Death Skies (Fire and Rust Book 4)

by Anthony James

  “Has your team finished looking at everything?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re midway through round two. Considering the beating we took, the Hurricane is hanging together pretty well.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Griffin closed the channel. It was good to hear Lieutenant Atwell’s confidence in his team and even better to hear they’d already inspected every piece of hardware on the spaceship.

  “Was that you speaking to the maintenance guys?” asked Dominguez.

  “Yes – everything is working.”

  “So this is nothing more than a bumpy ride?”

  “What else can it be?”

  “Was that a statement or a question, sir?” asked Lieutenant Kroll, becoming interested.

  “Somewhere in between.”

  “You think something’s wrong and you don’t know what it is.”

  “Is that a statement or a question, Lieutenant?”

  Kroll laughed. “Lightspeed travel is becoming more dangerous, sir. I think this is the first indication of it. Sooner or later, spaceships are going to start breaking up mid-flight.”

  “That happens now. The ULAF doesn’t advertise the figures.”

  “Everyone knows, sir. It’s not so easy to hide the deaths of entire crews. People – relatives, ground crews – they talk. What I mean is that lots of spaceships are going to go missing. Not one or two here and there.”

  It seemed like Kroll had more than a passing interest. “What do you suggest?” asked Griffin.

  “Don’t ask me, sir. All I can do is talk. Someone up high is going to have to order a real investigation and then redesign our ships so that it doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “That’s luxury research,” said Shelton, half-jokingly. “Until we see peace, it’ll be all guns, guns, guns.”

  Griffin didn’t comment, suspecting that she was correct in her assessment. He changed the subject.

  “The Raggers were up to something new in that facility. They were working on a way of transporting objects from place to place. Fleet Admiral Stone reported signs of an industrial accident.”

  “Teleportation? That could badly screw us up if they figure out how to teleport a fleet wherever they want and in zero time,” said Kenyon.

  “I don’t know the technical capabilities,” said Griffin. “And I’m uncomfortable with the idea of zero time. However, I agree that I don’t want to find whole fleets or even individual enemy spaceships jumping around the universe.”

  “And what if they started doing it midway through a one-on-one engagement?” said Lieutenant Effie Jackson. “The Raggers are hard enough to pin down as it is, let along if they start teleporting as well.”

  “Let’s hope that AF1 and AF3 did the same amount of damage to their planets as we did to ours,” said Kenyon. “The more hurt we do to the Raggers, the less time and fewer resources they’ll have for pissing about with new tech.”

  The turbulence, which had receded for a few minutes, returned with greater intensity. The conversation died off while the crew waited for the shaking to subside. It didn’t happen quickly and many minutes passed before it faded to the background.

  “I’ve got Lieutenant Atwell on the comms, sir,” said Kenyon.

  Griffin’s first thought was that it was going to be bad news, and he was correct.

  “I don’t know if that turbulence shook something loose, or if it was a gradual degradation that just hit a trigger point, but an alert went off on one of the tharniol detonators,” said Atwell.

  “What sort of alert?”

  “This is in the control system. It’s not like that minor we had on Rundine – this one is serious.”

  Atwell was normally a direct kind of guy, so Griffin was sure this was going to be particularly unpleasant.

  “Tell me what it is, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s an erroneous call on the detonator originating from an unknown piece of malfunctioning equipment, sir. In layman’s terms, the detonator believes it has received an instruction to fire.”

  “You mean it’s going to try and start up the lightspeed drive?”

  “Yes, sir. The lightspeed drive is already active and working, so the detonator should ignore the request. At first it did and we managed to block the ignition. Now we’ve run into other difficulties. If the detonator fires with the tharniol drive in operation, that’ll cause an overload and there’s every chance the Hurricane won’t come out of it in one piece.”

  “You’re on the comms to me because this isn’t an easy fix.”

  “That’s correct, sir. Unfortunately, this is affecting a detonator that we had already put into offline mode. We discovered a crack in the casing, probably caused by shock from the railgun strike that hit us adjacent to the lower decks.”

  Griffin closed his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me about the crack?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s routine, sir.”

  “Can you fix the problem, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ve got teams trying to pinpoint the cause, but I have to warn you that we have a lot of ground to cover.”

  “And if you don’t resolve this issue, we’re going to have an explosion in propulsion?”

  “That’s a certainty, sir.”

  Griffin pictured the hardware in his mind. The detonators were big grey cylinders fixed to the lightspeed drive. They were separate units, but it required shipyard facilities to remove them and the maintenance teams had no way to get inside with a spanner as a few of the long-served crew members liked to say.

  “How long until the detonator fires?”

  “We’ve introduced a loop in the instruction in order to delay it happening, but we’re looking at twenty minutes.”

  “If you were a betting man, Lieutenant Atwell, would you back yourself to resolve this in time?”

  “I’m not a betting man, sir. I recommend you shut off the lightspeed drive immediately and hope that the explosion doesn’t take out either the main propulsion or the other three detonators.”

  The bridge lights flickered and Griffin glanced at the monitoring screens. Everything looked normal.

