Blindspace, page 15
I grinned as I explored the user-interface settings and command structures, increasing excited about what the suit could do. Then I headed out towards the gangway, my armoured footsteps echoing on the scuffed decking.
‘Go out there and make me proud, Fukasawa,’ Fox called after me. ‘And for the love of everything holy, take care of that suit.’
13
Warpspace
Have I said how much I hate space travel? Well, I like warpspace even less.
Most folks can cryosleep through it, but stormtech and warpspace don’t exactly mix. Originally we only did short jumps, in our armour, primed to drop screaming into combat at a moment’s notice. The Space Battalion guys got used to it, and the Drop Shock Troopers got their own pods. The rest of us? No such luck. Reapers spent every jump sweating buckets and puking our guts out. Nothing like a little space travel to remind you you’re a flimsy bag of guts and bone.
But I’d adapted to it. Or at least I thought I had. Now, strapped into my crash-cradle seat as our chainship hurtled towards Solaris at high-burn, all my training threatened to unravel and I was blinking the sweat out of my eyes, sick tickling the back of my throat. A world of noise assailed me: the groaning of hull plating, the hiss of pressurisation systems.
My cradle was padded out with gel-ducts, membrane-padding and black, rubbery crash-foam to accommodate men in heavy and cumbersome gear. I was strapped in tight with a thick seven-point harness with metal buckles. My fireteam were also all outfitted in cutting-edge armour and strapped into cradles around me. Jasken had taken one look at the polished, olive-green metalwork of his new armour and set about carving his trademark skullface onto the helmet. The lucky bastard didn’t seem bothered by warpspace one bit as he chiselled and scraped away. Kowalski’s armour was the colour of fresh snowfall, with sulphur-coloured optic lenses burning away like distant supergiants stars in her helmet.
And we’d found out that Quilan loves his ships. He took great delight in informing us all that our Comet-class chainship was rigged with some of the best warpdrive engines in the galaxy. Shaped like a curved torpedo with a knife-like bow and a slim stern, the gunmetal-grey hull was slashed with severe red streaks. Favoured by slingshot racers and casuals for quick hops between planetary systems, ours was pristine and carried that new spaceship smell. There were no viewports. Instead, the dim cabin was lit by the thin-film screens that projected a real-time view of outside space, along with a winking array of tactical consoles and readouts. The small space might have been pleasantly womblike if it hadn’t been for my motion sickness. Astronav screen modules tracked our progress across space, our ship represented by a microscopic speck of sand in an endless ocean of glittering constellations. A little reminder of just how far-flung we were from everything I knew.
Mandy was reassembling her sharpshooter with machinelike efficiency, metal clacking in the small space. Of course, her armour was the colour of charcoal and looked remarkably solid. Her Squadron tattoo was carved on the armplate in stark white. ‘How the hell do you do that?’ I asked her through gritted teeth.
Mandy snorted behind her mirrored visor as her scope clicked into position. ‘Trick of the trade. You ever flown between an asteroid belt at Mach 8, blasting enemy squadrons from fifty thousand klicks while getting bombarded with plasma cannons from twenty different directions?’
‘Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.’
‘I highly recommend renting a slingshot racer and trying it out. Because in comparison, this is a cruise-liner.’
‘This is not a cruise-liner!’ Quilan snapped, the alien’s voice muffled behind his helmet. Strapped in next to me, he was clad in burgundy-red armour that was all smooth edges and hitech lights. ‘The systems, the seats, the disgusting bathroom, it’s all designed for humans. No multispecies life-support. A disgrace in this century! Especially when it’s moulting season.’
I wrenched my head around towards him. ‘Wait, Torven moult? We—’
‘No! Of course I don’t moult!’ the alien yelled indignantly. ‘Do I look like I have feathers to you? This is exactly what I mean – you don’t care about my needs.’
‘You just said you don’t moult,’ I said, wondering why the hell I was holding up my end of this conversation.
‘Well, no. I don’t. But if I did, like some species do, this ship would also be ill-equipped to accommodate me!’
‘If you ever start growing feathers, I’m sure you’ll let us know,’ I said, as Jasken snorted with laughter.
