“A weapon,” said Aston. “I think we all got that feeling when we first saw the cylinder.”
“Yeah,” said Eastwood.
“Lieutenant Burner, you thought it was generating power,” said Recker.
“It was, sir - a heavily suppressed output. Either the casing was blocking the sensor readings, or the energy source is so volatile that they need to keep a tight rein on it.”
“Did you recognize the source?”
“No, sir. Again, it was nothing we’ve seen from the Daklan before.” Burner took in a breath. “There again, they’re advancing so fast and we know so little about them. This could be something new or it could be that we’ve simply not encountered it.”
“All that time on the raw data and that’s the best you can come up with?” said Aston, her eyes twinkling. “Guesswork and maybes.”
“Oh no, Commander. I saved the juicy bits for last.”
“Don’t keep us waiting.”
“The cylinder emitted two wide area pulses in the short time we got to look at it. Until about an hour ago I couldn’t find any reason for the pulse to happen.”
“Comms?” said Aston.
“That’s what I assumed. Anything military and the sensors on the Finality wouldn’t be able to pick it up, so I guessed this pulse was something else. Maybe it came from a sensor scan or something, like the personnel on the cylinder were looking out for HPA warships.”
“It was something else.”
“Yes, sir.” Burner finished his coffee and placed the cup reverently on the edge of his console, as if he was buying himself a moment to prepare. “It turned out there was something in the pulse. A data packet so small that I don’t know how we managed to catch it.”
“What was in the packet?”
“Nothing, sir. Or at least nothing readable. Just a blip.”
“A blip?”
“That’s the nontechnical term, sir. I mean the packet wasn’t meant to carry anything.”
“I’m lost,” said Recker, mystified.
“The best explanation I have is that it was an acknowledgement of continued existence.”
“A handshake?” asked Recker. A knot built in his stomach.
“Not that, either, sir. More like a hello, I’m still here.”
Recker felt suddenly cold. “Another cylinder?”
“Maybe. Or something else.” Burner grinned, though it was an apologetic one. “There’s more. I mentioned two pulses. The second contained an identical data packet, but this one was aimed elsewhere.”
“You were right,” said Aston. “You did save the juicy bits for last.”
“Did we gather enough information on the travel direction to find where these transmissions were going?” asked Recker. “That’s the important question.”
“Short answer: I don’t know. The pulses were travelling so quickly that we only caught a snapshot of each. In order to follow their paths, we’d need to know at least two points on their route and then we could draw an imaginary line between those points which would give us an indication of the destination.”
“With some variance, given the likely distances,” said Eastwood.
“Definitely. Anyway, right now, we only know a single point on the route.”
“If you knew the transmission point from the cylinder, that would be a second point,” said Aston.
“I was coming to that, Commander. I think I can narrow down the likely transmission source to one of three places on the upper four hundred metres of the cylinder. Unfortunately, each of these possible areas is a few dozen metres across and I have no way of pinpointing the precise location of the antennae.”
“You’re holding something back,” said Aston. “I can see it in your face.”
“I’m that transparent, am I?” Burner grinned again. “The data packets were accelerating to lightspeed, which meant they left a trace blur across the raw data.”
Recker hadn’t heard the term before, but he could guess what Burner was getting at. “The packets left a tail?”
“Yes, sir,” said Burner, puffing out his chest a tiny bit. “A really small tail.”
“Which gives you a single definite point on the transmission path, alongside two other points which aren’t so definite.”
“And with a bit of manipulation and guesswork, we should be able to narrow down the destination of one of those packets.”
“Only one?”
“I’m sure the antenna for the second was on the cylinder’s blindside. We don’t have enough information to trace it.”
“One’s better than none,” said Recker. “That’s good work, Lieutenant, even if it leads nowhere.”
Burner’s expression became rueful. “And it might well lead nowhere, sir. I ran a preliminary course projection and you can appreciate the divergence becomes greater as the distance increases. If Admiral Telar decides this is something to follow up, he’s going to need a lot of spaceships.”
Recker hid his disappointment. “We’ll leave that for someone else to deal with when we get back. Maybe one of the deep space monitoring stations will be able to generate a list of candidates for further exploration.” He grimaced. “Which in a way leads to a question of my own. What do you suppose that Daklan lifter was doing on Etrol?”
“Bringing something in or taking the cylinder away, you mean?” said Aston.
Recker gave her a nod. “It was an enormous ship.”
“Maybe twelve klicks from end to end, sir,” Burner reminded him.
“A real big bastard,” Eastwood confirmed. “Something that size could fit an eight-klick cylinder in its bay and still have room for Lieutenant Burner’s lunch.”
“And it could also carry enough ground launchers and other armaments to keep Etrol safe from an HPA attack,” said Aston. “It’d be good if we knew which it was.”
Recker had already given the matter some thought. “Why would the Daklan want to remove the cylinder?”
“Because they suspected we found it,” said Burner.
“In which case, they got a lifter out there pretty damn quickly.”
