Chains of Duty (Survival Wars Book 3)

by Anthony James

A woman raised her hand. Her face was fine-boned and she had her dark hair tied back “Sir?”

  “Name?” asked Duggan.

  “Sergeant Carpenter, sir. If we end up in a firefight with these aliens, how do we respond appropriately if we don’t know their capabilities? Is there no intel at all?”

  Duggan swept his gaze across the troops. “I can see from your faces that you’re the best and that means you’ve been given the crappiest job. I can only reiterate that we know nothing about the Dreamer’s ground capabilities. We don’t know what they look like or how they deal with threats. The best advice I have at the moment is to try and put a slug in them from as far away as possible.”

  A man raised his hand this time. “Sir, Corporal Wong here. Are we definitely going to see some fighting?”

  “There are no certainties. The SC Lupus might well have broken up owing to a fault onboard. I’m sure there’s more to it. There are other Space Corps vessels searching as well, but we’re the people who’re going to the highest risk zone. If there’s anything to find, I’m determined to find it. If there’s anything to kill, we’re going to be the ones to do it.”

  “Damn, I’ll get a medal for this,” said a man a couple of rows back.

  Duggan raised his voice, to ensure they heard his next words clearly. “This is to be a joint mission. We’ll have the Ghasts with us – an Oblivion battleship is coming. If the fighting starts, you can be sure they’ll want to join in. Does anyone have a problem with that?”

  It seemed like everyone started talking at once. Questions came and the volume rose to an uncomfortable level. Duggan stood impassively for a few minutes until it settled. When things had quietened, he spoke.

  “Most of us have fought the Ghasts for as long as we can remember. I’ve lost more friends than I can put a number to. The thing is, I’ve seen what’s coming and I know the Confederation isn’t going to come out of this one – not without help. I don’t know if the Ghasts hate us as much as we hate them and in truth I don’t really care. We’ve beaten them and now we need them. What the future holds, I can’t tell you.”

  “We’ve got to keep fighting, man,” said a voice in the ranks.

  “Yeah, it’s not about the Ghasts anymore. We beat those, now we’ve got something else to beat.”

  “Nothing ever changes,” said Duggan. “You know that more than anyone. When we beat the Dreamers, there’ll be something else, and again after that. You might not have known it when you signed up, but you sure as hell must know it now.”

  “Alvarez here doesn’t know shit, sir. He still can’t tell the business end of a rifle without guidance.”

  “Hey, shut up, Hammond you Ghast lover,” came the response, presumably from Alvarez.

  There were a number of boisterous exchanges from the troops. Duggan smiled and waved them to silence, since he didn’t want the meeting to get out of hand. “Anyone got a problem if it comes to fighting with the Ghasts?” he repeated. This time no one spoke and Duggan nodded. He had one last thing to deal with. “I’m sure you’ve met Sergeant Ortiz by now.” There was more muttering, not entirely friendly. “Sergeant Ortiz has seen more action than almost anyone I know. She’ll be in charge from now on. As of this moment, she’ll also be Acting Lieutenant Ortiz. Anything you need, it comes through her.”

  Ortiz’ expression didn’t change. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “I have matters to attend to,” said Duggan. “I know I can rely on the men and women in this room to do what’s necessary. Lieutenant Ortiz may want to speak to you after I’ve left.”

  With that, he took the corridor which led back to the bridge. He’d hardly covered ten metres when he heard Lieutenant Ortiz raise her voice to a bellow. He smiled to himself – it had been a long time since he’d needed to promote anyone. Ortiz would have had a hard time of it if he’d left her at sergeant.

  “Do you think they’ll fight willingly with the Ghasts if it’s required?” asked Breeze, falling into step.

  “Absolutely,” said Duggan. “They look the part and I’m sure the skills are there. They’re soldiers and fighting is what they do.”

  “I’m not sure what I think about our situation.”

  Duggan laughed. “You’ve got to take the rough with the rough sometimes. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time we’ve done anything like it.”