  “Assuming you don’t fix it in time,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. It’ll take us a couple of minutes to get clear, so we won’t have the full twenty minutes.”

  Atwell took an audible deep breath and Griffin thought his lead technician was about to confide an even worse outcome. Instead, he came out with something unexpected. “I’ve got to go, sir. One of the teams working on the detonator say they’ve located something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve found what’s wrong.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Griffin closed the channel and sighed wearily. He counted himself lucky to have taken part in so many space flights and avoided the worst technical issues that a commanding officer might expect to come up against. “I guess it’s my turn,” he muttered sourly.

  “What’s wrong, sir?” asked Dominguez.

  “We’ve got a potential blowout on one of the detonators. I’ll have to bring us out of lightspeed and hope the maintenance teams find the cause.”

  The bridge lights flickered again and then for a third time.

  “Don’t say we’ve got a problem with the lights as well,” said Kenyon.

  Griffin wasn’t too concerned about the lights. He sent a command to the propulsion system to make it switch over to the sublight engines. By the time the nausea from the transition into local space had passed, three minutes of the twenty had elapsed.

  “Nothing to report, sir,” said Dominguez. “We’re floating in space, far from everywhere.”

  “I’ve sent an FTL distress call,” said Kenyon. “That’ll reach base in approximately three days.”

  Griffin didn’t want to say anything that might seem like he was predicting the future and he kept his mouth shut. He tapped the side of his flight helmet twice, a superstition he normally reserved for occasions when he was about to enter combat. It
seemed appropriate enough to do it now.

  “I’ll see how Lieutenant Atwell is getting along,” he said, bring up the list of maintenance crew receptors.

  “Anyone else feeling this pressure in their heads?” asked Shelton, out of the blue. “Or is it just me?”

  Griffin heard the words and realized that he was feeling it too, like a slowly-building weight resting on his brain. He shrugged it off and opened the comms channel.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lieutenant Atwell’s receptor was green, but he didn’t answer when Griffin opened the channel. Occasionally, the maintenance crews would take off their protective helmets in order to make it easier working in tight spaces. It was against regulations, but it happened. Atwell usually carried a hand-held communicator as well, so it struck Griffin as odd that his lead maintenance officer didn’t answer.

  “No response,” he said. “Let’s find someone else.” Griffin chose another receptor at random and, once again, heard only the quietest background hum from the comms link.

  “Maybe they’re just busy,” said Dominguez.

  Griffin tried a third and fourth time. “One of them must be able to spare a couple of seconds, even if it’s just to tell me to piss off and stop bothering them.”

  “I’ve traced the positions of each of the technicians you opened a channel to,” said Kenyon. “They’re all in propulsion.”

  “Find me someone who isn’t working in propulsion.”

  “There’s nobody in the technicians’ quarters and…here we go…a couple of teams on the upper decks, mid-section.”

  “Put me through to one of them.”

  Kenyon opened the channel and Griffin spoke at once.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “Technician Andrews, sir,” said the woman on the other end.

  “Why is nobody else answering? I need an update on the detonator.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” she stammered. “There’re only so many people you can have looking at the same problem. The rest of us are getting on with routine checks.”

  “Go and find Lieutenant Atwell. Tell him I want to speak with him immediately. Or have him pass on a message if he’s too busy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The connection went dead. Griffin felt better for having spoken to somebody, but was angry that the techs working on the problem couldn’t spare him a few seconds to provide an update on the situation.

  “Lieutenant Dominguez, bring up the internal monitors for propulsion.”

  “Yes, sir.” She fell silent for a long moment. “Oh, shit.”

  Dominguez put the feeds from three of the propulsion bay monitors up on the main bulkhead screen. They each showed a variation of the same thing – massive pieces of kit, surrounded by unmoving bodies dressed in grey maintenance suits.

  “What the hell?” said Griffin. “Are we getting any emissions readings from that area? Has there been an explosion?”

  Even as he asked the questions, he knew neither was correct. The maintenance teams’ spacesuits would keep them alive against any expected emissions and there was no sign of burn damage.

  “Zoom in on that one in the middle,” said Griffin, not yet ready to call it a corpse. He squinted at the image – the technician had fallen face down and sprawled out.

  “Looks…wrong,” said Shelton.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are any of those techs wearing a suit with a built-in life sign reader?” asked Griffin.

  “Just checking,” said Kenyon. “That data should load into the medical bay computer and I’ll be able to check it from there.” A moment’s pause. “No, sir. None of those suits have life sign readers.”

  “I think Corporal Jacks is with them, sir,” said Dominguez, referring to the Hurricane’s medical officer. One of the feeds panned and focused on a figure dressed in light blue. “From the color of the suit, this is definitely her.”

  “They could all be unconscious,” said Kroll.

  A memory was bothering Griffin. Before the remnants of AF2 withdrew from Qali-5, Admiral Kolb’s brief message to the commanding officers had mentioned the discovery of Ragger bodies which looked as if they’d been sucked dry of moisture. This was the industrial accident which Griffin had mentioned to his crew earlier. Now it seemed like the Hurricane might have suffered a similar event.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “Not one bit.”

