Crysis: Escalation (16 page)

‘Sir, you do not have the authority to remove me from command,’ Stevens said, a little too smugly for Harper’s taste.

Captain Harper’s anger moved like a thundercloud across his face.

‘Why? Has God come on board in the last five minutes?’

‘Sir, these are decisions being made at board level by CELL command. They feel that you may not be prepared to properly execute their orders.’

‘And I wonder where they got that opinion from?’ Harper demanded. His reply was one of Steven’s thin, evil little smiles. That was it. He turned to Talpur.

‘Lieutenant, do you still recognise me as Captain of this ship or are you in mutiny as well?’

‘Now just a minute!’ Stevens objected.

‘You, sir, will remain quiet!’ Harper shouted. He rarely raised his voice.

‘Yes, Captain, but . . .’

‘Mr Stevens, you are relieved of command. Lieutenant, escort Mr Stevens to his quarters and confine him there.’

‘Mr Stevens,’ Lieutenant Talpur said, gesturing towards the door. He turned to look down at the much smaller woman.

‘Are you out of your mind?!’ he demanded.

‘Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be please, sir.’

Stevens swung round to face Harper again.

‘You’re going to pay for this!’ he spat.

‘Another word and you’re confined in the brig. Lieutenant, relieve Mr Stevens of his sidearm, please. Leave it on my desk and escort him out of here.’

The lieutenant removed Steven’s M12 Nova from his holster and laid it on the Captain’s desk. She all but had to drag the protesting XO out of Harper’s stateroom.

Harper sagged in his chair as soon as the door closed. He had lost his temper and he knew it. He had let the evil little shit get under his skin and he had done something rash.

He glanced over at the half-full bottle of good whiskey next to the model of the 55-gun ship-of-the-line HMS
Prince Royal
. He desperately wanted a drink but knew he wouldn’t
succumb to the desire. Not this time.

Any kind of ruckus of this nature on a Royal Navy ship meant a serious black mark on everyone involved’s record. The problem was he didn’t appear to be in the Royal Navy anymore. It
seemed that they were even going to change the name of the ships. They would no longer be
His Majesty’s Ships
.

He glanced in the mirror over the sink in his cramped stateroom. He was tall, craggy, and had a hooked nose, which along with his eyebrows gave him a bird-of-prey-like appearance. Despite having
waged constant war against middle-aged spread he normally thought that he was doing well for his age. Today he just looked tired, tired and old. He cursed this so-called “anti-CELL”
resistance movement. If only they had left it another month before starting, he would have been out of the navy.

He could understand why CELL wanted some assurances that he would follow orders when the time came. If he balked at the last moment it could really mess up their plans. CELL had a lot of
influence with the US government and although they had managed to buy the US Marines, which effectively had its own navy and air force, it had not bought the US Navy. The HMS
Robin Hood
was their best hope for a naval bombardment in the area. Though why they hadn’t chosen to use what had been, until recently, the US marines was beyond him.

Most of the conflicts that Harper had served in during his thirty years had been so-called low intensity conflicts: Iraq, the London Emergency, Sri Lanka, Columbia, even dealing with Ceph nests.
Too many of them had involved him firing guns or missiles into civilian centres. Next to none of them had been stand-up fights. Once again his targets were ‘terrorists’. He knew that
Yonkers had mostly been evacuated when CELL had effectively annexed New York in the wake of the Ceph invasion. On a conceptual level, Harper still had problems with an alien invasion of New
York.

The problem was, he knew the people he was being asked to bombard. Not personally, though it wouldn’t surprise him if there were a few familiar faces amongst them. But these were the same
people he had known all his life. They were military people. He had served with their like. He understood why they were fighting. They were angry about the stranglehold that CELL’s energy
monopoly had on the world and their privatisation of the militaries of a number of different nations.

He knew his orders were wrong, but he’d known orders had been wrong in the past. He had been aboard HMS
Anguish
when her Captain had been ordered to fire on south London in the
face of widescale social disorder. That had been wrong. He’d spent the next four years as a functional alcoholic as a result of watching the south London skyline burn.

