Goliath, p.13
Goliath, page 13
“Sarcastic bitch.”
The massive steel doors concealed a shelf like arrangement. A dozen metres apart each shelf held a neat collection of vehicles, each one parked around the edges of the space in bays clearly marked by yellow chevrons, leaving a gap in the centre for access. They were all painted dull military green, red and yellow markings warning engineers not to step or advising the location of emergency equipment. The vehicle directly before Davido was approximately the same dimensions as their shuttle, ‘Marine 1040’ inscribed in white lettering beneath the tinted windshield. The stubby barrels of a gatling gun could just be seen protruding below it.
“Looks like they have regrav here. Hold on, I’ll let you down careful. Prepare for a drop,” Sash advised, unclipping Davido from the cable and letting him down gently.
With a grunt, Davido dropped to the rubbery deck, stumbling and almost falling over. A steadying hand reached out and held him up. “They still have power,” Prentice said. “Somewhere at least. There’s no lights on and all their systems appear dead... but at least we have gravity.”
Davido played his helmet lamp about him, studying the row of vehicles. There were twenty of them, each in perfect condition, as if they had just been serviced and were prepared for immediate launch. “Some sort of landing bay,” he said.
“These things will be surface capable,” Prentice said. “They’re military hardware so they’ll be tough as nails. I could sell each of these for ... demilitarised ... twenty mill each. Easy. She-it.”
“Ten minutes on the job and you’re in profit already,” Davido commented.
“Yeah. Thing is, they've been sat here eighty years. Who’s to say they still work. Plus we’d have to get these doors open.” She turned to cast her own light up the door frame, searching out the drawing mechanism. “That’ll be a tough bastard.”
“As you say, it’s military spec. It might just need power. You can pull a cable in from your shuttle.”
She said nothing, calculating the profit for the trip in her head. What else was there?
More lights joined them, banishing more shadows as Duncan and Marco clumped down behind them. “Ooh, look at those guns, Boss,” Marco said.
“Makes the ones you brought look a bit silly,” Prentice commented.
“One thing you have to remember,” Sollander said over the radio, “this is a military vessel. Just about everything will be security locked. Can you hack military grade crypto?”
Prentice swore quietly. The engineer was right. Even if the doors had power and the vessels were in perfect working order, they weren’t going anywhere.
“We should find the captain’s quarters,” Marco said. “He’d have a safe with all the code keys in it. If we break in there we will have the run of the ship.”
“I doubt it works like that,” Davido said, venturing deeper. There was a ramp system at the rear of the bay, leading to the shelves above and below this one. Delta Bay 3A, was written in shoulder high letters on the rear bulkhead. “Besides, how would you find it?”
“They’ll have a map or schematic here somewhere. So new recruits can find their way around,” Marco refused to be put off.
“This isn’t a supermarket you know,” Prentice commented.
“Fresh fish isle one.” Davido chuckled.
“Frilly knickers isle twelve,” Sash said.
“OK, ok. Shut up now.”
Marco scanned under one of the vehicles, admiring the weaponry. If they couldn’t take the whole thing maybe they could just rip one of these babies loose.
He was carrying an ancient slug thrower, a shotgun-like weapon that fired solid balls of pressed steel at astonishing velocities. The thumb sized slugs were capable of ripping through metal as if it was wet cardboard and it wasn’t worth thinking about what they would do to flesh and bone. Duncan, when he joined them a moment later, had a light machine gun clipped to his back, a canister of ammunition secured just beneath the life support panel on his chest. Of course, Sollander thought this sort of thing quite ridiculous, and made a point of saying just that. Davido honestly didn’t care. The first mission to the old warship had not ended well. The same was not going to happen to them.
Prentice’s crew were armed also, but in a slightly different manner. Cutters and plasma torches had gone into their gear, along with the sort of communications gear that could operate through a few kilometres of inert warship. They had done this sort of thing before, and knew they would have to drill and cut their way to wherever they wanted to go. No doors would be opening automatically for them here. Secret pass codes or not.