“It could have been stationed close by. The Daklan have a knack of guessing what we’re planning. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a stride ahead of us in this.”
“Coincidences happen,” Recker agreed.
“But you’re a reluctant believer,” said Aston.
“That I am, Commander.” Recker leaned back in his seat and the artificial leather creaked like a cheap jacket. “I can’t for the life of me imagine why the Daklan would install something as big as that cylinder and then want to take it away. Especially if it’s a weapon.”
“Didn’t you say Admiral Telar is good at answering questions like this?” asked Burner.
“He’s got a sharp mind and a dozen teams of analysts backing him up.”
“In that case, he’ll have something to say.”
“I’m sure he will. That doesn’t mean he’ll say it to me,” said Recker. “And I’m damned if I want to be left in the dark.”
“The workings of the military, sir.”
“I not a man who accepts the status quo.”
“We noticed,” said Aston.
Nobody had anything else to say about the data packets or the appearance of the Daklan heavy lifter, so Recker got to his feet and stretched his muscles. The Finality had a tiny gym that could accommodate two personnel and he considered paying it a visit.
Instead, he took himself for a walk about the Finality’s interior, uncomfortably aware that this was the last time he might see these claustrophobic passages. Once the debriefing for this mission was over, he had no doubt that Admiral Telar would have a replacement riot class waiting for him. The same layout, the same weapons, the same everything. But different.
And to go alongside the new spaceship would be a mission that would take Recker and his crew somewhere out on the fringes – to a place that would certainly be both dangerous and out of sight. His face twisted angrily at the th
ought.
One of the soldiers approached from the other direction and Recker saw that it was a private called Eric Drawl, a man whose bulky combat spacesuit failed to disguise his wiry frame.
“Sir,” said the man cordially as he squeezed by in the corridor.
“Soldier.”
A few minutes later, Recker was in the mess, where he picked up a tray of steak and potatoes for lunch. He returned to the bridge and ignored Lieutenant Burner’s envious stare.
“Anything happen while I was gone?”
“Nope,” said Aston.
The final two days passed in a similarly uneventful fashion, though Recker experienced renewed tension which he couldn’t understand. Arrival at Lustre posed problems which might end up fatal, but he’d come to terms with the possibility long ago. Something else was bothering him and he didn’t know what it was. The feeling gnawed at him.
Eventually, the journey’s end neared.
“Ten minutes and we enter local space!” bellowed Eastwood.
“I’ll make sure Sergeant Vance knows about it,” said Burner.
With all the advance preparations done and with the monitoring tools checked and checked again, Recker could only wait for re-entry.
“Sixty seconds!”
“This is it, folks. You all know what you’re doing.”
“Ten seconds.”
The Finality completed its last journey five seconds early. It rumbled and shuddered, the instrumentation jumped around and the sensors recalibrated.
“We completed the transition,” said Eastwood. “We’re back in local space.”
At the same time, the engine note climbed once more to its deafening howl, reminding Recker how much he hadn’t missed it.
“Switch the engines back to a stable condition,” he shouted.
“On it, sir.”
“I’ve sent a low speed comm to the Adamantine base requesting emergency assistance,” yelled Burner. “We’re eight million klicks out, so it’ll be a few seconds until they receive it.”
“There’s a new red on the life support,” said Aston. “Critical failure.”
“Any way to get it operational?”
“Too early to tell.”
Recker checked it out as well. As he was looking at his console, a red appeared on the navigational backup system and then another on the aft sensors.
“The Finality’s shutting down,” he said.
“It got us home and now it’s dying,” said Aston, sadness in her expression.
“What about those engines, Lieutenant Eastwood?”
“I’m not having any luck, sir. They won’t switch out of semi-stable. It might be because of a failure on the monitoring and control hardware.”
“Keep trying.”
“I’ve had a response from Adamantine, sir!” said Burner. “We’re to stay put and they’ll send someone out here to pick us up.”
“Let them know we’re in a bad way.”
“Already done.”
“And then send them every detail about the mission.”
“That’s just a bunch of unsorted data, sir.”
“I don’t care – get it on its way and I’ll send a verbal report to accompany it.” Recker glanced up at the sensor feeds. Lustre was a long way distant. “I’ll have plenty of time to put something together.”
The rescue craft were rapid in that they could match a riot class for speed. Eight million klicks was a long journey and they’d probably want to go to lightspeed for it. That plus the muster time and Recker guessed they’d be waiting a couple of hours. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere.
“Best get your suit helmets on,” he said. “We’ve got enough air to last, but we might as well be prepared.”
The crew’s helmets were stashed in a wall cubby along with a variety of small arms, a comms beacon and some medical supplies. Recker dropped his into place. A tiny motor whirred, and he felt the collar tightening around his neck to form a seal. It was disconcerting the first few times and thoughts of a motor sensor failure were hard to ignore.
With the rebreather humming softly, Recker instructed the helmet computer to link with the ship’s comms, so he could monitor the progress of the rescue team. His breathing was loud and hollow, and for some reason he associated the sound with loneliness.
