Alien Firestorm (Fire and Rust Book 2)

by Anthony James

  That got Dominguez’s attention. “If you’re about to do what I think you’re about to do…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Is that wise, sir?”

  “Have you got a better plan?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll try this one.”

  The Gradior’s engines came online, which provided the necessary power for the tharniol drive detonators. Griffin was ready for it and he immediately sent the activation command. A series of heavily-suppressed booms came from elsewhere in the spaceship.

  “That starts the warmup,” he said.

  “Where are we going, sir?” asked Dominguez.

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. As soon as the lifter enters local space, I’ll activate our lightspeed drive for one second. It should bring us out somewhere in the Anderol system, hopefully far enough from New Destiny that we avoid detection and close enough that we can react to circumstance.”

  If the Fangrin had any thoughts on the subject, they didn’t say and they took advantage of the tharniol charge-up time to replenish their bodies. Griffin lost count of how many visits Yeringar and Zargol paid to the food station and how many plates of lumpy meat they consumed. The smell of it made Griffin salivate, no matter how much he told himself it was dogfood.

  “Want some?” asked Zargol, seeing his interest.

  Griffin looked at the tray, piled high with meat, alongside something which was the same yellow-grey color as the Fangrin combat suits. His best guess was that it was bread. “Maybe later.”

  “It tastes good.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Your loss, human.”

  “You should find a seat. Three minutes on the tharniol warmup.”

  “I’ll contact Lieutenant Conway and the other Fangrin,” said Dominguez. “Tell them to find something to hold onto.”

  The Ragger lightspeed transitions were far smoother than those on most Unity League warships. Even so, it didn’t pay to take chances when it wasn’t necessary. The Fangrin used the thick seat harnesses to fasten themselves in and when Griffin did the same, he caught the smell of leather from the straps.

  Seconds later, the Gradior’s sensor feeds reported that the sound from the lifter’s engines had dropped to a whisper.

  “Too soon,” said Griffin. “We can’t activate the tharniol drive for another two minutes.”

  The lifter’s hull shook with the stresses of re-entry to local space as it completed its return journey to the Anderol system. The occupants of the Gradior were cushioned from the shaking, but not the usual unpleasant nausea and feeling of being in two places at once.

  “Done,” said Dominguez. “We’re in local space.”

  “Now the real fun begins,” said Griffin, not expecting the coming minutes to be anything remotely similar to fun.

  Chapter Twelve

  The lifter’s sublight propulsion activated immediately and Griffin felt the urgent acceleration of the spaceship. He guessed the Raggers had come in a little way off target and were keen to join up with the rest of their fleet.

  “The bay doors are opening,” said Dominguez.

  “The Raggers care little for each other,” said Yeringar, already out of his harness and prowling around the bridge like he was hunting for something to shoot or eat, possibly both. “They will not hesitate to destroy this lifter in order to kill us.”

  “If they blow up this spaceship, we’ll die and the nuke will be destroyed as well,” said Dominguez.

  Griffin knew the problems, he just couldn’t fix them. The Gradior’s tharniol drive wasn’t too far from reaching maximum charge. Since the heavy cruiser’s positioning system was screwed up by its time in the lifter’s hold, he would have to pick a direction and go. If they were unlucky, they might emerge from lightspeed in the center of the local star, Anderol, or one of its planets. He kept telling himself it wasn’t likely.

  A monumentally-large railgun slug punctured the side wall of the lifter, creating a sharp-edged hole dozens of meters across. The projectile didn’t stop – it came within a hundred meters of the Gradior and struck the opposite wall with sufficient force to create an exit hole. Through the holes, the darkness of space was visible.

  “Crap,” said Griffin.

  A second railgun slug came after the first. This one glanced off the heavy cruiser’s upper section, created a deep furrow and spun into the bay wall. Griffin got a sight of the flattened projectile and it was far larger than anything he’d seen come out of any other railgun.

