“Recommend immediate launch of whatever warships there are already warmed up on the ground,” Smith said.
“There’s an emergency broadcast from the Tillos base, sir - telling us what we already know. We’re ordered to intercept whatever it is that’s incoming and take any action we deem necessary. That’s a full authorisation for weapons launch,” said Rydale.
Smith accessed the warship’s AI and instructed it to commence evasive manoeuvres. The Termination’s gravity engines – their sound constantly present as little more than a background hum – grumbled loudly as they were made to generate maximum output. The warship’s acceleration was brutal, though the occupants were shielded from the effects by the vessel’s life support modules.
“The fission signature is fading, sir,” said Larsson. “Whatever it is, it’s almost here.”
“Point the sensors towards it.”
“You got it,” said Rydale.
The main bridge viewscreen came to life – an image of the warship’s front sensor arrays projected onto the bulkhead wall. At first, there was nothing – the blackness of space and a scattering of faraway stars. Then, something appeared, filling the display.
“Oh shit,” said Larsson.
At that moment, the ES Termination lost power. The bridge lights remained on, but the four main consoles did not and the sensor feed faded away to nothing. Smith pushed at a few of the activation points, knowing at once it would be fruitless.
“We’ve got no weapons,” said Anand.
“Our comms are down,” said Rydale. “Sensors offline.”
“Try the backup comms.”
“Switching across now.” She clenched a fist in triumph. “Yes! We have life from the backups!”
“Transmit that last sensor recording to the Juniper,” said Smith, surprising himself with the calmness of his voice.
It was too late. A weapon struck the ES Termination. The warship’s armour plating crumbled into dust and fell away, along with several thousand cubic metres of the central section which included the bridge and the people on it. The central Obsidiar AI core continued to function, but with the vessel’s main power source unavailable it could do nothing to stave off the inevitable.
The unknown weapon was fired a second time and was followed by a high-intensity particle beam, which lit up the Termination’s hull in white heat.
The light cruiser wasn’t able to withstand such punishment. A second particle beam strike split the Termination into three parts. The pieces tumbled and spun as they continued their voyage out into the depths of space.
Chapter Two
Lieutenant Maria Cruz stifled a yawn. It was coming to the end of her shift, after which she planned to get falling-down drunk to celebrate her twenty-seventh birthday. The evening would be no fun if she let her brain succumb to tiredness before the first drink was poured.
“Want me to cover for you?” asked 2nd Lieutenant Terence Reynolds, watching carefully.
Cruz tried not to meet his eyes. Reynolds was the last person she wanted to be indebted to. “Don’t worry about it Lieutenant. Captain Chan will cut my throat if he hears I sneaked off early.”
“It’s only thirty minutes. He’ll never find out.”
“Yeah, you’d think.”
Cruz slumped in her chair and stared at the bank of screens in front of her. Lists of text flew upwards in a variety of colours and quicker than the eye could follow, each one holding its own piece of information to be transmitted millions of light years to its intended recipient somewhere in the Confederation.
This was the operation area for the main comms hub on Atlantis – it was a big, dimly-lit, low-ceilinged, open-plan room located deep underground in the middle of the Tillos military base. Pretty much all of the planet’s comms routed through here, via a large, central processor box. They were sent in by cable or bounced off one of the hundreds of orbiting satellites into the main array. The comms hub encrypted the millions of messages addressed to the other Confederation worlds and fired them off into space to be received by similar hubs on the destination planets.
Cruz looked around the room – there was a total of six personnel working here – four civilian operators and two from the military to oversee matters. Most of the civvies had their heads down and were likely counting time until the end of the shift in the same way Cruz was.
In years gone by, before the latest kit was installed, there’d been as many as two hundred in this room. When it came to new tech, humanity was getting better every year and each new generation of equipment was more reliable and faster than the stuff preceding it. In fact, there was hardly any need for six people in the hub these days. Cruz thought it her great misfortune that Terence Reynolds was one of them.
“Go on, get yourself away,” said Reynolds, giving her a wink. “Have a drink for me and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, if you know what I mean.”
Cruz shuddered inwardly at the lecherous smile on his face and the way his gaze lingered on her chest. Reynolds was distinctly not invited to the evening’s festivities.
“It’s only another twenty minutes. Not worth the chance,” she said firmly, hoping he’d get the hint and shut up.
The message got through and Reynolds fell quiet, though he didn’t immediately take his eyes away from her breasts. Not for the first time, Cruz played through a mental scenario in which she punched her subordinate firmly in his scruffy, bearded face.
With ten minutes until the scheduled end of her shift, it happened. Without warning, the lights went out and the screens on every console in the room went utterly dead. A moment later, the lights came back but the consoles remained off. The two exit doors were designed to open in emergency situations. One remained completely shut, whilst the other juddered a few inches along its metal runners before coming to a halt. A distant siren wailed.
“What the hell?” Cruz asked, too surprised to be alarmed.
She leaned forward and pressed the emergency reset button. Nothing happened, so she pressed it several more times for good measure. The others in the room were alert now – heads above the level of their consoles like mice looking for danger.
