“We need to take out those repeaters,” he said through gritted teeth. The destruction of the tank put them in real danger of losing this one.
“Their closest two squads have advanced to within four hundred metres, sir,” said Ortiz. “We should be able to make it back to the rocks behind us if we stay low.” The cave mouth was at a higher level than the floor beneath the shelf, but not quite high enough for the repeaters to fire directly onto the shelf. Duggan knew they should make a run for it.
“Dammit, we need more time for the Crimson to repair her engines!” he said.
“We’re going to get slaughtered here, sir,” said Ortiz.
“We’ve lost Henderson,” said Blunt, patching a channel straight into Duggan’s suit.
Duggan swore loudly. He knew it was time to retreat. His head told him this one was a lost cause. The repeaters swept the shelf in front of him, sending a dozen serrated pieces of stone against his suit and helmet with a dull clatter.
“Sir, we should go, sir!” said Ortiz.
“Captain Duggan, you can’t wait there any longer,” said McGlashan, addressing him more formally than usual.
“If we have to fly out of this cave with the engines at thirty-five percent, that Cadaveron will blow us out of the air before we’re fifty klicks from the cave!” he said. “We need more time!”
“There’re too many of them!” shouted Collins across the open channel. He was close to panic.
A cold calm descended on Duggan as he considered his options. Just when he thought he’d have to concede this one as a lost cause, his brain came up with an idea. It was risky as hell, but once he’d thought it, he couldn’t shake it off.
“Commander McGlashan. Are the Crimson’s aft Lambda batteries operational?”
“Yes sir, all eighteen clusters are functional.”
“Good. I need you to fire two missiles at the cave mouth here. The repeaters are keeping us pinned down.”
“Sir?”
“Do I need to repeat everything for you, Commander?”
“No. Sorry, sir. It’s just that the cave mouth is far too close. The Lambda guidance systems don’t kick in until they’ve gone more than twenty klicks. Otherwise the acceleration destroys the instrumentation.”
“I am aware of this, Commander. You’ll need to override and target them manually.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line and he almost heard McGlashan gulp. “That’s going to need a hell of a shot,” she said.
“I trust you. Do it and do it now.”
“Aye, sir. Working on the override now. You might want to tell the guys and gals to put their heads down.”
“Listen up everyone. We’re going to take out those heavy repeaters with the Crimson’s Lambdas. You’d best keep your heads down.”
The squad’s open channel became awash with a cacophony of shocked voices. Duggan shut them down at once and ordered silence. “And once those repeaters are destroyed, I want you to show any Ghast survivors that the Corps can be dirty bastards too.”
“Amen to that,” said Ortiz.
“Launching now, sir,” said McGlashan.
Duggan flattened himself to the ground, willing himself to show as small a profile as possible. There was the tiniest of delays, during which two of the Crimson’s Lambda missiles shot away from their cluster, sleek tubes of single-burn gravity engines, guidance and payload. They followed an almost perfectly flat trajectory across the boulder-strewn cavern floor, racing over the huddled human soldiers, still accelerating at a colossal rate. The first warhead struck the cave wall a little over a hundred metres above the ground. The Lambdas were designed to pierce the thickest of armour and this one buried itself deeply into the rock face before its payload detonated, blowing out a ragged hole in the wall and incinerating the Ghasts and the heavy repeaters in a millisecond. The second missile shot out of the cave, its trajectory carrying it away from the planet’s surface and out into space.
The heat from the blast washed down the cave, killing all of the advancing Ghasts and charring their bodies to ashes inside their suits. A cloud of blue-hot dying fire engulfed Duggan and his squad, roiling over and buffeting them. Each suit immediately shut down all non-essential power-draining subsystems as the life support system sucked all available power to keep the occupants alive. Four hundred and ninety degrees, Duggan saw the outside temperature peak at. Can’t resist that for long.
