The Ghast Oblivion was at an even lower altitude than the Vraxar battleship and Blake guessed it was hardly more than two kilometres above the Tucson base. At close to six thousand metres long, the Sciontrar was the smaller of the two spaceships, yet the Ghasts somehow managed to cram in more deadly technology than either the Space Corps or the Vraxar could manage. The Oblivion launched another salvo of missiles – Shatterers which moved with such speed they defied the human eye. This time, the explosions were fewer, though individually the blast spheres were monumental in size.
A new sound reached them. It began as a whine, which built rapidly into a shrieking howl. The air vibrated and Blake groaned with the pain in his head. He squinted at the Sciontrar and saw a blue glow near the front of the vessel.
“They’re warming up their Particle Disruptor,” he shouted.
“It’ll kill everything on this base!” Pointer yelled back.
“Quick – back to the lift!”
Before they could regain their feet, the howling stopped abruptly and the rumbling aftereffects of the missile blasts came once more to the fore. The Sciontrar accelerated towards the south. The Ghast spaceship weighed in excess of thirty billion tonnes, yet its speed rose with crushing inevitability and it raced towards the horizon.
The Vraxar battleship followed, flying sideways at first, before it began rotating in flight to aim its nose towards the disappearing Ghast vessel. The first of the sonic booms reached Blake and Pointer. A series of them followed, the sound like a hundred joined-up peals of thunder. The Sciontrar vanished from sight, with the Vraxar chasing after.
The Ghasts had one more gift to bestow. Eight rear Shatterer tubes fired at a distance of a thousand kilometres. It took the missiles only a single second to accelerate and reach their target. They crashed into the Vraxar dropship, their armour-piercing warheads ripping through its protective plating. The explosion was huge and it tore the dropship apart, hurling millions of tonnes of metal and carbonized bodies in every direction.
From the top of the Ulterior-2 Blake couldn’t see the blasts directly, but he knew exactly where the Shatterers had struck. The plumes of white fire went upwards for more than a thousand metres, carrying red-glowing pieces of the dropship’s hull high into the air.
The noise faded and the fires receded. The temperature reading inside his HUD showed two hundred degrees and continued to fall. With the immediate danger over, Blake stopped on the edge of the lift hatch, tempted to run to the other side of the Ulterior-2, so he could look down onto the shipyard and landing strip. The battleship was wide and it was a long sprint to get there.
The nearby speaker came to life.
“Sir? Are you there?” asked Cruz.
“Still here, Lieutenant. I assume you saw that.”
“Clear as day, sir. Wow.”
“That about sums it up,” he replied, not yet certain what the ramifications were of the Sciontrar’s arrival. One thing was certain – the appearance of the Ghast battleship was exactly what he’d been wishing for.
“We’d best get inside,” said Pointer.
Before Blake could respond, a shadow fell over the hull of the Ulterior-2. He jerked around, fearful of what he would find.
Ix-Gorghal was above, travelling at a height of five or six thousand metres in the direction of the Sciontrar. It was difficult to guess its altitude or its speed since it was so enormous it gave off none of the usual visual cues to make the judgement. Over the base it swept, on and on, until it blocked out much of the sky. The hundreds of underside turrets rotated constantly, following targets known only to the Vraxar crew.
“Don’t fire,” whispered Pointer.
Blake held his breath, willing the huge spaceship to keep going and leave the Tucson base alone. With a sense of infinite relief, he watched Ix-Gorghal continue on the same course. It felt as if it took an age for the vessel to pass overhead. It was travelling much faster than it appeared and soon, the rear section of it went by, leaving Blake and Pointer staring with unashamed awe.
Then, it was gone. In its wake, a strong wind swept across the Tucson base. It picked up the rain and flung it hard against the two figures crouched on top of the Ulterior-2.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Blake.
He activated the lift and it descended a short distance into the battleship’s plating. The two of them jumped onto it and Blake pressed the button to take them down. Within seconds, the shielding effects of the shaft blocked out the wind and much of the rain.
