Fires of Prometheus

by Michael G. Thomas

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Colonel. Since I’ve been away you’ve had a tough time of it, I know. The good news however is that we now have three task forces, one here, one at Kerberos and the main Fleet at Khimaira. Our numbers have been increasing as missing ships or those that went into hiding have managed to reach the assembly points. It won’t be long now before I have the numbers and resources on my side to go on the offensive,” she said confidently.

  Colonel Blake nodded in satisfaction.

  “That is good to hear, Admiral. Since we lost the General and the ceasefire was implemented morale has taken a dive. Knowing we are about to get back into the fight will fire us all up.”

  “Don’t you worry, Colonel, there is plenty of fighting left to be done,” she said with a wry smile.

  They pushed on past the partially cleared debris. The station would probably never be quite the same. The battle damage and self-destruct system had caused so much devastation it would take years to bring it back to anywhere near the position it had once been. In fact, at any other time it might have been abandoned permanently, but with secession fever spreading through the Proxima Star System, and no contact with the rest of the Confederacy in Alpha Centauri, she needed to hold on to any facilities and forces that she could. The two Star Systems formed the bulk of the Confederacy but the vast distance between them created problems in both communication and travel. Even the fastest manned ships took hundreds of days to make the trip and compressed laser communications took two months to travel from one System to the next. Not that the time difference really mattered at the moment, Alpha Centauri appeared to be having its own problems and all transport and communication was currently blocked between them. Admiral Jarvis’ last orders from Naval Command had been to protect the citizens of the colonies and to crush the insurgency that was spreading before it was too late.

  The Naval Station itself was large and capable of offering medical aid, repair crews and substantial combat support anywhere in the vicinity of the planet Prime that the station orbited. There were also a number of much smaller stations known as the Transit Stations and the surviving platforms from the battle had proven invaluable in getting supplies and equipment unloaded prior to being moved to Kronus. Down below only one of the seven colonies, Avagana, remained loyal to the Confederacy. Although fighting had stopped it could only be a matter of time before the secession forces made a final push to claim this colony. It was an odd situation whereby the strongest naval base and defences were orbiting a planet that was fairly hostile to Confederate control. As long as Avagana stood it was imperative that the Fleet maintained a stranglehold on the transit routes. The ships guaranteed the safety of the colony by interdicting any hostile forces trying to resupply units that might attack Avagana. Also, from this position reinforcements could be dropped directly into battle. It was a dark time for the Confederacy, a place where the violently independent colonies had been bickering and arguing for decades and had now found a voice in the guise of the new socialist dogma of the Church of Echidna. Four of the eleven planets in the system had already seceded and these included the only two habitable worlds, Kerberos and Prime. The remaining loyal colonies consisted of small planetary platforms, research bases and industrial complexes based around the dead worlds and gas giants in the System. As she considered the current tactical position her attention was drawn to an approaching man. The young Captain, his fatigues dirty and well used, stopped in front of the Admiral and saluted smartly.

  “Admiral.”

  She stood for a short time, inspecting the man and simultaneously examining the space around them. He must have suspected something was wrong as his eyes drifted off to the side to a pile of heavy metal machinery and equipment before snapping back to the Admiral.

  “Good work, Captain, Colonel Blake informs me your work teams are making excellent progress on the station. I was hoping it would be ready for basic repair work yet you’ve managed to bring a number of weapon systems online as well as establish workable medical facilities. Outstanding!”

  “Thank you, Admiral. We have a good team here and they are bringing more and more of the equipment up to operational capability every day. I expect to have the primary shipyard cleared for dry dock work within forty-eight hours.”

  Admiral Jarvis walked along what had been the beautiful plaza and scene of the violent clash between the Zealots and marines. The debris had already been cleared but the damage to the structure was still very obvious. She moved slowly, still finding the lower gravity difficult to get used to. She had been on similar stations before and found it took a few days to get back into the rhythm of movement. It was common knowledge that extra weight could make life much easier and she had already adopted some of the salvage teams’ gear, especially the grav boots. It was a fancy name but there was nothing fancy about a pair of boots whose only special feature was an extra twenty kilograms of weight added to the innersole via the dense polymer inserts.

  “Tell me about the weapons, I thought the large calibre mounts were destroyed in the battle?”

  “They were. We’ve been recovering equipment from the crippled hulk of Victorious. The ship is a wreck but lots of the systems are salvageable, especially those on the starboard section, they were the least damaged.”

  Admiral Jarvis considered the battle for a moment. It had been the most terrifying and violent ordeal she had ever faced when they put the Battlecruiser Crusader up against the rebel Battleship Victorious. After a long and deadly duel the Crusader had emerged the winner though at a very heavy cost. Even now the warship was still undergoing repairs at Kerberos along with a number of other vessels that had been in action since the uprising.

  “How about the CiC, how badly damaged was it?”

