Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  “We are able to pin it down to a fairly narrow area,” said Chainer. “A few thousand square kilometres. If you go low and slow over the area, I should be able to get what we need in a single pass.”

  Duggan followed Chainer’s suggestion and reduced the Crimson’s speed to what felt like a crawl. They were less than two thousand klicks up, yet the bulkhead screen showed no more detail than it had from a much higher orbit. The surface was a bleak and featureless white. Any variation was invisible to the naked eye.

  “What’s it like down there, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Rough, sir. Really rough. There’s a storm right beneath us. If we were in a smaller ship and a bit lower than we are, you might have a tougher job keeping us steady. I’m going to have to tweak the sensors a bit. You get a lot more play with these old models. With the new ones, you have to do what you’re told.” Chainer went quiet. Duggan turned to look. The lieutenant’s face had gone completely white, as if he’d seen an army of ghosts run across the bridge. Duggan realised at once he was about to hear something disastrous.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, urgency in his voice.

  “You need to look at this, sir. You need to look at it now.”

  Duggan sprang from his chair and stood at Chainer’s shoulder. “Tell me.”

  “We’re broadcasting, sir. We shouldn’t be broadcasting, but we are.”

  “Tell me clearly, Lieutenant!”

  “It’s the sensors, sir. They send and receive external data and then pass it on to the mainframe. I was playing around with them to try and get a better picture of the surface, when I noticed one of them send out a ping. Just a single ping.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t even know if it was aimed anywhere.”

  “We’re a vessel of war. We should be running on silent! Check the rest of the sensors in the same way. Do it now!”

  “There’s nothing. They’re all quiet. Hang on, we sent another ping. From a different sensor.”

  “Does it contain any data? Anything about us?”

  “No specific data, sir,” said Chainer miserably. “Except if you happen to pick up that ping, you’ll be able to find out exactly where it’s come from.”

  “What’s giving the instruction to send? Stop it at once!” Duggan said. He realised his voice had climbed louder than he’d intended. “Find out what it is, Lieutenant,” he finished.

  “We’re in the shit, aren’t we?” said McGlashan.

  “Yes, Commander. We’re deep in it,” he said. “If the Ghasts can read those pings, there’s a good chance we led them straight to the Juniper and the Archimedes. There we were happily doing our duty, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, when all the while we were sending out signals to every enemy vessel that was listening!”

  “Sir? The instruction to send out the pings is coming from the mainframe. They’re going out at semi-random intervals from random sensors.”

  “Block it at once,” said Duggan.

  “I can’t, sir. I’ve traced the command through the Hynus-T and it’s coming from the interface with the Dreamer core.”

  Duggan almost punched the nearest wall. “The damned alien computer’s sending out an SOS! They put it into one of our spacecraft without guessing it might have an automated distress beacon, like every one of our warships! Who knows how long it’s been sending?” He took a deep breath. “What do we think? Is it nothing more than an automatic response? Or is there an intention behind it?”

  “I think we have to assume it’s automated, sir. A call for help and nothing more.”

  Duggan caught sight of Monsey. “There you go, soldier. It’s an alien computer, just not one that belongs to the Ghasts. We need access to it, or at least we need something that allows the front mainframe to take precedence. We have to override whatever locks or hard-coded instructions it’s been programmed with.”

  She met his eyes, not afraid to tell him the truth. “I can’t stop it, sir. I might never be able to crack it. If I had a billion times the horsepower I’d be able to give you some good news.”

  “We don’t have a billion times the horsepower,” he said. Monsey put her head down and started at her keyboard again.

  Duggan paced the two or three steps there was room for. “We can’t go anywhere until we can stop the pings. We might lead the Ghasts right to our position.”

  “At least you’ll be saved from a court martial, sir,” said McGlashan. “They can’t prosecute you for saving humanity. Just think what might have happened if we’d gone straight to New Earth.”

