Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  The last five of the Ghast light cruiser’s missiles detonated five thousand klicks away, confused by the swarms of one-metre metallic shock drones. The drones had tiny single-use engines that could propel them hundreds of klicks in only a few seconds. As they flew, they transmitted signals in all directions and on a billion different wavelengths in the hope that they would confuse or destroy the guidance systems of incoming missiles. If they failed, there were always the Bulwark cannons, but when they fired, everyone knew it was time to cross their fingers.

  “Lambdas will impact in twenty-five seconds,” said McGlashan.

  “They’ve launched another five missiles, Captain. Impact in thirty-two seconds. I’m getting something else from them. A power surge.”

  For the second time, everything went dead on the Detriment.

  Chapter Two

  The bridge descended into a darkness that was utterly impenetrable. Every screen winked out at once, the air conditioning stopped thrumming and the faint vibration of the Detriment’s huge engines stopped.

  Duggan spoke into the void, his voice calm, yet with an unmistakeable edge to it. “Anyone getting a response from their consoles?”

  “Nothing, Captain.”

  “Dead.”

  “No response.”

  “Keep trying.”

  None of the crew said anything further, waiting for Duggan to speak.

  “Thirty-two seconds to impact at last report,” Duggan said. His hand reached out for the solidity of the plasmetal control panel in front of him. With the absence of sight, his brain marvelled at the absolute smoothness of the material beneath his fingertips. In his head, Duggan counted down from twenty-five, slowly and calmly, permitting himself a deep breath every five digits. The seconds stretched on forever, time on the bridge going so slowly that it might as well have stopped. A long time ago, Duggan had watched a documentary about life aboard the old submarines hundreds of years passed. How the sailors must have waited in the confines of those tiny spaces, never knowing if death would take them until it almost inevitably did. And they call this progress.

  After a lifetime and more had passed, Duggan’s count reached zero and he breathed out noisily. “Drones must have got them. Let’s hope they didn’t launch any more.”

  “This makes you realise you’re alive,” said Chainer.

  “Everything’s still completely out,” said McGlashan.

  “It lasted for one minute last time. There can’t be long left.”

  “You think it’s the same thing again, Captain?” asked Breeze.

  “The Ghasts have used a new weapon on us. I would love to find out if there’ve been any other reports on the front. For the time being, let’s hope that when the lights come back on we don’t have six waves of incoming missiles.”

  “I’m mashing the release command for the drones,” said McGlashan. There was a smile in her voice. Duggan couldn’t remember the last time she’d been phased. At least not badly.

  The lights came on, as if that hidden power switch had been flicked again. Darkness vanished, to be replaced by displays and readouts filled with updates and status reports. Duggan had been so caught between expecting death and expecting light that the brightness caught him unawares and he had to squint and shield his eyes. The structure of the ship shuddered as energy flowed through one hundred and thirty million tonnes of engine mass.

  “Resume evasive manoeuvres. Status reports,” Duggan commanded.

  “We’re on a random course already, Captain. The engines are continuing as they were.”

  “Shock drones away, that’s our last cargo.”

  “Scanners clear. No missiles and no Ghast light cruiser.”

  “Bringing fission engines back online. One-hundred-and-seventy seconds. It seems like whatever shut us down has slowed up the mainframe.”

  “Any sign of debris, Lieutenant?”

  “Checking. Nothing at the moment.”

  “Could they have got away? Hidden themselves?”

  “There wasn’t enough time to escape. Scanning.”

  “Any transmit logs from the Lambdas?” asked Duggan.

  “Nothing at all, Captain. If they scored a hit, the transmits didn’t reach us or our sensors were offline and unable to receive.”

  “How long till the Cadaveron gets here?” There was no chance they’d have failed to detect the fission engine build up from the Detriment.

  “At least eight minutes. Plenty of time,” said Breeze.

