Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2)

by Anthony James

  “Shouldn’t there be someone taking charge, sir?”

  “You’d think. It’s only been five minutes – I’m sure they’re working on a response.”

  “I’ll listen out for updates.”

  McKinney ended the connection and addressed those with him.

  “We can’t stand around here. Our first stop is the armoury – while we’re running for it, I’m going to see if I can prepare some sort of organised response until a senior officer steps in. There are three thousand ground troops onboard and as far as I can see, not one of them is doing anything useful.”

  With that, he oriented himself and started towards one of the exit corridors.

  “The closest armoury is on level 197,” said Corporal Li. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  McKinney paused mid-step. “The airlifts,” he said.

  “Maybe not working,” confirmed Li.

  “There might be some residual power. We’ll check it out before running up nearly seventy flights of steps.”

  The Juniper was big and although much of it was taken up by engines, hangars and monitoring arrays, the internal levels were widely-spaced within its hull. Seventy flights would be a hard run if the airlifts weren’t powered up.

  The squad reached a bank of airlifts after a hard run along one of the wide corridors. There was no housing in this part of the Juniper so there were few other personnel in evidence. Those they passed looked confused and alarmed. McKinney didn’t want to get bogged down speaking to everyone they met, so he ignored the questions shouted in his wake.

  There was a power light on the airlift. McKinney hammered on one of the buttons with the flat of his hand.

  “Come on,” he muttered.

  The airlift took longer than expected and he pressed the side of his head to the doors to allow the visor microphone to pick up any sound from the other side. The airlifts were silent in operation and even quieter when they weren’t functioning. It didn’t take long for McKinney to accept the inevitable and he kicked the door in frustration.

  “The steps are along here, Lieutenant,” said Webb. “It’s one of the main stairwells and should take us up as far as level 175.”

  McKinney waved them onwards and jogged after, doing his best to make sense of the jumbled noise on the Juniper’s internal comms. Contrary to his prior belief, promotion to the rank of lieutenant didn’t give him any greater level of access than he’d been granted as a sergeant. Everything in the Space Corps was placed into its own compartment, outside of which you weren’t permitted to wander. The fact of the matter was, ground troops were expected to stay within their unit and to mostly communicate within that same group of men and women. McKinney was able to speak to any of the warship captains currently on the Juniper, but he could only request a channel rather than forcing one open. As a consequence, he discovered he was side-lined and any attempts to discover specifics about the current situation were quickly rebuffed.

  Ahead, his squad were getting away from him, their feet pounding along the gradually-curving corridor.

  McKinney picked up the pace, doing his best to ignore the distant siren, the strobing reds of the alarm and the dull thud of his own feet on the alloy floor. Ahead, Corporal Bannerman was the first to reach the stairwell. The man broke left and vanished from sight, with the others following.

  “Keep moving,” McKinney urged.

  The squad didn’t need encouragement and it was a struggle to keep up with them. The steps were solid, like they were hacked from the insides of a huge block of metal. They climbed for twenty metres and then switched back on themselves. From experience McKinney knew they were hardly used, which was unusual given the high fitness demands the Space Corps placed on its personnel. There were a few people hurrying in both directions. He pushed past them, giving only the briefest of responses to those who spoke.

  After the first four or five flights, McKinney found himself slowing - his reserves of energy were already drained from two hard runs and a day of patrol duty. The loudness of his breathing prevented him from fully registering the first of the explosions.

  “Crap, what was that?” asked Li, stopping abruptly to listen.

  “Wait up!” shouted McKinney.

  There was another explosion and then another. The sounds were muted by the density of the Juniper’s walls.

  “Are they going to blow us to pieces?” asked Webb.

  “I don’t know,” said McKinney.

  He remained in place, listening intently. More explosions came, their direction impossible to pin down. Then, for a time, there was silence and McKinney directed the men to continue climbing. He wasn’t used to getting hunches, but he had a feeling something terrible was coming.

