Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Can you open those doors?’ Nathan asked as he ran with the Marines.

  ‘I can do one better than that,’ Schmidt replied as he vanished from view.

  Foxx ran up alongside Nathan, her pistol held double handed before her and always looking far too big for her small hands.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ one of the Marines asked.

  ‘Having a look,’ Nathan guessed in reply, and was rewarded as Schmidt appeared before them once more.

  ‘O’Hara is not inside and nor is the intruder. O’Hara’s ID chip is located inside the room but has been abandoned.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Nathan cursed, fury boiling through his veins. ‘He must be somewhere. Can we track his form?’

  ‘He could have broken up into several different pieces and without proper scanning equipment it could take hours to find him,’ Schmidt said. ‘Right now we have no way of knowing how to reverse whatever he has done with the override codes.’

  Foxx looked at her data display and cursed.

  ‘The communications links are back up, but the fleet’s taking a pounding and they’re not going to last much longer. If we don’t get Admiral Marshall his full fleet back it’ll all be over no matter what happens here.’

  Nathan struggled to conceive a way out of their predicament but no matter what he considered nothing seemed capable of averting the tragedy that was unfolding outside.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do?’ he asked Schmidt again.

  ‘The codes were comprehensively altered,’ Schmidt reminded him. ‘O’Hara can do what he likes with the fleet’s vessels and we cannot stop him until we can access the codes.’

  ‘Then how is he doing it?’ Nathan asked. ‘Where is he able to place these commands? The ships can’t fly themselves, right?’

  ‘No, but they can be commanded to attack other vessels on autopilot and the crews locked out of the command interface,’ Schmidt replied. ‘It was an emergency measure designed to prevent a boarding force from taking permanent control of an allied ship by turning her against an attacking force if control was lost. Of course, nobody could have foreseen the codes being used against us by what we thought were our own people. Only the highest ranking and most loyal members of military rank were entrusted with them. If I hadn’t been shut down I might have got new codes to them by now.’

  Nathan stared at Schmidt and a new thought blossomed into life.

  ‘If the ships were entirely shut down, would they reboot under new command codes?’

  ‘No, the codes are hard wired in and the ship’s computers will remember them.’

  ‘Damn it, there has to be a way!’

  Schmidt shrugged apologetically.

  ‘I’m afraid that the whole system was designed to prevent an enemy from successfully boarding our ships and using them against us,’ he said. ‘The whole point of the safety system is that there isn’t a way out of it.’

  ‘Maybe if we find out where O’Hara is emitting the signals from we could shut them down?’ Foxx suggested.

  ‘It wouldn’t make a difference to the ships themselves,’ Schmidt countered. ‘They will continue on in the absence of any further commands from Polaris Station.’

  Commodore Hawker looked at the entrance to the conference chamber and turned to the Marines.

  ‘Blast those doors. I want in there.’

  The Marines did not hesitate to obey, rushing toward the doors and setting up a series of explosive charges around the control mechanism in the wall alongside them.

  ‘O’Hara’s infiltrator is not in there,’ Schmidt said, ‘I already looked.’

  Nathan tucked himself against the wall as the Marines retreated from their charges.

  ‘I don’t care, maybe we missed something. He couldn’t have gone far.’

  Moments later the charges detonated, blasting a small hole in the wall and frying the circuitry inside. The hard light doors’ opaque surface vanished and one of the Marines jogged forward and checked the power cables.

  ‘It’s down,’ he reported.

  Nathan hurried through the open doorway and into the chamber and saw before him the large room. The long table was still there and surrounded by chairs hastily vacated by the JCOS team as they left to join their ships.

  Nathan surveyed the room for a long moment but he could see nothing out of place.

  ‘It must be here, somewhere,’ he said. ‘It must be something physical, something that O’Hara could have held in his hand or worn somehow.’

  Foxx frowned as she looked around. ‘O’Hara took off, he might have taken it with him.’

