The fourth wave of plasma fire scoured the Crimson’s outer hull. Before a fifth was launched, Duggan triggered the release of another of the Crimson’s arsenal of Lambdas. A concealed opening at the rear of the spaceship slid open for the briefest of moments. A ten-metre-long alloy tube screamed away, accelerating at a rate quicker than any local space warship could manage. The missile’s guidance system remained inoperative as the Lambda exited the cave at a speed that made it difficult for a biological eye to detect. It flew low and fast over the clustered Ghast artillery. At last, the guidance computer came online, too late to prevent the missile from detonating against a steep escarpment, almost eighty kilometres beyond the Ghast positions.
“Missed,” said McGlashan on the Crimson’s bridge. “Got another wave of plasma rounds incoming. Same number as before.”
“Did we get anything from the Lambda’s transmit log?” asked Duggan.
“Nothing. The signal got blocked by all these rocks.”
It wasn’t unexpected, but nor was it what Duggan had hoped to hear. Without the transmit log, he had no way of determining whether or not his first launch had been at all close.
“How’re the piloting systems?” he asked suddenly.
“Still down, sir,” said McGlashan. “I had them on a low priority until we got closer to launch. The repair bot’s working on the sensor arrays.”
“Never mind,” Duggan told her. He turned to Lieutenant Breeze. “Start the gravity drive.”
“Sir? It’ll slow down the repairs,” said Breeze.
“Do it.”
“Whatever you say,” said Breeze. “We’re only at fifty percent.”
“I understand. Bring them up.”
“Coming online now.”
A feeling of excitement ran through the people on the bridge. Even Monsey felt it and she looked away from her efforts to hack into the Crimson’s core in order that she could see what was happening.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re starting her up,” said Duggan over the internal comms. “Since we have no idea what to expect, I’d suggest you prepare for a bumpy ride.”
A grumbling vibration coursed through the floor, scraping like two pieces of indescribably heavy metal rubbing against each other. There was a humming, whining sound which rose in pitch. The noise became louder and higher in frequency, yet it somehow faded rapidly into the background until it was detected only at the extremes of human hearing.
“What the hell is this?” asked Breeze. “I’ve not heard a ship that sounds like this one and I’ve been on a hundred. I was standing less than twenty metres above the Archimedes’ fission drive on one of her earliest flights and it was nothing like this.”
Duggan knew what Breeze meant. The Crimson sounded rough – harsh even, but there was something about it that raised the hairs on his neck. Not even the Detriment had come close and that was as seat-of-the-pants as any warship built in the last fifty years. He reached over the buttons and indentations on his console, their arrangement as familiar as any Corps ship.
“Let’s see how easy this bird is to fly,” he said.
“What’re you planning, sir?” asked McGlashan. She looked dazed.
Another barrage from the Ghast artillery washed over the ship’s hull, leaving the surface glowing briefly white before the armour dissipated the heat and the white faded to a dull orange. Duggan cleared his mind of the distraction and looked at the two horizontal black metal bars in front of him. They were set in a comfortable position for him to reach when he was reclined in the captain’s chair. The control levers had buttons embedded into them and there were a series of sliders and more red buttons adjacent. He stared at them for a few seconds. It was so long since he’d needed to use manual controls that his eyes hardly even noticed their existence these days. Going soft, he reprimanded himself. He stretched out his left hand and rested it on one of the control levers. The metal was cool and smooth. His other hand reached for the second control lever, his thumb taking a natural position between two of the buttons.
“We’re leaving this place. Right now.”
Chainer, Breeze and McGlashan exchanged glances. “There’s not a lot of room, sir,” said McGlashan at last. “You can’t get a ship this big out of here without the guidance systems.”
“You’ve got less than seventy metres spare at the narrowest point,” said Chainer. He looked worried – very worried.
“And you’ll be coming out backwards,” added McGlashan.
“With reduced engine capacity and a Ghast heavy cruiser circling over our position.”
