we’re still down here with no word about what’s happening. If the enemy was gone, everything would be working again and we’d have someone telling us on the comms what a good job we’d done and that we could stand down.”
There was no point in arguing the point and McKinney wasn’t even inclined. “Keep them distracted, Corporal. If we get a chance to fight I’d like to know there are people at my back rather than looking for some place to hide out.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
McKinney didn’t stick around to chat any longer. He walked over to the window and looked through it for a moment. The main Obsidiar storage area was brightly lit and there were few shadows. Cubes and cylinders of pure black were everywhere, some of them in piles, others alone. There was no apparent method to the arrangement of the Obsidiar blocks – they were kept away from the central gravity lift platform, but that was the furthest the organisation went.
“Humanity’s salvation,” said Bannerman with a note of bitterness.
“It might still be.”
There was ongoing activity inside the storage area. A series of specially-built robots continued doing exactly what they’d been instructed to do before the base went on alert. They cut the blocks into the required shapes and carried them to the transportation crawlers for delivery to the surface. McKinney had been told that the Estral had done much of the cutting work already and many of the blocks required little or no modification.
One of the cylindrical robots drifted past, floating serenely through the air a hundred metres from the window. Six multi-jointed laser cutting arms protruded from opposite sides of the robot’s main body and green lights from its status screens made the ice-rimed metal glisten. It was well below freezing in the storage room and McKinney shivered again at the sight.
“Let’s get moving,” he said.
They left the room and eventually found themselves in one of the technical control offices. This was a comparatively cramped space, made smaller by the densely-packed banks of monitoring equipment. There were five technicians keeping an eye on things and they all looked up at the arrival of the two soldiers. McKinney recognized the fleeting hope in their eyes at the thought he might be bringing them good news. It seemed best to tell them up front.
“No change, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Figures,” said one. McK
inney struggled to remember her name – Bobbi Melton.
“Lieutenant McKinney will keep us safe, won’t you?” said another, giving him an exaggerated wink.
“Sure will,” he agreed. He wasn’t here for small talk. “Just passing through, folks. You’ll be the first to know if anything changes.”
The technicians were clearly desperate for news and it was difficult to leave without answering at least a couple of their questions. McKinney tried his best, whilst walking slowly towards the exit.
“No, there’s no word from high command and no I don’t know where the defence fleet is,” he said.
“Blown to crap,” said Amie Horvath.
“Shut up,” said Melton, clearly sick of hearing her colleague parrot the same line.
“Whatever.”
Horvath turned back to her console and began looking at a series of status graphs relating to something McKinney neither knew nor cared about. He was hopeful of making a getaway when Melton brought him short with another question.
“Next time you send someone out to a place where the comms are working, will you ask if they can speak to one of Fleet Admiral Duggan’s team about this latest shipment we were meant to be getting out?”
“What shipment?” asked McKinney, impatient to be on his way.
“It’s classified,” said Melton. “They’ll know which one I mean.”
Horvath turned her head. “We’ve got twelve Obsidiar projectiles awaiting transportation to that new spaceship they’re working on. They were finished a week ago and we were told to hold onto them but keep them ready. They’re sitting on the main crawler next to the lift. They were officially signed out and so we can’t touch them until someone tells us they’re our responsibility again.”
“We need that crawler for the next Obsidiar core they’re due to deploy in a couple of weeks,” added Melton.
McKinney shook his head at this sudden shift in priorities. “The Vraxar are here,” he said.
“Yeah and we might be dead tomorrow,” said Horvath. “Until then, we’ve got work to do – it keeps us occupied.”
“No promises. I’ll do my best.”
The two men hurried through the exit before the technicians came up with any more questions.
“I thought we’d never get away,” laughed Bannerman.
“We got lucky to escape when we did. It must be lonely in that room – I once got stuck talking to them for half an hour.”
“I thought you were blunt when it came to crap you don’t want to hear.”
“I don’t like to be rude,” said McKinney.
“I’ve heard you say all sorts to the men!”
“There’s a difference between rudeness and discipline.”
“Fair enough. Where to now, Lieutenant? By my reckoning we’ve seen just about everything.”
“I’m going to take a look outside and make sure there’s no one sleeping when they should be patrolling. You don’t need to come.”
“What else am I going to do?”
The journey didn’t take long. The Obsidiar Storage Facility was large but well-designed. There were other places on the Tucson base which were rabbit warrens of interconnecting passages. Here it was straight lines and airlifts.
There was a total of four pedestrian exits from the building, each of them sealed by a guarded door thick enough to withstand thirty minutes of mobile repeater fire or several rounds from a medium tank. McKinney and Bannerman left by the front entrance which was to one side of the main transportation doorway.
It was dark overhead, though the base lighting made it feel as though they were standing in daylight. When McKinney looked up, he was reminded how strange this contrast between artificial day and night had been for the first few weeks on base, way back when he was a new recruit.
Bannerman shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Which way?”
