Harper pushed over to a control console, then looked across at Logan, saying, “Life support failure. Four days ago there was a major carbon dioxide spike. Enough to kill everyone on board.” Sighing, she said, “Systems have scrubbed it out now. Logan, they had time to fix it. Or at least get suits on. Why wouldn't they?”
“You’re the best one to answer that.” He pushed over to the engineering station and started working unfamiliar controls, smiling as a series of readouts began to flash up. “Looks like we can bring primary power online without too much trouble. This explains the wounded man in the airlock, as well. Independent systems, at least for as long as they lasted.”
“Got a name,” Harper said. “Lieutenant Curry, commanding. Last log entry. What there is of it, anyway. It's all garbled.”
Nodding, Logan pulled out his communicator again, and said, “Ryder, it looks safe enough over here. You can get the engineering team ready. We’re too late for the crew to get any help from the medics.” He paused, then continued, “I need an identification on a Lieutenant Curry, Martian Space Service. Dating from late in the war based on the uniform.”
“On it, sir.” After a couple of seconds, she said, “Watch Officer, Battlecruiser Hercules.”
Harper looked up from her work, and said, “Do you think Alamo might have found them?”
“Get those logs up and running, Kristen. Now.” He started to run through the internal cameras, trying to get a shot of engineering. His eyes widened as he saw the mess inside; torn relays and circuits, with new, clumsy equipment scattered loosely around. He could hardly recognize the drive units, except from history books; it looked like the earliest design models of the hendecaspace drive, back from the late 21st century.
“Good God!”, Harper said. “Logan, we’ve hit the mother-lode here. They’ve got a complete Cabal military database in their system, with the decryption codes attached. Terabytes of data!”
He drifted over towards her, eyes widened, and said, “It could take months, years to go over all of this data. The intelligence coup of the century.” He looked up, and said, “This could be the big game changer.”
Shaking her head, Harper replied, “Not what we need, though. Someone’s gone through all the logs and emptied them. The database was secured, and from the looks of it, they went to great lengths to keep it safe. I can see why.”
“So we still have a mystery, then. Can the data be reconstructed?”
“By the looks of it, hacking into this system wasn’t as much of a triumph as I had thought. The astrogation computer’s intact, though. We should be able to back-project its course to the point of origin.” Looking up with a smile, she said, “Want to take a look?”
The communicator chirped again, Ryder on the other end, “I’ve got a readout on the name, Captain. She was a flight officer on the Battlecruiser Hercules, disappeared with the ship.”
“I think she just answered you, Harper,” Logan said. “Yeah, I want to take a look.”
“Captain?” Ryder said.
“Get that team over here. I want every inch of this ship examined, and a full report ready as soon as Wyvern arrives. Then I want a list of all hendecaspace-capable ships that could leave the system in twenty-four hours – stall anyone who meets those requirements who is planning to leave.”
“Information to take back, sir?” she asked.
“No. We’re going hunting.”
Behind him, Harper screamed, and Logan turned to find her hovering by one of the other entrances to the bridge, the door sliding open. Behind it floated another body, wearing the same uniform as the rest but otherwise different, a brutish figure with a ridged forehead. Humanoid, but not human. As he grabbed the young hacker, turning her head away, he reached for his communicator with a trembling hand, using all of his nerves to prevent himself from screaming herself.
“Ryder,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “I'm going to turn on a video link. Brace yourself. You aren't going to believe this one.”
Chapter 2
Lieutenant-Captain Daniel Marshall had seen many things while commanding the Battlecruiser Alamo, but the image on the viewscreen was one of the closest approximations to hell that he had yet encountered. The planet the ship was speeding towards was shrouded in dark, green clouds, with occasional gaps revealing angry craters liberally spread across the surface, tumbling debris everywhere around them.
The viewscreen locked onto a point on the surface, zooming the view in as tight as possible, revealing crumbling ruins on the surface, miles of city turned into rubble and decay. He looked across at the ashen-faced Spinelli at the sensor station, who glanced up at him for a second before returning to his front-row view the devastation below.
“Radiation counts high on the surface. Lots of hard stuff, concentrated on what I presume were the cities. No signs of life on the planet anywhere, but plenty of evidence that there was some at one point, a pretty advanced civilization.”
“Hard to believe,” Lieutenant Caine said from the Tactical station. “A world devastated so thoroughly as this. It’d take a fleet larger than anything ever known to cause this.”
Marshall glanced up, and replied, “We could have done this to ourselves back on Earth quite handily, Deadeye. We came damn close in the Third World War. Without the Treaty of Kinshasa…,” he paused, then turned back to Spinelli. “What was the planet like before all this?”
“Probably uninhabitable, but with an atmosphere with a pressure comparable to Earth. Lots of nitrogen, bit on the cold side. Not a bad place for a colony – you could walk around on the surface with a respirator and a heavy coat, and you wouldn't need to do much to protect a settlement. There’s a runaway greenhouse effect in progress down there now, best guess caused by debris.” He shook his head, then said, “I’m seeing thousands of impact sites, Captain. Some of them large enough to be asteroid impacts.”
