“First inner door opening,” he said.
Duggan’s instruction reached the tank crew. The Colossus tank fired its gun once more, the force of it making the tray on the gatehouse table vibrate. The OSF doors were designed to repel an anticipated assault from light-to-medium weaponry, along with the occasional heavier-duty attack. What they were not designed to be proof against was the main gun on the Space Corps’ most advanced tank. The projectile smashed into the outer gate with terrifying force. The alloy slab crumpled and buckled, but stayed in place.
“Going to need a couple more shots,” said Garcia.
Vega returned. “Did you see that?” he asked in excitement. “We’re about to break into the place we were assigned to protect!”
The irony wasn’t lost on Duggan and though he felt the return of his old battle lust, he couldn’t take any joy from the destruction of Space Corps property, in spite of his light words to McKinney earlier in the tank.
The first inner door opened and Duggan sent the command for the crawler to move into the space between outer and inner doors. Then, he approved the closing of the inner door and waited impatiently for it to complete.
The tank fired again, striking the damaged facility door for a second time. The noise was tremendous and Duggan was glad he wasn’t any closer. A huge split appeared in the door and rubble fell from the facility walls nearby.
“How’s the crawler coming along, sir?” asked Vega. He lay prone on the floor inside the gatehouse door, doing his best to look underneath the tank at whatever was coming.
“Slowly.”
“That’s why they call it a crawler, huh? There’s a lot of pressure out there now.”
The inner door closed, allowing Duggan to open the outer one. He heard another noise – a clunk of two solid metallic objects colliding at speed. Garcia peered through the window.
“I think they’ve got a mobile gun trained on the tank,” he said. “Webb’s just taken a shot at it.”
“One isn’t enough.”
The third shot from the tank knocked the outer facility door clean out of its support frame. It fell to the ground, went up on one side and then crashed down again. There was just about enough angle for the tank to hit the inner perimeter door.
“If it takes another three shots for the next, it’ll be quicker to wait,” said Duggan.
“Waiting isn’t good,” said Vega. “The enemy are spreading out around us. If it takes much longer, they’ll be able to take shots at us when we run for the tank.”
McKinney evidently thought the same and he moved Colossus tank sideways, bringing it a few metres closer to the gatehouse building. It took another ringing blow from the Vraxar artillery gun and the soldiers arrayed about the hull pressed themselves tighter against it.
“Steady, Lieutenant,” said Garcia under his breath.
Duggan made his mind up. “Vega, get into the tank and order Lieutenant McKinney to hold fire on the gate. If he hits it again, it might jam and we’ll end up waiting longer.”
“On it.”
Vega was off again and vanished once more into the side hatch of the tank. The order was sent too late and the main armament fired a few seconds later. The inner perimeter door bent across the middle, but didn’t fall.
“Damnit!” said Duggan.
The second of the facility’s main building doors closed behind the crawler and Duggan sent the command for the remaining perimeter gate to open. For a moment, it looked as if it was operational. It slid a short distance into the ground and then stopped. The gatehouse console reported a blockage on the door. Duggan swore again.
“That’s torn it, huh?” asked Garcia.
“We need to get back into the tank,” said Duggan. “Now!”
There was nothing more he could do from here, so Duggan ran from the gatehouse, just in time to see Vega emerging from the tank.
“Get back in!” shouted Duggan. “Everyone inside!”
The men and women crawled towards the access ladders in the Colossus tank’s flanks. It was a good distance up and there was a lot of climbing for those at the highest level. Duggan urged them to hurry.
He saw movement to his left – a small group of Vraxar came into sight a hundred metres away, trying to flank the soldiers clinging to the tank’s hull. Duggan aimed and fired. His shot went through the closest Vraxar, knocking it backwards. Garcia fired three rapid bursts, killing two more. The rest scattered or dropped prone.
Once again, the tank’s gun fired, the recoil bringing it within three metres of the gatehouse wall. The final door was bent out of shape, held in place by its frame.
