Rise of the Valkrethi Read online

  Still, two kills, eh? The research team were an unpredictable bunch, that was for sure.

  “Returning to the hunt,” he snapped crisply, and closed the link to ops. Then he opened a pathway to another Reaper ship. A long silver thread came up in his optics, and connected him to a new target.

  While Cagill was recovering from the destruction of his first Reaper ship, Celia was rampaging through the hub she had dug into. She smashed her way through it from end to end, but found no central system to destroy. She climbed out onto the surface once again and kicked herself off, coasting along one of the flexing, colourful spars. She brought herself to a halt beside a much larger hub.

  It took a moment to work her way through the surface of the larger hub, and then she was in a huge, open space that seemed to be some sort of Invardii living quarters. The place was buzzing with orange shapes, and she fell back as a wall of them came to attack her.

  She soon discovered the energy forms didn’t have the heat or energy readings of the plasma shields, but they still packed a punch. Enough of them could knock her off balance, and she didn’t intend to find out what they could do to a Valkrethi once it was down. Unfortunately they were now attacking on all sides, and there seemed no immediate escape.

  The wall to her left burst apart, and two of the orange shapes hurtled across the room. They turned back into cylinders as they hit the wall opposite, and slid to the floor.

  “Need a hand, then?” said Roberto’s voice in her ear. She looked across, and indeed the face on the giant Valkrethi, smiling impishly, was Roberto’s.

  Celia wasn’t sure if she was pleased to see him, or annoyed that he might think she needed help.

  “This is my Reaper ship,” she said primly, picking up one of the Invardii in each hand and squeezing them until they returned to their cylinder state. Then she used them to bludgeon more of the orange shapes out of the fight.

  “That’s what I thought when I arrived,” said Roberto, wading into a group of the orange figures and battering the majority of them down. “There wasn’t a sign saying it was occupied.

  “Anyway,” he cut in, as she went to speak, “the main power centre for this hub should be straight ahead and down, how about we make a run for it together?”

  Celia nodded, and they bulldozed their way through a wall of fiery, orange bodies, and dug their way down until they came to a layer of extremely thick shielding. It had to be the power source.

  “Together,” said Roberto, as they battered their way into a circular room that soared above them, a thick column at its centre. Celia grabbed his hand, and together the Valkrethi bulldozed through the column. Cables ruptured and the central supports gave way. Intense light overloaded the Valkrethi optics, and then they were whirled away in a maelstrom of destruction.

  Celia stabilised her Valkrethi in space, and realised Roberto was still holding her hand.

  “That counts as half a kill each,” said Roberto, smiling.

  Celia rolled her eyes. Men thought keeping score was so important, when it wasn’t. Then she took the time to look around, and see how the battle was going.

  It was going well. Over half of the enemy ships had disappeared, presumably destroyed, and the rest were rapidly succumbing to the Valkrethi onslaught. She opened a pathway to a new target, knowing Roberto would be doing the same.

  “Good hunting,” said Roberto, and released her hand. They slid away from each other, Celia’s Valkrethi accelerating quickly toward the midpoint of its flight path, then swinging around for the deceleration toward the Reaper ship she had selected.

  In the end it was little short of a massacre, and not one of the enemy ships got away with the tale.

  Celia had managed to get something to eat, and was on her way to the debriefing session, when all pilots were called to the bridges of their respective craft. A top priority call was coming through.

  “Earth thanks you,” began Cordez, his voice booming out around the bridge as Celia unconsciously stood to attention.

  “Prometheus thanks you. Air Marshall Cagill thanks you, and I personally want to tell you what this victory means to me, to the alliance, and to your families and your most cherished memories of Earth.”

  His words rang out over the sub-space connection to the modified Javelins that had carried the Valkrethi to the Alamos system, their support ships, and Ayman case’s Javelin squadron.

  “We had less than an hour after squadron leader Case left for the Alamos system to decide to send out the Valkrethi. It was your first action against the Reaper ships, and you little more than half that time to get ready, and get underway.

  “You have faced the unknown of that first action bravely. You went out determined to fight for what you believed in.

  “You went out in untested machines against a deadly enemy, and you discovered within you what it took to beat them. When you didn’t know what to do you found a way. When the way ahead was barred you put your lives on the line, and forced a way through.

  “Not one of you has been lost, and that is as much due to your belief in yourselves, and each other, as it is to the powers of the Valkrethi.”

  There was a pause.

  “Squadron leader Case tells me the staff of the accelerator complex were lost when a group of enemy ships destroyed the relief depot in the mountains. I will ask you now to take a moment’s silence to remember them.”

  This time there was a longer pause.

  “Do not blame yourselves,” continued Cordez.

  “We all acted as quickly as we safely could to get here. This is not the time to ask whether the outcome might have been better if something we did was different, and I forbid you to have such thoughts.”

  His voice was low, and chiding, but the crews and the pilots did not mind. Every one of them would have followed Cordez into hell and back, but they followed him precisely because he would never have forbidden them their freedom, or forbidden them to have their own thoughts.

  What he was gently doing was asking them not to take themselves to task over the deaths.

