Erebus (30 page)

“We’ve got him!” Vance gave a wolfish grin then thumbed the com. “Take him out.”

“Clear the channel,” Vasily barked. “Everything from the mess comes through the group captain! And
no
, I am not going to preemptively shoot someone out of the sky when I have no idea who they are. Dana, plot the course. See if the heading of the lander can clue us in on where
Erebus
is.”

“The lander’s skimming low. Wait…I have her—I have
Erebus
! She’s orbiting out from the other side of Iwa.”

The image zoomed, and
Erebus
sprang into view. We were far enough out that she appeared little more than a toy, her long spine stretching from bottom left to top right on the screen, broadside on.

“What’s the ETA of that lander to rendezvous with
Erebus
?” Vasily asked.

“Twelve minutes. It’s really hauling ass.”

“It’s got to be Frain or Drayton,” I said. “We got very lucky here.”

“It’s a hell of coincidence,” Vance replied, “and I don’t like them. But if it is Frain aboard the lander and not
Erebus
, then that ship isn’t going to go to A-drive. We can target the shuttle and end this here and now.”

“But if it is Frain, he’s vulnerable,” I pointed out. “We can push him to surrender. Remember, he might be our only shot at finding who’s behind the attack on Io.”

Erebus
was steadily getting bigger in the display. She was still tens of thousands of kilometers away, but
Gagarin’s
primary large aperture telescope was pretty damn powerful.

“We have a chance for a first strike here. We need to decide fast. Dana,” Sihota called to the bridge, “do you think you can hit the A-drive ring and knock out her ability to escape?”

“I think…yes. Yes, I can,” she said decisively.

“Do it. Then call for her surrender.” He glanced around the table, and we all nodded, Vance somewhat reluctantly.

“Targeting. Firing.”

On the display, a red spot appeared on the smaller ring near the aft of the long explorer ship. I could see the A-drive shielding begin to slough away as the laser dug through, striving to get to the delicate machinery beneath.

“She’s maneuvering. Keeping focus,” Dana called out.

Ponderously,
Erebus
began to spin, trying to move her wounded side away from us. Suddenly, something popped in the ring. A spray of debris erupted out of the hole where the laser had been focused.

“Got her!” Dana’s words pitched up with excitement.

“Open a channel,” Vasily said, his voice thick with tension. “
Erebus
, this is
Gagarin
. We have crippled your ability to escape. Signal your surrender and prepare for boarding. Our next attack will target your lander.”

“Captain, she’s firing KIs!”

The display highlighted the stream of impactors that
Erebus
was pumping out of her launch rails at us. We weren’t the only ones who had prepared for battle.

“Target those KIs! Burn them down! All hands brace for maneuvering. Full burn and random jinking.”

I gripped the armrests on my chair as an immense weight crushed down on my chest.
Gagarin
was firing her engine hard, trying to evade the spread of KIs that bore down on us. One after another, they flared and disappeared from the display. Dana was doing a good job of shooting them out of the sky, but there were a hell of a lot of them.

“They’re adjusting course. Those KIs have maneuvering capability.”

This fight was moving awfully fast, now. Each of those KIs was homing in on us no matter the violent firing of our engine or our twisting, random jinks.

“Dammit, keep burning them. If any of them gets within twenty seconds of us, go to A-drive.”

“Temperature rise on the spine. We’re getting a thermal spike that’s dragging across us, Captain. She’s hitting us with a laser.”

“Fire our KIs—as many as you have on the rail. Let’s get that laser doing something else.”

A series of thumps resonated through
Gagarin’s
hull as she fired her own impactors along the probe launch rail. They sped down the electromagnetic coils and streaked toward
Erebus
.

“The laser’s off our hull, Captain. They’re targeting our KIs.” I could see on the display that our own impactors were popping like firecrackers as
Erebus
swatted them out of space. “That lander is moving to dock with
Erebus
.”

Whoever was in the lander was a deft pilot. Despite the fact that
Erebus
was twisting and turning, the sleek craft raced toward the docking port, firing a breaking thrust at the last possible moment.
Erebus
ceased moving just long enough for the lander to clamp on.

