BK> We don’t know and I’m not about to recommend we attempt it. Not with you onboard.

  JN> Is that an unsubtle hint to let me know I’m holding up the show?

  BK> Got it in one.

  In spite of Keller’s words, Nation found himself torn between the options of exploring for another couple of minutes, or simply turning around and running for the shuttle. His feet carried him on to the next intersection, where he promised himself he would stop and go back.

  Nation reached the T-junction and looked both ways. A short distance to the left, the passage ended at a room and, on the opposite side of the room, was a viewing window.

  BK> You can’t resist that window.

  JN> No, I can’t.

  BK> Looks like a flight monitoring station from here.

  Nation hurried into the room and took in the details. It was a large space, with no further exits. Monitoring screens covered the left and right walls, and two circular consoles squatted in the middle of the floor. A sign overhead informed him that this was indeed a flight monitoring station.

  JN> The power’s off again.

  The viewing window was seven or eight metres wide and about a metre thick. Nation tapped it with his knuckles as he looked through.

  JN> There’s the main hangar bay.

  BK> It’s got to be.

  The hangar stretched away into the distance and Nation got a ping off the far wall, three thousand metres away. The bay was long, but comparatively narrow, being less than a thousand metres wide. There were a few lights - sporadic spheres of blue amongst the immensity of the bay, and far from sufficient to dispel the darkness. Nation didn’t require illumination to make out the vessel which was docked. Its bulky shape was clamped to the inner wall and its hull filled a third of the available space.

  JN> A cargo vessel.

  BK> A big, armoured cargo vessel. Any emissions that might indicate it’s carrying Istoliar?

  JN> I’m getting a garbled response from my sensor. The one I’m fitted with isn’t as powerful as that in the Gundar. Can you attempt a focused scan on this area of Zantil’s hull?

  BK> I just did and I can’t pinpoint the precise location of the Istoliar. It’s either on that cargo vessel or it’s behind the hangar bay bulkhead wall and waiting to be loaded. Oh crap, I’m getting something else as well.

  JN> What?

  BK> Granol-42.

  JN> Was it there before?

  BK> No. The reading is faint. Oh crap.

  JN> That’s a second oh crap.

  BK> There’s an inbound fission signature – a big one. I’ll have to deal with this.

  The neural link went quiet, leaving Joe Nation alone on the Zantil station.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Four seconds after Lieutenant Becky Keller detected the fission cloud, eight Estral warships emerged from lightspeed. They spread across half a million kilometres of space, and the closest was a hundred thousand kilometres from Zantil. Their synchronised arrival made it likely they had departed from the same place, which implied the enemy were organised instead of this being a random collection of ships ordered to attend the scene of an attack.

  Keller’s Faor augmentation ran the shapes of the enemy warships through the databanks of known Estral vessels. Two of them were known to the Space Corps – the battleships Gulazan and Tirinax had served as far back as the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth wars. Each vessel was a thousand metres long and shaped like a wedge, with landing skids and angular metal plates designed to deflect sublight gauss rounds aimed at the bridge. Their hulls were old and scarred, but they’d been extensively refitted, to the point where the databanks categorised both as a Class 1 threat.

  The remaining six were between four and five hundred metres long and with more recent designs. A sweeping scan across their hulls indicated only one was fitted with an Istoliar core. The databanks had no record of an engagement with any of these vessels and listed them as a mixture of Class 2 and Class 3 threats, with advisories of caution.

  Keller (Gundar):: Focus on the Gulazan. Let’s shut that one down and then switch to the Tirinax.

  AI Gane-Q12 (Atlantis):: Do not hold back!

  AI Jason (MHL Argonaut):: I will remain in place at Zantil and will not attack.

  Keller’s practised eye sized up the opposing fleets and she reckoned the Space Corps had the edge over the Estral. She found herself smiling in anticipation – the chaos of multi-vessel combat was a craving she pretended didn’t exist. This was the time when a skilled pilot or an experienced battle computer could fall to the vagaries of luck. It was also the time when the very best could decide what they wanted their future to be and impose their will upon the whims of fortune.

