“Stay put for the moment. We brought the enemy warship down, but the light tank is unaccounted for. We’re coming out of the silo.”
The rest of the squad began leaving the Shatterer battery. Most of them followed Duggan’s idea of sliding down twenty metres or so and then jumping into the earth. It wasn’t so easy to get McGlashan out and her comatose body nearly slipped to the ground in the process.
“You three, stay here with the Commander,” said Duggan, pointing out the chosen squad members. “The rest of you are coming with me. Morgan’s alive and he’s got the beacon.”
The relief was palpable. The six of them set off at a good pace, using the torn dredger for cover. Morgan was in the cab of a dump truck. It had turned onto its roof in the earthquake.
“Lucky I remembered to belt in,” he said. “Else I’d have landed on my head.”
No one took advantage of the opportunity to comment on the benefits of Morgan landing on his head. The time didn’t feel right for joking, given what had happened so far.
“Where’s the beacon?” asked Duggan.
“Right here, sir,” said Morgan. He opened the glove box and slid out the comms beacon. It was a metal cube, with several extendable aerials. Duggan took it and set it up at once.
“Sir, there’s movement a way over to the north,” said Dorsey. She was outside the cab, peering into the distance.
Duggan looked up sharply. “Coming our way?”
“I’m not sure. I’d say it’s the tank.”
“Of course it’s the damned tank,” muttered Duggan. He powered up the beacon. “MHL Goliath, this is Captain John Duggan. Do you copy?”
There was a pause for a few seconds. “This is Captain Erika Jonas of the MHL Goliath. You are not going to believe the size of the hole you just made in this planet.”
“We need a pickup – urgently. We’ve got an injured officer here.”
“What about the missile bunker?”
“We’ve taken care of it. Come at once. There’s a Ghast tank hunting us and we’ve got nothing except our rifles.”
“Roger. On our way.”
With the broadcast finished, the beacon powered itself off. “Where’s that tank?” Duggan asked.
“About a klick away. It’s sweeping the area. I’d say they’re looking for something, without knowing what.”
“Could they have picked up our signal?” asked Duggan.
“Not sure, sir,” said Chainer. “These beacons aren’t well shielded. That doesn’t mean every piece of military hardware automatically knows when it’s sending.”
“Damnit, I think they’ve seen me,” said Dorsey. She ducked around the edge of the truck again.
“Think?” asked Duggan.
“Sorry sir, they’re coming straight towards us.”
“Get down!” shouted Duggan, throwing himself onto the ground.
The others followed suit. There was a clatter of metallic impacts against the side of the truck, punching dozens of holes along its forty-metre length. The force of the blows was such that each one knocked the truck a little way along the ground. The soldiers crawled on their stomachs to keep ahead of the machinery which threatened to crush them. Another volley smashed through the truck bed. Duggan could feel the depleted uranium projectiles ripping through the thin air above him. He looked frantically around for a place to run. There was no other cover within two hundred metres and the tank would see them if they tried to escape. And it’ll get us if we don’t, came the grim realisation.
“What do we do, sir?”
“Sir, should we run?”
“There’s the tank!” said Dorsey.
A menacing shape came into sight around the edge of the truck, all angular sides and plate armour. The turret on top rotated with unnerving speed as it retargeted. Another round of projectiles spilled into the ruined truck as the soldiers tried desperately to crawl around to the far side, in the hope they hadn’t been seen. Duggan fired a couple of shots from his rifle, determined to show at least this amount of resistance.
The seemingly inevitable death didn’t arrive for Duggan or his squad. Before the Ghast tank could focus on them, a wall of earth gouted from the ground. It stretched in a line a hundred metres long, like a high fountain of grit and stone. Duggan’s suit picked up hints of movement coming from above, objects streaking to the surface at an unimaginable velocity, accompanied by a deep thumping where they struck the surface. The tank was punched and flattened, flipped over and thrown twenty metres high. The fountain stopped and then returned, breaking the tank into pieces and shredding each part into something smaller again.