  “They won’t care about unintended, positive consequences. They’ll prosecute me for gross dereliction in not finding out sooner.” He swept the matter aside. “There’ll be time to think about it later. For the moment, we’re unable to go anywhere until I can think of a way out of this mess.” He felt suddenly weary all the way into his bones.

  “Want me to go back to scanning the surface, sir?” asked Chainer.

  “May as well, Lieutenant. We can at least accomplish what we came here for.”

  For a time, the clattering of Monsey’s keyboard and the humming of the ship’s engines was the only sound. Then, Chainer spoke. “Sir, I’m seeing an unusual pattern on the surface.”

  “What do we have?” asked Duggan.

  “These scars in the rock here aren’t consistent with any natural formations. There have been a number of impacts and the geological data suggests they’re comparatively fresh.”

  “Fifty years fresh?”

  “Give or take. But look, where the impact scars terminate, you’d expect to see signs of whatever caused them. These three here are all clean. There’s nothing there.”

  “Could the Dreamer craft have vaporised with the force of the impact?” asked Duggan.

  “If the pieces were big enough to make these indentations, then they’d leave evidence if they broke up. There’d be something for us to see. I’ve run a close-in scan of the first area and there’s nothing.”

  “Run a check on this new area over here,” said Duggan, pointing to another area of the surface.

  Chainer ran a number of commands. He frowned and ran another command. One of his screens zoomed in on something. He looked up at Duggan. “I’m sure you know what that is, sir.”

  “A Ghast dropship,” said Duggan.

  “It looks pretty badly beaten up and it’s buried beneath forty metres of ice and snow. If I had to guess, I’d say they crash landed and couldn’t get back up to their mothership.”

  “The Ghasts have been here? What does that mean?” asked Breeze.

  “What it suggests to me, is that the Ghasts found the remains of the Dreamer spaceship, Lieutenant. They were behind our technology curve for most of the war. It’s only fairly recently they’ve surpassed us and they’ve made astounding leaps. From the evidence we’ve got here, it’s clear the Ghasts have taken away the Dreamer wreckage and have succeeded in making copies of it.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Chainer. “The Confederation found the remains of a Dreamer ship floating next to the Helius Blackstar. We made a spaceship out of it. That same spaceship then shot down a second hostile Dreamer vessel, which the Ghasts found and are now using to kick the crap out of humanity?”

  “I’d say that covers the likely situation quite nicely, Lieutenant,” said Duggan.

  “That would also explain why there are so many Ghast ships in this sector,” said Breeze. “I wonder if they’re stupid enough to go looking for another Dreamer ship to cannibalise.”

  “Why else would they still be here?” asked McGlashan. “I’ll bet this is a regular patrol route for them now. Take a flyby every two weeks and see if there’s another alien vessel to shoot at or strip down for parts.”

  McGlashan’s words drove home to Duggan the danger they were in if they stayed here any longer than they needed to. “It doesn’t seem likely that the Ghasts missed anything,” he said. “Have you got enough sca
n data to finish up your search at a later time?”

  “I’ve got what I need,” Chainer confirmed.

  “Does anyone have any preferences as to where we go?” asked Duggan. “A nice, warm planet somewhere far away from humanity, where we can put our feet up?”

  “None that I can think of,” said McGlashan. Her brow furrowed. “Sir, we’ve still got the repair bot onboard. The one we carried on the Detriment.”

  “Yes, it’s inactive in the hold, waiting for something else to break.”

  “I can re-programme it to physically shut down the sensors if you want. It’ll take me a few hours to make the changes and then it’ll take the bot a few more hours to interface with each one and disable it.”

  “What else do we have to do with our time, eh?” asked Duggan.

  “I think we’re about to have plenty to do,” said Breeze. “Fission signature incoming.”