  Nathan turned to Schmidt. ‘You said communications were back on line. Can you check to see if any of the station’s sensors are detecting anomalous intruders present?’

  Schmidt paused a moment, his eyes almost glazing over as he accessed the station’s data banks and sensor arrays.

  ‘Negative,’ he replied finally. ‘Every member of staff has been accounted for, and seventeen infiltrators destroyed. The station is clean.’

  ‘Except for O’Hara,’ Nathan said as he looked about them. ‘He must be in the room.’

  ‘But there’s nobody here,’ Foxx said, ‘and his ID chip is here on the table.’

  ‘They’re shape shifters, remember,’ Nathan said as he looked about.

  His eyes fell on the chairs around the table and the moment they did, he knew what had happened. There had been twelve chairs around the table when he has last been here, but now he counted fifteen scattered before him. Worse, the table was sheened with an oddly glossy surface as though it had been recently wiped down.

  ‘The furniture,’ he said.

  Before anybody could respond one of the chairs changed shape and a wickedly sharp blade whipped out and pressed into Commodore Hawker’s ribcage as the chair began wrapping around him like a snake entwining itself around a tree. Hawker gasped in horror and Nathan took aim but already he could see that Hawker could be killed in an instant as Admiral O’Hara’s form mutated from inanimate materials into something recognizably human. As he watched he saw the material move like a fluid from the surface of the table, slithering and rippling as it joined up once again with the other two chairs and transformed until O’Hara stood before them, his right hand a blade pressed against Hawker’s ribs and the other arm about the commodore’s neck.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ Nathan said as the Marines’ rifles pointed at O’Hara.

  The infiltrator smiled. ‘It is too late.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ Foxx replied.

  ‘The invasion is already over,’ came the reply, recognizably O’Hara’s voice but the tone and delivery sneering and cruel. ‘Your fleet is doomed and the rest of you will not survive the day.’

  ‘What the hell do you want with us?’ Nathan asked in exasperation.

  Again, the cold smile.

  ‘You are corvu,’ it said as though Nathan should understand what that meant. When it saw the confusion on their faces, it used another word. ‘You are fuel.’

  ‘Fuel for what?’ Vasquez asked.

  ‘For everything,’ came the reply.

  Nathan frowned as he saw the blade pressed against Hawker’s body. The entity could have killed him in an instant but it had not done so.

  ‘It’s a distraction,’ Nathan realized spontaneously. He stepped back and holstered his pistol. ‘It’s playing for time for some reason and won’t kill the commodore yet because it can’t.’

  Foxx glanced curiously at Nathan but she followed his lead and stepped back, lowering her pistol. The malicious glimmer on O’Hara’s face fell slightly.

  ‘You are doomed,’ he insisted.

  Nathan ignored him and turned away to look at the table alongside them. Upon it were scattered data pads, probably left there when the JCOS had left for their posts. Vasquez, Allen and Foxx all saw the direction of his glance at the same time and they pounced on the data pads and began trying to open them.

  ‘They’re all password protected,’ Foxx
snapped.

  Doctor Schmidt stepped forward.

  ‘Put them all in a pile on the table,’ he ordered.

  ‘You’re doomed!’ O’Hara snapped again. ‘I will kill him.’

  Nathan deliberately ignored the entity but he glanced instead at the Marines.

  ‘Keep your weapons trained on it. If it moves, kill it.’

  The Marines obeyed instantly, much to the commodore’s distress. Nathan watched as Doctor Schmidt bowed over at the waist and his head vanished into the pile of data pads Vasquez and Allen had piled up on the table. He remained there for several seconds and then he emerged.

  ‘Pad four, password echo echo one nine three.’

  Foxx grabbed the pad and entered the password and immediately the screen lit up as Admiral O’Hara let out a shriek as he released Hawker and leaped toward Foxx. The Marines fired instantly and the blasts hit the entity directly in the chest and hurled it backward in a cloud of smoldering embers and incandescent cells. The creature wailed as it struggled to recombine itself as Nathan whirled to the soldiers.

