Lieutenant Joe Nation’s day wasn’t about to improve. The temperature inside the lift dropped steadily lower than minus sixty and the whispering sound returned. It was like having tinnitus inside his brain and he hated the feeling.

  Even worse, his powerful sensor augmentation detected a new and entirely unexpected sound. There was a metallic tapping sound in the lift shaft beneath the car. It was impossible to get an exact fix on its distance owing to the rumblings within the Isob-2 base and the tortured sounds of the airlift’s gravity motor.

  Nation had visited some shitty places during his time in Covert Ops, but the Isob-2 facility was up there with the worst of them.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The tapping didn’t stop. Instead, it increased in frequency and intensity, as though whatever made the noise was excited by something. Nation bitterly guessed what it was.

  It’s coming for the Istoliar I’m carrying.

  The lift climbed higher, passing through Sub-4 and then Sub-3. Nation clenched and unclenched his fists, wishing he had a weapon of some sort. His power cells were at 13% and falling. Once his stealth modules failed, he’d need something other than his fists if he came across any hostile Estral.

  Logic suggested any of the aliens which made it to the hangar bay would have escaped on one of the shuttles. Nation could never quite bring himself to rely on logic - especially when his life was on the line - and he fully expected there to be hostile troops waiting for him.

  Something screeched against the underside of the lift and Nation felt the entire car shake from side to side. The screeching came again, like steel talons across a hollow sheet of iron.

  JN> Keller?

  The neural link remained dead and Nation punched the wall in frustration.

  The airlift reached Sub-2 and kept going. Nation closed his eyes and hoped its power supply wouldn’t fail. Whatever was in the shaft struck the car with tremendous force, buckling the floor. It happened again and the floor split, allowing Nation a view into the shaft. His sensor augmentation tried to understand what was there, but the only interpretation it could offer was one of solid, pure blackness, emanating a deep, numbing chill.

  Nation stepped away from the breach. The lift passed Sub-1, just as his power cells dropped to 11%.

  JN> If you’re there, get into the hangar bay immediately.

  Another blow shook the lift, splitting the floor open further. The overhead hatch caught Nation’s eye and he wondered if he should try and get through. The ceiling of the lift was ten feet over his head – easy enough to jump, yet without anything grab onto. He crouched and sprang, hurling his fist into the centre of the grey hatch. His fist left a circular indentation in the metal and he dropped to the floor, leaving the hatch still in place.

  The stealth modules will cut out at any moment. Not that the Antaron is fooled by them.

  The lift shook once more and the panel indicated its arrival at the hangar bay level. The door crept open an inch or two and stopped. Nation pushed his fingers into the gap, leaned to the side and heaved. For a moment, he felt the resistance. Then, the door shot open, giving him plenty of room to escape. Without pausing to evaluate what lay beyond, Nation threw himself into the hangar bay.

  3:30. Damnit, that’s too long. Unless…

  JN> Keller?

  There was no reply and Nation sprinted away from the lift. His eyes scanned the hangar. It looked different from this side and it took a moment for everything to click in his head. There were no spacecraft inside, but the hangar wasn’t empty. It was filled with hundreds of alloy cargo crates. They were arranged in rows and from their positions, it was possible to see where the shuttles had originally rested between them only a short time previously.

  There were a lot of Estral in the hangar bay. These were the ones who’d reacted to the evacuation order too slowly and been left behind. If Keller hadn’t killed Admiral Redar-Finor, Nation was sure Isob-2 would now be an expanding cloud of rubble and these soldiers reduced to atoms.

  A group of five Estral milled near to the lift, looking for all the world like a squad of human soldiers killing time waiting for their shift to end. Nation was relieved to find his stealth modules remained active and he sprinted past the aliens, just as they began taking an interest in why an empty lift had arrived.

