Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Read online

  The Ulterior-2 was an evolution in design – it was still identifiably a wedge shape, but it was proportionally bulkier than most other warships in the fleet. A few last-minute alterations had allowed the shoehorning in of a secondary Obsidiar core and there were immense layers of shielding between the engine sections to try and limit the effects of the Vraxar Neutralisers. This shielding was of unproven worth and Duggan had been initially reluctant to sign off the design without greater research.

  The secondary Obsidiar core wasn’t the only significant update. Space warfare was changing and Lambda missiles were no longer as effective as they had once been. The Vraxar could jam their guidance systems, which meant Duggan had been forced to explore new methods of delivering high-impact punishment to the enemy. The Ulterior-2 was equipped with hardly any Lambda tubes, relying instead on the more effective and proportionally more expensive Shimmer missile system. It had new-design comms and sensor arrays, as well as heat-dispersing armour plates. Most importantly, the battleship was designed specifically to carry the first working prototypes of the new Havoc cannons, and the huge, squat turrets of the four upper guns were clearly visible.

  The Havocs had a twenty-metre bore. They could rotate 360 degrees and launch a sphere of hardened Gallenium at a speed in excess of two hundred thousand kilometres per second. The power of the guns had produced all manner of knock-on problems which had been exceptionally difficult to resolve. Duggan felt immense pride to see how far the Corps scientists had come in such a short time.

  Gradually, the gravity car left the Ulterior-2 behind. The vehicle picked up speed as it moved towards Trench Two. There was as much activity here as there was around the battleship. Trench Two had also required modifications, though in this case it was for width instead of length.

  Once again, the gravity car was required to wend steadily through the construction traffic, which increased in density the closer it came to the focus of the activity. Duggan knew who he was looking for and used the onboard communicator to speak to Cerys.

  “Locate Project Manager Peterson and point this car in the right direction.”

  “Certainly, Fleet Admiral. PM Debbie Peterson is seven hundred and three metres to your left.”

  The car changed course and its speed decreased to little more than a walking pace. Duggan was impatient, but he had no desire to injure someone because he wanted to reach his destination two minutes sooner. Eventually, the car pulled to a halt near a group of men and women who were in a heated debate over something. Duggan recognized Peterson, since she’d overseen at least a dozen high-end construction projects. She was in her middle years, with sharp eyes and a permanent frown. She saw Duggan emerge from the car and came to meet him.

  “Fleet Admiral, I wasn’t expecting you.” She was too much a professional to sound disapproving at this unscheduled visit.

  “PM Peterson, I have come to see how the construction is proceeding.”

  She turned towards the vessel nearby. “We are mostly on target, sir.”

  Duggan bent his neck in order to see the details of Earth’s Fury. The lower three-quarters of the spaceship were slab-sided and plain, with thick armour plating. The Shield Breaker was mounted on top. This experimental weapon was an intricate construction of beams, with a long, slender barrel in the centre. The gun was delicate and not designed to move quickly or to have a wide arc of fire.

  Earth’s Fury wasn’t really a spaceship as such – it had a gravity engine and a backup Obsidiar core, which were only intended to take it as far as one of the planets in the New Earth solar system. It was designed to scrape into a low lightspeed, though additional drive modules could be fitted if it ever needed to go faster.

  “Is testing complete on the loading mechanisms?”

  “As much as we’re able to, sir. We’ve test fired several hundred dummy projectiles, which doesn’t give us much information about how it’ll work when we send Obsidiar through it.”

  “You can appreciate we won’t be testing it extensively with live ammunition,” said Duggan. “I don’t have Council agreement for many trial shots.”

  Peterson was a pragmatist. “We’ll work with it. The field generators are functioning fine, and testing on the heat-exchangers finished an hour ago.” She crinkled her nose. “How the hell do they figure this stuff out in the first place?”

  Duggan smiled. One of the labs on Pioneer had discovered that if you spun a piece of Obsidiar at high speed through a powerful magnetic field, heated it to near melting point and then cooled it as low as it would go, the substance became temporarily unstable. It was a vaguely similar principle to how the Obsidiar bombs were detonated, but the major difference was that Earth’s Fury could repeat the process. It was nothing like as efficient as a dedicated bomb, yet the Shield Breaker could fire a four-metre Obsidiar sphere at high velocity and with what were assumed to be devastating consequences for anything unlucky enough to be hit. Earth’s Fury was originally conceived to knock out Vraxar Neutralisers. Now, the intentions were different.

  “It’s what our research labs are there for,” he said. “Believe it or not, there are a few of my best scientists who freely admit they can’t tie a shoelace. Like it’s a badge of honour.”

  “Yet they can design something like this.”

  “I’m a firm believer that everyone’s got a talent and the more talented you are in some areas, the less talented you are in others.”

  “The great scales of existence.”

  “They don’t always balance and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. How long until Earth’s Fury is ready for flight?”

  “I’ve got five weeks on the plan. In truth, we’re going to see a few days slippage on one of the engine modules. This is totally new, so everything’s custom and we’re having to change half of the components on the fly.”

