Guns of the Valpian

by Anthony James

  Deeper into the vessel, Duggan found two more wall pictures similar to the one he’d seen in the base on Nistrun. Later, he found something which might have been a cushion. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment and then discarded it, unsure what he should think.

  Here and there, monitoring panels were embedded in the walls and, in what appeared to be the primary maintenance area, there was a vastly complex console which they had no time to study in detail. These areas were connected by wide, cold passages, which occasionally turned at right angles for no apparent reason. There were thick doors at intervals, invariably closed. They provided no barrier to the squad’s progress, since each could be opened using a control panel in the wall nearby. It was as though the enemy never considered the possibility they might be boarded and had taken few precautions to defend against it. Everything was lit in a blue which exacerbated the impression of chill. Duggan had to resist the urge to shiver, even within his suit.

  The spaceship was an evolution of the technology already possessed by the Space Corps and the Ghast navy. Duggan suspected the enemy engines were thirty or forty per more efficient than those built by the Confederation and he knew their AI tech was a good twenty or thirty years ahead. After that, it came down to the weapons and defensive modules they fitted onboard.

  “They’re not so far ahead,” he said to Red-Gulos, wondering if he was trying to convince himself rather than the Ghast.

  “Far enough, Captain Duggan. In terms of numbers, we will never catch them. Equal technology won’t save us from extinction.”

  “We need a game changer.”

  “Easily said. Not so easily accomplished.”

  Eventually, they reached the bridge, with only three comparatively minor injuries amongst the squad. At a place where two main passages converged there was a short flight of metal steps. At the top was a door. It was the same as many others on the ship, except this one displayed an easily-translated sign. No Entry.

  “Secure the area,” said Duggan. “Cover that doorway and these two corridors.”

  As the soldiers hurried to comply, Duggan moved cautiously up the steps towards the door. There was an activation panel adjacent. He crept down again, mindful he was the only one with a chance of flying the Valpian. He ordered his troops to withdraw until they were a good distance from the steps and around a right-angled corner. He didn’t want to come all this way only to lose a dozen people to a plasma grenade thrown by someone on the bridge.

  “McLeod, get up there and see if you can open the door,” he said. “Cabrera, you provide cover.”

  The pair of them moved away at once.

  “Bonner, have you got enough to blow that door?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she hedged. “I’d need to take a proper look at it first.”

  They were stuck if they couldn’t get the door open. The bridge on a Space Corps vessel was always behind a heavy blast door. If the Valpian’s bridge was similarly protected, they’d never be able to force a way through.

  “I’m approaching the door,” said McLeod in a hoarse whisper.

  Several seconds passed, during which Duggan kept his fists tightly clenched.

  “Please report,” he said.

  “We’re clear, sir,” said McLeod. “You need to come and see this.”

  Duggan ran from cover and towards the steps. He paused at the bottom and saw that the bridge door was open. McLeod was nowhere in sight, whilst Cabrera was standing at the top, looking inside. Duggan climbed to join her.

  “The bridge,” she said, indicating needlessly with a wave of her rifle.

  Duggan stared into the room. It was blue-lit and compact, four metres long and six wide. The walls were plain and the floor was smooth. There was a single, curved console at the front which extended the full width of the bridge. A single glance was enough for Duggan to recognize both the differences and similarities to the equipment he was used to. There were eight seats arranged in pairs in front of the main console. These seats were large, with too many right-angles and no sign of padding.

  There were bodies – seven of them in total and all male. They were in their seats, upright and with their arms by their sides.

  “They’re dead,” said McLeod.

  The Dreamers looked so naturally posed that Duggan couldn’t bring himself to believe the words. He walked to the closest alien, keeping his rifle aimed towards it. McLeod wasn’t mistaken. The crew of the ship stared ahead, their eyes open and their faces bereft of expression, as if they’d been frozen in time.

  “Corporal Weiss, get in here,” he said.

  She didn’t take long.

  “Will your box of wonders tell us what killed these?” he asked.

  “Probably,” she said, already in the process of attaching wires.

  “Well?” he asked. The answer wasn’t necessarily important and he needed to get on.

  “Poison, administered orally,” she said. “Suicide.”

  “Are they safe to move?”

  “I wouldn’t like to kiss one, but there’s no harm in touching them otherwise.”

  “Sergeant Red-Gulos, send Havon in here. We’ve got some bodies to move,” said Duggan. “The enemy crew have killed themselves. The bridge is secure.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Ghast, referring to Duggan as sir for the first time.

  “Keep the area secure. There are sure to be others still alive on the ship but we can’t risk overstretching by trying to flush them out. It’s going to take me a while to figure out how everything works.”

  “Do you need my assistance?”

  “Yes. Come up here. Leave Corporal Gax in charge.”

  The former captain of the Valpian was easy enough to recognize. He wore red, where the others wore blue. There was an insignia on his chest and his cheeks were tattooed with blue symbols, their meaning unknown. Duggan looked into the open, grey eyes and wondered if he’d ever be able to feel so much shame that the only option left was to take his own life.

  “They should not have given up,” he said to Red-Gulos when the Ghast arrived.

