Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  “Any developments, soldier?” he asked.

  “Getting there, sir.” She hesitated, as if she wanted to say something more.

  “What is it?”

  “The more I see of the backend core, the more I’m left wondering about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t really know. I haven’t cracked it yet, but I’ve seen enough to think that it’s designed completely differently to any other core I’ve encountered.” She chewed on her lip. “It’s as if the front-end mainframe and the back core are speaking different languages. Similar, but not quite the same. They’ve been cobbled together and are getting along just nicely, yet there’s a problem with understanding.”

  “The Crimson was the result of the Hynus project. It had a lot of money thrown at it. And I mean a lot. Could the Crimson have a new type of core resulting from that?”

  “It’s possible, I guess. I can’t understand why they didn’t develop it further, since it’s brutally fast at almost every task. I can see a few weaknesses to how it approaches some calculations. Otherwise, it has few downsides.”

  “Maybe it’s got a trillion dollars’ worth of rare metals in it,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find out a bit more when you crack it. I need to know about those weapons systems, soldier.”

  Duggan sat down in his chair and ran through the Crimson’s status reports. Everything was as expected, with the fission drive still at seventy-eight percent. Repairs couldn’t proceed on the fission drive or sub-lights either while the ship was travelling at lightspeed. They just needed a break from action for a few days to bring everything to a level Duggan would be happy with.

  “Always playing catch up,” he muttered.

  An hour later, McGlashan returned to the bridge. She looked sharp and fresh – she was one of those people who could steal an hour here and there and keep on going. Chainer arrived after another hour, looking shabby and dishevelled. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a can of generic hi-stim in the other.

  “I never grew out of my youth,” he said, smacking his mouth. “If I didn’t lie in till eleven, I always felt like crap.”

  “Hi-stim overdose,” McGlashan told him. “I don’t touch that stuff.”

  “Some of us never learned how to powernap,” he replied without irritation. “There was nothing to report for the last few hours sir. No recorded pings, no sign of anything trying to sniff us out. The bot’s got three more sensor arrays online. We’ll be at full sensor strength before we hit the Juniper and with any luck the long-range comms will either be fixed or near as damnit.”

  “Good. I want us to be as ship-shape as possible before we see any more action.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes Commander?”

  “While you were sleeping, I had a chance to do some calculations. Based on our known volume, ship dimensions, quantity of Lambda batteries and so on, I figure that whatever the two unknown weapons systems are, they’re taking up a big chunk of space. Much bigger than anything I’ve seen on a ship before.”

  “An early beam weapon?” asked Duggan. “I know the Space Corps had a functioning unit long before we started seeing them on the Ghast warships. I don’t know if the research was completely abandoned, but I think we only have two vessels that carry one owing to their size and expense. The Archimedes has one and the Hadron Maximilian.”

  “Maybe that’s what they are. We could be carrying two. That would be interesting.”

  “If we ever get a chance to unlock them,” Duggan replied with a shake of his head.

  The following nine and a half days crept by. Duggan wondered if he should be grateful for the break, but all he could think about was the deaths of a billion people on Charistos and the secrets that the Crimson’s core kept locked up tight. Monsey kept at it, pushing herself for as long as twenty hours on some days, while she tried to find a way through the ship’s defences. Even though she didn’t say it outright, it was clear she was becoming increasingly frustrated at her failure to defeat the core’s protective layers.

  “I once took control of an old Gunner in under five hours,” she said. “That was when the military police came knocking on the door. Didn’t matter much to me then – I’d beaten the best minds in the Corps and took one of their ships out if its bay. Remotely, of course.”

  “I know all about it, soldier,” Duggan told her. “I still don’t know how you didn’t get twenty years for that one.”

  “I got five and that was enough,” she said with a smile. “I never got a shot at anything bigger than a Vincent class. I told myself that something as old as the Crimson would be a piece of cake. Except it’s orders of magnitude harder than a thirty-year-old Gunner.”

  “Still sure you’ll get there in the end?”

  “The bravado in me wants to say ‘hell yes’. The part of me that’s older and wiser tells me to keep my damn mouth shut and not make any more predictions.”

  Duggan was disappointed and it was hard to keep it from his face. “We’ve been through too much to go without answers. We get back to the Juniper and they’ll take this ship off me.”

  At the beginning of the tenth day of their escape from the Ghast Oblivion, the Crimson came within near space range of the Juniper.

  “Well what do you know?” said Breeze. “The old mainframe predicted the flight time bang on the nose. We’ll be coming out of lightspeed in ten minutes time.”

  Duggan connected through to Sergeant Ortiz. “Sergeant? I promised you advance warning of any possible turbulence, so here it is. Ten minutes and we’ll arrive in local space close to the Juniper.”

  “Thank you, sir. Some of the guys reckon they’re due a bit of leave. Any chance you can put in a good word for us when we dock?”

  “I’ll do my best. No promises. You know what the Corps is like.”

  She laughed with a complete lack of bitterness. “Understood, sir. We’ve been living on hope not certainty for long enough now. I’m pretty sure they know how it is.”

