Empires in Ruin Read online

“Near as damnit destroyed,” said Aston.

  It wasn’t true and she knew it. Both Laws of Ancidium had been nose-first to the Dark Bomb at the time of detonation and their energy shields had – incredibly – soaked much of the half-billion-kilometre blast. The Aeklu had lost three thousand metres of its nose and its engines had been knocked offline, leaving it with no power for the life support or weapons. At the same time, the Verumol had lost nearer five thousand metres from its nose section and underside.

  Recker wasn’t strictly permitted, but he guided the shuttle closer to the two parallel warships, taking care he didn’t interfere with the swarms of lifters and numerous other dedicated construction craft in the vicinity. The air in the cockpit became thick with vibration from the rows of immense gravity field generators which were holding the two captured warships above the ground, and a dull pain developed behind Recker’s eyes.

  A moment later, the base mainframe and then one of the senior ground operators gave him a friendly comms warning to let him know he should get out of the damned airspace. Recker smiled inwardly since he wasn’t anywhere near the construction traffic. The ground operator cursed openly about sightseers and spaceholes, and cut the channel.

  The two Laws of Ancidium were warships beyond imagination. At twenty-eight thousand metres and with a sixteen thousand metre beam, the reconstructed Verumol was the smaller of the two vessels. Its diamond shaped hull rose twelve thousand metres above the edges of the huge construction trench and a thousand or more repair craft worked to patch up its nose section. The rest of its armour was pitted and darkened to near black by the Dark Bomb explosion, but spit and polish was far down the priority list. Recker had always thought it was the older of the two spaceships, even if he preferred its design.

  Adjacent, the Aeklu was larger by mass and volume. Rebuilt to its original thirty-two thousand metres, it rose almost twenty thousand from its trench, with a maximum beam of eighteen thousand.

  The human and Daklan weapons engineers had been struggling to recreate the eight-thousand-metre barrel of the warship’s main armament, which had been torn off in the blast. The Ivisto fabrication plant had manufactured a two thousand metre replacement – which was already installed – and the weapons teams were figuring out the means to fit rifled extensions that would increase the accuracy.

  Aside from that, they’d got the turret motors and the magazine feed working, but nobody had even speculated on a test date. If the engineers couldn’t be confident it was safe, maybe the gun would never fire again.

  Like the Verumol, the Aeklu was also scarred and pocked from the explosion. The only data on the Dark Bomb blast came from the warship Vengeance’s sensors and so far, the scientists hadn’t made much sense out of it. With no sign of a consensus, Recker didn’t imagine the HPA-Daklan alliance would be building Dark Bombs anytime soon.

  “Have you seen enough, Commander?” he asked. Only a few thousand metres separated the former Laws of Ancidium in the shipyard and the two hulls were like alloy cliffs flanking the shuttle.

  “Yes,” said Aston. “Not much work left to do on the hulls.”

  “The interior refit will take another month from installation to testing,” said Recker. “Then, if we defeat the Lavorix, both the Aeklu and the Verumol will be back in dock to iron out all the problems we can’t waste time looking at now. That alone will likely see them grounded for a year or more.”

  “This is only a patch-up, I know,” said Aston. “It makes me feel better to see it happening so quickly.”

  Recker brought the shuttle into a steep climb and it rose above the sides of the two warships. From this altitude, the sensors had a perfect view east through the clear skies, across the shipyard and then to the landing field beyond that.

  Two desolators – the Incendus and the Olsear – were parked closest and their 2800-metre hulls, with front and rear Terrus cannons, blocked Recker’s view of the terminator class Vengeance, which was at the farthest end of the landing field. It was a few days since he’d flown the warship and he was due back on patrol duties in thirty-six hours.

  Denied a view of his spaceship, Recker took the most efficient route away from the construction yard airspace and got back on course for Comms Hub 3.

  “You planning to wait around while I talk to Fleet Admiral Telar, Commander?”