  “Perhaps they imagined the alternative was worse. The punishment for their failure might have been a thousand times harder than a quick death to poison.”

  Duggan was reluctant to dwell on it, though there was something about the suicides which took away from what should have felt like a great victory. We haven’t won anything yet, his inner voice reminded him.

  As soon as Havon dragged the dead captain away, Duggan sat. The captain’s seat was cold and hard, without any side bolsters or support. He immediately wished he’d possessed the foresight to bring the cushion he’d found earlier. The seat was also designed to be occupied by a creature in excess of seven feet tall. Duggan wasn’t a short man, but everything on the Valpian’s console was a little too much of a stretch. It irritated him immensely.

  “Where’re the engine controls?” he muttered to himself, trying to figure everything out. Exiting lightspeed before the Valpian reached its pre-programmed destination was the main priority. They would also need someone to work the sensors as soon as they returned to normal space.

  “McLeod, Byers, get to the bridge and see if you can assist Sergeant Red-Gulos,” he said.

  The two soldiers arrived, their suit helmets nowhere to be seen. “The interior is pressurized, sir,” McLeod said. “The life support must keep things steady.”

  Duggan had been concentrating on other matters and McLeod’s words reminded him that most of the Valpian had a breathable atmosphere. He’d left his helmet on simply because there was nowhere to put it down. With a feeling of relief, he unlatched it and put it on the floor beneath his seat.

  “Check out the enemy comms gear,” he said, pointing to his right. “I assume their comms and sensor arrays are closely tied in.”

  “A big assumption, sir,” said Byers, taking a seat. She ended on a positive note. “I picked up one or two things on Nistrun. Maybe I can figure this out.”

  “Yeah, I think I can
give it a go,” said McLeod, sitting next to Byers.

  There were screens, buttons, touchpads and four joysticks, none of which were labelled. Duggan pressed and pulled, with each action causing a response from one of the nearby monitors. Bit by bit, and with the assistance of Red-Gulos’ superior knowledge of the Estral language, he built up a picture of how the Valpian’s controls worked. With a vast amount of learning still ahead, Duggan figured out how to disengage the warship’s fission drive. He experienced the familiar sensation of a switch to gravity engines and it was done.

  “What’s out there?” he asked.

  “We’ll get back to you,” said McLeod.

  “There are several queued inbound messages, which arrived as soon as we emerged from lightspeed,” said Red-Gulos. “Each of them at Priority 1.”

  “The Dreamers will want to know what’s happened to their valuable warship,” said Duggan with a tight smile.

  “Should I respond?”

  “Not just yet. I need to think. How is the area scan coming along?”

  “We’re getting there, sir.”

  Duggan was on edge while he waited. He knew it wasn’t the soldiers’ fault they couldn’t operate the Valpian’s sensors – their training was a mixture of combat and tech, whilst someone like Lieutenant Chainer was entirely focused on performing a single role. It needed someone at the absolute top of their game to take charge of totally unfamiliar equipment such as this.

  “I think we’re in the clear, sir,” said Byers. “There’s definitely nothing hostile close by.”

  “I’m still on the fars,” said McLeod. “I need three pairs of hands to work this stuff and I’m a little rusty on the interpretation.”

  “We’re right in the middle of nowhere,” added Byers. “No planets, no stars.”

  “And no enemy spaceships,” said McLeod, looking relieved at his conclusion.

  “We’ve done it, sir,” said Byers with an expression of dawning astonishment. “We’ve really done it.”

  Her words struck Duggan like a bolt of lightning. “Yes,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Hell, yes!” He leaned across and clapped Byers on her shoulders. She grunted at the impact.

  He accessed the open channel. The warship was ultra-dense and some of the troops were unreachable. “Pass the message on folks,” he said. “We’ve done the impossible. We’ve stolen an enemy cruiser and got away with it.”

  There was a raucous cheer in response. The soldiers had been under immense, unrelenting pressure for too long. The news of their success was just what they needed to give them some respite. Duggan’s inner pessimist crept up to tell him there was plenty more to do. He ignored it and sat back to enjoy the moment, even if only briefly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Duggan was mentally and physically exhausted. Even so, he spent the following six hours familiarising himself with the controls of the Valpian. In a similar way to a Space Corps warship, the enemy vessel required only a small crew to operate. It was still too much for Duggan alone and he kept the other three with him and did his best to teach them the basics. He needed the support and these were the best placed to assist.

  Reports came in from his men and he was pleased to learn that Corporal Gax had completed a careful sweep of the ship and reached a point where he was confident enough to advise Duggan that the interior was effectively clear of the enemy. Even if there were some left in hiding, there wasn’t much they could do to wrest back control of the ship. Duggan was relieved, though he warned Gax to keep on full alert.

  Corporal Weiss stayed close by and administered a variety of mild stimulants that would keep the warship’s new crew alert, yet without filling them with bravado or making them overconfident. Duggan enquired after Lieutenant Ortiz and was told she would need a more in-depth medical assessment soon. She’d suffered an injury that the portable med-box could only partially diagnose and treat. The troops had found Ortiz a place to rest and she was in a closely-monitored sleep. The Valpian possessed medical facilities, but Weiss stated she wasn’t sure whether any attempt to operate the alien equipment would end up doing more harm than good. Ortiz wasn’t at immediate risk of death – at least as far as Weiss could tell – so Duggan suggested there was no need to push things just yet. He didn’t like the situation, though with nothing he could do to make it better he got on with business.