I leaned back into my armour as the tendrils and gritty abrasives scrubbed at my chest and back, my armpits and hamstrings. Even with a whole armoury’s worth of tech, it had gel-paddings in all the right places, and the suit was insanely comfortable. Made me never want to take it off, in fact. And not just because I’d been conditioned to bond with my armour, back in the Reaper War.
Ratchet had hated wearing his armour. Probably would have scratched himself bloody, even through his underskin fabric, if he’d been able to take his armour off. And he’d tried. Very hard. But he couldn’t even remove his combat harness. None of us could. Alcatraz had chalked it up to a substrate malfunction in the suits … only, it was by design. Harmony had wanted our suits to be a sealed system, keeping us hot and ready, building tension, by trapping us in our own smell and sweat, amplifying our stormtech. By the time we cottoned on, it was too late … and an attachment to our armour had been baked into every Reaper. We were organic pieces of military hardware, cranked up to maximum efficiency.
And that didn’t change when a Space Battalion Reaper just dropped dead in front of us. We’d hacked open his armour and smelled the reek oozing out from the purple-black blotches on his chest. Turned out that stormtech will reroute parts of the body to keep itself pumping. After two weeks with no sleep, below minimal food and water, the stormtech had scraped biomass from his body to sustain itself.
A different time. A different Harmony.
Grim’s voice came from the speakers overhead. ‘Hope you’re all still alive back there, because we’ve arrived. Thank you for flying with Grim’s Interstellar SpaceTravel, and all that.’ I gritted my teeth and rode out my churning guts as we punched out of warpspace with an electric roar, starfields all blurring. A hazy purple field enveloped our chainship before violently winking out.
Grim slowed us to system-speed. The thin-film screens stretched to allow an unobstructed view of space. Solaris loomed out of the star-flecked blackness like a steely skull rolled in ashes. The moon was orbiting a cerulean superoceanic planet and was girded with an ash-grey asteroid belt. A scrolling data feed added detail: the planet was inhabited by a wide spectrum of aquatic species, while Solaris was one-hundred-and-seventy-three kilometres in diameter, ringed with metal and infrastructure. At a glance, it looked like the moon was infected with some vicious alien virus: great clusters of glazed purple spikes had skewered the marbled surface. As our ship approached the spikes resolved into habitable superstructures. Angular and webbed with gossamer gantries and star bridges, the tips scintillated in the brilliant sunlight. Kilometre-long domed warehouses, hangars, manufacturing plants, dockyards and depots sprawled around them like frozen bursts of armoured metal coral. Magnetic maglev tracks shot along deep trenches and subsurface tunnels and sloping escarpments. The moon was honeycombed with machinery.
Where the moon was airless, its security was airtight. Every dockyard and hangar cycle lock was armed with shipbreaking autocannons and military-grade counter-intrusion security. No way in.
Only we’d found one. A spacejump from orbit, timed right, down to the long maglev tracks, would give us our backdoor into the moon.
I tapped my armoured fingers against my armrest. Long-range sensors would have already scanned our IFF tags and central system registry, recoded to spoof a trader chainship with interstellar licensing. No going back now. I wriggled out of my straps and rocked to my feet. I shouldered down the scuffed corridor and poked my head into the cockpit. Grim had customised the touchscreens and control array: old-school white and red neon facets with bulky black knobs and steering controls.
‘How’s the ship run?’
‘Like a dream.’ Wearing a spacesuit that turned him into a grinning robot, all red neon and chrome, Grim swivelled around in his crash-couch towards me ‘I could be drunk and still steer this thing.’
‘I guess that explains why we didn’t crash and burn on that asteroid belt back there. Anything we need to know?’
‘Yeah.’ Grim cracked his knuckles. ‘Don’t breathe in hard vacuum. Even you Reapers can’t handle that one.’
‘Thanks for the insight, Grim. I don’t know where I’d be without you.’
‘Stranded on Compass without a pilot and without much joy in life.’
‘And all the saner for it, most likely.’
‘Hey, I’m your only way home from this frozen turd of a moon. Be nice.’ Grim waggled a finger at me as he configured a system-readiness check. ‘Anyway, is our insider still waiting for us down on the moon?’