  “Well, not good, Sir. The self-destruct system pretty much destroyed the entire tactical system, the communication relays and all the power systems. We’ve set up a temporary power core and are moving systems down from the Bunker Hill and Santa Cruz to establish an operation data centre. I estimate it will take at least a week before all the systems are tied in and capable of providing wide band networking throughout the Fleet.”

  “Still, that is a good start. So in approximately a week we can start using the base here as the Sector Headquarters. I will ensure you are sent extra crews and equipment to help in your work.”

  “Thank you, Admiral, I should get back to my duties.”

  Admiral Jarvis nodded and returned the salute from the young man who then turned away smartly and rushed back to the many jobs he obviously needed to work on. No sooner had he left he was accosted by a several workers, each of them looking to him for information on the work projects. As the men went about their business the Admiral pulled out her datapad and examined the latest reports on the Fleet. There were a number of messages awaiting her attention but it was the one marked urgent that caught her eye. The subject simply read ‘prisoners’ and it could mean only one thing. Tapping the message it expanded out into a full report by the intelligence staff on the CCS Wasp, the light carrier and flagship of the small fleet in orbit around Prime.

  The first part of the report outlined three potential leads in the disappearance of General Rivers and his unit. The first two leads indicated a number of criminal gangs who were working on dangerous underground mining operation on Kerberos. The third lead came directly from comparing the previous two with the data recently arrived from the Tamarisk. It wasn’t much but it did seem to point to one man, a trader with links to the slave trade on Prometheus. According to the associated data the information recovered by Commander Anderson and his crew indicated that a consignment of slaves and high value prisoners were being sent to Prometheus. There was no exact location or even total number of slaves though. The data was already out of date but the more Admiral Jarvis thought about it the more she was convinced it was the strongest lead so far. What could be higher value than the senior General in the Proxima System, other than her, of course?

  Sliding her fi
nger over the message she spelled out a set of revised orders as well as a full copy of the intelligence data to be sent to the Tamarisk. Hopefully the information would prove useful in their attempts to locate the General. As she pressed the button to send the encrypted and classified message back to the ship she noticed movement at the far end of the plaza. Placing the datapad back into its pouch she made her way to the observation windows where a small number of workmen had already moved to. As she approached a few of the men spotted her and quickly moved back, one of them coughed to get the attention of the rest before she arrived. Upon reaching the toughened and recently replaced glass she looked out at the moving shape.

  “It’s the Resolution, Sir,” said one of the workers.

  “The Resolution? I thought she was a hulk.”

  Admiral Jarvis watched the massive grey ship move slowly away from its mooring and towards one of the cleared dock areas.

  “I don’t think she’s functional,” she said pointing out to the bow of the ship. “If you look carefully, Colonel, you can see the tugs pulling her away from the station. According to the damage report though it seems that with a repaired core and a new fire control system installed she might actually be usable.”

  “I don’t understand, I thought she was already crippled beyond use in the battle for the station? When our marines took the station she was out of action already. If her guns had been active it would have been a suicide mission.”

  “True. It looks like the crew were able to sabotage the ship before it was overrun. They damaged the power corps and destroyed all of the fire control system making her dead in the water and impotent.”

  As they watched the vessel move away Admiral Jarvis rechecked the battle damage again on her datapad. By her calculations, if there were any chance of getting the heavy cruiser patched up it would help boost her meagre forces to something a little respectable. Though the numbers were not all in yet she had a confirmed list of six capital ships, three marine assault transport ships and up to eighteen frigates plus an unknown numbers of cutters, corvettes and destroyers. It was hardly a fleet worth of the Great War where dozens of capital ships gathered for apocalyptical battles. It might be enough though to conduct significant operations in this System. At present she was down on heavy warships with both the Crusader and Vengeance undergoing substantial repairs.

  “I think I’ve seen enough. If you’ll excuse me, Colonel, I need to return to the CiC. Please continue as you were, you are running an excellent operation and I have no doubt that both the station and the Fleet will be fully operational and ready to conduct combat operations in a matter of days.”

  The two officers saluted before turning to their previous duties. As the Admiral marched off the Colonel turned and watched just for a moment as she disappeared into one of the many corridors, closely escorted by her bodyguards. He turned back to the work crews and shouted out to a small group of men working on a power coupling.

  “Chief, where are we on the Point Defence System?”

  The short, slightly overweight man in the orange jacket of the deck chief lowered his tools and spoke a few words before getting up and walking towards the approaching officer.

  “Sorry, Sir, what was that?”

  “I need an update on the PDS?”

  “We’re hitting a few problems. The power lines to the core were fried in the attack and we have to reroute them through the old copper lines. The output is a lot lower but I reckon we can have about half the system up and providing basic defensive screening in about twenty hours.”

  “Good, good. Any chance of getting the full system up after that?”

  “The full system? No way, we’ll have to rebuild the entire power network for that. I’d need about fifty men and two months minimum to do that, Sir.”