  ‘Containment unit, now!’

  The Marines rushed forward and tossed a high energy projection unit that unfolded as it flew through the air. It landed over the entity as it writhed on the deck, and in an instant a hard light cubicle formed around it and sealed it inside as Nathan hurried to Hawker’s side.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  The commodore nodded as he got to his feet, relief in his eyes. His relief turned to confusion as he saw the look on Nathan’s face.

  ‘You could at least look a little more cheerful that I’m okay?’

  Nathan wasn’t looking at the commodore. As he had helped the old man to his feet so he had looked out of the broad windows before them that displayed Saturn’s immense panorama, and there he had seen something truly terrifying.

  ‘We’re out of time,’ he said.

  They all turned, and there against the flare of the sun loomed an immense, wedge shaped craft at least twice the size of Polaris Station. Nathan stared in horror at the vast spaceship, its hull flickering with tiny pin prick lights. Flanked by four Marauder capital ships, the immense vessel was moving directly toward them and gradually blocking out the light from the sun as it did so.

  ‘A harvester of some kind,’ Commodore Hawker said. ‘That’s what O’Hara must have been talking about. Look at the size of it.’

  Nathan turned to Schmidt, who was already accessing the data pad’s internal codes.

  ‘Do you have them?’ Nathan asked.

  Schmidt’s head finally popped up and he nodded.

  ‘I’m rewriting the codes as we speak.’

  ‘Then stop speaking and send them, now!’

  ***

  XLII

  CSS Titan

  ‘Brace for impact!’

  Admiral Marshall reached across for the command rail, his vision blurred as blood trickled down his forehead from a cut. The great ship’s deck heaved as another devastating broadside slammed into it from a nearby Marauder and the lights on the bridge flickered out once more.

  ‘Hull integrity critical!’ shouted the tactical officer. ‘Engines almost out!’

  Marshall could see the main display panel showing the fleet in total disarray, the Marauders cruising through the cloud of debris and firing on any vessel within range.

  ‘Plasma cannons are depleted and we don’t have enough energy to recharge them!’ Olsen called, his own features wracked with desperation. ‘We’re out of options!’

  Marshall saw the Marauders turning slowly before them, huge plasma cannons coming to bear on the frigate Valiant. Even before he could cry out a useless warning he saw the massive cannons loose off a series of shots. The huge rounds plowed through the debris field and smashed into the badly damaged frigate and suddenly the entire ship vanished amid a brilliant supernova of searing white light. Marshall threw his hands up to shield his eyes as the frigate was consumed by the blast and exploded in a fearsome fireball that expanded rapidly out into the frigid cosmos.

  ‘We lost Valiant!’ called the tactical officer. ‘Pegasus is still out of control, Illustrious and the Russians are pulling out!’

  Marshall could see the smaller ships turning away from the fight and fleeing, firing back at the huge Marauders as they went. The big vessels turned slowly to pursue the frigates, and Marshall felt the old rage of his youth fire up once more inside his belly.

  ‘Helm, full power, take us closer to that Marauder!’

  The helmsman was already responding to Marshall’s thoughts, Titan turning onto an intercept course with the lead Marauder.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Olsen stammered. ‘You’re following a pursuit course?!’

  Marshall didn’t reply as he used his communicator to contact the ship’s compliment of Marines.

  ‘Sergeant Agry, prepare your Marines for a boarding assault!’

  Olsen stared in disbelief at the admiral. ‘A what?!’

  ‘We’re out classed and out gunned!’ Marshall snapped. ‘The only chance we have is to take one of those capital ships for ourselves!’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ Olsen raged. ‘We can’t take them on! We’re losing the battle and we’re on the verge of losing the war!’

  Marshall said nothing as he turned to the helm, watching as Titan accelerated in pursuit of the Marauder. The ship shook as another of CSS Victory’s broadsides caught it a glancing blow astern.