  The warships of Attack Fleet Z were running with their stealth modules active. There was a tiny window after a spaceship’s emergence from lightspeed, during which it couldn’t power up its shield or stealth units. This was the time during which a battle could be decided.

  AI Rune (Sunder):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Gulazan. Failure.

  AI Klister (Granite):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Gulazan. Success. Gulazan main Istoliar drive offline.

  AI Feds (Boxer):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Tirinax. Failure. Range extreme.

  The other ships of Attack Fleet Z were out of range and unable to use their stasis emitters. The SC Revelation and Piledriver were able to fire their particle beams from outside the overcharge range. They scored hits, but not enough to put their targets out of action.

  Keller (Gundar):: Firing overcharge repeater. Target Gulazan.

  She activated the particle beam and its turret thumped violently, eagerly. Keller allowed it to fire four times, when twice would likely have been enough. The Gulazan was heated so rapidly it was torn into molten pieces, some of which burst away at enormous speeds.

  The remainder of the Estral fleet activated their stealth modules. Two kills would have been preferable, but one was better than none. Now came the fun and games. Each warship of Attack Fleet Z sent out broad, sweeping wave from its sensors, in the hope of picking up the location of one of the enemy spaceships. Details from each sweep were tallied across the local battle network and analysed for anomalies which could indicate the location of a hidden craft.

  Soon, the area of space surrounding the Zantil station was filled with the detonations of speculatively-launched plasma incendiaries as the game of cat-and-mouse progressed.

  Keller (Gundar):: The sooner we get this over with, the better. These won’t be the only Estral warships inbound.

  AI Gane-Q12 (Atlantis):: Your two statements were self-evident and required no waste of processing cycles.

  Keller (Gundar):: I have plenty to spare.

  A wide-area sweep flickered across the Gundar’s hull and Keller detected an incendiary launch a quarter of a million kilometres to starboard. She activated the particle beam, which stabbed through space at the exact location of the launch. The attack missed and Keller activated a short-range transit to escape the incoming incendiary.

  When the Gundar reappeared, Keller’s augmentation fed her the coordinates of three converging anomalies nearby and she fired the particle beam again. The truncation of the beam informed her of a successful hit and she followed it up by firing both of the Gundar’s stasis emitters. One of the Estral Class 2 vessels appeared. Anticipating an immediate response from the other Estral warships, Keller entered another SRT.

  AI Nox (Piledriver):: Firing overcharge repeater.

  AI Sol (Rust):: Firing overcharge repeater.

  AI Nox (Piledriver):: Enemy neutralised.

  The discharge of weaponry was sufficient for the Estral to get a lock on the SC Piledriver and it was suddenly caught in the centre of an immense blast from three incendiary warheads. A moment later, the Piledriver dropped off the battle network.

  Keller (Gundar):: Successful enemy stasis emitter strike against the Piledriver.

  A dozen missiles, launched from three different places, plunged through the sphere of hot plasma. A series of new, hotter, explosives added their fury to that of the incendiaries.

  Keller (Gundar):: SC Piledriver destroyed. Damnit!

  The only positive to be taken from the loss of the Piledriver was the fact Keller believed she might have just got a lock on the second Estral battleship, Tirinax, and it wasn’t too far away. She went for broke and created a strafing pattern with the overcharge repeater. It took a chunk out of the Gundar’s Istoliar power core, but it had the required effect. The beam connected with the phase-shifting energy shield of an enemy vessel, producing a huge spike in power output which the Space Corps sensors could read easily. The Gundar’s stasis emitters hadn’t yet recharged and were unavailable. Keller activated an SRT to reduce the chance the enemy would lock on.

  AI Flex (Revelation):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Tirinax. Failure.

  AI Sol (Rust):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Tirinax. Failure.