‘Yeah, Liam Myphyr. Kowalski’s got his details. Keep an eye on the comms, we might need an emergency evac if things go sour.’
‘On it. Stay safe, man.’
‘You too.’
We bumped fists and shared a grin before I trooped back down to the armoury to join the others. The small metal space was filled with armour plating grinding, shells and rounds slotting into chambers like knuckles cracking. The Warchive had worked overtime for us, and I picked up my selections of fresh weaponry: The XA42 long-range heavy-assault rifle. Stocky and all black-matte. High-kinetic, general-purpose rounds, adjustable thermal scope up to 64x for marksman precision, 2.3x ammunition printing speed, premium ultracoolers. The Titan R59 handcannon; the black and red metalwork sheened as if coated with oil and flaring with lightning motifs. Tungsten jacketed slugs, multipurpose chamber with a railgun firing mechanism and impact-resistant casing. Suitbuster-calibre ammunition, favoured by Blade Hunters in zero-gee combat. I tilted the bulky weapon over in my hands to read the holographic ammo count in the chamber. Twelve. Fully loaded. I grinned at the reassuring hum of the energy coils thrumming to life as I clipped both weapons to my magnetic holsters. There’s nothing like a good handcannon, and Titan models had never let me down.
Kowalski snapped a freshly-printed quickmatter pack into her Light Laser Rifle, lights all going green. Jasken had his scuffed and evil-looking scattershot with wire-flechette rounds, and we did final checks on each other’s gear, ensuring all systems were green. Quilan was sitting on a bench near the disembarkation room, armoured fingers clutched tight around his helmet. I slid down next to him. ‘You okay there, Quilan? You’re looking a little rough around the edges.’
Quilan swallowed hard. ‘I’ve never done this before. Jumping out of a chainship? In orbit? Onto a moon? The oxygen could be ripped out of our lungs, our lids welded to our eyes, our organs exploded like pulped fruit.’
I decided not to tell him that at the speeds we were going, we could be smashed across the moon on impact, too.
‘You need some anti-nausea meds?’ Katherine asked the alien.
‘Isn’t laughter the best medicine?’ came Grim’s voice over the speakers.
‘No.’ Quilan shuffled his feet, the Torven way of showing nervous irritation. ‘It is actually the worst kind of medicine.’
‘Hey, just think of it all as one big adventure,’ Mandy butted in, ‘with death being the ultimate finale.’
‘Could be a little food is all you need.’ Jasken shoved a half-eaten energy bar in Quilan’s face.
‘Eating?’ The Torven reared back with great indignance. ‘Now?’
‘Let me tell you, you don’t want to die on an empty stomach.’
Quilan puffed out an exasperated sigh. ‘Forgive me, for possessing some optimism, but maybe we won’t die horribly and painfully?’
Jasken pretended to consider this as his skullface helmet attached to his neckseal. ‘Nah. Optimism in space is a luxury we ain’t got the time for.’
I gripped the alien’s armoured shoulder. ‘We’ve all got your back, Quil.’
Quilan’s big brown eyes twitched back and forth as he glanced at me, at his fireteam, swallowing his fear and nodding briskly. We exchanged a smile and I clapped him on the back. Our helmets all sealed up, visors going mirrored. The names of my friends and their vitals popped across my HUD in coloured-coded keygens, followed by magazine size and quickmatter ammo count, shield and armour integrity, local atmosphere temperature, handcannon targeting reticules, the works.
As one, we slotted ourselves into the drop chambers like armoured human bullets. The hatches pinched shut and the darkness became absolute. My own breathing echoed back to me as mechanisms clanked, locking the six of us in position. Green acknowledgement lights winked across my HUD. Everyone was ready. Within seconds, we’d be spat out into the zero-gee of an airless, hostile moon. Just like I’d done with my Reaper fireteam.
Only, it wasn’t like that. We might be a team. But I was the leader. That meant it was my responsibility to watch over them and protect them all out there.
And then we were shot out into the cold of space.