  ‘This is insane!’ Olsen shouted, but suddenly a realization dawned in his eyes as he stared at Marshall with a strange expression.

  ‘What?’ the admiral asked, off guard.

  ‘You don’t want to board them,’ Olsen gasped. ‘You want us to be boarded!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re one of them,’ Olsen said as he pointed at Marshall. ‘Why else would you order the fleet’s flagship on a suicide mission?!’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t order another to do something that I’m not prepared to do myself,’ Marshall shot back. ‘You’re either with me or you’re guilty of treason and dereliction of duty, Olsen. Get in line or get off the bridge!’

  ‘The hell I will!’ Olsen shouted as one hand moved for the service pistol at his belt.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Marshall warned.

  Four Marine guards around the bridge tensed up, their rifles held at port arms but all of them teetering on the verge of intervention as the ship’s internal lighting flickered as the power surged in and out.

  ‘I’m relieving you of command,’ Olsen said as he drew his pistol.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Marshall said. ‘Our fleet has been sabotaged, Olsen. The only way out of this is to take away their advantage, to neutralize the capital ships. We can’t win the battle any other way.’

  ‘We’re not attacking that capital ship and boarding her!’

  ‘Defense as attack,’ Marshall said as the bridge rocked again, Titan shouldering another massive salvo of plasma shots. ‘That’s our motto.’

  Olsen wavered as he looked at the tactical displays and saw the Marauder beginning to turn away from them. Marshall saw it too and he screwed his brow up as he watched the capital ship veering away from them.

  ‘They’re turning,’ the tactical officer called. ‘They’re pulling back.’

  Marshall turned to the main display and saw the big Marauder actively trying to get away from Titan, and suddenly Marshall was hit by a revelation as he looked at the big ship’s hull.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he uttered. ‘Helm, get us as close as you can to her!’

  The ship was already turning and accelerating as Olsen pointed the pistol at Marshall.

  ‘I said I’m relieving you of…’

  ‘They’ve got a weak spot!’ Marshall cut him off and pointed at the screen. ‘Look at them, damn it! Those huge cannons and the smaller plasma batteries! It doesn’t make tactical sense because if we get close in with them, they can’t shoot us with their main guns and our own sabotaged
ships can’t hit us without risking damaging the Marauders!’

  Olsen looked from the tactical display and back to the main viewing panel.

  ‘And if they board us we’ll lose Titan to them! The battle will be lost and earth exposed!’

  ‘The battle is already lost!’ Marshall bellowed, finally losing patience and storming across the bridge to confront Olsen. ‘We’ve fared no better than the Ayleeans because we’re fighting on their terms! It’s time to change the battlefield before we all die! For the last time, are you with me or not?!’

  Olsen struggled, the pistol pressed against the admiral’s chest as he wrestled with the dilemma. A wrong move now would cost them the battle, the war and most likely every living being on the earth.

  ‘Damn it,’ he uttered as he lowered the pistol. ‘You better be right about this.’

  ‘It’s my job to be right,’ Marshall snapped back.

  He turned as Titan moved inside the arc of the Marauder’s guns, the enemy capital ship fully twice as big as Titan. Instantly, the intense barrage of plasma fire ceased as both the Marauder and CSS Victory were denied the ability to maintain their attacks.

  Marshall clenched the command rail with both hands, both elated that his gamble had paid off and anxious of what the Marines would find when they entered the enemy ship.

  ‘The Marauder’s hull integrity?’ he demanded.

  ‘Seventy eight per cent,’ came the tactical officer’s reply, ‘and it’s sectioned and double plated, probably ten to fifteen feet thick.’

  Marshall nodded. The main screen now showed the Marauder’s underbelly, a vast maze of interconnecting panels built not of identical forms but connected in a seemingly random pattern. Marshal squinted, peering at the unusual shapes.

  ‘Keep scanning,’ he ordered. ‘Look for any kind of weak spot like exhaust vents, poorly fitting panels, anything.’

  Moments later, the tactical officer responded.