The Aston Martin's automatic systems were not designed to cope with extensive structural damage caused by an energy weapon. But the expensive sports car's safety features were sophisticated. As the car's body started to disintegrate the safety features acted instantly. The inertial compensator was switched to maximum and the car reduced speed dramatically - going from Mach 7 to under 200 miles per hour in a few seconds. At the same time, the car dove towards the denser air nearer the ground.
Grid Fannchinn almost crashed into the Aston Martin’s rear section. He swore aloud and jerked his joystick to the left, narrowly avoiding a small chunk of the Aston Martin's body that had fallen away as debris. His two wing men followed suit. Both of them did not even see the Aston Martin as they whizzed past it.
“Damn, it can change direction faster than anything I've ever seen. I hit it - twice - and its damaged. Close formation. I'm circling round to finish it off.”
The three fighters circled round, but the Aston had dropped below 5000 metres - lower than the altitude limit set by Imperial Defence. By the time Grid had turned his fighter around the Aston was less than 4000 metres from the ground and falling towards what looked like the ruins of an ancient city.
The city was massive. It stretched further than Grid could see. The fact that there was a city surprised him - but the size of it amazed him.
“Sir, are you seeing this?” one of the wing men said, “Its a city. And look at the size of it. It's got to be over fifty miles. How can that be?”
“Maybe we just found out why Crantarr is a forbidden planet,” the other wingman said, incriminatingly. “There's supposed to be nothing here. This is a dead world. Nothing ever lived here.”
“Well, it looks like that might have been... incorrect,” he hesitated and chose his words carefully. The Imperial Defence was listening. “This city's dead, if that satisfies you,” Fanchinn observed, “Okay, let's focus. has anyone got the target on their scopes? Don't forget we're out here to do a job.”
“I see it. Five miles behind us. Its dropping towards the city. I'm reading debris and smoke. Its damaged. How it managed to change direction so quickly is beyond me. It’s definitely not ours - or a Relathon design There's nothing we know of that can change direction so quickly, sir”
“Nothing we know of, yes,” Fannchinn said. He thought of the Justice Six and Jann Linn mountain on Relathon. There had been an incident at the mountain. Details were vague. A disaster of some kind. Justice Six had been sent to retrieve the ageing scientist. He wondered if the strange unidentified object was one of Jann Linn's designs.
“Imperial Defence from Homeguard One. We have shot down the alien craft. The wreckage is falling towards a... towards what appears to be an ancient city's ruin.
There was silence. The damaged Aston Martin continued to fall towards the dead city, more pieces of it falling away. Grid Fannchinn kept his cannon locked onto the main debris cluster and considered firing again. He hesitated, expecting orders from Imperial Defence that did not come.
The Aston Martin disappeared from his sensor display. It had crashed into the city below. On Grid's targeting screen a bright green circle faded to a green square which danced around the magnified and enhanced ground view. The grey square disappeared after a few seconds. The targeting system had given up trying to find the original target.
Grid stared at the targeting computer's screen. He brushed his gloved hand against it and the display sharpened. He searched himself for signs of the crashed ship, but there was nothing to see.
Fannchinn realised that he had not heard a reply from the Enrilean capital city. He licked his lips and prepared to speak again, but then the voice from headquarters sounded again. The voice was different and eerily unfamiliar, but the channel and identification were correct.
“Homeguard one, this is Imperial Defence. You are ordered to abort the attack immediately. I repeat, abort the attack and proceed to sector one delta. Hold there for further instructions.”
“Imperial Defence, the target was shot down in Crantarr map reference M239B33. I am preparing to inspect the crash site and check for survivors. Do you want me to proceed?”
“Negative. Your orders are to proceed to sector one delta and rendezvous with the warship Justice Six.”
“Understood,” Grid replied, “Wing team, you're with me.”
“I've got nothing on my scope,” one of the wingmen protested, “For all we know they're hiding down there.”