  “Kryptes-9 in five minutes,” announced Breeze a short while after. “We’ll arrive in near space an easy seventy minutes ride out from the Juniper.”

  “We can’t wait seventy minutes, Lieutenant. I want us to come in closer.”

  “Yes sir!” said Breeze. “Fifty minutes?”

  “Let’s try for thirty minutes, shall we?”

  McGlashan stifled a laugh. “You’re really going to piss someone off.”

  “Time is of the essence, Commander. And I’m not in the mood for waiting.”

  “Coming out of lightspeed should be easier than going in, right?” asked Chainer.

  “Who knows, Lieutenant. Is your stomach empty?”

  “I just ate, sir. Waffles, they were meant to be.”

  “Make sure you point your face away from me when we arrive.”

  “Yes, sir.” Chainer looked green already.

  The Crimson’s near space arrival was more serene than its entry. The ship grated and juddered, producing a scraping sound from somewhere deep within that almost had Duggan worried. There were a few moments of nausea which passed quickly.

  “Orbital Station Juniper hailing us on short-range comms,” said Chainer. “The AI isn’t happy to see us.”

  “Obtain landing permission. Say it’s an emergency and we’re coming in without autopilot.”

  “Permission denied, sir.”

  Duggan laughed. He was much happier dealing with a truculent AI than he was trying to escape from a Ghast battleship with half of his weapons systems unavailable. “It must know what this spacecraft is. Tell it to speak to Admiral Teron.”

  “I’ve relayed the message sir. It’s warned us to keep our distance.”

  “Setting a course directly towards Hangar Bay One,” said Duggan.

  “He’s enjoying this a bit too much,” observed McGlashan.

  “ES Deeper hailing us, sir. Telling us to keep our distance or they’ll be forced to
engage.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I’m picking them up leaving high orbit around Kryptes-9. It’s good to have the sensors back.”

  Before Duggan could push things any further, the Juniper’s AI provided clearance for landing in Hangar Bay One.

  “It’s holding off from any further criticism, sir. Someone must have told it to keep quiet.”

  “Let’s get docked and see what we’ve missed since we’ve been away,” Duggan said, realising how desperate he was to find out. He pushed the gravity drive to maximum and the Crimson rocketed onwards at such a speed that he had to quickly back off for fear of making the AI do something they’d all regret. “We’ll have near twice the sub-light speed of the Detriment when the re-routing’s completed.”

  “Shame we’d burn up if we tried to go so fast in orbit,” said McGlashan. “It’ll be nice to know what she can do with a fully functioning gravity drive though.”

  Thirty minutes later, they were docked. The Juniper’s bays could hold larger spacecraft than the Crimson and Duggan found it easy to pilot the ship in and land it smoothly. It was the kind of stuff they drummed into you in training, even when they knew the automatic guidance systems would do the work most of the time. Duggan had always possessed a talent for it, which came from a lack of fear about the consequences of getting it wrong.

  “Nicely done, sir,” said McGlashan.

  “Stay here,” he warned, getting up from his seat. “Keep everyone onboard until you’re ordered to leave. When we get the chance, I’ll let you take our next assigned spaceship out without the autopilot.”

  “Thanks – I’ll look forward to it,” she said.

  Duggan marched off the Crimson and took the lift to the 17th floor of the Military CU. He strode across to the reception desk, where the same man who’d greeted him weeks ago was sitting.

  “Déjà vu,” Duggan muttered to himself.

  “I didn’t catch that, sir,” said the man.

  “I’m here to see Admiral Teron.”

  “Yes, sir, he’s expecting you.”

  “Thanks, I know the way,” Duggan growled, walking past.

  Minutes later, he was at Teron’s door. It slid open at once, and Duggan stepped inside.

  Teron was inside, leaning forward intently on his battered leather chair. “Captain Duggan,” he said. “I hear you’ve found what you were looking for.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “What the hell did you send us to recover, sir?” asked Duggan.

  “Like I told you, Captain. Old military tech that sent us a warning about a coming war,” Teron responded smoothly.

  “You’re hiding something! I know you are! I lost one of my men finding that ship, damnit! Then I find it’s faster than anything else in the fleet and it’s got some kind of advanced core that can ride an attack from a Ghast disruptor. On top of that, half of the Ghast fleet were out there with us. There was an Oblivion battleship, sir. A new model. What was it doing so far away from anywhere?”

  Teron had the good grace to look pained. “The Crimson is important. Not just for the information it holds, but for what it’s carrying.”

  Duggan took a deep breath. “What exactly is it carrying, sir? Why did we spend so much on that ship and then not follow through with the tech? If we had the Crimson’s engines on every ship in the fleet, we’d already have a big advantage on the Ghasts. We’d be able to outmanoeuvre them in every dogfight. Outrange their missiles. It could be all the difference.”

  “I know, Captain Duggan. I’ve looked through the design specifications. It was damn fast when it left the shipyard.”

  “I tried to look it up. Access denied. Why is the information buried so deep? We should have an army of engineers digging up the files and building on the research.”

  “We can’t,” said Teron quietly. “There are no records of the design.”

  “What do you mean, no records? How’d they build the damn thing in the first place? Are you telling me that someone’s lost the files? Or they’ve been destroyed? How could you lose all that? There must have been exabytes of data!”

