Cornerstone, page 6
“Are the lights going to stay on?” asked Corporal Catina Hennessey. “And what about the power to the doors?”
“I can’t say for certain how they built this place, Corporal,” said Lanson. “But it’s a safe bet both the main and backup power supplies are buried deep underground. I doubt Cornerstone is going to go offline anytime soon.”
“What can we do to change this, Captain?” asked Matlock.
It was the question Lanson had been waiting for, though he didn’t yet have an answer. He stared out of the window and didn’t say anything for a time. Although Lanson couldn’t directly see them, the incendiary fires were clearly burning fiercely in the structures to the south, and they cast long shadows across the landing strip, which extended as far as the transport. The vessel was still shut down as a result of the enemy scrambler attack, and its undersides were firmly on the ground.
It wasn’t the fires which had Lanson the most worried. The destroyer which had taken the worst of the damage from the Sagh’eld’s initial attack was still on its way down, even if it wasn’t coming fast. Why the enemy hadn’t finished the job, Lanson wasn’t sure. Perhaps the Sagh’eld had been drawn away into an engagement with the Imposition cruiser. Certainly the ground batteries were no longer firing, though it was entirely possible they’d been taken out by the attacking vessel, or vessels.
“I reckon that destroyer is going to come down right on top of us,” said Lanson in sudden realisation. “We have to get out of here.”
He dashed over to the door comms unit and pressed the button that would enable him to speak with the soldiers outside.
“You have to open this door,” he said. “One of the local defence fleet destroyers is about to land on top of us.” Lanson waited a few seconds, and nobody answered. “Hello?” he said.
“They’ve either been called elsewhere, or abandoned their posts, Captain,” said Gabriel.
“Let me try my command codes on this door panel,” said Lanson, not wishing to delay a moment longer.
As he was speaking, the floor beneath his feet shook with enough force to be noticeable through the soles of his boots. The deepest of thudding sounds accompanied the vibration and Lanson looked over his shoulder towards the window. “Debris coming down,” he guessed.
Turning back to the door, he instructed his suit computer to interface with the access panel and then injected his command codes. The door remained shut. Lanson swore.
“Private Wolf, bring that comms pack here.”
“You want me to start flooding the door panel with emergency overrides, sir?”
“Yes - do it,” said Lanson.
“Yes, sir.”
In less than two seconds, the door opened. Warm air rushed in and Lanson looked outside.
“No guards,” he said.
Before Lanson could step into the passage, he felt another vibration, this one stronger than the previous. The noise of impact followed, and he pictured a million-ton slab of alloy crashing down somewhere in the middle of the Cornerstone facility.
“Which way?” said Matlock. Like everyone else, she was now on a shared comms channel, so her words were easily heard.
“East,” said Lanson without hesitation. “We’re heading back to the Gallivant.”
Nobody asked what his intentions might be should they make it as far as the warship. Lanson didn’t know himself. He remembered the way and he sprinted along the empty corridor. Although he had no view of outside, he acutely felt the presence of the descending warship.
“Maybe the best place for us is out on the landing strip, Captain,” said Gabriel. “That way we’ll be able to see what’s coming.”
“And we might find some parked vehicles that will get us to the underground bay a lot faster than running,” said Abrams.
Lanson didn’t wish to be out in the open when there was an enemy warship in the vicinity, and, in his mind, being crushed by an immense falling object was no worse a way to die than being carbonized by a plasma warhead. On the other hand, Lanson thought he might prefer to see his death coming, and on that basis alone, he chose the landing field.
The corridor exiting the mess room went on for about fifty metres. Then, a passage branched south while the main one continued east. Lanson paused while he looked for a sign that would tell him which way to go, but there were none. He reckoned the landing field wasn’t more than a handful of metres north, which made it doubly irritating that he couldn’t see an obvious way to reach it.
“I can hear that destroyer’s engines,” said Private Mitch Davison nervously.
“Just like the rest of us can hear them,” said Private Ashley Teague, the squad medic. “It’s either going to land on us, or it ain’t.”
“We’ll keep heading east,” said Lanson, setting off again at a run. Looking ahead, he could see another turning, but again, it was going south. He cast his mind back to the journey to the mess area and, although he’d made careful note of the way back – and the auto-map in his suit had recorded it as well – he hadn’t given nearly so much attention to the turnings on the way.
Lanson got what he hoped was a lucky break. Another thirty metres further on, a short, narrow passage opened in the north wall. The entrance was opposite a door leading into a technician’s station and had been hidden behind a support pillar which protruded from the wall.
A closed door at the end of the ten-metre passage barred the way. Lanson wasn’t sure how thorough a job the base security teams had performed to keep the Gallivant’s personnel from wandering, and he was relieved when the door slid open for him.
The landing field was on the other side of the door and the sights weren’t welcoming. From where he was standing, Lanson could see the fast transport still stuck on the ground. Red-orange light bathed the vessel’s hull, though there was no visible damage. The effects of a Sagh’eld scrambler didn’t usually linger anywhere near this long – and repeat applications resulted in rapidly diminishing returns – so he wasn’t sure what was keeping the cargo vessel out of action.
