Chains of Duty

by Anthony James

  “Not a chance, sir. We’re hardly tickling our available capacity. We could gather at ten times our current rate without concern. When we get closer we’ll see if the comms can send it off quickly enough.”

  A number of circles appeared on Duggan’s tactical display. He didn’t know what colour the Ghasts used for friendlies, but the Space Corps equipment showed the inbound ships as green circles. The largest dot moved faster than the others – an Oblivion battleship had been sent to investigate. Other ships appeared on his screen, some coming from the dark side of Vempor. Duggan counted them at fifteen in total.

  “How many orbits will you need, Lieutenant?”

  “As many as you can give me, sir. The more time I have to look, the surer we can be.”

  Duggan checked how far away they were from the planet. They were approaching a distance of twenty thousand kilometres and he adjusted their approach to ensure they’d come into orbit heading in a direction which would allow the first circuit to cover as many of the populated areas as possible. The Oblivion had almost reached them and it, too, changed course in order to follow the Ransor-D at a few hundred kilometres away.

  “Think they’ll fire at us?” asked Breeze.

  “Definitely,” said Duggan. “Keep your fingers crossed we can find what we need before they think it’s necessary.”

  “Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve got,” said Chainer. The bulkhead view split in two. The left-hand image displayed a feed of the surface beneath. To the right, the Ghast Oblivion shadowed them, keeping exactly parallel to their course. The clean lines of the battleship were marred by pits and scars caused by strikes from missiles and particle beams. Duggan had to do a double-take when he saw what it was.

  “The Dretisear,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “We’re being hailed again, sir,” said Chainer. “This time from the battleship.”

  “Who is it speaking?”

  “It’s Nil-Far. He wants to know what the hell we’re playing at.”

  “Maintain silence,” said Duggan.

  “He wants to know why we’ve come to Vempor instead of the prearranged meeting place.”

  “Sounds like our secret is out,” said McGlashan.

  “Have we found anything from the surface scans?” asked Duggan.

  “Nothing that springs out as unusual. We’re gathering sights, sounds and thousands of emission types. It’ll take me a while to make sense of the raw data.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Lieutenant. Once we’ve found what we’ve come for, I’m going to surrender the ship.”

  “I’ll tell you anything of significance, sir.”

  Duggan kept the Cadaveron on its course, wondering how long until the Ghasts decided enough was enough. They’d already held fire for longer than he dared hope. In a way it was a hopeful sign – if the Ghasts intended treachery, they would have destroyed the heavy cruiser already.

  “It’s Nil-Far again. He’s asking to speak to you. They are prepared to launch missiles at us.”

  “Talking might buy us some time,” said Duggan. “Patch him through on the speakers.”

  The connection was made. “Captain John Duggan, you are a long way from the place we’d expected to meet.” There might have been the subtlest hint of anger in the Ghast’s words.

  “We’ve brought your warship,” said Duggan.

  “So I see. You were not invited to our world. It was agreed in the first week of peace negotiations that your Space Corps would not come to any of our planets.”

  Duggan took a deep breath. There was no doubt Nil-Far had already heard the pre-planned response about maverick captains taking matters into their own hands. He didn’t want to jeopardise the Space Corps’ position by saying otherwise, but he wanted to see if the Ghast would offer up more information about what had occurred on Trasgor.

  “I have seen things which throw doubt over the Ghast commitment to peace,” he said.

  “What have you seen?”

  “Ghasts on a Dreamer world.”

  “The pyramid,” said Nil-Far. “Are you convinced we will always be your enemy?”

  “I would prefer to be sure before I accept there is no hope of peace.”

  “You have come here seeking evidence of treachery? There is none to be found.”

  “Without certainty there will never be trust.”

  “You will find no answers here John Duggan, only more questions.”

  “I thought the Ghasts took pride in speaking the truth.”

  “We do and I have told you no lies.”

  “You may not have told lies, but you evade the truth by refusing to answer the questions, or giving only partial answers. Amongst humanity, that is tantamount to lying.”

  “Will you land the Ransor-D and hand it over peacefully?”

  “I will not fire upon your spacecraft,” said Duggan.

  “Now who is giving incomplete answers?” asked Nil-Far. He made a sound which may have been laughter.

  “He’s gone,” said Chainer.

  “Keep scanning,” said Duggan.

  “We’re not going to stop?” asked Breeze.

  “Not until we’re done. We didn’t expect to be greeted with open arms.”

  “We didn’t know what to expect,” said McGlashan.

  “There’s something strange happening on the AI core,” said Breeze, raising his voice to be heard over the others.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Duggan, frowning.

  “I don’t know. The utilisation gauges are jumping all over the place.”

  Duggan checked their speed and saw a problem immediately. “We’re slowing down.”

  “The core is getting flooded with data,” said Breeze. “It’ll affect most things onboard.”

  “Whatever’s happening, it’s holding things up, sir,” said Chainer. “The core acts as the conduit for sending the data we’re gathering. It’s getting patchy.”

  “You mean we’re losing data?” asked Duggan sharply.