  “Can you hear that?” asked Garcia.

  “My suit’s registering a ten-klick wind,” said Bannerman in puzzlement. “Now it’s fifteen.”

  “That’s what the noise is,” said Garcia. “It sounds like wind blowing through a narrow space.”

  McKinney could hear it too, though he had no idea what was causing it. The movement speed of the air had increased to twenty kilometres per hour. It wasn’t sufficient to knock anyone over, though it was enough to push someone off balance if they weren’t careful.

  “Comms noise on levels 20 through 35 is dying off,” said Bannerman.

  “Same on 36 through 50,” said McKinney.

  “Levels 226 to 275 are showing reduced comms activity now, sir.”

  “Are they shutting the comms down?” asked McKinney.

  Bannerman was a comms man and knew his stuff. “No, sir, I don’t believe they’re shutting anything down. If you look at the list of receptors, you can see they’re still active.”

  “That can’t be right. If the receptors are open and there’s no one on the comms, that must mean they’re…?”

  “…dead,” said Bannerman. “Or unconscious. It’s the Vraxar, sir. I know which my money is on.”

  McKinney watched the Juniper’s sensor network as, section by section, the noise cut off. A couple of senior officers on the topmost levels attempted to assert some degree of control and there were sporadic requests for assistance elsewhere. It was too late.

  “My suit’s picking up something in the air,” said Causey.

  “Toxins,” said McKinney. “My suit doesn’t recognize them.”

  “Nope.”

  The voice of Corporal Evans intruded. “Sir? It’s all going to shit around here. Me and some of the guys got suited up and were coming towards the 197 armoury, then everyone just started dying.” There was a note of panic in the man’s voice.

  “Steady, Corporal. How many are you and what weapons have you got?”

  “There’s me and another ten. We’ve got a few gauss pistols and most of us have rifles. Nothing else.”

  “What have you seen? Are there any hostiles?”

  “No, sir, there’s nothing. Just lots and lots of dead people.”

  “Keep your visors down – they’re pumping some kind of toxin into the air circulation system. Get to the armoury on the double and if you find anyone else alive, bring them with you. The Juniper’s been attacked and we need to find out what the hell is going on and put a stop to it.”

  Even as he said the words, he realised how feeble they sounded. If they managed to meet up with Evans and his men, that would only make a total of eighteen. The Juniper was massive and it didn’t seem likely the Vraxar would be especially troubled by such a tiny amount of resistance.

  The quantity of the unknown toxin in the air increased, though the spacesuit’s computer was still unable to offer a suggestion as to what it might be. At the moment it was irrelevant – the substance was deadly and McKinney had no intention of exposing himself to it by lifting his visor.

  With his squad gathered around, he dropped to his haunches on one of the stairwell landings. The action he thought he craved had come to him and now he found it wasn’t worth the price. It was certain that thousands of the Juniper’s personnel
were dead. The Vraxar had come for something and once again McKinney found himself having to conjure up a way to stop them. Except this time there was no ES Lucid waiting in the hangar bay to shoot the alien bastards out of the skies.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FLEET ADMIRAL DUGGAN sat forward in his chair and stared intently at his desktop communicator. A connection was open to Captain Charlie Blake on the ES Blackbird.

  “The warning was too late,” said Fleet Admiral Duggan. “We’ve lost contact with the Juniper.”

  The response took a fraction of a second to come – a sign of the distances between New Earth and the Cheops-A solar system. “Is there anything available to mount an assault, sir?” asked Blake.

  “The Maximilian will be ready in two days. The technicians are running the final connections to its Obsidiar drive. It would take an additional eight days to reach the Juniper. After that, the ES Abyss will land and work will commence fitting an Obsidiar core to that one. Even with efficiency improvements, the shipyard estimates a further sixteen days. There are more warships lined up after the Abyss and we’ll fit them out, one at a time.”

