Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Marshall stood up, the hard–light bunk switching off automatically as he dressed and grabbed a small breakfast of crushed cereal before he washed and prepared himself for another day. At least the current rota had him on “days”, in as much as time counted this far out in the solar system.

  Marshall glanced at himself in a mirror on the wall, which was in fact a sheet of electro–film that flipped his image the right way around so he could see himself as others did. He looked older, the lines in his face more deeply ingrained, the gray hair a little thinner than on his last tour. He reminded himself, as his wife often did, that he had weathered well for a man of one hundred twenty six. She had also reminded him that most commanders of his age would have considered retirement before now, a thought that filled him with a greater horror than confronting an entire fleet of Ayleean warships in nothing but a…

  ‘Good morning!’

  Marshall almost jumped out of his skin as he whirled and saw the glowing holographic form of the ship’s doctor, Schmidt, shimmering before him.

  ‘It’s against protocol to invade the sanctity of the captain’s quarters,’ Marshall growled.

  ‘Unless circumstances dictate that a given situation qualifies as an emergency,’ Schmidt corrected him with an ingratiating smile of neon blue–white teeth.

  ‘What emergency?’ Marshall asked, all his anger instantly forgotten.

  ‘Follow me,’ Schmidt said with a cheerful nod to the door, and then vanished in the blink of an eye.

  Marshall strode through the door of his quarters and out into a corridor where Schmidt was awaiting him. The doctor’s ephemeral nature was one of the many advancements of mankind that Marshall felt uncomfortable with, many people no longer entirely human and, in the case of Schmidt and his kind, both alive and dead at the same time: a Holo sapiens.

  ‘Long range sensors have detected a high–priority transmission coming from the Ayleean system,’ Schmidt explained as he walked alongside Marshall. ‘The transmission is garbled and broken, but it doesn’t look good.’

  ‘For us or for them?’

  ‘Both,’ Schmidt replied, all pretense of humor gone. ‘Our communications team are trying to decode the message and extract some kind of meaning to it.’

  ‘What’s the emergency in all of this?’ Marshall asked.

  ‘It was a distress signal.’

  Marshall stopped dead in his tracks in the ship’s corridor and stared at Schmidt. ‘The Ayleeans sent us a distress signal?’

  The last encounter that mankind had had with the Ayleeans had been a protracted battle that had nearly cost the lives of everybody aboard Titan and the orbital city of New Washington, when the Ayleeans had attempted to breach the solar system and attack Earth.

  Marshall had fought the Ayleeans in two wars, from both of which the CSS had emerged victorious. The species were in fact human, but only partially so. Three hundred years before the Earth had succumbed to a plague known as The Falling that had taken the lives of some five billion souls and rendered society utterly broken. The land had been given over to both nature and to gangs of brigands and thugs who had roamed the wilderness and the crumbling wastelands of the fallen cities of Earth. Only small pockets of true humanity had remained, cities well protected by the remnants of the military, where studies had continued until a cure for the plague had been found.

  In those dark and terrible days many possible means of eradicating the plague had been explored, and with them the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Enforced elimination programs designed to destroy, however humanely, those carrying the plague had cost the lives of millions more innocent citizens, those in power acting only in the knowledge that to do nothing would see the end of the human race entirely.

  Some of those slated for “elimination” had inevitably escaped, and in turn some of those had in fact survived the plague by virtue of losing limbs, either by decay or by choice. Among those wandering, miserable hordes of disfigured survivors grew a new species of man, well versed in the art of bionic prosthetics, skeletal reconstruction and tissue regeneration, skills they used to replace their damaged limbs. By the time the war against the plague had turned in mankind’s favor, millions around the world were only half–human, the rest of their bodies made up of ever more complex machinery. Two centuries later and mankind was once again a technologically advanced species, with cities and space fleets and a renewed appetite to reach for the stars. For the Ayleeans, centuries of marginalization gave them the appetite to do more than just reach, and they had been among the first to leave Earth in the colony ships and find their own home several dozen light years from Earth beneath the fearsome glare of a red dwarf star. Ayleea, a steaming tropical world and one of the first ever–discovered habitable planets around an alien star, had evolved them even further into a race of hunters with an abiding hatred of humans, their only true brethren in an uncaring cosmos.