More than once he had questioned orders to fire on civilian population bases in Sri Lanka. By questioned he meant internally, of course, not out loud. He couldn’t afford to not play the
game, not in His Majesty’s Navy. Not if he wanted a career.

At least he knew that he would be firing at soldiers who were under arms and intent on violence. He just wasn’t sure he disagreed with them. Just like he didn’t want to be taking
orders from a rapacious multinational company.

Just one more month. Rachel and he had intended on using what was left of their savings, the little they had managed to protect in this apparently never-ending recession, and their paltry
pensions to buy a place in Dorset. She would continue to teach, he was hoping to get work as a consultant for companies with ship building contracts with the navy.

He slumped in the chair and looked at the whiskey again. He knew what the easy option was. He knew what he owed Rachel, particularly after she had stood by him after the London emergency. After
all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t bombarded cities from the sea before.

What he needed was intelligence. The problem was that he was the only one he trusted with gathering the information. He didn’t want to leave the ship – in fact, it could be seen as
treason – but he was running out of options.
Actually, you old fool, you still have two, you just don’t like them
, he thought. He didn’t trust his new employers. The
Royal Navy wasn’t meant to be the enforcement arm of a multinational corporation. He needed to know more about the armed insurrection. The resistance wouldn’t risk their comms
discipline to speak to him. That left speaking to them face-to-face, and the only person he fully trusted to do that was himself. He told himself that it was because he wanted to make an informed
decision. He stood up and left his cramped cabin.

Harper reflected that he had a love-hate relationship with the HMS
Robin Hood
as he made his way towards the bridge through the ship’s narrow corridors. It was a
superb vessel. It had a trimaran hull that incorporated SWATH – Small Waterplane Area Triple Hull – technology to minimise the ship’s volume at the surface area of the sea, where
it would encounter resistance from wave energy. This meant reduced acoustic and wake signatures, which added to the vessel’s stealth capabilities. It also made the guided-missile stealth
destroyer very fast. During test runs they had managed to get the ship up to speeds of just under sixty knots.

It packed a punch as well, even though its stealth properties precluded it from having the main gun that many other ships of its class were armed with. It had been designed as a near-invisible
missile platform, a surface ship with comparable stealth capabilities to a submarine. Although without a main gun, it was armed with two fully automated 30mm Bushmaster auto-cannons and two rotary,
radar guided, 20mm Phalanx close-in weapon systems designed to shoot down incoming missiles. As well as air defence missiles and ship-to-ship torpedoes it also carried 24 CVS401 Perseus multi-role
cruise missiles.

Its inward sloping, or tumblehome, hull design, its lack of vertical surfaces or right angles and its construction out of hardened, molecular-bonded carbon fibre all added to a reduced radar
cross section as well as reducing its heat and sonar signature.

However, the most impressive aspect was the cloak. An array close to the stern of the ship was capable of projecting a lensing field that bent light around the ship. This effectively made the
Robin Hood
invisible when it was stationary or travelling at speeds below twenty knots, and significantly obscured views of the ship at speeds in excess of twenty knots.

Harper had had to see it before he believed it. He was still less than convinced that the cloak wasn’t going to give the entire crew cancer. Allegedly developed from technology derived
from the US government’s Project Rainbow, a smaller version of the cloak was rumoured to have been utilised by US special forces operators in the Pacific during the Lingshan incident and
again in New York during the Ceph incursion.

The cloak was the reason that Harper had a love-hate relationship with the
Robin Hood
. Not because there was something sneaky, or indeed un-gentlemanly about an invisible ship, though
the old fashioned, traditional, hidebound part of him felt there was. The hate he felt for this amazing ship stemmed from the cost.

