Guns of the Valpian

by Anthony James

  There were no obstacles on the floor and it was a hundred-metre run to the second shuttle. The closer he came, the more detail his helmet sensor could resolve from the darkness. The vessel’s purpose as a transport was obvious – it had an armoured hull and a single cannon to lay down suppressing fire during a troop drop. It was also sealed, with no way to get inside.

  Duggan reached it first, with the others close behind. The shuttle was clamped in place, with its landing gear down – eight short legs rested on the floor of the bay. There were three doors in this side of the vessel and Duggan stopped at the nearest. The doors also acted as boarding ramps and with them closed, the floor of the shuttle was a good two metres up. Duggan cursed himself for not realising what a stretch it would be. There was a softly glowing panel adjacent to the door.

  “That must be nearly four metres up,” said Ortiz. “You can stand on my shoulders if you want.”

  Ortiz was strong but she likely weighed sixty pounds less than Duggan.

  “Not a chance, Lieutenant.”

  “Your arm isn’t better yet.”

  “Good point. Rasmussen, give the lieutenant a boost.”

  The soldier laid his plasma tube reverently onto the floor. He locked his fingers together in front of him and Ortiz planted her boot between his hands. With a grunt, Rasmussen lifted her upwards until she could get her palms against the side of the shuttle. Then, she stepped onto Rasmussen’s shoulders. It was quick, if somewhat ungainly.

  “Get it open,” Duggan said.

  She stretched up and pressed her fingers to the panel. “It’s not responding, sir.”

  “Try again.”

  “I already did.”

  Time was running out. “Get down. Rasmussen, blow it open.”

  Ortiz jumped nimbly to the ground and Rasmussen retrieved his plasma launcher. The three of them ran directly away from the shuttle.

  “I’m not sure I’ve got the firepower, sir. The armour looks pretty thick.”

  “Do it.”

  Rasmussen’s doubts didn’t stand in the way of him doing as he’d been ordered. He flipped the heavy tube neatly around until it was positioned on his shoulder. It was beeping even before it was in place and its projectile whooshed away within a split second. The rocket detonated with a grumbling thump against the side of the transport, obscuring a quarter of the vessel in white-hot plasma.

  Rasmussen knew his stuff and didn’t need to wait for the fires to recede in order to realise the first shot had failed. He fired again, the second rocket adding its heat to that of the first.

  “Again,” said Ortiz.

  A third rocket followed and then a fourth. The alloys of the shuttle were turned into molten sludge, which dropped away in huge lumps. They splashed to the floor and splattered droplets of liquid metal in a wide area beneath the hole.

  “That should do it,” said Rasmussen.

  “I need to get onboard,” said Duggan, already running. “Sergeant Red-Gulos, get the troops out of the shuttle at the double. Cover the left-side bulkhead door. The Valpian’s internal monitoring will have alerted the crew about the plasma explosions in here. There’s only one conclusion for them to draw.”

  “At once, Captain Duggan.”

  “You’ll burn to a crisp if you get too close to that burning alloy, sir,” said Ortiz, calling after Duggan. “Your suit won’t help.”

  Duggan was willing to take risks. Even so, he wasn’t suicidal and the blistering heat coming away from the breach in the shuttle’s hull was enough to bring him to a halt.

  “There’s no damned time!” he growled in frustration.

  “I don’t think I’m strong enough to throw you through there, sir,” said Rasmussen.

  “Braler is,” said Ortiz.

  She called a command through to the first shuttle. The Ghast came, running with an oddly clumsy long-legged gait which reminded Duggan of his low-gravity training from many years ago.

  “Get me up,” said Duggan.

  He knew the Ghast was strong but hadn’t counted on just how strong. Braler put one hand beneath each of Duggan’s arms and lifted him a metre off the ground without apparent effort. Then, he hurled Duggan forwards and away towards the hole in the armoured shuttle.