Still, Davido sincerely hoped there would be nothing for them to shoot at.
“Right,” Sollander dropped to the deck behind them. “Let’s get organised. We need to find an airlock of some kind. Spread out and start looking.”
None of the crew moved, turning to Prentice for instruction instead. Even in the gloom Davido could tell she was grinning. This was her show; the engineer had best learn that quickly. “We’re looking for signs of the first mission,” she said. “We suspect they would have come through here. If they did, we want to know where they went and what became of them. However, first things first. I want to get these doors open so we can bring the shuttle in. Have a look around and see if you can find controls for it someplace. In two’s please and no one get lost.”
Davido pointed to the twins and then gestured towards the ramp. “Try upstairs, boys. See what there is to see. And keep in touch.”
“Sure boss,” Marco took his brother’s arm. “Come along then, you big lump.”
“You sure the shuttle’s safe with your pilot and Adele?” Davido asked Prentice. They headed for the ramps also, headed down.
“I doubt that lady friend of yours will try to do a runner. Doubt she could if she wanted.” She chuckled. “Not a pilot by any chance is she?”
“No.”
“Good. Nothing to worry about. The shuttle’s safe ground, we need boots on the deck over here, not over there.”
They descended the ramp, discovering another shelf below, a near duplicate of the one above. The vessels parked there were the same too; they were even marked in numerical order. The two kept on going, their helmet lamps barely piercing the gloom around them. The shelf below that was the lowest, the ramp system terminating facing a wide pressure door. It was closed. A small panel was set into the bulkhead alongside, clearly the controls. It was dead.
“Right, we know where we go next, at least,” Davido said.
“Got something here,” he heard Sash say over the intercom. “I think we’re at the top. There’s a door here.”
“Yeah, got the same here,” Prentice said.
“This one’s got a power cable running up to it. Looks like it’s been opened recently.”
“The first mission?”
“Could be.”
“Let’s take a look.”
Davido and Prentice mounted the ramps again, heading upwards. When they arrived at the topmost shelf, they discovered most of the party gathered around the pressure door, inspecting the cable that was plugged into a power socket. It led away into darkness, towards the ajar doors behind them. A helmet lamp flashed from that direction, one of Prentice’s crew investigating what the other end was plugged into.
“No luck,” a voice said, Davido didn’t recognise it. He didn’t know Prentice’s crew all that well. “It’s secured back here. They attached it to the landing gear of one of the ships. The end’s been ripped off though. The cable’s snapped, like someone yanked on it. Yanked bloody hard.”
“That would have been the first shuttle,” Sollander observed. “Looks like they plugged the cable into their shuttle to power up this door. Any sign of the shuttle itself?”
“Nada.”
“Takes a lot of force to snap one of these cables,” Prentice said.
“It should be able to hold twenty tonnes. Unless it’s faulty,” Sollander agreed. “We know they came through here though. We should do the same and get this door open.”
“Let’s not be too hasty,” Davido said. “Looks like there’s a clear sign something bad happened here. Something yanked that power cable out. We need to know what it was.”
“Could have been anything,” Sollander said. “The pilot could have decided to leave and yanked the cable when he started the engines. Let’s not start jumping to conclusions.”
“I’m not jumping to anything. Something clearly happened here. I want to know what it was.” Davido had been around long enough to know it was never a good idea walking into a situation unless he understood it first. He didn’t like surprises.
“Ferena, can you repair that end and hook it up to the shuttle?” Prentice asked her crewman.
“Sure. Would need an extension, but we got one of those in a storage locker.”
“Do it.” She turned to Sparky and gave him a complex set of hand instructions. He held up a thumb and clumped off into the darkness. “We split up. Payce, make yourself useful. You, Cagne and Sash, I want to know if there’s any more signs of activity in this bay. Look everywhere. Take your time. If the first mission did anything here I want to know about it. Marco and Duncan, Sparky’s going to be bringing up some hand grapples. I want you to use them to inspect the outside of the doors. If something happened to the shuttle there’s bound to be some sign of it there.”