  “Does that mean the Maximilian isn’t coming?”

  “That is yet to be decided. I won’t throw it at the Vraxar just for the sake of doing something. The Juniper is precious, but…”

  “We’re working on the assumption it’s already lost?”

  Blake talked fast and with the eagerness of the young. In spite of his efforts to be accommodating, Duggan found it irritating.

  “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking,” he snapped.

  His wife Lucy was in the room with him. She moved to stand behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. He felt the tension ease and he was able to speak calmly.

  “You’re not correct, Captain Blake – we have to assume the Juniper is going to be difficult to recover and that there may be extensive casualties. I will not give up on our men and women, but without further intelligence, we are not going to cast our battleships into those turbulent waters.”

  “Let me and my crew bring the ES Blackbird to Nesta-T3, sir. If there are any Vraxar remaining at Cheops-A we stand little chance of finding them.”

  Duggan heard the sound of a young female voice in the background, before Blake resumed speaking.

  “My comms lieutenant estimates that with an entire year of searching, there’s only a thirty percent chance of locating any Vraxar ships in orbit around a sun of this size, sir.”

  Duggan smiled, remembering the days when he, too, had valued the illusionary solidity of putting a number to everything - the chance of life or death, success or failure calculated to twenty decimal places by a computer and spat onto a screen to be digested like the protein paste from a Ghast replicator.

  “I want you to return to Nesta-T3,” he said. “Keep an eye on the situation and report in with anything you learn.”

  “Will do, sir. Any chance of you telling me what this weapon is? We might need it.”

  “I’ll let you know if the situation arises. Now get yourself into lightspeed.”

  Duggan ended the connection.

  “John, why won’t you tell him?” asked his wife when the communicator light winked out.

  He turned in his chair and looked into her face. The lines in her skin were fine, but her hair was as dark as ever and the glittering eyes had lost nothing of what first drew him to her. “He doesn’t need to know. We used one before and you know what the consequences might be.”

  “We used two,” she corrected him. “You’re not telling him because he keeps asking.”

  “An Obsidiar bomb…it’s a lot of responsibility.”

  “You don’t think he’s ready for it?”

  Duggan shook his head. “I’m not sure he has the maturity to make the right call.”

  “Maybe he’ll learn.”

  “I have hopes.”

  “What next?”

  “I’m waiting for an update from the Council. If they give me the go-ahead I’ll speak to the Ghasts. Subjos Kion-Tur offered the services of three Oblivions in exchange for twenty percent of our Obsidiar. That’s if the price hasn’t gone up.”

  His wife had never been one to miss an observation. “They may regret their generosity once they see what they’re up against.”

  At any other time, Duggan might have laughed. “The Ghasts have never feared war, have they? I’ve spoken to a few of them over the last week and there’s a definite shift. You know what? I think they want revenge on the Vraxar for what they did to the Estral.”

  “The Ghasts hated the Estral!”

  “In a funny way, I think they coveted them as their enemy. Or maybe I’m reading it wrong and time had started to heal the old wounds. Whatever the answer, I’m sure the Ghasts are looking for an excuse to get involved. The only sticking point is pride – they can’t offer their assistance freely since I’ve already turned down an offer of paid help.”

  “The Obsidiar will overcome that obstacle.”

  “It has to. I’d hoped the Vraxar would go away for a while. In my head I had plans – organisation, construction, preparation. I envisaged a fleet of warships. And this news of Obsidiar on the frontier worlds. I told myself if we could take the opportunity – grasp it and pay a fair price, we might just have a chance.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I can see the Vraxar are here to stay. They aren’t going to give us the time to prepare for their return. Why should they fight fair? This is something they’ve been doing for a lot longer than we have and it’s going to take every ounce of ingenuity to hold them off.”

  “Do you think we can do it?” she asked softly.

  The set of his jaw told of his determination. “If I allowed myself to give into doubt, I might as well tender my resignation to the Council.”