To Duggan’s relief, the temperature fell away rapidly as the Lambda blast receded. He crawled quickly forward towards the edge of the shelf and saw Ortiz doing the same. It was utterly dark below and his suit’s comms and image enhancements were slow to reactivate. Must have taken some damage. After what seemed like an eternity, the suit’s life support allowed the helmet sensors enough power to resolve the blackness below.
“No movement,” said Ortiz. It looked like her suit was working a little better than his. “Damn, sir, that was crazy.” Her voice carried a mixture of admiration and relief.
“Ghast forces eliminated. Well done, soldiers,” said Duggan through the open channel.
Along the ledge, the rest of the squad pushed themselves to their feet. One or two of them looked distinctly shaky. A few half-garbled voices spoke at once, the men and women not quite recovered from what had happened.
“Sir? Is everything all right?” asked McGlashan. She sounded shaky too and Duggan realised he’d just told her to do something that could have killed them all.
“Your aim was good, Commander. Looks like you got them all.”
McGlashan didn’t say anything, but she didn’t close the channel quickly enough to stop Duggan hearing her sharp exhalation of breath.
He stood up, feeling more elated than anything else. Then he saw the prone body of Henderson, with one arm torn off and a dinnerplate-sized exit hole through his back. Corporal Blunt had hooked the soldier up to one of his machines. It hadn’t been enough. Duggan’s feeling of victory evaporated at once. “Let’s get back to the Crimson. Bring Henderson with us and we’ll send him out into space. It’s the least he deserves.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Should we leave anyone behind to keep watch, sir?” said Ortiz, as the squad of soldiers threaded their way through the boulders that led towards the Crimson.
“There’s no point anymore. The Cadaveron can’t fail to have picked up the Lambda blast. They’ll know there’s something big down here. The important thing is they don’t know where the Crimson is, which denies them the opportunity to destroy it.”
“Unless they bombard the surface and rely on luck, sir.”
“There’s always that, Sergeant. For the moment, I won’t risk anyone else. The Cadaverons carry upwards of a thousand troops. We can be pretty sure that next time it won’t be a single dropship that comes to investigate.”
“At least these rocks should slow them up some,” she said. “Might stop them getting their artillery close enough.”
Duggan wasn’t convinced but didn’t say so. “You’ve got command again,” he said, letting Ortiz know that she was giving orders to the squad again.
“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged.
“I want these rocks to be riddled with grenades. To give the Ghasts something to think about when their foot soldiers come this way.”
Ortiz unclipped one of the dull grey tubes from her bandolier. She gave the dial on top a twist, her fingers surprisingly nimble within the suit. Without a glance, she tossed it carelessly to one side, where it bounced twice before coming to rest. “It’ll arm itself in five minutes. Anything comes within twenty feet and it’s boom time. We’ll not be able to come this way again.”
“We shouldn’t need to, Sergeant.”
Sergeant Ortiz passed on the instruction and soon all of the soldiers were arming the grenades they carried with them and flicking them away between the rocks with a practised nonchalance, as if they were throwing away something of no concern at all.
“How’re the quarters on the Crimson?
” Duggan asked her, partly to pass the time and partly because he wanted to know.
“We might as well be back on the Detriment,” said Ortiz, her voice betraying the faintest hint of amusement. “The food replicator’s a sight to behold.”
“The Crimson’s internal layout is practically identical to a Gunner, going by what I’ve seen,” said Duggan. “They must have hired the same designers. We’re packing a lot more weaponry than we had on the Detriment.”
“Enough to beat that Cadaveron?” asked Ortiz. There was hope in her words. For all her toughness, she didn’t want to die out here.
“We’ll be trying to outrun it, not shoot it down,” said Duggan. “The Crimson looks like it’s a real killer, but it’s still over fifty years old.”
They got back to the Crimson much more slowly than Duggan would have liked. Carrying the body of Henderson slowed them down significantly, though there was no way Duggan was going to leave the man behind. At the bottom of the boarding ramp, he thanked the squad and dismissed them to their quarters. Duggan made his way towards the bridge – it had felt good to be out there with a rifle in his hand, but it was a relief to be back on a spaceship again.
