“Get inside!” yelled Conway.
Griffin jumped first, clearing the gap after a short run to gather speed. Dominguez followed and then two of the Fangrin. The aliens hardly needed any space – they just sprang across into the airlock room.
As far as Conway could tell, the rocket had killed every Ragger on the walkway and the enemy fire stopped. He stooped over Freeman and was surprised to see the man’s eyes open and his lips moving.
“It hurts,” he said.
“We need to get him inside,” said Conway. “Barron – lay down fire. Sergeant Lockhart – help me lift Freeman.”
On this day of surprises, Conway got another. The Fangrin he recognized as Lonstril leaned over and scooped up Corporal Freeman with his long, thick arms. He slung the man over one shoulder, turned, took three fast steps and then leapt onto the spaceship.
Lockhart followed, with Barron and Kemp straight after. Conway was halfway into his stride when he noticed a sudden silence, like the lifter’s engines had shut off. He knew at once what it meant and as soon as he landed on the Gradior, he shouted for Griffin.
“Sir, the Raggers are coming out of lightspeed.”
Griffin acknowledged. “I don’t know what that means for us, Lieutenant. We can only do what we’re going to do.”
One of the Fangrin touched his fingers against the inner security panel and the outer door slid shut with a solid thud.
“The Raggers can open this,” said one of the Fangrin. “We should guard it until Jake Griffin activates the propulsion. There are two other doors, but they are not flush with a platform, so the Raggers will be unable to enter through them.”
Conway nodded and made the arrangements to watch the entrance. Lonstril came onto the comms to let him know he was taking Corporal Freeman to the warship’s medical bay. Another Fangrin went with him and Conway ordered Lockhart to follow.
“Hope he makes it,” said Kemp, speaking for them all.
Moments later, the lifter shuddered as it exited lightspeed, producing nausea and a heavy thumping in Conway’s head. He imagined the Ragger crew reprogramming the spaceship with a new destination – one that would take it once more to New Destiny where the enemy warships would send troops to assist. There was nothing he could do about it. With events now out of his hands, Conway settled down to see what fate had in store for him and his squad.
Chapter Eleven
Captain Jake Griffin didn’t know the way to the bridge, so he shouted for Yeringar to come and give him and Dominguez some directions. The Fangrin acknowledged with a single nod of his head.
“Zargol. Come,” he said.
One of the other Fangrin joined them and the two aliens set off deeper into the ship. Griffin and Dominguez exchanged glances and then followed.
“Our enemy might have left a presence,” Yeringar explained. “I have checked the audit panel near the entrance door and it reports no life forms apart from ourselves. Still, it pays to be ready.”
The interior of the Gradior wasn’t too much of a surprise. When you built a warship, it was with a specific task in mind – blowing up other warships or surface facilities. There wasn’t much need for interior carpets or fancy pictures and therefore this heavy cruiser comprised the same corridors, the same cabling, status panels, thick doors, stark lighting and scent of metallic air as every human spaceship Griffin had ever walked through.
It would have been comforting if it wasn’t for the dead Fangrin lying in the corridors. The bodies of the aliens were twisted and contorted, as if they’d died in agony. Thick, dried mucus and spittle crusted their mouths and noses and Griffin detected the odor of putrefaction.
“Ragger bastards,” growled Yeringar, stepping over one of the corpses.
“I thought the Raggers took you prisoner,” said Griffin.
“Only the ones who survived the rupture wave.”
“That’s how they got you off the Gradior? This rupture wave?”
“Yes - it cuts through a warship’s shielding and kills or incapacitates, depending on how lucky you are when it hits. The pain it causes blurs the line between whether the dead or the living are the fortunate ones.”
“Do all Ragger ships have the same capabilities?”
“You have much to learn, human.”
“Yes – that is why I am asking.”
Yeringar slowed for a moment and Griffin wondered if he’d angered the Fangrin.
