The comms didn’t work at lightspeed, so Keller was left alone with her thoughts on the bridge of the Gundar. This was a significant victory, no doubt about it, and she was sure the Space Corps high command would be more than pleased at the outcome. However, the debriefing was in the future and for now, Keller was more concerned for Nation, stuck aboard the Zantil facility.

  She shook away the doubts – the Argonaut’s winch had its cargo held in place, so Nation would be fine. Even with the generators failing on the processing plant, he could survive quite happily in a vacuum, and besides, the Nisprol had its engines to power the cargo vessel’s life support.

  Knowing these things didn’t leave her feeling calm. In fact, she felt a greater concern with each passing minute and didn’t know why. She checked the countdown timer for the hundredth time. This was going to be a long hour.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Joe Nation wasn’t the kind of man to sit twiddling his thumbs when he could be doing something. In this instance, he managed twenty minutes of contemplation before the boredom was too much to handle.

  He wasn’t dead and Keller wasn’t responding to the neural link, therefore he knew Attack Fleet Z had escaped from the Estral. Procedure dictated a minimum of one hour at high lightspeed was required in order to ensure there was enough time for a lightspeed catapult to warm up and fire before any pursuing enemies arrived. Therefore, it made sense that he had no less than forty remaining minutes in which to do something useful.

  I should see if there’s any power to the central mainframe and try to get the Nisprol’s gravity clamps detached.

  The Nisprol’s sensor feed informed him the Zantil hangar bay was in complete darkness, so he was fairly sure the entire facility was out of power. The realisation wasn’t enough to stop him.

  Just face it. You’re too damned curious, he berated himself.

  It didn’t take long to retrace his path through the cargo vessel and out into the loading bay. To Nation’s surprise, the loading area was still lit, albeit so faintly that he was required to use the image intensifiers on his sensor array.

  He checked around. The crawler was exactly where he left it, piled high with crates of appropriated Istoliar. He stopped to admire the neatly-arranged crates. The Istoliar was so dense it took up surprisingly little space, given its boundless potential.

  The bay was a couple of degrees colder than last time and he felt the waves of cold coming from the storage crates. He jogged around the crawler, aiming for one of the exits he’d seen earlier. A single metal door beckoned on the opposite wall, adjacent to the one of the main cargo exit passages. High above this smaller door, Nation could see another window. Although this window had no view into the hangar bay, it was likely to be a control room for the cargo loading area, and the consoles inside would likely be tied into the same network. Nation was no Becky Keller, so he kept his fingers crossed the Estral had left everything powered up and ready.

  Crossing the open space of the loading area left Nation feeling exposed. His stealth modules were fine, so he put it down to the size of the place. The door was in a section of the wall free from the piles of supplies which were stacked in the bay. A rack of phase-shifters was the closest thing he recognized and the missiles towered more than halfway towards the ceiling. They should have been loaded straight into their magazine or stored in a secure location. The sight of them here reinforced Nation’s belief that the Estral on Zantil weren’t well-led.

  The access panel on the door was active, but only just. The No Entry script was so faint it was difficult to see, even in the near-darkness.

  There’s no way this door is going to open.

  He activated his number cruncher and shifted from foot to foot as the augmentation burned through the panel security. A few seconds later, the door tried to open. With a scrape, it shifted two feet into its recess and then stopped. Nation peered into a short passage which turned left onto what he hoped were steps leading to the control room above. He didn’t want to be trapped, so he waited a moment to see what the door would do. It rumbled once and didn’t move. With a mental shrug, Nation slipped sideways through the gap and into the corridor.

  Once inside, he was relieved to find a flight of steep steps heading upwards. Aware that he didn’t have unlimited time, Nation climbed them quickly. His positioning system informed him he’d ascended two hundred metres when the steps ended at a landing.

  Past the landing, Nation found himself in a corridor. He believed himself to be on the level beneath the room with the viewing window. The route to his destination wasn’t as straightforward as he imagined and it took several minutes before he located another set of steps. He was conscious that the seconds were ticking and he was obliged to ignore several closed doors. These ones had bright-glowing access panels, which made him think the Zantil facility had several layers of redundancy when it came to its internal power supply.

  These new steps only climbed one level and they deposited Nation a small distance from the viewing room he’d identified from below. What he found was mixed news, most of it bad. There was sporadic lighting and a sign hung from the ceiling. Nation muttered the words.

  “Loading Bay and Personnel Monitoring Area C. Shit.”

  According to the sign, this wasn’t the place where the Estral controlled the cargo loading, nor the departure of docked spaceships. Instead, it was one of the monitoring stations for the Zantil facility.

  Nation cast his eyes around the room. There was a bank of gauges on one wall, which he made no attempt to study closer. Most of the floorspace was filled by wide, straight-edged consoles, each of which was equipped with six screens. Nation counted twelve such consoles, all of them turned off apart from one of the four arrayed directly in front of the viewing window. The screens of this console were blank, but a tiny, blinking cursor in the corner of one gave the game away.

