Scum of the Universe (Fire and Rust Book 7)

by Anthony James

  “Afterwards, I mean.”

  “You’re asking if we’re going to incinerate the facility.” This time Griffin didn’t sound so sure. “I don’t know - that might be one I leave to Admiral Kolb. We’re going to take a closer look at the area first. A place like this is bound to be crawling with stealth craft, with or without a landing strip.”

  “We could do a circuit of the planet first,” offered Dominguez.

  “Time is tight and I like this target. Besides, nobody’s going to see us, right?”

  “In case you hadn’t guessed, we got the same advice as you did when it came to the experimental stealth hardware,” Dominguez said as an aside to Conway. “With some extra bells and whistles.”

  The Raider came close enough that the surface trees were visible on the sensor feed as a circular patch of green, vibrant against the undulating stone around it. The sight would have been cheering were it not for the fact that Conway felt certain he’d soon be killing Raggers down there.

  As well as the trees, Dominguez obtained a zoomed view of the dome and the pillars. The dome’s outer surface was smooth and unblemished, while the pillars themselves were etched and illuminated in the same way as the teleportation cylinder in the Qali-5 facility.

  “The Raggers don’t know how to stop pissing about,” said Griffin with undertones of anger. “They’re using the same tech that got them into trouble in the first place.”

  “I think that’s just a power source, sir,” said Dominguez. “Like any power source, it depends how you use it.”

  There was more. The entirety of the tree line was surrounded by Sekar. From the Raider’s current distance, the sensor feed wasn’t clear enough to determine what form the aliens had adopted.

  “A crapload of them,” said Conway. “If they’re amongst the trees it’ll make life difficult.”

  “The trees aren’t dying, which makes me think there’s something holding the Sekar back.”

  “The pillars.”

  “Could be.”

  “What next, sir?” asked Conway.

  “Return to your soldiers. I’m going to find somewhere to land.”

  “Won’t that leave a mark in the trees?”

  “It’ll create a nice spaceship-sized outline for any watchers to home in on,” Griffin confirmed.

  Conway understood the ramifications and didn’t ask for any more details. Getting in and out was Griffin’s cross to bear.

  “I’ll get the squad ready,” said Conway.

  He exited the bridge without further word. The soldiers had spread themselves a little deeper into the Viper’s interior passages, but Conway couldn’t exactly move freely.

  “Sir?” asked Kemp expectantly.

  “Check your kit, we’ll be landing shortly.”

  “What are we facing?”

  “A dome, power cylinders like we found on Qali-5, Raggers and Sekar.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “The good news doesn’t stop there, soldier. We’re finally going to see that tropical paradise Private Berg has been promising us for so long.”

  “Hell, Captain, I told you it would happen,” said Berg triumphantly.

  Conway let the squad run their mouths. He listened without joining in. For some reason he felt serene. Ready. He smiled inwardly and inspected his Gilner with its huge silencer fitted around the entire barrel. The gun was clean and ready, with a full magazine of forty, the same as it was last time he checked it.

  The smooth howl of vacuum coasting ended and the Raider’s propulsion became loud once more. Conway told his squad to be ready and he mentally prepared himself for the mission.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Griffin said time was tight, he evidently wasn’t exaggerating. Although Conway didn’t have access to the sensor feeds, he could imagine what was happening by the rise and fall of the engine in combination with the difficulty he was having staying upright.

  With a deployment likely imminent, the squad bunched up even more, pressing towards the forward airlock. Conway preferred to be first off, but this time he didn’t have a choice. He looked at the Fangrin soldiers a short way ahead and rightly concluded that getting by would be an exercise in futility.

  “I’ve been on smoother transport rides into the middle of a warzone,” grumbled Torres.

  “The shooting hasn’t started yet. That’s a good thing,” said Warner.

