“Eight missiles got through,” said Pointer.
“I have detected two more enemy warships coming around the edge of Atlantis,” said Cruz. “Heading towards us. Where else would they be headed, I suppose?”
“Keep focus, Lieutenant. I don’t need the fluff.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“More Lambdas on their way,” said Pointer.
Blake spent precious seconds studying his tactical screen. The two new Vraxar arrivals were approaching from a clockwise direction, pursuing the Lucid as it travelled anti-clockwise around Atlantis. It was a pincer movement, albeit a clumsy one. As he watched, one of the new Vraxar warships vanished into a short lightspeed jump and reappeared less than twenty thousand kilometres from the Lucid. It fired immediately.
“That’s a big chunk out of our shield,” said Blake.
Mindful of his instruction to focus on a single target, Blake ignored this new, closer threat. Instead, he moved the control bars, bringing the Lucid sharply away from Atlantis. The Vraxar immediately changed course to follow. The extra strain on the engines caused the Obsidiar reserves to trickle steadily downwards. The power core could maintain the ship at idle for a lifetime. Once the fighting started, every single action drew a little more from the source.
Wherever the Neutraliser was hiding, they needed to get far enough away for the Gallenium engines to fire up again.
“Overcharge the front particle beam and fire.”
“Firing.”
The overcharge capability was tech stolen from the Estral decades past. It was slow-firing and with a low range. It was also devastating. In the blinking of an eye, the target Vraxar ship became white hot and exploded, sending huge pieces of metal spinning away from the centre at an enormous speed.
Blake growled in triumph and activated one of the three short-range transits. The ES Lucid entered high lightspeed for somewhat less than one hundredth of a second and then emerged, with Atlantis far behind.
“Far enough for them to see us, not so far the Neutraliser can keep us offline.”
“Shouldn’t we be targeting the big one first?” asked Cruz.
“I need sensor reports, Lieutenant! Not questions!” He saw Cruz flinch and realised he was being too hard on her. “You’re doing great,” he said without the edge to his voice. “You just need to keep razor-sharp on those comms and sensors.”
“Yes, sir.”
While Cruz got on with it, Blake took stock. His heart leapt.
“I’m getting a power feed from the Gallenium,” he said. As if glad to be free of the suppression, the available power climbed rapidly. An automatic switchover process diverted the Obsidiar core away from the engines, life support and targeting systems, until it only maintained the energy shields and the overcharge units on the particle beam. It gave them a chance.
Cruz didn’t take long. It seemed she had talent and training, only lacking in experience. “All four Vraxar warships are back where we left them. Approximate range: seven million klicks.”
“As soon as they find us, they’ll do a synchronised lightspeed jump towards us and do their best to blow us to pieces.”
“We’re not going to let them,” said Pointer.
“Not if we play our cards right.”
The Vraxar came suddenly. They disappeared from high Atlantis orbit and reappeared within a hundred thousand kilometres of the ES Lucid before Lieutenant Cruz could do so much as open her mouth again. The Vraxar were evidently familiar with overcharged particle beams and they kept at a distance – close enough to fire their own weapons, but too far for Lieutenant Pointer to activate the weapon a second time.
The onslaught against the ES Lucid’s energy shield began immediately. Vraxar particle beams and missiles were joined by bolts of dark energy. Each strike wore down the Lucid’s energy shield, hacking chunks away.
In return, the heavy cruiser launched its own missiles in sporadic waves. Bulwark projectiles flew across the intervening space, striking at the shield of Blake’s second designated target. Countermeasures spilled out as quickly as they could reload, tracking and destroying the Vraxar missiles.
With the main power source back online, there was less need to worry about running out of power for the many onboard systems. It wasn’t enough - the ES Lucid was one of the most advanced, powerful warships in the Space Corps and it was being gradually overwhelmed.
“Our energy shield is almost gone,” said Blake. “Give our target an eight-chain disruptor strike.”