  “Since Prot-7,” said Breeze.

  “That was through necessity,” said Duggan. “There is also necessity here yet there’s a lot more to it, bubbling under the surface. We’re the lab rats, being tested to see what happens and how we react.”

  “You don’t get an easy ride, sir.”

  “None of us do, Lieutenant. Anyone who’s with me has to put up with the same.”

  “You live for it,” said Breeze. It was a statement and not a question.

  It wasn’t a conversation Duggan would have permitted except amongst a few people he trusted most, and Breeze was one of those people. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he replied. “It’s the only way I can make a difference.”

  They reached the bridge, to find McGlashan absorbed in an array of the ship’s specification documents. She looked up at the sound of the returning crew and her eyes found Duggan.

  “Sir, you need to see this. The Admiral wasn’t wrong when he said the Terminus was designed to show off.”

  McGlashan was excited, like a child with a dozen new toys. Some of it rubbed off on Duggan and he crossed over to take a look. Before he’d covered the few paces to her station, another excited voice reached him. This time, it was Chainer, holding a metal tray in front of him. There were several items resting on it.

  “They’ve got the same food replicators as they installed on the Crimson!” he said breathlessly. “Hi-stim, coffee and a couple of hamburgers. If I die, at least I’ll die happy.”

  Duggan shook his head. “Try not to spill it over your console, Lieutenant.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND?” asked Duggan. He waved Lieutenant Reyes over at the same time, in case he had any input.

  “There are seventeen Bulwarks. Seventeen of them, sir. They’ve got a higher rate of fire than anything I’ve seen before.”

  “New heat dissipation modules,” said Reyes. “They’ve figured out how to channel it out across the hull and into the engines. We could punch a hole through a twenty-metre steel plate with a single round.”

  “There are three beam weapons with overlapping fields of fire,” continued McGlashan. “The range is still poor compared to the Ghast stuff.”

  “They have no travel time,” said Reyes. He smiled. “If you can get in close enough to use them. These ones can draw from the main engines to increase their intensity and they have a firing interval of thirty seconds. I’ve heard they’re putting eight of them on the Maximilian.”

  “Why not the Devastator as well?” asked McGlashan. The Hadron Devastator had been sent to the Helius Blackstar with the Lancer. The Lancer had been destroyed and the Devastator had taken six weeks to limp home on its scrambled engines.

  “I’ve been told the Maximilian doesn’t need extensive redesign to fit the modules in its hull. It’s the only Hadron with a beam weapon.”

  “The Devastator won’t be ready to resume service for a while,” said Duggan. “They’re trying to find out how the Dreamers managed to shut its engines down.”

  “So it’s true?” asked Reyes.

  “Yes, Lieutenant, I’m afraid it’s true. Whatever they used, our sensors can detect it, but we had no way of stopping it happening.”

  “We’ve got thirty-six Lambda clusters,” continued McGlashan. “Each with ten tubes, and get this – an eight second reload.”

  “They’ll burn out if you use the rapid reload more than three times in succession,” said Reyes. “After that, it’s an expensive strip-down and repair on the damaged parts. We’ve been warned not to use it more than twice in a row – just in case.”

  “The range on these
is good,” said McGlashan. “Another change for the better.”

  “How far?” asked Duggan.

  “They’ll target at a hundred and fifty thousand klicks,” said Reyes. “They’ve got new boosters as well, taking them up to almost three thousand klicks per second.”

  “Everything’s new and improved,” said Duggan. “Even so, there’s nothing here that’ll beat a Ghast Shatterer.”

  “There are two more options,” said McGlashan. “Locked down, so I guess we’ve got some nukes with us.”

  “Lieutenant Reyes?” asked Duggan.

  “I’d guess the same, sir. I’ve been told we have extras that are usable at the captain’s discretion.”

  “I’ll have a look,” said Duggan. He sat at his chair and called up the weapons consoles. Sure enough, there were two options with a block on them. He enabled both, with the second option needing several layers of confirmation. “Can you see them now?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. The first one is definitely nukes.” She gave a low whistle. “Someone in the Space Corps has taken a shine to the idea of radiation weapons.”