“Hang on,” Marco objected. “You want to hang about on the outside of the doors?”
“No. I don’t want any hanging about. I want you to look for sign of what happened to the first shuttle.”
“Boss-“
“Do it,” Davido instructed.
“Sure, Boss.” Marco pulled Duncan after him, trudging towards the doors.
“Right. Let’s have a look at this door.” Prentice studied the armoured pressure doors.
“Looks pretty solid,” Davido commented.
“The navy didn’t take kindly to boarders. You have to remember that’s exactly what we are,” Sollander said. “The only advantage we have is no one’s firing at us.”
“The only disadvantage we have is we don’t know the interior layout,” Prentice said. “We could spend hours opening this door, only to find it leads to a fuel depot and that’s it.”
“Only one way to find out,” Sollander agreed.
Davido leaned against the nose of a nearby craft, growing tired of lugging the weight of the space suit against normal gravity. It wasn’t light by any means. The helmet, suit and boots weighed in at a good twenty kilograms. It was designed in such a way that most of that weight came down on his shoulders, as if he was carrying a heavy rucksack. Still, it wasn’t perfect and he was starting to get tired of it. He rather hoped there was air beyond this door, if only so he could get out of the thing.
“There’s got to be power here somewhere,” he said. “After all, we have gravity.”
“I’m afraid all that means is that we have gravity. Shipboard regrav systems are quite discrete mechanisms. They’re not tied in to anything else,” Prentice said over her shoulder as she studied the control panel carefully.
“There’s still power,” he insisted.
“Have you ever watched the rod racers?” Sollander came to Prentice’s assistance. Wondering as she did why she was bothering.
“Every now and then.” Davido was curious where she was going with this.
“The rods are the drive cores ripped out of old spacecraft. Small ones, nothing as big as the Goliath here. We can do that because they’re self-contained. For the racers we have to change the regrav polarity, so it acts as a sort of antigrav. But my point is that we don’t have to power the rods. They run themselves.”
“They still put those whopping great engines on them,” Davido said.
“Yes, to make them go forward. They don’t need engines to maintain the regrav field.”
“But the rod is an engine, a bloody powerful one at that. Capable of FTL—“
“They’re essentially a warp drive, yes,” she agreed.
“Sorry, doesn’t make sense. You’re saying we have gravity because the drive is running. But the drive isn’t running.”
“You’re not explaining it very well,” Prentice said.
“Just take my word for it then. Just because we have gravity doesn’t mean anything else is powered up.”
“It’s a redundant system,” Prentice said. “A fail safe. They ensured that, no matter what happened, they would always have gravity. You’d need to slice the ship in two to switch it off.”
“Well, ok. I’m sorry I asked.”
“Well,” Prentice stood back from the door. “This isn’t going to work. Not without an external source of power. I think the first mission got through though, so that’s a good sign.”
“I certainly hope so. We certainly can’t force it. Not without an atomic lance. And I doubt you have one of those in your kitbags,” Sollander said to Davido.
“Yeah. Left it at home. The batteries were flat,” he said ruefully.
It took two hours for power to be fed to the cable. Those with limited oxy and power reserves retraced their steps to the shuttle to top up before returning. Grumbling Marco spent much of that time hanging above the pit that led all the way to the Goliath’s core, searching for signs of what had happened to the previous shuttle. His search was inconclusive. The metal of the tunnel was marked here and there, but it was impossible to say whether any of the marks were new. The Goliath had not been a new ship when she was parked here, she had seen decades of use—and abuse. It was very likely Shoei forces had attempted to gain access to the ship through this very passage in a much earlier conflict. That attempt would certainly have left marks.
Of the shuttle itself there was no sign at all.