  AI Gane-Q12 (Atlantis):: Firing stasis emitter. Target: Tirinax. Success.

  With its Istoliar core shut down, the Estral battleship was dumped out of stealth and it drifted without power. Lambda sublight missiles launched from the Granite and the Boxer homed in on the enemy ship. The warheads didn’t have a chance to explode. The Atlantis and Sunder were close enough to overcharge their particle beams and a third enemy warship was destroyed.

  AI Klister (Granite):: The failure rate of our stasis emitters is unacceptably high.

  Keller (Gundar):: Agreed. The Estral must have developed a deflector.

  AI Feds (Boxer):: It will not save them here. We have the upper hand.

  The words came too soon. The Gundar’s sensors detected the formation of another inbound fission signature. Keller cursed the fact that her warship didn’t have a full loadout and waited to see how much the odds would shift once the additional Estral vessels emerged from lightspeed.

  With Keller engaged elsewhere, Joe Nation decided he’d do whatever he could to prepare for the aftermath of the conflict outside the Zantil station. In his mind, he’d been granted a few extra minutes in which to act and the best use for that time would be to come up with a plan that allowed Attack Fleet Z to make off with the Estral’s precious Istoliar reserves.

  Nation stepped away from the viewing window and approached the nearest of the two consoles in the room. If this was the flight control room, the operators would be aware of exactly when the cargo ship was due to leave, and also what it would be carrying in its hold.

  He reached beneath the console and snapped the power switch downwards and then up. The console remained dead. Nation crossed over to the second station and located the power switch. It was already in the on position, so he didn’t hold out much hope. He pressed the switch down and pulled it up.

  “Yes!” he said under his breath.

  Lights came on and the console started loading up and connecting to the Zantil network. It took a few seconds before the logon screen appeared and a cursor blinked softly in green as it awaited a password.

  Nation looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was coming. The coast was clear and he couldn’t hear an alarm. He activated his number cruncher and the augmentation began the process of breaking through the security on the console. Nation crouched low and kept an eye out.

  The number cruncher finished and the logon screen vanished, to be replaced by a long menu of different options. Nation read through them until he discovered one which looked interesting. He opened up the menu.

  Cargo ship: Nisprol. Loading Commencing.

  Cargo ship: Nisprol. Loading Aborted.

  Cargo ship: Nisprol. Loading Status Unknown.

  Nation had no idea what the cause of the delay was and this screen gave no indication whether or not the loading had completed, or the nature of the cargo. He looked through another two menus and discovered the docking time of the Nisprol, as well as its intended time of departure.

  “Overdue,” he muttered. His internal clock helpfully compared the time of Attack Fleet Z’s arrival with the Nisprol’s intended departure time. It turned out the cargo ship was due to leave Zantil thirty minutes prior to the arrival of the Space Corps fleet. Delays weren’t entirely unheard of, but thirty minutes was significant considering it was likely the Nisprol was here to collect a vast quantity of Istoliar. He attempted to connect with Keller across the neural link.

  JN> Are you there?

  Nation waited a couple of seconds before he accepted the walls of Zantil were blocking the signal, or that Keller was out of range.

  Working in isolation was nothing new to Joe Nation, so he put the matter out of his mind. There were a few more unexplored options on the console, and he went through them in turn, seeking anything which might provide a clue about the status of the Nisprol cargo vessel. If the craft was loaded, and, if it was in his capabilities to do so, he intended to get onboard the Estral spaceship and fly it into the hold of the MHL Argonaut once the coast was clear.

  It didn’t take him long to decide this room wasn’t the place to move things forward. The consoles were heavily locked-down and were here to allow monitoring only, rather than perform any useful task such as opening the external hangar bay doors. He switched the console off, left the room and followed the exit passageway past the intersection which would return him to his shuttle.

  Now he’d seen where the hangar bay was located, the computers in his head were able to make a much better prediction of Zantil’s internal layout. The specifics weren’t important to Nation. As long as he knew he was heading in the right general direction, he was certain he could find the airlock leading onto the cargo vessel.

