He reached the dump truck and scrambled along behind it until he could see the dredger. There was no movement. A thought formed in his mind and he didn’t like it. The Ghasts might come looking for their comrade soon. The possibility wasn’t a good one and it spurred Duggan onwards. He burst away from the shelter of the truck – one-point-nine klicks away from his target, the suit told him.
He reached another hut – this one had been tipped onto its side. A dark object loomed on the other side – it was an excavator which had somehow collided with the cabin. As he waited a few seconds for McGlashan and Simmons to join him, Duggan became aware of a sound, a distant noise picked up and amplified by his helmet. He realised what it was – a crushing machine was operating in the pit. It confirmed what he’d already thought - the Ghasts were keeping the mine running. Their attack must have happened within the last week or two, otherwise the Space Corps would have known about it and sent more than two Gunners to investigate. Or ignored it in case the Ghasts shot down a few more of our warships, thought Duggan bitterly.
He continued running, over a wide space free from industrial clutter. The natural light had gone, leaving only a deep, rich blue on the horizon, faintly seen over the northern edge of the pit. The suit helmet continued to boost the image, projecting the outside world as greens and variable greys. He saw movement – there was something climbing a gantry ladder on the dredger. He fell to one knee, sliding along through the gravel, raising his rifle as he did so. Duggan aimed and fired a shot, steadied himself and fired two more. The distant figure fell a dozen feet before it became tangled in something, causing it to hang suspended in mid-air. Simmons and McGlashan overtook him, while Duggan pushed himself into another run, his feet leaving gouges in the dirt as he accelerated.
The three of them reached a crane. It was a yellow-painted block with a model designation painted on the side in faded white letters. The boom towered above the thirty-metre-wide base platform, while the gravity engine thrummed quietly. The Ghasts either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared that it was still active. The cab was high above and reached by a ladder. Duggan looked for a moment, though he had no intention of climbing up to see what was inside. If there was anyone up there, they were certainly dead. The visors of McGlashan and Simmons pointed straight at Duggan – they were watching and waiting for him to take the lead.
Nine hundred and fifty metres, he thought as he sprinted away from the crane. There was almost no cover between here and the dredger. From the edge of the pit, it had looked as if there was machinery all the way to the centre. The perspective had deceived Duggan and he called on his reserves of energy. The muscles in his legs stretched and complained. There was a pile of rocks to one side. He ignored their offer of cover and kept a straight line towards the dredger. As he came towards it, the enormity of the machinery struck him. From afar it simply appeared to be big. Closer up, a kilometre of movable alloy structure was somehow just as awe-inspiring as a docked warship. The main section of the dredger looked like a solid wall, tall and imposing on its thick legs. At each end, massive arms reached outwards, with bladed wheels to rip through hard-packed dirt and stone. The support towers went ever upwards, with thick metal cables anchored in countless places.
Five hundred metres. Figures kept a rough line to his left and right. The members of his squad had converged into this open space, with little more than a hundred metres separating the furthest two. At three hundred metres, there was more movement on the dredger, a way back from the edge of the central section. The angle was too sharp for Duggan to get off a shot. Butler and Flores were a few metres back and they both crouched briefly. Duggan couldn’t tell if either of them had fired. He looked to the dredger and his suit was no longer able to detect a source of movement.
Duggan reached the base of the dredger, breathing hard. His suit warned him about his elevated heart rate and oxygen consumption. He ignored it and ducked beneath the central section. The support legs were only five feet high, so he had to keep his head low to prevent his helmet colliding with the machinery. The underside was scored and pitted, with deep grooves where the gravity engines had previously lowered the dredger onto sharp rocks. The opposite edge was a good distance away – two hundred metres, Duggan guessed. He tried to make sense of what was out the other side, but all he could see was grey.
“Sir?” It was Chainer. His voice sounded strained with running. “We should be okay to communicate under here as long as we keep it brief. The Cadaveron’s sensors won’t be able to penetrate so much metal unless they’re really focused on this spot.”
