The Vraxar had grenades of their own. One of them landed on the floor fifteen metres away, bounced once and then exploded. The dark, corrosive flames licked against the four men, before receding as quickly as they came. McKinney was unhurt, but his suit was damaged and he saw that most of Webb’s spacesuit was left blistered by the explosion. The soldier kept firing.
“Got the bastard!” he shouted.
“Are we clear?”
“Negative, Lieutenant. We are not clear,” said Webb.
“What numbers and where are they?”
“They’re tight to the walls, sir – to the right of the corridor exit.”
“I see at least two more in the closest side passage,” said Garcia.
“Get a grenade in there!”
With a mighty heavy, Garcia threw one of his remaining grenades into the room. McKinney was too close to the wall to see where it landed. The side passages were wide and he hoped Garcia’s aim wasn’t terrible.
“Well?”
“Not sure, sir.”
McKinney grimaced and chanced a look behind. The corridor was still empty, though he was sure time was running out to resolve this stalemate. He checked his repeater magazine: 35%.
“Roldan, Garcia, keep throwing grenades into that side passage. I’m going in.”
The two soldiers pitched their grenades and reached for more.
“Webb, hold fire!”
Webb held fire at once and McKinney made a crouch-sprint for the room. With a burst of speed he didn’t think he had left in him, McKinney charged into the room. He didn’t wait for his brain to catch up with what his eyes saw and he opened fire with his repeater, raking the walls and corner with a thousand slugs. There were four Vraxar, standing several metres apart and with their guns ready. McKinney’s brain dimly recognized that one had its arm raised to throw a grenade.
The repeater tore them to pieces in moments. One of the Vraxar was fast enough to get a shot off at McKinney. It missed and that was all he cared about. The alien holding the grenade toppled over, much of its body shredded and unrecognizable. The grenade went off with a heavy percussive thump and McKinney turned his back to the blast, dropping into a crouch at the same time. He was far enough away and his spacesuit suffered little damage.
Roldan appeared next to him, his face surveying the room for any more Vraxar.
“Clear!” he shouted.
“We did it?” said Webb.
McKinney was already on the move. “Looks like.”
The hull breach was an area of brightness against the gloom of the interior. He knew how bad it was outside, yet the sight of it was as welcome as a holidaymaker’s first view across the perfect white beaches of an Atlantis holiday resort. He waved the soldiers towards it. “Move!”
The four of them made haste across the room, with Garcia leaning on Roldan. McKinney dared to hope he’d once more escaped against the odds. Then, he saw a body on the floor with blood crusting around several bullet wounds. There was no way to guess who was inside the suit and the sight was a reminder that not everyone got lucky.
They reached the hull breach and McKinney waited for the men to get through. The Vraxar life support systems were clearly more advanced than those of the Space Corps if they could maintain the internal pressure of the Neutraliser even with this big hole through the armour. It was one for the scientists to puzzle over. Without further pause, he stepped into the breach.
The Vraxar had one more nasty surprise for him. McKinney felt a thump on his back. Before he had time to wonder what it was, his shoulder detonated outwards in a spray of blood. From his periphery, he saw movement far along the main corridor. He couldn’t make out the details, but it seemed like one of the Vraxar had finally managed to land a shot on him.
He nearly fell. Strong hands took hold of him and he found himself dragged out of the Neutraliser and into the biting winds of Vanistar. The howling gale showed no mercy and battered him with its fury. He tried to drop into a huddle to protect himself from the pinpricks of dust which was carried along in the storm. The hands lifted him up and wouldn’t let him fall.
“I’ve got you, Lieutenant,” said Webb.
McKinney’s brain swam and he looked at the exit wound on his chest. It seemed like such a little thing and the suit had already formed a thin skin over it, sealing the wound and keeping him safe from the low-pressure of the atmosphere.
With Webb providing support, McKinney walked through the Neutraliser’s damaged armour. The skies of Vanistar were darker than before and he wondered if this was dawn or dusk. He couldn’t quite remember how long they’d been inside.
“Where’s the shuttle?” he asked.
Roldan sprinted ahead and up the slope of the impact crater, with Garcia limping afterwards. They turned this way and that, trying to find where the escape craft was waiting.
“They’ve left us! They’ve damned well abandoned us here!”
McKinney checked the comms – there were no receptors available except those representing the other three soldiers. He bent his neck and saw he was still sheltered within the Neutraliser’s hull and it was likely blocking his signal. There should have been a beacon. Where’s the damned beacon? he thought.
Hopelessness washed over McKinney. It was an emotion he was a stranger to and it made him feel weaker than he had done even in the conduit. A question came to him, pointless in the circumstances, though one which he somehow found important.
“How did you manage so well in the conduit?” he mumbled. “I mean, we all nearly died, except you. You just kept on going.”
Webb gave a short laugh. “You remember when I got shot up on the Juniper and I spent weeks in that medical place?” He banged his chest with his spare hand. “They fitted me with some kind of new heart. The doctors said it would never stop ticking, even long after I died. One little piece of Obsidiar is all it needs to run for a hundred thousand years.”
“You’ve been augmented, soldier. How does it feel?”