“I doubt that,” Fannchinn grunted, “I watched it blown practically in half. I doubt anything survived. Anyway, we have our orders.”
“Affirmative, sir. We're with you.”
“Good. Accelerate to escape velocity and follow me to sector one delta. We're meeting up with the Justice.”
“Affirmative, we're with you sir.”
The three dart fighters closed formation, forming a tight V with Grid Fannchinn's bright scarlet fighter at the lead. Their blast drives exploded with power as the reactive engines annihilated more of the exotic material that provided their power source. The acceleration, even with the gravitonic shield generators on an automatic maximum, pushed each pilot deep into his seat.
The sound produced by the Enrilean blast drives would have deafened anyone within a mile radius and shattered windows within ten miles. In a few seconds they had gone - headed upwards into the upper atmosphere and back into space.
2195AD - USS Neil Armstrong.
“My God. I don't believe it. I can't believe it. This is real? It’s not a training exercise?”
“It’s definitely not an exercise. For all intents and purposes we're at war.”
The captain looked at himself in the mirror briefly. He pulled his uniform tight over his shoulders and turned round again.
“What intelligence do we have? What do we know about them?”
The captain turned smartly and touched the sensor next to the door of his quarters. It slid open to his left with a swift hissing motion, braking imperceptibly before receding into the wall panel. He stepped through and headed for the USS Neil Armstrong's command and control centre.
“English speaking, somehow,” Lieutenant Commander John Cutter said, shaking his head slightly, “Nobody knows how or why, but they're analysing hundreds of recorded radio signals and most of them are in English.”
“How can that be possible?”
“We haven't got intel on that. But we do know that the USS Drake has been lost with all hands. There was an encounter with a powerful alien spacecraft.”
They'd reached the control centre's main door. Cutter stepped ahead of the captain and tapped in his four digit code. The door slid open in the same way as the door to the captain's quarters. The two men stepped inside.
The control room was larger than the USS Drake's. The USS Neil Armstrong was a much larger ship - a flying fortress in space. Armstrong was the last of four large and heavily armed destroyers built as man was beginning to explore the then newly discovered wormholes in space. But Armstrong was an antiquated relic of an age forgotten by most. The ship's very existence was evidence that not everyone on Earth had given up on finding life elsewhere in the Universe.
“What's happening Clayton,” the captain put his hand on his old friend's shoulder, pouring over the holographic console the tactical officer had manned for two decades. “What are we dealing with?”
“CINCSPAC report that the contact with the cruise ship Spirit of the Future was lost after the captain ordered a detour through the Joan Gallsin wormhole. The USS Drake arrived on scene and was attacked and destroyed before they could begin a rescue effort.”
“The aliens speak English?”
“That's right, Liam. They speak English and a couple of other languages that command are trying to identify. They're in the Jailbar cluster, four gates from Joan Gallsin and tucked in between the curling Gettison nebula and the King George pulsar. There are seven planets in the system and two of them have advanced alien life. The third planet is unpopulated,
but contains a breathable atmosphere.”
“How can they be speaking English?” Liam O’Rourke, his tall frame slightly hunched as he examined the data on screen before him, “It’s impossible.”
“Highly improbable,” Cutter said. Then he screwed up is face and shrugged back towards the captain’s cold, hard stare, “Yep, pretty fucking impossible.”
“Exactly,” The captain gruffed.
EIGHTEEN
2195AD - Aston Martin DBS.
There wasn't much left of the Aston Martin. It was falling in one large chunk of smoking debris towards the cold, hard mountains below. Sloane could barely breathe. Each gasp he took was stolen from the car's cockpit as the emergency systems struggled to keep a fragile shield of energy around the missing roof panels and passenger door. Jack Sloane was still holding onto the Enrilean sidearm. He didn't know what had happened to the carbine. He looked around the car for it, but it was gone. sucked into the airless purple blue haze of the alien world's ionosphere. But he still had the four barrelled revolver and he held it clenched very tightly in his hand.
