Imperium Knight Chaos Rising (The Hunter Imperium Book 6)

by Timothy Ellis

  He popped up a hollo screen we could both see, and pulled it out into a full three dee image.

  Claymore had lost most of her front end in a collision. Instead of having the normal nose put back on, Chris had argued the front airlock was now redundant due to the cargo bay being mainly used for accommodation, and cargo being able to be brought aboard via the flight deck. So he’d had the airlock removed completely, along with the fixed forward light battleship guns down the sides, and along the bottom of the flight deck.

  Instead, he’d added two circles of ten battleship guns each, duplicating the ones on the rear wings, with one above and one below the flight deck. They’d had to be pushed closer together than the original wing circles, but they’d still managed to get ten guns into each circle. The side fixed guns were replaced with capital ship missile launchers the same as the destroyers had in his fighter task force. The torpedo tubes remained the same, firing out of the middle of the lower circle. It gave him more fixed forward firepower than before, using the same space. The new guns needed more power generation and augmenting crystals, but the rest of the cargo bay provided most of the space needed, and actual cargo was slotted into underused areas off the sides of the flight deck.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I reached into the top of the model, and pulled it up so the top decks were showing interiors. Starting with the two levels of deck zero at the back, I pulled all the marine crap out on both sides, pulled out the deck itself, and ran a finger across the frigate docking area, effectively removing it.

  “What do you intend there m’dear?”

  “Hanger for an Excalibur four, Lightning, and captain’s gig.”

  He started making changes to the design, and within minutes he had a full width hanger, doors opening to the rear. It could contain more, but not a lot more. It wasn’t really high enough to fit a frigate in there, but a standard corvette might. Only we had very few standard corvettes left these days, so it was most unlikely.

  “You can add missile launchers front and back where there’s room.”

  “What sort?”

  “Mixture of everything. Group up say ten anti-fighter launchers for FF’s and IR’s on each side, so they can be launched faster in groups. Some rear capital ship launchers would be good too.”

  He kept on making changes. The rear of the ship front and back started to bristle. When he was done, I pulled the next few decks out. I left deck one more or less as it was. Bridge, ready room, conference room, ready mess, offices for officers.

  Deck two was also left more or less as it was as well. Being mainly accommodation, mess and rec facilities, it allowed for a crew of several dozen, and all having their own small suite. For what I wanted, this was more than I needed, but there wasn’t much point in ripping it out, with the exception of relocating in a double sized gym and a small armoury. The team would be needing a combat suit park after all, and if BA couldn’t train, I’d never hear the end of it.

  “Better add a dropship to the hanger. And that’s all I need with life support,” I told him.

  “Ah.”

  I continued down the ship, now ripping out large chunks of almost every deck. The marine and pilot barracks Chris had redesigned on Claymore came out in their entirety. So did the marine assault courses, running tracks, and gyms. Bob gave a grunt of surprise when I ripped out the entire flight deck, maintenance deck, and all the launch tubes. He should have seen that coming, but apparently not.

  I left the fabricator sections as they were, but replaced ship making ones with more missiles, although retaining the ones designed to make hull plates. Repair I needed. Fighters I didn’t.

  The last thing I did was rip the entire titan turret off the bottom.

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t see that coming. I thought you wanted a dreadnaught?”

  “I do, but I don’t want the turret. Instead, we do this.”

  This, was me ripping all of Chris’s changes off the front of the ship. Without the airlock, flight deck and guns, it was now a blank canvas, so to speak.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Four titan guns in the center of the nose.”

  “Two by two?”

  “You can do four by four if they’ll fit.”

  “Probably not.”

  They did, but didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. And besides, eight titan guns would leave the ship without any power if they all fired together. Maybe not, but I didn’t want the risk. Four was enough.

  “Around the titan guns, put a ring of however many full battleship guns you can squeeze in.”

  Turned out there was just enough room for twenty in a single circle, allowing the titan guns a bit more space in the middle so they were not clustered too tightly.

  “Ok, now put the capital ship missile launchers back where they were.” He did. “And now copy one of the rear battleship circles, and place it on the side hulls about half way down, wherever they’ll fit so all guns have a clear line of fire.”

  He gave me a look, but did what I asked. He looked at me with a speculative expression. I grinned at him, and flipped the ship over on her back.

  “Now, I want another five of those ten gun circles on the front of the underside hull, stepped back from the front in a triangle so they can all fire at once. The rest of the hull needs the usual cruiser and destroyer turrets, and as much point defense and the usual missile launchers as you can fit on.”

  He was gaping at me.

  “And how do you expect to power all that?”

  “Why do you think I ripped the guts out of the middle of the ship? All the space you need for power generation, shield emitters, and titan crystals. You can even remove decks if you need to.”

  “Titan crystals?”

  “I looked them up. The original ones were small compared with what Thorn gave them later. I don’t care how you do it, but I want as close to titan shielding as you can give me.”

  “It won’t be that close. But I must admit, you have freed up enough space for multiple crystals in addition to the normal generators. Let me play with it. What are you hoping to achieve?”

