Bane of Worlds (Survival Wars Book 2)

by Anthony James

  “Can we fix it?”

  “I think so. It’s going to take weeks for the core to reconfigure the engines. It’s like when we first located the Crimson, except then it had already been rerouting for a long time.”

  “Meaning we only had to wait hours,” said Duggan.

  “That’s right, Captain. Now we’ll need to start at the very beginning and that’s where the reconfiguration is slowest.”

  “How could a weapon do that?”

  “It’s strange and I don’t have an answer.”

  “Start work on it at once, Lieutenant.” Duggan turned his attention to Chainer. “What about our sensors? When will they work and when can you get the comms running?”

  “Basic operation of the sensors will become available before the engines are at a fraction of one percent. Long-range stuff will take more time, because that draws more power.”

  “What about our comms?”

  “I can run diagnostics if you want me to tap into the mainframe’s cycles. Gut feeling is we’ve been jammed.”

  “Permanently? Is that possible?”

  “We can’t do it, sir. Neither can the Ghasts as far as we know. I’m sure it’s possible – I’m one of those people who believes everything is possible.”

  “Do you think you can get them working again?”

  “Truthfully? I have no idea. Given the time, I’m sure I could provide you with an explanation as to what’s happened. Resolving it might be a different thing entirely. It may be that our comms gear has been completely ruined such that it needs a complete replacement at a shipyard. The internal stuff looks like it's working for some reason. That’s a lot less sophisticated than the long-range comms. I don’t think it’s been affected.”

  “Commander McGlashan. Are our weapons online?”

  “Everything apart from the disruptors, which run off the engines. I’m assuming the Planet Breaker needs an external power source as well. It’s still hidden from my console, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. The Lambdas have their own power systems and we can instruct them to launch using the mainframe. I’d say we have nine or ten missile clusters which are unusable owing to our proximity to the side wall and floor of this canyon.”

  “If our weapons are working, it would be a wise to assume the Ghasts can launch as well.”

  “Definitely, sir,” she said.

  “And if the Ghasts can launch their missiles, yet haven’t done so, we must assume they have chosen to let us live.”

  “Or they’ve suffered damage we’re unaware of,” said Breeze.

  “For some reason, I don’t think that’s the case,” said Duggan, rubbing his chin. “Did we manage to capture any data on the Oblivion prior to the sensors going off?” he asked.

  “Whatever the sensors see, they keep a record of,” said Chainer. “Let’s have a look.”

  “I’d like to know if they are showing external signs of damage.”

  “Nope, sir. Nothing at all. They’re clean on top and on the one side we got a view of. There’s something else as well – it’s the same Ghast warship that we encountered on this planet when we took the Crimson out of the cave. The one we got away from.”

  “Well damn,” said Breeze. “Funny old world, isn’t it?”

  “From what we know, the Confederation fleet met up with the Ghasts at the Helius Blackstar and several of them were destroyed, presumably by the Dreamer spaceship. We’ve found a Cadaveron and an Oblivion on this planet, apparently stranded. Therefore, it’s likely they’ve been hit with the same engine scrambler as we have and they managed to escape this far. There must be other ships as well. The Oblivion hasn’t fired on us, so they do not see us as the enemy,” said Duggan, letting his mouth run.

  “Or they see us as the lesser of two enemies,” said McGlashan.

  “We came here for peace and found something we hadn’t bargained on,” said Duggan.

  “I wonder if they realise who and what we are,” said Breeze.

  It was a question to which Duggan dearly wanted to know the answer. “If they recognize the Crimson as the vessel carrying the Planet Breaker, I don’t want to predict what they’ll try and do,” he said. “Even less do I want to predict what they might do to the people who were onboard when Lioxi was destroyed.”

  “Yeah, the results might not be pretty. Least of all for us,” said Chainer.

  “All we can do is hope they remain unaware,” said Breeze. “There’s a chance.”