The lift descended, whilst above, the gale brought by Ix-Gorghal continued to howl.
Chapter Twenty
In years gone by, the Ghasts had been humanity’s mortal enemy. The two sides had spent decades fighting for reasons which were still debated amongst scholars of war. When the conflict was at its most terrible, entire planets of both humans and Ghasts had been destroyed, killing billions.
Here and now, Duggan knew he couldn’t want more fearsome or dedicated allies.
For a short period after Ix-Gorghal disappeared out of the Colossus tank’s sensor arc, the occupants of the cockpit shared something – the togetherness of those who’d found death, only to be hauled from the brink by the most unexpected of miracles.
“That was…” said Lieutenant Paz, tailing off to silence.
“Yeah,” said Roldan.
“Definitely.”
Duggan was the most experienced of all, yet even he was mesmerised by the appearance of the Sciontrar and the events which followed. He snapped out of it the quickest, shaking his head clear.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is our moment. If we live through it, we’ll raise a glass to Tarjos Nil-Tras and his crew. We haven’t earned the right to celebrate yet.”
“No, sir!” said McKinney, his voice crisp and his eyes clear. He had the look of a man born anew, who was going to grasp the opportunity with both hands and never forget what gave him this chance.
“Take us to the Ulterior-2, Lieutenant!” said Duggan with vigour. His body ached from age and the battering it had taken from the earlier engagement on the eastern road, but his voice was strong. “We don’t know how much time we have, so let’s treat every second as if it’s precious.”
Even the tank seemed somehow eager. The coarse vibration from its engines was muted and there was an underlying smoothness which had been lacking only minutes before. Duggan made his way to the front of the cockpit so he could better see the front sensor feed. He clapped McKinney on the shoulder in a show of camaraderie.
“Here we go, sir.”
McKinney slammed the control sticks to their furthest extent. The tank ignored the unimportant facts of inertia and accelerated hard, dragging thousands of tonnes of gravity crawler and Obsidiar ammunition behind.
Roldan aimed the rear sensor array at the wreckage of the dropship. The Ghasts hadn’t held back and there was nothing recognizable as a spaceship amongst the burning, glowing mound of melted alloy.
“I hope there was a million of those bastards still inside,” he said.
“The Ghasts did them a favour,” Paz replied.
As the tank moved out, Bannerman worked hard plotting the best course for them to take to their destination. The tank crew were blessed with a new energy, but they hadn’t lost sight of the overwhelming numbers of Vraxar they’d witnessed spilling out of the now-destroyed dropship and onto the Tucson base.
“The enemy exited the dropship here,” Bannerman said, poking at the map on one of his screens. “They fanned out here and here, with others into the OSF. We’re coming around the opposite side of the facility, between what’s left of these warehouses then out onto the landing strip. A few thousand metres after that we reach Trench One and the Ulterior-2.”
“We’ll be exposed, but this should minimise the amount,” said Roldan.
Duggan nodded. “Once we reach the shipyard there should be plenty of cover amongst the cranes and there was a big gravity crawler near to the Ulterior-2 when I visited yesterday.”
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Only yesterday, he thought. Or was it today? It feels like forever.
McKinney guided the tank away from the OSF and into another of the wide streets. This near to the shipyard, the roads were built to allow the transit of the largest crawlers and there was plenty of room for the tank to travel without hitting the adjacent buildings.
There were component warehouses on both sides, filled with everything required for spares and repairs. Gun barrels, launch tubes, engine blocks, life support modules and even spare landing gear were packed within these buildings. There was extensive damage, though the warehouses had got off more lightly than the occupied areas of the base.
“Here we go,” said McKinney, turning at the intersection. “Any second now we should be able to see what we’re dealing with.”
The street was cluttered with abandoned vehicles, including a seemingly undamaged light tank which was at an angle across the road.
“Don’t stop,” said Duggan.