14
Solaris
Everything was speed and silence. No sound. The world thudded in silent rhythm with my frantic breathing and pounding heartbeat. The moon’s steely surface came rushing up towards me through my curved visor, my vision fogging up as I exhaled. I held my arms and legs in position behind me. My armour was wrapped so tight and secure around me it was like I was an armoured torpedo. My thrusters snapped on and pressure burned between my shoulder blades like a hot coal, propelling me downwards at breakneck speed, the positions of my fireteam inked across my HUD in bright green. Our required trajectory was an arcing cyan pathway, curving down towards the moon. Pressure built up in my chest and I forced myself not to roar it all out, like so many people performing these jumps often do. We burned through dozens of metres a second, the glinting tips of the Spires all rushing up like clustered spears, as if desperate to impale us.
The nanolattice went numb against my skin, gelducts secreting a glossy liquid that enveloped my armour. It bristled like ferrofluid, morphed each of us into black comets chiselled from space itself, wrapping us in our own foam-cushioning.
A firework detonation rippled in my far-left field of vision. I grinned. Grim had deployed our decoy: a self-piloting cargo container full of drones had self-detonated in orbit. The blizzard of debris raining down over the central dockyards masked our approach, while Grim shuttled along to the local dockyard like any other interstellar trader.
I snapped my focus back to the moon’s cratered surface beneath us, the gantries and needlelike structures all whipping past, our landing-zone on the surface of the train’s tunnel marked with red crosshairs.
Landing. Always the tricky bit. Too slow, I’d miss entirely. Too fast, I’d smash my skull open and paint the nearby docking berth with my brains. My heart had wedged itself in my throat and the stormtech was busy trying to cram itself there, too, pounding hard, sensing a threat but nothing to fight.
Lock it down. Don’t lose focus when you’re this close.
I balled myself up, pre-calculated mechanisms slowing my thrusters and then killing my engines. Gravity and my own momentum gripped me and I landed hard on the metallic surface, the armour absorbing a physical impact that would otherwise have shattered every bone in my body. The world tumbled past once, twice, and then my gravboots locked tight to the metal surface.
Stabilised.
The others came thudding down around me, the vibrations of their landings shuddering up my spine. The black carbonyl fluid peeled from our bodies like dripping shreds of black flesh. No time to celebrate keeping our spines intact – we had a rendezvous to make.
Quilan was unclipping an implosive device from his harness when some stray debris slammed into his boots, and his magnetisation sputtered and lost contact for a moment. His eyes flew wide beneath his visor as he went spinning off, arms and feet flailing wildly.
‘Grab him!’ Kowalski yelled down the commslink. I snatched his harness, teeth gritting as I wrestled the alien back down. Mandy grabbed his legs, letting him swing with the motion. He planted them back down on the tunnel’s surface, earning a muffled click as the magnetisation grounded him again. I kept hold of Quilan until he stopped hyperventilating.
Kowalski deployed the shield surface, an electric-blue dome enveloping us and keeping the vacuum at bay. I could see Quilan’s relief as he planted his device. The black, egg-shaped contraption spread itself out and silently gnawed through the thick armoured surface. It only took a few seconds and we all pushed ourselves through the cleanly-cut manhole. Gravity and pressure returned in a blinding, disorientating rush as we hit the decking below. I sprawled flat on my back as my body lapped up the adrenaline, my mind struggling to readjust.
‘This moon’s gravity is atrocious,’ Quilan grumbled once we’d all caught our breath, scratching at his chest. ‘I feel fat.’
The commslink crackled as Grim pinged us. ‘Oi, oi. The old geezer make it in one piece?’
‘Say that again, Grim. I dare you,’ Jasken wheezed and clutched at his stomach as he got up on one knee. ‘God, my guts hurt. Feels like I’m going to give birth.’
‘Serves you right for eating,’ Katherine said. ‘Remember, you puke in your helmet, you’re keeping it on.’
I grimaced. That’s a mental image I didn’t want.
Mandy snorted and poked Jasken in the abdomen with the muzzle of her sharpshooter. ‘Like you’ve got the faintest idea what giving birth is like.’
‘You never know, love,’ coughed Jasken, ‘there’re some interesting jobs out there.’
We all got back to our feet, exhilarated and grinning after the jump. Even Quilan looking happy for once. We’d stared down the barrel of death together and survived it. For a moment it was like being with my old fireteam again, sharing a bond of brotherhood.