  Griffin checked the timer he’d created on his HUD to remind him how long until the detonator exploded. It showed thirteen minutes. He strode to the weapons cabinet and pulled out a Gilner.

  “A rifle?” asked Jackson.

  “It’s the unknown, Lieutenant. I like to be prepared for it.” Griffin pointed at Kenyon and Jackson. “Grab a gun - you’re coming with me. Someone speak to Lieutenant Faulkner and get him out of bed. We’ll pick him up on the way past.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Dominguez.

  “Maybe you should stay here, sir,” said Kroll.

  “I’m the captain of the Hurricane, Lieutenant. That means I get involved in whatever happens to this spaceship.” Griffin thought about it. “In fact, you’re coming as well, Lieutenant Kroll. And you too, Lieutenant Shelton. There’re plenty of rifles in that locker – take one.”

  That left only Lieutenant Dominguez in charge. It was a calculated risk – Griffin wanted as many pairs of hands with him as possible. Out here in unoccupied space, an unexpected engagement with another spaceship was monumentally unlikely. Dominguez didn’t complain and he caught her gaze. She nodded once.

  Griffin opened the bridge door and hurried into the corridor outside, with Kenyon and Jackson right behind. The propulsion section was at the far end of the ship and six people would have to be enough to drag everyone to safety if the technicians were alive. In his heart, Griffin didn’t have much hope.

  The crew’s quarters weren’t far from the bridge and Lieutenant Faulkner was already waiting at the door, looking as if he’d fallen out of bed.

  “Come on,” snapped Griffin, handing over the spare rifle he’d taken from the bridge locker before setting off.

  “What’s this all about, sir?” asked Faulkner, putting on his flight helmet and joining the comms channel.

  “We’ve got a detonator about to blow and most of the maintenance team are dead or unconscious in propulsion. We’re going to find out what the hell is going on.”

  The lights in the corridors appeared duller than usual, though not so much that it was hard to see. Griffin knew the layout of the ship like the back of his hand and he headed directly for the rear section of the spaceship. He ignored the lift when he came to it and instead dropped down the adjacent steps with practiced ease. A second flight and then a third took the group to one of the lower levels and here the lights were even more subdued.

  “The air feels heavy,” said Kenyon.

  The timer fell below ten minutes. Griffin paused for a second to speak to Dominguez.

  “We’re not too far from propulsion. Do you have anything to report?”

  “No, sir. No emissions and no sign of life.”

  “What about Technician Andrews?”

  “I can’t find her on the internal monitors and she isn’t on the comms, but her team is right where they were before.”

  Griffin knew he’d unwittingly put Andrews in danger and hoped he’d find her alive and well somewhere ahead. The corridor widened and the group crossed the threshold of a blast door that was jammed open. Last Griffin had been told, the technicians hadn’t been able to fix it yet. He tested the access panel. The door motor clunked and the door stayed open.

  “This blast door up ahead should be enough if that detonator blows, right?” said Kenyon.

  The final door leading to the propulsion section was a solid piece of alloy, thicker than all the others on the Hurricane. In truth, it wasn’t going to withstand any kind of major blast from the engines. It probably wasn’t meant to – any significant incident was likely to rip the spaceship apa
rt anyway, at which point the crew would be too dead to worry about the integrity of the blast protection.

  “What’s happened to this?” asked Griffin. He rubbed his hand on the surface of the door and pieces of it dropped to the floor.

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Jackson. “Looks like it’s falling to pieces.”

  Griffin gave the door a thump with the side of his fist. It still felt solid enough. He withdrew his hand at the same moment as a comms link appeared on his HUD. His earpiece crackled.

  “Sir? The rest of Technician Andrews’ team went offline,” said Dominguez. She was sounding pretty stressed. “I saw movement on one of the monitors.”

  “What kind of movement?”

  “Like a black shape, sir. It vanished – it went straight into the wall.”

  “You replayed the recording to make sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Griffin formed a mental picture of the Hurricane’s layout. He drew a line from propulsion to the last known position of Technician Andrews’ team. “Were you able to determine the direction it was going?”

  “One second while I think about that.” The channel went silent. “It might have been going towards that other maintenance crew on the upper decks.”

  “We’ve got something onboard,” said Griffin with sudden certainty. He referred to his mental picture again. “Tell that team to head across to the portside upper deck and cut back to meet us here at propulsion.”

  “What about me?”

  Griffin made a snap decision. “If you saw something go through the wall, the bridge door won’t protect you. Enter the emergency lock-down codes and get the hell away from there. Do it now, Lieutenant.”

  “Codes entered. I’m on my way.”

  “What’s happening, sir?” asked Kenyon once Griffin was done speaking on the other channel.

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. The Hurricane’s bridge is now locked down. I think we’re under attack and I’d prefer it if we all stuck together.” He turned his attention towards the nearby door. “And now we’re going to do what we can to pull out anyone who’s left alive in propulsion.”