A company that had been bought out by CELL had built the ship. The cloak had doubled the price of the vessel and the ship had come in significantly over budget. The
Robin Hood
and its
two sister ships had significantly contributed to the financial strain that had forced Britain to sell its navy, which, despite its size, was arguably the best in the world. CELL had squeezed and
squeezed the Admiralty, and then the Treasury and then the government. That was why Harper found himself hating the ship, despite how hard its capabilities tried to woo him.

The bridge was in the centre of the ship. It contained a series of dark carbon-fibre workstations illuminated by the holographic projections from the various departments: helm,
weapons, engineering, communications, navigation etc.

Lieutenant Commander Samantha Swanson didn’t seem surprised to see the Captain, despite it being her watch.

‘Captain on the bridge,’ she announced, saluting. Harper returned the salute. She relinquished his raised leather swivel seat, which allowed a commanding view of the bridge, and
stood with her arms behind her back by the navigation area. She was too professional to question or even show any reaction to his presence, though Harper guessed that Stevens almost certainly would
have spoken to her and she would be aware of the
Robin Hood
’s orders.

Harper had worked with Swanson before, and had found the tall, sandy-blonde-haired woman to be a capable officer. He had recommended her for XO of the
Robin Hood
, which might have
resulted in her eventual captaincy of the vessel but politics, and it was starting to look like corporate rather than Admiralty politics, had resulted in Stevens being foisted on him.

‘Navigation, plot a course to the west end of Long Island Sound, please. Engineering, enable the cloak. Helm, I want you to remain steady at twenty knots. Let’s see if this cloak can
do everything they say it can. We are going to be giving our new employers a demonstration of their stealth technology.’

‘Sir, should we make Liberty Station aware of our new heading?’ Midshipman Walters, the head of comms, asked. Liberty Station was the CELL installation at New York that was
ostensibly in command of the
Robin Hood
at the moment.

‘The purpose of this exercise is to test the
Robin Hood
’s stealth capabilities. We are going to see how close we can get to New York without being detected. Comms discipline
will be maintained.’

‘Aye sir.’

Swanson glanced at the Captain but said nothing. She knew he was disobeying orders, and those that knew the purpose of the
Robin Hood
’s mission out here also knew that they could
bombard the rebel positions in Yonkers from over a hundred and fifty miles away if they so wanted. A few people swapped glances but nobody raised any objections.

He felt rather than heard the background hum of the cloak as it initialised. The ship changed course. Even on the choppy sea the ship’s ride was so smooth it felt like they were sailing
silently across silk.

They passed the lights of New London, New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwalk and they were heading towards Stamford on the northern, Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. To the
south, Long Island itself was dark. After the Ceph incursion and CELL’s aggressive land grab, real estate prices had plummeted horribly. Now the wealthy neighbourhoods like Port Jefferson and
Whitestone had been abandoned. Empty mansions were homes for the displaced poor from the city, rats and wild dog packs.

Despite the tension that he could feel in the bridge, Captain Harper was appalled at how easy this was. Particularly as by now CELL must know that the
Robin Hood
was missing.

‘Mr Hamilton, will the East River provide you with any significant problems?’ Harper asked.

‘Er . . . no, sir,’ Lieutenant Hamilton said, not sounding entirely sure of himself. Harper had never worked with the plump moustachioed man before, but he had reviewed the
navigation officer’s record and it had seemed more than adequate. You had to be something of a high flyer to have been posted to the
Robin Hood
.

Closer to the city, more and more of the surrounding habitation had been abandoned. There was mile after mile of dark empty buildings that used to be some of the most desirable real estate in
the world. Now they were ghosts of suburbs and, as they got closer to the city, the neighbourhoods of New York. The only light or movement was from the occasional CELL patrol vehicle or helicopter,
their searchlights lancing through the darkness.

What had once been a very busy waterway was now all but empty. The patrol vessels they did see in the distance, mainly CELL but some were US Navy, they gave a wide berth to. Nobody challenged
them. Nobody even noticed them. The stealth field was working perfectly.

‘This is obscene,’ one of the ratings in the comms section muttered before being shushed. Harper wasn’t sure that he disagreed.