“Not every Ragger warship is as advanced as the most advanced craft in their fleet,” said Yeringar. “Your Unity League believes the Fangrin to be a powerful force and we are.” A rumbling laugh. “Yet compared to the Raggers, we are not powerful.”
“Your war isn’t going too well?” asked Dominguez.
“No, it isn’t going too well,” said Yeringar. “We could not fight on two fronts, even when one of our opponents was small like the Unity League.”
Griffin winced inside at being dismissed so easily. “And now we are at peace.”
“The Raggers will come for you. Their stinking armies of dead will not stop.”
“You keep referring to them as dead.”
“I can’t explain it better. They are not alive like we Fangrin are alive. They are different. Dead.”
Yeringar knew where he was going and he took them unerringly to the bridge. The door was open and Griffin spotted another one of the Ragger hacking devices plugged into the panel. Yeringar saw it as well and he ripped it clear before hurling it against the floor. With that done, the Fangrin moved onto the bridge, keeping the stolen Ragger gun ready.
Griffin entered the bridge afterwards and looked around. Again – no surprises. It was cramped, cold and with stations for eight or nine crew members. The Fangrin tech was mostly better than the Unity League equivalent, but much of it looked like it came out of the same factory. That didn’t mean Griffin considered himself a hotshot pilot of alien warships. It did, however, make him confident he could get something out of the Gradior.
He located the main console and dropped into the seat in front of it. The chair was padded, comfortable and the two arms were clad in a smooth, red material.
“We’re in local space,” he said, his eyes hunting for the button to bring the console out of sleep.
“This one,” said Yeringar, evidently with a greater awareness of the tech than he’d let on.
Griffin pressed the button and waited. Screens lit up and something hummed inside the console. An orange bar appeared on the center display and gave an estimate of the mainframe’s boot-up progress. It raced to 99% and then stopped for interminable seconds.
“I’ve seen this before,” said Griffin impatiently. “Lieutenant Dominguez, have you located the sensor panel?”
“Yes, sir. Just waiting for it to come out of sleep.”
Zargol approached, carrying two huge metal cups that he’d obtained from a food station on the rear wall. He handed one to Yeringar and the aliens drank in deep gulps, the ends of their muzzles buried in the containers. Griffin didn’t watch them for more than a second or two. The aliens were clearly dehydrated from their time on the lifter and they needed fluids.
“These start the propulsion,” said Yeringar, once he’d emptied the cup. He tapped at a row of other buttons. “You will be asked to input security codes.”
“I thought you couldn’t fly this.”
“I can’t. I am trained in light transports only. Some of the hardware is similar.”
Griffin knew his way around a spaceship. Not only that, the ULAF had captured several Fangrin vessels over the course of the war and studied them closely. Griffin kept himself up to speed with the enemy technology, so he had a good idea how the Fangrin did things.
“Starting it up,” he said.
The expected shuddering happened, though it was muted compared to a ULAF heavy cruiser. A power gauge on one of his screens climbed slowly. Griffin watched it until Dominguez drew his attention elsewhere.
“The Raggers are in the bay outside,” said Domingu
ez. “Let’s see if I can figure out how to get the feed up on the main screen…here we go.”
The Gradior’s sensor feeds sprang into view in mid-air, a couple of feet in front of the main console. The clarity was startling and looked solid enough to touch. Griffin told himself he wasn’t impressed and focused on the twelve Raggers advancing towards the spaceship’s forward airlock. They were spread out, dressed in silver-streaked black and carrying guns. They’d brought some kind of cylindrical floating robot with them. The device had many arms and a display screen.
“Those Raggers are wearing stealth suits,” said Griffin.
“And this ship’s sensors see right through them, just like ours do,” Dominguez replied. “Neat, huh?”
“Yeah, neat. I don’t think we want to see what that robot does to the door security. Can you reach Lieutenant Conway?”