“Firing.”
A disruptor was an old weapon, first used by the Ghasts long ago. When directed against a vessel with a single, slow core, a disruptor could shut the whole spaceship down for many seconds. Gradually, newer, faster and multiple-cored spaceships made the weapon nearly obsolete since the effects could be shrugged off almost at once. A disruptor chain relied on firing a perfectly-timed series of attacks to keep the enemy locked down for longer and was designed to be effective against all but the most advanced processing cores. If it worked, the Vraxar ship would be without its shield.
A critical alert flashed across his console. Firing the disruptor chain had overloaded one of the cores already primed for an SRT and it was shutting down. Seven additional cores still operational.
The disruptor chain worked. The Vraxar’s energy shield went offline at the precise moment three high-impact Shatterer missiles arrived. The warheads buried through several metres of armour and exploded, creating a line of deep, overlapping craters. Bulwark fire pummelled into the softer engine matter beneath.
“Firing the front two particle beams – normal discharge,” said Pointer, her voice admirably calm.
As soon as he heard those words, Blake hauled the ES Lucid around in a tight arc. The gravity drives rumbled as almost four thousand metres of solid Gallenium spaceship twisted through an impossibly sharp turn. Blake’s head thumped with pain.
“Firing the rear two particle beams – normal discharge.”
The sensor feed showed extensive damage to the Vraxar ship. Patches of orange encircled the missile craters in its hull, becoming blue-white deeper inside its hull. It was certainly out of commission and thirty Bulwark cannons continued their bombardment. A second later, the enemy warship broke into two pieces. A dozen Lambda X missiles plunged into the widening gap, their explosions covering the irregular surfaces with plasma. All the while, thousands of Gallenium slugs drilled into the Vraxar hull.
“Upper Bulwarks sixteen and nineteen have overheated and shut down,” said Pointer. “Twelve more have exceeded their design tolerances.”
“We have no option other than to keep them active,” said Blake. “Switching target to the next enemy warship.”
Two more dark energy beams hit the Lucid. The Obsidiar power gauge fell to zero and flashed red.
“I think we’re out of tricks,” he said.
This was the point at which a wise captain would cut and run – activate the final pre-loaded lightspeed jump and break off the engagement, taking two confirmed kills and a mostly-intact heavy cruiser back to the shipyard for repairs.
Captain Charlie Blake and his stand-in crew didn’t have that choice. They were the only ones in a position to do anything for the billions of people still on Atlantis and the only ones able to stop the Vraxar making off with the wreck of the ES Determinant.
The engagement became a messy punchout with no finesse. The ES Lucid continued to spit out Lambda X missiles – sometimes twenty at once, occasionally more than a hundred. The Shatterers targeted marginally better and they flew out in fours or sixes from the heavy cruiser’s eight launch tubes. Their reload was slow and it was frustrating to wait.
Meanwhile, Vraxar particle beams and waves of dark energy washed across the ES Lucid’s hull. This generation of Galactic was designed for precisely this kind of warfare. The heat from the particle beams was carried away and dispersed. Where an older ship would have been quickly reduced to a molten sludge the Lucid kept going, refusing to accept defe
at.
The dark energy was a different problem. There was no way to analyse it during the battle, but the damage it wrought wasn’t caused by heat. This was something new and even the Lucid’s AI couldn’t offer up an exact answer as to what it was. The weapon was as filthy as the Vraxar themselves and where it struck, millions of tonnes of alloy and Gallenium simply crumbled away, scattering into clouds of abrasive dust.
As the battle went on, it occurred to Blake that he’d unwittingly tricked the Vraxar into fighting to the ES Lucid’s strengths. They were smaller ships and evidently accustomed to seeing their enemies succumb to beam weapons, whilst the Vraxar hid behind their energy shields. When it came to it, the Lucid carried a little bit of everything – missiles, high-velocity cannons, energy weapons and countermeasures, so it had an answer to most situations. On top of this, it was designed to absorb as much damage as a full battleship. Bit-by-bit, Space Corps brute force was starting to turn the tide away from defeat.