  “I want a true dreadnaught for a small crew, maybe even just for me and a mage, so add in a mage crystal setup as well like Chris did. I want to be able to take on the sort of multiple fleets we keep seeing on my own. With the front firepower and the point defense, I should be able to shred entire fighter wings, and then take on the battleships one by one without having to worry too much about losing shields as the rest of them shoot at me. In effect, I want a dreadnaught sized fighter, designed as a fighter, but capable of taking on anything.”

  He blinked at me for a few moments.

  “And you shall have it m’dear. Dare I ask what name you have in mind?”

  “Chaos, of course.”

  Eight

  “George.”

  A voice from very far away. My eyes opened, and I could see Sim in front of me. She seemed ok. The chair I had been sitting in, at least I assumed it was mine, was next to me, and completely mangled. The view past her was anything but ok.

  It seemed as though collision mode worked. I’d had eight suits on me. My normal suit as a uniform, and beneath it, socks, jocks, and t-shirt, plus gloves. With my cap making eight. All of them had gone to protection mode at the same time, resulting in what on tests had looked more like a football than a person. The theory being this much protection could keep you alive even if the ship was totally destroyed smashing into a planet or asteroid. I guess I’d proved it.

  The downside was the extra protection had ripped the restraints clear off the chair, and left me in football mode, able to be booted anywhere.

  I now had only three suit belts left, which had returned to underwear and ‘slinky red’. Unlike most of the ship crews, I still preferred the slinky look to the new uniform.

  In front of me was ship wreckage from the Trixone tree, with not much being recognizable as ship. A lot of it was burning, and flames were still spreadi
ng outwards.

  Standing proved to a challenge, but Sim held me up until I steadied myself. She nodded behind me.

  I turned, and just gawped.

  We’d been lucky, and come down just over the top of the mountain, instead of smashing into it. I was now in a meadow at the bottom of it, and I could see a swathe of destruction extending dozens of kilometers from almost at the top, and all the way down.

  The remains of the titan turret was sitting on a ridge line in the distance, apparently having been ripped off as we went over it. The rest of Scimitar seemed more or less intact, and right way up, although about the front third of the ship was missing, and part of it was now buried, so from where I was, the rear end of the ship reared up into the distance.

  There was tree ship wreckage scattered the entire distance to the top of the mountain, and fires were everywhere.

  “How did I…”

  I stopped, and looked at Sim. She nodded, and I shuddered involuntarily.

  “Fuck me!”

  Football may have been closer to the mark than I thought. In the distance, I could see the front windows of the bridge were missing. It looked like the final smash which buried the remains of the front end had snapped my seat right off, and hurled me through the window and clear over the remaining hull, landing in the midst of the tree debris which had made the distance. I’d either flown or bounced more than three hundred meters, given there were only about five hundred meters of ship left.

  The titan turret drew my gaze again. If the indigenous had no idea there was life on other planets, they had surely just received a serious wakeup call, because that turret was now visible for a long way on this side of the mountain. Even when the fires died, and most of the wreckage was claimed by natural growth, the turret was going to stick out like the proverbial dog’s balls. I mean, ‘you have been visited’ couldn’t possibly have been made more obvious.

  Which was when I realized I was actually breathing real air.

  What are the odds?

  A random jump puts you close to a sun, and another one puts you down on a habitable planet? Then again, I had no idea what that stupid mage had tried to do. Habitable planet nearby might have been his primary thought, after all. Which reminded me.

  “Any sign of Pangbornd?”

  “None. Both of us were thrown clear of the ship. And being inside protection mode suits, I didn’t see anything much at all during the process. I can’t see him anywhere around here, and if he was thrown like we were, he’d be here somewhere.”

  “Maybe he’s still on the bridge?”

  “We’d best check.”

  I looked for the best way up. And stopped. And sighed.

  “Ah, the good die young.”

  “Young? Scimitar wasn’t young. I am, but the ship wasn’t.”

  I’d forgotten. She went on.

  “Before being updated and renamed Scimitar, she was known as Junk Heap Two, by the pirates who managed to prevent her being scrapped, while the records said she was. The hull is well over a hundred and twenty years old.”

  “The good die old.”

  She giggled. All the same, I wasn’t happy she’d died like this. She deserved to go out in glorious combat. But then, I’d have gone out with her, and while there’s life, there’s hope. And maybe she was salvageable.

  Sim started walking, picking a path past debris and mounds of earth, and led me onto the top hull. The angle made walking a little tricky, but we made our way up to the bridge. The final twenty meters required our suits engaging magnetic mode, and we made our way to the shattered windows.

  The bridge was completely wrecked. There was no sign of Pangbornd.

  The same mess was in my ready room. And my quarters when we reached the deck down via the stairway, proved to be much the same. The more I saw, the more I doubted the ship was salvageable at all.

  We found my combat suit on deck zero, and other than a few nasty dents, it was fine. Sim had control of it already, and had simply been waiting for us to get there. It seemed their ability to communicate was limited without the ship systems boosting range.

