A King's Ship (Empire Rising Book 2) (15 page)

As if from nowhere plasma bolts rained down on her small group. The two marines dived to the ground and Becket followed suit but not before she saw a plasma bolt strike the marine beside her in the leg. A grunt escaped from the marine’s lips before she swore, “I’m hit.”

“Target on the roof,” O’Brian called over the COM. Before anyone acknowledged a plasma bolt flew from the trees and took out the man raining shots down on the marines. “Got him,” O’Brian informed everyone.

“Get moving,” Johnston ordered Becket and the two marines with her. Without waiting for them he and Bell pushed their way into the complex.

Becket helped the injured marine to her feet and they half ran, half limped towards the building. When they got there O’Brian and Hastings had already caught up with them and they entered to see Johnston standing over a dead Havenite.

“Search the building,” Johnston said, “Chang has to be here somewhere.”

Bell waved Becket over and together they searched the ground floor while the marines spread out to cover the rest of the building.

The first five rooms they checked were empty but when they turned into a corridor with two more doors there was a dead Havenite lying against one of the walls. Bell approached one of the doors and pointed Becket towards the other. With a kick of her power armor she busted the door down and peeked in, Becket followed her lead.

“In here,” Becket shouted ducking out of the room. As she had poked her head around the doorframe she had seen Chang. He had been descending a set of steps that looked like they were cut into the foundations of the building. He must have paused to see what had happened to the door for he had been looking right at her when she looked in. Immediately, he had raised the plasma rifle and fired a quick burst of bolts at her.

“He’s in here,” Becket said again over the COM. “There were dead intelligence officers. I think he has escaped from them.”

Before she could say any more a massive boom shook the building and an unstoppable force picked Becket up and threw her across the corridor into the room Chang had been in. Before she knew what had happened an enormous weight descended on her legs and she let out a piercing scream before she blacked out.

*

The same shockwave threw Johnston to the ground on the second floor and when he managed to get back to his feet and look around he found himself staring out across the forest they had used to hide their approach. The wall, room and corridor he had just searched no longer existed. Outside he could see a large chunk of space station that had buried itself in the ground. The resulting shockwave must have blown half the apartment complex away.

As his mind cleared, he remembered what had made him dash out of the room that no longer existed.
Becket saw him,
he thought. He dashed towards the staircase that had been his target before the explosion. It was no longer there.
Screw this
, he thought before jumping into the hole where two flights of stairs had been.

He landed with a crunch and despite the combat suit he knew his knees would be hurting for a few days. Sprinting through what was left of the building he came to where Becket and Bell had been. Half the corridor was still intact but the explosion had blown the other half away. Bell was lying on her side in the corridor. A quick look at her combat suit’s display of her vital signs showed that she was ok, she had just blacked out from the concussive force.

Pushing on, Johnston entered the room that must have held Chang. On the ground there were two dead Havenites with plasma rifles at their feet. In one corner Johnston saw Becket under a great pile of rubble. Only her head poked out and something must have smashed her visor for her face was cut up and scratched. In the other corner of the room there were stairs descending to the basement of the building. Johnston rushed over to them and peered down. It looked like they led to a tunnel that ran out under the apartment complex to who knew where.

As he was about to dive down the stairs after Chang he looked back at Becket and stopped in his tracks. She looked innocent and helpless, just as he knew his wife had looked when she died.

Johnston closed his eyes, he had been dreaming of his chance to look Chang in the face for over a year. Every day he woke up and swore to himself he would make the Chinese murderer scream for mercy as he told him of how his wife had died. He had dreamed of crushing every bone in Chang’s hands then his feet and then finally his legs before squeezing the life out of the bastard and watching with pleasure as his eyes bulged and his mouth gasped for air. Only then would he know the memory of his wife would be able to rest.

And yet as he opened his eyes and looked at Becket crushed under the durasteel beams and permacrete rubble he imagined her screaming out in pain as he saw his wife scream out in fear in his dreams every night. She had been visiting family in a small fishing village on Cook when the Chinese attacked the colony, blowing up the orbital shipyard. Large sections of the station had plummeted through the atmosphere and impacted on the planet. One had caused a massive tsunami that had killed his wife and everyone else in the village before any warning had got to them. Every day he woke up in a sweat with the image of his wife standing before a massive wave as she screamed out his name in fear.

The fiery trails streaking across the sky above him and the rumbling and tremors caused by the debris impacting on the ground only made things worse as they mimicked the nightmares where he would see the falling debris and the approaching tsunami through his wife’s eyes.