The fountaining stopped and fragments of stone rained down upon the huddled soldiers, rattling against their helmets and covering them with dust. Duggan raised his head and knew that on this day, he’d relied on luck far more than he should have. He stood up and dusted himself off, the gesture both automatic and pointless. Cheering broke across the open channel as the men and women became accustomed to continued life, rather than death.
A few minutes later, a shape appeared in the sky. One of the Goliath’s four personnel transporters hovered silently overhead while its sensors scanned the ground for underlying fractures that would jeopardise its landing. At last, it settled to the ground in an open space a short distance from the truck. Duggan sent the five soldiers with him to meet with it, while he ran to help the three he’d left with Commander McGlashan. Together, they carried her across the rough ground to the transporter. The craft was big enough for two hundred people if you crammed them in tightly. At the moment, it only carried three members of the Goliath’s crew, plus the five from Duggan’s squad. Several came to assist and they got McGlashan up the wide boarding ramp and into the airlock. Minutes later, the transporter was away, heading towards the heavy lifter.
With a feeling of relief, Duggan pulled his helmet off and went to speak to the pilot. She greeted him with a smile that was as open and genuine as they came. She was in her thirties and attractive, with a mischievous glitter to her eyes.
“Glad you could join us, Captain Duggan.” She extended a suited hand. “Captain Jonas.”
They shook hands. “Your timing is excellent,” he said. “Another ten seconds and we’d have been finished.”
“The Goliath isn’t warship, but we still carry a few Bulwarks, in case any stray missiles come our way.” She winked. “Or a Ghast light tank.”
An image of something was zoomed in on one of her monitors. Duggan leaned over for a closer look.
“That’s the crater,” she said. “How much would you say one of those Cadaverons weigh?”
“That particular one? About nine-point-five billion tonnes. There are bigger ones in the Ghast fleet.”
She zoomed the image out to show the entirety of the heavy cruiser’s impact crater. There was a tiny spot off to one side, which she pointed at. That’s the mine operations there. You might not have seen it from where you were on the ground, but there’re cracks everywhere. One of them a whole kilometre wide. It’s going to take a while before they can get that site running again.”
Duggan was occupied looking at the two craters side-by-side. The Ghast ship had struck the planet at a sixty-degree angle. It must have turned over a few times after impact, which made the initial crater extend into a long, deep furrow.
“Three hundred klicks across.” He shook his head, dumbfounded at the damage.
“And about five hundred long. Goes down an awful long way, too. The hull stayed in one piece - inconceivable when you think about it. Would any of them have lived?”
“Depends on what damage the missiles did before it crashed. If the life support suffered damage, their bodies will be spread a nanometre thick across the walls.”
“Tough luck for them, huh?”
“I’m out of sympathy.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Something else loomed into view. The MHL Goliath lay ahead, with a hatch open high on one of its sheer sides. Captain Jonas engage
d the autopilot and the two of them sat in silence while the onboard computers lined them up with the docking bay and guided them in to land.
Chapter Thirteen
The ship’s medic was waiting for them in the hangar bay. He was a surly man who spoke in little more than grunts. He’d brought the Goliath’s mobile medical robot along with him, which was an eight-feet tall block with a human-sized tube through the middle. A couple of the soldiers wrestled McGlashan into the tube, which closed up, sealing her in completely. The med-bot reversed away on its tiny gravity engine, the ship’s medic close behind.
“Will she live?” Duggan called after the medic. The man just shrugged and continued walking. It was insubordinate, but this wasn’t a battle Duggan wanted to start.
“I guess you’re in charge now, Captain Duggan.” It was Jonas. She offered a perfect salute with just the right amount of mockery. It would have made Duggan grin on another day. “What do you command? Shall we set a course for Pioneer?” she asked.