  He drew back on the controls and the Gradior responded at once. Its engines were refined, yet with raw undertones, like a barbarian dressed in a finely-tailored suit. The warship flew backwards and struck the rear wall of the bay. The Gradior had enormous inertia but the lifter’s interior was reinforced. The impact split the rear bulkhead and the warship came to a halt.

  A third railgun slug went through the space the heavy cruiser had just vacated, missing the nose plating by only a few meters. It crashed into the loading platform, buckling the metal and making it rise like an alloy wave.

  “No more room to move,” said Dominguez.

  “We won’t need any.”

  The tharniol drive was ready. Griffin stabbed a finger at the activation trigger and the lightspeed engines fired. He couldn’t recall having undertaken such a short journey before and the in-out transition doubled up on the discomfort. Griffin retched and he heard Dominguez cursing with real feeling.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  The Fangrin’s sensors didn’t come up any quicker than their Unity League equivalents and the first image was of static. The sublight propulsion grumbled and the velocity gauge indicated the Gradior was moving, though Griffin’s translator couldn’t give him an exact figure. About eight klicks per second, he thought.

  When the sensors came up, Griffin nearly choked. On the forward feed, he saw the endless, white-topped blues and greens of a wind-blown ocean, coming up fast. He wrenched on the control bars until they came to the end of their guide slots. It wasn’t enough and the Gradior plunged into the water, still travelling at speed. A warning alarm chimed once – Griffin assumed it was the life support system – and then again when the heavy cruiser struck the sea bed. The nose section buckled and the impact threw up so much rock, grit and sand that the sensors went completely dark.

  A raucous sound broke the ensuing silence. Yeringar’s laughter filled the bridge with an unfettered joy.

  “This is how the Fangrin fight!” he bellowed. “We keep our enemy guessing until it is time for their deaths!”

  Griffin wasn’t sure if he’d been complimented or insulted and guessed it was the former. The Gradior’s instrumentation indicated it was 2200 meters beneath the surface of an ocean, which could mean only one thing.

  “We’re on New Destiny,” he said.

  “Yes we are, sir. The Gradior’s positioning system had enough time to calibrate, so I can tell you that we went into the Targatic Ocean.”

  Not many spaceships saw the bottom of an ocean during their time in service and Griffin wasn’t sure what to expect. The Gradior had suffered moderate impact damage, but was otherwise intact. The hull monitoring system reported the external pressures from the water, without generating any alerts. It appeared that the Fangrin warship was perfectly at home at the bottom of the sea and only the deep creaking of the metal suggested it was anywhere other than up in space.

  “Twenty minutes until the nuke goes off,” said Dominguez. “Its built-in comms unit isn’t visible, so it’s too late to change anything.”

  “We’ll have to work with it.”

  “I’m going to search for the lifter,” she continued. “Not that we can see too well from down here.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” said Griffin. “Try and contact anyone on New Destiny who might be listening and then get hunting for the lifter.”

  In the aftermath of Satra’s destruction, the comms had been badly affected and Griffin wasn’t expecting a change
in the situation. He got a surprise when Dominguez located several military receptors.

  “The nearest comms satellite is online, sir,” she said. “Looks like most of the network is back up and running.”

  “Who’s out there? I need to know what’s going on.”

  Colonel Doyle was fast to the comms. He was far from the most senior officer in ULAF, but he was in charge of the only operational military base on New Destiny. Dominguez hadn’t mastered the Fangrin comms system yet and Doyle came through on the bridge speakers rather than directly into Griffin’s earpiece.

  “I need an update,” Griffin told him.

  Doyle was in a bad situation and it came out in his voice. “The Raggers promised to lay waste to every major population center unless we surrender,” he said. “The trouble is, we aren’t going to do that. I got word from the League Council by FTL comm only ten minutes ago.”

  “What about the Invigilator carrier group?”

  “Four hours away, Captain Griffin and nothing else close by.”

  “What instructions were you given, Colonel?”