  “Hell no, sir. Adam and Jo are in the comms hub and I’m going to pester them. I asked Ken if he’d like a catch up, but as you’re aware, he spends all his time with his new Daklan engine buddies in the shipyard.”

  “Discussing output charts and overstress rates.”

  “Scratching their asses and reminiscing about the good old days of valves and pistons, more like.”

  Recker laughed – Lieutenant Eastwood lived for new tech and he always got angry when accused of having an attachment to the obsolete. Naturally, the more he complained, the more he got.

  Aston fished out a Frenziol injector, stared at it ruefully and then jabbed herself in the thigh. “I don’t even get a buzz anymore.”

  “I’m glad – I long ago got sick of listening to everyone talk bullshit because they were on a Frenziol high,” said Recker.

  “I miss the constant feeling of contentment, even if it was artificial,” Aston admitted. She pointed at the bulkhead screen. “There’s Hub 3.”

  “I see it,” said Recker.

  The comms hub was a flat building, easily identifiable by the array of kilometre-high ternium amplifiers protruding from its roof. A recent breakthrough – resulting from a human and Daklan collaboration – had discovered a method of overstressing the ternium in those amplifiers at the same moment as a data packet went through. The result was that the transmission packets were hurled towards their destination at an enormously increased lightspeed multiplier.

  A few tweaks at the receiving end and suddenly, FTL comms were passing between planets in minutes rather than hours. Whispers of real time transmissions were being heard amongst the theory teams, and that would be the most exciting development in comms technology for a hundred years.

  The sight of the Aeklu and Verumol, combined with thoughts of technological advancements caused a wave of optimism to sweep through Recker. With the breakthrough on the Aeklu’s intact control core, the future wasn’t as bleak as it might have been.

  Holding onto his good mood, Recker brought the shuttle down to land on the pad outside the comms hub. He and Aston left the transport and hurried down the concrete ramp. A two-hundred-metre plaza in front of the hub was flanked by five-storey buildings on both sides, while a much larger dome was visible behind the left-hand structure. Larger yet, the eight-thousand metre tenixite converter was less than three kilometres from the hub and it towered over every other building. Seeing it made Recker shiver with a memory of what the converters could do when they were controlled by the wrong hands.

  He averted his gaze and instead checked the road which entered the square from two directions adjacent to the bottom of the shuttle pad ramp. Gravity vehicles sped both ways, most of them carrying Daklan rather than human passengers.

  Since the comms hub was a vital cog in base operations, the Daklan had parked a pair of matte grey tanks in front of the building, one on each side of the entrance. Recker cast his eye over the vehicles – they were of a type he hadn’t encountered until recently. At twenty-five metres in length, twelve wide and nine high, they were mean-looking and angular, with twin gauss main armaments, complemented by shoulder launchers and chain guns. Had Recker seen one of these heading towards his ground squad back when the HPA and Daklan were at war, he’d have known the game was up.

  He and Aston made their way across the plaza, dodging moving vehicles and the other personnel, most of whom were on their way to or from the comms hub. At this end of Ivisto, the Daklan outnumbered humans many times over, though the aliens didn’t so much as spare them a glance.

  The tanks’ gravity drives produced a low, yet penetrating hum, which, for the time it took Recker and Aston to
walk between the vehicles, drowned out most of the other propulsion sounds from the shuttles above. They entered the five-storey hub through an ingenious rotating airlock which was designed to let dozens of people enter and exit at the same time without having to wait for the atmosphere to cycle.

  A couple of Daklan entered the same compartment as Recker and Aston. The aliens didn’t say anything and, in fact, didn’t acknowledge the presence of the two humans. Recker didn’t take it personally – the Daklan didn’t go in for small talk. If they had nothing to say, they didn’t feel obliged to come up with random crap just to fill the silence.

  The lobby area was large and with a high ceiling. Several passages led deeper into the building and many Daklan were in evidence, most of them female and all wearing spacesuits in a variety of colours. If you could forget the lack of windows and ignore the fact that the walls were unadorned alloy, this could almost have been just another comms hub on any one of fifty military bases. Almost.

