“They’re next on the list, sir. The repair bot should be on it later today. Yes, that’s it, today. They should be fixed soon. Do I make it six days till we reach the Archimedes? No, five days. It’s closer to five days. They’ll be ready before we dock. I’ve got to get on, sir.”
McGlashan was familiar with field medication as well and Duggan caught her grinning at Chainer’s babbling speech.
“We’ve got five days ahead of us, Commander,” Duggan said. “That gives us plenty of time to find out what we can.”
“I’m already on it, sir,” she replied.
They spent the next few hours hunting through the huge quantities of uncategorised data that Monsey had unlocked for them. If they’d accessed it through the usual front-end it would have been easy to find anything of interest. As it was, the work was slow and tedious. Duggan found his frustration growing as he picked through a seemingly endless array of schematics for the Crimson’s hull.
“Admiral Teron told me there are no design plans on record for this ship,” he said. “Yet that’s all I can find here. I find it hard to believe that they sent all the technical drawings and specifications out with the ship and didn’t keep any of them on the lab mainframe. From what I gather there aren’t even a few damned print outs available to look at.”
“I see hull composition, Lambda mountings, life support,” said McGlashan. “Even something about the replicators. There are more than two hundred drawings for the boarding ramp.”
“Nothing about the engines or the disruptors,” mused Duggan. “Or the last unknown weapons system either.”
“The Ghasts have disruptors, sir. They’ve only started to use them recently. Could they have stolen the designs from us?” She hesitated. “Or could someone have sold the details to them?”
“I don’t know, Commander. None of it’s making any sense at the moment. If the Space Corps had this technology fifty years ago, why didn’t we use it? Teron talked about funding. I can almost believe that, but why would the records vanish?”
“Do we know for definite there are no records?”
“I believed him when he told me,” said Duggan. “It’s why they’re so desperate to have the Crimson back now. I saw it in Teron’s eyes and I can see it with my own eyes. This warship is a game-changer.”
“You don’t think there was a traitor who sold the plans to the Ghasts?”
“There’d be no logic to it. What would such a traitor gain? Money? I can’t imagine there’s anyone who had access to not only steal all the data, but to completely expunge it from every place it was stored and backed up. It can’t have happened.”
“There are a few people who could pull it off though?”
“One or two people in the Space Corps, perhaps. A dozen members on the Confederation Council. It wouldn’t be at all easy and I can’t imagine there’d be enough gain to make it worthwhile. Is there really someone out there who hates the human race enough that they’d assist an enemy which gives every impression that they want to make us extinct? For nothing more than money?” He shook his head at the thought. The same name that had come into his head earlier paid him another visit. He kept it quiet.
“What, then?”
“The answers have to lie here somewhere, Commander. In the Crimson’s databanks. This was a top-grade warship. You can be sure that every snippet of information pertaining to its design and maintenance will be stored here somewhere. This might be the only place it exists.”
In spite of their best efforts, the answers remained stubbornly out of reach. They spent the next two days trawling through the area of the Crimson’s memory that Monsey had gained access to. By the middle of the second day, Monsey managed to provide front-end access, which allowed them to view all the data in a logical index. This sped things up immeasurably, but only served to demonstrate that what they were looking for wasn’t there.
“There’s nothing here,” said McGlashan at last. “At least not in this memory array.”
“I might have access to another chunk soon, sir,” said Monsey. She’d been so quiet that Duggan had almost forgotten she was there. The constant rattle of her keyboard had slipped into background obscurity like a droning lightbulb.
“How soon?” asked Duggan.
“Soon, sir. I’m not sure I can pin it down. I’ve successfully circumvented a whole load of encrypted block codes. I’ve got tricks the original programmers didn’t know about.”
Duggan opened his mouth to press her for specifics. He closed it again. He didn’t want to push Monsey so hard she’d lose focus. She’d been putting in eighteen hours a day.
“Yes!” shouted Chainer, clapping his hands loudly. “Main long-range comms back online, sir! If you want to speak to someone anywhere in the Confederation I can patch you through as soon as we come out of lightspeed! Even through to Earth if you want!”
“Thank you, Lieutenant, I don’t have any relatives there,” said Duggan dryly. “I’d like to get through to the Archimedes. It’s just a shame we can’t do it until we come out of lightspeed.” Comms wouldn’t get through at the speed they were going – it was one of the problems with lightspeed travel. You might be travelling fast, but you were also travelling blind. Still, it was positive news that the Crimson was now almost as good as new again and Duggan felt his mood lift slightly. It took another leap when Monsey spoke.
“Got them!” she said. “Sir, I’ve cracked another one of the arrays. This time I got straight in through the front door.”
“Good work,” said Duggan, giving her a clap on the shoulder. “That’s the sort of soon I can appreciate.”
She smiled back. “No problem, sir, I just didn’t want to set your expectations and get it wrong. Glad to help. I’ll grab myself a coffee and have a go at the other two arrays.”
“Take a rest when you need it, soldier.”
“I definitely will, sir.” She looked boosted by her success.
Duggan was tired and he could see by McGlashan’s face that she was running low on energy as well.