“Yes!” shouted Pointer.
The third Vraxar ship broke apart, its energy shield spent and its hull riven with Bulwark fire and plasma craters.
“Come on!” roared Blake.
The ES Lucid was battered and two-thirds of its hull was burning, leaving a trail of orange and sparkling flashes of crumbled Gallenium as it sped through space.
There were still two opponents and they must have sensed victory simply by the appearance of the Lucid’s hull. Two more particle beam strikes hit the mid-section of the heavy cruiser.
“It’s going to get hot in here soon,” said Blake. “That’s right above us.”
“I’ve detected something big way back near Atlantis,” said Cruz. “It’s accompanied by a single smaller vessel.”
“The mothership, come to rescue her babies,” said Blake.
“Disruptor chain fired.”
The disruptors were becoming less effective with each use – it was expected. The Space Corps built special routines into their warship cores to combat just such attacks, so it was logical the Vraxar – a species much more practised in war – would do likewise.
“Got one particle beam through before their shield came back online,” said Pointer.
Blake looked at the Obsidiar power gauge. It had climbed to three percent – not enough for an overcharged particle beam strike. On the adjacent tactical screen, the Neutraliser glowed a dangerous red, assigned a threat level of ninety-nine by the battle computer. It was eighteen thousand metres of unknown alien tech that could shut down an entire planet. We can’t beat it. Not a hope in hell.
His finger hovered over the activation for the last available short-range transit. The Neutraliser disappeared from Atlantis orbit and reappeared close to the scene of the ES Lucid’s engagement. With a sense of anticipation and reflexes far beyond the human norm, Blake used the SRT.
“Where are we?” asked Pointer.
“Back at Atlantis,” said Cruz. “At an altitude of ten thousand kilometres.”
“We were told to fight,” said Blake. “I’m buying us some time.”
“The Neutraliser is still back where it jumped,” said Cruz. “Along with three other Vraxar vessels.”
“It won’t be long until they come for us,” said Blake. “We need to locate the Determinant.”
There was a part of him knew it was already far too late – that the Vraxar lifter had taken the wreckage away and up to the mothership. Seeing the truth on the sensor feed didn’t make him feel any better.
“Gone.”
“Most of its arrays were burned out,” said Pointer.
“You know how they work these things, Lieutenant. Ten copies of everything.”
“Yeah.”
“There’ll be plenty of stuff on the Determinant that we don’t want them to see.”
“We did our best. Like you wanted.”
“That we did. Where’s the Neutraliser?”
“Same place, sir.”
“Are you ready to go down fighting?”
“Is there a choice?”
“No.”
The Neutraliser disappeared from the tactical screen, along with the three remaining escorts. Blake waited for it to reappear and crush them with whatever incredibly powerful weapons he was sure it was packing. He counted five seconds before he allowed himself to accept the truth.
“They’ve gone,” he said.
“Where?”
“Who knows? They came for intel and they got plenty of it. They’ll dig through the Determinant’s arrays and pull out whatever takes their fancy. Then, they’ll come back, except this time it won’t be with a handful of ships. They’ll come with hundreds – a Neutraliser for each of our planets.”
“And they’ll turn us into Vraxar,” said Pointer.
“Unless we can stop them.”
“Sir?” said Cruz. “I’ve got Fleet Admiral Duggan on the comms.”
“Bring him through,” sighed Blake. “Someone’s got to tell him the bad news.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When his conversation with Admiral Duggan was finished, Blake spent a short time in thought, whilst trying to ignore the insistent chiming of a dozen separate damage alerts on his console. The results of the previous day were catching up, leaving him hungry, thirsty and tired. On top of that, he was starting to feel wretched and weak, something he attributed to either the onset of radiation sickness or the aftereffects of the Vraxar truth drug.