“Best get onboard, sir,” said Garcia. He saw Duggan’s hesitation. “None of this works without you.”
Duggan got himself inside and through the passage until he reached the cockpit. The crew were grim-faced and focused.
“They’ve got a big gun around the far end of the facility wall,” said McKinney. “They move it out, hit us and then move it back.”
“Shoot it next time it comes out,” growled Duggan.
“With pleasure, sir,” said Li.
“The squad are still coming onboard,” said Roldan. “Waiting on Munoz, Clifton and Webb.”
The soldiers were well-trained and motivated. They piled into the tank and closed the outer hatch. Just when the tank was finally sealed, the Vraxar artillery gun floated out from behind the corner of the facility wall a little over two hundred metres away. It didn’t get a chance to fire and the Colossus tank blew it to pieces in a split second.
“Buh-bye,” said Sergeant Li.
McKinney was an intelligent man and knew exactly what his next orders would be. He sent power through the tank’s engines and the cockpit shook. “The gate?”
“Take it down, Lieutenant.”
The tank accelerated through an increasing quantity of Vraxar small-arms fire. The absence of the outer door left a gap easily wide enough for the tank to go through and McKinney didn’t let up once they were past.
“Uh, Lieutenant, we’re still waiting on reload.”
“Let’s keep some ammunition for later, Sergeant. Hold on tight.”
The tank smashed into the outer gate, racketing it backwards and tearing it free from its alloy frame. At the moment of impact, McKinney dragged the control sticks towards him and the tank slowed rapidly, ending up within the compound and hovering over what remained of the door. Inside, the crew were shaken, but the tank’s life support kept them shielded from the worst effects of the collision.
“There’s the crawler,” said Duggan.
“I see it.”
The flatbed gravity crawler was fractionally narrower than the gates through which it was required to travel and the vehicle itself was little more sophisticated than a floating platform with a rear-mounted crane and a navigation computer. The crawler waited mid-way across the inner compound, with a grey cuboid Obsidiar magazine on top.
“Pick it up,” said Duggan.
McKinney rotated the tank on the spot and reversed towards the crawler, watching his progress on the single rear sensor feed.
“There’s movement,” said Bannerman. “I can see Vraxar foot soldiers to the east. No artillery yet.”
McKinney didn’t answer and he brought the tank steadily closer to the crawler. “Activating winch.” He huffed out his breath. “We have a successful pickup.”
“Get us out of here, Lieutenant. Now we can go to the Ulterior-2.”
“Shouldn’t we take this crawler to the Earth’s Fury?” asked Li in puzzlement.
“In good time, Sergeant.”
There was a lower, deeper note to the tank’s engines when McKinney guided it towards the gates. “They can feel the weight.”
“Eyes front, Lieutenant,” admonished Li. “I estimate about fifty centimetres of clearance to each side.”
“It’s a little less,” said Duggan.
It wasn’t the easiest way to exit and McKinney took it slowly. Even so, he managed to knock ch
unks out of both inner and outer walls. Meanwhile, the Vraxar continued their endless small-arms attack on the Colossus tank. After a tense two minutes, the vehicle emerged from the Obsidiar Storage Facility, towing its prize. Duggan thumped his fist against the bulkhead wall behind him.
“We made it,” he said, hardly able to believe.
“We haven’t won yet, sir,” said Roldan.
“You need many small wins on the road to final victory, soldier.”
“One step at a time,” he means, said Lieutenant Paz, sitting on the floor in the corner.
Any satisfaction at this minor success was soon taken away. The squad medic, Amy Sandoval leaned into the cockpit. “Sir? I thought you might like to know – Lieutenant Richards has just passed away.”
Duggan’s face hardened. “Thank you for letting me know.”
“Shit news always comes in twos,” said Sergeant Li prophetically.
The words were hardly out of Li’s mouth when Bannerman confirmed the prediction. “I’m picking up an eight-klick object establishing a stationary orbit directly above our heads, at an altitude of ten thousand klicks.”