  “Lie through my teeth and try to buy enough time for the fleet to get here. We can’t see these bastards, so I don’t know how we’re expected to shoot them down before they drop more of those incendiaries.”

  “Do you have any idea where they are now?”

  “There’s one directly over Durham. Sometimes you can see through their stealth if you look just right. It’s like a shimmering in the sky – one minute it’s there, the next it’s gone.”

  “Is it a lifter? A damaged lifter?”

  “Doesn’t look like one.”

  “Can you give me the positional data?”

  “I can send that right over to you, Captain. What do you intend? I’d like to give our boys and girls in the carrier group a chance to show these alien bastards what happens when you kill four million of the Unity League’s citizens.”

  “The Raggers will not wait,” said Yeringar. “We Fangrin are familiar with this tactic. If the enemy believe they can obtain significant quantities of rust, they will hold fire. Otherwise, they will do as they please.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Doyle sharply. “One of my team suggests your comms is originating from a Fangrin spaceship.”

  “These are our new allies, Colonel. They have assisted me and my crew. I have command of their heavy cruiser and intend putting it to good use.”

  “We don’t have much of a chance. Don’t blow it for us.”

  “I’ll do what I think is right.”

  Griffin spoke with Doyle for another couple of minutes. There wasn’t too much that was new – the Raggers were in charge, their underlying motivations were unknown and the aliens had already shown themselves capable of mass murder. The rescue fleet was a long way off and even if it arrived in the next few minutes, there was no guarantee that the Invigilator would be able to track and destroy the enemy spaceships before they brought more death to New Destiny.

  Once Doyle was off the comms, Griffin spent a few precious seconds trying to predict the future. It was a technique he hadn’t perfected.

  “Fifteen minutes until the nuke detonates,” he said, drumming his fingers on the command console. “Colonel Doyle mentioned a spaceship over Durham, but said it wasn’t the lifter. If we assume the enemy stopped putting railgun slugs through their own spaceship once we lightspeed jumped out of there, then that lifter has to be elsewhere.”

  “I do not think it would be alone,” said Yeringar.

  Griffin met the Fangrin’s eyes. “Why so sure?”

  “It would make sense for it to travel with the protection of other spaceships. They have your Star Burner still, and would not wish to lose it.”

  “If the lifter is with the other Ragger spaceships, they will be saturated in gamma radiation when the warhead explodes,” said Griffin. “But not the ship over Durham. It’s like they’ve left that one there to make sure we don’t forget about them, while the other spaceships watch from somewhere else.”

  “They’re not going to be pleased when they start falling over with acute radiation sickness,” said Dominguez.

  “They’ll be pissed enough to start dropping more incendiaries,” said Griffin. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  He thought hard, trying to visualize the map of New Destiny in his mind. Durham was only about twenty klicks inland from the place where the ocean came up against the continental land mass.

  “I’ve sent out wide pings from our current position, sir,” said Dominguez. “The average visible depth of the Targatic is almost four thousand meters.”

  It was good to have backup officers who could read minds. “Thank you, Lieutenant. We’re still visible to enemy sensors when we’re beneath the ocean.”

  “Visible if they’re overhead and looking, sir. Not so visible if that enemy is close to the planet’s surface.”

  “Set me a course, Lieutenant. I’d like to get as near to the enemy as we can without being seen.”

  As soon as Dominguez sent him the details, Griffin fed power into the Gradior’s engines, half expecting things to start failing. Spaceship engines weren’t anything like an old combustion engine – they were sealed units with no intake. The heavy cruiser moved through the ocean like the deadliest of sharks and Griffin found the experience utterly bizarre.

  It was dark at the bottom of the ocean, though the Gradior’s sensors were sophisticated enough to cope. Griffin kept the ship at a constant depth of two thousand meters and watched out for the ocean floor rising too close. He’d never feared space, but for some reason Griffin had always feared the ocean. It took an effort to stay calm and he felt the sweat beading on his forehead.