  Cordez wound up his speech, and signed off. Cagill took over.

  “The Invardii threat to the nuclear accelerators in the Alamos system is over, people, and it’s thanks to your efforts. Not one of the enemy ships escaped, and the only damage we sustained was a communications malfunction in one of the Valkrethi – due we think to standing around for 200 thousand years.

  “Well done,” he said firmly. “And now, prepare yourselves for the trip home!”

  A short time after he signed off, Cagill got a comms message from Ayman Case.

  “Air Marshall, navs is picking up a signal from the heat exchanger shaft under the depot that was destroyed. It’s some form of primitive electromagnetic pulse, apparently mechanical in origin.

  “There’s no reply to a comms messages sent on all the usual frequencies. My engineers say we can expect some sort of resonance like that from the heat exchanger, now the energy is no longer being stored by the depot.”

  Cagill nodded. He turned away from the screen for a minute, then came back.

  “Affirmed. I’m getting the same interpretation of the situation from my people here. I think we can carry on with our pre-flight routines, and prepare to leave the system. Cagill out.”

  CHAPTER 11

  ________________

  In the shaft below the depot, now destroyed beyond all recognition, the group of eleven Mersa and four Humans was taking stock of the situation. Ereth and Sebastian had managed to close the isolation doors above the first booster station, and bring a plug of metal and rock down on top of that. It had protected them from the Invardii bombing that had destroyied the depot.

  Ereth was trying to tap into the cables that ran down the heat exchanger shaft. It was bitterly cold in the shaft, and the suits’ powerpaks would only last so long. Maybe he could augment them with power from the cables.

  Sebastian was trying to figure out a way the little group could make contact with the Javelins
before they left the Alamos system. He went over the schematics for the shaft again. There was another booster station a thousand metres lower down, and another set of isolation doors above that.

  If they wanted to make a breathable atmosphere out of the thin, poisonous gases of the planet it might be possible to close off the lower doors and build a set of gas scrubbers.

  He pondered that for a moment, then shook his head. The suits they wore recycled their breath, capturing the oxygen from the carbon dioxide they breathed out and removing the water vapour. They would last for days before the accumulation of more complex gases made them a hazard to health.

  That was not the problem. The problem was the Javelins would be leaving the ice planet well before the suits’ oxygen and water ran out. Whether the Javelins left in defeat or victory wouldn’t matter to those in the shaft – they would still die a slow death, abandoned under the depot.

  Sebastian had no illusions about their future if they did nothing. The depot had been totally destroyed, and the Javelins would have assumed they were dead.

  At least they had plenty of lighting from the cable running down the shaft. He looked with pride at the lamps he had jury-rigged into the system. The little group had also brought along plenty of equipment when they left the depot. Assorted packs and boxes now hung from the rungs they were tied to.

  Sebastian looked down the shaft, and was almost overcome with the spinning sensation that followed. The rungs faded away below him as the light from the lamps grew dimmer. It wasn’t just what the members of the little group saw that counted, it was what they thought about it.

  To Human and Mersa alike the shaft was a bottomless well – the stuff of nightmares – even though they knew it did eventually end, deep in the mantle of the planet. No one wanted to be endlessly falling, and bouncing off the rungs along the sides.

  “The electricity from the cable has started surging,” said Ereth over a comms link from his position beside Sebastian. He had a scan meter attached to one of the junction boxes, and the readout was starting to oscillate wildly.

  Sebastian forced himself to look away from the bottomless pit below them, and back to the work at hand. He nodded.

  “We might be able to use the heat exchanger cable to generate a comms signal,” said Ereth thoughtfully. “Question is, how?”

  Sebastian mentally kicked himself. The old engineer was ahead of him on the comms front. Getting a signal out of the shaft was their only real hope of getting rescued.

  Serostrina worked her way around the shaft, hanging off the rungs, and sidled into the booster station cavity.

  “There’s going to be a problem standing on the rungs like this,” she said, once she had switched to the comms link they were using. “Some of the Human females are getting tired already.”

  Ereth popped his head out of the alcove where the junction boxes sat. He could see the sense in what Serostrina said. No one could stand on the thin rungs and just hang there in a vertical shaft forever, certainly not with the extra weight of the suits.

  The rungs had been installed to fit into the cogs of tractors that wound themselves up and down the shaft when maintenance was needed. It was fortunate that both Human and Mersa feet were finding good purchase on them.

  Trust Serostrina to pick up a problem with the group first, thought Ereth. The Mersa were alert little creatures. He knew the men would just hang on grimly until it was damn near too late to save them. The women, though, had been talking. Men and women rose to extreme conditions in different ways.

  “Sebo,” he said quietly, “rig some sort of floor across the shaft will you? Then maybe some seats so we can fit everybody in, maybe even hammocks, something like that?”

  Sebastian looked up from the electronic schematics tablet he held and nodded.

  “I’ll try to figure out a way to send a signal the Javelins will recognise,” said Ereth, the white of his short hair all that was visible inside the faceplate of his suit, as he bent over the boxes again.