  “I’m going this way,” said Aston, thumbing left.

  Recker checked the time on his HUD - he was a few minutes early.

  “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “I’ll wait for you, sir.” Aston grinned again. It was an impudent grin that no one could be offended by.

  “Hanging on for the news, I’m sure.”

  “You’re expecting news?” she asked, quick as a flash.

  “Go,” Recker waved her away.

  With that, he headed towards his meeting. He’d been trying to hide it from Aston, but he suspected something big was imminent. After so long here on Ivisto, the start couldn’t come soon enough. Recker quickened his pace.

  Chapter Two

  The meeting room was another boxy space in the already boxy comms hub. Like Recker’s quarters, it was meant for burly Daklan, which made the quantity of space tolerable, though the unpadded seats would have been more palatable to 14th Century flagellating monks than those with untreated piles.

  Luckily, Recker was in good health and the thick material of his combat suit made his perch bearable. He watched the viewscreen on the opposite wall and waited for the connection. At his side, a cup of evil Daklan brew steamed menacingly, daring him to partake of its contents. The rough translation for the drink’s name was crap, yet the aliens couldn’t get enough of it. He accepted the unspoken challenge and winced at the sharp taste. Truly the universe was a strange and wonderful place to accommodate such differences.

  The dark viewscreen turned grey and static appeared, along with a burst of white noise from the ceiling speakers. A distorted image appeared, wobbled, and then stabilised.

  “Carl,” said Admiral Telar. The oak panelled walls in the background and framed picture of Telar’s wife and three children indicated he was in his office on Earth.

  “Sir,” Recker greeted in return.

  “How is Trinus-XN treating you?”

  “Same as last time, sir.”

  The corner of Telar’s mouth twitched upwards. “That’s the formalities out of the way. Let’s talk business.”

  “The evacuation of Lustre,” said Recker, getting in quickly. “Is it complete?”

  “It has reached the stage where I will expend no more resources attempting to persuade the stubborn. The last remaining soldiers have been withdrawn and the planet is without formal law enforcement. I have done what I can.”

  Recker could only imagine the logistics involved in evacuating seventeen billion people and finding them somewhere else to live. Doubtless Telar’s few words hid endless tales of tragedy and loss, and for that the Lavorix were to blame.

  “You can only give people so many chances.” Recker briefly wondered if he was being unsympathetic, but then his expression hardened. The enemy wouldn’t give quarter and everyone in the HPA was making sacrifices - it was the only way. “What’s in the future, sir?”

  “Something big.”

  Recker leaned forward. “Are the plans finalised, sir? Are we ready to act?”

  “Soon, Carl.”

  That word again.

  “How soon?”

  “We’ll talk about it in a moment.” Telar pursed his lips and steepled long fingers, his expression inscrutable.

  “You’ve got news,” said Recker. “Something you don’t like.”

  “It’s news,” Telar confirmed. “Whether it’s good or bad, I haven’t yet decided.”

  Recker’s gaze didn’t waver. “Tell me.”

  “You were present when we cracked the Lavorix comms and control encryption,” said Telar. “And you know the processing core didn’t contain the Aeklu’s transmission logs.”

  “Yes, sir – Ilsre-Lunei told me at the time the control core wasn’t a data repository.”

  Telar’s dark eyes gleamed. “And she was right. However, when the Dark Bomb shut down the power, the core was holding transient comms files which were on route to their storage arrays.”

  Recker straightened. “What was in those files?”

  “Amongst the traffic, we found evidence the Lavorix are losing their war against the Kilvar. We believe they are planning a withdrawal.”

  “The Lavorix never struck me as the running type, sir. I was told their war was a holy one. Everything about the enemy makes me think they will not back down in a confrontation.”

  “A threat of annihilation does wonders for one’s convictions, don’t you think?” asked Telar. “Besides, you’ll notice I said withdrawal, rather than full-scale retreat.”

  “The Lavorix home world is the Ancidium,” said Recker.