  In a few minutes, Attack Fleet Z would drop out of lightspeed and Nation was sure Keller would be pretty mad if she found he’d left the bridge of the Nisprol. Nation reasoned that if he managed to figure out how the Zantil station worked, it might save time in the long run, so he didn’t abandon the room.

  He crossed over to the console and pondered if it was worth spending any time on it. There was a remote chance the monitoring room consoles would have access to other critical systems.

  I’m out of options. It’s either this or spend thirty minutes wandering around Zantil looking for somewhere else.

  Nation leaned over and pressed the reset switch underneath the front metal lip. The cursor vanished and then reappeared, along with a series of dots to indicate it was booting. It took longer than expected, so Nation took a look through the wide viewing window. The loading bay seemed darker somehow, and filled with menace. Nation shook off the feeling and stood at the window for a while longer, wondering where the feeling had come from.

  A beep informed him that the console was finished booting and when he came to see, Nation found himself presented with a logon screen. He set the number cruncher away and waited. After a few seconds, he gave the ISOP access to eighty percent of his processing cycles and drummed his fingers against the cold metal surface of the console.

  “Got you,” he said.

  The login screen vanished and a menu appeared. It didn’t take a second for Nation to discover this wasn’t what he hoped to find.

  “Balls,” he muttered sourly. “Internal monitoring crap and nothing else.”

  Nation wasn’t much of a gambler and he recognized this was the end of the road. It would be irresponsible for him to keep going and he should make himself available on the Nisprol as soon as possible.

  “I’ve got a couple of spare minutes.”

  Only half-interested, Nation pushed at one of the menu options. Instantly, the other five displays on the console lit up. Two of them showed views into open areas elsewhere in Zantil, while the other three monitors registered a blank feed, which meant they were currently linked to offline sensors.

  Another menu option brought up a huge list of the different areas within Zantil. This particular console wasn’t approved to access them all. According to the labels, most of the off-limits areas were operational zones.

  “Let’s see what we have.”

  Nation cycled through a number of different plant areas, wondering if he could locate the personnel. If the Space Corps knew where to look, it would make clearing the Zantil wreck a lot quicker, easier and safer for the teams assigned to the task.

  Wherever the personnel had gone to, it wasn’t immediately apparent. Most of the sensor feeds were offline, in addition to those which were off-limits to this console. Everywhere he looked, it was cold, down to minus ninety in a few of the corridors.

  Nation was on the verge of giving up, when he located the first bodies. On Access Corridor 1211-F, the monitor showed him six dead Estral. They wore operator uniforms, which left their faces uncovered. Nation blinked twice and zoomed in the sensor towards the only corpse which was lying on its back. The grey skin of the alien was completely blackened and split. The only unaffected part was its eyes, which remained the palest of greys.

  With a growing sense of horror, Nation switched from camera to camera. He found more dead – dozens of them. From the way they’d fallen, it was obvious they were heading in the same direction, perhaps towards an evacuation point or a refuge area.

  An internal alarm chimed, drawing Nation’s attention away from the console. The power levels in his Istoliar cells were trickling away slowly, in the same way they’d done on the lowest levels of Isob-2. Without conscious direction from his brain, Nation’s forefinger accessed the next monitoring sensor on the list. An image of an area labelled Centrifuges 1-3 Refuge and Containment came up on screen and Nation found out where the Zantil personnel had gone.

  The refuge was a large room, filled with rows of forward-facing seats. In the background, protective suits hung from a rack on the wall. The place was filled with bodies. There were thousands upon thousands of them, piled up or strewn over chairs or on the floor. The skin of each Estral was withered, cracked and turned black. The corpses seemed diminished somehow, as though they’d been drained of their essences.

  The damned Antaron is here.

  Nation had absolutely no idea how this alien entity could have made it onto Zantil and he found himself asking if the Antaron was one of many. The thought was not welcome.

  The viewing window dared him to return and Nation’s feet carried him over. He stared outside and into the cargo loading bay. This time he was certain of the difference. The air was thick like on Isob-2 and there was something colossal inside the bay. The entire floor was cloaked in darkness, and it seethed and undulated. Nation’s eyes tried to locate the crawler loaded with Istoliar, but he could not see it. The huge mass of the Antaron had rolled over the Confederation’s war spoils and Nation could only watch helplessly, while his brain reminded him of what this creature had done to the Istoliar core on the Gundar.

  Another thought struck him like a hammer blow to the temple. According to his timer, only a few seconds remained until Attack Fleet Z exited lightspeed. Afterwards, they’d warm up their lightspeed catapults and their next destination would be Confederation Space.

  The timer reached zero.

  JN> Do not activate the lightspeed catapults. The Antaron is on the Zantil facility.

  There was no response. He tried again, in case the fleet had stayed at lightspeed for a few seconds longer.

  JN> Answer, damnit!

  Again, he received no response from Keller’s neural augmentation. Nation turned left and right, hating the thickness of the alloy walls. The link worked fine in the loading area, but he didn’t intend going that way with the Antaron inside.

  I’ve got to get back to the Nisprol. The neural augmentation worked from there.

  He knew there was no chance he could make it back to the cargo vessel. His first and only encounter with the Antaron was enough to make him certain he wouldn’t be able to avoid it, and his stealth modules wouldn’t fool it.