  “We can’t afford delays, PM Peterson.”

  “I know, sir. I’ll do what I can to minimise or eliminate.”

  Peterson was one of the best and Duggan knew the job was in capable hands. He took his leave and returned to the car, unsure exactly why he’d made this trip in the first place. The car pulled away and he leaned back in the seat, making its cheap foam filling squeak. The answer to his question came to him – Earth’s Fury and the Ulterior-2 represented humanity’s hope for the future. They demonstrated that the Confederation would never give up fighting. Even project Last Stand was a statement of the same intention, albeit one which would have appalling, unthinkable consequences.

  Atlantis was gone. The planet had seen far more than its fair share of conflict both against the Vraxar and, long ago, against the Ghasts. In a way, his experiences in and around Atlantis had contributed a lot to making Duggan into who he was today. Though the Vraxar had destroyed the planet, Duggan realised he was still attached to his memories by countless invisible threads which held him back and clouded his vision.

  He closed his eyes and allowed himself to feel the pain for this one last time. Then, he cut the threads and felt them drift away, vanishing into his past and leaving him feeling momentarily bereft. The sensation passed and his determination returned. Clarity of thought came with it and he was angry to have allowed this weakness to have affected him so much.

  A gentle beeping from the car’s navigational system caught his attention.

  “You have arrived. You have arrived. Please exit the vehicle.”

  Duggan complied. With purpose to his stride, he returned to his office with the intention of shaping the future instead of being constrained by his past.

  Inside, he was too invigorated to sit and he paced his office, deep in thought. After a period, his eye was drawn to a new folder on his desk, which had evidently been placed there during his absence. He picked it up and read the title. ES Determinant Memory Array – Projections Team Update 23-13d.

  He swore under his breath before he even bothered opening it. The captured data on the ES Determinant’s memory arrays had been hanging over the Confederation like some k
ind of shit-coated sword of Damocles and every time one of these Projections Teams updates arrived it reminded Duggan how tenuous was humanity’s grip on survival.

  The contents of the folder were far worse than he’d anticipated and the details threatened to overcome his new-found strength. He read the overview section and then studied the figures. With a grimace, he put it back on it desk.

  Chapter Two

  The sound of his door opening caused him to look up. There weren’t many people allowed access to his office and in this case, the new arrival was his wife.

  “John - I thought I’d find you here.”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “In bed, perhaps? Where I told you to go ten hours ago.”

  “There’s no time for bed, Lucy.”

  “Cerys tells me you’ve been out to look at the Earth’s Fury.”

  “I needed to clear my head.”

  “And?”

  “Now it’s clear.”

  “You’re worried about something.”

  “I’ve just received the latest Projections Team update on the ES Determinant. They reckon there’s a 92.3% chance the Vraxar have cracked the static arrays.”

  “How the hell did they come up with that? Wasn’t it only 31-point-something percent last week?”

  “The information we have on Ix-Gorghal suggests it has vastly greater processing capabilities than anything else in the Vraxar fleet.”

  “You look like you’ve already lost.”

  “You know I’ll never accept defeat. It would be nice if there was some good news for a change. How many people are there in the Confederation? Nearly four hundred billion at last count, and every single one of them could be dead within the year. Within months. It’s a lot to bear.”

  His wife was definitely the only person allowed to sit in his seat, and she did just that, leaning back with her hands behind her head in mimic of Duggan’s thinking pose. She grinned suddenly, unexpectedly, reminding him there was more to his existence than presiding over endless death.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  “We need to find the Vraxar and kill the bastards.”

  “That’s the sum of your thoughts so far? What happened to the John Duggan who was never short of a plan?”

  “It’s been hard these last three weeks,” he admitted. “I’m ashamed I didn’t figure out what was wrong sooner. Atlantis had a hold on me. And then this new information from the Projections Team.”

  She studied him carefully, understanding exactly what he meant. “Is the hold gone? Are you ready to guide the Space Corps? You’re the best they’ve ever had.”

  “I’m not the best. That was Malachi and always will be. He could wrap a plan within a plan and if those failed, he’d have a dozen viable backups waiting to take their place.”

  Lucy Duggan’s dark eyes gleamed dangerously. “Admiral Teron had Captain John Nathan Duggan at his disposal. Without you, those plans would have come to nothing.”

  “Maybe. I try not to think about it too much.”

  “You were never a good liar.”

  “No.”

  “The Vraxar are coming, John, and you’re the only one who can stop them.”

  He ended his pacing and leaned against his desk, rubbing one stubbled cheek. He started counting off on his fingers. “We’ve got two – possibly unstoppable - Vraxar capital ships somewhere in Confederation space. We don’t know where they are or when they’ll put in another appearance, but it seems likely they’ll come for our planets one at a time. In order to stand any sort of chance, we need to find them before they find us.”

  “Tell me how to find the Vraxar,” she prompted.

  “We have a fairly good idea of their aims now. They want to convert humanity into Vraxar, they want to destroy the Ghasts and then they want to move onto the next species on their list.”

