Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  “It looks like something got through the Helius Blackstar,” said Duggan. “Maybe it got destroyed on the way. The point is, it actually made the transit, broke up and left pieces of itself strewn across local space in the vicinity.”

  “You mean something that wasn’t the Ghasts?”

  “The technology was completely unknown. They hauled the pieces back to the labs for study. The trouble was, what they’d found was so far advanced, the scientists had no way of reproducing it. It was made of new materials, crafted in ways we couldn’t even comprehend. They assumed it had come from an unknown race of beings, living somewhere a long way distant from us.”

  “Aliens. I wonder if they’re anything like the Ghasts.”

  “They gave this unknown species the name Dreamers. There’s no indication why they chose that name.”

  “Couldn’t they have just pulled this new technology apart for a closer look?” asked Chainer after he’d thought about it for a moment.

  “Have you ever owned a watch, Lieutenant?”

  Chainer looked confused. “Sure, I had one when I was a kid.”

  “Did you ever take it apart to look at what was inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened when you tried to put it back together?”

  “I see what you mean. I took it apart and all the pieces wouldn’t fit back in the case.”

  “I think the scientists decided the technology was better in one piece.”

  “Why’d they decide to shove it into the hull of a ship? Shouldn’t they have left it in a lab somewhere?”

  Duggan wasn’t sure. He spoke, in the hope that his words would coalesce into something that made sense. “The Space Corps found the wreckage and they kept it. Did the Hynus project come about to make use of the alien technology, or did they use the funding for Hynus as a way of trying to meld our existing technology with the new? I don’t have the answers. The information in the data arrays is all over the place. Memos here, research notes there. It’s hard to build the complete picture.”

  “I know what I believe,” said McGlashan. They all looked at her and she continued. “If you ask me, the people at the top couldn’t stomach the idea of leaving a load of new toys sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for someone in the future to put to use and claim all the glory. I’ll bet my eye teeth they decided to put it into the Crimson to show what high and mighty bastards they were.”

  Duggan could be cynical at times, but McGlashan’s outburst surprised him. There again, her theory had a certain appeal, such that he found it hard to discount it entirely.

  “What happened to the Crimson?” asked Chainer eventually. “Why’d it hide itself in that cave?”

  “We’re still trying to find out,” said McGlashan. “There’s the entirety of the fourth array to search.”

  “Don’t let me keep you,” said Chainer.

  For the next eighteen hours, Duggan and McGlashan kept up the search. The longer they spent, the more they uncovered from the past. Halfway through, they had to take a break and although Duggan did his best to sleep, he found it difficult to rest. His mind continued to work feverishly and even when he finally drifted off, his sleep was disturbed by the vivid images in his head.

  By the time he was done, Duggan sat back in his chair, exhausted. He didn’t have all the details, but he was sure he’d found most of the relevant facts. Everything seemed to be linked – the Ghasts, the Crimson and this unknown alien species. He just couldn’t see where the connections lay.

  “How far from the Helius Blackstar are we?” he asked.

  “At current speed? Just over eight days. Then another five to get to New Earth from there.”

  “Change our course and take us there. Admiral Slender and his threats be damned!”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  With its new direction programmed into the navigation system, the ESS Crimson skimmed its way through space. Onboard, the crew sat, lost in their own thoughts. The bridge stank of coffee and sweat and Duggan’s flesh prickled beneath his uniform.

  Chainer was the first to speak. “You’re saying the Crimson actually fought one of these Dreamer spaceships?”

  “It’s all there in the combat log.” Duggan shifted in his chair. It was suddenly hard to get comfortable. “It launched over a thousand of its missiles and fired the disruptors eight times. The Crimson’s sensors logged a kill and recorded the Dreamer craft breaking up. Its last trajectory would place the remains on a planet near to where we found the Crimson.”

  “That Dreamer ship must have been one tough bastard to have mopped up a thousand Lambdas. What did it look like?”

  “Dark green, that’s the only details the sensors captured.”

  “Dark green? What’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say the Dreamer vessel was protected by some kind of field that made it difficult for the sensors to pick it up.”

  “That’s part of the reason the Crimson fired so many missiles,” said McGlashan. “Each missile had its targeting system disabled in order to fire them out in a straight line. Without guidance.”

  “That’d be like trying to throw a ball into a cup from two hundred yards away,” said Breeze. “The number of calculations needed to try and predict the enemy movement would be astronomical.”

  “We have a lot of processing power onboard, Lieutenant. Even so, it took a lot of attempts. Over a thousand missiles. We can’t even guess if the disruptors worked,” said Duggan.

  Breeze let out a low whistle. “This is nuts.”

  “On top of that, the Crimson tried to fire its last, unknown weapon. The one that Admiral Slender said the Corps engineers couldn’t figure out.”

  “Why didn’t it work?” asked Breeze.

  “The Crimson’s mainframe registered some type of jamming. Maybe that’s not the right word. It tried to fire and it was prevented from doing so.”

  “Prevented? You mean by the alien ship or something?” asked Chainer.