  BK> Wh&:$%t

  The reply left Nation confused for a split second, until he realised what it meant. The base mainframe had definitely flushed Keller’s code from the comms hub, but now that he was in the hangar bay, his comms augmentation was just about able to reach Keller. The range was clearly extreme and the comms unit was receiving a corrupt version of the neural message. On top of that, he was evidently a couple of seconds out of phase.

  JN> Get into the hangar bay! Now!

  Nation wasn’t expecting an immediate response and didn’t get one. He ran hard, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the airlift. A row of crates ran from left to right in front of him and he cut to one side. From a distance and in the enormity of the hangar bay, the cargo crates seemed small. It was only up close that their true size became apparent – they were three metres high and deep, with many of them several metres long. They had codes stamped into the metal to indicate the contents. Nation lacked the necessary software to read the codes and he also lacked the time to go looking inside the crates for something useful.

  BK> Co&/#es q1%///

  On the far side of the crates and three hundred metres directly ahead, lay an abandoned, twenty-metre crawler with a huge, circular console cluster on the back of it. The crawler’s gravity engine was offline and the vehicle rested on the hard ground.

  The middle of the console was as good a place to hide as any and Nation made for it. Behind, he heard the distinctive, pulsing roar of a plasma repeater. He thought for a moment his stealth modules had failed and anticipated the feeling of hot metal ripping into him. Death didn’t come and his stealth unit stayed operational.

  He looked over his shoulder, in time to see the squad of Estral firing their weapons towards the lift. Whatever had followed Nation up the shaft, it hadn’t stayed there. An undulating carpet of darkness flowed outwards onto the floor, spreading rapidly like a spillage of crude oil, except this was guided by a consciousness. The whispering in his brain resumed, as powerful as ever, and any doubts he’d possessed were swept away. This thing was coming for him.

  The Estral evidently accepted their fates and they didn’t move. The dark energy flowed around them and Nation saw with disgust how the material of their suits withered and crumbled, as though it had aged a hundred thousand years in only a moment. The Estral toppled as a group, falling to the ground.

  Other Estral came running at the sound of gunfire, but Nation didn’t stay to watch. His feet took him onwards until one of the crates blocked his sight.

  The Estral were fully mobilised, their doomed lives given new purpose. They came from all corners of the hangar bay and Nation dodged his way between them. The sound of gunfire reached a crescendo and was joined by a series of thumping detonations. Nation recognized the sound as that of a mobile plasma launcher, which he guessed had been too late into the bay for removal into orbit.

  With his power cells at 10%, he reached the flatbed crawler and sprang two metres onto its loading surface. The console looked brand new and cutting-edge and he had no idea if it was so valuable the Estral had attempted to remove it during the evacuation, or even if they were in the process of bringing it here before everyone started dying.

  Nation’s power cell reading changed to 9%, just as he tumbled across the top of the console and into the central space where the operators would sit. His stealth modules cut out, leaving him crouched, weaponless and vulnerable, in the Isob-2 facility hangar bay.

  JN> Where are you hotshot? I’m going to die in approximately two minutes.

  JN> That’s assuming they don’t blow the whole damned planet to pieces beforehand. I need a beer.

  His original five-minute timer was still ticking dutifully and the reading showed two minutes ten seconds remaining. Nation did his best to ignore it and tipped his head back, feeling his hair rub against the ice-cold surface of the console. The equipment was utterly dead, with not even a buzz from its inbuilt backup power supply.

  BK> &^dd!—Kj

  JN> Yeah, whatever. Don’t you ever run a spell check?

  The sounds of gunfire continued, no greater and no less than before. Nation didn’t know much about the Antaron, but he was sure the Estral weren’t going to hold it for long. Their far more extensive efforts had failed, so a couple of hundred soldiers with launchers and repeaters weren’t going to do the business.

  BK> %^&qqzon’t stand beneath the hangar doors.

  BK> hn$$low intensity beam ^&& but yeah you don’t $*&& drop it on your foot.