During this time Sollander stood patiently, forcing herself not to hurry them up. She couldn’t understand why there was no sense of urgency. They were methodical enough, checking everything twice, ensuring nothing was missed, but perhaps that was their biggest fault. If they kept on like this they would be here weeks. She wasn’t really prepared to spend that much time here. Two days at most. More than that and Drefus would want to know where she had been.
Finally allowed to do something after she reminded them that she was an engineer, Sollander studied the controls once power had been routed to them. The display was holographic, showing a string of numerals and graphs. Pressure differentials, she decided. There was vacuum on the other side, which was actually a good thing.
“Well, let’s give this a try.” She activated a control. The controls dimmed slightly, the door’s motors drawing power for possibly the second time in a century.
Without complaint the heavy armoured doors trundled aside, allowing the glare of helmet lamps into the airlock. “Ah, well.” Sollander stood back in surprise as she caught sight of what awaited them. “This isn’t a good start.”
Chapter Thirteen
“C’mon, you’re not going to sleep the whole time are you?” Adele kicked Jeno’s shoe. “I know you’re not dead. Quit pretending.”
The man muttered, his eyelids flickering as he grasped his injured hand closer to his chest. He didn’t rouse though. Pursing her lips Adele rocked back on her heels, studying him critically. He wasn’t much of a specimen, she concluded. He was emaciated, his clothing ill-fitting and baggy. She couldn’t tell how old he was. Old, she decided. Older than just about anyone she had ever met. That or he had spent too many winters out of doors. Or both.
Still, with the rest of the crew inside the Goliath, it was talk to him or talk to herself. And she wasn’t much of a conversationalist. “Shit.” She kicked his foot again, this time out of spite.
Sollander had discovered a pistol in his waistband while she was dragging him from the cockpit. It had been left on the seat alongside him. Adele picked it up and studied its worn grip. It looked like it had seen a lot of use. She knew the signs, most of Davido’s weapons looked the same. She clicked open the mechanism. “One bullet. What you gonna do with just the one bullet?” Perplexed she tossed it back onto the seat.
Jeno groaned, twisting in the seat to get more comfortable. His eyes flicked open, staring unfocussed at the ceiling. “Shit,” he said.
“Ah, he awakens. About bloody time.”
“What?” He focussed, turning to look at Adele. “Who are you?”
“My friends call me Adele. You can call me Ms Packer.”
He grunted, pulling himself higher in the chair, wincing as he put weight on his injured hand. "Shit." He studied the bandage, grimacing as he flexed his fingers. “That fucking AI.”
“Yeah, they do that. You were dumb. Just plain dumb.” She turned and left the passenger area. He could hear the clanking of glasses as she worked in the galley. She returned a moment later. “Here. This’ll help.” She passed him a glass full to the brim with amber liquid. He took it and sniffed it suspiciously. She shrugged. “If not, it’ll make you more fun to be around.”
“They left you here?” He sipped the bourbon carefully, his eyes watering as it stung his throat.
“Yeah. I guess they figured I can’t cause any trouble here.” She turned and walked back into the galley. After a moment she emerged with her own glass. “If that doesn’t make you more interesting, this certainly will.” She took a large mouthful.
“Where are we?”
Adele turned and clicked a control on the holoscreen. It flared to life, showing the interior of the passage, the landing lights still illuminating the immediate area. “That’s the Goliath. So I guess that means we’re in the Parking Lot.” She didn’t seem enamoured with the idea.
He nodded, taking another sip. It did help, after all. His hand felt stiff, his whole arm aching as if someone had pummelled it. So, they were aboard the Goliath. He knew this was where Tin Man had wanted him to be, but he was at a loss as to what to do next. He certainly wasn’t expecting a welcoming party.
Adele picked a portable radio from a seat alongside and clicked the send switch. “Hey, Davido, the pilot’s finally decided to wake up.”
The speaker hissed for a moment. It wasn’t Davido who responded. “Thanks sweet cheeks,” Prentice said. “We’re a bit preoccupied over here. See if you can get him to do something constructive.”