  ‘We were as surprised as you are,’ Schmidt replied as they began walking again, officers moving past in the opposite direction visible through Schmidt’s semi–transparent form as they moved by. ‘I decided to wake you while the cryptographers were studying the message, which seems to have been subject to interference of some kind.’

  ‘I was already awake.’

  ‘Just.’

  Marshall ground his teeth in his skull but did not reply. Schmidt’s unusual status as a Holosap meant that he complied with regulations and decorum only when it suited him. There was little in the way of punishment that could be meted out to those who were already dead and besides, Schmidt’s near–genius intellect and two hundred years experience of life, if that it could be called, were invaluable to Titan’s crew. In some strange ways, the emergence of the Holosaps was even stranger than that of the Ayleeans.

  ‘Do we have an idea of when the signal was originally transmitted?’ Marshall asked.

  ‘Forty eight hours plus,’ Schmidt informed him. ‘It should have been here hours ago, and what little we have received suggests ill winds on Ayleea. Whatever’s happened, it’s not good.’

  Marshall was about to reply when suddenly the ship’s lighting switched to a dull red and an alarm sounded that echoed through the endless corridors with a mournful wail. Marshall saw the bridge doors before him, two Marines standing guard either side of them. A tannoy crackled with an anxious command.

  ‘Cap’n to the bridge!’

  Schmidt vanished like a genie as he transported himself directly onto the bridge and Marshall broke into a run. The Marines guarding the bridge’s physical doors reacted immediately, one of them entering an access code via his optical implant, his eye flickering as he entered the data and the doors slid open. Marshall rushed through as the Executive Officer barked his arrival.

  ‘Cap’n on the bridge!’

  Titan’s bridge was a large oval with two floors, one elevated back from and above the other, both facing a large viewing screen and tactical panels. Dozens of staff worked at stations around the upper floor, overlooking the lower where several more manned stations were arranged around the captain’s chair.

  ‘At ease,’ Marshall snapped and turned to the XO. ‘What’s the story?’

  The XO, Olsen, was a man possibly a little younger than Marshall with a ramrod straight back and a jaw as wide and thick as a harbour wall, framed by a neat white moustache that shimmered with metallic implants as he spoke.

  ‘Distress signal, priority traffic from Ayleea. It’s garbled and has been jammed to some extent, but what we’re hearing is some kind of major catastrophe. Now we’ve got a jump cue right ahead of us.’

  Marshall’s gaze switched to the main viewing panel at the front of the bridge, upon which was displayed an optical image of the cosmos ahead. Ranks of millions of stars shone against the velvety blackness of space, but some of them were shimmering as though a gigantic lens was passing across them and warping their appearance.

  ‘Battle stations!’ Marshall snapped, knowing that Olsen would already have made the call.
‘Charge all plasma batteries and ready Quick Reaction Alert fighters for launch, all shields up full power!’

  The crew swarmed to carry out his orders, the Commander of the Air Group scrambling the QRA Phantom fighters in the launch bays, tactical officers re–routing power to shields and gunnery officers charging the plasma batteries that lined Titan’s immense hull as she prepared to face whatever was about to come out of the jump cue. The bending, spiralling patch of space was a sign of a vessel’s warp drive twisting the fabric of space and time like a bow wave ahead of it and thus betraying its arrival, a tactical error that would cost its crew dearly.

  ‘They’re coming right at us,’ Olsen observed as Titan’s computers calculated the incoming vessel’s mass and course. ‘They’re not even trying to conceal their approach.’

  Marshall took hold of the railings that lined the captain’s command position, ready for whatever was about to appear.

  ‘They’re either wildly confident or wildly stupid,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope it’s the latter. Tactical? Status?’

  ‘All batteries fully charged, all shields at maximum deflective power!’

  ‘CAG?’