  Duggan jumped to the controls, gripping the bars in readiness. This wasn’t part of his plans. “Damnit, what do we have?” he snarled.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The news was as bad as Duggan expected and he cursed himself for staying too long in orbit around the ice-clad planet. He should have realised the Ghasts would pick them up sooner rather than later. His thirst for answers might have cost them dearly. Screw those bastards.

  “Oblivion battleship, sir,” said Breeze. “The same one we escaped when we found the Crimson. This time their helmsman has got them close by. One hundred and forty thousand klicks. Their particle beam has just hit us. Fission drive down eight percent.”

  Duggan pushed the control bar to maximum and the Crimson surged away over the surface of the Hynus system’s tenth planet. He took them as low as he dared, in the hope that he’d be able to take advantage of the planet’s curvature and prevent the enemy battleship getting a missile lock. The beam weapon would take a few seconds to recharge and he knew exactly what they’d launch next.

  “Fire the disruptors,” he said. “Before they launch a missile.”

  “Firing now, sir. We scored a hit.”

  “Too late,” said Chainer. “Ghast super-missile inbound.”

  “Deep fission engines at sixteen percent,” said Breeze. “I’m not reading any positrons from the Ghast hull. They’ve been shut down.”

  “That missile is closing at a little over two thousand klicks per second.”

  The Crimson was fast. Flat out, it wasn’t vastly slower than a Lambda or one of the Ghasts’ conventional missiles. These new missiles were much faster than any other ballistic weaponry on either side. Duggan kept low, hoping to fool the missile’s guidance system, or force it to burn up in the thin atmosphere. It wasn’t working and Duggan was forced to climb away from the planet’s surface to stop the Crimson’s armour plates melting. The Oblivion was soon lost from sensor sight behind the planet, but the missile tracked them unerringly.

  “Forty seconds to impact,” announced Chainer.

  “Readying the disruptors,” said McGlashan. “What’s our power?”

  “Climbing. Twenty percent. There’ll be enough juice to fire. We’ll be pushing it fine.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Duggan muttered to himself, his eyes roving across a dozen tactical displays.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Engines at twenty-two percent,” said Breeze. “They come back at an astonishing rate. Much quicker than they did on the Detriment.”

  “That’s because the backend core is ten thousand times quicker than the Detriment’s mainframe,” said Monsey. She didn’t seem at all concerned about the incoming missile.

  When he heard her words, Duggan felt as if someone had plugged him into a socket and flicked a switch. A part of his subconscious fired a thought to the front of his brain that was so intriguing, he cursed the incoming missile again for preventing him acting upon his idea.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “Insufficient power to target and fire.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Still not ready.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “Firing.”

  “Enemy missile free-floating. Its velocity will take it completely out of orbit in approximately fifteen seconds.”

  “Engines at three percent. That’s as low as it’ll let them go.”

  “Damn we’re good,” said Chainer, slumping back in his chair and wiping his brow.

  Duggan was hardly listening. He turned his attention to Monsey and waved his hand to bring her attention away from the keyboard. “You said that if you had a billion times the horsepower, you could hack the Dreamer core?”

  “A turn of phrase, sir. I meant that I’d need a lot more number crunching power to brute force it open.”

  “The way I understand it is that the Hynus-T mainframe does all of the bits relating to Space Corps technology. It controls the Lambdas, autopilot, life support and so on.”

  “You’d know as much about that as me,” said Monsey.

  Duggan continued. “The two cores are linked by a series of enormously wide interfaces. The Dreamer core takes over where the engines are concerned. It does the repair re-routing and deals with post-jump recovery.”

  “That’s how it’s been set up. Whoever built the Crimson, they were tapping into the Dreamer core processor for its speed alone. It still has its own programming, presumably from when it was embedded into a Dreamer ship. Now that I know where it’s come from, things make a bit more sense. The Hynus engineers managed to block off large parts of the Dreamer core’s instruction set and only let through those parts which control the weapons systems they recovered. It’s a hatchet job, but I must admit I’m impressed.”