  Duggan brought matters back on course. “Lieutenant Breeze, you detected the arrival of what you took to be a Dreamer vessel just prior to our landing. We can be absolutely certain they will be hostile. I think our primary objective should be to figure out what we’re going to do about them. They can only have come for one reason, which is to finish what they started. The Ghasts are secondary.”

  “I’m sure you recall the logs from the Crimson’s last battle with the Dreamers,” said McGlashan. “The Lambdas couldn’t track the enemy craft and the Crimson fired hundreds of missiles before it scored a win. We don’t have the luxury of being able to out-fly anything at the moment.”

  “How much cover do we have in here, Lieutenant?” asked Duggan.

  “If we assume their sensor technology to be similar to ours and not too far advanced, they’d need to overfly us directly. It depends on how determined they are and how many orbits it takes before they happen to get the right angle to see where we are.”

  “You’re saying it’s down to luck,” said Duggan. He shrugged to show he wasn’t blaming Chainer.

  “Would you have it any other way?”

  Duggan wasn’t even tempted to smile. “For once, it doesn’t seem right to be talking about luck. We’re going to need a lot more than that to get us out of here.”

  “There’s no way the engines are going to be ready to fly us out of here in time,” said Breeze. “Even if they were, who’s to say they won’t get scrambled again?”

  Something occurred to Duggan. “The fission signature you detected just before we landed wasn’t big enough to be the Dreamer ship we saw at the Blackstar, was it?”

  “Not unless their engine technology is vastly, inconceivably different from ours. I’d say it was something much, much smaller.”

  “The mothership sent out a fighter to do the mopping up,” said Chainer.

  “I need some time to think,” said Duggan. “If the Ghasts or the Dreamers decide to blow us up, there’s not a great deal we can do about it.”

  He got to his feet and left the bridge. He walked along the tight, turning corridors of the Crimson, through areas where it was too hot and other places where it was so cold that moisture beaded on the walls and ceiling. The ship was dead – utterly silent where there would normally be a familiar, comforting humming vibration from the engines. The quiet was strangely distracting and Duggan found it a struggle to ignore the hush for long enough to allow his brain to slip into its familiar analytical mode, where it was able to view and evaluate the options dispassionately. When there wasn’t much to go on, it gave him more time on each of the few choices and it was easier to discard the ones that were least likely to bring success.

  After ten minutes alone, Duggan was left with one clear thought as to what they needed to do. He wasn’t sure if it was viable or not, but he was determined to find out. He was a few hundred metres from the bridge and he found his feet carrying him faster and faster, suddenly impatient to get on with matters. When he arrived, his crew watched him carefully, their eyes occasionally jumping to what he was carrying.

  “Lieutenant Chainer,” Duggan began. “We spoke about the Ghast language modules you uncovered in the Crimson’s data arrays.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Our comms are offline, so we can’t communicate with the Ghast battleship?”

  “No, sir.”

  “During our earlier conversation, did I mention that Admiral Teron talked about one day putting the language files into spacesuits?”

  “I don’t
think so, but it would make sense.”

  “I’m going to put on this space suit I’m carrying. If it doesn’t have those language modules installed, will you be able to add them?”

  “The files aren’t enormous. They should be easy enough to pass across.”

  Five minutes later, Duggan was in his space suit, with the helmet in place. He searched through the options and couldn’t find anything related to the Ghast language. He asked Chainer to patch the Crimson’s mainframe in and assist with the search. It didn’t take long to realise the space suit didn’t have the facility he wanted.

  “Please install them,” Duggan instructed.

  Less than ten seconds later and it was done. There was a new option within the suit’s communicator, that was meant to interpret Ghast words into human language and vice versa. He tried one or two phrases, but had no way of verifying if he was saying what he intended to say.

  “Want me to come with you?” asked McGlashan, having guessed where he was going.

  “I don’t think we need take that risk. One person should be sufficient to see if the Ghasts are hostile and if they’re willing to work with us.”

  “Do you have a plan beyond that?”