  “How so?” asked Duggan, standing again.

  “There is a grand total of thirty-two nuclear weapon launchers on the ES Terminus. Not only that, but the payload is massive. Two gigatons per warhead from the looks of it and we’re carrying eight missiles for each tube.”

  “They’ve had people working on this for a lot longer than the two months since we returned from the Blackstar,” Duggan said, referencing the fact that the Dreamer energy shields were vulnerable to heavy bursts of gamma rays.

  “It’s been closer to two years since we brought the Crimson home,” said McGlashan. “If you remember, we used nukes to pretty good effect against the Ghasts. Maybe this is just luck and they were developing these things to be used in a war we’re no longer fighting.”

  “Whatever the reason, I’m glad,” said Duggan. He leaned closer to one of the screens next to McGlashan. “Look at the propulsion section,” he said. “That’s something new, isn’t it?”

  “Lambda based, I reckon,” she said, peering at the specification diagrams. “Should be a lot more useful than what we had before.”

  “A lot better,” said Duggan. “I’m beginning to feel a little more relaxed about this whole trip. A few Shatterer launchers wouldn’t go amiss, but I can’t have everything.” He frowned. “This final weapon isn’t a weapon after all.”

  “What is it?” asked Reyes.

  “Something I’ve not seen in a long time,” said Duggan. “It’s an option to simultaneously detonate every single warhead we’re carrying. From the dates on these files, it’s been cobbled in at the last minute.”

  “Why would you want to blow everything up at once?” said Reyes.

  “Self-destruction, Lieutenant. To destroy the ship.”

  Reyes scratched his head. “I could understand how you might want the ability to do that if you were expecting the enemy to board and take a vessel by force. That’s never going to happen these days.”

  Duggan guessed why the facility was available and he didn’t like it. “It’s to make us into a weapon - not to deny the vessel to the enemy. If our engines get scrambled or we’re otherwise incapacitated, it’s to give us one last throw of the dice.”

  McGlashan looked troubled. “Sir? What if the same happens to us again? Like what happened when we were sent to Lioxi on the Crimson.”

  “Betrayal?” asked Duggan sharply, not caring if Reyes heard the exchange.

  “I don’t know,” said McGlashan. “What if they waited until we were close to a high priority target and someone decided remotely it was time to activate the self-destruct? We could be sacrificed in the name of the greater good. There are enough explosives to take a big chunk out of an entire planet.”

  “The Space Corps’ new Planet Breaker,” said Duggan with a humourless laugh. The idea left him uneasy and he returned to his station in order to disable the facility from Lieutenant Reyes’ console. Experience had told him to be wary with whom he trusted. If there was to be a double-cross it didn’t seem likely Reyes would be the source. Even so, access to the self-destruct facility was above the man’s grade. It was above McGlashan’s too, though she’d earned enough respect that Duggan was confident she could handle the responsibility.

  When Duggan finished speaking to McGlashan and Reyes, he saw Lieutenant Breeze waving him over. The man looked to be in his element, with multi-coloured gauges and power bars covering three of his display screens.

  “This ship is a marvel, sir. It just goes to show how things might have been if the Confederation Council hadn’t cut our spending to the bone. If we’d had half a dozen of these on the frontline five or six years ago, the Ghasts wouldn’t have come close to Charistos or Angax.” He fell silent for a moment, wondering if he’d said too much.

  “I understand,” said Duggan. “If they’d poured in enough money back then, we’d have developed our technology faster and been better prepared. The Ghasts might not have had enough ships remaining to install their Shatterers.” He didn’t say that billions of lives – both human and Ghast – could have been saved.

  “They’ve made some updates to the engines,” said Breeze, changing the subject. “It would appear those debriefing meetings had some use after all.”

  “What sort of updates?”