  “I can control the Valpian manually with these joysticks,” he explained to Red-Gulos, Byers and McLeod. “It’s not much different to what I’m used to, if a little nimbler than anything in the Space Corps. Some of the weapons are locked down and we don’t have a code to work them. In fact, I can’t even tell you what those ones are. Luckily, we can launch missiles and the energy shield comes on automatically when we power up any of the other weapons arrays. We have two particle beams as well and they’re easy enough to lock on and target. The Space Corps and Ghast navies would give anything to learn how they keep the range and power so high.”

  “I think I can just about keep you informed of potential threats,” said Byers. “McLeod can feed you the targeting information.”

  “It’s the navigation I can’t figure out entirely,” said Duggan. “I can send us to lightspeed and back, I just can’t work out how to tell the ship where to go. The arrangement is unusual.”

  “What is the plan?” asked Red-Gulos.

  “I felt we’d done enough to return home before we crashed on Nistrun,” said Duggan. “We’ve done more than enough now.”

  “So, we’re going back?” asked Byers, not trying to hide her preference in the matter. “I think I’d like to see home again.”

  “We’re going to try and go back,” he replied. “There are a number of obstacles in the way.”

  “Will the Valpian make the transit?” asked McLeod.

  Duggan’s gut instinct told him the cruiser had been designed to do exactly that. He didn’t know what gave him the feeling, other than the apparent newness of the design along with the evident eagerness of the Dreamers to plunder Confederation Space. “Maybe,” he said. “I’d prefer to try it in the Crimson if at all possible.”

  “Isn’t the Crimson a bit beat up?”

  “It’s not in good shape. It needs a new core to activate the double jump we use to get through the wormhole. Even if we could somehow extract one of the cores from the Valpian, the chances of getting a successful interface with the Crimson’s systems is vanishingly small.”

  “How many cores are on the Valpian?” asked Byers.

  “Three. I have no idea where they are or how to get to them and I only know there are three because it tells me here on this display.” He tapped a finger on one of the many screens. “They could weigh five hundred pounds each for all I know and operate at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Not straightforward, huh?”

  “Too many unknowns.” Duggan forced a smile. “We won’t know until we try. One thing is for certain – we’re heading back to Nistrun and we’re going to see what we can do. If I can get my crew onto the Valpian I’m confident we’ll be able to use it at a level much closer to its full potential. No offense meant.”

  “None taken, sir.”

  “A warship’s navigational system must contain a comprehensive chart of known space. Once I can find it within all of these other systems here, I should be able to get us on our way to Nistrun. We were only at lightspeed for a couple of hours – a tiny step in the grand scheme of things, but far enough that we have no hope of guessing how to return.”

  “Anything we can do to help?” asked Byers.

  Duggan chewed his lip. “I thought I’d be able to access the list of coordinates from here,” he said. “Except there’s no data.”

  “Could the enemy crew have stripped it clean?” asked McLeod. “That would be a good way to get revenge – send us on our way to one of their space ports and remove any way for us to go elsewhere.”

  “And stop us obtaining a map of their populated worlds,” said Byers.

  W
ith a sinking feeling, Duggan believed they might be on to something. There was a single set of coordinates that he could locate easily and those were for the destination the Valpian’s crew had chosen. These coordinates were not linked to anywhere else within the ship’s navigational system. Duggan had never flown on a vessel where the charts were difficult to access – they needed to be at the pilot’s fingertips at every moment and it seemed unlikely the Dreamers would have significantly different methods.

  Not one to give up easily, Duggan spent a further hour searching for a chart. There was nothing to be found. He swore and then swore again.

  “The enemy captain must be laughing at us from his grave,” he said.

  Red-Gulos took on a puzzled expression and he turned to look over his shoulder. “I do not understand. The enemy captain is where Havon left him - in a pile with the other members of his crew at the bottom of these steps behind us.”

  “It’s a figure of speech,” said Duggan. He grimaced. “We have the freedom to go anywhere, but in reality, there’s only one destination open to us.”

  The Ghast lowered his brow and looked at Duggan. “If we follow this one course, we will surely be destroyed upon our arrival. What do you expect to find? An undefended base with databanks of star charts, waiting for us to plunder them?”

  “I don’t know. I prefer to take direct action when I have the option. We may not know what we’ll find but we are still doing something.”

  “There is always a choice. We could go anywhere we want and keep searching until we find an opportunity to improve our situation.”

  “If we lived to be a thousand years old, we might not come across anything more than deserted planets and dying suns.”

  “That is true. The point is, nobody can decide the course you take. Do not allow a dead man to defeat you.”

  Duggan pondered the words and realised he’d let himself be sucked into a position where the dead captain of the Valpian had dictated his actions. There must be another way, he told himself, trying desperately to believe it.