  “We’re guessing,” said McGlashan. “However, the combat logs show that the jamming wasn’t directed against the weapon itself. Rather, it seems as if the first core tried to fire and the second core prevented it.”

  “Or refused to do so,” said Duggan.

  “The ship’s own core refused to fire?”

  “Not exactly. The Hynus-T battle computer tried to fire and was overruled by the Dreamer core,” said McGlashan. “I’ve spoken to Monsey and had her run some checks. Several of the major functions on this ship are initiated by the human-built mainframe and then passed on to the Dreamer core for processing. That’s part of the reason the Crimson is so fast – the alien computer is magnitudes quicker at shaping the engine output, for example. It has a lot of grunt.”

  “The implication worries me,” said Duggan. “It suggests the weapon might be so devastating that the Dreamer core would have preferred to risk its own destruction in combat, rather than let it be fired.”

  “What was it doing in the cave? Why not just come home? And why didn’t the Corps send anyone out looking for it? Like really look for it?”

  “They did look for it - Admiral Teron said as much. We saw how well it was hidden. Maybe they had to abandon the search. It could even be they had to call off the search before someone in the Confederation Council got wind of it. After all, they’d lost the most significant discovery mankind has ever made.”

  “Great. They swept it under the rug,” said Chainer. “Don’t you just love the men in charge?”

  “As for why it was in the cave? The mainframe was damaged and there was substantial other damage. I think it was acting to preserve its own existence by hiding until it could send out its message. Prepare for war. It wasn’t talking about the Ghasts. It was talking about the Dreamers. We could be facing two enemies, each of them more advanced than we are.”

  The crew didn’t look happy at Duggan’s revelation. Eventually, it was Breeze who spoke, his voice calm and quiet. “We need
that weapon, don’t we, Captain?” he said. “Something to keep us in the game.”

  “We need something, Lieutenant. We’re staring down the barrel of a gun.”

  “Then why are we going to the Helius Blackstar?” said Chainer. “We’ve got an idea of what’s gone on. Shouldn’t we get on our way to New Earth and let the engineers take over? I mean, they might be able to get it to work. Instead, we’re taking the long route.”

  “We need answers. At the very least, I’d like to know what the enemy vessel looked like. There might be clues and wreckage we can scan. We’ll be delayed by six or seven days taking this diversion. The Archimedes will arrive at a similar time. They can’t broadcast from lightspeed to ask where we are. I guarantee that if we fly straight to the New Earth Capital Shipyard, the Crimson will sit untouched in a dock until Admiral Slender arrives to give instructions.”

  “Won’t someone in the Confederation Council take charge?”

  “I very much doubt they know about the recovery of the Crimson. They might not even be aware it was ever built. Rest assured, Lieutenant, if anyone is hauled before a court martial for this, it’ll be me.”

  “Everything’s screwed up,” said Chainer.

  “Everything but us, Lieutenant,” said McGlashan.

  As the days passed, the stress built amongst the crew. Duggan could feel it in the hot and claustrophobic atmosphere. Tempers were short and he could feel that they were one wrong comment away from being at each other’s throats. He ordered them to take turns away from the bridge, doing whatever they did to let off steam when they were off duty. There was no gym on the Crimson and it was sorely missed. It made him realise how tough it must be for his soldiers, cooped up in their bunks for hours on end.

  “No one said war would be easy,” he growled to himself, wondering if the pressure was getting to him as well. He’d told Breeze they were looking for answers. In reality, he didn’t know exactly what answers he was hoping to find and on more than one occasion, he was confronted by the urge to change their course to New Earth.

  On the third day, he had an idea and called Monsey to the bridge. She arrived, looking as keen as ever and carrying her box of semi-legal computer hardware.

  “What did you find out about the Crimson’s secondary core?” he asked. “Before you got into those data arrays.”

  “Just what I told you, sir. It’s damned fast. I’d bet everything I own it’s something different to the usual nano-cores. It’d rip the AIs on the Juniper into shreds at most tasks. At a few bits and pieces, it’s surprisingly slow.”

  “It’s fully interfaced with the front mainframe?”

  “If you asking me whether it speaks in numbers and can understand instructions given in numbers, then yes it does and yes it can. There are a few differences and there’re a dozen hardware interpreters to allow the front and back to shake hands properly. It’s a Ghast computer, isn’t it, sir? Just goes to show, biological creatures make up their own languages, but wherever you go, computers speak the same.”

  Duggan smiled. He didn’t want to lie. “No soldier, it’s not a Ghast computer.”

  Monsey was wise enough that she didn’t ask anything more about it. “Okay, sir. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “We’re carrying a weapons system that I want to access. The secondary core is hiding that weapon away. I have reason to believe that it will also prevent the weapon from firing should I ever require it.”

  “The rebellion of the machines, huh? My old man always warned me it would happen.”

  “I need you to see if you can find out how it’s happened and how I can override it. After all, I am the captain of this ship.”

  “Right you are, sir. I’ll plug in and get back to where I left off. I’ll warn you – the data arrays were stored on the Hynus-T mainframe and that was quick enough to make the hacking a real test. This other core? That’s something else entirely. I could grow old and die before I get around its defences. This bootbox works on brute force. It’s good, but there’s only so much it can do.”