  “No, Commander. I intend to play it by ear.”

  “Our inventory lists three low-powered portable beacons in cabinets at various locations on the ship,” said Chainer. “They’re meant for surface use only. It would be a real risk, but they should have the power to get a signal to the Space Corps. It might take a few weeks for our message to get there, but it’s an option.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant, I’ll bear it in mind. I would prefer to speak to the Ghasts before I risk jeopardising us further. After all, we know very little about the Dreamers and what they can do.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll dig the beacons out while you’re gone in case we need to use them. I might be able to set them to send a pre-defined message at some point a few days from now. That way we’ll still get a message out, even if we’ve all been killed.”

  “That’s a fine idea, Lieutenant. I’ll leave you to it.” Duggan paused before he left the bridge. “Since I’ll be unable to communicate with you once I’m away from the Crimson, please take whatever action you deem necessary if any harm comes to me. Commander McGlashan will be in charge.”

  “Are you taking a rifle?” asked Breeze.

  “I don’t think I’ll need one,” said Duggan. “They’ll either shoot me or listen to me. One way or another, a rifle won’t help.”

  “What if they don’t see you?” asked Chainer.

  “I’ll have to hope they do.”

  He exited the bridge, taking exaggerated care to avoid hitting his helmet against the side walls. In the corridor outside, he walked swiftly to the Crimson’s secondary boarding ramp. There was an airlock, which he entered and sealed behind him. A red warning light cycled as the boarding ramp released with a clunk of gears. It lowered to the ground below. The light outside was almost non-existent. When he was set on a course, Duggan rarely felt trepidation. With confidence, he strode down the boarding ramp.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The canyon was deep and wide, its floor covered in rocks and boulders. It jagged away in both directions and its walls loomed ever upwards, sheer in places and overhanging in others. Light reached here, though it was feeble and hardly enough to give the impression it was day. There was no river at the bottom – in fact, Duggan couldn’t recall if there was any water at all on Prot-7. It made no difference. A single object dominated everything - the Oblivion towered several hundred metres high, yet it also managed to appear low-slung and intimidating. From the ground, Duggan was able to see the warship was on dozens – perhaps hundreds - of pillar-like legs, each of which must have been strong enough to support a Vincent class fighter. Fractures spread away in all directions, many of them several metres in width. It was easy to see the rock wasn’t strong enough to support this burden and the heavy cruiser might soon sink into the ground.

  Duggan walked purposefully across the intervening space. Here and there, he had to jump across cracks in the ground and once he needed to backtrack to find his way around a five-metre-wide fissure that vanished into emptiness beneath the surface. When his helmet sensor told him he was only one hundred metres away, he stopped. From this close, he could make out the variations in the Oblivion’s surface. There were dents and scrapes here and there from where small objects had collided with it in flight. In one place, there were faint, round indentations, in a cluster of twenty, which Duggan took to be launch tubes for the Ghast missiles. There was another, much larger hatch underneath the spacecraft, which most likely housed one of the Oblivion’s many Vule cannons. All-in-all, it looked like a perfectly-designed implement to destroy as much of the Space Corps fleet as possible.

  Duggan had never possessed the patience necessary to wait for extended periods. It appeared the Ghasts weren’t patient either. With no indication how they’d detected his presence, they lowered one of their boarding ramps. At first, Duggan didn’t notice it had happened, since it was several hundred metres away and there were numerous support legs between him and the ramp. His suit picked up sound and movement and he turned his head to see six Ghasts walking towards him. He’d expected them to be in their mech suits and they were. A lone, unarmed human presented them with no threat and Duggan wondered if everything about the Ghasts necessitated an outward display of strength.

  They approached, two abreast and three deep. The dull silver of their armour was an almost perfect camouflage for the terrain here. They stopped in front of him and Duggan noted they carried light repeaters. In spite of the name, nothing about these weapons was lightweight. They were powered by a cell on the mech suits and they could spray a large number of projectiles in a short amount of time.

