Crimson Tempest

by Anthony James

  “Can you override?”

  “I’m working on it. I’m denied access. Looks like the old girl is suspicious of newcomers.”

  McGlashan gave a shake of her head. “So, we’ve been sent all the way out here to bring the Crimson home, yet with no way to defend ourselves against attack?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “What else have we got?” she asked.

  Duggan poked around for a minute longer, giving out one or two low whistles of surprise, yet saying nothing.

  “Don’t you hate it when he does that?” complained Chainer.

  “I’ve authorised all the consoles as much as I’m able. The life support is now online. It’s already closed the boarding ramp and we’ll have another five minutes till the atmosphere is hospitable. Admiral Teron wasn’t lying when he said they’d spent a lot of money on this ship. If you believe this readout, the engines have one hundred-and-seventeen times the output of the Detriment’s. They’re bigger and vastly more efficient.”

  “That can’t be right,” said Breeze. “That would make them far more advanced than the Detriment’s and we had a refit only four years ago to add on some extra power.” He called up half a dozen readouts and positioned them side-by-side on his screen. “This thing’s got more power than a Hadron class,” he said, looking puzzled.

  “That means we can just fly out and show that Cadaveron a clean pair of heels?” asked Chainer.

  “Not likely,” said McGlashan. “If it picks us up manoeuvring out of this hole, it’ll blow us away long before the fission drives come online.”

  “The last record before the mainframe shut down shows that something fried a big chunk of the engines.”

  “It’s had ninety-six weeks working at them,” said Breeze. There were weapons that could disrupt the connections between the atoms that comprised the engines of a spaceship, in order to slow or stop them entirely. As long as the material remained in place, the vessel’s mainframe could generally re-establish those connections or re-route as necessary. It wasn’t a quick process. A missile strike was a different thing entirely, but the Crimson hadn’t suffered any explosive damage that Duggan could see.

  “Ninety-six weeks hasn’t been long enough for it to repair everything. I’m reading a history of extensive damage,” said McGlashan.

  “We’re not quite ready to fly out yet,” Breeze replied. “We’re at thirty-five percent.”

  Like a jigsaw puzzle of trillions of pieces, the earliest parts were the hardest to slot into place. The further along the repairs went, the easier they became. Thirty-five percent sounded low, but Duggan knew that meant the ship’s core had completed the bulk of the work.

  “That’s much faster than I’d have expected. Perhaps the brain of this thing is quicker than it’s letting on,” mused Duggan. “Or maybe it was designed to be exceptionally good at specific tasks. Lieutenant Breeze, can you give me a prediction for when we’ll be ready to fly at something close to peak efficiency?” He didn’t need to spell out that he meant with a chance to escape the Ghast heavy cruiser.

  “We’ll be above ninety percent in approximately twenty hours, sir. A little longer if you want to go at a hundred percent.”

  As he talked, Duggan worked at the weapons systems. Without warning, the Crimson provided access to the locked-down sub-arrays. Several new options became accessible from his console and Duggan opened them up.

  “It’s let me into the weapons,” he said.

  “What’re we carrying?” asked McGlashan.

  “Wait on, I’m authorising you.”

  “Here we go,” she said, excitement in her voice.

  Duggan was ahead of her and he scrolled through the Crimson’s lists of arms and ammunition. “We’ve got eighteen banks of ancient Lambdas – big clusters. There’re eight early-gen Bulwarks and a dozen nukes. Big ones. Really big ones.”

  “Nukes?” asked Chainer, blinking in amazement.

  “Looks like it. Long range and slow.”

  “What’re we carrying nukes for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Duggan.

  “Sometimes, when everything else has failed, there might be a time when you need to rely on a crude and filthy high explosive,” announced Breeze. He sat back in his seat with an air of faint satisfaction.

  “I wouldn’t like to be within a hundred klicks when one of these things goes off,” said McGlashan. “I didn’t even think we made them anymore.”

  “We’re carrying a lot of ordnance,” said Duggan. “Teron wasn’t wrong when he said they’d put the good stuff onboard. This vessel must have been a flying juggernaut.”

  “Until they launched the first Hadron class, at least,” said Breeze. “This ship would have been a match for anything. Even today they could refit it with the newest Lambdas and it would be worth sending to the front line.”

  “There’s more,” said McGlashan quietly. “Two more weapons systems. At first, I thought they were offline. Now I can see that the ship is preventing access.”

  Duggan picked up on it and tried to call up the details. He was blocked as well. “I wonder what they are,” he said.

  “Mines?” asked McGlashan.

  “Nope, I can access the mines. They’re under countermeasures for some reason. These are something different.”

  “Sounds interesting,” said Chainer.

  “I’ll keep working on it,” Duggan said. He looked at McGlashan. “See if you can find a back door.”

  “Will do. These things are normally locked down pretty tightly.”

  “Of course,” said Duggan. “And how’re our sensors and comms?”

  “It looks like the repair bot’s been busy,” replied Chainer. “Unfortunately, it’s had a lot to do. I’ve got onboard comms fully functional and nine of the thirty main sensor arrays are reporting themselves to be operational.”