He realised how exhausted he was. He’d not slept apart from a few restless minutes snatched on the walk from the wreck of the ES Pugilist. His body had been running on battlefield adrenaline for too long and the pain from his forearm was making it difficult to focus.
“We can’t go to Pioneer yet, Captain Jonas,” he said. “We’re not finished with our duties here on Everlong.”
She raised an eyebrow and there was no trace of humour when she spoke. “The miners are all dead, Captain Duggan. We were in orbit long enough to find that out, at least.”
“I know,” he said. “The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance. We can still get something out of this.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“The Shatterer emplacement on the ground. Do you have room for it?”
“How big is it?”
“One hundred and twenty metres in diameter, length unknown. I’d guess no more than three hundred metres.”
“Oh, I thought you meant it was big. There’s almost room for that under my bed.”
This time Duggan couldn’t help but smile. “We’ll need to get it onboard. If we get it back to a shipyard, the Corps research labs will have something to go on. We’ve got nothing to combat them at the moment. The Shatterers ignore all our countermeasures.”
“I know,” she said. “We’ll get it into the hold. Tonight. Want to come up to the bridge and see how a Class One Military Heavy Lifter works?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
While a Corps warship was all engines and weapons, the Goliath was all gravity lifter and cargo bay. The hull was triple-skinned and access corridors ran between the walls. Duggan found himself sitting in a narrow two-seater gravity-drive car that scooted along the seemingly deserted passages.
“We’re a bit more spread out than a warship,” said Jonas. “So we need transport to get us around.”
“How many crew do you have?”
“Twenty-two. It’s not as if we could lift any of our cargo by hand, no matter how many people we brought onboard.”
“What’ve you got in your cargo bays?”
“A couple of rock-borers at fifteen million tonnes apiece. An entire smelting plant, custom-built on Pioneer for operations here. That’s got to weigh at least five hundred million tonnes. Then there’re all the vehicles and supplies. Nothing we can’t handle. Here’s the bridge.”
They left the vehicle at the bottom of a grey-metal stairwell. Everything in the Corps was grey, as if a tin of paint would push the budget too far. Duggan was used to it and hardly even noticed these days. He entered the bridge behind Jonas. To his eyes, the room was sprawled across an unnecessarily large area. There were a couple of men at banks of screens on the far side.
“Second Lieutenants Green and Haster,” she said. They turned and nodded at Jonas. Discipline tended to be a bit less formal on anything that wasn’t a frontline warship and Duggan didn’t worry about it. Jonas pointed to a chair in front of some more screens and he sat.
“What happened to the ES Ribald?” he asked, hoping she might have some more details beyond what he’d already guessed.
“Same thing that happened to you. They got hit by a missile. At least that’s what our mainframe assumes happened. See, our sensors aren’t made to detect objects travelling at four thousand klicks per second. Anyway, they didn’t get lucky. Broke to pieces in mid-air and ended up scattered across half the planet.” She turned to face him. “Captain Graham seemed like he had a good heart. He was petrified of meeting you. I could hear it in his voice. I hope he left a good impression.”
Duggan sighed. “I didn’t like him. Maybe I should have given him more of a chance.”
“It’s too late for that now,” she said, her words without judgement.
“How did you know what the Ghasts wanted of you?” Duggan asked. “After they’d destroyed your escort.”
“I didn’t have the faintest idea. They shot down the Pugilist and Ribald and simply didn’t shoot us down. I knew I couldn’t outrun them, so I just waited to see what they’d do. They did nothing and I kept waiting. Then, the Cadaveron showed up. They tried to communicate with us – sent us all sorts of messages. Our mainframe’s been working on figuring out what they wanted, but it’s not the quickest model in the Corps. It’s funny to think we’ve been fighting for so long and we don’t even understand each other’s languages.”
Duggan knew the two sides had communicated in the past, though it was something he kept to himself. Even with that knowledge, he was unaware how the dialogue had taken place or how the Space Corps had figured out enough of the Ghast language to get things moving.