Duggan didn’t respond directly. Instead, he opened a channel to the whole squad and spoke while he continued towards the far side of the dredger. “We can use comms under here if we keep it quick and to the point. The Ghast emplacement can’t be far and we have to get inside before they realise we’re here and lock it down. We might already be too late. I saw movement up top. Powell, Walker, Hill, Friedman, you’re going up there to look for it along with Corporal Simmons. Once the threat is eliminated, you’ll provide cover for us below. Only break silence when you have to.”
“Aye, sir,” came the responses at once.
“Go now. It’ll give you a chance to get in position.” The five soldiers he’d instructed turned as one and crabbed their way back where they’d come from. Duggan continued to give his orders. “Morgan, you’re going to sit tight under here. If it all goes to shit, you’re going to use that comms beacon to send a distress signal to the Corps. Let them know we think the Ghasts have a Cadaveron in orbit and a ground-installed Shatterer and disruptor.”
“Damn, sir, looks like I’m going to miss out on all the fun.”
“It’s vital you get it right, soldier. If you use the beacon too early, the Ghast ship will destroy us all.”
“I’ll do my best. With your permission, I’ll haul the beacon out towards one of those dump trucks back there. I’ll not be able to send anything while I stay under here. At least I’ll be able to fire off a quick transmission if it all goes bad.”
“Fine, do it,” said Duggan. He dismissed the matter and moved onto the next one. “Flores, do you still have the shaped plasma charges? We might need them.” They’d not had time to properly equip themselves while escaping the Pugilist – they had rifles and no grenades. Duggan was grateful that Flores had kept a couple of explosives in his footlocker and had brought them with him. It was entirely against regulations, but in the circumstances Duggan wasn’t going to say anything, particularly since Flores was the squad’s boom man.
“Still got them, sir. Just point me in the right direction.”
“Right, let’s go. I don’t think we’re going to find any lost miners wandering around, so if it moves, shoot it.”
There was a series of enthusiastic responses to this last instruction. The Ghasts were hated by almost everyone and a command to kill them was guaranteed to be met with approval. Duggan made haste across the underside of the dredger. It was still hard to be sure what was out the other side until he came to the last few metres and got a better view. Much of the open cast pit was visible, with its machinery and tiered walls. However, there was something unusual two hundred metres or so from the dredger. At first glance, it looked like someone had dug a ragged three-hundred and fifty metre hole in the floor of the mining pit and afterwards had partially filled one half of it in, forming a loose-packed mound of brown-grey dirt in the process. The mound was only about ninety metres high, so it was no wonder they’d not been able to see it from the upper edge of the pit.
“What the hell?” asked Sergeant Ortiz.
It struck Duggan what he was looking at. “That’s a missile crater,” he said, finding he was speaking almost in a whisper. “The Ghasts must have been in a hurry to establish their defences – they’ve blown a hole in the ground and dropped their battery inside. They must have used some type of transport to bring it here.”
“Some of the older Cadaverons had room for cargo, sir,” said Lieuten
ant Breeze. “Before they started filling all the available space with weapons.”
“There we have it. A missile emplacement in a hole covered with soil was enough to fool two Space Corps warships long enough to blast both of them out of the sky.” Duggan wasn’t happy to have been so easily beaten.
“Any sign of a way in?” asked Ortiz. “I assume they’ve got a crew to make the decision about what to destroy and when.”
“Are we looking at two different structures?” asked McGlashan. “I’m sure the disruptors and missiles would be entirely separate units on a warship.”
“We’re going to have to find out, Commander. I can’t see anything other than dirt, so the way in must be around the far side of this mound or in what’s left of the crater.”
Another voice intruded on the open channel. “Sir, it’s Corporal Simmons. We’ve eliminated a Ghast soldier up here. He wasn’t wearing his mech suit. He took cover before we got him. I’d assume he got a message away. Damn they’re ugly bastards.”