“We’d best not hang about, then,” Duggan told them. His face lit up in a broad smile and he felt completely calm. Without giving the matter any more thought, he pulled gently at the left-hand control lever. The Crimson lurched fractionally as it rose a few feet from the ground. Duggan corrected the tilt. The action came to him automatically, even after so long of relying on autopilot systems to get his ships to where he wanted them. He stabbed at a button on the console and a flashing light indicated that the landing gear had retracted into the hull.
“Piece of cake,” muttered Chainer anxiously.
The pilot’s displays threw up reams of information, which flashed onto Duggan’s primary and secondary screens. A head-up-display shimmered in the air before him, feeding through the details from the warship’s external sensors. Many of the arrays were still not functional and Duggan found he had to patch together a mental image of the Crimson’s surroundings based on the details he gathered from those of the sensors which were operational, and from his recent trip outside.
“Up we go,” he said to himself. Proximity alerts flashed to warn him that the Crimson had come within ten metres of the left-hand wall of the cave. In a hovercar it would have been ample room. When you were piloting more than a thousand metres of warship, the distance suddenly seemed tiny. As if it had decided that lights alone were insufficient warning, the Crimson’s warning systems played an insistent buzzing sound through a speaker on the bridge. The sound instantly set Duggan’s teeth on edge.
“That last artillery barrage scraped underneath us,” said McGlashan. “It just missed.”
Duggan only half listened. Although he was calm, it was taking the utmost concentration to keep the Crimson steady. The control sticks were sensitive and the designers hadn’t expected the pilot to ever need to handle the ship in such a confined space. They’d probably been thought of as redundant anyway now that the mainframes and AIs were relied on to pilot Corps vessels. There’d been more than one captain who’d suffered the indignity of having their command stripped because they’d decided to show off by taking direct control of a spaceship. Either way, Duggan was glad the option was still available on the Crimson.
With a deep breath, Duggan steadied the ship and brought it another ten metres away from the wall. He doubted that a low-speed collision would do much damage, but he didn’t really want to find out what would happen if almost two billion tonnes of ultra-dense metal struck several billion tonnes of heavy ore. Slowly, he raised the ship until it hovered above the highest of the boulders that littered the cave floor. He pulled at the right control stick and the Crimson began a steady movement backwards. Duggan scarcely noticed that the vibration of the hull had smoothed off as the spacecraft glided through the thin atmosphere.
“Another artillery strike, sir,” said McGlashan. “Ten hits and four misses. They’ve recalibrated their aim.”
“I wonder if their crew realise we’re coming,” Duggan replied.
“We’ll need every second we can get if we’re to escape that Cadaveron.”
Duggan had most of his focus on keeping the ship level, but he had a sudden idea. “How’re you with aiming the Bulwarks manually?” he asked. “We’ve got two out of eight at the rear?”
“I’ll give it a go, sir,” said McGlashan, picking up his meaning at once. There was still no room for the Lambdas to target the artillery. The Bulwarks, on the other hand, might be a better bet on
ce they could get a line of sight along the cave. If McGlashan could manage it, things would become messy for the Ghast artillery and their crew.
“Looks like we’re coming close to the ledge now, sir,” said Chainer. Duggan was surprised that it had taken so little time. There again, two klicks was almost nothing to a spacecraft, even one being piloted as gingerly as the Crimson.
“I see them!” said McGlashan. The excitement in her voice was clear. “The cocky bastards must have thought we were grounded. They’re spread across the cave mouth.”
Duggan couldn’t take his eyes away from what he was doing in order to look across at the commander’s console. He felt the faintest change in the Crimson’s structure as it absorbed the recoil from the two rear Bulwarks. The early models of these cannons had suffered from enormous amounts of kick, such that it had taken many iterations before they could mount more than a single one on practically any vessel. In his mind, he could picture them spewing out their depleted uranium projectiles. The modern versions could burst up to twenty thousand rounds a minute as a last-ditch defence against incoming missiles. He didn’t know what the Crimson’s versions could do, but he could imagine them shredding the rock floor of the cave like it was nothing more than paper. The Bulwarks bore similarities to the main armaments on the tanks, only they were much, much bigger and vastly more destructive.