The emergency energy bubble seemed to have destabilised completely. It flickered on and off like an energy-brolly in a storm. Sloane held his breath. His body was tingling as the atmosphere around him started to thin out. He felt like his eyes were going to be pulled out of their sockets, so he closed them tight. The Aston Martin had started to spin and the scenery outside - clouds, mountains, sky, mountains - started to blur. Sloane had no sensation of momentum. The Aston Martin's inertial compensator might have been lost with the rest of the back third of the car, but the emergency systems were keeping him from behind torn apart by the incredible forces generated by the car's uncontrolled descent through the atmosphere.
But it wasn't entirely uncontrolled. Sophisticated emergency systems in the state of the art automobile were working furiously to protect the car's occupant. Energy field emitters constantly built and rebuilt a protective energy bubble around the car's passenger compartment. Reserve inertial compensators were absorbing and inverting the gravitational and centrifugal forces that were pulling the car apart. So far the Aston's velocity had dropped from thirty six thousand miles per hour to a mere five hundred miles an hour. The ground was getting closer, but the Aston Martin's emergency systems were going to ensure that Sloane survived the landing - even if the car was a wreck.
Sloane couldn't hold his breath anymore and gasped harshly. He hadn't realised that the car had plummeted to a height where the Crantarrian atmosphere was dense enough to breathe. In the next half second he realised that the atmospheric gasses were not poisonous to him. He felt his hair blowing around his face. He opened his eyes. The Aston was still spinning, but not so fast. The vertical spin seemed to have stopped, almost, and the car was dropping belly first now and spinning round on its horizontal axis. It wobbled slightly, pitching backwards and forwards as the emergency systems worked.
The landing on the mountainside was hard. Sloane had realised that the Aston Martin was not going to impact like a meteor - leaving a massive crater - but he had steeled himself for a painful landing. He was right to have been prepared.
The Aston's emergency systems worked beautifully right up until the last tenth of a second before the crash happened. Hidden sensors that had tracked the car's proximity to the ground had been grazed by debris that had torn through the car. Their calibration slightly off, the sensors had predicted the car's impact just after it actually happened.
The mountain was lifeless. No land animals had lived on Crantarr for over twenty nine thousand years. So the spectacular destruction of the shining Aston Martin was witnessed by nobody. The car hit the rocks at two hundred miles an hour, travelling almost fully vertically downwards. The front section of the sports coupe broke off and shattered into small fragments. Jim Quinn's golf clubs, which he'd stored in the bonnet on the day he'd bought the car, twisted and broke into deadly metal poles, hammers and wedges which exploded outwards and away from the Aston. Sloane was still in the driver's seat when he was ejected upwards. The back and base of his seat were falling apart as a new crash bubble formed around the seat, cocooning Sloane from the impact. The bubble had enough power for only a fraction of a second, but it saved Sloane's life.
He fell away from the seat as the bubble burst. He was still travelling at about thirty miles an hour as he tumbled over the rough ground. He couldn't feel any pain, though he was conscious of his left elbow and shoulder bashing against something hard. His momentum tumbled him a full fifty metres from the Aston Martin's crash site.
He'd closed his eyes again instinctively. He opened them again and looked to his right hand. The handgun was no longer in his hand though he could not remember letting it go. His hand was covered in orange - red powdery dust.
2195AD - SS Glasgow.
“These little ships - these dots - are going to be on us in a matter of minutes,” Frank Brooks said. “They've accelerated to point nine two C. There's nothing we can do. We can't get away.”
Vinn Apple looked at the main screen.
“We have to assume they're hostile,” he said, “It would be insane to even hope otherwise.”
“We're travelling at point six C. The nearest wormhole entry points are about twenty six minutes away. The first wave of those little ships will be on us in less than twenty minutes.”
“Six minutes of horrible, horrible, unthinkable death. That’s right.”
Everyone looked at Barrett. He looked away, embarrassed.