  “Plenty of time,” echoed Duggan, wondering why he didn’t feel convinced. He looked at the displays in front of him – at the carpet of white-spotted blackness in the background of the gas giant. It told him nothing at all. There were times when sight was reduced to an almost useless sense and there was still that primeval feeling of helplessness when it happened.

  “I’m picking up a cloud of fragments, Captain,” said Chainer. “Decaying orbit approximately ten thousand klicks from the last known position of the Ghast ship. We got them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Definite, sir. No! We’ve got homing mines! Three of them only ten klicks!”

  “How’d you miss those?” snarled Duggan, preparing himself for the impact.

  “Sorry sir, no time to pick them up when the power came back.”

  In the vacuum outside, three one-foot diameter mines clamped themselves to the Detriment’s starboard side. They armed themselves and exploded within half a second. The shaped explosions sent a ripple through the spacecraft’s hull, inflicting a violent trauma to the Detriment’s thick armour plating. Insulated from the worst of the blasts, the occupants on the bridge felt little more than a trembling through the walls. A stark red emergency light filled the room.

  “Status report!” shouted Duggan.

  “Engines still at ninety-five percent, sir,” said Breeze.

  “Have they breached the hull?”

  Breeze looked up, worried. “I’m reading damage to the lower infantry quarters.”

  “Sergeant Ortiz, please report at once!” Duggan said through the onboard comms. “We’ve taken a hit over the lower infantry quarters.”

  The comms crackled and spat, a cacophony of background shouting. “It’s gone to shit down here, sir. Life support’s shut us out of the below quarters and we’ve got men in there!”

  “I need to know what’s happening, Sergeant!” Duggan blew out his breath and sprinted through the narrow exit door from the bridge. He dropped down the access steps three at a time and charged through the tightly turning corridors of the spacecraft’s interior until he came to the area of the ship where the soldiers spent their time. The upper infantry quarters were cramped. Men and women from the Detriment’s small contingent of soldiers were gathered, shouting and pressed tightly in the narrow space between the wall-mounted bunks. There was an access hatch that led down to the lower quarters. It was closed.

  “Sergeant, what’s the situation?” asked Duggan, picking out the slender shape of the infantry officer. She was crouched over the featureless alloy plate that led below. It had a display panel that was flashing a blood-red colour.

  Ortiz stood and faced him, anger visible in her deep-set brown eyes. “Rogers, Morgan and Rivera are down there, sir,” she said. “The mainframe slammed the access hatch tight.”

  Duggan shouted and kicked out at the nearest wall. “Captain to bridge. Anything you can give me on the status down here?”

  The voice of Lieutenant Breeze returned at once. “There’s been no breach, sir, but the engines dissipated a lot of heat through that area.”

  “How much heat?” asked Ortiz.

  “Fifteen hundred degrees. Looks like the temperature’s down below a hundred now. The hatch should open up soon.”

  “Where’s Corporal Blunt?” asked Duggan, looking around for the ship’s medic.

  “They’re gone, sir,” said Ortiz quietly.

  “Ship’s sensors aren’t reporting any signs of life,” said Breeze.

 
Duggan sat down on one of the bunks and put his head in his hands. Corporal Blunt arrived, carrying with him a pack and a metallic box of hi-tech medical equipment. The man was thickset and looked younger than his years. He’d arrived just in time to hear the report from the bridge.

  “Clear the room,” Blunt instructed. “The hatch lock has just disengaged. I don’t need anyone to go down there with me.”

  “I need to see, Corporal,” said Duggan.

  Blunt nodded and waited until the soldiers had cleared the room before he opened the hatch to the lower quarters.

  Half an hour later, Duggan returned to the bridge. The destruction of the Ghast light cruiser against the odds would have usually filled him with elation. Now all he felt was anger and sadness that he’d lost three of his men.

  “Good work ladies and gentlemen,” he said, the words sounding hollow. “Point us towards the Juniper with no stop-offs.”

  “The Juniper it is,” said Breeze.