“Feel? I don’t know if I feel anything special, Lieutenant. I’m alive the same way I always was and that’s what matters, eh?”
“Yeah, that’s what matters. You did good, soldier.”
As McKinney’s eyes closed, the last thing he remembered seeing was the ES Abyss’s fourth shuttle drop like a stone from the sky. It decelerated at the very last moment, coming to a halt just above the ground a couple of hundred metres away. After that, he knew no more.
Chapter Thirteen
The interior of the central medical facility on the New Earth Tucson military base wasn’t much different to every other medical facility Fleet Admiral Duggan had ever visited. The truth was, he hadn’t seen more than a handful of such places, owing to the fact that they made him feel uncomfortable. This effect was something he’d experienced ever since he was a young man and while it wasn’t quite fear, it wasn’t too far removed from it.
Duggan walked at the head of the small team of his personal staff who were there to relay his orders and also to offer advice where necessary. In addition, eight heavily-armed soldiers followed in their wake, each one dressed in protective body armour and wearing a specially-adapted version of a spacesuit visor, which kept them safe from gas attacks. Not that Duggan expected to run into assassins, but it seemed a wise and easily-enacted precaution against the vagaries of the unknown.
The corridors of the facility stretched on interminably, as though the entire building was nothing more than a series of interconnected passages with nowhere for research or treatment to take place. As was common in such places, the air was chilled to an uncomfortable level and Duggan found himself longing to be on the hot, stifling bridge of an ancient Vincent class fighter. His piloting days were long gone and of all things, it was this loss he felt keenly, almost as much as the deaths of those who’d served with him during the Estral and Ghast wars.
Duggan set a fast pace and Dr Faith Clarke walked alongside him. Duggan wasn’t fond of Clarke’s defensiveness when it came to
her work and she was equally unhappy at having to answer to a military man, even though her department was entirely funded from the Space Corps’ budget. Consequently, they only spoke when absolutely necessary.
Their destination was six levels below ground, though such was the identical nature of each floor it wasn’t obvious and only a lack of windows on the perimeter corridors gave the game away. Not even the signs dangling at regular intervals from the stark white ceilings alluded to the subterranean nature of level DF-17.
“In here,” said Dr Clarke, offering with ill-grace to let Duggan go first through a set of double-doors.
He pressed his fingers to the access panel and a red light appeared, to indicate his entry was denied.
“Override code: Duggan,” he said without hesitation. The red light turned green and the doors slid open. “That will be fixed today.”
“Yes, Fleet Admiral,” said Clarke.
He went through and his entourage followed. Clarke gave the impression she wanted to object to their presence; luckily for her, she was wise enough to keep her mouth closed.
The room beyond the doors was large and with a high ceiling. The walls were white, the floor was covered in white tiles and the overhead lights were white. There were several white-coloured consoles arranged along the walls and teams of scientists and other medical staff, again dressed in white, talked in hushed tones.
Only two things broke up the monotony of colour. The first was a hulking military robot, which was grey. This robot looked nothing like a human – it was part cube, part cylinder, covered in screens and equipped with an array of hidden defensive weaponry and a tiny Obsidiar power source to keep its gravity drive running in the event of a Neutraliser attack. Inside, was more Obsidiar, this in the form of a number-crunching processing cluster designed to do all manner of tricks when it came to encryption.
A thick, flexible cable emerged from midway up the robot’s central section and descended through the empty eye socket of a Vraxar on the table, which was the second intruder upon the preponderance of whiteness. This Vraxar was held completely immobile by a combination of drugs and numerous grey metal straps which held it in a semi-upright position on a slanted examination table.
Duggan stepped closer to the alien – the light of the room made the creature’s skin appear nearly translucent and he saw bones and organs where they came close to the surface. This room carried the odour of powerful cleaning solutions in the same way as the other parts of the facility. However, there was another smell, which caused Duggan to wrinkle his nose. The Vraxar exuded the stench of rotting flesh and harsh preservative fluids. When he came even closer, the alien’s second eye opened and it looked at him steadily.
With an infinite array of possible questions open to him, Duggan asked one to which he knew the answer.
“Why have you attacked us?”
The Vraxar’s mouth moved in what might have been a grin, giving Duggan an unwanted view of its decaying teeth. A pallid, green-tinged tongue slipped into view and briefly touched against lips before vanishing once more. When the alien spoke, its voice was a hollow, whispering sound and it was difficult to make out the words clearly.
“We come where there is life.”
“Why do you need to kill in order to prosper? I am not aware of any other species that requires the extinction of others.”
“We are what we are.”
“What sort of an answer is that?”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
“Do you follow willingly? Is this what you wished for when you were alive?”
The Vraxar closed its eye. “This is not what any of us wished for. Not the Estral, not the Rilq, nor the Fuabnar, the Grax’d or the Fade before them. A hundred thousand years of misery. We are unwilling soldiers fighting for the species which defeated us.”
“Who are the originals? Who started this?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps they have turned to dust, or perhaps they direct their fleet from a place I shall never learn.”
“What compels you to fight for them? You are not under duress to talk, yet you answer my questions.”