  “The Antaron.”

  “So we believe. I’ve spoken with my officers about all of this, without being able to figure out a way to put our guesswork to good use.”

  “Their main fleet is still in Estral space. Won’t their priority be to bring them here? Perhaps they can open another wormhole or something. Their fleet is surely more important to them than anything else. If they know where our planets are, they don’t need to rush.”

  There were several other wormholes in Confederation Space, each of which had been traversed several times during the last four decades. As far as it was possible to tell, none of them led to populated areas of the universe. The only certain thing was that the other ends of these wormholes were so far distant they rendered the Space Corps’ star charts useless.

  “They can’t simply open another wormhole anywhere they choose. In theory, they could make another attempt to reopen the Helius Blackstar.”

  “Which they haven’t done.”

  “We have Obsidiar bombs ready to deploy.”

  “I’m not convinced that’s enough to put them off,” said his wife.

  “I agree. It seems more likely they don’t have another Gate Maker, which is why they haven’t tried again.”

  “You’d imagine they’d carry a few around with them, considering how important it is for the Vraxar to keep moving.”

  “They’ve been travelling for a long time and they’ve come a long way. Perhaps they’ve lost them through attrition.”

  His wife had the familiar serious expression which indicated she was thinking hard about something. “Don’t you ever wonder how they achieved this?”

  “Achieved what?”

  “Everything we know indicates they have spent hundreds or more years going from place to place, killing as they go. Yet…they never once saw the need to make use of the captured ships of their enemies. Where do they get their resources from? How have they survived the constant whittling away at their fleet, particularly against the Estral?”

  “They could turn out dozens of ships every year from Ix-Gorghal alone.”

  “What happens when they run out of Gallenium or Obsidiar?”

  “Are you suggesting they have a home world, somewhere out there?”

  “I don’t know. You might be right – they could simply plunder each race they conquer and store a hundred trillion tonnes of raw materials in their capital ships.”

  “It would be another limitation which would have the effect of providing impetus to their progress.”

  “Have you tried contacting the Antaron?” she asked.

  “It’s not a risk I am willing to take. I am old enough to assume every species out there is as hostile as the next one.”

  “What if there’s an exception?”

  “It makes no difference – we don’t know where to aim our broadcast. Even if we did, I still wouldn’t sanction it.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, huh?”

  “Show me evidence to the contrary and I’ll generate you lunch from the replicator outside.”

  She laughed. “I already ate.” The smile faded quickly. “Maybe it’s time we did the same as the Estral. Put as many people as we can on our Interstellars and head out into the depths.”

  “We don’t have nearly the capacity with our existing fleet and I think we’ve run out of time to lay down new hulls.”

  “I can see it in your eyes – you think it would be a declaration of failure.”

  “There’s always a time to run – we did it often enough in the past. The trouble is, you reach a point where you can’t run any more. When the enemy reach your door, it’s time to fight with everything you have.”

  “The rules don’t apply when the enemy are firing missiles through your window from forty thousand klicks.”

  There was little useful to add to the conversation and Duggan reclaimed his chair.

  “Time for me to go?”

  “I’ve got a lot to do.”

  His wife left the office and Duggan returned to business. He took a deep breath before issuing his next orders.

  “Cerys, please
make the information contained in report 23-13d available to everyone of appropriate rank. Afterwards, I want you to ensure every warship and every planetary base, every defence emplacement is on maximum alert.”

  It took the Cerys node of the Tucson base a few seconds to acknowledge. By the time it spoke again, the sound of the Tucson siren was already audible through the thick panes of Duggan’s window.

  “Your orders have been disseminated and I have received confirmation from each warship in our fleet.”

  “Good. Please cancel all scheduled leave, except where the reason is related to health or bereavement.”

  “Done.”

  “I would like the Confederation Council to be aware. As soon as they learn about it, my communicator is going to light up. Please make sure I am not interrupted.”

  “Is that wise, Fleet Admiral?”

  Cerys didn’t usually offer advice, and Duggan hoped it wasn’t about to go through another of its funny periods.

  “Allow me to make that decision, Cerys. After you are finished, I would like you to connect me with Subjos Kion-Tur.”

  “Certainly.”

  Duggan found himself becoming increasingly at ease with his Ghast counterpart. It wasn’t long until an image of Kion-Tur appeared on one of the desktop viewscreens. The presence of screens and consoles in the background suggested the alien was onboard one of his fleet’s Oblivion battleships.

  “What can I do for you, Fleet Admiral Duggan?” rumbled the Ghast.

  “Have your warships reported any new sightings of the Vraxar?”

  “There has been nothing in the thirty minutes since we last updated the Helius database.”

  “We believe there is a high chance the enemy have unravelled the contents of the Determinant’s arrays.”

  “How high?”

  “92%”

  “That is high. Do you know the Vraxar’s likely first target and have you ascertained their intentions?”

  “We don’t know where they will come or when. As for their intentions, death would be preferable to conversion.”