Two hours and five minutes after Lieutenant Burner made the emergency broadcast to the Adamantine military base, the rescue ship arrived to pick them up. In the circumstances, the team onboard were more cautious than usual and it was five hours later that the Finality’s occupants were back on the ground.
With no fatalities and plenty of useful intel, Recker knew he should have been elated at the outcome. All he felt was foreboding.
Chapter Eleven
To Recker’s surprise, he was assigned an office in the central administration building and left to fill his time. The rest of his crew were ordered to report for temporary duty in other areas of the base, while the soldiers were sent to barracks.
That had been an hour ago. Recker cracked his fingers and breathed in the faintly musty air, detecting odours of polish and leather. The room he’d been given was suitable for a senior officer, with carpets, pale-blue painted walls and a few decorations, which had probably been brought in when the base was first constructed and which now looked like they should have been hanging in an elderly person’s flowery-wallpapered living room.
A large wooden desk faced the door and a full-width, four-screen communicator terminal took up most of its surface. Every screen was switched on, allowing Recker access to any information available to his grade, as well as to his overflowing inbox. He scanned the latter once and then deleted everything. If any of it was important, Recker was sure someone would turn up at the office to fill him in.
Two windows looked out onto the wall of an adjacent building and the noise of spaceship and shuttle engines was distantly audible through the soundproof clear polymers which most people still referred to as glass. The sky above was tinged with late afternoon pink and – he longingly recalled - the air was refreshingly cool. Unfortunately, the windows weren’t designed to open, leaving him to rely on the air conditioning. It didn’t feel the same.
Recker wasn’t the sitting down kind and he certainly wasn’t a desk officer. The chair was both soft and supportive, but he couldn’t get comfortable in it. However, he couldn’t get up to pace the room, because something was going on and he was determined to find out what it was by means of the communicator.
Firstly, the crew on the rescue craft had been jumpy and uncommunicative. Recker was good at ignoring hints that he should stop asking questions and had talked to the personnel at great length. That was when he first became sure something had happened, and that it was a bad kind of happening.
The rescue crew didn’t know any details, but they felt it. Usually the rumours would have coalesced by now – possible truth formed out of conjecture - but so far there was nothing other than that feeling.
Here on the ground, the unease was palpable, like the atmosphere in a hospital waiting room. Once again, Recker had tried to extract information from the personnel he met, only to come up blank.
He didn’t like to be denied and combed through the available information. In an organization as big as the HPA military it was hard to keep anything secret and Recker knew where to locate traces of facts that his superiors wanted kept hidden. He had a report to write, but as far as he was aware nobody ever read them, and he believed they were filed away on a data array and then immediately forgotten about. The verbal report he’d sent from the Finality would have to be enough for now.
In an hour, he’d uncovered enough. The HPA fleet had suffered a catastrophic defeat to the Daklan, fighting over an insignificant installation on an insignificant world. The more he unearthed, the greater Recker’s anger became and he found himself shaking with the intensity of it. He closed his eyes. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t so bad as he thought.
He tried to contact Adm
iral Telar, only to be advised by a computer PA that his commanding officer was busy. Since he was only speaking to a collection of ones and zeroes, Recker gave it an earful and then cut the channel. Ten minutes later, he tried again with the same outcome.
Having discovered the cause of the widespread trepidation, Recker was reluctant to dig further. This was something he’d prefer to speak directly with Admiral Telar about. Telar had faults, but he didn’t sugar coat and that suited Recker fine.
Three hours later and he was still in his office, though now the light was artificial instead of entering through his windows. In truth, Recker didn’t want to go to his quarters – in a building twenty minutes’ walk across the base – and he didn’t have anything to do here either. On Lustre, he had no friends and no family. Except his crew. He reached a hand towards the communicator, intending to contact them and find out if they wanted to talk crap in a mess room somewhere.
An inbound message halted his finger mid-air. He answered it and the comm system converted the text file to speech.
“Office 003. Briefing and debriefing with Admiral Telar. Immediately.”
Recker stood from his chair and hesitated for a moment in order to study the direction map the computer helpfully provided. Office 003 was in the same admin building as his office, two floors down and in one of the far corners.
He left his room quickly. Telar didn’t like to be kept waiting and Recker was keen to speak with him. Last he heard, the admiral was on Earth and FTL conversation would be slow and frustrating, but it was better to have the meeting done than to sit around on the Adamantine base for another few days. Briefing and debriefing, the message said. It sounded like he wouldn’t be staying on Lustre very long at all.
Recker’s stride lengthened. The admin building was well-constructed, with stone-effect cladding around a strengthened alloy frame. It was just the right side of opulent – enough to instil a sense of pride without prompting Representation members to ask too many questions about the use of taxpayer money.
The building was also filled with tech and that’s where the architects had screwed up – the transition between classical materials and square-edged pieces of HPA hardware was jarring and Recker wondered if they should have done something different with the cladding. Like use it for target practice.
War from a Distant Sun (Savage Stars Book 1) Page 9