“Understood,” said Duggan. “Get in position and provide cover.” He waved the members of the squad who remained with him forward, urging them into the open. “Time is running out. We need to finish this.”
Chapter Nine
As soon as he left the comparative safety of the dredger, Duggan felt vulnerable. He had to assume the Ghast had alerted someone about the presence of Corps soldiers and if the message reached the Cadaveron, there was an excellent chance a precision-guided missile would be on its way shortly. Unless they don’t want to risk damaging their own ground structures, Duggan thought with a flickering of hope.
He reached the edge of the crater. The piled earth made it closer to a moon shape than a circle. As soon as he arrived, his earlier words that a missile was responsible for it were confirmed. The sides of the hole had been turned into a deceptively smooth-looking reflective glass from the heat of the plasma. The remaining part of the crater was well over a hundred metres deep, with steeply-sloping sides. At the bottom of the dirt mound, he could see metal, glinting to his image-enhanced sight. There was definitely something under the soil which the Ghasts had tried to conceal. This close, it was a poor job. From forty thousand klicks away, it had been good enough.
He set off at a fast jog, following the lip of the hole and looking for a way into what was certainly a weapons battery. When he reached the part of the crater which contained the mound of earth, he noticed how rough and ready the construction was. He guessed they’d forced some of the miners to do the work. There were a couple of huge excavators not too far away which could have done the job in a day or two. Ahead, he saw what he was after. Smooth metal was visible, jutting directly out of the heaped earth.
“Sir, we’ve got movement.” It was Corporal Simmons. “There’s a vehicle coming out from one of the far tunnels. Three klicks and heading straight towards us.”
“I’d suggest you get your head down,” said Duggan. The squad members with him were hidden from the tunnels by the pile of earth. He hoped they’d evade detection for long enough to do what they’d come for.
There was a shrieking sound, followed by a series of harsh clangs, so numerous they almost became a continuous sound. Duggan looked up and saw streaks of green from the Ghast rounds as they raked across a section of the dredger. He knew the projectiles would have been invisible to his naked sight, but they left a fleeting echo on his helmet sensors, which the suit’s tiny computer dutifully fed through.
There was another fusillade, which ripped into one of the dredger’s gantries, producing momentary orange traces which rapidly faded back to grey. There was a secondary noise – a screeching from torn metal shredding through other metal. Duggan kept his head low and sprinted on, doing his best to ignore the din.
“We’ve lost Walker,” said Simmons with absolute calm. “Returning fire. We’ve got a Ghast light tank with a repeater turret.”
“Get under cover,” said Duggan tersely. “You can’t scratch it with your rifles.”
The words had hardly left his mouth when the Ghast repeater unleashed another punishing volley of rounds into the structure of the dredger. The noise was unbearable and Duggan didn’t like to think what it would be like for the soldiers huddled up there.
He reached the metal wall he’d seen and he slowed, the others stopping with him. From here, it was possible to make out the rough shape of what was buried. It was a huge cylinder, with a diameter of more than one hundred metres. It was as high as the dirt mound, with no indication how deep into the earth it went. Duggan remembered the Ribald was hit with the disruptor from thirty thousand klicks. Unless the Ghasts had made huge advances in miniaturisation, there had to be a big power source in the cylinder – something with similar mass to a Vincent class fission drive.
The earth had been packed down tightly on this side of the mound, with a steel mesh in place to stop the soil coming down. The reason was immediately apparent – there was a doorway, two metres wide and three high, visible only as a fine seam in the polished surface of the alloy. Most Ghasts were seven feet tall, made even bigger in their mech suits. This must be where they came in and out.
“Flores, come here and take a look,” said Duggan.
Flores came forward and checked over the door and its surrounds. He reached out and struck it with a clenched fist. The blow produced no discernible sound. “Damn sir, this must be five feet thick. It’s warship grade alloy.”