“Fuck me,” Sihota swore—the one and only time I’d ever heard him do so. “That’s some coordination.”

I was just as concerned that each of the KIs that were closing on us was being popped closer and closer to
Gagarin
, each providing a distraction for the next closest.

“She’s not being distracted by our KIs.” Dana was sounding panicked. “She’s got her laser back on us. It’s on our bridge now!”

“Keep evading,” Vasily barked. “Major, can you do something about those KIs?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Phillips replied calmly.

I heard another loud thump as Phillips’s Hawk launched. It barely cleared to a safe distance before firing the engine. The assault shuttle raced toward the slowly thinning cloud of deadly projectiles heading our way.

Shit
, I thought. Things had moved so fast that we had neglected to use Phillips and her Hawk earlier—the one thing that could tip the balance in our favor.

“Something weird is going on Iwa,” Frampton said loudly, looking at the sensor readings from the moon. “There’s a high intensity energy emission coming from it. It’s off the charts across the spectrum. From what I can make out, it’s registering like a gateway scanning array.”

“Another spread of KIs coming in. Temperature rising on the habitat ring over the bridge. It’s burning through!” Dana was practically screaming.

“Go to A-drive. Now!”

The weight I was feeling slamming into me from all sides as we maneuvered suddenly ceased. Alarm klaxons began whooping.

“Are we out of there?” I asked and then realized that the displays were showing a piercing white beam of energy shooting up from the surface and striking
Erebus
. The starship disappeared, leaving nothing but KIs coming at us. Phillips was thinning the barrage with the Hawk’s cannon…but it was going to be too little, too late. My hands clenched in a white-knuckled grip on the arms of the seat again.

Then without warning, one after another, the KIs flared and popped out of existence, leaving nothing behind.
Erebus
and all her projectiles had just disappeared.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked into the sudden calm. I noticed that the feed from the bridge had gone dark.

“I don’t know. Captain?” Sihota called over the klaxons.

“Da?”
The voice at the other end was strangely calm.

“Can you shut off the klaxons?”

The mess fell silent, other than the lingering noise still ringing in my ears as if I were suffering from tinnitus. “Any idea what just happened?”

“No,” Vasily mumbled. “All munitions seem to be gone. I can’t see
Erebus
.”

Sihota looked at me, his brows crossing at the odd sound of Vasily’s voice. “Are you okay?”

“We have…” he said slowly, hesitantly. “We have taken casualties.”

All of us around the table stared at each other for a moment, then scrambled to unbuckle ourselves.

***

The bridge was a decompressed mess. Anything not fastened down had been sucked out through two, half-meter-in-diameter holes, one facing the other across the compartment. Between them was where Dana was sitting facing the central bridge holotank—or half of her was. Her torso was missing where the beam had passed through her, the wound cauterized by the sheer heat.

I could see Captain Vasily and the other bridge crew moving around in their survival suits in a slow daze, securing the bridge, working around the horrifically mutilated corpse. Their priority was getting functionality back to the wounded ship.

“Are you okay?” I put my hand on Vasily’s shoulder.

He paused and looked at me. His gaze piercing through both sets of visors, both anguish and rage present in equal measure.

“That bastard. He best be fucking dead, because if he’s not, I’ll make it slow and painful for him.”

We were hovering over the craggy dark rock of Iwa, licking our wounds. After Dana’s body was placed in one of the ship’s sample freezers, Captain Vasily’s crew busied themselves plugging the holes in the bridge. Mourning would wait; the repairs would not.

“There is definitely an installation down there,” Frampton said. He’d spent the last hour analyzing whatever the hell had happened to
Erebus
. “It’s small. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the complement is, but I doubt it would be many.”

“Is there anyone left?” I looked over his shoulder at the mess-table display, which showed a topographical map of Iwa. In the center of the map was an ash-grey dome with a spike emerging from the apex.

“Well, they have power and heat—I can get that much from our sensors—but they do seem to have built it with stealth in mind. There’s just not a hell of a lot visible.” He squinted at the display.

“That thing protruding out the top of the dome,” I said, pointing at it as I leaned in closer. “Bring up an image of the pagoda from Io.”