With a shake he brought himself back to reality. He was torn, he wanted to avenge his wife’s death. Yet he knew that if he didn’t act this image would haunt him for the rest of his life. Becket had almost become a daughter to him. From the first day she had showed up at his house to recruit him to the hours they had spent on the freighter training together, he had come to think of her as family. In all his rage and anger he had pushed his feelings to the side but now, seeing her like this, they came rushing back.

With a deep groan of frustration, he threw down his plasma rifle and ran to Becket’s side. Using the strength his combat armor gave him he threw large chunks of rubble off Becket’s lifeless form. Finally, he dug down to a large durasteel beam that was crushing her legs. He lifted with all his might. Nothing happened at first but then, slowly, the beam began to move. With his knee and one hand Johnston propped the beam up and used his free hand to pull Becket out from under it.

With a gasp he released the beam, allowing it to crash to the floor. He checked Becket’s vital signs. She was alive but her legs were broken. Johnston hefted her over his right shoulder. He turned and approached the stairs to the underground passage. With his free hand he reached for one of the devices he carried. A couple of twists and it was armed. Crouching down to get a better angle he looked to check what direction the tunnel headed in. Satisfied it headed out towards the forest and not towards a nearby building he hurled the device down the passage with all his might.

“If anyone is still left in the building you need to get out now,” Johnston shouted over the COM. “I’ve just set a concussion grenade at full yield to go off in sixty seconds. Evac back to the shuttle ASAP.”

Johnston leaped out of the room, pausing only to put the still unconscious Bell over his other shoulder before he sprinted out of the building and towards the forest.

He was still sprinting when the grenade went off and the force threw him to the ground. As he fell he was careful not to injure his two charges. Rolling over he looked back at the apartment complex. What was left of the building had been thrown over a hundred feet into the air before it fell back in on itself, forming a crater over three hundred meters wide.

Checking the sensors on his combat suit Johnston saw that it had only been three minutes since Becket had spotted Chang. There was no way he could have got far enough away to escape the explosion. The underground passageway would have directed the force of the explosion for at least a couple of miles along its length, assuming it was that long.

As he turned back to look at Bell and Becket he was satisfied he had made the right choice. “Sit rep,” he said over the COM channel.

“This is O’Brian Sir,” the marine said. “Harkin and Hastings are with me, we’re almost at the shuttle. Jones has taken a plasma bolt to the leg but he should be ok. I’m afraid there is no sign of private Henning. I think he was searching a part of the building that got blown away by the debris.”

“Thanks private,” Johnston replied.

When he got back to the shuttle the rest were already aboard. He handed Becket and Bell up to the other marines before stepping into the shuttle himself. “Take us out of here,” he commanded the pilot.

Opening a channel to the frigate he spoke to Gupta. “Chang is dead, or as near to it as I can be sure. That was the best we could do.”

“I understand Major,” Gupta replied. “Good job.”

*

On the bridge of
Endeavour,
James was trying to coordinate the rescue of the hundreds of survivors stuck on the damaged orbital stations when his command chair beeped to inform him he had an encrypted message waiting for him. It was from Gupta and was simply two letters MA.

With a smile of satisfaction, he uploaded all of
Endeavour’s
sensor logs from the battle and sent them to Gupta with his own text message.
Au revoir
. 

*

Ten minutes later the shuttle docked with
Innocence
and Gupta took the freighter out of orbit. With all the confusion going on no one had challenged her ship and with luck she would make it back to Earth without the Havenites even knowing she had been here.

What the Havenites called The Gift would eventually be one of the main reasons the human race survived the War of Doom. Yet in the beginning it only caused war and strife.

-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD

8th May 2466 AD, HMS
Endeavour
, Haven system.

A week after the battle for Haven,
Endeavour
was still in orbit around the colony. James and his crew had been rushed off their feet. After intercepting most of the Vestarian’s final missile salvo and staving off total disaster, they had thrown themselves into helping Haven recover from the alien bombardment. In response the Havenites had been more than generous in assisting the crew in getting
Endeavour
repaired and fully operational.

“The final checks on missile tube seven have been completed,” First Lieutenant Ferguson reported to the senior officers James had assembled in
Endeavour’s
conference room. “It is now fully repaired and functional again. We have also loaded fifty of the Haven navy’s most modern anti-ship missiles. We will have to carry out some minor modifications but we should be able to use them if we run out of our own. Their range and firepower is substantially less than ours though.”