“This tube was probably built for an Oblivion. Can you get it open?” As he spoke, another extended round of heavy repeater fire ripped overhead, pummelling hundreds of half-metre holes across the upper deck of the dredger. Duggan looked in the direction of the mining tunnels and his suit reported the presence of a Ghast vehicle coming into sight around the banked earth.
When Flores didn’t respond immediately, Duggan shouted at him. “Speak, man! That tank could see us at any moment!”
Flores slung his rifle and held up the two shaped charges. They were fist-sized and could stick to any surface. A built-in timer could be set manually or the charges could be detonated remotely through a command from a spacesuit. “There’s not a hope in hell, sir. I’d need a dozen of these babies to burn a hole in that door.”
Duggan opened his mouth to speak, not knowing exactly what he was going to say. In the end, he didn’t need to say anything. Without warning, the door moved of its own accord, sinking five feet into the walls of the missile battery and rotating slowly sideways with the glacial smoothness of perfectly-machined gears. The space behind the door was revealed to be a large airlock, with featureless walls, ceiling and floor. There was an indistinct shape, visible to one side and waiting patiently. It was a Ghast, hulking and angular in a mech suit. It had a hand-held repeater clutched across its chest, with the weapon’s power cell visible over the alien’s shoulders. There was a moment, a fraction of a second, which felt like it lasted half a lifetime while the two sides looked at each other in mutual surprise. Duggan lowered his rifle and pulled the trigger, sending a metal slug into the Ghast’s chest. There was a sharp hiss of escaping air or servo fluid. Duggan shot it again, while the Ghast began to swing its repeater towards him. Then, the creature was thrown from its feet by another half-dozen rounds from Duggan’s squad. It thumped against the floor with a dull clunk and didn’t move.
“Inside! Now!” barked Duggan. The squad didn’t hesitate and scrambled past to get into the airlock. Before they could make it, a flash of pure, exquisite white lit up the night. Duggan had to close his eyes to shield them from damage. A roaring wave of heat buffeted against him and he fell flat while the other soldiers did the same. He felt the light fading and when he opened his eyes, he saw static across his vision from the overload to the helmet’s sensors. A series of warnings told him the suit’s exterior had suffered permanent damage from a blast of heat significantly above its design tolerances. Duggan blinked, trying to clear the white spots from his eyes. The helmet sensor recalibrated itself in moments, just as a second de
tonation dispersed the night. The heat roiled over the huddled squad while they tried frantically to crawl into the shelter of the airlock. Duggan scramble-crawled the last few feet to join the others. He saw what had happened – something big had struck the dredger, followed by another of the same. The gargantuan machinery had been ripped into two pieces, each one glowing bright orange from the after effects of the missile strikes. The remains looked like a hideous wreck, melted and distorted until they were something completely different to what they had been before.
Duggan rolled to his feet and pressed his back to the airlock wall, in case another strike was incoming. “I think the orbiting ship knows we’re here,” he said, hoping the thick alloy shielding of the missile battery would prevent the Ghast ship detecting where they were. More dead, he thought. With each one, I owe those bastards a little bit more.
Someone moved past him, stepping over the sprawled body of the Ghast. It was Sergeant Ortiz and she was looking at something. There was a panel on the wall, on the opposite side of the doorway to where the enormously thick door waited unmoving. “Anyone know how to work this Ghast stuff?” she asked. “I think we should close the door.”
“They don’t teach you that at the academy,” said Chainer. He laughed nervously. “I think my suit’s failing.”
“Mine’s taken a battering,” said Bryant.
“And mine,” said Dorsey.
“Permission to piss around with this panel, sir?” asked Ortiz.
“Go ahead,” Duggan told her.
Ortiz didn’t wait. She pressed a couple of fingers on it. When it was clear nothing was going to happen, she put her palm against it, then made a sweeping motion with her hand. She stopped trying and gave the panel a two-fingered salute.
Bane of Worlds (Survival Wars Book 2) Page 7