  “It’s more to the core than anything else. The brain of this vessel is fast – from the model designation, we’re carrying a pared-back version of the AIs they have on the Juniper. They have three full-fat models, of course, but there’s a lot more stuff to control on the orbital. If you see here, our AI has been optimised – they’ve added some extra hardware to it. Without knowing the specifics, I’d say it’s been designed to subdivide the engines into a series of linked units.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “If the Dreamers try to scramble us, the AI will pretend we’re only equipped with five hundred tonnes of engine, instead of nearly six billion tonnes.”

  “That must mean the lab guys are sure the Dreamer weapon instructs the ship’s own AI to do the scrambling.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Breeze. “Last I heard, they still didn’t have a clue, if you can excuse the technical term for it. They’re trying something, and that’s better than nothing.”

  “Of course,” said Duggan.

  Duggan spent the remainder of the following two days familiarising himself with all aspects of the ES Terminus. The ship had a lot of firepower and the Space Corps engineers were clearly proud of what they’d designed and built. In other circumstances, a new captain would have been given weeks of trials and training before he was permitted to take a warship like this one on active duty. It was a sign of the Space Corps’ concern that they’d sent Duggan out with this one immediately. In reality, there was nothing that would take an experienced captain unawares. There was always change and the best officers adapted to it.

  So, the ES Terminus had newer and better weapons. Her rooms and corridors were kept at a constant temperature which never fluctuated more than a single degree in normal operation. There was a large gym and a small cinema room. The captain’s quarters consisted of two rooms – one for sleeping and another for study and contemplation. The bunks for the soldiers were marginally more opulent than normal. Everything was just a little bit better than it needed to be and Duggan couldn’t decide if he liked it or not.

  “It’s got no soul, has it?” said McGlashan, as they sat opposite each other in the mess. It was breakfast time and the room was lively.

  “How did you know what I was thinking?” he asked.

  “Your face always tells a picture,” she said, laughing. “I’ve worked with you long enough that it’s easy to read.”

  “I didn’t know I was so obvious,” he said gruffly. “You’re right, though. I think I miss the Detriment most of all. Even more so than the Crimson.”

  “There’s something about living on the edge, isn’t there?
We’ve had too much luck, sir. Maybe it was time to move on.”

  “Maybe,” he hedged.

  “And this is something you’ve deserved. Not just you – Frank, Bill and me too. You can achieve anything you want now there’s nobody to hold you back.” She winked. “I hear there’s an opening within the admiralty. You should apply.”

  He laughed in genuine delight. “I’d love to see their faces when they opened that letter.”

  “Definitely,” she said. “One day, though. You deserve a chance at it, sir.”

  “If the past had treated me differently, I think it may have been a path to follow,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s something I want. I’m institutionalised – without a ship I feel lost.”

  “You need to change, sir. Fill the void with something else.” Her eyes glittered – mischief tinged with sadness. “You should look up Captain Jonas when we get back.”

  He laughed again, causing heads nearby to turn - Duggan wasn’t known for outward displays of humour, something the men and women on the Terminus had picked up on quickly. “Perhaps I’ll do that, Commander. Perhaps I will.”

  The following morning, the ES Terminus exited lightspeed, ten minutes earlier than projected. The designated meeting place was located on the fringes of the Garon sector and close to nothing of interest.

  “Anything here?” asked Duggan. He looked across in time to see Chainer giving Ensign Perry a nudge.

  “Sir, just doing a sweep now,” said Perry. He looked relieved to have delivered this tiny snippet of information. If he lacked confidence he’d need to get over quickly.

  “Let me know soon,” said Duggan, meaning I need to know at once.

  The Terminus was bedecked in sensors and the comms team worked fast in order to collate the data.

  “I’ve detected a single object, sir,” said Massey. “Four-point-five kilometres in length, with a volume almost twice our own. They’re twenty minutes away on full gravity drive.”

  “They’re turning, sir,” said Chainer. “Swinging about and coming to greet us.”

  “Send a message to the Juniper to let them know we’ve arrived and then hail the Oblivion,” said Duggan.