McKinney paused for a moment in thought, trying to plan the most efficient route which would allow him to speak to as many of the facility soldiers as possible. He looked around - the first of the two surrounding walls was a couple of hundred metres away and it loomed overhead. To the right, the immense outer main door was sealed. It was opened only when absolutely necessary and rumour had it Fleet Admiral Duggan was made aware every time it was activated. There was a second door beyond it and a particularly nasty surprise waited behind the inner door – an additional defence in case it was ever needed.
“Let’s check out the wall gate station,” said McKinney.
There was a total of eight rooms in each of the two perimeter walls – four rooms on each side of each gate. These guard stations were warm, comfortable and gave an impression of remoteness. A soldier had once been found asleep in one of these rooms.
The ground was covered in thick plates of perfectly-joined metal, which McKinney presumed were meant as added protection from aerial bombardment. He walked quickly – there was no give beneath his feet and his steps gave off hardly any sound. The metal could have been fifty metres thick for all he knew.
They didn’t reach the gate station. The soldiers had gone little more than halfway across the open space when McKinney heard a noise – it was a kind of pulsing fizz that pounded his eardrums and made him grit his teeth. He spun, raising his voice to speak a question he knew was pointless.
“What the hell?”
Bannerman pointed towards the roof of the main building. Several of the facility’s fixed gun emplacements were firing. McKinney could see the low, squat turrets with wide-bore barrels protruding from the centre. Three of the ten were visible from this angle and they thumped out a steady stream of projectiles which streaked away into space, leaving their bright trails behind.
“Something’s coming,” said McKinney.
“Yeah.”
McKinney lowered his visor across his eyes and used it to enhance his vision. Like everything else on the base, it was running much slower than normal and it took seconds to adjust. He saw a huge, ugly spaceship made up from a series of different-sized blocks. It was high above and descending at speed.
“Where’re our ground-to-airs?” he muttered. “They should have lit that bastard up by now.”
Eventually, a few base missile emplacements fired their rockets. McKinney heard the shriek of their propulsion systems as they hurtled into the sky. One or two of them detonated against the inbound spaceship. It didn’t have an energy shield, but the impacts weren’t enough to knock it from the sky.
“There are about a hundred multi-launchers around Tucson,” said Bannerman. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said McKinney. “Maybe they can jam those too.”
Whatever the Vraxar were doing, it wasn’t enough to completely negate the Tucson automated batteries. Another high-yield missile exploded against the incoming craft, leaving a deep crater in its armour.
“We’re going to get those bastards!” said Bannerman, clenching one fist.
At that moment, the artificial daylight was increased tenfold by a thousand huge explosions. Protected by the walls, neither McKinney nor Bannerman could see the blasts directly. A second after the light came the sound. It thundered and rumbled, shaking the ground and forcing them to lower their visors to block out the sound. The rumbling went on and on, like it would never stop.
McKinney grabbed Bannerman by the arm. “Move!”
They ran for the facility door. McKinney glanced upwards as he ran – the incoming spaceship was damaged and its hull glowed with heat. No more missiles exploded against it and it was only a few kilometres above the base. He knew exactly what it was coming for.
“Looks like they had mammy to protect them,” gasped Bannerman as they reached the door.
McKinney gave the access panel a hard slap with his palm. “Was it ever in doubt?”
“Maybe for a moment.”
It had only been a short run, but McKinney found he was out of breath. They stopped for a few seconds, panting.
“There’s more bad news,”
he said.
“What’s that?”
“When I had my visor down it gave me an alert – the atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping. If it keeps going down, billions of people are going to suffocate.”
Bannerman took it in his stride. “We’d better stop them, eh, Lieutenant?”
“With our gauss rifles and endless determination.”
“That’ll do it.”
“Come on, we need to plan our defence.”
They ran for it, bringing whoever they met with them. The Vraxar had decided to pay the base a visit and McKinney was in no doubt what they wanted, since they’d left the OSF intact. Obsidiar was the most valuable substance known to exist, so it made sense the enemy would send their troops to pick it up. McKinney hated the aliens more than ever and told himself he’d do whatever it took to throw a spanner in their works. With rifles and determination, he repeated in his mind. McKinney grimaced and ran on through the corridors of the facility.
Chapter Seven
Since the Vraxar bombardment of the surface a few minutes ago, activity within the underground command and control bunker had increased markedly. Groups of personnel ran here and there, doing their best to collate information in the hope of sifting a clear picture from the ruins of a chaotic situation. Within the main command and control room, the various teams did their best to keep everything moving and ensure everyone was working towards the same goal. Through it all, the base technicians tried to get the comms working and to fix whatever was wrong with the Tucson processing clusters.
In the centre of the room, Fleet Admiral Duggan stood, doing his best to exude calm. His fists kept clenching of their own accord and it was a constant effort to keep himself from folding his arms across his chest.
As soon as news came of the missile attack, Duggan had organised a team and sent them to the surface. He wasn’t sure exactly what he hoped to achieve with this action, other than doing something instead of nothing. In fact, he already had a fairly good idea of what had happened and he crossed over to the comms team for the second time in five minutes.
Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Page 7