God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3)
Page 2
Before he knew it, Duggan was lost in the world of his endless duties.
Chapter Two
The heavy cruiser ES Abyss was several hours into its journey to Vanistar. Captain Charlie Blake was feeling cooped up and he paced around, keeping an eye on his crew. Most of the officers were known to him, but there were two others who had been assigned during the last scheduled maintenance check on Pioneer a couple of weeks ago. These two officers – Ensigns Toby Park and Charlotte Bailey – so far appeared to be competent and eager.
“I wish this smell would go away,” said Comms Lieutenant Caz Pointer for the dozenth time.
Blake sniffed – the entire bridge stank of smoked fish and had done since they’d left Pioneer. None of the crew owned up to ordering fish from the replicators and none had been witnessed eating it. A brief and distracting investigation suggested the smell was coming in through one of the air conditioning vents. While it was unpleasant, there were no warning alarms on any of the spaceship’s life support systems, so the mystery remained unsolved.
Privately, Blake suspected it was a practical joke played by one or more of the technicians on Pioneer. He’d almost built up sufficient interest to begin an audit on the maintenance teams in order to cross-reference with similar incidents on other warships, but the call from Fleet Admiral Duggan had forestalled this time-wasting exercise. He put it out of his mind.
“I think we need to focus on where we’re going,” he said, addressing the crew. “We’ve been out of action for a year and we’ve lost our edge.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Pointer. “It’s just hard to ignore.”
“We’re going to enter local space in a few hours. At that point, we may find ourselves under immediate attack and it’s imperative we’re prepared. I don’t need to remind you what the Vraxar want and how important it is that we blow the crap out of them before they achieve their aims.”
Blake sat down and studied his console, alert for anything untoward. He was just killing time – keeping himself occupied in order to prevent his brain turning over the endless possibilities of the future. Before the Vraxar, he’d never been bothered by thoughts of what lay ahead. Now, it was as if a plague of tiny, biting insects whirled inside his mind, refusing to go away no matter how many of them he swatted. He chuckled inwardly and without much humour. I’m starting to get old and there’s a part of me that’s unwilling to let it happen.
He accessed the Abyss’s data repositories and looked at the files on Vanistar again. There was nothing new waiting to be unearthed and while they travelled at lightspeed, there would be no updates from Monitoring Station Delta. He was tempted to exit lightspeed for a brief time to allow the warship’s memory arrays to synchronise with the Space Corps network. He rejected the idea - the first report from the monitoring station suggested it would have lost sight of the object several hours ago, meaning there was unlikely to be any new information.
So, Blake waited and did his best to suppress his fidgeting. He was just starting to realise that his perception of how time passed was accelerating with every year he got older and as a consequence, the remaining three hours went by quicker than he was expecting.
“Entering the Kopel system in two minutes,” said Lieutenant Jake Quinn. “Vanistar is the third planet and we’re aiming for fifteen million klicks out. That’s enough for our fission cloud to escape notice and gives us plenty of opportunity to approach with the stealth modules active.”
“What I’d give for a fission suppression system,” said Blake.
“We’re scheduled to have one fitted in six months, sir,” said Quinn. He saw Blake’s face. “I see. Not much use to us at the moment.”
“Activate stealth modules as soon as we’re able. I’ll require an in-depth scan of the locality and please keep the Tucson base advised.”
The warship’s fission engines emitted the faint whine which indicated they were about to shut off. There was a brief silence, a hint of dislocation and then the ES Abyss emerged into the Kopel solar system, between the third and fourth planets. There was a flurry of activity on the bridge.
Blake preferred to keep the Abyss moving instead of leaving it a motionless, easy target for any potential enemies. As soon as he got his bearings, he aimed the Abyss towards Vanistar and pushed the gravity engines to full output. The Abyss rocketed forward, hitting a speed in excess of two thousand kilometres per second.
“Stealth modules online,” said Quinn.
“Get our energy shield up as well.”
“Shield online. Our Obsidiar core is holding steady.”
“Beginning area scan. First indication is there’s nothing in the vicinity.”
“I have informed the Tucson base as to our arrival. We are to proceed as planned,” said 2nd Lieutenant Maria Cruz. She was operating at a reduced rank during her on-ship training period.
“I know we’re to proceed as planned,” muttered Blake. “I’m the captain of this damned ship and I’m giving the orders.”
With the heavy cruiser at full speed, the stealth modules and energy shield active, Blake felt reassured they wouldn’t be susceptible to instant destruction while Lieutenant Pointer finished her far scan. He drummed his fingers until it was done.
“We’re the only thing out here, except for a few dozen asteroids which are half a million klicks to starboard.”
“Good – focus on Vanistar and find what we’re after.”
“Already on it, sir,” said Pointer. “There’s a big old storm covering a third of the southern hemisphere.”
“Is that where the target was detected?”
“I’m trying to tally it up. Yep, that’s where it was – right under the storm. We have hydrogen, helium and then we get down to the toxic crap.”