“Next question,” Zebrova, his Executive Officer, said from her position at the rear of the bridge. “When did all this happen?”
“Difficult to tell, ma’am,” Spinelli said. “I need more readings. On the order of a thousand years.” Taking a deep breath, he said, “We could send a team down there. Our suits would protect them from the radiation as long as they didn’t get too close to an impact area.”
“We know they were spacefarers,” Zebrova said, gesturing at the debris ring orbiting the planet. “So the question we need to answer is whether they did this to themselves, or whether they were attacked by someone.”
“After a thousand years, that might be difficult to tell,” Caine said.
“Suicide or murder,” Marshall replied, rubbing his chin. “If the latter, are the people who did this still out there?”
The duty officer, Sub-Lieutenant Steele, turned from her station and said, “Surely that’s not important now, sir? After all this time, they must be long gone, or we’d have encountered them already.”
“It isn’t impossible that we have,” Marshall said. “The Neander, remember. There’s a lot of unanswered questions still.”
Looking up from the communications station, Weitzman said, “I’ve tried sending messages to every planet in the system, and there’s been time enough to get replies. Nothing. There are a few automated beacons, probably long-duration satellites or probes, but no sign of any intelligence there.”
“It might be worth retrieving some of them anyway,” Caine said. “Their databanks might give us the information we’re looking for.”
“Good idea. Find the nearest, Spinelli. If there’s one in orbit.”
The sensor technician worked his controls for a moment, then replied, “I’ve found one in high orbit, Captain. Course on its way to the helm.”
“Right. Bradley, get us there.”
The recently commissioned officer nodded, started punching buttons, and replied, “Aye, Captain.”
Almo
st imperceptibly, Alamo began to pull away from the planet as her speed increased, rising into a higher orbit to hunt down the satellite. Marshall leaned forward, looking at the debris field, millions of objects hugging the planet, the remnants of a massive battle. It must have been worse at some point, shortly after the fighting, before some of them started to re-enter the atmosphere. In a few more centuries, the debris field would be gone.
He frowned, then said, “Any trace of surface installations, Spinelli, on any of the other planets?”
“No heat sources I can detect, Captain, though I suppose there’s a chance that they could be dug in deep, hiding from us.”
Caine shook her head, and said, “There’s no-one left here, sir.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Instinct. This is like walking into an old, deserted house, all the owners long since gone.”
“More like an ancient graveyard,” Weitzman said.
“That’s enough,” Zebrova snapped. “We’ve got a job to do, and I don’t trust instincts over sensor systems.” She turned to Marshall, and said, “Recommend we go to standby alert.”
Marshall pondered that for a second, then nodded, “Agreed. Caine, sound the alert.” The crew needed something to do, something to keep their minds off the shattered world below. Morale was high at the moment with Alamo on its way home, but it was brittle. The crew was tired, worn out, and that was a dangerous state for them to be in.
“Closing on target, sir,” Spinelli said. “Intercept in five minutes.”
“Have a salvage shuttle standing by. Get Lieutenant Nelyubov down there with a couple of the security technicians.”
“You don’t want to bring it aboard?”
Shaking his head, he replied, “No point desecrating this place any more than we have to.”
Spinelli looked down at his station, then snapped back up, “Energy spike, Captain. From immediately below us. Power levels building from half a dozen points in the satellite field below.”
“Pull us up, Bradley,” Marshall said. “Countermeasures on the move, take us to battle stations right now. Evasive maneuvers on random walk pattern.”
“Missiles launching!” Spinelli said. “We have nine missiles from five sources, coming around the arc of the planet. On direct intercept course, time to impact is one hundred and thirty-five seconds on my mark. Mark.”
Caine’s hand started to furiously move across her console, and she replied, “Can’t hack into the enemy missiles, deploying physical countermeasures.”
“Can’t?” Zebrova asked with a snarl.
“Totally alien programming language. Missile salvo in the tubes, ready to fire in ten seconds. Laser cannon charging, radiators deploying, ready to fire in ninety seconds.”
Marshall sat back in his chair, looking around the bridge as his crew frantically made their preparations, Bradley sending the ship dancing on its thrusters, playing the console like a virtuoso. A few weeks ago, she’d been a shuttle pilot; now she was marking time on her way to flight school as soon as they got home. His eyes widened at a few of the stunts she was pulling; Alamo wasn’t a shuttle or a fighter, but she was keeping at least within the spirit of the tolerance restrictions.
“Physical countermeasures are working!” Caine said, almost astonished.
“Must be pretty primitive,” Marshall replied.
“Still got six incoming, though,” warned Spinelli.
“My lucky number,” Caine said, tapping a control. Alamo rocked as six missiles raced forward from its tubes, propelled by the electromagnets with barely tolerable acceleration on their way to intercept their opposite numbers. Tracks flashed onto the tactical display, a tangled confusion that slowly began to resolve into a series of projected interception positions.
“Spinelli, I need to know where they came from,” she said, turning her head for a split second. “Second salvo getting into the tubes now. I want to take out the origin points.”