  The bumpiness of the ride became steadily worse and the Raider’s life support unit became progressively less able to cope. Conway checked the safety on his gun for the dozenth time and instructed the others to do likewise. The squad were professionals, but a few wasted words telling them to be careful seemed like a small price against the possibility of an accidental discharge.

  “We’re entering the planet’s upper atmosphere,” said Kenyon abruptly on the comms. “The plan is to set down on top of a bunch of the smaller trees about a klick from the target.”

  “That far?”

  “Some of the thicker trunks might damage the Raider.”

  “Understood. What’s the ETA?”

  “We’re coming in fast. Two minutes, give or take.”

  “It’ll take us a few seconds to get clear.”

  “We know. As fast as you can.”

  “Roger that.”

  The comms went dead and Conway made the others aware. The two minutes to deployment fell into what he thought of as the transition time - when the pent-up tension of waiting would switch into action. Conway hated the helplessness of transition time and the quicker it was over, the better.

  After ninety seconds during which his earlier serenity came under threat, Conway’s feet were lifted from the floor by a violent deceleration. Barron was caught unawares and thudded head-first into the ceiling. She swore over the sound of the propulsion and used her free arm to push herself towards the floor. The life support established a degree of control over the interior and she dropped down, landing easily like everything was intentional.

  “Status?”

  “I’m good, sir. No damage alerts on the suit.”

  Conway didn’t attempt a reply. The propulsion went so loud that any hope of reliable conversation was gone. His helmet drowned out much of the sound and he didn’t want to think what would happen to his eardrums if they were unprotected.

  Through his visor, he watched his squad struggling against the extremes of spaceflight and hoped they’d get off the Raider in one piece. A thumping crash – worse than anything which had gone before – rocked the Viper with such force that Conway wondered if they’d been struck by a missile. He heard no explosion, though it could have been left behind in a split second if the Raider was travelling at high enough speed.

  “Get ready,” said Kenyon.

  It was warning enough for Conway to brace himself. The Viper crunched onto the ground and the muscles in his legs – his entire body – strained, and he thought the tendons in his knees would snap with the force of it.

  Having been caught out once, Barron rode the landing by dropping low at the precise moment of impact. She straightened at once and reached a hand towards Conway.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  Lieutenant Kenyon muted the open channel so that he could speak without interruptions.

  “Time to get the hell away from here,” he said.

  Kenyon unmuted the channel and Conway was ready.

  “You heard the man. Move!”

  The soldiers complied. Conway watched impatiently, mentally urging the Fangrin blocking the passage ahead to get going. It happened with a surge – the aliens were far more agile than they appeared – and then Barron went after.

  Conway moved too, cursing the tightness of the passageway and the dim lighting as he followed towards the airlock. Mercifully, the engines had subsided, allowing him to think without distraction.

  Barron entered the airlock two paces ahead and Conway saw light coming through the opening. It was the kind of subdued orange-yellow of morning or late afternoo
n and his mind cast up memories of cool autumn evenings on New Destiny.

  Barron clambered easily down the ramp, hardly bothering with the rail. Aware that he was last man, Conway went as fast as he dared, not entirely abandoning caution in his eagerness to exit the spaceship.

  Moments later, he was on the ground. He turned his head and saw a chaos of splintered branches, thick with foliage. Yellow beams speared amongst them, splitting and forming a beautiful cascade of sunlight with exaggerated contrast against the shadows. He had no time to gawp and sprinted from beneath the hull, following Lieutenant Rembra’s directions on the comms. Snapped and overhanging branches scraped against him and he stooped lower in case they snagged on his stealth webbing.

  “This way,” said Rembra, a short distance ahead.

  “Are you clear?” asked Kenyon.

  Conway flipped a look over his shoulder. The Viper was gone and for a moment he wondered if the foliage was thicker than he imagined, or if he’d run farther than he expected.

  Stealth ship, he remembered, spotting the uneven flex of countless branches and the way the nearby trees bent outwards like something immensely heavy was resting against them. “Yes, Lieutenant Kenyon, we’re clear. Go gentle on the way out.”