“Do you understand what it is like to lose your soul, human? We have had ours stolen and replaced with embalming fluids and command processors.”
“We have studied the processing unit embedded in your brain and there is nothing there which forces you to act with hostility.”
The Vraxar showed its teeth again. “It is more than the Fior implant. The conversion takes everything and leaves behind only a corrupt version of what there was.”
Duggan struggled to understand. The Vraxar was telling only partial truths or perhaps the truths as it knew them. Believing either could be equally dangerous.
“If you are corrupted, does that mean you are acting of your own free will? Have your morals been subverted and changed to something else?”
A soft whoosh of breath escaped the Vraxar’s mouth and Duggan realised it was laughing. “We Rilq are unimportant and so too are the Estral, though they fought the hardest. All we have left is existence. We are left with a memory of life and a desire to continue living. We are children and each new Vraxar is welcomed like a child amongst us.”
Duggan was horrified at these words and at that moment he knew there was no way to fully understand the Vraxar and it was the final confirmation that there would be no negotiating with them, nor ever a settlement reached.
“If I let you free from these bonds, what would you do?”
“I don’t know. I might try to work out what those consoles over there are for. I might speak to these scientists. I believe I once learned about things. More likely, I would try to kill everyone here and attempt to make a connection with Ix-Gorghal.”
The name was something new.
“What is Ix-Gorghal? A commander of the Vraxar?”
“I don’t know who commands the Vraxar.”
“Then what is Ix-Gorghal?”
“It is one of the Vraxar capital ships. You humans destroyed much of the local fleet with your bomb, so they have summoned Ix-Gorghal.”
“What do you mean by summoned?”
“I will assume you do not have the technological capabilities to do the same. The Ir-Klion can produce power in such quantities that they can reach through barriers of mere distance. They can pull vessels through space from anywhere in the universe. It is how fleets are brought once we have found new children.”
Duggan felt giddy with the stream of new names, ideas and technologies the Vraxar was telling him about. Partial truths or not, he was certain he was on the brink of learning something of absolutely vital importance.
“Are these Ir-Klion the vessels with nullification spheres? We know them as Neutralisers.”
“The descriptive name is fitting. We Vraxar have conquered civilisation after civilisation with the Ir-Klion. The only significant power source they are ineffective against is what you call Obsidiar.”
“And they have brought Ix-Gorghal into Confederation Space?”
“That was the purpose of the spaceship your soldiers took me from. After Ix-Gorghal, we were to summon Ix-Gastiol, but we had insufficient Ir-Klion to accomplish both summons.”
“Is that what damaged your vessel?”
“It was. Ten others were destroyed in the chain reaction. Only the Ir-Klion-32 and the Ir-Klion-6 escaped annihilation. We were too badly damaged for the Ir-Klion-6 to assist.”
“The Vraxar make no attempt to save their children?”
“There will always be more. What happened to the Ir-Klion-32 after I was taken away?”
“Your Neutraliser attempted lift off and its rear nullification sphere was close to exploding. One of our heavy cruisers destroyed your vessel to prevent both its escape and detonation.”
“A shame.”
“That is in the eye of the beholder. What can we expect from this Ix-Gorghal?”
“You can expect death, human, followed by new life amongst us.”
The words
caused a few of Duggan’s staff to mutter and his armed guard shifted uneasily. He gave a look which told them he’d brook no more interruptions and the whispering abruptly ceased. He continued speaking to the captive Vraxar.
“What capabilities does this capital ship have?”
“I do not know. It was not required to defeat the Rilq. I know it exists, without knowing how it is used.”
“What about the Estral? Was it deployed against them?”
“It destroyed many of their spaceships towards the end of the war and ensured their final defeat. They had opportunities and they failed to take them.”
“What about Ix-Gastiol? Is it similarly powerful?”
“I do not know. We Vraxar are many and it does not generally require our entire fleet to conquer a new species. It is likely that other civilisations than your own are currently at war with us. I do not know why we were instructed to summon both of our capital ships, since one is more than sufficient for a civilisation as limited in its expansion as yours.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“I do not know everything.”
Duggan remained silent for a time, with his mind trying to sift the nuggets of truth from the hints and suggestions. The Vraxar stated that its Neutraliser had been instructed to summon the Ix-Gorghal. On the one hand, it gave the impression there were no commanders and then it suggested exactly the opposite. It wasn’t a necessity for Duggan to know his enemy, but it was always best to have an idea of their motives and their command structure. His conversation with the Vraxar left him no more enlightened than he had been when they first attacked Atlantis.
The real concern he had from the conversation was the mention of Ix-Gorghal. If it was a Vraxar capital ship, then it was likely to be an exceptionally powerful opponent. Even worse was the Vraxar’s assertion that it had been successfully summoned into Confederation Space. It wasn’t as though the Confederation’s territory was so compact that there were only a hundred planets to explore – in fact there were many thousands. The worry was that the Vraxar were unlikely to have brought one of their most powerful warships if there was no hope of forcing an engagement of some type. It didn’t seem likely that Ix-Gorghal would jump happily from place to place in a random search for human worlds, which suggested they knew where they were going or soon would.
God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3) Page 12