  “They had almost infinite resources,” said Duggan. “And probably two thousand of the Corps’ finest minds working on this alone. Still, it’s good to see they managed to get as far as they did. What you suggest goes some way to explaining why they couldn’t get the final weapon to fire. The Dreamer core must have some failsafe to prevent it working unless certain conditions are met.”

  “Or it obtains certain approval,” said McGlashan.

  “What are you getting at, sir?” asked Monsey.

  “If the human-built front-end can utilise the processing power of the Dreamer core and send instructions back over the interface, can we tell the Hynus-T to brute force its way into the weapons systems?”

  Monsey blinked. “You’re asking if we can get the Dreamer core to hack itself?”

  “That’s precisely what I’m asking,” said Duggan. “Can you tell it to do that?”

  Monsey opened her mouth and closed it. Duggan couldn’t remember seeing her at a loss for words before.

  “That’s a very good idea, sir,” she stuttered. “But you can probably do that from your console with a few lines of code.”

  “That’s not my field,” Duggan said. “Please proceed. I want full access from my console as soon as possible.”

  “What are you planning, sir?” asked McGlashan.

  “I’d have thought it was obvious, Commander. First, I’m going to use our access to the Dreamer core to prevent it from sending any further signals. Secondly, I’m going to evaluate the hidden weapons system. If possible, I’m going to test it out on that Ghast battleship by blowing them apart!”

  “That’s a plan I can go with,” said McGlashan.

  “I just need to find us the time,” said Duggan. He changed their heading, trying to keep it as erratic as possible. “At least we can outrun them and can knock out their super-missiles if we need to.”

  “They’ve only been launching one at a time, sir,” said Chainer. “The battleships which attacked the Archimedes were capable of launching more.”

  “Maybe this Oblivion’s only carrying a prototype version. Or perhaps we’ve been lucky so far,” said McGlashan.

  “Our luck’s got to run out eventually. Can’t we just point the nose somewhere far out and come back when we’ve had a chance to sort all this stuff out?”


  “We’re staying, Lieutenant. We’re going to get something out of this. It’s what we all signed up for.”

  “Aye sir,” Chainer muttered.

  The first circuit of the planet took eight minutes. It was enough for Monsey to adapt some of the code she’d already created to access the Crimson’s Hynus-T mainframe.

  “I’m setting it up for a first run, sir,” she said.

  “Do it as soon as you can.”

  “On its way. Shit, it’s almost filled the interfaces with breach attempts.”

  “Fission drive recovery has slowed right down, sir. We’re almost at full, but if we have to fire the disruptors again, you won’t have them ready for a long time after. The Dreamer core must have too much on its plate.”

  “I wish I had access to this much grunt all the time,” said Monsey. “It’s probably for the best that I don’t.”

  “Can you tell how long?” asked Duggan.

  “It’ll happen when it happens, sir. It takes patience to hack anything big. The same patience works well when I’m looking along the barrel of a rifle, waiting for a Ghast to walk into my sights.”

  “I don’t have a lot of patience just at this moment, soldier.”

  “Sorry, sir. Nothing I can do to speed it up. This is something new to me as well.”

  At that moment, Duggan’s luck ran dry.

  “Enemy vessel coming up on the sensors, sir. High above us. Nearly three hundred thousand klicks up and over.”

  “Have they seen us?”

  “We’re hard to miss, sir. They’ve changed course and are coming in lower.”

  At that moment, Duggan realised he was about to be sucker punched. With the usual missiles employed by both sides, there was little point in sitting out of orbit and waiting for the enemy to come to you. The standard missiles couldn’t target from so far out, and the opponent could easily fly out of sensor sight around the other side of the planet. This turned planetary combat into a hunt, which often relied on luck to see who got the first shot away. Not anymore, Duggan thought.

  “I’m detecting super-missile launches, sir. Something tells me they were holding back before. This time it’s six at once.”