“I don’t think I can stomach another coffee as long as I live,” she said, calling up the new access menu. “Whoa, look at this! I can access the fission drive details here. There’s something on the double-core design as well. Looks like we hit pay dirt!”
“Let’s get on with it and see what we’ve got,” he replied, feeling the tiredness ebb. He knew it would only be a temporary relief but he was glad to take advantage of it.
After half an hour, it become clear that the more he learned, the more was hidden from him. There were thousands upon thousands of new schematics relating to the Crimson. Duggan was no engineer, but he’d learned enough that he could understand the basics of spaceship design and he could look at a technical drawing and know what it meant and where it fitted into the whole. What they’d unearthed in the Crimson’s archive was a mystery.
“Look at this drawing here,” he said. “It’s a very high-level diagram to show the two processing cores. Over here’s the model designation of the front-end core. I’ve checked it out and it’s a design from one of the Corps labs. Not quite a standard model – they’ve modified it quite extensively for the Crimson and called it the Hynus-T. It’s slow by modern standards, but dramatically quicker than most warship cores of the era. Nevertheless, it’s consistent with a cost-no-object new military design.”
“Yeah, I remember reading about this model series,” said McGlashan. “New and improved super-cores, now too old to bother with.”
“This secondary core here isn’t anything I recognize at all. I call it secondary, when in reality it appears to have primacy over the known model. I can see the interfacing between the two and they expected a tremendous amount of throughput. The connections between the cores suggests that the engineers were prepared for so much data to be transferred that the front core has specially-designed buffers to prevent it from getting flooded.”
“Like too much information coming at one time choking it up?”
“That’s how it appears. It’s hard to say more without looking at the original specifications, or speaking to some of the engineers who worked on it.”
“There’s no code or model number for this second core?”
“Not that I can see. Wait! There is something. It’s been given a strange name, listed on a few of these drawings. They’ve called it a Dreamer core.”
“A nickname? The name of a company perhaps?” asked McGlashan. “Maybe a sub-project of Hynus, designed to produce a new type of computer.”
Duggan did a search on the word Dreamer, to see if it was mentioned elsewhere. It was, many times, except nowhere was there any clarification on what it referred to. “Dreamer engines,” he said. “We’re packing a Dreamer engine and a Dreamer core. Shame I don’t have the first idea what that means.”
“Doesn’t look like the designers did either, sir. Must have been so classified they didn’t even know what it was they were working with.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore, Commander.” Duggan got to his feet. “I’m going for some rest. You know where to find me.”
With that, he headed to his quarters for the six hours he allowed himself. He was dog tired, but sleep didn’t come at once. Possibilities swirled and spun. The face of a man he’d tried to forget came to his mind and wouldn’t leave him alone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
After a little over five days and eight hours of travel, the ESS Crimson’s fission drive shut off and the spaceship entered normal space with another violent burst that shook the crew and soldiers who were onboard.
“Damn I’ll never get used to that,” said Chainer.
“At least you didn’t knock your head again,” McGlashan replied with little sympathy. “Look on the bright side – the arrival is much easier than the departure.”
“Maybe they’ll refit the life support systems for us,” he replied. “It’s clear the one we’ve got isn’t up to the task.”
“Pay attention to your stations,” Duggan told them. “What’s our status. Where’s the Archimedes?”
“Sorry, Captain,” said Chainer. “I’ll find out for you right now.”
Duggan backed off. The physical punishments inflicted by the Crimson weren’t something he enjoyed either and it took a few moments to shrug off the effects. “No problem, Lieutenant. Let me know when you’ve found them.”
“We’ve come in right on the spot,” Chainer said. “I’d kind of got used to the Detriment’s old way of landing us here there and everywhere, half a day late or early. Checking sensors now. Yep, got the Archimedes, sir. Well, the Crimson’s mainframe doesn’t know it’s the Archimedes, but it’s the only spacecraft I know that’s nine kilometres long. It’s coming out from the far side of the planet over there. Dion-983.”
“Catchy name,” said McGlashan.
“They’re two hours distant, sir.”
Duggan took control of the Crimson and pointed it towards the coordinates Chainer fed through. The repair bot had fixed the autopilot a couple of days back, but Duggan found it suited him better to guide the ship manually. “Bring up their comms man and let them know we’ve arrived. I’m sure they’ve seen us.”
“Aye, sir. They’ve acknowledged our hail and returned the greeting. We have permission to come in close.”
“What escort do they have?”
“Getting multiple pings. I’m downloading the data.” The Crimson’s data on Corps vessels was fifty years out of date and Chainer had to send a request to the Archimedes’ AI for each of the spacecraft in the vicinity. “Hadron Precept in attendance. Along with Anderlechts Fixation, Extermination and Delectable. Those are just the ones I can see. I’d expect there to be others still hidden behind Dion-983.”
“They’ve got a quarter of the damned fleet here,” said Duggan. “Out in the back end of nowhere.”
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” said McGlashan.
“I hope you’re right, Commander. They’ve got enough firepower to waste half a dozen Cadaverons. At least we know where the Delectable got to. Sent here to orbit a dead planet while Ghast ships attack the Juniper.”