  The front two Ghasts were eight feet tall in their suits – probably not much shorter out of them. They towered over Duggan, broad and threatening in their metal armour. The visors on the suits were large and almost square, wrapping around the front of the Ghast helmets. Duggan looked into their eyes and could read no emotion in the wide, thick-boned faces of this strange species.

  Duggan knew that without communication, he was open to whatever the Ghasts decided to read into the situation. If they got his intentions wrong, it would be easy to kill him. This was his only chance to get it right and Duggan activated the language module in his helmet. His suit scanned for receptors nearby and it located six channels, all of them blocked and encrypted. Duggan sent a query to one of these receptors. At first, nothing happened. Then, the receptor allowed his helmet to pair with it. Duggan cleared his throat.

  “I’ve come to talk,” he said. His helmet converted the words into the Ghast tongue and sent them off to the receptor.

  The front two Ghasts continued to look at him, their gaze unflinching. Duggan had no idea if this was a threat or a test, so he stared back, meeting the grey eyes with his own. His visor was opaque, so it made his job much easier and all he needed to do was bend his neck and keep his helmet pointing towards the two aliens.

  He got his answer. He wasn’t sure which of the Ghasts spoke, but the response was succinct. “Come,” it said. The helmet’s interpretation gave no idea as to the tone or intent behind the words. It was going to be hard to reach an agreement without having a misunderstanding.

  The six Ghasts turned and began walking away, as if they’d already forgotten about Duggan. He followed them, finding their pace matched his natural walking speed. His past encounters – where there’d been only fighting instead of talking – told him the Ghasts weren’t especially fast in their suits. He had no idea how quickly they could run in whatever normal clothes they wore.

  His escort took him into the darkness amongst the towering support legs of the Oblivion and to the bottom of the support ramp. There were steps, which Duggan saw had been perfectly designed to match the strides of a Ghast wearing a mech suit. The aliens didn’t wait and climbed upwards at once. Duggan
took the time to stare into the cold blue interior of the vessel, twenty or thirty metres above. For the first time since leaving the Crimson, he felt the first suggestions of fear, tendrils of it working away at his confidence. It wasn’t fear for himself, rather a fear that he might fail to capitalise on the opportunity which lay before him. He swept the feeling aside, replacing it with determination. The Ghasts surely wouldn’t deal with a man who quailed before them.

  There was an airlock at the top - a high-ceilinged room with smooth walls. Duggan was instantly reminded of the Shatterer tube on Everlong, which had a similar room. Everything was bland and featureless. Pretty pictures distract a soldier from fighting. The words of one of Duggan’s old trainers jumped unbidden into his mind. He’d never thought them important enough to waste time thinking about, so he had no idea why his mind chose this moment to serve them up.

  The outer ramp rose at speed and it thumped closed. There was the sound of a dozen metal bolts sliding into place somewhere within the warship’s hull and the hiss of a seal being created. One of the Ghasts clanked across to a metal plate on the wall. It pressed the metal knuckles of its suit gauntlet onto the panel and the interior door slid aside. There was a passage beyond, blue lit, in the same hue as the airlock. Duggan followed the Ghasts through and was struck by the absence of other sounds. Aside from the metal-on-metal of the mech suits, there was no noise. The humming of the engines was missing and Duggan could tell this ship was dead, in the same way the Crimson was dead. It confirmed the Ghasts had suffered the same fate, not that there’d been any doubt in Duggan’s mind.

  Like most warships, whose vast exteriors concealed a compact interior, the Oblivion appeared to have little internal space to spare. There were some Cadaverons which had been known to carry in excess of one thousand troops and Duggan assumed the Oblivions could carry substantially more. Even so, he didn’t see much evidence of places where troops could be stationed. They went along a long corridor, which branched several times. After one branch, Duggan thought he could see steps at the end, and wondered if the Oblivion contained several different levels. Certainly, he saw no one else apart from the six Ghasts who led him onwards.