“Can our sensors pierce it?”
“Maybe. It’ll be slow, but at least we’ve got a head start in that we know where to look.”
“Not quite the head start I was hoping for, Lieutenant. Luckily, we have almost two hours travel time ahead of us before it becomes an issue. Please proceed.”
It didn’t take two hours before they made their first discovery and it wasn’t what Blake was expecting.
“There’s some type of crazy reading in an area of space away from the planet,” said Lieutenant Cruz.
“I’ll need a better definition than crazy.”
“Yes, sir. My mouth talks to buy my brain time to think. I’m not quite sure what it is. This is more Lieutenant Quinn’s speciality.”
Quinn was already concentrating on the data harvested by the Abyss’s sensor arrays. “There are decaying traces of energy – it’s an arrangement I don’t recognize,” he said.
“Do we need to worry about it?” asked Blake.
“It’s an unknown, so I would suggest we give it due consideration, sir.”
“It covers a huge area,” said Cruz.
“That’s my worry, Lieutenant,” Quinn replied. “I can’t imagine what it would have taken to generate so much energy across such a wide area. I’m trying to calculate when it was formed by watching the rate of its decay.”
“Will that work if you don’t know its original state?” asked Blake.
“You’re quite correct to ask, sir – we’re missing a required variable. However, I’ll be able to generate a chart which shows the levels of energy against time. All we need to do is pick a point on the chart which we believe most accurately reflects the time of generation.”
“We guess, you mean?”
“Welcome to the world of reverse predictive modelling, sir.”
“I think I’m more interested in why it’s here, whatever it is or was,” said Blake.
“Every piece of the jigsaw gives us a better idea of the whole.”
“I won’t give you an argument, Lieutenant. Carry on.”
Minutes passed.
“The sensors are reading faint signs of positrons filtering through Vanistar’s atmosphere,” said Pointer.
“Show me.”
“Based on the atmospheric density and speed of the wind, this is where I predict the target object is located.”
“Any signs of the storm clearing?”
“No, sir. The ship’s AI predicts this particular storm won’t blow out for another three years, by which point it will have certainly been replaced by another storm of equal or greater magnitude.”
“Will you be able to see through the storm when we’re at an altitude of a few thousand klicks?”
“I think so.”
The Space Corps only put the best on its fleet warships and this short discussion provided Lieutenant Quinn sufficient time to work through some advanced modelling, with assistance from the Abyss’s eight blisteringly fast Obsidiar processing units. The outcome wasn’t quite the clear-cut conclusion Blake was hoping for.
“I don’t know when this anomaly was formed, sir. If we predictively reverse the decay, you can see how quickly the line on this chart climbs upwards.”
“In other words, whatever this was originally, it required an inconceivably large power source to generate it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re none-the-wiser as to what it was?”
Quinn chewed his lip. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s consistent with the movement of atoms around a wormhole.”
“Except we’re a long way from a wormhole.”
“A very long way.”
“I don’t like it. Send the data to the Space Corps. They can set a team onto finding out if it’s significant.”
“I sent them it already, sir.”
Blake found it pleasing when he didn’t have to micromanage everything. The only problem was his own inability to stop doing it. He trusted his officers more each day, so he was obliged to concede the weakness was his own and he set himself a personal goal to improve himself in this regard.
The ES Abyss flew on. The grainy image of Vanistar became gradually more detailed and the two comms officers were able to narrow down the site of the target object to within fifty kilometres. There was no sign of hostile activity, though it was looking increasingly likely they’d need to descend into the atmosphere to gather the necessary intel.
“Is there anything other than unshielded Gallenium which can produce this quantity of positrons?” Blake asked when they were a hundred thousand kilometres away.
“Not that I’m aware of,” said Quinn.
“What we’re seeing is consistent with wreckage,” said Cruz. “If it’s Vraxar, I have no idea why they’d simply crash into a planet.”
“Is there any seismic activity?”
“Bits and pieces – nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Is there any sign of recent seismic activity?”
“Yes, sir. There usually is if you look hard enough,” said Pointer.
“What about an impact crater? I’m trying to decide if there’s an active enemy installation on the surface or if a Vraxar ship crash landed.”
“I guess we’ll need to poke our noses into those clouds before we find out,” said Hawkins. “It can’t smell worse than the air on this bridge.”
“I think there might be a crater,” said Cruz. “There’s no clear picture, but there are what I first took to be naturally-forming ridges over here.” She highlighted an area of the display which was thickly shrouded by the storm. “There’s something similar a few hundred klicks to the south as well.” She highlighted another area.
“That comes to about nine hundred klicks from north to south,” said Ensign Park.
“If you ram an incredibly heavy object into a lump of rock at an enormous speed, you get a big hole,” said Hawkins.