  “No, sir. It’s simply taking longer to send what we’re picking up. There’s already a five second backlog.”

  “Can anyone tell me what’s happening?”

  “I think they’re trying to take control of the ship, sir,” said Breeze.

  Duggan wanted to reject the idea out of hand. Then, he remembered some of the earliest Space Corps warships had been equipped with the facility to take over control of other fleet warships. He vaguely recalled it was intended as a protection against officers who went off the rails and decided to use their warships to commit mass murder - they could be shut down before they caused too much damage.

  “You might be right, Lieutenant. Can we stop it happening?”

  “Maybe. I’m sorry but I don’t have a clue how,” said Breeze.

  Duggan looked at Chainer and McGlashan in turn. Both shook their heads.

  “Twenty seconds backlog on our data stream.”

  “Can you compress the data?” asked Duggan. “We need to get it back to base.”

  “I can knock it down to ten percent of its original size if you want. It’ll lose some detail and we could end up missing what we’re looking for.”

  “Do it anyway,” said Duggan. He stared briefly at one of his screens and found he’d just been locked out of the weapons systems. It didn’t matter – they weren’t going to get out of this with missiles and disruptors.

  Chainer pressed furiously at his console, a look of consternation on his face. “Too late. They’ve blocked our transmission.”

  Duggan cursed and suppressed the urge to kick his console in pointless anger. “What’s left?”

  “The engines have dropped below twenty percent,” said Breeze.

  “They’re not going to let us crash, are they?” asked Chainer.

  “I think it’s more likely we’ll be brought in to land slowly under the control of the Dretisear,” said Breeze. “They’re not going to want a huge crater or mile-high tidal wave that would result f
rom letting us come down without guidance.”

  Duggan was shortly locked out of each major system on the heavy cruiser. He tried a few things to get his access back – nothing worked. The control bars would still move, though they no longer affected the direction of the warship.

  “I think we’re coming to the end of the road,” he said.

  “Yeah, I can’t get anything working over here,” said McGlashan. “I can view a few bits and pieces, but they won’t respond to my commands.”

  “Can we get through to the Dretisear?” asked Duggan.

  “Certainly can, sir. That’s something I’ve not been denied access to,” said Chainer.

  “Get Nil-Far.”

  The Ghast spoke almost at once, as though he’d been waiting patiently for Duggan to make contact. “We have control of the Ransor-D, John Duggan. We will take it to one of our landing fields and set it down.”

  “What will happen to my crew?” asked Duggan. “They were obeying my orders.”

  “Everyone is responsible for their actions,” said Nil-Far.

  “What will happen?” repeated Duggan.

  “I am not sure,” said Nil-Far after a pause. “You will be detained for a time. After that, I cannot say.”

  “Very well,” said Duggan. He cut the connection to the battleship.

  “He didn’t give much away,” said Chainer.

  “I wouldn’t read too much into it,” said Duggan. “Keep your fingers crossed that Admiral Teron is as good as his word.”

  Chainer was too worried to attempt a wisecrack and he simply nodded in response.

  “I wonder if we got enough data away to the Space Corps for them to learn something,” said McGlashan. “It would be a shame if we were shut down before it could happen.”

  “At the very least, they’ll know a bit more about the Ghast home world. Whether it’ll do them any good is another matter,” said Duggan. An idea came to him. “Lieutenant Chainer, can we still access the data we gathered?”

  “There doesn’t appear to be anything stopping us looking,” he said. “In fact, we’re still gathering. It’s like we’ve been put in a position where we can’t escape or do any harm, but are permitted to observe.”

  Duggan checked their speed again – the Dretisear was taking them to their destination at a much-reduced velocity. “I don’t know how long until we get to where we’re going, so we should make good use of our time. Why don’t we analyse what we gathered and see if we can unearth what we came for? Once the Ghasts take this ship from us, there’ll be no way to access the data again.”

  Chainer’s expression changed until it showed something akin to eagerness. “I’ll give everyone an equal section of the data to view. I usually rely on the AI to flag up points of interest, but sometimes there’s no replacement for watching something with your own eyes.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Duggan. A series of files appeared on his main screen – they were colossal in size, being a raw capture of everything the warship’s sensors had gathered. He didn’t hesitate and opened the first one.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Duggan had no idea how long remained until they were marched off the Ransor-D. He’d spent the last ten minutes studying video streams of Vempor’s surface, whilst trying to identify signs of a Dreamer presence on the planet. Several of his files showed nothing apart from the blue-green of deep oceans and he was able to check through these ones quickly. Some contained high-resolution videos of lush countryside and farmlands. He learned little from these and was left with the impression much of the planet was used exclusively for growing an unknown type of grain. At another time, he’d have permitted himself a minute or two studying it closer.

  When ocean and countryside ended, there were cities – vast, neatly-ordered metropolises, which must have been home for tens of millions of Ghasts. The architecture in these cities bore little resemblance to anywhere found within the Confederation – the alien species eschewed concrete and nearly everything was built from metal.

  “Domes everywhere,” said Breeze. “Some of them are huge.”