  JN> Hello?

  There was still no response and Nation descended more stairs. There were numbers painted onto the walls, presumably to denote the level within the Zantil facility. At the bottom, he reached a passage heading to the left and right, with more stairs leading downwards. Doors lined the corridor, each of them closed but not locked down. Nation stepped across to one of the control panels and swiped his fingers over it. The door wouldn’t open.

  Everything on this facility must tap into a separate power source, he thought. And we disabled the external generators during the attack.

  The realisation didn’t offer any reassurance that his job was about to get any easier. Even the hangar bay doors might run off one of the power cores which were fixed beneath the facility. He ignored the insidious thoughts about failure. If Attack Fleet Z could make off with the Istoliar, rather than being required to destroy it, it would be a victory which would sap the morale of the Estral high command, as well as offering compensation for the loss of the Confederation plant on Sindar.

  Without much hope, he tried the door opposite and it opened at once. He leaned carefully into the room, in case Estral hid within. What he found was living quarters intended for two of the aliens. There was a steel-framed bunk bed bolted to the far wall, along with a table and a metal locker fixed to the wall. An Estral space suit dangled from a hanger which was hooked over one of the partially-open locker doors. There was an uneaten meal on the table – a few of the Estral’s bland pastes were piled up on a tray and a spoon lay on the floor. A red light cycled silently through a range of shades from blood-red to near-pink.

  The alarm must have sounded as soon as Attack Fleet Z appeared and the facility personnel went to their muster points, he told himself.

  Nation withdrew from the room, feeling inexplicably relieved at having found proof of why no Estral patrolled the interior.

  His internal map calculated he was still several levels above the hangar bay floor, so he descended once again. The interior of Zantil felt strangely cramped, with its criss-crossing corridors and rooms which were much smaller than the Estral usual. Nation guessed the refinement operation took up more than eighty percent of the internal space, with the rest given over to the hangar bay and the places where the Estral lived.

  At the bottom of the steps, he paused in a compact room and listened. A distant alarm wailed somewhere deeper in the facility and the thickness of the walls made it difficult for him to get a fix on the location. Something else caught his attention – his sensor registered trace particles of Granol-42 and Istilin in the air. The quantities weren’t anything like as concentrated as on Isob-2, but still sufficient to cause death for anyone who didn’t have a protective suit on. Nation recalled Keller saying that she’d only detected Granol-42 recently and he guessed the attack on Zantil had ruptured some of the processing equipment. It would be another reason for the Estral to keep their heads down.

  With a shrug, he moved on.

  JN> Hello, hello, hello?

  Keller gave no response on the neural link and Nation admitted to himself he was beginning to get worried. Zantil was clearly vitally important to the Estral and it was sure the enemy would respond forcefully to this attack. The best hope was that the bulk of their warships were deployed elsewhere and unable to assist. Nation told himself it wasn’t so far-fetched an idea, especially since the discovery of Zantil wasn’t something either side could have predicted.

  He came across more stairs and climbed down them. This flight was much longer than the others and with each step the air became colder, until the temperature fell to minus twenty Centigrade.

  At the bottom, Nation found himself in a red-lit open space, which stretched hundreds of metres into the distance. The room was comparatively narrow at three hundred metres, and his internal map informed him it ran parallel to the hangar bay. He tipped his head back and sent a ping off the ceiling. It was two hundred metres away.

  The floor space was covered in a haphazard collection of huge alloy crates, flatbed crawlers, gravity cranes, pre-fabricated piping and objects which Nation recognized as modular components for an Istoliar processing operation. One especially large construction of black metal looked like an exact copy of something from Sub-62 on Isob-2.

  Here we go. The operational support area.

  A thick layer of hoar frost had formed everywhere and Nation felt like he’d stumbled up on a place abandoned long ago and forgotten. Elsewhere, the alarm continued and from its volume it was no closer than when he first heard it.