“Thank you Ferguson,” James said, “you have done a stellar job in overseeing the repairs.
Endeavour
is almost as good as new thanks to you.”

“Just doing my duty Captain,” Ferguson said with a wave of his hand as if he wanted to swat the praise away. “It was really the Havenite engineers who made it all possible. Even with a large part of their orbital industry destroyed they were still able to provide us with all the parts we didn’t have ourselves. It really is a miracle what they have managed to accomplish here.”

“Indeed,” James acknowledged. “In fact, that is why I called this meeting. We have been invited to a formal reception that the Haven Council is hosting on our behalf. We are the first Earth ship that has come to their colony and they want to officially welcome us, and thank us for our aid in fighting off the Vestarian attack. So we’re going to get a chance to enjoy ourselves. You have all earned it over the last week.”

Smiles broke out among the senior officers and James was pleased they were all going to get a chance to unwind. Everyone had been pushed beyond their limits. It didn’t help that Lieutenant Becket was still in the medical bay. As
Innocence
didn’t have the medical facilities to look after her Gupta had sent her over on a shuttle before she had taken the
freighter out of the system.
Endeavour’s
doctor had fixed Becket’s broken legs and she was well on the way to full health, all she needed was more rest.

Major Johnston had also returned with Becket to take command of
Endeavour’s
marines and James hadn’t been surprised to see Agent Bell also coming on board. She wasn’t going to miss the political intrigue of Haven and the on-going drama of humanity’s first contact with an alien race.

“However,” James said before the senior officers got too excited. “I don’t want you having too much fun. Haven is still a great mystery. We don’t know how they managed to establish a colony so far away from Earth without a working shift drive. Nor do we know how they built up their industrial base so fast. We’re also totally dependent on their version of events for how the first contact with the Vestarians went. For all we know they could have started the hostilities. To that end each of you will have a mission during your time on the surface. We need to find out how the Havenites got here and how they managed to build their colony up so fast. Ferguson is right, what they have accomplished here is a minor miracle.

“Every other human colony established before the shift drive was failing miserably by the time we made contact with them. Something different happened here and we need to know what it was. To that end I tasked Lieutenant Scott with investigating Haven through whatever means she was able to gain over the last week. While the rest of us have been helping them and repairing
Endeavour,
her science team have been sifting through the reams of data Haven has given us on the aliens and all the sensor data and communication data we have picked up from the planet.

“Lieutenant Scott, if you could present your findings so far?” James asked as he stepped away from the center of the room and took a seat. 

Scott nodded at James and got to her feet. The last time she had given a briefing to the assembled command officers she had been very nervous. Now her nerves had all but vanished. She suspected that the battle had had something to do with that.

As
Endeavour
had flown into battle she had almost been beside herself. Having spent many hours with the Sub Lieutenants running training simulations in the auxiliary bridge she had thought herself ready for combat. Reality had proven her wrong. While the command crew on the bridge had shown themselves able to handle the suspense of flying into battle Scott had been a nervous wreck.

It had taken
Endeavour
a number of hours to get into range of the Vestarian fleet. In that time Scott had found herself questioning her abilities and her decision to join
Endeavour
. She had convinced herself that she had no business being in the middle of a battle.

Yet when the first missiles had been fired something had changed within her. Her instincts had taken over and she had found herself doing what she did best, analyzing everything. The aliens had a number of unknown systems and weapons and it had fallen to her to figure them out and provide tactical advice to the other officers. At the time she hadn’t thought of the responsibility that had fallen on her, she had just been doing what was asked of her. Afterwards she had reflected on the whole ordeal and it had given her a new measure of self-confidence. She knew from all the simulations she had run that she had the skills to serve on a King’s ship. Now she knew that when it came to real combat she had the strength and ability to do her duty.

“As our Captain said,” she began confidently, “there are still many unknowns. Nevertheless, my team has been able to fill in a few details.

“First, let me say that our sensor scans of the system supports the account Haven has given of their dealings with the Vestarians. There are a number of electromagnetic sources in the outer rim of the system consistent with small battles. There are also a number of debris fields supporting the idea that the aliens attacked the outer mining stations.

“What’s more interesting is that the alien’s technology seems to be an odd mixture of advanced and primitive technology. We obtained a clear scan of their jump into shift space as they retreated and their shift drive appears to be highly inefficient. What’s more, their shift drives emit a massive amount of waste electromagnetic energy when they are activated. As a result, we have been able to confirm a number of recent jumps that the alien ships have made within the system. Some were over two months old and yet we were able to detect the residual electromagnetic energy. As far as we can tell, all this activity correlates with what the Havenites have told us.