In my HUD, an image of the pagoda appeared. The top, where it poked out of the peak of the grey, stonelike dome, looked identical to what had been on Io.

“They have found another.” Frampton’s eyes gleamed. “I don’t think
Erebus
has been destroyed. This must be another mode of the gateway to transport a starship. She must have gone through the alien gate. We can follow her!”

“Hold your horses,” Vance said, holding up one hand. “We don’t know where that thing leads. Hell, we don’t even know if we would survive going through.”

“Not to mention that we don’t know if we can even activate it,” Sihota cut in.

“I say we load up the ute and go find out,” Phillips said from where she was leaning against the wall.

“The ute?” Frampton looked perplexed.

“The Hawk,” Phillips clarified for the bewildered-looking Frampton. “Let me lead my troops down and have a look-see.”

“I’m—I’m sure you and your troops are very smart,” Frampton said hesitantly. He seemed to be trying to be diplomatic, probably because he didn’t want to piss off the combat-enhanced soldier. “But it’s probably not going to be as easy as just flicking a switch.”

“Right you are, there.” Phillips gave a slight smile; I could already tell what she was going to say next. “That’s why you’ll be coming along.”

“Oh,” Frampton gulped. “Okay.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. It was time to start earning my oxygen on the ship again. “I’ll come look after you, if there’s room for another, that is?”

“We’ll squeeze you in,” Phillips nodded. “Suit up, boys and girls, ; I want to be heading dirt-side in twenty mikes.”

“Mikes?” Frampton swallowed.

“Minutes,” Phillips called back, amusement and exasperation present in equal measures in her voice as she swept out of the room.

The irony wasn’t lost on me; Frampton, so cavalier about being shredded into his component subatomic particles and beamed across the galaxy, was a hell of a lot more nervous at the prospect of getting his hands dirty, old-school style.

“We don’t know what’s down there,” Phillips briefed over the link. I was in the passenger bay of the Hawk with six heavily armored troopers. They were intimidating in their battle armor, looking solid, indestructible—more like walking tanks than people. “Frampton and Trent, stay behind us. We’ve trained extensively together for low-gravity operations, and if either of you tries any heroics, it’s likely you’ll screw our tactics. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said. Frampton merely nodded, his head nearly hidden behind the helmet visor that covered his face.

“For the rest of you, ladies and gents, I want a standard secure opposed breach against Entry Alpha.” A rudimentary plan of the small base appeared in my HUD. A blinking light flashed at a point on the dome’s pressure hull where we would be entering. “I want it quick and neat with no loss of atmosphere.”

“We’ve got a targeting radar trying to acquire us,” the pilot at the front called calmly. Sihota had volunteered to sit in the copilot’s seat, citing that he knew enough about flying a Hawk to at least be able to get us back aloft if things went south. This gave Phillips an extra woman on her team while still giving us the ability to escape from Iwa quickly.

“What have we got?” Phillips replied.

“Zulu band search-and-attack radar. pretty outdated. Normally, they’re linked to a Snapdragon chemical laser automated defense installation.”

“At your discretion, pilot.”

“Roger. Stealth mode is absorbing emissions for the moment.”

I slaved my HUD to the forward view, watching Iwa get bigger as we hurtled toward the grey, cratered rock.

“They’ve acquired us. Switching to reflective,” the pilot said. The parts of the lander I could see through the portholes and displays from inside flicked, almost instantly from being a matte black to a highly reflective mirror. “Chaff, chaff, chaff, and two decoys away.”

The Hawk fired out packets of silver streamers, and small decoy drones popped out of the sides with slight thumps. The pilot zigzagged the shuttle, rocking us in our seats.

I heard a loud bang from the left side of the shuttle.

“The Snapdragon has just popped a decoy. Deploying replacement.” Another thump came through the hull as a replacement drone shot out of its bay. “I have the Zulu captured. Viper S2S away.”

A rumble emanated from beneath my feet, and I watched on the HUD as a missile raced ahead of the Hawk at an acceleration that no manned craft could match. It streaked toward the moon, disappearing quickly. A few seconds later, a fireball flared on Iwa a few miles from the dome of the base.