“You're probably right, professor,” the captain said, “Six minutes too many. We have to have a second option.”
There was a groan. The first sign of protest from the ship's secondary hull. It came from the right. Apple turned to look in the direction of the sound. His mouth fell open as he saw the large welded plasteel panels flexing and vibrating like they were about to come away from the hull.
“Frank, are we about to fall apart?” he asked.
“I don't think so,” Frank Brooks touched the palm of his hand against the panel and pressed hard. The panel moved again. “The ship's stretching out. We're going so fast that the Fairbairn principle is taking effect. The front of the ship is moving slightly faster than the rear of the ship, crazy as that sounds. I think we're talking a matter of a few millimetres over the fifty metre length of the ship. Enough to make her moan, but not enough to make her break apart,” he pushed away from the panel and went back to his control panel, “We're about eight minutes away from the big orange planet, but most interesting of all is the large asteroid cluster that's lying directly in our path. It covers an area of space about twice the size of our moon. The rocks vary in size. Some are in the region of about fifty metres and I've got a half dozen that are at least thousand miles across. It looks like we can lose ourselves in there.”
“That's what we've got to do then,” Apple nodded, “We'll get in deep and close to one of the big ones. Maybe we'll even find something we can hide inside.”
The SS Glasgow veered two degrees to starboard. Brooks cut the main thruster and the ship finally stopped accelerating. The ageing Alcatraz class vessel's altered momentum engines were first generation. They wouldn't give the big ship the same kind of manoeuvrability that the Aston Martin's fifth generation engine could. Even if the engine could change direction as radically as the Aston Martin, the inertial compensators could not handle the massive forces. The crew and most of the internal mechanics of the ship would be torn apart.
“We'll reach the outer edge in five minutes,” Brooks said, “We'll have to slow down or I won't be able to guarantee that we won't smash into something, but I think we'll still have a good two minutes on our pursuers.”
“Okay. Get us in there,” Apple nodded, “Do your best, Frank. It’s always been good enough.”
Jonas Jackson was standing in the doorway. He'd been there for a few seconds and was staring with bloodshot eyes at the back of Brooks' head. Vazquez staggered past him, almost stumbling as she came into
the room. She stopped and turned to look at the young man. He looked at her blankly and gave a weak, reserved smile.
“Thanks for saving my life,” her eyes twinkled slightly as she gave Jonas her cute, lopsided smile, “You're my hero, kid.”
“I..,” Jonas wiped cold sweat from his high forehead, “Thanks, I guess,” he said.
“Welcome back, beautiful,” Apple remarked, “Do you think you can help out? How about you, kid? Think you can try to send a message back home? Maybe we can get some help out here. Maybe it’s already on its way.”
“Sure,” Michelle said, “I can punch a console button easy enough. Just got a little winded.”
“Me too,” Jackson said, quieter, “I'll see what I can do.”
NINETEEN
2195AD - Jann Linn Mountain.
“This tin can mannequin reminds me of a project a bunch of us did in primary school,” Quinn was saying, as if in a dream “There were eight of us involved. No, that’s wrong. Four of us to be more accurate. Yes, I remember now. I was in primary six – really, really clever idea by the teacher. Mr…” there was a long pause. Quinn drew a slow breath, “Mrs Anglesey. I think that was her name, at least. It was something Welsh, anyhow. Long time ago now. I was in primary six at the time. You know, I really don’t think she cared for my mother all that much.”
Silverman’s mouth was dry. He was thirsty now to the point of distraction. He felt increasingly edgy. It was cold on the mountainside. The wind was getting up. Quinn was rambling and seemed to make less sense the more he spoke. Silverman reached towards the strange metal figure and touched it with his fingertips.
“A robot?” Silverman picked up one of the dead, limp arms and flakes of burned plastic fell away in his fingers, “You built a robot as a project in school?”
“Dear me,” Quinn said, “That was a long time ago, mind you. You wouldn’t know where I left my medicine now, would you?”
Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1) Page 30