  “No main comms?”

  “None, sir. The ship sent its distress call through the emergency beacon. It must have known what a risk that was. It’ll have lit up the receivers of everything between here and Monitoring Station Alpha.”

  “How’d it even get a signal out if our sensors couldn’t find it?” asked McGlashan.

  “It’s been clever. From what I can see here, it waited until the tilt of the planet meant the cave mouth was pointing in the approximate direction of the Alpha. It fired the signal off and bounced it twice to achieve the angle it needed to reach space. The emergency beacons send out a much more robust signal than anything from a regular transmission system. You can do this sort of pissing about with them.”

  Duggan nodded to indicate his appreciation for Chainer’s detective work. “How long till the main transmission systems are available? If we get out of this cave, I want to be able to speak to the Juniper immediately.”

  “I don’t know. The repair bot is working on them now, but it isn’t feeding a status update to the core. The comms are intricate,” he finished.

  “Keep me updated.”

  “I’ve got some bad news, sir,” said McGlashan. “The autopilot and guidance systems aren’t responding to my status requests.”

  “Broken?”

  “I can’t get into them to find out the extent of the damage. Maybe the Crimson’s landing wasn’t so smooth and a few of the tertiary systems got knocked out.”

  “That’s going to make things a little more difficult,” said Duggan.

  With those words, he climbed to his feet and stretched as he attempted to clear his mind. They’d found what they were looking for and against the odds, it appeared as if the Crimson wasn’t the bucket of bolts he’d expected to find. There was still damage, but it could have been a lot worse than it was. One-hundred-and-seventeen times the output. The words echoed around in his mind as he wondered how fast the vessel would go. It wasn’t an exact science, since the engines needed a super-powerful core to mould their output continuously through lightspeed. Even the largest-engined vessel would be comparatively slow without the processing grunt to
back it up. They wouldn’t know how fast the Crimson was until they gave it a go.

  Something boiled up inside. “Everywhere I look, there are secrets,” he said angrily. “And I don’t like it one little bit.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” asked McGlashan.

  “Look at this spacecraft. Built for no reason and carrying enough weaponry to have knocked out half of the Ghast fleet if she’d been available at the start of the war. Old weapons, old defences, yet engines that we couldn’t build even now. Other weapons that the captain isn’t allowed to look at. I need to know what this shit is all about.”

  None of the crew had anything else to say and they stayed quiet. Duggan glowered angrily for a few moments until his spacesuit’s helmet binged softly to let him know that the environment on the bridge was now adequate to support human life. He released the seal around his neck. It hissed softly and he put the helmet to one side, glad to see the back of it. He called up the onboard comms, which he patched directly through to Sergeant Ortiz’s suit.

  “Sergeant Ortiz. Let the soldiers know the life support systems are operational and they can take off their suits if they wish.”

  “Thank you, sir, we’ve already discovered that.”

  “Also advise them that the ship is armed and will soon be operational. I’ll keep you posted on progress.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And Ortiz?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How has Monsey been keeping up with her special skills?”

  “Sir?”

  “Hacking, Sergeant. Does she still practise?”

  “I believe she might dabble when the opportunity presents itself.”

  “The opportunity is about to present itself now. Send her to the bridge at once.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Duggan ended the communication and found the others looking at him quizzically. He smiled back. “Let’s see if modern techniques can breach the defensive walls of a fifty-year-old warship’s core,” he said. “I’d rather fly with full knowledge of what’s at our disposal.”

  Monsey arrived on the bridge five minutes later, stooping low through the entrance door. She carried a foot-square metallic cube, which had an old mechanical-style keyboard plugged into it and a separate grey-framed display screen balanced loosely on top.

  “How’s it going, soldier?” asked Duggan.

  “I’m good, sir. I hear you need me to break into something.”

  “The Crimson’s mainframe. It’s hiding something from me. I need access to the ship’s databanks and weapons.”

  “That’ll need time, sir,” said Monsey, hiding her surprise. She put the cube down gently. “This baby’s one of the latest bootboxes. Updated with the latest military-grade boards when we were on the Juniper a couple of years ago. If this ship’s as old as you say it is, I’ll be able to crack it. They built the warship cores tough, so don’t expect it to happen at once.”

  “I need something and soon,” he said.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said. With that, she lifted the keyboard into her lap and began tapping away with a speed that indicated she’d had a lot of practise. Reams of text scrolled over the monitor’s display, showing strings of encrypted numbers and letters. Her blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the screen, telling Duggan that she was already lost to the world.

  Duggan picked up his helmet. “I’m going back outside,” he said.

  “Sir?” said McGlashan.

  “If the autopilot’s unavailable and most of our sensors are offline, I’ll need to take another look at the cave - to see how much of a squeeze it’ll be to get out of here if we have to make it without the guidance systems. The bulkhead viewscreen never seems quite good enough when things get really tight.”

  “Need company?” she asked.

  “Wait here, Commander. I need you to keep working and see if there’s anything else about this vessel that we need to be aware of.”

  She looked disappointed. “Understood.”