“And yet, despite being more than a century behind us in shift drive technology,” she said as she brought up a short series of images on the holo display, “the Vestarians were able to take out the frigate from an extreme range with a directed energy weapon.

“We have analyzed the smaller hits
Endeavour
took from the same weapons and it appears that they use some form of x-ray laser. Our own scientists have been working on directed energy weapons but when it comes to laser technology they have reached an impasse. The effective range of a laser is determined by the energy supplied to it and the laser’s rate of diffraction. We have theoretically had the ability to produce ships with similar x-ray lasers but at present it would take a ship the size of the Chinese battleship we captured at the end of the Void War stuffed full of fusion reactors to power one laser with enough range to compete with our plasma cannons. So either they are way ahead of us on energy production or they have found a way to significantly reduce a laser’s diffraction rate, or both. Added to that, the aliens must have some pretty impressive targeting computers if they can hit ships at such long ranges.

“However, they do not appear to have incorporated their laser technology into their point defense network and the only reason I can imagine for this is that they haven’t been able to miniaturize their larger lasers. Yet given the technical skills required to build the things in the first place it shouldn’t have been too hard to do this.

“Certainly this strange mix of technology suggests the Vestarian’s story, of looking for weapons technology to help overthrow some other alien civilization that has enslaved them is legitimate. Haven has many technologies that are way ahead of the alien’s, particularly their sub light drives and missile tech. However, the Vestarian’s subsequent actions suggests that their request was a front.”

Taking a break to have a sip of water Scott asked, “Are there any questions so far? My team have put together a fuller brief on our best guess of the aliens’ technological abilities for you all to look over later.”

She took another sip as she waited to see if there were any questions. When no one spoke up she changed the image on the holo display to show the Haven system.

“Let’s move on to Haven itself then,” she said. “The system still has a number of functioning asteroid mining facilities along its outer rim, ones the Vestarians didn’t touch. The Havenites have also established a significant presence on the system’s seventh planet. They call it Athena. It seems they have found rather large deposits of valstronium on the planet and they have built up an impressive extraction and refinement operation. Alongside the development on Athena there are two gas mining stations around the two gas giants in the system. Both orbital structures are significantly larger than any similar gas mining stations we have, suggesting they are used for other purposes as well.

“If we turn to Haven itself. A large part of their orbital industries have been destroyed but at least forty percent survived. Groundside, our best estimate is that there is a population of at least twenty million. Almost a quarter live in Haven’s capital but the rest are spread out all over the planet. Their news organizations are reporting that upwards of twenty thousand were killed in the orbital bombardment. Most were killed by the debris that fell from orbit. The two nuclear missiles that managed to detonate on the planet’s surface didn’t hit any population centers and only killed a few thousand each.

“Putting all that information together with what we know the Havenites brought with them on their colony ship, we have an approximate date of founding.

“2250,” Scott announced and then paused to take in everyone’s reaction.

“Impossible,” Driscoll the Chief Engineer shouted, “there’s no way they could have gotten out here that fast. When did they leave Earth?”

“Our records indicate they left in 2198,” Scott answered.

“You see, impossible,” Driscoll repeated.

“Impossible, but clearly undeniable,” Ferguson said. “We have seen what they have accomplished with our own two eyes.”

“There must be some other explanation,” Bell added as she jumped into the conversation. “There is always a plausible explanation. In this case, one I think we’re all going to find very interesting when we figure it out.”

“What have you managed to get from their communications?” Mallory asked. “Surely there is lots of information out there about their history?”

“Yes and no,” Scott answered. “The Haven authorities have flat out refused every request my team has made to gain access to their datanet. For the first two days after the battle we were able to break the limited encryption on many of their COM channels but then everything went dark. We believe their government issued a strict ban on all non-essential COM chatter.

“That being said, we were able to get enough information from casual conversations about grandparents and great grandparents as well as from a number of discussions about business deals that dated back decades. They all support our estimate that Haven was founded approximately two hundred years ago. The real mystery then, is how they got here so quickly after leaving Earth?

“We do have one clue,” Scott continued before anyone jumped in. “There were a few references to something called the Gift. As far as we can tell Haven isn’t a particularly religious colony, everyone is free to believe whatever they want. Though when it comes to the Gift, it is spoken of as if it was a gift from the gods or a god. There were a few phrases like; ‘the Gift brought us here’ or ‘this is all thanks to Maximilian’s Gift.’