  “No promises.”

  The stealth module made the Raider near-invisible, but it didn’t have any noticeable effect on the propulsion sound, as Conway had already discovered. The Viper’s engines thundered and he heard a tremendous crackling that made him want to run harder. Damaged branches broke free – some tumbled to the ground, whilst others were borne upwards as if by an unseen hand.

  The last thing Conway saw before he turned away was a tree with an enormous trunk and the elasticity of a sapling catapult from left to right before finishing upright. He joined with his squad while the spaceship’s propulsion receded fast.

  “Best you hightail it out of there, Captain Conway,” said Kenyon, offering a piece of advice which Conway didn’t need.

  Moments later, the squad were sprinting from the landing site. Details flooded into Conway’s brain – the high canopy of green, almost-familiar leaves, the straight, proud trunks of the trees, the waist-high ground covering of foliage, easily brushed aside. Through it all, filtered sunlight lanced at an angle thirty degrees from the perpendicular.

  Like the forests I used to explore when I was a boy.

  Underfoot it was uneven, but not so bad that it slowed them down. Fear of an orbit-launched plasma missile was enough to add a few meters to legs burdened by a full loadout and Hul-J5’s one-point-one gravities.

  A faraway boom took Conway by surprise and he expected white-hot incineration at any moment. Instead of a Ragger missile, it was the Raider’s boosters, their activation sound muffled and made peculiar by the thickly clustered trees.

  Five hundred meters later, Conway ordered the squad into a fast walk instead of a run. They’d come far enough to avoid a precision strike on the landing area and he didn’t want his soldiers breathing too hard when they approached the target.

  Conway made his way to the front and walked in step with Lieutenant Rembra. The Fangrin held his chain gun ready and turned his head warily in every direction.

  “This place is quieter than the forests I’m accustomed to,” he said.

  “There’re no animals and no insects,” Conway realized. “Just plants and hardly a breeze to make them dance.”

  “The canopy hides the dome.”

  “We may not see anything till we’re right on top of it.”

  “Did our arrival raise an alarm? Have you heard?”

  Conway hadn’t. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  “It is best to be prepared.”

  Seven hundred meters from the deployment site, they spotted one of the pillars through the trees. It wasn’t much off their path and Conway led the squad close enough to see the details. The pulsating lights and the intricate patterns exactly matched his memory.

  “Looks like the one in Qali-5,” said Kemp.

  “That’s what I told you,” Conway replied.

  He remembered the debilitating pressure waves from the Ragger facility on Qali-5 which he’d always believed emanated from the power cylinder. Here on Hul-J5 he felt nothing similar – he detected an underlying drone and nothing more. It was a relief.

  The trees surrounding the Ragger dome were so dense, that the squad didn’t catch a glimpse of their target until they were less than a hundred meters away. Under Conway’s direction, they advanced cautiously, sprinting from tree to tree. Everyone was running active stealth, but he wasn’t prepared to entirely trust the technology when the webbing wasn’t combat tested. Conway well-remembered how lax the Raggers became after relying on their stealth suits for so long.

  With his shoulder resting against the rough bark of a tree, Conway requested a channel to the Raider. The assault craft was still in comms sight and his request was granted at once.

  “We’re in spitting distance of the target. Any news for us?”

  “None worth telling,” Kenyon replied. “We’re eight hundred klicks from your current position. No sign of hostiles in the sky.”

  “That doesn’t mean much, does it?”

  “Not really,” said Kenyon with a humorless laugh. “They didn’t figure out how to fit the Raider with one of those Hantisar sensor arrays in time. We’re as blind as ever when it comes to the Ragger fleet.”

  “We’re making our approach. Over.”

  Conway scanned the position of his squad. Lieutenant Atomar stood close to an adjacent tree, his shoulders too broad for the trunk to entirely conceal. He watched Conway, his hunger for combat clear in the depths of his eyes. That’s how some of the dogs were, the same way Conway knew of human soldiers who only felt alive when their guns were jumping in their hands and the enemy bullets came in return.