Zebrova was standing over the sensor station, looking down at the readings, and shook her head, “I’d advise staying clear instead, Captain. That’s a mess down there, and we only picked up the launchers when they fired. For all we know, there could be a hundred launch platforms hidden among the debris.”
“Agreed. Bradley, take us up nice and high, well clear of the field.”
“Aye, sir,” she replied, setting the ship onto a steady course as the threat of the missiles receded. Below, a series of point flashes heralded their destruction; they hadn’t even attempted the most basic forms of evasive action.
“Should I launch the shuttle, sir?” Steele asked. “We’re well within range.”
“That could easily cause another missile launch,” Zebrova replied. “A shuttlecraft wouldn’t have anything like the ability of Alamo to dodge them.”
Nodding, Marshall said, “Fire another missile on the track the shuttle would take. Maybe we can run down their inventory a little.”
Caine tapped a button, then said, “On the road, skipper.”
“Spinelli, keep watching out. I want to know if anything in that debris field so much as twitches.”
It didn’t take long for the missile to trigger a reaction. This time, only a pair of missiles raced up to intercept it; evidently something was producing a proportionate response, Marshall mused as he watched the doomed warhead on its final dive. Caine sent the missile into a series of course changes, trying to duplicate the abilities of a shuttle, and it managed to elude them for a surprisingly long time; Marshall felt a pang of disappointment when one if the pursuers finally made contact.
“That answers that question,” Zebrova said. “Too dangerous to take that satellite. We could try one of the others, though, out in deep space. Spinelli, find one and get the course plot down to astrogation…”
“No,” Marshall said. “If Deadeye couldn’t hack the missile, there’s not much likelihood that our hackers would have much luck with one of the satellites.”
“We’d have a lot more time…”
Caine interrupted, “Everything about that program had a different set of assumptions. It could take months before we even worked out where to begin.”
“Suggestions?” Marshall asked.
With a sigh, Zebrova said, “Steele is probably quite correct in that the ones who destroyed the system – assuming it wasn’t some sort of genocidal war – are long since gone. I hate to leave a mystery unsolved, but we should consider simply leaving the system, though I would still be interested in picking up one of the satellites for technological evaluation if nothing else.”
“What about getting a shuttle down to the surface?” Caine said.
“Through a missile swarm that might launch dozens of warheads at them?”
Shaking her head, she replied, “Once the shuttle entered the atmosphere, those warheads would be useless.”
“You are assuming that there are not similar planetary defenses.”
“We could test it with a missile first,” Spinelli said. “Or a probe. I’d like to get some more data from the planetary surface anyway.”
“Haven’t you seen enough, Mike?” Weitzman asked.
“More than enough, but I’m not going to get exact measurements without it.”
Marshall nodded, then said, “It sounds a bit ghoulish, but I suspect that some of the terraforming people will be interested in taking a look at anything we can gather, as well. I don’t think we can argue that they transformed their world.”
“An unmanned probe seems reasonable enough, but is there really a need for a landing team?” Zebrova asked. “We can stand-off at a safe distance, keep well clear of any missiles, and gather everything we need by remote, surely.”
“I’m less convinced,” Caine said. “I think the only way we’re going to get the answer to the questions we’re looking for is to actually go down there and take a look,
and that means putting boots on the ground. We should be able to come up with a way to get through the defenses; it seems to be a fairly primitive system.”
“That’s something else,” Steele said. “It can’t be an orbital defense network gone rogue, not one designed to fight battles between two powers in orbit, or it would have been depleted over the course of the war.”
Marshall replied, “Which means that someone set it up after the war, to keep others away. That strengthens the argument that this was done by someone else, and makes it more important to find out all we can about it.”
“That satellite network could be a thousand years old…,” Zebrova said.
“And it could have been established last week, for all we know,” Marshall interrupted. “There’s nothing to say that it was constructed when the planet was destroyed. I want a plan to get a team down to the surface by the end of the watch.”
“Volunteers?” Caine said.
“Yes, and not you. Or you, Bradley, I could see you twitching to take that shuttle ride. You’re supposed to be getting married in a fortnight, and that’s not something I want to miss. Ask the crew, Lieutenant,” he said to Zebrova. “Keep it tight, four people, at least two of them qualified pilots.”
“Aye, sir.”
Rising from his chair, he continued, “You have the bridge,” and made his way to his office in five quick steps, the door sliding shut behind him. He sat down behind his desk, looking at the datapads strewn across its surface, months of paperwork backlog to be resolved in the few weeks before Alamo finally made it home. Home. It had been so long that he had almost forgotten, but soon he’d be back under Admiralty command once again.
He picked up one of the pads, scrolling through the familiar text. His report. Tens of thousands of words documenting Alamo’s actions over the last year, since they had broken orbit at Mariner Station. The recovery, and subsequent loss of Hercules, the battles they had fought against the Cabal, and their desperate dash for safety, and his expedition into the heart of the Cabal to rescue his men – which had, as a side-effect, secured them a prisoner currently sitting in a hastily-secured guest cabin.
Battlecruiser Alamo: Ghost Ship Page 2