  Duggan put his helmet back on and made his way back down the boarding ramp at a half-jog. He needed to spend time on the Crimson to familiarise himself with the controls, but he also knew that there was no way he’d be able to pilot it out of the cave if he didn’t have a mental image of what he was flying through. He was itching to test himself.

  “Still a young man at heart,” he muttered.

  He pushed himself through the piles of rocks that covered the cave floor, with his helmet light set to maximum intensity. It wasn’t bright enough to give him a perfect view of the walls and it certainly didn’t illuminate the cavern’s ceiling. What it did do was let him see enough to realise that he was going to have a fight on his hands to get the Crimson out of here without hitting something. Duggan got to the rock shelf and knew he’d come far enough. Beyond this point, the cavern opened up enough that it would be a piece of cake to get the Crimson out. He sat on his haunches for a minute, looking at the four parked tanks below. The increased gravity of the planet was starting to weigh down on him. Chainer’s voice came through unexpectedly, a mixture of static and hiss to indicate the difficulty of communicating down here.

  “Sir?” said Chainer. There was an urgency in his voice.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “We’re too deep underground for our remaining sensors to detect anything in orbit. However, I’ve patched into the sensor array on one of the tanks and used that to piggyback to the beacon we left near to the entrance.”

  “And?”

  “It’s picked something up, sir. The same approximate dimensions and weight as a Ghast drop ship. I think they’ve found us.”

  “How far?”

  “Three klicks from the cave entrance. Maybe less.”

  Duggan clenched his fists in anger and opened a channel to Sergeant Ortiz. “Sergeant. Get back in your suits and prepare for combat. We’ve got incoming.” He killed his light, unslung his gauss rifle and lay low, with his suit helmet’s sensors scanning ahead for movement.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Sir, you should get back to the Crimson.” McGlashan’s voice was faint.

  “Negative, Commander. I’m waiting here to find out what we’re facing. They won’t see me.”

  “Sir,” she acknowledged. Even through the interference, her doubt was palpable.

  “Sergeant Ortiz, I need your squad here at the shelf – on the double. Bring everything you’ve got.”

  Ortiz’s voice crackled through to Duggan. “We’re leaving the Crimson now. Good job we didn’t take off those suits, huh? What’ve we got?” From the tone of her voice she was running, though it hardly sounded like she was labouring at all.

  “Lieutenant Chainer’s picked up what he believes to be a Ghast dropship coming to land less than three klicks from the entrance to this cave. We need time to get the Crimson’s engines up to peak efficiency.”

  “Any idea of their numbers?”

  “None. I’m assuming they’ve sent a full complement.” They both knew that an enemy dropship could carry fifty of their soldiers, as well as several pieces of heavy equipment.

  “Won’t the Cadaveron just send missiles to blow this place apart when we’ve killed all of their soldiers?” she asked, confident as ever that she and her squad would come out on top.

  “They may. We have to assume they don’t know exactly where the Crimson’s landed. It’ll take a heavy bombardment if they want to be sure they’ve got us. On top of that, they don’t like to think we can beat them face to face. It could be that they send another dozen shuttles after the first one.” Duggan also held a secret hope that the Ghasts would be interested in finding out what had brought the Corps out here. There was a chance they wouldn’t necessarily try to destroy anything until they found out what it was they were dealing with.

  “Shame about that beacon,” Ortiz said. “They’ll know we’re here.”

  “Nothing we can do about that. We can’t hide the tanks anyway.”

  “We’ll r
each you soon. Any movement?”

  “It’s quiet.”

  “Just the way I like it.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Sergeant.”

  Ortiz laughed, a rich, throaty noise. “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”

  The comms went quiet, giving Duggan a few moments to think. The soldiers had a long way to go and it would be a close-run thing for them to reach him before the Ghast forces arrived. He considered the idea of pulling everyone back and having them sit tight inside the Crimson. The trouble was, such a course would allow the Ghasts to reach the spacecraft without opposition. From there, they could report the ship’s exact position underground and give the Cadaveron’s captain an easy ride if he decided to launch a full broadside of his missiles towards the surface above. More importantly, it would also betray the fact that there was a Corps warship here. All-in-all, it seemed better to keep the enemy guessing.

  His suit camera still hadn’t picked anything up, so he took the opportunity to move to a new position on the edge of the shelf, where he could lie flat behind a raised area of rock. He kept his rifle braced against his shoulder and activated the head-up-display within the helmet. The results weren’t perfect, though some of the areas of deepest darkness ahead were intensified into sharp relief.

  As he waited, he made use of his CO’s authority to connect with Ortiz’s helmet feed. The soldiers were still finding their way through the rocks and they ran at an impressive pace. A speech-to-text overlay accompanied the feed, giving an update of the communications between the men and women. It was a useful facility when you needed to keep track of the action during an engagement without listening directly to what everyone was saying.

  “Sir, I think you should reconsider,” crackled the voice of McGlashan, trying again to get him to return to the Crimson. “You might get killed.”

  “Thank you for the concern, Commander. We need to keep the Ghasts from finding out what we’re hiding here. At least until we can fly. Otherwise we run the risk of their captain bombarding the roof of the cave until it comes down on us.”