Dominguez’s main backup skill was comms and she had no problems accessing the Gradior’s internal systems. “Letting him know he should be ready for anything.”
“I can see more enemy on those walkways,” said Griffin. “And some waiting on the far side of the airlock door.”
“Lots of Raggers,” said Zargol. “More than we can hold off with our limited numbers. We should kill them with the Gradior’s external armaments.”
It was a tremendous plan and Griffin hunted through the main weapons systems to see if he could figure out how to set the chain guns onto automatic.
“Let’s try this,” he said.
As soon as he activated the guns, their turrets rotated as they acquired targets. Griffin watched it happen on the sensor feed and experienced great satisfaction when all four portside guns began spewing out a vast quantity of bullets. The Gradior’s chain guns were meant to pulverize convoys of armed vehicles while the spaceship remained in high orbit. Griffin was aware from experience that they could take out a Viper class, given enough time. Against the Raggers, it was overkill.
Within moments, the enemy soldiers were gone – killed with such murderous efficiency that they were reduced to paste on the surface of the platform. Two of the chain guns pummeled the walkways, bringing them crashing down and producing huge indentations in the bay wall.
A shoulder-launched rocket sped through the airlock door and hit the Gradior. The blast was large but the Ragger weapon didn’t have a fraction of the necessary firepower to damage a warship. Massive-caliber bullets plunged through the laser-cut airlock and Griffin had little doubt that the Ragger which fired the rocket was comprehensively killed.
The guns shut off and Yeringar laughed. “They did not enjoy that.”
Having spent no more than ten or fifteen minutes in the company of the Fangrin, Griffin had already learned far more about the aliens than during many years of fighting against them. It might be that Yeringar wasn’t a representative example, though Griffin suspected that he was.
He turned his attention to the slowly-climbing engine gauge. It had a long way to go, which was expected given how long Captain Jostral said the propulsion had been offline. With no way to speed it up, Griffin did what he could to familiarize himself with the operation of the Gradior.
The computer systems were logically set out. The language module in his flight helmet couldn’t translate a few of the words and he was required to ask for Yeringar’s assistance. The Fangrin knew a lot of things.
“How old is the Gradior?” Griffin asked, pretty sure he knew the answer. Everything felt new.
“Not old. Within a year.”
“What were you doing when the Raggers used their disruptor on you?”
“Captain Jostral told us during our time in captivity. We followed an enemy spaceship in anticipation of locating suitable targets for destruction. Then we came upon an opponent capable of using a sustained disruptor on us. Captain Jostral believes we encountered the fleet which the Raggers were preparing use in a planetary assault.”
“Our planet – New Destiny.”
“So it would appear.”
“How many spaceships were in that fleet?”
“At least four. They are difficult for our sensors to track.”
“Four including the lifter?”
“I do not know the precise numbers.”
Griffin had no doubt there were many other details about the Gradior’s capture which were worth hearing, but for now he couldn’t spend the time digging. Four enemy ships plus the lifter sounded like a small number to attack a planet – unless one of those warships was a capital ship that didn’t require much in the way of support. He suspected he’d find out soon.
The Gradior was armed to the teeth. As well as the chain guns and the four visible upper railguns, it had two additional underside railguns. Then came the missiles – ten clusters of ten, the surface incendiaries, the shock-pulse missiles, countermeasures and the nukes. The ammunition reserves were not full – the warship had seen plenty of action since its last resupply.
“The Gradior has launched two of its nuclear missiles,” said Griffin. “Or it left base without a full complement.”
“Our war with the Raggers leaves no room for sentiment.”
The Fangrin weren’t evasive and so far, Yeringar hadn’t avoided speaking about the conflict. Griffin wondered exactly how far they were being pushed. It was easy to think Fangrin losses were a good thing for the Unity League and until the Raggers showed up at New Destiny, Griffin would have agreed. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“Are you at total war?”
“Yes. The entirety of our industrial effort is focused on this.”
