Terminus Gate (Survival Wars Book 5)

by Anthony James

  “The shock drones have taken out sixty-three of the inbound,” said McGlashan.

  “There’s a spike on the core, Lieutenant,” said Duggan. “Is that part of the launch?”

  “No, sir. There shouldn’t be that much of an increase.”

  “Two hundred and thirty percent already.”

  “Launching at the wormhole in fifteen seconds,” said Breeze, his stare fixed on his screen. The timing was critical.

  “We’ve scored four hits on the enemy cruiser, sir,” said McGlashan. “It won’t put them out of action. The last of our shock drones are away, along with another sixty Lambdas. They’ve fired another salvo.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “The core is at three hundred and ninety-five percent,” said Chainer. “Oh shit.”

  “Rear Bulwarks firing.”

  “First missiles incoming.”

  “Launch sequence aborted! The core is shutting down!”

  “We’ve taken two missile strikes aft, sir!”

  Red alerts appeared across a dozen separate displays. The control bars juddered in Duggan’s hands as the spaceship rocked beneath the force of the high-yield missile impacts. The walls of the bridge creaked and the bulkhead display split down the middle, whilst smaller stress fractures appeared around the edges. A violent, rumbling vibration shook the crew.

  “We’re being crushed,” Duggan said, raising his voice to be heard.

  “Our structural integrity was reduced by those plasma strikes,” said McGlashan.

  “The gravity drive is failing.”

  “You have to pull up, sir!” said Chainer.

  “We have another hundred missiles coming after us!”

  For the first time in his life, Duggan understood what utter helplessness felt like. In moments, the Crimson would be crushed by the overwhelming gravity of the wormhole. The engines had plummeted to twenty percent and continued to fall. Behind, the wave of missiles raced towards them and there were no shock drones left.

  “The aft Bulwarks are in a state of catastrophic failure,” said McGlashan.

  At that point, Duggan heard Breeze speak, the words forced grimly from his mouth.

  “I’ve got this.”

  A wave of incredible nausea rolled through Duggan’s body, forcing him to curl up in his chair. His body felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds and the agony of it made him shout out with bestial anguish. The sensation lasted for only a few seconds and then, when he thought the worst of it was over, it returned, as bad as it had been before. He blacked out.

  He had no way of knowing how long he’d been unconscious, but he awoke to the blaring of the bridge siren. His joints ached and his broken forearm throbbed deep inside. Got to get moving, urged a voice in his mind.

  With a groan, he sat forward. The screens on his console were a mess of failure warnings, a mixture of minor, major and critical. The tactical display was still operational and it showed there were zero potential threats in the vicinity.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  He turned as best he could to see if his crew were still out cold. “Any of you awake?”

  “Just about,” said Chainer. “I wish I wasn’t.”

  “Commander McGlashan? Lieutenant Breeze?”

  McGlashan grunted something to reassure him she was alive. Breeze snored gratingly in his seat, his head tipped back and his mouth open.

  “What happened?” asked Chainer.

  “I think Bill managed to pull us out of the fire,” Duggan replied. “He got us to lightspeed somehow, before the core shut down.”

  “Are we home?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant - you tell me. I’ve got almost zero left on the gravity drives and just about everything else is offline or failing.”

  “Wherever we are, it isn’t home, sir.”

  “Damn.”

  Additional alerts came onto one of his screens, giving him warnings he couldn’t ignore.

  “I need to set us down, Frank. It has to be soon.”

  “We’re in a solar system with three planets. The middle one is the closest.”

  “I see it. I’m setting us on a course towards it. Someone get Lieutenant Breeze awake. I need to see where he’s taken us.”

  Breeze didn’t want to be woken, though he eventually came to with a snuffling intake of breath.

  “What?” he asked, his brain clearly uncertain what was going on.

  “I need you alert, Lieutenant. What happened and where are we?”

  “I don’t know where we are, sir,” he mumbled. “Everything was failing, so I punched in some coordinates and sent us into lightspeed before the core stopped working entirely. There was no way we could have managed a double-jump, else I’d have attempted to get us through the wormhole.”

  “You did well, Lieutenant,” said Duggan. “We’d have been crushed on the far side if you’d sent us into the Blackstar. You saved us all.”

  “And brought us to what?” Breeze asked, clutching his head and grimacing.

  Chainer’s mind was surprisingly sharp, given what had occurred. “I’ve located us!” he said. “We’re a short lightspeed distance from the wormhole. It appears as though Lieutenant Breeze’s randomly-selected destination was somewhere about eight months away from here, but we’ve suffered so much damage that we came back to local space after only a short time. Once the AI shut down, we got dumped here.”

  “That’ll be why it felt like I was put through the mill twice,” said Duggan. “Once on the way in and once on the way out.” He knew what that meant. “The life support is damaged,” he said.

  “Along with everything else.”

  “We need to get to this planet.”