“I think I should get Grover back up here,” he said. “And where’s the closest food replicator?”
“I’ve got Sergeant McKinney asking for you on the internal comms,” said Pointer.
“Is it important?”
“He thinks it might be.”
“Where is he?”
“Waiting outside the bridge.”
Blake smiled and ordered the bridge door to open. “Sergeant McKinney. We have driven the Vraxar away, yet on balance we have suffered a defeat.”
McKinney was clearly agitated. “Sir, you need to hear this.”
There was another of the squad with him.
“Comms Trooper Bannerman,” said Blake.
Bannerman came forward, carrying his field pack with reverence.
“I’ve received a comms message from a civilian on Atlantis, sir – just a few minutes ago. A man called Jerry Greiner – he used to be in the Corps, so I guess that’s how he managed to connect to a military field pack. It’s the second time he got through – the first time we were still on Tillos.”
The soldier was dithering, but Blake could see there was something important coming. “What did Mr. Greiner want?”
“He’s stranded out on the Plangaean Sea. On a boat.”
Blake wasn’t unsympathetic to the plight of an old man lost at sea. “We can’t rescue him. The Lucid’s hull is far too hot to launch a shuttle. The power is returning on Atlantis. If his boat won’t start I can request someone on the surface goes looking for him as soon as they are able.”
“No, sir. He says the Vraxar dropped something in the water. Something really big. He sent me the coordinates of it.”
Blake felt a chill run up his spine. “Did he say exactly what it looked like?”
“A big metal cube a few hundred metres along each side, carried by a larger vessel.”
“I need those coordinates. Transmit them to the Lucid immediately.”
“I sent them while I was waiting for the bridge door to open.”
With a sense of impending dread, Blake turned in his seat and accessed the list of recently-received coordinate data. The location was a third of the way around the planet, seventy or eighty kilometres offshore.
“Lieutenant Pointer, target those coordinates and launch clusters 1F and 2F.”
“Missiles locked on. Launched.”
The Lucid was at an altitude of twenty thousand kilometres. Forty Lambda X missiles exited the frontmost batteries, accelerating rapidly to their maximum speed of three-thousand five hundred kilometres per second. The crew and
soldiers watched a sensor feed on the front bulkhead screen, which showed the faint trails of the missiles as they sped off around the curvature of Atlantis.
The heavy cruiser wasn’t nearly so fast, but Blake followed the path of the Lambdas. The Lucid groaned as its overstressed hull took the load of another bout of high acceleration.
Far ahead, the missiles plunged into the Plangaean Sea, their armour-piercing warheads designed to survive such an impact. At a depth of eighteen hundred metres they struck the Vraxar object and exploded, tearing it to pieces and destroying the unusual array of components held within. The surface of the Plangaean ruptured outwards and upwards in a spray of scalding steam, water and dead fish.
A few kilometres away, the still-drifting Jerry Greiner caught sight of the fountaining water and nodded to himself.
Decisions
Fleet Admiral Duggan faced the gathered members of the Confederation Council through his wall-mounted viewscreen. Unused to scrutiny they averted their eyes, as though they could feel the waves of his fury buffeting them.
“I will have what I need,” he stated simply.
“Yes, Admiral. You will have what you need,” said Councillor Stahl. “We are fully aware of your plans to utilise the Obsidiar reserves anyway.”
“They were needed for our defence!”
“Indeed,” said Councillor Newport. “We had hoped the Space Corps would be able to face the Vraxar without Obsidiar. It is apparent we were mistaken.” He made it sound like the failing was Duggan’s.
Perhaps it is, he thought. “The funding must continue. The research labs in particular must have no constraints. We cannot be so vulnerable to these Neutraliser vessels.”
“You will have the funding you require,” said Councillor Dawson. The next words were a struggle for him, even in the circumstances. “Unlimited funding. With the usual oversight, of course.”
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 25