  “They’re neither lost nor destroyed.”

  “What are you telling me, sir? Why aren’t you talking straight?”

  “Because I’m not allowed to, John.” The two men stared at each other for a time. Eventually, Teron looked away towards one of the banks of screens on his office wall. “Charistos finally drove the message home to the Confederation Council,” he said. “There’ve been riots on Earth, New Earth, Hope, Pioneer. Every habited planet in the Confederation has seen some sort of unrest. The people realise they’ve been fooled and that the Ghasts really might wipe us out. We’ve gone to total war. Everything from now on will be geared towards destroying our enemy. Before you left to find the Crimson, the military was already receiving more funding than we could easily deal with. Imagine that - our infrastructure was so badly cut, we could hardly spend the money quickly enough. Now the investment is pouring in.”

  “What about the shipyards, sir? The factories? The research labs? We can’t just revive them and expect everything to work at full speed again.”

  “I understand your cynicism, Captain – it’s something I’ve been accused of myself on more than one occasion.” Teron gave a glimpse of a smile. “However, someone in the Space Corps had enough clout to ensure that many of our facilities were mothballed, rather than dismantled. It’ll take time to bring them up to speed, but I assure you it’ll take a lot less time than it would to build them from scratch.”

  “Where do you get the people to work them? We must have lost the skills and the expertise.”

  “The Confederation has implemented National Service. Interplanetary Service would be a more appropriate term, of course. There was no resistance to the proposal at all. Even now, we’re commandeering the scientists and engineers we need. Just think of it – we have access to tens of millions of people across the Confederated planets who have skills we can put to good use. We’ll not go wanting for lack of suitable personnel.”

  Duggan ran his fingers across his stubbled chin. He hadn’t had the chance to shave yet. “I’m almost impressed. Why didn’t we do this five years ago when it might have meant something?”

  “We are all guided by the whims of our superiors. This is the hand we’ve been given and we have to play it to the best of our ability. We’ve already begun work on two new Hadrons. There will also be eighteen new Anderlechts, on top of those partway through construction. The Hadrons will take five years before they come into service. The first Anderlecht will be ready in two. There’ll be another flagship when we can build a big enough yard. We’re designing a whole new class of heavy cruisers to match their Cadaverons. It’s a gap in our fleet we’ve put up with for too long.”

  Duggan’s mind raced at this cascade of new information. “It’s good to hear we’re doing everything we can, sir. We’re totally outgunned at the moment. We’re going to need a lot more than two Hadrons and we’ll need them a lot sooner than five years from now.”

  “Indeed, but it’s a start. As I said – we have unlimited funding. When the facilities become available we’ll have the money and resources to lay down another five Hadrons. And another five after that. We are going to have so many light cruisers that the skies will be filled with them.” Teron’s eyes glittered angrily. “We’re going to beat these bastards, even if I have to take charge of a spacecraft myself!”

  “Tell me about the Crimson, sir,” Duggan said.

  Teron leaned towards him. “I can’t. This is top-top secret. Even I only have partial access to the files.” He sat back again and steepled his thick fingers in front of his face. “The Crimson is carrying several things we need, that we thought we’d lost for good until we received its signal. We have to break the ship up and take the pieces to the labs. I am not a man prone to melodrama, so you must believe me when I tell you that the Crimson is the greatest hope for humanity’s salvation.”

  “I had
guessed there was more to it than the need for a simple databank interrogation.”

  “I didn’t lie to you, John.”

  “Does partial truth count as the truth or a lie?”

  Teron exhaled loudly. He didn’t look comfortable. “We received the Detriment’s death code. I know you loved that ship.”

  “We were surprised by a Cadaveron. We didn’t stand a chance.”

  “There’s a Vincent class parked in Hangar Bay Two. Its captain got killed in a Ghast ambush on the surface of an outlying mining planet. ES Brawler. Fitted with new Lambdas and the same engine mods as you had on the Detriment. You’ve been assigned to it.”

  “What about my crew? And the soldiers?”

  “The Brawler’s already got a crew. I hear some of yours are overdue vacation.”

  “I don’t want a new crew, sir! I want the crew I’ve got!”

  “I’m sorry, Captain Duggan. I need them here on the Juniper where I can keep an eye on them. I’m sure they know little of importance about the Crimson, but I can’t have them going around spreading rumours and gossip. I’ve given you more information than I should have done, out of respect for who you are.”

  “I understand, sir. I don’t like it and I don’t agree with it, but I understand.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to reunite you with the same crew when you return from your next assignment. By then, the need for secrecy may well have diminished. For now, you’re dismissed, Captain, and the men and women on the Crimson will have some much-deserved rest and relaxation here on the Juniper. You’ll be reporting for duty first thing in the morning. Things are difficult for us in Axion and we need every spare ship to keep the Ghasts from finding Angax.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Duggan through gritted teeth. “Permission to tell them myself?”

  “That will be fine. Don’t take too long. I have a team of engineers preparing to board the Crimson. I don’t want them having to contend with ill-will from any crew who might have overstayed their permission to remain.”