  With a sideways movement of his head – you go – Conway instructed Atomar to break cover and then did likewise. To his left, the other soldiers advanced, looking painfully exposed to inbound fire. Conway had to keep reminding himself about the stealth webbing, but he couldn’t lose a lifetime of caution.

  The base of the dome became visible. Both trees and undergrowth came right up to the structure’s base, which gave the impression that the place was long-abandoned and the planet had come to reclaim what the Raggers had built.

  Conway couldn’t help himself. The moment he came close enough, he thumped his palm against the alloy surface. The contact produced no sound, while his environmental sensor told him the metal was a few degrees cooler than the ambient. Nothing unusual. Nothing unexpected.

  “Which way, sir?” asked Barron.

  “That’s something for us to find out,” said Conway. “The Raider couldn’t see anything from the air.”

  “Just say the word and I’ll blow this place wide open, sir,” said Lester, a few meters away. He repeated Conway’s action of hitting the wall. “Or maybe not.”

  “They don’t let you have the real tasty charges, yet, huh?” asked Kemp. “On account of you only being old enough to grow a caterpillar on your top lip.”

  Lester recognized that it wasn’t the time for pissing about and he didn’t offer Kemp a reply. “My pack charges might be enough, Captain, just no guarantees is all.”

  “Last resort is the Raider puts a missile through the skin,” said Conway. “That would really let the Raggers know something’s up.”

  “And this data extractor takes ten minutes to fill up from empty,” said Freeman, proud to be carrying the twenty-pound device on his back. “I’d rather not be under pressure while it happens.”

  “We’ll go clockwise,” said Conway. “Loose formation.”

  The squad spread out and headed north, while keeping the base of the dome in constant sight. Conway fervently hoped that he wouldn’t be obliged to use explosives or worse, call in an airstrike. Equally, he didn’t want to walk for 6.3 klicks all the way around the dome before discovering that the Raggers didn’t enter the plac
e through a door.

  Lockhart was thinking similarly. “It would be a pain in the ass if this dome was accessed by teleporter. Or via a subsurface passage,” he said on the officer channel.

  “Yes, it would be a pain in the ass,” Conway agreed.

  “I’ll shut up now.”

  The conversation didn’t distract Conway for long. In fact, it hardly distracted him at all. However, when he turned his head left, he caught sight of a long, flat-topped, metallic object, protruding about a foot above the undergrowth. The automated chain gun was down in a small hollow and partially concealed by low-hanging branches, allowing Conway to come within twenty meters before spotting it.

  He stopped dead and ducked below the level of the undergrowth at the same time as he gave an urgent order on the comms. Rustling noises nearby informed him that his squad had dropped low. Conway listened hard for the sound of motors. He heard a quiet whining sound coming from the direction of the gun and that was all.

  “Think it detected us?” asked Warner.

  Conway knew the answer to that one. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “In that case, it didn’t see us.”

  With a sigh of infinite relief that he hadn’t been chewed into a bloody paste by a Ragger chain gun, Conway crept carefully away from the turret, giving it a wide berth, which took him right up to the dome. The squad followed in a line, watching and listening anxiously for the sound of a gun motor spinning up.

  “The stealth works,” said Corporal Brice, like she’d never doubted it for a second.

  The Unity League’s take on the Ragger’s own tech had fooled the detection sensor on the chain gun, which was a good result. An excellent result. Even so, the presence of the defensive emplacement put Conway even more on edge.

  Uttering a quiet stream of invective that would have shocked his wife and made his daughter cry had they been in the vicinity to hear it, Conway led on.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fleet Admiral Stone despised the Raggers, a fact he freely admitted. He didn’t go about his daily duties telling everyone who’d listen, but he assumed most people in the ULAF recognized his feelings on the subject.