“You’ve found something,” he stated.
“Yes, sir.” She brought up a chart on one of her screens and showed Blake the accompanying image.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t be certain, sir. This double-peak on the chart shows there are two objects near to Cheops-A.”
“Transfer the data to Lieutenant Quinn.”
“She already did, sir,” said Quinn. “That’s a good spot, Lieutenant.”
“You can shake hands afterwards,” said Blake. “What is it?”
There was uncertainty in Quinn’s voice. “There isn’t a hope in hell of giving you an accurate assessment, sir. We’re too far away.”
“It’s not a natural fluctuation, is it? Something fooling the sensors?”
“Absolutely not.”
“We’ll need to take a look. Are you sending everything on to the Juniper, Lieutenant Pointer?”
“Yes, sir. I’m updating them every few minutes.”
“These objects you found are too far away for the tactical system to register them as targets,” said Blake. “The navigational system won’t accept them either.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Pointer. “Whatever we’ve found, it’s too close to Cheops-A for the sensors to get a solid lock. There’s a lot of interference.”
“Let’s go and find them,” Blake replied.
With a surge of acceleration, the ES Blackbird reached its maximum gravity drive velocity of three thousand two hundred kilometres per second. Blake was sure no other vessel in the Space Corps could match it.
“It’ll be seven hours until intercept,” said Quinn.
Blake wasn’t happy. “That’s too long.”
“There’s a chance we might lose them as well, sir. The target objects are moving at speed and interference from Cheops-A is making it hard to keep track.”
“Are you telling me there’s a chance you might lose them?”
“Yes, sir. Or they might go to lightspeed.”
“The presence of these objects is significant enough,” said Blake. He rubbed his chin in thought. “It’s imperative we gather more information. How far away from the sun are they?”
“Sixty million klicks, give or take,” said Pointer.
“Hot enough to make us sweat, not enough to melt the hull,” said Hawkins.
“If we perform a short range lightspeed transit, will the stealth modules function amongst all the interference?” asked Blake.
The question was met with silence. He looked at Pointer and Hawkins and they averted their eyes. It wasn’t really their field.
“Lieutenant Quinn?”
Quinn shifted uncomfortably at the question. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Are you able to put together a halfway reliable guess?”
“We don’t need to land on their doorstep, do we?”
“If we come to within half a million klicks it’ll give us a better chance of getting a thorough scan.”
“We could try going to seventy million klicks from Cheops and see how the stealth modules hold up. I’d be confident at seventy million.”
“Whatever you decide, you need to make your mind up quickly, sir,” said Pointer. “They’re entering an area of heavier interference. It might be that I lose them entirely.”
Sometimes you gotta take risks.
“Fire us towards Cheops. Aim to arrive half a million klicks away from the target objects.”
Quinn didn’t question it further. “Yes, sir. Half a million klicks it is.”
The ES Blackbird’s immensely powerful cluster of processors didn’t take long to do the lightspeed calculations. They churned away for a few seconds and then hurled the spy ship towards Cheops-A. Blake did his best to prepare for the double transition. It made him feel like crap but this time he managed to put on the same outward show of indifference as Quinn and Hawkins. Pointer appeared to be adapting and she spared a second to look up from her console in order to grin defiantly when he glanced across.
“Where are those spaceships?” Blake asked. “And what’s the status on the stealth modules?”
“The stealth modules are active and they appear to be holding up,” said Quinn, not trying to disguise his relief.
“I’m having difficulty finding the targets,” said Pointer.
“Are we definitely in the right place?”
“Bang on target,” confirmed Quinn.
Blake chewed on his lower lip as Pointer did her thing. While he waited, he cast his eyes over the various status displays on his console. Sixty million kilometres was a good distance but given how much energy was pouring out of Cheops-A, it wasn’t as far as he’d have liked.
“We’ve got a few amber warnings,” he said. “Good job we’re shielded from solar radiation.”
“Heavily shielded,” said Hawkins.
“I’ve found them!”
“Something tells me I’m not going to like what you’re about to say.”
“No, you’re not. You’re really not going to like it.”
“Pass the details to my console.”
“Over to you and Lieutenant Quinn.”
“Holy crap,” said Quinn.
Blake remained silent for a moment, unsure what to say. “There’s no possibility of a misread?”
“No, sir. What you’re seeing is an accurate representation of what there is.”
It wasn’t two objects as they’d first thought. In fact, there were four vessels, moving in a close formation and following a trajectory that kept them sixty million kilometres above the surface of Cheops-A. Blake grabbed the control bars and swung the Blackbird on a course that would shadow them. The enemy warships were moving at two thousand klicks per second, so it was no effort to keep up.
“Forty thousand metres long,” he said.
“Forty-one thousand, sir.”
“Plus two Neutralisers and a battleship.”
Blake’s statement of what everyone could already see was met with dumbfounded silence.
“What the hell is it?” asked Hawkins.
“Damned if I know. Any signs we’ve been detected?”
“I doubt it, sir. They’ll suffer the same effects from the interference as we are. The difference is, we know there’s something to search for.”