  “Have you come up with any new theories about how the Vraxar got here? Is there another new wormhole out there somewhere that we don’t know about?”

  “The numbers don’t add up, Lucy. There are other wormholes, the closest being five years high lightspeed from here. The Valpian’s databanks told us there were other wormholes in Estral space. The trouble is, the chance of them being linked is infinitesimally small. In other words, that isn’t how the Vraxar reached Confederation Space.”

  “And the analysts figured out that it’s ninety years high lightspeed between here and Estral territory?”

  “Give or take. So even if the Vraxar found out about us from stolen Estral data, they would have taken a lot longer than forty years to get here.”

  “Unless their warships are a lot faster than ours and equipped with something similar to an Obsidiar drive. As fast as the ES Blackbird, perhaps.”

  “That doesn’t work either. Those smaller warships which Captain Blake shot down in the ES Lucid – there was nothing about them which suggests they could travel so fast.”

  “They were equipped with energy shields.”

  “Which didn’t hold up to much punishment, suggesting they weren’t backed up by a lot of Obsidiar.”

  “Maybe they came in the hold of something else. You remember how the Estral mothership brought a fleet in its main bay.”

  “I remember.”

  “You’re determined that it’s something else, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I just don’t know what it is.”

  “There are people waiting to speak with you.”

  Seven lights flashed on Duggan’s desktop communicator, appearing with a suddenness that suggested a coordinated effort. Behind each light waited a high-priority caller of the type able to bypass his personal assistant Cerys in order to reach him directly.

  “The Council are holding an emergency meeting,” he said.

  “Do you think they’ve reached a decision already? It’s been less than two hours since you told them about the Juniper.”

  “That third flashing light is Councillor Stahl.”

  “I should go.”

  Duggan didn’t answer. He reac
hed out with a forefinger and stabbed at the communicator.

  “Councillor Stahl,” he said in greeting.

  Moments later, he was lost in conversation. His wife kissed him on top of his head and quietly left the room.

  LIEUTENANT ERIC MCKINNEY found the journey to the level 197 armoury a test of his mental strength. He and his squad were able to keep to one of the main stairwells for much of the route, but at level 175, this particular stairwell ended and they were required to travel through a series of passages and corridors in order to reach another stairwell that went as far up as level 200.

  “Shit, how many did they kill?” asked Huey Roldan.

  Level 175 was the first floor of one of the housing modules on the Juniper and there were bodies everywhere. The hundreds of corpses were stiff, as though rigor mortis had set in with exceptional speed, leaving the orbital’s men and women frozen in parodies of photographic poses. Alarms continued to sound, adding a sense of tragic urgency to a situation which had already reached its conclusion.

  “Looks like they didn’t even know the gas was coming,” said Webb, pointing at a long cabinet on the wall of one corridor. The cabinet was open and rows of civilian spacesuits dangled from a rack, along with a hundred over-face visors. None of the men were trained in chemical warfare and didn’t know if the Vraxar toxins killed when they were breathed in or if they simply needed to make contact with skin.

  “Poor bastards weren’t even trying to protect themselves.”

  “What happened to the fail safes?” asked Bannerman. “The Juniper is made up from thousands of compartments. A gas attack shouldn’t be able to kill everyone.”

  “We saw how much control the Vraxar had over the secure base on Tillos,” said McKinney. “See how all the doors are open? This is how they wage war and it seems as if they’re good at it.”

  “How many personnel were there on the Juniper, sir?”

  McKinney closed his eyes briefly. “More than ninety thousand.”

  “Damn.”

  They walked along a corridor of numbered rooms. Every door was open, revealing the horrific secrets within. McKinney looked into a few of the rooms and found each one decorated with the personal touches that the Space Corps eschewed. The occupants were dead on the floor – they’d been woken by the alarms but had been given no guidance on what to do, so here they’d fallen.