Duggan chewed his lip as the Crimson closed the gap on the Archimedes. He’d expected a lot more communication than they’d received so far. The Corps flagship was practically silent and unresponsive.
“Can her hold accommodate us, sir?” asked McGlashan.
“Not a hope. It’s a warship, not a cargo vessel. They might have a couple of Gunners docked. Otherwise it’s the same as every other Corps combat ship: engines, weapons, armour. It’s a lot more luxurious than anything else in the fleet, though. After all, it’s meant to host important people.”
“The sort of people who might take offence if they’re not treated with the respect they feel they deserve?” asked Breeze.
“Exactly, Lieutenant. The sort of people who might decide to cut ten percent of the Corps’ budget if they don’t get a perfect cup of coffee from a replicator.”
“Bastards,” said McGlashan, almost to herself.
“Not all of them, Commander. There’re plenty of good men and women on the Confederation Council. They’re just too slow to react and they’ve been badly-informed about how the war is going. Or maybe we have too many peacetime leaders. Still, it’s better to treat your superiors with respect, rather than hope for their goodwill.”
Duggan heard what sounded suspiciously like stifled laughter at his last sentence. He pretended he hadn’t noticed. “Let’s have a look at what we’ve got,” he said to Chainer. “Bring up the Archimedes on the screen.”
Chainer complied and an image of the largest battleship in the Space Corps filled the bulkhead monitor. It was difficult to see the enormity of it without another vessel for comparison and to the untrained eye it looked like a functional wedge, the same way that most Corps ships did. When he looked closer, Duggan could see the thousands of pits and indentations along the flanks which hid hundreds of Lambda clusters, Bulwark cannons and defence ports. To the front and rear, there were the tell-tale bulges that showed where the particle beams were housed. The Space Corps beam weapons were technologically inferior to the Ghasts’ latest models, but from what Duggan knew, the Archimedes was big enough to carry power modules that were large enough to overcome many of the shortcomings.
McGlashan was the first to speak. “It’s impressive,” she said.
“But?”
“It’s too clean, Captain. Either they give it a sponge down every two weeks or it’s never been fired upon.”
“It’s thirty years old, Commander. It came into service near the start of the war. An experiment, I believe, simply to see if we could make something that big. It’s seen action and plenty of it. In the first ten years, she scored dozens of confirmed Ghast warship kills. Then the enemy ships started to get bigger and better. Someone got scared that the Archimedes might one day get crippled or worse. They’ve kept it out of harm’s reach since then, refitting it endlessly with the latest technology they had no plans to use in anger. If it got destroyed, the Space Corps would look like fools. Even worse, it would have made it impossible to stop the public learning what a mess we were making of the war. I don’t know where the orders came from to keep it away from the front. A faction in the council, perhaps. They couldn’t have done it without some agreement within the Corps.”
“Everyone knows we’re losing the war now,” said McGlashan.
“They do. And it took the incineration of a billion people on Charistos before the Council took proper notice. That’s why I’m so pissed off to see the Archimedes out here…hiding from it all. Not only that, but she has a full battle escort. Orbiting endlessly around an empty planet, while the people on Angax check the skies every day to see if the Ghasts have found them. Those people are being failed, even now.”
“They should have made you Admiral, sir,” said Breeze. “At least then everyone would know they had someone who would always try his best.”
Duggan looked at the man and met
his eyes. There was nothing other than sincerity in them.
“Sir? How can you say on the one hand that the Council are mostly good men and women, when they’ve spent years cutting our funding?” asked McGlashan.
Duggan sighed. Officers were expected to ask questions of their superiors, and it occasionally made things difficult. “I don’t know for certain, Commander. I only have guesses.”
“Can we know what those guesses are, sir?”
Duggan didn’t really want to say anything else on the matter. In the end, he spoke. “It’s as I’ve told you. The Council can only react to the information they’re given. Who knows if they’re always provided with a complete picture? Let’s not talk any more about it. Admiral Teron told me this is the hand we’ve been dealt and it’s the one we have to play.”
“Feels like we’ve got a seven high at the moment,” said McGlashan.
“Enough, Commander.”
“Incoming message from the Archimedes, sir,” said Chainer. “For your ears only.”
“Very well. Who is it?”
“It’s Fleet Admiral Slender.”
Duggan didn’t say anything. Anger played across his face, clear for them all to see.
“Sir?”
Duggan sat down. “Patch him through at once.”
There was a humming in Duggan’s earpiece, before a cold voice cut across it. “Captain Duggan.”
“Admiral Slender.”
“You are to bring the ESS Crimson to a parallel path with the Archimedes. A shuttle will come and pick you up. You alone.”
“Sir.”
The line went dead. Duggan looked over to Chainer, with an eyebrow raised questioningly.
“He’s cut you off, sir.”
“I think he just wanted to hear my voice,” said Duggan. “To remind himself that I’m still alive.”
“You don’t get on with him?” asked McGlashan.
“That would be an understatement, Commander. Admiral Slender is the man responsible for everything that happened since the Tybalt.”
Crimson Tempest Page 18