“I’m reading a simultaneous surge across each of the four enemy vessels,” said Quinn. “They’re warming up fission engines.”
Blake swore.
Seconds later, the Vraxar were gone into high lightspeed, leaving the Cheops-A system far behind.
“Can you get a reading from that fission signature?” asked Blake at once. “It’s vital we discover where they’re going.”
“Our sensors captured plenty of information,” said Pointer.
“I’m holding the details in our data arrays,” said Quinn. “I’ll start off the predictive flight modelling process. It’s going to slow everything else down for a while.”
“Can you predict how long until you’ll have a result?”
“Not yet. As the analysis progresses I’ll have a greater chance of narrowing it down.”
“Keep me informed,” said Blake. “And get me Fleet Admiral Duggan. He needs to hear this directly.”
Several hours later, the ES Blackbird was still in the Cheops-A system, skimming far above the sun’s corona at the same altitude of sixty million kilometres. It was hot enough to trigger alarms, but not enough to melt the external plating of the spy craft. The intense radiation was causing sporadic movement on a few of the gauges which monitored a variety of critical systems.
The waiting was painful and Blake drummed his fingers until they ached. Duggan’s orders were for them to continue the hunt for Vraxar around the sun. In reality, there was so much area to search they were doing nothing more than killing time until the Blackbird’s sixteen processing cores could produce a meaningful guess as to where the Vraxar had gone.
“It’s been thirty hours,” said Blake. “My patience is running low.”
“I think it’s because there were four big ships in one go, sir,” Quinn replied. “Their jump into lightspeed produced vastly more energy than a single ship and there’s a lot more to analyse.” He paused. “I think it’s about finished.”
Blake was caught unawares by the suddenness. “What are the findings?”
“One moment,” said Quinn. “I’ve got a list of three possible destinations, ranked in order of likelihood.”
“Anywhere we know about?”
Quinn’s eyes widened and his face went pale. “Sir? The flight modelling software has placed the moon Nesta T-3 at the top of the list.”
“Get me a comms channel,” snapped Blake. “They’re going after the Juniper!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE JUNIPER NEVER REALLY SLEPT. Many of the orbital’s personnel had worked there for so long, they’d developed their own shift patterns. The Space Corps scheduling computers produced countless rotas and tallied up endless hours clocked. As long as targets and milestones were met, a degree of flexibility was permitted.
There were quieter periods, times during which eighty percent or more of the Juniper’s staff were either off duty or asleep. It was during one of these periods it happened.
Seventy thousand kilometres from the orbital, a fission cloud formed in the nothingness of space. The Juniper’s sensors detected the anomaly immediately. There were no additional Space Corps warships due here for another three days, so the orbital’s AI cores sent Priority 1 messages to dozens of different people across half a dozen locations both within the Juniper and on distant planets.
The Imposition class cruiser ES Impact Crater, stationed nearby, was halfway around the moon Nesta-T3. Its battle computer received a warning to go on full alert and the warship’s AI fired up the gravity drives before the human captain had the time to comprehend the urgency of the situation. The Impact Crater reached its peak velocity and flew across the cold surface of the moon at an altitude of only a few hundred kilometres.
Within the Juniper’s main command and control room, personnel scrambled to assess the risks. The woman in charge on this particular shift – Captain Marta Drake – found the decision taken out of her hands. The orbital’s immense array of Obsidiar processors had seen enough and they initiated the warm-up routines for the fission engines.
The Juniper’s lightspeed engines were kept running at tick over. Unfortunately, the huge orbital wasn’t a spaceship and it wasn’t designed to travel at the drop of a hat. Time and preparations were needed.
Twelve seconds after the incoming fission signature was detected, four Vraxar warships entered local space. In the three additional seconds before the Juniper’s vast Gallenium engines were shut down, Captain Drake was granted sight of what had come.
There was a Vraxar battleship. It was six thousand metres of black metal, shaped like an ungainly, elongated cuboid, with blocky outcroppings and thousands of slender pillar-like arrays of unknown purpose.
Along with the battleship there were two Vraxar Neutralisers. They looked similar to the file pictures of the old Estral ship Excoliar – at eighteen thousand metres in length, they had a trapezoidal central section with cylindrical beams jutting from two opposite faces. At the end of each beam was a sphere, crackling with a sickly green of barely-restrained energy.
The last vessel was something else entirely. It was more than forty thousand metres in length and bulky with it. This vessel’s shape was similar to that of the Vraxar battleship, except there were additional turrets dotted about its surface. Barrels protruded from these turrets, with enormous bores and an obvious threat that the weapons could punch a hole clean through anything smaller than a light cruiser.
The spaceship had colossal hangar doors, clearly visible beneath. These doors were already opening, revealing tantalising glimpses of a cargo bay that stretched for much of the vessel’s length. There was room inside to contain four or more Neutralisers. Or a single, larger object.
LIEUTENANT ERIC MCKINNEY was fighting boredom. After years of the same old patrols around the same old Tillos base, he’d finally had a taste of the action and now he wanted more. The Juniper orbital was technically impressive and given its size, there was plenty of interior space. Somehow it still felt confining.