The Colossus tank ploughed into the much smaller Grant Mk4, pushing it first to one side and then tipping it completely onto its side. Within the cockpit, the crew felt the impact but the Colossus didn’t slow.
“We should build more of these things, sir,” said Sergeant Li.
“This one is certainly coming through its live test with flying colours,” Duggan agreed.
“There we are,” said McKinney. “The landing strip.”
The tank was still within cover of the warehouses; however, the front sensor was already able to get a good viewing arc onto the landing strip ahead and beyond it, the shipyard.
The rows of spaceships which had been parked here only hours before were gone, destroyed by Ix-Gorghal a short time after its arrival from lightspeed. Now there were Vraxar foot soldiers and a few pieces of artillery.
“Most of them must have reached the shipyard,” said McKinney. “These look like stragglers.”
“The last ones off the dropship before the Ghasts took it apart,” said Roldan.
There was no delineation between the landing strip and the shipyard. One area simply ended and the other began. The tank’s sensors picked up the many work vehicles close to Trench One. The visible upper section of the Ulterior-2 dwarfed everything, making the heavy plant appear tiny and insignificant.
“The shipyard was busy when I set off the base alarm,” said Duggan. “Procedure is to abandon everything in place and get to safety.”
“Cranes, crawlers, bots, haulers,” said Li. “Plenty of everything.”
“Plenty of Vraxar too,” said Bannerman.
The enemy soldiers were visible in huge numbers. They moved in amongst the machinery like ants coming back to their nest. Duggan saw many artillery guns, most of them stationary and aimed at the Ulterior-2, as if they had any hope of even scratching the battleship, let alone putting a hole in its side.
“How do you plan to get inside, sir?” asked Li.
Duggan’s eyes found what they’d been hunting for. “There!” he said, pointing at an elongated cuboid with a squared back and something which vaguely resembled a nose. “Lifting shuttle.”
The lifting shuttle was more than two hundred metres in length and forty tall. If you weren’t paying attention, it could be easily mistaken for a fixed building. It was mostly gravity drive and designed to haul pretty much anything into the skies above a half-built spaceship hull and drop it into place.
“That thing?” asked Roldan doubtfully. “It looks kinda slow.”
“It is, but it’s solid engine and not much else. You’re going to help me get onboard.”
The shuttle was parked a short distance from the main clusters of plant and about five hundred metres from the Ulterior-2. Duggan saw McKinney’s eyes narrow as the soldier sized up the task before him.
“There are lots of Vraxar, sir.”
“Bring the tank in close and I’ll take it from there.”
“You’ll require an escort.”
“Of course.”
“What about us, sir?” asked Li. “How are we going to get this ammo to the Earth’s Fury?”
Duggan gave him a broad smile. “Sit tight in the tank and you’ll find out.”
Li caught on immediately. “I never did like heights.”
“You’re a lying shit, Sergeant,” laughed Roldan. “You’re not scared of anything.”
By the time the short conversation was over, the Colossus tank was a quarter of the way across the landing strip. McKinney altered course slightly, aiming for the lifting shuttle, while Roldan called through to the passenger bay and told the soldiers to prepare for deployment.
“Thirty-eight klicks per hour,” said McKinney. “Come on you beautiful, stubborn bastard!”
For a time, the tank’s approach went unseen by the enemy and the vehicle came ever closer to the shuttle. Inevitably, the good luck ended. A number of Vraxar near the Ulterior-2 noticed the approaching tank and a few of them took pot shots with their hand cannons. It was a waste of ammunition and the slugs plinked harmlessly off the tank’s thick plating. The enemy got a heavy repeater turned and it started up. A dozen glowing lines traced through the patches of light and darkness to betray the path of the bullets.
“Big gun,” said Li, identifying one of the larger artillery pieces a few hundred metres away. “There - near that gravity crane.”
“What are you waiting for?” asked McKinney.
Li wasn’t waiting for anything. He lined up the crosshairs on his targeting screen and fired. The Vraxar gun was struck with tremendous force and it flipped over several times before coming to rest on its side.