“Welcome back, sir,” said McGlashan. She looked almost gaunt. They already knew about the loss of Henderson and it was clear from the haggard faces on the bridge that the man’s death didn’t sit easily with them.
“What’s our status?” he asked. “I doubt we’ve got more than another couple of hours before we have Ghast troops knocking on our door.”
“Twelve hours until ninety percent on the engines,” said Breeze.
Duggan frowned. “Going quicker than expected?”
“Yes sir, much quicker. It’s going like we’re packing a modern AI, rather than a bunch of silicon.”
“Could it be highly optimised?”
Breeze looked pained, as if he didn’t want to commit to an answer. “Could be, sir.”
Duggan turned to Monsey. “Any progress, soldier?”
“They’ve locked the core down pretty well, sir. Or should I say cores. It’s the strangest arrangement I’ve seen.”
“What do you mean?” asked Duggan.
“It’s like they’ve got an old mainframe piggybacked on top of another back-end core. I don’t know how to explain it better than that. It’s not something I’ve come across before. The front end is a design I recognize. I’m only getting glimpses of what the back end is doing. It’s fast, sir. Really fast.”
“Some sort of push-pull system?” he asked. “Or done to improve the redundancy?”
“Unlikely, sir. The term mainframe on warships like this always encompasses a dozen layers of redundancy anyway. This is something different. I can’t get a proper go at the second core at all.”
Duggan was intrigued, but didn’t know what to make of the soldier’s words. He left her to it and considered his other options. The Ghasts were certainly not going to leave them alone now that they’d seen their dropship destroyed and picked up the launch of two Lambdas. They’d either send an overwhelming force of their troops to the cave, or they’d pound the surface above. Given that their ground troops had been killed before they could discover any worthwhile information about what was hiding here, Duggan had to assume the Ghast commander would send more of his soldiers.
Another two hours passed in a tense near-silence. The clacking of Monsey’s keyboard was louder than the air conditioning and the faint humming sound that was prevalent throughout the entirety of the ship. There was something about it which made Duggan think that the Crimson was eager to see action. He shook the feeling away.
“Engines at forty-five percent,” announced Breeze. “Whatever the core is doing, it’s flying through it.”
“Not quickly enough,” said Duggan.
“I’ve got movement on the sensors,” said Chainer. “I’d say it’s ground troops coming towards our position.”
“They can’t get anything big enough to hurt us through those rocks,” McGlashan replied. “They’re not going to damage anything throwing grenades and firing their rifles at us.”
“Of course, they aren’t,” said Duggan. “However, their plasma launchers might be able to land a few shots on us if they can get them far enough into the cave.”
“Do they have the firepower to pierce the Crimson’s armour?” she asked with a frown.
“Who knows? I can’t recall a time when a piece of Ghast artillery was given the opportunity to fire upon a Corps vessel.”
“Probably best we don’t find out,” said Breeze, without lifting his head from the instrument panel.
“Here they come,” said Chainer.
All five on the bridge watched on the viewscreen as a dozen Ghast soldiers came into view from the cover of the rocks. They took a defensive position, spreading themselves widely amongst the outcrops and loose boulders.
“There’re more behind these ones,” Chainer said. “I’d guess at least three hundred. I’m picking up their attempts to transmit.”
“Can you read what they’re saying?” asked Duggan. It made no difference – it didn’t take a genius to imagine what details their message contained.
“Negative, sir. The Crimson was build long before their latest encryption methods. It’ll take the mainframe a while until it learns how to decrypt what they’re sending.”
“Fine,” said Duggan, waving the matter away. “See what it can come up with. Don’t divert from other tasks.”
The Ghasts didn’t take any hostile action immediately. They set up position and watched from within their alloy space suits.
“What are they up to?” wondered McGlashan.
“They probably can’t get a message to their ship’s captain,” said Duggan. “I’ll bet they’re having to send some of their soldiers back towards the cave entrance so they can act as a relay for the message. It’ll buy us some time. Not much, but better than none.”