  His fear was about more than nature. If the Raggers spotted the Gradior, they’d be able to take it out easily at this low speed. Railgun projectiles wouldn’t be greatly effective through so much water, but plasma missiles would reach this depth just fine.

  Dominguez had unexpected news for him. “I’ve just discovered the Gradior is sending out data packets on an FTL channel with a five-minute interval.”

  “What sort of data packets and where are they going?”

  “I’m not sure - they’re all going to the same place.”

  “Yeringar?” asked Griffin, confident the Fangrin would have an answer.

  “I believe our warships communicate automatically with their base. I am sure the Unity League navy does not like to lose its valuable hardware either.”

  “What response can we expect?”

  “Warships.”

  “When and how many?”

  “I do not know.”

  The Fangrin’s dumb soldier act was no longer convincing, but Griffin didn’t push it further. He watched the estimated distance count down on the Gradior’s navigational system.

  “At this speed, we won’t reach the continental shelf before the nuke goes off,” said Dominguez.

  Griffin didn’t want to test how quickly the Gradior could travel underwater. The engines were hardly straining at all, which made him think the answer was pretty damn fast.

  “The people on New Destiny have suffered enough,” he said. “I don’t have any idea what size of wave we’ll create if we go any faster than this. We might have already made the biggest tsunami this planet’s ever seen when we hit the ocean’s surface.”

  “It won’t be anything worse than the Raggers bring, sir.”

  The truth was simple, painful and Griffin knew it well enough. “Let’s speed things up.”

  He took the Gradior deeper, reasoning that it would reduce the resulting disturbance on the surface. Without any knowledge of hydrodynamics, it came down to guesswork and he hoped that nobody would die as a result of him getting it wrong.

  “Five minutes on the warhead, sir.”

  Griffin dearly wanted to know if bomb was still intact. He remembered Yeringar’s words that the Star Burner was valuable to the Raggers and that they wouldn’t destroy it. Nothing was pred
ictable in an engagement like this one and it was entirely possible the enemy turned their own lifter into wreckage, taking out the Star Burner and the nuke with it.

  The seabed rose up steadily beneath the Gradior and the underside sensors picked it out in greater detail. It was smooth and undulating, with shifting patterns of sand and grit. Here and there, Griffin imagined he saw other movement that might have been enormous schools of fish, glittering as they skimmed away from the oncoming spaceship.

  “Two minutes.”

  “We should be able to detect the gamma radiation from a four hundred megaton nuclear explosion from here, right? Even if it’s a hundred thousand klicks in space?”

  “If it’s overhead and I’m looking, I should be able to find it, sir. We only have a limited viewing arc here – if it’s blindside, we won’t see anything.”

  Griffin’s hold on the controls became so tight his fingers ached. He couldn’t loosen up and he watched the seconds count down. The ocean floor climbed rapidly and he brought the spaceship to a halt at a depth of one kilometer, and ten from shore. The assumed position of the Ragger spaceship over Durham was thirty klicks away.

  “If the enemy remains over your town and military base, launch the shock pulse missiles very high,” said Yeringar. “Unless you wish to kill your people.”

  It was going to be hard enough without additional complications.

  “How high?”

  “Ten thousand meters.”

  “Got it.”

  “The Ragger incendiaries have a minimum deployment height of four thousand meters. Use the fact to your advantage.”

  “Captain Jostral sure talked a lot when you were in captivity.”

  “Sixty seconds,” said Dominguez. “Thirty…twenty…ten. Boom.”

  Griffin held his breath as he awaited the outcome.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The wait wasn’t long.

  “The sensors are reading strong gamma waves way up on the edge of New Destiny’s moon,” said Dominguez. “No explosion in a vacuum, but plenty of radiation for anyone close by. It’s three hundred thousand klicks from here – the center of the sphere is hidden from view, but I have a pretty good idea where it is from the travel speed of the radiation waves.”