  While Sebastian was trying to solve one problem, he witnessed the beginnings of another.

  He had cut rungs from further down the shaft, and was cold welding them into a lattice that could support a floor, when he saw a flicker of light deep in the shaft. He mentioned it to Ereth as he carried on welding.

  “I was afraid of that,” said Ereth, over the comms link. “The data from the junction boxes suggests the cable isn’t discharging into the surrounding snowfields as normal. Since it isn’t being used by the depot, or stored, the power has been building up until it earths somewhere in the shaft. That is what’s been causing the energy in the cable to surge.

  “The cable’s probably burned some of its insulation off lower down,” he continued. “My best guess is you saw an arc from the cable as it crossed the shaft to a point where the conductivity is good. The problem is, the arcing’s going to get worse. It might be a good idea to get that floor finished as soon as you can.”

  Sebastian made a circular ‘speed it up’ signal to the two Mersa working alongside him, and the little group redoubled their efforts.

  It wasn’t long before Ereth was proved right. Bright flashes issued from the depths of the shaft on a regular basis, accompanied by phantom thunderclaps as the flashes split the thin air around them.

  Ereth disconnected the lamps from the junction boxes when the surges started to overcome the bypass circuits he’d put in place. He and Sebastian kept working using their suit lights, but the rest of the group stayed in darkness to conserve the power the suits still held.

  Sebastian soon had the floor supports in place, and started working on the floor itself. He was using the doors off the junction boxes and the lids off some of the equipment boxes, and anything else he could find, to make a patchwork floor covering. Out of nowhere there was an enormous electrical discharge in the shaft, and what sounded like an all-out artillery battle directly below them.

  The welders scrambled for the walls, and the rest of the group clung to the rungs. Immense flashes lit the shaft time after time, while the whole shaft screamed as electrical arcs ripped the air apart, and groaned as the surrounding rock reverberated from the assault.

  “Sounds worse than it is,” shouted Ereth over the comms link.

  “It’s the methane gases in the planet’s atmosphere building fireballs around the arcing. We’re lucky the concentration isn’t any higher, or the whole shaft would go off like a bomb.

  “Sebo, set some heat cutters around the cable, we’re going to have to drop it down the shaft. It’s only lightly pinned to the walls when its not going through the booster stations. The stations are a thousand metres apart, and that should give us a reasonable margin of safety.”

  Sebastian hurried to carry out Ereth’s plan. The light show and unholy racket had diminished a little by the time he was ready. He set the heat cutters to activate in a matter of seconds, and climbed up to join the others. As he reached the makeshift platform the cutters flared, and the thick cable fell away into the depths below them.

  Sebastian looked at Ereth, who shook his head sadly. He didn’t need to say anything. Their plan to set up a comms system using the energy in the cable had disappeared as the cable had plummeted into the depths. They would have to think of something else.

  “Come up to the booster station when you’ve finished your welding,” said Ereth quietly, and Sebastian knew their chances of survival were down to slim, or none. And those chances depended on what the two of them dreamed up next. What they could make out of the supplies they still had left.

  Everyone was relieved when the rough patchwork floor was finished. The fear of falling down the shaft had affected them all differently, and one or two had dipped into the small medical kit that came with each suit for something to reduce the anxiety.

  Some of the little group were standing, but some could now sit with their backs to the wall, legs spread out. Sebastian left his two Mersa co-workers trying to change some tough, synthetic-fibre sheeting into ha
mmocks to sling around the walls.

  He climbed up into the junction box alcove and tapped Ereth on the shoulder. It was time for desperate measures. The older man put down the circuit board he was working on. His own ideas for sending a message had all reached dead ends when he examined them more closely.

  “I can’t see how we can send a message to the Javelins without the sort of power the cable was carrying,” said Ereth.

  “Even coupling up all the suits, and whatever else we can find, there wouldn’t be enough power to send a signal through the rock and ice above us, and into space.”

  Sebastian agreed. It was odd the way it had turned out. The shaft that had been their salvation had now become their tomb. He began to cast his mind over the possibilities for a comms system, looking at the equipment they had and the ways they might use it. They had to attract the attention of the Javelins soon, while they were still somewhere above the planet.

  An hour later their prospects weren’t looking any better. Some of the group were working on ways to prolong air and water over the next few days, and some were taking the first rest shift. It was strange to see survival suits curled up uncomfortably in the simple hammocks that were now slung around one side of the shaft.

  “We just don’t have the power!” exclaimed Serostrina as the three of them tried to brainstorm a solution.

  “Pretend that we do!” said Ereth obstinately, wedded to the idea that the message they sent must be powered somehow.

  “Pretend that we don’t!” said Sebastian suddenly, his face lighting up in hope. “What generates a comms signal without a power input?”

  “Nothing?” said Ereth automatically, still not sure what Sebastian was talking about.

  “Well, the piezoelectric effect does, for one,” said Sebastian, “but that’s not what I’m thinking of.”

  “You want to generate electricity from crystals in the rock? How will you get them under enough mechanical stress?” said Ereth.

  “Nothing like that,” said Sebastian. “Let me think!”