  “Nistrun,” said Breeze.

  “Eh?” said Chainer.

  “That’s what it’s called,” Breeze replied with a weak smile. “Planet Nistrun.”

  “We’ll reach it in approximately twenty minutes,” said Chainer.

  “Will we be able to land?” asked Duggan. “The gravity engines aren’t looking good for it.”

  Breeze pulled himself together. “They’re failing at a reducing rate, but the eventual trend is for them to end at zero output.”

  “What can we do to maximise our chances? And will someone shut off that damned alarm?”

  “There’s little we can do but hope, sir. I could attempt to take the gravity engines offline in the hope it’ll reduce the rate at which the output is falling, but there’s no guarantee they’ll come back when I try to restart them.”

  The alarm stopped and its sudden absence made Duggan realise what a distraction it had been. “Keep the engines warm and I’ll try the landing.”

  “We’ve got a couple of nice craters towards the back of the ship,” said Breeze. “I’m glad our armour plating is thickest there. If we’d been hit somewhere else, I don’t think there’d be much left of the Crimson.”

  An image of Nistrun appeared on the bulkhead viewscreen, distorted by the cracks. They were approaching from the day side and the surface was hot from the scouring heat of the sun. It wouldn’t have been Duggan’s ideal destination, but the planet was no more or less hospitable than countless others in the universe.

  “I’m going to try a quarter orbit and put us down. If the life support isn’t able to sustain us, expect it to get bumpy.” He opened a channel to Lieutenant Ortiz. “If there’s anyone alive down there, tell them to remain seated and strapped in.”

  “Sir,” she responded with noticeably less enthusiasm than usual.

  The gravity drive output registered as hardly a flicker on the needle. The spaceship rumbled and shook as they approached, reminding Duggan of a trip he’d once taken on an ancient transport shuttle that had run into severe high-altitude turbulence on New Earth. The Crimson’s approach wasn’t a quick one, sparing the battered hull much of the heating effect of a rapid entry into a gaseous atmosphere. Even so, the alloy glowed and its temperature soared far quicker than he expected.

 
“Coming in too fast,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “We’ll impact with the surface in twenty seconds,” said Chainer, the use of the word impact not lost on Duggan.

  “We’ve got nothing left, Lieutenant.”

  The altimeter dropped like a stone, numbers blurring with the speed of their descent.

  “Landing gear down, we can make this,” said Duggan, as if the force of his will alone could make it happen.

  The Crimson smashed its way through the peaks of a high mountain range, sending countless tonnes of rubble into the valleys, or far away across the surface. The spaceship was so heavy its course remained unaltered by the collision and it streaked onwards, still falling in half-controlled flight. At the last moment, Duggan shut down everything on the spacecraft apart from the life support and one front sensor array, freeing up a fraction of the engines’ output.

  With a howl of displaced air and a screech of tortured metal, the Crimson hit the surface. One of the forward landing legs bent and snapped away, clattering beneath the still-moving spaceship and tearing a deep gouge through the underside plating. The life support struggled to keep the occupants alive against the thundering contact with the solid rock and the men and women onboard felt a renewed nausea.

  “Come on!” Duggan roared.

  The Crimson skipped up once and threatened to flip over entirely. Instead, it slowed and then it stopped, leaving a wide furrow through many kilometres of the surface behind.

  “Are we alive?” asked Chainer.

  “For the moment,” said Duggan. “I know we’re screwed, but you might as well give me a status report.”

  “Well, sir, we’re screwed,” said Breeze, attempting humour. “We have less than one percent of the gravity engines, the fission drive is offline and the Dreamer core is completely inaccessible.”

  “Can we repair it?”

  “I really don’t know, sir.”

  “We’re stuck here, then.”

  “For the time being.”

  Duggan closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against them. Things weren’t going to get better.

  “I think I detected something on the way in, sir,” said Chainer. “Right on the cusp of the horizon when we came down.”

  “Come on, Lieutenant, give me the bad news.”

  “I think the enemy have a base on this planet. I don’t have much information on it, since you shut off most of the sensors to get us safely down. I’ll be able to make some educated guesses once I’ve enhanced the recorded feed.”

  “It can’t get much worse than this,” said Duggan, expecting one of his crew to volunteer something which would prove him wrong. They did not.

  “We’re alive, sir,” said McGlashan. “That’s something.”

  “Marooned in hostile space with a heavily damaged warship, near to an enemy installation.” He shook his head bitterly. “With no way to get home.”

  “We’ve come through worse,” said Chainer, repeating the old mantra.

  “Only a couple of times,” said Breeze.

  Duggan forced a smile to his face that he didn’t feel inside. “And we’ll damn well get out of this one,” he said.

  He’d never been a liar, but he knew this was going to be the hardest promise to keep. The hopeful faces of his crew roused him to action and he got to his feet, determined he wouldn’t let them down.

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