“The Vraxar battleship.”
“One and the same, sir. That trip to the Ulterior-2 is about to get a whole lot harder.”
Rather than crumbling under this barrage of ill-fortune, Duggan forced a smile to his face. “I swore to myself that whatever happened, I’d do everything to beat these bastards. I don’t care what they send – we’re going to the Ulterior-2.”
The words were brave and the men were buoyed by them. Deep in his heart, Duggan knew their luck had finally run dry.
Chapter Nineteen
Charlie Blake couldn’t remember ever feeling quite as low as he did at this point in time. He’d been on the bridge of the Ulterior-2 for almost thirty minutes and it felt closer to a lifetime. His expulsion from the Space Corps had been a given from the moment he told Admiral Morey what she could do with her orders. Still, he blamed himself for the timing of it. If I’d kept up the pretence I was following orders for a little longer, maybe I could have kept the act going.
It probably didn’t matter – there was no sign of Fleet Admiral Duggan, and without his signoff, the Ulterior-2 wasn’t likely to offer much threat to the Vraxar battleship. And then there was Ix-Gorghal. It would surely take twenty or more Hadrons to put a dent in that spacecraft’s shield, let alone shoot it to pieces.
When Blake first conceived the idea of using the ES Lucid to lure away the Vraxar spaceships, he’d been confident that something would happen which he could capitalise upon as events progressed. In his mind’s eye, he thought there would be a way to get Earth’s Fury loaded and after that land a few shots on Ix-Gorghal – give the thing a bloody nose or drive it away. The harder he looked back on it, the more foolish it appeared.
Now, he was stuck in the middle of a neutered battleship, whilst the enemy troops outside used some kind of device to try and circumvent the security locks keeping the boarding ramps sealed. Once they succeeded, they’d pour inside and no doubt murder anyone they found, before carting the bodies off to Ix-Gorghal for conversion.
Even worse, Earth’s Fury was left unsealed because of Lieutenant Griffin’s reckless disregard for his duty and that vessel was no doubt full of crumbling Vraxar animated corpses. This same Lieutenant Griffin was now locked inside the Ulterior-2’s brig, in spite of his loud, foul-breathed protestations of innocence.
“The Vraxar battleship is back,” said Pointer glumly. “At a lower altitude this time.”
“The Lucid did better than I expected,” said Blake. “How long did we get out if it?”
“Fifty minutes,” said Quinn promptly. “Maybe it decided on an extended jump and still has Ix-Gorghal following it.”
“It doesn’t really make a difference,” said Blake. “If nothing changes, we’re totally screwed.”
“You probably don’t want to hear that a six-hundred-kilometre object just skimmed off the upper edges of New Earth’s atmosphere, do you?” asked Lieutenant Cruz.
“Heading?”
“Same vector as before – looks like it’s settling in for another long, slow orbit of the planet.”
“There you have it,” said Blake bitterly. “Business as usual for them, as if there’s nothing to worry about.”
“That’s good news, isn’t it?” asked Hawkins. “It means they’re not expecting anything.”
Blake threw up his hands. “That’s because we haven’t got anything left to surprise them with. We’re prisoners here until the Vraxar outside manage to crack open the boarding ramp and then they’ll kill us.”
“Their battleship is moving again,” said Pointer.
Something in her tone made Blake look over, though without much interest. “What are they doing?”
“Coming lower and doing it fast. Nine thousand klicks, eight, five, slowing, three, two thousand, one thousand, slowing again, five hundred klicks.”
“Strange,” said Hawkins.
“Entering the upper reaches of the New Earth atmosphere,” continued Pointer. “Still descending.”
The Vraxar battleship came lower and lower. Each time the crew thought it was going to stop, it kept on going. Eventually, it did stop.
“Three thousand, one hundred metres,” said Pointer. “Directly over this base.”
“Atmospheric oxygen levels have just fallen to 16%,” said Quinn. “They’re getting ready for the next stage.”