  JN> Do not fire the lightspeed catapults!

  It was no use – Keller was unable to receive his comms. Nation ran from the room to see if he could find a place from where his neural signal would get through to Keller. All the while, he wondered if the Antaron would come for him in the same way as it came for the Estral.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The ships of Attack Fleet Z arrived at a place somewhere in the middle of Estral Space, far from any known enemy planets or installations. Keller checked the sensors and found exactly what she wanted – several billion kilometres of absolutely nothing.

  Keller (Gundar):: Great work guys. We’re an hour ahead of the enemy. Warm up the lightspeed catapults.

  AI Klister (Granite):: Acknowledged.

  The rest of the fleet commenced the warmup procedures for their catapults. In a little over one minute, they would be back in Confederation Space, leaving a whole lot of mightily pissed Estral shaking their fists at thin air. The fanciful thought made Keller smile inwardly.

  BK> Hey, Joe, looks like we made it. Which shoulder do you want them to pin your medal onto?

  Nation was still not responding and Keller guessed he’d gone exploring. He was never a man to sit still.

  The boom of the Obsidiar detonators faded away and the comforting whine of the catapult took over.

  BK> I forget, they don’t give out medals anymore, do they?

  The whining became a stabilised howl. The catapult would fire soon.

  BK> Maybe when we get back, they’ll send us out together on another mission. What do you reckon?

  JN> DON’T FIRE THE DAMNED CATAPULT!

  Keller didn’t waste time on pointless questions and she shut down the Gundar’s lightspeed catapult. The other warships were synchronised and they, too, aborted.

  BK> I assume you have a good reason for this interruption?

  JN> There’s an Antaron on the Zantil station. It’s in the process of destroying the Istoliar.

  BK> Don’t say that.

  JN> We can’t take it back to Confederation Space.

  BK> Where is it now?

  JN> I don’t know – the only place where the neural link works is in the middle of a corridor. I can’t see the cargo bay.

  BK> I’ll have the Argonaut drop its cargo. We need to think of a way to get you off there. Have you found a way to disable the gravity clamps holding the Nisprol?

  JN> Not yet. Damnit, we’ve got to destroy this thing.

  Keller was at a loss. The Antaron was on the Zantil facility along with Lieutenant Nation. There was no way to kill one without killing the other.

  The decision was taken from her hands.

  AI Jason (MHL Argonaut):: I have detected an anomaly within my cargo hold. Analysing…

  Keller (Gundar):: It’s the Antaron.

  AI Jason (MHL Argonaut):: An object weighing approximately twenty-five billion tonnes has emerged from the Zantil facility.

  Keller (Gundar):: Open your bay doors! Expel the cargo!

  It was too late. One of the Gundar’s portside sensor arrays was aimed directly at the Argonaut and through it, Keller watched something burst free of the heavy lifter’s thickly-armoured side wall. One moment, the Argonaut was intact, the next, its flank was dominated by a jagged-edged rupture with a diameter of almost two thousand metres. It happened so quickly, the Gundar’s sensors only captured a partial, indistinct image.

  With the Antaron free of the Argonaut, Keller frantically tried to get an idea of where the entity had gone once it emerged from the flank of the lifter. She couldn’t find it on any of the sensors. Keller tipped her head back and rubbed her face with her hands.

  Keller (Gundar):: We’re going to try the catapults again. If the Antaron comes back, shoot the crap out of it.

  The Antaron didn’t return and, one minute later, six lightspeed catapults activated simultaneously across the fleet. The warships were dragged into temporary wormholes and transported across several galaxies in the blinking of an eye.

  Keller (Gundar):: Welcome home. We are two hundred million klicks from Eriol. Not the best landing and not the worst.

  AI Flex (Revelation):: A job well done. We performed at our best.

  Keller (Gundar):: That we did.

  She aimed the forward sensors towards their destination. The planet was too far away for the Gundar’s front array to provide anything like a clear image and Eriol appeared to be nothing more than a grainy sphere of mixed colours.

  Keller (Gundar):: I have checked in with Fortress-3 for our orders. We are to land at once for maintenance and repairs.

  JN> We made it back and we left the Antaron in Estral Space. It could have been worse.

  BK> Why don’t I feel happy? Let me see…we’re at war, we’ve discovered a new and hostile species of alien and if you’re right, we just lost forty million tonnes of Istoliar.

  JN> On the plus side, I located a cargo manifest in one of the offices here. The Estral already managed to load twenty million tonnes of their Istoliar onto the Nisprol. The stuff in the cargo area was due to be loaded right afterwards. It probably got interrupted when the alarms went off.

  BK> So we lost forty million tonnes and gained twenty million, plus a bonus Antaron?

  JN> If you want to look on not-so-bright side of it. Me? I see it as a win.

  Keller couldn’t help but smile at Nation’s positive swing on the situation.

  BK> We’d have sixty million tonnes of Istoliar and no Antaron if you’d done your job properly and killed the thing. What’s the point in having a shockwave augmentation if you aren’t going to use it?

  JN> It was a bit too big for me to take on. Next time, I’ll throw a few punches and see what happens.