  ‘Four fighters on the catapults, ready to launch! Eight more right behind them!’

  Marshall nodded, the bridge now enveloped in silence as they all stared at the jump cue right ahead of Titan.

  ‘Bring her to bear, port batteries,’ Marshall said in barely a whisper.

  An old man sat at the helm with his hands on a series of complex looking controls while a thick bunch of optical fibers travelled out of the man’s head and into his seat. Although Marshall had spoken the words the helmsman had already carried out the command, his mind reacting not to Marshall’s words but to his very thoughts, his brain wirelessly connected to the admiral’s to reduce reaction time during combat. The helmsman had served with Marshall since his first command, and their thoughts were often perfectly aligned. Titan turned her massive port batteries to face the jump cue as suddenly the stars within rippled as though they were reflections of a night sky in a pool of water as a pebble was tossed in, and then a brilliant white flare of light burst like a new born star and a massive ship loomed into view.

  The white starburst of light faded, and in the faint starlight of deep space Marshall got his first look at the new arrival, a huge and lumbering warship painted a dull red in color that matched the glow of the lights on Titan’s bridge. But that was where the similarities ended.

  The ship was Ayleean, a three–pronged hull like Neptune’s trident peppered with weapons and sensors, built for combat and little else, but there was almost nothing left of her. Clouds of debris entombed her shattered hull, across which great chasms of destruction were filled with flickering fires and trails of escaping gases.

  ‘What the hell happened to her?’ Olsen uttered in amazement.

  ***

  VIII

  Doctor Schmidt spoke from behind his work station, to which he was wirelessly connected and able to assimilate and analyse data and tremendous speeds.

  ‘No signs of life aboard, captain,’ he reported. ‘Whatever happened to her, it claimed the life of the entire crew.’

  ‘Any stasis capsules aboard her?’ Olsen asked.

  Schmidt studied his instruments for a moment. ‘It’s possible but with all the debris and random electrical discharges I can’t get a clear reading from the ship’s interior. The only way we’ll be sure is if we…’

  ‘… go inside and take a look,’ Marshall finished the sentence for him.

  The admiral clenched the bridge railings more tightly. The Ayleeans were fearsome in stature and temperament, and like many aboard Titan he could recall the horrifying experience of engaging them in combat at close quarters in their own ships, the corridors filled with humid air and moisture, like jungles growing within a steel dungeon. The Ayleeans were skilled and hardy warriors in any environment, but nowhere were they more dangerous than on their home world or in their own vessels.

  ‘Two shuttles,’ Marshall said finally, ‘one for insertion, the second for support but to remain outside the hull.’

  Olsen relayed the command immediately as Marshall turned to Schmidt.

  ‘I will be there,’ the Holosap said before Marshall could make the request. ‘There is enough power to sustain my projection within the hull, but I don’t know how long the ship will last before it collapses. I would advise the Marines to maintain a watch outside the interior and only one platoon to follow me in, just in case.’

  Marshall nodded. Schmidt could travel with impunity through the shattered carcass of the Ayleean ship’s hull, whereas the Marines would be in danger of being trapped should the dangerously weakened hull collapse further or, worse, the ship’s fusion cores ignite in a runaway reaction.

  ‘Order Gunnery Sergeant Jenson Agry and his team to deploy,’ Marshall said to Olsen. ‘I want eight Phantoms on constant patrol and I want those Marines out of there at the first sight of trouble, understood?’

  ‘Yes sir!’ Olsen snapped, and began issuing orders.

  Schmidt vanished from his workstation without another word as Marshall stepped down from his command platform and surveyed the shattered hulk of the Ayleean warship.

  ‘What are you hiding?’ he whispered to himself.

  *

  ‘Hoo rarr!’

  Gunnery Sergeant Jenson Agry’s shaved head reflected the harsh white lights of the shuttle’s interior as the craft launched from Titan’s forward landing bay and rocketed out into the bleak vacuum of space.