  It wasn’t perfect. Duggan’s shins landed on the hot metal. The material of his suit melted at once and he kicked his legs frantically until he was inside. The pain returned from a combination of his partially-mended arm and the burns on his lower legs. His suit gave him a painkilling shot and the agony receded to a level where he no longer felt the need to grit his teeth.

  He clambered to his feet, aware that four plasma explosions in the Valpian’s hull would have the troops onboard scrambling to investigate.

  This second shuttle was much like the first and he found himself in a long, unlit room, with seating enough for three hundred or more troops. Towards the rear, there was a pair of evil-looking multi-barrelled heavy repeaters, mounted on what he assumed were compact gravity drives. The details were indistinct in the darkness. The cockpit door was to his left and it was open.

  Grunting with the pain, he forced himself to run the twenty metres to the doorway. The cockpit was much as he’d expected it to be, with room for four to sit and an additional set of controls for the heavy gun mounted on the vessel’s nose.

  “Will it power up, sir?” asked Ortiz, concern in her voice. “They’ll be coming soon.”

  Duggan sat himself on the central seat. There were no lights on the console, which was a bad sign – in the Space Corps it was usual to keep control equipment powered up at all times. He pressed one or two buttons, trying to activate anything that would respond, only to find the shuttle’s control systems remained stubbornly offline. The nose cannon was the only weapon with the capability of getting through a four-metre thick bulkhead door, but if he couldn’t get the shuttle working, there was no way to aim the gun where he needed it.

  There was movement and a figure came through the door – it was Ortiz.

  “Check out those mobile guns in the passenger bay,” he said. “The shuttle’s offline.”

  “I’ve looked, sir. Even if they’re twice as powerful as the ones we use in the Space Corps, they’ll burn out before they’ll get us through the door.”

  Something caught Duggan’s eye – there was a square slab of black metal propped up on top of the control console, which he’d missed because he was concentrating elsewhere. There were symbols on it, etched in white. His language modules translated them literally.

  “Operational misfit?” he said. “What the hell does that mean?” He contacted Red-Gulos. “Patch into my suit camera and tell me what this says.”

  The familiar rumble of laughter reached his ears. “That is bad news for us, Captain Duggan. You have found a notice which says the shuttle is out of action.”

  The Ghast’s words hit Duggan hard. They’d fought every step of the way, inch by inch bringing themselves closer to an improbable victory over their enemy. Now they were stuck, trapped in the bay of the Valpian with no choice other than to await the return of the other two shuttles, or for the troops already onboard to muster an organised response. The despair he felt wasn’t for himself, it was for the people who’d followed him this far, drawn to his unspoken promises that he would eventually bring them home. He stood up, shaking with rage and the scarcely-masked pain of his injuries.

  “I will not have this!” he shouted.

  He kicked out with his foot, hitting the shuttle’s console firmly at the base. Fresh pain shot through his toes. He didn’t care and kicked out again and again. Suddenly, the console sprang into life, row upon row of lights and screens coming online in the blinking of an eye.

  “Did that just happen?” asked Ortiz, sounding as utterly shocked as Duggan felt.

  “Upon such tiny miracles does our existence rest,” he said, quoting words the origin of which he no longer remembered.

  The shuttle’s gravity engines were cold and they responded sluggish
ly when he fed power into them. They’d likely need an hour before they could deliver anything like their full output. Fortunately, Duggan didn’t need them to do much at all, other than rotate the vessel.

  In the few moments it took to prepare the engines, he did a mental best guess about how long it would be until the other two shuttles returned – fifteen minutes, his mind told him. An insidious second voice whispered that it would be substantially less than fifteen minutes if the crew of the Valpian took active steps to close the gap between the warship and the returning transports.

  “What would I do if I were the captain of a warship in this same position?” he asked himself.

  He knew exactly what he’d do and he gritted his teeth in renewed anger. The only competent approach the Dreamer captain could take was to keep Duggan and his soldiers contained in the bay of the Valpian, recall the other two transports and then use their nose cannons to spray the hold with bullets. One versus two wasn’t good odds and Duggan didn’t fancy his chances of slugging it out with the enemy given the circumstances. They had to get out of the hold and they had to do it soon.