It took Lanson’s brain only a moment to absorb the details of the transport. After that, his attention was fully taken by the incoming destroyer. The warship was hardly more than five hundred metres above the ground now and was descending much faster than when he’d last seen it from the mess room. Although the vessel’s Rodos drive was functioning, the noise of it was irregular in such a way that it felt to Lanson almost as if he were being punched in the guts with each rising sound wave.
“It’s going to come down over—” said Lanson.
The words died in his mouth. A shape slid into view from the south-east at an altitude of no more than two thousand metres. On and on it came, like the sky was being swallowed up by grey alloy. The vessel came to a halt and then the sound of its propulsion caught up, overwhelming that of the failing destroyer and making Lanson feel as if his body were being subjected to forces it wasn’t meant to withstand. He dreaded to think what kind of pain he’d be suffering were it not for the insulating layers within his combat suit.
This was no heavy cruiser.
“An Ex’Kaminar!” said Lanson on the comms. “The Sagh’eld sent a damned battleship to Lorimos!”
He’d seen vessels just like this one before. Wherever the Ex’Kaminars fought, they brought death and destruction to the human fleet. This one was at least four thousand metres in length, and, with a likely mass of fifty billion tons, it dwarfed the Human Confederation’s latest-gen battleships, which had mass values closer to ten billion tons.
Lanson waved the others back. If they emerged onto the landing field, there was no way they’d escape the battleship’s attention long enough to reach the underground bay. Lanson was sure enough by now that the local defence fleet destroyer wasn’t going to directly land on top of him or his personnel, so he preferred to take his chance with the shockwave, rather than trying to evade the Ex’Kaminar.
Having taken one last glance outside, Lanson swung the door shut, blocking out much of the sound. “East!” he shouted. “Keep heading east.”
Sergeant Gabriel had left most of his squad in the main passage and he urged them to move. The soldiers didn’t need encouragement and they sprinted away. Lanson emerged from the narrow passage a few seconds later and the soles of his boots squealed as he broke into a sprint of his own.
A new sound came to him. This was a crunching, scraping, thud, that had four hundred million tons of mass behind it. Along the corridor – back the way Lanson had just come, the walls bowed outwards, howling and shrieking with strain. The ceiling too sagged lower, first by a half metre, and then by another.
Fearing he’d misjudged the destroyer’s impact point, Lanson ran as hard as he could. A shockwave rolled through the hard surfaces all around him, and through the air as well. The floor jumped beneath him and Lanson struggled to maintain his balance. He was last in the line and Commander Matlock directly ahead nearly fell.
Another shockwave followed the first and it was accompanied by a booming sound which made Lanson think he’d been sealed inside a metal drum that was being struck forcibly from the outside. His head suddenly started hurting and it became harder to think straight.
Looking behind him once more, Lanson saw that the distortion of the corridor had stopped. The impact sound, too, ended abruptly, though it was replaced by the creaking and pinging sounds of overstressed metal.
Although it seemed as if the worst effects of the collision were over, Lanson kept on running for another fifty metres or so, and then he slowed himself to a stop. Turning, he stared back along the corridor for several seconds until he was sure the danger had passed. Then, he called on the other personnel to halt.
“I’m damned glad that destroyer came down under some sort of control,” said Lanson. Already, the disorientation he’d felt only moments before had disappeared, though the headache hadn’t shifted yet.
“What next, Captain?” asked Commander Matlock. “Are we still heading for the Gallivant?”
Lanson wasn’t sure. Twenty Carbine class vessels wouldn’t do much more than scratch the armour of an Ex’Kaminar, so he wasn’t keen to test the damaged Gallivant against the enemy warship without some significant backup – backup which would almost certainly not be arriving any time in the next few days. Equally, there was no way the Gallivant would escape the battleship when the enemy vessel was hovering directly over the facility.
That left few options. Finding a place to hide was one of those options, and probably the most logical course of action in the circumstances, but Lanson wasn’t the hiding type.
“Maybe it’s time we found out who’s alive on this base,” he said. “And asked them if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“I’m all for shooting Sagh’eld, Captain,” said Gabriel. “But what kind of help do you think we can offer?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out, Sergeant,” said Lanson.
He made his way through the gathered soldiers – who looked more like automatons in their full combat gear - and stared east along the corridor. He spotted a passage heading south, a little way farther.
“Let’s go that way and turn south,” said Lanson. “Maybe we’ll find somewhere we can hole up while we find out exactly what is happening here on Cornerstone.”
“I should lead, Captain,” said Gabriel. “Where there are Sagh’eld warships, there’ll be Sagh’eld soldiers.”
“I agree,” said Lanson. “You take the lead.”
Although the TL-1 All-Purpose combat suit he was wearing – which was made from a lightweight polymer – was practical for most duties, its protection was limited. It might deflect a Sagh’eld gauss round hitting at an oblique, but not much more. The GK-3 Frontline combat suits were far more effective at stopping incoming projectiles. Their weight was greater – though not by as much as appearances suggested – but their biggest disadvantage was that they were not so easy to move around in.
Gabriel bellowed a couple of orders and then got moving, with Private Chan alongside. Lanson followed.