  “What if I could get you two hundred men and all the power lines and hardware I can salvage from the carcass of the Victorious?” asked the Colonel with a slightly raised eye.

  “Well, if you can pull that off I reckon we can get it done in about a quarter of the time. If you can scrounge the power lines from the ship we could even get some of the primary anti-ship railguns running again, Sir.”

  “Alright, consider it done. I’ll see you again tomorrow and I’ll bring you news on the hardware you need.”

  The Chief smiled before realising quite how much extra work he had just volunteered for. He opened his mouth to respond but the Colonel was well gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cases of cell mutation were first recorded on the manned missions to Mars back in the old Solar System. Direct exposure to radiation with little shielding resulted in abnormalities and many children were born with deficiencies and long-term problems. Screening of newborns was the only option until the development in the late 21stcentury of adequate radiation shielding equipment. Even then some of the more crude ships and bases lacked decent protection until the mid 22ndcentury. By this point, tens of thousands had been affected and the scourge of mutation became a known and terrifying problem.

  Lessons on Mutation

  Spartan stood in line along with what must have been about another hundred prisoners. They’d been granted just a few hours sleep before being forced to meet in the main hall of their wing in the compound. The internal structure was crude and certainly not a military or research laboratory site. Though there was much space, this part of the facility had been built by simply blasting through the hard rock on the planet to create living space. There was no heating, not that it was needed, as all the stonework was warm to the touch but not too hot that it burned. The side effect was that the overall temperature was hot and it made breathing and sleeping difficult. As he stood there Spartan could see the sweat dripping from the prisoners, each one of them losing substantial amounts of water.

  In front of the group was a nasty looking man. He was short and squat, stripped to the waist and carrying a coiled whip on his side. Dotted throughout the area were a number of armed guards, some watching the group the rest just relaxing, obviously used to the day-to-day grind at the compound.

  “My name is Vespis and this place is your new home, it is also your last home!” shouted the little man as he paced along the group.

  “Some of you are here because you owe money, others because of your crimes and the rest for just being assholes! I don’t care though because now you belong to me!” He then stopped in front of them.

  “Remember what the Governor told each of you, the entire site is protected by automated sentry units as well as over a hundred armed guards. There are only two ways out of this compound. One is by visiting the surface. That is a one-way ticket by the way and the punishment for repeatedly breaking our rules or refusing orders. The second is a lottery for those who do as they are told. Each day a random selection of you will be given the only opportunity you will ever have to leave here alive. This is a trip to the re-education and social rehabilitation centre.”

  Spartan wasn’t interested in the options right now, all he could think about were the numbers of guards in the facility. Over one hundred was a massive amount. A hundred guards must mean there were thousands of prisoners, maybe more. This was a much bigger operation than he had ever expected.

  “If you obey the rules you will receive privileges.” He raised both hands up and as if by magic it seemed, a loud buzz echoed through the chamber before settling to a low hum. At first it wasn’t clear what was actually happening until a blast of cool air moved into the open space. It felt as if they were standing outdoors in a light breeze before it eased and started to reduce the overall temperature.

  “The entire compound has its air scrubbed and cooled, that goes for this area too. Every section can be cut off and experience shows you will sweat out every last drop of water in hours. Any breaking of the rules will result in a six-hour penalty with the scrubbers switched off. Anybody breaks the rules twice and you pay a visit to the surface. That is the one-way trip!” he snarled and then waited for the information to sink in. />
  “Now, there are plenty more people coming from where you came from. You’re cheap and we can afford to lose some of you working here, so don’t fuck around!”

  There was a stunned silence in the hall as the prisoners stood in a mixture of fear and relief at the switching on of the scrubbers and coolers. Cool air or not, it was obvious to them all that this was a one-way assignment and some were already showing signs of they would probably give up early.

  “Each of you will be assigned a coloured band which you will wear at all times. The colour will indicate your group for work, rest and training. Failure to wear your band will constitute a breaking of the rules. Failure to comply with the orders of our officials or guards will constitute breaking of the rules.”

  He turned and continued walking, looking at the odd prisoner and then moving along. As he came closer Spartan did his best to avoid eye contact but it didn’t work. The short man stopped directly in front of him and looked carefully at his face.

  “You...you have military or combat training don’t you? Which unit?”

  Spartan was torn between telling the arrogant toad the truth revealing a secret that might be dangerous, or lying and being caught out. Both options could be as severe as each other. He decided to take the middle road and use an earlier truth, answering in a slow, monotone voice.

  “I used to be a pit fighter.”

  “Fighter, huh? We have fighters at the pits here on Prometheus. Ever fight on the station circuit here?”

  “Yes.”

  The little man stepped back with a smile on his face.

  “Good, then you must be the first volunteer for the red group. Take this and stand over there!” He handed Spartan a red elasticated band. He slid it on and looked over to where he was supposed to stand.

  “Don’t make me tell you twice!”