  A flashing symbol brought him to back to the present, letting him know the engines had reached five percent of maximum output. After that, there was a brief moment when he thought the gravity clamps wouldn’t disengage and he worried they might have been locked by someone on the bridge. He sighed with relief when they released and he fed a trickle of power through the engines. The landing feet scraped across the floor and the shuttle thumped twice as he moved it away from the side wall. When there was sufficient clearance, he turned the spacecraft until its nose pointed directly at the side bulkhead door.

  “Lieutenant Ortiz, please do the honours,” he said.

  She sat at the weapons console. There was nothing complicated about it – a joystick controlled the movement of the gun and there was a button on top to begin firing. “With pleasure, sir,” she said.

  Ortiz aimed manually and pressed the button.

  Chapter Eleven

  The weapon wasn’t strictly a chain gun; however, most soldiers used the colloquial term as it was less of mouthful than ‘rotating Gallenium-driven gauss repeater’. The model on this shuttle had ten barrels arranged in a circle and their bore was sufficiently large to put a hole in almost anything.

  There was a short spool-up time, during which the chain gun rotated to its full speed. Then, the slugs poured out. In a vacuum there was little apparent drama – there was no muzzle flash and with no air to carry the sound, there was only a thrumming in the cabin to indicate the gun was firing.

  Duggan found the sensor activation screen and brought up an external view. There was movement across the width of the hangar bay, like a thick, blurred line connecting the shuttle’s nose to the far wall. Two thousand five hundred rounds spilled from the gun each second. They hammered into the opposite wall, pummelling the ultra-hard alloy with unstoppable velocity.

  “Shit,” said Ortiz in grudging admiration when she saw the damage inflicted on the hangar’s interior door.

  The metal heated, starting off as a red glow, which built into a deep orange. The hotter the metal, the softer it got, until eventually it would give way. That was the plan, at least.

  “It’s taking too long,” said Duggan impatiently. Each passing second was a moment they couldn’t afford to waste.

  “This temperature gauge is climbing quicker than I’d like,” said Ortiz, checking the gun’s status display.

  “Hendrix, Berg, Rasmussen, fire your tubes at that door.”

  “Those bullets will chew up the rockets before they explode, sir,” protested Hendrix.

  “Aim off-centre then!” Duggan snapped. “I need you to put as much heat as you can into that metal!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And keep a couple of rounds in reserve. We might need them later.”

  The plasma tubes held six rounds each and they were disposable. Once the ammunition was gone, there was no point in hanging onto the launcher if you didn’t need to. Duggan tried to calculate how many rounds they’d fired recently. He gave up quickly – Rasmussen’s launcher was almost empty, but the others should have a few rockets left.

  Plasma explosions joined the intense, torrential flood of gauss bullets. The door and surrounding metal became a mixture of orange and white, speckled with an ever-changing pattern of darker circles where the projectiles punched into it.

  “Come on!” Duggan roared.

  “The chain gun is going to shut down soon, sir.”

  “Don’t let up!”

  Two more plasma rockets detonated off the door and Duggan noticed a series of smaller explosions interspersed amongst the chaos. The soldiers knew their time was limited and they hurled grenades, darting out of cover in order to land their throws more accurately.

  “Three of the barrels have shut off,” said Ortiz. “Wait - make that six barrels.”

  “Keep firing! If we stop now we’ll have nothing left to get us through.”

  The chain gun burned out a few seconds later and it stopped firing completely.

  “Did we do it?” Ortiz asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Duggan got out of his chair and ran through the passenger bay, with Ortiz following. The shuttle’s doorway had cooled sufficiently and he was able to execute a quick hang-and-drop to the floor using only his good arm.

  “Keep low,” warned Ortiz. “In case we got through and there’s someone waiting on the other side.”