“Ramps, check the main power terminal!” shouted Cruz.
Manoj Ramprakash did as he was asked, taking three quick strides to a metal wall-mounted box with a single screen on one side. “It’s dead, Lieutenant.”
“Restart it.”
“There’s no response. I can’t get anything from it.”
Cruz was momentarily lost and panic rose within her. Probably a test exercise a voice inside whispered. The idea calmed her at once.
“What should we do, Lieutenant?” asked Reynolds. “The internal network is down. There are no comms in or out.”
At that moment Cruz remembered something she’d been taught once, many years ago by one of the Space Corps’ longest serving officers. She couldn’t remember his name – at the time he was just another dodderer with a long list of improbable stories. He’d mentioned something to her which she remembered now.
“Residual power,” she said.
“What?” asked Reynolds, his jaw hanging open stupidly.
“Let’s find out if it works,” she muttered to herself. She raised her voice. “Ramps, go and find someone. If this is an exercise, tell them I’m going to be really pissed off.”
“Even if it’s Captain Chan?”
“Especially if it’s Captain Chan.”
Ramprakash saluted limply and jogged towards the nearest exit door, still uncertain if there was any need for panic.
It took a few attempts and some experimentation before Cruz figured out how to tap into the tiny reserves remaining within the Tillos base’s three massive Gallenium power generators. Her console fired up, each of the five screens awaiting input.
“There’s no message queue,” she said. “Shit.”
“What do you mean, there’s no message queue?” said Reynolds.
“There’s nothing waiting to go out.”
The remaining personnel gathered around her console. They exchanged worried glances, each experienced enough to realise what this meant.
“The whole satellite network must be offline,” Operator Larry Keller said.
“Worse than that,” Cruz corrected him. “We’re not getting anything via the cable. There’s nothing communicating.”
“That’s not possible,” said Reynolds. “The whole planet can’t possibly have shut down.”
The words were logical, but the evidence in front of them couldn’t be argued. The comms network across the entirety of Atlantis had failed. It was inconceivable, yet here it was happening.
She soon found the situation was even worse than a complete failure of the planet’s comms.
“I can’t get the doors open, Lieutenant,” said Ramprakash, swallowing hard.
“There’s no backup power?”
“I tried – everything’s dead. I can’t even get a light on the override panel. The south door’s open a crack, but there’re no lights in the corridor.”
“We’ll have to wait for someone to come and get us out,” said Cruz.
“How long is that going to take?” asked Reynolds. “If this is as bad as it looks, we could be stuck here for hours. Days, even.”
A sound reached them, distant and muted. It was like a thousand claps of thunder coming from a storm of unspeakable size. The rumbling continued for a few minutes, whilst the hub personnel remained frozen in place, unable to do anything but listen. The noise died off, to be replaced by a sporadic rumbling.
“Explosions,” said Cruz.
“It can’t be. Maybe it’s a spaceship coming in to land.”
“That’s no spaceship.”
With no answers to be found and the situation suddenly a whole lot worse, Lieutenant Maria Cruz crinkled her nose, grimaced and then swore.
Sergeant Eric McKinney shivered in the chill of the air conditioning which blasted in through the vents of his armoured patrol car. He tried for the dozenth time to shut the system off, before accepting the undeniable truth – it was jammed open and the vehicle would require a visit to the Tillos maintenance yard. He cursed the missing soldiers who’d forced him out here and tried to convince himself he was warm instead of freezing cold.
An imperfection in the seat padding prompted him to shift position. The cockpit of the car was spartan and badly-worn, consisting of six seats clad in ripped beige cloth, a basic dashboard and a broken ventilation system. It smelled of sweat and stale grease, with an underlying edge of something metallic. McKinney peered out through the reinforced plastic windscreen which had begun to cloud as it reacted with whatever crap the environmental guys denied was floating in the air.
“Man, that feels good,” said Corporal Johnny Li, holding out his hands to the vents. “Don’t you think, Sergeant?”
“You must have balls of ice,” said Rank 1 Trooper Martin Garcia from the back seat.
“Let’s find these AWOL bastards and get back to base,” muttered McKinney, his knuckles white on the control joystick.
“Yeah, I’ve got a red-hot date with that new replicator they installed over by the Obsidiar labs,” said Webb, the final occupant of the car. “Some of the guys reckon they haven’t locked down the alcohol dispensers.”
“That’s why we’re out here, you shit-for-brains,” said Garcia. “Someone probably got drunk and went missing.”
“Not someone, several someones,” said McKinney. He hadn’t told the others the suspected reason nine of the troops stationed on the base were missing, but Webb had stumbled upon it. “On the off-chance they haven’t repaired the replicator and I catch any of you going near it, I’ll kick the crap out of you and have you docked a month’s pay.”
“I hear you, Sergeant,” said Webb. He grimaced and rubbed his chin ruefully. “I’m out of leave for the next four months. I don’t think I can stand to stay dry so long.”
“Not my worry,” said McKinney. “Now let’s focus - if the colonel finds out what’s happened, he’ll have no choice but to sack everyone involved.”