  “Do what you can, soldier. We have no choice.”

  On the eighth day, the Crimson emerged from lightspeed into a position close to its destination. The arrivals were easier to handle than the departures, much to the relief of the crew.

  “Sir, it’s just clicked what this place is,” said Breeze. “It’s called the Hynus solar system. They might not have found names for the planets, but they sure as hell found a name for the sun.”

  “A short jump from the Helius Blackstar,” said Duggan. “This is where it all began.”

  “For the Crimson at least,” said McGlashan.

  “The combat logs show that the engagement with the Dreamer vessel took place on the tenth planet. It’s approximately the same size as Earth and we’ll reach a high orbit in less than one hour. Hynus is a big sun and we’re a long way out.” He called up the image of the planet on the bulkhead screen. It was unusually large given how far away it was from the sun. It radiated an icy blue that made Duggan feel cold just by looking at it. “There we have it. The alien craft fell somewhere onto the surface.”

  “Scanning it now, sir,” said Chainer. “It looks serene from the main screen. When you look closer, it’s a tempest. Average temperature close to minus two hundred and forty degrees Celsius. Snow, ice, mountains and not much else.”

  “We don’t have suitable kit to let us disembark, so surface work is out of the question. I wouldn’t like to risk it with a normal spacesuit,” said Duggan. “I’m going to take us into a mid-orbit and we’re going to scan the surface. If there’s anything unusual or unexpected, we’re going to try our best to find out what it is.”

  “We have more sensors than the Detriment carried, sir. However, I don’t know if they’ve been adapted for this kind of work. Things have moved on since they built the Crimson. Every ship in the fleet is now expected to take topographical readings whenever they’re in orbit. It might not have been a priority fifty or sixty years ago. There’s a lot of surface interference for us to look through.”

  “We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got, Lieutenant. If there’s anyone that can make sense of incomplete sensor readings, it’s you.”

  “Aye sir!” said Chainer.

  The planet loomed ahead and Duggan took the Crimson to an orbit ten thousand klicks above the surface. He hoped Chainer’s pessimistic suggestion about the sensors would prove to be false.

  “I’m owed a bit of luck,” he said.

  “What’s that sir?” asked McGlashan.

  “I said I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t end up circling the planet for days on end before we locate anything of interest.”

  McGlashan was aware of the consequences for Duggan if he was caught disobeying Admiral Slender’s orders and she nodded at him. “Fingers and toes, sir.”

  “How fast can I go?” Duggan asked.

  “I’m already getting gaps in the readings, sir,” Chainer replied. “I think you should slow down. A one-hour orbit should allow us to gather what we need.”

  Duggan gritted his teeth at that, since the Crimson would comfortably do a full orbit of a planet this small in five minutes, depending on the height and hull temperature. “One hour orbit it is,” he said. “How many till we’ve covered everything?”

  “I’d say twelve if we come across any excessively mountainous areas. Ten if it’s all flat rock.”

  With his knuckles white from their grip on the control sticks, Duggan got on with it.

  Chapter Thirty

  After two hours, Duggan relented and activated the recently-repaired autopilot. It almost felt like he was betraying himself, but he was relieved that he could take a break from sitting in the same position. Chainer was drinking what must have been his ninth cup of coffee since they’d begun the search. The man seemed to have an infinite capacity for the stuff.

  “What’ve we got, Lieutenant?”

  “We’re getting a pretty good picture of what’s d
own there. It’s just slow. There’re lots of mountains. It’s like the entire planet is one big, damned mountain range. It’s hard for the sensors to pick up details from their shadows in a single pass.”

  “Give me the bad news.”

  “We might need ten full circuits and then you might need to turn around and do another seven or eight in the opposite direction.” Chainer put his half-empty cup down. “Unless you can think of a way to limit the amount of terrain we have to cover? Like when you guessed the Crimson might be under the surface. That gave us something to home in on.”

  Duggan sat back in his seat to ponder the words. An idea jumped into his head.

  “Commander, can you locate the precise time and date on which the Crimson engaged the Dreamer vessel?”

  “Checking.”

  “When you have that, use it to determine the exact rotational position of this planet at the time of the engagement. Lieutenant Chainer, I want you to take a break from what you’re doing. I’m sending you a link to the Crimson’s sensor logs. There’s a plot of the debris as it fell. I need you to combine that with Commander McGlashan’s information. There’s a chance it will show which area of the planet the wreckage fell onto.”

  It took some time until they came up with an answer. There wasn’t quite enough data to make it a straightforward calculation and there was some guesswork involved.

  “I’d say it came down here, Commander. What do you say?”

  “I’d agree with your assessment, Lieutenant.”

  “Where do we need to go?” asked Duggan, turning off the autopilot.

  “I’ve sent you the coordinates.” Chainer grimaced. “It’s an area that was on our second-last planned orbit. We may have saved ourselves ten hours of looking at mountains and snow.”

  “Some good news at last,” said Duggan. He increased power to the gravity drive and completed a half-circuit of the planet in two minutes, leaving the hull glowing like a sullen ember.