“I’m going to bring us over the mine area,” she said. “The gravity chains have a range of thirty klicks. Like a reverse gravity engine, except slower and with more short-range grunt. Where’d you say that missile tube was?”
“Right in the middle. In a crater.”
“Another crater? You make a lot of them, do you?” It was a throwaway comment, not meant to be anything.
Duggan grimaced, remembering the planet he’d destroyed while captaining the ESS Crimson. “It’s been known to happen.”
“The sensors have located the object. Half-buried and at an angle. Shouldn’t present a problem and there’s plenty of room in Cargo Bay Fifteen. I see it’s just shy of eighty-five million tonnes. Pretty heavy for its size - it must be right up there with the other densest metals.”
“It’s no problem, is it?”
“No problem at all. Here, we’re hovering at nine klicks. Opening the bay door.”
The nearby screens each showed a different viewpoint of what was happening. One showed a pair of cargo doors sliding away into the recesses of the spacecraft – Duggan assumed there’d be room for them between the hull skins, to ensure the doors wouldn’t interfere with what was in the hold.
“Got a fix on it,” said Jonas. She sounded as if she were reciting the words as much for her benefit as Duggan’s. “Watch what happens.”
Duggan had seen before how the lifters worked. Nevertheless, he stared in fascination as one of the screens showed the Shatterer tube being dragged smoothly and cleanly from its crater.
“The invisible hand of God, we call it,” said Jonas. “Five klicks away. Rotating it perpendicular. Coming in nicely.”
A couple of minutes later and it was done. The Ghast Shatterer tube was safely stowed on the Goliath.
“The Corps engineers will be happy to see that,” said Duggan.
“And I’ll be happy to see the back of this planet,” said Jonas. “The deep fission drives take nearly an hour to warm up. I’ll bring us to a high orbit while Lieutenant Green hits them with a spanner.”
“How much can this vessel lift?” asked Duggan. “If the cargo bays were all empty and you wanted to haul the heaviest item you could?”
“We’ve done five billion tonnes before, though that was in separate units of a billion each. We were expecting to pick up almost that amount of metal from Everl
ong.” She looked at him sideways. “You’re up to something.”
“What about nine-point-five billion tonnes in the form of a single object?”
“I knew you were up to something. If you’re referring to that wrecked Cadaveron on the surface below, then there’s no room for it. We’re full up.”
“What if you removed all of the other cargo apart from the missile battery? Would there be room?”
Captain Jonas opened and closed her mouth, still not sure if she should take Duggan seriously or not. “If we emptied the hold and dumped all our inner walls there would theoretically be enough room to fit a Cadaveron inside. It’s nearly ten billion tonnes.” She repeated the weight as if to remind Duggan what he was asking.
“Could the gravity chains pick it up? And if so, would you have enough power to bring it into space? Captain Jonas, we have a unique opportunity to capture one of the enemy’s most powerful warships. As far as I’m aware, such a chance hasn’t arisen before. We’ve taken wreckage of course, but nothing like this. The things we could learn, Captain. Imagine what this might do for the Confederation.”
“I’m too busy imagining my precious spaceship crashing into the same impact crater as the Cadaveron you want to lift out of it. It’ll take us at least two days to safely unload our cargo. What if the Ghasts come back?”
“How long to jettison the contents of the hold?”
“Less than half an hour. I can’t possibly authorise that. It’ll take years to pay for out of a captain’s salary.” Her sense of humour was still there at least.
“Could you recover the wrecked spaceship?” asked Duggan quietly.
“If you approve it, I’ll give it a go.”
“Very well. Captain Jonas, I want you to jettison whatever cargo you’re carrying. After that, the MHL Goliath will bring the Cadaveron into its hold and we’ll take it back to Pioneer.”
“You’re the boss,” she said. “What if there’s anyone alive on board and they decide to open fire?”
“We’ll find out long before we get them into the hold.”
Bane of Worlds (Survival Wars Book 2) Page 10