  “I’ve seen one or two which could house a million people,” said McGlashan.

  “There’s lot of heavy industry,” said Chainer. “They’re throwing all sorts of crap into the sky. It’s no wonder they’ve got no windows.”

  Chainer was the man to spot these details and Duggan hadn’t even noticed the high levels of pollutants in the air. The Confederation planets had tightly-controlled guidelines on industry and you could go more or less anywhere without fear of having your lungs clogged up with airborne toxins. One or two of the military labs operated under looser rules, though they were required to be many kilometres from populated areas.

  “Lots of soot, not much else,” said McGlashan. “There’s nothing here which suggests the Ghasts are in alliance with the Dreamers.”

  “They’ve got more planets than this one,” said Chainer. “Each world might set its own rules. We know so little about their politics. So little about anything related to the Ghasts, come to think of it.”

  “This is the world they first came from,” said Duggan. “The data which the Space Corps pulled from the Ransor-D’s memory arrays referenced this world as their seat of power. If there’s something to find, it’s most likely to be here.”

  “Not definite, though,” said Breeze.

  “This is where we’ve come, Lieutenant,” said Duggan, dismissing any further talk on the matter.

  “We’re slowing,” said Chainer. “Coming in to land soon.”

  “What’s our destination?” asked Duggan, his eyes not moving from the rolling images on his screen.

  “There’s a landing area dead ahead. We passed near it when we first arrived.”

  “We don’t have long,” said Duggan. “Keep searching.”

  A few minutes later, the Ransor-D’s automatic landing systems kicked in. The warship descended vertically for a thousand kilometres. Below, the Ghast base beckoned. Duggan spared himself a moment to look – it was as though the land had been clad in metal. Dozens of square kilometres of dull silver-grey lay beneath them, completely flat in places and with dome-shaped buildings in others. There were more than a dozen Kraven light cruisers, lined up neatly. A few kilometres away, there were two Cadaverons – they looked subtly different to the others Duggan had seen.

  “New models,” he said.

  “There’s no need for them to stop building,” said McGlashan. “The Confederation has imposed nothing upon them yet.”

  “They need to, and soon,” said Duggan. “Even if the Ghasts aren’t allied to the Dreamers and even if we need them to fight with us, we can’t permit them to outgun us again. Not after last time.”

  The lower they came, the more details were visible. Aside from the spaceships, there were smaller objects moving across the open spaces. Some of these objects gathered around the docked ships and Duggan guessed them to be maintenance vehicles. He was right – there were many cranes, along with other vehicles he didn’t recognize. They were of different shapes and sizes, moving about with purpose.

  “We could be back on Pioneer,” said Chainer. “They aren’t far removed from us.”

  “I never thought they would be,” said McGlashan. “If you examined the minutiae, I bet everything would look strange and different. When you pull away and look at the broad picture, the similarities are striking.”

  “I don’t know if that makes me happy or sad,” said Breeze.

  “It doesn’t make me either,” said Duggan. “Except to say that it’ll be easier to deal with a species which is similar to us than one which is vastly different.”

  The Ransor-D landed, away from the other warships berthed here. There was no perceptible sensation of setting down – the Cadaveron was too heavy to land at anything other than a snail’s pace. The outside view was one of activity – vehicles closed in, several of them quite obviously troop transports.

  “Here they come,” said Breeze.


  “The centre boarding ramp is opening, sir,” said Chainer.

  Ghasts climbed from the transport vehicles. There were dozens of them, dressed in grey uniforms that blended in with their skin. They were armed with heavy gauss rifles and they ran beneath the Ransor-D. Duggan wasn’t sure if they’d be carrying interpretation modules and he didn’t want to be shot because of an early misunderstanding. He opened the bridge locker and pulled out two of the helmets, meaning to activate their translation facilities.

  “Sir, you’ve got to see this!” said McGlashan.

  There was something in her voice which made him set the helmets down with a clatter on the floor. He ran past his console to stand next to her. Chainer and Breeze joined him.

  “What’ve you got?” Duggan asked.

  McGlashan said nothing and simply pointed at her display.

  “Shit,” said Chainer. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It can’t be anything else,” said McGlashan. She called up further details on what she’d discovered. “It’s too dense for the sensors to provide an exact reading from the height we crossed over it. The estimate is that it’s several hundred years old.”

  “How long ago did we capture these images?” asked Duggan.

  “Not long after the Dretisear showed up, sir.”

  Duggan put a hand on top of his head, rubbing his short-cut hair. “Did we get it away to Monitoring Station Beta?”

  “I don’t know, sir, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll find out,” said Chainer.

  He sprang away and threw himself into his seat. Before he could settle, the door to the bridge opened and Ghast soldiers came inside with rifles levelled. Their grey uniforms rustled and swished as they spread out to either side. Fifteen or twenty of them entered, the shortest of them towering over Duggan. Their expressions were not friendly and there was little mistaking the message behind the gestures they made. Through the bridge door, others were visible, lined up against the corridor walls.

  “Stop what you’re doing and act friendly,” said Duggan to the others.