  The corruptions in the link weren’t enough to prevent Nation from understanding the gist of the message. He didn’t need to move his head far to realise that he was offset to the overhead hangar doors. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be crushed or reduced to carbon if Keller misjudged the particle beam.

  A new sound joined with the others. This one was far deeper and much more resonant, and Nation felt it within the alloys of his bones. It was the groaning of an incredibly heavy slab of reinforced metal expanding and warping with the heat of an attenuated particle beam. There was an enormous bang, so loud it drowned out every other sound. Nation tried to guess what produced such a noise, and the best he could come up with was the upper door landing on the lower. Something told him it was about to get messy within the hangar bay.

  Suddenly, the inner bay door turned from dull grey to a bright orange which bordered on white. Nation hunkered down, ready for the draught of blistering heat to wash over him.

  BK> Coming in!

  Keller was evidently aware that a second shot from the particle beam might produce enough heat to incinerate everyone in the bay. Rather than risk it, she dropped the SC Gundar straight down on top of the softened hangar doors. The Retaliator was incredibly dense and its weight pushed the spaceship clean through, punching a vast hole into the metal. To Nation’s immense relief, one of the Space Corps’ most advanced spaceships arrived in the centre of the Isob-2 facility.

  With superheated air howling around him, Nation struggled to his feet, only to be sent staggering by the colossal soundwave produced by the Gundar’s impact with the doors. He clutched the edge of the console and dragged himself upright. Keller must have been concerned that the Gundar’s energy shield might crush anyone in the bay, so she’d switched it off for this trick. Lumps of burning metal clung to the Gundar’s underside and part of the armour plating was flattened by the impact.

  With a muted howl from its Istoliar drive, the Gundar dropped to the ground and landed with such force that Nation saw visible flex in its landing legs. He vaulted over the console and off the end of the crawler. The nose of the Gundar was aimed directly at him and its front ramp was partway down, with Keller holding it in that position until she was certain it was Nation coming onboard.

  JN> On my way.

  BK> What the hell is that?

  There were several things Nation could imagine Keller referring to and he didn’t ask her to elaborate. After everything so far, he wanted nothing more than to get away from Isob-2. His eyes fixed on the part-open front boarding ramp a hundred metres away and he ran for it.

  Movement in his periphery made him look up, just in time to see a five-hundred-tonne chunk of red-hot hangar door detach itself from the edge of the hole made by the Gundar. It dropped quickly, landing between him and the spaceship. He swore and changed direction, passing as close as he dared to the smouldering metal. The smell of charring hair and cloth reached his nostrils.

  There was something else to his left. His eyes caught sight of a spreading carpet of darkness. It seemed to rise from the floor, warping it and lifting the stone upwards in mounds, from which tumbled crates and gravity cars. The Estral were all dead, or at least he couldn’t see any who were still alive.

  JN> Shoot at the damned Antaron!

  As soon as he sent the words, Nation knew Keller couldn’t do what he asked.

  BK> I can’t! It’ll kill you or bring the roof down!

  Repeater turrets didn’t have a physical recoil as such. Instead, when they fired, they expelled a separate wave of force to disperse the build-up of energy in the turret. A single, low-intensity shot in the vicinity of anything breakable could do plenty of damage. The expulsion after a full-blown overcharge round was enough to flatten a town.

  JN> Lower the ramp!

  The boarding ramp clunked against the ground and Nation covered the lower eight steps with a single jump.

  JN> Raise it!

  Nation felt the ramp lifting behind, bringing him up into the airlock space even as he continued to climb. A surge of acceleration pushed against his body, whilst through the narrowing gap he could see the floor of the hangar bay rapidly recede. Hot air was sucked inside just as the boarding ramp closed, sealing him inside.

  It was tempting to spend a few seconds enjoying the elation he felt at the close escape. However, he had no idea if it was time to celebrate yet. Weariness wasn’t something Joe Nation felt anymore, but a check on his Istoliar cells told him how close to failure he’d come.

  JN> 5%

  BK> Get up here. You want to see this.