Another thirty minutes passed until, without warning, the Ghast troops disappeared into the rocks as if they’d never existed.
“Got plasma rounds incoming, sir,” said McGlashan, five minutes later. “Lots of them.”
“At least we’ve got our answer,” said Duggan. “It doesn’t look as if the Ghasts are curious enough about the Crimson to bother trying to capture it.” On one of his screens, he watched at least a dozen red dots which came in a wavering line towards the Crimson. Each of the dots represented an incoming plasma shell. “Let’s see what damage ground artillery can do to the armour of the Hynus project’s pride and joy.”
Chapter Fifteen
The cluster of dots came closer and closer, until one by one, they winked out. A damage readout plotted a variety of graphs, charts and tables to indicate where the impacts had occurred and the extent of the damage. Deep as they were in the structure of the ship, none of the occupants felt even the slightest indication that anything was amiss. The plasma launchers were designed to take out armoured vehicles like the Detriment’s tanks. Against an eleven-hundred-metre warship, they were rather less effective.
“They’re going to need something bigger,” said McGlashan with a grin. “They hardly scratched us.”
“They’ve got plenty of time,” said Duggan. Sure enough, a second cluster of the red dots appeared on his screen, drifting silently towards the Crimson.
“The bastards got our range pretty easily,” said Breeze.
“Their soldiers will have planted a tracking beacon beneath us, or somewhere nearby,” Duggan told him. “All they’ll need to do is point their launchers this way and let their guidance systems do the rest.”
“Second rounds have impacted. The surface of our aft armour plating has melted to a depth of nearly a metre.”
“Dammit!” said Duggan. “I don’t want them whittling us away before we’ve even taken off.”
“Engines at forty six percent,” said Breeze. It had only been a few minutes since his last announcement.
“Third wave incoming,” said Dugga
n under his breath. He turned his attention to Breeze. “If we forget lightspeed, how long until you can get the gravity drives functioning?”
“They’ll work now, sir. I just don’t have enough data to predict how fast we’ll be able to go with them.”
“Divert the mainframe until it’s working fully on the gravity drive.”
“I’m on it,” Breeze replied.
“How’re you coming on with the core, soldier?” asked Duggan.
“Still at it, sir,” replied Monsey noncommittally. “Don’t rely on me getting it unlocked before you need it,” she said.
“Do your best,” he replied. In truth, he didn’t know if whatever was held in the locked-down core was going to be of any use to them. Regardless, he had no intention of letting up in his efforts to find out. It appeared as if the Crimson had secrets and he was determined to find out what they were, before he got back to the Juniper. Assuming the Cadaveron doesn’t blow us to shit first.
The third barrage struck the Crimson and it wasn’t long until a fourth appeared on the spaceship’s detection screens. Duggan breathed deeply, feeling the warm air of the bridge fill his nostrils with its comforting odours.
“I’m taking direct control of the first rear Lambda battery,” he said.
“You don’t have the angle, sir,” said McGlashan. “I think they’ve learned from the last missile strike they took from us. Our sensors won’t reach outside, but we can plot back to the Ghast position by analysing the trajectory of the incoming rounds. Even if you fire as flat as the Lambdas will go, you’re going to overshoot.”
“I think you’re right,” he said with a humourless laugh. “Maybe it’ll give them something to think about though.”
“Just don’t bring the ceiling down and block our way out,” she replied.
The fourth wave of plasma fire scoured the Crimson’s outer hull. Before a fifth was launched, Duggan triggered the release of another of the Crimson’s arsenal of Lambdas. A concealed opening at the rear of the spaceship slid open for the briefest of moments. A ten-metre-long alloy tube screamed away, accelerating at a rate quicker than any local space warship could manage. The missile’s guidance system remained inoperative as the Lambda exited the cave at a speed that made it difficult for a biological eye to detect. It flew low and fast over the clustered Ghast artillery. At last, the guidance computer came online, too late to prevent the missile from detonating against a steep escarpment, almost eighty kilometres beyond the Ghast positions.
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