Blake piloted the ES Abyss on manual and brought it to an altitude of twenty thousand kilometres. Then, he handed off control to the autopilot which set the heavy cruiser flying in a tight circle directly over the target area. The evidence suggested this was a crash site, rather than a military installation. Nevertheless, he didn’t like heading into a situation without a having a bit more than simple guesswork as backup. Whatever was down there, it was likely as blind as they were and Blake didn’t want to make the first move. Before he could be forced into making a decision, his comms team came through for him.
“I got a sighting of it!” said Pointer.
“Oh crap,” said Cruz. “Is that what I think it is?”
“What is it?”
“On the main screen, sir.”
A static image appeared, enhanced by the ship’s sensors and with the shrouds of choking grit filtered out by a series of complex algorithms. The resulting picture managed to be both indistinct, yet also far too clear.
“A Neutraliser,” said Blake. “A damned Neutraliser.” He turned to Lieutenant Hawkins. “Keep it targeted with every missile we’ve got. If it tries to lift off, we’re going to blow it out of the sky.”
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere, sir,” said Quinn. “There’s output from its aft nullification sphere, but everything up front from that is dead.”
“Offline and recoverable or offline and completely out of action?”
Quinn shrugged. “I wouldn’t like to guess. At this precise moment, they’re going nowhere.”
“What now?” said Blake to himself.
He stood and walked closer towards the image of the spaceship, as if proximity would bring him answers. It was an unexpected situation – for the Neutraliser to have crashed, it must have sustained catastrophic damage. The Space Corps hadn’t inflicted the damage and there was no record of an engagement between the Ghasts and the Vraxar. Warships absolutely did not fail this badly without external influence.
“We were sent to check out what the hell is going on, so we’d better get on with it,” he said at last. “I’m going to bring us through this storm and we’re going to find out what happened.”
“What if there’s a fourth race of aliens and they attacked this Neutraliser?” said Lieutenant Hawkins. “That would stir things up, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
Feeling as if he needed to take hands-on control, Blake grabbed the control bars. The autopilot dutifully switched itself off, whilst providing an advisory notice to warn him how much better a computer was than a human at piloting a twelve billion tonne warship. Blake ignored it.
“This storm won’t interfere with the stealth modules, will it?” he asked.
“It shouldn’t do. It’s generally radiation that causes the problems,” said Quinn.
The storm was dense and violent. It raged with the force of a million atomic bombs from the surface of the planet, up to an altitude of two hundred kilometres. On the bridge of the ES Abyss, the crew felt nothing as the spaceship descended. Wind and grit pounded against the energy shield in wasted fury. There wasn’t a planet in existence which could host a storm with the power to trouble a warship the size of this one.
At a height of eighty kilometres, the warship’s sensors were able to penetrate the atmospheric conditions all the way to the ground and they provided a near-perfect reproduction of the Neutraliser. It lay at the bottom of an immense crater. At the place of impact, the crater was many kilometres deep and it sloped upwards, forming a shallow basin with a diameter of several hundred kilometres. It looked bad, but Blake was sure Vanistar had got off lightly – the Neutraliser had come in at a comparatively low speed.
The vessel itself was a mess – half of the front nullification sphere was missing and the remainder was partially flattened. Lieutenant Quinn confirmed it was generating no power whatsoever. The rest of the Neutraliser’s hull was blistered, swollen and misshapen. The rear connecting beam was noticeably bent as if it had been subjecte
d to extreme heat or force. It was a troubling sight.
“That’s dispersed heat damage with no explosion crater,” said Hawkins. “Whatever did this it wasn’t a beam weapon and it wasn’t a missile strike.”
“Could it have been caught on the edge of the Inferno Sphere and somehow escaped this far before they suffered complete system failure?” said Quinn.
“I don’t think so. When the Obsidiar bomb went off the Neutralisers were close to the centre of the blast and they didn’t stand a chance. The analysts spent weeks checking the Blackbird’s sensor recordings and they didn’t find anything to suggest there was another Neutraliser in the vicinity.”
“There’s plenty of juice running through that aft sphere,” said Quinn. “About a thousand times more than our maximum power output, including from our Obsidiar core.”
Blake watched the uneven play of green and blue lights as they jumped erratically across the surface of the nullification sphere. There was something wrong, he was sure.
“Is it stable?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” said Quinn. “It’s an excellent question and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to provide you an answer. I’ll get on with it at once.”
“I wouldn’t like to think what might happen if it were to go critical.”
“Nope.”
“What are you planning to do, sir?” asked Pointer.
“Fleet Admiral Duggan sent us out here to gather intel, Lieutenant. There’s only so much intel you can find from looking at the outside of a ship.”
“Should I launch the drones?” asked Pointer.
“Yes – I’m exceptionally interested to see what lies inside that Neutraliser.”
The recon drones were designed to be launched at a moment’s notice. Lieutenant Pointer sent a dozen racing towards the Vraxar spaceship beneath. The drones were robust and designed to withstand the elements, so they sped easily to their destination. Blake watched, fascinated, as they flew over and around the Neutraliser, scanning and searching.