  Nation clambered through the airlock and into the Gundar’s nose section. A spaceship’s Istoliar drive produced an easily-recognized high-pitched whine when its stealth modules were activated and he heard the sound through the walls. He braced for the transition to lightspeed, but it didn’t come.

  On his way to the bridge, Nation stopped in the tiny medical bay and waited patiently while a purple light swept over him a few times. There was no visible effect, but the bay computer announced he was now free from contaminants. Nation double-checked and his sensor located no traces of Granol-42, Polysempe or Istilin.

  When he reached the bridge, he found Keller sitting in the pilot’s chair with her head twisted to look at him. She gave him an enormous grin.

  “You look like absolute crap.”

  Nation checked out what remained of his spacesuit. The material was blackened, split and torn. He pushed a finger into one of the gaps and saw that his artificial skin was mostly unmarked. There was no such thing as a vanity mirror on a fleet spaceship, so Nation was unable to check his face for damage. Keller helped out.

  “Nothing that won’t wipe clean,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sit down and look at this.”

  Nation dropped into the second chair, his eyes resting on the Gundar’s main sensor screen.

  “And you stink,” said Keller, wrinkling her nose.

  “What she means is welcome aboard, Lieutenant Nation,” said Teal.

  Nation grunted a response.

  The Gundar was already a million kilometres from Isob-2 and the planet looked exactly the same as before. Nation had seen hundreds like it during his years in service. The first few, you tended to notice the details, the striking bleakness of which most of the universe was comprised. After a while, they all looked the same. One grey sphere after another, with a trillion trillion others out there in the universe, so many that even the longest-served man or woman couldn’t hope to see more than a fraction of them.

  Isob-2 was dying.

  “How long ago?” asked Nation.

  “The ship’s sensors detected the first stages of the reaction twelve seconds after I took us out through the hangar bay door.”

  “It might take hours to finish.”

  “I feel obliged to watch.”

  “I hate the place, but I don’t want to see it fall apart.”

  In spite of their name, the Estral planet busters were subtle in their effect. Rather than shattering a planet with explosive force, the bombs undid the bindings of gravity, allowing a planet to simply fall apart. Sometimes the reaction happened quickly, other times it could take a day or more. The Estral word for the weapons translated roughly as Disintegrator.

  The sensor image focused on the area around the Isob-2 facility began to shimmer, as though the array was imperfectly calibrated. The storms of dust whipping across the surface appeared to thicken, until they completely obscured the ruined hangar bay.

  Over the course of the next few minutes, the dust became a progressively heavier cloak, until the entire visible surface of Isob-2 was covered. As the planet continued orbiting its distant, uncaring sun, it left behind a thick trail of tiny stones and grit. Keller piloted the Gundar afterwards, matching the speed of Isob-2’s orbital track. The dust trail expanded and spread across thousands and thousands of kilometres as the planet shed trillions of tonnes of its existence every second.

  “There’s got to be something better to do than this,” said Nation. “Why are we waiting here?”

  “For a man who deals in death, you don’t enjoy it.”

  “As soon as I start enjoying it, that’s the time I quit.”

  “We’re waiting to see if anything survives.”

  “You think the Antaron can live through that?”

  Keller gave a shrug. “I didn’t like what I saw on your feed.”

  “Maybe we should get back to base.”

  “Another few minutes.”

  “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

  “No problem. I promised, didn’t I?”

  “You did. To a lot of people that doesn’t mean much when the going gets tough.”

  “How do you think that Antaron got there?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Spaceship?” Keller pressed.

  “There’s was no sign of anything that wasn’t Estral.”

  “It didn’t just appear on Isob-2.”

  Nation sighed. “Look, it’s dead and we can’t keep a Retaliator out here watching a planet fall apart.”

  “This could be really significant, you know?”

  “There’s a chance it could be significant. On the other hand, a ninth war with the Estral is definitely significant. The facility is gone and we found what we were sent to find.”