South, the corridor continued for a long distance, and there were intersections and doorways.
“The air’s heating up,” said Gabriel. “And it’s happening quickly.”
Lanson checked the temperature gauge on his HUD, and, sure enough, it was much warmer than it had been only a short time before. “Maybe the HVAC isn’t able to keep up,” he said.
“Or maybe it shut down,” said Lieutenant Abrams.
“There’s a long way to go before the temperature threshold of our suits is breached,” said Lanson. “Keep going, Sergeant Gabriel.”
Gabriel increased his pace to a jog and the Gallivant’s personnel followed. As he kept pace, Lanson’s mind turned over recent events. The arrival of the Sagh’eld had flipped everything on its head, but that was how it often went in war, and every participant had to find their own way of dealing with it.
Lanson, as a veteran of many engagements, had therefore already recovered from the surprise of the Ex’Kaminar, but now he was desperate to learn what was so valuable here on Cornerstone that it would prompt the enemy to commit such a fearsome vessel to its recovery.
Soon, perhaps, he’d have some answers.
EIGHT
“There’s a place here, Captain,” said Sergeant Gabriel from the front. He was standing outside a room with an open door. “I had no problems with the door security, so maybe only the mess area was locked down.”
Lanson joined the other man at the doorway and looked into the room beyond.
“Another technician station,” he said.
“And nobody’s home,” said Gabriel.
The room was about ten or twelve metres along each side, with a normal-height ceiling and surfaces clad in the same tiles as elsewhere. Several consoles were positioned seemingly haphazardly on the floor, and they were all powered off. The place was a mess of discarded cups and unfinished trays of food. Lanson breathed in the air through the filter in his suit helmet and detected stale odours of decay.
“It doesn’t look like this place has been used anytime recently,” he said, heading for the centre of the room and standing next to one of the consoles. “Private Wolf, bring that comms pack over here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wolf, pushing her way past Private Davison.
Unslinging the cloth-wrapped comms pack, Wolf lowered it to the floor and then dropped into a crouch. She pulled open the front flap on the pack and then pushed a couple of buttons on the comms unit.
“Do you want me to start putting through those comms requests to see who answers, sir?”
Lanson bared his teeth in thought. “Let me give the main hub one last try.”
Using the comms module in his suit, he requested a link to the comms hub. For a time, the request went unanswered, and then the connection was severed. Lanson tried again, with the same outcome.
“No response,” he said. “I guess if you’re looking to shut down a place, the comms hub is always going to be high up your list of targets.”
“The routing hardware will be way underground, sir,” said Wolf. “And that’s all this pack needs in order to start bombarding those channels.”
“Do it,” said Lanson.
“I need to set a priority number, sir,” said Wolf. “The pack will stop automatically when it receives an answer on a channel of that priority.”
“A base like Cornerstone is going to have several priority one personnel, and many at priority two,” said Lanson. “Set the pack to stop when its channel request is accepted from either of those priority levels.”
“Yes, sir, priorities one and two it is,” said Wolf. “Commencing channel bombardment.”
“You can tell that Wolf used to have one of those auto-diallers when she was a kid,” said Private Castle, leaning against his two-metre rocket tube.
“Probably hoping to find a boyfriend that way,” said Private Chan.
Wolf didn’t answer, though she did raise her middle finger in the direction of the other soldiers.
“Leave Private Wolf to concentrate,” growled Sergeant Gabriel.
The soldiers didn’t say anything further and everyone stared at the comms pack to see what it would turn up. As he waited, Lanson listened to the sounds of distressed metal coming from all around. The alloys of the structure were not so much groaning with stress as they were pinging with heat expansion.
Meanwhile, the air temperature continued to rise, and it was now past one hundred Celsius. Lanson had been keeping a close eye on its rate of increase and it wasn’t climbing at such a rate that he was overly concerned, though he suspected the heat would be far more of a problem elsewhere on the base.
“Got a Priority 1 for you, sir!” said Wolf.
“Open the link and divert the speech to the comms pack’s built-in speaker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And everyone keep quiet – let me do the talking.”
Wolf raised her thumb to indicate the connection was made.
“Who is this?” Lanson asked at once.
“That’s a question I should be asking you,” said a female voice calmly. “And why have you forced open a channel to my comms station?”
“I’m Captain William Lanson, ma’am,” said Lanson. “My crew and I arrived at Cornerstone yesterday. When the shit hit the fan, I thought I’d better take direct action to find out what’s going on here.”
“I’m Anya Rose,” said the woman. “I’m head of research here at Cornerstone. I heard about your arrival – you were being quartered in the north-west section adjacent to the landing field, weren’t you?”
“That’s right,” said Lanson. “What are the Sagh’eld looking for?” he asked.
Rose hesitated, evidently wondering whether even an overwhelming enemy attack was sufficient grounds for her to betray the secrets of her research. “It’s certain they’re here for the Galos module.”
Lanson had plenty of questions, but he was aware of the urgency so tried to keep it brief. “What’s so important about the Galos module, RH Rose?” he asked. “And if it came in on that fast cargo shuttle, the enemy already have the vessel locked down. Their soldiers are probably storming it already.”