It was getting hotter. A second heavy repeater joined the first and was soon followed by a third. Within the cabin it was uncomfortably loud and Duggan lowered his visor to block out some of the sound. Two much larger projectiles clanged away from the tank’s nose in rapid succession and Duggan felt the bulkhead wall he was leaning against shake with the impacts.
“If you would like to pass on a suggestion to the design teams, sir, maybe you could ask them to work on the reload interval for the main gun,” said Li.
“I’ll be sure to pass the message on,” said Duggan drily.
At the front of the cockpit, McKinney said little. Each time a new target was identified, he altered their course to try and bring pieces of construction machinery between the artillery and the tank. It was only partially successful and each time he cut off the firing angle for one gun, it seemed as if another took its place.
“They definitely know we’re here,” said Roldan.
Li fired the main gun again. Against single targets, the weapon was tremendous. Faced with so many smaller enemies, it was of limited use. Even so, this second shot smashed into a heavy repeater and carried straight through into a second artillery unit directly behind. Both guns were destroyed, along with a dozen of their crew.
“Did you like that?” snarled Li, the first unrestrained expression of anger Duggan could remember seeing from the man.
“Here comes the shuttle,” said McKinney. “I’m going to try and drift us in sideways.”
“Get ready to jump,” said Roldan to the rest of the squad waiting near the exit hatch. “There’s a lifting shuttle, which Fleet Admiral Duggan hopes to inspect. Keep him safe guys and gals.”
McKinney made a final change of direction and aimed directly for the flank of the shuttle. The craft was nearly parallel to the Ulterior-2 and from this close, it cut off much of the incoming fire.
“You’re coming in fast, Lieutenant,” said Bannerman.
“I’ve got this.”
McKinney left it late. He pulled back on the left control stick and used the thumb switches to apply the brakes on one side. The tank shook and its rear came around until the vehicle was in a controlled sideways drift. Duggan had been out of action for too long and he gritted his teeth in anticipation of the collision. It didn’t come.
“Perfect,” said McKinney, wiping sweat from his brow.
If not exactly perf
ect, it was near as damnit.
“Squad, exit the vehicle!” shouted Roldan on the comms. “Move it, move it!”
Duggan picked up his rifle, beckoned to Lieutenant Paz and dashed into the passage outside. The rest of the soldiers were in the process of jumping through the exit hatch and Duggan went hot on their heels.
It was windy outside and there was no let-up in the rain. The artificial lighting had failed nearby and this area of the shipyard was gloomy like dusk on a winter’s day. Before him, Duggan saw the slab side of the lifting shuttle, hardly ten metres away. The squad of soldiers were already spread out defensively and they kept their gauss rifles ready in case there was enemy movement.
The door to the shuttle was thirty metres away, towards the craft’s blunt nose. Duggan spotted it and waved the squad in that direction.
“There’s the door,” he said.
It wasn’t the right time for caution and the group ran towards the shuttle entrance. It was a struggle for Duggan to keep up and he gratefully accepted Garcia’s assistance. Together, they got there and Duggan experienced relief when he saw the access panel ahead.
The tank’s main gun thundered and the vehicle rocked back.
“We’ve got to move,” said Whitlock, glancing behind. He spun and fired a series of shots from his rifle. The coils on the gun whined and he kept it up, round after round.
“Shit,” said Munoz, firing his own rifle.
Duggan crossed the last few paces to the access panel and slammed his palm against it. The red light turned green and the door slid open to reveal a flight of steep, narrow, brightly-lit steps leading into the depths of the shuttle. As the earlier dose of battlefield adrenaline and painkillers gradually wore off, the aching pains were becoming an impediment and Duggan groaned inwardly at the climb before him.
He went in first, forcing one weary leg in front of the other. The cockpit on these shuttles was near the top and it felt as if the climb was closer to three hundred metres rather than thirty.
“A little further, sir,” said Lieutenant Paz from directly behind.
Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Page 20