  The shuttle’s interior was lined with stereoscopic viewing panels that allowed the Marines a clear view of their target and the surrounding environment, as though they were riding in an open–top shuttle in the vacuum of space, essential to provide maximum situational awareness for the troops before they deployed into the enemy vessel.

  As the shuttle drew away from Titan’s vast hull two sleek Phantom fighters slid protectively into formation either side of her, the Marines watching the heavily armed spacecraft.

  ‘The interior of the ship is structurally compromised!’ Agry snapped, his sandpaper–rough voice loud enough to reach every corner of the shuttle. ‘Atmosphere has been lost in most quadrants and is leaking from those not yet exposed to vacuum, so we’ll assume zero gravity conditions will be the norm. Weapons hot, and stay sharp: we all know how the Ayleeans can end up when they encounter CSS Marines!’

  ‘Toast, Gunny! Hoo rarr!’

  The thirty Marines checked each other’s environment combat suits, ensuring that all seals were good and that oxygen levels were sufficient for a one hour deployment into the Ayleean vessel. Twenty minutes in, twenty out, Agry reminded himself, with twenty spare for the unexpected. Walking into any Ayleean warship was an endeavour neither he nor his Marines would have undertaken lightly – entering a dangerously damaged vessel was tantamount to suicide.

  ‘Thirty seconds.’

  The pilot’s voice sounded through the fuselage and Agry readied himself, checking his plasma rifle once more and glancing into his optical display to check oxygen levels. His heart rate was elevated, but only by four beats per minute: he’d done this enough times to only get fidgety when the plasma started flying. Not recorded by the monitors was the anxiety twisting at his guts, as much now as it had done on his first combat deployment almost twenty years previously. No matter how hardened a soldier became he recalled his drill sergeant explaining to him that the day a soldier stopped feeling fear was the day they were really in trouble.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  The pilot’s calm voice filled the troop compartment as Agry called out.

  ‘All arms!’

  The soldiers’ plasma rifles hummed into life as they were activated, and each man checked his neighbour’s face mask one last time for gaps in the seals and their oxygen supply via the tanks carried upon their backs. Satisfied, they sat in tense silence waiting for the ramp to drop.

  They shifted as one as the shu
ttle swung around, and Agry heard the sound of the engine exhausts change as the pilot altered his power settings to land the craft in the landing bay he had selected on the vast hull. Schematics obtained from Titan’s logs provided a deck plan of the Ayleean ship for the pilots and the Marines to follow via their optical implants, and right now they were using the closest open bay to the bridge that they could find.

  Through the panoramic viewing panels, they could see the Ayleean warship’s shattered hulk, tremendous damage throughout so that they could see deep into the vessel’s superstructure. Then, the side of the Ayleean vessel swallowed them whole as the shuttle entered the landing bay.

  ‘Deck Charlie, midsection, landing now!’

  Agry tensed, one hand ready to punch his harness free as the other held his rifle aimed at the still–closed ramp. The shuttle shook violently as its landing struts slammed down onto the deck and with a hiss of vapor the ramp dropped under hydraulic force and the pressurized atmosphere within the shuttle blasted outward in a white whorl of instantly frozen crystals as Agry released his harness and dashed from the shuttle.

  Behind him forty Marines followed in an orderly flood, running with their suits weighted at fifty per cent normal gravity to provide them with extra speed, agility and stamina.

  Agry thundered down the ramp onto the darkened deck of a small landing bay, the flashlight on his rifle slicing into the gloom. The deck was slippery with ice that glistened like diamond chips in the flashlight beams. Agry ran forward and then dropped down onto one knee, his rifle pulled into his shoulder as behind him the Marines formed two groups and one giant arc of firepower pointed out into the darkness.

  The shuttle’s engines flared with silent white light in the vacuum as it lifted off and pulled out of the bay, ready to return when the soldiers required an extraction. Agry watched the darkness intently but nothing loomed forth to threaten them. His eyes cast down across the ice and sought any sign of footprints, but nothing revealed itself. Behind them, the landing bay doors silently lowered and sealed themselves as the shuttle pulled away into the distance, and suddenly they were totally alone aboard the massive ship.