“It’ll be their own fault,” grumbled Li. “Not that I want them to be discharged, of course,” he added hastily.
“There are times I wonder about the common man and woman,” said McKinney, shaking his head.
He steered them along the deserted roads, past the main administrative building and then into the eastern barracks area. The Tillos base was not a place for romantics, nor those with an eye for beauty. Each building was a mundane cuboid, with the occasional window to break up the monotony. McKinney had long thought it was like living amongst a hundred square kilometres of prisons, except the base food replicators were marginally better and there was a bit more privacy when you needed to take a crap.
It was the middle of the night but the base was lit up in an average approximation of day, using a hundred thousand different sources of illumination. In times gone by, Tillos had operated around the clock, though extended shifts were no longer required and the base had fewer than one quarter its peak number of personnel. Forty years of peace resulted in steady cutbacks to the Space Corps’ annual budget, gradually eroding the capabilities of some of the more far-flung bases.
Li pressed his face to the side window. “There’s no way we’re going to find anyone out here, Sergeant.”
The patrol car left the last of the eastern barracks behind, emerging onto the edge of the main landing field. McKinney stared across the kilometres of starkly-lit, flat, reinforced concrete, the backdrop of rugged mountains lost in darkness. From the low height of the patrol car cockpit, it wasn’t easy to spot any of the three vast docking trenches in which some of the Space Corps’ largest vessels could berth during repairs and maintenance. The closest trench was only visible because of what was sitting in it.
“When is the Impetuous due to leave?” asked Garcia. “It’s been sitting here for weeks.”
“I’m not sure it’s going anywhere soon,” said McKinney. “Last I heard they’d taken some kind of super power source out of the hull and they’re going to break the rest down for parts.”
“Shame.”
The ES Impetuous was only partially visible – two-point-five kilometres of the Space Corps’ finest destructive technology. It was little more than an elongated wedge, with turrets and domes protruding through its plating. McKinney shivered again at the sight – the Impetuous was just one ship amongst many in the Corps. In the wrong hands it could wipe out entire planets with its incendiaries.
“It never saw battle,” he said.
“And now they’re pulling it to pieces,” shrugged Li. “What else were they going to spend the money on?”
“My pension,” said Webb.
“No sign of runaways, Sergeant,” said Garcia, leaning forward to get a better look. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to set off this way.”
“Your point being?”
“The replicator must be a couple of thousand metres behind us, Sergeant.”
McKinney nodded. “You’re right – we’ve come far enough.” He gave one last, wistful look at the ES Impetuous and reached out for the patrol car’s control stick. “Let’s get back.”
“What’s that over there?” asked Garcia, pointing. “Is that the way into the underground bunker?”
“It is,” said McKinney, squinting at the low, square building a few hundred metres away to their right. “That’s the maintenance entrance.”
“Somebody left the door open.”
“Yeah,” said Li.
“Maybe we should take a look.”
McKinney took a deep breath – the underground bunker was off-limits, except for the specially-designated staff who worked inside. The Corps did its secret stuff in there, not that it was easy to keep anything hidden when there were so many mouths eager to reveal gossip.
“If we get caught.” He left the sentence unfinished.
“What if they get caught, Sergeant? It’ll be a one-way trip out of the Corps.”
> “I’m going to personally kick each and every one of them in the balls when I find them,” said McKinney through gritted teeth.
Before he could turn the vehicle in the direction of the maintenance entrance, the lights went out on the Tillos base. One moment there was artificial daylight, the next there was an absolute darkness, as though nothing in the world existed. The engine on the patrol car died – there was no shuddering last gasp, it simply cut out, dropping the vehicle six inches onto the ground with a heavy thump.
“What the…?” said Garcia.
“A power cut?” said Li incredulously. “I didn’t think that sort of crap happened anymore.”
“Why is the car affected as well?” said McKinney, not really expecting an answer.
The four men sat for a few seconds and their eyes gradually adjusted to the night. Where there had previously been nothing, edges and hints of shapes became visible. McKinney reached for his gauss rifle without knowing quite why he did so.
“What now, Sergeant?”
“We should get back and find out what’s going on.”
McKinney pulled at the door release handle. Before he could open the door, something filled the night with a light so pure and so intense he was convinced his eyes would be left with permanent damage. A series of plasma explosions detonated along the length of the ES Impetuous, ripping enormous holes in its armour. Something else – a particle beam – struck the vessel, igniting the metal and melting it into a shapeless mass of alloys and pure, liquid Gallenium.
Inside the patrol car, the soldiers ducked instinctively. The Impetuous was a long way away, but the roiling clouds of plasma expanded with a roar, bringing an intense heat with them. McKinney closed his eyes and felt the patrol car shake as it was engulfed.
“Oh shit,” said Li.
McKinney opened his eyes and blinked to try and clear the speckling of motes which danced elusively across his retinas. Far away, the Impetuous continued to burn and the glowing remains of its hull cast a sullen illumination by which McKinney could just about see. Where it had been freezing cold, now the air was warm and carried the scent of superheated metal, drawn in through the vents. He pushed the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open, so he pushed harder.
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 2