  Two minutes later, there was a whine and everyone on board the Detriment was gripped by the unshakeable feeling that they’d been displaced, yet without being able to put exact words to the feeling. The life support systems sucked up almost a thousandth of one percent of the engine’s output as they fought to stabilise the vessel’s interior against the incomprehensible dislocation that was about to happen to the fragile bodies aboard. Then, the Detriment vanished from the orbit of Gyer-12, skimming away through space at many multiples of lightspeed. Far behind, the shattered pieces of the Ghast light cruiser tumbled lazily towards the planet’s surface. The few sections which were large enough to survive the heat would crash into the surface over the coming weeks.

  The Ghast Cadaveron, which had come in response to the distress beacon from the smaller ship, registered that the Corps vessel had entered Light-H – a speed somewhat in excess of that normally achievable by a Vincent class, but well within the capabilities of the heavy cruiser if it chose to follow. Its AI ran through the countless destinations in its databanks of known human outposts, before narrowing them down to the five most likely. None of these possibilities had a greater than three percent likelihood of being correct. Accurate lightspeed pursuit was almost impossible even with the processing power available to the most advanced warships. The Cadaveron possessed a colossal amount of firepower that would be wasted in the pursuit of a Vincent class. The Ghast ship left the planet to travel its own course.

  Nineteen days later, the Detriment exited Light-H and re-entered normal space. The ship’s sub-light engines fought to stabilise its speed and course for a few seconds and the brutal exit from lightspeed was replaced by a comparatively serene entry into a very high orbit of planet Kryptes-9. Along the way they’d jettisoned the bodies of their dead out in space, letting the infinity of darkness claim them forever. The men had been reduced to little more than carbonized lumps of matter, dehumanized as an added insult to their deaths. Duggan felt his blood boil whenever he thought about it. He’d not lost a man or woman in five years.

  “You’ll not hear the end of this little trick when we dock,” said Breeze, his voice cutting through the silence.

  “So we dropped in a little too close for comfort,” said Duggan. “Teron said no delays. We’re just following orders.”

  It was accepted practise for a ship to emerge from lightspeed travel at least an hour away from an orbital position. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for a helmsman to plot a course that was fractionally awry and there were rumours that an AI had once managed to screw things up and nearly cause a disastrous collision between an Anderlecht class and the surface of a moon.

  “Like he’ll take the flack for that one,” said McGlashan.

  “Juniper ahead, Captain. Her AI isn’t pleased.”

  “I’m sure it knows why we’re here.”

  “I’ll bet it knows more than we do.”

  “Amen to that,” said Duggan.

  Through the main viewscreen he saw the approaching orbital command and control station, magnified by the Detriment’s mainframe so that the details were sharp. The Juniper was a vast, metallic cuboid that rotated smoothly about its own axis, with a surface that appeared featureless from a distance, but which was covered in a myriad of sensors when viewed from close range. It had taken many decades to build and its construction had stripped at least three remote planets of their precious resources of certain rare metals that went into making up the ship’s awe-inspiring power and propulsion systems. Duggan had once heard an engineer boast that the Juniper’s engines could generate enough thrust to reverse a large moon’s orbit. He didn’t know if that was true or not, but had no reason to doubt what he’d heard. They’d not been fired up in anger for thirty years anyway and the Juniper continued to rotate in a smooth elliptical orbit, several hundred thousand kilometres above the surface of ice giant Kryptes-9.

  “We’ve got clearance to land,” said Chainer. “It’s still not happy.”

  Duggan gave a rumbling laugh. He’d never learned to feel guilty for pissing off an AI. An hour later, he was in an airlift taking him from Hangar Bay 1 on the 705th floor, all the way to the 17th floor of the Military Command Unit. The Military CU took up several dozen floors and much of the Juniper’s interior. It was one of the few operational command and control stations that remained after decades of cutbacks. The once almighty armed forces had been scaled back and scaled back, with the funds ploughed into whatever current issue the bigwigs thought would get them votes. It was short-termism at its worst.