“When will the Vraxar come back, Lieutenant?” asked Corporal Johnny Li. “I can see you want to shoot something.”
“Word is, they might take years to crack the encryption on that data array they stole on Tillos,” said Rank 1 Trooper Huey Roldan. “Imagine that, Lieutenant? Years.”
“A man could get old and die before it happens,” said Corporal Nitro Bannerman.
McKinney could tell when the baited hook was being dangled in front of him and he steadfastly ignored the temptation to bite. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the metal ceiling of the level 128 break out area. He did his best to imagine blue sky with clouds. It was no good. McKinney couldn’t put words to it, but the Juniper felt like a tightly closed metal coffin.
Unwilling to succumb to the tedium, McKinney had developed the twice daily habit of running a few laps around some of the more remote areas of the orbital. There were plenty of gyms and the troops had access to personal trainers. Somehow it didn’t appeal.
So, before and after every duty period, McKinney would put on a spacesuit and run six kilometres through the Juniper’s interior. It garnered him more than his fair share of curious looks and the occasional expression of outright hostility, usually from one of the more short-tempered scientists or researchers. He didn’t care and gradually some of his companions-in-arms from the Tillos base joined him in his routine. Tonight’s run had been more popular than usual.
“The next ten days are twelve-hour shifts,” said Li, too carefree to actually grumble about the vagaries of the schedule. He cast his eyes around the near-empty room. “Where is everyone?”
“It’s late,” said R1T Zack Chance. “They’ll be in bed.”
“Or drinking illicit liquor,” said Dexter Webb, with a faraway expression.
“It’s only us poor soldiers that aren’t allowed to get pissed, you know that don’t you?” asked R1T Martin Garcia. “Everyone else is trusted they won’t try to steal important hardware.”
“Like heavy cruisers.”
“Yeah. Lock ‘em up or lose ‘em,” said Darell Causey.
The destruction of the Tillos base hadn’t been too long back. McKinney and his men had been out hunting AWOLs, rumoured to have got themselves drunk by extracting alcohol from a malfunctioning replicator. They never did find out what happened to the missing soldiers, but the story that they’d been attempting to steal the Galactic class ES Lucid was already well through the process of entering folklore amongst some of the troops.
“I think I’m going to catch an airlift back to the barracks,” said McKinney, climbing from the meagre padding of the break out area chair.
At that moment, he heard the sound of an alarm somewhere within the depths of the orbital. High up on the nearest wall, a red light pulsed softly.
“What the hell?” asked Roldan.
“We need to check in and find out what’s happening,” said McKinney. “All of you – up!”
In moments, the other six men were on their feet and looking along the four exits from the room, in the hope they might find clues.
McKinney was rather more practical. He dropped his spacesuit visor into place and patched into one of the local comms nodes. There was plenty of noise, but as yet no indication what the matter was. He left his visor in place.
“Something’s wrong. Get your visors down – and connect to the Squad A comms group I’ve just created.”
“I think we’re about to lose power,” said Li with remarkable prescience.
“What makes you say…”
A few metres away, the row of free access public terminals went blank. A couple of seconds later, the lights went out, not only in the break out area, but in the adjoining corridors. The sensor in McKinn
ey’s visor adapted almost at once, projecting an image of green shapes and lines onto his HUD. Then, the lights flickered and returned, soon joined once again by the noise of the siren. The bank of consoles remained offline.
“It can’t be, can it?” asked Garcia. “We just got away from that shit.”
“Shhh!” McKinney urged. “Listen!”
“What for?” asked Webb. “I can’t hear anything.”
“The Juniper’s engines are gone,” said Roldan.
He was right – the ever-present, comforting vibration of the Juniper’s dual drives was missing. McKinney crouched down and pressed one of his palms to the bare floor. The material of the spacesuit was an excellent insulator, but it still allowed a muted sense of touch.
“They’ve found us,” he said.
McKinney checked through the lists of security personnel and found out who was in charge. He attempted to open a channel to Captain Marta Drake and wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t get through. There were another thirty soldiers of lieutenant rank on the Juniper and not one of them was available on the comms. McKinney swore. There were other senior personnel on the orbital, many of them in the science and research arm of the Space Corps. In addition, there were fifteen of captain rank aside from Captain Drake. Captain Gary Nagy appeared briefly online and McKinney requested a channel.
“Who is this?” asked Nagy.
“Lieutenant McKinney, sir.”
“Get the hell out of my channel, Lieutenant McKinney. I’ve got to speak to Admiral Murray.”
“Sir, the Vraxar have…”
It was too late – Nagy was gone. In truth, McKinney wasn’t sure exactly what he’d expected. He cursed himself. Already looking to others. Stop pissing about and do something.
A name he recognized came onto the comms network. In a flash, McKinney connected to it.
“Corporal Evans?”
“Sir? What’s going on?”
“Vraxar. Round up who you can. Get them suited, kitted and await orders. There’re seven of us on level 128 – we’re going to make for the armoury on 197. Bring who you can and meet us there.”
Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2) Page 7