The Bulwarks fired again, and this time Duggan was able to glance at an external feed from the cavern outside. He saw a hundred deep rents across the stone and something that might have been the mangled remains of ground artillery. Chunks of rock fountained into the air once more and he saw a couple of silvery shapes thrown violently into the distance.
“That’s the last of them,” said McGlashan. “Not much they could do about that.”
Duggan didn’t hang around. Gaining in confidence, he increased the speed of the Crimson, feeling the ship’s gravity drive respond eagerly as its output rose to a tenth of one percent. For the first time in over fifty years, the ESS Crimson emerged from its hiding place and into the bleak darkness of the unnamed planet’s night.
Chapter Sixteen
Almost at once, the warnings came. Chainer’s station chimed a multitude of updates, which mirrored themselves onto Duggan’s tertiary console screen. McGlashan’s hands moved rapidly across buttons and touch panels, as her brow furrowed in concentration.
“I’ve picked up the Ghast ship,” said Chainer. “It’s high and circling towards us.”
“Has it detected us?” asked Duggan.
“No way to tell, sir. Too many of our own sensors are damaged.”
Duggan didn’t respond immediately. He pushed at the spaceship’s control levers to bring its enormous bulk to a halt. With a twist of one lever, he swung the nose around and lifted the vessel away from the planet’s surface. A wave of giddiness threatened to swamp him and he saw McGlashan stumble forwards against her own console. The Crimson’s outdated life support systems caught up with the crushing effects of the acceleration and the feeling subsided almost at once. Duggan took a deep breath and rammed the left-hand lever as far along its slot as it would go. The feeling of giddiness returned, much stronger than before, but this time the life support was able to counteract the tremendous stresses within a second. For all its size, the Crimson wasn’t at all ponderous. There was a vibration deep enough to set Duggan’s jaw aching and then the warship rocketed away, eleven hundred metres of engines and weapons.
“Nose temperature already at thirty-five percent of design tolerance,” said Breeze. “You’ll need to take us higher and soon.”
“The Cadaveron’s changed course,” Chainer said. “It’s coming to see what we are.”
“Can’t get a lock on with the Lambdas,” McGlashan added. “We’re at the extremes of range and the sensors I need are out of action.”
Duggan checked their speed. Even with its gravity engines at little more than half power they were approaching ninety percent of the Detriment’s maximum speed. It wasn’t going to be much good if they burned up because he was keeping so low to the surface.
“Bringing us up,” he said. “I don’t think we can outrun them yet.”
“I think they’ve launched, sir,” McGlashan told him. “Can’t be certain.”
“Release shock drones.”
“It doesn’t look like they’re shock drones as we know them,” said McGlashan. “They’re some sort of metal globe with a transmitter in. They’re away now. Not sure what good they’ll do.” She looked at the countermeasures readouts. “We’re carrying plenty of them,” she said with grudging admiration. “We must have dropped about ten thousand just there.”
Duggan thought fast. He had to assume the Cadaveron had launched at least four waves of missiles at them and given their previous encounter with it, they might have a little over fifty seconds until impact. Maybe as much as a minute. The Crimson was now at the extremes of the planet’s atmosphere and the hull temperature had steadied. The Cadaveron was at least five thousand klicks higher and an uncertain distance behind. It showed no signs that it wanted to drop into a lower orbit. Whoever the Ghast captain was, he or she wasn’t stupid. All the heavy cruiser needed to do was to keep up the pursuit and launch missiles until the Crimson was eventually knocked out of the sky. Duggan checked his velocity. Incredibly, the Crimson had reached one hundred and five percent of the Detriment’s maximum gravity drive speed.
“We might outrun these bastards,” he said. “If we can live long enough.”
“There’ll be no deep fission engines for hours, sir. The core is working entirely on the gravity drive.”