  At the 17th floor, the air lift slowed smoothly and its doors opened, allowing Duggan to exit into the Military CU. The lobby area was stark and clean – almost clinical in design. The temperature was several degrees too cold. The space he’d entered was huge and overwhelmingly metallic – like a spacecraft hanger with a low roof. People hurried to and fro, dressed in their contrasting uniforms, all trying to give the impression that they knew what they were doing.

  Duggan was familiar with the place. As a captain with over twenty years’ experience, he’d visited the Juniper on dozens of occasions. There’d been a time when he’d almost felt as if he lived here. The rest of his time had been spent scouting the edges of Confederation space for signs of Ghast activity. He set off across the floor, the hard soles of his boots producing a crisp noise from the metal underfoot. Duggan was an imposing figure – over six feet tall, with broad shoulders, cropped blond hair and a piercing stare from his green eyes that sent people scuttling out of his way as he approached. The CU had a row of reception desks with real people sitting at them, instead of automated check-in screens. The man whom Duggan approached looked up.

  “Captain Duggan?” the man asked, polite and impersonal. The scanners in the lift had sent this information on ahead.

  “I’ve been asked to see Teron.”

  “Admiral Teron, sir. I assume you know how to find him.” The receptionist was a pro – he made his words neither a statement or a question, allowing Duggan to ask for more information if he needed it.

  “Thanks,” said Duggan. He knew exactly where he was going.

  He walked along what seemed like several hundred metres of stark, silver-grey corridors until he arrived at his destination. Sensors checked his identity, whilst a nano-computer somewhere in the Juniper’s brain tallied his appearance with the diary of the occupant. Finding a match, it dutifully slid the plasmetal door open, permitting him entry. Duggan didn’t pause and stepped through into the office beyond.

  “Good to see you, Captain Duggan,” spoke a deep voice.

  “That wasn’t what you said last time I saw you, sir,” replied Duggan.

  Chapter Three

  The office was large and the left-hand wall was covered with screen upon screen, each of which flashed with numbers, diagrams, schematics. There were other monitors on the right-hand wall which received a feed from the orbital’s monitoring sensors and showed alarms and statuses of the vital systems that kept the Juniper running. The orbital hadn’t broken down yet, but
there were thousands of technicians who lived aboard and worked long hours to keep it ticking. There was a large desk – made of real wood, which had seen better days. Behind the desk was a man – he looked at least sixty, though it was difficult to be sure how old anyone was, with the availability of life-extending drugs. Admiral Malachi Teron could have been over a hundred years old for all Duggan knew.

  Teron was broad and grizzled, with short, white hair and a lined face. He had scars on his neck – light pink and angry from where he’d been caught by a Ghast plasma burst twenty years ago. His red uniform dripped with medals, testament to the campaigns he’d fought in.

  “Take a seat,” said Teron, his voice was harsh and with an unnaturally rough quality that came from the injury he’d suffered. It was an order and Duggan took one of the two firm chairs.

  “What do you want from me, sir?” he asked.

  “You always liked to get to the point, didn’t you, Captain Duggan?” asked Teron. The man exhaled noisily and sat back in his seat, running his thick fingers over his scalp. He looked tired. “Something’s come up. Things are happening – important things, that need the right man to deal with them.”

  “Things? Is that the military term for it?” asked Duggan with the hint of a smile. “Come on, sir. Stop beating around the bush and tell me what’s going on.”

  Teron paused for a moment in order to push a brown folder from one position on his desk to another. Then, he looked up. “Have you ever heard of the ESS Crimson?”

  Duggan frowned and racked his memory. He’d probably flown in half the Space Corps’ ships at one time or another, but this one didn’t ring a bell. “ESS means it’s old, right?” he asked.

  “Very old, as it happens. Corps ships became universally prefixed with Earth-Star over forty years ago. There was only ever one ship built as Earth-Star Superior, which was the Crimson.”

  “What happened to it?” asked Duggan,