  “We don’t know what the Ancidium is or where it is located, but it is logical to assume the Kilvar have not found it, otherwise it would have been destroyed.”

  Ever since he’d heard about the Ancidium, Recker had pondered what sort of place it might be. He had ideas in plenty and no way to confirm they were true. “The Ancidium may not be an easy target, sir.”

  “A target is a target, whether it’s an easy one or not. With sufficient pressure applied, the Ancidium would fall.”

  Recker knew it too. “So we assume the Lavorix withdraw to the Ancidium. What then?”

  “The Lavorix laid waste to Meklon territory, leaving behind many usable assets. Perhaps they will reclaim those assets and put them to use against the Kilvar.”

  “And if the Lavorix plan to resume their war, they will also require fuel in the form of life energy,” said Recker, guessing which way the conversation was heading.

  “Resources and fuel,” nodded Telar. “They have a source of one and knowledge of the other.”

  “They’ll turn their focus towards the HPA and the Daklan,” said Recker.

  “We’ve assumed – quite naturally, since our existence is under threat – that we are an important consideration to the Lavorix, when it is more likely we are no more than a distraction.” Telar gave a fleeting smile. “Before we destroyed three of their capital ships, I doubt we were even a distraction.”

  “Just a source of life energy to be tapped once the Meklon were gone,” said Recker bitterly.

  “Tell me, Carl – how is the work on the Aeklu and Verumol progressing? I would like your opinion on the anticipated results.”

  “We’ve got our best construction teams here, sir, as have the Daklan.”

  “Go on.”

  “Both of those ships could fly within the hour if it was important enough to give the order.” Recker narrowed his eyes at the viewscreen.

  “The order isn’t coming yet,” said Telar. “Go on.”

  “Our life support units don’t have the capability to cover the interior of either the Verumol or the Aeklu. We’ll have to accept partial coverage.”

  “Yes, that’s something it’ll take us at least two years to resolve. What else?”

  “With the decryption of the Aeklu’s control systems, we can replicate the necessary commands to activate the weaponry and energy shields on both the Aeklu and the Verumol.”

  “Almost everything apart from the Extra
ctor will function once the reconstruction work is finished,” said Telar. “We have dozens of Obliterator cores working on the Aeklu’s data arrays.”

  “And since those data arrays are still inside the vessel’s hull, that work will stop the moment the spaceship is required for action.”

  Telar nodded. “It is vital we decrypt the Lavorix star charts. Without those, we are at their mercy, passively awaiting an attack on our planets.”

  “I’m confused, sir,” said Recker. “One moment you’re talking like you’ll order the Aeklu and Verumol out of their trenches, the next you’re concerned about star charts – star charts we can’t extract once the spaceships are ordered to active duty.”

  “You’re hearing the words, Carl, but the message has flown by.”

  Recker kept his expression neutral, while he thought hard. “We don’t need to be passive. We can use the Lavorix’s own comms system as a lure to draw them into an attack at a place of our choosing. They won’t know we’ll be fighting them with their own warships, giving us a chance to kick the crap out of their fleet.”

  Now Telar smiled. “That’s what I’m planning,” he said. “In collaboration, of course – our Daklan allies have much to say on the subject.”

  “Are the plans finalised?” asked Recker.

  “Not yet. We’re still outgunned – at least according to our projections based on known data – and we don’t yet want to commit to an all-or-nothing confrontation that might wipe out our fleet.”

  “The Aeklu and the Verumol, along with support craft will be a challenge for anything, sir.” The irony of describing Daklan annihilators and HPA battleships as support craft wasn’t lost on Recker. He continued. “We don’t need to send our entire fleet.”

  “Our primary objective is to knock out the Laws of Ancidium,” said Telar. “I don’t need to spell out the problem with that.” His image flickered on the screen and then steadied.

  “The Lavorix control three Laws of Ancidium and we control only two,” said Recker. “On top of that, the Lavorix crews are experienced and their ships are likely to be in full working order.”