“Understood, Lieutenant. Keep focus on the gravity drives for now.”
“Ghast missiles within range of some of our working sensors,” said McGlashan. “We’ve got four waves of twelve. Uncertain if there are others coming after. Impact with our drone cloud in eight seconds.”
“Are the Bulwarks getting enough information to target them?”
He got his answer soon enough. The deep vibration of the Crimson’s engines was suddenly accompanied by a low thrumming.
“The six we can bring to bear are firing on auto, sir.” She paused. “The drones have destroyed twenty-three of the incoming.”
“Release more.”
“Looks like we don’t need to,” McGlashan replied after a few seconds of staring at one of her screens.
“We’ve got them all?” asked Duggan in surprise.
“We’ve been on the Detriment too long, sir. The Crimson’s got near Hadron-class cannons. They’re old, but fast and they’ve destroyed the rest of the missiles.”
Duggan blinked. “The Crimson’s not that big,” he said. “We’re carrying eight supercruiser-sized Bulwarks?”
“I’m only telling you what I see, sir.”
“She’s right, Captain,” Breeze told him. “This ship is far denser than the Detriment.” He called up the schematics for an old Anderlecht cruiser. The Crimson didn’t have the schematics for anything newer in its databanks. “From memory, I’d say we’re easily the heaviest spacecraft per meter cubed that the Confederation navy has.”
“What the hell is going on here?” asked Duggan. “The Crimson’s ancient. The Corps engineers have been trying to improve engine density for decades. They’ve hardly moved on since the war started. A percent or two every year.”
“Yet here we are,” said Breeze lamely.
“They’ve launched more missiles,” said McGlashan. “I can’t see how many. Drones away.”
“We’re losing them,” said Duggan with a low whistle. The distance pings showed that the Crimson was creeping away from the Cadaveron. “We’ll be out of missile range in less than a minute.”
“More cat and mouse till the deep fissions are up.”
“Something I’ll happily accept,” Duggan replied.
A minute later, the second waves of Ghast missiles encountered the same fate as the third. More than half collided with the drone cloud, while the rema
inder were shot down by the Crimson’s Bulwark cannons. Duggan reflected that for the first time, the Cadaveron’s captain had slipped up by underestimating what he’d faced. Some of the Ghast heavy cruisers could launch more than a dozen waves of twelve missiles at a time. If Duggan had been piloting an Anderlecht cruiser, that’s how fast they’d have come. Maybe their factories are having problems keeping up with missile production, Duggan thought. It was some consolation, though he realised that a lucky Lambda hit from the Detriment had taken out the Cadaveron’s particle beam. Things might not have gone so well if the Crimson had taken a few hits from that.
“We’re out of missile range,” said McGlashan.
“We’re quicker than they are, even with this damage,” Duggan replied. He looked at Monsey. “Any news, soldier?” His internal alarm bells had begun to ring with increasing urgency. Somebody in the Corps had been keeping secrets when they’d sent him out here and he was desperate to find out what was going on. The Crimson’s data banks might just hold the information he wanted.
“I’ll let you know, sir,” she said, not even lifting her face to look over.
“The Ghast ship’s veered away on a new course, sir,” said Chainer.
It had been inevitable. Once it became clear that the Crimson was the faster vessel, the Cadaveron would be forced into plotting an AI-determined semi-random course that would have the greatest chance of intercepting them. Duggan had nothing to rely on but himself with the autopilot non-functional and he didn’t like the idea of trying to beat an AI at a task they were perfectly designed to excel at. He could buy them some time by heading directly out into space. On paper, it sounded like a good idea. In reality, as soon as the planet stopped becoming an impediment to the Cadaveron’s sensors, they’d be able to do a short-range lightspeed jump to bring them out near to the Crimson. It wasn’t something that would have been possible even ten or fifteen years ago, but the processing power available to a larger ship made this new tactic viable. Duggan had almost been caught out by it the first time it had been used against him.
Crimson Tempest (Survival Wars Book 1) Page 12