“That’ll be the harvesting of our corpses, Lieutenant. Then the drilling of holes into our backs so they can prop us up against a metal pillar for a ten-year flight to find the Antaron.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of pessimism, sir,” said Hawkins. Like the others, she refused to address him as a civilian.
Blake sighed. “I don’t.” He stood and winced at the knots in his muscles. “I’m going up top for some air.”
“They’ll be able to see you from that battleship,” said Pointer.
“I doubt it matters – they’ve already demonstrated how they hope to capture the Ulterior-2. I’ll be surprised if they send down a missile for one man.”
Blake left the bridge and retraced the route to the upper access shaft. He called down the lift and waited for it to arrive.
“Need some company?” asked Pointer from behind.
“Sure.”
The lift arrived and they climbed onboard. It ascended through the shaft at its own pace, until it reached the top, where it became part of the hull. On a peaceful, sunny day, the view would have been magnificent. On this day, the wind-blown rain spattered their spacesuits, and ran in rivulets down the surface of their visors. Far from suppressing the appearance of devastation on the Tucson base, the rain increased the volume of the smoke, which rose into the still-dark skies above.
Blake dropped to his haunches and looked up. The artificial light from the base generators was failing. Even at its usual intensity, it wouldn’t have illuminated the Vraxar spaceship three kilometres above. He used the image intensifiers in his visor to look at what they faced. The enemy battleship hung, motionless, like a black-bladed sword waiting to swing down upon them.
“Looks kind of old, don’t you think?” asked Pointer. She sat next to him on the Ulterior-2’s plating and pulled her knees up.
“I know what you mean. As if they stole it five hundred years before and keep it running out of sympathy.”
“You have a funny way of looking at things.”
“I don’t hate that ship,” he said, his voice distant. “The way I see it, that thing up there is a record of what the Vraxar did to the species who built it. Maybe they’ll reduce it to parts once they’re done with us and before they move on to the Antaron.”
“And then it’ll be forever lost.”
Blake settled down next to her, unmindful of the rainwater covering the metal. “Us with it. Four hundred billion souls gone and forgotten.”
“Fleet Admiral Duggan is a man who comes through.”
“I was beginning to think I was too. Look at me – look at all of us – now.”
They sat together for a time – mere seconds or minutes, Blake wasn’t sure how long. He closed his eyes to block out the sights and found it strangely peaceful, with only a near-imperceptible hum of something deep within the Ulterior-2 to break the silence. He didn’t mind. If you were born to fly spaceships, that was all you wanted – the sound, the sights and that feeling of being part of something able to defy nature and physics.
“Maybe if we get out of this, we should go on that date,” said Pointer.
“You picked an odd time to change your mind.”
“I can see you need the motivation.” He turned his head and saw her expression was serious. “I mean it,” she said.
He didn’t answer and they sat together without speaking. He put his arm around her and she didn’t pull away.
“We need something to happen,” he said. “It can’t end like this.”
They were interrupted by a disembodied voice, come seemingly from thin air. “Sir?”
It was Lieutenant Cruz, using the speaker system integrated into the maintenance shaft access panel.
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“You aren’t going to believe this.”
He opened his mouth to ask the question. Just at that moment, the sky itself seemed to explode and the Vraxar battleship was engulfed in the plasma fires of what must have been a thousand missiles. The sound came a moment later and with such force Blake felt as if his insides would disintegrate with the resonation.
“Urgh,” said Pointer, leaning in closer and putting her hands to her head.
The heat and flame roared down and around with a punishing fury which promised agonising incineration for any living thing caught within. The HUD inside Blake’s helmet peaked at five hundred degrees and remained there, while he held onto Lieutenant Pointer, hoping they would somehow live through this storm of fire.
Blake got a sense of something and he looked up, trying to make out the details through the sun-bright plasma. The sensor in his visor snapped into sudden focus, revealing a new shape in the sky.
“The Sciontrar,” he breathed. “They shouldn’t be here for hours.”
Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Page 19