“Will it be enough?”
“Perhaps not. I am a soldier and I will fight.”
It was sobering to hear and Griffin didn’t know what else to say. He was almost ready to declare himself capable of flying the Gradior and he rested his hands on the horizontal bars the Fangrin used to control their spaceships. The cool metal rods shifted smoothly and easily along their guide slots and he could feel the hum of the propulsion in his palms, as though the controls and the engines were directly connected.
“Thirty minutes on the Star Burner’s nuke,” said Dominguez. “We may be cutting it tight if you don’t alter the timer, sir.”
“I know.”
The engine charge gauge climbed beyond fifty percent. As soon as it reached one hundred percent, the sublight propulsion would start up, assuming nothing went wrong. It was painfully slow and a limitation of the technology that affected both humans and Fangrin and, for all Griffin knew, the Raggers as well.
“What’s the plan, sir?” asked Dominguez. “Blow the crap out of the lifter and then fly to New Destiny?”
Griffin wasn’t sure on the specifics. Since they came up on the Star Burner, there was little choice other than to let events guide him. And here he was, at the controls of a powerful Fangrin spaceship, in the bay of a Ragger lifter on the way back to a planet in the Unity League with a total population in excess of four billion, without a plan as to how he was going to fix things.
An idea came to him, as they often did in extreme circumstances and when time was in short supply. He studied the propulsion gauge and then examined the details he could find on the Gradior’s tharniol drive system. The specifics were in there somewhere, he just couldn’t find them.
“Yeringar, how long does it take for this warship’s tharniol drive to warm up?”
The Fangrin made an expression that looked like a scowl, but was probably something else. “I do not know the exact information. Not very long.”
“Can you guess?”
“Eight minutes. I heard one of the maintenance team speak of it.”
The idea might work, but the timing was going to be tight. The main propulsion gauge trickled upwards and Griffin resisted the urge to swear. Something else was nagging at him – a follow-on from his idea - and he asked Yeringar a question about it.
“You said you followed one of the Ragger spaceships and came to their attack fleet.”
“Yes.”
“Was tha
t through lightspeed?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t aware such a technology existed.”
“We have fought for years without it, human. Captain Jostral said it was something new – a modification to the sensors. The Gradior was one of the first ships fitted with the hardware. This is the reason I haven’t demanded you return it to the Fangrin navy immediately.”
It didn’t take long for Griffin to make the connection. “You want us to track the Ragger fleet once it leaves New Destiny?”
“That is correct, human. Vengeance for my species.”
There was likely more to it than simple vengeance and Griffin wondered if the Fangrin believed something big would happen if the Gradior went to New Destiny.
“What is your rank in the Fangrin armed forces, Yeringar?”
The deep, green eyes blinked once, slowly. “My rank would not translate directly into something you would understand.”
Griffin got a hint of evasion in the response and he could see he wasn’t going to get an answer. He turned. “Lieutenant Dominguez – think you can find out what those sensor modifications are?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do what I can.”
“We don’t have long.”
“No, sir. A few minutes.”
He turned his attention back to the Fangrin. “Did your species have a specific purpose in mind for this technology?”
Yeringar laughed. “Find the factory planets of our enemy and destroy them.”
Griffin shrugged, not expecting anything more in-depth. “Lieutenant Dominguez?” he asked.
“This is new, sir. Give me a moment.” A note of impatience crept into her voice and Griffin knew it was time to back off. It was easy to expect miracles and it wasn’t always possible to deliver.
“When the lifter enters the New Destiny solar system, we will be vulnerable,” said Yeringar. “The Raggers will be able to target us when we shoot open the lifter’s bay doors and emerge into space. The Gradior is a new ship but it cannot beat a railgun projectile in a contest of acceleration.”
“We won’t be here longer than a few seconds when the lifter exits lightspeed,” said Griffin.
Alien Firestorm (Fire and Rust Book 2) Page 9