  There was little in the way of cover and Duggan chose speed over caution. He dashed to the first shuttle, around which most of his troops were arranged. There were others who had taken the initiative and these five had their backs pressed to the bulkhead wall a few dozen metres away from the door.

  “Two thousand Fahrenheit near the centre,” said Cabrera. “I’m not going first.”

  Duggan crouched at one of the shuttle’s landing legs and stared at the interior door. His helmet sensor struggled with the contrasts and he wasn’t sure if there was a way through.

  “Can you see?” he asked Red-Gulos, in case the Ghast sensors were stronger than their Space Corps equivalents.

  “I can only guess.”

  Duggan lacked the patience to wait longer. He left the scant shelter beneath the shuttle and sprinted towards the five soldiers at the bulkhead wall. The temperature of the damaged metal had already dropped since Cabrera announced it at two thousand degrees and Duggan thought he could see through to the other side. His heart jumped at the possibility they might have broken into the ship. When he was fifteen metres away, his suit detected a faint breeze, as well as the presence of oxygen.

  “We got through,” he said. “The area on the other side of the door is depressurizing. I don’t know how big the hole is.”

  It was inconceivable to think an entire warship would be vulnerable to something as simple as a breach into the vacuum. Sure enough, by the time Duggan reached the wall, the levels of escaping oxygen had already fallen, indicating the Valpian’s interior was compartmentalized.

  Duggan shuffled his way along the smooth wall until he was only a few metres from the door. The alloy felt warm through the insulation of his suit and his HUD gave a warning about the temperature. There was no option other than to ignore it and he stepped ever closer to the doorway. The alloy had faded to a mixture of reds and oranges as it cooled.

  “It’s clear, sir! I can see through!” said Ortiz. She was standing opposite the hole, near to the first shuttle and with her rifle pointed forwards.

  “Is there any movement?”

  “Not on my sensors.”

  Duggan took a deep breath. The helmet sensors were good, but they could be fooled in a number of ways and extreme contrasts of temperature was one of them.

  “Anyone else see movement?” he said across the open channel.

  He heard a dozen negatives, which gave him some reassurance.

  “They weren’t expecting us to get through the hanga
r wall!” he said in realisation. “The stupid bastards thought they had us trapped.”

  It wasn’t an entirely foolish notion to think the solid walls of a warship would be able to repel the attentions of a small band of soldiers, but it still took Duggan by surprise. He wondered if he’d become so used to the expectation of failure that he was becoming blinded to the chances of success. A wave of giddiness washed through him at the thought, insisting he grasp this opportunity with both hands and not let it go.

  “We need to get through this door and take the ship while we still can!” he said.

  “What about the shuttles, sir?” asked Ortiz. “If they land, we’ll have hundreds of the enemy chasing us through the interior of the Valpian.”

  Duggan’s mind churned through the options. There was no chance they’d be able to capture the entire ship, figure out how to operate it and then either destroy the incoming shuttles or simply fly away from them.

  “Lieutenant Ortiz, I need you to get those gauss repeaters off the second shuttle and deploy them in preparation for an imminent attack from outside.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied at once.

  Orders were given. Several humans and two of the Ghasts sprinted towards the second shuttle.

  “What are your thoughts, Captain John Duggan?” asked Red-Gulos.

  “I think we’ve caught them unawares, Sergeant. I think we’ve got our noses in front for the first time since we crashed here on Nistrun. If we don’t take this ship, we’ve spurned our chances.”

  “They will know there’s a breach through the internal hangar wall. We cannot let them pin us on the far side of this bottleneck.”

  The Ghast was right – they couldn’t wait a moment longer before going through the gap in the blisteringly hot metal. If they could establish a strong position on the other side, it would give them the platform to push on.

  “You can’t go through, sir,” said Ortiz.

  “Stop reading my mind.”

  “None of us can fly a Space Corps warship, let alone a Dreamer one.”