  The armoury was of course trashed, but we loaded the combat suit up with two of the heavy anti-plant guns, and two spare of the lighter versions, of which both Sim and I holstered one each on our backs. We both also added a sword to our backs, as once we left the ship, I had no doubt eventually the guns would be useless. I still had my sidearm, but I added one of Jon’s favorite long guns to my left side holster. Both of them vanished as I engaged stealth mode for them.

  The bin holding extra suits took a while to find, but we both added six as armbands, and another six as leg bands.

  Next we raided the various kitchens on deck two, but there was little except snack and protein bars we could take with us. We filled a duffle with what we could, which would at least keep me alive for a while if food proved hard to find here. I had no illusions about any quick rescue happening.

  Another duffle was stuffed with water bottles, and both were slung off an arm of the combat suit. In the remains of the medical bay, we found enough medical supplies to cover most of what might befall me in the way of injury or poisons. Or so I hoped. A third duffle was added to the combat suit.

  When I got home I was going to have to get Jon to upgrade every ship with decent survival supplies. I understood why we’d never seemed to need them before, but things were changing. We were sending ships out alone, and even the big ones were not totally safe anymore. It was only a matter of time before an in orbit fight resulted in another ship crashing on the surface, and survival of the crew would be paramount.

  And as I’d just aptly demonstrated for everyone, once beyond our network of comsats, you could vanish without a trace. Which thinking brought me to our next task.

  We returned to the bridge, and exited through the windows where we’d come in. Further down the hull we found a way down to the ground, and followed the side of the hull up the slope until we found a launch tube we could enter through. The maintenance deck was in just as bad shape as everywhere else.

  There had only been the two smaller ships on board, and we found both of them where the open hull met the ground. The Lightning was almost unrecognizable.

  Gorilla was in better shape, but the left wing was missing, now lying beside the ship. Getting inside was a matter of clambering up over debris. Here we found much less chaos. Stuff had been thrown around a bit, but nothing was more than dented. The ship still had power, but no working shield emitters. It was also still fully loaded with ordnance, although none of the point defense turrets could move. I doubted most of the guns were operational anyway.

  The Gorilla AI was still online, and confirmed the amount of damage the ship had suffered. All of it was fixable, given some droids to do the work. So far, we hadn't found any. Not even the butler which had been on the bridge.

  Still, it did give me one option. I could live here for a reasonable time if I had to. And eventually, we should be able to get Gorilla flyable again. An older fighter flying Trixone infested systems would be something of a crap shoot, being severely under shielded by mark four standards, but it was another option down the track.

  Sim and the combat suit went looking for droids. On a higher deck, the original marine armoury had a company of combat droids, and there were supposed to be a few security droids as well. But they needed to find a way up there without functional access shafts.

  While they were gone, I checked out all of the remaining launch tubes. None of them were undamaged, and only a single one of them had any chance of allowing Gorilla to get out from the hull. But once again, we’d need droids to open the way. Which meant we needed builder and cargo droids. Not to mention repair droids. Gorilla had several repair types operational, and we set them working on ship systems.

  The first thing they found was the external coms points being damaged, and after some rough and ready repairs, Gorilla was able to contact Sim, and the search was widened to include all types of droids.
<
br />   With not much else I could do, I used the kitchen in Gorilla’s living area to prepare some food from the stores I always left on board for a rainy day, and began thinking about the best course of action from here. The best was to stay put, and hope for rescue. But I had a sinking feeling the more time I spent here, the more unsafe it was going to become.

  I had no idea if any of the Trixone had survived the crash. And there was a whole fleet of them in orbit. While they’d seemed to be bombarding the planet, it was pretty safe to presume they were either on the planet in force already, or were planning to be. And once they started landing, some of them would be coming here.

  Which started me on another train of thought. How much of our unique tech had survived, and could I allow it to fall into Trixone hands. Or local hands for that matter. And not knowing how long I had made the urgency factor go up rapidly.

  I started making notes while I waited for Sim to return.

  Nine

  Much to my surprise, the crash site remained unvisited by either plants or locals, and when Sim returned, she brought four platoons of combat droids, all armed, and all suited, so they could emulate either a person, or the locals, once we knew what they looked like.

  They brought with them several damaged builder droids, a half dozen repair droids, and a mixed lot of various sized cargo droids. The repair droids began with repairs to the other droids.

  The fully functional combat droids were sent out to retrieve or destroy the stock of comnavsats we had on board, and to retrieve all of the new style guns and any belt suits in either marine armoury. I suggested to Sim we needed to destroy Scimitar’s guns as well, especially the buffers and recent developments, but she thought the plants wouldn’t be interested in them anyway, as in spite of firing faster, they were still not up to their hitting power. And what I didn’t know, and Sim did, was the new tech wasn’t compatible with Trixone guns. We’d taken the best they had to offer, but the tech advances as a result were made to our tech, not theirs.

  All the same, I wasn’t happy with leaving them. But we had no hope of getting to the titan turret before either locals or Trixone could, and it seemed pointless to disarm Scimitar totally, when it was still possible we could power up from Gorilla as we’d planned before the crash.